She wants to take it back as soon as she says it, because her mother’s face changes right away, and she pulls off abruptly into a gravel turnoff and jams on the brakes.
“What do you mean?” her mother says. “What do you mean, you dance for him?”
“Nothing,” Annabelle says, looking down into her lap.
Her mother has her by the shoulders. “You dance for him,” her mother repeats.
“Is it a sin?” Annabelle says.
She thinks about doing the hula in front of Grandpa, to the music she has to imagine in her head. She thinks about her arms moving from side to side, like waves in the ocean, wherever it is. She thinks of climbing into a boat that is too small for Grandpa and his wheelchair. A whale will tow her out to sea, a rope from the boat looped around its tail.
“I do the hula,” she says.
“Oh,” her mother says, looking into her eyes.
But Annabelle feels, now, that her mother can’t see anything there, that she probably doesn’t want to see anything—not the fish, not Sam, and not Grandpa watching her dance, drinking his whiskey.
“Be careful,” her mother says.
“Yes, ma’am,” Annabelle says.
At Grandpa’s, Annabelle watches whatever Grandpa watches; tonight it is one of the crime shows he likes. There is a little girl about Annabelle’s age, but she isn’t really in the show, only her picture; she has disappeared, and the police are trying to find her, talking to different grownups and to the girl’s teenaged babysitter.
A commercial comes on, a big expensive car going fast down a highway toward some mountains in the distance.
“Fix me another drink,” Grandpa says.
He has been saying this for a while now, drinking fast. Annabelle hopes that means he is going to fall asleep soon. She goes and makes him another one. She sees the new box of chocolates in the refrigerator when she opens the freezer for ice.
“How about a little dance from my girl?” Grandpa says, when she brings him his whiskey.
“It’s my bedtime,” Annabelle says, which it is. She is already in her pajamas. She yawns, opening her mouth wide, stretching her arms up.
“Aw, c’mon,” Grandpa says. “Pretty please with Hershey’s syrup on top.”
“I don’t like chocolate anymore,” Annabelle says.
“Oh, sure you do,” Grandpa says. “You love it. My favorite little girl,” he says. “My little girl loves chocolate.”
“No, I don’t,” Annabelle says.
“You listen to your Grandpa,” he says. “Do what I tell you.”
“No.” She remembers her mother saying, Stubborn as a mule to the man in Sue’s Kitchen. “I hate chocolate,” she says. “And I hate dancing and I hate it when you wet your pants, so there.”
Grandpa looks at her a moment. Then he says, “You spoiled little brat.” He looks really upset. Annabelle has never seen him like this before. He has always been nice as pie, smiling at her, giving her treats and presents, asking her for dances. “Get over here right now.” He starts to rise from the couch, but sinks back down, wheezing and red in the face.
“I need my oxygen,” he says. His tank is in the bedroom. “Go bring it in here.”
“No,” Annabelle says.
“Now!” Grandpa says.
This is a Grandpa she has never seen, angry and needing his oxygen.
“I won’t,” Annabelle says.
“Oh, yes you will, Missy.”
He is breathing more slowly now, his face returning to its normal color. Again, he starts to get up from the couch. But before he is even off it, she has run out the door of the trailer and down the ramp.
“Get back here,” Grandpa calls.
But Grandpa is old, and slow. By the time he is at the door, she is running through the woods in the dark, branches stinging her face and arms.
When she can’t run anymore she stops, panting. She looks back toward the trailer, at a light pole on the road she knows is nearby. She can’t actually see the trailer, or Grandpa. Maybe he has gone back to get his tank from the bedroom, to sit on the couch and watch his show. Or maybe he is in the plastic chair in the dirt yard, smoking one of his cigars. The cigars will kill him one day. Her mother said so. Every day, Grandpa will get older and slower, and Annabelle will get bigger and stronger. If he chases her, Grandpa will wheeze and turn red in the face. The next time he asks for his oxygen, she will hide it, and he won’t be able to catch his breath. He will take in the air in little gasps, and then he will pass out for good, and be perfectly still. Then Annabelle will disappear, like the girl on the crime show. No one will be able to find out where she is. She will live in the woods in a fort, just her and Simba and the white cat Beautiful Lady of the Snow. Annabelle has never seen real snow, but she knows that somewhere, like at the North Pole, it falls all the time, covering the ground and trees and buildings, making everything it touches white, and pure again.
It’s Halloween, and I don’t have plans with anyone. No big thing. It’s only a Wednesday evening. From Sunday through Wednesday, if I happen to be alone in front of my old Sony TV with a succession of gin-and-tonics and a diminishing package of salt-and-vinegar potato chips, this is not a serious existential problem. After Wednesday, though, things get dicier. First there is Thursday, or “little Friday”: the bars and restaurants crowded, the clubs pulsing with music and bodies until the dawn hours. If little Friday arrives and I don’t have plans, a sharp but still-distant note of anxiety begins to sound—the harsh whistle of a train, coming from a long way off. On Friday it rumbles closer, and on Saturday night it appears from around the curve and bears down on me, huge and monstrous, threatening to cut me in two.
So, it’s only Wednesday. But Halloween complicates things: a day of bank tellers in bunny ears and fairy wings, the occasional drunken clown reeling from a bar at lunch hour with a smeared red smile, so that by evening the air is charged with the lonely ions of expectation. It is not a night to stay in, watching ill-trained teenaged actors get cut up with knives or crushed under electric garage doors or chased sobbing through the woods. I call three different friends, but everyone else has had the foresight to find a date, and no one invites me to tag along. Next I call Mona. Mona is way older, like sixty or so, and she hasn’t dated in years.
“Let’s go for drinks,” Mona says. “I was going to have dinner, but I’ll skip it. Nothing like a liquid diet.”
I can hear ice slithering around in a glass, and behind that her TV going. Predictably, someone is screaming. Nearly every channel has some kind of scare-a-thon happening.
“Drinks
