Then leave your mother to face the world’s judgment.
They couldn’t use Helen’s name, for that would have been the same as identifying Alice, but the local television stations had somehow rationalized showing Helen’s face as she ducked in and out of various government buildings that summer. She wore dark glasses, her hair pulled up in a way she had never worn it before and never wore it again. But people knew, of course. They knew which girls had been sent home from the pool party after what was reported as a “racial incident,” knew which children disappeared from the neighborhood, as if they had never existed. But no one ever said anything, because what would they say? Saw you on the news. Sorry your kid killed that baby. What are you doing this weekend?
Helen went inside and began setting up her next class, taping newspaper to the desks, straightening the little chairs, the style of which had not changed since she was in fifth grade. For all she knew, these chairs could have been in service during her fifth-grade year. The city system was pretty poor. She definitely remembered colors like these, seventies colors, colors that embodied the promises of the modern age. Aqua blue. Mod orange. Now these were the ironic, self-conscious shades of iMacs and junior high school fashions. She remembered an outfit, purchased for her first plane trip-an orange-, blue-, and brown-striped dress with a matching scarf, from the old Best & Co. Her mother had saved all Helen’s clothes, and Helen had taken it out of a box when Alice was the same age. But she was too big for it. Hormones. It had to be hormones.
Thank God the afternoon classes would be fourth-graders. They were still baby sweet, unlike the middle-school-bound fifth-graders. The fourth-graders reminded her of Alice, the lost Alice. In remembering her daughter, Helen always imagined her from the back-the part in her hair, two tails of yellow hanging down on either side of her head, tied with bows that Helen fashioned from fabric remnants and Christmas ribbon. She conjured up her smell, which was sharpest at the back of her neck, varying with the day and the weather. Chalk, soap, grass, suntan lotion, chlorine, peanut butter, pickles. She saw that neck bent over the kitchen table, intent on a project-a Christmas gift, homemade Valentines-saying to herself, as she must have heard Helen say: “Homemade is nicer.” She was so good, there was no other word for it.
But Alice ’s goodness, her very lack of reproach, became a reproach. “I did something bad,” she would say to Helen in their last days together, tentative, hopeful of contradiction. “When you do something bad, you have to be punished.”
“Yes, baby,” Helen had said. Show them how strong you are, and then one day they’ll realize you’re really a good girl, that it was just a mistake. It was a mistake, wasn’t it, baby? A mistake, an accident? Whose idea was it, baby? You can tell me. Tell Mama what happened. I know the truth is sad, but it’s important to tell the truth. Always, always. It’s better if we know everything. Maybe it will change things. Nothing’s really done, nothing’s really decided, not yet. Just tell the truth, Alice.
But Alice had shaken her head, refusing to tell Helen anything. “Everything’s decided now,” she had said. “I have to go away.”
That was the night before the final hearing, the formal sentencing. On top of everything else, Alice had just gotten her period for the first time, and they were in the bathroom, fixing her up, soaking her underpants in cold water. Menstruating at eleven, not even in sixth grade. Helen had started at thirteen, and her mother thought that was young.
Helen had given Alice the sex talk in bits and pieces over the years, so Alice wasn’t scared. She was so placid, so composed, that Helen couldn’t help trying to shake her up, make her treat the moment as more of a milestone.
“In my day, we didn’t have these adhesive-backed pads. We had to wear little belts,” she said. “With teeth.”
The image startled Alice, sitting on the toilet with a sanitary napkin in her hand.
“Did the teeth bite?” she had asked, eyes round, and Helen regretted mentioning it.
“No, they weren’t teeth-teeth. Just little holders, for the napkin’s tabs. You’re lucky. But remember, you have to be responsible now. You’re still a little girl, but your body thinks it’s a woman. Don’t forget that, okay?”
That damn song popped up again, lodged in Helen’s brain the way only an unwelcome melody can burrow in. Girl-you’re a woman now. Strangely, it brought a memory with it, but not of when Helen first heard it. Instead, she saw herself sitting on the edge of that useless kidney-shaped pool at the apartment complex off I-83, the summer after her first year of graduate school. Suddenly, anachronistically, she could remember everything-the seat of her suit pulling at the rough-textured concrete, the sun on her back, the baby oil cupped in her palm, ready to anoint her lovely freckled shoulders. And then Roy surfaced, shaking his hair, so long by today’s standards, water streaming down his well-formed chest, looking almost as good as he thought he did.
“You live around here?” he asked, and she smiled at the sheer stupidity of his come-on, delighted that he was dumb, because then she wouldn’t fall in love with him, she could just fuck him for the summer and move on, happy and carefree. She had been right about that much, at least. She hadn’t fallen in love with him. For all she knew, he could have come and read her meter over the past decade, and she wouldn’t have recognized him.
Had he recognized Helen, in her sunglasses and piled-up hair seven years ago, racing across his television set? Had he realized his daughter was one of the “pair of eleven-year-old killers” mentioned incessantly on the news, in the paper, until the phrase lost its ability to shock? Even if he had, Helen couldn’t fault him for not coming forward and confessing to Alice ’s paternity.
She probably wouldn’t have either, given the choice.
5.
2 P.M.
“Don’t you want dessert? They make great sundaes here.”
Alice looked up from her plate, where half of her cheeseburger and most of her french fries still sat. She wasn’t trying to impress Sharon with her willpower-she never worried about impressing Sharon -and she wasn’t self-conscious about her appetite. She plain didn’t like this cheeseburger, which had come with Cheddar instead of American cheese, or these fries, which were too real to Alice ’s way of thinking, with the skins still attached, and soft, lumpy insides, damp with oil.