Chapter 20: The Nanny

I’m eighteen now. Two of them already, and a third on the way.

He told me once, with his hand spread flat on my belly the way he liked to keep it, that eighteen wasn’t going to save me. That I could pack a bag and walk out the front door the day I turned it and it wouldn’t matter a bit, because by the time I got there he’d have worked himself all the way through me. And he had. He has. His kid on my hip with his blood in it. His size worn into me where I don’t close anymore. My own body trained to answer him whether I want it to or not. He was always right about my body — he spent more time studying it than I ever did. The spring came and I turned eighteen and I didn’t go anywhere. There was nowhere to go that would leave him behind, and there wasn’t enough of me left by then to want to. He wasn’t a place I could walk out of. There’s no walking out of your own body.

I don’t count this one the way I counted the first. I don’t count anything now. It rides heavy out in front of me and I carry it from room to room and it’s the realest part of me — the only part still building something, still doing anything at all, alive down there under a girl who mostly isn’t.

He still comes to me. Less than he used to, and quicker, his mind gone off somewhere past me before he’s even finished. Afterward, most nights, he goes down to the basement, and the light burns under that door into the small hours. Some weeks there’s a crate in the front hall when I come down in the morning — the long kind, foam-packed. I don’t look at what’s in it. I don’t go down the stairs anymore, either. I stopped being curious about my father a long time ago.

And here’s the one thing neither of us can kill, no matter how far back behind my eyes I go: my body still answers him. Even now. Even quick, even bored, even with him half gone from it — when he pushes into me the old treacherous heat still climbs, my hips still work it, and at the end I still turn my face into the pillow the way he taught me I do, the one tell he built a whole machine to learn. He got that much, and he gets it still. The girl went dead and the body under her never got word. I’d have handed him the body years ago if that was all he was ever after. But it wasn’t, and what he was after is the one thing that went out of me, and there’s no setting on me that brings it back.

My mother is exactly the same as she ever was. That’s the thing nobody would believe if I told it, which I never will. Grandchildren dropped into her house out of a story she declined to read, and it changed nothing in her — not one lunch, not one trip. The club knew, of course — Sasha Reyes and that whole set would have done the math the season I dropped out of sight, filed it, gone a degree cooler to her over the lunch tables, the way people at that level know a thing without once saying it out loud. It cost her nothing. Their knowing was theirs; the only knowing that could ever have marked her was the one she’d sworn off years back, and she held that line the way she held everything. She has the doll bring them down when there’s a camera, holds whichever one at the right angle for the picture, hands it back. The rest of the time she keeps to the front of the house and the children to the back, and she moves through her days routing around them the way you’d route around a wet-painted wall, without ever once seeming to notice they’re in the room. She has never asked whose they are. She never will. Some mornings I watch her leave for the club with her keys in her hand and nothing in her face, and there is not a mark on her anywhere.