St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves (16 page)

Don’t panic,
the grown-up voices in Big Red’s head say sternly. They sound a little bit like Coach Crotty, the phys ed teacher, and a lot like Margarita, the TV mother on
Guess Who Loves You More? Stay calm.

But the next thunderclap undoes her. Suddenly, the prospect of spending the night here seems too terrible to bear. Big Red’s body heaves with panic. She bloodies her hands on Cornuta’s horny clefts; she writhes on an invisible hook; she goes salmon-leaping towards the top of the shell, again, and again. And again and again she slumps back, battered and exhausted.

“Help!” Big Red squeals in the empty shell. Hot, oily tears roll down her face. “I’m stuck, I’m stuck, help!”

Nobody is coming,
the grown-up voices intone, a tribunal of icicles.
Correction: the rain is coming. So you’d better help yourself get out of this mess before it storms.

But then there he is, looking inside the shell with a worried expression. Big Red stops blubbering. Those piercing blue eyes, that gosling-soft hair. The doomed, affable face of the World’s Greatest Sensational Mystery.

“What are you doing in there, kid?” Barnaby barks. “Park’s closed.”

The first raindrop hits the tiny hairs on the back of his neck. The sky is a seething, cobalt blue; it’s going to start coming down any minute. What a nightmare. Barnaby knows that a better man would be feeling sorry for the kid, a roly-poly redhead who is staring up at him. Instead, Barnaby is thinking:
I’m going to miss the big game, and possibly the last ferry. The boss is going to find some way to pin this fat kid’s misfortune on me. And I’m not even getting paid overtime.

“Didn’t you see the sign? Cornuta’s out for the count.”

“I just wanted to look around,” she squeaks, “but now I can’t get back out.”

“Well, you got in, didn’t you?” Another raindrop slides down his nose. “Why don’t you give it another try?”

Big Red holds up her bloody palms and shakes her head. And Barnaby finds himself in an awkward sort of hostage situation, negotiating with the prisoner for her own release.

“Listen. Do you hear that?” he says through gritted teeth. “It is going to start raining any minute, kid. And we will have many sodden problems if we miss that ferry. So I need you to give it one more try.”

She puts a hesitant hand on the jagged underlip of the ledge out. She tries to do a pull-up and winces.

“Careful! Can you move your leg? Can you wiggle your toes? You may have sprained something.”

Big Red wiggles all five of her toes inside of her sneaker. She looks up at her Houdini and says nothing.

“Well? If you can’t move them,” Barnaby sighs, “I’ll have to come in and get you myself.”

Big Red withdraws her hand. “I can’t.”

He groans. “This oughta be good.” Barnaby has never worked hard enough to develop the tawny musculature of a career broom pusher. His muscles have long since gone soft and turned to fat.

“Okay, kid, you’ve got to help, too….”

Barnaby finds himself thinking many ungenerous thoughts.

“I can’t get you out of there if you don’t cooperate, you know….”

Thoughts such as: I probably can’t get you out of there at all, you goddamn butterball. He is thinking: winches, pulleys. Goggled men blowtorching the chubby lass out, the boss somehow blaming Barnaby for the lost revenue.

“Jesus, kid, would you just—”

“You’re hurting me!”

“Put your right foot there, and push with your…god
damn
it!”

Barnaby looks at his watch. Seven minutes till the ferry leaves.

“Okay. Clearly, this isn’t working. Just hang tight. I am going to go tell the ferry driver to wait for us. And then I’ll call for help….”

Thunder booms through the City and they both jump. Barnaby watches the poor kid bang her head on the chitinous dome of the shell. Her gray eyes are filling with tears.

“I…I’m sorry, sir,” she gasps. “I can’t. Please, please don’t leave me here.”

Barnaby stops in his tracks. Oh, he wishes the kid hadn’t called him sir.

“All right,” he hears himself saying. “Let’s give it one more shot in the dark.”

They seesaw together in a sweaty dance: Barnaby pulls, and Big Red pushes. Big Red pushes, and Barnaby pulls. And in the middle of their pendular wrangling—while Barnaby is pulling, the blue tendons throbbing on his spindly arms, and Big Red is pushing, pigeon-toed on the polished floor—she falls backwards for a second time. And pulls Barnaby in after her. Cornuta reverberates with their strangled cries, and the splintery crunch of bone.

“Are you still angry with me?”

It’s been almost an hour since they heard the last ferry engine gunning in the distance. Night seeps into the City, an implacable blackness. Barnaby’s face is inches from her own. Big Red is acutely aware of every pore on her face, every follicle of hair on her head. Her smile feels huge and strange.

Barnaby doesn’t answer. He is rubbing his leg and staring morosely out the small portal where Cornuta’s spiral opens to the sky. A few fat raindrops plink into the sand. Goosebumps prick up along his arms. He shivers, snaps up his top two shirt buttons. The floor, the walls of the shell have become freezing to the touch.

“How long till your boss comes?”

“I told you, kid. At least twelve hours.” He is holding his curly brown head in his hands. “Jesus. Any guesses as to when your parents are going to sound the alert?”

Big Red tugs at her shoelace. “Hard to say.”

Big Red’s mother is away on business. She is “on call,” and often has to leave at a moment’s notice. This is confusing to Big Red, because her mother is also unemployed.

“You’ll understand when you’re older,” her mother sighs. Then she gives her the scary, slack tightrope smile, and Big Red knows not to press.

Mr. Pappadakis is estranged from lucidity. On his bad days, he thinks Big Red is a figment of his imagination. On his good days, he lives around her, in the polite, damning way that he will eat around certain loathsome foods on his plate.

“What about your dad, then?” Barnaby asks. “I mean, your real dad?”

Big Red has never met her biological father. She heard her mother refer to him once, with a dismissive wave of her hand, as “a rainy afternoon at the Bowl-a-Bed.” She’s never even seen a picture. But Big Red hates him just the same. She is learning about genetics, and she envisions her father as a big, bow-legged X. Pumping out the evil chemical that accounts for Big Red’s glandular woes, the orange injustice of her stupid hair.

“Kid? What’s your name anyways?”

“Big…” She bites her lip. “Lillith.”

“Big Lillith?” He smiles. “You look like a Lillith.”

“Really?” Her face mushrooms out of the darkness with a terrible hopefulness. “I do?”

Lillith is the name of her old self, the one she left behind when they moved to the island. On the Mainland, her nickname used to be Lil. That was before her body swelled into something loafy and unrecognizable. Now the kids at her new school have rechristened her:
BIG RED
—
BIG RED
!

They chaw imaginary wads of gum like truckers when they say it. They chaw it so often that even she has started to think of herself this way, “Big Red,” in the cheery singsong of her tormenters.

Sometimes Big Red can hear the ghost of Lillith haunting this new body. At night, Lillith goes wailing down the corridors of Big Red’s limbs. She swings angrily in the belfry of her hips, the nave of her breasts. “Growing pains.” Her mother shrugs. Hearing her real name spoken aloud, Big Red sheds her awkwardness like a mantle.

“You know,” she grins, “who you look like?”

Barnaby looks at her blearily and shakes his head.

“Harry Houdini.”

“Houdini, huh?” He grins in spite of himself. “That’s a first. I guess you could call me a magician. My name’s Barnaby. I’m the janitor. I make the trash disappear.” His laugh echoes hollowly in the dark conch. “It’s a limited bag of tricks, kid. I’m no great escape artist, clearly. I couldn’t crack us out of this shell.”

“Houdini is my favorite,” she says shyly.

He snorts. “Shouldn’t you have a crush on one of those boy bands? Gregorian Chowder, or whatever their name is?”

Big Red makes a face. “Everybody will come to their senses and stop liking them in three months, tops. Houdini is perennial.”

For a ten-year-old girl, Big Red has a rich fantasy life. Pirates tie her to their tattooed shoulders and stroke her parrot feathers. Impish, asexual jockeys named Nate or Stan nudge their heels into her flanks with a stirrupy gentleness. Zookeepers put her in cages filled with clean, soft straw. They ask simple things of her—Honk this rubber ball with your nose! Eat a banana!—and applaud softly when she succeeds. “Even better than the ocelot!”

But her favorite is the Houdini fantasy. Big Red disagrees with his biographers, who say that he was driven by his longing to shuck off this mortal coil. She knows that he was all the time just searching for a box that could hold him. In the Houdini fantasy, she is curled inside an iron nautilus that sinks slowly to the dark sea floor, sending up silvery columns of bubbles. She has shackled dreams in blue meadows of sea grass, an inert argonaut. The nautilus is nothing like this porous, polluted shell. It is a seamless wedge of stone, impregnable. The keyhole subsumed back into the metal, and no suggestion of a lock.

“Do you think that’s normal?” Big Red asks Barnaby. “To daydream about that stuff?”

“Sure.” Barnaby shrugs. When he was her age, he fantasized about robots and cartoon mermaids.

Outside the shell, Barnaby can just make out a single star, hung low in the violet sky. Now that he has lost all feeling in his left leg, things are much more pleasant. The pink island moon bounces off the whorled roofs of the City. Intermittent moonlight makes the spiraled domes appear to be moving, somehow, spinning to the beat of an off-kilter carousel. The whole skyline ripples in jolly waves, as if the invisible world is casting material shadows.

Raffy was wrong, though, Barnaby thinks; there are no ghosts in the City of Shells. It’s been dark for hours, and the only thing that’s materialized so far is a cloud of mosquitoes. The storm has held off for longer than Barnaby dared to hope. Even so, he can’t take much more of this. His leg is bent under him at a wrong-feeling angle, and it’s colder than a meat locker inside Cornuta. He wonders if his injury qualifies him for workman’s comp.
Surely we’ll hear the ferry motoring up at any moment,
Barnaby thinks.
Surely
somebody
is out looking for us.

Big Red, however, seems downright jubilant. She is squidged up under his right elbow, staring up at him with a moony grin. He smiles back at her uneasily.

“Are you hungry?” Barnaby fishes around in his pocket. “Here.” He produces five lint-furred peppermints and a silver flask. “It’ll take the edge off.”

Big Red takes a sip and blanches.

“Well, hand it over if you’re not going to finish it.”

She stares up at him and takes a long swig.

Barnaby takes the bottle back and downs a few gulps himself. He hasn’t spent any real amount of time inside the shells. It’s depressing. He can see all the spots he’s missed. The hose reaches only so far, after all, and Barnaby isn’t known for his janitorial scruples. The dark stains are like Rorschach tests, each one diagnosing his professional shortcomings. Even by Cornuta’s muted glow, Barnaby can see the tarry footprints where his boots slipped, a monument to his most recent failure.

“Geez,” he coughs. “Pretty filthy down here.” He doesn’t tell the child that he, Barnaby, is the reason that these ancient shells resemble waste receptacles. Sponging baby oil and bleach onto Giant Conchs all day—this is not his vocation. When Barnaby was a boy, about Big Red’s age, he wanted to be a real forest ranger. He wanted to be the steward of eternal landscapes, gashed rock and petrified woods. He would protect the cud-chewing noblesse of the buffalo; he would wear a badge and a hat. Now here he is, scraping expletives off Possicle for minimum wage. One thing never led to another. Mr. Uribe would have fired him long ago, if he hadn’t made himself indispensable by hiding all the cleaning supplies.

Barnaby tries not to think about this too much. He looks at Big Red, her eyes welling with some dopey-kid sentiment, and he gets a sudden image of a jack-in-the-box with its crank broken off. A child’s box with no handle. That’s how Barnaby feels when he thinks about his own kid ambitions. This cold, coiled music in the pit of his stomach and no hope of release.

“Yup. Pre-tty filthy…”

Keyhole light spills through the minuscule cracks in the conch. The kid is moon-spattered and covered with dust. She just sits there, staring and staring at him.

“Say, you know what we’re sitting in, kid?” Barnaby does his nasally tour guide impression. “A megalithic exoskeleton. Why, we can only conjecture about what used to live here—” He breaks off abruptly. Hearing his own voice echo in the dark, he has accidentally terrified himself. All of a sudden, the shiny penumbral walls seem oddly malleable.

“Say, kid?” Barnaby coughs. “You haven’t, uh, heard any strange noises out here, have you?”

Her ears turn bright pink. “Why?”

“Oh, nothing,” he says with a whistling nonchalance. “My, er, colleague says he hears funny noises sometimes. Coming from inside the shell.”

“Oh.” Big Red says flatly. “That.”

“Oh, what?”

“That’s just Laramie.” She scrunches up her nose. “You know. Doing it.”

“Laramie Uribe? Doing…it?” Now Barnaby blushes, too. He is going to give Raffy some major shit about this in the morning. Leave it to Raffy to mistake that terrestrial yowling for a ghost song. Unless Raffy was just messing with him all along—Raffy has a bad reputation around the City for pranks that are more cruel than funny. And Laramie! She can’t be older than twelve. He almost preferred the ghost explanation.

“So the boss’s kid sneaks into the conchs.” He shakes his head. “What about you? What’s your story? Were you going to meet a boyfriend, too?” Barnaby elbows her in the side, perhaps a little harder than is strictly necessary. “Playing hide-and-seek? Pretending to be a sea slug?”