“Once, in the motel. The hot and cold water blend together.”
“That’s right. Upstairs, the hot water is the left handle, and the cold is the right. When the temperature’s right, turn the knob in the middle and the water will come out from the showerhead above.”
“Thank you, ma’am.” I glance at Nessa, and it’s impossible not to smile at her syrup nose. “Melissa is going to give you a bath. Mind her, okay?”
Nessa nods and grabs onto one of Melissa’s hands, holding it in her two sticky ones. My heart lurches, because it’s always been me and her . . . but that’s not normal. Not for most people in the world, and I want Nessa to be normal. I want her to stand on her own two feet, to have other people she can really, truly depend on. She’s not a baby anymore. She deserves a real mama, a mama like Melissa.
Sorry, Mama.
Melissa leads her away by the hand, and I rinse off our plates in the sink, fascinated by the blue-colored squirt soap and the sponge, which is soft on one side and bark-rough on the other.
“This is a dishwasher,” my father says, walking up beside me. He opens a door and pulls out the top and bottom racks, which roll out on little wheels.
“You don’t have to wash them by hand. You rinse them in the sink, then stack them on the racks. Cups and glasses on top, plates and pots on the bottom. The machine does the washing for us.”
“With electricity?”
“Smart girl.”
He walks back and forth from the table, handing me plates and cups, which I rinse under a stream of hot water and stack as he instructed. He whistles a song I don’t know, but a corner or two of the melody sounds familiar.
I fumble a dish and he rescues it midair. I flinch, before I realize he’s only passing it back to me. I concentrate on loading the utensils. If he noticed, he doesn’t say.
“Slippery suckers, aren’t they?” he says, his words gruff.
I nod at his boots, and then the last dish is stacked, the last fork rinsed and placed.
“See?”
He takes a light blue box from a shelf in the cupboard and pours what look like colored crystals into a small compartment built into the door, then clicks it shut. I watch as he turns a did above the door to Normal Wash. I jump back as the machine comes to life. We both smile.
“Go on up and take your shower. We have a two o’clock appointment with Mrs. Haskell. Her regular office is about twenty miles from here. She has tests for you girls, to get you ready for school.”
I nod when my voice fails me. School, like the girls in my books. My stomach churns as I pass Melissa, who’s on her knees next to the tub in the first-floor bathroom, squinching her eyes shut as Nessa splashes bubbles all over the floor.
I think of Nessa’s back and make a beeline up the stairs and straight into the bathroom connected to my new room, closing the door behind me with my foot. I make it to the toilet just in time as the pancakes and bacon thrust up and out, landing with a plunk and my own splash into the toilet water.
I don’t want to go to school. The woods are my school.
I think of the motel, and teaching Ness how to use a toilet after she’d pulled a handful of leaves from her coat pocket and motioned toward the trees out past the parking lot. Tears stung my eyes, seeing her joy in not having to trek out into the darkness of strange, cold places. She flushed the toilet with a grin, watching the contents spin and spin and then, like magic, disappear.
Again, her eyes shouted. Again!
I run my shower, the water lacking the fishy creek smell I’d grown used to and even liked after a while. Cupping my hands under the stream, I splash water onto my face. Once I double-check that I’m locked in, I strip naked, squaring off with the full-length mirror on the back of the shower door. I’ve never seen my whole self all at once before.
I see lots of angles connected to bones. I turn around and strain over my shoulder, my eyes traceing the white lines left by the switch, and the two purplish red upraised circular scars from Mama’s cigarettes, just below my left shoulder. All that’s fresh is a bruise on my upper arm, where I’d slipped down some rocks while chasing a quail.
I stand under the stream of hot water. I could stand here forever. The peachy-pink bottle on the shelf squirts liquid soap onto a puffy scrubby thing hanging from the showerhead. The shampoo has black letters written on it: Scrub hair. And another bottle, called conditioner, has more black words: After shampoo, put on hair. Wait a few minutes. Rinse off.
So I do both, lingering in the heat and steam until I’m clean from the inside out. I think of Saint Joseph and thank him for all of it—plentiful amounts of food, the miracle of electricity, inside flush toilets, clean, running water, bubbles for Jenessa, heat and blankets and the thick, plush towel that wraps around my body nearly twice, hanging down to my bony ankles.