“I'll let you go if you tell them you ran away from camp and spent all these weeks counting dead leaves on the forest floor and making friends with little animals,” the troll began thoughtfully as if he'd been practicing this speech all night. “If you can tell me the name of the bird with the highest IQ, or the exact weight of the one-legged Indian chief's beautiful daughter,” he stared at the inside of her wrist where the tendons stood up like piano strings. “I'm going to let you go,” he said in a firm voice, meant to convince himself, “but not until the very last minute.”
“No talking allowed,” the unicorn said, because to fly he had to meditate, think about angel food cake and milkweed spores, of loosened balloons and grocery bags caught in the wind. The mall from above resembled sand dunes, and the myriad condominium complexes, patches of mushrooms. Wind stung her ears and jerked her hair back. She crouched behind the unicorn's head, her hands fisted in the long hair of his mane. His fur smelled like old snow and was sooty and damp, pricked up on end with effort. Below the cloud cover, school buses lined up behind the cement-block building and a smudge of gray became the flapping American flag. She was surprised how shabby and ephemeral all the buildings looked, like an overturned junk drawer filled with gray ribbon and ugly dime-store beads. There was the 7-Eleven where she and her brother played pinball, drank Slurpees, and ate silver-wrapped Hershey kisses. She recognized her block by the strange triangular cul-de-sac, and the unicorn spiraled down until he hovered like a dragonfly just above the split-level's bay window. Inside, her mother slept on the couch under her winter coat, her face above the navy wool so slack and lined that she looked like a different person. On the coffee table was a drawing Sandy made in kindergarten of a stick figure with arms coming out of its gourd-shaped head and a naked doll with stiff black hair. Watching her mother's hand clutching the coat's material to her chin, Sandy realized that for a long time before she'd gone to camp she'd felt sorry for her mother. In her head she created a string of pink hearts and red rose petals, and clasped this necklace around her poor mother's neck. Through the doorway, Sandy saw her little brother sitting at the kitchen table eating a TV dinner. He'd turned his head to look at the poppy-colored refrigerator, a fancy one with double doors and a tinkling ice machine. There, held up with a magnet, was a pencil drawing he'd done of her face and at the bottom he'd written Sandy Come Home.
The troll carried a blue plastic bucket and sang “Rock-A-Bye-Baby” as he entered the dark room. He bent over and turned on the pink shell night-light. Steam rose in fragmentary tendrils from the pail's lip. He sat on the edge of the bed and sank the yellow dishrag into the bucket and crushed a stream of water out with his fists. He washed her hip and thigh in tiny round strokes as if he were buffing a beloved sports car or stripping an antique table. Through the cage of her lashes she watched his face flush and his eyes fill up with tears and she felt grateful and wanted to tell him it was all okay, that God could still forgive him if he'd change his ways at once.
“That's exactly right,” the butterfly, who was always looking for any opportunity to proselytize, interjected. “Miracles happen every day! Take the little baby who crawled onto the open window ledge, tried to reach out and touch a bird on a nearby branch and began to fall.
‘''No, baby!’ a man screamed out and ran forward. He arrived just in time to catch the infant in his cradled arms.” The butterfly sighed dramtically, “Now isn't that a sweet story?”
Sandy nodded her head and the moon sent a ring of light into the room that moved across the floor like a rock's ripple on water, and she tried to get the dream back but the unicorn had lost his concentration. Crippled with exhaustion, he needed to be led through the dark wood.
Eleven: GINGER
In the dream she was singing off a printed sheet at the new-age center. The melodies were like campfire songs and the lyrics full of eagles soaring above mountaintops and lines about beautiful souls dancing in celestial moonlight. Cheerful men in pastel sweaters took her father away to the county hospital. She felt the lyrics bite into her scalp, slither into her brain like baby snakes. As the group chanted their affirmation, she managed to sneak out of the cinderblock building. But all around the perimeter stood a chain-link fence. Spirals of barbwire laced the top, and on the other side a Doberman with a bloodied, bandaged foot foamed at the mouth and stuck his snout angrily through the metal mesh.
Throwing off the sleeping bag, she limped up the stairs, still wearing the thrift-store blouse with the Peter Pan collar and her mother's floral skirt, the waistband twisted to one side. The house reeked of phantom pot roast and ink off the Sunday Times. She hallucinated tinkling silverware and her mother's lilac perfume. Turning on the faucet in the kitchen, Ginger washed out her father's coffee cup and scrubbed the oat bits stuck to the edge of his cereal bowl, then let water gather into a glass and carried it to the rec room, where she sat under the gloomy Easter lily painting and contemplated putting on one of her father's jazz records. She liked the blue duo-tone covers and the way the scratchy music crackled out of the speakers. Sipping the chlorine-spiked water, a light froth spun on the cloudy surface; she noticed that the latch on the window behind the TV was open. Hairs on her arms pricked; her flesh goose-pimpled as she walked over and slammed the frame shut, twisted the metal lock. Anyone could shimmy up the drainpipe, latch onto the deck rail, and slip inside the window; that's how a convict escaped from a chain gang had raped a lady the next state over. He climbed onto the deck, opened the sliding glass door, found a steak knife in the kitchen, and accosted her on the bed, where she was folding clothes still warm from the dryer. The lock on the kitchen doorknob lay horizontal. Her father forgot to lock it when he went to church. Ginger slid the button vertical, which stiffened the flimsy latch bolt, not that somebody couldn't kick the hollow plywood door down or break a pane and shift the lock. The dining-room window was locked, but at ground level one smash of a hammer and a stranger would be standing beside the table with the white lace dolly and the bowl of plastic fruit.
Ginger saw this same sort of split-level built at the end of the subdivision. Each house took two weeks: first the pine skeleton, and then they stapled up the pressed-board walls and stuffed them with pink insulation. Using a chain saw anybody could cut through the house's exterior. As a child she set garlic on the window ledge to repel vampires and kept a baton under her pillow to bash intruders in the head. She practiced fire drills incessantly. Her father tried to calm her by insisting God watched over her, but Ginger knew if she had to believe in God and the angels, then devils and monsters existed too. Besides, God was always letting all kinds of bad things happen. It would be different if car crashes and murders were written off to chance, but what scared Ginger as a child was that God just sat on his golden throne and watched these things happen. Sure, he watched over you but that didn't keep you safe. Actually it was even scarier to think of somebody staring at you all the time, like the disapproving ladies in church.
Ginger walked down the hallway to her mother's bedroom. Her father kept the window cracked open to air out the room, trying to rid the space of mothballs and that medicinal ointment, but Ginger saw it as a way to lure her mother's soul back, give her a chance to hover around the bedspread ruffle or be absorbed into the wood grain of the dresser. Ginger lay down in the position her mother took in the last days of her life, slumped sideways, one leg hanging over the edge. She imagined her blood growing sluggish, her own heart stopping, veins fraying, and her soul lifting up with the slippery pluck of an avocado pit out of the greasy green pulp. But what if her consciousness gave out with her corporeal envelope? What if her mother'd become a piece of meat like the hunks of steak wrapped in cellophane at the grocery store? On her last day, Ginger rubbed her mother's feet with peppermint oil and brought flowers from the yard, lilacs and sweet-smelling hyacinths. She brought items that might stir her memory, photographs, the little ceramic deer that sat on the mantle, her beloved blue glass beads. But no object could link her mother with this material world; only Ginger's hand entwined in hers allowed her mother to close her eyes and breathe with a little less effort.