Something About Sophie (21 page)

There was a long pause. He was asking and answering his own questions—a good sign. And yet while it was perfectly fine with her if he slipped over the edge of sanity, she did need to speculate on how it would affect his reflexes. Faster? Slower?

She hesitated, her mind jerked backward.
We . . . that night . . .

“You know I don't think we thought she was even human. I don't. Not that night. It was like she was too stupid to understand what was happening or maybe we thought she was so simple-minded she wouldn't remember the next day so it didn't matter.”

She tipped her head to one side. What the hell
was
he talking about? Her skin began to crawl in a whole new way.

He went on. “And you don't know about people like her, do you? Not really. You can't tell what they're thinking. They say and do whatever passes through what little brain they have and—”

He stopped short and it looked like he swayed a bit, like he was feeling dizzy. After a moment he looked her way again. “That's not the point, though. Is it? Her being simple-minded made it easy but nothing could ever make it right.”

“Simple-minded,” she murmured softly, remembering . . .
that while she has developmental disabilities and is known to have wandered off before. . .

“Yeah. You know. Retarded,” he said, frustrated, filled with shame and hopelessly without honor. He backed away immediately. “Not completely, though. I mean, she could read some, and write, and she could figure most things out if she had enough time. Slow, they'd say.”

He nodded—seeming to think it a much better word.

“Yeah. But for the most part no one cared. She was what she was. We all knew about her. She was harmless. Sweet even . . . real friendly, happy all the time. Most of the time she just . . .
was
, you know? She'd roam around smiling, saying hi to everyone by their full name. Hi, Frank Lanyard. Hello, Maury Weims. Good morning, Leigh Kerski. Sometimes she'd sit herself down in the middle of a group of us and pretend she was part of the conversation. No one minded. Now and again she'd say something—either completely off the wall or so true and smart it made your jaw drop—then she'd get up and wander off.” He gave an unconscious half-laugh. “There was no reason for her to be afraid of any of us. She was like a class pet or a school mascot; she was one of us. We all knew that loud noises scared her and she didn't like being touched. And for the fuss that followed either one of them two things, it just wasn't worth messing with her.” But, he recalled, “Unless you were in need of a quick distraction. A pat on her back or taking hold of her arm was better than throwing a live grenade into an angry mob.”

Sophie sat in silence, feeling dead inside.

He was lost in recollection. “She liked to walk around. Her old mama kept a real close watch on her, but once in a while she'd give her the slip and off she'd go. You'd see her strolling down Main Street and soon enough here'd come her mother, huffing and puffing to get her. She wasn't well, though, the mother. She passed early on. After that you'd see her dad or the housekeeper or a babysitter trailing after her.

“If you came across her alone somewhere and asked her what she was doing, she'd say she was
traveling
. And as far as I know, her destinations were always some wacky place she'd get into her head like DisneyWorld USA or she was going to Paris for springtime or to Boston to see what happened to the tea or the moon or . . . or some street where a character from a book lived.” He raised his hands in amused wonderment—the gun a loose appendage. “See, she knew stuff but the pieces didn't always fit tight, you know? She was a couple years younger than us, but I heard that one of her teachers used to have her draw some of these places she traveled to . . . I heard she drew pretty good.”

It felt like he was awaiting her approval for divulging so much information to her. She wished him in hell.

He cleared his throat. “Looking back, it's almost like it was meant to happen.” He flustered quickly. “Not meant to happen—we never meant for it to happen, but like a setup, a trap we fell into.” He paused again. “Well, no. That makes it sound like we had no choice. We had lots of choices. . . .”

Choices.
Everybody makes choices—some good, some bad. Some so easy you don't even know you're making 'em; some so hard they rip your heart to pieces. Good people make bad choices. Evil people make choices that hurt innocent people. Innocent people make choices that put them in harm's way. It's always the choices we make that whittle the life we live,
Lonny had said.

“I remember hearing the gravel crunching under the tires as he pulled off the road behind her,” Frank was saying. “The tension was already so strong it felt like a fifth person inside the car. We all knew something bad was going to happen—I did, at any rate. I didn't know what, I swear. But I knew it was going to be wrong because of . . . because of how she was, you know?

“When he told her it was getting too dark to be walking along on the highway alone, I thought maybe I was wrong, maybe I was all wrong. He wasn't going to play any tricks on her or tease her or make her cry. She told him she had eyes like a cat and could see in the dark just fine and there was something so . . . I don't know . . . evil, I guess . . . in his voice when he said,
‘Is that so?'

“It wasn't until he asked her where she was traveling to, and she said she was walking to the very top of the mountains to see the snow, that me and Jeremy looked at each other. He knew, too. And when Cliff said he'd seen the snow and offered to give her a ride up the mountain, Jeremy told him to stop, told him to leave her alone. Cliff laughed and called him a candy-ass. Then he got out and opened the back door for her to get in. She did resist, at first, but only because she didn't want any of us to sit too close to her. Cliff told us to move, to give her plenty of room. We should have gotten out, let her have the whole backseat.” He stopped.

“No. We should have thrown her over our shoulders and run like hell in the other direction. That's what we should have done, that's what I wish we'd done.” He pictured the alternate scenario in his mind. “But we didn't. We knew how it would be if we didn't go along. We knew we couldn't leave him and we knew we couldn't leave her with him. Trapped. We were trapped.

“We moved way over and she smiled and got in. ‘Hi, Jeremy Bates. Hi, Frank Lanyard,' she said.” He used his left hand to wipe her words off his lips. “Cliff got back in and pulled back onto the road and she sat in the backseat yakking about mountains and how the higher they got in the sky, the less air and the more snow they had and how some mountain climbers had to use air tanks like the one someone at her church used, and she went on and—”

He stopped abruptly, grew thoughtful and paced a few steps back and forth before speaking again.

“You know, I don't think I ever heard her talk like that before. Do you think . . . ? Do you think she knew what was coming? Maybe she could sense it, like feel trouble coming. Think she was talking like crazy to keep herself calm or something?”

She felt no compulsion to answer him. Even
she
knew what was coming and her upper lip was already curled with repulsion and disgust.

Had she the wherewithal to examine the furor powering through her body at the moment, she probably wouldn't have been surprised to note the shocking lack of fear in her system. He was looking smaller and weaker with every word he spoke. Clearly, the girl was autistic to some degree. Clearly, she was a trusting innocent. Clearly, he'd known she was in danger and he'd done nothing to help her.

She was all fury and anger and rage as she leaned slowly to her left and bent her legs up under her right hip. She wasn't going to die tonight, not without a good fight and not without tearing part of his face off first.

“I thought, when Cliff turned into the park here, that he was planning to set her down somewhere and let her stumble through the park all night. You know, because of the cat-vision thing? That wouldn't have been the worst thing we ever did to someone and I could always come back and get her later . . . or Jeremy could. Hell, it might even be good for her—teach her to stay home at night, not to get into cars, to run screaming from people like Cliff . . . like us.” He shook his head. “She had to have known what we were like back then. She wasn't that dumb. She saw. She heard. She could have figured it out.”

“You pig.”

He looked her way through the faint moonlight but said nothing—acknowledging that there was nothing
to
say. And while she obviously agreed, she was sorry she'd spoken. He was confessing his sins, distracted from the here and now—the time zone in which her left hand clutched as much thick, rich forest dirt as she could gather while she used her right to search for something big enough and hard enough to split his skull wide open and turn the contents therein to a slimy mush before she spit on them. Conversing in
Supergrossout
with five- and six-year-old boys was paying off in a most satisfying manner.

“No. You're right. What she was thinking didn't matter. Not to us. We were like animals—all of us. Always looking for someone pathetic to hassle. And as long as I'm telling it all, for you I'll admit I enjoyed it as much as anyone. I did. I loved that look on their faces when they first noticed us noticing them.” A loud bark of a long lost laugh. “Pure, raw fear.”

“When they first noticed
us,
huh? I bet that when you were alone, when you weren't with all your pals, people looked straight through you.”

He looked away, wiping at something on his face.

“And Lonora? How did she look at you?”

She couldn't seem to stop engaging him. And she needed to move to expand her search area. She bit the tip of her tongue to remind herself of the danger and remained still, waiting for him to speak again.

It took a while.

“She was confused, I guess.” He spoke so softly she almost missed it, straining to hear the rest. “Yeah. Confused. At first. No.” He shook his head. “The whole time. She didn't understand. The whole time. She just didn't get it.” He looked at Sophie, but he wasn't with her anymore. “We stopped in the lot up there. I remember thinking that she was getting off easy. Setting her loose to wander in the dark for a while wasn't so bad. If she were some kid, one of our regulars, we'd have taken all his clothes, too. So, I laughed with everyone else when Cliff opened her door and waved her out like she was royal or something.

“She stood there frowning for a second, then explained to him—like
he
was the idiot—that he'd taken the wrong road, that this wasn't where the mountains were. Sure it is, he said. He pointed into the darkness. Over there, he said. She looked but you could tell she still thought he was in the wrong about it. That's . . . that's when it all turned to shit. So fast. Like a nightmare you couldn't control, that you couldn't wake up from. Cliff touched her neck to try and turn her head in the right direction. She screamed and her whole body wiggled like an eel trying to get away from him. I don't think he'd meant to hurt her. I don't think he did—he barely touched her and she went nuts. And that scream of hers—seemed like it echoed for miles. Scared the shit out of all of us. Cliff just automatically slapped a hand over her mouth to shut her up . . . but he was touching her again and she went wild trying to get away from him. He tried holding her for a couple minutes but finally let her go. Pushed her away from him. Put his hands in the air like a promise not to touch her again. Told her he was sorry. She'd be okay.

“She—She stopped screaming but she was shook up; her hands were shaking and she had this crazy look in her eyes. We'd all seen it before. You know, from setting her off by accident.”

Sophie stopped midbreath and went still except for the tips of her fingers as they pried loose a rock from the dry earthen floor that fit perfectly into the palm of her hand. A good manageable size; she tested the weight of it—it would have to do. She finished exhaling and took another breath.

“When Cliff didn't get back in the car, Maury got out. The two of them . . . they weren't like Jeremy and me. They weren't. They fed off each other, like they needed one another to even breathe. I'd say they were worse than us, but even as young as I was, I knew watching was as bad as doing. Watching was my part in the game, see? Like sports: half the fun of playing is having people watch you, root for you.”

Lanyard stopped to review the analogy. He gave it a nod, walked a few paces and stopped in a beam of moonlight.

“And maybe you're right. Maybe I did need them so people wouldn't look straight through me like I wasn't there. But they made me feel like I could be somebody. They made me feel alive, like I mattered. Even fear and hate were better than people feeling nothing for me. It wasn't fair, you know. I was as good as anyone else, but they couldn't see me. No matter how I tried, they couldn't see me until Cliff and Maury and Jeremy came along.
They
saw me. I was their friend.”

She got the impression that he expected her to commiserate or show him some compassion, but instead he swiftly realized he was drowning in the contempt that was rolling off her in ever growing waves.

“Even
she
got more attention than me!” he shouted.

She had nothing to lose. She met him head on. “She probably deserved more!”

“She wasn't normal!”

“And you are?”

He started toward her in a charge. She clutched her rock, grabbed more dirt. She was only vaguely aware of the instinctive, feral changes occurring in her muscles as they coiled and drew strength from no place she'd been before. He stopped unexpectedly. Her war cry died in her throat. He huffed and puffed and stood staring at her. She stared back.