Skeleton Man (4 page)

T
HERE ARE NO PHOTOS
at all in this house. No pictures of any kind, no paintings, not even any mirrors, aside from that small cloudy one in my bathroom. Even that was not up on the wall at first. I found it tucked behind the wardrobe and hung it up in the bathroom. Whenever I leave each day I take it off the bathroom wall and carefully
put it in its original hiding place. I just have this feeling that if I don't do that, it will be gone when I come back. There is nothing else in this house to show his face or anyone else's.

When he picked me up, he smiled and laughed and talked like a concerned adult. It must have been an effort for him. His face was drawn and thin, angular with high cheekbones and a chin that jutted out, a high forehead with only a fringe of hair around his ears. But he looked human then.

As soon as he got me into the car, he started to change. I remember him putting on sunglasses and pulling his big hat down so that his face was concealed from me and from other drivers. I caught a glimpse of the side of his face every now and then, and it seemed as if the flesh was melting off his bones. At the time I figured the light was playing tricks on me, but now I'm not so sure. Ever since that day he's been careful not to show me his face at all. He always keeps his back to me.

And his hands! He'd kept them in his pockets, hidden from the social service people. But I could see them as they held the wheel. They were white, pale, pale white. And the skin on them was so thin that I thought I could see
through to the bones. And the fingernails were thick and long and sharp like claws. He must have seen me looking because he slipped on a pair of leather gloves at the next stoplight. Then I turned away to watch the trees and telephone poles and the houses whizzing past, being left behind us as we went down that road toward someplace I never wanted to go.

He didn't speak much that day. He just opened the car door when we got to the house.

“Get out,” he whispered.

I got out.

“Go in,” he said.

I went in.

“Eat.”

I ate the plate of food he put in front of me while he stood behind me and watched until I was done.

“Your room is upstairs,” he said.

And I went up to it with my box and my suitcase, and he shut the door behind me and locked it. I remember wondering that night if the door would ever be unlocked again. I also remember not caring whether I lived or died. I missed my parents so much. And then I remember feeling zombielike and conking out.

I still miss them. But I can't believe that
they're gone forever. Dad always told me that being a dreamer meant that I had a special kind of gift like our old people had long ago. If they really were never going to come back I'd know somehow through my dreams. But I haven't had that kind of dream. Instead, I just have this feeling that they're out there somewhere and that they will be back. And when they come back I will be there and they'll hug me and explain why they were gone and things will be all right again. I do care whether I live or die.

It is the middle of the night. It is still Wednesday night, a night that just doesn't seem to want to end, that just keeps creeping along. But my mind is moving like a runaway freight train. Run away, that's exactly what I feel like doing. But run away where? First of all I've got almost no money, and without it I wouldn't get far. He'd find me and bring me right back here.

But that is not the only reason I haven't run away. I have this feeling that if I'm ever going to see my mother and father again, I need to be here. That somehow my uncle is involved in their disappearance, even though he didn't show up until after they were gone.

Trust your dreams. Both my parents said that. That's our old way, our Mohawk way. The
way of our ancestors. Trust the little voice that speaks to you. That is your heart speaking. But when those feelings, those dreams, those voices are so confusing, what do you do then?

“Help,” I whisper. “Help.”

I'm not sure who I'm talking to when I say that, but I hope they're listening.

W
HEN THE MORNING COMES
I haven't dreamed again. I haven't slept. I've been thinking about what I can do, and I've made up my mind. I've got a plan at last. It's a simple one, but simple ones are probably the best. It's also the only thing I can think to do.

At school you are always hearing about kids with problems. And there are people called counselors whose job is supposed to be to help kids who have them. It seems to me that most kids never actually see them. At our school, at
least, the counselor is kept busy by the kids who are always in trouble or getting into trouble. Her name is Mrs. Rudder. Unless you are frothing at the mouth or something, it just isn't easy to get in to her.

As soon as I walk into the classroom I go right up to Ms. Shabbas. She doesn't do the adult thing of seeming to listen while not really hearing you because she thinks she already has the answer. She listens so well that she even forgets to sing whatever show tune she's picked out for that morning.

“It's gotten worse for me,” I tell her. “It's driving me crazy. Every night when I hear him lock me in my room I think I'm going to scream.”

Ms. Shabbas sits up straighter at that. “He locks you in? You didn't tell me about that before.”

As soon as class goes out to rec, she takes me straight to the counselor's office. The door is partially open. I've walked by the door a million times and never gone in before. Ms. Shabbas pushes it open the rest of the way and pulls me in with her.

One whole wall to the left of the desk is taken up with pigeonholes. Not the kind that
you put mail in, but smaller. Every one has the name of a kid written under it, and in every pigeonhole is a little pill bottle. Ritalin and stuff like that. The kids who need meds have to take their daily pill in Mrs. Rudder's office. There's a water cooler and paper cups, lots of them. On the other wall are some posters about not smoking and not taking drugs. I guess the two walls balance each other out.

“Can I help you?” says a voice from behind us that sounds like the person mostly wants to help us to leave.

We turn around and Mrs. Rudder is standing there. She's not very tall, but she has this way of looking at people that makes them feel as if they're being shrunk down under a microscope.

Ms. Shabbas, though, refuses to be diminished.

“Molly needs to talk to someone.”

“I can make an appointment for…” Mrs. Rudder says, stepping past us to her desk and starting to look at her appointment book.

“Now!” Ms. Shabbas says.

“I'm very busy,” Mrs. Rudder replies. “I'm sure this can—”

“This child is afraid,” Ms. Shabbas says.
“Look at her eyes.” She won't take no for an answer.

The next thing I know, I'm sitting in the chair and Mrs. Rudder is leaning over her desk asking me questions and taking notes while Ms. Shabbas listens.

At first I can't make any headway. I'm telling the truth, but I feel like I'm not giving the right answers to the questions I am asked in a calm, matter-of-fact way.

“Has he ever touched you in a bad way?”

“No.”

“Hmmm.” Mrs. Rudder nods. “So he's never hit you?”

“No.”

“Has he ever threatened you?”

“Not really.”

“Ah-hah,” Mrs. Rudder says. She looks over at Ms. Shabbas and shakes her head. I can tell that she thinks I am wasting her time. She's no longer sitting but standing up in a way that makes me feel as if I'll be standing up soon, on my way out her door. “What has he done that makes you afraid?”

I know what I want to say. I want to say that I see him looking at me out of the corner of his eye in a way that makes chills go down my
back. Even when I'm walking down the hall and going into my room I feel like I'm still being looked at. It is as if eyes are watching me wherever I go in his house. I want to tell her that whenever he comes into a room, the air gets colder. Whenever I know he is thinking about me I have that feeling like someone is walking over my grave. I want to say that he's not really a human being, he is something else. I don't know what. He is fattening me up. But if I say that they'll suspect I'm nuts. I want to tell them about my dreams. But I know that if I tell Mrs. Rudder my dreams are warning me about the danger I'm in, she'll move from mere suspicion to absolute certainty that I'm lying.

Instead, I say the one thing that does get her attention.

“He locks me in my room at night.”

Mrs. Rudder sits back down. She looks right at me over her desk, her hands clutched together. “Every night?”

“Every night.”

“Can you come out if you ask?”

“I don't think so.”

More things are said, but this was a big one. I see Ms. Shabbas nodding to me. Mrs. Rudder has listened. She'll do something.

But not much.

That afternoon Mrs. Rudder and a man who is introduced to me as Mr. Wintergreen from Child Welfare escort me to the house. Ms. Shabbas wanted to come along, but Mrs. Rudder told her that it wouldn't be following proper procedure.

He's waiting because they've called him on the phone an hour before we get there. Plenty of time for him to get ready. He's wearing his hat and a human face again and he smiles at them. They don't seem to notice that he doesn't offer to shake hands, that he keeps his hands in the pockets of his sweater.

“Your niece is very upset,” Mrs. Rudder says to him.

“I understand,” he says. “She's had a lot to deal with.”

They follow him upstairs. He shows them the door to my room. There is no lock on the outside of the door. Never was. And no sign of screw holes that would be there if a lock had been removed. The only lock is on the inside. See, there's the release for the lock on the inside of the door, he tells them. Her side of the door. She can get out any time she wants.

“She's a very imaginative child,” he adds.

I can't say anything. How can I say that he had time enough to change the door frame and the door? It wouldn't make any difference no matter what I said. They believe him, not me. I'm the melodramatic one. He's just a kindly older man who's taken in a difficult young relative.

They stand up. They're going to go and leave me there with him.

Mrs. Rudder leans over and places a hand on my shoulder. “Molly, dear,” she says. “If you are still having these anxiety attacks, I can fit you into my calendar next week.”

She looks up at my uncle and smiles. “Thank you for your time.”

I hold my hand up as they walk toward the door as if to stop them. I want to scream, but I can't. They think I'm waving and they wave back to me as they go through the door, as it closes behind them, as my uncle goes over to the door and locks it.

As he turns, without looking at me, I wonder what he is going to say, what he is going to do…

But he doesn't say anything about it. It's as if he has no anger, no real emotions at all.

“Your dinner is in the refrigerator” is all he
says. Then he goes upstairs. I can hear the whirring of an electric screwdriver. I don't even have to guess what he's doing. After a while he comes down and walks out the back door to his work shed.

That night, when I am in my room and my door is closed, I hear his feet coming up the stairs. Then, after that moment of heart-stopping silence, there is the familiar sound.
Snick
. As he locks my door from the outside.

I
T'S WORSE THAN IT WAS
before. Now he knows how I really feel about him. He knows that I suspect him. That means he'll be twice as watchful.

To calm myself, I try to imagine him sitting in front of his computer or out in his toolshed, a normal person doing normal things. But I can't. All I can see in my mind is the image of
the cave creature from my dream crouched in the corner, its long, uncombed hair over its face, its clawed hand reaching backward to grasp my arm to see if I am fat enough to eat. I don't want to think about that.

I stretch out on the bed. It is all so hopeless. I try to remember one of the funny stories that Dad tells, ones in which the things that happen are so silly you just have to laugh. Some of them are old stories, but some are about things that happened to him when he was a kid, like the time when he talked his little brother into jumping into a muddy pond with all his clothes on to try to catch a turtle. Then, realizing his little brother was going to get into trouble because he'd gotten his clothes dirty, Dad jumped in, too, so that both of them would be in trouble. That way the trouble would be only half as bad for each of them, Dad explained. Maybe that doesn't sound funny to you, but the way Dad told it always made me laugh. Thinking about it I almost do laugh, until another thought comes to me. I may never hear my father's voice again. Then the little smile that had started to form on my face disappears.

I'm so sure that I won't be able to sleep that it surprises me when I realize I'm dreaming
again. I am no longer in the room that has never been mine. Instead I am standing in a forest. I know I haven't gotten there by sleepwalking. Even if the door had been left unlocked and I'd found my way out of the house, I could never have found a place like this in the waking world. The trees are so big, bigger than the redwoods of California that I've seen in pictures. There haven't been trees that big around here in central New York for three hundred years or more.

The trees are not the only clue that I'm somewhere other than the usual waking world. The two figures who stand in front of me make it more than clear that I'm back in that dream. One of them is the same rabbit I saw before. It's a snowshoe rabbit. It wears its summer coat of brown, not the white of winter that it puts on when the snow is on the ground. It's more than twice as big as the little cottontail rabbits that I sometimes see at the edge of the school playground by the little patch of woods.

The other one is me. How strange to be me, looking at me. I blink twice at that. But there are subtle differences. The other me has skin that is a little more tanned than mine. Her hair is longer, and there is a little scar on her
cheek, just below her left eye, as if something sharp—a knife or a claw—cut across it once. She is also dressed the way I remember being dressed in my dream of the cave. Moccasins, deerskin dress, braided rawhide bracelet on her wrist. I stare at that bracelet. I remember my mother telling me about bracelets like that that Mohawk children used to wear to make sure they woke up safely from their dreams.

I blink my eyes again and the other me is gone. Or is she? I'm standing next to the rabbit now. There are moccasins on my feet, there's a rawhide bracelet around my wrist, and I'm wearing her deerskin dress…my deerskin dress.

“I'm in someone else's story,” I blurt out.

“No, Little Sister,” says a kind voice at my feet. “It is not someone else's story.”

I look down at the rabbit. “What?” I say.

“This is your story now,” the rabbit continues. “But even though it is your story, you are not safe. You must be brave. Your spirit must still remain strong.”

For some reason, that makes me angry. After all that's happened I don't need some furry Oprah Winfrey to tell me I need to get my spiritual act in order.

“Is that all you've got to say?” I ask the
rabbit, clenching my fists. “That I'm in trouble? Don't you think I know that?”

The rabbit hops close to me and places its front paws on my feet as it looks up at me.

“Little Sister,” it says, “I am here to tell you something.”

“What?” I ask in a voice that is no longer angry, a voice that is small and halting.

“Your parents,” the rabbit says, “they have been buried.”

“No,” I whisper. “They can't be dead.” I want to shout, but to do that I'd have to catch my breath, and right now it feels as if I can't breathe at all.

The rabbit's paws are patting my knee.

“Little Sister,” the rabbit says, “I did not say they were dead. If they were dead, then you could not help them. They are buried but not dead.”

Buried but not dead? Can I find hope in that? And if I can't understand what it means, how can I help them? I'm confused and I want to ask the rabbit to explain, but before I can do so it is gone.

I sit up, looking around for the rabbit, reaching for it…and I find myself grasping the blankets of my bed.