“No,” I say. My voice is perky as though I can’t wait to find out.
Alice takes my hand and pulls me until I am looking at her with all of my attention.
“Well,” she begins, and anxiety fills me head to toe.
But she continues. “Someone was following him too close. You’re not supposed to do that. You’re supposed to stay far away from the car in front of you. Then he slammed on his brakes, and the car behind him crashed right into the back of him! And it wasone of those really little cars so it got all dented. And then the driver of that stupid little car said she was going to call the police, but then he told her that when you hit someone from behind, it’s always your fault.Always.”
My heart pounds as she rambles on. I try to be patient. I don’t want to agitate her. But I am finding it difficult.
Alice keeps rambling.
“And then she gave him a lot of money so he wouldn’t go to the police or the insurance people—and you know what else?” She giggles then. “He gets to keep all the money when that happens.”
I open my mouth, am about to ask her what she means by this and how she knows. Is he filled with rage? Is he proud of making people crash their cars?
But I don’t ask. I don’t care. I need to get outside to that fence and see where it leads, see where we are in relation to the town. The sky is clear. The air is warm enough to go out in these clothes. At least while it’s daylight.
I don’t know if I can trust this instinct, but it is strong. And it tells me to leave this house.
“Come on!” Alice says. “Do you want to see where I was born?”
Alice takes me back down the hall, past the bedroom on the left where I slept. Past another bedroom on the left, then a bathroom on the right and a third bedroom after that. This is a strange house—I have not seen any stairs. It’s laid out like a long ranch, but has the facade of a farm house, with the porch and the gable roof.
Next to the last bedroom is a smaller room. It’s dark and windowless and has a sink and hookup for a washer. The floor is not wood like the other rooms and the hallway. It has hard ceramic tile. There is some kind of toilet in the corner.
“Here!” she says. “Right here! My mother didn’t like hospitals.”
I look at her and wonder if she knows how strange that sounds.Her mother had a home birth in a cold, dark laundry room. Alice rarely leaves the house herself. But I come from a different world. Maybe they couldn’t afford the cost of the hospital. Maybe they didn’t trust the government to educate their child. Maybe they didn’t trust anyone.
And then—wait. He said my clothes were drying in the laundry room. There are no machines in this room. No drying rack. No clothes.
“Alice,” I ask. “Is there another place where you do the laundry?”
Alice shrugs. She has no idea and she doesn’t care.
“Now it’s time to play!” she says. She takes my hand and we walk.
We sit on the floor of a small room at the front of the house. There are shelves on the walls, filled with children’s books and toys—and dust. There is so much dust it makes me wonder if anyone ever cleans this house. And it is then that the small memories come flooding in—memories from last night and this morning. Walking up the porch with loose steps. Paint peeling from the shingles. Even in the storm and darkness I could see the patches of brown. The floorboards of my room, and the hallway, are caked with a thick line of dirt—the dust that has condensed and slowly crept to the sides as air flows through the rooms. And the kitchen, the one with the phone that is dead—its floor is yellowing. White linoleum turning color from age and neglect.
Maybe I was wrong to think the man’s wife just died. No woman has kept this house for a long time. Years perhaps. And yet the clothes are freshly laundered. Maybe she was sick for a while.
Maybe she was young and didn’t know how to clean a house.
I have to find my clothes. I have to get outside.
“You be this girl,” Alice orders me. She hands me a small plastic figurine with chestnut hair. “Her name is Suzannah.”
I take the little doll and smile. “Okay,” I say.
“I’ll be Hannah. She has blond hair like me. It’s better to have blond hair. Did you know that? Is that why you make your brown hair blond? I can see your roots, you know.”
I want to tell her there’s a nicer way to ask a personal question like that, to be a parent to her because she needs one and it’s unthinkable that she lives this way, never leaving this filthy house, never seeing another child. But she is not my child, even though she slept in my arms and made me dream about Annie.
She is not your child. You’ll be leaving soon.
“What are you allergic to?” I ask her.
I think now about gathering information. Maybe it will help me leave here.
