Free The Sacrifice by Joyce Carol Oates Page A

from girlhood Natalia who’d murdered her common-law husband (as the newspapers would identify him) while he’d slept in just this way, gripping in both hands a revolver belonging to the man, pointing the barrel at the man’s forehead from a distance of no more than three inches then pulling the trigger. It was him or me, he’d have killed me Natalia said and though this was true, they’d convicted Natalia of “cold-blooded” second-degree murder and sent her to the women’s prison at Trenton twenty-five years to life.
    Ednetta loved Anis too much for anything like that .
    Even if it became necessary Ednetta wasn’t the one for anything like that.
    So, you moved quiet and took care not to close any door with a click, not to waken the man. Stumbling out of the room to dress in the bathroom and not to use the faucet that squeaked, and not to flush the toilet that made too much damn noise. And if you turned on TV to see local morning news you kept the volume down almost to mute.
    (Nothing on the TV about “Sybilla Frye”—yet. There’d been no official charges made, no news released to the media. Ednetta reasoned that so long as she kept away from all cops, and kept Sybilla away, there would never be this news and maybe it would all just fade away like things do.)
    The younger children had learned also to hush, to be very quiet not to awaken their stepdaddy. They were gone to school by the time Anis staggered out for breakfast and by this time Sybilla would have been gone also if she’d been in the house. No reason for Anis to ask about her and he hadn’t asked. Hadn’t said a word. Silent in the kitchen devouring the breakfast Ednetta had prepared for him which was a hot breakfast—sausages fried in grease, corn bread—and strong-smelling coffee whitened with milk the way Anis liked it and he hadn’t looked at her in fury or in shame though he’d grunted in farewell rising from the table, grabbing his jacket and his cap and departing with footsteps quick for a man so heavy, like mallet-thuds on the floor.
    All he’d been hearing on the street that week, had to be hearing and he hadn’t said a word to Ednetta.
    Between the girl and the stepfather was a treacherous wild place Ednetta tried to avoid.
    They were two of a kind, Ednetta thought: the girl, the stepfather.
    She was the responsible one. She was the mother.
    First thing he’d said moving into this house he’d said if these kids are under my roof with me, they are going to be disciplined by me. In Anis’s own way of speaking (which did not involve the employmentof actual words you might recount, contemplate) he’d allowed her to know this. And he had his own boys he’d brought with him—big, brooding boys, not home half the time, or more than half the time, never mind them.
    And Sybilla was just a young girl then, sixth grade, eleven years old, grateful to be taken up by the Tyne girls across the street, and the gorgeous Jamaican Gloria Estes who was their stepmother and braided the girls’ hair including Sybilla’s hair and it was like Sybilla adored them all and had no judgment. And the girls were running crazy-wild colliding with people on the sidewalk, elderly ladies, crippled men, that poor no-leg boy in his wheelchair in Hicks Square, giggling and screaming and in the Korean grocery two of them attracted the attention of the cashier (who was also the store owner) and another two wandered the aisles with schoolgirl innocence while slipping things into their pockets, licorice twists, salted peanuts, gummy worms, mints, no surprise the girls were caught—(disgusted Mr. Park could see the ghost-white-girls cavorting on a TV surveillance screen)—and when Anis found out that his eleven-year-old stepdaughter had been “arrested” for shoplifting with three other, older girls he’d disciplined her grimly in a way he said had to be done, it was the way his own father had done with all his children, beating the girl with his belt, a