“I’ve got to get away, baby. Be with some people my age, you know? I mean, I really, really need this.” Her mother smiles beautifully. The girl doesn’t doubt that what she says is true, but there are things the girl really, really needs also. Still, she tries to act like an adult. Her mother doesn’t belong to her. Her mother needs this.
The car pulls out of the driveway and, left alone, the girl creeps through the house. It’s so quiet that even sitting on the sofa makes a huge noise. She moves like light, silent but not unnoticed through the hallway, into the dining room they never use, out back into the yard. No one is there.
It isn’t until much later that she starts to feel scared, once it seems certain that the sun will set and she will be alone until day breaks again. That changes everything. She locks the doors, but that does nothing to keep the darkness out. There are gaps, secret holes in the house. There are bushes right outside where anything could hide. The kitchen cabinets look sinister. She doesn’t open them. She turns on the TV in the living room to have a voice nearby. That way, if she hears something like a floorboard creaking upstairs or a man sharpening his butcher knife she can blame it on the TV even if she knows it’s not the TV.
In the morning she’s happy to find that she survived the night, but she’s not going to take any chances again. She picks up the phone.
“Remember you said if I ever needed anything?”
“Sort of.” Trey exhales, the breath amplified by the telephone line.
“You said it.”
“Okay. All right.”
“Well. Do you want to come over for supper tonight? I’ll cook it for you.”
“You want to make me dinner?”
“Sure.”
“What about your mother?”
“She’s out of town.”
There is a lot of silence on the line—space for her to imagine the room he’s standing in. Torn linoleum and a kitchen table painted to look like oak. Dog hair everywhere. A chipped china sugar bowl someone she doesn’t know anything about once gave Trey.
“What time?” he asks.
*
Her mother left her with plenty to eat: cottage cheese, sliced salami, some frozen dumplings, canned soup, peas. Nothing she could serve a man for dinner. She has twenty dollars, emergency money. When she hangs up the phone with Trey she’s all air. That seems like an emergency to her.
At the store she purchases chicken breasts, broccoli, white rice, and frozen pound cake. She waits outside for a guy who agrees to buy her wine coolers. He says it’s no trouble at all and starts to laugh. He enjoys holding that door open for her.
*
“Ding dong,” Trey says. Her or the sound a doorbell would make?
“Trey,” and then properly, “Won’t you please come in?”
She’s conscious of where he looks, though there’s nothing unusual about her house: overstuffed, windows that have slipped some from their sills, dusty rugs, and on the walls, prints of fishermen in dangerous waters.
“I’ve got to finish up in the kitchen.” And into the kitchen they both go. She takes the broccoli off the stove and pours it through a colander. The steam rises up around her head and Trey, as if blown by the wind, presses his body up against her back. There, she thinks, now, finally, he will kill me. He grabs on to the edge of the sink and pulls in tightly, holding on, spooning her from behind. She stills the colander. He moves his hands up to her neck. No one says a thing. He breathes behind her ear, covering and calming her the way one might an epileptic. Which is close to what she feels like.
Trey was in his twenties the day she was born. She doesn’t fight him off. She wants to see just how wrong something can get.
Eventually he clears his throat. He lets her go. The wind dies down and Trey has a seat.
*
It turns out not to matter much what she made for dinner. Trey stares at her while he eats, not noticing the difference: broccoli, chicken, rice. She wishes they could agree not to talk, better to just sit there looking at each other, but she can’t keep her mouth from moving.
“You all right?” she asks him when the room gets too quiet.
“Fine, fine, fine.” He doesn’t want his wine cooler. She drinks two and pours him a glass of milk for dinner. She eats slowly. She’s not sure how things are going to go afterward and she wants time to make a plan.
“Down in Florida,” he says finally, “some people went out on their motorboat for a joyride. When they couldn’t see land anymore they stopped for a swim. One, two, three, four they jumped overboard, cannonballing, back dives from the deck, showing off. They swam about, joking, talking about the food they were going to eat, the beers they were going to drink that afternoon. Eventually one woman got cold and headed back to the boat. That was when they realized their trouble. No one had let down a ladder. At first it was funny. They were bobbing a few feet away from their potato salad, their cell phones, and not one of them could scale the side of that fiberglass boat.” Trey strokes his chin to make her wait for the rest of the story. “The Coast Guard found the boat a couple days later, floating like a phantom ship. Hamburgers and whatnot, rotted in the sun, covered with flies. The bodies washed up later.”
The girl wonders if Trey planned to tell her this story. If he’d saved up something to talk about, something he thought might make her like him, a story about dead people and flies. She feels sorry for Trey. He doesn’t understand much.
“They found a lady’s fingernail dug into the side of the boat.” Trey raises his eyebrows for her reaction.
“How’d you know what kind of dives and jumps they did if no one lived?”
He looks off over her head and laughs before taking a bite of food. He chews slowly, swallows. “Isn’t that it exactly?” He snaps his lips together. “That’s the difference between where you’re at and where I’m standing.”
“What?”
“You’ve got a clearer view.”
“Well, you’ve got your driver’s license.”
No plan comes to her and the meal is done. Trey wipes his mouth on a napkin before standing up. She doesn’t look at him. She knows he’s coming.
When he kisses her she has a strange thought: I’m kissing a water buffalo or maybe a rhinoceros, a creature foreign and large, an animal only seen in photos. Maybe it’s his mustache. He grabs on to her butt with both hands kneading and dividing. Strange new territory, and all she wonders is What’s next? What is the next thing he’ll do to me? And then, Do it now, because she needs to know what comes next.
Each move he makes gets carved into her. Not her flesh, as flesh heals, but carved like stone. She’ll have his sharpness and breath with her always now. She’ll be an old woman sitting on a porch and she’ll be able to pull Trey out, get that moment back whenever she needs it, even if he’s dead then.