Come Little Children (29 page)

Abigail looked down. Finally she whispered: “Coming out of the water.” She didn’t look up again. Instead, she massaged the bedsheets in her lap and asked, “Mom, am I crazy?”

For a second, the world stopped spinning.

The question hung there, midair, like a raindrop trapped with a high-shutter-speed lens, and then everything spun backwards. The hours turned back, then the days and the years—past Camilla’s time in Nolan, past her college days, even past her semesters in high school—shrinking her down to three and a half feet tall again and returning her to when she was seven-years-old.

“Small straight, honey. That’s a small straight.” The memory of Camilla’s mother tapping the dice between them with the tip of her pencil flashed to life. “Two, three, four, five.” She leaned over and wrote thirty points on a hand drawn scorecard.

“Can’t count ‘em yourself, genius?” Her father was reclined on the other end of the booth beside her mother, a rum in hand and a haze of alcohol clouding his face. “Gotta get your mom to write down your points for you?”

The dice clacked over the table again. “Full house,” Diana mumbled and slid the cubes back to Camilla, marking off twenty-five points for herself.

“Hey, kid,” her father called relentlessly. “She’s a cheat. You gotta watch her, huh? She’s a…she’s a crazy little cheat.” He laughed obnoxiously and slurred louder since no one must have heard him the first time, “She’s a batshit bullshitter!” His howl filled the trailer, but when it was clear—even for a drunk—that they were ignoring him, he belched and pulled a totally different
topic out of his ass. “Where’s the chicken?” The gross man sat up with a look in his eyes that was suddenly mean, grabbing his wife’s arm, and shouted, “Hey! I’m asking you somethin’!” Even at that age, Camilla noticed her mother wince at the pressure his hand put on her collage of bruises.

“It’s still in the oven.”

“Well, don’t burn it. You burned it last time.” He let her go and cuffed the back of her head. “There’s a warning. It’ll be worse if that damn chicken comes out black.”

Everything fell silent again. Camilla waited a minute before picking up the dice and rolling them again. Two twos, two fours, and a six. She looked at her mom for help, but Diana was just staring down at the table, completely blank-faced. “Mom?”

She tapped her mother’s hand, but no response. She lowered herself into her mom’s line of vision and made eye contact, but for one horrifying second she saw that no one was home. Whoever this was, it wasn’t her mother. It was a shell. Or a totally different person who didn’t even recognize her own daughter’s face.

“Mommy?”

“Nor to drink wine,” Diana whispered. “Nor to drink wine, wine where brothers stumble…offended, or is to be made weak…”

“Mom, you’re not making any sense.”

“C’mon, batshit!” Her father cuffed Diana again, laughing grotesquely. “Snap outta it. Clap on, clap off, clap on, clap off.” His backhand caught her again and again, harder with every blow, as his jowls trembled and the arteries bulged out of his fat, quivering neck. Still Diana kept rocking on the bench, mumbling her incoherent spittle to herself and staring into a void.

“Dad, stop! You’re hurting her!”

“Ya, and I’ll smart you too, you little shit, if you don’t shut up.”

His last backhand buffeted through the air and popped Diana right below the eye. Blood squirted from her nose and she collapsed face-first onto the table. Instantly the mumbling stopped. Her hands twitched to help herself up again, and when she lolled back there was more blood trickling down the sweaty space between her nose and her upper lip. Awareness had reappeared on her face, along with four or five blotches of red marks that would all flower into bruises, but she never cried out or called for help. In fact, when she sat up, the only thing Camilla remembered her mother saying was, “I think the chicken’s ready.”

Flabbergasted, too stunned even for tears, Camilla watched as Diana got up from the kitchen table and went to check the oven.

“Pour me another drink while yer there,” her father slurred. But little did he know, that was the last demand he would ever make of his battered wife. Because when Diana Carleton reached for the forty ounce of rum, she spaced out one more time. Camilla couldn’t see her dissociated stare from this new angle, but she
did
see her tip the bottle upside down and start draining it all over the stove. The bitter smell of spiced rum filled the trailer as it ran down the oven and dribbled over the cracked linoleum. She swept the bottle right and coated the countertops, then left and soaked the radio and the coffee maker and the rabbit ears on their old Finlux television set.

Camilla’s father had been slow to catch on, but when he saw Diana dousing the kitchen, he cried out, “Hey fuck-knuckle! Waddaya doin’!”

It was too late. Diana mumbled something incoherent and reached for one of the burner dials. There was a sudden hiss of
propane and the
click, click
of the oven starter before a jet of fire caught the stovetop and sent the whole thing whooshing up in flames.

The memories warped forward to when the firemen and the paramedics showed up with the police department. Camilla watched as her father was cuffed and thrown in the back of the cruiser while she and her mother were taken to an ambulance. Diana hadn’t come out of her trance yet—she wouldn’t for another seven months—but Camilla was too young to understand what was going on. All she could see was a swarm of emergency workers and the tail of the police car driving away with her father trapped in the backseat. His screams echoed behind the glass while the vehicle pulled away, a begging drunkard whose words still haunted her over twenty years later. “She’s crazy! You’ve got the wrong person! Take her! Take
her
! Put her down! She’s a goddamn psychopath!”

The police car, the ambulance, and the black, smoldering trailer vanished through space and time, but the hollering didn’t.
She’s crazy! Put her down! She’s a goddamn psychopath!

The words morphed as the world kept spinning forward.
Her mom is nuts
, whispered classmates at Alice Park Elementary.
She’s nuts too
. Then in high school:
Everyone thinks that Carleton chick’s pretty, but something about her brain is messed up. It’s ugly in there
. All the looks of hate and fear came hurtling with it, along with flashbacks from visits to psych centers and therapy rooms and endless doctors’ offices, all of them saying again and again,
we don’t know, we don’t know, we don’t know
, as they poured more cortical cocktails through Diana’s bloodstream and tracked them in their growing spreadsheets. But what if her father had known all along?
She’s crazy!
he cackled with his quivering jowls and throbbing veins.
Put her down! She’s a goddamn psychopath!

The flashbacks ran out of mental pavement, and Camilla slammed back to reality. She was in her daughter’s room on the third floor of the Vincents’ house again. Abigail was staring at her, waiting for an answer to a question that must have been asked a century ago.

“N-No,” she finally said. “You’re not crazy, honey. Don’t let anyone ever tell you that.”

“All right.” Abigail frowned, still looking dismayed. “But all these dreams just feel so…real.”

Camilla wiped her own forehead—
good, at least I’m not sweating
—and leaned over and kissed Abby’s cheek. “You know what?” she said. Her voice sounded shaky and she tried to steady it. “Dreams can’t last longer than twenty minutes. That’s a fact. And most times they’re only a few seconds.”

“Really? Says who?”

“Neurologists. Brain doctors.”

“And how do…
nerogists
?”

“Neur-ol-o-gists,” Camilla articulated slowly. Her breathing was evening out.

“
Neur-ol-o-gists
. How do they know that?”

“Electroencephalography. Say that one ten times fast.”

Abigail slapped her forehead and fell back on her pillow, defeated. “No way.”

Camilla smiled, the flashback fading away quicker now, and tickled Abby’s ribs until she was giggling again. When they both had sufficient smiles stretched across their cheeks, she pulled up the covers and tucked Abigail back into bed. “Sleep tight, honey. And remember: dreams aren’t around for long.”

Abigail nodded, relaxed. But as Camilla kissed her one last time and whispered, “Good night,” another flash of fear crossed the seven-year-old’s face.

“A couple minutes,” Camilla emphasized. “Max. Got it?”

“Mm-hmm.” Abby nodded, and then she rolled onto her side and watched as her mom got up and walked across the bedroom. But just as Camilla reached the door, Abby’s voice cooed once more in the rose-colored shadows.

“Mom?”

“Yes?”

“Do we have a rope?”

The question came out of left field. It reminded Camilla oddly of something she would have said herself.

“I don’t know, sweetheart. Probably.”

“And a really long knife?”

Camilla’s posture went rigid. She froze in the threshold of the hallway and looked back into the bedroom. “What are you talking about, Abby?”

The room was quiet. Abigail was still facing the door, her two eyes glistening like oil drops from across the dark void.

“The dreams aren’t just about the backyard,” she said. “Sometimes there’s other stuff too.”

“Like what kind of stuff ?”

“Like—like people running through our house screaming. And Uncle Jasper getting hurt with a long knife.”

Camilla shivered as if someone had just stepped on her grave. “Dreams aren’t real, Abigail,” she insisted. “They’re
not real
.” But if every part of her had believed that—if there wasn’t a small compartment of her subconscious that had bought into her own dreams over the last eight years—she might not have paused with her hand on the doorknob and asked one more question to the pair of glistening eyes in the shadows. “What was the rope for?”

The eyes blinked once, and then the soft voice replied with two words that sent another shiver coiling up Camilla’s spine.

“For you.”

22

Marlee and Todd

E
arly the next afternoon, Camilla found herself entering the gate of a green picket fence and approaching a postcard cottage that looked the exact opposite of Lou and Sharon Mullards’. She had barely tapped the polished gold knocker when the door swung open and revealed a plump woman in an enormous snowsuit. Her eyes were shielded by sunglasses the size of dessert plates, and she had a bag of ice melt clenched in her right garden glove.

“Oh Lord! Is that you, Camilla? Stone the crows, I thought I had time to sand the walk before you got here, but I guess not.”

“Sorry,” Camilla apologized. “I’m early. Go ahead—”

“Nonsense, girl. Get in, get in. It’s colder than my ex-husband’s heart out there.”

Before Camilla could say anything else, the woman pulled her inside with a meaty grip and whammed the door closed behind them.

The cottage was intensely warm and humid. They made their way through a sweltering glass solarium that was packed to the roof with tropical flowers—tiger lilies, moon orchids, Chinese
bellflowers—as peaceful Korean flute music wafted around them and a bamboo water fountain trickled in the foyer. The environment’s heat wave felt like a giant hug in the middle of Nolan’s terrible cold spell; after thirty seconds, Camilla was already sweating under her parka.
I’d hate to see the power bill for this place
.

They walked into an open living room with 360-degree floor-to-ceiling windows. The sheer radiance of sunlight hitting the glass and bouncing off the white walls was enough to illuminate the space like a well-lit photography studio. Camilla, coming in with her charcoal peacoat, her raven-shade lipstick, and her obsidian earrings, was a black speck in the sea of bright, praise-Jesus white.

“So welcome, welcome,” the woman said, unzipping her snowsuit and extending a hand. “I’m Lola Pinkton, as you probably guessed. And, uh, well Marlee’s around here somewhere.”

Camilla’s hand was swallowed inside of Lola’s and shaken enthusiastically.

“Marlee? Marlee!”

The sound of footsteps came tromping from somewhere else in the house, and a second later Marlee Pinkton stalked into the room, her nose glued to a cell phone that was vibrating every five seconds with new text messages. She was a tall, blonde teenager now, but Camilla recognized her as the second child to step out of the Vincents’ pond in the last eight years. Her appearance hadn’t changed nearly as much as Hudson’s, but she had certainly come a long way—from a skipping shortstop to a slender, bubble-gum-popping cheerleader-type, whom Camilla
definitely
would have loathed in high school.

“Marlee, Camilla. Camilla, Marlee,” Lola introduced, putting a proud arm around her daughter.

“Hey,” Marlee said, slumping into an ivory-white La-Z-Boy.

“So.” Lola beamed. “I don’t really know the, uh, the process here, but do you two need to be alone? Or…”

“No,” Camilla said. “I just need to ask a few questions.”
And make sure she’s not a kidnapping, psychopathic teenager
.

“Wait.” Marlee frowned, looking up from her cell phone for the first time since entering the room. “What is this?”

“Well, Ms. Vincent here’s stopped by to make sure you’ve been feeling all right. Though I assure you, Ms. Vincent, my girl is as healthy as they come. She might
eat
as much as a corpse, but she’s just as dandy as you and me, I promise you that.”

“Hold on.” Marlee’s lower jaw jutted out. “Is this is some kind of joke? Mom, I thought we said we’d never talk about that again?”

“It’s just a few questions—”

“This is bullshit.”

“Watch your mouth, young lady.” Lola looked at Camilla and forced a chuckle. “Could you sew that shut before you bring her back next time?”

Marlee crossed her arms and puffed out an impatient breath, sending all her bangs blasting upward in defiance. She lifted her legs and plopped both feet on the La-Z-Boy’s matching white footstool.

“Hey, zombie,” Lola barked, “get those muddy shoes off my ottoman.”