She looked like a child herself, Olivia thought.
“Oh,” Olivia said, “I don’t think it’s really that bad.”
“You don’t have any kids?” the girl said, lazily scratching a mosquito bite on her arm.
Olivia got the feeling that the girl was sizing her up, taking some kind of measure of her.
“No kids yet,” Olivia said with false cheeriness.
Then she had another, frightening thought. She had seen movies about teenaged girls who were ruthless killers. It was their youth, their seeming innocence that got them into the places they needed to be.
She swallowed hard, then forced herself to say, “My husband and I are working on it.” She hoped the girl hadn’t heard the way her voice caught on the word husband,
The girl narrowed her eyes. “No luck yet, though, huh?”
Olivia shook her head. “Not yet.”
“I’m pregnant you know,” the girl said. Then she laughed that adolescent laugh. “No shit, Sherlock, huh?” Her face clouded as quickly as it had cleared. “It sucks,” she says. “It sucks big-time.”
There was a moment of silence, less like the awkwardness between strangers and more like a settling in.
Olivia said, “Where’s the father?”
She looked at Olivia blank-faced, then giggled. “Oh,” she said, “the father. Ben. The asshole. He goes to college here and he was supposed to stick around all summer so I go there, to the college, to his fraternity house—which, I just want to say, is something I don’t believe in. I mean, they’re so fascist. Like they blackball people they don’t like, and they’re prejudiced and everything, and they drink until they puke, honest to God. But Ben said I could live in the basement during the summer and no one would even know because only like five people are even there at all in the summer and there’s a bathroom there and everything.”
Olivia wondered if the girl would even stop for air. She didn’t. She kept talking.
“Except Ben, that asshole, was supposed to be one of those five people and sort of take care of me. You know. And then yesterday he tells me that A, he got a job at a camp in upstate New York and so he’s leaving, and B, they’re coming in to exterminate the place because it’s infested with fleas or something and they have to bomb it and no one can go in for like three days because this bomb is really bad shit, chemicals and everything, and you can’t breathe the air, especially me. Because if I breathe the air and the baby gets retarded or something, no one’s going to want it.”
Finally, she paused to twist a ring that she wore on her index finger, a silver star and moon, like a ring that Olivia herself might have worn when she was a teenager twenty years earlier.
“That’s a fact,” the girl said, her voice soft now, and distant. “No one will adopt deformed babies or stupid babies or HIV babies unless they’re from someplace like Romania where they’ve been tortured really bad.”
The girl looked up, away from her hands and right at Olivia. All those freckles and the tip of her nose sunburned made her seem even younger, like a little girl herself.
“Anyway,” she said, taking a big loud breath, “thanks for the water.” She picked up a tattered backpack, made from patches of velvet and sewn with thick gold thread. Again, Olivia thought of herself as a teenager, the vest she had that was made in the same ragtag fashion. She used to wear that vest for special occasions only—rock concerts, dates with older boys.
The girl moved past Olivia, who stood this entire time in the center of her empty kitchen, and toward the door, trailing patchouli.
“Wait!” Olivia said, and hurried to the girl, grabbing her by the shoulder to stop her from leaving. Was it that familiar scent that made her keep the girl there? Olivia remembered the jar of patchouli oil she’d kept on her dresser, how she’d carefully put droplets on her pulse points, the way it clung to everything. Or was it her own loneliness, her own desperation?
“Where will you go?” she asked. The girl’s freckled arm under Olivia’s hand was warm from the sun.
The girl shrugged.
“Where will you stay for the three days?”
She looked at Olivia, puzzled. Someone should tell this girl to use sunscreen on her face, to get her hair trimmed—the edges were all split ends. Someone should help her.
“While the fraternity house is getting bombed,” Olivia said.
“Oh, that.”
The girl twisted her ring again. Her fingers were swollen, Olivia noticed.
“I haven’t exactly thought it through,” she told Olivia. “But at the college, there’s this whole street of fraternity houses. So I figure they must all have basements, right? And they can’t all have fleas, right?”
“This boy,” Olivia said. “Ben?”
The girl nodded.
“Has he given you any money? Have you seen a doctor?”