When I reached for the towel I knew was hanging behind the door, something sharp—Wavy’s knee—caught me in the kidney, almost doubled me over, and I slid into the wall with a thump.
“You kids quit making so much noise,” Val yelled from her bedroom.
I waited for Val to open the door, turn on the light, and find me wrestling with her naked daughter, but Val didn’t get up. She didn’t even call again. It boiled my fucking blood.
“You stupid bitch! I could be in here raping her! And you can’t even get your ass out of bed to come see what she’s screaming about? What the fuck is wrong with you?”
No answer to that.
While I was yelling at Val, Wavy finally stopped fighting me, and I got the towel around her as best I could. In the dark, I carried her up the stairs, expecting more darkness, but the moon lit up her whole room. Full moon. Did that explain what I’d done?
After I got Wavy under the covers I took the towel and dried her hair. She laid there shivering and let me.
“You have to talk to me,” I said. We weren’t gonna solve this with charades. “You’re not dirty. Why would Val say that?”
“Liam not to be trusted.” She always said it that way, like it was his name.
“What about him?”
“Sitting on his lap.”
“When?”
I knelt next to the bed, with the covers pulled tight over Wavy, but she slipped a hand out of the sheets and touched my arm. Then she found my hand and squeezed it. I squeezed back.
“Before I could read,” she said. “And Mama said, ‘Don’t touch her. That’s dirty! If you touch her you’ll go to hell! No one touches her!’”
“Did Liam do something to you?” After what I’d done, I knew I didn’t have no business feeling self-righteous, but this hot thing welled up in me. If Liam had messed with her, I was gonna kill him. Choke his fucking neck with my bare hands. “What did he do to you?”
“Nothing.”
“What was he doing when Val told him that?”
“Reading to me.”
I tried to picture Liam with Wavy on his lap, reading her a story. I couldn’t manage it ’til I remembered even my pa did some nice things. Took me to a few ball games. If Jesse Joe Barfoot had a few days when he was a decent father, maybe Liam had some, too.
And Val was crazy as hell. The kind of person who could see her daughter on her husband’s lap and think the worst thing. Might explain why Liam never went near Wavy. If your wife accused you of doing something nasty to your baby daughter, you might think twice before you ever touched her again.
“He didn’t touch you? Not—” With her holding my hand like she still trusted me, my throat about closed up around what I wanted to ask. “Not in your private place?”
“No. She said he would, but he didn’t. She said all men would.”
“Wavy, I’m sorry I—”
“Now you’ll go to hell and it’s my fault, because I’m dirty.”
“If I go to hell, it won’t be because of you.” I was definitely going to hell, but that wasn’t her fault. “And you’re not dirty.”
“You said.”
“I said it was dirty, not that you were dirty. You’re a good girl.” My knees were killing me, so I sat down cross-legged next to the bed, keeping her hand in mine.
“Why is it dirty? You liked it,” she said.
“Because you’re thirteen.” There were a lot of other reasons I shouldn’t have been fooling around with her, but that was the big one. “You’re not old enough.”
“I’m old enough to like it.”
She pulled more of my arm under the edge of the sheet and pressed her cold, bare little tit into my hand. I jerked it away without even thinking. For a while, she laid there quiet. Then she snaked her arm out of the covers and dropped something that clattered next to my knee.
I patted the floor and found her ring. I’d been so hell-fired against anybody turning it into something nasty, and then that’s what I did.
“Wavy, this is yours. I gave you this because I love you.”
She turned over, away from me, and sighed real heavy. She’d used up all her words. Maybe for months. I’d never heard her say so much. Holding that ring in my hand, I came up with three things I could do. One was really bad. One was too awful to even think about. That left me just the one option.
The radiator rattled and it got me moving. I pitched the wet towel on top of it and sat down on the bed. I held the ring on the tip of my pinky to keep track of it while I pulled off my boots and jacket. I shoved Wavy toward the wall and lifted up just the quilt, keeping the sheet between us. She was wound tight when I put my arm around her, her spine stiff against my chest.
“I love you, Wavy. I love you.” I said it until she relaxed. “Now put your ring back on.”