“Sure.”
“Socks off please,” she says. Her toes move around inside her socks. He takes them off and pulls the blanket to her chin. He pats her hair, and her breathing slows.
“When’s the dentist?”
“We’re back from the dentist. It’s all done.”
“I’m worried,” she says.
“What for? You were a champ.”
“She was raped?”
“Yes,” he says. He remembers to breathe.
“Who?” He fishes the wet wad from her mouth and throws it in the bedside wastebasket.
“A summer girl. Vacationing with her grandparents.” Jenny has heard this much, last night. He told her after the phone tree people called. He did not use the word rape. She didn’t ask any questions then.
“Adelaide,” she says. “Right, right. Oh no.” She puts a hand over her eyes. “But she’s so beautiful. She was always waving to me. Every time I saw her, she smiled and waved.”
Adelaide walked every morning, fast, but never with mail or a dog giving her a reason to walk. She wore white Keds. Her mother was from Jamaica, her father from Connecticut. She had blue beads on the ends of her braids. Everyone in town waved to everyone else, but Adelaide would wave and smile at him like he’d just walked through the door after being away for too long. Like his was the face she’d been hoping to see.
“Oh no,” Jenny is saying, shaking her head back and forth. “She was so happy.” Harold closes his eyes. It is terribly easy to watch the film reel continue: The van slowing beside her as she turned to smile. How her face must have changed as the man drew a gun and pointed it to her temple. How it must have changed again when he pulled a hood over her head. Fear, with no one to see it.
Jenny’s quiet for a minute with her eyes closed, but they’re twitching behind her lids.
“Wait,” she says. “How’d he get her?”
“He had a gun,” he says.
“Where’d he take her?”
“Back behind the cemetery.”
“So close,” she says.
While Adelaide was being attacked, Harold was weeding the garden. The man must have taped her mouth. Harold surely would have heard her if she’d screamed.
“She got away?”
“Yes, sweetie, she got away. Afterward she ran. She was lucky.” Jenny’s eyes stay shut. He kisses her cheek goodnight. Her skin is hot, tight with a slight swelling.
“He got away too?” she says.
“The police say there’s no way he’d stick around. Probably escaped out of state. Maybe he got out by boat, but they’ll get him. The coast guard searched the harbor. He’s not coming back here.”
She’s still and silent under her blanket. He listens to her breathing slow. “He’s back,” she says, her words softened, dream-speak.
* * *
The wad of dollars warms in her fist as she walks up the driveway. She hates the sailing lessons, how the instructors make her wear a mildewed orange life jacket, stiff from spending winter in a basement. She hates how the older boys capsize the dinghies on purpose, then swim quickly to the dock to watch as she doggy paddles in, salt water lapping at her mouth. But sailing is an excuse to get her away from the chicken soup and lime Jell-O, crossword puzzles, cartoon marathons, Dad’s anxious face. She had to beg him to let her walk the five minutes to the dock alone. She hasn’t been outside in days, and her legs feel wobbly. She is walking away from sailing and chaperones, along the dirt road that leads to the graveyard. She must have intended to lie to her dad all along, but she discovers the lie as she watches her feet in their course toward the place she is no longer allowed to go.
The leaves on the oak trees leading to the graveyard are mottled with hot pink fungus. Pepperbush, which her dad points out every summer and Jenny has never noticed before, is in full bloom and the air is spicy and over-sweet. Hidden in the leaves as she turns down the graveyard drive is a scrap of weathered blue fabric. She imagines it is part of a girl’s dress, but it’s only a fake flower. She tucks the dirty silk petals behind her ear and walks up to the graves, putting a hand on her mother’s warm stone.
The headstones in the new graveyard are shiny and clean, etched with soaring eagles and lobster boats trailing wakes into the rising sun. She weaves through them. Behind the new graveyard, the headstones in the old graveyard are black with age. Lichen grows over the engravings. Many of them are nameless children’s graves, no bigger than schoolbooks.
She is afraid, but she has always been afraid. In the parking lot of Home Depot, listening to Prairie Home Companion with the doors locked, waiting for her dad to pick up some lumber, she is afraid. She’s afraid when she gets home from school, as she eats her pudding cup and watches TV alone before he gets home, and she is afraid when she isn’t alone also, falling asleep to the quiet hum of the house. Sometimes her fear takes the form of an imagined man in a black mask, and it isn’t so much what he could do to her that scares her, but that when he did it she’d be alone. That afterward she would never be let back into her life the way it was before. And now this fear is real and in the world, escaping by back roads in his white van.
When she slaps at her neck, her hand comes back dotted with blood. The mosquitoes make a veil around her hair, drawn by her shampoo. There is no sign that anything terrible happened here. The graveyard and the main road curve out of view. The ground grows soft; tire ruts cup muddy water. There is a stink in the air, fetid but sweet. The leaves on the trees are flipped, their pale undersides puffed to the sky. Rain is on its way.
She rounds the corner to find the forest flooded by a yellow swamp. Row after row of trees grow out of the water, skinned of their bark, brittle and sun bleached, riddled with woodpecker holes. A ring of scum encircles each trunk. Jenny always imagined the woods at her town’s center as lush and dark, pines too crowded to run through, but here it is, ruined by beavers. She remembers overwatering the garden lettuce, how the roots of the dying plants rose from the soil like slow spiders. The pines submerged at the lake’s edge have boughs tipped with light green new growth, but she knows they are done for.
She untangles the blue flower from her hair, turning from the water, fighting the urge to run. The bog gapes at her back. She watches her thighs pressing uphill, and counts her breath in tens until the main road comes into view. The humidity raises a musky smell from her shirt. Safe in the new graveyard, she puts the blue flower and the sailing money on her mom’s headstone.
“Please,” she says. It is an offering that stands for a prayer, for Adelaide, and seeping into that a second prayer, for herself. “Thank you.”
That night she scuffs her sneakers on the pavement, listening to Freddy while pretending she’s not listening. Her dad has allowed her to go on the Community Night scavenger hunt, because they walk around in a group, she argued, plus there are chaperones.
“Wasn’t supposed to hear it, because they were in the front with the radio and thought I was sleeping, but I heard,” Freddy says.
“Come on, man,” says Jake. “Just spill.” He plucks a half-smoked cigarette from the library lawn and fumbles to light it. His lips are chapped. Jake’s one of the terrible boys from sailing who threw her off the dock last summer. He exhales a weak curl of smoke. He’s probably sixteen, a chaperone, but he’s short and as small as Jenny, his braces gluey with rubber bands.
He claps his hands. “All right, little ones. Let’s get this show on the road.” They’re headed to Freddy’s house for a marble, the first item on the scavenger-hunt list. Jenny tries to tuck herself into the group of chaperones. The littler kids run ahead, squealing.
Jake hands the half-smoked cigarette to Freddy. “Sick,” Freddy says, but he puffs anyway. “Gag. Wet.”