Enfant Terrible

Chapter 2

Evelyn had her coat on when I arrived.

“Thank God—” she murmured, ushering me into the house and closing the door behind me. “Something came up and I have to run out. I don’t really know how long it’ll take.”

“Cool, where’re we going?” I asked trying to guess what would induce her to rush out of the house in the dead of night. Her appearance offered no obvious clues. It seemed unlikely she was headed to the Botanic Gardens, where she worked during the day, or the Renaissance Faire, where she worked on weekends. At night she bartended at the club where Melody danced but she was hardly dressed for nightlife in pajama pants and a faded Northwestern sweatshirt. Her smooth, fair hair was pulled back in a ponytail and her face was clean of makeup. Her breath smelled like toothpaste.

“Not ‘we,’ me,” she clarified. “I need you to stay here. I’m in the middle of babysitting and I need someone to be here in case the kiddo wakes up. Could you hang out for an hour or two?”

“Hang on, you needed someone to babysit and you thought of me?” I asked. I could think of a lot of people who were probably a better choice. “What about your roommate? Or, hell, even Mom?” If I knew one thing for sure, it was that Evelyn wasn’t stupid, if she’d chosen me, she’d done so for a reason.

“Gracie’s on graveyard shift and I don’t need Mom asking me a million questions about my business,” Evelyn said, “And besides, it’s Vico. Melody asked me to watch her for the night; she already knows you. I don’t want her waking up to a stranger. Are you cool with that? I mean, it should be super easy, and there’s food in the fridge—you’re welcome to whatever you want.”

“Sure, Evil, I got you,” I said.

“Thanks, you’re a lifesaver.” Evelyn breathed an audible sigh of relief and began rattling around the room to gather her keys and phone and wallet from various surfaces. “Vico’s in the den on the couch.” She nodded toward a small study area off the kitchen where a lumpy form was stretched out on a secondhand sofa. A glowing lamp made out of salt suffused the room with a soft warm light. It was so painfully domestic it made me long for a pair of slippers and a pipe. “She’s out cold but…you know, just in case.”

“Cool. I got this,” I assured her. “You wanna tell me where you’re headed?”

“It’s not really any of your business,” Evelyn said. She shoved everything into her purse and gave a little hop to kiss me on the cheek. “Thanks, though. I’ll owe you one.”

And then she was gone.

Comedy Central was rerunning classic episodes of South Park, so I took up residence on the living room couch with a bag of potato chips and settled in to watch Cartman fart fire. I’d just about reached a satisfying level of comfortable stupor when an unholy shriek from the back room startled me upright.

I lurched to my feet in panic and ran to the den. The Girl Child was on top of the covers writhing in a fit. I ran to her side. Her cheeks were streaked with long, wet trails of tears and her mouth was a wide square of terror, showing all her baby teeth around a hollow, clenching throat.

“Lemme go! Lemme go! Lemme out of heeeeere!”

No one else was in the room. Nothing was even touching her—she’d already kicked all the blankets off the couch in her struggle.

“Vico, hey! It’s okay! You’re okay!” I shook her shoulders gently but she twisted and kicked, whimpering out a low, animal moan. In the dim light, I saw that her eyes were open but when I waved a hand over her face she didn’t respond—still asleep.

Don’t panic, it’s just a night terror. I told myself, then laughed inwardly: Just.

Night terrors weren’t just bad dreams; they were a kind of sleep-panic that happened deep down in the lizard brain that knew the world only as That Place Made of Imminent Death. I knew this from experience: I’d had night terrors as a kid. I’d wake up half the neighborhood with my screams and then have absolutely no memory of it in the morning.

“Lemme goooo!” The Girl Child’s voice cracked into the high, whistling scream only small children could manage, and my ears shrieked in harmony. I felt a sudden sympathy for Mom, sitting up with me screaming b****y murder night after night until the neighbors called the cops.

The cops.

Shit.

If she kept this up, someone was going to think I was killing her or worse. The cops would take one look at me and throw me in jail. Evelyn would get in trouble. Melody would be f*****g furious. And then Judge would get involved and I’d spend the rest of my worthless life down in Pontiac Max taking proton torpedoes up the exhaust port.

I had to make her calm down.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, it wasn’t dangerous to wake someone out of a night terror but it was difficult. I’d be waking her out of deep sleep and I wasn’t sure my perforated face was going to be much comfort to her but physical pressure sometimes helped. I captured her flailing hands and pressed them to her chest, crossing her arms over her heart and wrapping her in a firm embrace.

“S’ okay, Girl Child,” I murmured in her ear, smoothing her hair back as best I could with my free hand. “S’okay. You’re okay.”

Girl Child drew in a monster breath in preparation for her next scream, and I pressed her head against my chest and crooned the lowest note I could hit, deep down in my guts, letting it sustain as long as I could. The Girl Child’s howl never came: she held the breath in her chest letting it out bit by bit in little hitching whimpers but didn’t cry out again.

“Lemme outta here,” Girl Child sobbed, quieter now: no longer a scream. “I uwanna go…I want my Mamaaaa. I…wan…my…Mammaaa.”

I took another breath and crooned another low note, holding her close, smoothing her hair. It was the only thing that ever got me to calm down as a kid. When the neighbors called the cops, my stepfather, Michael, was the cop that responded. Somehow, his crooning embrace was enough to smooth my anxious mind back into sleep. Mom used to joke that he’d stayed the night so many times she might as well marry him.

Back when Mom told jokes.

The Girl Child’s breath was calmer now. I could still feel the frantic butterfly of her heart against my chest but she stopped struggling and slowly settled back into stillness. I rocked her some more until the fit seemed to be over, then gently laid her back on the sofa. Using the front of my shirt, I wiped away her tears and picked up the blanket off the floor. It was too thin; the autumn cold was seeping into the room through the window panes. I dumped it on the back of a chair and picked up Grandma Rose’s heavy, knit afghan off the back of the couch and draped it over her instead, and then started out of the room.

“Mama?”

The Girl Child’s voice reached me at the threshold sounding bleary and hoarse but awake. I tucked myself behind the doorframe where she wouldn’t see me.

“She’s at work, Girl Child,” I told her.

“Where’s Evie?”

“She had to go out,” I told her. “It’s me, Damen.”

“Damen?” The Girl Child didn’t sound alarmed. She sounded almost…pleased. I hazarded a peek around the doorframe and saw her roll over under the blankets to sit upright.

“You had a bad dream,” I told her. “It’s over now, you can go back to sleep.”

“I’m not sleepy.”

“Just close your eyes.”

“I can’t, there’s monsters.”

“Not while I’m around there’s not.”

“I caaan’t.”

I sighed. She was awake now. Getting her to go back to sleep was a battle I wasn’t going to win without resorting to cough syrup, and I wasn’t prepared to explain to a grand jury why I’d drugged my stripper girlfriend’s five-year-old daughter.

“You like cartoons?” I said at last.

Together we made our way back to the living room and the Girl Child scrambled up on the couch beside me to snuggle under my arm like a puppy. I pulled a blanket over her and she settled in against my side to stare at the colors flickering on the screen as aliens wreaked havoc on a quiet mountain town.

“What’s an ‘ayno pro’?” she asked as Cartman signaled to the aliens using a satellite dish coming out of his a*s.

There was a good chance I’d never be allowed to babysit again.

“Uhh, it’s something people think aliens like to do.”

“Oh,” The Girl Child said and fell silent until one of the characters swore. She giggled. “He said a bad word!”

“Yeah, he did. Don’t repeat that to your mom, okay?”

“Okay.”

Cartman launched into a lengthy blue streak and I put my hands over her ears until it was over. “You know what? You probably shouldn’t repeat anything you hear on this show, okay?”

“Okay.” The Girl Child lapsed once again into silence and was quiet for so long I thought she might have fallen asleep until she asked: “What’s a ‘s**t’?”

“What did I just say about repeating stuff from the show?!” I said as I mentally rewound the last fifteen minutes of dialogue, trying to remember if it had been among the litany of swears pouring out of the screen.

“I didn’t hear it from the show,” Girl Child protested.

“Then where did you hear it?” I asked.

The Girl Child looked cornered. “Nowhere?”

“C’mon, Girl Child, I know that’s not true. Tell me where you heard it.”

“Is it bad?” The Girl Child’s voice was tiny. I realized she thought I was going to yell at her for asking me about it. I softened.

“Heyy—you’re not in trouble for asking, okay? It’s just not a nice word.”

Girl Child nodded.

“Where’d you hear it?”

“At school.”

“From a grown-up?”

Girl Child shook her head.

“From another kid?”

A nod.

“Another kindergartener?”

“Mno. One of the big kids. They were saying bad stuff about Mama.”

“Bad stuff like ‘s**t’?”

She nodded. “And they laughed at me cuz I didn’t know what it means.”

“You’re not supposed to know what it means,” I told her. “It’s a mean thing grown-ups say sometimes and you shouldn’t be hearing it yet.”

“But why would they say that about Mama?” she sniffled as tears welled up in her eyes. I felt my heart go out to her.

“They’re just being little shits,” I said then winced. “Don’t repeat that, okay? They probably heard it from a grown-up.” I remembered the barrage of jealous side-eye from the other moms outside the schoolyard and figured I knew who the real culprit was. “Do you know what your Mama does at her job?”

Girl Child nodded. “She’s a dancer. I think she’s pretty. I wanna be a dancer too.”

“Maybe someday,” I said. Some parent I would make. “Well, some people don’t like that she’s pretty and dances to make money and are going to say mean things about her.”

The Girl Child scrubbed her face and nodded, still upset but trying to hide it.

“Listen, if they make fun of your Mama again, you knock them down. You tell them ‘No one makes fun of my Mama.’”

“But that’s fighting.”

“It’s standing up for yourself,” I said. “Sometimes that means knocking someone down.”

“I’ll get in trouble.”

“They won’t tell,” I told her. “They won’t anyone to know they got beat up by a girl. I mean, don’t go around starting fights but if someone else starts one you can sure as hell finish it, okay?”

“Okay.” The Girl Child smiled tentatively.

I put my arm over her again and she snuggled down under the blanket, snug as a bug in a rug. Within minutes she was asleep, snoring gently against my t-shirt. I could feel her little ribs rising and falling beneath my arm: peaceful and soft. I flipped off the television and eased out from under her, then stretched out on the floor beside the couch to keep the monsters away.

Just in case.