The Heroines (5 page)

I
slammed the door behind me and pressed against the oak panels, breathless. Mother came tearing out of the living room, her long auburn hair flying behind her in wavy kinks.

“Penny! Where on earth have you been?”

I struggled to catch my breath, blinking at the bright overhead light, not quite believing that I was staring into the opaque pink glass with a scalloped edge. Woozy, I squinted at my blistered feet, toes gripping the rubber flip-flops, stunned to find them planted on the checkerboard ceramic tiles of my home. I had the strange feeling that I was entering a house completely known and completely unfamiliar. The rumpled elegance of the Prairie Homestead, with its faded velvet settees and ragged Persian rugs, seemed like a movie set. Something had transpired in the woods, and I was not the same girl, and this would never, in my mind, be the same house for me again.

“Look at you!” Mother cried.

I ran to the hall tree and gazed in the small oval mirror. My hair was wider than the glass, and razor-thin slashes crossed my cheeks and forehead. Everything about me looked wild: my eyes, my panting mouth, my sweaty, freckled forehead. The grandfather clock chimed the quarter hour. It was after midnight.

“I’ve been worried sick!” Mother said. “Where have you been?”

My mother’s interrogation seemed like a parody of an exchange any mother and daughter would have over a broken curfew. I almost laughed.

“You were in the woods, weren’t you? How many times have I told you to stay out of the woods after dark?”

“I’m not seven years old!” I snapped. “I go to the woods all the time.”

“You what?”

My big mouth had done me in again. Admitting that I wandered the woods was not a smart tactic. Even if minutes before I had vowed never to return to the woods, I couldn’t let pass any opportunity to challenge Mother’s authority. My fragile young ego didn’t want to admit that she’d been right about it. To save further browbeating, I started to cry. “It’s not my fault! This man—”

“What man? Your face is all scratched, and oh, my God!” She pointed at my legs.

I looked down. Two purple bruises had blossomed on my inner thighs from squeezing the flanks of the horse. They looked like perfectly oval plums.

“What did this man do to you?”

“He pulled me on his horse—”

“Sweet Lord.” Suddenly her anger evaporated, replaced by horror. “Oh, my darling. Lie down on the couch. You need to rest, to stop thinking—the police are on the way.”

“You called the cops?”

“Come lie down.” She held my hand and led me to the living room couch. I walked with my eyes half closed, pressing my hand to my chest, hoping that would help my heartbeat to slow. The sound was turned down on the television, but a picture of G. Gordon Liddy with his fat black mustache dominated the screen. Mother had told me he was the mastermind of the Watergate break-in. I lifted my hand to point at him, but Mother stopped me, put a pillow under my head, and peeled the flip-flops off my feet, the plastic sticking between my raw toes. I wanted to explain everything, but I was suddenly so tired, and I enjoyed her touch so much I didn’t want to ruin it with words that might be misconstrued. She stretched out my legs and laid an afghan across my chest, which moved up and down more and more slowly. Mother’s touch was utterly soothing. I hadn’t let her come this close to me since Madame Bovary had left. The velvety cushions felt wonderful, and fatigue fell on me; my legs felt heavy and leaden. I closed my eyes and a little while later felt a warm cloth on my forehead. Mother gently washed my face.

“That feels good,” I said.

“Shh. Rest now.”

Her voice lulled me to sleep, the warm soothing tone she used when I was a child. I hadn’t known how much I missed it.

I woke to the sound of a hissing walkie-talkie and gruff voices in the hallway. The back of my neck was killing me. I blinked, wondering why I wasn’t in my bed. Then everything came back to me. My head thrown back as he’d pulled my hair. The flash of fire in his torch. The thrum of the horse beneath us. My high-speed escape through the prairie. I pushed the afghan off and propped myself on my elbows to listen.

“My men are combing the woods, but we need to ask her a few questions.”

Combing the woods? I sat up and plunked my feet on the floor. Could the cops possibly apprehend Conor? Would they even see him? We kept the Heroines a secret from all outsiders. Hell, in Mother’s mind,
I
was an outsider. But if the cops brought him in, what would happen to Conor? And what damage might he do to them with that hundred-pound sword of his? Did Conor even exist? I touched my legs; the bruises were real, the scratches too, and the memory of his holding me on the horse sent streams of warm feelings through my legs. For an instant I hoped they’d bring him in. But that was crazy, and I felt ashamed and confused. I wasn’t supposed to have liked a brutal man like that, was I? I wasn’t supposed to have found him handsome.

“I want her to rest!” Mother barked. I rarely heard her sound so forceful.

“But if we’re going to catch this guy, we need a description.”

I crawled back under the covers and squeezed my eyes shut. I was in it deep. What could I tell the cops? That a fictitious character had yanked me up to his horse? I needed to ask Deirdre if Conor was a Villain, but getting up the stairs without their noticing was impossible. If only I hadn’t passed out so quickly, I could have told Mother to call off the cops.

“Did she give you a description?” the cop asked.

“She was delirious. In shock. She said something about a horse.”

“That’ll help.” His voice became clipped and deep. “Flannery, read me?”

The walkie-talkie hissed “Roger.”

“Suspect on horseback.”

“Roger that. Found some hoofprints.”

My stomach dropped when he said that. Hoofprints proved that it had really happened. Then again, the prints could have been made by another rider earlier in the day. This was a horsey town.

“Miss Entwhistle, you’re going to have to bring her down to the hospital. To verify that nothing happened.”

“Does it have to be tonight?”

“The sooner, the better. They’ll need a fresh sample.”

I had no idea what
fresh sample
meant, and I certainly didn’t need a doctor for a few cuts and bruises, but they had lowered their voices, and I couldn’t hear anything else. I needed to get upstairs to talk to Deirdre. But what would I say to her? We had never initiated a discussion with a Heroine about her circumstances. Mother had pacified Emma Bovary with little trouble after my outburst. Emma had been too steeped in her sorrow to worry about anything I’d said. Mother had slapped tactfulness so deeply into my skull that I imagined the truth would make a Heroine melt like the Wicked Witch of the West when doused with water. I couldn’t flatout ask Deirdre if Conor was a bad guy. And if I was going to lure her to the woods, I couldn’t tell her he was there. I had no clue what book Deirdre came from, so it wasn’t as if I could reveal her lucky or unlucky fate. This was another league of Heroine. Mother and I were as in the dark about her fate as she was.

Mother came into the room with a tall, broad-shouldered cop in high-riding, polyester pants. He stood a full foot higher than Mother, and he had short, dirty blond hair and a dishwater-blond mustache that was as thick as my grandfather’s shaving brush.

“Honey?” Mother switched on a standing lamp and a cone of light fell on me. I squinted and tugged the quilt up over my mouth.

Mother pulled up a caned side chair for the cop, then she sat down in the rocker and scooted closer to the couch. “Officer Marone would like to ask you a few questions.”

I looked up at him. He smelled like tobacco, and his towering height struck fear in me. A hard pack of cigarettes nested in his breast pocket, and I could read the word
Marlboro
through the thin blue fabric. Aviator sunglasses hung from the other pocket. He wedged his large self into the chair and leaned his elbows into his thighs, staring at me with intense curiosity.

I looked away from him, toward Mother’s puffy, tearful eyes. “I need to talk to Deirdre,” I said.

“We have to take a quick little trip to the hospital first, okay? Just to make sure you’re all right,” she said.

“Who’s Deirdre?” the cop asked. A pair of handcuffs rested on his leg, dangling from a clip on his belt. The silver star on his breast pocket read “Prairie Bluff.” Everything was becoming so official! I eyed the gun in his leather holster. Even the Illinois flag patch on his sleeve intimidated me.

“A boarder. But she has nothing to do with this,” Mother said. She widened her eyes to warn me against mentioning Deirdre again. I realized then that she had figured out that Deirdre was a Heroine. It angered me, how she wanted to protect Deirdre, and how she wouldn’t listen to my story.

“Miss, have you seen this man before?”

“Never.”

“What color was his hair?”

“Blondish brown, I guess.”

“Did he have any distinguishing marks?”

“He had a beard. And long hair.”

“Damned hippie,” the cop said.

“Did he look like a hippie, Penny?” Mother asked.

This was going in the wrong direction. I didn’t want them to catch Conor, even though I doubted they could. But if he did appear, he’d probably slice off their heads with one blow. I remembered him slashing and stabbing the earth in his rage. Would Mother and I be somehow responsible for a cop-killing? I had to get them to stop searching. The wilder my story, the sooner they’d call off the search. “He was a Celtic king! Come back to look for his lost wife.”

“A king?” Marone’s eyebrows came together.

“Don’t make up stories,” Mother said.

“I’m not. Ask Deirdre. She’ll tell—”

“Officer Marone, please.” Mother looked up at the cop with a soulful stare. She was using her big eyes to derail my outing of Deirdre. I knew it was bad, if Mother was turning on the charm for a cop. “This isn’t going anywhere.”

The cop was not immune to Mother’s beauty. “Okay,” he said. “That’s enough for now, Penny.”

Mother and I sat in the back of Marone’s squad car, the lights flashing without the siren as he sped through the empty Prairie Bluff streets. The faux gas lamps shone with a meager yellow light. I was too worried to speak to Mother, and the harsh and raspy voice of the dispatcher spewing code numbers and addresses from his radio silenced us both. Everything felt recognizable, but in a TV way: the grating between us and him, the back doors that wouldn’t open. I stared out the window, watching the houses get smaller, from Tudor mansions to split-levels to ranches; the gas lamps changed to ordinary streetlights. When we pulled into the North-bluff Hospital, I felt as if I were entering a movie set: the squares of lit windows, the staff milling about in the parking lot, the boxy ambulance with the doors flung open. Marone let us out of the backseat, then said he’d go and talk to the admitting desk for us. Mother and I followed him in.

The corridor and waiting room were crawling with people. Two little boys ran circles around a pregnant white woman. When I sat down in a vinyl chair, one of them cocked an eyebrow and said, “You don’t look sick.” A woman with pudgy arms and swollen ankles wept in her husband’s arms. He patted her back and said, “We’ll find a way.”

Behind a curtain, a woman screamed, “I just want this needle out of my hand!”

A nurse charged in and yelled, “We have a life-threatening situation here! I’ll have him talk to you when the life-threatening situation is settled!”

But the woman wouldn’t let up. “I want this needle out of my hand right now!”

A Boy Scout hobbled around on crutches, his purple and swollen foot tucked behind him. A baby squalled in his mother’s arms. A man held his stomach and stared up at a bombed Vietnamese village on a corner television. Mother shook her head at the screen, tapping her foot. I scanned the room for Marone. He stood at the front desk, talking to a man in a doctor’s coat. Pushing huge silver-rimmed glasses up his nose, he laughed and patted Marone on the back. He gestured to a box of Dunkin’ Donuts, but Marone shook his head. They both turned and looked at me, and I dropped my head.

A few minutes later, a nurse with a single gray braid called my name and led us into a private examination room. Mother sat down with a clipboard and started to fill out papers the nurse gave her. The nurse had me pee in a cup in an adjacent bathroom. I thought they would put iodine on my cuts, make me say ah! and send me along with an aspirin. Instead, the nurse wrapped a tube around my forearm and told me to pump my fist.