Hold Me Close(41)
This piece would probably be better painted in the dark.
She stood in front of a canvas still mostly blank. She’d stroked a few tentative lines over the surface. Letting her fingers get a feel for the image. At this point, the picture was still all in her head. It had taken her a few weeks to get started, for the idea to move from concept to actual planning. This piece would be different from the ones she put up for sale at her Craftsy store or the ones people paid her to create based on their own specifications. This one was going to be all Effie.
She’d thought she would sketch an outline first, but now she picked up several tubes of paint instead. Black, crimson, shades of blue. The faintest, palest pink. She squeezed out liberal amounts onto her wooden palette and took up a brush. She began to paint.
* * *
Happy little trees.
People could make fun of Bob Ross all they wanted, but Effie has spent hours with his soft drone and those landscapes. The TV in the basement gets only one station, PBS. It’s almost worse than having no television at all, but Daddy gave it to them as a “reward” for good behavior, and Effie wouldn’t complain about it, not even to Heath. Especially not to him, when he’s been the one to suffer for the reward.
She’s always loved drawing and painting and art, but she’s learned more about technique in the past few months of The Joy of Painting than she had in the years of taking classes with Madame Clay. Yesterday, Effie painted a pretty landscape with trees and mountains and a lake. Then she painted crossbars, like a window, so they could hang it on the wall and pretend they had a view. Her perspective is all off. If her painting was truly what they could see from their window, the water of the lake would be lapping at their toes. She doesn’t care. She’d give anything to stand on a sandy shore with warm water teasing her to dive into it.
Today, Effie wants to finish the landscape she started last week, but she woke up feeling sick to her stomach. It’s the drugs. Sometimes there are too many. Daddy’s going to kill them one day. Maybe that’s what he’s going for.
Effie wants to be still and quiet in the dark and sleep until all of this goes away. She could sleep through the music, that same song over and over, the one about sailing. She can’t sleep through the bright lights, though, and he always turns those on just before he visits.
Daddy. That’s what he insists they call him. He calls them Brother and Sister. He’s a small man with round glasses and a balding head, a belly a little too big for his pants that hangs out under his too-tight belt. But he’s stronger than he looks, Effie knows, because the time she did try to jump past him and head for the door, he was on her before she could get more than a few feet. He’d backhanded her, sending her reeling. Worse, he’d punched Heath in the face over and over until Effie begged him to stop, and then Daddy promised her that if she tried another stunt like that, he would make sure Heath gets worse than a knuckle sandwich.
Effie believes him. It helped her understand why Heath is so reluctant to try to escape, too. The burden of knowing that your actions will hurt someone else. He’s still convinced someone will find them. Effie is losing hope.
“Good morning, children,” Daddy always greets them. “Wakey wakey, eggs and bakey!”
Sometimes there are plates of eggs and bacon, the smell so good it makes her mouth squirt saliva. Sometimes there is fresh fruit cut into artful shapes like flowers or panda bears. When he’s angry, there’s plain, cold oatmeal or undercooked noodles made bitter with the dust of pills and other things. Sometimes for days and days there’s nothing at all, and that’s all right, because it’s easier to deal with hunger when there isn’t a plate of steaming, fluffy scrambled eggs sprinkled with cheese in front of her.
Still, there’s only so long either of them can go without eating something, and last night Effie had broken down and gobbled the entire plate of pasta with butter. Heath only picked at it, watching her with a concerned expression. There’d also been garlic bread, and he’d passed on that entirely, but Effie had been ravenous, incapable of resisting once she’d taken a few bites.
Effie has learned the hard way to believe Heath when he told her not to eat what Daddy brings them.
She regrets it now. Her stomach aches, her guts cramp. She’s been up half the night with the shit-shivers and had almost thrown up several times. She managed to keep herself from it only because the thought of the stink it would leave for days or weeks in the basement was too much to handle.
Today when the song starts and the lights come on, Effie pulls the shabby, stinking blankets up over her head and rolls onto her side with a groan. There’s no way she’s getting up, no way to put a smile on her face the way Daddy demands. Not even for the promise of being allowed to go upstairs, an event Daddy assures them both over and over will happen “one day.” When they’ve both been good enough. When he knows he can trust them. Effie knows better than to believe him. The only way either she or Heath is going to go upstairs, she thinks, is if one of them is dead.
“Effie,” Heath says now. “Get up. He’s coming. C’mon.”
“I’m sick.”
“You shouldn’t have eaten the garlic bread,” Heath says.
Effie whips the blankets off her face and scowls. “Gee, thanks, Captain Obvious.”
Overhead, the creaking floors tell them Daddy’s heading for the basement door. Then the wooden steps and the door at the bottom that leads into their living space. The rooms she and Heath share have been soundproofed so thoroughly they can’t hear anything else outside it, but sure enough, in a few minutes, the door opens. Heath shakes his head and moves away from her to stand. Effie curls into a ball.