“Lucy! Why are you crying?”
She wrapped around me, sobbing. Clinging to me with fierce desperation, she cried, “I don’t want you to die! I don’t want you to die!”
“Lucy . . .” I was stunned, bewildered. Her tantrums, her arrogant and angry outbursts were one thing. But this! I could feel her tears soaking through my blouse. I could feel the hot intensity of her miserable little body as she held on to me.
“It’s all right, Lucy,” was all I could think to say, and I pressed her close.
“I don’t want you to die, Auntie Kay!”
“I’m not going to die, Lucy.”
“Daddy did.”
“Nothing is going to happen to me, Lucy.”
She was not to be consoled. The story in the paper affected her in a deep and pernicious way. She read it with an adult intellect yet to be weaned from a child’s fearful imagination. This in addition to her insecurities and losses.
Oh, Lord. I groped for the appropriate response and couldn’t come up with a thing. My mother’s accusations began throbbing in some deep part of my psyche. My inadequacies. I had no children. I would have made an awful mother. “You should have been a man,” my mother had said during one of our less productive encounters in recent history. “All work and ambition. It’s not natural for a woman. You’ll dry out like a chinch bug, Kay.”
And during my emptiest moments when I felt the worst about myself, damn if I wouldn’t see one of those chinch bug shells that used to litter the lawn of my childhood home. Translucent, brittle, dried out. Dead.
It wasn’t something I would ordinarily do, pour a ten-year-old a glass of wine.
I took her to her room and we drank in bed. She asked me questions impossible to answer. “Why do people hurt other people?” and “Is it a game for him? I mean, does he do it for fun, sort of like MTV? They do things like that on MTV, but it’s make-believe. Nobody gets hurt. Maybe he doesn’t mean to hurt them, Auntie Kay.”
“There are some people who are evil,” I quietly replied. “Like dogs, Lucy. Some dogs bite people for no reason. There’s something wrong with them. They’re bad and will always be bad.”
“Because people were mean to them first. That’s what makes them bad.”
“In some instances, yes,” I told her. “But not always. Sometimes there isn’t a reason. In a way, it doesn’t matter. People make choices. Some people would rather be bad, would rather be cruel. It’s just an ugly, unfortunate part of life.”
“Like Hitler,” she muttered, taking a swallow of wine.
I began stroking her hair.
She rambled on, her voice thick with sleep, “Like Jimmy Groome, too. He lives on our street and shoots birds with his BB gun, and he likes to steal bird eggs out of nests and smash them on the road and watch the baby birds struggle. I hate him. I hate Jimmy Groome. I threw a rock at him once and hit him when he was riding by on his bike. But he doesn’t know it was me because I was hiding behind the bushes.”
I sipped wine and continued stroking her hair.
“God won’t let anything happen to you, will He?” she asked.
“Nothing is going to happen to me, Lucy. I promise.”
“If you pray to God to take care of you, He does, doesn’t He?”
“He takes care of us.” Though I wasn’t sure I believed it.
She frowned. I’m not sure she believed it either. “Don’t you ever get scared?”
I smiled. “Everybody gets scared now and then. I’m perfectly safe. Nothing’s going to happen to me.”
The last thing she mumbled before drifting off was “I wish I could always be here, Auntie Kay. I want to be just like you.”
Two hours later, I was upstairs and still wide-awake and staring at a page in a book without really seeing the words when the telephone rang.
My response was Pavlovian, a startled reflex. I snatched up the receiver, my heart thudding. I was expecting, fearing, Marino’s voice, as if last night were starting all over again.
“Hello.”
Nothing.
“Hello?” In the background I could hear the faint, spooky music I associated with early-morning foreign movies or horror films or the scratchy strains of a Victrola before the dial tone cut it off.
“Coffee?”
“Please,” I said.
This sufficed for a “Good morning.”
Whenever I stopped by Neils Vander’s lab, his first word of greeting was “Coffee?” I always accepted. Caffeine and nicotine are two vices I’ve readily adopted.
I wouldn’t think of buying a car that isn’t as solid as a tank, and I won’t start the engine without fastening my seatbelt. There are smoke alarms throughout my house, and an expensive burglar alarm system. I no longer enjoy flying and opt for Amtrak whenever possible.