When Julie glanced over her shoulder and saw the little girl with the pudgy face standing beside the trash can, clammy sweat broke out across her shoulder blades, wrapping her in tentacles of ice. The little girl looked up at her with big, watery eyes, clutching a tattered yellow stuffed rabbit to her chest, and Julie knew she was in imminent danger. Some would say the child looked innocent, vulnerable even. Julie, however, knew better than to be fooled by a child’s appearance. She knew the terrors brought forth from the most twisted adult brains could never comprehend the deviousness lurking in the mind of a child, gestating in the smack of their lips as they masticated snacks, crawling in the clamminess of their grimy hands.
Prior to seeing the child, Julie walked alone on a side street, in the city she lived in for years. She was on her way to a bar to meet a friend for a cocktail. Her journey took her through a neighborhood she navigated by memory while contemplating when she last went to the dentist (answer: too long ago). Despite her preoccupied thoughts, Julie was a woman of the world, a woman who left the house, and she was conditioned to be keenly aware of her surroundings and to react accordingly.
The pizza restaurant on the side street was delicious, but the cooks sat outside smoking and flicked their butts at Julie when she passed. She knew the man who ran the dry cleaners carried a small, razor thin knife under his smock, and if she walked too close to him while he stood at the dumpster, she would wonder a block later why her forearm burned. And then she’d frown at the drops of blood sinking into the soft weave of her sweater, and think to herself, aw man, now I must remember to pre-treat or this stain will never come out. The three boys who lived above the barber were always ready to drop eggs onto her head from the upstairs windows. The last time she wiped the embryonic goo from her hair, the barber swept up the shells at her feet with a smile and said, “They like you.”
Julie wasn’t a particularly beautiful woman, but she wasn’t ugly either. Not that it really mattered. She’d once seen two women wearing brown paper bags over their heads walking a block or two ahead of her on this exact route and the men treated them with equal, if not elevated, animosity. But, no big deal, it was second nature for Julie to dodge these landmines. She crossed the street at the block before the pizza restaurant. She always wore protective arm sleeves under her jacket to protect her clothes from blood stains, and she never left home without an umbrella whether weather was forecast or not.
But this child? Just showing up in her path? The matted curls framing her face in the same way Julie’s did as a kid? The large shadow the child’s head cast on the sidewalk? The tender way she stroked her stuffed rabbit? Julie was not prepared to handle such an aggressive encounter. The threat prickled her skin, her brain triggered her feet to flee, and off she ran. She ran so fast she didn’t feel her legs radiating fire, didn’t clock the desperate burning in her lungs, so numb she was with the need for survival. Julie just kept running.
Eventually she stumbled into the arms of a passerby on the sidewalk. He took her by the shoulders and shook her to rid her of her frenzy, and she was thankful. It was the same gesture she’d seen Jimmy Stewart and Paul Newman execute in old movies. At first the thought gave her comfort, but then she remembered Paul Newman slapping Charlotte Rampling in The Verdict, and she wondered for a split second if this man would do the same to her, but then she thought, it didn’t matter because at least she was away from the child. The man didn’t slap her. He simply asked, “Is someone after you?” Julie reluctantly looked behind her, panting, but saw only the cherries from the cigarettes of the cooks outside the pizza place. She sighed with relief and a returned sense of safety.
The man into whose arms she’d run insisted on walking her to the bar where she was to meet her friend, Ariana. Julie told him he didn’t need to bother, but he insisted. Still feeling shook, she struggled to catch her breath enough to carry on a conversation. When Ariana saw her in this condition, she was concerned and turned her ire onto the man whose name, it turned out, was Brian.
“What did you do to her?” Ariana demanded.
“I saved her,” Brian said. It was then that Ariana realized how attractive Brian was and she relaxed, slipping into her wing woman voice weighted with solicitation, “Oh, how very noble of you, right Julie?”
Ariana invited Brian to join them at the bar, but he said he had a previous engagement that he was now, actually, late for. That last bit he said with clear annoyance.
“Some other time then,” Ariana said to his back as he walked away.
Situated in a booth of the trendy dive bar, Ariana grinned, and Julie shook.
“I’m shaking,” Julie said, taking a gulp of her martini.
“From your meet/cute?” Ariana asked, her eyes sparkling.
“No,” Julie said. “From the child.”
Ariana’s smile dropped. “Oh. The child you saw by the dumpster?”
“Yes,” Julie said and shivered harder.
Ariana raised her hand and signaled for two more martinis. Although supportive of her friend, Ariana didn’t quite understand Julie’s reaction to the child. In all the years they’d been friends, Julie had expressed little interest in children, but she’d never acted repulsed by them. Ariana herself desperately wanted a child. If it had been Ariana who looked behind her on the street and saw a child’s face looking up at her asking, Will you be my mommy?, she would have gathered the child into her arms without a moment’s hesitation and kissed her all over while exclaiming, Yes! Yes! Yes! Ariana felt a rush of warmth flow over her, and her vagina contracted, leaving her with a dewy glow.
Julie, noticing her friend’s euphoria, frowned at her. Ariana, noticing Julie noticing her, refocused.
“What did the child look like?” Ariana asked.
Julie closed her eyes and took a deep breath.
“She was short and pudgy. Her dress was a faded light pink and ill-fitting, like, all bunchy, with white lace around the waist and a bib?” Julie mimed a collar of scratchy synthetic. Ariana absently pulled at her own neckline. “She couldn’t have been comfortable in it. It was one of those dresses our mothers put us in back in the 90s.”
“Poor thing,” Ariana said. Julie scoffed.
“Poor thing?” Julie said. “Am I supposed to feel sorry for her?”
Julie wasn’t normally a mean or selfish person, and her lack of compassion confused Ariana. But she also knew Julie had a lot on her plate. These were extreme circumstances. But she also felt she couldn’t completely excuse this line of questioning. “But don’t you though? A little? She’s just a child.”
“No!” Julie shouted, and Ariana’s eyebrows raised, and she pursed her lips, her signal to Julie to tread lightly. Julie took a breath to calm herself.
“I just mean— I haven’t told you the worst of it,” Julie said.
“What? What was the worst?” Ariana asked, feeling her face flush from the liquor. The din of the bar and all the single men (read: potential fathers) she wasn’t talking to lowered, finally, to a tolerable pitch, allowing her to focus on her friend fully and completely.
“Her face,” Julie said, softly, embarrassed. “Her cheeks should have been creamy with cute dimples, but they just reminded me of sad, old, lumpy mashed potatoes. And her beady little eyes glinted out of the misshapen blob of her face.”
“Whoa,” Ariana whispered, her head a balloon floating, enlarging its capacity to hold all her own fears along with Julie’s.
“Yeah,” Julie said, and they sat in silence.
After a moment, Ariana shook her head and ordered two more martinis.
“Let’s google stalk Brian—”
“Yes please!” Julie responded, thankful for the distraction, but as Ariana’s phone brought up Brian’s clearly-cared-for toothy grin on social media, all Julie saw was the little girl’s gravy slick eyeballs glaring at her from behind the trash can. They were so shiny she could see her own terrified expression reflected in the moisture.
The next morning Julie rushed around, balancing an electrolyte drink in her arms with her usual water and coffee as she stepped out of her apartment building. Her mind darted again to the mental reminder that she must call the dentist as soon as she got to the office, and then, without warning, to the memory of the little girl behind the trash can. Distracted, Julie didn’t notice the trash on the stoop until the wedge heel of her boot squished down into something sickeningly like cream cheese. The sensation, oddly like falling, made her stomach flip, and she hovered on one foot, afraid to lower the foot again, afraid the feeling of empty space would descend forever, and she’d never find solid ground again.
Still holding her beverages, Julie looked around and beyond her stoop. She hoped anyone looking would see a professional woman in a seasonal overcoat descending gracefully to the ground instead of an unnerved hot mess with bad dental hygiene awkwardly attempting to place her hangover beverages on the ground without spilling them. Once she freed her arms, Julie examined the pile she stepped in and gagged.
She recognized the box right away, even though it was decayed and waterlogged. It held the distinct markings of a long-established chicken pot pie company, the same pie her grandmother made on the nights her own parents went to whatever engagement warranted them to relinquish care of their biological ward for two to three hours on the weekend. Or when Julie was sick, and her father carried her into her grandmother’s living room. He plopped her on the couch, and Julie, through her illness-induced fog would hear the click of the remote and the buzz of the tube TV and the comforting refrain of the Captain Kangaroo theme song, or The Price is Right, or, if Julie became ill at school and had to be picked up in the middle of the day, The A-Team.
Her grandmother was a woman who wore pantyhose to iron, full make-up to the grocery store. Whenever this perfectly coiffed example of female existence walked into the living room with a tray, the pot pie steaming in the middle, redolent with carrot and chicken, Julie knew everything was right in her world, and she made notes on how to keep the world from going wrong.
When Julie picked up her boot heel out of the putrid, maggot-ridden sludge inside the chicken pot pie’s box, she was overwhelmed with the acute knowledge that she’d fouled up somewhere. A fissure opened separating Julie from security, and the vertigo was epic. She squinted against the tinted light bouncing through the overcast sky. Was this a prank? She scanned the sidewalk that ran in front of her building. Who would do such a thing? Some kids? A man with a scruffy beard and dressed in a tuxedo (an unusual sight for nine o’clock in the morning) with a phone to his ear yelled at the person on the other end.
“No, fuck YOU!” the man screamed, then cut his eyes to Julie, his face a satisfied smirk, letting her know his profanity was meant for her pleasure.
“Hey.” Tuxedo Man was at the bottom of the stoop. Julie stood up.
“Hey,” she said.
“What’s up?” he asked.
Julie looked down the street again. It was empty, and the air, cooler.
“Nothing. I’m on my way to work,” she said.
Tuxedo Man climbed the stairs, his grin widening, sliding his eyes down her legs.
“Where do you work— Uh gross,” he said, his leer coming to a stop at the sight of the putrid slime she stood in. “Why are you standing in that shit?” He covered his eyes, turning his face away.
“It was just here when I walked outside,” Julie tried to explain.
Tuxedo Man held up his hand to silence her and hurried down the stairs again.
“Wait!” cried Julie.
“You’re disgusting!” The man yelled back at her.
Julie frowned, unsure what had just happened. She conjured her grandmother sitting at her dressing table, carefully applying lipstick, outlining her lips with the color of a red rose, luscious. Again and again her grandmother’s hand circled her mouth, around and around, the color becoming deeper and deeper, darker and darker, then the lipstick rubbed outside her lips onto her face, until she no longer looked so put together. She looked like a clown, and Julie was embarrassed for her. Her grandmother smiled a closed-lip smile (so as not to reveal her dentures) at Julie in the mirror and said, “This is how it’s done.” Julie gasped, pulling herself out of the memory or daydream or day mare or whatever mind fuck she had just been in. How much did she drink last night?
It was then that Julie spotted them: two ragged blond pigtails sticking out from opposite sides of the trunk of the oak tree a few doors down. The hem of a ripped pink dress swayed as the body that occupied it fidgeted and held its breath in the hopes of making itself smaller, its presence invisible. Fear, hot and insistent, slid into Julie’s chest. It was the child.
The little girl peeked out from behind the tree and smiled coyly at Julie, her shy giggle wafting over to Julie’s ears like a radioactive plume. She couldn’t let it get near her. She couldn’t risk the child manipulating her, couldn’t risk falling into her deep brown eyes. Desperation sprung Julie to action. As she gathered her beverages, her armpits squeaked with clammy sweat. She fumbled with her keys and hopped on one foot back into her building, leaving the other boot, the one with the detritus of the rotten pot pie, on the stoop as collateral damage.
“Is he gone?” Ariana asked over the phone, “Can you still see him on the street?” Julie called her friend in hysterics after coming back into the apartment. She held the cellphone to her ear as she looked out onto the street from behind the curtains.
“No, it’s a girl child,” Julie said.
“Wait, the child is back?” Ariana asked.
“Yes, yes, yes,” said Julie. “She’s still out there!”
“Oh,” Ariana wanted to catch up. “I thought you were afraid because of the man.”
“No!” screamed Julie. “The child!”
Ariana struggled with how to help her friend. If the roles were reversed, Ariana would have invited the child in for a snack, asked her who her parents were in the high-pitched comforting voice that adults used with children. When the child said she was an orphan, Ariana would have called her aunt, the social worker, and asked how long a child must go unclaimed before she could keep it as her own.
Julie could see the toe of a mud-spattered Mary Jane sticking out from the trunk of the tree.
“I’m not safe here!” Julie exclaimed into the phone.
“You are safe, Julie,” Ariana said. “We had too much to drink last night. You’re probably dehydrated. You know how drinking makes you frazzled.”
“I am not dehydrated! I’m in danger!”
“Julie. Acting like a child won’t protect you from one,” Ariana said. Her mother’s own words coming out of her mouth left a distinctly bitter taste there. But she didn’t know what else to say.
“I should go to my mom’s,” said Julie. Her childhood home did not conjure safety and comfort. But, this time, it might just work in her favor.
“Julie, no,” Ariana said. “You said you weren’t going back, remember? You’ve already said goodbye. It’s the whole reason we went out last night.”
“That’s why it’s so perfect,” Julie said. “It’s the one place the child won’t go.”
Julie arrived in front of the one-story ranch-style house at dusk. The streetlights buzzed hazy orange light over the cul-de-sac. She jumped out of the car, clutching her overnight bag, and ran up the walkway to the front door. When she twisted the knob and flung her weight against the door, it was locked. The hair on the back of her neck stood on end.
Julie looked first to the right toward the abandoned playground she played on alone, then to the left where her grandmother’s house had stood before the city demolished it. Thirteen-year-old Julie had watched in horror as the teeth of the forklift bit into the brick, the glass windowpanes exploding, the cornflower wallpaper flapping in the wind like strips of flesh.
The front door swung open, and a woman, tall and capable, stood silhouetted in the rectangle of light it unleashed.
“Good evening, Ronda,” Julie said, clearing her throat.
“Julie,” Ronda said, her voice matter of fact, unsentimental. She was an excellent caregiver.
“May I come in?” Julie asked.
Ronda moved aside. “Of course.”
Inside the house, light flickered from the muted TV set, casting shadows on the walls around them. Julie’s breath quickened. Maybe this was a mistake.
After learning of her mother’s diagnosis, Julie moved back into her childhood home to take care of her. Back then, the house was still loud with her mother’s collections, a museum of precious objects revered and defended. The expensive green rug young Julie had ruined, ruined, ruined (on purpose!) was in the entry way. On the coffee table, a crystal bowl still held the broken pieces of an (irreplaceable!) blue vase. It might as well have been Julie’s head on a stake. “Never show mercy,” her mother had told her the day her father left.
The pink tiled upstairs bathroom was where Julie hid as a child. Other than her parents’ bedroom, it was the only room in the house with a lock. It wasn’t long after moving back in as an adult that Julie found herself hiding there again. Every time she walked out of the bathroom, her mother raged with horror.
“Why are you here!?” her mother screamed. “Why are you here!? Why are you here!?!” Her mother’s anger was like an airhorn coupled with the insistence of a smoke detector low battery chirp. She wouldn’t stop yelling unless Julie removed herself from her line of sight. She defaulted to her old childhood strategies, dodging squeaking floorboards, hiding behind curtains, making herself as invisible as possible.
The doctors assured Julie this behavior was the dementia. It was not her mother. “Don’t take it personally,” they said. But Julie knew better.
After her mother called the cops on Julie and reported her as an intruder, she told her older brother they had to hire someone.
“You’re the daughter. Why can’t you do it again?” he asked, annoyed. She could hear the golly-good time of a party in the background through the phone.
“Because she hates me,” Julie said in a small voice.
“What?” her brother asked but didn’t wait for her to repeat herself. “Whatever. I’ll pay half if you manage everyone.” And he hung up.
“Because she hates me,” Julie said, louder, to no one.
When the professional caregivers came, her brother told her to move out the valuables (the jewelry, the art, the antiques) for safekeeping. He said the caregivers would steal everything since there was “no family around.” The house became a staged tomb, striped of all personality, but still filled with enough heavy furniture so as not to suggest scarcity of wealth.
“I want these people to know who they’re dealing with,” her brother said within earshot of the women who made sure his mother didn’t lay in her own filth all day.
Two years later (or had it only been one?), Julie loitered in the foyer, apprehensive to step off the entry rug, lest she be consumed by the lava of her childhood and beyond. By the time Ronda returned to the couch, Julie got control of herself and proceeded to scour the dark corners of the house for the child. Satisfied the living room was clear, she walked slowly down the hallway, scrutinizing the shadows in the empty kitchen and dining room as she passed. She stopped at the last door on the left that led to her dying, bedbound mother and let out the breath she’d been holding. She was safe. Her plan had worked. The child was nowhere to be seen. Carefully, she turned the knob until she heard the most indiscernible of clicks, then opened it the smallest of slivers. But before any light could fall into the room, Julie heard the most chilling sound: the child’s giggle.
Julie jumped back and let the door slam shut.
That’s when she felt them. The short arms reached from behind, slithering against her waist and encircling her hips. When the grimy, squishy fingers met in front of Julie’s navel to pull her in for a squeeze, Julie knew she must move or die. She ripped herself out of the child’s grip and ran back toward the living room, then quickly pivoted to pound herself up the stairs, taking them two at a time the way she’d done as a child when she needed to get somewhere fast.
Julie blew by her childhood bedroom, straight into the bathroom, and slammed the door shut, locking the deadbolt into place. Backing herself against the mauve tub, she squeezed her eyes shut as the jiggle of the doorknob rattled against the linoleum floor, the frosted shower door, and the tiled backsplash.
When she dared to open her eyes again, the child stood right in front of her, chubby arms crossed over her paunchy belly, her chin down, eyes up, expression hidden in the shadowed relief of the overhead fluorescent. There was nowhere to run. Julie opened her mouth to scream when, much to her surprise, the child screamed first. The little girl screamed and screamed and then turned her back on Julie and slammed her small fists against the bathroom door. She looked back over her own shoulder, eyes wide pools of frightful tears.
Julie’s own fear sobered in the presence of the child’s. The child was afraid of Julie? She bristled. What a faker. What had Julie ever done to her? Big fat tears slid out of the child’s eyeballs and down her cheeks, leaving gashes in the grime on her skin. She was so dirty. So rejected. In close proximity, Julie smelled the sweat and neglect radiating off her. Julie opened her mouth to tell the child to put on her big girl face, stop being so sensitive. But before she could vocalize the words, she heard their echo in her own head, a cacophony of voices of authority, melding into a single voice she’d convinced herself was her own.
Instead of admonishment, the words “I’m sorry” freed themselves from Julie’s lips. She quickly slapped her hand over her mouth in disgust, but it was too late. The empathy would not go back in its cage. The child immediately quieted and then ran to Julie, flinging her arms around her neck. Julie was surprised to find the child’s weight soothing, and her heart swelled to the point of painful, exquisite explosion. The thunder of the child’s sobs began as a rumble, then quickly grew in force until it pounded against Julie’s chest. But this only made her hold the child closer, as close as she possibly could without breaking her. And Julie sobbed as well, her catharsis matching the child’s, as she realized her worst nightmare had come true.