Bonnie Nadzam - Lamb

“I want.” She sniffed. She ran her hand beneath her nose and her arm came away streaked with snot and blood. “To go home.”

“No,” he said. “No you don’t. Here.” He held up her hands and lifted off her tank and held his breath. “I’m not looking,” he said. “I give you my word. I’m just giving you a bath, right?” She nodded. “Now slide those off. There you go. Good girl. Oops. Oops. Get the other leg. Good. Okay. Now soap,” he said. “Soap soap.” He put it in her hand. “Ssh,” he said. “Ssh. Lather that up. You know how to do it. This is fine, right? Just like a father would do if you were sick, right? Or if you bumped your head. Let me see your chin. Is it bad? Stick out your tongue.” She sat there holding the soap, so he took it back and rubbed his palms with it, his hands shaking. And he washed her. Scooped up warm water to splash over her shoulders. He cleaned her face. He talked the whole time, not stopping, and she hung forward and he soaped her back and lifted one arm at a time and underneath the arm and across the chest, mechanically, coldly, like a nurse. “That’s it,” he said, singing, “nice and clean. Then we’ll sleep in and sleep all day tomorrow. We can just stay here all day and sleep and watch TV and eat snacks.” He turned off the faucet. The room went dead quiet. Small splashing of bathwater. He picked up her feet and soaped her toes and ankles and calves and ran the bar of soap up beneath her thighs and around her bottom moving fast, every inch of her body as smooth as the inside of her arm. “We’ll pull down the blinds and double up the pillows and blankets and just sleep.” Whispering now. Small splashing of bathwater. “You can curl up right against me. You can snore away and”—he filled his hands with warm water and spilled it over her head—“dream and dream.” He stood and took a cellophane-wrapped cup from the bathroom sink. “Let me wash your hair and I’ll tuck you in. Just like you were my girl. Just like you were my very own. Now. Here you go. Yes just stretch right out. Lean—yes. Put your head in my hand. There you go. Relax. Yes.” And he was filling her hair with warm sloshes of water and with shampoo and he rubbed her scalp in small soapy circles, and the water lapped in the dark and he felt her let the weight of her head go into his hand. “Do you want to be my daughter for the week?” He was saying. “My very own?” She nodded her wet, soapy head in his hands, and it was fine, she was fine, he rinsed her hair, filling the plastic motel cup with warm water and pouring it over the top of her head. “Yes,” he was saying, “let me wash you, sweetheart, let me put you to sleep.”

When the girl woke the road was running beneath her. Sky painfully brilliant through the windshield. “I thought I was dreaming,” she said suddenly and sat straight up. She was in the yellow sweater and her old sneakers and dirty blue jeans. Outside the truck, before and beside and behind her, an endless span of blond grass and silver bitterbrush and greasewood and sage. All of it vast and unchanging, as though Lamb and the girl were at rest and not rushing west, a diffuse and unmappable destination toward which they sped on an otherwise empty state highway.

“You were dreaming.” Lamb looked over at her, his cheekbone a soft shining purple, blue eyes bright. He was in a clean shirt, face scrubbed, hot coffee and a boiled egg in his belly, and the open road before him. “Boy, did you ever sleep, my pretty little pig. Were they good dreams?”

She looked out the window, then back to him, to the bruise on his face. “No.” She crossed her arms over her chest and looked back outside. “Where are we?”

“North Dakota.”

“I want to go home.”

“No you don’t. Don’t be that way. Here.” He reached into the glove compartment and pulled out a giant chocolate chip cookie wrapped in Saran Wrap. “You hungry?” She turned her head, and he put it on her lap. “You have a good internal clock,” he told her. “Anybody ever told you that?”

Nothing.

“Well,” he said, “put it on the list of amazing characteristics of the amazing girl you are.” She kept silent. “Don’t you want to know why I think you have a good internal clock?”

Shrug.

“Because you slept two full days and woke up just in time to see the street sign.” The mouth of a narrow dirt road broke through the shrub without warning, an opening in the brush and scrappy trees that anyone but our guy would have missed. He slowed the truck almost to a stop and turned and pointed: El Rancho Road.

“Two days?”

“I wanted to show you the Royal Gorge. But you wouldn’t wake up.”

“Two days?”

“Then I wanted to show you Rabbit Ears Pass. But you told me go to hell and take my rabbit with me. Did you know you talk in your sleep?”

She started to cry. She pulled the handle of the door again and again. “You said two days on the road.”

“I miscalculated.”

“I want to go home.”

He stopped the truck and put it in Park.

“I did not sleep two days. Unlock the door. Why do you put the child lock on? I’m not a little kid.” Her voice high and fast and tight again. “Open it.”

“Where are you going to go?”

“I don’t know. I don’t care.”

“You fell asleep at the top of that mountain. Do you remember? It was all dark and you said it was scary and I told you to shut your eyes. Just sleep. Do you remember?”

“You’re never going to take me back.”

“Tommie. Tommie Tom Tommie. We can go back right now. Is that what you want to do?”

“I don’t believe you.” She put her face in her hands and talked into them. “I did not sleep for two days.” She looked again at the bruise.

“Well. I don’t know what to say about that. I think you were pretty tired that night at the motel.”

“You think I’m stupid and you treat me like I’m five.” She crossed her arms over her chest, tears still coming. “I don’t need fucking baths.”

“Hey.” He raised his voice. “Watch your language. I know how old you are.”

“Well, why don’t you act like it?”

Lamb took the car out of Park.

“So you’re just going to keep driving anyway?”

“There’s no way to turn around on this narrow road without going to the end where it widens. I’ll take you back. You want to go back? I’ll send you. And so much for all this.” He flung his hands up. “So much for all this.” They wound through a stand of cottonwoods and round bushes with waxy yellow flowers all hunched together over an empty arroyo. The road was pitted and narrow and wash-boarded, dipping and rising again. Long-stemmed spikes of yucca already dried out by cold nights and wind rattled in the breezes. The girl turned away from Lamb and leaned her forehead against the cool glass. She shut her eyes. For five minutes they rolled slowly over the uneven road.

“Talk to me, Tommie. What is it? You’re all finished now? You want to go home really?”

“Like you would really let me.”

“I promised you a plane ticket if you want one and we can go straight from here to the little airport and put you on a propeller plane and good night, Tommie. Is that really what you want to do? Just say. I’ll give you a little purse of money and a bag of snacks and cash for a cab from Midway to Lombard.” The left front wheel dropped five or six inches into a gouge of dirt and they jerked in their seats. He gave her a look. Contrite. “I’m sorry, Tom. I am. I’m not very good at this. I’ve never had a niece, or a sister, or anything like that. To say nothing of a daughter. This is new territory for me, do you understand? That’s part of the beauty of this thing, isn’t it?”