Devotion (4 page)

W
HEN THE AMBULANCE
and social services finally left, Eleanor went to pick up Hattie at school, just before they would start charging her for being late. Her skin felt filmy and unclean, the oily smell in her nostrils and her pores. Now it was in her car.

“Will we go to the new house now?” Hattie asked.

“Not yet,” Eleanor said. The exterminator had said that clearing the house would take days, and a lot of garbage bags. She might not want to see it.

At her parents' house, Eleanor put her clothes in the washing machine and started it. Then she stood under a hot shower for a long time. She washed her hair and scrubbed her face in the fragrant steam. Finally she got out, rubbed her hair with one of her mother's fresh towels, and put on clean clothes.

Her mother, expecting them, had overshopped. The fruit basket on the kitchen counter looked like a Dutch still life: lush abundance. Oranges and tangerines and golden pears. The sink and the counter were so clean they shone. Hattie was at the kitchen table, drawing something with circles.

Eleanor took an apple, even though she didn't want it. “So,” she said, not sure if she should be addressing Hattie or Manuel. “What did you learn at school today?”

“The solar system.”

“Cool.” She ruffled her daughter's soft hair. She wanted to scoop her up and squeeze her, but Hattie would twist away, intent on her drawing. The circles in the picture must be planets. “What did you learn about it?”

“Jupiter is the biggest.”

“Right,” Eleanor said. “Which one has rats?”

Hattie looked up sharply.

“I meant
rings
!” Eleanor said, feeling her face flush. “Which one has rings?”

“Saturn,” Hattie said, still watching her.

“Yes!” Eleanor said.

“Earth has rats,” Hattie said.

“True.”

Eleanor's mother came in and rearranged the fruit basket to fill in for the lost apple, to make it more aesthetically pleasing. Eleanor felt her chest tighten.

“How was the house?” her mother asked.

“I'll tell you later.”

“Did you get the G-R-E-E-N shirt?”

“Oh, God.” The ballpoint reminder on her hand was faded from the shower. “Will you watch her? I'll run back up.”

“You should dry your hair first,” her mother said.

“It's warm out.”

“Still. It gets cold at night.”

Eleanor got in the car. The streets were deserted except for the ghostly rats that seemed to be always at the corners of her vision now, scuttling away. The house was like the amulet cursed by gypsies that she had read about as a child. To save yourself, you had to look an unsuspecting young victim in the eye and put the amulet in her hand as a gift, as it had been given. The curse continued until a pure-hearted girl destroyed the amulet, refusing to pass it on.

Eleanor wondered what her broker had known, talking about manna from heaven. She was going to talk to a lawyer now, and take photographs, and find out who had known what. It wouldn't be neat like the smashing of an amulet. It would take time, but she would break the curse. When the exterminator was finished, she would disclose everything, and then she would sell her house to someone who could have a future there. In the meantime, she would try very hard to be kind to her mother.

The street was quiet when she pulled up. Adult protective services had taken Sylvia away, screaming. They would bathe her and put her in some strange institutional room, terrified and grieving, possibly restrained. The sister had been loaded into an ambulance on a stretcher, but Eleanor didn't think she would live.

Eleanor had always believed, without thinking about it, that to grow old you first had to grow up. And she had so far avoided doing that. She was still living with her parents, locked in her old teenage struggle with her mother, hoping to please and surprise her father. But the ancient sisters had plucked a deep, resonating note of fear down in her belly. There was no loophole in time, and no escape. And to grow old without growing up made it far worse. She would be old someday, unless something worse happened, but not like that.
Please
, not like that.

She let herself into the house. The green Manuel T-shirt was on the counter where she had left it, the new trap in the kitchen waiting, baited with peanut butter, sinister and unsprung. She thought of Sylvia's keening wail, and the memory was so sharp that she thought she heard it again and felt the clawing grip on her arm.

She grabbed the green shirt and locked up the house. Manuel was not afraid, and she would not give Hattie reason to be.

MAILE MELOY
is the best-selling author of a middle-grade trilogy, two novels, and two story collections, including
Both Ways Is
the Only Way I Want It
, which was one of
The New York Times Book Review
's 10 Best Books of 2009. Her stories have been published in
The New Yorker,
Granta
,
Zoetrope
, and
The Paris Review
. She has received the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, the PEN/Malamud Award, the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2007 she was chosen as one of
Granta
's Best Young American Novelists. She lives in Los Angeles.

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