Babysitter, page 5
“You do?”
“Yes.” She hesitated. “When I was thirteen, I—” Then she stopped herself. She had never been able to discuss with anybody but Gramps what they had seen silhouetted that night on Lorna Daily’s shade-drawn window.
“Yes?”
“Well,” Jody said, “let’s just say I know what this is.”
“And you want to know if I’ve ever seen this kind of behavior before in Winthrop?”
“Right.”
“No. But the strange thing is, I’ve heard about it.”
“You have?”
“Yes. Dr. Malbourne, the man I succeeded in this office, he told me of three or four cases of local children who had just suddenly gone berserk, gotten really violent and—” Now it was Dr. Peary’s turn to hesitate and become evasive.
Quietly, almost as if she didn’t want to hear the answer, Jody said, “And what happened to those children?”
Ruth Peary touched Jody’s hand again. “It doesn’t mean it will happen to Jenny.”
“Please,” Jody said. “What happened to the children?”
“They had complete breakdowns and had to be permanently institutionalized.”
Jody thought of Lorna Daily. She wondered what had happened to the girl after her family had so abruptly left Winthrop following the incidents with the car and the dog.
Then Jody’s eyes lifted and looked out the window at her Buick SUV in the parking lot.
Institutionalized.
Permanently.
Helplessly, tears formed in the corners of Jody’s eyes and she said, “Thank you, Ruth. I’ll be in touch soon.”
Then she was gone down the stairs, two at a time, needing to stand in the air, in the warmth of the day and the noise of the traffic and the exhaust of buses—somehow they all seemed reassuring, given the ugly reality of the drawing that she could not quite put out of her mind.
3
In eleventh grade, Marietta Stover had found herself with a curious mixture of pluses and minuses. There was the fact, for instance, that she had the most beautiful face that had ever graced the halls of Winthrop High, a face that suggested to most people a budding Marilyn Monroe at her youngest and most lovely. But then the minuses took over. Marietta had no breasts to speak of, and her ankles, while not very thick, were not nearly so graceful as her long neck or elegant wrists and fingers. Then there was her reputation, which on the one hand (accurately) billed her as almost too good to be true—the daughter of money who nonetheless was not in any way snobbish and who in fact spent her high school Saturdays not at football games and matinees, but working in the hospital on the ward for the indigent (at the time she had planned, much to her mother’s disdain, to go into nursing). On the other hand, she was shy to the point of paralysis and this tended to give the impression of aloofness. Only among the hospital’s poor, where she dispensed soup, bandages, and as much good will as possible, did she feel secure. She learned, from this experience, that she was happiest only when she had a Project at hand, whether that Project was maintaining a straight A average, helping the new blind student learn her way around the halls of Winthrop High, or helping the choirmaster at the local Lutheran church turn the collection of tone-deaf but very sincere choir members into real singers.
Unfortunately, it was her penchant for Projects that initially got her involved with Glen Stover, at a time in high school when, despite his really striking good looks and his very wealthy family, he was something of a social pariah. Glen was one of those boys who had decided to punish the world for the pain that had been inflicted upon him at a very early age (and twenty minutes with his parents told you all you needed to know—the doting but bullying mother, the arrogant and unfathomably insensitive father). So he was constantly in trouble for smashing windows, stealing cars, getting girls pregnant, smoking marijuana, and doing some pretty deadly imitations of his various teachers. By the time she met him senior year, he had twice been expelled from public school, twice sent to military school from which he’d also been expelled, and was living under a court’s threat to send him to reform school if he was ever again arrested for going 130 miles per hour in his father’s Cadillac convertible (his father owning, among many other businesses, the local Cadillac-Oldsmobile dealership).
Two things happened to make Marietta susceptible to Glen’s raw charms. She’d just been dumped by a very earnest but probably homosexual college freshman painter who had had dreamy blue eyes and the ability to talk endlessly about great art, if not produce it (hard as she’d tried, she’d never quite been able to understand his paintings, they were all sort of a blurry mess to her untutored eyes; nor had she ever been able to coax him into sex, either). And secondly, on the night she danced slow with Glen for the first time (it was to a song that she remembered as being “Feelings” and Glen remembered as “Color My World”), she had just learned that her father had become afflicted with Lou Gehrig’s disease, the second member of his family to be struck with the fatal illness. Her socialite mother had gone completely to hell. And so on this night she’d been in search of two things: a friend and a new Project, a Project so impossible on its face, so all-consuming in its demands that there would be no idle time to worry about her father or about what her own future held. Friend and Project came in the same person—Glen Stover. During their very first dance together, he let his hand drop onto her bottom. During their second dance together, there in the darkness of the gym, he forced his tongue into her mouth and pressed their bodies together. During their third dance together, he whispered quite loudly (so that those around them sniggered) what he wished to do with her if only she would accompany him outside. He was quite drunk of course and as boorish as he’d ever been in his life. And during their fourth dance together, she decided to do something about both these unfortunate facts: she slapped him only once, but so jaw-shatteringly hard that he literally shot back into the brick wall. Then she took his hand and yanked him out of the gym. He was crying —whether from shame or rage, she wasn’t sure—and babbling. He wanted to know just where she thought she was taking him. He wanted to know just what she thought she was doing. He wanted to know if she thought he wouldn’t hit a woman because if she knew any goddamn thing about him, she should know goddamn well that he’d hit a woman any time he felt like it. All she told him before they reached his Oldsmobile was that he should not take the Lord’s name in vain. In the car, he would not speak. He sat sullen and still humiliated. Then she slipped over to him and said that if they were going to do this, then they’d better do it well and do it properly. And he’d just said “Do what?” and she’d said, “You mean you really don’t know?” And this time it was she who kissed him, putting her tongue in his mouth, and setting one of his big hands on one of her small breasts.
And so that was how it started, and the terrible thing was that it never got any better, not the sex and certainly not the friendship. But she persisted through it all (until the night of her thirty-sixth birthday when she’d caught him screwing this doctor’s wife in the garage on a bed of lawn fertilizer bags, his white ass pumping away and the doctor’s wife’s heel wrapped up somewhere around his neck). But Marietta had married him and bore him two children (both through Caesarean) and only occasionally threatened divorce. And only occasionally admitted to herself that A—their friendship had failed, and B—so had her Project. She had never been able to change him from what he was—a shallow, spoiled, dishonorable little boy, who still made her sad in a way she would never be able to understand.
Her Project now was the household—the girls (Hedley, 6, and Annie, 3) and the house itself, which she redecorated each spring with the enthusiasm of an Egyptian princess designing her pyramid. (This year the living room had been done in Country French, with caned chairs and overstuffed upholstery, a writing desk flown here from Paris, and upstairs canopy beds with full-sized armoires with hand carved scrollwork and shell motifs in warm fruitwood finish.)
Of course, she had to be The Wife, as well, which explained why she was so busy helping Glen with the club’s One Hundredth Anniversary and why, now, she was standing at the foot of the stairs listening to her small girls squeal with delight over something the babysitter Glen had brought home was showing them.
She wondered what it was. Her girls were so reserved. Plus they tended on principle to hate all babysitters.
Marietta, dressed this afternoon in faded jeans and a ragged sweatshirt that said SWIM TEAM (one of her last remnants from college) went up the sweeping carpeted stairs to the second landing and then quietly approached Hedley’s room, where the three of them were.
The girls’ laughter grew more audible the closer she got, and for a moment she felt an irrational pang of jealousy. She could never make her girls laugh this way. Never; no matter how silly or playful she got.
She moved up to the room and peered in.
Three-year-old Annie stood in her jeans and white Smurfs T-shirt and blue Keds. Six-year-old Hedley, dressed in jeans and a white blouse and blue Keds, stood next to her. The age difference wasn’t the only way you could tell the girls apart. Annie was white blonde and Hedley auburn-haired.
At first, peering around the corner, she wasn’t sure what the girls were doing. Being Hedley’s room, the decor featured massive overhead beams painted blue, colonial-style shutters, two large hooked rugs that provided earth tone contrast to the flawlessly varnished floor. As the day fell to dusk, deep shadows collected in the corners of the room, casting the teenage girl on the edge of the quilt-covered bed into near darkness.
The two girls held the babysitter’s hands, forming a loose circle. None of the three spoke. They simply stared at each other.
“I can feel it!” exclaimed three-year-old Annie. “Inside MY head!”
“So can I!” cried Hedley.
Hedley’s enthusiasm for the mysterious game surprised Marietta. These days Hedley pretended to a great sophistication. Still, the question was, what exactly were the three of them doing?
“All right,” the babysitter said (she’d been introduced to Marietta; what was her name—something that could have been a boy’s name as well; Leigh? No, Nikki; that was it; Nikki). “All right. Let’s keep holding hands and now I’m going to think of something and I want to see if you two can guess it. Okay?”
“Hurry up and think it!” blurted Annie.
Nikki closed her eyes. The girls held hands very tightly. Marietta could see their knuckles straining white from their grips.
All of it—the handholding, the closing of the eyes, the intense stillness—began to remind Marietta of a séance she’d attended on a lark during her senior year in college, during the course of which she did or didn’t make contact with a deceased aunt of hers she’d loved madly. The did or didn’t depended on whether Marietta needed to believe in the spirit world to get through a particular day. Sometimes you needed the notion of a spirit world to lean on, and sometimes you didn’t.
The girls cried out in unison. “You’re thinking that tonight we’ll watch a movie on cable and make red popcorn balls!”
Without quite knowing why, Marietta felt her stomach tighten. A thin layer of sweat broke out on her forehead.
How could both girls have come up with so specific an answer—”red popcorn balls”—when no words, not even any hints, had been exchanged?
Nikki said, “That’s very good. Want to try again?”
“Yes!” cried Annie. “Yes!”
Hedley’s small, pretty head bobbed up and down in agreement.
“This time, let’s let Hedley have the thought, Annie, and then you and I can guess it. Would you like that?”
“Yes!” Annie said again.
But Hedley looked nervous. “Do you really think I can do it?”
“If you just relax and think a very clear thought, you can,” Nikki said. Even in the near darkness you could see her white smile. She was a very appealing girl.
“All right,” Hedley said. But she still sounded nervous.
Hedley closed her eyes just as Nikki had.
And then Marietta accidentally leaned on a dead board and a creak as loud as a curse sounded in the silent room.
The girls, still holding hands, turned to stare at her, and for the first time Marietta got a good look at their eyes.
There was something different about their gazes, but she couldn’t say what exactly. All she knew was that she felt excluded—angrily so—from whatever was going on in Hedley’s room.
“Mother,” Hedley said. “What are you doing spying on us?”
Marietta felt as helpless and humiliated as she had the night she’d caught her husband in the garage with the doctor’s wife.
She started to speak. She wanted to say, You’re my daughters. Why are you looking at me this way?
But no words came out.
Hedley, looking at Nikki, said, “Let’s stop. It’s no fun if grown-ups have to be around.”
Nikki. Soothingly, said, “We’re just having some fun, Mrs. Stover.” She dropped the girls’ hands “Just having some fun.”
Marietta had at last found her voice. She tried to sound commanding. “I’d prefer it if the girls came downstairs and played in the TV room.”
Nikki stood up. Came out of the shadows. In the light she looked like an ordinary enough young girl. What had Marietta been expecting? Horns on her head? “Sure, Mrs. Stover.” She put her hands on the girls’ shoulders. “Why don’t we go downstairs now, girls?”
Hedley said, “Thanks very much, moth. We really appreciate your spoiling this for us.”
She had never before, not once, used that tone with her mother. Hedley, if anything, was Marietta’s pet. Annie, so rambunctious, could tend to fray the nerves. But Hedley was so gentle and soft-spoken. . . .
Hedley stormed off down the stairs, leaving Marietta to burst into tears and then flee down the hall to her own room.
She went in and flung herself on the bed. She felt as if she were losing her mind.
What had she seen in the room with the girls? Had they really been communicating through telepathy? But no, that was impossible, Marietta thought, trying to draw herself together again. She was a strong, sensible, giving woman. She supposed it wasn’t the game they’d been playing – thought that had certainly disturbed her – but the way Hedley had sassed her and then stormed off. That was the part of the whole incident she’d never forget.
The hatred, the absolute hatred in Hedley’s eyes.
4
“She asleep?” David Fairbain asked.
“Yes,” Jody said.
“She’ll be better now.”
“I hope so.”
“Like a drink?” David asked.
She smiled. “There are a lot of years separating us, David. I’m an alcoholic.”
“Oh.”
“I’m sorry if that puts you on the spot. I mean, it’s still sort of an awkward thing for me to admit.”
“Well, then maybe I won’t have so much trouble telling you about my heart attack.”
“God, Really? When?” Jody asked.
“Last year about this time. They nearly lost me.”
“God.”
“To be truthful, they still don’t know if I’m going to make it.”
Tiny little lines wrinkled her forehead. “You look fine.”
“That’s one of the problems with myocarditis, I’m afraid. Doctors tend to get it confused with conditions that aren’t as serious, and sometimes don’t recognize it until it’s too late.” He smiled. “Still don’t know what myocarditis is, eh?”
She laughed. “If this is a pop quiz, I’m failing.”
“It’s a degenerative disease of the heart muscle. The doctors happened to stumble on it when they were trying to save me from my heart attack. In the old days, myocarditis was usually caused by things such as syphilis and goiter. In my case, it seems to have been caused by hypertension.”
She watched him closely as he spoke, seeing the boy she remembered in the man who sat across the living room from her now. He still had that nice, proper presence—a boy well-raised—and he still had that slow, killer smile, and he still had those serious blue eyes she’d dreamed of so many grade school nights. But now they were nearly fifty and sitting in the front room of a rental house whose bruised and battered walls gave all indication that the previous occupants had most likely been a gang of Hells Angels out to raise some hell just before they were taken to prison for a long stint.
He had white hair and slightly slouched shoulders and even a few liver spots on his hands, and yet she felt an unmistakable thrill at sitting in his presence again. Perhaps there were some people whose approval you wanted no matter how old you got. David Fairbain seemed to be one of them.
He shrugged now, sitting back in the overstuffed armchair with the doily on the plump right arm. The doily concealed a huge black cavern of a cigarette burn.
The biker gang had been a busy bunch. “I could live twenty-five more years or I could drop dead tomorrow.”
She smiled sadly, not knowing what to say.
“But, as one of my doctors said, that’s true of any of us.” For the first time, a suggestion of melancholy came into his gaze. “Life’s a pretty fragile business, I’m afraid. For all of us.”
When he said this, Jody thought of Jenny. Of the terrible destruction she’d visited on Ruth Peary’s office. Of the curious transformation that seemed to have taken her over.
“So I quit my job on the Tribune and came back here,” David went on. “I came into a small inheritance when my folks died and I just decided to spend my time as I really wanted to.” He paused and looked out the window. “I’m writing a history of Winthrop. I figure it will take me two years or so to finish, and then the State University press is going to publish it.”
“That’s wonderful, David.”
“Actually, I think it is. I haven’t felt this good about myself since—” He paused and once more the impression of melancholy encompassed him like a force field, stronger now than before. “I’m afraid I had a pretty terrible marriage. I used to think it was all her fault, and then I went through a period of thinking it was all my fault, and now I’m not so sure.” He shook off the mood instantly and said, “But, anyway, I brought up the book for a particular reason.”
