He wasn’t trying to trip her up. He’d muffed a detail of something precious, and it scared him to think she knew his child’s life better than he did. He shifted the conversation to something more obscure. “Remember Halloween?”
She asked, “Which one?” Guarded. A student undergoing a pop quiz.
“Your first,” Foster coached her as he sailed the car through traffic. “When you were four.”
This Lucinda brought a hand to her mouth and bit her thumbnail. She closed her eyes in concentration. Insisted, “Don’t tell me.”
Foster urged her along. “You were a witch.”
“No.” She drew out the word, stalling. Triumphant, she cried, “I was an elf!”
Unnerved, Foster changed lanes abruptly. A horn honked behind them. “You were?” He was losing hold of his most valuable possessions, his memories.
This Lucinda chided, “I wore my pink footy pajamas and my pink tutu from ballet class, you remember.” Now she was dictating his memories. This imposter had taken authorship of his past.
He couldn’t argue. He didn’t remember. For the first time, he turned the tables. “Now you choose a story.”
She touched a fingertip to her smooth forehead. “Remember…the Christmas when your brother played Santa Claus?”
He couldn’t and felt a flash of anger. He’d given away his child’s life to this stranger. She knew Lucinda’s life backwards and forwards.
She wasn’t being cruel. Only blushed as if embarrassed on his behalf. Timidly she asked, “You remember my guinea pig?”
He poked around in his memory the way a person feels for a light switch inside the doorway of a dark room. Foster brightened. “Ringo.”
Concern clouded her face. “Rufus,” she corrected. Right again. They drove in silence for a few blocks. Almost at their destination, she asked, “Where are we headed, Dad?”
On the lookout for a parking space, he told her, “Don’t call me that.” Suddenly he’d broken character. She’d learned the game too well, and he was losing this contest. It felt like a classic reversal: the parent becoming the child, the child lecturing the elder.
A space opened up and he pulled the car into it. She glanced at her phone, if only to check the time. This was going to be a long hour.
“Thank you,” she said, her voice hushed. “For the pearls, I mean.” She touched them as if afraid he might want them back.
He lifted her book from the seat. “You recognize this?” He nodded over the steering wheel to indicate an office tower down the block. A building as bland as a tombstone.
She leaned forward to peer through the windshield. “It’s the Parker-Morris Building,” she said, “where Daddy—where you used to work.”
He climbed out of the car, carrying the textbook as bait so she’d follow. Striding down the sidewalk, he shouted back over his shoulder, “Do you remember how you got lost that one time?”
She climbed out her side and scurried after him.
“Yes,” he continued, outdistancing her, “your mother and I never thought we’d find you again.”
Rushing to keep pace, this Lucinda chirped, “It was Daddy-Daughter Day at your office…”
Without slowing, he demanded, “And?”
Stumbling between other pedestrians, now uncertain, she answered, “I wanted to play a game? I wanted to play elevator tag.”
They’d arrived at the doorway to the tower. She kept reaching toward the book he held. Because she was actually a drama student or because her money was inside it, Foster couldn’t tell. “Lucinda?” he asked. “You want to play a game with Daddy?”
Jimmy she dated for his legs. He had long legs that made it easy to plant a foot against the back of her head. He’d rolled her facedown and yanked her naked hips into the air. Jimmy, he’d only needed to watch the video once. Jimmy with his gummy dreadlocks and pockmarked cheeks. His nose like something found pickled in a jar after a hundred years. The whole of his lanky, leathery nakedness like something excavated from a peat bog. He never asked about the bruises left over from the last one. Or the scars on her arms and back from the ones before that. Jimmy had just watched the video on her monitor at the Fontaine. For men porn was like a tutorial.
The tiny man on the screen rolled the tiny woman facedown. He pulled her butt up until she was on her knees, but kept her face pinned to the floor by planting one tiny foot on the back of her tiny head. His other foot remained on the floor, and he bent that knee, lowering himself to sodomize her. Not everyone could mimic the position, but Jimmy could.
Like someone learning to dance, he’d carefully rolled her over and placed his bare foot on the back of her head. They were on the floor. The bed was too wiggly. Mimicking the video, he’d spat on her upturned asshole. His aim, warm and dead center. This, already an improvement over the Gypsy Joker who’d chewed tobacco.
His balance wavering, he wedged the head of his erection against her. For a moment half his body weight was drilling into her as he bent his other leg to lower himself. The pressure of his foot drove down on the nape of her neck, drove Mitzi’s mouth into the carpet. Muffling her words as she insisted, “Harder! Step harder!”
The wine in her stomach surged up her throat, but she choked it back down. Wine burning with bile and sleeping pills. She tried to twist her head and get more foot-stomping pressure against her cervical vertebrae.
An internal decapitation is what she was angling for. It’s why she’d trekked down to Riverside and braved the death glares of local homegirls until she’d met Jimmy. Jimmy with his long legs and his toenail fungus shoved tight against her jaw. The one before, the Gypsy Joker, even with his swagger and his meth-fueled need to fuck, he hadn’t the lower body strength. Weren’t motorcycles supposed to build up thigh muscle? He might take a couple halfhearted stomps against the back of her head. She could kick the heavy bag at the gym harder. Beyond that,
