“What?”
“You have to spray them,” she sobbed, falling to her knees.
Something from Mary Poppins came back then: Not another word, or I shall have to summon the policeman. Brisk, kindly, firm. “Annali Whistler, you calm down. You know there’s no such thing as monsters.” With that, Pru began to leave the room.
“Stay with me!” Annali yelled, lunging at her and clutching at her sweater.
“Oh, all right.” Pru lay down on the bed and Annali wrapped both arms around her neck. After a while her sobs subsided and her breathing slowed. Every now and then she would hiccup. Pru fell asleep, too, and when she woke up later, the little arms were still holding on tightly to her neck. The phone next to the bed rang and Pru snatched it before it could wake up Annali.
“Hello?” she whispered.
“How’d it go?” Not Patsy, but their mother. “Is she asleep already? I was going to call earlier, but then I thought it might upset her to hear my voice.”
Pru untangled herself from Annali’s grip and brought the phone out to the living room.
“She freaked out about monsters.”
Her mother laughed and said, “That’s a big thing right now. Did you spray?”
“What is that?”
“She can’t go to sleep until you spray for monsters.”
“Patsy didn’t mention anything about monster spray.”
“I just use my deodorant.”
“Why are we indulging this? I mean, is it healthy? What if she gets dependent on it?”
“Nobody’s ever gone to college needing monster spray,” said Nadine.
“If she even gets into college.”
“Prudence. She’s two. When you were two, I used to have to sweep out from under your bed every night with a broom.”
“Really?”
“You had terrible fears. Always did. We used to keep a pallet on our floor so you could sleep next to us. Until Patsy was old enough to share a room with you, anyway.”
What a funny thing not to know about yourself, Pru thought, tucking her feet under her. A pallet, next to her parents’ bed. It made her sound like a servant child.
“Annali told me she gets ice cream when she has nightmares. Is that true?”
Nadine sighed. “Well . . . sometimes, yes.”
“Come on, that can’t be a good thing. A sundae, every time she says she has a nightmare? What is Patsy thinking?”
“She says it’s to give Annali something happy to think about when she remembers the nightmare. So, tell me about Jacob.”
Whoop jumped up on her lap, bringing with him a cloud of clay litter. Pru began to scratch him in his favorite place, on his belly.
“Well, he certainly seems to love Patsy. And Annali.”
“Patsy says he’s great with her.”
“I guess.” This was followed by a little silence. Where, Pru guessed, she was supposed to rave about Jacob.
“Don’t you like Jacob?” her mother said, now worried.
“I do,” Pru said, slowly. “It just seems that it’s moving awfully fast. You know, she’s so taken by him. She’s even more impulsive than usual. I mean, the whole thing with Jimmy Roy—”
“We don’t know what happened with Jimmy Roy,” her mother interrupted. “He had qualities. You remember how he was, when Annali was born. You saw him.”
“Deer in headlights” was the phrase that came to mind, when she recalled Jimmy Roy at the birth of his daughter. He’d seemed much younger than twenty-five, almost teenagerlike. Patsy’s midwife had let him pull the baby out and cut the umbilical cord. He would hold the baby and stare at her for hours, without saying a word. In Pru’s opinion, he might have been irresponsible, but you couldn’t say he wasn’t affected by the birth of his baby girl.
“Patsy knows what she’s doing,” Nadine said. “She follows her heart.”
“Her heart doesn’t always have the best sense of direction.”
Her mother laughed. “Did you get a new TV?”
“Not yet.”
“Well, you might want to take Annali to the swings, after breakfast. Mornings can be hard.”
She wondered if she should have told her mother that Patsy and Jacob were actually talking about Patsy and Annali moving to the beach house. But she knew it would break her mother’s heart to hear that news. And maybe it was just talk, anyway. You didn’t want to act too quickly on what Patsy said. Patsy said a lot of things.
FOR THE NEXT THREE WEEKENDS, ANNALI STAYED AT Pru’s while Patsy and Jacob worked on the beach house. They bought all new furniture, replaced the thin, leaky windows with weatherized, double-paned ones, and recarpeted in the bedrooms. Patsy never said so, but Jacob had to be paying for everything. Patsy’s small teaching stipend barely allowed her to cover her own rent on a little two-bedroom house down the street from their mother’s and to keep up repairs on her battered old hatchback. Although Pru was worried about the arrangement, she kept her mouth shut. She figured her part in all of this was to keep Annali happy.
Which wasn’t an easy job. For one thing, Pru found the occupation of child watching unbearably dull. She hated, for instance, Annali’s main delight, the swing set at the scruffy little neighborhood playground near her building. This morning, the third Sunday in a row Annali was a visitor to Pru’s apartment, there was a definite chill in the air, announcing the beginning, at last, of D.C.’s brief autumn. Patsy had promised that this would be the last time she’d ask Pru to watch Annali, until almost Thanksgiving. Pru shivered in her sweater. The chains of the swing made a forlorn, creaking sound, threaded through with the sad notes of the little song Annali liked to sing to herself. My heart, she sang, love to my heart . . . The street was empty, except for the occasional homeless person shuffling down the street.
Kill me, Pru thought, giving the swing a sharp push. Somebody, please, kill me now. God, her mother hadn’t been kidding— mornings were deadly. Annali got up dreadfully early, just as Whoop was allowing Pru to let her sleep later.
