The Rules of Survival (2 page)

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Authors: Nancy Werlin

BOOK: The Rules of Survival
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I grunted. I didn’t think there was enough money for three Popsicles, but if Callie wanted to sacrifice her own for you, knowing you would drip half of it onto your shirt, that was her business. For me, it was hard enough knowing that we couldn’t stay long at the store, or even out on the street, where there was sometimes a breeze from the ocean a few blocks away. If you woke up and found you were alone, you might be scared. I’d decided we’d risk being away fifteen minutes. I glanced at my watch; it was only just before eight thirty and the sun hadn’t quite gone below the horizon.
Doubt suddenly pushed at me. If you woke—or if our mother returned unexpectedly—
“Don’t worry. Emmy won’t wake up,” Callie said. When it came to you, little sister, we always knew what the other was thinking. “And we’ll be right back.”
“Okay,” I said. But I made a mental note to get us back in ten minutes rather than fifteen. Just in case. And next time, I’d let Callie go to the store alone. She was old enough, really. I’d stay with you. Or bring you, maybe.
It was hard to figure out what would be the safest thing to do, for all three of us, all the time. But it was my job. As we pushed open the door to the Cumberland Farms and were greeted by a glorious blast of cool air, I was thinking that in a year—year and a half—I could maybe go out by myself at night and trust Callie with you. Even if I could only do that once in a while, it would really help. I could get over to the ocean at night, walk the causeway, hang out with some of the guys from school. Maybe I could even talk to this one girl I sort of liked. If our mother were out anyway, it would be okay to leave you girls alone, I thought. I’d still be careful that you weren’t alone with her when she came home after her Saturday night outings. That wouldn’t be hard, considering she rarely came home before two or three in the morning. If at all.
Then I saw him. Murdoch. Okay, I saw him but I didn’t really see him. That came a few minutes later. I just glanced around the store. There was a teenager at the cash register behind the front candy counter. A huge, barrel-shaped man stood in front of the counter with a little boy, smaller even than you were then. And Murdoch (of course I didn’t know his name then) and his date (a woman I never saw again) were in line behind the man with the boy.
Callie and I headed straight for the ice cream freezer, and we’d just reached it when the yelling began. We whipped around.
It was the barrel-shaped man and the little kid. The man had grabbed the boy by the upper arms and yanked him into the air. He was screaming in his face while the kid’s legs dangled:
“What did you just do?”
The little kid was clutching a package of Reese’s Pieces and he started keening, his voice a long, terrified wail, his small body rigid.
The big man—his father?—shook him hard, and kept doing it.
“I’ll teach you to take things without permission! Spend my money without asking!”
And then the other man, the one I later knew was called Murdoch, was between the father and son. Murdoch snatched the little kid away from his father and put the kid down behind him. Then Murdoch swiveled back.
Emmy, I like to freeze the memory in my mind and just look at Murdoch. He was a medium kind of man. Medium height, medium build, hair shaved close to the skull. You wouldn’t look twice—until you have looked twice.
He wasn’t afraid. I noticed that right away about him. Here was this huge enraged man, facing him. But this other man, Murdoch, was calm. At the same time, there was this tension coiling off him.
Callie and I were behind Murdoch and to the left, so we had only a partial view of his face and expression. But we had a full-on view of the barrel-shaped man. And we had a good view of the little kid, who was so shocked that he stopped crying and just stared up at Murdoch’s back with his mouth open.
Meanwhile, Murdoch said, quietly but audibly, “If you want to hurt somebody, you can hurt me. Go on. Hit me. I won’t hit back. You can do it until you’re not angry anymore. I’ll let you.”
There was an endless, oh, five seconds. The father’s eyes bulged. His fists were clenched. He drew one arm back. But Murdoch was still looking straight at him, and I knew—you could feel it vibrating in the air—that even though Murdoch had said he wouldn’t hit him, he wanted to. He wanted to hurt him.
I liked him for that. No, Emmy, I loved him for that. Immediately.
“Hit me,” Murdoch said. “Come on. Better me than the kid. Why not? You want to.”
And then it was all over. The man blinked and took a step back. He said something, loudly, about having had a hard day and it doesn’t hurt a kid to learn to keep his hands to himself. And Murdoch was nodding even though I guessed that he was thinking what I was about that man. But Murdoch turned away from the father as if he was no threat anymore. He knelt on the floor in front of the little kid.
You could smell the kid’s fear floating on the stale, air-conditioned store air. He stole one little look behind Murdoch at the big man, and you could see him thinking,
I’ll have to pay for this later.
But Murdoch talked directly to the kid. “It’s wrong for anybody ever to hurt you. No matter who does it, it’s wrong. Can you remember that?”
The kid’s eyes were now huge. He looked at his father again. Then back at Murdoch. Then he nodded.
“You’ll remember that?” Murdoch insisted. “You don’t have to do anything else. You just have to remember.”
He waited.
The kid nodded. Solemnly.
“Good,” said Murdoch.
The kid reached out one hand toward him. In it was the package of Reese’s Pieces. Murdoch took it and said, “Thank you.” He stood up in one smooth motion. He put the package on the counter. But his eyes didn’t leave the little boy. The little boy kept looking back, too, while the big man finished paying for his stuff and then hustled the kid outside.
As the door slammed behind them, there was complete silence in the store. It was then I realized that Callie had grabbed my hand and was holding it.
“Oh, hello?” said the woman who was with Murdoch. “Hello, Murdoch? You should have thought about me. What if there was a big fight and I got hurt? What kind of a date do you think that would be? Huh? Murdoch? Are you listening to me? Murdoch!”
Murdoch, I thought. It was a name I had never heard before. A strange name.
It suited him.
Murdoch didn’t reply. His eyes had narrowed into slits. He held up the pack of Reese’s Pieces and said to the teenage clerk, “I’ll take these. And the ice coffee.” The woman sighed and shrugged. She moved a step closer to Murdoch, but without even looking at her, he took a step away.
One more moment from my memory of that night: On his way out the door, Murdoch turned. He tossed the Reese’s Pieces underhand to me and Callie. He smiled at us as he did it, but the smile didn’t reach his eyes. And he wasn’t thinking about us at all, or really seeing us. I could tell. Not the way he’d seen that little boy.
He was still giving off that invisible coiled pulse of—whatever it was.
He was still angry.
Then he was gone.
2
 
ABOUT FEAR
 
I don’t know if you’ll understand this, Emmy, but for me, fear isn’t actually a bad thing. It’s a primitive instinct that’s your friend. It warns you to pay attention, because you’re in danger. It tells you to do something, to act, to save yourself.
I read a book about this recently. If you remind me, I’ll give it to you. The guy who wrote it, he’s a security expert, the kind of person celebrities and politicians hire to keep them safe from crazies. He says that the ability to become aware of fear is a gift. That if you honor that gift—if you notice when you’re afraid and if you respond to your fear instead of ignoring it, you will be safer. Run, he says, run when your fear tells you to.
But he doesn’t talk about what happens to your gift of fear when you live with the feeling all the time.
I remember one night, when I was little. I waited until our mother had gone to bed, and then I sneaked into the kitchen. There was a package of Oreo cookies there. My plan was to take one of them back to bed with me. She wouldn’t notice one missing cookie, would she? I would eat quietly. And I would make sure not a crumb escaped as evidence.
I made it all the way back to bed with the cookie. I was beneath the sheet, in a little tent, with the cookie flat on my palm and my nose pressed to it—when she whipped back the covers.
“Thief!” our mother yelled. “Cookie thief!” She burst into giggles.
She had the big kitchen knife, and it was pressed to my throat. And as she laughed, I could feel it shake in her hands, and push against my skin.
She cut me that night. Just a little.
Just to teach me not to steal, and not to sneak.
This is what I think happens when you live with fear, and I think it happened to me, to Callie, and to you, even though you were so little. I think the fear gets into your blood. It makes your subatomic particles twist and distort. You change, chemically. The fear changes, too. It becomes not your helper, but your master. You are a slave to it.
Obviously, I am not a scientist. I’m not even sure I would have passed eleventh-grade chemistry if Callie hadn’t helped me study. But I know that I am not who I was supposed to be, who I could have been, and I know it’s because I was too afraid for too long. It made me think about things I never should have.
I learned to live with the fear. I learned to function with it. We all did. Maybe that was what I recognized in Murdoch that night. Maybe that was what drew me to him. He wasn’t afraid. Or—if he was—he took action anyway.
Yes. Where most people would have done nothing, he acted.
Anyway, I stood in that convenience store on that hot summer night and stared after him, and I thought:
I have to know that man.
There is a word for this feeling, Emmy. It’s called obsession.
I was obsessed with Murdoch, Emmy, for months before our mother ever dated him. In fact, if not for me, she never would have met him.
3
 
MY FIRST MEMORY
 
I must have been about four, and that means Callie would have been two, or a little older, sleeping across the bedroom in her crib. Emmy, you didn’t exist yet.
I don’t know what time it was. It was the middle of the night, and suddenly I was awake. My every muscle was rigid. I was listening while, at the other end of the apartment, our mother began, without speaking or yelling, to smash one of the kitchen chairs repeatedly against the wall.
And then another one.
Of course, at the time, I didn’t know what she was doing, exactly. The next morning, I would go into the kitchen to see the chairs in splintered pieces all over the floor, beneath the gaping hole in the plaster of the wall. In the night, though, I didn’t know what was happening, or why, or even exactly where. But I knew who was doing it: Mom. And that was all that mattered.
I don’t remember any feeling of surprise. What I remember is the awareness that I had a job to do. Callie had already woken up and started whimpering, and I knew she would start screaming soon. Our mother would hear her—and remember us.
I slipped out of my bed. I worked the mechanism to lower the crib’s slatted side, and I clambered up and over it. I grabbed Callie and held her. I whispered, “Shhh, Callie. Shhh.”
Holding Callie as she thrashed and yelled into my shoulder, and, eventually, quieted, I felt hope. This wasn’t over yet, but I was doing well. I was making sure Callie’s yowls couldn’t be heard outside our room, over the methodical, determined smashing from the kitchen. If we were lucky—I remember thinking—Callie and I would be left alone, unremembered, and it was my job to try to make that happen.
That particular night, I did it. I kept us out of the way, unnoticed. So, in fact, you could say that my very first memory is one of success. Of triumph. Of watching Callie go back to sleep safely, because I had made sure she hadn’t called attention to us while our mother was angry.
I did this many times for you, too, Emmy. So did Callie.
4
 
SEARCHING FOR MURDOCH
 
I looked for Murdoch for the rest of my thirteenth year. The first thing I did was go back to the convenience store to ask the teenage clerk if he had seen that man before, or if he knew whether he lived nearby, or if he knew anything at all about him. But the guy didn’t have a clue, and he started to look at me funny, so I couldn’t ask him to please call me if he saw him again or learned anything about him. In my pocket, I curled my fist around the piece of paper I’d prepared with my name and phone number, crumpling it. But I wasn’t discouraged.
I thought Murdoch might be one of the new, young, wealthy people who were moving into our neighborhood, attracted by its nearness to the beachfront, the airport, and the center of Boston. Our mother and her friends complained bitterly about these people, who were cramming the tight city streets of the old neighborhood with their Land Rovers and BMWs. Their presence had driven up housing prices and pushed out most of the old-time working class Irish-American population. We’d have been among those forced to move far out of Boston, according to Aunt Bobbie—who lived alone downstairs in the second-floor apartment. But our grandfather had bought the triple-decker house back when prices were much lower.

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