Steve Tem - Ugly Behavior

She watched his face go away as he stood up. She nodded and he smiled again.

She got in trouble that day at school for staring out the window too much and not doing her work. She couldn’t help it. Everything looked so blurry outside, like the sun had come down and made all the plants, cars, and buildings glow with a funny light. Or like she was seeing everything outside through water, but it wasn’t raining. It was funny.

Later she looked into her lunch box and brought her marbles out. They were red, blue, green, lots of different colors. Some you could even see through. A bunch of them had belonged to her first daddy, her real daddy, her mommy had told her. She liked looking at those the best. They looked so old. And they made her feel better. She brought them to school every day but she didn’t play with them. She just liked to look. Somebody might steal them if she played.

Before dinner her daddy came home and stepped on her foot. Twice. He pretended he didn’t notice and she pretended it didn’t happen, even though it hurt a lot. But she pulled her feet up into the chair and sat on them, just to make sure he didn’t do it again.

After dinner he passed by her in the upstairs hallway and nudged her into the wall. She hit her cheek and it cut a little.

A few minutes later he came out of his bedroom. She was sitting in the middle of the hall crying and holding her cheek. The blood felt hot and sticky on her fingers.

“Why, Cheryl! What happened?” he said and crouched down next to her, his wide face filling her vision.

“You… you pushed me!” she cried, sobbing, and for a moment was very afraid, afraid of what he would do to her now that she had said that. She shouldn’t have said it, but she’d been hurt, and it made her forget.

“Why… how can you say that!” he said, looking really puzzled. Cheryl knew he was play-acting; his eyes were too wide and his mouth so large and open he looked like the giant chicken she liked so much on the cartoons. But she didn’t like her daddy like this. She didn’t like him at all.

“I’m… I’m sorry. I guess I fell.” She looked down.

Then he was holding her, speaking softly to her, telling her that everything was going to be okay, and that he loved her very much. He talked to her just like she was his own real daughter. She hugged him back real hard, hoping maybe it was all true, though she really didn’t think it was. Her old daddy had died so long ago she couldn’t remember him, and when this new one came along last year and married her mother she used to dream sometimes that he was actually her real daddy come back to her, and that her mommy just didn’t recognize him.

But that couldn’t be true. Her real daddy wasn’t like this one at all.

That night in bed she was thinking about her real daddy when the tall man with the dark face came in. She knew he was really her new daddy but now she was trying to think of him as a stranger, a bad dark stranger who pretended to help her by taking her to the bathroom so she wouldn’t wet the bed but who was really an evil, bad man out to get her. It made her feel better that way. It made her feel safer when she had to be with her new daddy during the daytime.

The man with the dark face, the man with no face it was so dark, reached down and lifted her up out of the bed. “Time to use the bathroom,” he said softly.

He took her down the hall into the bathroom and tried to crash her head against the doorframe. But she was too smart for him this time and put her hands over her head. She hurt her fingers when he bumped her into the doorframe but at least they didn’t hurt as badly as her head had. Sometimes her head hurt so badly she couldn’t sleep after that. And besides, her mommy asked funny questions about the bruises.

So she wasn’t expecting it when he ran her face into the front of the sink. Her nose mashed and she couldn’t breathe and it felt all funny. When she opened her mouth to cry he put his hand over her mouth and held it there so long she started feeling sleepy. Then he took it away. Then she was too sleepy to cry.

The next morning her mommy was all upset about her nose, wanting to know what happened.

“I can’t remember,” Cheryl said.

“But your nose is all bloody! Surely you know what happened?”

“Maybe Cheryl was playing where she shouldn’t be playing and that’s why she’s afraid to tell us,” her new daddy said, looking funny at her mommy.

Cheryl didn’t say anything at first, then looked up at her mother. “I have bad dreams sometimes and they make things happen.”

“Well, you didn’t dream a bloody nose!” her mommy said.

“I… I think I must have tripped when Daddy was in my room last night.”

Her new daddy looked at her mommy, then turned to Cheryl. “I wasn’t in your room, Cheryl. You must have dreamed it.”

Her mommy nodded her head slowly, and it looked to Cheryl like her mommy was very nervous. Cheryl nodded her head back. “I guess I did,” she said.

“I know… you must have had a bad dream and fallen out of bed,” her new daddy said.

Cheryl nodded silently, and the more she thought about it, the more she tried to think her new daddy was right. She wanted it to be true.

She sat for a long time on the stairs before bedtime listening to her mommy putting away the dishes, her new daddy talking to her in low sounds like a dog barking. For awhile it made her giggle, thinking that he sounded like a puppy, but then she got scared, and the staircase seemed darker than before.

“…getting to be a problem… her imagination…”

The words were suddenly easier to hear, and at first she couldn’t understand why. But then she understood.

“She’s delusional, Betty. All these dreams. And I think she’s lying to you… to us, half the time…”

Her new daddy knew she was out on the stair listening. And he wanted to make sure she heard what he was telling her mommy.

“…something wrong with her, Betty. We love her. I love her. But we may have to send her away…”

Cheryl crawled up the steps carefully. She was afraid to stand up and walk, afraid she would make too much noise. And she didn’t cry this time. It surprised her, but she didn’t even feel like crying.

That night Cheryl woke up a little early. She looked at the doorway, but there was no one there. The dark man with no face hadn’t come yet.

She lay there thinking about what her daddy would do if he were in her place — her real daddy. Her good daddy.

She got up and went to her closet. She took out her bag of marbles. They were really old; she’d had them a long time. She took them and walked out the door.

She was really careful placing the marbles around the bend of the hallway, at the top of the stairs. She put them down one at a time, so that they made a nice pattern. The pattern looked a little like the moon. She put her real father’s old marbles on the outside, and the newer marbles on the inside.

Then she got up to leave. There wasn’t much light in the hallway. You couldn’t even see the marbles on the dark carpet now.

She didn’t have to wait long after she got back into bed. She heard her mommy and daddy’s bedroom door opening, and the creakings and groanings of the hallway floor as the dark man with no face walked toward her bedroom.

Then there was the big crash, followed by a loud scream, and a lot of thumps and bangs as the dark man fell down the staircase.

“You must have dreamed it, Daddy,” Cheryl said softly beneath the covers, giggling and snuggling closer to her pillows. “You dreamed it.”

Jimmy hadn’t caught four hours sleep all week. Normally he was a dead man about five seconds after he hit the sheets. In fact he liked telling people “I work like a bastard for my sleepeye.” Not that he didn’t lie there staring at the ceiling a few hours now and then, but not like this, not for days, not for a week. Sometimes he might lie awake counting the tiles because he was trying to remember something, even though he might not know he was trying to remember something. Some special butt-saving part of his brain would nag at him until he’d think of that anniversary, birthday, or special favor for his boss that he’d completely forgotten. “Ah, Jimmy, thank you,” he’d say when he remembered these things, flat on his back in bed. Sometimes Tess would nudge him with her elbow a little when this happened, pretending to be asleep but still letting him know he’d saved his butt by just a hair this time (she figured he’d forgotten something having to do with her and most of the time she was right).