Authors: Jacqueline Sheehan
N
atalie had been staying with Rocky for ten days when finally she had seen the girl's arms uncovered. Rocky had walked into the house at the end of a particularly hot midsummer day and found the girl uncharacteristically poised on the counter, in a tank top. Rocky saw the scars from across the room. She stopped, despite the urgent request from the dog for his dinner, his ungainly dancing steps that he performed for his food, his black claws tapping on the linoleum as he moved from the plastic tub of food in the pantry to his bowl on the floor. Back and forth, as if Rocky would never get the hint.
Natalie jumped off the counter and lunged for her denim shirt hanging on a chair and put it on.
“Don't look at me,” she said. The double meaning in her panicked voice was unmistakable:
Look at me, don't look at me. See me, don't see me.
Part of Rocky sagged, the part of her that knew how hard something had been for Natalie, how much Bob would have moved heaven and earth if he had known this child existed. Rocky would have to do it for him now. She knew what Bob would do. She had watched him soothe broken animals at his clinic, the ones who'd suffered at the hands of the worst end of humanity.
“Let's feed the dog first.”
Cooper supervised every step of his food preparation. He peered into the fifty-gallon plastic garbage can as Rocky dunked a coffee mug into it and it came out brimming with kibbles. He escorted her back to the food dishes, staying five feet away, and watched as she poured the kibbles into his bowl. He looked up at her and waited for the touch, the reassuring rub of Rocky's hand on his flanks. Only then did he lie down to eat.
“Bon appétit, big guy,” said Rocky.
She popped open a can of cat food, and Peterson appeared at the screen door within five seconds. She placed the cat's dish on the other side of the joint water dish. Peterson glanced at the dog and arched her calico spine upward in warning.
“Play nice, Peterson. Cooper thinks your cat food is creepy, and he doesn't want it, so relax.” Rocky was killing time, letting the girl recover from whatever agony gripped her.
Rocky pulled a package of lasagna noodles out of the cabinet, pointing it at the girl. “I'm going to dazzle you with my budding cooking talents. You can help if you want. Bob was the real cook at our house.”
Natalie hadn't moved after pulling her shirt around her. The girl stood in the center of the kitchen, her back hunched as if she was trying to hide the center of her body, trying to hide everything about her, her arms wrapped tight.
“I've learned a lot about cutting while I worked on college campuses. I don't know if this helps, but I've heard just about everything you can imagine from people who cut.”
Rocky also learned a surprising amount from Bob's canine patients. Abused dogs that showed up at Bob's clinic either cowered pathetically, shivering and whining as they crouched on the floor, often urinating uncontrollably, or were overly aggressive, willing to survive at all costs by attacking, but visibly terrified at the same time. Bob's job was to attend to their wounds and assess the damage done by starvation in cases of neglect, but before he could do that he had to establish the examination room as a safe place, and he had to become a safe guy.
Bob had responded in the same way to the abused dogs whether they were overly submissive or overtly aggressive. He talked, often ignoring the dog completely, but he kept up a steady flow of words, with heavy doses of
good dog
tossed in. In the midst of his monologue, he would pull out dog treats from a cookie jar and set them between him and the dog, allowing the dog a respectful distance. Bob would move slowly, and eventually either the dog would nod off in exhaustion or Bob would be able to hold out his hand, palm up, for the dog to sniff.
“It doesn't always work,” he had told Rocky back when she assisted him at the beginning of his career. “There is a tipping point with animals where they are unable to see safety when it's right in front of them. All they can see is danger and potential threats because that is precisely all they've known, and that makes them very dangerous pets. Some animals can come back from the tipping point, and some can't.”
R
ocky didn't have a huge repertoire of language about food preparation, but she talked steadily while Natalie stood frozen, keeping Rocky in her sight constantly, rotating her head like an owl. Rocky talked about boiling the noodles, about popping open the jar of sauce, the miracle of having mozzarella cheese in the fridge, her regret about not having other ingredients that would no doubt improve the lasagna, even if she didn't know what those ingredients were.
“What do think, is 350 degrees the best setting? The last time I looked, everything that went into an oven was cooked at 350 degrees. Do you like Parmesan cheese?” asked Rocky.
She was a terrible cook, but Natalie couldn't possibly know the full extent of her disastrous cooking. She might even get the girl to eat the stratified layers of thick noodles that looked like seaweed, smothered in bottled sauce.
Natalie unclenched her body. “Sure, 350 degrees sounds right.”
The thing with lasagna is the timing. Rocky wanted to ingest something profoundly high in carbohydrates, something that would stem the tide of what Natalie was sure to tell her as soon as she asked about the scars. Asking questions is all about timing and being ready to listen. More than anything, Rocky was filled with a desire to feed the girl the way Bob would have gone about it, step-by-step. Maybe if she cooked like he did, then Natalie would vicariously get some of the feel-goodness that Rocky had always gotten from her husband's cooking.
She mimicked Bob's foodie body language. At each step of the process, she placed a finger in the bowl of thick sauce or shredded mozzarella and licked the essence, touching her lips lightly, uttering a pleased “ahhh.” She let the noodles swell in a bath of boiling water, watching them expand. Then she laid them out in the nine-by-thirteen pan she had bought in Portland. The first layers of noodles hovered over a thin layer of the sauce. She spread the cheese layer with her fingers, topped it with more sauce, then more limp noodles, until she had filled the pan. When three layers were squeezed together in a pattern of compatibility, she slipped the pan through the throat of the oven and patted the door shut with her oven mitt. As the lasagna began to heat up and expand, the entire thing heaved and moaned. The topping of freshly grated Parmesan sweated into a glistening coating until it darkened and formed a burnished layer. Rocky and Natalie both jumped when the timer went off.
Bob had never made lasagna in July. What was she thinking? The house was blazing hot from the boiled noodles, the 350 degree oven. Sliding the lasagna to the center of the table, she sat across from Natalie and wiped her face with a blue dish towel.
“I'm sweating and wiped out. The truth is, I'm not a cook, and we don't have to eat this if it's terrible. If we're going to test it, we better eat it outside before we both pass out from the heat.”
On the deck, the lasagna sat midway between Natalie and Rocky. Natalie pulled the cuff of her shirt down over her hand and used it to protect her hand as she grabbed the edge of the hot dish.
“Can I scoop it out on our plates?” asked Natalie.
Rocky nodded, handing her a thick white plate that looked like it came from a restaurant. They both loaded up and gingerly balanced the plates on their legs. Cooper's pink tongue tipped over the edge of his bottom teeth as he panted; he soon headed to the cooler grass and rolled on his back to rub in the full essence of the sweet green stubble.
“You can take your shirt off if you want to,” said Rocky. “I've already seen your scars, and you've got to be roasting in that shirt. Your choice.”
Natalie slowly dipped her fork in a three-inch section of noodle, and a glob of cheese slid off it. She put her plate down on the weather-beaten cedar table that was no bigger than an end table. She unbuttoned her shirt, revealing her tank top, pulled her arms out of the sleeves, and placed the shirt on the back of her chair. The scars along her arms varied from webs of fine white lines to thick raised welts. Some of the injuries looked brighter, as if she had cut her arms within the past few months. Natalie held her arms out for Rocky to see. She turned them over to reveal more scarring on the flesh of her inner arms, some old and firm, some more recent with a telltale red shimmer.
Rocky put her fork down with deliberate slowness. She did not want to picture the girl slicing her body. She swallowed hard. “It looks like you had a lot of feelings that needed an outlet at one time. Did cutting help?”
“It was the only thing that helped when I was thirteen and living with family number seven. I learned not to do it so that I needed stitches. But the family saw them anyhow and thought I was a danger to the little kids in the house, like I'd really hurt them, you know? If I cut, I knew I was real and I had real feelings, and I didn't want them to take that away from me. So they put me in a special group home, as if that would make things better.” Natalie rubbed her forefinger along her inner arm. “I sort of went back to cutting, just a little, when I started to look for my father.”
They both pushed their plates away. As the meal cooled, flies took the opportunity to land in the red sauce. Natalie had a bottomless reservoir of horrors to tell her. Rocky would have to listen, it was the least she could do. No, more than that. She owed it to Natalie. It wasn't just because Natalie was an adolescent in need; it was because someone should have been there to protect her. If that someone was Bob, Rocky wanted to make up for lost time.
Natalie
N
atalie had shifted from the foster care system to her own apartment to Franklin's apartment. Her moves had been ordained by the Subway restaurant where they worked in Worcester. If Natalie hadn't been drawn to the vegetarian sub sandwich and Franklin hadn't already been working there, helping the manager with her Facebook page in his spare time, they wouldn't have met. The fast-food franchise was at the heart of it. Franklin had a future; Natalie could see that as clear as anything, and she wanted to be a part of his future, at least for a while.
Franklin traveled nightly over the Internet, scouring the links that he sought, reading them like tarot cards and divining their destiny. Most nights they stripped off their clothing as soon as they returned to his apartment on the second floor, leaving behind the gases of bread yeast and processed meats, mayo, and the sharp tang of pickles. She liked to pull on one of Franklin's T-shirts that stopped at the top of her thighs. She liked to be naked beneath the T-shirt so that she was draped in Franklin.
Natalie had a litter of scars, high on the inside of her thighs and on the tight muscles of her forearms. Franklin was pulled into the red raised ridges. The first time he saw them he ran his thumb along the ridges and examined them as if he was in an art museum.
“Did someone else do them, or did you?” he asked.
“It was an inside job,” she said, suddenly trying to pull the T-shirt down to cover the slats of scars. “It was me, and me.”
“What did you use?”
“Hey, it was a long time ago, back when I was thirteen, which is why they look so stupid. I don't do it anymore. Especially since I get like keloid scars, which are worse than regular scars. They get bigger. One thing about being a floater is that caseworkers and therapists come with the territory. One of them actually helped me figure out another way to take care of feeling bad.”
But Franklin was drawn to the scars, touched them daily, and watched them from across the room as if reading them, assessing their value.
“You and me, we're a gold mine,” he said every night as he slipped in next to her on the mattress on the floor.
They were two months into the living arrangement, and one month after Natalie had given up her room in a rental house, when he asked her, “Can you do a couple more of those?” He ran his tongue along the raised scars on her arms.
“Get out of here,” she said, pushing him away.
He placed his hand on her wrist and encircled it. “I'm working day and night on this project. And I want to bring you along with me, but, babe, you've got to bring something more to the table. You know what I mean?”
“How does cutting bring something to the table? Even saying that I'd do it, which I won't.”
He slowly pulled one arm over her head and pressed closer to her. His knee opened her thighs. The pillow hadn't had a pillowcase on it all week, and a stale scent of hair oil rose up.
“ 'Cause you're a fallen angel. You're the sweet meat that's going to draw in our players when we find them. And I know they're out there. Who can resist a sweet angel who hurts herself? They'll be standing in line to save you.”
With his other hand, he started at her collarbone and ran his fingers along the central line of her torso, stopping briefly at her belly button and then going to the scars on her inner thighs.
“I'm the mastermind, but you're the honey in the trap.”
“I could do a few more. It's no big deal,” she said.
When she was positive that Franklin was too busy admiring the scars on her thighs and working up to the inevitable destination between her legs, she tilted her head back and let out a sigh that Franklin would think was desire.
O
nce she moved in with Rocky in July, it was important for Natalie to pursue work. She applied for two waitressing jobs in Portland. These were real waitressing jobs, not like her job at Subway, where she had been counter help. She was more like a sandwich construction worker at Subway, asking the customers if they wanted peppers, lettuce, tomato, chopped olives, or onions as she dipped her spoon into the plastic tubs of sandwich extras. And sauce, did they want sauce? Ranch, southwestern, blue cheese, all of which were mayo-flavored from prepackaged mixes. Each sandwich was wrapped in tissue paper with the Subway logo and tossed into a plastic bag that Natalie spun in the air to twist it closed before she handed it to the customer across the great divide of the counter.
She had applied at the Portland Hotel; predictably, they didn't want her. They didn't say as much, but not being wanted was a language that Natalie understood immediately. She had learned the language of inference from the procession of foster parents. Everything depended on what was meant and very little on the words that were actually spoken.
At age six, Natalie had braced herself to learn inference from the body language of the Graftons, the family she lived with for all of her first-grade year. She was the only foster kid there, and the parents had two sons who were fourteen and sixteen. The brothers looked like grown-ups, yet they weren't. They had tricked her the first time and then the second time, pulling down her pants, using their fingers on her with their ragged boy fingernails, telling her what would happen if she told their mother or father. Their parents would bury her in the depths of the murky backyard pond, they had insisted. It hadn't mattered when she cried, so she no longer cried. But at six, she studied the large boy who waited for her and learned what preceded his want of her. Because she was a floater, not a real kid, not a biological child, she had to reckon her days and nights differently. In the Grafton house she was fed, which she liked very much, and she even ate at the same place as the mother, the father, and the two large boys. This was so much better than her previous family, who hadn't allowed her to eat with them. She was clever at six, and food was something that she needed to live. The boys could hurt her with their fingers, but it was a fair balance in order for her to have food. Then they promised to do more than that, and one of them had unzipped his khaki shorts and showed her his penis, and said that was what he'd use on her the next time. Natalie knew that this could split her apart and she might die from it. The boys showed her a picture of exactly how on the computer.
Natalie had to keep strict attention on both boys when she was home. She learned that if the boys stayed in the computer room with the door closed and they were uncharacteristically quiet for too long, they might be looking at pictures of people doing naked things and then they would wait for her in the laundry room or the two-car garage. The older boy drummed his fingers on the table when he planned to surprise her. She couldn't believe that he didn't know that this gave him away. At first she thought he was sending her secret messages, but then she realized that his body acted without a big hunk of his brain. The younger boy stared at her when she watched TV, glaring like he was both mad at her and wanted her. This was his giveaway. And most of the time these twitches and glares gave her a way to avoid them, but not always. They were very big and strong, and she was only a first-grader. Natalie discovered that even though she thought the penis would split her in half, it had not, not like she imagined.
“W
e don't have anything available now,” said the headwaiter in the hotel, “but if something comes up, we'll give you a call.”
He was twenty-three or twenty-four, and Natalie knew that his parents had spent a fortune sending him to college, an easy $35,000 a year. Here was their $140,000 investment, curling his lip up on one side, and he couldn't lie better than that? If every single waitress called in sick with dengue fever, he still wouldn't call her. Natalie had known that when she walked into the lobby with its richly carved front desk and the press of money filling the air.
She walked downhill to Commercial Street and picked a more likely place. The Lobster Shack. No second-guessing was required to figure out what they served. She pushed open the door to a battalion of tables all covered with red-checked plastic tablecloths. Two waitresses carried large round trays, and they wore street clothes, shorts and T-shirts with the L
OBSTER
S
HACK
logo on the back. The woman working the bar was fast, filling pitchers of water and pints of beer from a tap, shoveling ice into glasses for tea. She was a machine. She had worked hard all her life, and she liked to work. Natalie knew that this womanâhair pulled back into an almost ponytail assisted by hair clipsâliked to work because work was better than home. The giveaway was the shape of her arms, the way her arms had become long, hard, and sinewy, as if no one had ever lifted a bag for her, opened a door when she was loaded down with four grocery bags, or helped her carry a child. Natalie would need to be careful with her. She approached the bar.
“Are you hiring any waitstaff?' asked Natalie. She wished she hadn't picked this place, and she glanced back at the door to the street to gauge her exit strategy.
The woman behind the bar looked up and locked her eyes on Natalie in a metallic click, as if to say,
I've got you.
“I'm hiring help who don't whine, don't call in sick ten minutes before their shift starts, or give food away to friends. I'm hiring waitresses who have a memory that can hold five orders for five minutes and who don't ever spit in anyone's food. I know it's a tall order, but that's the way it is. We have standards.”
Natalie knew that bullshit would be useless; she might as well stand there in her underwear because this woman could see everything. She slammed down the beer tap again, and Natalie flinched. Sam Adams gushed into a tall glass.
“Well, do you want to apply or not? My lunch crowd is coming in.”
This woman was a floater just like Natalie. She'd bet $100 on it. What was it about her that screamed
foster kid
? The way she scanned the room for trouble when each customer entered, the way the bar was her command post? Was this what Natalie would look like when she reached the unimaginable age of thirty? Not if she could help it. Not if things worked out.
“Yes, I'd like to apply. Yeah, thanks.”
The woman reached under the bar and pulled out an application and pushed it toward Natalie in one efficient movement in between two orders of iced tea and another beer. Natalie filled out the application using Rocky's address on Peaks Island, noted her GED education, and listed her job at Subway as her past job experience. She gave the number for her pay-as-you-go cell phone as her contact number. She prayed this woman wouldn't call her. Natalie pushed the application across the bar, then melted off the stool and headed for the door.
“Hey,” said the woman with a bark that echoed off the wall. “You live on Peaks? Since when? I know everyone out there.”
How could she make this woman shut up? Natalie would never in one million years work for her, not the way she saw straight through her.
“I'm just there for the summer,” said Natalie as she pulled open the door, letting heat and daylight stream into the dark bar. She ran down Commercial Street until her lungs burned like a woodstove. She needed to look out for people like that bartender. She couldn't afford to be seen.