The Ivory and the Horn Page 8

  The girl looked at him then. He saw the grey-green eyes first, the features that might one day grow into ones similar to those of the woman he’d met yesterday, though this couldn’t be her. The discrepancy of years was too vast. Then he saw the bruises. One eye blackened. The right side of her jaw swollen. She seemed to favor one leg as well.

  His training kept him silent. If he said something too soon, he wouldn’t learn a thing. First he had to give the woman enough room to hang herself.

  “This is Debra Eisenstadt?” he asked.

  “What, you need to see her birth certificate?”

  Dennison turned to the woman and saw then what he hadn’t noticed before. The day was warm, but she was wearing slacks, long sleeves, her blouse buttoned all the way up to the top. But he could see a discoloration in the hollow of her throat that the collar couldn’t quite hide. Abrasive or not, she was a victim, too, he realized.

  “Where is your husband, Mrs. Eisenstadt?” he asked gently.

  “So now you’re a cop?”

  Dennison pulled out his ID. “No. I’m with Social Services. I can help you, Mrs. Eisenstadt. Has your husband been beating you?”

  She crossed her arms protectively. “Look, it’s not like what you’re thinking. We had an argument, that’s all.”

  “And your daughter—was he having an argument with her as well?”

  “No. She… she just fell. Isn’t that right, honey?”

  Dennison glanced at the girl. She was staring at the floor again. Slowly she nodded in agreement. Dennison went down on one knee until his head was level with the girl’s.

  “You can tell me the truth,” he said. “I can help you, but you’ve got to help me. Tell me how you got hurt and I promise you I won’t let it happen to you again.”

  What the hell are you doing? he asked himself. You’re supposed to be quitting this job.

  But he hadn’t turned in his resignation yet.

  And then he remembered an odd thing that the other Debra had said to him last night.

  I just wanted to see what you were like when you were my age.

  He remembered puzzling over that before he finally passed out. And then there was the way she’d looked at him the next morning, admiring, then sad, then disappointed. As though she already knew him. As though he wasn’t matching up to her expectations.

  Though of course she couldn’t have any expectations because they’d never met before. But what if this girl grew up to be the woman who’d helped him last night? What if her being here, in need of help, was his prophetic sign, his burning bush?

  Yeah, right. And it was space aliens who brought her back from the future to see him.

  “Look,” the girl’s mother said. “You’ve got no right, barging in here—”

  “No right?” Dennison said, standing up to face her. “Look at your daughter, for Christ’s sake, and then tell me that I’ve got no right to intervene.”

  “It’s not like what you think. It’s just that times are hard, you know, and what with Sam’s losing his job, well he gets a little crazy sometimes. He doesn’t mean any real harm….”

  Dennison tuned her out. He looked back at the little girl. It didn’t matter if she was a sign or not, if she’d grow up to be the woman who’d somehow come back in time to help him when his faith was flagging the most. What was important right now that he get the girl some help.

  “Which of your neighbors has a working phone?” he asked.

  “Why? What’re you going to do? Sam’s going to—”

  “Not do a damned thing,” Dennison said. “It’s my professional opinion that this child will be in danger so long as she remains in this environment. You can either come with us, or I’ll see that she’s made a ward of the court, but I’m not leaving her here.”

  “You can’t—”

  “I think we’ll leave that for a judge to decide.”

  He ignored her then. Crouching down beside the little girl, he said, “I’m here to help you—do you understand? No one’s going to hurt you anymore.”

  “If I… he said if I tell—”

  “Debra!”

  Dennison shot the mother an angry look. “I’m losing my patience with you, lady. Look at your daughter. Look at those bruises. Is that the kind of childhood you meant for your child?”

  Her defiance crumbled under his glare and she slowly shook her head.

  “Go pack a bag,” he told the woman. “For both of you.”

  As she slowly walked down the hall, Dennison returned his attention to the little girl. This could all go to hell in a hand basket if he wasn’t careful. There were certain standard procedures to deal with this kind of a situation and badgering the girl’s mother the way he had been wasn’t one of them. But he was damned if he wasn’t going to give it his best shot.

  “Do you understand what’s happening?” he asked the girl. “I’m going to take you and your mother someplace where you’ll be safe.”

  She looked up at him, those so-familiar grey-green eyes wide and teary. “I’m scared.”

  Dennison nodded. “It’s a scary situation. But tell you what. On the way to the shelter, maybe we get you a treat. What would you like?”

  For one long moment the girl’s gaze settled on his. She seemed to be considering whether she could trust him or not. He must have come up positive, because after that moment’s hesitation, she opened right up.

  “For there still to be trees when I grow up,” she said. “I want to be a forest ranger. Sometimes when I’m sleeping, I wake up and I hear the trees crying because their daddies are being mean to them, I guess, and are hurting them and I just want to help stop it.”

  Dennison remembered himself saying to the older Debra, Trees don’t cry. Kids do. And then Debra’s response.

  Maybe you just can’t hear them.

  Jesus, it wasn’t possible, was it? But then how could they look so similar, the differences caused by the passage of years, not genetics. And the eyes—the eyes were exactly the same. And how could the old Debra have known the address, the phone number—

  He got up and went over to the phone he could see sitting on a TV tray beside the battered sofa. The number was the same as on the scrap of paper in his pocket. He lifted the receiver, but there was no dial tone.

  “I… I’ve packed a… bag.”

  Debra’s mother stood in the hallway beside her daughter, looking as lost as the little girl did. But there was something they both had—there was a glimmer of hope in their eyes. He’d put that there. Now all he had to do was figure out a way to keep it there.

  “Whose phone can we use to call a cab?” he asked.

  “Laurie—she’s down the hall in number six. She’d let us use her phone.”

  “Well, let’s get going.”

  As he ushered them into the hall, he was no longer thinking about tendering his resignation. He had no doubt the feeling that he had to quit would rise again, but when that happened he was going to remember a girl with grey-green eyes and the woman she might grow up to be. He was going to remember the wheels that connect everything, cogs interlocked and turning to create a harmonious whole. He was going to remember the power of good vibes.

  He was going to learn to believe.

  I believe it. I learned that from a man that I came to love very much. I didn’t believe him when he told me, either, but now I know it’s true.

  But most of all he was going to make sure that he earned the respect of the angel that had visited him from the days still to come.

  Dennison knew there was probably a more rational explanation for it all, but right then, he wanted to believe in angels.

  THE WISHING WELL

  Do you think it’s better to do the right thing for the wrong reason or the wrong thing for the right reason?

  —Amy Luna, Sumner, WA, from Sassy, May 1991

  Beyond the mountains, more mountains.

  —Haitian proverb

  1

  There are always ghosts in the well. I can�
��t call them echoes, because the sounds I hear all were made too long ago.

  The splash of coins in the water.

  Voices whispering their wishes.

  Secrets.

  Nobody was supposed to hear them.

  But I do.

  2

  “It’s been almost two weeks,” Brenda said, “and he still hasn’t called.”

  She butted out a cigarette in the ashtray on the table between them and immediately lit another. Wendy sighed, but didn’t say anything about her friend’s chain-smoking. If you listened to Brenda, there was always something going wrong in her life, so Wendy had long ago decided that there was no point in getting on her case about yet one more negative aspect of it. Besides, she already knew the argument Brenda would counter with: “Right, quit smoking and gain twenty pounds. As if I don’t already look like a pig.”

  Self-esteem wasn’t Brenda’s strong point. She was an attractive woman, overweight only in the sense that everyone was when compared to all those models who seemed to exist only in the pages of a fashion magazine. But that didn’t stop Brenda from constantly worrying over her weight. Wendy never had to read the supermarket tabloids to find out about the latest diet fad—Brenda was sure to tell her about it, often before it appeared in newsprint along with stories of recent Elvis sightings, Bigfoot’s genealogy and the like.

  Sometimes it all drove Wendy a little crazy. In her unending quest for the perfect dress size, what Brenda seemed to forget was her gorgeous green eyes, the mane of naturally curly red-gold hair and the perfect complexion that people would kill for. She had a good job, she dressed well— perhaps too well, since her credit cards were invariably approaching, if not over, their limit—and when she wasn’t beating on herself, she was fun to be around. Except Brenda just didn’t see it that way, and so she invariably tried too hard. To be liked. To look better. To get a man.

  “Was this the guy you met at the bus stop?” Wendy asked.

  Brenda nodded. “He was so nice. He called me a couple of days later and we went out for dinner and a movie. / thought we had a great time.”

  “And I suppose you sent him flowers?”

  Sending small gifts to men she’d just met was Brenda’s thing. Usually it was flowers.

  “I just wanted to let Jim know that I had a good time when we went out,” Brenda said, “so I sent him a half-dozen roses. What’s so wrong about that?”

  Wendy set down her wine glass. “Nothing. It’s just that you—I think maybe you come on too strong and scare guys off, that’s all.”

  “I can’t help it. I get compulsive.”

  “Obsessively so.”

  Brenda looked at the end of her cigarette, took a final drag, then ground it out. She dropped the butt on top of the half-dozen others already in the ashtray.

  “I just want to be in love,” she said. “I just want a guy to be in love with me.”

  “I know,” Wendy replied, her voice gentle. “But it’s never going to happen if you’re always trying too hard.”

  “I’m starting to get old,” Brenda said. “I’m almost thirty-five.”

  “Definitely middle-aged,” Wendy teased.

  “That’s not funny.”

  “No. I guess it’s not. It’s just—”

  “I know. I have to stop coming on so strong. Except with the nice guys, it seems like the woman always has to make the first move.”

  “This is too true.”

  3

  Sunday afternoons, I often drive out of town, up Highway 14. Just before I get into the mountains proper, I pull off into the parking lot of a derelict motel called The Wishing Well. The pavement’s all frost-buckled and there are weeds growing up through the cracks, refuse everywhere, but I still like the place. Maybe because it’s so forsaken. So abandoned. Just the way I feel half the time.

  The motel’s all boarded up now, though I’m sure the local kids use it for parties. There are empty cans and broken beer bottles all over the place, fighting for space with discarded junk food packaging and used condoms. The rooms are set out in a horseshoe, the ends pointing back into the woods, embracing what’s left of the motel’s pool. Half the boards have been torn off the windows and all of the units have been broken into, their doors hanging ajar, some torn right off their hinges.

  The pool has a little miniature marsh at the bottom of it— mud and stagnant water, cattails and reeds and a scum of algae covering about two feet of water. I’ve seen minnows in the spring—god knows how they got there—frogs, every kind of water bug you can imagine. And let’s not forget the trash. There’s even a box spring in the deep end with all the beer cans and broken glass.

  The lawn between the pool and the forest has long since been reclaimed by the wilderness. The grass and weeds grow thigh-high and the flowerbeds have mostly been overtaken by dandelions and clover. The forest has sent a carpet of young trees out into the field, from six inches tall to twenty feet. Seen from the air, they would blur the once-distinct boundary between forest and lawn.

  The reason I come here is for the motel’s namesake. There really is a wishing well, out on the lawn, closer to the forest than the motel itself. The well must have been pretty once, with its fieldstone hp, the shingled roof on wooden supports, the bucket hanging down from its cast iron crank, three wrought-iron benches set facing the well and a flower garden all around.

  The shingles have all pretty much blown off now; the bucket’s completely disappeared—either bagged by some souvenir-hunter, or it’s at the bottom of the well. The garden’s rosebushes have taken over everything, twining around the wooden roof supports and covering the benches like Sleeping Beauty’s thorn thicket. The first time I wandered out in back of the motel, I didn’t even know the well was here, the roses had so completely overgrown it. But I found a way to worm through and by now I’ve worn a little path. I hardly ever get nicked by a thorn.

  The fieldstone sides of the well are crumbling and I suppose they’re not very safe, but every time I come, I sit on that short stone wall anyway and look down into the dark shaft below. It’s so quiet here. The bulk of the motel blocks the sound of traffic from the highway and there’s not another building for at least two miles in either direction.

  Usually I sit there a while and just let the quiet settle inside me. Then I take out a penny—a lucky penny that I’ve found on the street during the week, of course, head side facing up—and I drop it into the darkness.

  It takes a long time to hear the tiny splash. I figure dropping a penny in every week or so as I do, I’ll be an old lady and I still won’t have made a noticeable difference in the water level. But that’s not why I’m here. I’m not here to make a wish either. I just need a place to go, I need—

  A confessor, I guess. I’m a lapsed Catholic, but I still carry my burdens of worry and guilt. What I’ve got to talk about, I don’t think a priest wants to hear. What does a priest know or care about secular concerns? All they want to talk about is God. All they want to hear is a tidy list of sins so that they can prescribe their penances and get on to the next customer.

  Here I don’t have to worry about God or Hail Marys or what the invisible face behind the screen is really thinking. Here I get to say it all out loud and not have to feel guilty about bringing down my friends. Here I can have a cathartic wallow in my misery, and then… then…

  I’m not sure when I first started to hear the voices. But after I’ve run out of words, I start to hear them, coming up out of the well. Nothing profound. Just the ghosts of old wishes. The echoes of other people’s dreams, paid for by the simple dropping of a coin, down into the water.

  Splash.

  I guess what I want is for Jane to love me, and for us to be happy together.

  Splash.

  Just a pony and I swear I’ll take care of her.

  Splash.

  Don’t let them find out that I’m pregnant.

  Splash.

  Make John stop running around on me and I promise I’ll make him the bes
t wife he could ever want.

  Splash.

  I don’t know why it makes me feel better. All these ghost voices are asking for things, are dreaming, are wishing, are needing. Just like me. But I do come away with a sense of, not exactly peace, but… less urgency, I suppose.

  Maybe it’s because when I hear those voices, when I know that, just like me, they paid their pennies in hopes to make things a little better for themselves, I don’t feel so alone anymore.

  Does that make any sense?

  4

  “So what’re you doing this weekend, Jim?” Scotty asked.

  Jim Bradstreet cradled the phone against his ear and leaned back on his sofa.

  “Nothing much,” he said as he continued to open his mail. Water bill. Junk flyer. Another junk flyer. Visa bill. “I thought maybe I’d give Brenda a call.”

  “She the one who sent you those flowers?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You can do better than that,” Scotty said.

  Jim tossed the opened mail onto his coffee table and shifted the receiver from one ear to the other.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked.

  “I’d think it was obvious—you said she seemed so desperate.”

  Jim regretted having told Scotty anything about his one date with Brenda Perry. She had seemed clingy, especially for a first date, but he’d also realized from their conversation throughout the evening that she didn’t exactly have the greatest amount of self-esteem. He’d hesitated calling her again—especially after the flowers—because he wasn’t sure he wanted to get into a relationship with someone so dependent. But that wasn’t exactly fair. He didn’t really know her and asking her for another date wasn’t exactly committing to a relationship.

  “I still liked her,” he said into the receiver.

  Scotty laughed. “Just can’t get her out of your mind, right?”

  “No,” Jim replied in all honesty. “I can’t.”

  “Hey, I was just kidding, you know?” Before Jim could reply, Scotty added, “What do you say we get together for a few brews, check out the action at that new club on Lakeside.”