The Unwanted

In the dream, she was standing by the freeway watching the traffic rush by, and then, far in the distance, she had seen her mother’s car. There didn’t seem to be anything different about that car—in fact, in the dream it had looked just like all the other cars on the freeway. But still, somehow, she had known that that particular car was her mother’s. And then, as the car passed her, she saw her mother turn and look at her. The odd thing was that the woman in the car, whom she
knew
was her mother, didn’t look like her mother at all. While her mother’s hair was sort of drab brown the woman in the car in her dream had long black hair that fell around her shoulders, and deep blue eyes that seemed to penetrate right into Cassie’s soul.

Her mother’s eyes had been brown, like Cassie’s own.

And then, in the dream, her mother had said something.

Cassie couldn’t quite make out the words, but a second later her mother had begun laughing, and the car had suddenly shot forward. A second after that, it veered sharply to the left, smashed headlong into the concrete supports of an overpass, and burst into flames. It was then that Cassie had awakened, sweating and shaking, her ears still ringing with the sound of the explosion, her vision still filled by the sight of her mother’s face—the stranger’s face—as, flames consuming her, she stared at Cassie and uttered a single word: “Good-bye.” Then she had started laughing as if she didn’t care that she was leaving Cassie alone in the world.

It had been the very next night that the dream had repeated itself—this time in horrible reality.…

The sun was high in the cloudless blue sky, and had it not been for the faint trace of a breeze drifting in from the sea, the stiflingly humid heat of the August afternoon would have been unbearable. The beach was all but deserted. Only far away—much farther than she was allowed to go—could the little girl see the barely visible figures of the big children playing at the water’s edge. Once—and it didn’t matter how long ago it had been, for in her two-year-old world every day was forever and each week an eternity long forgotten—she had tottered toward the distant figures, her tiny hands reaching out as if she could touch them at any moment. But long before she had gotten close enough even to see them very well, she had felt the stinging slap of her mother’s hand and heard the horrible word.

“No!”

Even before the first scream of pain burst from her, she had felt herself being jerked around and dragged back in the direction from which she had come, the rough sand scraping the skin from her knees as a stream of unintelligible sound rained down on her from her mother’s looming face above. Though she didn’t know what all the words meant, the message was clear.

She had done something wrong. When they got back to the blanket, her mother would spank her, and then she would have to sit on the blanket even long after she had forgotten just why she was there or what she had done.

Today she watched the children playing in the distance for a while, but made no move to abandon her bucket and shovel and try to escape down the beach toward them. Though she no longer remembered exactly what would happen if she did, she knew going that way hurt, and she didn’t want to hurt.

She began digging in the sand with her shovel. In a little while there was a hole beside her, with water seeping into it as if by magic. She tried to splash the water out of the hole, but each time more water came in, and it always seemed to be just as deep.

She tried digging the hole deeper, but that didn’t work either. It kept filling up with water, and then the sides would cave in, and pretty soon the hole would be wider but almost all filled up again.

Then she noticed that if she dug into the sand at the bottom of the hole, and scooped up whole handfuls of the mixture of sand and water, she could dribble it out onto her legs in neat rounded drops that looked like tiny little gray pancakes.

And if she dribbled more on top of that, it looked like a whole stack of little pancakes.

Chuckling and clucking softly to herself, she began covering her legs with dribbles of sand, building towers of it on top of her knees and ankles, then covering her toes as well.

After a while she noticed that if she held very still, the gray sand would turn white. And if she waited for it to turn white, then wiggled her toes, it would crumble away into the beach again.

Over and over she repeated the game. Then another idea came into her head.

She packed her bucket full with wet sand from the bottom of the hole, then patted the sand next to the hole flat. Turning the bucket upside down on the flat space, she lifted the bucket away and found a neat round pile of sand with a flat top.

Scrunching around onto her knees, she began dribbling wet sand from the hole over the top of the mound, letting it run down over the edges like frosting on a cake. Then she began dribbling it into towers, turning it into a castle. When she was done, she picked up her shovel and began carefully digging a moat around the castle. But when the moat was
about six inches deep, it began to fill up with water and its sides began to cave in.

The little girl watched in fascination as her sand castle crumbled away.

When it was gone, she started another one.

The sun drifted slowly across the sky, but the little girl didn’t notice.

She was surrounded now by the ruins of five sand castles, and was starting to build another one when she felt something brush against her.

It was a kitten, its tail sticking straight up in the air, its gray fur matted with sand.

It mewed softly, then sat down in the sand, staring up at her with large, curious yellow eyes.

The little girl reached out to touch the kitten, but it backed quickly away.

“Kitty,” the little girl said softly. Then, again: “Kitty.”

Her sand castles forgotten, she pulled herself to her feet and took an uncertain step toward the kitten.

It was then that she saw the little boy standing a few yards away, frowning deeply as he stared at her.

She looked back at him, then grinned and plumped back down onto the sand.

The little boy giggled and came closer.

The kitten, three feet away now, sat back down on the sand and wrapped its tail around its legs.

As the sun continued its slow course across the sky, the two children sat in the sand looking at each other, giggling happily as each of them mimicked the other’s movements, with the kitten sitting a few feet away, watching them both.

Then, mewing softly, the kitten stood up, stretched elaborately, and darted away across the beach.

“Kitty!” the little boy exclaimed. Pushing himself to his feet, he started after the tiny cat, the little girl apparently forgotten.

The girl sat where she was for a few seconds, then turned around and stared solemnly at the blanket on which her mother was sitting.

Her mother was looking the other way, talking to a man the little girl didn’t recognize.

The little girl scrambled to her feet and started after the
boy and the kitten—her bucket and shovel, as well as her sand castles, completely forgotten.

She had to hurry to catch up with the little boy, but she knew that if she called to him, her mother might hear and stop her, so she stumbled along as fast as she could, tumbling down every few steps, then scrambling back to her feet and hurrying forward once again. Every few steps she felt her shorts slipping down over her bottom and reached down to pull them up again, but when the little boy kept getting farther and farther ahead, she finally abandoned the shorts altogether, leaving them in a heap on the sand.

The slope of the beach got steeper, and the little girl found her feet sliding out from under her with almost every step. But there was dune grass here, and she could use that to pull herself along. When she finally got to the top of the slope, the little boy was standing by himself, the thumb of his right hand poked securely into his mouth while his eyes—wide set and round—stared at the kitten. The kitten was sitting next to what the girl knew was the Bad Place.

She wasn’t sure why it was the Bad Place, but dimly she remembered her mother bringing her here once and pointing to the place, then spanking her while she repeated the Word.

“No! No, no, no! Do you understand?”

Between the Word and the angry sound of her mother’s voice and the stinging on her bottom, she understood.

She stopped uncertainly, and instinctively looked back. But all she could see was grass.

After a moment the little boy saw her, and his thumb suddenly popped out of his mouth. He pointed at the kitten and giggled happily. Then he started walking toward the Bad Place, holding his own shorts up with his left hand as his right thumb went back into his mouth.