Don't Look for Me(19)

But I don’t ask. I don’t care. I need to get outside to that fence and see where it leads, see where we are in relation to the town. The sky is clear. The air is warm enough to go out in these clothes. At least while it’s daylight.

I don’t know if I can trust this instinct, but it is strong. And it tells me to leave this house.

“Come on!” Alice says. “Do you want to see where I was born?”

Alice takes me back down the hall, past the bedroom on the left where I slept. Past another bedroom on the left, then a bathroom on the right and a third bedroom after that. This is a strange house—I have not seen any stairs. It’s laid out like a long ranch, but has the facade of a farm house, with the porch and the gable roof.

Next to the last bedroom is a smaller room. It’s dark and windowless and has a sink and hookup for a washer. The floor is not wood like the other rooms and the hallway. It has hard ceramic tile. There is some kind of toilet in the corner.

“Here!” she says. “Right here! My mother didn’t like hospitals.”

I look at her and wonder if she knows how strange that sounds. Her mother had a home birth in a cold, dark laundry room. Alice rarely leaves the house herself. But I come from a different world. Maybe they couldn’t afford the cost of the hospital. Maybe they didn’t trust the government to educate their child. Maybe they didn’t trust anyone.

And then—wait. He said my clothes were drying in the laundry room. There are no machines in this room. No drying rack. No clothes.

“Alice,” I ask. “Is there another place where you do the laundry?”

Alice shrugs. She has no idea and she doesn’t care.

“Now it’s time to play!” she says. She takes my hand and we walk.

We sit on the floor of a small room at the front of the house. There are shelves on the walls, filled with children’s books and toys—and dust. There is so much dust it makes me wonder if anyone ever cleans this house. And it is then that the small memories come flooding in—memories from last night and this morning. Walking up the porch with loose steps. Paint peeling from the shingles. Even in the storm and darkness I could see the patches of brown. The floorboards of my room, and the hallway, are caked with a thick line of dirt—the dust that has condensed and slowly crept to the sides as air flows through the rooms. And the kitchen, the one with the phone that is dead—its floor is yellowing. White linoleum turning color from age and neglect.

Maybe I was wrong to think the man’s wife just died. No woman has kept this house for a long time. Years perhaps. And yet the clothes are freshly laundered. Maybe she was sick for a while.

Maybe she was young and didn’t know how to clean a house.

I have to find my clothes. I have to get outside.

“You be this girl,” Alice orders me. She hands me a small plastic figurine with chestnut hair. “Her name is Suzannah.”

I take the little doll and smile. “Okay,” I say.

“I’ll be Hannah. She has blond hair like me. It’s better to have blond hair. Did you know that? Is that why you make your brown hair blond? I can see your roots, you know.”

I want to tell her there’s a nicer way to ask a personal question like that, to be a parent to her because she needs one and it’s unthinkable that she lives this way, never leaving this filthy house, never seeing another child. But she is not my child, even though she slept in my arms and made me dream about Annie.

She is not your child. You’ll be leaving soon.

“What are you allergic to?” I ask her.

I think now about gathering information. Maybe it will help me leave here.

“Everything that’s outside the house,” she says.

“Like what?” I ask.

“All the trees and the grass and the sky and the air. All the animals. All of it. I can’t ever leave. Except with the mask and only if it’s an emergency.”

She says this without emotion. She says this without longing because she doesn’t know any other way of life. She must have been living this way since she’s had memories.

I make some mental notes and pretend that they are important so that I don’t jump out of my skin playing with dolls when I want to run.

First, she has been here since age four or perhaps even earlier. She has no memory of any other life.

Second, she never calls the man by a name. She uses only the pronouns he, him, his.

Third, he has lied to her to keep her here. If she had such severe allergies, the dust in this house would have killed her by now.

Fourth, this man who won’t say his name is angry and impulsive. I picture him slamming on his brakes, causing a car to crash into him. He may also be violent.

“Suzannah!” Alice yells.

I am pulled back into the moment where I am playing with dolls.

I hold mine up. “Yes, Hannah?” I say in a different voice than my own.

Now Alice throws hers down. “She doesn’t talk like that!”

“I’m sorry,” I say. “How does she talk? I will try to be just like her.”

Alice calms and picks up her doll. “Just normal. In your regular voice.”

“Okay,” I say. “What, Hannah?” I try again.

Her face lights up. It’s night and day. Dark and light. The emotions that flow through this child.