Alligator - Lisa Moore [18]
So Trevor, she said. What do you do? He clinked his glass against her glass.
BEVERLY
SHE HAD WATCHED Colleen, just last week, from the guest-room window that overlooks a long, gentle hill and the playground beyond. The park was sunlit and pulsing green and after a moment Colleen lay down on the grass and rolled down the hill.
She turned over and over very quickly and then lay on her back with her arm thrown over her eyes.
She looked both joyful and shipwrecked.
Beverly felt a thud of relief: she’s still a child. When she turned away from the emerald-bright window to finish her ironing, the room dimmed and she was satisfied as when a good movie ends.
The vandalism Colleen had inflicted on the bulldozers was a rogue act — Beverly had this thought watching a documentary about a demolition team on television with the sound muted — a rogue act so charged with alien zeal that she imagined Colleen had been brainwashed.
Eco-terrorists had kidnapped her daughter and turned her from her mother and everything she’d ever been taught, such as being polite at all costs, using cloth napkins, wiping the sink if there’s toothpaste crusted on it, achieving excellent marks at school, avoiding sexual intercourse, and oral sex in the back of school buses, which is the rage, recycling, and eating what’s on your plate — all of this had been erased.
On the television screen a quick succession of shots showed a leaden ball hitting a New York tenement in slow motion, and then a hotel in Bombay and then a skyscraper in Paris and the buildings bowed down like supplicants greeting a Japanese emperor.
What pissed off Beverly the most was the brutish lack of imagination.
Self-indulgence she could have forgiven; self-righteousness pissed her off.
It was a calculated and dull-witted act; Colleen had got caught.
Beverly had been drinking blueberry wine by herself at the dining-room table when the pale red and blue washes of light swept across the glass doors of the cherry-wood cabinet. A police cruiser had pulled into her driveway. It was late afternoon and the officer who got out from the driver’s side wore sunglasses and a gun. The other cop was a short woman with plump hips and a heart-shaped face.
Beverly had watched them coming up the driveway and there was an elastic moment when it seemed they might have lost their way. Colleen had been staying at a friend’s for the weekend. Jennifer Galway had asked her to sleep over. Jennifer’s mother played bridge with Beverly.
She saw the police officers and imagined Colleen asleep on the mauve-and-blue shag carpet of Jennifer Galway’s rec room in Mount Pearl. A wooden bowl of chips nearby, crunched cans of soft drink; what else did they eat? And the other girls too, Sherry Ryan and Cathy Lawrence, all asleep in the gloomy renovated basement smelling of old sneakers, cigarette smoke, and dampness. Beverly tried with all her might to imagine Colleen’s dark hair shushing over the nylon sleeping bag when she turned her head in the murky morning light from the base-ment’s grimy, half-sunken window and knew at once that her daughter was not there. She had not slept at Jennifer Galway’s last night. She had not, had not, had not slept at Jennifer Galway’s. Colleen hadn’t mentioned Jennifer Galway in months, except to say that’s where she would be sleeping. Beverly had been delighted.
The male officer drew a small pad of paper from his breast pocket and flipped a few pages and then studied the front of her house. Beverly immediately assumed Colleen was