Don't Look for Me(64)

Slowly, but with conviction, Nic nodded.

Yes.





29


Day fifteen





We lie on the floor. I am on my side of the bars. Alice is on the other. She wanted to sleep near me even though we are not allowed to sleep together anymore, so I told her to get some blankets and cushions from the sofa. I showed her how to make a pillow bed and she liked it very much. Of course she did. My kids used to love pillow beds. When we would go to a hotel, all of us, as a family—oh, that was another life—we would share a room. Me and John in one bed. Two kids in the other. And the third on a cozy bed between them, made from cushions or extra pillows—whatever we could find in the room.

The trick is to tuck a sheet tightly beneath them so they don’t come apart.

Evan usually chose the pillow bed. Even as he grew too big for anything we could make, he would sleep on the bound pillows, arms and legs hanging off the sides. He didn’t want to sleep with one of his sisters. Girls were yuck. Thankfully, I wasn’t recognized as being a girl. These memories flow now, freely and with the semblances of joy. Leaning over to kiss him goodnight, he would pull me to him with both arms and hug me tight. Still a little boy inside, but with the strong arms of a big boy. He needed me. And it was blissful. Even as the memory retreats to the other side of the line, the joy lingers. But it does not last. This night has ended in disaster.

Alice sleeps soundly in her pillow bed, even though I have untangled her arms from my waist and moved beyond her reach.

It is not far enough.

I let the feeling flow through me, still and silent, because Alice has left the hallway light on for Mick and now Dolly can see my face.

It is probably for the best. I don’t know what I might do if these feelings are set free.

We waited for Mick for a long time. We waited until we had watched all of her shows on the iPad and grown bored and tired.

“I want my Jell-O,” she’d said then.

I told her it was okay. She could bring us our Jell-O but she should leave the one for Mick, the lime Jell-O, in a place where he would see it. Maybe he would want dessert when he finally came home.

I can still see her face as she told me, “No!”

It was Coy Face, speaking with defiance.

Then she said, “I threw it away.”

“What? Why?” I asked, because it was all I could think to do. The hatred surged. Pulsated. Took over every inch of me and crawled over my skin, making me shudder.

“Because he didn’t come home so he doesn’t deserve Jell-O,” she said.

“Alice—that’s not nice!” I was so close to reaching through those bars and shaking her, violently. “Go and get it right now—out of the garbage and bring it to me!”

It was a ridiculous request. The Jell-O would be scattered among the remnants of the chicken and coffee grinds from the morning and who knew what else. Still, I needed it. I needed her to bring it to me.

But then she said, “It’s not in there. I can’t even stand the smell of it.”

“What did you do with it?” I asked, my mouth bone dry.

Coy Face answered, and my only plan for escape disappeared before my eyes.

“I put it down the drain.”



* * *



Alice has killed my chance to escape. She has done it over her frivolous hatred of lime-flavored things and she has done it in a way that demonstrates the extent of her hatred.

It does not matter that in any other set of circumstances I would not care about her actions. It does not matter that she did it without knowing what her actions would cost me.

I find this all ironic. How her hatred of lime-flavored things has caused me to feel hatred for her. Truly feel it for the first time, in depths that are beyond the reach of my ability to pull them back. The hatred is deep inside my bones. Inside my mind. Inside my heart.

I am too tired to reach for it. Too tired to fight it. I hate a child.

It is hard to think straight. I had a plan which is now gone. New plans swim and swirl, but there are too many unknowns.

I do not know where we are, and what is beyond that fence. I do not know how far away he is, and whether he could get to me while I run there, back to the hole and the tools I left beneath the dead leaves.

I don’t even know if the tools are still there. And yet, I could get another knife from the kitchen. Maybe there are more scissors as well.

I think through the steps. I would have to convince Alice to open the grate. I would have to find the boots, maybe a coat. The air is still cold at night. I could run through the woods this time, in the direction of the fence to the right side of the driveway, not down the driveway. But then—what if I overshoot the place where I cut the fence and hid the tools? I could just make a new hole.

No, no, no.

This plan will not work unless I can be sure he’s far enough away. He will see me leave. He will know.

I can’t go back to that dark room. I can’t go wherever Daisy Alice Hollander has gone.

I have to stay and be a good second mommy to one child to protect another—my daughter. To protect Nicole.

I fight to keep my face calm, though the tears fall down my cheeks and into the pillow around my ear.

Stillness brings chaos inside my mind.

Nicole.

You used to be a glorious warrior. That was how I saw you, though I never said it. I didn’t want you to become something simply because I put the image in your head. My mother did that to me.