The Tiger’s Child and Somebody Else’s Kids 2-in-1 Collection

“Oh, God,” Sheila murmured softly, as she regarded the sight, “why do beautiful things make me feel so sad?”

Chapter 18 (#ulink_31b3635a-296a-5672-a9b9-a2aa620a551c)

Back at the motel, we had our evening meal and then went out to enjoy the pool. The rain had cleared away entirely to give a cloudless night, the stars dimmed by the town’s lights but still faintly discernible.

Sheila remained subdued. There was a heavy, almost depressed feel to her quietness. For the first time, she put aside that smoldering anger I always sensed just below the surface. In its place was nothing, just a great emptiness.

The exercise did me good. The pool was cool enough to let me swim hard and I did, blocking out everything except the feel of the water rushing over me, until at last I surfaced, tired and relaxed. Sheila wasn’t a very good swimmer. I suspect she had never been taught and just got by on what she’d figured out over the years, but she kept at it almost as long as I did. Then we both retreated to the warmth of the Jacuzzi.

Back in the motel room, she stood before the mirror toweling her hair dry. She studied her reflection as she worked.

“Do you like me?” she asked.

Having finished with my shower and changed into my nightgown, I was lying on my bed and inspecting the TV schedule. Her question caught me unawares. “Well, yes, of course I do.”

“I know I look stupid,” she said to her reflection. “I know you think I do.”

“No.”

“Yes,” she said. “You do. Everybody does. I do too.” She ran her fingers through her hair, smoothing it down. “You see, I just don’t want to look like me. That’s why I do it. I can put up with looking stupid, if there’s a chance that it might make me into someone else.”

Once she was in her bed, I turned the light out. It wasn’t all that late, only a little after eleven, but the swimming, combined with the emotional rigors of the day, had left me exhausted. I was ready for sleep and drowsy almost immediately.

Sheila turned restlessly in her bed. The room was very dark, so I could only hear her, not see her, but the sound of her movements kept intruding.

“Torey? You asleep?”

“No, not quite.”

Silence.

“You wanted to say something?” I inquired.

A second long pause. She turned again. “A lot’s changed,” she said quietly.

“In what way?”

“In the migrant camp. It’s a lot different to what I remember it.”

I didn’t answer.

“I do remember it. I haven’t forgotten everything.” A pause. “My memory’s like Swiss cheese. It’s got big holes in it. But other things … I saw the camp today and it was, like … well, like I’d never been away. I can remember it so good.”

Silence then, long enough that I felt myself growing drowsy again.

“You know what I used to do at night, when we lived in the camp?” Sheila asked into the darkness.

“What’s that?”

“Well, my pa used to always be out drinking,” she said, using her old name for her father for the first time since we’d been reunited. “He used to leave me. Nearly every night. He’d give me, like, a bag of corn chips or something and tell me to go to bed, and then he’d go out. And once he was gone, I used to get up and go out into the camp and walk around. It was dark. It was, like, really late at night, and I would look for places with lights on. We didn’t have any electricity then, just a kerosene lantern and a flashlight. So, I’d look for these places with lights and then I’d go peek in their windows. All the time. Every night.”

“Why? Because of being alone? Or the light?” I asked.

“Yeah. I wanted light, I remember that. But mostly just to see what they lived like. A lot of the people weren’t a lot different than us, but I just wanted to see.”

A pause.

“I got in trouble for it. My pa catch me and I’d be whipped red for it.”

Catch. I heard the word in its present-tense form, echoing Sheila’s old childhood speech patterns. We never had found out why she spoke like that and since we had been reunited, she had used remarkably impeccable grammar for an adolescent. It was eerie to lie in the dark and listen to these long-ago words and speech patterns begin to reemerge.

“The police got me once. More than once, I think. People thought I was stealing things, but I wasn’t. I’d just been looking.”

“I can understand,” I said softly. “It must have been lonely, being left on your own so often, when you were such a young child.”

“Yeah,” came the quiet, disembodied voice through the darkness. “It was.”

A long silence followed. I had woken fully up by then and lay staring up. The curtains were heavy to shut out the motel security lights, but the occasional car turning into the parking lot shot a brief spear of light over the top. This threw the stucco ceiling into sudden relief.

“Can I tell you what happened sometimes?” she asked.

“Here? When you were little?”

“Yeah. When we lived in the migrant camp. When I was in your class.”

“Yes, of course,” I said.

“I had a mattress on the floor. That’s where I slept. My pa slept on the couch. But he’d go out boozing and when he came home … there were always people with him. Women, usually. And they’d fuck on the couch.”

“Yes, I can remember you telling me once,” I said.

“But sometimes …” She stopped.

I listened into the darkness. She was breathing shallowly, her breaths audible to me in the next bed.

“Well, he was doing drugs. You knew that too, didn’t you?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Smack mostly. And these guys got it for him. There were two. Sometimes he’d come home with them. Sometimes it was one or the other, sometimes both of them, but he never used to have enough money to pay them. I can remember lying there listening to him pleading with them. Begging them to give him the stuff, telling them how he was going to get them money. He’d even cry some of the time; I can remember hearing him.”

I watched the patterns flash black and headlight-yellow across the ceiling.

“Well, this one guy, he used to give it to my dad cheap if … He liked me to lay down with him … He didn’t fuck me or anything; it’s just he liked little girls. Like to feel them over. And if I sucked his cock, my pa got his stuff cheap.”

My blood ran like ice. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“How do you say that when you’re six? Besides, it was my life. I was used to it.”