The Fiend by Margaret Millar Page B

it when your mother comes.”
    â€œI don’t care.”
    â€œDo you suppose you’ll cry?”
    â€œI may have to,” Mary Martha said thoughtfully. “It’s lucky I’m such a good crier.”
    Jessie agreed. “Maybe you should start in right now and be crying when she arrives. It might wring her heart.”
    â€œI don’t feel like it right now.”
    â€œI could make up a real sad story for you.”
    â€œNo. I know lots of real sad stories. My ex-father used to tell them to me when he was you-know-what.”
    â€œDrunk?”
    â€œYes.”
    It had been two years now since she’d heard any of these stories but she remembered them because they were all about the same little boy. He lived in a big redwood house which had an attic to play in and trees around it to climb and a creek at the back of it to hunt frogs in. At the end of every story the little boy died, sometimes heroically, while rescuing an animal or a bird, sometimes by accident or disease. These endings left Mary Martha in a state of confusion: she recognized the house the little boy lived in and she knew he must be her father, yet her father was still alive. Why had the little boy died? “He was better off that way, shweetheart, much better off.”
    â€œI wish you could stay at my house for a while,” Jessie said. “We could look at the big new book my Aunt Virginia gave me. It’s all about nature, mountains and rivers and glaciers and animals.”
    â€œWe could look at it tomorrow, maybe.”
    â€œNo. I have to give it back as soon as she gets home from the beach.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œIt was too expensive, twenty dollars. My mother was so mad about it she made my father mad too, and then they both got mad at me.”
    Mary Martha nodded sympathetically. She knew all about such situations. “My father sends me presents at Christmas and on my birthday, but my mother won’t even let me open the packages. She says he’s trying to buy me. Is your Aunt Virginia trying to buy you?”
    â€œThat’s silly. Nobody can buy children.”
    â€œIf my mother says they can, they can.” Mary Martha paused. “Haven’t you even heard about nasty old men offering you money to go for a ride? Don’t you even know about them?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œWell, then.”
    She saw her mother’s little Volkswagen rounding the corner. Running out to the curb to meet it she tried to make tears come to her eyes by thinking of the little boy who always died in her father’s stories. But the tears wouldn’t come. Perhaps her father was right and the little boy was better off dead.
    Kate Oakley sat, pale and rigid, her hands gripping the steer­ing wheel as if she were trying to rein in a wild horse with a will of its own. Cars passed on the road, people strolled along the sidewalk with children and dogs and packages of groceries, others watered lawns, weeded flower beds, washed off driveways and raked leaves. But to the woman and child in the car, all the moving creatures were unreal. Even the birds in the trees seemed made of plastic and suspended on strings and only pretending to fly free.
    Mary Martha said in a whisper, “I’m sorry, Momma.”
    â€œWhy did you do it?”
    â€œI thought you’d be talking on the telephone for a long time and that I’d be back before you even missed me.”
    â€œYou heard me talking on the telephone?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œAnd you listened, deliberately?”
    â€œYes. But I couldn’t help it. I wanted to know about my father, I just wanted to know, Momma.”
    Real tears came to her eyes then, she didn’t have to think of the little dead boy.
    â€œGod forgive me,” her mother said as if she didn’t believe in God or forgiving. “I’ve tried, I’m still trying to protect you from all this ugliness. But how can I? It surrounds us like