Girl in the Basement

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  The Girl in the Basement

  Ray Garton

  For Dawn

  From the Journal of Ryan Kettering

  Foster care is like playing Russian Roulette. Sometimes the hammer clicks and you’re fine, and sometimes you take a bullet to the brain.

  Like the fat guy who beat his wife and used to come into my room late at night and make me do things. That was taking a bullet to the brain. I wasn’t there very long, though, because some other kid ratted on the guy and all the foster kids were taken out of their house.

  Or those really religious people who made us pray all the time. The man used to beat us with the belt. They were always playing this religious music on the stereo, organ music a lot of the time, like something from an old horror movie. Not CDs or tapes, either, but old vinyl records with lots of scratches and pops on them. That place was so depressing. Another bullet.

  The place I’m in now is pretty nice, though. The hammer clicked this time. It’s a big house, it’s fucking huge and rambling and stands on a plot of land off Fig Tree Lane between two old oak trees. Two stories tall with an attic so big, it’s been converted into a roomy bedroom – that’s where Lyssa, Candy, and Nicole sleep – and a basement big enough to hold a bedroom and a large rec room. The house has central air conditioning, which is nice in Shasta County’s blistering summers, like the one we’re having now, and there’s a big back yard with a nice concrete swimming pool. The woman’s name is Marie. She’s short and really fat, and she always wears her hair pulled back in a bun. She smiles all the time, even when she’s angry. It’s kind of creepy sometimes. But she’s okay. It seems like she’s always rushing around in the kitchen. Her husband’s name is Hank, and he’s this tall, broad-shouldered guy with only one arm. He lost his right arm in some kind of machine. He used to work in a factory. Now he’s got this plastic arm with these metal hooks he can open and close on the end of it. He’s got a gut on him, from all the beer he drinks. He sits and watches TV a lot, while she’s bustling around in the kitchen. Meanwhile, they’ve got us working around the house most of the time. Marie keeps the girls busy with cleaning the house and doing laundry and any other thing she can think of, and he keeps us boys – along with me, there’s Gary and Keith – busy doing yardwork and working on the house. The only one who doesn’t do any work is the girl in the basement. But they’re okay, Hank and Marie. They’re old, in their fifties, I think, but they’re okay.

  It seems the only time Marie leaves the kitchen is to take care of Maddy. It’s short for Madrigal – what the hell kind of name is Madrigal? Maddy stays in the bedroom in the basement. I mean, she really stays there – the only time she comes out is once a day when Marie walks her out the back door and around the backyard a few times. Sometimes, Marie asks one of the girls to help her with Maddy. Never the boys. We only see Maddy if we happen to be around when Marie takes her out for her walk.

  I was making out with Lyssa in the rec room awhile ago. We’ve been meeting there at one or two in the morning, after everyone’s asleep. We’re the newest kids in the home and there was an instant attraction between us when I came three months ago. She’d only been here a month herself back then. She brought a blanket and we stretched out on the couch in the rec room and put the blanket over us. I always use a rubber. I’m fifteen years old and I got a summer job bagging groceries and lifting things at Kent’s Market down the street, and I don’t need a pregnant girl staring me in the face.

  Lyssa is amazingly hot. She’s got long black hair and this pale milky skin that I just have to touch when I look at it. She has the kind of body that makes guys bite their hands.

  Afterward, we just lay there talking in whispers and she told me she’d helped Marie with Maddy a couple times, most recently the day before.

  “Maddy doesn’t dress herself,” Lyssa said, “so I helped Marie change her clothes.”

  “What’s she like?” I asked.

  “Somethin’s wrong with that girl,” Lyssa said.

  I said that she looked fat, and she did. I’d seen Maddy a few times. She looked big and lumbering, with a fat face and narrow piggy eyes, and a flat piggy nose.

  “She’s big for her age,” Lyssa said. “Marie says she’s nine, but she’s so big-boned and fat. But that’s not what’s wrong with her.”

  “Then what is?”

  “I ... don’t know for sure. Sometimes Maddy looks right through you, like you’re not there. Then other times, she looks at you like she can see inside you, like she can see your most secret thoughts. Sometimes she talks and she sounds like a little girl. And sometimes she says things ... really strange things ... and her voice is deep and almost sounds like a man’s. Sometimes she talks nonsense, and it sounds like she’s speaking another language.”

  “What kind of strange things does she say?”

  “Today, she looked at me, she looked into my eyes and looked deep, Ryan, she saw inside me, I swear, and her voice went deep when she said, ‘Sadness will be your constant companion through life, girl.’” Lyssa turned her head to me. It was dark and I couldn’t see her face, but there was something scared about the way she moved her head. “That scared me, Ryan. It really scared me. The way she said ‘girl,’ it ... it sounded like an adult talking to me, it really did, like someone ... old. Really old. And what if she’s right? I mean, what if she looked inside me and saw that?”

  I chuckled. “Cut it out. She’s a retarded girl.”

  “I don’t think she’s retarded.”

  “All you have to do is look at her to see she’s retarded. She’s got that ... well, that look to her, you know?”

  “But what if she’s right, Ryan? What if she’s right? That girl really gives me the creeps.”

  Something about Maddy had made Lyssa think it was at least possible that the girl wasn’t just rattling off whatever popped into her head. Something about Maddy had frightened Lyssa deeply.

  That intrigues me. From what I’ve seen, Maddy’s just a lumbering little retarded girl who’s not so little, a sad sight, the kind of child who makes you click your tongue and think, That’s too bad. But she’d scared the hell out of Lyssa. Clearly there’s more to this Maddy girl than I thought. I haven’t been told to stay away from Maddy, but it’s been made clear to me that she lives separately and is not a part of the general population of the house. It seems kind of sad that she’s kept down in the basement by herself all the time. I don’t see any reason why I shouldn’t stop by and pay Maddy a visit tomorrow.

  ONE

  Elliott Granger pushed his walker to the open front door and looked through the security door as Ryan Kettering finished mowing his front lawn. The lawn had been tall and bushy with weeds before Ryan came over and offered to mow it. Elliott knew Marie next door had sent him over – she had been taking good care of him while he was down with the hip.

  While Elliott wasn’t too sure about the other two boys in the group home next door, he thought Ryan was a good kid. Marie had told him Ryan’s mother was a drug addict who lived on the street half the time, going from fix to fix. No one kn
ew who his father was, but Marie said Ryan had expressed no interest in finding out.

  Ryan was very guarded. When he first met the boy, Elliott sensed the walls he threw up. Then one day, Ryan learned Elliott was a writer and expressed an interest in his work. Elliott gave him copies of a couple young adult thrillers he’d written. After reading them, Ryan had discussed them with him. He’d expressed an interest in writing and Elliott had told him to keep a journal, write down his thoughts and experiences. Elliott got the feeling the boy was so guarded because his feelings were just beneath the surface, raw and vulnerable to hurt. He knew how therapeutic it could be to write about those feelings, to drain them on the page.

  Elliott Granger was a writer of horror fiction. It was the only thing he’d ever wanted to do with his life since he was eight years old. He had no problem with the fact that he was a horror writer, but so many others seemed to that he hesitated to admit it when asked, “What do you do?”

  “I write for a living.”

  “Oh, what do you write?”

  “Novels mostly, but a short story now and then.”

  “What kind of novels?”

  At this point, Elliott usually had not spent enough time with the person to have any idea how they would feel about his being a horror writer, so he’d have to make a snap personality judgment, or just play it safe and say, “Thrillers, mysteries.”

  “What kind of thrillers?”

  He usually gave in quickly and confessed the truth. “Horror, actually, I write horror novels.”

  Their true reaction did not come right away, it came a little later. First, they had to say the inevitable: “You mean, like Stephen King?”

  While they did the same thing for a living, Elliott’s advances were not even in the same galaxy as Stephen King’s. This was always the first thing discussed by everyone, man, woman, and child, without exception, when they learned that Elliott wrote horror novels.

  “Wow, I betcha you’d like to get some of his royalties by mistake, wouldn’tcha?”

  “You could probably live well off his interest, couldn’t you?”

  “You ever think of writing a book the way he does it?”

  “Do you know Stephen King?”

  Sometimes, Elliott felt like saying, “Of course, he comes to all the meetings,” but he never had because it was snide and unpleasant, and he tried never to be snide and unpleasant to potential readers. He had, however, tried two different answers to the question. When, in response to, “Do you know Stephen King?” he said that he’d met Stephen King, people were always friendlier to him than they were when he was honest and said no, he did not know King. So he had King to thank for that.

  Then, once all the frivolity about Stephen King was over, it started to set in – they realized that this guy actually thought that stuff up, and they began to get suspicious. And he didn’t even do it for millions of dollars, like King – it was common knowledge in town that he lived in his parents’ house because he was flat broke and was having trouble selling a new novel, when he could be making perfectly good money at a perfectly normal job.

  “Where do you get your ideas?”

  “How do you think of such things?”

  “Do you just sit around and think about horror all the time?”

  “Why do you write horror?”

  And that was about the time he usually lost them, when he couldn’t come up with a satisfactory answer for them – and who could? He preferred King’s response: “What makes you think I’ve got a choice?” But that never made anybody feel any better.

  Ryan turned off the mower and rolled it into the garage. It was a few minutes after ten in the morning, but it was already hot. Ryan was sweaty as he came out of the garage and headed for the front door. He wore an X-Men T-shirt, a pair of denim cut-offs, and old sneakers. He was a slender-muscled boy with a thick head of blond hair.

  “Come on inside,” Elliott said as he backed away from the door.

  Ryan came inside.

  “Here, take this,” Elliott said, handing him a ten dollar bill.

  “Oh, no, you don’t have to pay me, Marie told me to just come over and – “

  ”I know, I know, but go ahead and take it, anyway.”

  “But I didn’t even do the back lawn.”

  “So you can do the back lawn tomorrow morning.”

  Ryan hesitated, but finally took the ten and stuffed it into his pocket. “Thanks, Mr. Granger. By the way, I took your advice.”

  “What advice was that?”

  “I started a journal.”

  “Hey, that’s good. Now, if you ever decide to try writing a short story, let me know. I want to read it.”

  “Okay. I might take you up on that.” Ryan shrugged. “Well, I guess I’ll go. But I’ll come back tomorrow morning and do the back lawn, I promise. It’s getting hotter fast out there.”

  “That sounds good, Ryan. Give Marie my best.”

  On his way out, Ryan said, “I think she’s cooking something for you.”

  “She’s always cooking something for me. I don’t know what I would’ve done without her.”

  Marie Preston had made sure he was well fed and cared for the last few months. In fact, he’d put on a few pounds eating her food. The pain from the osteonecrosis had been excruciating and he’d been unable to walk without crutches before surgery. It had hurt too much to write, and not writing had made him feel like a useless vegetable. His right hip had been replaced with a prosthesis. He’d had the surgery only a couple months ago and was recovering.

  He hobbled with the walker back down the hall to his office and seated himself – he winced at the pain in his hip when he sat – at the computer on his desk. His cup of coffee was next to the keyboard. He read the morning’s headline stories in a number of different newspapers while Diane Krall played on his stereo.

  Elliott and his brother and sister had grown up in the four-bedroom ranch-style house in which he now lived alone. When his father died, his mother had used the money from his life insurance to buy a double-wide mobile home in a park across Airport Road from Fig Tree Lane, just north of Kent’s Market. The house was too big for her to keep clean, but she didn’t have the heart to sell it. That had been four years ago, about the time Elliott and his wife Irene were getting a divorce, and Elliott had moved into the house.

  “Stay as long as you like,” his mother had told him. “Think of the place as yours.”

  He always had. The house was home.

  His brother Mike was a twice-married veterinarian with a son in Red Bluff and his sister Angie lived with her therapist husband and their two kids in Sacramento. Elliott and Irene had an eight-year-old daughter, Lizzy, who lived with her mother. Elliott saw her every other weekend, although Irene had brought her by more often since he’d been down with his hip, and he’d been grateful for that – Irene even had made an effort to be civil. On the corner of Elliott’s desk stood a stuffed Opus the penguin – it belonged to Lizzy, and she had left it to take care of him while he was recovering.

  He was ready to get to work when he drank the last of his coffee. He reached for the single crutch leaning against the wall by the desk. When he had to carry a drink, he walked with one crutch, although it was more painful than walking with two, or using the walker. He was halfway down the hall when the doorbell rang.

  “Coming!” he called. He opened the door and found Marie standing there holding a pie in both hands, smiling. He pushed open the security door. “Uh-oh, looks like you’ve been baking, Marie.”

  “The girls and I went blackberry picking down by the river early this morning,” she said as she came in. “I made an extra pie for you, Elliott.”

  “It looks delicious, Marie.”

  She took the pie to the kitchen and set it on the counter. “Is there anything I can do for you while I’m here?”

  “No, thanks, Marie. I’m good for now. I can’t thank you enough.”

  “I see Ryan mowed your lawn for you.”

 
“Yes, he did. I like Ryan. He’s a good kid.”

  “Yes, he is. His mother is coming to see him this morning.”

  “Really? He didn’t say anything about it when he was here.”

  “He just found out himself. She only called a few minutes ago.” Her smile faltered. “Sometimes I think her visits do more harm than good to that boy. He always seems so unhappy after she goes.”

  “How is she?” Elliott asked. “I mean, is she off the drugs?”

  “She’s better sometimes than others, but she just doesn’t seem able to shake the drugs for long. They’ve really got their hooks in her.”

  “That’s too bad,” Elliott said.

  He thanked her again and she reminded him to call her if he needed help with anything, then she left. He felt bad for Ryan. What must it be like to know your own mother can’t take care of you because her addiction to drugs takes precedence in her life?

  He got a fresh cup of coffee and went back to his office to work.

  TWO

  Ryan did not want to see Phyllis – that was his mother’s name, and that’s how he thought of her, as Phyllis, not Mom – but no one ever asked him if he wanted to see her or not. She just showed up once in awhile. She usually looked worse each time, and this time was no exception.

  Marie put them at the dining room table together – Phyllis at the end and Ryan on the side, with only the table’s corner between them – with iced tea and a slice of blackberry pie each.

  “How ya doin’, honey?” Phyllis asked.

  “I’m fine,” he said, staring at his pie.

  “Well, look at me, sweetheart.” She reached over and hooked a finger under his chin, lifted his head. “I haven’t seen you in – how long’s it been?”

  “Since Christmas.”

  “Has it been that long?”

  She could not hold still. She jittered and fidgeted at the table as if she were about to come out of her skin. Her pale, rough face seemed to be collapsing – her top front four teeth were gone, and most of her bottom teeth as well, and her lips and cheeks sank into her face, and her temples were twin indentations flanking her brow, giving her face a skull-like appearance. Her nose, pierced in the left nostril, was always runny and sniffly, her eyes always red. There were dark grey half-moons beneath her eyes, and her blonde hair was pulled back in a ponytail and looked unwashed. She was skinny and all bones. She wore a red halter-top and a pair of jeans that looked too big on her, cinched tight at her waist with a thin, worn red belt. Her arms and shoulders were pale, with a yellowish hue, small dark bruises here and there. The old track marks on her arms were ugly, but she made no effort to hide them. Her hands never stopped moving. They touched her hair, her face, fumbled with each other, fed pie into her mouth, reached across the table to squeeze Ryan’s hands. They were like spiders on the ends of her arms, crawling here and there and all around.