Read Eileen for Free Online Page B

inspire in me. I knew better than to mouth off or cause any fuss, but I tried to send her violent messages with my mind. She’d hired me as a favor to my father. To my great embarrassment, on occasion I had mistakenly called her “Mom.” Mrs. Stephens rolled her eyes then and chimed sarcastically—gums glistening, bubbles of saliva popping in a broad grin, that damn caramel candy clanking against her back teeth—“Of course, dear, whatever makes you happy.”
    I’d laughed and cleared my throat and corrected myself. “Missus Stephens.”
    I doubt she deserved the amount of hatred I directed at her, but I loathed just about everybody back then. I recall driving home that night, imagining what her body looked like under all that paisley print and gray wool. I pictured the flesh hanging from her bones like cold flanks of pork swinging from hooks at a butcher shop—thick, clammy, orange-hued fat, meat tough and bloodless and cold when the knife hacked through it.
    I can still see the twenty-minute drive from Moorehead to X-ville. The long expanse of snow-filled pastures, the dark forest and narrow dirt roads, and then houses, first sparse, homesteads, then smaller and closer together, some with white picket fences or black iron posts, then the town with the ocean glinting on the horizon from atop the hill, then home. There was, of course, a sense of comfort in X-ville. Imagine an old man walking a golden retriever, a woman lifting a bag of groceries from her car. There was really nothing so very wrong with the place. If you were passing through, you’d think that everything was fine there. Everything was wonderful. Even my car with the broken exhaust and the biting cold at my ears was fine and wonderful. I hated it, and I loved it. Our house sat one block from an intersection where a crossing guard directed traffic in the mornings and afternoons for the children who went to the elementary school up the block. Oftentimes stray mittens or scarves were placed on the spokes of the neighbors’ fences, or in winter spread out on the high banks of snow like a lost-and-found. That night there was a boy’s knit wool hat on the snow by our driveway. I inspected it under the lamplight and tried it on. It was tight enough to make a seal around my ears. I tried saying something, “Randy,” and my voice vibrated, an echo inside of me. It was weirdly peaceful there inside my head. A car passed silently through the slush.
    As I walked up the narrow path to the front porch, a car door opened across the street and a uniformed cop crossed the murky ice toward me. The wind was strangely still, a storm brewing. A light went on inside the house, and so the cop stopped in the middle of the road.
    â€œMiss Dunlop,” he said, and motioned for me to come near. This was not out of the ordinary. I knew most cops in X-ville. My father did his best to prompt their visits. That night Officer Laffey told me the school had called to complain that my father was lobbing snowballs at children from our front porch. He handed me a letter of warning, bowed his head, and walked back to his car.
    â€œYou can come inside,” I said, voice booming between my ears. “Talk to him?” I held the letter out.
    â€œIt’s late,” he said, and got back in his car and on his radio.
    Those icicles hanging above the front door must have grown by several inches while I’d been gone, since I remember reaching up and touching the tip of one and being disappointed by its bluntness. I could have swung my purse up and broken them all off if I’d wanted to. But I just shut the door gently and kicked off my shoes.
    Here’s the house. The front hall was wallpapered in darkgreen and blue stripes and had golden wood moldings. The stairs were bare because I’d broken the vacuum cleaner that summer, then ripped out all the rugs. It was too dark in the house to see the layer of dust over