The Witch Read online

  Then the movie was over and Mrs. Wojo said it was time for our baths.

  We didn’t argue, though we might have said we didn’t need a bath just then, or we didn’t take baths, only showers. I don’t like to admit how quick she’d beat me down, but she had.

  There is no greater powerlessness than being a child. So Mrs. Wojo set out towels for us, and the pajamas we’d brought with us from DCFS, and ran water in the tub. She sat on the toilet and clamped first Kerry, then me, between her knees and picked through our scalps, looking for nits. Her hands were hard and practiced. Satisfied that we didn’t have lice, she pushed the plastic curtain with the seashells to one side. “All right now, get undressed and hop in.”

  I found my voice. “We don’t do that.”

  “Don’t do what?”

  “Take baths together.”

  Mrs. Wojo made a show of her exasperation. “The two of you would tax the patience of a saint. What have you got to hide? Do you think I’m going to heat up water for two baths? Does this look like the Grand Hotel? Do you want to wait until that water’s cold?”

  She was going to watch us too. And maybe it shouldn’t have been any big deal, a child’s nakedness, but it was, it felt as if we had been stripped not only of our clothes but of some last defense against her as well. I couldn’t keep from looking at Kerry, his small, dangling parts and bare bottom, and he couldn’t keep from looking at me. We had been made helpless. We allowed Mrs. Wojo to pour some stinging shampoo over our heads and into our eyes and scrub out our ears. The water was something less than hot. By the time we were declared clean, made to stand, and wrapped in stale-smelling green towels, I was so sunk in misery, all I wanted was to hide myself away.

  Kerry started crying. His eyes hurt him, but nobody had figured that out yet. Mrs. Wojo grumbled as she got him into his pajamas, saying things along the lines of ungrateful children who didn’t have anything to complain about. But when we were dressed, she shooed me upstairs and kept him with her. “Run along,” she told me. “Don’t worry, he’s coming.”

  I climbed the stairs and waited. After a little while, Kerry came upstairs, accompanied by Mrs. Wojo’s shouted instructions from the hallway, telling us to get to sleep, no fooling around.

  The light on the stairway was left on, bright enough for a hospital. Kerry put his hand out and showed me two cookies, the packaged kind known as Fudge Ripple. “Here. She thinks I ate them.”

  I took one and Kerry the other, and we sucked the last bit of sweetness from them.

  Oh she hated me. She really did. Because I was female, or because I had a mouth on me, or a face that showed my mistrust, or all of that. The why didn’t matter. We were enemies. The next day she started in on me, giving me chores to do that I had no chance of doing right, things like going over the heavy furniture with a rag and a can of wax, or adding water to the cottage cheese cartons that fed her fussy African violets. And every time I did something wrong, I would be punished with an extra chore. “Why doesn’t Kerry have to do anything?” I asked, and Mrs. Wojo said it was because he had the pinkeye, though by then I had it too, or later because he complained of a stomachache, or some other invention. And because we were treated this unequally, and because we were only children, after a time Kerry began to lord it over me and behave as if I deserved no better.

  The DCFS woman came by that next afternoon with the paper sacks full of our clothing. We hate it here, I told her. We want to go home. But the DCFS woman was used to children who said such things, because of course the children hated these places they had been sent to, it was understandable.

  Kerry and I were seated at the table in the dining room, where we had not been allowed until now. The wallpaper was a pattern of creeping vines; the tablecloth was starched and spidery lace. The DCFS woman sat with us. Mrs. Wojo was somewhere else, in the kitchen, probably. We were whispering. Mrs. Wojo might be half-blind, but her hearing was supersonic. Kerry said he wanted to see our father.

  “We’re working on that,” the DCFS woman said, in an unnecessarily loud and cheerful voice. “Give us a few days.”

  We didn’t say anything more. We were hemmed in at every turn by adult actions and adult dictates, pronouncements, decisions, decrees. Days and days went by, I don’t know how many. Long enough for the pinkeye to clear up. Long enough for the smell of Mrs. Wojo’s cigarettes to work its way into our clothes. We didn’t know she was paid to feed and house us—I will not say take care of us—until she told us so.

  It was that portion of the evening devoted to television watching. Mrs.Wojo was in her recliner while Kerry and I sat on the plaid couch with the plastic cover that betrayed any fidgeting. We’d found a pair of hand puppets, a dog and a cow, and sometimes we made the puppets wrestle and beat at each other in silent, furious combat. The television only got three channels and we’d given up on it producing anything interesting. Mrs. Wojo favored movies, elderly dramas about World War II soldiers and the girls they left behind them, or struggles between good and evil played out among cattle ranchers, or deeply unfunny comedies. She couldn’t see much of the screen but she enjoyed following the story line, those dramas of virtue rewarded, of sacrifice and triumph.

  In the breaks between shows she got up to fetch more cigarettes or go to the bathroom or make herself a highball. (She drank, but not catastrophically.) Returning from one of these, she paused and regarded us, shaking her head at whatever she saw in us that was so visibly deficient. “They need to pay me a lot more if they want me to keep taking in strays.”

  She rearranged herself in the recliner. Kerry and I looked at each other. I said, “Who pays you for us? Our dad?”

  Mrs. Wojo laughed and raised her glass to her mouth, turning the rim cloudy with her lipstick. The drinks always put her in a more indulgently communicative mood. “Your daddy? I’m sure he doesn’t have a pot to piss in. The state pays for you. You’re foster children, and I’m your foster mother.”

  “No you aren’t,” I said, uselessly, not knowing what “foster” meant, but certain she wasn’t any kind of mother to us.

  Mrs. Wojo laughed again, and dabbed at her mouth with Kleenex. “Fine. Have it your way.”

  Kerry said, “Does that mean we have to stay here from now on?”

  Her show was starting up, so she waved this away. “You can only stay in foster care until you’re eighteen.”

  It was a lot to think about. No one had explained any of this to us, or if they did, we had not understood, and we didn’t understand now, especially the part about being eighteen. Eighteen! We would never be eighteen! Mrs. Wojo would never let us grow up, go to school, leave the house. She’d use spells and charms and the pure evilness of her nature to keep us small, helpless, captive.

  But it made sense to know that she was paid money for us. How else to explain it? And they didn’t pay her enough, which was why she was always so mad.

  Another television night. The show was one of the ones with dancing, a woman in a twirly skirt, violins, romance of a particularly coy, sick-making variety. Then the show ended and Mrs. Wojo snapped the television off. Getting up from the recliner, she hummed the melody and took a few gliding steps across the carpet. Her eyes were closed and her powdery face tilted upward, smiling in secret reverie. Her striped blouse, still damp in patches from the evening’s dishwashing, belled out around her.

  “Mrs. Wojo?” Kerry piped up then. “Do you have any kids? You know, your own?”

  She stopped her swaying and opened her eyes. I waited for her to blow up with rage, but she walked past us and into the dining room.

  We heard her opening and shutting drawers in the big glass-fronted buffet that held her collection of ceremonial china. When she came back in, she was holding a boxlike object in gold metal. It had a latch in the center that Mrs. Wojo worked open, splitting it into two framed portraits. She set them down on the table in front of us so we could see.
r />   “That’s him,” she said. “That’s my Frank. Go ahead, you can look at him.”

  There were two color pictures, one of a fat-faced baby wrapped in a blue blanket, the other a boy a year or two older than Kerry. He was posed in the front yard of Mrs. Wojo’s house, a weedy kid in google-eyed glasses. He was wearing shorts and a peculiar shirt, buttoned up tight beneath his chin and with stiff, oversized sleeves that stood away from his thin arms. The photographer had forgotten to tell him to smile. He looked like a kid we wouldn’t want to play with.

  We looked from one picture to the other. What were we supposed to say about him?

  “Where is he?” I asked.

  “In heaven.”

  Mrs. Wojo coughed and sniffled. “My baby. He’s an angel now.”

  I stared at Frank’s blurry eyes behind their glasses. I felt a little sick.

  “So what happened?” Kerry asked. He must not have been as afraid of her now that he was her favorite.

  Mrs. Wojo picked up the portrait frame and snapped it shut. “Polio. Do you know what that is? Well, there used to be this disease. A lot of children came down with it. Every summer there’d be what they call an epidemic, children all over, one day they’re fine, the next, they’re cripples. You know what cripples are, don’t you?

  “It started out like the flu, with a fever and a sore throat and whatnot, and then pains, pains all over. And once it got bad it paralyzed them so’s their legs would be all twisted up and they couldn’t walk. All these little children in leg braces, using crutches. Sometimes it went to the muscles that make you breathe and they wouldn’t work right and the children had to be put into what they called an iron lung machine, a big metal tube that did their breathing for them, and they had to stay inside it for the rest of their lives.”

  I tried not breathing. I saw the iron lung machine in my mind. The metal tube puffed in and out with a whoosh and a clang. There was a whole room of them, and inside each one was a child, and each child was pale and shriveled and growing old.

  “My poor Frankie. He caught the virus from going swimming at the public pool. He came home with an earache and he didn’t want his supper, and that night he woke up screaming and screaming. His stomach hurt him and then his back and then his legs. He had seizures where he went blank in the head and his poor little body almost lifted off the mattress.”

  Mrs. Wojo was in the grip of her story now. Her useless eyes were lifted to the ceiling, seeing the long-ago. You would have thought it was all too awful to remember, but she took some kind of energy from it, the testament of suffering. “He went to the hospital, to the ward with the other polio children. They put steamed wool blankets over him and rubbed him down with arnica. The virus went to pneumonia, his lungs filled up with water. For a night and a day he choked on his own insides. Then the life went out of him and he was at peace. He’s buried up at Queen of Heaven Cemetery, with a statue of the Archangel Raphael, the Healer.”

  She reached the end of her story and lowered her gaze to us. “Did anybody bother to get you two your vaccinations? I’ll have to ask.”

  That night in bed I couldn’t keep myself from thinking about Frank. I saw him as he was in his picture, a dumb-looking kid forever alone, then later when he was sick, his skin white as paste, sweating under his steamed blankets, drowning from the inside out. He had lived in this very house, and might have slept in this very bed. I felt myself growing heavy, falling into the grooves of the mattress his body had made. Frank was dead but that didn’t keep him from being curious about me. He came in from the cemetery, an angel with crutches in place of wings, and tugged at my pillow. “Move over,” he said. “Or I’ll give you polio.”

  I pinched my mouth together and squeezed my eyes shut so the polio couldn’t get in. He was smothering me with his dead, flopping arms and legs. I was already inside the iron lung. It was rusty and echoing and it had swallowed me up and now I was trapped. I screamed, and it took me a lot of frantic heartbeats to realize the scream had not left my mouth, and my eyes had opened to the stark light of the stairway, and my brother asleep in the bed across from me.

  It was witchcraft that gave me such a dream. I knew Mrs. Wojo had done it on purpose, told us a horrible story so it got stuck in my brain.

  One thing we never asked her about? Mr. Wojo. It was just as well.

  Our father and Monica came to see us! We had just about given up! We didn’t know they were coming, but all that day Mrs. Wojo had me helping her clean, and as usual, I couldn’t do anything to please her. “Does that look clean to you?” she’d demand, and there was no right answer.

  We scrubbed down the front porch steps, we polished the glass of the front door. We vacuumed and dusted. I fetched rags, buckets, polish, cleansers. The bathroom got a new air freshener cone that sent out waves of industrial-strength gardenia. Mrs. Wojo set up some ancient lawn chairs in the back yard, the kind with interwoven straps. Then we were told to change clothes, wash our necks, faces, and ears, go out in the yard, sit in the chairs, and stay there.

  The back door closed on us. Small as I was, the woven seat of the chair sagged beneath me. I still wasn’t any good at sitting still and I kicked at the chair frame, trying to get something to break. There wasn’t ever anything to do in the back yard. From the alley beyond the fence came occasionally interesting sounds of cars passing, garbage trucks, voices, but we never saw any of it. The weather had turned warm enough for flies and Kerry swatted them away. Mrs. Wojo fed him up so much, his face was getting round. He never saved cookies for me anymore. I said, “You look like a femmy girl.” He still hadn’t gotten his hair cut.

  “Shut up. You smell like pee.”

  “I do not.” I didn’t think I did. Then the back door opened and our father stood there, with Monica crowding up behind him.

  We were so unprepared for the sight of them that we just sat there staring. “Hey there, guys,” our father said, jolly, but with an edge of annoyance. I guess we were supposed to rush toward him, overjoyed. “Whatsa matter with you, come here.”

  We did get up then and allow ourselves to be embraced and patted. Both our father and Monica looked out of breath, keyed up. She had pulled her hair back into a ponytail and was wearing a new pair of pinchy-looking shoes. Our father had shaved with so much care that his face was bright pink. They looked the way a photograph of people you know can look, familiar and strange at the same time.

  One of the DCFS women came to the screen door and looked out at us. It was what they call a supervised visit.

  They sat down in the extra lawn chairs and wobbled around, trying to get comfortable. Our father cursed mildly, the chair hurting his bad back. “Are we going home?” I asked. I was bouncing up and down, already gone.

  “Ah, we have to work a few things out before that happens,” my father said, and though I wasn’t a big cryer I did cry then, and Kerry did too, out of the kind of emotional hydraulics that can lead to a whole room full of crying children, once one of them starts up. “Oh come on now,” our father said, uselessly. “It’s not so bad here, is it? You both look great, she must be taking great care of you.”

  “She’s a witch,” I said, and that got their attention, startled them, but I followed it up with, “She doesn’t like me,” and that allowed them to relax, dismiss me.

  “Of course she likes you, honey,” our father said. “She likes children, that’s why she takes care of them.”

  “She’s got her a real nice house,” Monica said. “If I could stay in a house like this, I’d count my lucky stars.”

  Kerry was still crying and our father was getting impatient with him. “Come on, buddy, turn off those waterworks. Let’s take a look at you. Put on a little weight, have you?”

  “She’s fattening him up so she can sell him to the gypsies! She locks us in the basement!”

  Our father and Monica put their lips together in a way that was both tole
rant and disapproving, and I knew they didn’t believe me, and that there was no point in telling them about the dreams I had every night where Frank tried to smother me and give me polio, so that every night I fought hard not to fall asleep and always lost.

  But they should have listened to me. They really should have.

  Just then the screen door opened and Mrs. Wojo came out, carrying a tray with glasses of lemonade and some packaged cookies set out on paper napkins. “I thought you all might like a refreshment,” she said, sweet as pie. She was wearing a dress made of some shiny navy blue fabric and when she lifted up her arms, you could see the white, baked-in rings of old deodorant and old sweat.

  I helped myself to three of the cookies. Her eyes cut me an evil look but she didn’t dare say anything in front of the others. When she had gone back inside, our father said, “See? She’s real nice.” But he seemed to disbelieve himself even as he spoke, his shoulders sinking.

  I said, “We could leave with you. We could run real fast, they won’t catch us.”

  “Actually, honey, you can’t. It’s a matter of the law now.” The idea of the law seemed to take something out of him, deflate him. He shifted his weight in the miserable chair.

  Monica scrubbed the cookie crumbs from her mouth with the back of her hand, and our father asked her what was wrong with using a napkin. They had themselves a little fuss about it, back and forth, and finally Monica waved her hands around and said, “Well, why do we even have to be here? It’s because these kids got themselves out of the car! Why did you do that, huh? You know you wasn’t supposed to!”

  Kerry said, “Jo got out first. It was her fault.”

  The solid weight of the guilt landed on me. Everything had been my fault and always would be. I said, “I was trying to walk home.”

  Monica said, “The whole way to North Halsted? That would have been some trick.”

  “Keep your pants on, Monica. It’s not like it matters now. Ah crap.” Our father was trying to get himself loose from the lawn chair.