“One egg feeds a family of five.”
“Where you going to find a family that eats emu eggs?”
“Internet, maybe? Beats me.”
She crunched some ice from her drink. “I’ve been wanting to get into stocks my whole life. Something safe, but something with a good payback. My bank CDs are getting like, well I’m not sure, but those stocks I hear are going up 20 percent and all.”
“Well, some of mem are, Caryn. The thing to remember is a lot of those stocks weren’t up at all last year. Stocks should be long term. If you want to play them short for a big return, well, that’s where you get burned. Still beat emus, though.”
She seemed somehow burdened by this idea. “The little guys, like Chet and me, we ought to have some way of getting profits like the big boys. He works hard. I work hard. Get to the end of the year and what do you have? Same as you started the year off with. Lauren’s chippin’ about college already. I don’t even know if she’s smart enough. But it costs real bread.”
“There’s a couple of education trusts that are—”
“—Want to see her?”
“Uh... yeah.”
Caryn led me back into the living room and down a short hallway. We stood outside the door on our right. Caryn raised her fist and knocked as she pushed open the door. “Sweetie? Lauren? This here’s Art, one of our new friends?”
Chet had said she was ten, and he wasn’t lying. Pedophiles usually round the age down. Lauren was cute in a plain, wholesome way, slender and rather tall. She stood there beside the bed at loose attention, her hands folded behind her back and her feet turned in, looking not quite at me and not quite away. She had her mother’s dark eyes and nice skin. Dad’s dark hair. Caryn had dressed her in a simple blue smock dress, white socks turned down and red canvas tennies with cartoon characters on them. Her hair was parted in the middle and tied off in two opposing pigtails that fell to her shoulders. The pigtails are a well-known deviant’s delight, and I was instantly furious at Lauren being turned out by this woman next to me, her mother. Lauren was the picture of innocence, and I wanted to run out of the house with her and take her someplace where her childhood could be removed like a bad part and replaced with a new, better one. One of my faults is that I feel children are precious. There was a TV going in the corner — music videos — and an open textbook on the bed. Dangling from the closet door were a couple of clothes hangers with a skirt and blouse on them, still packaged in clear plastic from the cleaners. In another corner stood a full-length mirror framed by those makeup lights you see backstage.
“Oh. Hi.”
Chet had told me he “started her” when she was two, taking pictures of her naked, getting her “used to things.” He gradually escalated the touching to include himself. He turned her to friends for profit when she was six — more pictures, more touching. She really took to it. Anything you wanted. Chet had ruined an entire life. In that moment, if he had been there with us, I would have had to restrain myself from pushing him into the hallway out of his daughter’s sight and killing him bare-handed. I knew there was no way that Lauren would ever have her childhood replaced with a better one. It would be her foundation forever, a nightmare from which she could never quite awaken, a painful haze through which she sleepwalked the daily thing called her life. Lauren had the resigned eyes and the aura of passive invincibility found in nearly all children who have escaped to the last place they can go — to the private, silent cave of their own selves.
She looked at me very briefly, and I looked very briefly back, trying to tell her with my eyes that I was not what she thought I was. But I could tell by the way she looked away that she already knew who I was, and why I was here. There are few more heartbreaking expressions in the world than that of a child who has given up hope on you.
“Your dad tells me you’re a good student,” I said.
She shrugged, her gaze fell to the carpet and she mumbled, “Pretty good.”
“What’s your favorite subject?”
“Art.”
“His name is Art, honey. Isn’t that nice?”
“I know,” Lauren answered, with a slow glance at her mother and just a hint of impatience.
“You like that,” I asked, “the drawing and painting?”
“It’s all on computer. I made a picture.”
“Show him,” said Caryn.
Lauren stepped over to her dresser and took a piece of paper off the top. It was kind of a montage, like kids used to make with construction paper and clips from magazines. There was an image of desert sand dunes at night, blue in the light of a full moon, one of those mood shots used to advertise perfume, or maybe a utility vehicle. I guess she’d scanned it in first. Then there were small smiling faces within the dunes — models and movie stars. At the bottom was a candle in a shiny gold candleholder, and the flame seemed to be reaching up into the desert and lighting the faces looking out of the sand.
“That’s really something,” I said. I didn’t have to fake my admiration at all — I was truly befuddled that a ten-year-old could make such a sophisticated piece of work on a computer. I held the piece out and studied it. I told her I had a computer at home, but it was always giving me problems and flashing up options I didn’t call for and didn’t know what to do with.
She looked at me with her calm, subdued eyes. “Click help.”
“Help?”
“On the toolbar. Help. Then do what it says.”
“Well, thanks. I’ll remember that.”
She took back the sheet and set it on top of the dresser. Then she hiked herself onto the bed and looked at me, then at her mother. “I’ve got the stomachache,” she said.
“Ah, honey, I’ll get you something for it. Don’tcha worry about a thing. Come on, Art, let’s go make up something good for Lauren’s tummy. See you in a while, sweetie. Say good-bye to Art for now.”
“ ’Bye, Art.”
“Good-bye, Lauren.”
In the kitchen, Caryn mixed up Lauren’s medicine: a big mug of whole milk, with a shot of chocolate liqueur, a shot of cheap bourbon and some cinnamon sprinkled on top. She put it in the microwave to warm it up.
“Settles her stomach,” said Caryn. “She... really likes it.”
Not even Caryn could look at me as she said this. I watched her quick little smile come and go, and she opened the microwave and handed me the cup. “Take it to her, and don’t touch.”
I knocked on her door and waited for her to say something. I heard the book shut, then the rustling of fabric on fabric. She opened the door and looked up at me. I held out the mug to her and tried again, with my eyes, to tell her I was not who she thought I was. She took the cup in both hands and sipped some, her eyes focused down at the liquid like a kid will do. Then she looked up at me again and smiled just a little. A smile of invitation. She cocked her head and closed her eyes slowly, then opened them again about halfway in a sleepy, bedroom look — a gesture so startling I wanted, again, to just grab her and make a run for it. Daylight. Freedom.
“Hang in there,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because I’m asking you to.”
I had to wonder what my team, picking up every word that was said in here, made of this statement.
“You have to talk to Mom.”
“I will. Believe me.”
“I do what she says. And Dad says.”
“It’s going to be all right.”
She looked at me with her dark dead eyes and shut the door.
An hour later the men were drunk and eating hamburgers and store-bought potato salad. I drank right along with them, but I can hold a lot of booze and not show it. The evening had turned cool so everyone had on light coats or sweaters. The sun was still a half an hour from setting and I pictured Johnny and Frances sitting in their car, just beyond the cinder-block wall that ended the backyard. I pictured Louis in the black antmobile, dressed in his exterminator’s costume with his automatic in the big radio holster. I pictured Lauren sitting on her bed, watching videos, drinking milk and bourbon to dull her nerves against the things to come.