DADDY PULLED THE blinds across her big window that looked out over the backyard; she had the smallest but coziest room in the house. But she liked it best when Daddy was there with her, adding his splashes of color and movement to her plain cubicle. She’d given up years earlier trying to color the white walls with her fat toddler crayons, as Mommy always painted over it. “Why won’t you use all the paper we bought? Or the coloring books?” Mommy said her toys could be colorful, her bedding and books. But the toys were kept in perfectly arranged stacks of white bins, and the yellow comforter couldn’t fill the entire room. She wished she could blow into it and make it puff up into a giant sun, or a hot air balloon that would carry her away.
Mommy wanted her to keep her drawing and painting contained to the easel that stood soldierly in the corner. So Hanna left the big sheets of white paper perfect and unused. It wasn’t just to disobey Mommy, who used to plead “Just a little picture? A tiny one? Too small for anyone to see?” That was when Mommy was still in her sad phase, before it turned to anger.
She didn’t give up. On every Christmas Eve and the third night of Hanukkah, Mommy gave her art supplies. Hanna loved how the pencils and crayons looked, with their pointy unused tips. She liked the quarter-size circles of watercolor paint, like frozen puddles from a dripping rainbow. She didn’t want to mess them up. If she took the Magic Markers out of their perfect nest, she’d never be able to put them back in the right order. She liked Mommy’s presents, but she’d never do with them what Mommy wanted. Hanna made sure Mommy saw her holding them sometimes, running her fingers over the tops of the crayons, making gentle swirls in the dry rainbows of paint. Sometimes she kissed the colors she especially liked. Mommy never got mad then. She watched, very still, her eyes wet with tears. Hanna couldn’t tell if she was happy or unhappy, though sometimes Mommy frowned. But she kept buying the beautiful packages of color, and that’s all that mattered. Every win for Hanna was a you-lose for Mommy.
He slid a book from the shelf above her head and sat beside her, ready to read.
“‘There was a forest under my bed, one I had been cultivating for quite some time.’”
Daddy had the faintest of accents and there sounded more like dere.
“‘It was quite a tropical place, suitable for molds and monkeys and very small things that—’”
Daddy said tings dat.
“‘—might enjoy swinging on vines of hair and bouncing on trampolines of spider webs.’”
Hanna smiled, anticipating the next line.
“‘I had been suspicious for a while of the existence of an UnderSlumberBumbleBeast. I heard noises coming from beneath my bed as I lay in the dark trying to sleep.’”
Hanna so wished for a messy under-the-bed, but Mommy and her mops and buckets would never let such a forest grow beneath anything in the house. Hanna wanted funny-looking friends like the ones in the story, which is why she always picked it for Daddy to read.
“‘Sometimes I heard scratching sounds like it was scavenging for food.’”
Hannah wished she could sprinkle her floor with crumbled granola bars. She wanted to feed the little beasts.
“‘Other times it sounded very much like a tiny bug singing at the bottom of a tall glass. Once I could have sworn I heard something driving a bus up a very steep hill, the engines grinding and the brakes squealing. The conditions under my bed were ripe for an UnderSlumberBumbleBeast, that I knew.’”
Stuff. That’s what Hanna needed to attract her own under-the-bed friends. Bits of stuff for them to form themselves out of, broken old toys and sticky pieces of half-eaten candy—things Mommy would pinch up in her rubber gloves and throw away.
Mommy came to the door. She leaned against the jamb, watching beautiful Daddy as he read.
“‘Since I had never seen one, I wasn’t sure how to anticipate its arrival. I rather thought it would introduce itself one night—I had whispered ‘Hello?’ so many times, so certain of the existence of a creature under my bed. But I never heard a reply. Maybe it was shy. Or perhaps we didn’t speak the same language—’”
Hanna waved her hand, a shooing gesture, at her mother. Daddy glanced at Mommy, then fanned his fingers lightly over the open pages of the book, like giant moths landing in a field.
“Mommy can stay and listen. Maybe she likes this story too.”
Hanna made a sharp, guttural grunt and gave one hard shake of her head.
Daddy frowned at Mommy. “We don’t get as much Hanna-Daddy time as you get Hanna-Mommy time.”
“It’s fine.”
She saw the hate-you-don’t-forget-it in Mommy’s glare before she left. Someday Mommy would open her mouth and have teeth made of shards of glass. She’d give Hanna that hateful look, and then start eating her own hands. It would be gross, but she almost wanted to see it.
She just needed to push Mommy a bit further. Fortunately, Marie-Anne was helping her come up with some very excellent ideas for making Mommy go-away-die forever.
Daddy resumed reading, and she stuffed the sunshine comforter under her chin and smiled.
“‘As I hung there over the edge of my bed, flashlight searching, I suddenly saw him! (I assume he was male because of the mustache.) He squinted in the beam of bright light, holding up an arm that looked like a lollipop to protect his sensitive eyes. ‘Wow!’ I said. We were looking right at each other! I wondered if I looked as strange to him as he appeared to me. His body was about the size of a yam, and he wore a pair of sky-blue knitted shorts.’”
Hanna and Alex giggled together, sharing an image of a yam with a mustache in a pair of knitted shorts.
* * *
She didn’t remember falling asleep, but when she woke, it was dark and Daddy was gone. She hung her head over the side of the bed, like the little girl in the book, to see if any UnderSlumberBumbleBeasts were tottering around. She kept a compact purple flashlight on one of the shelves above her bed, but even on maximum brightness there was nothing but smooth, clean, Mommy-perfect floor. She got out of bed, tugged down her soft hedgehog nightgown, and tiptoed to her dresser where she pulled out a few random things. A white sock. A brown barrette. A red hair band. She peered into one of the bins that held her art supplies, but couldn’t, in the end, mess up any of her crayon or pencil or marker sets.
It was an inadequate collection, but better than nothing. She tossed them under her bed. Maybe she’d get a day or two to gather up more things before Mommy gasped in horror at the accumulated mess. She’d seen Mommy on her knees so many times, her vacuum wand a sword, her mission the annihilation of every colony of dusty invaders, no matter how small. It might not be enough time for an UnderSlumberBumbleBeast to assemble itself, but it was worth a try—and then she’d hide it somewhere safe from Mommy.
She heard a noise she recognized but couldn’t decipher. She crept from her room and down the hallway, toward the glow that emerged beneath her parents’ door. Breathy grunts and gasps. She’d heard such noises her whole life and knew it was the secret language Mommy and Daddy used when they were alone together. It bothered her that they never spoke it with her, though she’d tried on several occasions to duplicate their sounds. Daddy laughed, telling her she sounded like a cave girl. Mommy wrinkled her eyebrows and looked scared. “Please use your words.” Hanna supposed she hadn’t gotten the articulation just right and that’s why they didn’t understand her.
She listened a minute longer. The grunts and gasps, devoid of meaning, were a bit scary. Mommy sounded like she was drifting around a spaceship, on the verge of running out of air. Daddy’s voice kept punching something, again and again. She’d tried, when she was younger, to enter the conversation. But they stopped as soon as she came into the room. After that, they instructed her to knock first, especially when people within a room sounded busy—though she should interrupt only if it was an emergency. But they were never going to communicate with her in the language she found more interesting than words. Maybe it was only for adults, or maybe it was for only two people at a time (they never spoke to anyone else in the guttural tongue). Sometimes she wanted to ask them, in the language she refused to speak, “Why won’t you include me?”
She went back to her room, impressed with her magical ability to not make a sound. Not only could she withhold her words, but her feet stepped across the floor like she was made of air. A phantom, floating. A witch, reincarnated.
* * *
A few hours later, printouts in hand, she came down from Daddy’s study to a hallway filled with morning light. Her feet grew warm in its triangle of sunshine as she stood by the window that looked out over their private yard. She scanned the well-trimmed bushes and ankle-high grass, the wooden wall and the roof of the neighboring house. The blooming daffodils waited in a tidy row in front of the hedge, like an army about to charge. The tulips weren’t finished yet and their pink heads looked like arrows, ready to burst. Someone’s cherry tree blew a soft snow of white petals into the yard. She sniffed the glass, wanting the aroma of flowers, but got only the household smell of Mommy’s vinegar concoction.
She’d expected Daddy to get up awhile ago; she’d already dressed, brushed her hair, and worked on her special project. After looking up some stuff on Daddy’s computer, she printed off a bunch of pictures onto recycled office paper. It didn’t matter if the pictures were a little crinkly or splotchy. The online images were from very old photographs, and she printed some of them in color so they were brown and white instead of black and white. With one thing still left to do, she crept off to her room to hide the photos.
Pressing her ear to her parents’ door, all was quiet within. There was no particular rule about going into their room while they slept, so she carefully turned the door handle and slipped in. Daddy lay long and naked on his side of the bed. She could almost see all his man parts—properly called a penis—but his leg, bent upward, blocked the complete view. He had one arm under his pillow and the other across his chest. His mouth was parted and he breathed in and out, unaware of her and everything else.
She gazed at Daddy for several moments, then resumed her mission. She picked up Daddy’s phone from the shelf beside his bed where he kept a few scattered things within easy reach: two books, some tissues, a mostly empty glass of water, a pickle jar full of loose change. She walked around to Mommy’s side of the bed.
Mommy lay in a similar position on her right side, her knees tucked up. She gripped the pillow between praying hands, and dark hair made stripes across her face. Mommy’s boobs flopped to one side, and Hanna decided that if she had to grow extra body parts, she’d rather have a tail. She couldn’t see Mommy’s new scar, but she liked the old one better. A purplish worm held between fleshy lips of white skin. She touched it once when she was very young, in a dressing room at the mall, but Mommy pulled away like it hurt.
She took a couple of steps backward and held the phone horizontally so she could get a picture of Mommy’s whole sleeping form. She slept on the window-side of the room, and even with the blinds drawn she was still softly illuminated. Hanna pressed the button, and the camera made its little clicking noise. She pressed it a second time for good measure, and that’s when Mommy lifted her head and sucked in air, like she’d been lying there dead the whole time. It was a wonderful thought. Mommy pushed the hair out of her face and blinked several times, and Hanna could have run from the room, but she didn’t.
Instead, she slid her feet along the floor until she was right against the bed. Mommy eased away from her, a look of confusion on her face.
“Hanna? Do you need something?”
She bent at the waist. Lower and lower until her face hovered above her frightened mother.
“My name. Is Marie-Anne. Dufosset,” she whispered in Mommy’s ear in her bestest French accent. Mommy didn’t think she’d played that French by French computer game more than once. But she had.
As Mommy pushed herself up on her elbow, the abrupt motion made her boobs jiggle. Hanna smirked, and Mommy pulled the sheet up to cover herself.
“What?” Mommy glanced over at sleeping Daddy. Then she spoke more softly. “I’m glad you’re speaking, baby. What did you say?”
“My name. Is Marie-Anne. Dufosset. Don’t forget.” Her voice still sounded weak and soft, from lack of use.
The word “who” formed on Mommy’s lips, but Hanna giggled and skipped out of the room, with Daddy’s phone still in her hand.