Free Precious by Sandra Novack Page B

She feels her chest tighten and swims upward, toward the light, toward the waiting air, to cut through the surface of water and into the world again.
    No one would believe such a story, not even Natalia with her tales of ghost children and caravans and Gypsy camps. At the age of nine, what Sissy Kisch already senses—what she already knows—is that most people are lonely and that when they are lonely, they are prone to make up a story. What might Sissy say—really—if asked? That Vicki lives, protected, at the bottom of a watery hole, that she is fine and well there, in that place of waiting? That nothing can harm her? That she is protected by animals and loved?
    People would laugh at her. They would send her to the loony bin. Still, she might insist, no one disappears without any trace. There are always clues. There is always a story.
    No one leaves forever.
    Later, Sissy lies in bed, distressed by the almost-quiet, the fingers of women tapping on her window. She is not unaware of the larger world around her.
Tap, tap, tap.
In the smallest recesses of her mind, in the tiniest crack in her heart, Sissy believes the events of the day to be true—Vicki, the lions, the horses. She bites her nails, though it doesn’t do her any good because they are already a knobby mess of flesh and tortured cuticles. She is so engrossed in thinking about Vicki, in thinking about an underwater world, that she fails to notice the moon that brightens the room.
    Just after ten—an hour to spare before their father comes home— Sissy hears Eva climb the stairs and quietly shut the door. Sissy lets go a series of frantic knocks through the wall, and she is more than grateful when Eva knocks back and says that yes, it’s okay to come over.
    Blue light drenches Eva’s bed. Eva lifts the sheets and lets Sissy settlein next to her. “Hey, bugaboo,” she says lazily. She still feels the wave of a dreamy high, the sweet musicality of the day. After Peter, she spent the evening with Greg, getting high in his bedroom, laughing about the Mafia girls but saying nothing—nothing at all—about Peter and saying nothing about all that has bothered her in the past months.
    “Nightmare?”
    Sissy shrugs, and Eva draws her closer, letting Sissy form her body to the shape of a spoon against her long frame. She covers them up. “We could live under here,” she says, musing.
    “After a while we’d suffocate,” Sissy tells her.
    “Maybe.” She puts her chin on Sissy’s head, notices that her hair is damp and smells vaguely of leaves and mud.
    Eva will not ask. She will not encroach on Sissy’s time alone any more than she wishes anyone to encroach on her time, on her meeting with Peter, even more perfect now that it has slipped into memory. Let Sissy have her secrets, Eva decides. She is sleepy, she is tired, and she can and will ease into dreams.
    “Eva.”
    “What?”
    Sissy tries to form the words for the day, for all she hopes for and all she questions. She wonders if Eva believes in heaven, or God, or if there is another place people go to, another world just out of reach where they watch, wanting to be remembered. She threads Eva’s arms around her instead. Finally, she says, “Never mind.”
    “Go to sleep, Sissy,” Eva says, yawning.
    “Tell me a story first.”
    “I don’t know any,” Eva says. Try.
    Eva thinks for a while. “When you were little, I used to carry you around and pretend you were mine. I’d sing to you.”
    “That’s not a story,” Sissy whispers. “That’s just something you remember.”
    “Once when you were a baby, I dropped you.”
    “Really?” Sissy turns.
    “You landed on the carpet but you didn’t cry.”
    Sissy pulls the covers closer and thinks about this. “Knowing myself,” she says, “I have a hard time believing that.”
    “Well, you didn’t cry,” Eva says, nearly drifting off to sleep. “You didn’t cry at all—you laughed, actually. It wasn’t the end of the world.”

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