Jonathan Nasaw - When She Was Bad

The gentle, insistent pressure and the ticklish warmth of his breath reminded Lily of the way her pony used to nuzzle her with its velvety soft nose, searching for treats she’d hidden on her person. “I always hated it,” she said. “I wanted to be blond, like Sunny Lemontina.”

The name sounded familiar, but Lyssy couldn’t quite place it. “Who’s that?”

Lily rolled onto her side, facing him, and sang “Frere Jacques.” When she got to sonnez les matines he grinned sleepily. “Right, right.”

“She was my imaginary playmate,” she told him. “In the beginning, anyway.”

“Tell me about it.”

“It was a week or two after I moved in with my grandparents.” Lily rolled over onto her other side and snuggled backward against Lyssy. “At first she was like this imaginary friend-only I don’t know if other kids actually see their imaginary friends. I could, though-I can see her to this day. Physically, she was almost the opposite of me. Short blond hair instead of long dark hair, blue eyes instead of brown, and instead of my sort of round face, a sharp witchy one with a pointy little chin.

“So this one morning we’re sitting next to each other on the parquet floor of my grandparents’ parlor, playing with my new Barbie my grandma gave me. The sunlight’s pouring in like melted butter, making a warm yellow spotlight on the shiny-waxed floorboards, only it keeps moving, shrinking and moving, so every few minutes we have to slide over a few inches, me and Sunny Lemontina, to keep both of us in that warm puddle of sunshine. And the more it shrinks, the closer we get to each other, until pretty soon there’s only gonna be room for one of us.

“Then Sunny Lemontina looks at me with those blue, blue eyes, and she laughs this evil laugh and says, ‘ I know your secret.’

“I don’t even have to ask which secret, because at this point in my life there’s only one, and it’s so big and so dark that I know if anybody ever finds out about it, I’ll be the one who gets taken away and locked up forever and ever instead of my mommy and daddy.

“The next thing I know, I’m sort of floating outside my body, looking down at the little blond girl sitting alone in the puddle of sunshine, playing with my new Barbie.

“And the next next thing I know, I wake up in bed, it’s night time, I can’t remember anything that’s happened since that morning in the parlor, and when I try to open the bedroom door, it’s locked. I freak out, pounding on the door and screaming. Then the door opens, my grandmother’s standing there looking down at me with this weird expression on her face, almost like she’s afraid of me. She asks me if I’m ready to come out of my room yet.

“I say, ‘Boy, am I!’ Only now my grandfather’s standing in the doorway behind her, he’s like, ‘I’ve already told you more times than I care to count: if you want to come out of your room, all you have to do is promise to stop the nonsense.’

“Now I have no idea what he’s talking about, but by this point I’ll promise anything. ‘No more nonsense, cross my heart an’ hope to die.’

“Grandma looks relieved, but Grandpa doesn’t budge. ‘What’s your name? I want to hear you say it.’

“I’m still clueless-and getting scareder by the second. Doesn’t he know ? I’m thinking. ‘Lily,’ I say. ‘It’s Lily, Grandpa.’ Then it’s group hug time. Grandma’s crying with relief and Grandpa’s reaching around her patting my shoulder.

“All of a sudden I notice my head feels kind of strange-on the outside, I mean. Because it turns out I had spent the day chopping off most of my hair with the pinking shears, and Barbie’s hair too, and trimming the fringes off all the furniture in the house that had fringes, and when the maid caught me, I told her my name wasn’t Lily, it was Sunny Lemontina, and when she went to fetch my grandmother, I told her, ‘You’re not my grandma, you can’t tell me what to do.’

“Oh, and the cat wouldn’t come near me for a month,” she added. “I never did find out what that was all about.”

Lyssy turned over onto his stomach, his chin resting on the windowsill just above mattress level. The window, like the other windows in the cabin, was unglazed, with the wooden shutters opening outward; the redwood walls were unadorned save for an enormous USGS topographical map mounted next to the fieldstone chimney. “One thing I don’t understand,” he said. “I thought everybody already knew about the abuse by then-wasn’t that why they moved you in with your grandparents in the first place?”

“Mmm-hmm.” A tight-lipped affirmative.

“Then what was the big dark secret nobody was supposed to know?”

Lily stretched out next to him; together they watched the tumbling, quicksilver water of the creek turning coppery in the failing light. “That it was all my fault that my parents were taken away. That I was a dirty, wicked, ungrateful little snitch who deserved everything bad that happened to her.”

Lyssy felt his heart breaking for her-for both of them, really. “Oh, jeez,” he said. “Didn’t anybody ever tell you that all abused kids feel that way sometimes?” He rolled over onto his back and shifted into his Dr. Al imitation: “Let me, ah, tell you something you may find difficult to believe, my young friend. Of all the cruel things your parents did to you, the, ah, cruelest of all was making you feel you deserved it.”

“Of course I know that now, silly. Dr. Irene said it was because we couldn’t blame our parents-that would have meant they never loved us, and to a kid, that’s even worse than…you know.”

“I surely do.” A humongous yawn took Lyssy by surprise; he wasn’t sure how much longer he’d be able to stay awake. “But you and me, we don’t have to worry about that now.”

“Why not?”

“Because we have each other,” he murmured sleepily. “To love each other, I mean-we don’ need no steenkin’ parents.” His head lolled to the side and he was out, snoring lightly, a drop of clear saliva trickling down the corner of his mouth.

Lily, who’d never seen Treasure of the Sierra Madre, had no idea why he’d switched over to an exaggerated Mexican accent. Maybe he was embarrassed about having used the L-word, however indirectly. And maybe he was just pretending to have fallen asleep so suddenly-but she didn’t think so. Somebody might fake snoring, nobody’d fake drooling.

“Okay, well, I love you, too,” she whispered experimentally; she’d never said it to a man before, not counting her grandfather. It felt a little funny-but good. As she smiled down at him, noticing how much younger he looked when he was sleeping, she gradually became aware of a distant noise, a popping, Little Engine That Could pocketapocketapocketa, slowly rising in volume over the human-sounding babble of the creek.

Fano’s mule, she thought-crap oh crap oh crap, how could I possibly have forgotten!

Irene swam upward from a deep dreamless sleep, saw Pender’s face floating above her like one of those giant balloons in the Thanksgiving Day parade. It took her eyes forever to bring him into focus. He looked so concerned, hovering there. “S’matter, Pen?” she mumbled.

“Are you all right? Where are they? Did they hurt you? Do they have your car?”

“Too many questions. Just lemme…a couple more minutes, lemme sleep a couple more minutes.” She rolled over onto her side, facing the back of the couch, and drew her legs up.

“Irene! Wake up, Irene, I need you to wake up now.”

His hand was on her shoulder, shaking her. How rude, she thought, covering her ears with her palms and resuming the fetal position. But it was no use-her head was starting to throb, her back and knees ached, and her neck felt like she’d spent twenty minutes in the ring with Hulk Hogan.