Also by Lily King

Also by Lily King

The Pleasing Hour

The English Teacher

Father of the Rain

Euphoria

Writers & Lovers

Dedication

For my brother Apple, with all my love

CREATURE

The summer I was fourteen, a few months after my mother had moved us out of my father’s house, I was offered a job on Widows’ Point babysitting this old lady’s grandchildren who had come to visit for two weeks. Mrs. Pike got her dresses fitted at my mother’s shop and the two of them made these arrangements without consulting me. It wasn’t like my other babysitting jobs, a few hours at a time. I had to live there. I can’t remember the conversation with my mother, if I’d wanted to go or if I’d put up a fight. I fought her on so many things back then.

The Point was a frying pan–shaped spit of land that thrust out into the Atlantic. Beyond it, at low tide, you could see a crescent of rocks offshore, but at high tide the water hid them entirely. No doubt it was those rocks, several hundred years earlier, that made the widows who’d given the Point its name. My father still owned the house I’d grown up in, on the handle of the pan, and to get to the Pikes’ from our apartment downtown I had to pass it on my bike. He was in rehab again, in New Hampshire this time, but still I kept my head low as I pedaled by. All I saw was the bed of flowers along the road, untended since last fall, new shoots and buds trying to push through brown husks. This was the third time we’d moved out and I hoped the last.

The road sloped down after that as it began its loop around the Point. An ornate sign announced PRIVATE WAY. High hedges hid most of these fancier houses from sight, giving everything an overgrown, Sleeping Beauty feel. As kids we’d ridden down here despite the warning, scaring ourselves into believing that we’d be put in jail if we got caught, but we never dared go down a driveway. Still, we knew all the pillars, all the plaques with the old names barely legible anymore.

The Pikes’ driveway was much longer than I’d thought. There had been a hot sun on my back on the road but now it was cool and dim, huge trees shaking on either side of me. The only other person I had ever known to do such a thing as I was doing now was Maria from The Sound of Music. I couldn’t remember the song about courage that she sang as she walked with her guitar from the abbey to the von Trapp mansion, so I sang “Sixteen Going on Seventeen” until a horn blasted behind me and I swerved off the road and down a shallow gully and tumbled softly off my bike onto last year’s leaves.

Above me, a man in a black suit and a bow tie called down. “You breathin’?” is what I believe he said. He had an accent. He formed the r with his tongue, not his lower lip.

I told him I was. He did not step down into the gulch of leaves to help me, but he waited until my bike and I were back on the driveway. He had a long face and a perfectly round bald head so that the two together looked like a scoop of ice cream on a cone.

“You come to subdue the kiddies?”

“Yes,” I said uncertainly.

“I’ll meet you below then. Come round the back. To the left. Not the garage side.” He made garage rhyme with carriage, the stress on the wrong syllable.

It was only after he had driven off that I noticed the car, its tinny engine and lack of roof and long thin nose of a hood. It was an antique. I heard the horn again, very loud, even at this distance. And nothing like a regular car horn. More like the signal at halftime of a football game. No wonder it had blown me off the road. The word “claxon” came to mind and floated there as I wound down the rest of the driveway. I was halfway through Jane Eyre for summer reading. I figured the word had come from that.

The house came into view. Slowly. The road bent and I saw a section of it then more as I went along until the whole thing was splayed out in front of me. It was a mansion. Gray and white stone with turrets and balconies and other things that jutted or arched or recessed that I had no words for. We’d always guessed it was a mansion because people spoke of it that way, but really all we could picture was a house like our small capes, only much wider and taller. But mansions, I realized, were not made of wood. They were made of rock. There was a great curved procession of steps up to the front door but I remembered about going round the back.

The back seemed to me no less fancy than the front, fewer stairs to reach the door but the same carved columns and stone balustrade around a wide veranda. The man from the road was waiting for me, along with a woman in a striped dress and white shoes. They led me up and into the house, through a dark hallway to a pantry with a square table covered in checked oilcloth and three mismatched chairs.

The woman asked me if I was hungry, and though I said I wasn’t, she brought out saltines and slices of orange cheese. She pressed a small wheel with spokes into an apple and produced eight even wedges and threw away the core. The two of them sat down with me. I wondered why, if they had this whole house, we were in such a small, dreary room.

“Where are your children?” I asked the woman. I figured she was more my direct boss than the father.

I’d never seen a grown-up blush before. Hers was instant, the way mine was, and the worst shade imaginable, as if the blood itself were just about to spill out. “I don’t have any,” she said. Sweat glinted above her lip and she stood quickly to bring my plate to the sink.

The man laughed. “The children you’re to be taking care of don’t belong to either of us! Show her upstairs and straighten the poor girl out.”

I followed the woman up three flights of back stairs, uncarpeted wooden steps with a greasy banister and a potato chip smell. We turned out onto a wide corridor full of light from long high windows that framed the blue sky above us. We passed at least five bedrooms until she pointed to one on the left, as if she were just now choosing it for me. But when I peeked in I saw a set of towels at the foot of the bed and my mother’s green suitcase on a wooden rack. It felt for a moment as if I would find my mother, too, in the room when I stepped in, but when I did it was empty. I’d forgotten she’d driven the suitcase over on Sunday. The woman told me her name was Margaret and that she would be downstairs in the kitchen whenever I needed her.

“The littles have gone to the beach with their mum but should be back for naptime. They’ll come find you then, I’m sure.” Her accent wasn’t like the man’s. Foreign, but different. I realized they might not be married at all.

When she’d gone, I shut the door and looked around my room. It was the first room I’d ever had that had nothing to do with my parents, their tastes, or their rules. I felt like Marlo Thomas on That Girl, a girl with her own apartment. It was a chaste room, with two twin beds covered in the same white knitted bedspreads, their fluted oak posts rising to eye level and tapering to pinecones. The bedside table between them was small, covered with a piece of calico, and had just enough space for a glass lamp with a pull chain and an ashtray, also glass, with a bull in the center and four notches along the edge for cigarettes. I’d smoked a bit when I was younger, with my friend Gina in the woods, but I’d grown out of it. Even though the ashtray was clean, I could smell old ash and I slid it into the rickety drawer below.

I had a window seat! I rushed over to it as if it might disappear and stretched out on my stomach on the long, curved cushion. There were three huge windows that bent to form a half circle—this whole half of my room was curved—and it was only then that I realized I was inside one of the turrets I’d seen from the road.

I pressed my nose to the old glass and breathed in its dusty metallic smell and looked down at the gravel driveway and the shaved lawn that gave way to an ungroomed field of tall grasses and a few wildflowers and ended abruptly with a drop to the ocean. I thought of my parents and their fights over money, of my father living in what my mother and I thought of as a big house now that we lived in a one-bedroom apartment, which wasn’t at all like That Girl to me. Though maybe to my mother—who was still in her thirties and had a pretty smile and, as she often said, a lot of things going for her—it was. I wanted to show each of them my room in this mansion, but then again I didn’t. I wanted it to be all mine.

The ground suddenly seemed a long way down and escape far away. I pushed out thoughts of Rapunzel, a story that had always scared me, and of Charles Manson, whom Gina’s older brother had told us about that spring. I opened my suitcase and took out Jane Eyre and the new notebook I’d bought. But I didn’t feel like reading or taking notes, so I started a letter to Gina. I told her about the bike ride to the Pikes’. I told her about going past my father’s and seeing the neglected flower beds, all the death and new life tangled together, I wrote, and surprised myself and kept writing.

Over an hour later a navy blue station wagon came down the driveway and stopped in front of the garage. My windows were closed but I could see the little boy was crying when he got out of the car and the little girl was asleep as her mother pulled her out of the back and draped her on her shoulder. I supposed I should go down and help them unload the car of towels and beach toys or scoop up the sleeping girl and put her down on a bed somewhere, but I didn’t. I wasn’t in a hurry to become an employee. I stayed in my turret sprawled on my window seat until, a half hour later, there was a knock on my door and the job began for real.

It wasn’t difficult, at least not before Hugh arrived. Margaret made all the meals and Thomas, the man with the ice-cream cone head, did all the serving and the washing up. A lady named Mrs. Bay came for the laundry, including the disgusting cloth diapers that Kay, the children’s mother, insisted on using. When I met Kay the first day, she attached Elsie to one of my hands and Stevie to the other and said, “I’ve got to pee like a racehorse, Carol,” and dashed off. She came right back and gave me a hug and thanked me for coming, as if we were old friends and I’d stopped by to visit. I was aware of the age difference between us—I was fourteen and she was twenty-nine—but to her, because she spent her days with a two- and a four-year-old, I must have seemed older than I was. Kay was different around her mother, stiff and nearly silent. Mrs. Pike told us each morning in the breakfast room how the day would unfold. Kay nodded at her mother’s ideas—Mrs. Pike wanted her to see old friends, play tennis at the club, visit her old German tutor who had said she had so much promise—but as soon as her mother left the room to go to her desk after breakfast, Kay turned to me and hatched another plan.

We took the kids to several different beaches, a whaling museum, an aquarium, often stopping after lunch at an ice-cream parlor where we made our own sundaes. In the early afternoon I played with the kids in the pool while Kay read her book on a lounge chair in the grass, then I took them up and put them down for their naps. They never resisted the naps. After the morning activity and the hot sun and the swim, they were ready to crawl into their cool beds in the dim house and fall into a heavy sleep. While I read and sang to them, I imagined going to my room and sleeping, too, but when I got up to my third-floor turret I always had a new surge of energy. I continued the letter I’d started to Gina all about my life in the Pike mansion. I read Jane Eyre. I suddenly felt so much closer to Jane, now that I, too, lived in a huge house and had charge of two children. Soon my long letter took on the tone and vocabulary of Charlotte Brontë, which Gina mocked me mercilessly for later. But I was trying things out, life as That Girl, life as Jane Eyre, life as a writer alone in her own room, which eventually, after a lot of other things, is what I became.

When the children woke up from their naps, I played with them outside on the lawn until hunger made them cranky and we went and visited Margaret in the kitchen for a snack. Dinner wasn’t served until eight, when I’d wrestle Elsie into her highchair (she much preferred a lap, especially at that hour) then retreat to the kitchen where I was given my dinner at the oilcloth table. Sometimes Thomas or Margaret would sit with me for a minute or two, but they were always popping up to plate and serve a new course. Stevie and Elsie rarely made it to dessert. Kay often poked her head in the kitchen, signaling that I should evac them upstairs. Of course they put up a fight. Dessert had been held out to them as a reward for good behavior at dinner, but they had “fussed,” as Mrs. Pike called it, and their departure in my arms from the dining room was loud and trailed behind me like the tail of a kite all the way up the wide front staircase, across the landing with the two sofas beneath the windows, and up to their rooms on the second floor.

This is how it went for the first six days. Then Hugh arrived. He pulled up in a scraped-up Malibu sedan. We were at breakfast, which I ate with the rest in the dining room to help manage the kids’ morning energy. Margaret was the one to notice. We all went out to the loggia, as Mrs. Pike called it, a covered portico held up by a series of arches facing the driveway.

“But Thomas is supposed to get you at Logan this afternoon,” Mrs. Pike called to him as she began making her way down all those steps.

Hugh leaned against the car. “Then I’ll go back to the airport this afternoon and wait for him.”

“Don’t be silly.” Mrs. Pike, in stockings and pumps, took each uneven step carefully.

“Look at him. He won’t move an inch toward her,” Kay said to me. Then, down to him, “Where’s Molly Bloom?”

“Molly Bloom’s got a new job.”

“She’s not coming?”

“Nope.” He tugged a canvas duffel out of the back. “You get me all to yourselves.”

When Mrs. Pike reached the gravel, he put out his arms and said, “Motherlode.”

She lifted her heels off the ground to kiss him.

“Who’s Molly Bloom?” I asked Kay as we waited for them to come up. I had Elsie in my arms and she had Stevie in hers. They were both squirming but we ignored them. Kay and I had already gotten to that point of not having to communicate about the kids, not having to point out how perilous those steep steps would be for them.

“Hugh’s wife.”

Hugh looked too young, too disheveled, to have a wife. He looked like a boy coming home from boarding school. He was lean and seemed to be still growing, his torn, unwashed pants an inch short, his arms waiting for more muscle. And he had wild teenage hair, frizzy and unable to lie down. He climbed the steps with his arm around his mother and they looked like a pair in a movie, the rich old lady befriending the hobo.

When he got to the top he wrapped his arms around his sister and Stevie and squeezed till they squealed.

He turned to me. His eyes were a pale, watery green. “An alien in our midst.”

“This is Carol. She’s my mother’s helper.”

“Hello, Cara.” He ruffled Elsie’s hair instead of shaking my hand.

“Carol,” Kay said.

But he didn’t pay attention. He reached down and lifted Stevie high in the air and broke into song about someone begging a doctor for more pills.

Stevie shrieked his laughter.

The song continued in my head. The Stones. “Mother’s Little Helper.” It thrilled me that he hadn’t spelled it out, that he’d been confident I would get it.

“Put him down or he’ll wake the dead,” Mrs. Pike said.

Hugh set him down on his feet with exaggerated alacrity, then pressed his mouth to Stevie’s ear. “You’ll wake the dead,” he said in a slow growl. “And the dead are our only friends around here.”

Stevie sunk his face in his mother’s leg.

“Hughie, he’s four, for pity’s sake,” Kay said.

“Pity’s sake? Who are you, Mrs. Milkmore?” He turned to me. “You know Mrs. Milkmore?”

“Talk about waking the dead. Jesus,” Kay said.

“You think she’s dead?” Hugh raised himself up and thrust out his chest and spoke with his jaw slanted to one side and a wet frog in his throat. “For pity’s sake, Kay, go change that skirt. Your school is not called the Ashing Nudist Colony!”

“Oh God, you sound just like her. She really said that, didn’t she?”

Behind them, Mrs. Pike slipped away through the door. I saw the white of her shirt and the tan of her plaid skirt flicker in a window on the way to her writing desk. Hugh was looking off toward the pool and the ocean beyond it. “I’m having wedding flashbacks.”

Kay watched her mother through a window. “Well, we chased her away in less than a minute. Might be a record.”

“Easy come, easy go.”

“The thing I remember the most,” Kay said, turning back, “is that minister weeping.”

“That’s the thing everyone remembers. He stole the show. Where did she find him?”

“I think he’s the summer church guy.”

“No, it wasn’t. That wasn’t Reverend Carmichael.”

“Reverend Carmichael? How on earth do you know these things? We never once went to that church. I never know if you’re shitting—” She covered her mouth.

Hugh stretched open his glowing green eyes. The whites were full of bright-red threads. He bent his head in front of Stevie’s. “Mommy said a bad word.”

Stevie giggled uncomfortably.

“So, flashbacks in a good way?” Kay said.

He looked off again, nodded slowly. He had more to say but did not say it. He scratched one of his bony elbows. Then he said, “It was magical. It was like a long dream.” He turned back. He looked at me. “Elsie is making you a lovely runny poop bracelet.”

Elsie’s diaper was leaking onto my wrist. As I raced up the wide dark stairs, I felt light, my chest full of something new and exciting, a helium that lifted me from step to step and made breathing difficult but somehow unnecessary. The poop had soaked through the useless cloth diaper and rubber cover and I had to change her whole outfit. I hurried back down to the front patio, but they were gone.

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