Death Benefits E-Book

Jerome Mandel

• Herausgeber: Next Chapter
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Barengaria, Thane and Yardena live with an abusive stepfather in the basement of a shabby house on the coast of Maine.

After they discover the addresses of relatives in a cache of rotting Christmas presents, they begin writing to them secretly. But it seems like escaping from the prison their stepfather has constructed for them will not be easy, and anyone who even attempts to help them faces grave danger.

But the three are each gifted in their own way, and they decide to pursue every option to get out. With their stepfather's presence looming over them like a deadly shadow, can they find their way to freedom... and at what cost?

Leseprobe

DEATH BENEFITS

JEROME MANDEL

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

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About the Author

Copyright (C) 2021 Jerome Mandel

Layout design and Copyright (C) 2021 by Next Chapter

Published 2021 by Next Chapter

Cover Art by CoverMint

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the author’s permission.

ChapterOne

--1--

The children had been locked in the cellar before and knew He would release them eventually, though not without cost. The first time, several years ago, Thane had been terrified of the prehensile dark and the smells and the sudden knock against things, and when the light came on and the door unlocked, he turned wildly and dashed to the top of the steps and threw open the door only to have it slam back in his face. He was cast back upon Gari and Yardena, and all three fell down the stairs in a tumble of twisted arms, legs, bumps, and scratches. The next time, Thane restrained his terror, and Barengaria, being the oldest, opened the door cautiously. It slammed back, catching her fingers against the jamb.

"Oh, looky here. There's been an accident. Ha-ha," He said, when He opened the door. "Barengaria, you must be more careful."

Her fingernails turned black. They lifted off like the tin lid on a boiling pot. No one knew she ran a high fever until she fell down one morning in Homeroom, and, in attempting to revive her, Mrs. Decker removed Berengaria’s hand from her pocket and saw the mountainous fingernails, one of which she had just inadvertently ripped off. It oozed a bloody black and yellow liquid. She called the principal. When Mr. Skilling could find no home phone number listed for Barengaria, he called Thane and Yardena out of their classes to accompany her to the school Nurse’s Room.

"How did this happen?" the nurse asked kindly.

"It was an accident," said Yardena. "She has to be more careful."

"But why hasn't it been treated?"

Yardena and Thane stood silent. Mr. Skilling winked at the nurse and later explained that the family seemed particularly impoverished though they lived in that big, gray, clapboard house on Lane End, the one with the rotting boathouse. Surely she noticed the condition of their clothes. The children's mother died, he said, and the father -- stepfather to all three, actually -- seems a bit of a recluse. No phone listed. Can you imagine? No phone in this day and age.

Since the nurse could not imagine it and did not trust the younger children to convey the written instructions on treating Barengaria's hand to their father, she drove them home herself at the end of her shift. It was not out of her way. They climbed the decaying wooden steps to the front porch and stood before the door while the nurse rang the bell and rang the bell.

"When does your father get home from work?" she said.

There was no answer.

"Your father's not at home," she said.

The children stood silently while she rang the bell again. Standing on the exposed porch, she was aware of the wind.

"How will you get in?"

The sullen children did not respond. They stood on the porch in the late afternoon while the evening approached from the woods behind them. Birds twittered and screamed in the dilapidating gum tree that sullied the yard.

"Do you have a key?"

"He's not at home," said Thane.

"You can't come in," Yardena added.

High on the hill behind the house, a woodpecker rattled, was still, then rattled again.

The nurse looked at them with sudden distaste. The cleanest thing about the thin girl with strikes of dirty yellow hair and hollow cheeks was the startling white dressing on her hand. The boy was shorter, ruddier, browner, or perhaps simply dirtier, surely more unkempt. And the sober little girl with the round face and olive skin was the skinniest and most disheveled of all.

Sour children, damaged by poverty, neglect, and despair. Grim, latchkey children, closed to her, to any sympathy, permanently resistant to tenderness. Urchins, that's what they were. Scruffy shoes. Cloth coats, frayed at collar and cuff. They needed to be washed and pressed, fed something more than carbohydrates. But since they weren't her children, she turned to go. There were limits even to her professional kindness.

"Make sure your father gets that prescription," she said to Barengaria. "I'll pray for you."

Yardena lifted her gypsy face.

"What for?" she said.

"Thank you for driving us home," said Barengaria, aware that thanks were due for the nurse's irregular generosity.

But the nurse had already abandoned them.

They entered the house that day and hung their coats in the hall closet. They found Him in the kitchen with His back to the stove where their dinner eggs were boiling now so they would be cold by dinnertime. The lamp above the table funneled light on His work and the knife in His hand. He was shaping or shredding a piece of wood -- a bird, wings extended, talons holding a stick and a sheaf of arrows. The slivers fell in a small heap of white pine curls and crumbs on the paper spread at His feet.

"Ha-haaaaa, the children!" He brayed, His immense face tilting up as He sat back in the chair. His fists, closed on the knife and the worked wood, rested on the arms of the chair. The blade glinted.

"What do you have there? Let me see it."

He meant the square of paper. She held it out to Him. Six inches separated His steady hand from the trembling sheet. Barengaria slowly circled to His left, away from the knife, and lay the paper in His palm.

"What's this? Well, if it isn't a pre(fucking)scription. Salves and balms, is it? Soaking and washing? Change the bandage? No, I think not," He said, rocking forward, rising, crumpling the prescription, dropping it on the pile at His feet. "Let me help you with that hand."

He lifted the knife as the children scudded silently and quickly to the basement door -- open, available. They disappeared beneath the house.

--2--

Always after that, the front door was bolted. But the storm door was open, and they knew then the basement was theirs. Some jolly malice, dangerous, powerful, and quite beyond their understanding of cause and effect, threatened their entrance through the front door. The children thought it had to do with the size of people: the larger they were, the louder they laughed. They respected seriousness, even severity, in a face -- they were in school, after all -- but smiles and laughter were unpredictable. Happy people stopped laughing as they approached.

When the children first realized they were banished to the basement, they were terrified of the dark and the rats He said lived there and ate children's toes and fingers. But they soon grew accustomed to the gloom and never heard scurrying. They heard only the distant almost musical squeak of the floorboards as He walked from room to room in the world above them.

Half the basement was dark and half was gloomy. One wall was divided into bins and slatted lockers each with its wooden door sealed with hasp and lock. The opposite wall had pigeon-holes and shelves made of rough-hewn planking alive with splinters that reached out and tugged at their clothes, a workbench with cold tools mounted on pegboard, and windows that looked out under the front porch to latticework designed to keep small animals from nesting under the house.

Even on bright summer afternoons, only gray light filtered through the lattice and under the porch to leak through the window wells where bottles stood, shoulders defined by dust and capped in black. There were no colors in the basement, only various shades of gray, lowlighted by shine from the window and fading to dark toward the wall.

The basement smelled of cut wood, old clothes moldering on rusty wire hangers, and rabbit droppings though no rabbits had ever been there. The floor near the oil burner was stained with slick and smelled of ancient sawdust soaked in oil. After great rains, water rose through cracks in the floor.

For years now, it seemed, they came from school through the woods to the basement. They stayed in the basement until dark. Sometime after dark the light in the basement turned on and the door unlocked, a signal that they were allowed into the kitchen where a naked twenty-five watt bulb cast a dull light above the sticky table. There was not much to eat and it was cold, but they ate quick and quiet before they filed carefully up narrow back stairs that rose steeply to one of the unfinished attics on the third floor that served as their communal bedroom.

A long, rectangular space ran beneath the mansard along the back of the house with a single light bulb suspended from a twisted wire in the ceiling. The left-hand wall was straight and unbroken, but the wall on the right under the mansard slanted in to give the room the feeling of a corridor or a tunnel. Barengaria and Yardena slept beneath the gables cut into the mansard. Thane slept under the window at the end that looked out onto a spit of land and the dark sea beyond. No light but moonlight illumined the treetops outside or glinted off the aluminum shell of the Airstream trailer abandoned in the yard.

No interior walls disturbed the open space. Halfway down on the left, a toilet with a cracked wooden seat and a stained porcelain washbowl stood in the center of the passageway. It was one of the shocks of going to school to discover that bathrooms were segregated by gender and toilets were set in stalls. They washed in the cold-water sink with a sliver of soap. They slept on squeaky iron cots once painted silver with "U. S. Army" embossed on the frame.

The two ends of their world were joined by a deciduous wood scarred with low guggling streams in steep folds of earth. Year after year, on the way to school and back, Yardena watched the woods change from gloomy green to brown and stark. The autumn now burned the leaves the wind drove down in showers that left the trees naked to the cold.

Some trees in their yard were naked winter and summer. He spilled chemicals around their trunks. The trees died. All but the strongest boughs cracked off in various winds that blew in from the sea and left slick trunks, white as bone, and irregularly covered with bark alive with vermin. Woodpeckers loved them. Their hollow knocking could be heard as long as the light lasted. Squirrels housed in the rotted caves where limbs once were. These trees did not sway in the wind. Yardena pitied them.

Once in the basement, the children always did the same thing. Barengaria settled herself primly on a sawhorse, ankles and knees together, back straight, as she had seen in a fogged film the gym teacher had shown during Health class. Yardena copied her sister silently while Thane sprawled knee-splayed on a stool. They held hands for a moment in imitation of an event Barengaria imperfectly remembered as something she used to do in the days before her mother married Him.

They always began with history. This comfortable ceremony provided a talisman for their pain and a doorway into peace. They no longer heard the words, which they had long since memorized, but they bathed in the tone and timbre of each other's voice, the rise and rhythm of familiar sentences.

Barengaria began. “My father, Eric d'Serafini, was a professor of Romance languages at Harvard University in Boston. He was the son of Alphonse d'Serafini, a member of the Patriarca family of Providence, Rhode Island, and Angelica de la Cruz of Buffalo, New York. He was one of seven children -- four boys and three girls -- whose names were Dante, Gina, Beatrice, Ricardo, Antonio, and Consuelo. I don't know who they married, where they live, or whether they have children who would be my cousins. My father was a good man but not very athletic. Mommy said his father bought him a chair. He died when I was a baby."

"That's when mommy married Alfred Albert Held," said Thane. "He was an engineer who was educated at MIT which means the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And then I was born. I am fourteen-and-a-half years old. My father had an older sister, Constance, who married Frederick Collins. They had a daughter named Philippa, who would be my cousin, but I don't know where they live or what they do. My father was killed in an accident in Surinam where he had gone to build a dam. Surinam is in the Pacific Ocean."

"I am Yardena Marrano y Iglesias de Ximinez-Quick. My grandfather was Marrano and my grandmother was Iglesias de Ximinez. Their son, Enrique Rafael Marrano y Iglesias de Ximinez, married our mother, Anne Quick d'Serafini Held, in Seville where I was born and where we all lived until my father died. I don't remember much because I was just a baby, but Gari was six and remembers we lived in a big house with open windows and a Nana."

"And then mommy married Him," said Barengaria. "And then she died."

The children recomposed themselves.

"I'll begin," said Yardena. She spoke briefly and quickly about the story she read for English, the material she had covered that day in Social Studies and Geography, and lingered, because it was more difficult and more fascinating, over Advanced Geometry. Thane and Barengaria followed the simpler geometrical solutions in their heads. Yardena put the more complex geometry problem in the air between them, describing the angles, length of line, and proportions. Laying out the axioms, she arrived, quite happily, at the inevitable mathematical conclusion.

Thane spoke next about what he had done that day in Citizenship and in History, both local and American. But he was most concerned about the story he had read in English.

"This guy in England is sitting in his cottage during a rainstorm," he said. "His girlfriend, Porphyria, comes in, hangs up her wet shawl, and makes a fire in the fireplace. Then she sits down and spreads her wet hair over him. He realizes that she loves him and so he strangles her."

He paused while they waited.

"That's it?"

"That's it."

"You would think there would be rules against that," said Yardena.

"Maybe the rules are different in England," said Barengaria. "They are in France, I know."

"No punishment at all?" Yardena asked.

"No," said Thane. "The last line is 'And yet God has not said a word.'"

They absorbed this sagely. It seemed to make sense.

But it worried Thane. He loved his sisters and knew that they loved him. He hoped he would not have to strangle them.

Barengaria talked about European History with emphasis upon current events. She taught them the French grammar she had mastered during class and the vocabulary she learned during recess.

As the light changed from dull to gloom, they turned to calisthenics. Like republics on the cusp of revolution, they moved from mental to physical exercise as the light failed. It was Thane's idea, a way of warming themselves against the night. He thought of it as a counterweight to the girls' ability to remember things better and to imagine solutions more quickly than he could. It was a way of defining himself.

Thane rigged a broomstick on looped rope suspended from ceiling hooks twisted into the joists and adjusted the crossbar for each to do chin-ups. They found jars of ancient preserves that they held in their hands and lifted toward their shoulders. They graduated from one-pound lifts to five-pound lifts to lifts of indeterminate weight -- cans of bolts or sacks of grout and cement. They did knee-bends and leg-lifts. They stretched and twisted. They knew the order of drill and moved from station to station with confidence. And if they arrived too early, they would do one-leg knee-bends while they waited.

They had no plan: they were not preparing for some future intellectual triumph or self-defining physical test. They were filling time, economizing on the present; otherwise the hours in the basement were boring.

So long as they could see each other, they spoke in whispers, they traded lessons. But as the dark came up from the floor around them, and their faces were dimly visible only in the band of gloom that eddied into the basement through the windows, talk tattered and stilled. They retreated into the comfortable self-absorption of exercise -- the stretching, pulling, twisting of their bodies denied them by the absence of afternoons at play. Their concentration shifted from their society to themselves. They relished the silence and the focus on their own bodies. And if they spoke, it was only to clarify a point in their lesson.

"What's the French for 'fruit cocktail'?" Thane might ask as he lifted a can toward his eyes.

"Compote."

"And in Spanish?" asked Yardena.

"Frutas mixtas."

They had explored the basement during the summer months when the light lasted longer. They could differentiate among the lockers by the smells they emitted. One smelled of naphthalene, a thick, clean, narcotic smell; another smelled of tree-rot and mold, the low, earthy smell of decay they associated with dead clothes and something else they could not quite identify until Barengaria said it reminded her of the sheets on her bed. Another locker held suitcases and trunks, and the last locker seemed to contain boxes or packages of irregular shape piled to the ceiling. This was the locker that smelled sweetly of an odor they could not identify -- until Barengaria noticed that Ms. Klumb, the substitute teacher, smelled the same. She told Thane and Yardena who surreptitiously sniffed Ms. Klumb as she walked down the hall. They all agreed that the odor emanating from the sweet locker was the perfume that Ms. Klumb wore. It was a small mystery solved. But what was that perfume doing in a locker in the basement and why did it smell so pungently from that locker alone?

--3--

They had nowhere to go. They had nothing to do. They suspected other children had different lives with visible advantages. They attributed those advantages to having two parents, perhaps, or a bedroom with a desk and lamp, or a bathtub with hot water and soap. Without such advantages, they could only depend on each other.

Thane was a boy and allowed to be dusty and unwashed; Yardena was a child whose peculiar color and opinions distanced her from the expectations of her peers. But Barengaria noticed what others had and her own deficiencies. Some of her peers pinched their noses when she passed. No one chose to sit near her. She knew something was wrong. She didn't know how to fix it.

Once she stole some of the pink liquid from beneath the kitchen sink. She squeezed it into a black plastic film container she found in the street with a crack down the side that she repaired with scotch tape borrowed from the school secretary. After Thane and Yardena had gone to sleep, Barengaria stuffed a sock into the hole at the bottom of the sink and filled the bowl with the cold brown water from the tap. She smeared the pink detergent over her skin as sparingly as she could because she wanted to wash her whole body, but when she tried to wash it off, it only got soapier and soapier, suds without end. Buoyant bubbles slopped over the bowl and wet the floor, leaving her skin itchy, red.

She went to bed that night to dream of the Handsome Man, but as she stuck her thumb in her mouth and ran her forefinger beside her nose, she touched the tip of her finger to the corner of her eye. The detergent set her eye aflame. The more she rubbed, the more her eye burned, the more the tears flowed. It was the first time she had cried in years and years.

"I smell bad," she said one day in the basement.

Thane tilted toward her and sniffed.

"No you don't, Gari. You smell just fine. Like always."

"You can't tell because we all smell bad."

Thane lifted his arm, twisted his head around like a sleeping duck.

"The kids in school look at me funny and hold their noses when I pass."

"You need soap," said Yardena.

"Or some of that perfume," said Thane, jerking a thumb toward the sweet-smelling locker. Thane liked the smell. It reminded him of Ms. Klumb who had breasts.

"How can we buy soap?" asked Barengaria. "We have no money."

"If we each save a dime from our lunch money,” Yardena explained, “we should have enough saved up by the end of next week to buy a bar of soap. Thirty cents a day for ten days is three dollars. How much can it cost?"

"We've never bought soap," said Thane.

"It can't be too difficult," said Barengaria.

But it was. They stood before the racks of bewildering soap bars gorgeously wrapped and smelling like all the perfumes of Araby. Dial, Irish Spring, Zest, Safeguard, Ivory, Lux, Cashmere Bouquet, Jergens, Palmolive, Dove, Camay, Shield, Tone, Caress, Gentle Touch, Aloe and Lanolin, Vitamin E and Lanolin.

"I don't get it," said Thane. "What's it all for?"

"Different things," said Barengaria quickly reading the smaller print. "Some are for beauty; they are called 'beauty bars.' Some are to make you smell good; they are 'deodorant' bars. Some are to make you healthy; they have vitamins."

"You don't want to be beautiful, do you, Gari?" The thought that Barengaria might want to be beautiful was disturbing to Thane.

"No," she said. "Just clean."

"They don't seem to have any soap for that," he said, examining the rack. And then he suddenly laughed.

"What?"

"This soap has oil in it. See? 'Made with baby oil.' That's stupid. Why would anyone want to wash themselves with oil?"

Thane reached into the rack, pulled out another bar, and read: "'Kirk's Original Coco Hardwater Castile.' What does it mean?"

Yardena and Barengaria peered over his shoulder at the bewildering label.

"Castile is a province in Spain," said Yardena. "Columbus. Ferdinand and Isabella."

"And 'coco' must be 'cocoa,'" said Barengaria.

"But what is 'hard water'?"

"If this soap is from Spain, it should be good," said Yardena.

"Do you know what hard water is?" Thane asked.

Yardena was silent.

"It doesn't make sense," he said.

"Look," said Barengaria, "we should be able to figure this out. It's a possessive, an adjective, and three nouns. We just have to figure out the relationship among the nouns."

"The possessive is somebody's name. But who is he? 'Kirk.' Could be anyone."

"Maybe it's like telegraph language," said Yardena, "and all we need to do is add the prepositions. So it would be, maybe, 'Kirk's original cocoa [made from] hard water [in] Castile.'"

Since it seemed to make sense, they considered this seriously, but finally Barengaria said, "But who cares what the cocoa is made from or where it was made originally?"

"And what does cocoa have to do with soap?" asked Yardena.

"And if they have hard water in Spain," Barengaria continued, "it won't do me any good here. Ours is liquid "

"Someone must have placed this hard water cocoa in with the soap by mistake," said Yardena.

"This is no good, either," said Thane, pulling another bar out of the display rack. "See. It's for dry skin. You're going to use water, right?"

"I thought so."

"Why do they make soap like this?" he asked. "It just doesn't make any sense."

A wrinkled woman pushed her cart among them.

"Excuse me, children," she said. She took a cake of Dove Beauty Bar from the display.

"See," whispered Thane as she wheeled away, "she needed that."

They stood aside, as if by common agreement, and waited for someone more like Barengaria to choose a soap.

The Assistant Store Manager, arranging apples with the bruised side down, watched from among the fruit and vegetables.

Barengaria waited in expectation as a giggle of girls with buoyant hair and flouncy skirts came down the aisle, but they didn't stop at the soap.

A woman with teenage daughter in tow approached with her cart and stopped in front of the soap display. She threw a six-pack of Safeguard and another of Dial into her cart.

"You want Lux or Camay?" she said to her daughter.

"No," the girl said, "they dry out my skin. I want to try … Aloe with Lanolin."

"They all dry out your skin. No soap is any good for you. God! I'd be so happy if this damn family would use one bar of soap instead of six different brands."

"Safeguard doesn't seem to work on Bobby. He still smells like a locker room."

"At his age he's nothing but glands and hormones."

"But not me."

"No, dear. You're all sugar and spice and everything nice."

"Aloe with Lanolin, that's what I'll try. Or maybe Vitamin E with Lanolin."

"What all you children really need is brown laundry soap."

And she wheeled her cart away.

"Brown laundry soap?" said Thane when she was gone.

"No, I don't think so," said Barengaria. She reached tentatively for the Lux and then, at the last moment, her hand closed upon the Ivory.

"'Ninety-nine and forty-four one hundredths percent pure,'" Yardena read. "What does that mean?"

As they turned to go, the Assistant Store Manager blocked their exit from the aisle. He knew they were guilty because of the way they looked at the floor.

"Do you have anything in there that doesn't belong to you?"

Barengaria and Thane looked at him, Barengaria because of the bar of soap in her hand and Thane because he didn't know the way to the basement of the supermarket. But Yardena slipped her backpack off her shoulder and drew out a library book. She opened the back cover.

"I have an extension for another week," she said.

"What do you have in your hand?" he asked Barengaria. She held out the bar of Ivory.

"You have enough to pay for that?"

Yardena reached into the side pocket of her pack and withdrew a fistful of dimes.

"You pay for that right over there," he pointed.

They moved together to the cash register under the watchful eyes of the Store Manager in the gallery above, the Assistant Store Manager on the floor, and the three solemn women at the checkout counters.

"Do you want a bag for that, dear?"

"Yes, please," said Barengaria.

"Plastic or paper?"

"Plastic," said Yardena who was thinking ahead to the winter.

"Well, now you have it," said Thane as they walked home through the wintering woods.

"That man frightened me," said Barengaria.

But Yardena didn't hear what they were saying. She was worrying about the fifty-six hundredths that wasn't pure.

ChapterTwo

--1--

Yardena was most alone in the busy crowds of school. The colors and patterns of her cut-down clothes, the flotsam of second-hand shops and the detritus of thriftiques, actively thrust in different directions. She seemed a smudge as she walked down the hall or sat among the shiny others in their crisp school clothes and polished shoes. She was an antithetical person, a plain stick clothed in rummage. And there was about her the slightly sour smell of unwashed body. Students made way for her.

Yardena didn't notice or, if she noticed, didn't care. She did not think of herself as moving on the fringes of a society that despised her, nor as consciously removed from a world that she despised -- though the isolation, in either case, was the same. If she thought of herself in terms of her society at all, it was as a person cut off, separated by poverty and the workings of her mind from the inanities of adolescence, and isolated by ignorance and her imagination from the television dreams of her peers.

Yardena was most alive in the society exiled to the catacombs of the dingy house on Lane End. That's where she was most whole, one of three, separate among equals. Though less athletic than the others, she contributed to the health of the whole, because her mind was retentive and her command of mathematics superior to that of her sister and brother. She could teach them as they could teach her.

In school Yardena had a temporary friend, the boy who ate by himself, scattering more food than he swallowed. Yardena found him abandoned on the playground. Never selected for playground games, he wandered by himself on the margin of the world and played in dirt. When Yardena dropped from the horizontal ladder, he was sitting on one knee with the other leg thrown carelessly out before him. He was fashioning a mud man on a frame of pipe cleaners from the dirt that surrounded the hole where the supporting upright disappeared into earth. As Yardena swung across the horizontal ladder, the upright moved in the ground and pumped up murky liquid which the boy mixed with the dirt to make a muck in which his hands were busy.

He looked up at her when she dropped beside him. He had sandy hair atop a sunny face and a crooked smile that looked insincere but was only the result of improperly functioning facial muscles. He talked funny, his contorted nasal passages refusing to allow initial consonants to escape without the expense of energy he was often incapable of providing.

"'woe," he said.

"Hello, Jew-Jew-Julian."

"My name is just Julian," he said with the energy needed to pronounce his name.

"I thought your name was Jew-Jew-Julian."

"It's not."

"Why do they call you Jew-Jew-Julian?"

"It's a sobriquet."

Yardena didn't know what a "sobre-kay" was, but she would ask Barengaria that evening in the basement.

She liked Julian. He reminded her of the squirrel.

Yardena had discovered the squirrel beneath the noisy gum tree in the yard near the storm door that led to the basement. Other squirrels scattered as she came near, chittering, darting half way up the gum tree, tails signaling in frantic alarm. But the squirrel on the ground didn't move. It glared at her. She recognized the look in the black eyes. Patience. Resignation.

"Look," she said to Thane and Barengaria. "There's a tame squirrel under the tree. He doesn't run."

The squirrel remained in place as they approached it, stopping, crouching down with hands extended, creeping toward it.

"Nice squirrel," they said.

It didn't move.

"Maybe it's dead," said Thane, but as he reached, it bared its teeth.

"Maybe it's hungry," said Yardena. She quickly gathered a handful of acorns and piled them in front of the cautious squirrel.

"Here, squirrel, have something to eat."

But the squirrel did not respond except to flick its tail limply to the side. Yardena reached to stroke the tail.

"I think it's sick," said Barengaria.

"What have we here?" He said striding among them. "Haa-haaa, a pre(fucking)posterous squirrel, down from the tree-tops, full of disease and corruption. Look, it's covered with fleas. The fleas are infected. They jump on your skin and hide in your clothes and bite you when you sleep."

The children stood away and looked at Him with horror. They scratched their skin through their clothes.

"Ha-haaaaaa," He brayed. "Well, let's bring it into the house for you to play with. Wait. I have a better idea. Look! This is the end to all earthly care."

He brought His heel sharply down and crushed the squirrel's head into the ground. He stood on it. The head rose again slowly when the heel was removed and the grass reasserted itself. The eyes were open. Twig and grit attached to them.

Yardena looked in fascination at death.

"What! Are you filthy children still outside? Get into the basement where you belong. I want you all to die. Or run away. When will you learn to run away?"

But Yardena didn't forget the squirrel. It offered the possibility of care, the cat she never stroked, the dog she never fed or walked. The squirrel told her that someone in this world might need her. It was something firm to search for, a purpose, like the answer to a problem in geometry. She thought she had found it again in Julian.

"What are you making?" she asked.

"'eople."

She crouched and looked at the figure in his hands. The chest was made of two pipe cleaners twisted together into four stems that made a hollow vault; four pipe cleaners, knotted in pairs at each side of the hip, became femur; then one knotted at the knee became the shinbone of the lower leg. The same knotted complication formed the shoulders, elbow, and arms. He twisted a pipe cleaner into a ball that he attached between the shoulders. He covered the wire skeleton with mud, then set the mud man on a piece of aluminum foil.

"What's that for?"

"'ake it."

She followed him to the far corner of the grass field at the end of the playground. He laid the figure in the field and curled up the aluminum edges.

"Why do you want to bake it?" she asked at last.

"So I 'an 'reak it."

When the alarm rang to end recess, Julian stopped beside the horizontal ladder and dipped his hands in mud. As they approached the school, Julian lifted his muddy hands before him and the crowds cleared away.

"Julian!"

"Really! Julian."

"That boy is coming again, Sylvia, watch out."

"Too disgusting."

"Well, if it isn't Jew-Jew-Julian," said Jefferson Davis Crowe, striding along, trailing clouds of groupies.

"Mr. Clean and Miss Piggy."

"Who's your girlfriend, M-M-Mud-bag?"

"Watch him, Jeff!"

"Oh, there's nothing to worry about here. I'll clean him up tomorrow."

The others looked at him expectantly.

"I'll bring a can of Raid," he said.

"Raid!"

"Ha-haa."

"Your days are numbered, B-B-Bug-boy."

"Watch out! It's Raid!"

"RAAAAIIIIIIID," they shouted.

--2--

One day Julian surprised her.

"'ome to my house to 'lay," he said.

"Why?"

"I want to show you what I made. Out of 'lasticine."

"I can't," she said.

He cocked his head to the side and peered at her. Accustomed to disappointment, he had not expected to be disappointed by her.

"Why not?"

"I can't come to your house."

"Why not?"

"I can't come to anyone's house."

"Why not?"

She was going to say she was not allowed, because she knew, though she had never been told, that it was forbidden. Her life was circumscribed. He would punish her. He would tie her up and flog her with a leather strap as He had flogged Thane until he stopped crying. But it was also something that none of them had ever done before. Barengaria, who was older, had never gone to anyone's house. She had always come to the basement to share who she was and what she learned with them.

And Yardena realized that she didn't want to go to Julian's house. She wanted to preserve the consistency of her life as it was. She didn't want to miss the moment of touching hands with Thane and Barengaria, the comforting mantra of their history, the eager exchange of the afternoon's lessons in the basement. She looked forward to hearing what was happening in eighth-grade civics and tenth-grade French. She wanted to explain what she had learned in advanced geometry and math. She wanted to do her exercises and review what Thane and Barengaria told her. She wanted to be surprised by the light, as she always was, and go into the darkling kitchen for her cold hard egg and cold hard toast. And she thought it would be awkward to learn Julian's history and explain her own to him. And so she was silent.

"Ask," said Julian.

"Ask what?"

"Ask your 'arents if you 'an 'ome."

That evening in the basement, as Barengaria explained what chez meant, Yardena said in the best French she knew, "Julian asks me to come to his chez."

"Why?"

"He wants to show me something he made out of clay."