She was far away from the mall now, past the bank with the drive-in cash machine, across from Chi-Chi's, the Mexican place were the suits came for margaritas after their long day under fluorescent light. She passed Wendy's and Burger King, almost to McDonald's. The big glass fronts were postered with drink and burger specials. Each chain had its own long empty parking lot separated from each other by barriers of cement. Humidity glowed under the highway lights. Gray moths beat themselves against the textured glass, the asphalt glittering below.
Ted wanted to bash things up, break windows, do wheelies, burn rubber until his skull cracked open and he fell down dead. Before the accident he was less bones than liquid, as if his thin frame were filled with water and his face smooth and beautiful as a child's. But memories from before the accident, precious as a fairy tale, were just as unreliable.
She heard the sputtering engine of Ted's car, the pebble rattling in his hub cap, and without looking back ran down the slope into the woods. There was a path that led into the Millers’ backyard and across the road to Brandy Lane, where her house sat dark and silent, but she'd have to pass the deer. The woods were littered with Coke cans, empty cigarette packages, the aluminum and plastic catching what was left of the highway's white light.
What happened to Sandy was the worst thing that could happen to anyone. She remembered her only in fragments shown on television, the video of her posing at her dance recital, wearing an off-the-shoulder canary-yellow leotard with black sequins around the neck and a big black feather coming out of her hair, her face made up with rouge, mascara, and eye shadow. But when she tried to think of her now, it was always like a porno movie, a little girl with her nightgown pulled over her head.
Ginger hurried through the thin-trunked trees and thorny underbrush, but then paused. She saw something scurring away, disappearing into the weeds. The deer's body was badly bloated. Where the skin had been pink and furless, it was now yellow with burry blue veins running this way and that. She covered her mouth and nose, turned her head, the flies congregating in the ridges of raw flesh.
She heard another sound, maybe a dog wandering melancholy among the trees or Ted coming toward her. She moved around the deer, broke off the path, and slipped into the woods. A branch snapped in her face and her cheek stung; brambles pulled at her shirt. She panicked, felt her body lunge toward the backyards, the swing sets, the Weber grills, the cement patios and their sharp overhead lights. Her foot caught in a ridge of mud and she ran forward, leaving her tennis shoe. She ran toward the cul-de-sac lights, the deer chasing her, running like a man up on two feet.
Six: SANDY
Early light seeped through the green plastic bags taped over the window, making the room feel like the bottom of a swamp. Algae bled into the walls, spread over her mattress, oozed into her pores until she was green all the way through. Lying in muck, silverfish swam over her and an alligator crept past. Light intensified behind the plastic as if God were on the other side. She knew from books that children sometimes found passageways to kingdoms in the backs of wardrobes or by rubbing lucky coins. Maybe a boy wearing knee-socks and thick glasses would step through the plastic, blinking in confusion, because the moment before he'd been on the beach examining a piece of blue glass.
In horror movies, the portals that led to hell had gatekeepers, huge three-headed dogs, or blind men with tiny snakes living inside the sockets of their eyes. And if you went down into hell to retrieve somebody you'd better bring an ivory cross or a lock of baby's hair, because the devil tricked people, turned them into other things like bats or lawn chairs.
This room was smaller than the last one, her mattress a twin, and there was just a broken-down director's chair in one corner and a stack of newspapers in the other. She couldn't read where they were from, but by the layout, length, and spacing of the tiny letters on the edges, she figured they were in English. This comforted her, as she was afraid he'd taken her all the way to Mexico, through Latin America, where she heard men roamed in packs like stray dogs and killed tourists for their Visa cards and traveler's checks. Towns back in the rain forest of Costa Rica, where whorehouses had cement gates and barbed wire. If you ended up there, Robin had told them at camp, you'd never escape.
Oh-u. Oh-u. A bird called in a voice resonant with worry. Oh-u. Oh-u. But she couldn't answer through the gag, just thought of the bird's purple feathers, its pale peach beak and pink tongue, how all day it ate iridescent blue beetles and licked water off white flower petals. When he came in to feed her, pea soup right out of a red and white Campbell's can, he wouldn't make eye contact, and since she'd tried to escape he hadn't even touched her. It was a silent fight like her parents used to have. For days her mother wouldn't get dressed and rushed around in her nightgown acting crazy and officious. Her father sat on the edges of the furniture as if he were a houseguest. But now the man wanted to make up. All night the TV crackled and whispered like a campfire as he sat at the kitchen table writing, cutting letters out of magazines with scissors and pasting them to a blank page. Maybe the letter was to his mother or to an old girlfriend or some company whose product pissed him off; maybe he was working on a project, or filling out a work application. Or maybe he got an idea for a kid's book about a lonely troll that kidnapped a little girl right out of her subdivision. But she knew from the frenetic pace of his work, from the long meditative pauses where he went inside himself, that it was an important letter, that he was careful with the details. His scribbling went on for hours, cutting and pasting. He never looked at her once and for a moment she wondered if he'd forgotten all about her.
The gecko came up from where it lived between the wall and her mattress and stood frozen, lashing its tongue in the air. Its beaded head scooped the quilted material for centipedes and red ants. The movement of her eyelashes frightened the shy thing and it dived back over the mattress's edge. If Sandy sat very still in a forest filled with every kind of wild flower, chipmunks and squirrels would come up to take nuts from her fingers and lay their tiny warm heads against her thigh. She heard the turtle plodding along in the underbrush, eating soft leaves and meaty mushroom caps, the baby bear with a velvet bow tie listening patiently while the caterpillar, in his top hat, gave a speech in the style of Abraham Lincoln, talking mostly about Divine Providence but sometimes about Divine Intervention.
* * *
Sun baked the house. Like bread in the oven, she felt her mushy insides changing into a substance both dry and white. She was thirsty for water, for grape juice, for Sprite with crushed ice in super-sized wax cups, for a cold piece of watermelon, for a teacup full of homemade lemonade. And there was water and lots of it somewhere behind the plastic, a green lime quarry, or a man-made lake, maybe even an ocean. She heard the wet slap against sand and rocks and mud, and she pushed her tongue against the black electrical tape and for an instant hallucinated sucking on an ice cube, sitting in a baby pool, drinking from a cold can of Coke.
It was cute how her brother, when he was little, leaned against her legs, how he'd go around to the neighbor's front lawns eating the stale bread thrown out for the birds. Sometimes he'd take off all his clothes and run naked around the house. He was a preoccupied little kid. Once she asked what he was thinking and he said, “The big bang theory,” and threw himself onto the couch. Another time he found a baby rabbit in the garage and squeezed its stomach so hard blood gushed out of its nose. The frog he'd found in the back woods had an orange belly and crazy eyes. He'd caught a catfish in the graveyard pond. Its skin was like black rubber and he'd pulled its whiskers off on the asphalt driveway, cut its heart out with an old hunting knife. The heart looked like a piece of wet gravel and her brother skewered it on the tip of the blade and carried it into the house.