Animosity (11 page)

At last, the door creaked open.

My little girl stepped out.

“Come on, slowpoke,” I said. “Our dinner is gonna get cold.”

“Daddy?” A sniffle. “What’s… what’s wrong with me?”

She held her left hand open, palm-up, in front of her. She just stood there, staring at it. A single tear trickled down her cheek. Her face was pale, shiny with perspiration.

“Sam? Are you okay?”

“What’s wrong with me?” she asked again, her bottom lip quivering.

She staggered across the lawn toward me, her teary gaze never leaving her left hand.

I met her halfway.

“Baby, what is it? What’s the matter?”

The tips of my daughter’s index and middle fingers were smeared with dark brownish blood.

“I’m scared,” she said. “D-Daddy, what’s happening?”

“Jesus,” I whispered, throwing my arms around her. My heart leapt into my throat. I glanced toward the house, and for those first few seconds I wondered if someone lurked inside my home. Perhaps the same person who had hurt Rebecca Lanning…

“Oh my God, Samantha, what—”

And then, suddenly, it hit me.

I felt like such an idiot.

Between her legs, Sam’s white shorts were also speckled with several dime-sized dots of dark blood. Not much, but enough to make me realize what had happened here. What was “wrong” with her.

“Oh, baby…”

“Daddy?” she said. “Am I dying?”

In spite of the situation, a nervous chuckle slipped out of me. I couldn’t help it. Because my fear was instantly replaced with an almost dizzying sense of relief.

“No, sweetheart,” I said. “Not at all. You’re not dying.”

“Really?” she wept.

“Would I lie to you?”

I kissed her forehead, brushed her long blond hair out of her eyes.

“Daddy… ”

She buried her face in my chest, and her body hitched with sobs. I could feel the sticky discharge on her fingers staining my shirt collar, smearing across the nape of my neck.

“It’s okay,” I told her. “Shh. Sam, it’s okay…”

As I held her, I clenched my fists behind her back. I couldn’t believe her mother hadn’t told her.
Damn you, Karen,
I thought. My ex-wife had been so busy carrying on her torrid affair with Captain Studmuffin, she hadn’t bothered explaining to Sam that something like this might happen soon.
Would
happen soon. That our little girl’s body was changing day by day, and it would only be a matter of time before she was no longer a little girl.

Now the task had been left up to me.

I wished Karen were standing right there in front of me so I could give her a piece of my mind.

My cheeks grew hot. I had never felt so awkward in my life. But I knew what had to be done.

First things first, I turned to Norman.

“Stay,” I told him, in the most no-nonsense voice I could muster. I pointed at the food on the table. “Don’t you even
think
about it, furball. I mean it.”

The retriever whined up at me as if I had deeply offended him.
Come on, Andy,
his big watery eyes seemed to say.
Give me the benefit of the doubt, would ya?

I picked Samantha up, and carried her into the house like I used to when she was an infant.

“Everything is going to be fine, honey,” I said, easing her down onto her feet in the hallway outside the bathroom door. “I want you to take a warm washcloth and get yourself cleaned up. While you do that, I’ll grab some clean clothes out of your bedroom. Then we’re gonna take a little trip to the store.”

“The store?” Sam said. “But what about dinner?”

“We’ll worry about dinner later. I’ll bring the food inside. We’ll heat it up and eat when we get back. For now we need to… we should probably pick up a few… things… at the Stop-N-Shop.”

“What kinds of things?”

Your guess is as good as mine,
I thought.
Is there a number a guy can call for such a dilemma? Some sort of website?

But to Sam I said, “Just get yourself washed up, okay? Hurry. We’ll talk about it on the way.”

“Okay, Daddy.”

I motioned her into the bathroom. Closed the door behind me. Slid down the wall, and held my head in my hands. I tried not to hate my ex-wife. Tried to convince myself that she had merely waited too long to have this discussion with Sam, but she hadn’t planned to put it off forever. Perhaps she had been searching for the right words to say and hadn’t found them yet. I hoped that was the case. Prayed that was her excuse. Because I could certainly relate…

“How the hell am I supposed to handle this?” I groaned. “I don’t have
ovaries
, for Christ’s sake.”

For those next few minutes, as I listened to the sound of running water in the bathroom and the muffled flush of the toilet, I found myself wondering who my daughter would be when she grew older. Where would she go in life, after she stopped needing me? What amazing feats might she accomplish? Who would capture her heart one day, when she became a woman?

I would know soon enough. The events of this afternoon had forced me to accept that fact, whether I wanted to or not.

My God, where did the years go?

And why, at a time like this, did I suddenly find myself thinking—out of all the people in the world—of
Eldon Prescott,
my jailbait girlfriend’s father from so many years ago? Why did I, for the first time ever, realize that I sympathized one hundred percent with the big man’s fury on that fateful night?

I did not understand why he suddenly filled my thoughts. Then again, as I sat there brooding over how to explain to my daughter what was happening to her body… it all made perfect sense. Somehow. In some strange way.

Finally, Sam came out of the bathroom wrapped in a pink Bugs Bunny beach towel. I exhaled loudly when the door opened, remembered to start breathing again.

“Daddy?” she said, peering down at me. “I thought you were gonna get me some clean clothes.”
I stood, composed myself.

“Um, yeah,” I said. “Yeah. Sorry…”

I hurried down the hallway to her bedroom, wiping my eyes as I went.

She followed me.

“Are you all right, Dad?”

“I’m all right.”

“You looked like you were getting ready to cry.”

“Don’t be silly,” I said. “I just had something in my eye.”

“Do you want to go in with me?” I asked her as I parked the Explorer in front of the 7th Avenue Stop-N-Shop.

Locks of my daughter’s sweaty blond hair danced within the air-conditioner’s breeze as she reached to turn it down. Before we left the house, she had slipped into her favorite pajamas. She looked comfortable now, no longer scared, but very tired. And
disappointed
, somehow. As if she had barely survived some tragic ordeal far worse than her first menstruation, and she knew it had changed her forever.

“I think I’ll wait in the car,” she said. “If that’s okay?”

“Of course it’s okay.”

She gave me a sad little smile, started fiddling with the radio.

“Sit tight, sweetheart. I’ll be right back.”

I sat there watching her until she found something she liked, and then I slowly climbed out of the Explorer.

I felt so old. Useless.

***

An electronic bell above the door chimed twice as I entered the building.

“’Afternoon,” said the guy behind the counter, but he did not turn from his work as he said it. He was busy stocking a tall plastic shelf with cartons of Camel cigarettes, giving every customer who entered the store a free view of his enormous ass-crack each time he bent over to open a new box.

“What’s up, Round Man,” I mumbled a dutiful reply.

I headed for the toiletries aisle. My shoes squeaked like dying mice on the store’s recently-buffed tile floor.

When I reached my destination, I gave an exasperated sigh. I hadn’t expected this to be a simple task by any means, but as I stood there staring at the myriad of choices before me, scratching my head like a chimpanzee trying to comprehend the fundamentals of long division, I felt as if I were drowning in a sea of feminine hygiene products.

Thin… ultra-thin… ultra-thin with wings… super absorbency… regular absorbency… “light days”… “overnighters”…

Christ. What the hell was I supposed to buy for an
eleven-year-old
? It gave me a headache, trying to sort it all out.

After what felt like forever, I returned to the front of the store, placing a small blue box of maxi-pads on the counter beside the cash register.

Ronnie “Round Man” Miller, owner of the 7th Avenue Stop-N-Shop, continued his work at the cigarette racks.

I coughed into my fist to get his attention.

“Oh, sorry about that—”

His eyes grew wide when he turned around. His Adam’s apple jiggled and twitched like some living thing stuck in his throat, trying to get out. He looked like an enormous deer caught in a hunter’s spotlight.

“Um… h-hey there, Mr. Holland,” he stammered.

Ronnie “Round Man” Miller had called me “Mr. Holland” from the first day we met, even though I was seven or eight years his junior and had reminded him countless times that my first name would suffice. He was a very obese fellow, the type of person I would have described as “pear-shaped” in one of my novels. He kept his hair shaved in a Marine-style buzz-cut, but a bushy salt-and-pepper goatee dangled at least three inches from his chin (in certain company he called it his “pussy tickler,” which never failed to make me chuckle despite the crudity of such a claim). He favored loud Hawaiian shirts and leather sandals, wore three silver hoops in his left ear. His breath always smelled suspiciously like the butterscotch candies he kept in the GIVE A NICKEL/SEND A BLIND KID TO BAND CAMP bowl beside his cash register.

I liked Round Man a lot. I always had. He was a genuinely
nice guy,
an amicable sort with whom you could strike up a conversation about anything at any time and never find yourself growing bored. His perpetually meek demeanor never failed to belie his hulking, middle-aged-punk appearance.

On the day in question, however, I knew—the second he saw me standing there—that something was wrong.

“Hey, Round Man,” I said. “How’s business?”

His mouth worked soundlessly for several seconds as he tried his damnedest not to look me in the eyes. He stared down at the box of maxi-pads on the counter between us, shifted his considerable weight from one foot to the other. Behind him, on a battered old ghetto blaster with a peace symbol sticker over one speaker, Jimmy Buffet sang about growing older but not up.

Round Man reached to turn down the radio.

“I, um… heh… I woulda figured this was the kinda thing you didn’t have to worry about anymore, Mr. Holland,” he said, offering me a lop-sided smile.

“Come again?” I said.

“Being… ya know, divorced and all. I assumed trips to the store to pick up, uh, stuff like this for the, um, little lady was a thing of the past for ya.”

“Right,” I said.

He glanced outside, through the Stop-N-Shop’s plate glass window. When he saw Samantha sitting in the passenger seat of the Explorer, his fat face turned as red as the Marlboro sign on the wall behind him.

“Oh,” he said. He looked sick.

“Don’t worry about it,” I told him. “I don’t mean to be rude, Round Man, but I’m sorta in a hurry, okay?”

“Sure, sure. Sorry. Sorry.” Round Man’s head bobbed up and down as his chubby fingers rang up my purchase.

It took him several tries to get it right. His hands were shaking.

I crossed my arms. Glanced around the store, waiting.

And I froze… when I spotted something that made my heart start to beat a little bit faster.

For as long as I had lived on Poinsettia Lane less than a mile from his store, Round Man kept two crooked aluminum racks propped up on the counter to the right of the cash register. Normally, those racks were stocked with several dozen copies of my latest novels, mass-market paperback editions the Stop-N-Shop’s rotund proprietor purchased from the distributor at bulk wholesale prices. SIGNED BY THE AUTHOR, read a bright yellow decal on every cover, above a penciled-in price at least twice that edition’s original value. The green placard at the top of the rack, its bottom edge carefully trimmed to look like dripping slime, advertised SPOOOOOKY BOOKS BY A LOCAL FAVE!!!!!, and every “O” resembled a bulging, bloodshot monster eye drawn in red Magic Marker.

Today, though, that sign was nowhere to be seen.

The racks were bare. My books were gone. Every last one of them.

A chill caressed my spine at the sight of those empty, skeletal racks.

There had to be a reasonable explanation, I told myself. Maybe every copy had sold out since my last visit, and Round Man was simply awaiting another shipment. Perhaps some horror-loving thief with impeccable taste had absconded with my portly pal’s entire inventory. Or… another unsettling possibility lurked in the back of my brain as well.