“How did you know the baby was…sad?”
Again, a long time passed before there was any sound from the backseat. “It’s complicated,” Ronnie said at last, sounding like Alice when she had invoked her “past”-rehearsed, channeling words suggested by someone older. “It’s a very complicated story.”
She did not speak again for the duration of the ride. And now she was sleeping. Infante and Nancy studied her through the glass. In her T-shirt and jeans, she looked younger than she was. Yet she could have looked much older with minimal effort-a short skirt, a little makeup. That was the odd trick of eighteen, Nancy remembered. You could turn the clock forward or backward, be a kid when it suited you, or fool the world into thinking you were a woman. It was a time filled with promises. She had broken up with Andy the summer she was eighteen, taken a chance on the world at large. Then she ran back to him, realizing she shouldn’t reject the great luck of meeting her soul mate at age fourteen.
“First she runs, now she sleeps,” Infante said. “She’s like a textbook example of guilt.”
“She’s got to be exhausted,” Nancy said, a sense of fairness automatic with her. “She has had a pretty long day. And she seemed genuinely baffled when I mentioned Brittany Little.”
“You’re tired, and you’re not sleeping. The only difference between the two of you is she knows what happened to Brittany Little and you don’t. You think we should wake her up?”
“I’m telling you, it can’t be done. She’s dead to the world.”
The words hung on, and Nancy wished she had chosen a different way to say it.
Yes, Ronnie Fuller slept, but there was neither innocence nor guilt in her sleep, just a lifelong way of coping with a world that bewildered her. She had always been able to sleep, in almost any circumstances. She had slept through the night at the age of three months. As a toddler, she had dozed in the backseat of the family car, wedged so tightly between her brothers that her father said they didn’t need seat belts, not that the old Ford station wagon had any. She had napped in school, leading her teachers to suspect a chaotic home life that didn’t allow her to get enough rest, and they were half right. Ronnie had a chaotic home life, but she got plenty of rest, which saved her from much of it. Her bed was her one private place in a most unprivate household.
And when her youngest older brother, Matthew, began trying to get into her bed when she was nine, she used sleep to keep herself safe.
Matthew was twelve at the time, and Ronnie had suspected for several days that he was planning something for her. So far, most of Matthew’s plans for her had been cruel but tolerable-pinches, hits, endless “Punch buggies, no punch backs.” If she weathered these attacks without comment or reaction, Matthew usually grew bored and found someone or something else to torture. Helen Manning had told Ronnie the story of the Snow Queen, and Ronnie quickly saw the advantage in having a splinter of ice in the heart, as long as you could take it out at will. She thought of herself as the Stone Queen, holding a pose in Freeze Tag. Ronnie had always been good at Freeze Tag.
On an August evening, the year Matthew was twelve and Ronnie was nine, he came into her room when the house was quiet, or as quiet as it ever got, with the living room television blaring into the night, her father’s snores rising and falling. Matthew’s hands were clutched at the groin of his pajamas, as if he had to pee, and he was holding himself so only the tip peeked out. It was the same way he held the baby field mice he sometimes captured in the Mannings’ wild, overgrown backyard. Ronnie could see all this because her eyes were fake-squinched shut, allowing a tiny field of vision through her lashes. She had been lying there, barely breathing, waiting to see what Matthew was going to do when he came for her. She had known, somehow, it would be this night.
“Ronnie,” he whispered hoarsely. “Ronnie, are you awake?”
She let out a sigh, the kind of half-murmur, half-talk sound that her father made when he fell asleep on the sofa after dinner, before moving on to an impressive crescendo of snores. She didn’t dare try fake-snoring because she knew it would come out like a cartoon character, all whistles and lip-flaps.
“I’ve got something I want to show you.” Matthew reached for her wrist, but Ronnie rolled over as if in a restless dream, pinning her arms in a tight V beneath her stomach, hands crossed at her crotch.
“Ronnie, Ronnie. C’mon, Ronnie, it’s a secret, a really cool secret.”
It was all she could do not to say, “It’s not such a secret, dummo.” She knew about sex, if not all its particulars. Her mother had miscarried when Ronnie was four, leading to an early overview of the facts of life. Cable movies and soap operas had filled in the gaps, and Ronnie had a general idea of what went where, what the consequences were, and the odd effect the whole enterprise had on men. She had even seen movies on television that explained why her brother was here, in the middle of the night. These things happened in families, according to the movies, but it was always, always wrong, even when the boy was handsome, which Matthew wasn’t, and really loved the girl, which Matthew didn’t.
But Ronnie would lose a confrontation with Matthew. He would hit her, she would yell, and her father would come in and dispense slaps all around, indifferent to what had caused the noise. The next night, Matthew would come back, the sequence would be repeated, and eventually, he would take what he wanted from her. As for telling her parents what Matthew was trying to do-well, it was too shameful. Ronnie felt she had to protect her mother from the truth about her youngest son-what he did to neighborhood merchants, not to mention cats, how he behaved at school. She had to protect her mother, in general, from the ugliness of life. Her mother didn’t know how awful the world was. Her mother liked to talk about the old shows she had watched on something called Picture for a Sunday Afternoon, back when the world had only three channels. Ronnie didn’t want her mother to know how things had changed, that children were so dirty now, that there were a hundred channels full of things no one should see.
Helen Manning was clearly sophisticated enough, but Ronnie would be even more ashamed to tell a neighbor about Matthew. This was back when Matthew was the bad one, the one headed for trouble and juvenile hall. Funny, he had turned out okay after it became clear that Ronnie was so awful that no one else in the family could ever be known as the bad one. Ronnie never forgot his face the day they came for her, the stunned, almost joyous look of reprieve. He didn’t have to be the bad one anymore.
But this was two years earlier. On her stomach at the age of nine, arms beneath her, hands pressed over her private parts, he was still bad and Ronnie was good, or at least better than him. Smarter, too. She realized she was impenetrable as long as she kept up the pretense of sleeping. Perhaps an older boy, a more vicious one, would have kept going, but Matthew assumed he needed Ronnie’s cooperation. The female body was mysterious to him. He would never find his way inside without a little help.