The girl’s head jerked in Olivia’s direction. Something flashed across her face—not panic, exactly, but something like it. Awkwardly, she got to her feet, in that way that pregnant women have. She was all belly. The rest of her was slender; her legs, poking out from cut-off dungarees, were a young girl’s legs. She waddled, off balance, straight to Olivia, like one of the baby ducklings in that children’s story.
“Stop right there,” Olivia ordered, putting an arm up like a traffic cop. Her eyes scanned the kitchen counter for something she could use as a weapon, but there were only crumpled bags of junk food from her ride up here in the middle of the night. And the jar of paste she’d used when she arrived, to paste the things she’d found here to the wall: David’s cracked Wayfarer sunglasses and unopened mail and the newspaper still unread from the day he died and Arthur’s tiny straw hat that he hated to wear and dead flowers she’d found in a vase by the bed. Before her run, she’d pasted all of that to the wall. Oh, Olivia groaned inwardly now, how can you defend yourself with paper and paste? She remembered that childhood game: paper, scissors, rock. Rock always won, she thought.
“Look at me,” the girl said with a nervous laugh. “I’m harmless.” Taking a step closer, she added, “I’m desperate.”
The smell of her own sweat slapped Olivia in the face. “Don’t you come any closer, you little trespasser,” Olivia said, sounding foolish rather than threatening. The Lord’s Prayer ran through her mind for the first time since her childhood. “Forgive us our trespasses.” Or was it “trespassers”? Olivia picked up the ruler she’d stuck in the jar of glue and held it up.
“Don’t call the police or anything,” the girl said.
“You bet your ass I’m calling the police,” Olivia told her. “Breaking and entering and who knows what else.” She tried to make a plan, to figure out how to call the police and keep the girl from running away.
“I didn’t take anything except, like, eight ounces of water,” the girl said, indignant. “Jeez.”
Her voice was a teenager’s, a voice that was capable of uncontrollable giggles and passionate sobs over small things like dead animals by the roadside or a Top Ten love song. Olivia knew this because she’d been that type of teenager herself. She saw something familiar in the girl’s eyes. It was what Olivia had felt sitting in her room with the canopy bed and pink dotted-swiss bedspread and matching curtains and silver monogrammed hairbrush and hand mirror. Get me out of here, she used to think, begging the stars, the gods, whoever might be “out there” listening to a teenager’s cry for help.
Olivia looked at the girl and remembered all this, but she thought, Still.
Still, she was a stranger. A stranger who had broken into Olivia’s house.
“What the hell are you doing in my house?” Olivia said. “If you haven’t taken anything, then why the hell did you break in? People don’t break into other people’s houses.”
“I was just so hot.” She shrugged, keeping her young arms—also covered with freckles—held out in surrender.
Olivia had to call the police. The phone, nestled against the far wall, seemed miles away. She could hear herself telling them, We have a B and E here. Barbara Stanwyck would be proud. But a pregnant teenager, she thought, how dangerous could she be? And she heard her own teenage self crying, Get me out of here. She had saved herself with Melanie records and cheap incense and rock concerts at the hockey rink that doubled as an auditorium. This girl had found sex. Still. Olivia considered everything. When she licked her lips, she almost tasted the black cherry lip gloss she used to wear, almost smelled the Love’s lemon scent that she used to spray on herself after a bath.
“I found the extra key. Under the rock by the door.” The girl let her arms drop, and she giggled, the way Olivia knew she could. “It’s probably not a good idea to keep it there,” she said. “That’s the first place a burglar would look. My aunt, her name is Dolly—I swear that’s her real name, not even a nickname or anything. She used to keep her money in her freezer because she thought a robber would never look there, but then she read in a magazine—I think it was You!—that the freezer is the first place a robber would look.”
Olivia’s eyes drifted toward her freezer, where she had twenties rolled into neat bundles, hidden behind the ice-cube trays.
“You have to go,” Olivia said. The air between her and the girl seemed almost electrically charged.
“I’m not a robber or anything,” the girl said, insulted. “Jeez. I just wanted to cool off. I think it’s like a hormone thing or something.” On the girl’s arm, in the spot where children of Olivia’s generation got their smallpox vaccination, was a tattoo of a butterfly.
“Cool, huh?” the girl said, grinning. “It hurt like hell, though. I’d never get another one. I hate pain.”
Olivia nodded. This close, she saw that the girl’s shorts were unzipped to allow room for the baby. Under her too-small T-shirt, they gaped open. This broke Olivia’s heart.
“I guess,” the girl said, “that having a baby hurts a lot.” Her eyes were that odd yellow-brown that some redheads have. “Right?” she asked Olivia.