This was the morning of Ruth McNaughton’s third day without a drink. She had decided not to go to Hydro’s funeral. She couldn’t take a funeral, not today. She hadn’t been feeling very well.
She was in the bathroom sitting on the toilet, with her head leaned into her arms on the lavatory. She had stomach cramps, diarrhea. She was sweating like a field hand. She hadn’t slept well for two nights. In fact, she had slept almost none at all.
At least she wasn’t nauseated. At least she didn’t have a hangover. That was the one positive thing about today. She could live with insomnia and a dose of the flu, or whatever this was, a lot better than not remembering going to bed. But no funeral for her.
She wouldn’t have gone to the funeral in any case, even if she hadn’t been feeling so shaky for the last couple of days. She didn’t really know Hydro all that well. She just saw him around town. He used to chase cars and howl at the fire whistle when he was younger. He ate all those peach pies, everybody knew about that. She had plenty of good laughs at Hydro’s expense, but she couldn’t say she knew him all that well. With his outlandish head and odd ways and funny name, Hydro had been more of a cartoon character to her than a real person, if she admitted the truth. Hydro could have been a character in one of those comic books he was so famous for reading. And living with his daddy, a man who liked to shoot refrigerators out on the island—well, it was a little hard for Ruth to take such people seriously, or to think of them as being truly broken up, grieved by death. Weren’t they just comical rednecks?
She lifted her head off her arms and said, “Katy.”
She had to try to keep remembering that Katy was in the house. That child was quiet as a mouse, it was easy to forget about her. Anyway, the last thing Toby had said to her before he left for the funeral was, “Take good care of Katy while we’re gone.” Toby hadn’t wanted to take her to the funeral with him and Louis. He thought she was too young. When did Dr. Tobias McNaughton become Father of the Year? When did he start thinking he knew more about taking care of her own daughter than she did?
She called again: “Katy!” She could hear the impatience, a shrillness, in her own voice. Well, that’s what she intended. Where was that child? She called, “Katy!”
Katy didn’t answer.
Goddamn it.
Toby told her before he left, “I think Katy leads some kind of secret life. She’s alone so much. I’m not sure, you know, what she does, where she goes. Maybe we’d better watch her more closely.” He said he had found bird feathers all over her bed.
Ruth stripped a long stretch of toilet paper off the roll and cleaned herself up as well as she could. She flushed the toilet and pulled up her underpants. She was never wearing that girdle again, she didn’t care how big her stomach got.
She hollered, “Katy, answer me this minute. I mean it.”
What kind of secret life could a child have? Dr. Tobias McNaughton was nothing if not dramatic. Bird feathers?
Still—where was she? Why wasn’t she answering?
Ruth came out of the bathroom and looked around the house. Her hands had a slight tremor that bothered her. She thought if she had a drink, just a beer, the shaking would stop. She went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. There was a beer in there all right. Two of them, in fact, way back in the back, cold as ice.
She kept standing at the refrigerator with the door open, staring at the two beers.
She closed the refrigerator door. She opened it again. She stood there staring. Just one of them, maybe. If she drank just one beer, it might be just the thing to calm her down a little. It would help her think where Katy might have gone off to. It would give her more patience to deal with Katy when she did turn up. She closed the refrigerator again.
She screamed, “Katherine Ann! Goddamn it!”
She opened the refrigerator and stared at the two beers. She closed the refrigerator.
She walked out on the front porch and looked up the street, towards Scott Butane, and then down the street, in the direction of the schoolhouse. Pecan trees and oaks, wide lawns. A chalk drawing on the sidewalk where Katy had played hopscotch.
She looked across the street at the Methodist church, at the tall steps where kids liked to play with Slinkys. She couldn’t see her. It wouldn’t have killed Toby to take Katy with him to the funeral, would it? Toby knew Ruth wasn’t feeling well. He could have done that small favor for her. And he called himself a doctor.
She walked down the steps, off the porch, and stood out on the sidewalk, looking this way and that.
She called, “Katy, honey?” Trying to keep the shrillness out of her voice so the neighbors wouldn’t notice.
Then—she could not have said why this happened at just this moment—a thought came into her head that she had never entertained before. Maybe she had, maybe she hadn’t. It seemed like a new thought. She thought how dangerous the world is, how many dangers lurk here.
That was all. Not much more to it than that.
And yet suddenly it was so clear, so incredibly clear, the danger. Not just a danger of marrying a man who turned out to be a person you did not expect or want, not just weakness of character and an unhappy marriage. Those were dangers enough, and real, but those were not what she was thinking about. Not even just alcoholism, and loss of self-respect, and not just that you were a person you had never expected to become, with experiences you had thought belonged only to others, lesser creatures than yourself. And not just becoming a bad parent, or a bad person—or even a child molester, as she supposed she had been when she first let Morgan see her naked, when he was still a mere child, and stripped him of whatever childhood he might have been able to salvage of his hard life. Not just looking back on a lifetime and thinking, This is not what I wanted, these were not the choices I meant to make, this is not what I counted on.
But real danger, life and death dangers, the kind that happen quickly and are no one’s fault, or maybe they are. A small quirk, a twist at birth, or before birth, and then so fast you didn’t even know what was happening, hydrocephalus, maybe, or mental illness, or suicide—even that might be genetic, or congenital, or caused by an unkind word at just the wrong moment, or both, or all these, or worse. You could lose everything, just as easily as that, before you even had it, or had anything, it could all be gone. For no good reason, you could, in one second, become a laughable figure, a cartoon character to the rest of the world, abandoned to a life of loneliness and oddity in the flicker of an eyelash. You could become pathetic. You could suddenly become a parent whose child died. Whose child committed suicide. You never knew. There was too much danger in the world to predict it all.
And there were other dangers, plenty of them. There were rapists, child molesters more treacherous than herself, murderers, lurking in church basements, on playgrounds, in friends’ homes, in abandoned school buses, or walking randomly off the street and into country stores or people’s homes, capable of unimaginable crimes—who on earth knew where they were, or even what all the dangers were.
And then, in that same instant, she thought how little she knew of her own daughter’s movements in this world, Katy’s, and of how foreign those imminent dangers had always seemed before now. For the first time Ruth McNaughton understood the concept of neglect, and secret lives, and her own responsibility in all this, and of doom, and fate, and chance.
Something like panic swept through her, standing there on the sidewalk in the pecan shade. Was it panic—or was it despair? They seemed to be the same.
Her first thought was to run down the street screaming Katy’s name. She took one step this way and then one step the other way. She looked right and left. She wrung her hands. She was frantic, and yet she was rooted to the sidewalk. She became breathless. She turned and turned in circles, she didn’t know which way to go.
Her second thought was to run inside the house and drink the two beers. She didn’t know how that would help; it just would. Just the thought of those two cold beers going down was enough to stop her from turning in circles.
She stopped turning. She stopped wringing her hands. She collected herself for a minute. She crossed her arms over her chest and held herself. The shortness of breath improved some; she was able to take a couple of deep breaths. She even smiled—put on a smile. She patted her hair with her hand, still smiling.
She looked up and down the street to see if anyone had seen her turning in circles. Still smiling. Nobody. Nobody saw her. No one was in sight. All right, fine. Good. Shit. Fuck. Excellent. She felt better already. And Katy was fine. Well, of course she was. She had panicked. Just like a mother. She felt silly. Katy was just fine.
There might still be a part of a bottle of vodka in the house as well. Wasn’t there? Didn’t she remember that? She thought so. Okay, well, that was good. Just in case she needed it. She might not need it. If she felt all right after she drank the beers, she wouldn’t have to touch the vodka. She probably wouldn’t need to touch it.
It was good to have it as a backup, though, of course—to know it was there, in an emergency—but she probably wouldn’t need the vodka at all. She would just drink the two beers, and see how she felt. Maybe just one beer would be enough. Then, if she still felt shaky, or panicky, she could mix a shot of vodka with a little orange juice, or just pour herself a shot, or two, or just drink a little out of the bottle, something like that. She would be fine. No problem, no problem at all.
Except that there was no vodka in the house. Oh, God. She remembered now. The other day, after that awful fight with Toby, when they had made up and he offered to make her a drink, a Bloody Mary, she had thrown a fit. She had been indignant. How dare you, she had said. How dare you offer me a drink when I’ve all but admitted to you that I’m an—well, she couldn’t quite say the word “alcoholic,” but he knew what she meant. She told him he must like to keep her drunk. It was in his best interest for her to be out of her mind. She said he was the reason she drank so much in the first place, his weakness, his lack of self-respect, and now she found out he had a stake in keeping her hooked.
He had looked at her in a kind of shock. At himself as well. Was it possible that what she was saying was true?—that he actually—These were thoughts that had never entered his mind. He told her this. He said, “I’m not fully convinced, but maybe—” Good Lord. Maybe—Well, all he could do was try, he could act in good faith.
To prove his good intentions, he took the bottle of vodka to the sink and poured it out, every drop, down the drain.
She said, “Uh—”
He felt better already. Now they were working on a problem together, the first time they had been together on anything in a long time.
She said, “Uh—”
He said, “It’s a start, anyway. We have to start somewhere.“
So now it was all gone, the vodka. It hadn’t seemed like a great idea, even at the time, a little impetuous, pouring out that whole bottle. Because now there was no vodka in there. None in the house. Not a drop. He had poured it all out. That idiot had poured all her vodka down the fucking kitchen sink, a half bottle of vodka. Emptied the bottle, rinsed it out, and threw it in the garbage can. Thoroughness personified. Didn’t he know how wasteful that was? How compulsive and self-serving and thoughtless? No vodka! All she had in this house was those two measly goddamn beers, for God’s sake? Two beers? And her daughter missing? Jesus! She was going to need a lot more than two beers.
Well, but wait. Was Katy missing or wasn’t she? Whoever said she was missing? She looked up and down the empty street again. She wasn’t there, but well, so what? She couldn’t keep her mind on Katy, or even on being afraid, for thinking about needing a drink.
This, too, was a thought that seemed new enough to give Ruth McNaughton pause. In that pause, she thought, Katy is probably in her room. I didn’t even look there. I only screamed for her. I only stormed around the house a little, a few rooms. She never comes when I call her, anyway. Maybe she’s not lost at all. She’s probably in her room, playing with a doll.
Ruth McNaughton went back inside, much calmer now. She called, “Katy? Honey?“
Katy was not lost. She was nearby. Very safe. She was only hiding for now. In her room, up on the second floor of the house, in the back of her closet, behind her dresses and loose wire coathangers and a few hanging plastic bags where her mama stored a few winter things, behind a false panel that could be taken out and replaced, Katy was sitting alone in a crawlspace in the rafters with the bird she called Sister.
Louis had taught her about the secret hiding place, had showed her how to take out the panel, how to replace it once she was inside so no one would know she was in there, how to duck down so she wouldn’t crack her head in the low space, how to crawl back into the rafters and not put your foot down on the insulation and fall through. In summer, how to crawl out before you got so hot you fainted. He had given her a candle stub stuck with wax onto an old saucer, and a box of wooden kitchen matches to light the candle so she could see. He had taught her how to spit on the tip of the match for safety, when the candle was lighted. Louis had a place just like this behind the closet in his own room where he sat sometimes and read comic books.
Katy didn’t care much for comic books, so she usually only went inside the crawlspace to sit in the dark. She loved to sit in the dark. In this darkness she became invisible.
With the panel replaced, and the plastic bags hanging down, and the closet door shut tight and the candle not lighted, the secret hiding place was perfect darkness. An absolute blackness, like a grave. No light at all came in, not even the smallest hint, even in the bright middle of the day.
Katy could sit in the darkness for two hours. She thought of eyeless fish in underwater caverns. She thought of blind people. She thought of dead people. She saw what the fish saw. She saw what the blind saw, what the dead saw.
Today she was thinking of Hydro. She knew about his death, the funeral today. She knew he had drowned. In Katy’s mind, Hydro was an underground cave fish. She pretended she was Hydro. She envied Hydro. She held up her hand in front of her and looked at the spot where she knew it was. She saw nothing. She held her hand up so close to her face that her palm touched her nose. She opened her eyes as wide as they would open. She still saw the same thing—nothing. She held out her finger now, pointing outwards. She said, “My fingertip sees the same thing as my eyes see.” She said, “I am invisible.“
But today she wanted to see. She needed some light. She was sitting, a little uncomfortably, on one of the rafters, a two-by-four, with her feet propped on another rafter. It was her usual seat. She felt between her feet, down in the soft insulation between rafters, until her hand touched the matchbox. She lifted it out of its place and heard the soft rattle of matchsticks inside it as she pushed open the little drawer of the box and took out one match. She closed the box again, for safety, as Louis had shown her. She struck the match on the side of the box and watched it flame up and illuminate the tiny rafter space, the raw pine boards and insulation, and she smelled the burning of the sulphur. She dragged the candle stub and its saucer towards her and touched the flame of the match to the wick and watched it gutter and spew and catch fire.
Her brown lunch bag was beside her, the top neatly folded over. Inside the bag was the dead bird, the wild canary. She had brought it with her from the refrigerator, as she had each day since the storm. She kept it in a brown paper bag in the vegetable crisper, no one ever noticed.
The dead bird was her best secret. Even Louis didn’t know about Sister. She never told him that one of the drowned birds didn’t wake up that night, didn’t fly away, out the big window, into the sunshine and the trees the next day. Even Louis didn’t know she had kept one bird to play with.
She uncreased the neat fold in her paper bag, and reached in with her hand, and felt the stiff little creature in the bottom, its feathers coarse against her fingertips. She closed her hand around it, gentle, and brought the bird out of the bag and held it out in front of her to look at. Even in the dim light of the guttering candle flame, the bird’s feathers still were bright, the yellow-green of life.
She sat for a long time, holding it, sometimes bouncing it lightly in the palm of her hand. The bird was beginning to get a little rumpled looking, but it was holding up pretty well in the refrigerator, where it stayed most of each day and night. The little eyes were closed. The lids were lightest green.
She heard her mother’s voice, the almost indiscernible sound through the walls. “Katy? Honey?“
She looked at the bird. She felt a little annoyed with her mother. Until now she had only sat with the bird, named it. Once or twice she sang to it: Hush little baby, don’t say a word. Once or twice she told it a story: And the birds ate up all the bread crumbs that Hansel had dropped, and they were lost in the deep woods.
Today she had thought she might take all its feathers off.
The soft, muffled voice of her mother: “Honey? Are you hiding? Is this a game?“
She wanted to see the bird naked, she was not sure why. Her plan was to start just below the yellow beak, just at the bird’s tiny neck, and strip all the feathers away, all the way down the bird’s stomach and back, until the bird was completely naked. She might leave the tail feathers just as they were. The tail and the head would be normal; the rest of the bird would be naked. Maybe the wings would still have feathers, too. Maybe she would bite off the head. She thought of the bird’s head inside her mouth.
Her mother said, “Honey, you’re scaring me. Come out, honey, please, please come out for Mommy.“
She put the dead bird back in its bag and folded the top over and made its neat crease. She was very angry at her mother. She waited until her mother’s voice was too dim to hear, in another part of the house, downstairs maybe, and then she blew out the candle and wet her fingertips and squeezed the wick for safety, as Louis had shown her, and heard the soft hiss of the steam between her fingers. It burned her hand a little, but she didn’t care.
She removed the wall panel and came out of the crawlspace and then replaced the panel neatly. She stuffed the paper bag with the bird in it into a shoebox for now, in a corner of the closet, and came out of the closet and shut its door behind her. She had been thinking of stripping the bird’s feathers and biting off its head for a long time, since the first day. Now she was ready to do it, and she couldn’t get any privacy.
She walked out of her room and down the stairs and up towards the front of the house. She made her voice sweet. She said, “Mommy?” Her mother was out on the porch, looking up and down the street again. Katy said, “Were you calling me?“
Ruth McNaughton’s hands were shaking badly now, and a beer would have probably helped, but she was not thinking about a drink right now.
At the sound of the child’s voice, Ruth startled, and turned quickly . She saw her through the screened door. She said, “Oh, Katy! Oh! Where were you? I’ve been calling and calling.“
Katy said, “I was hiding.“
Ruth knelt down in front of her and put her hands on Katy’s shoulders.
She said, “Oh, honey, please, please, please, don’t ever do that again. Oh, I was so scared, baby. Promise Mommy, okay, promise you won’t ever, ever scare Mommy like that again. Do you promise?“
Katy said, “Okay.“
She said, “Oh, honey.” She hugged her now, held her tight. Katy allowed herself to be held without resisting.
Her mother said, “I’m going to quit drinking, okay?“
Katy said, “Okay.“
Her mother said, “For you. Just for you. Because I love you so much. Okay? Does that make you happy? Are you glad Mommy’s going to quit drinking?“
Katy said, “I’m happy.” She tried to make her voice sound a little happier. She said, “Happy, happy, happy.“
Her mother released her and looked at her at arms’ length again. On her mother’s face was a brave, sad smile. She said, “Okay, that’s what I’m going to do then. So you’ll always be happy. That’s what I’m going to do, I’m going to quit drinking. In fact, I’ve already stopped. Three days ago.“
Katy said, “Yay!“
Ruth said, “But you have to promise me you won’t ever scare me like that again, okay? Really and truly promise, you know? Because I don’t know what I would do if anything ever happened to you. I just really don’t know what I would do. So promise me, okay? Will you do that right now, right this minute? Cross your heart and hope to die?“
Katy squinched up her eyes and put her hand on her chest. She said, “I hope I die.“
She held her daughter close again. She said, “Oh, thank you, darling, thank you, thank you, thank you. You’re a good girl, you are Mommy’s good, good girl.“