F Wilson - Deep as the Marrow

Poppy adjusted her Minnie Mouse mask and then untied Katie’s hands and removed her blindfold.

“You have to go to the bathroom, Katie?” She shook her head and said nothing. She looked so down, poor kid. Poppy sat beside her on the bed and massaged her wrists.

“There. How’s that? That feel better?” Katie looked at her with those big blue eyes and nodded glumly, then looked back at Poppy’s hands.

“How come your fingernails are all black?”

“ ‘Cause I paint them that way.”

“Oh. When am I going to see my daddy?”

“Soon. Real soon.” Again she wondered why she didn’t ask for her mommy.

Of course. Poppy had always been real close to her dad too. Mom had the regular job, working a register at Kmart, so she wasn’t around most days. Dad did seasonal work and sometimes he’d be home for weeks at a time. Since he loved basketball and she was his only kid, he’d taught her the game early. They’d spent countless afternoons going one-on-one.

Dad… I didn’t even know you were sick.

She looked at Katie and saw that her fine, dark hair was all tangled. A case of terminal bed head. But what’d you expect when the kid was tied to her bed all the time?

“How about I fix your braids?” Poppy said.

Katie brightened. “Could you do a French braid? My Nana never lets me have a French braid.”

“Nothing to it. One French braid, coming right up.” Katie’s smile, missing tooth and all, sent a shiver of pleasure through Poppy. If that’s all it takes to make you happy, little girl, you’ll get a million French braids.

And then the smile faded.

“You’re not going to make my hair like yours, are you?” Poppy felt her hair where it fell from behind the mask.

“What’s wrong with it?”

“The color’s weird.”

“Weird?” Poppy had to laugh. “That’s Deadly Nightshade, honey-bunch. The coolest color around. You rinse it into dark hair like mine and it comes out looking like red wine.”

“I still don’t want it on my hair.”

“Don’t worry. We won’t change your color, just your braids. Now, turn around and let me brush it out.” As she worked with Katie’s hair, Poppy couldn’t help thinking about Glory, and wondering if this is what might have been…

“What’s your name again?” Katie said.

Before she could give it a thought, her real name slipped out.

“Poppy.” Damn me! What an Appleton thing to do! Jesus, what am I gonna do now? The kid knows my name.

“That’s a pretty name,” Katie said. “Isn’t a poppy a flower?”

Oh, well. The damage was done. But maybe it wasn’t so bad. Anybody asking her would like figure Katie’s kidnappers would use fake names, so they’d pay no mind to “Poppy.” She hoped.

“Yep. It’s a little flower. That’s what my daddy used to call me. His little flower. Until I got tall. Then he called me his sunflower.”

“Where’s your daddy now?” Poppy’s eyes misted for an instant.

“He’s far away.”

“Is that where you grew up? Far away?”

“No. I grew up right around here.” Now that was like a total lie but it ought to throw off anybody coming around later looking for a Poppy who grew up in northern Virginia. No worry about her real home popping out. Poppy never told anyone her real home town.

Really, how could you tell someone you grew up on Sooy’s Boot, New Jersey? Sooy’s Boot! How could you let those words past your lips?

“I grew up far away,” Katie said. “In Georgia.”

“I figured you were from somewhere down South.”

“How come?”

“Yo‘ axent, hunny,” she said, mimicking Katie’s drawl. “Lank Joe-jah.”

“I don’t have an accent.”

“Oh, yes, you—” Poppy stopped as her hand found a depression in Katie’s scalp on the left side of her head— in her skull. “Hey, what’s this dent in your head?”

“I… I had an accident.”

“What sort of accident?”

“I broke my head.” Poppy’s stomach turned.

“Shit! I mean, shoot! When did that happen?”

“When I was little.”

“When you were—?” Poppy had to laugh. “You’re not so big now. At least you weren’t born that way. If you were I might think you were an Appleton.”

“What’s a Appleton?”

“They’re some weird folks from back around where I grew up. Lots of them got weird-shaped heads.”

“I thought you said you grew up around here.”

“Yeah,” Poppy said quickly. “Yeah, well, somewhere not far from here.” Not far in miles, she thought. Probably less than two hundred. But so very far in every other way it might as well be like Mars or someplace.

Sooy’s Boot… a hiccup on one of the roads running through the heart of the New Jersey Pine Barrens. She was born and raised there, which made her like a fullfledged Piney. Which meant “poor hick” to most people.

But she didn’t remember feeling poor when she was growing up. Mom had the Kmart job in May’s Landing, and Dad worked the pineland’s annual cycle: He cut sphagnum moss in the spring, picked blueberries and huckleberries in the summer, then cranberries toward fall, and cut cordwood through the winter. They had everything they needed.

Until Mom died. She’d been bothered by the veins in her legs forever, and one day one of her legs got red and sore. She should have seen a doctor, but she put it off and put it off, and then one day at work she grabbed her chest and keeled over. She died on the way to the hospital. Coroner said a giant clot had come loose from one of the veins in her leg and clogged her heart. Or something like that.

That left Poppy and Dad. She was all he had, and he doted on her. And no doubt Poppy would like still be living in the pines, would have grown up to be another Piney girl married to a Piney guy, raising a bunch of little Pineys… if it hadn’t been for basketball.

Still brushing Katie’s hair, Poppy smiled. Jesus, she’d been good. Dad had drilled all the fundamentals into her before she was ten, and by middle school she was playing with the boys at recess and giving them a run for their money.

The coach at the regional high school took one look at her in tryouts and put her in the starting five of his varsity squad. She had to put up with some heavy resentment until they started winning like they’d never won before.

All because of me, she thought.

No brag. Truth. She’d been totally awesome in the paint—could dribble circles around anyone who got in her way. And when they walled up to block her out, she hung back and dropped in three pointers. And when they got so frustrated that they started fouling her, she’d sink two for two on her free throws—ninety-five percent from the line.

By junior year she’d already been offered a full ride at Rutgers. Dad had been ecstatic: Not only was his little flower All State, but she was going to college. That big round ball was going to be her ticket out of poverty and the pines.

Then she did a real Appleton thing: She fell in love.

With Charlie Pilgrim, of all people. Even now she couldn’t help wincing at the whole thing. How could she have been so totally stupid?

Well, one thing leading to another, as it so often does, Poppy had found herself pregnant. And since there was no way she’d have an abortion—after all, this was Charlie’s baby and they were in love—she had to quit basketball.

Dad was crushed, of course. And seeing his face every day when she came home right after school instead of practicing with the team became a total torture that finally got to be too much to take.

So she and Charlie had run off to New York City where Charlie was going to find a job and they were going to get married. Except Charlie never did find steady work and they never got around to like getting married. They wound up on welfare, sharing a filthy Lower East Side apartment with two other couples.