Lucky wears nothing but a Mario Brothers sweatshirt.
Not twenty-four hours after his fever broke, his bare bum hangs out in the chill of the night air. He plays ball all by himself under the log cabin’s porch light. Tosses the ball up, claps his hands, and catches. Tosses, claps twice, catches. Tosses the ball way up, claps three times, catches.
“How you feeling, Lucky Star?” I try out a new nickname for him as I approach. “Did you take your medicine? The cherry syrup?”
“Yes, thank you,” he says. “Mama gave it to me before bed.”
I unlock the cabin door. “Come inside. Let’s have a look at you.”
He hops on the cot and I angle the desk lamp toward his tiny face. Crusty sores rim his lips. No doubt he’s been rubbing the rash. Kid still needs a doctor. “You know what helps you get all the way better? Rest and more rest. How come you aren’t asleep in your bed?”
“I like it here. I want to see the lady light up.”
“You do have a bed, right?” I promised Saint Veronica I’d ask these kinds of caretaking questions.
“It’s bang bang o’clock at my house.” He bangs his hands up and down on the straw mattress, and his unassuming genitals skip with the motion. He notices me looking and cups his hands between his legs, suddenly embarrassed. Unconsciously my own arms fold tight across my chest. For a heartbeat, we are both kids with nothing but our kid bodies between us and the complex and sharp-edged world.
“You curl up here, Lucky Star. I’ll go see what’s happening at your place.” Saint Veronica give me courage, what in the name of sin is going on with Lucky’s parents? I tuck Lucky under the flannel and denim quilt.
“Mama sings me a song,” he says.
“Well, I’ll go ask her to come out and sing it to you.” People lie to children all the time, right? Watch him, I nod at Rocco’s painting, as if perverse art is any kind of babysitter. The composition of tits and slits seems to nod back at me.
I only need to follow the sound of a blundering domestic row to find the right trailer. A small group of shadowy figures is a sure sign, too. I hear one bystander hiss, “This is the worst they’ve ever been.”
“You said that last time,” says the other. He points at me and shouts, “Here comes the new girl. Hey, girl, you ain’t thinkin’ ’bout goin’ in there, is ya?”
A sturdy woman with a mullet gets in my path. She’s the type who, if she lived in the city, I’d say she was a bull dyke, but in Crystal Beach she’s small-town tomboyish. “Bobby never invited you in,” she says.
I push past her, past all of them. Maybe I ought to stop and take a deep breath or something, except I’m kind of high being as mad as hell. Anger is a great motivator because it never operates alone. The anger of this moment has already joined forces with past angers. I’m always pent up—not-so-secretly waiting for any chance to unleash. I feel a familiar prickly heat radiate through my body as I stand outside their trailer. There’s a raised rabbit hutch to my left, twenty-four empty James Ready 5.5 bottles to my right. My whole body is vibrating. I storm in with such fervor, the welcome mat goes skittering under my step.
“Do you know where your kid is?” The question flares from my lips before I even take in the spectacle. Hal squirms on the linoleum floor; Bobby holds a forty-ounce bottle high, ready to bring it down on Hal’s grizzly white head. Brutal, aside from the bottle being plastic, and still half full. She’s fixing to crack him with a useless plastic bottle. Stinking cheap Georgi vodka trickles the length of Bobby’s arm, soaking into her blouse. She swings the bottle down and it bounces like a child’s Nerf bat off Hal’s head.
“Get on your feet, Hal.” I kick the refrigerator beside his crumpled body. Outside, a flashlight beam swoops past the window. I hope it’s not Rose. I want to spare her this uproar. “Where’s your boy, eh? Where’s Lucky?”
Bobby edges over to a vinyl accordion door, peeks inside a darkened room, and lets out a defeated sigh. She turns to Hal, shaking her head to tell him the room is empty. “I told you to put a screen on his window, Hal. Do I have to do everything around here?”
“Not even twenty-four hours after he comes down with a fever, and he’s outside unsupervised and half-naked,” I hiss.
“Who asked you?” Bobby spits back at me.
“Lucky did,” I tell her. “He was waiting outside the cabin for me. Says it’s too noisy at home to sleep.”
I put a hand on her shoulder, cautiously. She looks like she might haul off and punch me. Instead she turns to Hal, voice booming. “You told me you’d dry out, you s of a b. You told me you were gonna start being a real father. You said you wouldn’t do to your son what your Paps did to you. Those are your words, Hal. You said that, Hal. Ya fucking lying sack of manure.”
Hal’s brow screws up and, as he rises from the floor, his hulking chest pushes forward.
“I’ll remove any booze you got around here. We can have this place cleaned up before Lucky wakes up,” I say.
Hal looks from Bobby to me, back and forth. I can’t tell if he’s listening or just recouping before an attack. “You are not touchin’ th’ bottles tonight ’n’ not tomorr’a either,” he slurs, shaking his finger an inch from my nose.
“Have you ever even tried?” My edge has already been replaced by irritation. Hal hears it—the thin slip of weakness in my voice boosts his rage. In one swift, liquored moment, he catches hold of Bobby’s hair and clamps his other meat hook of a hand around my arm. The plastic vodka bottle bounces and spills across the grimy linoleum floor, and both Bobby and I start slipping around in the drunk puddle. But not Hal, no. Hal stays firmly rooted. Firm enough to shake us.
“Women,” he shouts. My hip hits the corner of the kitchenette counter, hard. The pain is blinding. I hear people gathered outside begin to speak louder. My mouth fills with bitter saliva. “Women ’n’ fuckin’ children,” Hal shouts again. “Women ‘n’—fuck!”
Behind us, the trailer door bangs open. The mullet-haired woman either kidney-punches Hal or kicks his knees out, and he goes crashing down to the wet floor beside us. Rose is in the doorway shouting, “Basta! Basta!”
Then Hal’s cursing gets caught in slow motion, even slower than the dreadful crawl of drunken violence. We all feel it—the suspended pause of astonishment. From out of Lucky’s room the unthinkable floats, baby blue and nearly three feet tall. It points a fuzzy arm at us and freezes. A terrible feeling rips into me. Hal lets go of me, and the feeling grows worse. I lean into his bulky body, not wanting to be alone before this vision. My eyes search the air for fishing line or any kind of string holding this stuffed thing in the air.
“Make a wish,” babbles Bobby. “Make a wish, make a wish, make a wish …”
“I wish that Lucky would always be safe,” I say, desperate to answer her. The awful weight of inconceivability slightly lifts as I say it aloud. Something deep inside me almost accepts that what haunts us is a hovering jumbo Care Bear. I freeze, waiting for the ridiculousness of it all to counteract my terror. It’s too funny to be scary, isn’t it? My chin trembles uncontrollably.
“I wish Hal would stop drinking,” Bobby cries.
Hal hollers, “Yes, anything, yes.”
“I surrender to a higher power,” Mullet shuffles herself down beside us. Rose, too, hunkers low in the doorway.
“Cold turkey, Hal?” asks Bobby.
“Alright! Alright, almighty.”
The stuffed Care Bear falls to the floor, lifeless.
The five of us breathlessly rise and robot around the trailer, our movements detached from reason or emotion. We solemnly assist Bobby as she fills a hockey bag with bottles. We right tipped kitchen chairs and straighten furniture. A bottle of Windex and a rag subconsciously make their way into my hands, and I find myself cleaning surfaces. Mullet beats and beats sofa cushions, releasing clouds of dust.
None of us touch the Care Bear. Bobby gets brave and emphatically steps over it to get into Lucky’s bedroom. Then she emphatically steps over it again to rejoin us in the kitchen. “Hal won that bear at the duck shoot. He won it for Lucky the last day the Park was open. He was a sure shot then, practically a whole different man,” Bobby tells us. “It’s called Make-a-Wish Bear. See the shooting star on his tummy?”
I don’t dare look. I’ll take Bobby’s word for it.
A few onlookers murmur as we exit with a clinking hockey bag full of bottles. I hear one whisper, “Hal quits for one whole week, and that girl’s a miracle worker.”
“I’ll bet you twenty dollars he don’t last a …” says another.
I run my tongue across my front teeth, swallow back a bit of blood. I’ve never been in a brawl before, if you can call that a brawl. I survived whatever that was that just happened.
Back in the cabin, Lucky’s tiny head on the pillow is my touchstone. When Bobby scoops him up he sings a line from “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” with his eyes closed. Is he dreaming?
“It’s his favourite song,” Bobby whispers to me. “He can sing it in his sleep.”
After they leave, I stand alone in the dark cabin wondering if I had a favourite song as a child, a song I could sing in my little girl sleep before P-O-G-O-N-O-P-H-O-B-I-A began creeping into my bed.
Can people really change? Can Hal? Can I? Dear Saint Veronica, I don’t know if I want to live or die. Tell me what to do.
I lie on the cot and try it. I cup my hands over my mouth so my voice won’t carry. “Twinkle, twinkle, Lucky Star. How I wonder what you are …” Above me the perverse painting seems to light up.