Everyday Psychokillers (29 page)

Okay, so I think of Alicia in one of those paintings and she's the girl in front right now, she's the girl, now, and behind her are all those girls through history, through mine, my history, all lined behind her. They're bound. A string is strung through them. They're beads on a string. I pull the string. They're not beads, they're shadows, they're paper, I pull the string and they all slide forward until they hit Alicia's back and smack, pop, pow, they're one girl, they're a whole girl, they're animated, multi-dimensional, they're more than composite, they're her, she's alive, she's here.

I watch her. I imagine her. For weeks, for months maybe. All those things you do when you're a psychokiller. No lie.

It is very difficult to remember what I was thinking.

Then one day I follow her to school. I do. I decide that what I have to do is I have to follow the bus, because I don't really know where the school is, which one she goes to.

I take off work on a Friday and I put my poodle in my hatchback, and my poodle promptly hops up front and sits next to me like she's a person, like a person's crawled inside her and she's a disguise. It's such a decent town that each morning the bus pulls right up in front of the house, first the bus that takes some of the little kids to their school, and then the bus that takes Alicia. I've become used to being a few minutes late for work so that I can wait with her, and watch her get on it. The first bus grumbles and squeaks to a stop at their walkway. The kids totter through the yard and Alicia shuttles them along and then runs back into the house to collect her own stuff. If it's nice weather she sits outside and waits. Sometimes she reads. All dressed and ready to go, I watch out my window with the last of my coffee.

So the morning I follow the bus it's a little tough to change my routine that I like so much. I wait in the car in my driveway with its nose facing out, huffing and puffing from its stubby exhaust pipe, pretending I'm letting it warm up, practicing so that if someone walks over for some reason and asks about my dog I'll be able to say it's take-your-dog-to-work day.

For a second, I ask myself why I am bringing my dog. And then I realize: I'm not sure when I'm coming back.

The first bus leaves and then the second bus arrives. Alicia's running late and she springs from the front door holding her backpack by its loop handle because she doesn't have time to sling it over her shoulder. She's wearing a goofy crochet hat with a pompom on top. The back seats of the bus are already full, so I know immediately there's no chance of her sitting where I can see her. I follow the bus up and down two more blocks. Within those blocks we make three more stops. Then I follow the bus out of the neighborhood. We cross the creek and swing onto the highway and go one exit away. We pass a shabby golf course and a public park and then we arrive at a tidy brick building with white columns rising from wide front steps. No surprise, on the sign with the name of the school, which I read and promptly forget, there's a cross. I pull over. The bus pulls in behind two other busses.

Alicia exits the bus. She's not wearing her hat anymore. Her hair is newly cropped in chunks. It's both ridiculous and adorable. The sole of one of her completely beaten sneakers is flopping and I can see her little smirk at the sound on the sidewalk. I'm struck, knowing we are thinking of the same thing.

She's surrounded. She's one bright, fallen leaf in a stream with thousands. The great double doors to the boxy brick school suck them up, a breath, the half of a breath that goes backwards.

There's no fence around this school and I have a clear view. I spend the day in the car, parked across the street, with a sandwich and the newspaper. My dog fusses for a while. She can see the soccer fields and she's convinced I meant to take her out to run and have lost my mind. She's sure I've simply forgotten. She pokes her nose at my paper. She's briefly interested in my sandwich. She gives up, I'm being ridiculous, and she curls up in the bucket seat and sleeps.

At lunchtime, the kids come out of the school again. It's pretty big for a private school, but apparently there's no hot lunch and they gather in groups outside along the brick retaining wall or spread their sweaters like picnic blankets, eating their lunches from paper bags and lunchpails the shape of mailboxes. They're in groups according to the clothes they wear and how big they are.

Alicia's there. She's eating lunch with three girls. Apparently each girl has done something funny to her hair: one has dyed hers black, one has dyed hers blue, one has braided hers in dozens of sloppy braids. Alicia's the only one who's chopped hers off, though, and I imagine they're impressed. All day, at intervals, they've been saying, “God, Alicia, I can't believe you did that,” or “God, Alicia, you're crazy. I totally didn't think you would.” In math, in algebra I bet, the one with the braids, the timid one, passes a note to Alicia. It's intricately folded into a square with a diamond in the center. “Don't worry,” it says in smudgy pencil. “Your hair looks pretty cool. Plus it will grow back.”

Mostly, though, watching them, I wish I'd saved my sandwich so I could unwrap mine as she unwraps hers, so I could open it up and adjust the placement of the tomatoes, so I could see how it feels to eat the whole thing before taking even a sip of soda, the way, it turns out, she does.

All day the sun comes through the windshield, one angle at a time. At some moments colors sparkle from my dog's black curls like momentary rainbows in oil. In the schoolyard lost bits of plastic wrap float over the grass like baby ghosts.

The bell rings. It's mechanical, broadcast. My dog sits up, and I sit up. The kids fill the yard, moving at such varieties of speeds it's impossible to focus really. Some are flat out running, shoving through the crowd, and some are slouched and shuffling and some are standing in clumps with their hips cocked, holding their books to their chests and snapping gum, planning their weekends, cramming in social information while they can. I can see how noisy it is. Alicia's solitary, striding toward the line of busses. She's already done thinking about school. She's thinking about something else, and I can see it's something that somewhere pains her. She only half-knows she's in public. I think she's already home, sweeping the leaves from the porch, seven squat kids screaming Emergency! Emergency! because suddenly their toys have become entirely unappealing, and I leap from my car. I feel it finally, how desperately I must save her.

“Alicia!” I holler. I'm waving madly. I've got both hands in the air. Like I'm at a rock show. Like someone in the sky's got my fingers caught in strings, deus ex machina, shaking them from above. “Alicia! It's me!” I call. “From next door!”

I'm driving. I'm amazed. She's next to me.

I waved like that and she did, she came over. She stood with me by the hood of my car. I said, “I'm here to give you a ride home.”

She said, “Why?” Her eyelashes went right around her eyes, precisely as you'd expect. One eyelash had escaped, and balanced on her cheekbone near her nose, undecided.

I said, “Don't you hate the bus?” and she said, “No, I don't mind the bus. It's kind of meditative.”

I said, “Well, your aunt asked me. To pick you up.”

A couple girls approached, but she waved them away. “See you later,” she said. Then she said, “Shit. What happened?”

“I don't know,” I said. “You know her.”

Alicia said, “I thought she was over the hair.”

I opened the door to her side of the car and my poodle stood there, wiggling at her. I shooed her into the backseat and Alicia got in. My dog licked the side of her face from behind. Alicia smiled like mad. She shoved her backpack back there and it settled nicely into the depression in the backseat, right where if I was another abductor I might have tossed her once I clunked her on the head with my golfclub.

Instead, I'm driving and she's next to me, leaning her head against the window, letting it vibrate there. When I glance over I can almost mistake her for being asleep, as if she's fainted and slid sideways down a wall. Her scrappy hair is the color of a faun. She's remarkable. She pulls her knee up so her foot's on the seat with her, and picks at the rubber that's still holding the flapping sole to her shoe. Her little toes peek out of their container. Her white sock is black with filth. She's immaculate. My face, I make sure, is as blank as possible, but I'm clinging to the steering wheel much harder than I mean. I pass our exit. It's gone as if it never came up.

I'm seething with warmth. I push at it with my mind, trying to shove it away it's so utterly inappropriate, utterly inconvenient. Almost predictably, I'm filled with affection and it's shifted, it's edged right over, it's slipped out of me, these feelings, when I'm not looking. It's the way it happens for me. I'll take my mind away from my book to examine a thought for a moment, or glance up from my dinner, or from television, I'll remember something, and it's easing from me, wavering like a loose layer around me, like egg white. Alone, it can end with a hand down my pants, but anywhere else, it just never wells up when it's appropriate. It just never seems to have to do with anything
right now
. In the car, in the glances I take of Alicia and keep as I return my eyes to the highway, I feel it, I'm squirming with it. I'm dizzy with it, frantic. The car is like a steel trap and I want to chew my fucking arm off. I can't remember if I ever decided: am I driving home, or am I driving us, together, away?

I think, Christ I don't have time for this. I have to go to work on Monday. I think about how crappy motels are, how quickly I would run out of money, how it's such a pain to travel with a dog. I mean how many abductions in history happened with poodles? How many rescues? Captivating captive. Adopted, abducted. Rescued, reduced. We're past the actual town. We're in that space between named places. She's used to the bus, I think. She's just zoning out there. She's tired. Or she doesn't care. Or she doesn't want to go back to her uncle and Claire.

In a bright spasm of a decision I jerk the car into the right lane and down the ramp off the highway. It's pretty much in the country. There are farms. The road goes up and down some hills but is straight as far as I can see.

Alicia looks up finally. “You miss the exit?” she says, but she's so unruffled I wonder if I drugged her. She's being what you call blasé. I can't tell if she's faking.

I mean, I just don't
know
her that well.

“God, you drive fast,” she says.

I don't, but it's true. I am.

“Did someone die?” she says. She's not afraid. She's not scared, that I can tell. She's not worried. “Where are we going? Come on, really,” she says. “Believe me, you can tell me. I'm not going to be shocked.” I believe her. If anything, I think she's worried for me.

I turn the car again. It's like we're driving on a grid. I jerk and turn, I jerk and turn. Each time I turn we're on another straight road, and each turn the road's more desolate, less kept. I turn onto dirt, finally. There are potholes. My dog is bouncing around in back, trying to stand and see out the window without falling down. I turn again. There's no sign, and almost immediately I can see it's a dead end. It's a dead end into a cornfield. I stop the car. The cornstalks are taller than the car, and absolutely pale. It's an abandoned field. The corn is dead, drained and colorless. No one bothered to harvest it.

My dog really wants to get out of the car.

“Are you going to tell me now?” says Alicia.

I love it. She has no patience for drama.

She's stopped picking at her shoe but she's still sitting with her one foot up on the seat, which makes it so she's turned slightly toward me. She's looking right at me. She's waiting for me to say what I'm going to say, to do what I'm going to do.

It's one thing to let someone touch you. Being touched can almost be okay, because it's merely a matter of bravado, of bearing it. You've made peace with anything that could happen. You've had to, in order to move through the world at all.

But I can't touch her, much as I scramble for a disclaimer about knocking a bug away or lifting a leaf from her hair. I shove at my mind but I can't even imagine it, really. I can imagine my hand moving, and I can imagine it near her. I can imagine the particles that surround her humming with heat and I can imagine feeling the electricity of them, their hyper, microscopic orbits. I can imagine coming as close as imaginable to the rows and rows of practically transparent, practically invisible hairs on her body, and like a magnet turned backward, hovering there at their multitudinous uniform tips.

I look at her and it's as if I'm standing over her. I'm like that one girl who slammed that other girl into the iron beam in the basement locker room and stood over her as she disappeared into a coma.

She's a spinning top, her own little universe, all the particles in her body, these microscopic solar systems, molecules following one another in such close circles they're bound, moving so fast they seem still. When I look at her I feel like I'm taking her into myself, like I'm wearing her, like she's another layer of me. I feel as if I'm seeing her inside-out, but what I see is how mysterious she remains to me, as I remain mysterious to myself, and in this, how ultimately distant we are.

The very gesture. My hand approaching. It could be a snake striking. It so easily could be one, despite any intentions at all. I can't touch her. I can't touch her because if I actually touched her, I'd have to know I could do it
right
.

I mean, what if it hurt? What if it hurt her feelings, you know? I'd have to be certain. And there's no way.

Go ahead: think. Think about girls. Think about girls you know, and girls in history. Think about girls you knew in your childhood. Really. I was not surrounded by terrible things as a child, not particularly, and neither were any of them, any of the girls or any of the people. Where I lived was not a particularly bad place. It's true, it's gotten a lot of press about being a microcosm. The election, for instance, when the country was torn in half with apathy or antipathy and then again between two awful men who'd run and it came down to that place. It even came down to who's the real kidnapper, us or them, of the six-year-old boy who was as dark and angelic as Adam was blond.