Cursed Be the Child (27 page)

You shut up, Lisette! You shut up now!

She opened the closet door.

Then she stepped into the closet that was so big she sometimes thought of it as her special secret room, a place where you kept secret things, things made magical because you were absolutely the only one in the whole world who knew about them. On the rods, clothes hung like lonely invisible people. The lower half of one wall was all shelves for her folded sweaters and shoes, and on the top shelf, there it was! The shoe box. Her collection. Private. Personal. Secret.

I am the secret. You cannot tell. You will not tell.

On the shoe box’s top, in the very best crayoned letters she could do last year, it read: MELISSA BARRINGER.

That is who I am.

I am…

The shoe box contained her secret collection—a pretty stamp from a letter some professor in Belgium had sent her father, a rock from her old school’s playground so that she would
never
forget, a pair of huge earrings glittering with rhinestones.

There it was. The doll.

My doll. Your blood. My life, Melissa. Now it is my life. Mine!

The precisely crafted china image of the little girl with the bonnet, basket of eggs on her lap, It scratchy and cold. It feels dead, Missy thought, not knowing how she knew what dead felt like but not doubting that this was it. The doll’s face, she thought, might have been her face—or Lisette’s face. Or it might have been her face and Lisette’s face.

Missy stepped out of the walk-in closet. Eyes half-closed, she held out the doll. She swallowed a hot, excited sob down to her racing heart. “Take it, Lisette. Take it and go away and leave me alone,” she begged.

No.

“Then I’ll smash it! I’ll break it into a million pieces!”

Eyes wide now, she squeezed the doll as though to crush it in her hands. She wanted not to shatter it, not to destroy it—but to kill it.

But its lifeless eyes caught hers for a long moment, a moment in which she could not feel her heart and thought it had stopped beating.

And she knew she could not kill the doll. It wasn’t alive. It had never been alive, and so it would never die.

It was and it always would be.

Carefully, she set the china doll on the top of her play table.

She looked at it—and she felt lost.

Then she spun around as her mother came in.

— | — | —

Thirty

“Didn’t I tell you to sit in that corner and stay there until I said otherwise, young lady?” When Vicki had thrown open the bedroom door, Missy froze.

Moments ago, as she’d started up the stairs, Vicki was convinced she had cooled down and could deal with the situation. Had she found Missy in the corner, penitent, guilty, perhaps a tear or two, then everything would have been okay, she was certain of that.

But Missy’s defiance was a blazing patch on each of her cheeks and a squint so tight it was painful.

Vicki curbed her fury and saw that her daughter was terrified! It was time for Mom to have a discussion with Missy to learn what had happened with Dorothy and to learn why Missy was acting so strange lately, so unusual.

“Are you mad, Mom?” Missy backed up, her retreat halted by her play table.

“No,” Vicki said. She was upset, but she was not angry. She was…concerned. Yes, that’s what she told Missy.

Mom needed to know what happened and why it happened. They had to talk about it so that nothing like this would ever happen again.

She had to know why Missy had hurt Dorothy like that.

“I didn’t,” Missy said softly and seriously.

Vicki did not raise her voice, nor did she acknowledge Missy’s words. She continued the interrogation. Was it something that had been meant as a joke, a trick played on a friend? Was it just an accident? Vicki persisted. Accidents do happen; she could understand that.

“It was not an accident,” Missy said, “but I didn’t do it.”

Vicki drew a resigned breath. “Missy, your friend, Dorothy, was really hurt. She was hurt badly, and she could have been hurt even worse. Do you understand? You cannot…”

“I didn’t do it.”

Missy’s not quite innocent but definitely not guilty look and her repeated denial of wrongdoing got to Vicki. She folded her arms. Goodbye, cool, she thought, as she severely demanded, “Then who did?”

Missy’s face screwed up. Her mouth worked wetly. Her lips soundlessly shaped words as though each one was too momentously weighty and awful to be said aloud.

Then in a rough-edged rasping whisper that hurt to listen to, Missy said, “She did.”

What the hell was Missy saying? What the hell kind of game was this?

And who the hell did Missy think she could fool?

Three strikes and out, Vicki thought. I will not get angry, Vicki told herself, but how about a good, old-fashioned, bottom-whacking, administered by a non-angry, totally in control Mom who has rationally decided that a spanking will benefit her daughter’s behavior? Yes, Vicki decided, a paddling was a definite option.

She was about to warn Missy of that, but she didn’t, because, just then, an expression flickered across the child’s features.

And what Vicki saw on Missy’s face was hideously wrong, a look that should not have been on her child’s face, on any child’s face.

Vicki’s mind flashed back to the past summer, a day in Chicago.

It was early August, temperature 91 degrees, no lake breeze, no chance of rain, the kind of humid heat that makes you feel you are melting and the city is melting around you. Warren had Missy on an educational jaunt—Adler Planetarium, the Shedd Aquarium, The Field Museum. Vicki had been shopping at Water Tower.

Then she stepped out of the air-conditioned nationality and civilization, and madness accosted her. He was albino, crossed eyes blazing pink and wild, frenzied tangles of white hair exploding around the feral face. He was as tall as a pro basketball player. A woolen coat, stained and stinking of body odor and urine, flapped around him.

“Spare change?” He jabbed a hand toward her, and she managed not to scream. “I need help, lady!” Then he thrust his face at her, and he was the only reality she saw as he whispered, “I need help, lady. I got seven demons in me and they’re eatin’ my soul!”

For that one, awful, unforgettable moment, she did not doubt that it was so, that his inner demons were devouring him, because on his face was unimaginable torment.

That was what Vicki Barringer thought she had just seen on the face of her little girl.

Or she had a new, invasive thought, one perhaps more credible but no less awful: Missy was crazy!

Missy was mentally ill, blaming someone else for Dorothy. It was like Sybil! The Three Faces Of Missy!

It was crazy, all right, and the craziness was totally on the part of good old Mom, because this was Missy, no one else, with her Winnie-the-Pooh bear and Mickey Mouse night light. This was a good kid, her very own good kid—and that was that.

Not crazy.

She sat on the foot of Missy’s bed. “Come here,” she said. Missy tentatively walked to her and no less tentatively settled on her lap. Vicki felt the child’s slim warmth against her as Missy leaned back. She wrapped her in a loose hug.

“Mom?”

“Hmm-mm?”

“There’s…I want to tell you, I really do.”

“You can. I’m your mom. You can tell me anything. Missy, I love you. I love you more than anything in the whole world, and there’s nothing that can ever change that.”

A silence.

“Mom?”

“What is it, honey?”

A silence, only a silence. Vicki couldn’t hear Missy’s breathing nor her own.

“Mom, sometimes...”

Missy stopped talking.

“You can say it,” Vicki said.

Missy did. “Sometimes I am not me.”

Even as Melissa Barringer said that, she wasn’t. She was Lisette.

It was Lisette who heard Vicki say with a worried sigh, “I don’t understand.”

The child who was not then Melissa Barringer understood.

Lisette understood completely.

She pressed against Vicki Barringer and hated her. She knew this woman loved Missy. She would do anything for her daughter, her little girl, her Missy…

But I am Lisette and I am alive!

She could not share a life, a body, with Melissa. Melissa and Lisette could not both be here in this beautifully real world. So Melissa had to go away, go away forever! And the woman, Melissa’s mother, would do everything she could to keep Melissa here, to keep Melissa from going away.

Though she might not have used that precise term, Lisette knew her mortal enemy, this woman who would deny her need and right to be alive.

With a voice that was Missy’s voice, she said, “Give me a kiss.”

The little girl twisted on Vicki’s lap, offering a cheek. She turned her head before Vicki’s lips touched her face.

In the next wild instant, Vicki’s rational mind knew exactly what was happening, but could give no commands to her body because of the fiery, tearing pain, a pain ballooning inside her head, so intense and awful in its sheer surprise that it literally could not be believed.

She bit me! She is biting me!

The child ground her teeth into Vicki’s lower lip, gnawing at wet and bloody pulp, and Vicki felt the blood flowing, coating her teeth and running down her throat. She tried to scream but could only moan as pain mingled with the child’s hot breath invading her mouth.

Then came another pain. There were hands on her throat, small but with animal strength, strangling hands.

Insane! It was beyond belief, but Vicki Barringer did not doubt that her little girl meant to kill her. How can this be?

A heated and weighty blackness rushed from her lungs.

Within the pain, Vicki felt her mind melt to liquid. There were things like thoughts swimming there, but nothing seemed to have meaning or to be of any importance.

Finally it was outrage that brought Vicki around.
If I do not do something, she is going to kill me.

With awkward determination, Vicki wedged her arms in between herself and the girl. She forced her hands between the thin, straining forearms and levered against them with all her strength, strength that was rapidly slipping away, until the fingers left her neck.

Then Vicki’s right hand shot up beneath the child’s chin. Index, middle, ring fingers sank into the hinge at the jawbone, while her thumb found the same spot on the other side. Vicki squeezed, pushing the girl’s head back, prying open her jaws until the awful grip of teeth was broken and the little girl thumped off her lap to the floor.

Vicki tried to think, tried to understand what was incomprehensible, as she drew a breath that corkscrewed painfully into her. She snuffled blood and spit and snot, trying not to throw up.