If You Find Me(24)

“This is a dishwasher,” my father says, walking up beside me. He opens a door and pulls out the top and bottom racks, which roll out on little wheels.

“You don’t have to wash them by hand. You rinse them in the sink, then stack them on the racks. Cups and glasses on top, plates and pots on the bottom. The machine does the washing for us.”

“With electricity?”

“Smart girl.”

He walks back and forth from the table, handing me plates and cups, which I rinse under a stream of hot water and stack as he instructed. He whistles a song I don’t know, but a corner or two of the melody sounds familiar.

I fumble a dish and he rescues it midair. I flinch, before I realize he’s only passing it back to me. I concentrate on loading the utensils. If he noticed, he doesn’t say.

“Slippery suckers, aren’t they?” he says, his words gruff.

I nod at his boots, and then the last dish is stacked, the last fork rinsed and placed.

“See?”

He takes a light blue box from a shelf in the cupboard and pours what look like colored crystals into a small compartment built into the door, then clicks it shut. I watch as he turns a did above the door to Normal Wash. I jump back as the machine comes to life. We both smile.

“Go on up and take your shower. We have a two o’clock appointment with Mrs. Haskell. Her regular office is about twenty miles from here. She has tests for you girls, to get you ready for school.”

[page]I nod when my voice fails me. School, like the girls in my books. My stomach churns as I pass Melissa, who’s on her knees next to the tub in the first-floor bathroom, squinching her eyes shut as Nessa splashes bubbles all over the floor.

I think of Nessa’s back and make a beeline up the stairs and straight into the bathroom connected to my new room, closing the door behind me with my foot. I make it to the toilet just in time as the pancakes and bacon thrust up and out, landing with a plunk and my own splash into the toilet water.

I don’t want to go to school. The woods are my school.

I think of the motel, and teaching Ness how to use a toilet after she’d pulled a handful of leaves from her coat pocket and motioned toward the trees out past the parking lot. Tears stung my eyes, seeing her joy in not having to trek out into the darkness of strange, cold places. She flushed the toilet with a grin, watching the contents spin and spin and then, like magic, disappear.

Again, her eyes shouted. Again!

I run my shower, the water lacking the fishy creek smell I’d grown used to and even liked after a while. Cupping my hands under the stream, I splash water onto my face. Once I double-check that I’m locked in, I strip naked, squaring off with the full-length mirror on the back of the shower door. I’ve never seen my whole self all at once before.

I see lots of angles connected to bones. I turn around and strain over my shoulder, my eyes traceing the white lines left by the switch, and the two purplish red upraised circular scars from Mama’s cigarettes, just below my left shoulder. All that’s fresh is a bruise on my upper arm, where I’d slipped down some rocks while chasing a quail.

I stand under the stream of hot water. I could stand here forever. The peachy-pink bottle on the shelf squirts liquid soap onto a puffy scrubby thing hanging from the showerhead. The shampoo has black letters written on it: Scrub hair. And another bottle, called conditioner, has more black words: After shampoo, put on hair. Wait a few minutes. Rinse off.

So I do both, lingering in the heat and steam until I’m clean from the inside out. I think of Saint Joseph and thank him for all of it—plentiful amounts of food, the miracle of electricity, inside flush toilets, clean, running water, bubbles for Jenessa, heat and blankets and the thick, plush towel that wraps around my body nearly twice, hanging down to my bony ankles.

There’s a soft rap on the door, and Melissa’s voice floats like a ghost through the wood.

“Your sister is squeaky-clean. She’s picking out some clothes. We have half an hour, okay?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“There’s a brush and a comb for you, Carey, in the top drawer.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

I hear her pass, and I turn to the sink, opening the drawer below the basin. Looking inside, I find an antique silver brush and comb set with my initials engraved into the metal: C. V. B.

Carey Violet Blackburn named after my gran.

“Let me comb your hair, cookie.”

“Okay, Gran.”

“Come sit here on the footstool. That’s a good child. A cookie for my cookie, when we’re through.”

“I love you, Gran“

“And I love you, cookie-girl“

Gran had a set just like this. Jenessa, a real girlie girl, is going to go nuts when she sees it.

I think of the old horse brush we’d been using the past few years and the comb with more gaps than teeth left. I’d wither and die if Delaney or Melissa saw them. Not wasting a minute, I stride into my bedroom and pull out the brush and comb hidden under my T-shirts and bury the items at the bottom of the bin in the bathroom. I go to Jenessa’s room, grab the two garbage bags from the bottom drawer of her bureau, and arrange them on top of the rest brush and comb, for good measure.

I stand there, staring at the garbage. Once again, the heat creeps up my neck and into my cheeks.

“You’re a square peg“ Mama says, none too kindly, “bent on shovin yourself into a knothole“