Off Season - Jack Ketchum [90]
Early that evening my father and I were out with the horses in the barn, my father currying them down with brisk short strokes while I cleaned and handed him the brushes. We fed them and gave them water. It was still so cold in the barn that unless my father was out there with the heater on working on the Monitor the water would ice over. So you had to change it often.
We stomped on in through the door and the first thing we heard was Betty whining. We went into the living room and there was the male pup dead on the floor in front of her, its flesh half-eaten from the back legs halfway up the belly. Betty was licking at it, looking guilty and defeated.
“Sometimes they do that, Jordy,” he said. “I know it’s hard. But I guess there was something wrong with him we didn’t see. Dogs sense that somehow. They don’t want their pups to grow up sickly.”
Tears were pouring down my cheeks. My father drew me to him and hugged me and after a while I was better and he let me go and went to the kitchen for some newspapers to clean up the mess. Betty was still licking the pup’s head as though she’d just given birth to him, as though that might revive him.
I turned and saw the girl standing behind me and I remember glaring at her, daring her to smile. She didn’t. She just looked right through me as though I wasn’t there, watching Betty lick the pup. And I didn’t know if it was true or not that Betty had some sense about the pup the way my father said but I knew for sure that I had a sense about the girl and that somehow the dog would have been fine if she hadn’t been there. I didn’t know what she’d done, but something.
And that night I made sure she was the first of us to go to sleep.
You can get used to anything, though—even lingering distrust—especially if you’re a kid. My father’s heart had opened up to her and there was nothing I could do to change that. I made it clear that I neither liked nor trusted the girl but my father said give it time.
She stayed.
We tried every possible way to locate parents or relatives—flyers, radio broadcasts, newspapers. My father’s company even arranged to get us a series of two-minute spots on the fledgling local TV station. When it became clear that no one was going to come forward my father instituted formal adoption proceedings, which happily for me dragged on and on. Child welfare felt they had a claim to her, especially since my father was a single parent. He found himself a lawyer he could barely afford to oppose them. Meantime we needed to give her a name.
We named her Elizabeth, after my mother.
It was not my idea. But it seemed to make him happy.
Our lives slipped slowly into a routine. My father went to work. We went to school. It was a small sixroom schoolhouse and Elizabeth stood out there like a sore thumb. She never talked. She never appeared to listen. She frustrated every approach to teach her, just sat and doodled with a pencil while the lessons droned on. If you looked to see what she was drawing she tore it up. Individual attention didn’t help. She just stared at Mrs. Strawn with those wide green empty eyes as though she and the teacher had come from different planets altogether. We knew she could understand language, simple commands, but she obeyed them only if she chose to—that is, unless they came directly from my father. Then she’d smile in that sly sidelong way I’d come to dislike so much and do whatever it was he asked.
I thought it strange that not one kid at school teased her. Here she was, an eleven or twelve-year-old sitting in a third grade class along with the rest of us—who actually belonged there—learning nothing, doing nothing, obviously doomed to repeat third grade while we’d move on to the fourth. Yet nobody teased her. She was pretty, god knows, probably