Chapter 20
20
POLLY
As I chop carrots on the kitchen counter, I sense I am being watched.
There aren’t many people out here. Hank and I own a home well off the beaten path—the seller advertised it as a house, but I’d really call it a large cabin. We live in a rural part of Maine, and there’s only one other house within a mile of ours. Even our postboxes are all the way down the road, since the postman won’t drive down the one narrow, unpaved road to our home, which tends to get overgrown with trees and branches that Hank cuts down himself when they get out of control. We don’t get many visitors—not these days.
Now more than ever, I appreciate the solitude. But when Hank is at the shop, I get nervous. This is the kind of place where if you screamed, nobody would hear you.
I lay down the knife on my red cutting board. I’ve now peeled and chopped three large carrots, which will be added to the stew Hank and I will eat for dinner. I turn around, and two blue eyes are staring at me through the window on the back door. Then I hear it. Three soft raps in succession.
I cross the room and flip open the single lock on the back door. I pull the door open, and there’s a little girl standing there, her dark-blond hair gathered into two messy pigtails. Her giant eyes stare up at me.
“Sadie,” I say. “What are you doing here?”
She shifts between her gray sneakers, which look like they were once white. There’s a little hole over her big toe on the right sneaker, although really, she should be wearing boots in this weather. “Daddy isn’t home yet. Can I help you make dinner?”
I hesitate, even though I know I’m ultimately going to let her in. Sadie’s father specifically told me he didn’t want her to come here after school, but I’ve been letting her do it anyway. Sadie is seven years old, and in my opinion, she’s far too little to be making the half-mile trek back from the bus stop on her own, but her father doesn’t seem to care, and her mother cares so little that she doesn’t live here at all. I told Mitch I would pick Sadie up every day—God knows I don’t have anything better to do these days, ever since The Incident—but he didn’t like that idea. Actually, his exact words were Mind your own goddamn business, Polly.
I’ve never been good at that.
“Sure,” I say to Sadie. “Come on in!”
As she skips into my kitchen, I mentally tick off in my head whether I have all the ingredients to make oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, because those are Sadie’s favorite. But I’ll feed her some stew as well before I send her on her way. The girl is far too skinny. As she slips off her winter coat, which is frayed at the sleeves, I can see all the bones jutting out in her arms. That girl is all sharp angles.
“What are you making?” Sadie asks me.
“I’m making beef stew,” I say. “That’s Hank’s favorite.”
Hank loves my beef stew, but to be fair, anything I put in front of him gets demolished and the plate practically licked clean. My husband sure can eat.
I put Sadie to work dropping the stew ingredients that I chop into the simmering pot. When she’s a little older, I’ll teach her to chop vegetables herself, but she’s too young now. Still, she likes to watch me. She crinkles her tiny nose as I light a candle on the kitchen table.
“Why are you doing that?” she asks me.
“I’m chopping onions,” I explain. “If you light a candle before you chop onions, it burns off the toxins so your eyes don’t water.”
That’s a tip my mother taught me when I was a girl, and we’ve got a ton of candles lying around since the power always goes out whenever there’s a storm. It’s always good to be prepared.
I’ve got the radio tuned in to the news. The two big stories are the snowstorm coming tomorrow—which is hardly news, since it seems like there’s a snowstorm every week—and also some big merger from a businessman I’ve never heard of. Neither story interests me, but I like the background noise.
As I chop the onions, the flame on the candle grows brighter the way it always does. I always imagine that the toxins from the onion are feeding the flame. Sadie watches with wide eyes as the fire grows, her chin balanced on the ball of her palm. I can’t help but notice the dirt caked deep into her fingernails.
When was the last time this little girl had a bath? If I had to guess, I’d say it’s been a few days at least.
I instruct Sadie to scoop up the onions and drop them in the pot. I chew on my lip, watching her. “Sadie?”
“Yes?”
“How would you like a bubble bath? It’ll be like a spa.”
Sadie’s blue eyes light up. Hank is going to kill me, but I can’t let this girl leave my house without making sure she’s at least achieved the minimal level of hygiene.
I turn down the heat under the pot so the stew can simmer, and I head to the bathroom to run a bath for Sadie. I don’t have a real bubble bath solution, but I have a bottle of baby shampoo that bubbles up nicely when I pour it in with the warm running water. While the water is filling the tub, I allow Sadie some privacy to undress and climb in. I stand outside the door, listening to the sound of her struggling to peel off her shirt and pants.
“You can come in now, Polly!” she calls out.
I gently push open the bathroom door and find Sadie in the tub, the bubbles nearly up to her neck. The water is the perfect temperature, and she’s smiling ear to ear. I pick up the clothes she abandoned on the toilet; they are stiff with old dirt. I’ll throw them in the washing machine now for a quick cycle, and they’ll be clean and toasty warm when she’s ready to go home.
The tub is nearly full now. I reach over to shut off the water, and that’s when I notice the angry purple bruise encircling her upper arm. It’s the exact shape and size of a man’s hand.
My cheeks burn. I used to be a nurse before The Incident, and I recognize what this must be. Mitch got a little too rough with his daughter. It’s not the first time I’ve seen a mark like that on Sadie. I even called Child Protective Services once, but nothing came of it. Except Mitch suspected I was the one who did it, which gave him reason to hate me even more.
“How did this happen, Sadie?” I ask her.
She looks down at the bruise on her arm. “I fell.”
I can’t imagine how falling would cause a bruise that looks like that, but I’m not about to interrogate this little girl. I did what I could. I called Child Protective Services. It’s not like I could take Sadie and rescue her from that awful man all by myself.
Could I?
No, I can’t.
Sadie spends the next half hour in the bathtub. The formerly clear water turns gray, and I have to unplug the drain and turn on the faucet to let the dirty water leave the tub. I shampoo her hair for her, trying to comb through the knots with my fingers. I use a cup from the kitchen, and I have her lean her head all the way back so I can rinse out the shampoo without getting any soap in her eyes. It’s the way my mother did it for me.
“Will you braid my hair like yours, Polly?” Sadie asks me.
I touch the braid at the back of my head. Over the last couple of years, especially since I stopped working, I’ve been wearing my hair in one long braid hanging down my back. It’s not stylish, but it keeps it out of my way. “Sure. I can even French braid it for you.”
“What’s a French braid?”
I don’t entirely know how to answer that question. “It’s like a regular braid, only fancy.”
Sadie’s eyes light up. She definitely wants a French braid.
Just as I’m straightening up to help Sadie climb out of the bathtub, a large fist pounds on the bathroom door. My heart is in my throat as I brace myself for what’s about to happen. I crack open the door, and my hulking husband is standing there, a deep crease between his eyebrows. He attempts to push the bathroom door open, but I hold my ground for once, keeping it open only a sliver.
I force my lips into a smile. “You’re home early.”
Hank looks down at me, his own lips turned down. I always felt too tall and gawky at five foot ten and used to envy women who were smaller in stature. But that all changed when I met my husband, who is an impressive six foot four. He’s built like a lumberjack, and half his face is obscured by a thick brown beard that has gotten bushier every year over the past decade, although he swears he trims it once a week.
Hank is the sort of man who if you saw him in a dark alley, you’d run the other way.
“What are you doing in there?” he demands to know.
I slip out the door, keeping it cracked slightly. “I’m giving Sadie a bath.”
Hank doesn’t talk much. He doesn’t like to say something if he doesn’t feel like it’s worth saying, and in his opinion, not much is worth saying. Before him, I dated a lot of men who liked to talk just to hear the sound of their own voice. Hank isn’t like that. On our first date, I talked and talked to fill the silence, and Hank just sat across from me at the restaurant, nodding like he was hearing every word. It was the first time I ever felt like anyone was really listening.
And now all he says is “ Polly .”
“I know ,” I hiss at him. “But she was filthy, Hank.”
This time, he doesn’t say a word. His own shirt under his coat is stained with oil. And like Sadie, he has dirt ground into his fingernails, from his work at the auto shop we own. But he’s going to go upstairs and take a shower now, like he does every day when he gets home from work. Sadie can’t do that.
“She came here to find me.” I fold my arms across my chest. “I’m going to have her clothes cleaned, and then I’ll send her home. Mitch won’t even know.”
Hank lets out a long sigh, but he doesn’t say anything else. After ten years of marriage, I know exactly what he’s thinking anyway. You’re asking for trouble, Polly.
And he’s right.
But I don’t care.