The thought of her mother still caused an ache in her chest. “Low blow, Cameron. I’m not denying anything. I simply let Bethany out so he’d be convinced.”
“If Achilles killed her, he already knew you weren’t her when you answered the phone.”
She hated it when he threw logic back in her face. “I haven’t figured that out yet. I’m still in the investigative mode. I don’t know anything.”
She could have lied again and said she didn’t feel anything, that only Bethany did. She could have avoided his question by saying she didn’t remember what she felt. Instead she told him the truth. “He scared us.”
She realized what she’d said and switched immediately to first person point of view, hoping in vain that Cameron hadn’t caught the little gaff. “I think he liked to scare Bethany a lot. I think he liked to get under her guard with how special she was to him, how much he needed her, wanted her, then he’d throw some little thing in there to undermine her. A master manipulator.”
Just like Bud Traynor.
*
It was dark and cold, and her tummy rumbled painfully as if she hadn’t eaten for days. Her cheeks were wet, her eyes, glued shut with goop, aching around the rims. She hid in the closet behind the plastic sweater hanger so Jada wouldn’t find her.
Max stretched her hand out and wiped the tears from her cheeks, smooth, unlined cheeks, plump with baby fat. If she could open her eyes, she knew it would not be her closet she sat in, nor her body she moved in.
She was Bethany as an eight-year-old child.
Max opened her eyes and rolled with the vision, became Bethany Spring, burrowed into Bethany’s childhood suffering.
She heard voices and laughter, a squeal as they looked for her. Jada would find her in the end. She always did. And she always brought her friends with her to laugh at the fat girl’s tears.
Today it was worse. Today Jada had Billy Johnson over, along with Susie and Patty and Tommy. Billy Johnson. He was tall and handsome and the most popular boy in school, and once he’d even held the door open for Bethany. He hadn’t laughed. He’d smiled, and she could have sworn it was a real smile.
Now he was Jada’s friend, and he was Jada’s age, two years older than Bethany. Today, Jada had told them all how Bethany’s dress had blown up in the wind on the way home from school and shown her underpants. Her gargantuan underpants. Fatty panties, Jada had said. They’d all laughed. Even Billy. That’s when Bethany had hidden away in the closet.
She didn’t want to hate Jada. Jesus said it wasn’t good to hate. Jesus said you might not get to heaven if you hated people. So she didn’t hate Jada. She just couldn’t say she loved her.
Laughter, closer. She cowered against the wall. Her tummy rumbled again, and she wrapped her arms around it so the sound wouldn’t give away her hiding place.
Max reached up once more to wipe the tears and goop from the child’s eyes. She wanted to see.
Footsteps, rustling, muffled laughter, whispering. Then they were gone, just like that, the sounds hanging in the stale air of the closet to haunt her.
“Bethany.” She almost started crying again. Mommy. The door handle rattled, then the door itself was thrown open. Bethany scrambled out on her hands and knees and breathed in the flowery scent of her mother’s perfume.
“What did they say, sweetie?” Pulling her to the bed, her mother cuddled her to her bosom, then sat, arms still tight around her. Bethany curled her legs and lay her head in Mommy’s lap.
“Jada said I wore size extra fat.” Tears welled. She squeezed her eyes shut to keep the tell-tale drops from sneaking out. “Why does she hate me so much?”
“Oh, sweetie. She doesn’t hate you. She’s just trying to make friends. Every little girl wants to do that. Jada just does it the wrong way sometimes.”
Bethany didn’t know the right way either. As hard as she tried to make people like her, she didn’t have any friends to impress at all. But if she did, oh yes, if she did, she’d never say bad things about Jada just to make them like her. “I’d never do that to her,” she mumbled, her face pressed to her mother’s flour-dusted apron.
“You have to be tougher, sweetheart. People will always say things like that. They’ll call you fat, and they’ll call you ugly. You can’t listen to them. You have to remember that I love you anyway, no matter what you look like. You’re a beautiful little girl inside.”
No matter what she looked like. Fat and ugly is what she looked like. No one else could ever love her. Only Mommy. Because mommies had to love their little girls. What if she got fatter? How fat could little girls get before even their mommies stopped loving them, too? New tears burned behind her eyelids.
With a rhythmic stroke of her fingers, Mommy pushed her hair behind her ear. Her hands were warm and smelled of baking chocolate.
“Jada’s mean,” she whispered to her mommy and hoped she would agree.