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“Like I said, you’ve got nothing to fear—”
“Don’t come any closer!”
He holds up his hands. “I need you to be calm, that’s all.”
I glare at him.
“Stay calm and everything is going to be fine.”
And that’s when I open my mouth and scream.
I know what this is. This is what they warn every teenage girl about.
I keep yelling.
Dobbs doesn’t move.
My scream ricochets off the concrete walls and swirls around us like a dust devil.
When I’ve run out of breath, he says calmly, “Getting all het up won’t help.”
I scream again. This time, the effort rips out half my throat. Something tears; Lord help me if it’s my resistance.
“Nobody can hear you,” he says in the next lull.
What is this place? I run to the door. I yank on the handle, screaming where the crack ought to be. I slam my fists against the door. “Help me! Somebody! Help!”
Behind me, Dobbs might as well be chiseled from marble.
“Let me out of here! I want to go home!”
He grabs my wrists, but I wrest them easily from his grip. He should be stronger. It is sickening just how weak he is. And then I realize he isn’t weak at all; he’s purposefully trying to keep from hurting me.
“This isn’t like you, Blythe.”
I deliver a kick that catches more air than shin. Don’t fight like a girl, I think.
I roar at him, and he suffers rather than counters each blow. His hair bounces out of its neat side parting and falls over his eyes. I swing my hand and it catches him in his face. I feel his skin roll under my nails like the pale dough Mama uses for biscuits. Apart from red welts on his cheek, there is no response, no about-face.
It’s clear now what his intentions are.
I don’t want him to soil me without first leaving a bruise. I want his spoils damaged.
A thick vein sticks up out of his sinewy neck, and his eyes flicker like strobe lights. With my hands bound in his grip, I buck and kick.
He says, “I don’t want to hurt you, Blythe.”
“You
are
hurting me!”
And he just keeps saying those same stupid, useless words while I fight him, a not-quite-full bag of flour.
“I DON’T WANT
you to struggle now because that will only make things worse. Think of something nice.”
I look around. My head feels like it’s about to split open. I try to protest, but my lips won’t work. My tongue’s swelled up. Last thing I remember, my arm was twisted behind my back. We were in the kitchen. A rag.
“You’ve only been out twelve minutes. I used just a drop.”
Why is he wearing a plastic jumpsuit? I ask him for a glass of water.
“No, not now.”
I lift my hand to insist, but it won’t cooperate. I look down. Both my arms are tied to the chair. On the table in front of me is a pair of scissors. I start shaking worse as soon as he picks it up.
“Be still now.”
I swing my head to see where he’s going with them. From behind me, he tells me to settle down. I shake and buck and bounce the chair about.
“You want to get an ear snipped off or not?”
“No, please. What are you going to do? Please don’t! I haven’t done anything to you!”
Mama, why haven’t you come? Daddy!
I hear the sharp blades slide open. He leans close to me. I feel his hot breath on my neck. He pushes my head forward.
“Mama!”
“Hush, now.”
A warm spread happens between my legs.
He smells it, too. “That’s okay; accidents happen. We’ll get you cleaned up after I finish. Now, hold still.”
I can’t stop crying, but I keep my head very still as soon as those blades come toward it.
“Think of something nice, like I said.”
Snip
. I feel the weight give way. One auburn braid lands in my wet lap.
Think of something nice. Think of something nice.
Daddy hollering up the stairs this afternoon. “We’re leaving in fifteen minutes. Don’t make us all late for the picnic, you hear?” Suzie has long overshot her allotted ten minutes in the bathroom. Gerhard is pacing out his frustration in front of the door. And there I am, the youngest girl, with Theo giddyapping on my back, using my braids as reins. What will Theo use now?
Snip!
There goes my other braid.
Think of something nice! Me trying to look nice for Arlo, winding my hair around a hot roller when Suzie barges into Mama’s room. “What’s this? Remedial hairdressing?” Suzie calls my hair a national embarrassment. She says braids are childish. “Are you wearing Mama’s perfume?” Suzie sniffing my neck, declaring, “Blythe’s got a boyfriend! Blythe’s got a boyfriend!” Making wet kissing noises, knowing full well I’d never been kissed.
Snip.
I wanted to look like a grown-up, not a freckled, pudgy sixteen-year-old. Mama likes to say round cheeks are an indication of good health and that Gene Tierney had an overbite, too, and that didn’t stop her from being considered one of the most beautiful movie stars back in her day. According to Mama, if I’d just show my green eyes instead of letting my bangs hang in them and if I’d accentuate what she insists are Grandma’s bow lips, I’d be more grateful for what God gave me.
Dobbs is hacking at my bangs. The scissors are going to gouge my eyes out. I squeeze them shut.
My sister, watching me weave my hair quickly back into braids: “Who
is he? The retard?” She means Arlo, who’d inexplicably changed from the friend I had known since first grade, the one with whom I used to play down by the creek on Sundays only after the others had left, to someone whose attention the girls in my class compete for. Suzie refuses to notice that Arlo has shed his baby fat, his bowl haircut and fidgety mannerisms, probably because he’s never taken much notice of her, and these days, even less so. But she’s right: Arlo is the one who I am fixing to meet at the Horse Thieves Picnic. Suzie pulls a face at me and mouths the word
freak
.
Snip, snip, snip.
Worse than freak now.
He starts cutting more quickly. Bits of hair fly about.
I can’t think of something nice. Mama’s face is all, but she’d be crying, seeing this.
It goes on for ages and when I think there can’t surely be anything left to cut, he throws a thick wet towel over my head.
I struggle for breath. He’s going to smother me. I wrestle and kick and the chair tips all the way backward and I land upside down. My skirt is up around my waist. The smell of my urine is shameful.
He rights the chair, then smooths my skirt back over my knees. “I do not want to give you chloroform again. Please, sit still now. This is the tricky part.”
I try to be still, but I’m shaking too hard. He lathers my head with something that smells like tar. The package on the table reads,
VAN’S CARBOLIC HOUSEHOLD SOAP
.
“Please, no,” I beg when he picks up the plastic razor.
It scrapes my scalp. The blade is too dull. It nicks and cuts. He daubs where blood runs down my temple. My head is stinging all over, but the sound is just as terrible. The sound of scraping; the sound of skin crawling; the sound of the razor tapping against the bowl.
I can’t think of anything except the word
freak
.
When he’s done shaving me, he comes back with a nail trimmer. I dig my fingers into my palms, but he pries each one loose and clips my nails
down to the quick. He sweeps up my hair from the floor and the table, bags my nail trimmings, and stuffs it all in a tin can.
He undoes the straps. “Easy now.”
I run my hand over my head. It’s bristly in places, slick in others. I can’t imagine how hideous I must look. I burst into tears.
He lets me have a drink. This time I really do need to use the facility.
There are locks on all the other doors in this place, some with the kind that uses buttons and some that need keys, but this toilet door barely latches. I pull down my wet underwear. I squat over the commode. What’s to become of me? I can’t bear to go with him being able to hear me.
When I leave the stall, he hands me a rag, an ugly polyester nightgown, and big white granny briefs. I go back into the toilet. I put on the underwear. I decide I will just sit here forever, or until someone comes, but he raps on the door, and I have to get up.
“One more thing.” He gives me a queer look, like he’s almost embarrassed to say.
It doesn’t matter what that thing is; that there is more makes me drop to my knees. I bend my head till it reaches the floor in front of his shoes. Those ugly beige moccasins. It feels so terrible that my braids are not beside me, that my bangs are not there to offer some small relief from the cold concrete floor.
He pulls me up by the armpits. I am set down on the cot. He places the bar of carbolic soap, the rag, and a bucket of water beside me. Then he hands me a razor. “You are going to have to do down there.”
“What?”
“I will be checking, so don’t try to pretend.”
He draws the doctor’s office curtain around me. I look at the razor for a long time. I cannot understand what is happening.
“Are you done yet?”
I stand up and turn my back to the curtain. I pull down the underwear. I make a little lather in my hand. Raising my skirt, I shave myself without looking.
When I am done, I slide the bucket and razor under the curtain.
“Very good.” He flings back the curtain. He hands me a wet napkin and asks me to wipe myself because he has to be sure. I aim to close the curtain again, but he stops me. He has to see me do as I’m told. I turn my back to him. I think I am going to be sick. I wipe myself and hand him back the napkin. He inspects it for stray hairs.
“Excellent!”
I was a girl with hair. Auburn hair. Now color has gone. Everything fades. Mama’s flushed cheeks, the smutty palette of the evening sky, our yellow clapboard farmhouse. As goes color, so the senses. I try to conjure the scent of Theo’s head, all sweaty from play; Gerhard’s voice; the smell of Suzie’s nail polish. Nothing. What does rain feel like? Only yesterday, I’d gotten drenched in an afternoon downpour. If I could just hear the sounds of the carnival, or visualize the colored lights strung along Main Street, if I could feel Arlo’s fingers on the back of my hand. Instead, everything condenses into a small point of memory, like a knot in Grandma’s needlepoint, and then—
snip!
—gone. In its place is absence, and the color of absence is gray. Gray walls, gray floors, gray ceiling. I can taste the gray, smell it. On my arms, the hairs have risen up to meet the stale, gray air. Gray pushes its way into my ears and up my nose. Down my throat, too thick for lungs. I start to gag. It settles in my stomach, and retching moves it not one inch.
Dobbs bends over me. “You okay? Here, use the bucket.” On my back, his hand is heavy and damp. His forefinger rubs back and forth over my vertebrae.
“Don’t!” I right myself and clutch the rumpled curtain so we have at least this between us.
“Blythe, don’t be like this.”
“Be like what? You don’t be like this! Why are you doing this?”
He does nothing but stare at me.
“Please! Say something!” I scream.
“I’m sorry about your hair. They aren’t going to suspect me, but if they do, they won’t find any trace of you on my clothes. Hair fiber’s the kind of mistake amateurs make.”
I don’t want to cry in front of him, but I can’t stop myself.
“I’m going to have to leave you again. This time, it’s going to be for a bit longer. The fluorescents are on a timer, seven a.m. to nine p.m., but if for any reason they fail to come on, or you need a light in the middle of the night, there are glow sticks under the basin.” He points. “Crack one, and it’ll give you ten hours. Try not to use them, though, because I can only get them on special order.”
He moves toward the door. I do, too.
“I’ll be back to give you the grand tour tomorrow.”
I clutch his shirt.
“You’ve got to stay now.”
I grab him around the waist.
“Be a good girl.”
“Please. Please don’t leave me here.”
“I can’t expect you to take this in all at once, and I don’t expect you to feel the way I do. But you’ll see—it will all make sense in a little while.”
I try to get through the door when he unlocks it, but he pushes me back. Before I can recover lost ground, the lights go out. The door closes with a heavy thud.
“Dobbs?” I beat my hands against it.
“Dobbs!”
THERE IT IS
again, that terrible silence that comes when the lights go out. And the kind of chill that doesn’t come from weather. I crawl on my hands and knees back to the cot for the sweater Grandma knit that Mama insisted I take to the picnic in case it turned cool, but I can’t find my way. I tell myself crying won’t help.
I give myself the small task of finding the sweater, believing if I can do this, I will be able to do greater things when the time comes.
My knees are scraped raw by the time I find it. I clutch it instead of putting it on. I find Grandpa’s watch, too. It doesn’t matter that I can’t tell what time it is.
I rub the inscription on Grandpa’s watch.
Thus let me live, unseen, unknown;
Thus unlamented let me die;
Steal from the world, and not a stone
Tell where I lie.
I didn’t think twice about pocketing it. I took it from Mama’s jewelry box before heading out for the Horse Thieves Picnic because I didn’t want to be late for meeting Arlo. I thought Grandpa’s watch was going to help me. Now, the words make my blood run cold. Not a stone tell where I lie.
Any minute becomes just like every other minute.
I can’t decide which I hate more: the quiet or the dark.
Wait. What had Dobbs said about glow sticks? Where did he say those were kept?
The blackout has done a number on my balance, so I get on my knees. I navigate my way over to the right, where I am hoping the kitchen still is. With hands patting dead air, I shuffle forward until I hit something. Feeling around its rounded edges doesn’t help. I can’t fathom what it is. Several steps to the left is the counter. I stand up. Everything on it is unfamiliar. Why hadn’t I paid closer attention when the lights were on? Something clatters at my feet, and something else bangs down on the floor. A can, maybe. After a sweep of the counter, I find the burner. The space below is covered by a curtain. Behind it are pots and pans and a stack of plastic containers. I am in the ballpark. In one of them, I find the glow sticks. I have to use my teeth to tear through the plastic wrapper. I snap one. A sporing of neon green light. There are my hands; there are my elbows, my legs, my feet. Still in one piece. I snap another one. In the green glow just three feet away, and not the half mile I imagined, is the table. By the time I’m done, there are half a dozen sticks glowing throughout the room. It’s like one of those toxic algae blooms down at the reservoir in the spring.
I look at Grandpa’s watch. It’s a little past midnight, which means six hours have passed since we first arrived at the picnic. Only six hours separate me from my life. Six hours ago, I was watching my town do what it does best. With the carnival set up between the old school and the fire station and crowds jamming the sidewalks, downtown was barely recognizable. Main Street was lined from K-10 to city hall with parade floats, tractors, hay wagons, and vintage cars gussied up with banners and apple-cheeked officials. If an outsider were to have driven by, he’d have likely mistaken Eudora for the land of milk and honey. It wasn’t only the festival; nature helped put on a show, too. Summer’s
always when our town looks its best, like it is yay-close to living up to its potential. The creek runs full, the trees are so leafy it’s a wonder we don’t get light-headed walking beneath them, and the sun brightens colors like a washing detergent commercial. Fall’s more honest. It shows our town as it truly is: worn-out. A ghost town except with the people still in it. Come October, it’ll look like someone needs to take a great big broom to the place. Yards will be stacked with dead leaves; trash will have blown against the chain-link fences; flower beds in tractor tires will have dried up. The only signs of life will be old vans parked in cracked driveways and the occasional dog tethered to a stake in a yard. Nobody will be outside. Instead, waxy children with stringy hair will be playing silently indoors, trying not to get on their parents’ last frayed nerve. But the weekend of the Horse Thieves Picnic in the middle of summer: well, it gets everyone’s hopes up. Especially someone on her way to meet Arlo Meier.
I knew what Mama was going to ask, so before she had a chance to open her mouth, I told her I had to run. Having none of it, she thrust Theo at me and repositioned her bun.
“But I’m supposed to meet someone in a few minutes.”
“Who?” Mama was ill-tempered on account of Theo’s tantrum. He was insisting on riding his trike down the parade route, even with a sudden fever.
“Mercy,” I fibbed.
“Well, surely she can wait while you walk your brother down the parade. It won’t take but ten minutes.” Mama, unlike a lot of people in this town, would never come right out and say it’s better for people to hang around their own kind, but she lets her disapproval of my friendship with an albino girl be known in other ways—that she sees nothing wrong with keeping Mercy waiting, for example.
There’s no arguing with Mama, so I did as I was told. The Girl Scout leader was trying to organize her troop into neat rows behind us; she might as well have been organizing geese. Faring even worse, the person tasked with lining up the kids’ parade couldn’t keep wayward cyclists from pedaling madly into the crowd. As Theo and I made our way to
the back of the line, we passed the new statue of Chief Paschal Fish and his daughter. It commemorates the one hundred and fortieth anniversary of the town’s beginning. Legend has it that back in 1857 when the chief traded 774 acres of his land to three German settlers for ten thousand dollars, he had one other deal in mind. If they named the town for his daughter, he’d promise no harm would come to the place. You’d think the statue would depict him assured of this vow. Instead, he and Eudora appear to be struggling at the front of a storm. Held in his left hand is an oar, as though a current is threatening to wash them away. Eudora is not skipping ahead of her father, as is the custom of carefree children. Rather, she has her father gripped around the waist, his shirt clenched in her fists. With furrows on her forehead, she seems to be looking something terrible in the face. If statues could talk, this one would have Eudora hollering, “Save me, Daddy!”
Daddy’s going to come. He’ll come. I know he’ll come. He always does.
I can’t remember what I’m doing on a cement floor, or why there are no windows. The clicking stops and the handle of the door turns and Dobbs walks in with two impossible words: “Good morning.”
I sit up. Every muscle in my body is stiff, as though I’ve been left too long in the spin cycle of a washing machine. I try standing. Rush him! Knock him down! Run!
The dizziness brings black spots to my eyes, and I sit down hard.
Something else is wrong. I remember: my hair. It’s not there. I feel so ashamed, as if this is somehow all my doing.
He steps over my trap—fishing tackle tied between two kitchen chairs—and pulls a doughnut out of thin air. “You look like you need to eat something. Here.”
I can’t even look at it.
“You sleep okay?”
Dobbs isn’t dressed for a road trip. Pressed short-sleeve shirt, clip-on tie, trousers an inch too short, lace-up shoes . . . these are church shoes. Sunday, then. Because Mama didn’t get around to it yesterday on account of the picnic, she would be stripping the beds today. The house would be one big hum—washing machine, dishwasher, vacuum cleaner
sucking up all but Suzie’s sulk. Through the windows would come the sound of Daddy’s bench saw, Gerhard’s motorbike on a stand, revving and sputtering with his tinkering.
“They’ve found your letter,” Dobbs says, and just like that Mama’s house is deathly still. Dobbs drags the chairs back to the table and gestures for me to sit down. He unties the tackle and winds it back onto its spool. “It’s all over town.”
In a town of two thousand people, news travels the way it always has ever since those German settlers rushed home to tell how the great Shawnee chief who sold them the land was actually—gasp!—a white man. Word of mouth—it’s trusted more than the
Eudora Bugle
, which has the annoying habit of printing only facts. For the real scoop, you either call Dolores Weathers or Mel Barker, and if their lines are busy, you show up at church on Sunday morning.
He starts unpacking groceries from an army duffel bag.
“Folks are saying how you and Arlo Meier looked awful cozy on the bleachers last night. Some are speculating you’ve run off with him.”
Dobbs’s mouth is bent crooked. It’s not what I would call a smile. His eyes have chase in them. I cannot be the half-dead thing with no run in me.
“Take me home!”
“What if I told you that you have Arlo Meier to thank for all of this?”
Why does he keep bringing up Arlo? I remember the first time I met Arlo. Lined up outside the first-grade classroom, I was too shy to play with the other kids at the swings. Arlo walked up to me and pointed to the birthmark on my neck. “What’s that?”
“It’s a map of the world,” I said, because that’s what Mama always called it. He said he wished he had one, and I guess that was all it took to get me to be his friend. Arlo lived three blocks away, and I can’t count the number of times we ended up roaming the creek bank together in the late afternoon, or practicing our birdcalls, or spying on the teenagers necking under the bridge. Arlo moved away two years ago without so much as a good-bye. When he came back a month ago, I pretended not to notice. Maybe it had something to do with the scandal that led to
his family’s moving; maybe it had something to do with the fact that he seemed different. I hadn’t yet figured out what turned me shy around him when he snuck up behind me at the checkout line in the library and held his hands over my eyes. I knew it was him from the way he smelled—that same smell: a pile of leaves turned boggy and something new, aftershave.
“Hey, Rand McNally.” He made to touch my birthmark, asking if he’d fallen off my map, but I swatted his hand away and turned my books over to Dobbs. That same afternoon, walking to the bus, I heard Arlo call to me as he pushed his way through a throng of kids. “So you guys have moved out to the country. Is this your bus?”
No, it’s my very own personal limo that I just happen to share with twenty other kids, I’d wanted to say, to show him I was like other girls now, mouthy and sure of themselves. At the very least, I wanted him to know that if you up and leave a friend without so much as a good-bye, you couldn’t expect to be welcomed back with open arms. I said nothing and hurried into my seat. Arlo slid down next to me, took my backpack on his lap as though it were a toddler we were going to raise together, and started talking. I spotted Mercy in the crowd outside. She was about to wave and then saw who was leaning in next to me. She stuck out her hip and wagged her finger instead.
I got out my notebook and turned to the poem I’d been working on all week.
“You still scribbling in those books of yours?”
On the page the words kept rearranging themselves. They got smaller and then bigger. When Arlo pressed his forearm snug against mine, they ran clear off the page.
I slammed the book shut. “What is it you want exactly?”
He grinned. I hoped it had nothing to do with my cheeks, which felt like seared and tender slabs of flesh. “I want to marry you and be the father of your children and live with you till they bury us side by side in Oaksview Cemetery.”
“What?”
“Okay, I’ll settle for a conversation. Like the old days.”
Except it wasn’t the old days.
“It’s a stroke of fortune, Arlo’s not turning up this morning,” Dobbs says now.
There’s not enough air left to manage the question out loud: What’s he done to Arlo?
“Don’t look at me like that. I didn’t have anything to do with it. My guess is he’s sleeping off a hangover at one of his girlfriends’ houses.”
No, he’s lying! I am supposed to be Arlo’s girl, or at least, on my way to being his girl.
Arlo got off the bus at my stop and walked me the quarter mile down the dusty road, past the rows of parched corn, until I told him my house was coming up and he best be on his way. I looked at him properly, then, to show him I meant business. Running from his sideburns to the bend in his square chin was a line of acne that hadn’t been there before, but the same big wheat-colored curls fell across his blue eyes. He looked back at me, and it seemed he’d found something different about me, something worthy of his curiosity. “I didn’t forget about you,” he said. And just like that, there was no arguing with him. When he asked me to meet him at the Horse Thieves Picnic, I couldn’t seem to insert any delay between his asking and my agreeing.
Dobbs clucks. “Arlo Meier. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”
Dobbs starts whistling. He doesn’t act like a crazy person, and our town certainly has its share. All of them are what Grandma calls “harmless crazies,” like the man at the old-age home where Great-aunt Maeve lives. He likes to get out his whatsit and play with himself just as the lady chaplain comes by, but nobody pays him no mind. Mr. Lambert who shaves his head and calls his classroom the Temple of All Knowledge—he’s crazy. As is Mrs. Littleton’s son, who looks like he’d just as soon lop off your head as eat a cheese sandwich. But Dobbs Hordin is not like any of them. He has
a kind of craziness you can’t tell from the outside. Only the whistle gives him away. There’s harm in that whistle, in that terrible tune.
Dobbs is putting cans on the shelf beside the kitchen counter.
I notice the door is ajar. I move to the other side of the table. I
chance another look. Open, definitely open. By my estimate, fifteen feet separates me from it.
“I didn’t care for how that boy’s been sniffing around you since he’s been back. Full of ideas about taking what has no business being his. Just like his daddy with my Evabelle Horne back in high school.”
“Arlo’s my friend.”
“Friend. Right.” You’d think something’s got a hold of his funny bone. “Boys don’t want to be”—he punctuates the air with quotation marks—“friends . . . with girls. Our young Mr. Meier was after one thing and one thing only.” He tilts his nose as if he’s caught a whiff of something starting to sour. “Looked to me like you were set to give it to him, too.”
“You were spying on us?”
Arlo showed up at the picnic just as he said he would. He plunked himself next to me on the bleachers and talked about his new job working at Pyle’s meatpacking plant and that the funniest thing had happened that day: Two guys who worked the rodeo found a deer in their backyard and got the bright idea to lasso it and take it to Pyle’s for cash. Somehow, it got loose and took off down Main Street when Becky Willoby stepped out of her salon and defended the fleeing animal by stopping the men dead in their tracks with her hair dryer. While Arlo was telling the story, my hand had been resting on the wooden bench between us like a purse no one wanted to claim, but as soon as I laughed, he brought his hand down gently on it and wove his fingers through mine. There wasn’t time for this monumental event to sink in because his head was suddenly tipping toward mine.
It was a proper kiss—the kind Suzie was always going on about. No longer were we ten-year-olds snickering from behind a tree at the embrace of young lovers; at sixteen, we were the young lovers. By kissing someone, I thought you exchanged some hidden knowledge. I couldn’t have been more wrong. In place of everything I knew about my childhood friend was a widening, thrilling uncertainty. It made me want to stop and keep going both. And then someone was calling for Arlo over the PA system, and the matter was settled.
“Didn’t even bother to come back, did he?”
Seeing Dobbs smirk like that makes me realize: Dobbs was the one who had Arlo called away. Just as he’d arranged to be driving down the road when I was walking home because Arlo didn’t come back as he said he would. I should’ve just stayed glued to those bleachers instead of wanting to show Arlo a kiss didn’t mean I’d wait on him forever. If I had, Dobbs’s great big plan would’ve amounted to nothing. And I would not be here. A convict—except I can’t figure out my crime.
“When are we going?” I ask Dobbs.
“Going?”
It’s hard to answer him because the muscles in my face have fallen slack. “The letter said—”
He waves his hand at me. “No, no, no. We have to stay put for now. Way too risky to be getting in a car and driving off when everyone’s looking for you.”
“You said they weren’t going to be looking for me. You said that’s why I had to write the letter, so they wouldn’t think I’d been—” I can’t say the word. I mustn’t say the word. As long as it is not spoken, it won’t be true.
“Kidnapped? It’ll be a while yet before someone gets the notion a crime’s been committed. And even then, what with that new gung ho deputy and his wild-goose chases, they’ll be dredging Clinton Lake and rummaging through the Hamm Landfill before they think to follow other leads. You might as well hear it now, Blythe: the trail’s already cold.”
Dear Jesus.
Dobbs starts clapping me on the back, like it’s a bad piece of meat that’s got the better of me.
I pivot out from under him. He goes back to rearranging items on the shelf. He’s jabbering away about Arlo being a carbon copy of his father. I take three steps toward the door.
“Came real close to ruining everything, that boy did.”
Three more steps. Halfway there.
Run!
He pulls me back into the room. He leans against the door till it closes, then locks it with a key from the bunch on his belt.
“You gone awful pale again. You sure you won’t eat something? Let’s heat up some water. Here, this is how you use these gas burners.” He points to a valve on the propane tank, gives instructions. “Always remember to switch it back off once you’re done. You don’t want to gas yourself.”
He fills a kettle with water from the barrel and sets it on the hot plate. “This water’s purified and will last ten years before going stale. Even then, I’ve got some tablets that will dissolve in it and freshen it right up.”
“Dobbs?”
He points out the nonperishables as though he is the owner of a grocery store and this is my first day on the job. “I can’t promise you fresh produce very often. Besides, the canned stuff is better for you in the long run, what with the government doing those chem-sprays over all our farmlands. Airplane vapor trails, my foot.” He fills a small bowl with canned peaches. “This is a special occasion. What we don’t finish, we’ll put in this cooler, and they’ll last you a good week or so. Once I get that old icebox up and running, you’ll be able to order T-bone steaks if you want.”
“Why are you doing this, Dobbs?”
“When I come back, I’ll bring you cold cuts, but just about everything you can think of is here in a tin or a packet or a box. MREs—know what they are? Meals ready to eat. You don’t even need to cook if you don’t want. Give you more time to work on your poems.”
Poems? He expects sonnets in this hole?
“If there’s something you want that’s not here, put it on the list.” He gestures to a bulletin board with a small piece of paper pinned to it. Then he stirs a packet of powder into an enamel cup filled with hot water and hands it to me. “Tastes good; try it.”
I push the cup aside. “Why are you doing this?”
“I realize you have a lot of questions, and we are going to discuss them, in due course.”
There are pauses between his words, whereas mine come out in a rush. “Whynotnow?”
“Because you’re all wound up, and I need for you to be calm. We’ll discuss everything when we can talk, one adult to another.”
But I’m not an adult. I’m sixteen years old.
Taking a sip of the hot chocolate meant for me, he watches me over the rim of the mug. I do my best imitation of being calm, so he will talk to me like an adult and tell me what is going to happen next.
“You weren’t like other girls,” he says instead. “You had your head screwed on right. The first time I saw you in the reference section, I knew. The others: a dime a dozen. But when you came along, I said to myself, ‘Now here’s one who doesn’t buy everything she hears. Here’s one who isn’t brainwashed.’ ” He talks, and I watch the silent movie projected above his head.
We’re in the library. He’s bringing me a book. Saying something nice. “I’m not a teacher, so you don’t have to keep calling me Mr. Hordin. Why don’t you call me Dobbs.”
The next frame is Mercy, smacking her lips together, saying it’s creepy for him always to be suggesting I read survivalist books. Mercy, my best friend—why hadn’t I listened to her? Instead, I defended the man. “He’s an Eagle Scout,” I told her. “He thinks we’d all do better if we were properly prepared.”
“He’s probably one of those conspiracy theorists. Ask him who killed JFK; I bet he’s got an answer.”
Dobbs had, in fact, mentioned previously that the head of the World Bank was responsible for the assassination, but I wasn’t about to tell Mercy that.
When Dobbs’s tone starts changing, I look at him. His voice is scary, not at all conversational anymore. He shakes his head at me. “You started changing when that kid showed up again. I wasn’t about to sit by and watch you turn out like the others, what with Arlo Meier zeroing in.”
