With his face pressed so snugly against his arm that his eyeballs ached, he began the countdown towards the momentary blindness that would signal the start of the hunt.
“Twenty-five . . . twenty-four . . .”
The words echoed with blood-thumping distortion inside his cranium.
“Seventeen . . . sixteen . . . fifteen . . .”
Counting backwards wasn’t required, of course, but it made more sense to him to do it that way. And, under his breath, between each vocalized number, the words “one thousand” provided spacers to tick off the seconds in his head. A proper hide-and-seeker recognized and respected time, acknowledged its unceasing dance toward the unimaginable nothing.
Before he knew it—the big bang—the sun exploding first in his head, then his eyes, and then finally crystallizing into reality as he knew and loved it.
Life always began with pursuit: for food and shelter, for self-mastery, for experience. From birth, humans wanted, and as they grew they wanted more and rarely gave up the quest for it, from cradle to grave.
Now, the object of Tab’s pursuit was the elusive Kirsten Tessier, the girl of minimal words and a frightening magnetism. As Tab had observed, she could stand and stare out her bedroom window in perfect stillness and silence for far longer than one so young was generally capable of, upwards of a half hour on one particular occasion.
Autistic, he’d thought the first time he’d observed this feat on the part of his little neighbor. He remembered, then, he’d read somewhere that autistic children often couldn’t stand to be touched. But no, she wasn’t autistic, as he later discovered; she was gifted—gifted in ways that would call to mind mental trauma to the untrained observer.
Little Kirsten Tessier, all of seven years old, with her painfully thin frame, her pale skin and perfectly straight locks of white gold, was almost inhuman. She of the quietly observant demeanor and blazing intelligence—she was a living ghost at times, so beautiful and ephemeral that Tab was afraid to look at her directly for fear she’d dissipate into the air under direct scrutiny.
He walked faster than his normal pace, looking behind trees, in the shed, wherever he thought might make a good hiding place for a slender, flexible seven-year-old, but every place he looked was empty of that singular beauty. Tab spent a good twenty minutes looking for her, and then nearly panicked, fearing she was, indeed, gone forever, that she’d never existed save in his mind—luckily, a brief fear that subsided quickly, but a powerful one.
There was one place he hadn’t looked, and he knew instinctively she’d be there. He’d noticed her wandering around out there before, seeking some hidden treasure, or maybe searching for lizards and frogs (her favorite pets.)
* * *
This is what it was: At the far end of Tab’s parents’ land, residing at the edge of the woods, was a small ancient garden surrounded by a five-foot high stone wall—too high for Kirsten to see over but short enough for her to scale, with plenty of hand and foot holds to make climbing it a simple enough task for a light, dexterous child. The garden had a gate, of course, but it was hard to open without a bit of muscle. Tab shoved it hard, and it swung tentatively on its rusty hinges.
The place was overgrown with a near infinite tangle of weeds and vines and brambles, untrimmed and abandoned even before the Sorensons had bought the property three years ago. At the center of the garden was a small stone structure, likewise shut tight, and towards the rear of the garden, a rotting, weathered gazebo, long since conquered by kudzu, was shaded by the line of oaks at its back.
And, sure enough, it was here that Tab located his quarry, her gleaming, molten crown easy to pinpoint against the sea of dark green surrounding her.
“Found you!” he shouted, and he heard her giggle, then watched her dart in and around the undergrowth. “Hey, where are you going, you little squirrel? No fair!”
Kirsten made her way to the little stone building and began climbing the side of it, headed for the roof.
“Kirsten, no! You’ll fall!”
Too late. By the time Tab got to it, the girl was already atop the stone shed, standing proudly and fearlessly on the roof ledge.
“Queen of the castle!” she bellowed.
“Come down from there right now!” Tab shouted, fearful and on the verge of anger.
Unflinching, the little self-appointed monarch demanded, “First you have to do everything I say.”
“Okay, okay, I will,” he lied. “Just get down from there. It’s dangerous!”
Without a moment’s hesitation, Kirsten yelled, “Catch me!” and jumped towards Tab, who waited anxiously below. He barely had time to react, but somehow she landed in his arms perfectly and immediately straddled his belly with her wispy legs.
“Take me in there,” she said, pointing at the building she’d just leapt from the top of. Her blue eyes were mesmeric, her gaze steady and pure.
Sighing, Tab walked to the old mausoleum and shoved the door open with one foot.
* * *
“Who was it for?” Kirsten enquired, enthralled that the building had been designed to house the body of a dead person.
“The owner of the house before my mom and dad said it was for someone’s daughter. When she was about your age, she was very sick. I guess they expected her to die early. The doctors thought she had some kind of fatal disease, but it turned out she had something else,” Tab explained.
Scratching at a scab on her knee, Kirsten asked, “What’s fatal mean?”
“It means something that you’ll die from.”
“Oh. So, she didn’t die?”
Tab lifted Kirsten and set her onto the marble altar at the center of the small, dark room, then sat down beside her.
“Not then. She lived to be an old woman and was buried up at the cemetery.”
“So the doctors were wrong?” Kirsten asked.
“Yeah, they were. It happened a lot back then. They didn’t really understand the human body as well as they do now.”
“So doctors aren’t wrong anymore?”
Chuckling, Tab said, “Boy, you sure ask a lot of questions. That’s okay, though. Yes, doctors can still be wrong. They’re just not wrong as often as the used to be.”
Kirsten smiled oddly and muttered, “I thought so.”
“C’mon. You want a piggy-back ride back to the house?”
Silently, Kirsten stood up on the altar and circled behind Tab, clinging to his back. In response, he curled his fingers beneath her thighs and stood up himself, marching proudly out of the tomb.
* * *
The Tessiers were an odd family, to say the least. Gordon, Kirsten’s father, was a tiny, slender man with dark hair and large, thick-lensed glasses. He was rarely home, and when he was, he never appeared to speak more than three words throughout the entire time Tab was present. He wasn’t a cruel man—quite the opposite. He seemed to lack any will of his own around his wife, and his daughter, well . . . he barely registered her presence, from what Tab gathered.
The man was curiously devoid of emotions or passions of any sort, at least in Tab’s presence. Though from the way his wife Marlena spoke, he was always like that. He did love his wife—he must have, from the way he obeyed her every wish. Maybe that wasn’t love, after all; maybe it was simple practicality.
But sadly, there was no love between the man and his child. Of that, Tab was reasonably certain. Kirsten had literally become a ghost to him—her appearances were like a soft breeze that flowed into the room; he sensed she was there, but he neither cared nor gave her any thought or attention.
This had been verified on one occasion when Kirsten had been climbing a high bookshelf in the living room to remove a large tome that was on the very top and had tumbled to the floor and cut her arm. Tab had tried to object to Kirsten’s clambering up the precarious bookshelf before the fact, but Marlena had overruled him on the grounds that Kirsten should be allowed to learn the lessons of gravity on her own. And so she had.
Gordon had been present the whole time and had never said a word nor made a move to comfort the crying, bleeding Kirsten. He’d watched her fall curiously, as if it were only a mildly exciting event that added a bit of spice to an otherwise bland evening of television watching. But then, he’d gone back to the news and forgotten all about Kirsten, leaving Tab and the girl’s mother to carry her to the bathroom, bandage her up and wipe away her tears.
Marlena was a different story altogether. A thin, sinewy woman, she was a full six inches taller than her husband and, personality-wise, precisely his opposite. She was well-known in the community as a patron of the arts, a garishly-dressed social butterfly of a woman with flaming red hair, often cut short and modeled upon the latest trends. Where her husband lacked passion, Marlena was a veritable fountain of passion and lively gesticulations—she was the apotheosis of drama queens, a woman who performed social stunts that engendered much gossip and attracted a pretentious following of gays and bohemians, particularly artists and writers of the modern stripe.
She was known to be rather permissive with Kirsten, and she did love the girl—clearly, she was a parent of the vein that believed a child’s experimentation was not to be thwarted, which is what Tab liked about her. He generally agreed with this viewpoint.
Still, he had witnessed Marlena slap Kirsten quite hard on one occasion, and for nothing more than having the gall to dislike her mother’s experimental avocado dish (which Tab himself had hated as well.) So, Tab feared that the woman might be unstable and possibly abusive.
In fact, it was because of Marlena’s mental issues that Tab’s involvement with Kirsten had taken its strangest and most intriguing turn.
On a lazy Summer evening, and for no discernible reason, Marlena had determined she was unloved and unwanted by her family and promptly swallowed a handful of Tylenol PMs and what turned out to be vitamin C tabs (as her stomach had been pumped at the hospital.) It was merely another of her staged pleas for attention, and she’d elicited the reaction she wanted—Gordon and several of her friends had stayed by her bedside all night.
Kirsten, however, had been left on her own; her father had never even considered calling a babysitter or even taking the child along with him to the hospital. In fact, he hadn’t thought much about her at all upon the verification of his wife’s overdose. This was not unusual, of course. Gordon had vacated the premises at least twice and left Kirsten alone, and so, Marlena at least had the insight not to leave the girl with her husband thereafter, if for no other reason than to avoid an entanglement with authorities.
But this time, Kirsten had meandered over into the Sorensons’ yard, chasing imaginary butterflies with an imaginary net, and Tab happened to spot her. He went outside and questioned her, and she had explained simply enough that her mother had took a lot of pills and her parents were now at the hospital. If Kirsten registered this occurrence as a tragic one, she didn’t show it.
So Tab had taken her back home and stayed with her until the next morning, and while there, he had experienced an awakening on a transcendental scale, a strange fever dream of emergent love and kaleidoscopic sensations such as he had never known. This experience had fully and finally enamored him of Kirsten and introduced him to the delights of a child who was wise, intelligent, sultry, and who had been raised to recognize very few boundaries . . .
* * *
Tab was worried and called the hospital, not so much to verify that Marlena was still alive (although that was part of it) but to get Gordon’s permission to stay with Kirsten, or to see if he wanted him to contact another family member, or precisely what he should do about her.
“Stay there until we come back,” was all Gordon had mumbled into the phone receiver, quickly hanging up, and that was that.
So Tab had spent a quiet evening playing Go Fish and Charades, making himself and Kirsten a pan of macaroni-and-cheese with hot dogs cut up in, and reading her stories, to which she listened silently and attentively.
Near about eight in the evening, Tab grew tired and thought Kirsten might be too, but she appeared as alert and curious as ever. Well, it did happen to be a Friday evening, and supposing the Tessiers were as lax about her bedtime (at least on weekends) as they were about everything else, that made sense.
“Kirsten, when do you usually go to bed?”
“After I’ve taken a bath,” was the reply, to which she added, “it is my bath time now.”
She padded her way into the bathroom and began turning on the spigot, setting the temperature to where she wanted it. Then, taking out the big hot pink bottle of bubble bath from beneath the sink, she poured a liberal amount into the tub. Obviously, she’d been doing this herself for quite awhile.
“D-Do you need any help? I mean, getting a towel or anything?” Tab asked uncomfortably.
“No. Will you stay in here with me?”
Rubbing his eyes, Tab responded, “I’m not sure that’s such a good idea.”
“Why not?”
“Well, because I’m not sure if it’s appropriate. I don’t know you that well, and anyway, I don’t know if your parents would like it.”
Laughing, Kirsten began to strip anyway. “My mom and dad don’t care what I do.”
That was true enough, for the most part, but—
“Well, it’s not really about what you do. It’s about what people might think about me. They might think I did something wrong.”
She stood there before him, fully nude now, her skin as white and pristine as a porcelain doll’s. She was unashamed of her nudity, untainted by the culture’s tainting of sex. In that sense, there was no doubting her innocence; she didn’t view her body as evil or depraved. But, likewise, there was no denying her sexuality—it massaged his vision and pulled at his emotions and desire like a thousand little suctions.
Kirsten paused like a kitten about to pounce on its sibling’s tail; she knew she had him.
“Please? I want you to stay with me. I’m scared.”
“What’s there to be scared of?” Tab asked.
But, when he looked into her eyes—those amazing eyes—that mirrored and distorted his face, he thought he knew what there was to be scared of. Except it wasn’t Kirsten who was afraid. Not really.
“Alright, I’ll stay.”
Kirsten grinned and whispered, “I knew you would.”
She turned off the faucet and climbed carefully into the tub, into the hissing mound of suds, and plopped down, splashing Tab a bit unintentionally but finding it amusing anyway.
“Hey, you! If I ‘m going to sit in here with you, you can’t splash me, okay?”
“I won’t,” Kirsten assured him, then sunk down into the water to her chin and put her feet up onto the rim of the tub with the soles facing Tab. “Well you rub my feet?”
Tab sat on the toilet, next to the bathtub, and took one of the little wet things, so narrow and delicate, in one of his hands, and with the other he began to massage the bottom of Kirsten’s foot, kneading it delicately with his thumb. The girl sighed and started playing with bubbles, piling a small hill of them on her head.
“I’m the bubble bath queen,” she snickered, “and this is my crown. I’m going to stay in the bathtub forever. Will you stay too? You can be the bubble bath king!”
“Okay, why not,” Tab humored her. What would it hurt?
“Then, you have to take your clothes off and get in with me.”
Pulling his hands away from Kirsten’s foot, Tab said, “Absolutely not, Kirsten. That is out of the question.”
“Why?”
“I-I can’t really explain why. It just is.”
The bubbles were beginning to dissolve; there were almost none left.
Sitting with her arms on the tub’s edge, Kirsten laid her chin on her folded arms and said, “Don’t you like me?”
She looked genuinely hurt by the rejection.
“Of course I like you,” Tab clarified. “But if anyone found out—“
“I won’t tell them!” Kirsten cut him off, and Tab could see she meant it.
There was no use resisting the girl. She had a power over him, and he knew it. He shed his clothes hesitantly; it was such a strange thing to be stripping in front of a small girl, whose eyes were fixed desperately at the level of his mid-section to see what emerged from behind his jeans and underpants there. He waited only a few seconds; then, he jerked his briefs down, taking the plunge.
Kirsten’s happiness and astonishment at Tab’s actions were unquestionable.
“I’ve seen penises before, in my mom’s books.”
“You know what it’s called, then.” This time, it was Tab’s turn to be astonished.
“My mom taught me. Mine is called a vagina, but only inside. Wanna see it?”
“No, no, that’s okay.”
Tab eased himself into the tepid water, hoping the girl would forget about sex organs and concentrate on the business of washing herself.
“Will you wash my hair for me? Mommy does it usually. We take baths together all the time.”
“No problem. Just turn around,” Tab suggested, and Kirsten complied.
Taking a dollop of shampoo, which smelled of strawberries, into his palm, he began to massage it into the child’s scalp and through the wet tendrils of her hair.
“Do you think she’s going to die?” Kirsten asked suddenly.
“No, I don’t think so. I was going to ask your dad, but he hung up before I could ask. He didn’t really sound that worried, though.”
“Oh. What happens when we die?”
Tab found a cup on the side of the tub and scooped up some bath water, reminding Kirsten to close her eyes. He poured the water over her head, rinsing the shampoo out of her hair.
“No one really knows for sure. Some people think we go to Heaven, or Hell if we’re bad. Some people think you come back to earth in a different body,” he said.
“What do you think happens?”
“I think . . . that you ask a lot of questions. Well, I just really don’t know. I don’t believe in Hell, though. Or Heaven, really. Not the way most people believe in it. I think there is a place where all the people who’ve passed away live, and it’s as big as the Universe, or as big as it needs to be anyway, which is bigger than anyone will ever need. I think it’s a very peaceful place—maybe too peaceful for some people. Everything is predictable, which is how some people like it. Other people don’t like it and decide to come back and try life again, because they want an adventure.”
Turning part way round so as to face Tab, Kirsten continued her interrogation of him.
“What does predictable mean?”
“It means you know everything that’s going to happen before it ever happens. No surprises.”
The child considered this idea carefully and finally confessed, “I like surprises. It’s like when you dream, and an elephant walks down the street in your dream and comes in your house and in your room. I know elephants aren’t supposed to be in there, but wouldn’t it be a big surprise if you came home and found one in your room? It could be a bad surprise or a good surprise.
“If you pretended he wasn’t there and tried to get around him and stuff, it’d be bad because he’s so huge he takes up your whole room, and he makes it really hard to do stuff like get dressed and go to sleep and stuff. But, if you became the elephant’s friend, he’d help you do those things, and he’d even put you on his back with his trunk and you could sit up high and see everything below. He’d even take you places, like to school and the store, and he could get you books from the top of the bookshelf! Wouldn’t you think it was the best thing in the world?”
Tab pondered this cryptic metaphor, and at last he understood it, and he smiled, his eyes misting over. “Yes, I would.”
* * *
After a thorough toweling off of both himself and Kirsten, Tab put on a dark green bathrobe he found hanging on a hook inside a little closet in the bathroom, then wrapped the girl in a fresh towel and carried her to her bedroom. Setting her on the bed, he sat before her and lightly pushed some tangled bangs from her eyes. Her hair was still a bit matted; he combed it carefully so as not to hurt her scalp, then lay his cheek against the cool wet hair atop her head, breathing deeply the scent of her freshness, the sweet aroma of her strawberry shampoo and the smell of Ivory soap and letting it remove him somewhat to a realm beyond this one, an Eden-like garden of wonders and mysteries, where children wandered the shady paths freely, naked (save for belts and crowns and anklets of orchids and other exotic flora), unashamed and safe from the cruelty of ideology, safe from the horrors of the belt and fears of hellfire. Safe, and free . . .
“Tab, do you think I’m sexy?”
“Wha?” he asked as he returned to himself and to the reality before him.
“A lot of people think Mommy is sexy. Daddy does. They fighted about it one time. It was the only time they ever fighted.”
“Fought, you mean,” he corrected her. “It was the only time they fought.”
“Yeah, it was the only time. Daddy doesn’t love me like he loves Mommy. He doesn’t think I’m sexy,” Kirsten proclaimed.
“Well, I don’t know for sure that he doesn’t love you. He doesn’t show it much, though, that’s for sure. Well, he probably doesn’t think you’re sexy, but that’s no big deal. Most dads don’t think their little girls are sexy. That doesn’t have anything to do with him loving you, or at least, it shouldn’t. I guess you should put your pajamas on now.”
Kirsten removed her towel and walked to her dresser to retrieve her pajamas. She gathered up a two piece pale yellow outfit that had little bears and blocks on it and dark blue cuffs and collar and actually looked more like a boy’s outfit than a girl’s. She stretched lithely, pulling the long-sleeved top over her head, and Tab felt a response in his groin that he hadn’t been anticipating but wasn’t surprised by.
“Yes, you are,” he averred. “Sexy, I mean.” There was a quiver to his voice when he spoke those words.
She grinned, knowing it was the truth, and walked back to him with her pajama bottoms still in her hand. She tossed them on the floor at the side of the bed.
“I don’t want to put those on,” she said, climbing beneath her covers.
Tab so wanted to touch her, to hold her close to him, but he didn’t dare at that moment. He stood to leave the room, and that’s when the girl noticed the horizontal pyramid at his mid section, beneath the dark robe. She pointed at it.
“What happened to your penis? It got bigger.”
“Yes,” was all Tab could manage.
“Take your robe off,” Kirsten ordered, and there was a definite trace of desperation in the command. She knew this was the secret that had been withheld from her, and she needed to know it so badly she could barely stand it. Tab, for his part, did hesitate, but not for long.
The robe fell open, slipping over his shoulders and down his arms into a pile at his feet, the fullness of his tumescence pointing like a thick accusing finger at Kirsten, but she would not be so easily cowed.
“Will you get under the covers with me? Please?” she begged, and the request was no sooner voiced than Tab granted it and slipped beneath the cool pink Strawberry Shortcake sheets on Kirsten’s tiny bed.
Turning to face one another, they were simply mesmerized by one another’s eyes for several long seconds—the usually taut rubber band of time going lose for a few seconds or minutes (or who knew how long?) while they meandered as far into one another’s gaze as was comfortable for each. Then, Tab felt the girl’s tiny hands investigating every inch of him, ratcheting his brain ever upward into the whirling heights of ecstasy as her fingers trailed upon and pulled and massaged the sensitive flesh of those external organs.
After she was satisfied with her explorations, she took one of his hands with both of her own and pressed it palm down against herself, gently pushing his index finger into the soft, moist furrow, and he engaged his own curiosity—engaged it, in fact, until Kirsten’s eyes glazed over, her eyelids drooped and her grinning lips took on a slackness that could only mean she had found a comfort beyond comfort. All the while her warm hands clutched his, controlling the pressure of his fingertip, which moved like the rhythm of the calmest sea.