The Dispatcher (11 page)

Tonight will mark the beginning of her escape. She won’t make her move yet. She needs to think things through. But tonight will mark the beginning. She will soon escape the Nightmare World. She doesn’t care if Borden can’t leave. In fact, she hopes it’s true. She never wants to see him again. Soon she will escape and she will stand beneath the light of the sun and she will not be afraid.

‘You’re going to make Beatrice sad.’

She looks left, then right.

He’s across the room, in the farthest corner, next to a stack of cardboard boxes. The boxes are full of Christmas ornaments, old magazines with pictures of naked ladies in them, cowboy novels, old clothes saved to be used as rags. He is mostly hidden in shadows, but some of him is visible. He stands very still.

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘I know you’re still planning to leave.’

‘I’m . . . I’m not.’

‘You could stay.’

‘I am.’

‘Beatrice loves you, you know.’

‘No, she doesn’t.’

‘Of course she does.’

‘She loves someone named Sarah.’

‘You could be Sarah.’

‘But I’m not.’

‘You could be, you’ve been Sarah longer than you were anybody else. You could let Beatrice love you. If you let yourself be loved, you wouldn’t hate it here so much.’

‘But this isn’t where I belong.’

‘It is where you belong. That’s why you can’t escape.’

‘I—’ This is not a discussion she wants to have. ‘I’m not gonna try to escape,’ she says.

‘I can see your thoughts.’

‘You’re lying.’

‘You know I’m not. I can see the darkest corners of your mind. There’s nothing you can hide from me.’

Tears begin to well in her eyes. She knows what he says is true. He has responded to mere unexpressed thought before. Throughout the years he has done this: responded with echoes of her deepest fears, fears she never voiced aloud: your parents got a new daughter and don’t even think of you anymore, Henry’s going to put you on the punishment hook one day and never let you down, you’re going to die here.

She blinks the tears away and wipes at her eyes. She stares across the room and into Borden’s glistening, rolling tar-pit eyes. His nostrils flare. His big square teeth form the shape of a smile. It is an ugly thing.

‘I know everything you’re thinking.’

She wipes her eyes again.

‘Because you’re not real,’ she says. ‘That’s how you can do it. You’re not real.’

‘You can never leave.’

‘You don’t want me to leave because if I leave I won’t need you anymore.’

‘You can never leave.’

‘But I don’t need you anymore now.’

‘You can never leave.’

‘You’re not
real
.’

‘You can never, ever leave, Sarah.’

She closes her eyes and tries to remember when she first saw Borden. It was before she ever came here. It was before she was kidnapped and brought here. She’s sure of it. It was at the petting zoo. She was seven years old and she had just lost a tooth and she was with Daddy and Jeffrey and the sun was out and the world was bright and beautiful. A ten-year-old boy with Chuck Taylor basketball shoes and cuffed Levis and a red button-up shirt that he kept tucked in was there. The shirt was rolled up to his elbows and his hands were in his pockets. She fed the last of her carrots to a miniature horse and the boy pulled a hand from his pocket and in his palm was a piece of celery and he handed it to her and said his name was Danny Borden and she said thank you and fed it to the horse. Danny Borden: a normal boy with freckles on his cheeks and brown eyes and bangs cut straight. This Borden is only a Nightmare World copy of him.

Not the real thing. Not real at all.

She looks up at him. He flickers a moment, vanishing from the room like an image on a TV that’s losing its signal in a storm, like a light just before it goes out. Then he returns. His eyes roll in their sockets and then lock on her.

‘You can never leave,’ he says.

‘You can’t scare me anymore,’ she says. ‘You’re not real.’

Another flicker.

‘You can never, ever leave. If you try, I’ll tell on you.’

‘You can’t tell on me. You’re just pretend.’

He takes a step toward her, a step out of the shadows. He flickers again and she can see through him. She can see the stack of boxes behind him. Then, once more, he is solid. Except he flickers now and then as he takes another step toward her. He seems to be falling apart. An arm becomes a smear before coming back together. A leg flickers out, then returns.

‘You can never—’

‘You’re not
real
.’

She grabs the plate from the floor and lifts it over her head and throws it across the room. It arcs through the air wobbling like a poorly thrown Frisbee and if he were real it would strike him in the head, right between his eyes, but he is not real, so it flies through him, hits the cardboard boxes stacked against the wall, falls to the concrete, and shatters.

Borden is gone.

After a few minutes she gets to her feet. The concrete is cold beneath them. She walks to where the pieces of shattered plate lie, spread outward from the point of impact. She walks with great deliberation, being very careful about where she sets each foot. She doesn’t want to cut herself. Once she is standing among the shards she looks down at them. She will probably get into trouble for breaking the plate.

Don’t think about that. Nothing can be done about it, so don’t think about it.

One two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve.

She bends down and picks up the biggest shard of plate. It’s about nine inches long and forms a crescent, made mostly of the outer edge of the plate, and ends in a sharp point. It is lined with painted vines and at the tip a blue flower. If she has to she will plant it in Beatrice. But not tonight. She carries it to the back of the stairs. There is a cavity beneath the bottom step filled only with darkness. She sits on her haunches and reaches the shard toward it, to hide it there, but hesitates as she imagines a large claw emerging from the darkness and grabbing her wrist and pulling her bodily into the shadows. That’s silly, of course, and impossible. There is nothing in the shadows but more shadows. She knows that. Nothing bigger than a cat could even fit beneath that first step. Even so she simply sets the shard of plate on the concrete and pushes it into the shadows, not allowing her fingers to touch the darkness. She will have to reach into it to get the shard back out, but she’ll worry about that then. For now she just wants it hidden and she doesn’t think anybody will find it there. Not unless Borden is watching from the shadows.

He’s not
real
.

That’s right: Borden is not real and she does not have to worry about him.

She is just getting to her feet when the door at the top of the stairs squeaks open and the light comes on. Feeling sick and guilty, caught, she walks around to the front of the stairs and looks up toward the door.

 

 

 

Beatrice stands silent looking at the shattered plate on the floor. Her hair lies flat and dull on her head, framing a sad round face. Her wide-set eyes droop on the outside, her mouth at both corners. It’s like invisible hands are pressed against her cheeks and pulling down. Her shoulders are round, dresses always hanging from them lifelessly before catching on her heavy lower body and bulging outward with lumps and ripples, making her look to Maggie like a poorly stuffed toy animal.

She turns from the plate and looks at Maggie. Her mouth hangs open for a moment and she breathes heavily from it. Finally she shuts her mouth, swallows, and says, ‘What happened?’

‘I dropped it,’ Maggie says. ‘I’m . . . I’m sorry.’

‘By accident?’

Maggie nods.

‘It don’t look dropped.’

‘It was.’

‘Looks like you thrown it.’

‘I didn’t. I promise.’

‘How’d it get way over there?’

‘I’ll clean it up.’

‘You don’t have no shoes. It’s not safe. I’ll clean it up.’

She turns back to the stairs and walks up them, each plank sagging beneath her weight. Her thighs brush together beneath her dress, making a swishing sound with each step. It makes Maggie think of her daddy sanding in the garage. She would help him sometimes. She liked the feel of the fine dust from sandpapered wood on her hands. Beatrice pauses at each step, inhale exhale, and goes one more. She walks through the doorway to the kitchen.

Maggie walks to her mattress, away from what she is hiding, and sits.

When Beatrice returns she is carrying a broom and a dust pan with her, and a small plastic grocery bag crumpled in her fist. She walks down the stairs the same way she walked up, one step at a time, standing on each with both feet and taking a breath, inhale exhale, before moving on to the next. She stops at the bottom of the stairs. She breathes heavily and with great effort. Her face is pale and beads of sweat stand out on her oily skin.

Maggie stares at her with great concentration. Please die please die please die.

She hates that she has those thoughts, she feels like a bad person for having them, but she can’t help it. She doesn’t think she could kill a person—she knows she couldn’t; the very idea makes her sick—but if Beatrice were to just die, that would be different. She knows she would feel guilty for thinking it if it happened, but she feels guilty for thinking it when it doesn’t happen, so it might as well. It would make her life so much easier.

Part of her feels sorry for Beatrice. Part of her feels that in her own way Beatrice is as trapped as she is. But even so if she would just die all Maggie’s problems would be solved. If she died at the right time, anyway, with Henry gone for work and the door unlocked. If he was home and Beatrice died he might take it out on her. He certainly wouldn’t have any reason to keep her alive.

‘Oh, Lord,’ Beatrice says, large chest rising and falling, rising and falling.

‘Are you okay?’

After a while Beatrice nods. ‘Yeah.’

Too bad, Maggie thinks, hating the thought.

Then Beatrice walks to the shattered plate and bends down and sweeps the shards of glass into the dust pan. She dumps the contents of the pan into the plastic bag she brought with her, sweeps the floor once more, dumps the pan once more, ties off the bag, and stands.

She did not notice that a large piece of the plate was missing.

‘You need to be careful about walking barefooted over here.’

‘Maybe I could get some shoes.’

‘What for?’

‘So I don’t cut my foot.’

‘Henry says no shoes.’

‘Okay.’

Beatrice stares at her a blank moment, then frowns. ‘Did he hurt you bad yesterday?’

Maggie rubs at the thin scabs that have wrapped themselves around her wrists. They’re only about the width of a man’s pinky finger, but the wounds are deep, and tender purple bruises surround them. She thinks of the slaps across the face and tongues the split in her lip. She remembers the punch to the gut, the air rushing out of her, the feeling of drowning. And the fear: this time she might really die.

She nods.

‘I’m sorry,’ Beatrice says. ‘I don’t like it when he does that.’

‘He’s never going to stop.’

‘He don’t mean to hurt you. He’s just got a temper.’

‘He might kill me.’

‘He wouldn’t do nothing like that.’ She purses her lips a moment, thinking. ‘Not on purpose.’

‘He might on accident.’

Beatrice exhales through her nostrils but says nothing.

‘You could . . . you could let me go.’

‘Sarah, you know we can’t do that.’

‘He couldn’t hurt me if you let me go. I wouldn’t tell anyone what happened. I wouldn’t tell anyone where I’d been.’

‘You don’t understand the world yet. It’s meaner out there than Henry could ever be, I promise you that. I know it.’

‘But I don’t want you to keep me here.’

‘Oh, Sarah. How many times do we have to have this conversation?’

Maggie looks down at her lap, at her hands clasped there, at the brown scabs wrapped around her wrists just below them.

‘Sarah?’

‘Not too many more, I guess,’ she says without looking up.

‘Good. And don’t worry about the plate. I won’t tell Henry you broke it. It’ll be our secret.’

Beatrice makes her way up the stairs and they protest under her weight.

Fall down and die, just fall down and die.

Beatrice reaches the top of the stairs. The overhead light goes out. A moment later the door closes, cutting off the light from the kitchen, and the deadbolt slides home.

After a while Maggie’s eyes adjust to the darkness. She sits doing nothing for some time.

Then she gets to her feet and walks to the back of the stairs and looks into the shadows beneath the bottom step. She wants to hold the shard of plate again. Her stomach feels tight at the thought of reaching into the shadows. She can see one corner of it. She reaches down and quickly puts her hand upon it and slides it out of the shadows. Nothing grabs her wrist or brushes against the back of her hand or nibbles at her fingertips. She picks up the shard of plate. She holds it in her fist and imagines burying it in Beatrice’s arm or leg or neck. It makes her sick to think about. It makes her sick, but she’ll do it. Maybe not in the neck. She knows there are important arteries there and a person can die. She doesn’t want to kill Beatrice. She just wants her hurt bad enough that she can’t chase after her when she runs. If Beatrice were to die on her own Maggie would not shed a tear, but she cannot kill the woman. But stabbing her in the arm or the leg, causing enough pain that she couldn’t chase Maggie up the stairs and out the front door, so she couldn’t get upstairs and call Henry on the telephone, Maggie could do that. If it meant getting away she could do that.