Stella tried not to be annoyed. “You want to say, ‘No, thank you, Auntie Stella’?”
“No, thank you, Auntie Stella,” Pam repeated obediently.
“All right,” said Stella, but that was when her mother-instinct kicked in, through the soft fuzzy pulsing of the wine. Something was funny here. Pammy was only six—why had her mother left her alone? Why was she sitting in the hallway? What a strange place for her to play with her doll. “Pammy, you here by yourself?”
“No,” her niece answered. “There’s Barbie and Grandpa, but they’re playing.”
“Where are they?” Stella asked. She hadn’t seen anyone in the backyard.
Pammy used the doll’s arm to point silently to the closed door behind her. Tony’s bedroom.
Stella felt her heart speed up before her mind did. “What are they playing with the door closed?” she was asking Pam out loud, even as she was already thinking, That can’t be why she’s not wearing any pants. How had she not registered that it was strange for Pam to be sitting on the bare floor in only her underwear?
“They’re playing the game,” Pam said. “I have to wait for my turn.”
He wouldn’t, Stella thought, but she knew he would—the pieces snuggled together in her mind, like a plug fitting into a socket. She had always known he would.
She bent down and swooped Pam up in her arms, sitting the little girl on her left hip in the clamp of her elbow. She tried the doorknob, which was of course locked. Her skin roiled with the memory of her recurring nightmare, her father running his large hard hands over her body. Without thinking through whether it was the right thing to do, whether she might hurt the little girl, Stella threw herself against the door. She was lucky because the frame was made of cheap pine, and it splintered and gave. Pammy made a grunting noise in her ear and gripped Stella’s neck. Stella heaved herself a second time, and the door flew open.
The curtains were drawn. Before Stella could think through whether she wanted to see what was happening in this dank bedroom she swatted the light switch. She already knew, she already knew, there was no surprise. Her eight-year-old niece Barbie crouched on the bed, her face bent over her grandfather’s crotch and her tiny bare bum pointing toward the door so that Stella had a clear view of where her father was putting his fingers.
“No!” Stella shrieked. Her voice sounded inhuman to her, like the dying shrill of a pig being drained. It came again, the shriek:“No!”Hooking her naked little niece around the waist with her elbow, Stella snatched Barbie off the bed as Tony sheepishly pushed himself to a sitting position, pulling the blanket over his groin.
“You.” Stella’s chest heaved with fury. “Monster.”
“Stella,” he was saying, waving his hand, waving it away. “It’s no big deal. I didn’t ruin them.”
“Monster!”She was fighting her way through a blur of emotions and impulses, to scream, to be sick, to tear him with her fingernails, but the little girls were there in her arms and the wine-blood beating against her temples made her slow and confused. Her own hatred and disgust for her father, the crusted dome encasing Stella’s life, built up layer by layer over fifty years of encounters and nightmares and grief, descended on her.
The little girls. She had to get them out. “I’m coming back for you,” she spat at him, and she turned and rushed down the hallway, almost tripping into the clear glass front door in her flight across the street.
Thank God none of the boys were in the living room when she got home to number 3—she hadn’t thought that through, what if they had been? She bundled Pammy and Barbie up the stairs, slipping on the too-thick pile carpeting and sliding backward a jarring single step, almost taking all three of them down to the bottom. Naked Barbie was silent and stiff, awkward against Stella’s side. Pammy was crying snottily into Stella’s blouse.
She sat the girls on the bed, wrapping Barbie in a crocheted sham. “What’s wrong with you?” she shouted at them. “What were you thinking, letting him do that to you?”
The girls were silent. Pammy had abruptly stopped crying, and they were staring at her with identical brown, sullen eyes—cow eyes, Stella thought, as she had thought many times of Tina at her most frustratingly obtuse.
What waswrongwith them? How stupid were they?
“Well?”
She wanted to shake them, but then—No, Stella. What’s wrong withyou?They were just little girls. Little girls at the mercy of a monster with a heart as cold as a rock.
“Girls, youneverlet someone close you up in their bedroom.Never.You understand me?”
They nodded, and Barbie’s eyes slid to the door. Maybe it was the wine that made Stella stumble over that thought—was it confusing that she had just closed them up in her bedroom? But they must already understand there were differences between women and men.
“Your body,” she tried again. “It’s the only thing you have. You never let anyone touch it.Never.”
“I’m sorry, Auntie Stella,” Barbie said, and Pammy echoed her, “I’m sorry, Auntie Stella.” Pammy’s voice was snuffly; Barbie’s was clear. Stella wondered at the girl’s hard little soul, how long she had been playing her grandfather’s “game.”
“Don’t apologize to me,” she snapped, and heard how she sounded.What are you doing, Stella?She put a hand on each of their heads. “You don’t apologize, you hear me?” It still sounded harsh, like she was asking them to apologize for apologizing. “I love you,” she made herself say. It wasn’t easy, because she wasn’t a great liar, but she couldn’t think of what other thing to say to comfort them. “I just want you to protect yourselves when no one else is there to protect you. The world is full of bad people. Your grandfather is a bad, bad person, and you need to protect yourself from him.”
The girls stared at her with their sister-matching faces.
“Okay?” she said.
They nodded.
