“Mama…”
“I’m coming, honey.” She paused long enough to light a fresh Pall Mall and continued down the grimy hallway to her daughter’s bedroom. Outside, an ambulance or a fire truck wailed, an open fire hydrant hissed in protest to children’s voices screaming as they played in the water.
Lucy lay in bed, brown curls plastered to her forehead with sweat. The poor kid.
“Mama, I’m hot.”
“You and me both, honey.” She crossed to sit on the bed. Lucy was small, even for seven, but pretty, like a doll. Sandy hair that fell in ringlets to her shoulders, naturally. She never used rollers or even her fingers to make the tight sausage curls that sprouted from her daughter’s head: a wild riot of hair that set off the elfin features—the button nose and big brown eyes.
She ran her hand across Lucy’s mop of hair, already damp, almost soaking near her neck and forehead.
“Can we go to the beach today?”
“Aw honey, I don’t know.” She wondered from where the fare for the train would come. The task of packing up Thermos, blankets, radio, swimsuits, towels, and snacks daunting with the way her head ached, with how the heat made her languid, each movement real effort. She wanted to lie in a dark room, fan blowing on her, no sheet. She remembered how he used to run an ice cube down her body on other hot summer nights, the traffic below them as they lay on a mattress he had dragged on to the fire escape.
But he was gone.
“C’mon, Mama. It’s so hot.” Lucy swung her legs over the side of her bed. The little girl stretched and rubbed her eyes. She wore only her panties, and her baby skin was already moist.
She wanted to hug her, because she was the only thing in this world that was really hers. But it was so hot. And the pain behind her eyes so great…she just didn’t have the energy.
Lucy crossed the room to look out the window. She leaned out as the music from the ice cream truck swelled as it neared their building.
“It’s the ice cream man!” Lucy turned to her mother. “Mama, it’s the ice cream man! I want some ice cream!” Already, she was rummaging in her drawers, looking for shorts and a shirt to throw on so she could run downstairs.
She put a hand to her forehead, trying to hide the wince from her daughter. “Honey, you can’t have ice cream for breakfast. C’mon, I’ll fix you a nice bowl of Cheerios.”
“I don’t want Cheerios! I want ice cream!” Lucy bounced up and down, features creasing with desire. Her lower lip was out and beginning to tremble.
Her mother shook her head. She had no money for luxuries like ice cream. Lucy would have to get used to that. She had money for hardly anything since he had left.
Lucy began to wail, staring out the window, arms outstretched beseechingly at the children and truck below her.
“Honey, c’mon.” She placed a comforting hand on her daughter’s shoulder. Her reward was Lucy shrugging the hand away. She turned to her mother, with tears glistening. “I hate you.” Lucy rushed into the bathroom and slammed the door.
She collapsed on her daughter’s bed, pulled the pillow over her head and lay there until the sweat trickled down her face to dampen the sheets. Wearily, she got up, crossed the hall to the bathroom door and tapped.
“Lucy? Better hurry up in there ’cause we’re goin’ to Coney Island!”
* * *
She put a hand to her own forehead, where her own headache was beginning. It was so easy to imagine them. Why did she want to, though? Why couldn’t she get the little girl and her mother out of her mind? She found herself thinking of them on her way to work in the morning, el train rumbling beneath her. She would think of them at her desk at the agency, thoughts drifting off for minutes at a time, imagining them, almost feeling as if she were coming to know them.
She didn’t want to think about them. Didn’t want to imagine a scenario in which she could make sense of what had happened. Who were they anyway? Why should the death of a child affect her so much? Was it because she had been about the same age as the little girl back in 1965? Her own mother never had the strength to spank her, let alone…
Oh God, the image rose up again. Her little lips parted, perhaps to draw in her final breath.
* * *
At Coney Island, heat shimmered off the sand. The beach was crowded, but not as bad as it would be on the weekend. She moved through the oiled bodies, the umbrellas and the transistor radios blaring songs like, “Alley Oop” and “Downtown,” hanging on to Lucy’s hand. The little girl had so much energy. Already, she was bouncing up and down at the sight of the Atlantic, pointing at the waves rolling in. “Look, Mama! Big waves today.”
She had only enough energy to nod at her daughter, giving her a wan smile.
They managed to find a space big enough for them to spread out the blanket they had brought from home.
“How about right here?” she asked.
But Lucy had eyes only for the sea.
She threw down the blanket, towels and beach bag. The heat was adding a twisting nausea to her gut, to keep company with the headache no amount of aspirin would alleviate.
Lucy let go of her hand and started running toward the surf. “Lucy! Lucy, come back here! Aren’t you going to help me put the blanket down?”
“You do it!” she cried, and ran, splashing, into the water.
Normally, she would have dragged the little girl back for sassing her like that, but she just didn’t have the energy. She began to unfold the blanket.
* * *
There must be a way, she thought, to rid herself of this imagining a dead girl and her mother. Perhaps she could go to a hypnotist and have the memory excised from her brain, like a growth. She knew she couldn’t do what she wanted most: turn back time to the day she went into the bookstore and listened to her own voice of reason when it told her not to look inside the book of crime scene photographs. But if we could do that, she thought grimly just before putting out the light next to her bed, everyone would be going back in time to correct his or her mistakes. She let out a whispered snicker in the dark: there would be no one in the present.
She wondered if the little girl’s mother had rued the day she had strangled her daughter. Had it been some horrible scar she had borne the rest of her life? Was she still alive in prison somewhere, able to see that same picture in Technicolor memory over and over, tormenting her so much she would want to die? Did she too wish she could turn back time and change the one thing on that day that led to her killing her own child? Or was she a sociopath with no feelings, not even for her own little girl? Had she died in the electric chair? What were her last thoughts? Were they of her daughter? Had she been relieved to die?
She turned over and closed her eyes, but the image from the book was there: imprinted on a matte of black inside her eyelids.