Authors: Karleen Bradford
Thirteenth Child
Child
by
one
Stephanie took a step backward, then stopped. She looked behind her and gasped in terror. The cliff edge crumbled beneath her feet, and far below her the sea crashed against the jagged, pointed rocks in an insane fury. “No!” she cried.
But the terrible form of her pursuer advanced remorselessly. His hands reached out for her throat … she could feel his hot breath burning her cheeks…. There was no escape!
“Kate! Wake up—it’s your stop. You’re home.”
Kate came back to reality with a jolt and grabbed for her books. Flushing, she clambered over her seatmate, Barney.
“Plotting stories again?”
“No—” The answer was automatic, defensive, then she relaxed. “Well, yes. Sort of.” She gave him a sheepish grin. It was just Barney, and he was about as close to a friend as she had. This was her second year at the high school that served all this area, but its size and the number of students who went there still intimidated her. She’d never made friends easily anyway; the only girl she’d been close to in public school had moved away. There were some kids here from her old school, but none who would ever look twice at her. Barney was the only one she’d become friendly with, and that only because he had happened to sit next to her on the bus a couple of times, and somehow or other it had developed into a habit. He was a year ahead of her, but he didn’t seem to have any friends either.
A nerd, she thought. Just like me. But she liked him. He was comfortable to be with.
“See you tomorrow.”
“See you,” Barney answered.
Kate gained the aisle, then dropped a couple of books as she fought her way to the exit through outstretched feet and backpacks. As usual, she had loaded up at the library and was carrying far too much. She bit her lip as she bent to pick the books up, acutely conscious that the driver was waiting impatiently for her—she was the only one to get off at this stop, and Mrs. Murphy was running late. The noise was
overwhelming. It was almost as if it were a physical weight in the air holding her down. She never got used to it.
As the bus pulled away, leaving her at the roadside, she stood for a moment looking at the building in front of her. Home. As always, it depressed her. A crummy gas station and snack bar, sitting all alone like an unwelcome wart on the side of a dusty Ontario highway. Painted in broad, garish, vertical orange and white stripes. As if it didn’t stick out enough already. A stack of useless tires leaned against a drooping air hose that had stopped working months ago. A peeling, creaking sign in front of the snack bar read:
COFFEE
SNACKS
WORMS
Her eyes rested briefly on the burned-out remains of a house at one side of the station. There was nothing left but the foundation and a blackened, crumbling chimney. She ripped her gaze away from it, the old, familiar pain twisting inside. Why didn’t her father get rid of it?
At the thought of her father, she looked around. He was nowhere in sight. Not a good sign. Her stomach knotted. She went around to the back of the service station and let herself into their kitchen. The screen door complained
behind her and only closed halfway, letting in several flies.
“Close the
door,
Kate.” Her mother, Angie, came in from the living room, voice a whine.
“All the holes in it, doesn’t matter much whether it’s closed or open,” Kate answered, turning to face her.
Angie’s face was set, as usual, in a mask of worried lines. She’d chewed all her lipstick off, and her hair hung in sad, brown wisps around her face.
I used to think she was pretty, Kate thought. I wonder when that stopped? Then she shrugged. Who am I kidding—I know when it stopped. The image of the burned-out house flashed behind her eyes like the black and white negative of a photograph.
“I have to go to the dentist,” Angie went on. “This tooth is killing me. Can you take care of the snack bar for an hour or so by yourself? You’ll have to do the gas too. Your dad….” Her voice trailed off.
“Okay, Mom. Sure.” Throwing her books down on the kitchen table, Kate hit the swinging door behind it with the flat of her hand so hard it bounced against the wall on the other side and came flapping back. It caught her on the shoulder. The pain was a relief, somehow. She went through into the snack bar.
She didn’t have to ask where her father was. Up in the room above the garage. Resting. With a bottle of rye, “resting.”
This was the day Burrell’s delivered their groceries and stuff too. Angie had forgotten that. As usual. Kate dug underneath the counter for the order list.
There were only two customers, a man and a woman, both out-of-towners. They were drinking coffee, their plates pushed to one side. They seemed to be in the midst of a fight. The man shoved his chair back as Kate came toward them and handed her the bill and his money. Then they left, still arguing. Kate looked down at the amount scribbled on the bill and at the money. He’d left a fifteen-cent tip.
“Thanks a lot,” she muttered, then set to clearing the table. She heard her mother crunch out over the gravel in the old pickup, but luckily no other cars drove in. She hated pumping gas. Usually managed to spill some of it on her hands, and the smell of it sickened her for hours afterwards. The air conditioner whined but didn’t seem to do much good. Record heat for this early in the season, the TV had said. Kate wiped the sweat from her forehead; her blouse was plastered to her back.
A trucker came in and asked for coffee. He wasn’t one of the regulars. She gave it to him, hardly noticing what she was doing. A scruffy kid came in—one of the Davidsons, who were camping in the trailer park down at the end of the lake, she thought, although there were so many kids running around, and they all looked
so uniformly grubby, it was hard to tell them apart. He asked for worms. Not bothering to hide the disgust on her face, she went over to the worm refrigerator and took out a styrofoam tub containing peat moss and twelve worms. The kid and the trucker both left. She was alone again. Absent-mindedly, she took up the dishcloth and began wiping the counter….
Stephanie pressed herself against the wall, straining against the ropes that tied her fast. The tunnel was pitch-dark. Already she could feel the vibrations of the approaching train, hear its lonesome, wailing whistle. But, strain as she might, she knew it was hopeless. There wasn’t enough clearance between the wall and the train for a living, breathing body! Frantically she twisted her hands, feeling the coarse rope cut into her flesh. She reached down to her shoulder and grabbed between her teeth the rope that bound her there. She ground her jaws together desperately….
“I’ve got a knife! Give me all the money in the cash register.”
Kate hadn’t even heard the door open. She looked up. A thin, sick-looking boy was leaning toward her. Dark hair hung down over his eyes in lank strands; his forehead was beaded with sweat.
A knife? It occurred to Kate that Stephanie had never been threatened with a knife. The time might come when she would be, and Kate didn’t know anything about knives.
“What kind of knife?” she asked.
“What do you care what kind of knife?” the boy demanded. “It’s a sharp knife, okay? You don’t want to find out how sharp.”
With a shock, Kate came back to reality. Then she took a closer look at him. Both of his hands were on the counter and there was no sign of a knife anywhere.
He doesn’t look all that much older than I am, she thought. And he looks scared silly. I’ll bet he doesn’t have a knife. The boy seemed to sag forward for a moment, and put a hand up to his forehead as if suddenly dizzy. No way does he have a knife, Kate decided.
“Why?” she asked.
“Why what? Look—” He straightened up and glared at her. His face was white.
On drugs? Kate was suddenly more concerned. That was something else. She snuck a look at the clock—the Burrell’s man wasn’t due for another half-hour at least. Then she looked back at the boy. His eyes looked all right. She’d seen a trucker once who was freaked out on drugs. This guy didn’t look anything like that. And even kids at school—you could usually tell. He was just sick. That was it.
“Are you going to get that money or am I going to have to cut you?” The words were threatening, but they wavered and he still made no move toward a weapon. Kate made up her mind.
“Why do you want money?”
“Why?” he echoed, his voice desperate.
“Because I’m hungry, that’s why. I haven’t eaten in two days.”
“Well, that’s not too bright,” she said, throwing the dishcloth back into the sink. The boy’s mouth dropped open. A slightly confused look took over from the glare.
“What I mean is, if you’re really starving and you steal money from here, that’s not going to help you much. You can’t eat money, can you?”
He started to say something, but the words seemed to stick.
“Once you get the money,” Kate went on, “you’re going to have to take off fast, right? Then I’ll call the police. Then, as far as I can see, they’ll either catch up with you and drag you into the police station—and you can be sure they won’t feed you there—or if you do get away you’ll have to hitchhike or something and get as far from here as you can, as fast as you can. Either way, you’re not going to get anything to eat, and you’re still going to be hungry.” As she spoke, Kate turned to the back counter and began slapping margarine onto slices of bread.
“What are you doing?” The belligerence was rapidly deteriorating into bluster.
“Making you a sandwich, of course.” She added a couple of slices of ham and some lettuce, tossed it onto a plate, cut it, and pushed it over to him.
He stared at it, then back at her.
“Go ahead, eat it.”
He hesitated for a moment, poised as if ready to run or attack, but even he didn’t know which. Then, as if of its own accord, his hand reached for the sandwich. It was gone in four bites.
“You weren’t kidding, were you?” Kate asked. She made another one. She set this in front of him, then filled up a mug with milk.
The boy didn’t say a word, just sank onto a stool and wolfed the second sandwich down even more quickly than the first. Kate cut off a generous slice of apple pie and slid that in front of him as well.
When he finished, he pushed himself back from the counter and looked up with slightly glazed eyes.
“You work here all the time?” he asked.
“My dad owns the place,” she answered shortly.
“He let you give away food like this?”
“No.”
Times were even harder than usual lately and Kate knew that every bit of food was counted and measured. Somehow or other, her dad always seemed to be sober enough to see to that. She’d answer for this.
The boy stared at her in wary silence. Kate was beginning to feel uncomfortable. What was she going to do now?
“You ever done anything like this before?” she asked finally, gesturing toward the cash register. “I mean, you know, tried to hold up a place?”
He looked away, uneasy. “No.”
“Just as well,” Kate said. “You’re not too good at it.”
“Guess not.” He ran a hand through his hair and tossed it back out of his eyes, face still averted.
There was another awkward silence. Kate gathered up the mug and plates and began to wash them.
“What were you planning on doing? After you left here?” She concentrated hard on scrubbing.
“Hitching a ride west. Going to try and find a job.”
“I don’t think you’ll find much out there. Things are just about as bad there as around here, they say. My dad knows a guy—he went out a few months ago. Couldn’t get any kind of a job and had to hitch his way back. Got home a week ago, tired, broke, and sick as a dog.”