The Devil's Stepdaughter: A Bell Elkins Story (Bell Elkins Novels)
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Authors: Julia Keller
A Bell Elkins Story
Julia Keller
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They were gathered beside the creek. At that point she didn’t know their names, but in time she would. There was Steve, the oldest and thinnest and tallest, along with another boy and three girls: Leonard, Abigail, Crystal and Tina.
Steve, hands in his pockets, was leaning out over the black, bad-smelling water, examining the greasy surface with meticulous care, like a finicky surgeon scouting for precisely the right spot for the first cut. Leonard hunched behind him, eager but in a different way, not suave, fidgety with expectation. Abigail, Crystal and Tina stood in a small circle a few feet over, intent on some mysterious game. All five were barefoot—it was nearly noon on a summer day and the heat was tremendous, overpowering—and wore cutoff jeans and T-shirts. All five had flat, straight hair the color of dirty sand.
“It’s her.”
The circle of girls broke apart with a clean snap that was almost audible. The one who had spoken was Crystal. Belfa didn’t know that at the time, aware only that she was the biggest girl. Not the oldest, Belfa would later learn. Abigail was sixteen, two years older than Crystal, but Crystal outweighed her by a good fifty pounds. The weight did not seem sloppy, like regrettable excess, liable to bog down her movements, but like an aspect of her personality, a solid, irrefutable fact that the world would have to find a way to deal with. Crystal’s bulk had a certain dogged inevitability to it; each pound looked as if it had a premeditated reason for being there. Abigail was small and slight. Tina was six, and slight-built, like Abigail. Steve was nineteen. Leonard was seventeen. The boys were skinny, though, and so looked considerably younger than their ages.
“How old are you?” Abigail asked her.
“Eleven,” Belfa said. She was ten, but she would be eleven in two months. Their stares persuaded her that she needed to go on. “They told me to come on down here. To find you all. By the creek.”
“Who. Who told you that.” Now it was Crystal again who addressed her. Crystal’s questions didn’t come out like questions. They came out like tiny pricks from a straight pin, quick and needle-sharp, avid and ravenous, even though her eyes seemed to have been dipped in a vat of liquid boredom.
“Mr. and Mrs. McCluskey,” Belfa said.
“
Mr. and Mrs. McCluskey
.” Crystal, mocking her, made her voice high-pitched and silly-sounding. With two fingers she flicked back the quadrant of her long hair that had fallen across her face.
“Yeah,” Belfa said, choosing to ignore the mockery.
“
Yeah
.” Still in the prissy, fluting tone.
Belfa focused on her tormentor. Crystal had full lips, a spread-out nose spattered with acne, and droopy, languid-looking eyelids. Head tilted, feet spread, hands on her massive hips, she was a peculiar combination of sluggishness and preternatural attentiveness, like someone who is simultaneously dormant and over-stimulated. The half-closed eyes were a ruse; she missed nothing.
“Stop that,” Belfa said.
“
Stop that
.”
Crystal’s brothers and sisters apparently were used to her habit of casual harassment, and untroubled by it, so they paid no attention. Steve continued to lean out over the creek; Leonard leaned behind him. Abigail and Tina returned to their game, something involving fingers and counting and obscure rhymes.
“I’m supposed to be here, okay?” Belfa said.
“
I’m supposed to be here
,” Crystal said, smirking, smacking her lips. “
Okay?
“
“Cut it out.”
“
Cut it out
.”
Steve’s voice broke the chain of Crystal’s abuse. “There’s one,” he said, and Crystal abruptly turned away from Belfa to join the others as they massed closer to the creek’s edge, ready for a show. Suddenly Steve, with a motion so nimble that it startled Belfa, reached down and plucked a small object from under the pale drowsy grasses fringing the creek bank. He opened his clenched fist ever so slightly, and Belfa saw the wide wet terrified eyes of a tiny frog.
Before she had a chance to wonder what Steve intended to do with it—before, really, she was even able to register the fact that it was a living creature—he clamped his hand shut again. Strings of a greasy yellow snot-like substance shot out from between his fingers. The other four laughed, but Crystal’s laugh did not blend: It rose above their laughter, a thin grating shriek edged with hysteria. Belfa was shocked by what he had done, but the most disturbing part—she would realize this later, when sorting out the day and her introduction to these people—was Crystal’s reaction, the laugh that cut the air like a diamond scoring glass.
_______
The McCluskeys were very poor. Belfa’s family had been poor, too, but this was different. A different kind of poverty. It wasn’t about an absence, the way other ways of being poor constituted an absence—a nagging lack of food, of nice clothes, of the rent on a regular basis. It was, rather, about a presence: a soaked-in stain of conviction that things had always been like this and always would be.
After the social worker left, Mrs. McCluskey told Belfa to sit down at the small wobbly dinette in the kitchen area of the trailer and—not unkindly, but in a matter-of-fact tone—explained the rules: One bowl of cereal in the morning. One. If you didn’t finish it, the bowl and its slack, tepid contents would be there waiting for you in the evening, and it would be your dinner. Then Mrs. McCluskey told her to go outside. She had a thin face, with a shelf-like ridge of bone across her forehead and, beneath it, sunken green eyes. “Other kids’re all down at the creek,” she said, gesturing with her bony chin, “so go.” Mr. McCluskey was sitting at the table, too. He had a stack of papers in front of him. Bills, Belfa saw. She recognized the red stamp, slantwise across the belly of the top sheet: PAST DUE. IMMEDIATE PAYMENT REQUIRED. Herb McCluskey never raised his face. His jaw moved back and forth, grinding away. He didn’t open his mouth. He was thin, but not as thin as his wife; over the top of his belt, his gut had just begun a growth spurt. He had not really looked at Belfa yet. Not even when the social worker was there.
Belfa had found her way down to the creek. It was easy: the scraggly grasses were crushed and pummeled, and the small trees had been shoved over to make the path. The path was like a tunnel, twisting in rhythm with the uneven ground. The woods rose up on both sides like the solid slats of a high fence. The McCluskeys had to re-make this path every spring, Belfa surmised. It surely closed over in the winter, swallowing up the footprints and the memories of the summer before.
Then came the moment when Steve squished the frog. Belfa felt sick to her stomach. But she knew better than to say anything out loud. She watched as Steve wiped his hand on his cutoffs, and then went right back to the hunt for additional victims under the foliage. The girls returned to their game.
____
Things had happened very quickly. The world had become a machine, a toothed wheel that turned and engaged the next toothed wheel, with someone else running the controls, which was a relief. A week and a half ago, Belfa and her sister, Shirley, were living with their father in a trailer by another creek—Comer Creek—and then, on a night of smoke and jumping flames and crackling noises and abject confusion, the trailer burned down. Her father was dead and her sister was taken away. There was a deputy sheriff, a big man in a brown uniform with serious-looking black boots, who reached for Belfa’s hand that night and told her that everything was going to be okay. He said the sentence roughly, not softly, as if he needed to bully it into coming true. He told her his name was Fogelsong. “Funny name, right?” he said. Belfa nodded, because he seemed to want her to, so that he could keep talking, not breaking his stride. “Yeah,” he went on. “Got teased a lot when I was your age. Had to learn to stand up for myself.” His hand was thick and hard, the palm ridged with calluses. It totally swallowed up her hand, the way the water instantly closed over the small rocks that she liked to toss into Comer Creek.
The social worker’s name was Mrs. Perkins. She was a nervous, chubby, fluttery woman who kept a light pink Kleenex folded over twice and tucked up in her right sleeve, although she never used it. She sat down across from Belfa in an artificially bright conference room at the hospital that night—they had taken her to the hospital even though nothing was wrong with her—and asked her if she had any relatives they could contact. Grandparents? No. No grandparents. Well, how about an aunt? An uncle? Cousins? No. No. And no.
Mrs. Perkins’ mouth made a straight line across the bottom of her pale face. It looked like a dash on a page. “Okay,” she finally said. “Well.”
The man named Fogelsong loomed over Mrs. Perkins. He had come in the room suddenly, and he seemed too big for it, like a piece of secondhand furniture that doesn’t quite fit. His stiff brown hat was in his hands. His head, Belfa thought, looked a lot smaller without the hat.
“Hey, Sheila,” he said to the woman. “While you’re setting up placement, why don’t I take her and go get something to eat? Ike’s Diner, maybe.”
Mrs. Perkins’ mouth never changed, except to open when she was ready to speak. “You don’t mind?”
“I don’t mind.”
Mrs. Perkins rose, retrieving her printed forms and her file folders and her empty Hardee’s coffee cup and her pen, holding the assembled supplies tightly against her broad chest as if she feared someone might snatch them from her. She looked very tired, Belfa thought. Well—so did the man who’d said his name was Fogelsong, come to that. Everyone looked tired tonight. Even the doctor who had asked her questions when they first arrived at the hospital an hour or so ago. The doctor had very gently put her hands in places Belfa didn’t like to think about, apologizing as she did so, after which the doctor—looking relieved, looking as if a great burden had been removed from her—turned to Mrs. Perkins and shook her head, mouthing the word
No
.
“Tough one,” Mrs. Perkins said to Fogelsong. “Don’t know how in the world I’m going to—”
The deputy met her eyes, and then let his eyes drop to the level where Belfa sat. Mrs. Perkins understood his silent message:
Not now
. Of course. What was she thinking? It was the tiredness that had gotten hold of her. And the frustration. And the endless case load.
This job
. That was what Mrs. Perkins really wanted to say, Belfa would realize many years later, when she recalled the moment:
This job. Look what it’s done to me. Talking like that, in front of the child. Jesus
.
“Belfa,” Mrs. Perkins said. “I’m working very hard to find a family for you to stay with, okay? And if you don’t like it, we’ll find another family, okay? Try not to be scared. Or upset. There are people who care about you. And who are here to help you. Okay?”
“Okay,” Belfa said, because she couldn’t think of anything else to say.
____
She slept in one end of the trailer with Crystal, Abigail and Tina, in a space set off from the rest of the place by a tacked-up orange bedspread with a sticky fringe at the bottom. Belfa’s bed was a deflated air mattress on the floor. The three sisters slept on an old brown couch—Crystal stretched out in one direction, and Abigail and Tina, scrunched up side by side, going in the other. Crystal’s big dirty feet repeatedly pushed in between the small bodies of Abigail and Tina; sometimes they yelled when her toenails speared their flesh or her foot “accidentally” whacked them in the chin, and Crystal laughed. Some nights, Mrs. McCluskey slept in the girls’ area, too, in a sagging old recliner that she dragged in, an inch at a time, and Mr. McCluskey bunked with Steve and Leonard at the other end of the trailer. Other times, Mr. and Mrs. McCluskey slept together on the broken-down sofa in the living room. No matter where Mr. McCluskey was sleeping, however, you could hear his snores; they were gravelly and prolonged, with a tortured adenoidal twist at the core. They reminded Belfa of the sound of her father’s snores. If you didn’t know better, you’d think the person was dying every other minute.
With only one bathroom, a speck of a room so small that you had to squat and scoot sideways under the sink in order to sit on the toilet, the trailer offered no privacy for anyone at any time. Belongings could not be personal. Everything was shared, and not because the McCluskeys were overly generous; there was simply no place to put anything where other people wouldn’t find it.
The funny thing was, though, Belfa didn’t mind the crowded conditions. Not at first, anyway. There was a definite comfort in the fact that so many people—strangers, actually, which was even better—lived alongside her, cushioning her, making a sturdy and impermeable boundary between herself and the rest of the world. So much had happened so fast, and so much of it was so perplexing, that she liked having several layers between herself and everything else. It meant she didn’t have to decide about anything. She could just go along. She rarely had to react to events or circumstances; no one much cared how she felt about things. Had her first foster home been a more regular and loving environment—this epiphany came to Belfa much later, when she was an adult—her ordeal would have been far worse, because she would have been asked, “How are you doing, sweetie?” and “Can we do anything for you?” and similarly well-intentioned but fundamentally unanswerable questions on an excruciatingly regular basis, questions that came garnished with little sprigs of worried frowns. At the McCluskeys, however, no one hovered. No one fussed over her. She could just be.
She didn’t mind Abigail and Tina. Leonard and Steve, too, were all right. They’d endured foster kids in their midst before, they told her. Sometimes two or three at a time. They had learned not to bother resenting, or sometimes even acknowledging the reality of, the strange young faces that showed up in the trailer every now and again, sticking around for a few months and then moving on to other families.
The only problem was Crystal. She was big and mean and smart, and when she sensed weakness, she attacked. She was like a certain breed of dog, savage and calculating: Once she got a taste of your skin, she never forgot it, no matter what, and time after time her teeth would find their way back to the place they’d breached with the initial bite, slotting automatically into the perforations. Cross her once—even if you didn’t know you’d done it—and you paid the price forever. After the first week or so of living with the McCluskeys, Belfa suffered a chilling and dire realization: Crystal had discovered that she was weak, and hereafter her life would be unbearable.