published in The Long Story 9 (Spring 1991): 53-74.

The Wickedest Child

The wickedest child was five years old and she was the wickedest child in the world.  She had her mother’s word on this, so there was no reason to doubt it.  When she spilled her milk or left her crayons lying around or lost her pencil or refused just then to take a bath, when she said she’d rather not go to school that day, when she shouted with exuberance or wept in despair, when she did, in short, the things that children do, her mother would accuse her of being stupid and stubborn and spiteful.  Then she would say, “You are the wickedest child.”

If it stopped there, or even if the child felt compelled to defend herself and was answered with a grappling flurry of pinches and slaps, the wickedest child was actually relieved.  But it usually went on to things that were more dreadful than the things done for her “own good.”  Her mother would walk to the telephone and, brandishing the receiver with one hand and holding her other hand over the phone as if to dial, she would say, “I’m gonna call the police to come and put you in jail.  Or maybe I’ll call the preacher to take you to an orphanage where you belong.”  If these threats did not elicit sufficient misery on the child’s part, the mother would go on to the best one yet: “I will call your father at work to tell him how bad you are and he won’t ever come home and we will never see him again!”

But the father was seldom at home, and the mother preferred a style of impromptu punishment that took the child by surprise, was preceded by vague explanations, if any, and usually consisted of chasing the child down, for she almost invariably struggled and tried to get away, and then letting the blows fall where they would.  The mother still did this from time to time just to keep the child in line and remind her who was boss, but she found it tiring, especially now that she was pregnant again, and she was happy to have the expedients of the threats.  With the threats she could make the child admit or submit to anything, and sometimes a simple gesture toward the telephone could lead to whole days‑‑endless days for the child‑‑of quiet compliance.

The threat of prison was the weakest for the wickedest child, for she thought the worst thing about it would be being taken away by strange people in uniform.  Being locked up, unloved, and never getting to go outside seemed to resemble her present situation too much to make it wholly unbearable.  The threat of the father’s absence got the strongest response.  Indeed, it horrified the child, but she was not quite sure that it was not also something that was already happening.

When the child asked the father why he was away from home so often, he always said that he had to work very hard to help the sick and the dying and there were very many of them.  But when she asked the mother the same question, the mother always said that it was because the child was the wickedest child and her father therefore did not love her.  Announcements of this sort frequently led to the thing the child dreaded most, which was those times, sometimes when the child was certain that she had done absolutely nothing bad, when her mother threw herself on the bed and wept and wailed and beat her fists against her pillow.  Then the child knew that she had hurt her mother deeply.  The only thing she could figure out was that if her father stayed away because she was wicked and he did not love her, then the mother, too, was deprived of his love, and it was all the fault of the wickedest child simply because she was there.

Early on, the mother had hit on the brilliant pedagogic device of the invisibility, omniscience, and omnipresence of God.  Reminding the child that she was always being watched by God and that he knew just what she was doing even when there was no one else around, and reminding her that God’s punishment was infinitely worse than anything her parents could dole out had had a remarkable effect on the child for a while.  The child, of course, had attempted to trick God into making his presence known by doing disgusting things like picking her nose.  When this failed, she designed other sorts of experiments that almost proved conclusively that God did not report everything to her mother.

The child still suspected, however, that God might just be storing things up for a special occasion of humiliation.  Her mother might just reach into a kitchen drawer one day and pull out something like a Bible, for God had His Word, and read a long list of crimes that the wickedest child could not remember but had somehow committed because there they were in print and she had a perpetual feeling of guilt as internal proof.

Finally, when the child was safely in the car and her family was on its way home from church, she breathed the deep air of relief.  But the relief always rapidly disintegrated in the face of the undeniable: unless the wickedest child disappeared or became too small to see, there would always be another time and her mother could always simply use the telephone.

The wickedest child rendered a visitor to her classroom speechless one day by saying, in response to the question of what she wanted to be when she grew up, “I want to be invisible, like God.”  The child was perturbed when the question was immediately readdressed to someone else, which meant that she had not said the right thing or that she had not been understood, for the child had thought long and deeply about this.  If to be good was to escape being punished for your own good and getting what you deserved, and if God was everything that was good, then surely one’s survival ultimately depended on being invisible like Him.  If she were invisible, then surely she would be good: her parents would no longer punish her because there would be no trace of herself.  She would be happy then because she still existed to herself but had made her parents happy by making it appear that she didn’t exist.  It seemed like the most reasonable thing in the world.  It had the added virtue of letting her get away with her life.

The wickedest child had started to work on the problem of becoming invisible at an early age, but she had had no success yet, no matter how much she longed for it or how long she held her breath or how fast she turned around and around until she fell.  While invisibility still seemed a desirable thing, the child was concerned that it not be an invisibility exactly like God’s.  She did not want, for example, to know everything, because she had enough to think about already.  And she certainly did not want to be everywhere at once because it was hard enough to be in one place.  She just wanted not to be punished for being wherever she was.  She wanted an invisibility that would let her stay in her body but that would make her body something like a room that was all hers, some place her mother couldn’t just traipse into and say, “What no good scheming are you up to now, you Devil?”

The wickedest child had entertained alternatives to invisibility, one of the best of which was simply becoming very, very small.  She had the evidence of her own senses to prove that she could see little things that her parents could not see.  It took only a few lectures about lying to make her stop telling them about the water people who lived in sea shells, the tiny people with wings who lived in moss and sometimes in trees, or the small and terrifying family of tigers who lived under the bed and got big at night and lived in the closet in the day.

Then there were the winged wood folk with whom she had become acquainted when she had stayed with her grandparents and spent every day but Sunday playing in the woods and along the banks of a brook while her grandfather worked in the fields.  They mostly lived in the moss and mysteriously moved their camp from day to day so that most of her day was spent in relocating them.  They had sweet voices that one could barely hear on the breeze.  However, they were not particularly friendly, despite their iridescent wings, and she had been unable to make an appeal to them, though she was on the verge of catching their attention when her parents came and took her far away to the new house where they now lived and where there was no moss.

She had tried very hard to become very small before her parents came to take her away from her grandfather, who was the only person in the world with whom she felt safe, but her parents had come, and then she was with them.  On the long drive to the new house (“five states away!” the mother kept saying) they fed her bits of stunning information in their usual indirect and fragmented way.

The wickedest child was so excited about learning to read by herself and so excited at the prospect of a baby that might be her friend that her mother reached into the back seat and pinched her hard to calm her down.  Later she asked a very important question about the baby, but the mother said, “It’s none of your business.”

On the very first night in the new house, the child saw the mother’s suitcase open on a chair and realized that the tiger family had hitched a ride in the pocket of the lid.  There they were, sort of peeking out and looking smug, just like tigers always did.  The mother had punished the child severely for crying out in the night when the tigers first started to come and had accused her making them up to stall going to nursery school when the child pointed to them in the closet in the daytime.  She dared not say a word.

The wickedest child did well in school and was very proud that her teacher said she had “great appletude,” because it pleased her to please someone, and she knew from experience how important it could be to give the answers that adults had in mind when they asked questions.  But getting to school was as much a nightmare as the tiger’s paw.  Since the wickedest child was already guilty of everything anyway, there were certain things to which she would not willingly submit.  She drew the line of rebellion at being ordered to do anything that lacked reason or reward, and she hated restriction of any sort.  But she was especially fierce on the subject of anything that got too close to her body.  She was trying very hard to be a big girl and she had even given up asking to sit in her father’s lap, but she told her parents every morning that she was not going to put her panties on because they were too tight, they hurt, and they left red marks.  Every morning she received a spanking, followed by the tearful donning of the panties, followed shortly thereafter by her arrival at school, where she did very well in everything except recess.

Excited by these dreams, the child undertook various projects of flight after school each day.  First there was the expedient of leaping from the swing on the big water oak, but when she got the swing high enough to fly out of it, it was too difficult to coordinate letting go and propelling her body forward.  She fell with a great thud that turned into blackness darker than night.  When she came to, her mother was leaning over her slapping her face, and she screamed “You almost scared me to death!” before ordering the child to stand up and then stalking off to the house and slamming the door, which she proceeded to lock.

After the swing, she tried flying leaps from branches and tree stumps, but this only made a perpetual hash of her knees and forearms.  She stoically bore her mother’s complaints about her stupid clumsiness during bandaging.  She was certain of eventual success, and that would mean that she would never have to hear her mother’s endless shrill complaints about anything ever again.  Then she came upon an idea that was sure to succeed once she worked the kinks out.

“I’m trying to fly,” she said.

“But people can’t fly.  Only birds can fly,” he said.

“But I have been flying, Daddy.”

“When have you been flying?”

“At night,” she said, “when I sleep.”

“You mean you dream you are flying.  Like the tigers.”

“No.  I see the tigers before I go to sleep and sometimes in the day.  I fly when I’m sleeping.”

“But that doesn’t mean you can fly when you are awake,” he said.  “Leave flying to the birds in the daytime.  Don’t you know what dreams are?”

“Yes,” she said, wishing he would just go away.  “A dream is like a majin, a majin . . .”  She gestured solemnly in the air.

“Imagination,” he said.  “It’s not a real thing.  It’s something you make up.”

Since he was so seldom at home, the father hesitated to contradict anything the mother had told the child.  He sighed and said, “Well, haven’t you hurt your knees with this foolishness?  And look at your hands.  You know it hurts your mother to have to keep patching you up.  Do you understand?”

The wickedest child did not understand, but she knew the correct response: “Yes, sir.”

“All right, then,” he said, patting her on the top of her head to make things final.

A few days later she gave the tricycle ploy another shot, but she got mud on her best blue shorts, which led to a confrontation with her mother of the most humiliating sort and a formal spanking, which her mother seldom gave, usually opting for a scene of threats, grappling slaps, or a subtly and suddenly placed foot that simply tripped the child and made it fall on its face, in which case the mother had the added pleasure of saying “Fool!”

Thinking about things had the virtue of silence, and silence, according to the mother, was a golden thing, though the child had always considered it rather gray and bluish.  But thinking had a great virtue as far as the child was concerned, for as long as she was thinking and was quiet, and as long as her mother didn’t suddenly appear with one of her accusations or one of her equally frightening outbursts of rare affection, the child was in territory where her mother could never ever set foot.  She had, for example, been thinking about numbers for ages now, and her mother had never said a word about it.  This was a final proof of a thing that just now meant more to the wickedest child than just about anything else: her mother could punish her for things she said and things she did, and she could punish her for simply being there, but her mother could never punish her for the things she really thought, because her mother could not read her mind.  It was a small thing, but there was refuge and safety in the place inside where she thought, and there was no place else to go.

Attempts at flight were thereafter limited to furtive jumps and leaps.  It was clear that she would have to take off from a position with her feet on the ground.

Numbers might never have posed an even greater problem if the wickedest child had not asked her father for a watch of her own after she had asked her mother what time it was for the tenth time in a row one Saturday morning when the father was supposed to get home at eleven and the mother had slapped the child and threatened to send her to an orphanage if she ever asked what time it was again.  They had actually been trying to explain time to the child since she started school, but the wickedest child simply could not tell the difference between one hour and the next or between one day and the next except by what happened in them.  This time was anticipation, while that time was disappointment, this terrifying, and that reassuring, this full of humiliation but that full of magic.  This time was yellow with grass in it, while that time was blue and had birds.  If, however, her parents did things by time, the only thing for her to do was to learn to tell time for herself.  She thought of time as a great key that would help her win her parents’ love and  prove to them that it was not bad for her to exist.  Learning to tell time would help her unlock the secret of their erratic behavior, part of which, of course, was their granting her wish for a watch and then hounding her day and night because she could not use it.

The father and the child did talk about it another time, again and again on the rare occasions when he was home.  Attempting to cultivate some sense of duration in the child, he arranged exercises in which they “timed time,” but the child simply could not tell the difference between a minute and an hour.  He would clock two minutes, ask the child how much time had passed, and she would say “ten hours.”  Finally, the father just gave up, diverted the child’s attention to other activities, and secretly worried that she had some sort of brain damage.

The mother, on the other hand, had designed her own temporal exercises for the child and did not tire of repeating them.  “What time is it?” she would ask the child, and the child, who was not yet convinced that the watch had anything to do with real time, would simply come up with numbers of hours and minutes that sounded like the time she felt.  “You’re wrong,” the mother would say, twisting the child’s arm to look at the watch and announce the “correct time” with a snort.  “Stop it, Mama, you’re hurting me,” the child would say.  Then the mother would say, “Stop your whining.  You know how to tell time and you’re just doing this to spite me and get your father’s attention.”  If the child responded with silence, it was a draw, but if the child denied the accusation, the old grappling scramble and pinches would ensue, culminating in blows to the side of her head.

Wearing the watch and persisting in her contemplations of time became a point of honor with the child.  After a week or so of her mother’s quizzes, she began to ignore the mother’s questions and to get as far away as soon as possible.  This led the mother to a new series of tests of the child’s hearing that had the same tone and the same outcome as the tests of time.  The mother became more and more determined to stop the child’s willfulness once and for all, and just any old punishment would not do.  Finally, she came up with a threat that could make the wickedest child as meek as a mouse for days on end: “If you don’t pay attention to me when I’m talking to you,” she said to the child, “you’ll hurt the baby and then you’ll really go to hell.”  This made the wickedest child rise to new heights and flourishes of supplication, and it took only one repetition to elicit total obedience: no more refusal to wear panties, no more preferring something else for dinner, no more stalling in the bathtub, no more jumping out of trees, no more of this idiotic time business, and no more wondering when the father would be home.  Long weeks of prompt cooperation ensued, and the mother could put her feet up at last, exerting herself only to slap the child’s legs occasionally as she passed through the room, just to keep her in line.  And the wickedest child was on the verge of figuring out what time was: huge soundless and shadowed stretches of it surrounded her on all sides and all of it was filled with silent and deliberate effort not to “upset” her mother.  She was paralyzed by the fear that she might hurt the baby.

Another problem with time was that if they had been married a month and a half or so earlier, the child would not be a constant reminder that they had made a mistake, and she would never have had to suffer the disdain of others, particularly her mother-in-law.  If only it would be a good child, then it would not be a mistake.  The new one would make things right and they could start over, if only she could get the other one to cooperate and stay out of the way.

Furthermore, she doubted that the child really suffered or got the point when she was threatened or punished; otherwise, surely the child would not persist in her wickedness.  But even if the child did suffer, she thought, it was short-lived‑‑the child could not even tell the difference between one day and the next‑‑and it was nothing compared to what she had suffered and was suffering for the child.  The whole world knew, after all, that children must be punished or they will shame their families, that children will find out soon enough that life is a vale of tears and there’s no sense in spoiling them, that they should be made to be grateful for what they have, and that it is necessary for their own good to do things to them that they do not like, no matter how much they protest.

Still, after she had let the child know that she must do as she was told and not as she pleased, after the exhilarating righteousness of her rage had passed, after she was no longer angry with the child for forcing her to do the things she did, she was overwhelmed by intense feelings of tenderness.  She loved the child then as if it were the most precious thing on earth.  Then she would make plans for toys for the child, clothes for the child, things she could give it or do for it that would please the child and make her herself feel like a good mother.  Out of her own bottomless fund of yearning and disappointment, she would decide that the child needed a fine set of colored pencils, a picnic, or a new dress that she would sew herself to make her happy.

Then she made a picture in her head‑‑full-page, full-color, glossy‑‑in which the child sat happily, carefully and quietly choosing colored pencils from a neat box and drawing, with a skill remarkably beyond her years, a house, a tree, a redbird.  The beaming mother in this scenario, wearing the latest in maternity fashions, bent toward the child like an angel in response to the child’s sweetsoft request for advice or approval.  And later the people in this picture greeted the tired but happy husband home from work with smiles and endearments, and the child, having prepared herself for bed and not having left a single drop of water on the bathroom floor, would sweetly bid the parents good night just before they sat down to a plain but wholesome meal, artfully presented.  And while the child dreamed of big pink clouds and cheerful fluffy blue sheep and never cried out in terror in the night, the parents discussed purchasing handsome modern automatic appliances in pastel colors, and kissed, and drifted off to a simply-but-elegantly-appointed bedroom (the resourceful mother had stitched the dotted-swiss curtains and matching shams and chair covers herself) that was very far away from where the child slept.

The mother had a whole magazine-rack full of lovely pictures of peaceful, loving family life in her head.  She had started collecting them when she herself was a child: everybody was happy, things were going well, everything was in order, and she was just about to present her husband with another little well-behaved angel, already wrapped in a blanket of a color appropriate to its gender.  The delivery had been remarkably easy, mother and child were doing well, and flowers were pouring in from everywhere.  The wickedest child, proud and eagerly waiting at home to help her mother, was also making straight A’s in the school that her parents had happily sacrificed to pay for.  Then the mother was full of love, and modern life was just one bang-up treat after another.  Everything was going to be all right.

Now that the wickedest child was behaving so well, the mother could indulge in one of these bright and cheery moods, and she came up with the idea of having a party for the child.  Home from school, the child was sitting at the kitchen table eating crackers and cheese when the mother said, “I know, let’s have a party!”

Not even looking up, the child said, “Party.””Yes,” the mother said.  “We can have a tea-party.  Well,” she laughed lightly, “I guess you’d rather have co-colas.  But we can have a party after school and invite all your friends.”

The wickedest child wouldn’t do anything in the world to hurt the baby, but she had to say it: “But I don’t have any friends.”

“Sure you have friends, silly,” the mother said.  “We can have cake and candy and nuts and co-colas, and a good time will be had by all!  Let’s have a party!”

Assuming that her mother knew something she didn’t, since adults always knew things that children did not know but had to guess, the wickedest child said, “OK, Mama.”

“Well, you could at least smile,” the mother said.  The child looked up with an obedient grin.  “You need to wash your face,” the mother said; “We’ll have the party next Thursday.”  And then she added, “It’s set,” because she had recently read a story in which a mother in similar circumstances said that to a cheerful child.  When the child asked if she could go outside, the mother said, “Of course you can, my sweet!”

She knew that her mother was her real mother and that she was really her mother’s child, but when the mother acted this way, it was as if she had said, “OK, let’s play-pretend that I am your mother and you are my child, and we’ll act like Mrs. Brown and Sally in your school reader, OK?”  The child was perfectly willing to go along with it, but it gave her the uncomfortable feeling that she was playing a game whose rules she did not know and that she might do something without knowing it at any moment that might put an end to games forever.  She finally decided that she would simply have to trust her mother and do the best she could.

The wickedest child was not sure how far away or near the party was, but she thought that was just as well because it allowed her to entertain an unusual hope that the prospect had quickened in her.  Her mother had said that she had friends and that they would all be invited to the party.  This must mean that she had had friends all along and that she simply had not known who they were.  Setting aside the problem of numbers and time, the child speculated about the friends who would be at this party.  Maybe her mother had just been kidding about not seeing the water people and the wood fairies.  Maybe she had secretly arranged to have them at the party as a surprise for her daughter.  Maybe when she got to the party they would all be there but bigger.

 Then one night her mother said, “Now don’t forget, the party is tomorrow.”  The wickedest child laid out her peacock blue pedal pushers and her favorite green shirt with the special hole in it, but when her mother saw she simply said, “You can’t wear that to the party!”  Not wishing to hurt the baby, the wickedest child promptly said, “OK, I won’t.”

“Go get ready,” the mother said, and when the child balked in the apologetic way she had recently developed, the mother said, “You mean you do not even know what you are going to wear?”  She stared at the child and finally said, “Well, at least go and wash your face and hands.  It’s almost time.”  Then she laughed in a high, airy way that the child had never heard before.  It made her heart beat fast, but she didn’t know why.

The child sat at the party table facing her mother, who leaned against the patio door beaming in her smart purple-checked maternity outfit and viewing the scene before her with great pleasure.  When the wickedest child reached for a peanut, the mother said, “No, no.  Wait until everyone gets here.”  By the child’s reckoning, ten hours passed, and she was on the verge of beginning to fidget despite her constant admonitions to herself not to do anything that might upset her mother.

Then suddenly the mother said, “Where are your friends?” at the same moment the child said, “When will they get here?”

The mother’s smile faded.  She stepped to the edge of the table and put her hand down on it with the rigidity that usually presaged some drawn-out and humiliating inquiry.  The child instinctively shifted in her chair and put one foot firmly on the ground in preparation for flight.  The mother said, “How should I know when they’ll be here?  Didn’t you tell them when to come?”

The child’s mind became a big dark place.  The pounding in her ears was so loud that she could not hear inside the words that she could repeat to her mother to make everything not be bad.  She was trying to play the game and knew that she had to choose words carefully.  Finally she found something that seemed both neutral and true: “But I don’t know who they are, Mama.”

“How can you have friends and not know who they are, stupid?  What did you tell them when you invited them?  If you told them the wrong day, you made me go to all this trouble for nothing!”

The wickedest child’s mind raced.  What did her mother want?  What was she supposed to say?  Did her mother want her to make up pretend-friends?  Was it a pretend-party and she just hadn’t caught on?  The mother began to shift slowly around the table toward the child, who kept thinking there must be something she could say to make this stop if she could only figure out what her mother wanted.  Whole days seemed to pass and the palms of her hands were wet.  She ran her mind through the strange new neighborhood and finally hit on the name of a child she had met once.  “How about Elizabeth?” she said.

“You mean Elizabeth around the block?” the mother said.

“Yes,” the child said, “Yes.”

“She’s around the block, Mama.”

“Well, didn’t you invite her?”

“I can, Mama, I can now.  I can go and get her right now.  Right now.”  And the child stood up and ran from the yard and started to walk down a sidewalk that she’d never been down alone before.

She did not know Elizabeth, and she was not sure just now what knowing people meant, but she and her mother had been out for a walk around the block one day, and she had met Elizabeth, exchanged a few words about where they were in school, and petted her dog while the mother chatted with Elizabeth’s mother, who was pruning a rose bush in the front yard.  The child remembered that on the way home the mother had said, “What a nice family.  And little Elizabeth­­-­-she’s a year ahead of you at the same school­­-­- ice-skates in the Ice Pageant dressed as a little black sheep.  Isn’t that nice?  Maybe you’ll be friends.”

She thought about the black-sheep skating problem again as she walked down the endless street to turn a corner and look for a house that she had seen only once.  She made a few bounding leaps, hoping that full flight might come to her suddenly in this time of need, but it just hurt her feet when she came down on the concrete.  She was trying to put a picture puzzle of a house together in her head, trying to imagine if Elizabeth’s house would be gray with white trim or brick with yellow or blue with none, when things went her way for once.  She noticed Elizabeth sitting on the front steps of a house just a few feet away.  The wickedest child prepared herself for the next stage of her task, approached the steps and said, “Hi.  I’m having a party.  Will you come?”

“Who are you?” Elizabeth said, looking down her nose.

“Oh, I’m nobody.  But I live around the block and one day when I was with my mother I met you and petted your dog and you have a black sheep costume,” said the wickedest child.

Something must have worked.  “When?”

“Oh, I don’t know.  At the beginning of school.”

“No.  I mean, when’s the party,” Elizabeth said.

“Oh, now.  Now,” the child said.  “Please come.  There’s cake.”

When they got there the mother was all smiles and that funny laughter.  She cut them pieces of cake and chattered about the weather, which was getting quite grim.  Then she said, “Well, I’ll leave you children alone so you can have fun” and disappeared into the house.  The wickedest child had just succeeded in pulling two children out of thin air to please her mother.  When the door closed behind her mother, she realized that it still wasn’t over.

“What a stupid-looking cake,” Stephen said.  He and Elizabeth both laughed and said in unison “stupid-looking cake-a-rake-a-roo.”

The wickedest child, who had a good bit of practice at changing the subject, said, “Let’s go play.”  She got up and walked away from the table, knowing they would follow but not knowing where she would lead them, because she still had the game she was playing with her mother in her head and she couldn’t think of a single game in the world to play with other children. With relief, she heard Stephen say, “I know a game, but we have to find where to play it.”

Stephen turned to her then and said, “Now you do it.”  The wickedest child said, “No,” and responded to his insistence with a host of no’s.  She didn’t understand the game, but she knew that there was no way to run when your clothes were down around your ankles, which was why she tried not to go to the bathroom when her mother was nearby.  It didn’t look like any fun to her.  Moreover, although she had to bear the commands of her parents, she had decided as far back as nursery school never ever to bow to the commands of other children.  “Please, let’s play something else,” she pleaded, her voice sounding like a small thing in her head.

The three of them stood there in silence for a hundred years.  Finally Stephen said, “You’re no fun and your party stinks.  We’re going home.”  And as Elizabeth pranced off behind him, she looked over her shoulder at the wickedest child and said, “You’re no fun.”

She walked around to the side of the house and stood on the patio staring at the party things still laid out on the table.  The air smelled like rain and the wind had started to blow, whipping up the edges of the table cloth and making the little paper nut cups scoot toward the edge of the table.  Several unopened co-colas stood sweating in a group as if waiting for something to happen.  The icing on the cake had started to slide off in big buttery gobs.  Elizabeth and Stephen’s unfinished pieces of cake still lay on pastel plates next to half-finished drinks.

In the dark bedroom the wickedest child could barely make out the outline of her mother, who lay on her side facing the wall.  Her mother always lay on her side now to cry in bed ever since the baby had come into her stomach.  Before the baby, she always just threw herself face down on the bed and screamed into her pillow.  The child could not think what she had done to hurt her mother, but she knew that her mother cried because she was the wickedest child.

The bed was so high that the child could barely put her hand up on its edge, which she did now, choking back her own sobs to speak to her mother in her most supplicatory voice.  “Mama, please, please don’t cry.”  Another hundred years passed.  She said, “But what have I done?  What can I do?”  As if in response her mother wept louder than ever and the bed shook with her sobs.  Then without moving, her mother wailed, “Get out of here!  Can’t you ever leave me alone!?”

Another hundred years were passing when she heard her mother cleaning up in the kitchen.  When she heard her father get home, she thought: he came home even though she called.  He came and stood at the foot of her cot, and she stared at the tiny brown spots on his white shoes because she couldn’t look up at his face.  If she looked up at his face, she was afraid he would disappear, she was afraid she would cry out and not act like a big girl.  He said, “What have you done to your mother?”

The wickedest child stared at his shoes and tried to think what answer the question had in mind.  “I don’t know,” she said; “I tried not to hurt the baby.”

He said, “Don’t you know that your mother loves you just as much as she will love the baby?”

She stared at his shoes for another hundred years, and then he went away.  She knew that the spots on his shoes were blood from the sick and the dying that he was away from home to help.  She had long ago given up hope that everyone would get well and nobody would die, had long ago given up hope that he would help her.  There was no one sick or dying here.