Hide and Seek (10 page)

When it finally wore down for us the palms of my hands were wet with her tears and the musty smell of them filled the car as she sobbed into my shoulder, great mangled racking sounds that tore what was left of my anger to shreds and left me holding her, stroking her, wondering how in the hell it had come to this, anyway.

"Just hold on to me, huh?"

Her voice was very small against me. She sniffled, laughed a little.

"I... I think I've got a screw loose somewhere, you know? So please just... hold on?"

I did hold her.

And then a little later I heard her sigh.

"God, I'm fucked up!"

"You want to tell me about it?"

She laughed again. It was weighted with sadness.

"No."

"Tell me anyhow."

For a moment she was very still. My hand found the warm bare flesh of her shoulder where I'd torn the shirt. Her breathing was calmer and more even now.

"He hasn't done anything fora longtime now. I'd almost forgiven him.

Both of us."

She paused, thought a moment. Her voice turned colder.

"No, I hadn't. That's a lie."

"Who? Who are we talking about?"

"My father."

She turned her head away from me slightly so that it rested just below my shoulder and stared out through the windshield. Clouds had parted for the moon again just moments before and now I saw snail tracks of tears across her cheeks, bathed in cool white light, dissolving the tan into something pale and famished-looking.

"He drinks. A lot. You're not supposed to do that when you're vice-president of a bank. So he drinks at home where there's nobody there but us to see.

"My mother would go out. Clubs and meetings and all that, the kind of thing that's expected of a wife in ... her position. Because he couldn't manage his end of it. Get him around liquor, and he's drunk.

So he stayed in. With us, me and Jimmie, my little brother. Maybe she just wanted to get away from him. I don't know.

"He's not a bad man. He's not mean. Even when he's drunk, he's not mean. Just weak, and foolish. She's very smart. Intolerant, and disappointed, I guess. They should never have married at all. But where she comes from, you get married. You just do."

She glanced at me once and then looked away, shaking her head.

"I'm not doing so good at this."

"Go on."

"When I was thirteen ... I guess you could say he raped me."

I waited. I could feel something clog my throat. I think I'd half expected it. I felt the sudden press of the inevitable. Itwasas though the car sat underneath a bell jar and we were in a perfect vacuum, with everything extraneous sucked out of it and us except this one moment in time, this one event.

Figure this if you can:

It was then that she seduced me utterly.

I waited. I don't think I so much as blinked. Perhaps a car went by, playing over us with its headlights. I know I saw her very clearly.

"I was in the tub. I still liked baths then. "We were never very big on privacy. I'd left the door open. I looked up and saw him standing there, and I knew he was drunk. You could always tell. He looked bad.

Very bad. I wasn't angry. I felt sorry for him. I watched him looking at me and I didn't yell and for a while I didn't move or say a word. He'd seen me naked before, but this was ... different. I was already a woman by then. I knew. I really knew. And I felt bad for him.

"I got up and wrapped a towel around me and walked past him. He didn't touch me. He didn't say anything. I went into my bedroom and closed the door. I remember looking into the mirror for a long, longtime.

"I read for a while until I got sleepy and then I went to bed. I could hear him rattling a round downstairs in the kitchen. I guess he was drinking some more. But I couldn't sleep. I'd get close and then I'd drift back and I'd hear him again.

"How can I say this? I... wanted him to come in. I used to think I'd willed him there. He was so obviously, so terribly unhappy. And I

I watched the tears come, watched her fight them to submission before they could take hold of her again.

"... and I loved him. He was my father. He'd never harmed me.

"I heard his footsteps on the stairs and then the door opened and then he was next to me on the bed, and he was making these sounds and he smelled of whiskey. The smell was bad and the sounds were bad, like someone hurt and frightened. His hands felt so much bigger than I thought they would.

"He stroked my hair and my cheek. He put his hand on my breast. I was wearing pyjamas. He pulled the bottoms off me. I was sea red, the way he looked. I asked him to stop. I told him I was sorry, like a little girl who'd been bad. "I'm sorry," I said, over and over. I was crying by then. But he kept on touching me. He wasn't hurting me but I was scared, really scared, and I started yelling for him to

stop and yelling that I'd tell, I'd tell my mother, and over and over saying I was sorry

"So then Jimmie came into the room. Rubbing his eyes. Adumb little kid, eight years old, half-asleep, wondering what all the commotion's about. And there's my father with his pants half-off, and there's his sister bare-assed in bed with Daddy's hand between her legs, and there's blood ... all over the sheets, all over my legs. Blood I've just seen for the first time now.

"He ran out of there so fast it scared me worse than I already was, and my father, I remember he just groaned like I'd hurt him bad or something, only it was worse than that, an awful shuddery sound. But he rolled off me. And I... I went after Jimmie.

"We had a little dog. Just a mutt. He was Jimmie's dog but everybody loved him. And we had a staircase in the house just like the one in this one. And the hall was dark. Jimmie ... he didn't see the dog lying by the stairs. I ran for him but he went down ... and the rest is all just sounds for me. The dog yelping. My father screaming behind me. Jimmie falling down the stairs. And then something loud and wet like if you dropped a ... melon. I guess passed out.

"Jimmie died in a coma. My mother knew everything by then. We got rid of the dog. You just couldn't have him around anymore. My father was sober for about a year, all told-"

She leaned back hard against the seat, exhausted.

I watched her awhile, saying nothing, wondering if she was more comprehensible to me now, wondering if it helped anything.

She was silent for a moment, and then she laughed. In the laugh you could see how some of the toughness was made.

"Just now my father, who I suppose has had a couple martinis, had the temerity to put his hands on my shoulders and kiss me on

She looked at me and her eyes held that same indifferent cruelty I'd seen that day at the beach, looking down at Steven from that rock, naked and terrible.

"He doesn't touch me. Not ever. I touch him if I feel like it, but nothing else is acceptable. And every time he forgets that, I make him pay. Every time."

I knew a girl once who was rumored to have slept with her father. A local girl. She was a pinched, starved little thing with frightened eyes who held her books tight to her chest and ran on spindly legs from class like something vast and evil was always in pursuit. Sitting next to me now was the opposite of her, tempered maybe in the same waters but unbroken, raw and splendid with physical health and power. This one had turned the tables, pursuing the pursuer with a ferocity that probably would have amazed that other girl, but that she would have understood thoroughly.

I wondered, though. I'd met the man. To me he was just ashadow.

Insubstantial, insignificant. And I wondered if in that place within where we're all blind and dumb to ourselves, the cat wasn't chasing its own flayed and miserable tail.

"Let's drive," she said.

I started the car. Since we'd met, how many times had she said that now? Let's drive. Let's just drive. It never mattered where. Slice a fissure of black macadam through time.

Drive me.

Orders from the lost to the superfluous.

And I think I saw, glimpsed where I fit in then. Where Kim and Steve fit in too.

We were just diversions, really. Bodies of water suitable for a brief immersion. I diverted her into passion. If we were lucky, orgasm.

Steve and Kim into something that looked like friendship but was probably more like continuity, habit. Company. There was nothing--not even herfatherorthe memory of her brother--between Casey and Casey. Not anymore. She'd expelled everybody else. Maybe it's like that for all of us. I don't know.

I know we all are lonely. Locked off from one another in some fundamental secrecy. But some of us declare war and some of us don't.

This isn't a value judgment upon Casey. I'm sure she had her reasons, that for her it was the only strategy. I don't think she came to it out of any elemental cruelty.

But war is still death. Death made unselective and infectious.

Tonight she'd repelled a minor invasion. But it had cost her. A piece of her father, a piece of me. And something of herself too. She was dying. She would always be. Casey could survive, but not intact.

There were some rules she couldn't break. And the best of her was as vulnerable as the worst.

I drove. Silence thick around us. Eyes fixed to the road in the headlights as though eyes and lights were one and the same.

I knew she did not want sympathy. I knew she'd talked it through and then had wrested the confidence back from me again and thrust it away inside her. In the morning there would be broken windows. The only evidence that it had ever happened.

I drove. Slow through the little towns and back roads and fast -very fast-over the long rolling hills between. We saw a doe frozen in the headlights along the side of the road. The clouds had cleared away and the moon was bright, the sky filled with stars. I felt like I had a destination, a purpose, but of course I didn't. The purpose was just the feel of motion, the car cutting through the night.

We went up through Eastport and Perry and Pembroke, turned south and drove to Whiting. I was hardly aware of the circle moving in on itself. To me they were just towns, all familiar and alike.

It was two in the morning when we started heading back to Dead River.

The roads were empty. We hadn't seen a car for miles. At West Lubec we went over a wooden bridge. We passed a little country church, bone white and bleak with disrepair.

"Stop here," she told me.

, ..

' ,

I .

She got out of the car and walked toward the church. I followed her.

Beneath the bridge the crickets and frogs were a single texture of percussive sound.

The door was fastened with a single Yale lock. Perhaps there was nothing inside worth stealing.

The white paint was chipped and flaking. She pulled a long strip of it off the door. The Yale lock was rusted. I flipped it with my thumb.

"Sad shape."

"I sort of like it"

We peered in through the window. It was too dark to see much there. A row of hardwood benches. In the distance, outlined by moonlight, what looked like a small raised altar. We walked around back.

"It's old. A hundred years or more, I bet."

She wasn't listening. She grabbed my arm.

"Look."

Behind the church and off to the left there were about thirty upright stones broken, chipped, eroded behind a low wrought iron fence.

"Come on."

She took my hand. We walked among the leaning headstones. We each took out packs of matches and read the inscriptions. On some of them there wasn't enough left to read.

Beloved wife of. Beloved daughter to.

^^^^^^1 '

Most seemed to have died in the mid-to-late 1800s. A lot of them were women, and young.

"Childbirth," she said.

"Lydia, wife of John Pritchett. She died in childbed December thirtieth, 1876, in the twenty-third year of her age. Sarah, daughter of Mr. Jonathan Clagg, wife to William Lesley, who died thirteenth of June 1856, in the eighteenth year of her age. That one too, maybe."

There was one that made us laugh. E//sha Bowman. Died March 21st, 1865. Aged 33 yrs, 1m, 14d. He believed that nothing but the success of the Democratic Party would ever save this Union. There was some good carving on the headstone.

I lit another match and looked it over. A skeleton inside a circle described by a snake swallowing its own tail. The skeleton was grinning. In one hand it held an apple, in the other an hourglass.

Beneath, two bats. Above, two seraphim. Pretty elaborate, I thought,

After a while I found one I liked even better. Here lies the body of Bill Trumbell, it read, dead in 1829. Been here and gone. Had a good time.

Strange how even laughter has a hush to it in a place like that at night. You talk as though there's somebody around. And maybe there is. A hundred-year parade of mourners, for one thing, some of them standing there just as you are now in the moonlight, thinking about the past and loved ones gone. The aura of last rights given among simple people who still believed in god and the devil and the Democrats.

And the people underground.