The dream was always the same. She was standing in the middle of a tiny apartment that reeked of booze and smoke and sweat, her breathing shallow and rapid, her heartbeat loud in the silence. Her hands shook so that she placed them on her faded jeans to steady them. That was when she noticed the blood, caked inside the folds of her knuckles and embedded around her nails like polish.
Slowly, the room came into focus, and she looked with horror at the still form on the bed in the corner. The pale body, curled as if in sleep, with its long, black hair fanned out like a blanket, didn’t look like her best friend. There were bruises where once the skin had been smooth and beautiful, like porcelain.
The man on the floor at her feet was responsible for her friend lying dead. His closely-shaved head lay in a pool of dark blood. The bat on the chipped linoleum beside him was what she’d used to knock the life out of him. She could hear the sirens and knew she had to escape. No one would care that he had beaten her friend to death and planned to rape her next. No one would care that he was well over 30 and she was just 14. They would shuffle her in the system and forget about her until some other predator managed to leave her in her own pool of blood.
Usually, the dream ended there, and she would wake soaked in her sweat and spend the rest of the night counting by sevens until the dawn light peaked its way through the windows of the bedrooms she always shared with others. This night, the girl in her dream reached her blood-soaked hands to a protruding belly, rubbing it absently as the sirens grew louder. That was when the form on the floor groaned and moved, rising suddenly, his eyes yellow and piercing, and lunged toward her, toward her baby.
She woke to piercing screams, moments passing before she realized they were her own. Her bedroom door, which she had locked for the sheer luxury of having the ability to do it, came crashing open, slamming against the wall so that the doorknob left a circular dent in the sheet rock. Judd, dressed only in striped pajama bottoms, his broad chest bare, hurried into the room with a gun raised by his head. Even though she’d obviously awakened him from a deep sleep, he wasn’t even breathing heavily.
Bess pushed her sweaty hair away from her eyes and sat up in the bed, pulling the covers up to her neck, even though her flannel gown already covered her completely. “I’m sorry,” she rushed to explain. “It was just a bad dream, a really bad one. I usually don’t wake up screaming like that.”
He glanced around the room as if he didn’t quite believe her and then slowly lowered his gun. She held her breath, expecting him to interrogate her with fifty questions. Instead, he stood at the foot of her bed and just studied her for the span of two breaths.
“You’ll be all right now?” he finally asked.
As she opened her mouth to answer, Agnes appeared in the bedroom door. “What’s happening in here?” she asked, her voice groggy with sleep. “Would you like some warm milk, dear?”
“Yes,” Judd answered for Bess, turning toward his mother. “And I could use some, too. I’ll help you.”
Bess watched them walk out of the room, so stunned by Judd’s behavior that she forgot to be shaken by her nightmare. Before anyone returned with a glass of milk for her, she had laid back down, snuggled into her pillow, and fallen into a dreamless sleep.
The next morning she woke feeling so rested, until the memory of the night before came flooding back full force. She was almost too embarrassed to go to the breakfast table. In the end, she chided her sudden shyness when she had faced many more challenging situations in the past with more gusto, dressed in a bright yellow sundress with matching sweater and walked into the kitchen as gracefully as her bulging belly would allow.
She was surprised to see Judd still at the breakfast table. He looked up when he heard her enter, his usual smirk pasted on his face. His black eyes were pinched as if he had not slept well. Bess decided to feel pleased instead of guilty. After all, he’d given her plenty of restless nights since her arrival.
Before she could even pour herself a cup of decaf, he motioned for her to take the seat across from him with such a scowl that she obeyed without thinking about it. He was going to interrogate her after all.
In typical Judd fashion, he cut right to the chase. “So?” was all he asked.
She shrugged. “Hormones.”
He stared at her until she was forced to look away, to the polished wood of the round table. Still, she kept her mouth shut, letting the silence stretch into minutes. Finally, he sighed and stood up, his chair making a loud scrape in the quiet kitchen. She did look up then, surprised that he would give up so easily.
But then, he probably already knew everything about her. It would be simple enough for a sheriff to discover everything in her files. Why he was waiting to confront her, she didn’t know, but she wasn’t in any hurry to find out.
He stopped beside her, towering over her, the warmth from his body emanating toward her too-cool skin. “Everyone has a past, Bess,” he said. “Secrets, now secrets are suspicious.”
Before she could say anything, he turned on his heel and left the room. Bess glanced at her shaking hands and took several breaths before she felt calm enough to move. He wasn’t going to throw her out, at least not until the baby was born. Why did she feel disappointed in herself for not telling him what he wanted to know anyway?
—
Bess hated dirty things. Too many years of having basically nothing to call her own had made her almost obsessive about keeping everything around her sparkling clean. That’s why she was scrubbing the cabinets when Agnes came into the kitchen later that afternoon with the pastor’s wife right on her heels and didn’t even notice the other two women until Agnes spoke.
“Heaven’s sake, Bess,” she exclaimed, “you ought to be resting after the night you had, not slaving away in my kitchen.”
Bess unbent herself from the lower cabinet where she had been concentrating on the well-worn handle and rubbed her lower back. “I don’t mind,” she said. “Cleaning relaxes me.”
“Well, relax yourself over to a chair. Mrs. Jones has come for a visit.”
Bess smiled at the thin pastor’s wife, thinking that she looked like a stiff wind would blow her away. Bess sat down and watched Michelle and Agnes talk without adding anything to the conversation, which was another one of her habits born of survival.
Her ears perked up, though, when the talk turned to an upcoming charity ball. Michelle was lamenting her lack of a proper wardrobe, and Agnes joked that the younger woman could combine two of her formal dresses people had seen her in before to create something totally new.
When Michelle sighed that she couldn’t sew on a button, much less dresses, Bess heard herself telling the other two women, “I could do it.”
“What was that?” Agnes asked lightly.
Bess cleared her throat at the shocked faces looking at her. “I did alterations at my old job at the laundromat,” she explained. “I never exactly had the resources to try something like you’re talking about, but I’m sure I could do it.”
The pastor’s wife gave her a genuine smile. “Are you really willing to try? I wouldn’t want to put you out, now of all times.”
“Look,” Bess told her, flexing her fingers above the table, “my hands are just itching to get started.”
Agnes stood up suddenly, disappearing into the laundry room, and then re-appearing with a pile of clothes she sat carefully on the table in front of Bess. It was a stack of Judd’s work and uniform shirts, along with several pairs of socks. Agnes grinned so that her strong teeth sparkled.
“I just hate doing the darning and mending. I always put it off until the dead of winter when there just isn’t anything left to do. Would you mind, Bess?”
“I’ll love it,” Bess assured her, sorting through the clothing with experienced hands. “All I need is your sewing basket and a toothpick.”
“A toothpick?” Michelle exclaimed.
“It makes repairing buttons so much easier,” Bess said. “I’ll show you.”
When Bess had finished her demonstration, Michelle asked if she could bring the two dresses over the very next morning. “How did you learn to sew, Bess?” she asked. “I didn’t understand a bit of my home-ec lessons, except for the cooking sections.”
Bess knew her eyes took on a far-away, revealing look when she spoke about this, but she had a firm policy of telling as much of the truth as necessary or keeping her mouth shut, and ignoring Michelle’s question would be just too rude in the present circumstances. She cleared her throat.
“A good friend,” her voice broke on the word, “taught me when I was 13 and full of rebellion. She made it challenging so that I even learned how to sit and listen better in my classes at school after.”
Michelle laid a cold hand on top of Bess’ and smiled knowingly. “What a wonderful gift. She must be very dear to you.”
Bess swallowed several times before she could speak. “She was. Very dear.”
The moments stretched out as if the other woman was waiting for more details, but she wasn’t going to get any. Besides, making a dress for Michelle was one thing. Having those kind eyes turn to her in judgment if Michelle knew the whole truth, well, that was more than Bess could bear.
When Michelle finally left, Agnes claimed she needed a nap and headed off to her room for that purpose, leaving Bess to work on the clothes or around the house as she chose. Wanting to spread out the mending, she darned two pair of socks and fixed up one shirt before quitting for the day. That left her with quite a few hours still on her hands.
Her eyes wandered to the kitchen floor, whose many dimples and crevices were covered in a fine film of sand, even though Bess knew Agnes had cleaned just the day before. She scraped her foot across one of the piles of dust settling into the kitchen from the open back door.
Though she had needed a sweater when she woke up that morning, it was October, and the afternoon sun was blazing through the screen. She took off her sweater and tried unsuccessfully to block out the musty scent of the sand pervading everything, even making her teeth gritty.
Finally, she gave in to impulse and went to her room to probe her luggage for just what she needed. The faded toothbrush with the wide-smiling cat, Felix, on its handle, was her favorite cleaning brush. She went back into the kitchen, located a bucket under the sink, and just managed to settle herself onto the floor by using one of the chairs to hold onto as she descended.
She had begun on the floor with the toothbrush in the corner by the sink. The bristles worked into the wavy surface of the linoleum so that the fine imprint of dirt in them lifted. She was halfway through the room, sitting back on her heels, pushing the sweat off her brow with the back of her hand, when a gruff voice barked at her from the opposite door.
“Just what in the hell do you think you’re doing?”
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