Ugly Behavior (7 page)

Later she looked into her lunch box and brought her marbles out.
They were red, blue, green, lots of different colors. Some you could even see
through. A bunch of them had belonged to her first daddy, her real daddy, her
mommy had told her. She liked looking at those the best. They looked so old.
And they made her feel better. She brought them to school every day but she
didn’t play with them. She just liked to look. Somebody might steal them if she
played.

Before dinner her daddy came home and stepped on her foot. Twice.
He pretended he didn’t notice and she pretended it didn’t happen, even though
it hurt a lot. But she pulled her feet up into the chair and sat on them, just
to make sure he didn’t do it again.

After dinner he passed by her in the upstairs hallway and nudged
her into the wall. She hit her cheek and it cut a little.

A few minutes later he came out of his bedroom. She was sitting in
the middle of the hall crying and holding her cheek. The blood felt hot and
sticky on her fingers.

“Why, Cheryl! What happened?” he said and crouched down next to
her, his wide face filling her vision.

“You… you pushed me!” she cried, sobbing, and for a moment was
very afraid, afraid of what he would do to her now that she had said that. She
shouldn’t have said it, but she’d been hurt, and it made her forget.

“Why… how can you say that!” he said, looking really puzzled.
Cheryl knew he was play-acting; his eyes were too wide and his mouth so large
and open he looked like the giant chicken she liked so much on the cartoons.
But she didn’t like her daddy like this. She didn’t like him at all.

“I’m… I’m sorry. I guess I fell.” She looked down.

Then he was holding her, speaking softly to her, telling her that
everything was going to be okay, and that he loved her very much. He talked to
her just like she was his own real daughter. She hugged him back real hard,
hoping maybe it was all true, though she really didn’t think it was. Her old
daddy had died so long ago she couldn’t remember him, and when this new one
came along last year and married her mother she used to dream sometimes that he
was actually her real daddy come back to her, and that her mommy just didn’t
recognize him.

But that couldn’t be true. Her real daddy wasn’t like this one at
all.

That night in bed she was thinking about her real daddy when the
tall man with the dark face came in. She knew he was really her new daddy but
now she was trying to think of him as a stranger, a bad dark stranger who
pretended to help her by taking her to the bathroom so she wouldn’t wet the bed
but who was really an evil, bad man out to get her. It made her feel better
that way. It made her feel safer when she had to be with her new daddy during
the daytime.

The man with the dark face, the man with no face it was so dark,
reached down and lifted her up out of the bed. “Time to use the bathroom,” he
said softly.

He took her down the hall into the bathroom and tried to crash her
head against the doorframe. But she was too smart for him this time and put her
hands over her head. She hurt her fingers when he bumped her into the doorframe
but at least they didn’t hurt as badly as her head had. Sometimes her head hurt
so badly she couldn’t sleep after that. And besides, her mommy asked funny
questions about the bruises.

So she wasn’t expecting it when he ran her face into the front of
the sink. Her nose mashed and she couldn’t breathe and it felt all funny. When
she opened her mouth to cry he put his hand over her mouth and held it there so
long she started feeling sleepy. Then he took it away. Then she was too sleepy
to cry.

The next morning her mommy was all upset about her nose, wanting
to know what happened.

“I can’t remember,” Cheryl said.

“But your nose is all bloody! Surely you know what happened?”

“Maybe Cheryl was playing where she shouldn’t be playing and
that’s why she’s afraid to tell us,” her new daddy said, looking funny at her
mommy.

Cheryl didn’t say anything at first, then looked up at her mother.
“I have bad dreams sometimes and they make things happen.”

“Well, you didn’t dream a bloody nose!” her mommy said.

“I... I think I must have tripped when Daddy was in my room last
night.”

Her new daddy looked at her mommy, then turned to Cheryl. “I
wasn’t in your room, Cheryl. You must have dreamed it.”

Her mommy nodded her head slowly, and it looked to Cheryl like her
mommy was very nervous. Cheryl nodded her head back. “I guess I did,” she said.

“I know… you must have had a bad dream and fallen out of bed,” her
new daddy said.

Cheryl nodded silently, and the more she thought about it, the
more she tried to think her new daddy was right. She wanted it to be true.

She sat for a long time on the stairs before bedtime listening to
her mommy putting away the dishes, her new daddy talking to her in low sounds
like a dog barking. For awhile it made her giggle, thinking that he sounded
like a puppy, but then she got scared, and the staircase seemed darker than
before.

“... getting to be a problem… her imagination…”

The words were suddenly easier to hear, and at first she couldn’t
understand why. But then she understood.

“She’s delusional, Betty. All these dreams. And I think she’s
lying to you… to us, half the time…”

Her new daddy knew she was out on the stair listening. And he
wanted to make sure she heard what he was telling her mommy.

“. . . something wrong with her, Betty. We love her. I love her.
But we may have to send her away…”

Cheryl crawled up the steps carefully. She was afraid to stand up
and walk, afraid she would make too much noise. And she didn’t cry this time.
It surprised her, but she didn’t even feel like crying.

That night Cheryl woke up a little early. She looked at the
doorway, but there was no one there. The dark man with no face hadn’t come yet.

She lay there thinking about what her daddy would do if he were in
her place — her real daddy. Her good daddy.

She got up and went to her closet. She took out her bag of
marbles. They were really old; she’d had them a long time. She took them and
walked out the door.

She was really careful placing the marbles around the bend of the
hallway, at the top of the stairs. She put them down one at a time, so that
they made a nice pattern. The pattern looked a little like the moon. She put
her real father’s old marbles on the outside, and the newer marbles on the
inside.

Then she got up to leave. There wasn’t much light in the hallway.
You couldn’t even see the marbles on the dark carpet now.

She didn’t have to wait long after she got back into bed. She
heard her mommy and daddy’s bedroom door opening, and the
creakings
and
groanings
of the hallway floor as the dark man
with no face walked toward her bedroom.

Then there was the big crash, followed by a loud scream, and a lot
of thumps and bangs as the dark man fell down the staircase.

“You must have dreamed it, Daddy,” Cheryl said softly beneath the
covers, giggling and snuggling closer to her pillows. “You dreamed it.”

Jimmy hadn’t caught four hours sleep all week. Normally he was a
dead man about five seconds after he hit the sheets. In fact he liked telling
people “I work like a bastard for my
sleepeye
.” Not
that he didn’t lie there staring at the ceiling a few hours now and then, but
not like this, not for days, not for a week. Sometimes he might lie awake
counting the tiles because he was trying to remember something, even though he
might not know he was trying to remember something. Some special butt-saving
part of his brain would nag at him until he’d think of that anniversary,
birthday, or special favor for his boss that he’d completely forgotten. “Ah,
Jimmy, thank you,” he’d say when he remembered these things, flat on his back
in bed. Sometimes Tess would nudge him with her elbow a little when this
happened, pretending to be asleep but still letting him know he’d saved his
butt by just a hair this time (she figured he’d forgotten something having to
do with her and most of the time she was right).

But not this time. He didn’t think his lack of sleep had anything
to do with her. Not this time. What he forgot this time, he knew, came from
somewhere deeper than that, from somewhere further back, off where the dog bled
in the dark and the rats gathered round to lick the blood.

“Ah, Jimmy, thank you.…” he said, but quietly, not wanting Tess to
hear. Off where the dog bled in the dark.…

Maybe he felt the scratching before he actually heard it. Later
he’d wonder about that. He felt it up in his scalp, long and hard like
fingernails scratching through a wooden door, the fingers bleeding from the
effort and the mind spinning dizzy from the pain. Jimmy raised his head and
looked toward the bedroom door—they always kept it open halfway and the
hall light on because Miranda was just down the hall and at five years old she
still hated the dark, almost as bad as Jimmy used to hate the dark. Almost as
bad as he hated it now. They kept the door open because Jimmy wanted to be sure
and hear her when she screamed, which she still did about once every two weeks.
He didn’t want to lose any time getting into his little girl’s room.
 

Tess was always telling him that he coddled the kids. That was a
funny word—he didn’t think he’d ever heard anyone else use it besides his
grandma, back when he was a kid. And maybe Tess was right. He’d never been able
to talk much about what it is you do with kids—being a dad to them,
disciplining them, that kind of thing—not the way Tess could. Sometimes she
gave him these books to read, books on parenting by experts. He never got much
out of them.

All Jimmy knew was to pay attention to them, love and protect
them. And tell them when they did wrong, though after a while you couldn’t stop
them from doing wrong, just slow them down a little. Just doing that much
wasn’t easy, not like it sounded. The kids would find out soon enough that the
world was worse than they’d ever imagined, and maybe they’d hate him a little
at first because of that. But all he could do was try to keep them alive and
teach them a few things that would help them keep themselves alive. And maybe
someday they’d figure out he’d loved them and that he’d meant the best for
them, even with all the mistakes he’d made. He figured love was mostly mistakes
that turned out okay. And maybe he’d get lucky. Maybe he wouldn’t be dead when
that someday came around.

A small black dog, maybe a cat, came racing by the open door, in
and out of the little bit of light like a shadow pulled by a rubber band. On
its way to Miranda’s room, looked like. But they didn’t own a dog, not since
they put old Wooly to sleep. And their cat was white as a clean pillowcase.

Kids scream for all kinds of reasons. But even for the silly ones
Jimmy had never been able to stand it. When Miranda’s scream tore so raggedly out
of the dark, he was up and heading out the door without even pulling down the
covers. Tess made a little gasp of surprise behind him as the headboard rocked
back and banged the wall. The whole house was shaking with his legs pounding
down the hallway and Miranda screaming.

As soon as he reached his little girl’s door he caught the sharp
smell of pee, and when he slammed the light switch on he fully expected to find
the rat up on the bed with her, marking her with his teeth and claws and
marking the bed with his pee just to let Jimmy know whose was whose. But there
was just Miranda huddled by herself, her face red as a beet (how do little kids
make their faces go that color?), and the damp a gray flower opening up all
around her tiny behind.
  

“Daddy! A big mousy! Big mousy!” she screamed, words he would have
expected from her two years ago but not now (Dad! I’m a big girl now!),
pointing a whole pudgy and shaking fist toward her open closet door. Jimmy ran
back into the hallway and Miranda started screaming again; he could hear the
baby squalling in the back room and Tess and Robert were out in the hall, Tess
shouting What’s wrong!, but Jimmy could hardly hear her over Miranda’s Daddy!.
He waved a hand at Tess trying to get her to stay back, jerked open the hall
closet door and grabbed the heavy broom, and ran back into his daughter’s room.

Where he slammed her closet door as far back as it would go and
held the broom up, waiting.

Miranda’s screams had choked off into hard, snotty breathing. He
could feel Tess and Robert behind him at the door, Tess no doubt holding
Robert’s jaw in that way she had when she wanted him to know he shouldn’t talk
just now. Daddy’s real busy.

Suddenly there was movement at the bottom of the closet: Miss
Raggedy Ella fell over and Jimmy could see that half her face had been torn
away into clouds of cotton and he just started waling away with the broom on
Miss Ella and Barbie and Tiny Tears and Homer Hippo and the whole
happy-go-lucky bunch until they were all dancing up and down and laughing with
those big wide permanent grins painted on their faces (except for Miss Ella,
who now had no mouth to speak of) and screaming just like Miranda did. “Daddy,
stop! You’re hurting them!”