The box of washable markers lived on the second shelf of my pantry right behind the spare box of quart-size freezer bags, and I knew every single cap was missing except the purple and the black long before I pulled it down. Piper was sitting at the oilcloth-covered table with her knees tucked up into her chest, the way she had started doing lately, her little white socks gray at the heels from the linoleum in her mother’s kitchen.
She was five years old, and she could draw you a pig with curly whiskers or a sun with eyelashes if you gave her half a chance, but last month I asked her to draw her house so I could put it on the side of the Kelvinator under the magnetic grocery list.
She reached into the plastic bin and her fingers didn’t hesitate at all. She pulled out the black one. She didn’t draw a chimney or a front step or even a triangle for the roof, which was what she usually did when I gave her a piece of green construction paper.
She just drew one hard, heavy square and colored it in until the paper started to pill under the wax. She pressed so hard I could hear the marker squeaking against the grain of the oilcloth.
“That’s the closet,” she said. Her voice didn’t have any bounce in it. “That’s the safe one.”
I kept my hand steady on the edge of the table because my coffee cup had a little chip on the rim and I had a habit of picking at it when I was nervous. I learned that habit from my mother, who picked at her apron strings every time the thunder started rolling off the bay down in Biloxi.
I asked her, just as easy as I would ask about her alphabet book, what made that particular closet so safe.
“You go in there when he gets loud,” she said, and her little red pencil box stayed shut on the corner of the table. “And if you’re quiet and you count to a big number, sometimes he forgets.”
I asked her where her mama went while that happened. I tried not to let my teeth click together when I said it.
Piper didn’t look up from the black square she had made. She just stared right at the spot where the marker had gone through the paper into the cloth. “Mama can’t always fit,” she said. “Because sometimes she’s already on the floor.”
I have raised two children and buried a husband who coughed himself to death in that little room off the kitchen, and I have never worked so hard to keep my face still. My hands went cold around the rim of that chipped mug. I didn’t yell. I didn’t stand up and knock the chair over the way my brother Ray used to do when he got riled up at a card game. I just got up and walked over to the refrigerator like I was looking for the butter, though I knew damn well the butter was on the counter getting soft for toast.
Renee had brought her home at eleven that morning in that old gray Honda with the bad muffler that sounded like a tin can full of gravel every time she shifted into second. Renee was twenty-four now, and she had that tired look around her eyes that women get when they spend all their time trying not to set off a floorboard that squeaks. She had met Kyle at the hardware store over on Main Street where he worked the lumber counter, and within six months he was living in that two-bedroom apartment behind the Laundromat with them.
I met him twice. Once at Thanksgiving when he brought a stale pie from the Piggly Wiggly still in the cellophane, and once when he came to help Renee carry up a case of oil because the Honda was burning through it too fast. He shook my hand too hard, the kind of shake where a man wants to see if he can make your knuckles grind together, and he called me grandma in a way that felt more like a fence post than a family word.
The visits had started getting shorter after that weekend. Renee stopped answering half my calls, and when I asked her about it on a Wednesday she told me her phone was always dying because the charger cord was frayed at the plug. When I did get Piper for an afternoon, the child had gotten this twitch in her thumb where she would pick at the cuticle until it bled a little red dot, sitting there watching the front door like someone was going to come through it without knocking.
The drawing was on a Sunday. The sun was coming through the yellow gingham curtains I’d hemmed myself back when my oldest was starting first grade, and the kitchen smelled like the roast beef I’d put in the slow cooker before church. I didn’t grill her. I gave her a little paper plate of graham crackers and a glass of milk, turned on the small television in the corner where the cartoons were playing low, and then I went into my bathroom.
I shut the door and clicked the little brass latch that didn’t quite catch unless you gave the wood a slight lift with your hip. I sat down on the edge of the tub and pulled my little green ledger book out of my purse, the one I used to keep track of the church bazaar donations back when I was treasurer. I took my ballpoint pen and wrote down every single word Piper had said, right down to the part about counting to a big number, and I put the date and the time at the top of the page in my neatest cursive, exactly the way the lady at the county welfare office had told us to do during those seminars they ran at the parish hall after the flood back in ninety-four.
Then I did the thing I’d been putting off for three months because I was scared to death of losing the only little girl I had left to love. I took my phone out of my apron pocket and I took three clear pictures of that black square on the oilcloth, making sure the lighting didn’t have a glare from the window.
I walked back out into the kitchen where Piper was watching a rabbit chase a hunter on the screen, her little brown eyes dry and wide. I didn’t say anything to her about what I was going to do. I just walked to the wall phone by the pantry, the old rotary-style push-button one that stayed plugged into the jack because the cordless always went dead when you needed it most, and I dialed Renee’s number.
It rang four times before she picked up, and I could hear that little metal fan they had on the windowsill humming in the background, chopping up the air.
“Renee,” I said, and my voice sounded like somebody else’s, thin and dry like corn husks in January. “Did Kyle ever put his hands on you?”
The line was quiet for so long I thought the battery had finally given out or she had just laid the receiver down on the counter to go back to whatever she was doing. I could hear the television murmur through the wire, some game show with a studio audience clapping on cue.
Then she spoke, and she didn’t sound like my girl anymore. She sounded small, like she was trying to shrink herself down inside her own clothes. “Mom, don’t. You’ll make it so much worse. You have no idea what he’s like when someone gets involved.”
That told me everything I needed to know. She didn’t say no. She didn’t get mad at me for asking. She just told me not to make it worse, which meant there was something already broken that she was trying to hold together with spit and string.
I hung up the phone without saying goodbye, and the little plastic click sounded loud in the quiet kitchen. I sat back down at the oilcloth table with Piper’s black square right in front of me, and I picked up the receiver again. This time I didn’t call Renee. I dialed the seven digits I’d written down on the inside cover of my recipe box a week after Kyle moved into that apartment.
It rang twice before a woman answered with that flat, professional county voice that doesn’t belong to any particular town. “Ross County Children’s Services, how can I help you.”
I opened my mouth and realized I had to choose my next words like Piper’s whole life turned on them. I told her about the drawing first, because that was the part I could prove with the photographs sitting right there in my hand. I told her what the little girl said about the closet and the counting, and I told her about Renee’s voice on the wire when I asked if the man had touched her.
The caseworker didn’t make any grand speeches. She didn’t sigh or tell me everything was going to be fine the way people in movies do. She just asked for the address, the make of the gray Honda in the driveway, and whether Kyle was currently at the apartment or working his shift down at the lumber yard.
“We have a field worker in that township today,” the woman said, her pen scratching against some paper on her end. “We’ll do a welfare check this afternoon. You keep that little girl right there with you, and do not call her mother back.”
I stayed right there at that table for three hours with Piper. We didn’t talk much. We colored a picture of a blue cow, and I made sure she ate every bite of her carrots even though she didn’t want them. Every time a car went down our gravel road, my heart did that old heavy thump against my ribs, the one I hadn’t felt since my husband was in the hospital down in Portsmouth.
At 3:15 in the afternoon, a white Ford sedan with small county seals on the doors pulled up by our mailbox, and two women in sensible shoes got out before the motor even stopped ticking.
They didn’t come in through the front door like company. They knocked twice, sharp and steady, and when I opened it, the one with the short gray hair looked at me with those tired, level eyes that had seen every kind of kitchen floor in the county.
“Mrs. Gable?” she asked.
I nodded and stepped aside, letting the screen door swing shut behind them. Piper didn’t hide behind my skirt; she just looked up from her blue cow with those big, serious eyes and reached into her pocket for her little red crayon.
The investigation didn’t take all night the way people think it does when they see it on television. The case worker who came to my house had already talked to the nurse at the local clinic where Renee had taken Piper two weeks earlier for an ear infection, a visit where the chart noted three distinct bruises on the child’s upper arm that didn’t match a playground fall, though Renee had signed a paper saying she fell off a kitchen stool. By four o’clock, a deputy from the sheriff’s department had gone out to the apartment behind the Laundromat and found Kyle packing a duffel bag while Renee sat on the edge of the mattress with her face in her hands, her shoulders shaking without a sound.
They didn’t arrest him right then, because the paperwork for the emergency removal and the protection order had to crawl through the judge’s night drop at the courthouse, but they told him he had twenty-four hours to clear out or face a trespassing charge with a county car parked in the drive.
Renee called me at six o’clock that evening, and her voice was shaking so hard she could barely get the words out around her teeth. She didn’t yell at me for calling the county. She just asked if she and Piper could come home.
I went out to the porch and looked down the road toward the mailboxes where the dust was settling in the ruts after the county car went by. I didn’t tell her she was foolish for taking him in, and I didn’t remind her of all the times I told her that man had bad eyes. I just looked through the screen at the kitchen where Piper was trying to wash the black marker off her little thumb with a wet paper towel at the sink.
“Bring your green laundry basket,” I told her, and my voice didn’t shake at all. “The room at the end of the hall is still just the way you left it when you turned eighteen.”
She was on my front step by seven with two plastic garbage bags full of clothes and a cardboard box of pots and pans, her eyes red and swollen like she’d been crying into a towel. She didn’t look at the porch light, and she didn’t look at the car parked by the hedge. She just carried Piper inside, one arm wrapped tight around the little girl’s waist, and set her down right on the kitchen floor where the black square was still sitting under the edge of the napkin holder.
Piper didn’t say anything about the closet anymore. She just climbed up into the wooden chair by the window and asked if we could make butter toast before it got dark.
