The Push, Ashley Audrain [popular novels TXT] 📗

me. Could they recognize me as the kind of person they came from? Someone like their own mother? An employee with short, side-swept hair barely looked up from reading art catalogs at the lumbering oak desk in the corner. I touched the glass covering one young girl’s school portrait. A perfect braid hung over each shoulder. Where does it begin? When do we know? What makes them turn? Who is to blame?

On the walk home, I talked myself through how irrational it was to think I’d find something familiar in those portraits. Going there was an absolutely mad thing to do.

I picked her up early from school that day and we went for hot chocolate and cookies. She offered me half of her cookie when we sat down.

‘I think you’re a very kind girl,’ I said. She licked the chocolate chips of her half while she thought about this.

‘Noah said I’m mean. But I don’t like Noah anyway.’

‘Noah doesn’t know you very well, then.’

She nodded and stirred the marshmallow goo with her finger.

We skipped dinner – the cookies had ruined our appetites. In the bath she closed her eyes and floated over a layer of bubbles like an angel in the snow.

‘I’m going to hurt Noah tomorrow.’

Her words stopped my heart. I wrung the facecloth and hung it on the tap, careful to measure my reaction. She wanted a reaction.

‘That wouldn’t be nice, Violet,’ I said calmly. ‘We don’t hurt people. Instead why don’t you tell him one thing you really like about him? Does he share nicely? Is he fun to play with at recess?’

‘No,’ she said and put her head under the water.

The next day I told you I had an appointment and asked you to pick her up at school. Instead I circled the grocery store and bought nothing. My heart raced as I got closer to home. I’d been looking at my phone all day, sure the teacher would have called.

‘How was she?’ I was nearly out of breath.

‘They said she had a really good day.’ You ruffled Violet’s hair while she twirled her spaghetti. She looked up at me and sucked a strand through the gap in her front teeth.

Later, before I went to bed, as I collected her clothes for the washing machine, I found a huge fistful of curly blond hair in the pocket of the dress she had worn to school that day. I stared at it in my hand. The feeling of holding another human’s hair in my palm was unsettling. And then I realized whose hair this was. Small, shy, pale little Noah with his head of messy curls. I walked down the hall unsure of what to do with it.

‘Fox?’

‘I have something for you,’ you’d called from the living room. Your voice was higher than it usually was. I closed my fist around the hair. You were sitting on the couch and handed me a small square box. And then I remembered you’d had your annual review that day. You’d been promoted. You’d been given a huge raise.

‘You do so much for us,’ you said, your nose to my forehead. I opened the box. Inside was a thin gold chain with a small pendant engraved with the letter V. I lifted it up and held it against my neck. ‘Things aren’t so easy right now, but I love you. You know that, right?’

You slipped off my shirt. You told me you wanted me.

The hair sat in the pocket of my jeans on the floor, and when we were done, I flushed the nest of blond hair down the toilet.

In the morning on the way to school I asked Violet what had happened to Noah the day before.

‘He cut off all his own hair.’

‘He cut it himself?’

‘Yes. In the bathroom.’

‘What did the teacher say?’

‘I dunno.’

‘You had nothing to do with it?’

‘No.’

‘Are you lying to me?’

‘No. I promise.’

She was quiet while we walked another block and then she said:

‘I helped him clean up, so that’s why his hair was in my pocket.’

When we walked into the playground that morning, Noah looked at Violet and ran back to his mother and buried his face in her legs. His head had been buzzed clean. Violet walked right past him and through the front doors. His mother bent down to ask him what was wrong. Nothing, I heard him whine. She held a tissue at his nose and told him to blow. I gave her a look of sympathy and smiled. She looked tired. She did her best to smile back and waved, the dirty tissue in her hand. I should have walked over to say, I know the feeling. Some days are hard. But my knees were weak, and I needed to get out of there.

On the way home, I thought of the photographs hanging in the gallery from the day before. The women behind those children. But her mother was so normal. She was just like one of us.

After school that same day, I came up from doing the laundry and found her standing on the edge of a chair at the kitchen counter, her little fingers dancing leisurely through the pickle juice.

‘What are you doing?’ I had asked.

‘Fishing for whales,’ she had said. I looked over her shoulder and watched her try to catch the last few warted pickles as they gracefully breached and dove in a jar of soggy dill weed, and you know what, they did look just like whales. She had a brilliant, beautiful mind and sometimes I longed to be inside it. Even though I feared what I might find.

29

You might not remember that his name was Elijah. His funeral was on a Saturday in early November, and it had been raining for two full days, and there was a heaviness to us all that sometimes came when the apartment felt damp, when our bones felt cold. We left Violet