Anna Snoekstra - Little Secrets

He squeezed the awful thing into the evidence bag. The plastic stretched across its face, its open mouth gaping as though it was trying to breathe. Frank tried not to think about how much it looked like an asphyxiated child. Despite himself, he shuddered as he snapped the trunk shut.

6

Rose didn’t have a chance to think while she got the kids ready for school.

“Shoes on,” she said to Laura as she passed her bedroom. The little girl was sitting on her bed in her socks, arms crossed. She was still angry about Frank taking her doll away.

In the kitchen, Sophie was attempting to put peanut butter on bread, but somehow had managed to get most of it on her hands, cheeks and the bench. Their mother had recently given her the new chore of making the school lunches, but Rose always ended up doing it. She nudged Sophie out of the way with her hip; it was quicker just to do it herself.

The piece of sandwich Sophie had attempted to make had holes in it from where she’d pressed too hard with the knife. Rose folded it over and took a large bite as she lined up six slices of white bread. She chewed, enjoying the salty crunchiness, as she neatly spread each slice. The peanut butter had to reach each corner; she knew that from when she was a kid. She finished off her own mangled sandwich as she neatly cut each of the three in front of her into two even triangles. Behind her, she heard shrill giggles.

“What are you doing?” she said, turning to the twins. Sophie was lying on the floor and Scott was crouching over her. They stopped and looked at her, Sophie rubbing her wet cheek.

“He was hungry,” said Sophie, and they burst out laughing again.

“Were you eating the peanut butter off her face?”

“Maybe,” said Scott.

“Gross! Hurry up.”

She quickly wrapped the sandwiches in cling film, then tossed them into the schoolbags that had been dumped next to the front door yesterday afternoon. She remembered Bazza tripping on them when he and Frank had come in this morning. The thought made her wince. She hated the idea that they’d seen where she lived. Somehow, with them standing there, the stains on the carpet and the crumbs on the bench top seemed magnified.

She picked up Laura’s bag and went into Laura’s seemingly empty room. Rose knew better.

“Don’t leave without her!” she yelled, hearing the twins opening the front door.

“But she takes forever.”

Rose placed the backpack on the ground and knelt down in front of the bed, taking the small scuffed-up shoes off the carpet.

“Can I have a foot?” she asked softly, and one of Laura’s little socked feet emerged from under the bed. She slid the shoe on and gently did up the buckle.

“Are you angry with me?” she asked.

There was no response, but another shoeless foot was extended out from under the bed. Rose took it in her hand.

“Fair enough,” she said as she slipped the white-socked foot into the shoe. There was no point in trying to explain to Laura. Rose would prefer her sister feel angry than afraid of whoever had chosen her for that strange present.

She held Laura’s ankles in her hands and carefully slid her out from under the bed. Laura ignored what was happening and stared at the ceiling, her cheeks blotchy and red from all the angry crying, her eyelashes still wet.

Rose took her under her arms and, pulling her up onto her feet, kissed her on the top of her head. “Off you go, then.”

The twins banged and skidded out of the house, Laura trotting quietly behind them. Rose often felt sad watching her siblings walk to school. Laura was always left lagging behind. Like Rose herself. She closed the door against the heat and noise, and the house went totally silent except for the low hum of the refrigerator.

Rose padded across the carpet to her bedroom. Standing in the doorway, she didn’t enter. Her suitcase was in the corner of her room. It was open, her best clothes folded inside. She’d packed. Actually packed. That was how sure she’d been about the cadetship. She was such an idiot.

There was no point in unpacking. Cadetship or not, her mother and Rob had told her she had to move out by the time Rob came home from his latest haul. That was in just one week. Part of her thought that maybe if she told her mum what had happened, if she asked for a bit more time, her mother would relent.

Really, though, she’d long stopped thinking of this place as her home. She had to start looking for a rental, but even the idea of it made her exhausted. Her sleep had been hollow, never dipping far from the surface of consciousness. Frank had promised he’d come over first thing the next morning when she’d called him in a panic from Mia’s car last night. When she did get home she had quietly pulled the doll out of Laura’s sleeping fingers and put it on the highest shelf, its glass eyes staring at her. The strangeness of it, her own inability to understand what the implications were, meant that no matter how tired her bones felt, her mind had whirred on. She had listened to her mother get up at 5:00 a.m. to go to work. Heard her soft footsteps down the hall, her sigh, barely audible, from the dark kitchen. She hadn’t moved. She’d remained motionless in her clammy sheets, listening as her mother’s car backed out of the driveway, the headlights illuminating her bedroom. Then her thoughts turned to dreams and she was asleep without even knowing it. Soon after she had awoken sharply to Laura’s screams.

Jumping out of bed, she’d realized the screams were out of anger, not fear. Laura had found the doll eventually and was almost crushed in the process by climbing up the bookcase. She only had the thing for about fifteen minutes when Frank and Bazza had pulled up.

Rose was still hovering in her doorway when the home phone rang. She ran back into the kitchen and snatched it up.

“Rose?” It was her mother, sounding breathless. “I just got your message. The police were at the house? Is everyone okay?”

“Yep, but everything’s fine. They just came because someone left Laura a doll.”

There was silence down the line, and Rose braced herself.

“You called the police because of a toy?” The panic was totally gone from her voice now.

“The police were worried, Mum. They say that there’s been a whole bunch of kids getting dolls and—”

“Rose.” Her mum’s voice was quieter then. Rose imagined her in the break room at the poultry factory, her hairnet still on, her body turned away from the rest of the workers’ pricked ears. “We’ll discuss this when I get home.”

The line went dead. Rose slammed the phone back onto the cradle. Her mum never listened to her anymore. Rose ignored the peanut butter smeared across the counter and went back to her room, diving onto the bed. Turning away from the suitcase, she squeezed her eyes shut. The sheets beneath her felt sticky from her restless night.

Rose knew the conversation that was going to happen with her mother when she got home. She knew the way her mum would look at her too, like she was an inconvenience, like she was just another frustration on an already-long list. It hadn’t always been like that.

It was less than a month after the rumor began that the Auster Automotive Factory would close that her mother had started seeing Rob. He was a long-range trucker, and looked the part. Rob was someone her mother would never have fancied before. But when a steady wage became a rarity in the town, Rob became a catch. Back then, Rose didn’t even care. She didn’t care when he moved in, or even when they announced that her mother was pregnant with twins. Rose was seventeen, almost finished high school and stupid enough to be excited about the future. The idea that she would fail to get a scholarship, and what with no savings and no financial support wouldn’t be moving out of town anytime soon, hadn’t even crossed her mind. Ever since then she’d been living on borrowed time.