Something She's Not Telling Us - Darcey Bell Page 0,93
mother would.
No decent human being could say no, and the woman resigns herself to whatever is going to happen. Probably nothing. We’re probably innocent. Honest. Just a little strange. Anyway, harmless. Who would bring such a dear little child along on a robbery-murder? I feel a mix of conflicting desires—to push past her, to hurt her, to warn her about what I might do.
Or just beg her to set my grandparents free and stop this cruel charade.
She says, “You’ll have to excuse us. We’re in the midst of a renovation. Your grandparents had a lovely house. But the investor who bought it let things run down. The house turned out to require an almost total gut job.”
What could be crueler than telling someone you’re “gutting” their childhood? Sheetrocking over your memories? This woman deserves whatever she gets, though I don’t yet know what that will be. But a part of me already knows. It’s as if I’ve lived through this before. As if I’ve been here and seen this. As if I’ve done what I’m about to do.
The sane part of me holding Daisy’s hand doesn’t want to listen to the crazed part of me that can see into the near future.
It’s not pretty, I want to say, except that she (meaning the sane part of myself) knows that already.
The woman is still talking. About something. Nothing. “Once the systems needed updating, one thing led to another. The plumbing, the electricity, the—”
I don’t know how anything leads to anything, at least not in my grandparents’ house.
“The minute the contractors came on board, we had to dumpster what was left.”
Since when is dumpster a verb?
The woman is talking nervously, filling the silence with random words. “It’s like that TV show, where the couple’s house is being fixed up, and the designer says, ‘I have a not-very-nice surprise for you.’ Well, renovating a house is one very not-very-nice surprise after another.”
All this time I’m thinking that she may be about to have the most not-very-nice surprise of her life. I squeeze Daisy’s hand to make my thoughts stop racing like a hamster on a wheel.
“Help,” says Daisy. “The bathroom.” She’s dancing from foot to foot.
“Oh! Excuse me! This way.”
I look past the woman onto a desert of plaster dust, paint-speckled tarps, ladders rising like oil rigs from the wasteland they’ve made of the only place where I was ever happy.
What has she done with my grandparents? Where are they? What must I do to find them?
Suddenly I’m conscious of holding a huge bag of candy. The candy I used to lure Daisy here.
“I’m Vanessa,” says the woman.
“I’m Ruth,” I say. “And this is my daughter, Daisy.”
No reason to not give our real names. In a few moments none of that will matter.
Is Daisy looking to see why I lied? I can’t look her in the eye. I can’t let her solve the mystery that she might see in my face.
“The downstairs bathroom is useless,” the woman—Vanessa—says. “The plumbers shut off the water. But the one upstairs still functions. Be careful not to trip on the steps. The tarp’s—”
“Can you come with me?” Daisy, my heroine, asks me. “Can you keep me company? This house is sort of scary.”
I look at the woman for permission. Permission to move through my own home.
“Go ahead,” she says. “I promise, dear, that it won’t be the least bit scary by the time we fix it up. It will feel comfy and safe and nice. The bathroom is at the top of the stairs. I’ll walk you up.”
Daisy has no idea what this woman is saying. She literally can’t hear. The only voice she’s hearing is saying: I need to pee!
Do I really need this stranger, this intruder, to tell me that Daisy and I can go upstairs? On the second floor, unless she’s destroyed it, is my old room stuffed with memories of my childhood successes. With memories from when I was Daisy’s age and the sun hadn’t turned its back on me in order to shine on the lucky. That room is probably empty, if it exists at all. The walls have probably been knocked down.
The stairs are covered with white canvas, and chemical fumes sting the back of my throat.
Wherever she’s got my grandparents, they are inhaling this.
Daisy sneezes.
“Bless you,” Vanessa says.
We let Daisy precede us toward the bathroom at the head of the stairs. Daisy rushes in and closes the door.
Then I turn around and push the woman—Vanessa—as hard as I can.