“But I didn’t know that. I only did it as a test, to see what would happen.”
“You might not have realized what you were doing, but something in you knew the hamster was in trouble and it made you bring it to me. Now, it won’t suffer and neither will Marla.”
Something in me? What the hell? “But…but what about…?”
“Yes, there have been others. There was one little girl a couple years back, who was soon to be kidnapped, raped, and murdered. I called her here, like I called Buddy. Her parents forgot they had a child, and so didn’t miss her.”
“Oh, yeah,” I said, my fingers going to my suddenly dry lips and beginning to pick. “The little girl. She was cute, red hair. I knew she’d gone missing but nobody said anything so I just…I don’t know…forgot, too.”
Miss Dowdy nodded. “It’s good the children think I’m a witch so they’ll leave me alone. This work is best done without interruption.”
“Have there been a bunch of others?”
“Oh, yes, from the whole town. Many you wouldn’t know, and a lot of them before you were born.”
I looked at the old woman, at her little white shoes and her little gray braids. I looked out at the street, and the sunshine that reflected off the bits of quartz in the gravel. I should be with Jena, collecting quartz. We were going to make a million selling our rocks once we had enough.
“You said,” I began, then began again. “You said something in me knew about the hamster. I don’t get it.”
“It means you’re like me. You’ll take over for me someday.”
“No!” I jumped up. “I’m not going to do stuff like you do!”
“Not now, honey. When you’re grown and old enough to understand the importance and can handle the responsibility. It’s nothing to worry about now. Later. Later.” She reached over and patted my knee. It didn’t burst into flames. Her touch was kind, soft. Then she said, “How about the cookies, now?”
“Oh.” I looked at the cookies on the step. “No, you can’t. They’re…stale.”
“All right, then.”
I said good-bye to Miss Dowdy, collected the cookies, and hurried home. The plastic plate of Oreos went into the kitchen trashcan under a bunch of sloppy leftovers from supper the night before. That way, Mom wouldn’t see it and dig it out to save the plate.
All night long I tossed about in bed, thinking about the terrible things that could happen to people and their pets, and how Miss Dowdy did all she could to make things better. It was kind of like Jesus or Superman, helping others like that. I tried to imagine myself as a grownup, sitting on a porch in the shadows, calling for people and animals to come to me, making those who loved them forget they ever existed.
Jena and I continued to collect sparkly rocks from the road until our jars were filled to the top. Marla finally learned the sign language alphabet and we signed dirty words to each other up in the tree house. David’s mom gave into his nagging and bought him a black lab that he named Rusty. I walked around with an uncomfortable sense of superiority bubbling just under the surface, knowing that one day I would be a savior.
On a Friday afternoon in August, when Mom and Jena were watching one of Mom’s stories on television, I sneaked out the back door to slip down to Miss Dowdy’s house. It had been weeks since I’d sat on her porch. I just wanted to have a look to remind myself that what I’d learned was real, that she was real.
David was in the alley, sticking out his tongue and swinging an old jock strap he’d found in somebody’s trash. “Where you going?”
“None of your business.”
“Here, smell this.” He wiggled the jock strap at my face.
“Get that away from me.”
“No, smell it!” He jabbed it at my nose and I slapped it away.
“Stop it, you asshole!”
“I’m telling!”
Hatred and heat raced up my spine. “No, you aren’t!” I drew up my fist and cracked him so hard in the jaw he fell back onto the gravel and bit his lip.
“You’ll get a spanking for this, just you wait!” he wailed around a trickle of blood. “You can’t do that to me!”
“I just did, now get out of my way!”
I left him in the gray dust, knowing Mom would be furious, knowing there would be punishment waiting. “One of these days!” I whispered around the knot in my throat. But still, I had to see Miss Dowdy again. Nothing was going to stop me.
The house hadn’t changed. Still small and dark, the grass still tall and tangled. I
thought for a moment of going right up to her door and knocking, but I didn’t want neighbors to see that. We had a secret, Miss Dowdy and I. So I sneaked around the side of her house and crept low beneath a scrubby forsythia bush. Maybe she would sense I was there and let me in the back door.
I heard it then. Weeping, moaning. Very soft, but unmistakable. I squatted close to a tiny, filthy window at ground level and squinting, I peered inside.
The cellar was dirt-floored, stone-walled, and low-ceilinged. It was dark except for a roaring fire inside a huge oven set into the far wall. Miss Dowdy, in her blue dress and white sneakers, stoked the fire with a poker. The flames licked at her cheeks, coloring them orange and yellow.
In the deep shadows along the other walls I detected the outlines of cages. Cages with faces pressed to the bars. Small animal faces in the little cages. Human faces in the larger cages, and hands that reached through the bars, clutching, pleading. Miss Dowdy only laughed, and then tossed more wood into the oven, making the fire erupt anew in a bright and sparkling dance.
And then she looked up at me, smiled, and winked. Her lips were blood red; her eyes the same.
I fell away and ran from her house. I hadn’t wondered what had happened to all those who had gone into Miss Dowdy’s keeping. I suppose I’d thought they had, once forgotten, become nothing. As if they had never actually existed.
Up in the tree house, alone again, I held my chest as my heart pounded and railed within. They were still there. They were still alive. Miss Dowdy had lured them in and kept them for her own needs.
Terrible!
Terrible.
But what power that old lady had. What incredible power.
I heard Mom call me from the house. “Annie! Where are you! Get in here, I have a bone to pick with you!”
My heart clenched, picked up an angry, painful beat, but then it slowed, and didn’t hurt as much.
“I mean it, Annie! I’ve had about enough of your bad behavior!”
A beetle crawled along a limb near me and I squished it with my thumb.
I wondered what it would be like to have that much power.
I guessed I would find out.
One of these days.
Crow, Cat, Cow, Child
It took almost ten minutes to catch both the beetle and the centipede, but Hannah Livick’s paper cup finally had the captives securely inside, and she walked them down to the grassy stretch behind the dumpster and let them go. Best to be out in the wild than in her apartment, where they might get stepped on or caught by one of Hannah’s cats. It was more time consuming now to keep up with her promises. With the onset of fall,more insects sought warmth inside, and she spent more time chasing them and putting them out.
But promises she had made and promises she would keep.
She went back inside and dropped down on a kitchen chair. On the table before her was an opened letter from her father. The bastard. She flipped her hand and the letter fluttered to the floor. The two stray kittens she’d rescued from the college parking lot blinked at her from the hall. Timothy jumped onto the table. Hannah kicked off her shoes and tucked her hair back behind her ears. She waited as her breathing eased and her heart slowed. She needed to let things like this go. She was thirty-two, for heaven’s sake, no teenaged flower child. She should no longer be thrown for a loop when others didn’t understand. In fact, their lack of under-standing only clarified her own. It clarified that of Karla Casey and little Allen and Joe and the other student members of Voices for the Voiceless, people who had true commitment to great causes.