Princess

She tried the door. The door was unlocked. She went in.

The moment was layered and complex, almost like a fairy tale, but where were the three bears? Upstairs, barking. Did bears bark? No, but dogs did, and that was what was going on here, dogs barking and scrabbling with their black shiny toenails—pawnails?—at the closed door at the top of the stairway, the stairway that was carpeted and strewn with soft, welcoming shadows cast by various objects in the dimmered glow of the lamp behind the couch that was only ten feet from where she was standing. There were pillows on the couch, a whole flotilla of them, and there were two armchairs flanking it, a coffee table, bookshelves, the black nullity of a flat-screen TV affixed to the wall across from her. When she moved, and she moved only a foot or two into the room—edging, that was what she was doing, edging in—the screen gave back her reflection in a way that was too obscure to matter.

There may have been a voice calling from the room at the top of the stairs—“Cameron, is that you? Hello? Is somebody there?”—but it was lost in the uproar of the barking, and it wouldn’t have applied to her, in any case, because her name wasn’t Cameron and she wasn’t there, was she? She was still back at the party, the bar-bee-cue she’d lucked into on this fine, cheery holiday afternoon that had somehow become night when she wasn’t devoting her full attention to the details. In her right hand was a plastic sack containing spareribs lathered in a gooey red sauce, two ears of corn still wrapped in the blackened tinfoil in which they’d been roasted over the grill, a container of what looked to be potato salad, and dessert, lots of dessert: two napoleons, a wedge of cherry pie, and a fistful of chocolate-dipped strawberries she’d picked out herself, after the hostess, whose name may have been Renée—she reminded her of her mother on one of her mother’s good days—had insisted that she take some food with her, because I don’t know what we’re going to do with it all.

She remembered that there had been a band at the party—bass, guitar, drums, a singer—the joyous reverberative thump of which had led her to push open the back gate off the alley and give all those wondering faces a friendly little nod and let herself in, which was O.K., fine, no problem, everybody was a friend of somebody’s. And she remembered the champagne, good champagne from France and colder than winter in Poughkeepsie, which had helped moderate the buzz she’d been riding for three sleepless days and nights now—and the singer from the band, who’d come up to her at the buffet table as if he wanted something from her and made some sort of lame joke about the way she was going at the dessert display and then flapped away like a six-foot crow once she opened up her smile and he got a good look at her teeth and the sore at the corner of her mouth she couldn’t stop picking at, and so fuck him, fuck everybody. But that was her right hand, weighed down with all that food she didn’t really feel like eating, not at this point, when the only thing she wanted was to crash, as if that would have been understandable to any of them standing around locked into their tunnel vision that featured nobody but themselves, and what about her left hand? What was this? She saw that she had a plastic sack dangling from the bunched fingers of that hand, too, and for a minute, what with the newness of the surroundings and the barking of the dogs and the voice that had gone unanswered and had stopped expecting anything now, she momentarily blanked on what was in there. Until the dogs seemed to run out of breath and she remembered: makeup. Blush, foundation, and eyeliner she’d borrowed from the Rite Aid somewhere down the street and around the corner, out on the boulevard that was like a stage set, same street lamps, same tired palms, same traffic lights going green and going red and going green.

O.K., all right, fine. But she didn’t need makeup now—that would be for tomorrow. The food, too. What she needed now, because her legs felt as limp and soft-boned as the barbecued ribs in their squishy plastic bag, was sleep. A bed. Sheets. A blanket. What were all these doors? Doors didn’t exist for nothing. There had to be a bed behind one of them, didn’t there?

Dawn’s son had got home at eleven-thirty, same as the past two nights, because they’d given him an extra shift so that baggers with seniority could take the holiday off. There was the sound of his car in the driveway and then the front door slamming, right on cue. If her eyes drifted to the clock radio on the nightstand it was only a reflex, and because she was already in bed, reading and half watching some outer-space slasher movie (with the sound muted so she didn’t have to hear the screams), she didn’t bother to go downstairs. Cameron ate at the store, anyway, and if he was hungry there were cold cuts and a fruit salad in the refrigerator. She thought of texting him about the fruit salad, which she’d just made that night, but if he opened the refrigerator he couldn’t miss it, so why bother? At some point, she drifted off with the book still propped up in her hands, as she did every night, both dogs and three of the cats stretched out in various configurations beside her and at the foot of the bed. Usually, she slept through the night, but not this night, because at 2:36 A.M. both dogs rose up on their haunches and started barking for all they were worth.

The first door she tried was locked, so she moved to the next one, which gave onto a bathroom—or a half bath, actually, as she saw when she flicked the light on. It was like any bathroom in anybody’s house—toilet, sink, mirror, towel rack, framed cartoon on the wall—and if it could have been cleaner she wasn’t complaining. The cartoon was a Gary Larson, the one with two dogs in a courtroom full of cats—cat judge, cat lawyers, cat jury. It was funny, but she’d seen it before, and whoever used this bathroom must have seen it a thousand times now, and how funny was that?

She could have looked at herself in the mirror but she didn’t, because looking at herself right then was outside the realm of possibility, but the idea of the bathroom, the fact of it and the fact that she was in it, reminded her that she had to pee and this was as good a time as any. When she was done, she flushed and put down the lid, washed her hands, and went back out into the main room, where she plopped down on the couch for a minute, just to stop things from spinning. That was when she noticed that there were two more doors to try, one giving onto what looked to be a study, with a desk and a laptop, and the other—bingo!—revealing the bedroom she’d been looking for, and if the dogs had started up again it was nothing to her. She belonged here. This was her room. Or it ought to have been, because whether she’d grown up in this house or not it was the room she would have chosen, though the clothes hanging in the closet were the wrong size and the colors and patterns weren’t even close to her style. And the shoes! They made her feel sorry for whoever had actually taken the time to go to the store and pick them out and put down cash for them—or a credit card, as the case may be. She reflected briefly on the fact that she’d once had a credit card herself and how nice that was—hand it across the counter and you got whatever you wanted.

Except drugs. Drugs were cash only.

The food she left in the bathroom, but she kept the makeup with her, and maybe she even sat down at the vanity and tried the blusher and the lipstick, not that it mattered at this point. In the morning, she told herself. In the morning, everything would be different. But—and here’s where the cold hard world interceded to cut her down, the way it always did—she’d barely closed her eyes before she woke to the overhead light and three faces lined up in a row, staring down at her.

“Why didn’t you let the dogs out?”

“I would have, if I’d known, but I was afraid to, because it could have been anybody down there. With a knife or a gun or who knows what?”

She was sitting on the couch in the living room, the couch where the girl had apparently stretched out and left a long red smear of something on one of the pillows, which turned out to be barbecue sauce, thankfully, and not blood. Dawn herself had taken a washcloth to it first thing in the morning—after photographing it, that is. For evidence. Not that the police needed it, since they already had the girl in custody.

She’d been on the phone pretty much the whole morning, talking her way through last night’s events, as if she could somehow neutralize them, make them make sense. At the moment, she was talking to Chrissie Wagner, who lived directly across the street and, like her, was a single mother, which was part of their bond, which went beyond just being neighbors. The other part was that they were both junior-high teachers, though in different school districts.

“I hear you. I mean, it’s terrifying, but Buster’s so huge he’d scare off anybody, right? Even if he is a big pussycat. And Ernie’s a pipsqueak, but I’ve seen him get riled up—like the time that woman came around canvassing for the mayor’s race, remember that?”

“Ankle biter,” she said, and laughed at the memory. “But you know what I’m saying. First thing I did was lock the bedroom door, and Cameron was downstairs in his room and he always locks his, because he doesn’t want anybody going in there—me, that is—so I texted him not to make a sound and dialled 911. Why risk the dogs getting hurt?”

“What about Tammy?”

“Talk about small mercies—she was spending the night at Beau’s house, because she’d had a couple of beers at his family’s Memorial Day party and didn’t want to drive. Or so she said over the phone.” Her daughter—seventeen, combative, pampered, and privileged, and way too obsessed with crime shows and doom-scrolling—would have been seriously traumatized, or worse, because her door was never locked. And that was something Dawn didn’t want to even begin to imagine, this girl pushing her way in while Tammy was lying there asleep in her own bed, with her movie posters on the wall and the Minnie Mouse night-light she’d had since she was three years old pushing back the shadows.

She gazed out the window at the sunstruck palms that lined the street out front, the safe and tranquil street in a decidedly safe middle-class neighborhood, where the only crimes were committed in her daughter’s imagination. Or had been until now. Home invasion. Frightening words, chilling words, words out of the morning paper, which was always suffused with somebody else’s misery but never hers, never theirs. Was she even going to tell Tammy? And, if so, how would she put it? Especially since the girl had gone into Tammy’s room and had maybe even sat at the vanity, trying on makeup she’d probably stolen from Rite Aid, though she hadn’t attempted to take anything from the house, not Tammy’s laptop or iPad or anything else as far as she could see. Which was strange. And then the whole thing with the bed . . .

The 911 operator had instructed Dawn to stay in her room with the door locked and definitely not try to confront whoever it was who’d broken into the house and flushed the toilet and flicked the lights on and off. Just sit tight. They were on their way.

The police arrived within ten minutes, give them credit there. They didn’t use their siren or the flashing lights, and they parked two doors down and came up on foot for the element of surprise. They wound up going in through the front door, which Cameron must have forgotten to lock when he got back from work (though, of course, he never forgot to lock his bedroom door—that was automatic for him, even if he was just jumping up from his console to get a soda out of the refrigerator). They found the girl in Tammy’s bed, fast asleep, the comforter and sheets stripped back and thrown on the floor as if they were of no use to her. She herself didn’t get a good look at her from the window at 3 a.m., the nearest street lamp a dull blur at the far end of the block, but she seemed slim and maybe even pretty, and she was wearing a rumpled yellow tunic dress that left her legs bare, and her shoes were high-top sneakers. By then the police had brought the squad car into the driveway, and one of them put a hand on the girl’s head to keep her from banging it on the doorframe as they put her in the back seat, just like in the movies.

She tried to tell them she lived there—look at the evidence right before their eyes, because here she was, in her own room, in her own bed—but one of the three faces staring down at her, the one that wasn’t mushrooming out of the collar of a neat blue uniform, belonged to a kid of sixteen or seventeen, acne, arms like two strings of dangling sausages, and hair that might have been cool if somebody would only get their shit together and cut it right, and he was saying, “She’s lying. I’ve never seen her before. She broke in, she’s the one—she broke in! ”

She was only the tiniest bit drunk at this point, and the crank buzz that had kept her going for all these glorious, blazing, mile-a-minute days had totally deserted her, to the point where her whole body felt as if it were encased in cement and all she wanted from this world and this existence was sleep, but she looked at the kid’s big, dumb dump truck of a face and couldn’t help herself, so she said, “You’re the one that broke in! Oh, my God, Officer, Officer, who is he? What’s he doing here?”

“She’s lying!” the kid repeated, and now the cops were giving him the look, and so she kept it up, repeating, “My God, my God,” till it was like a little song she was singing to put herself to sleep.

That set him off. His face clenched, and he started barking like the dogs upstairs, “Yeah, right, prove it. What’s the address, huh? The phone number? The name on the mailbox? My mom. What’s my mom’s name?”

The thing was, there was nothing they could charge the girl with besides trespassing, since she hadn’t broken in and hadn’t stolen anything, but when they asked Dawn if she wanted to press charges she said yes. As much as she’d have liked to be sympathetic, she just couldn’t get past the sense of violation, which made her feel dirty and insecure in her own home, and that was inexcusable, absolutely and categorically, and so yes, she was going to press charges. As it turned out, the girl was twenty-two, her name was Tanya Swifbein, and she had no fixed address. She’d been arrested only once before, for disturbing the peace; no details on that beyond what you could glean from the charge itself, but she’d disturbed the peace in this household, that was for sure. Tammy had wound up spending the entire weekend at Beau’s, without calling or even texting, which was beyond irritating, and when she came in late Monday night with bloodshot eyes and liquor on her breath she just said, “Mom, don’t, because I’m not going to talk about it, O.K.?,” and slammed the door to her room so hard that the pictures on the wall rattled in their frames. Two minutes later, she was back out in the hallway, demanding to know who’d been in her room.

So the story came out, and before Dawn could even catch her breath her daughter had apportioned the blame—it was her fault, all her fault. And her stupid brother’s. “What, am I going to get head lice now from my own pillow? Or aids, or whatever? Some street person sleeping in my bed? Is that fair? Is that what you want?”

What was fair and what wasn’t didn’t enter the equation. She said, “I put everything in the wash—with bleach—and vacuumed the rug twice, and I know, I know, honey, because I feel violated, too.”

Tammy just glared at her, then stalked back into her room and angrily stripped the bed, bundling everything up—sheets, pillows, blankets, the bedspread her dead grandmother had crocheted for her—and tramped through the house and out the back door, where she stuffed it all into the trash can, the sentry lights snapping on to catch the hard white flash of her elbows and the suffering icon of her face.

So they booked her and let her go, back out into a night that was starting to brighten around the edges. She was cold, wrapping her arms around herself and making sleeves of both hands, but her actual sleeves were attached to her denim jacket with the butterfly patch flapping across the shoulders and her shades in the pocket, which was back at Luther’s, she thought, or at least she hoped it was, but where was Luther’s from here? She had no idea, and she hadn’t gone a block before she had to go down on her hands and knees on somebody’s front lawn and vomit up the dregs of the champagne. She would have stretched out right there on the grass and slept until the sun came up and fried her like an egg, but here was the gardener, slamming out of his truck with all his rakes and hoses and gardening paraphernalia strapped to the top of it, and so she pushed herself up and started off down the street, going nowhere. Of course, she didn’t have a phone. Her phone had disappeared somewhere along the line there, so she couldn’t call Luther and wouldn’t have known the phone number, in any case—or even, for that matter, what his last name was. The street was Marigold, wasn’t it? If she could find Marigold, she’d recognize the house for sure, but where was Marigold? She didn’t have a clue. Meanwhile, her feet were like boxcars, giant boxcars strapped to her ankles, and she dragged them along with her down the block till she saw what looked to be a park up ahead, and that seemed like just the place, because there’d be a bench there, and maybe a rest room, a water fountain, and she could sleep, just sleep, and worry about the rest later.

Well, there was a bench there, as it turned out, standard issue, painted a graffiti-hatched forest green, but only one bench, a solitary bench, and a bum was curled up on it, his face turned away from her like a promise he wasn’t about to keep. The rest room was locked, but she found a water fountain and drank till she could feel it coming up, then slapped water on her face and ran it through her hair and saw that there was a dirt path behind the rest room that led up into some sort of dense undergrowth, where at least she could crash for a while and let things settle. She didn’t want to get high—she was no addict, not really, not like some of them—but the thought of it, of the way the first hit made her feel invincible, like a superhero supercharged with energy, made her calculate: sleep first, then figure out how to find Luther, then see what the day would bring.

Birds spoke to her, saying what they were going to say in their own language, and then the sun jumped over the ridge to explode in her face like a supernova, bushes to the right of her, bushes to the left, nature just an endless repetition of the obvious—but here, what was this? Somebody had dug out a little nest under one of the bushes and lined it with flattened strips of cardboard that weren’t even that dirty—a bed, a bed made just for her. But then, as she brushed back the fringe of dried-out vegetation that hung over the cardboard like a canopy, she saw the rest, and it was so sudden and inadmissible it was like being attacked by all the snarling bears and wolves in the deepest, darkest forests of the earth: there was another human being there, a girl, a little girl, but she wasn’t breathing and she wasn’t moving and if her eyes were open she wasn’t seeing anything.

To get this straight, to get it precisely right: she’d never seen a corpse before, because that wasn’t who she was. Even her grandfather, when he died, did it elsewhere and came back to them in a glazed ceramic jar the color of olive oil, and if there were pictures on TV of the dead bodies lying sprawled in the streets of Ukraine she wasn’t there, was she? But she was here now, and here was this little girl stuffed half in and half out of a black plastic trash bag somebody had stashed under a bush in a public park in the Golden State of California.

Of course, and Dawn could have predicted it, the girl—Tanya—never showed up for her court date and there was nothing anybody could do about that, not until the next time she got arrested, anyway. The Memorial Day weekend gave way to a non-holiday weekend and then another one after that, and the whole incident began to fade away. The school year was winding down, which meant tests and grades and the usual madhouse rush. She and Tammy went shopping for a dress for commencement, Cameron picked up an extra day a week at the market, the weather turned hot. Both dogs got tapeworm—which was disgusting—and had to stay out in the yard till the pills went to work. Her car didn’t seem to want to start in the mornings, and, when it did, it spewed a black cloud of exhaust as she wheeled out onto the street, which meant that she was going to have to take it to the garage, whatever that was going to cost. The lawn needed cutting. There were more weeds in the flower bed than flowers.

It was her daughter who told her about the little girl in the trash bag, who’d been found in the park not ten blocks from here, and how nobody knew who she was or what had happened to her, more evidence of the corruption of the world. As if she needed it. As if any of them needed it.

The girl was estimated to be between eight and ten years old. She was thin, skinny, as if she hadn’t had enough to eat, as if she’d been abused, and the police were asking for the public’s help in identifying her. She was wearing pink Crocs, pajamas in a blue-and-white polar-bear print, and a yellow visor bearing the logo “Princess” in a bold black looping cursive. She didn’t have any I.D. on her—what eight-year-old did?—and no distinguishing marks, as far as the police could see.

When Dawn did an online search, the picture that came up—a police sketch of the girl’s face and torso—jumped out at her. She’d seen her someplace, she was sure of it, but where? It couldn’t have been at school—the girl was too young, a child, just a child. Her face was narrow and serious, but the eyes were all wrong and the mouth, too, slack and lifeless and like no mouth she’d ever seen. But then she had to remind herself that this was only a sketch, not a photo—a photo would have been more than anybody could bear.

She should have flagged somebody down, but once she was back out on the street the words just couldn’t seem to get past the barrier of her brain: There’s this dead girl, this dead body? Like, back there in the bushes? She was trembling, that was what she was doing, lifting her big boxcar feet one step at a time and trembling all over, even though it wasn’t cold, or not especially, the sun tracking her everywhere she went. There were people sitting on a bench at the bus stop, and she almost leaned in over their bowed heads and slumped shoulders and told them, but then they would have called the police and the police would automatically assume she was the guilty party. She’d already been photographed and fingerprinted and all the rest of it, and wasn’t that enough for one night? So she just kept walking, like a zombie, and everything was sorrowful now, everything.

Luther said he’d been looking for her and that was why he happened to be driving by and also just happened to have a box of Dunkin’ Donuts on the front seat, including two of the Bavarian Kremes that were her favorite, and so she was rescued by her knight in shining leather and all that started up again.

She didn’t tell him about the girl, didn’t tell anybody, but she was tempted to borrow his phone to call her mother back in New York and just sob over the line, because her mother didn’t want to hear from her anymore and was not now or ever again going to send her money only to have it go up a glass tube. Was that clear? Yes, Mom, clear as Smirnoff (which was what her mother drank, in a tall glass, all day long). She stayed away from partying for a couple of days, just to get her strength back, and once she was oriented she went to her storage locker and picked up a few things to wear and two twenties from the stash she kept there in the inside pocket of the black puffer jacket she was going to wear on the airplane back to New York when her mother finally relented and sent her a ticket. She slept for most of two days straight, and made sure to brush her teeth when she was conscious, though the damage was already done and if she ever got to a dentist it was going to cost more than she’d ever make in this lifetime, and then it was Friday and she and Luther scored and she became the single most powerful woman alive on the planet and everything was under control.

She could see what Tammy was doing, pushing the limits and using the break-in as an excuse, but when she stayed out all night on a school night Dawn took away her car keys and grounded her. Which led to the usual fights and tantrums and threats, with the added anxiety of graduation hanging over it all.

“I’m not even going to go, O.K.? Is that what you want?”

“Suit yourself,” she said, sounding just like her own mother.

But, of course, that was all nonsense, and when the day approached Tammy relented, as they both knew she would, and they wound up holding a reception at the house for her and Beau and a few of her friends, catered by Hana Sushi and floated on a raft of carnations and white roses and baby’s breath. There was dancing and a computer collage of the kids at all ages and fruit punch and sodas but no alcohol, not till they were of age—she was sorry, but that was the way it was going to have to be—and if a couple of the kids who kept slipping in and out were glassy-eyed by the end of the night, she understood that there were times when you just had to let the boundaries drift. As long as nobody got hurt. That was the worry, always the worry, but beyond a certain point there was nothing you could do about it.

As for the little girl, the child stuffed into the trash bag and abandoned like a dead animal, she realized she’d been right—she had seen her before. A week after the discovery of the body, the newspaper identified the girl as a local resident, Evena Clarkson, and they ran a photo of her, with a plea for anyone who might have seen anything unusual to come forward. In the photo, the girl was smiling into the lens, her eyes as wide as the world, her shoulders arched and her head cocked as if she’d been dancing for the camera, and that was when it clicked.

Back in February, she’d gone with Chrissie to talent night at the elementary school because Chrissie’s son, Robert, who was something of a piano prodigy, was one of the performers. It was the usual sort of thing, kids singing along to prerecorded tracks or even, for the minimally talented, lip-synching, but then this girl had stepped out of the wings alone, leaned into the microphone, and delivered an a-capella ballad that hushed the whole auditorium. Dawn recognized the song—it was from an animated feature Tammy had been obsessed with at that age—and maybe that had something to do with it, with the rush of her feelings from back then, when everything was so much simpler, but she’d found herself on the verge of tears. The girl had presence. She had talent. And when her voice rose up you forgot the echoey sound system and the imperfect lighting that made all the performers look as if they were carved out of stone, because you were soaring right along with her.

This time the party was all in her head. It had been days now and she was getting delusional, which always happened to her at the end, because her body was trying to tell her something. (And she wasn’t listening.) After the fight with Luther—and with Bob, his friend Bob, a king shit if there ever was one—she’d gone outside for a breath of air, not depleted, not fully, not yet, and found herself going off down the street in whatever direction her feet seemed to want to take her. It was a neighborhood, and it was beginning to look familiar to her, palm trees with fronds like heaps of dirty clothes, cars parked bumper to bumper, hardly any lights on anywhere and everybody in bed, because it was 2 a.m. or 3 a.m., or something like that. She might as well have been following a trail of bread crumbs, because she went straight to the house, which she couldn’t have found on any rational basis, even if you’d given her a map.

The dogs didn’t bark. They were out back in the fenced-in yard, having committed some sort of crime, and that made them unsure of themselves. Timid, they were timid, and when she held out her hand the big one came up to the fence and licked it, his tongue working at her fingers like a warm washcloth. This time the front door was locked. But she climbed over the fence and got into the yard with the dogs, and they were just fine with that and so was she. Was the kitchen window open? Or maybe just cracked an inch to let in a seep of the cool night air flowing off the ocean that was however many blocks away? It was. And she didn’t really think beyond appreciating that it had to be lifted as silently as possible. Of course, the dogs were right there, just watching her, cheering her on in a silent, steadfast way and thinking, no doubt, that she was going to let them in. Which she wasn’t.

She stood in the kitchen a moment, just feeling things, listening, taking in the strange mélange of odors—of cooking, of dog, of dust and mold and the ancient grease worked into the burners of the stove—till they felt familiar. Then she went on through the living room with its dimmered light and heaped-up pillows, eased open the bedroom door, and got into bed, and so what if there was somebody already in it? This was her tale, and nobody else’s. ♦