Life Sentences (14 page)

"Mr. Barsum?" she gasped,
her stomach tingling like a peppermint. "Can we go back now?"

"
Shh
.
Almost there," he said cheerfully.

When they got to Turtle Island,
they had to climb up a slippery bank that smelled of creatures dying in the
hot sun. Mr. Barsum carried Anna onto the island, put her down, then came
back for Daisy. She could hear him breathing hard in her ear as he scaled
the greasy bank. Finally, the three of them were standing on the little
island that used to be in the middle of the lake.

"Wow," Anna said.
"Look how far out we've come!"

"We have indeed," Mr.
Barsum said.

The island trees grew tangled together,
and Daisy could just see the shoreline from here. Dozens of sunning turtles
and snakes stirred all around them, and Mr. Barsum laughed as he shooed
them off their warm rocks. "Hey," he said. "Let's go check out
the house."

Daisy looked at the old ramshackle
house, which the girls had explored countless times. Leafy vines swallowed
up the windows, and the front door stood open. Mr. Barsum took their
hands, and the three of them went inside, where the furniture was bleached
of color and most of the paint had flaked off the walls. High school kids
had had lots of parties here, and the floor was littered with beer cans.

"Let's go upstairs,"
Mr. Barsum said, and they climbed the creaky staircase together, then
entered a bedroom that smelled of rain and growing things. Their feet
disturbed the dust as they crossed the floor, motes of dust drifting in
the sunlight, and they could hear something rustle in the walls. Rustle,
rustle.

"What was that?" Daisy asked.

"Bats," he said.

Anna shuddered. "I hate
bats!"

"Bats are good," Mr. Barsum
told her. "They eat mosquitoes."

"Oh. I love bats!" she
lisped.

"You don't love bats," Daisy
groaned, exasperated.

Mr. Barsum cleared a space for
them on the moldy mattress, sweeping aside the muddy sneakers and little
rubbery things. After he had brushed it all off, he sat down and pulled the
girls onto his knees. One for each knee. "There," he said, looking
at them and smiling.

Daisy got so jittery she just had
to stand up.

"What's wrong?" he said.

"Nothing."

"Sit down, Daisy."

"No."

"Okay, fine." Mr. Barsum
sat there hugging Anna until her face grew very pale. Then he did a strange
thing. He pulled off her panties and reached his hand up underneath her
yellow sundress. He kept his hand there for a minute.

Anna's eyes popped wide open, and
she stared at Daisy, who didn't know what to do. She just stood like a statue,
frozen and silent, while Anna's mouth drew into a taut little bow.

Mr. Barsum reached for Daisy
next and pulled her down on top of him, and the three of them lay on the musty
old mattress for a while. The mattress smelled of pee. "Will you give
me a kiss?" he asked Daisy, but she shook her head no. "Just one
little kiss?"

She lay very still, barely breathing,
and when he kissed her, it felt as if she were sinking, as if her pockets
were filled with stones. His breath smelled funny. His lips were wet. She
figured that by saying yes to a kiss, she had given him permission to do
anything else he wanted to do. There was a butterfly on the wall above
her head, and she stared at its huge false eyes, one on each wing. On the
wall near the butterfly, somebody had written in pencil, "Promise
not to erase this." All right. She promised. She would never erase
it, just as long as Mr. Barsum let them go.

The butterfly flexed its wings and
flew away, and the wall dissolved into the stinky mattress, and suddenly,
Mr.
Barsum's
hands were all over her. His fingers
were sticky. She felt stuck in his stickiness. Would she ever be unstuck?

Daisy could feel her heart thumping,
her blood buzzing, her stomach bubbling as he touched her all over. She
turned away and stared at the things on the floor-a dusty syringe, an old
textbook gnawed on by mice, a beetle walking across a crusted
T-shirt, a football spray-painted with a bright red X. The football was
flat, all the air leaked out, and the stitches in the leather were like
angry little mouths.
Xxxxxxxx
.

Now Mr. Barsum rolled her over and
planted a big kiss on her face. He tilted his head like an insect, like
a praying mantis, and Daisy started shaking. What did he want from her?
She closed her eyes, and her eyelids rotted shut. It felt as if she were
falling backward off the mattress. When she opened her eyes again, all
she could see was the football, something written on its side. Wilson
NFL. She squinted at the pebbled leather-it was old and cracked and had a
big hole in it. She stared at the red spray-painted X.

X
means no.

X
means stop.

Daisy rolled away from him, then
crawled with frantic movements toward the edge of the mattress and stood
up. "Anna, c'mon!" she cried.

Her sister was a scared rabbit,
folded in Mr.
Barsum's
big hairy arms.

"Anna! Hurry!"

Mr. Barsum shushed her. "
C'mere
, sweetie," he said, but there was fear in
his voice now.

She realized just how far they'd
come and ran down the stairs and out the door. She scurried down the slippery
bank, but when she got to the lake bottom, her feet sank so deep in the mud
she couldn't move. She took another step forward and sank even deeper into
the wet muck. Terrified, she screamed, "Help! Help me!"

Mr. Barsum came running out of
the house.

Daisy fell forward into the mud,
her hands disappearing like two spoons in cake batter. She was sinking
into the lake. The lake would swallow her alive. "Help!" She
wept hysterically.

Mr. Barsum yanked her out of the
mud, and she hugged him gratefully around the neck. "
Shh
. You're safe now. You're okay," he said, but she
wouldn't stop crying. She sobbed like a baby, like Louis in his crib. The
mud kept sucking the footprints out of Mr. Barsum-
squish, squish, squish
-as he walked a few yards away, then set
her down on a mudflat where it was safe.

"Stay here," he said,
then headed back inside for Anna.

But Daisy didn't wait. She ran as
fast as her legs would carry her back to the dock. She had to get out of there.
She jumped from mudflat to mudflat, leaving squishy footprints. She
was quick as a flash. Nothing could hurt her. Nobody would ever catch her.
She was super-fast.

"Daisy!" Anna screamed,
her voice echoing across the lake. "Wait for me!"

But Daisy didn't wait. She saw the
shore, she saw the wharf and she ran. The faster she ran, the further away
the wharf seemed to get. She tripped and fell on her hands and knees, then
picked herself up, brushed herself off and ran for the wharf as if her hair
were on fire.

"Daisy, slow down!" Mr.
Barsum hollered behind her. "I want to talk to you."

She spun around and looked at him.
He was carrying Anna on his shoulders, and Anna had her arms wrapped around
Mr.
Barsum's
head. His squinting face reminded
Daisy of the worried look he'd gotten last night when he first discovered
Louis was sick. She hated him. She didn't feel so brave anymore. She
felt sick to her stomach.

Mr. Barsum let Anna down, and she
ran toward her sister, and the two girls hugged, then washed themselves
off in a clear shallow pool near the wharf. Anna splashed a few minnows
ashore with her cupped hands, then watched as they flipped back into the
water.

Mr. Barsum squatted beside them
and silently rinsed his arms and neck. His face was beaded with sweat. He
said, "You're okay now, aren't you, Daisy?"

She nodded.

"Here, use this." He took
off his T-shirt and handed it to her, and she wiped her arms and face with
it. When she handed it back, he said, "Don't tell your mother,
okay?"

"I wouldn't," Daisy said,
ashamed.

"Okay, Anna?" Mr. Barsum
said. "This'll be our little secret."

Anna scratched her arm, lost in
thought.

"Our secret. What happened
on the island."

Anna nodded absently.

"We got carried away."

Daisy looked at him, at his lips
and eyebrows and those big pores on his nose. He was strange. She didn't
know him anymore. She took Anna's hand, and together they headed back
up the hill. "Don't tell Mom," she whispered harshly.

"Why not?"

"Just don't!" She glanced
over her shoulder. Mr. Bar-sum was picking trash out of the lake. He heaped
things in a soggy pile near the wharf and whistled a song she'd heard
plenty of times before. "In the Good Old Summertime."

When their mother got home from
the hospital that afternoon, she didn't have Louis with her. "He's
staying overnight. The doctors need to do more tests."

"What's wrong?" Daisy wanted
to know.

"They think he's very sick, sweetie."

"How sick?"

"Don't worry. I'm going back
there tonight."

"When's Louis coming home?"
she asked.

Her mother put her hand on Daisy's
head. "Will you do me a favor?" she said. "Will you be the woman
of the house while I'm gone?"

Daisy looked away.

"I need you to be brave,
okay? For me. Can you be my big strong girl?"

Anna came downstairs just then.
She was crying.

"Honey, what is it?" Lily
asked in a voice as soft as butter. She plucked a tissue from the box and
made Anna blow her nose. "Louis is going to be just fine," she
said. "Don't worry. We're all going to be fine."

Mr. Barsum stood in the doorway.
He leaned against the door frame and watched them silently while Anna
mumbled something to herself.

Lily bent close. "What, sweetie?"
she said.

"My tummy hurts."

"Come here."

Lily hugged Anna until she stopped
crying, and
Mr.Barsum
went back into the living room.
Daisy could hear the TV playing low while Lily lit a cigarette, purring
smoke rings thick as bracelets into the air.

Louis was sick for four long years
with a rare disease that slowly erased him. He seemed like a perfectly
healthy baby until he was two. Then the night of the flood, Mr. Barsum had
noticed that Louis was having a seizure. His eyes rolled up in his head,
and he couldn't stop twitching. When the twitching stopped, he couldn't
grasp anything with his hands. A few months later, he stopped responding
to certain words. Over the years, Louis's motor skills worsened, and he
never learned to walk. The disease weakened him in slow increments,
gradually forcing his head to one side. Toward the end, he had to take
medicine for the pain. First Valium, then morphine. Lily injected
the morphine herself. One day, Louis lost the use of his legs and had to
be wheeled around in a stroller like a toddler.

The summer Louis turned four,
there was an invasion of Japanese beetles. Iridescent-green beetles
were everywhere-in the roses, in the fields, devouring the grapevines,
gnawing on the pansies. Louis had a pet guinea pig named Yoda, and the
girls would pick handfuls of Japanese beetles from the garden and feed
them to Yoda, then watch with fascination as he crunched on them like
peanuts. To the Japanese beetles, Yoda was a hideous monster with an
unquenchable appetite.

One day after school, while the
grown-ups were still at work, Daisy and Anna went a little nuts, running
around the house like a pair of wild ponies. They played hide-and-seek
and wheeled Louis around from room to room, hiding him in the pantry, then
inside the
closet,when
all of a sudden, Anna
ran up to Daisy and said, "There's a man at the door!"

"What man?"

"I don't know. I didn't
ask."

"So? Go answer it."

"You!" Anna was looking
scared. "He's just standing there."

Daisy peeked around the corner
and saw the man through the screen door, which was latched shut. He was
standing on the porch, glancing at his watch. She ducked behind the kitchen
counter again. "What a weirdo," she whispered.

"Told you," Anna said.

There was another knock, and the
girls held their breath and waited, but the man didn't go away.

"Why doesn't he just leave?"
Daisy hissed after a minute.

"Maybe he saw us. What should
we do?"

Daisy shrugged. Very carefully,
she peered around the corner again and could see the man's silhouette.
He stood in the great open furnace of the day, dressed in a rumpled
black suit. He had dark hair and a dark beard and mustache and wore dark
glasses, and he looked like a tall shadow.

He knocked again.
Bang, bang, bang.

Daisy ducked behind the counter
and squatted next to the refrigerator. "Go away," she whispered
fervently, like a prayer. "Go away, go away, go away."

"Should we ask him what he
wants?" Anna said.