The Face of Death

  45

  “YOU’RE BAD LUCK, PRINCESS,” KAREN WATSON SAID AS THEY drove away from Ned and Desiree’s. “Some people just have bad luck. Yours rubs off on the people around you.”

  Sarah sneered. “Maybe I’ll get really lucky someday, and my bad luck will rub off on you, Ms. Watson.”

  Karen glanced over at Sarah. Her eyes narrowed. “Keep talking like that and it’ll be a long time before I let you back into any foster home.”

  Sarah turned back to the side window. “I don’t care.”

  “Really? Fine. Then you can stay in a group home till you’re eighteen.”

  “I said I don’t care.”

  Sarah kept her gaze fixed on the scenery rolling by. Karen felt dismissed. This made her angry.

  Who the hell did this kid think she was? Didn’t she understand what a burden she was?

  Screw it. She’d dismiss Sarah right back.

  “You can rot in there then, for all I care.”

  Sarah didn’t reply. Karen Watson had gotten under her skin, as always, but only for a moment. The numbness had settled back in, bringing that thousand-pound weight along with it.

  Sarah had been taken to an emergency room and examined. She had a mild concussion (whatever that was), which meant she wasn’t supposed to go to sleep. Everything else was bruised and hurt, but no major damage had been done. Not on the outside, at least.

  Ned, Desiree, Pumpkin. Mommy, Daddy, Buster.

  Your love is death.

  She was starting to believe that this was true. Everyone she’d ever loved was gone forever.

  A twinge of uncertainty.

  Except for Cathy. And Theresa. And maybe Doreen, if she was still alive.

  Sarah sighed.

  Theresa was in jail. Surely that was enough for The Stranger, for now. She could decide what to do about her foster-sister when she got out. As for Cathy, she was a policewoman, she should be able to keep herself safe, right? Right?

  She’d have to worry about that later. She had other things to concentrate on, for now.

  Sarah had learned the lessons of the group home from her last stay there. She had no intention of starting out at the bottom of the food chain again.

  Janet was still skinny, and still running things at the home. She remained oblivious to the perils of the place. Janet was the worst kind of do-gooder: one who was incapable of recognizing evil. She gave Sarah a sympathetic nod.

  “Hi, Sarah.”

  “Hi.”

  “I know what happened. Are you in a lot of pain?”

  The answer was yes, but Sarah shook her head.

  “I’m okay. I’d just like to lie down.”

  Janet nodded. “You can’t go to sleep, though. You know that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you need help with your bag?”

  “No, thanks.”

  Janet led her down the familiar hallways. Nothing had changed in a year.

  Probably nothing has changed in the last ten years.

  “Here you go. Only two doors down from your old room.”

  “Thanks, Janet.”

  “Sure.” The skinny woman turned to walk away.

  “Janet? Is Kirsten still here?”

  Janet stopped and looked back at Sarah. “Kirsten was killed by another girl three months ago. They got into a fight and things got out of hand.”

  Sarah stared at Janet and swallowed once.

  “Oh,” she managed. “Okay.”

  The skinny woman looked worried. “Are you going to be all right?”

  Sarah had a hundred pounds of iron sitting on the top of her head.

  Numbness. Hug it tight.

  “I’m fine.”

  Sarah had unpacked her things and settled into her bunk to wait. She’d arrived in the late afternoon; the dorm would remain pretty much empty until early evening. That’s when she knew she’d have to make her move.

  Her head still ached, but at least she wasn’t nauseous anymore. Sarah hated barfing.

  Nobody likes it, dummy.

  Someone who’d had a more normal life might worry about talking to themselves so much. The thought never occurred to Sarah; when you were alone as much as she was, you talked to yourself to keep from going crazy, not because you were.

  Numbness cloaked her, soaked her, bonded with her DNA. Sarah felt that she’d crossed a threshold of pain. Sadness, grief—these emotions had to be suppressed. They’d grown too large to let roam free. They’d eat her up if she let them out of their cages.

  Other emotions were allowed. Like anger. Like rage. She could feel them building inside her. A well had been dug in her soul and it was filling up with darkish, violent things. A beast of a dog lapped at the well and wouldn’t stop growling. She wondered how long she could keep it leashed, or if she could at all.

  With all of it had come a tectonic shift in pragmatism. Survival was her god. All else was illusion.

  I’m changing. Just like he wanted me to.

  How?

  I think I could kill someone now if I had to. I couldn’t have done that when I was six.

  Happy birthday.

  She twirled a strand of hair in her fingers and smiled an empty smile.

  I broke a girl’s finger and I took her bunk, and that was that. I was top dog of the room again, queen of all I surveyed.

  Hey, don’t make that face.

  I’m not proud of what I did, but I did what I had to.

  Besides, I have a lot more in common with that “me” at nine than I do with the “me” at six. The “me” at six is long gone and buried deep.

  46

  When I look back and write this, I think Cathy becomes my mirror. A way to look at how I was through someone else’s eyes.

  I wonder: Did she think these things? Or am I putting my own words in her mouth? Maybe a little bit of both? Maybe Cathy was Cathy, but in these pages, Cathy is also the me-now looking back at the me-then.

  Hea-vy, man….

  CATHY WAS DISMAYED BY WHAT SHE SAW HAPPENING WITH Sarah. But what else was new?

  It was Sarah’s eleventh birthday. Cathy had come by with a simple offering—a cupcake and a single candle. Sarah had smiled at this, but Cathy could tell she was being polite.

  What bothered Cathy the most was Sarah’s eyes. They weren’t open and expressive they way they’d once been. They were full of walls and blank spaces and watchfulness. The eyes of a poker player, or a prisoner.

  Cathy was familiar with eyes like this; she saw them on hardened street-hookers and career criminals. They said: I know how things work, I’m watching you, and Don’t even think about taking what’s mine.

  Cathy had recognized other changes over the last two years. She knew that Sarah was the “head girl” of her dorm and she had a pretty good guess as to how that had come about. The other girls deferred to Sarah. Sarah’s attitude toward them was dismissive. It was prison mentality, the rule of power and violence. Sarah seemed to have learned it well.

  Why are you surprised? This place is might-makes-right in spades.

  Cathy was frustrated by her own inability to provide hope. She hadn’t been able to convince anyone else of her belief in Sarah’s story of The Stranger. Truth be told, lying in bed at night, she wasn’t sure she’d completely convinced herself. She’d tried, she’d failed, and while Sarah had told her it was no big deal, Cathy knew this was a bald-faced lie. It mattered.

  Cathy had been doing what she could. She’d gotten copies of the case files on the deaths of Sarah’s parents, and the murders of Ned and Desiree. She’d spent many nights after work poring over them, looking for hints and inconsistencies. She’d even found some. In this way, at least, she and Sarah still connected. Life came into those hard eyes when they discussed the cases. The fact that Cathy believed her was important to Sarah. It mattered.

  But we’re losing you, aren’t we, Sarah? This place and your life are killing you off. Right in front of my eyes.

  “I have some news about Theresa,” Cathy s
aid.

  A spark of interest.

  “What?”

  “She’s getting paroled in three weeks.”

  Sarah looked away. “That’s nice.” Her voice sounded faint.

  “She wants to see you.”

  “No!” The word snapped out with a vehemence that startled the cop.

  Cathy waited, chewed her lip.

  “Do you mind if I ask why?”

  All the blankness and hardness and distance vanished, replaced by a naked desperation that made Cathy’s heart ache.

  “Because of him,” Sarah whispered, her voice urgent. “The Stranger. If he knows I love her, then he’ll kill her.”

  “Sarah, I—”

  Sarah reached across the table, grabbing Cathy’s hands with her own. “Promise me, Cathy. Promise me that you’ll make her stay away.”

  The cop stared at the eleven-year-old for a long moment before nodding. “Okay, Sarah,” she said in a quiet voice. “Okay. What do you want me to tell her?”

  “Tell her I don’t want to see her while I’m in here. She’ll understand.”

  “You’re sure?”

  Sarah smiled, a tired smile. “I’m sure.” She bit her lower lip. “But tell her…it won’t be long. When I get out of this place, I’ll find a way to get in touch with her. A way we can be safe.”

  The smile and the spark and the urgency all vanished. The blankness was back. Sarah stood up, grabbing the cupcake. “I have to go,” she said.

  “You don’t want to light the candle?”

  “Nope.”

  Cathy watched Sarah walk away. The young girl walked straight and tall, a walk that said she was sure of herself without having to double check. She looked small to Cathy. The swagger only emphasized it.

  Sarah lay back on her bunk, bit into the cupcake, and eyed the envelope. It was addressed to her, care of the group home. There was no return address, just a stamp and postmark.

  It was the first piece of mail she’d ever gotten, and she didn’t like it.

  Just open it.

  Okay. Maybe it’s from Theresa.

  She thought about Theresa almost every day. Sometimes she dreamed about her foster-sister, fantasy dreams where they sailed or flew away together. The places they came to were never dark and always had signs posted that proclaimed: No Sorrow Or Monsters Allowed.

  Those dreams left Sarah wishing she could sleep forever. Theresa was the hub around which Sarah’s only wheel of hope spun.

  She ripped the envelope open. It contained a simple white card. On the front it said, Thinking of you on your birthday. She frowned and flipped up the front. Inside was drawn a picture of a domino, next to it the words Be A Wild Thing.

  The frosting from the cupcake went sour in her mouth. A chill ran through her body from head to toe.

  This is from him.

  She knew it to be true. It didn’t matter that he’d never sent her anything before this. It didn’t need any explanation at all. It just was.

  She stared at the card for a moment longer before putting it back in the envelope. She placed it under her pillow and resumed eating the cupcake.

  I am turning into a Wild Thing.

  Come and see me again and I’ll prove it to you.

  Her smile was joyless.

  One nice thing, she thought, it can’t get any worse. That’s something.

  I know what a silly thing that was to think now. Of course it could be worse. A lot worse. And it was.

  Karen Watson ended up in jail. I don’t really know why, but I’m not surprised. She was evil. She hated kids and she liked being able to fuck up kids’ lives. She was a big old vampire, but instead of sucking blood, she sucked souls, and someone finally caught her doing it.

  She made sure all the other homes I went to were bad ones. Bad people. In some places they hit me. In a few places, they touched me, and that was bad, real bad, but we won’t talk about that, no way, uh-uh. I guess Theresa tried.

  Even so, nothing was ever quite as bad as when Desiree and Ned died. I’ve thought about it a lot, and that was really the beginning of the end for me. It started with Mom and Dad and Buster, and it ended with

  Desiree and Ned and Pumpkin. Everything since then, good or bad, has just been me walking through a dream.

  Cathy offered to adopt me once, but I didn’t let her.

  I was afraid, you know? That if Cathy took me in, that would be the end of her.

  But Cathy disappeared later anyway. They told me she’d gotten hurt, but they wouldn’t tell me how, or who’d done it. She didn’t answer her phone when I called, and she never called me back.

  I let that drop into the big black pool, like everything else.

  That’s what I call it—the big black pool. It’s what’s inside me. It started to fill up the day after Desiree and Ned died. It’s thick and stinky and it feels like oil. But it’s kind of cool too, because you can drop things that hurt into it, and they sink and disappear forever.

  Cathy not calling hurt, so I dropped that into the big black pool. Bye-bye.

  One thing I didn’t drop into the pool was what happened to Karen Watson, when that cunt went to jail. I know, I know, cunt is the worst word ever, especially for a girl to say, but I can’t help it. Karen Watson was a cunt. I mean, come on, the word was practically invented for her! I hated her, and I hoped she’d die in jail. Sometimes I dreamed about someone sticking a knife in her and cutting her stomach open, like a fish. She flopped around and screamed and bled. I always woke up smiling after I had that dream.

  One day, she actually did die. Someone slit her throat, from ear to ear. I smiled till I thought my cheeks would split open. Then I cried, and The Crazy blinked a few times and it cried too. Black, watering-hole tears.

  Bad water, baby, it’s all bad water now.

  As for me, I’d always end up back in the group home. I had a rep from before, so not too many girls tried to mess with me. I kept to myself.

  Which is for the best, because I’m pretty much over, you know? I get this feeling sometimes, like I’m sitting naked at the north pole, but I’m not cold, because I can’t feel anything anyway. And I’m looking down at the big black pool, watching it bubble. Every now and then, hands shoot up out of it, and sometimes I recognize them.

  The Stranger left me alone for a few years. I don’t know, I guess he was keeping an eye on me. So long as the homes were bad, I guess he was fine.

  I got another card on my fourteenth birthday. It said, I’ll be seeing you. That’s all. I woke up that night screaming and I couldn’t stop. I just screamed and screamed and screamed. They had to drag me off and strap me down to a bed and give me some drugs. That time I was the one that got dropped into the big black pool. Blurp. Bye-bye.

  The Kingsleys decided to foster me, and I’m not sure why I didn’t fight it. I’m finding it hard, these days, to feel like fighting anything. Mostly I float. I float and I shake sometimes and every now and then I talk to myself, then I go back to floating. Oh yeah—and dropping things into the big black pool. I’ve been spending a lot of time, lately, dropping things into it. I think I’ve just about got everything now. I want to be an empty room, with white walls. I’m almost there. The black death-bees have almost become the light.

  I’m writing this story because it might be the last chance I have to get this all down before I drop myself into the big black pool, forever. I don’t really want to go there, but it’s harder and harder to keep moving every day, and The Crazy, it seems to want to come up from the watering hole a lot more often. There’s something, though, a small, stubborn part of me that still remembers being six. It talks to me less and less, but when it does, it tells me to write things down, and to find a way to give it to you.

  I don’t think you’re going to be able to save me, Smoky Barrett. I’m afraid I’ve spent too much time at the watering hole, too much time writing stories I set on fire. But maybe, just maybe—you can get him.

  And drop him into the real big black pool.

>   That’s about it. The last sprint on the white and crinkly.

  A Ruined Life?

  Pretty close, I guess.

  I don’t dream of my mom and dad anymore. I did have a dream about Buster the other night. It caught me by surprise. I woke up and I almost thought I could feel where his head had been, lying on my tummy.

  But Buster’s dead, along with the rest of them.

  The biggest change is the deepest change:

  I don’t hope anymore.

  THE END?

  I finish this last line of Sarah’s diary, and I put a hand to my eyes and this time I find my tears. Bonnie comes over to me and takes my other hand in hers and rubs it, offering comfort. I wipe my eyes after a moment.

  “Sorry, babe,” I say. “I read something that made me sad. Sorry.”

  She gives me one of those smiles that says, It’s okay, we’re alive, I’m just happy you’re here with me.

  “Okay,” I say, forcing a smile. I still feel pretty bleak.

  Bonnie catches my eye again. She taps her head. This one I know without having to think about it.

  “You had an idea?”

  She nods. Points to the wall, where a picture of Alexa hangs. Points at the ceiling above our heads. It takes me a moment.

  “You had an idea about what to do with Alexa’s room?”

  She smiles, nods. Yes.

  “Tell me, sweetheart.”

  She indicates herself, mimes sleeping, shakes her head.

  “You don’t want to sleep there.”

  Quick nod. Right.

  She mimes holding something, moving it up and down in brushing motions, and, as sometimes happens, I get her full meaning in a flood and a flash.

  When Bonnie had first made it clear to me that she wanted some watercolors, I was overjoyed. The therapeutic possibilities were obvious; Bonnie was mute, but perhaps she’d speak through her brush.

  She painted scenes bright and scenes dark, beautiful moonlit nights, days washed through with rain and grays. There was no trend in her imagery beyond the fact that all were vivid, regardless of subject. My favorite, a depiction of the desert under a blazing sun, was a mix of stark beauty. There was hot, bright, yellow sand. There was blue, forever, cloudless sky. There was a single cactus, standing alone in all that emptiness, straight and strong and tall. It didn’t seem to need comfort or company. It was a confident, aloof cactus. It could take the sun and the heat and lack of water and it was fine, thank you very much, just fine. I had to wonder if it represented Bonnie.