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For all unwanted children
THE GOOD NEWS
Angel’s Climb, Montana
1991
Monica Howard couldn’t stop cleaning. It was two days until her daughter, Casey—seventeen in three weeks—came home from camp, a thought that nagged at the back of her mind every moment she wasn’t scrubbing, sweeping, tidying, mopping, or folding something. If the house is clean enough, her subconscious whispered to her as she lay awake most nights beside her husband Wayne’s snoring bulk, then maybe it will be all right. Maybe Casey’s problems will be cleaned up, too. She didn’t know what Wayne had paid that place in the desert, he didn’t like to worry her with things like that, but she knew it was a lot because she’d heard him talking it over with Cal Olson in the den one night just after the camp’s people came for Casey.
It’s an arm and a leg, Cal, but I’ll be goddamned if any girl of mine turns bull dyke. I’ll drown her first.
Mm, Cal replied, as though mildly interested.
Monica, a tray of ham and cheese sandwiches and glasses of cold Coke balanced on one hip and her ear pressed to the door, had whispered, “You misheard,” out loud to herself without meaning to, then gone in to bring the men their lunch.
“Too much ice,” said Wayne. “You know I only like a little. Where’s your head this week?” The air was thick with cigar smoke. On the television, one boxer pounded on another. Monica had thought of the dull thud of her mother’s meat tenderizer against a piece of veal. Sunday dinner.
“I’m sorry, dear,” she said, forcing a smile.
It had to work. Two years now of screaming, cursing, sullen looks, the stink of marijuana clinging to the jeans and sweatshirts Monica found balled up in one of Casey’s backpacks. And then the magazine. You expected it with boys. They couldn’t help themselves, dirty little animals rooting around in the filth, always touching themselves, chasing girls on the playground like a pack of baboons, grimy hands tearing her blouse open, serrated teeth on her nipples, her sons, but her daughter? Her little girl? Tan limbs twined together in those glossy pages hidden under the mattress. Teased manes of hair, pink lipstick glistening, and the dark forks of their legs, those obscene curls and shadowed clefts. Roadside ditches, overgrown and choked with muck.
A phase, said Pastor Daniel. Just a phase some girls go through. A dirty, nasty little phase brought on by MTV and communism and free love and grass and the tribadists haunting locker rooms all over the country. A brochure pushed across his desk. Smiling children in ranch clothes. A huge man in a suit of cream-colored linen, a smile on his face, his hands on their shoulders. Camp Resolution. That night as she’d sat beside her husband in the den, watching college football reflected in his glasses, her empty stomach tied in knots, she’d asked Wayne if maybe there was another way, if maybe they should try counseling or medication first, or sending Casey to stay with her parents in Flint for the summer.
“She’s going,” said Wayne, still watching the game, and the flat, dull dismissal in his tone nearly drove Monica to allow herself to know what she had spent nearly sixteen years unknowing every day, to tell him that he could blame her for coddling their girl, for raising her wrong, but that she knew the real reason Casey had turned into such a mess. Then, as it had perhaps a half a dozen times before, that small urge to poke holes in her family shriveled up and died. She was making up stories. She had simply misheard.
The next morning Monica had started to clean. First the windows, scouring each pane inside and out, squinting to make out streaks and water spots in the late summer glare. Then surfaces until her hands were red and itchy from all the cleaning product. The girl on the plastic bottle of Fairy smiling mindlessly out at her. On her knees wiping stray hairs from the bolts on the toilet in the den bathroom. Cleaning urine from under the toilet seat. Wayne and the boys never checked. Their pubic hairs stuck in nameless residue.
The baseboards, furred with dust. The red wine stains on the den carpet, usually hidden by Wayne’s navy La-Z-Boy recliner. Hydrogen peroxide fumes stung her nostrils as she watched her cleaning mixture fizz between the carpet fibers. It was the same one her mother had used. Peroxide, club soda, and dish soap. Monica still tasted it in dreams sometimes. She scrubbed until her shoulder burned and her knees ached from kneeling. She was so tired that night she nearly forgot to make dinner. As she cleaned the dishes afterward her hands began to shake. She chipped a plate. The rough edge cut through her glove and opened her palm as easily as a letter opener slides through paper. No one asked at breakfast why her hand was bandaged.
The days passed. The house rebelled against her. Her sons, Brian, eleven, and Stevie, thirteen, tracked dirt through the kitchen and the dining room. Wayne and his friends left constellations of crumbs and broken chips ground into the carpet. In the attic she found oceans of little black mouse turds, and for weeks afterward the high-pitched squeaks of mice caught in the glue traps she’d set out tormented her through sleepless nights. She lost weight. The women at church and at the Moms Against Satan group said she looked wonderful, then asked if she was all right, then stopped mentioning it. Her sister, Jane, asked delicately over coffee if she’d seen a doctor lately.
Still, the house fought her. It fought her with water spots in the tiles of the basement’s drop ceiling, with mold in the vegetable crisper, with dry rot under the sink and grime in the basin of the bathtub, and a clotted string of hair and nameless gunk she fished out of the drain with the aid of a bent hanger. The smell of it, dank and flatly mineral, like lake water, made her think of the box at the back of Wayne’s closet, a worn and sagging cardboard box that had once, perhaps two decades ago, held little miniature Snickers bars like the kind her parents had given out on Halloween. She had never touched that box, not once in eighteen years of marriage, and she never would, because it wasn’t there. It had no smell. It was just another thing that she’d misheard.
At night she dreamed of Casey torn apart by lions on the African veldt, of hyenas with matted red faces cracking her daughter’s blood-slimed femurs in their jaws, of black flies swarming over exposed viscera and vultures roosting on the rotten arch of a scraped knee, plucking Casey’s eyes out of their sinking sockets. Casey baptized dead at Righteous Savior in Lincoln, where they’d lived before Wayne’s job with the ministry, her big brown eyes filmed and staring under the clear water, her curls floating on the surface of the font. Casey kicked by other girls behind the school until her mouth and anus bled. Night after night she woke soaked in sweat, hours before dawn, and polished silverware or dusted shelves until it was time to pack lunches for Wayne and the boys, and then to make breakfast.
Five weeks after the men in their van came for Casey, Monica broke down crying in the middle of a meeting of the Angel’s Climb Christian Decency League. Veronica Peterson handed her a pecan sandy and she burst into tears. She told them everything, weeping on Carol Anne Forester’s shoulder, clutching at her blouse with its ugly paisley print. The magazine. The fights. The call from the principal’s office. And then finally, shamefully, the camp. “They’ll kill her,” she screamed, not caring that Carol Anne’s elderly mother was upstairs, that there were children playing in the yard who looked up from their games as though they’d heard a wolf howl. “They’re going to kill my baby. I did it. I did it.”
