Useless Bay(31)

No wonder Grant didn’t want to come home when Pixie rowed him into the Sound. He was a witness. He’d seen something happen to his own mother, and he’d told no one. Not even me.

I swear, as soon as I found the little urchin, I was going to kick his ass for not coming to me first.

If I found him.

Outside, the weather was picking up. The wind whistled through the cracks in the windows, and the rain splashed against the glass.

I wove my way across the room and found myself sitting next to Pixie on the sofa. Agent Armstrong had finished his questioning and left with the others. Without thinking, I took her hand. I interlocked my fingers in hers. She took it and squeezed.

I should’ve known better than to reach for her.

Pixie was an observant girl.

She felt my scars. I’d been picking at them again. I couldn’t leave them alone, especially when I was stressed. She opened my palm and counted them. Five. A whole constellation of old cigarette burns.

“They’re bad again, aren’t they?” she said.

“It’s been a long couple of days,” I said.

She’d seen the scars before. Most of the time, they were easy to overlook.

But now they were leaking, oozing red.

Pix got up, went to the bathroom, and came back with a first aid kit. As she dabbed at my hand with neomycin ointment, branches blew back and forth against the windowpanes. Something swooped overhead, and I didn’t ask what.

“These aren’t ever going to fade, are they, Henry?” Pix asked, investigating my skin.

And maybe it was the trauma of the past couple of days, or the idea that I might never see my little brother again, or the knowledge that I’d had two mothers come and go from my life, but right then was when I broke.

I resolved to tell Pixie about the scars on my hand, and the secret of my life, and how I became a little soldier.

I am four years old. Meredith is two. We spend our lives propped between a pair of golden women. Two blondes. One, our mommy, sits us on her lap and reads to us every night before we go to bed. She takes us to the kitchen, where Hannah feeds us gooey chocolate desserts and lets us put all the sprinkles we want on them and writes our names in raspberry syrup.

Our nanny has golden hair just like Mommy’s. She’s pretty like Mommy, too. She takes us where we need to go and sets us up with experiments in foam shapes and glue and hardly ever gets upset when Meredith gets sloppy and gets glitter on the carpet.

I want to be a good boy for both of these golden women. But I can’t always be. I am told to sit still. But I just can’t. I break things. I break a Slinky. I break Candy Land. Once, I break the fountain in the front yard. I don’t mean to. I just want to play in it, and I break a tile trying to get to the part where the water comes out.

That’s when I get the first one, the first burn.

That was an expensive tile imported from Italy, the pretty blonde says. Your father will be mad when he finds out.

I didn’t mean to. It was hot. I just wanted to play in the water.

Still, your father will be furious. Come upstairs with me.

She takes me to the bathroom in the playroom on the top floor. She locks the door and opens a window.

She lights a cigarette. I’m surprised, because she doesn’t smoke.

Hold out your hand. You’ve done a bad thing, and now you’ll have to be punished, but it’ll be over quickly and you’ll be forgiven.

Just like that?

Just like that.

And she jabs the cigarette out in my palm and it hurts so much and I cry and try to pull away, but she holds my hand tight.

There now, she says. Stay. Good boy. All done. She lets my hand go and smiles at me and shrugs as if it were no big deal. She puts the cigarette butt in the toilet, then flushes it away. Of course I understand. And then she’s running my hand under cool water, putting salve on it, and bandaging it up. I’m forgiven. All done.

There’ll be a mark, but it’ll be our secret, she says. You were so good. You’re my little soldier. She kisses me on the head and smiles so prettily at me, and we drink hot chocolate. Though my hand hurts, the rest of the day seems like a party.

At dinnertime, Dad doesn’t seem furious at all. She has made it better.

Four more times this happens. The second because I make a bad choice in kindergarten and take a little girl’s crayons and make her cry. The third because I won’t sit still and practice writing my letters. The fourth because, at a friend’s birthday party, I say trains are dumb, even though he loves trains and has a train birthday cake and we’ve gotten him a train puzzle as a present.

The fifth one is the deepest and does the most damage. This one is because I break my sister’s tiara with the pink gem and my sister cries and cries, and no amount of glue can put it back together.

Then the pretty blonde turns on me with that look on her face, and I know I will have to be her little soldier once again. This time I am afraid because even though she has trained me, I know she is mad. I don’t want to be a soldier. I don’t want to be forgiven. I want her to leave me alone.

But the training holds. She burns me, leaving the cigarette in the valley between my thumb and forefinger extra-long. I don’t jerk away. I don’t cry. But for the first time, I can tell that she wants me to. And finally comes the All done, which sounds more and more hollow, and then the salve, and then the ice, which lasts longer and longer. I begin to think she is made of ice herself.