Allie is annoyed and scared that a tooth could just disappear. It’s one thing when you send two socks down the laundry chute and only one comes back, but something very different when you go to bed with a full set of teeth and wake up one short. “Dad!” she shouts.
Her father sticks his finger into the gap, as if the tooth might be there after all, as if it is hiding. “It was a cheap plastic cap,” he says. “I should have had it replaced. I’ve had it since the age of the dinosaurs.” He carelessly sweeps his hand over the carpet. “Well, maybe I swallowed it.”
“Really?” Allie asks.
“Who knows.” He shrugs.
Allie feels like crying. A panic starts thumping through her. What is going on here, she thinks. Today a tooth, tomorrow an ear or a finger.
“Where is it?” she yells.
Her father is looking at her now, but he doesn’t seem to see her. Behind her the drapes billow in the breeze—it is a warm summer evening, an ordinary evening. There’s the smell of a barbecue not far away.
“Your mother will come back to us, you know. It’s like she’s on a vacation, honey.” He rubs his eyes. “Come sit with me, Allie.”
Allie sways from leg to leg. She does not want to sit; she will trace his tracks and find that tooth. “Tell me everywhere you went last night.”
On the back porch the world seems much bigger and harder to weed through than it had looked from the living room. Allie will not search for the tooth. How do you find something fingernail-sized out there—where do you start?
Besides, she’s lazy during the day. She rests on the sofa, falling in and out of dreamless sleep. Her bones seem to have curved and shifted. She feels like a smaller girl.
She now slumps on the steps, eating potato chips and quietly reciting curses. She waits for the night, when her vision will sharpen, when her energy is up and her spirit yawns and stretches, standing up straight and taking her creaky bones with it.
At midnight it is calm and starry. There is no wind as Allie sits on the front steps blowing bubbles through the wand. The yard is filled with translucent blue bubbles and the low hum of crickets. The phone rings.
“I know it’s you,” Allie says, picking it up.
“You’re a mind reader. How are you, sweets?”
“Good.”
“How come I always do all the talking? Lemme ask the eight ball something. Should the kid talk for a change? ‘Signs point to yes.’ Okay. Act alive; say something.”
Allie crunches the phone cord in her hand, thinking fast. “If you had to have a pet snake, a pet rat, or a pet tarantula, which would you have?”
“None! My god! Why would I want one of those things?” The woman is silent for a second. Then she says, “Your problem, kid, is that you take too much crap. You gotta learn to say ‘fuck off’ once in a while. Don’t let anyone push you around. Say it. Say ‘fuck off.’ For practice.”
“Fuck off,” Allie says.
“Like you’re mad, say it like you’re mad.”
Allie says it again, louder.
“Try ‘go piss up a rope.’ Say it with an attitude.”
“I like the middle of the night. Do you?”
“What are you interrupting me for? You show a lack of concentration, kid. Your problem—”
Allie hangs up the phone and thinks this is the last straw. She doesn’t know what that means, but when she looks at her reflection in the oven window she looks like a person whose feelings have been hurt.
Outside a few fireflies glimmer near the azalea bush. The moon is a toenail clipping, and a breeze blows back her hair.
Allie wanders through the patch of woods behind her house and into the next development. The houses there are dark and quiet. She roams through the backyards like a spirit in a nightgown. On the back stoop of one house a long-necked watering can catches her eye and she waters her feet, leaving wet footprints on the concrete. The back door of the house is open, and Allie peers through the screen down the hallway to where a light shines. She steps inside, imagining a sleeping family there, a mother and father and a few children tucked in their beds. She walks down the hall as though she is invisible.
In the darkened living room a man sits on a couch with a long-haired woman curled up next to him. Soft voices come from a small TV, which gives the room a bluish glow. Both the man and the woman look up at her standing in the doorway.
“Who are you?” the man asks.
“Is that a kid, Marshall?” The woman sneezes three times in a row. “God, I feel like shit,” she whispers in a raspy voice. “Am I hallucinating or is that a kid?”
“It’s a kid.”
The man gently pushes the woman off his lap. Standing, he runs his fingers through his hair as he looks from the woman on the couch to Allie. “This is kind of fucked up,” he says.
The woman sneezes again and lets her head fall to the couch. “I must have a fever. Am I a hypochondriac, Marshall?”
“You’re allowed,” he says. “Where are your parents?” he asks Allie.
Allie leans against the wall. Something smells good in the kitchen, and she looks toward the smell.
“Come here,” the man says. He’s very tall and slouchy in his body. He’s wearing faded jeans and flip-flops.
Allie follows him into the kitchen, where soup boils on the stove. The can says “Chicken & Stars.” He stirs it.
“I’m going to walk you home after she eats.”
“Oh, I know the way.”
“It wasn’t a question, it’s a statement.”
Allie nervously pulls her hair. “Well, goodbye,” she says, losing her nerve. As she turns, he grabs her by the back of the nightgown.
“It’s two o’clock in the morning. Just hold your horses.” He directs her to the stove, where he pours the soup into a bowl. It is steaming hot. He leans over and blows on it. This man smells like grass. “Can you pour that ginger ale into a glass?” he asks.
Allie does. “You want some?” he says. She does not. But as if in a dream she remembers the book with the silhouette people, Correct Behavior for All Occasions. In the chapter on food it says to always accept a small offering of food or drink, it’s the polite thing to do. Allie takes a glass off the drainboard and pours herself some.
The man takes a box of Saltines down from the cupboard. “Carry the drinks,” he says. Together they join the sick woman on the couch.
“Oh, Marshall,” the woman says, in a high, pained voice. “I’m all clogged up.”
The man sets up the food on a TV tray and puts his arm around the woman. Her hair is matted, and her face is shiny with sweat. In her feverish daze, she takes delicate sips of the soup.
Allie sips her ginger ale with similar grace.
“Give me something to wrap around my neck. My throat’s so sore,” she says to Marshall. He puts a sweatshirt over her and wraps the sleeves around her neck.
“That’s much better, Marshall. Much better.” She eats steadily, daintily. Looking up at Marshall she says, “You’re all right, you know that.” Marshall kisses her lightly on the forehead.
“What’s the kid doing here?” the woman says.
Marshall studies Allie with kind, searching eyes. “What’s the deal with you?” he asks.
Allie doesn’t know what to say, or what she might say if she could say something. Nothing feels certain to her.
“Do you love each other very much?” Allie asks in a sleepy voice. She asks because she knows what the answer is and wants it confirmed, to know that she’s right.
Marshall nods.
Suddenly Allie needs to get home, to check and see that everything is all right there. She’s out the back door and into the woods before she realizes no one is following her. She is alone, it is the middle of the night, and her house is not far away.
Her house is dark, even the attic. In the silence she can tell her father is inside, maybe in the den. Allie stands in the hallway, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the lack of light. The house is very still, there is no movement, no wind, no creaking floors, no life it seems except for her pounding heart, which is too loud to be hers alone and must really be three pounding hearts, the one in the den and the one in the attic and hers here in the hallway.