Was Ruth an opportunist? Had she made her crime up as she went along? Had she thought,
Ooh, passport, money, child, what a great opportunity?
Or had she planned it all from the start?
Sylvia needed someone to talk to. All these thoughts spinning in her brain were giving her a migraine. She picked up the old dial telephone and called Jacqueline. Who wiser than she?
Jacqueline picked up after the second ring. “Let me just turn down the TV, Sylvia honey.” She came back on the line and said, “I know, you need to let it all out or you’ll go crazy, right?”
“What is it, Jacqueline, that marks someone as a psychopath? That makes them different from a normal person? I mean, not Charles Bronson, or some murderer, but people who appear normal?”
“Sylvia, you know, I’ve been mulling over the same darn thing. What kind of person would do what this woman has done? And fool you so? I guess individuals who appear to others to have genuine sentiments, and often function in the real world as average human beings. Ruth seemed warm and caring, right?”
“Well yes. She did. Or I wouldn’t have made friends with her in the first place.”
“You know, honey, I think you were feeding Ruth’s ego, her appetite; reading her novel, giving her critiques—acting as a sounding board for her life dramas. She needed you in some way. She was using you but you were too kind to see it that way.”
“I guess you have a point.”
Jacqueline continued, “You know them big cats you see on the Discovery Channel? They’ll fine tune all kinds of crafty functions in order to stalk their prey, cut ‘em out of the herd, hone in and exhaust their kill, just like this lady Ruth has done. Like a predator. Am I not right? She’s like a hunter, hiding behind all kinds of elaborate camouflage to get what she wants.”
Jacqueline was right. Ruth had a predatory hunger. Everything she craved was useful to her in some way;
to have her needs met
. If her needs weren’t met, she simply moved on. A Ruthless Predator. But a clever one. Ruth-Less.
Jacqueline went on, “Like a big greedy cat, working on instinct, not on common values. She has no moral code.”
To
have her needs fulfilled, Sylvia thought. Those were Ruth’s words.
Lies mixed with snippets of truth and “vulnerability,” blended together in a careful cocktail to gain whatever she set out to subjugate, to manipulate. Whatever, whomever, she marked out to become her prey.
“How come you’re so wise, Jacqueline?”
She laughed. “I’ve been around the block a few times.”
Sylvia snapped her laptop shut. “Well thanks. Just talking to you has made me feel a lot better.”
“Any time honey. If you need to call in the middle of the night, you just holler—I’ll be here. My phone is by my bed. Bye honey. You get some rest now, you hear?”
But Sylvia didn’t feel better. She thought about the satisfied spider she’d been staring at earlier, feeling as if Grace were the unsuspecting fly, and she curled herself into a fetal position. She gulped great mounds of air in between her yowling sobs as she thought of poor little Gracie. Was her daughter aware, she wondered, of who this monster was?
She knew that if Tommy did find Ruth . . .
He’d be capable of killing her.
And although Sylvia hated to admit it, she’d be cheering him on.
Grace
G
race was sitting cross-legged beneath a mango tree, facing the beach. The sun was turning as orange as the mangos, and Lucho was still surfing. Nobody was around. She was quite alone.
She pressed down the pocket clip on her recording pen:
“SHE’s been gone five days. Hooray! Now Lucho’s in charge. I heard her give him instructions about how to look after me, what I’m allowed or not allowed, and my bedtime. She went over the rules twenty times. She gave him money and promised extra if he did a good job. She said we’ll all meet up again in three weeks, when she’s better from her operation.
I’m still not sure what a Devious Septum is, but she explained she’d need a vacation afterwards because her nose’ll be sore, and she also told me that she could do with ‘a break from being Mommy.’ My Real Mom never took a break but I guess Ruth doesn’t like being a mommy so much. Lucho’s doing a perfect job anyway. I don’t need HER. Things are fun now! Except I still feel sad about my Real Mom, about the car accident. Ruth said I’ll never see her again cos she’s died forever and she’ll never
ever
be coming back. So I might as well stop praying, she said, as I’m wasting my words and my tears.”
Grace pressed the pocket clip up to stop the recording. Her nose felt all burny again, just thinking about her mom. She imagined that her bright yellow bear Hideous was Blueby, and mimed winding up the key on his bottom, listening to his imaginary tune. She sang in a croaky, teary voice, “And that’s the day that teddy-bears have their pic . . .nic.”
She daydreamed about Heaven a lot. About how her mom was getting on there. And Mrs. Paws. She knew what Ruth had said—about animals not being allowed in Heaven—wasn’t true. She knew this because her Real Mom had told her that
all
animals went to Heaven. Guaranteed. No exceptions. She explained that some humans, if they’d been
really
bad, would have to wait their turn and come back to Earth for a second, or even a third go around, until they learned to be kind. But animals always had a place waiting for them, no matter what. Mrs. Paws would be there with her and they’d be able to cuddle.
She wanted to ask Lucho what he thought of Heaven but it was too complicated to talk about in Spanish. Grace also got the feeling that Lucho felt as if he was already living in Heaven with his surfboard, anyway, so it was useless to discuss Heaven with him.
Grace took a big breath and pressed the clip again. She wanted to tell her story, so when she saw her dad, he could hear all about it:
“Five days ago, all three of us—me Ruth and Lucho—left El Salvador and came to a new country by different buses, and then a fishing boat. The buses took two days! We changed buses A LOT! And boy, was it a bumpy ride! And dusty. Our faces got real dirty. SHE was not happy at all, but she kept saying that we had no choice, that we had to take the
camioneta.
The journey was really long and, once, we slept on the bus overnight. But that was okay because I got to rest my head on Lucho’s shoulder. He always made sure I was comfortable and he called me
Cariño
. He’s so kind to me. He let me listen to his iPod, and when the bus stopped we went outside, and sometimes he guarded me and held his sarong around me while I did a pee behind a bush. He bought me little bunches of bananas from children selling really funny fruit.
I saw bright green parrots and naughty monkeys with black arms and faces, the color of toffees. They were running about free on the roads. They came down from the trees and tried to steal the bananas from people’s carts! Little boys were chasing after them, shouting and waving their fists like they wanted to punch them. But there was no way—the monkeys were too fast! I didn’t know about wild monkeys, I’d only seen them at the zoo and on TV—so cool to see them running free.
After we got off the last bus we got a taxi to a beach where we waited to find someone with a boat. But it started pouring with rain—crazy, crazy rain, so we hung out there for a whole day until the water was calm enough to leave. SHE was in such a bad mood. The Dragon Mood. Finally, a fisherman with just a few teeth said he’d take us in his little boat. It took a while to get it into the water. He put two small logs under the boat so it was resting on top of the logs like wheels. Then Lucho and him rolled the boat out. They had to stop a lot and kick the logs in the right place so it rolled out nicely. Otherwise, Lucho said, the boat was too heavy. It was small, and in the water it rocked about in the waves and we got really wet and cold. It was night and I was shivering and my teeth were clattering like a scary ghost, but I felt safe because Lucho held me in his arms and said, ‘
Tranquila Cariño.
’ So it was okay.
The fisherman with two teeth dropped us off in a mangrove. I could count his teeth because Mama Ruth paid him lots and lots of money and he smiled. So funny! His whole mouth opened and I could see inside, right up to the top of his mouth. Oh yes, and I saw a seagull sitting on a turtle! The turtle was floating and the seagull was just hanging out using him like a raft!”
Grace stopped the magic pen recording and looked around.
The sky was now getting dark pink and was streaked with purple. There was the moon, too, not full the way it had been the week before, but like someone had taken a great bite out of it. Grace thought she could see the eyes and lips of the Man in the Moon but she wasn’t sure. She’d have to check with Lucho.
She stood up and looked toward the ocean. She wondered when he’d be finished with his surfing. Usually Lucho surfed just mornings, but sometimes the swell was high later in the day, too. She didn’t like being alone, but he told her she wasn’t allowed to go in the big waves. And never when he was surfing. He warned her it was too dangerous for little girls. Besides, she nearly got bitten by a jellyfish and was too scared to go in alone. Sometimes she watched him. He stood on his board with his knees bent a little and went under the big curly wave and under the big, foamy, bubble of white. Each time, she wondered if the wave would eat him up but then he appeared again smiling. She wanted to be a surfer, too. When she grew up.
She remembered when they arrived, after the toothless fisherman had dropped them off five days ago, the bright moon glowed like a shiny quarter in the sky. She had never seen mangrove trees. They were half in the water, half on land, and they had roots like great eagles’ claws. Lucho explained that the trees in a mangrove ate and drank more and more water every day and, bit by bit, turned the water into land with their big claw roots that fed on a mixture of sweet and salty water. Monster trees that guzzled the water! Grace was sure she saw the legs of one tree move right in front of her nose like the trees in
The Wizard of Oz.
They all spent that night in a hut with a straw roof. Wild birds swooped about, high in the sky, and Grace could hear animals making noises in the black night. Spooky. Way better than Disneyland. Then, the next morning, very early, they all got into a taxi and drove. After about an hour, Ruth dropped them off, and she went on alone in the taxi. She was heading for the airport to go to Rio to have her Devious Septum operated on.
Now
, Grace thought,
I have Lucho all to myself.
She still couldn’t pronounce the name of the new country where they had arrived by fishing boat. Like the British word for panties: Knickers.
Knickers and water.
Knicker Agua.
Her dad, she remembered, once told her a joke that went like this:
Knock knock.
Who’s there?
Nicolas
Nicolas who?
Knickerless girls shouldn’t climb trees
!
She missed her dad. She missed him a lot. Maybe he would come and join them. Ruth said she was “working on it.”
Because of her dad being English, Grace knew all about knickers and thought the word knickers was much funnier than panties. It made her giggle. And now they were in a place called KNICKER AGUA. It was beautiful, too, even if it did have a silly name.
After Ruth dropped them off and carried on to the airport, Grace and Lucho got another car to the beach. And that was where she was now. It was called The Boom because of the great surf. The sand wasn’t black like in El Salvador. The sand here was goldenish. The waves were enormous, and she had never seen Lucho with such a big grin. SHE wouldn’t let him bring his surfboard on the journey. She said it would
draw
too much attention. But how could a surfboard draw? SHE forced him to sell it in El Salvador but promised to buy him a new one when they arrived in Knicker Agua.
So the day they arrived at The Boom, Lucho bought a board from another surfer. He said the new one was lighter and better than the last. He was
contentisimo,
he said.
And Grace was
contentisima
because she could do anything she wanted now.
Every morning she woke up and felt her mattress. It was dry! No pee-pee. She wished she could show HER the clean, dry bed to prove that she wasn’t a baby. She and Lucho had been at The Boom for five whole days and nights. She had counted the days. And every single morning Grace felt the bed after she woke up, just to be sure, and it was as dry as a freshly laundered towel. Five nights of dry bed. Not even a trickle!
They lived in a secret little cabin deep in the woods, just next to the beach. Lucho was renting it from another surfer for eight dollars a day. Grace thought it was the most perfect house in the world. Well, not as perfect as Crowheart or her Granddaddy’s house in Saginaw where she spent last Christmas, but almost as good. It had three single beds, wooden, like the beds in
Goldilocks and the Three Bears.
There were three chairs and a table, too.
Outside in the garden was a solar shower hanging from a tree behind a screened area, a few steps down from the porch. It looked over to a wild garden dripping with banana, avocado and mango trees. The toilet was a wooden seat around a hole that dropped a long way down. Grace wondered what happened to her poop and she soon found out. A hairy hog lived nearby and would come to their garden for visits. He’d wait patiently down below and get excited when he heard anybody approaching the toilet. If she just did a wee-wee, he grunted crossly. Lucho joked and said that her poop was like caviar to the pig. She didn’t know what caviar was but it was obviously delicious.
At least the hog thought so.
Every day before sunset, Lucho surfed, and Grace listened to music and played games on his iPod. Lucho knew about the secret pen. He never said a word about it to Ruth, and luckily, Ruth had never looked inside Carrot.