She was glad her daughter enjoyed it, though.
Sally’s faith had never been allowed to fully form before it had been broken. Sometimes, she regretted her belief in religion’s impossibility. The comfort. The hope. To shed life and rise into glory. To one day know the grand plan, to feel swaddled in its calculation and reason. It would be amazing to believe that everything had a purpose, and the guiding force of all things was a being of good. Wonderful. Sally so wished she could look forward to such a revelation. But she couldn’t. Life was life. Death was death.
Her family would be gone until ten-thirty, and then Eric would bring their daughter home to begin the hunt for the things Sally had been charged with hiding: the plastic egg holding the silver bracelet and most of the eggs Sally had decorated that morning.
Most of them.
She drank from her coffee and opened the fridge and knelt down to open the crisper. There, the decorated eggs rested on a white cloth like vivid tumors. Sneering at the display, Sally placed her coffee cup on the counter and reached in for the fabric nest. Her hands shook, and she closed her eyes. Took a deep breath.
Once the eggs were on the counter, Sally transferred them to a wicker basket she had filled with green plastic confetti. Mary would use the same basket to gather the colorful atrocities later that morning. Joyful and ignorant of the ritual’s meaning, her daughter would push aside leaves and crouch behind stones…
Such a lovely, ghunt.
“Don’t,” Sally whispered, choking back a sob.
All she had to do was get through the next ten minutes. Hide the eggs and come back inside. She didn’t have to watch Mary. Didn’t have to watch the…
Ghunt.
SALLY SITS ON HER bed. Uncle Henry fills the doorway. Though not tall, he is an adult and built wide, so he looks like a wall erected between her and the rest of the house. He holds a sugar cookie out to her, but she shakes her head.
“You look pretty,” Uncle Henry says, bouncing the cookie in the air like he’s trying to lure a dog inside. “Why you have to look so pretty?”
“F-for church,” Sally says, wondering why her uncle is asking her a question when he already knows the answer. “F-for the pi-nic and the eh-ghunt.”
“For the what?” Uncle Henry asks. A terrible grin pulls at his lips.
Her uncle steps into the room, and the reek of cigarettes pours from him like skunk and Sally is all the more unsure. She can barely think, and when she tries to tell her uncle about the church’s picnic and Easter egg hunt, all that comes out is, “Ghunt.”
“A ghunt, huh?” he says. “Tell me about your ghunt.”
Now he’s really smiling, but something has changed in his eyes. They look like the eyes of a painting. Flat. Hard. Fixed on an image Sally cannot imagine. Startled by this transformation, she forgets to speak.
“Cat got your tongue?” Uncle Henry asks. He pushes the cookie into his pants pocket and draws out a pack of cigarettes, never breaking eye contact with Sally. “Such a lucky pussy,” he says. Then he chuckles and slides a Marlboro between his damp lips.
Sally doesn’t understand the filthy sentiments adrift on her uncle’s foul breath. She doesn’t want to know. Something tells her to move, to get out of the room, so she stands from the bed. Before she takes her first step, he says, “Sit back down, now. Your mama don’t tolerate a disobedient child, so you do what you’re told.”
“But, I have to get ready for church. Mama’ll be cross if I make everybody late.”
“Your mama’s already left. I told ‘em I’d get you there. Ain’t a problem. Church is just down the street. Hardly a walk at all.”
“She left?”
“You sound worried. Nothing to be worried about.”
Sally tries to speak but her throat is completely closed as if she is being strangled.
“We got things to talk about,” Henry says and closes the door.
ONE EGG WENT BENEATH the rose bush on the south edge of the lawn and another went behind the bleached stone beside the patio. Sally put another at the base of the redwood play set and then, as an afterthought, she climbed the narrow ladder and put another in the corner of the play set’s second level.
Carefully, she climbed down the ladder and began walking to the back of the property.
“SEE THAT?” UNCLE HENRY whispers, his voice dry and rasping. “Just like an egg.”
Sally can see little through the scrim of tears. She doesn’t want to see.
“And what do we do with eggs?” Uncle Henry asks.
SHE DROPPED THE EGG on the grass and stared at it, half expecting the dyed shell to emit a scream of terror, of pain. Sally took a step back and closed her eyes, pushing out the tears pooled on the lower lids.
“YOU DON’T TELL ANYONE what you did,” Uncle Henry says. “You understand that? You never tell a soul what you did to me.”
She doesn’t know what she’s done to him.
Sally stares at the floor, but it isn’t there. There are no boards, no nails. Beneath her is the surface of a swirling black lake, like a swamp filled with grease and bile and…
The fluid ripples and twists under her feet like the mouth of a maelstrom and she wishes it would pull her down and away—even drowning would be better than enduring her uncle’s stare. His voice is like pennies in a grinder, and her mind pulls away, so far away, until his words are lost in the gurgle of the whirling bog. She shivers and closes her eyes and begins to whisper a prayer to the black fluid, but then she is being shaken and drawn back from the whirlpool of filth, and she is looking into the diseased-rabbit face of her uncle and his foul breath is on her skin and his grinding-penny decree demands her oath.
“You say it,” he insists.
“I promise,” she says.
“Promise what?” Uncle Henry asks.
“Promise I’ll never say anything.”
“About what you did?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Get out of here,” he tells her with a chuckle. “We don’t want you to be late for your ghunt.”
She shuffles to the door.
“Get yourself a bushel of eggs,” he says.
He laughs, and the sound is wet and horrible and far worse than his speaking voice. Sally shakes all over as if emerging from a frozen lake. She hurries to the bathroom and vomits and vomits until her body feels like it’s been crushed between two cars.
SALLY WALKED IN FROM the backyard. A single egg remained in the basket—the cracked one with the red bottom and the halo of glitter. She traced the crack from the narrow dome to the fat base with a finger. She carried the basket to the basement door, opened it, and descended the steps. At the bottom, she again regarded the egg and again touched it as if it were a good luck charm.
She was still infuriated with her mother for including Uncle Henry in the family Easter. Sally had protested vehemently, going so far as to nearly break her promise and reveal what the sick old man had done to her all of those years ago, but Sally couldn’t get the words out. She couldn’t explain about the egg.