“No,” Marie said, shocked into telling the truth.
“Then it’s just us girls,” she said, smiling a weird, thin smile that impelled Marie to reach behind her, holding the car for support. The girl presented her water-wrinkled palm and Marie forked over the car keys.
“Did you bring food?”
“In the trunk.”
The girl held up the knife. “Stay right there.”
Marie watched, terrified, as the girl opened the trunk and tore into a box of groceries, shoving a tomato into her mouth as she reached for some bread. A bloody trail of tomato juice sluiced down her neck.
Studying the girl — her quick, panicky movements — Marie felt her fear begin to settle into a morbid curiosity. This skinny girl seemed an unlikely killer; her tiny wrists looked breakable, and her stunning whiteness gave her the look of a child ghost. In a matter of seconds, a thin, reluctant vine of maternal compassion twined through Marie and burst into violent bloom.
“When did you eat last?” Marie asked her.
“None of your business,” the girl said, cramming her mouth full of bread.
“How old are you?”
The girl finished chewing, then answered: “Nineteen. What’s it to you?”
“I have a son about your age.”
“Thrilled to know it,” the girl said, handing a grocery sack to Marie. She herself hefted the box and followed Marie into the cabin, her bare feet making little animal sounds on the gravel. Once inside, she ripped into a box of Cheerios.
“Do you want milk with that?” Marie asked her.
All at once the girl welled up, and she nodded, wiping her eyes with the heel of one hand, turning her head hard right, hard left, exposing her small, translucent ears. “This isn’t me,” she sniffled. She lifted the knife, but did not give it over. “It’s not even mine.”
“Whose is it?” Marie said steadily, pouring milk into a bowl.
“My boyfriend’s.” The girl said nothing more for a few minutes, until the cereal was gone, another bowl poured, and that, too, devoured. She wandered over to the couch, a convertible covered with anchors that Ernie had bought to please John, who naturally never said a word about it.
“Where is he, your boyfriend?” Marie asked finally.
“Out getting supplies.” The girl looked up quickly, a snap of the eyes revealing something Marie thought she understood.
“How long’s he been gone?”
The girl waited. “Day and a half.”
Marie nodded. “Maybe his car broke down.”
“That’s what I wondered.” The girl flung a spindly arm in the general direction of the kitchen. “I’m sorry about the mess. My boyfriend’s hardly even paper-trained.”
“Then maybe you should think about getting another boyfriend.”
“I told him, no sleeping on the beds. We didn’t sleep on your beds.”
“Thank you,” Marie said.
“It wasn’t my idea to break in here.”
“I’m sure it wasn’t.”
“He’s kind of hiding out, and I’m kind of with him.”
“I see,” Marie said, scanning the room for weapons: fireplace poker, dictionary, curtain rod. She couldn’t imagine using any of these things on the girl, whose body appeared held together with thread.
“He knocked over a gas station. Two, actually, in Portland.”
“That sounds serious.”
She smiled a little. “He’s a serious guy.”
“You could do better, don’t you think?” Marie asked. “Pretty girl like you.”
The girl’s big eyes narrowed. “How old are you?”
“Thirty-eight.”
“You look younger.”
“Well, I’m not,” Marie said. “My name is Marie, by the way.”
“I’m Tracey.”
“Tell me, Tracey,” Marie said. “Am I your prisoner?”
“Only until he gets back. We’ll clear out after that.”
“Where are you going?”
“Canada. Which is where he should’ve gone about six years ago.”
“A vet?”
Tracey nodded. “War sucks.”
“Well, now, that’s extremely profound.”
“Don’t push your luck, Marie,” Tracey said. “It’s been a really long week.”
They spent the next hours sitting on the porch, Marie thinking furiously in a chair, Tracey on the steps, the knife glinting in her fist. At one point Tracey stepped down into the gravel, dropped her jeans, and squatted over the spent irises, keeping Marie in her sights the whole time. Marie, who had grown up in a different era entirely, found this fiercely embarrassing. A wind came up on the lake; a pair of late loons called across the water. The only comfort Marie could manage was that the boyfriend, whom she did not wish to meet, not at all, clearly had run out for good. Tracey seemed to know this, too, chewing on her lower lip, facing the dooryard as if the hot desire of her stare could make him materialize.
“What’s his name?” Marie asked.
“None of your business. We met in a chemistry class.” She smirked at Marie’s surprise. “Premed.”
“Are you going back to school?”
Tracey threw back her head and cackled, showing two straight rows of excellent teeth. “Yeah, right. He’s out there right now paying our preregistration.”
Marie composed herself, took some silent breaths. “It’s just that I find it hard to believe—”
“People like you always do,” Tracey said. She slid Marie a look. “You’re never willing to believe the worst of someone.”
Marie closed her eyes, wanting Ernie. She imagined him leaving work about now, coming through the mill gates with his lunch bucket and cap, shoulders bowed at the prospect of the empty house. She longed to be waiting there, to sit on the porch with him over a pitcher of lemonade, comparing days, which hadn’t changed much over the years, really, but always held some ordinary pleasures. Today they would have wondered about John, thought about calling him, decided against it.
“You married?” Tracey asked, as if reading her mind.
“Twenty years. We met in seventh grade.”
“Then what are you doing up here alone?”
“I don’t know,” Marie said. But suddenly she did, she knew exactly, looking at this girl who had parents somewhere waiting.
“I know what you’re thinking,” the girl said.
“You couldn’t possibly.”
“You’re wondering how a nice girl like me ended up like this.” When Marie didn’t answer, she added, “Why do you keep doing that?”
“What?”
“That.” The girl pointed to Marie’s hand, which was making absent semicircles over her stomach. “You pregnant?”
“No,” Marie said, withdrawing her hand. But she had been, shockingly, for most of the summer; during John’s final weeks at home, she had been pregnant. Back then her hand had gone automatically to the womb, that strange, unpredictable vessel, as she and Ernie nuzzled in bed, dazzled by their change in fortune. For nights on end they made their murmured plans, lost in a form of drunkenness, waiting for John to skulk through the back door long past curfew, when they would rise from their nestled sheets to face him — their first child now, not their only — his splendid blue eyes glassy with what she hoped were the normal complications of adolescence, equal parts need and contempt.
They did not tell him about the pregnancy, and by the first of September it was over prematurely, Marie balled into a heap on their bed for three days, barely able to open her swollen eyes. “Maybe it’s for the best,” Ernie whispered to her, petting her curled back. They could hear John ramming around in the kitchen downstairs, stocking the cupboards with miso and bean curd and other things they’d never heard of, counting off his last days in the house by changing everything in it. As Ernie kissed her sweaty head, Marie rested her hand on the freshly scoured womb that had held their second chance. “It might not have been worth it,” Ernie whispered, words that staggered her so thoroughly that she bolted up, mouth agape, asking, “What did you say, Ernie? Did you just say something?” Their raising of John had, after all, been filled with fine wishes for the boy; it was not their habit to acknowledge disappointment, or regret, or sorrow. As the door downstairs clicked shut on them and John faded into another night with his mysterious friends, Marie turned to her husband, whom she loved, God help her, more than she loved her son. Take it back, she wanted to tell him, but he mistook her pleading look entirely. “She might’ve broken our hearts,” he murmured. “I can think of a hundred ways.” He was holding her at the time, speaking softly, almost to himself, and his hands on her felt like the meaty intrusion of some stranger who’d just broken into her bedroom. “Ernie, stop there,” she told him, and he did.