God Help the Child: A novel Read Online Free

swollen to shed water. Poor thing. Somebody ruined one of those eyes, the ones that spooked everybody with their strangeness—large, slanted, slightly hooded and funny-colored, considering how black her skin is. Alien eyes, I call them, but guys think they’re gorgeous, of course.
    Well, when I find this little emergency clinic facing the mall’s parking lot I have to hold her up to help her walk. She hobbles, wearing one shoe. Finally we get a nurse’s bug-eyed attention. She is startled at the pair of us: one white girl with blond dreads, one very black one with silky curls. It takes forever to sign stuff and show insurance cards. Then we sit down to wait for the on-call doctor who lives, I don’t know, far off in some other crappy town. Bride doesn’t say a word while I drive her here, but in the waiting room she starts the lie.
    “I’m ruined,” she whispers.
    I say, “No you’re not. Give it time. Remember what Grace looked like after her face tuck?”
    “A surgeon did her face,” she answers. “A maniac did mine.”
    I press her. “So tell me. What happened, Bride? Who was he?”
    “Who was who?” She touches her nose tenderly while breathing through her mouth.
    “The guy who beat you half to death.”
    She coughs for some time and I hand her a tissue. “Did I say it was a guy? I don’t remember saying it was a guy.”
    “Are you telling me a woman did this?”
    “No,” she says. “No. It was a guy.”
    “Was he trying to rape you?”
    “I suppose. Somebody scared him off, I guess. He banged me around and took off.”
    See what I mean? Not even a good lie. I push a bit more. “He didn’t take your purse, wallet, anything?”
    She mumbles, “Boy Scout, I guess.” Her lips are puffy and her tongue can’t manage consonants but she tries to smile at her own stupid joke.
    “Why didn’t whoever scared him off stay and help you?”
    “I don’t know! I don’t know! I don’t know!”
    She is shouting and fake-sobbing so I back off. Her single open eye isn’t up to it and her mouth must hurt toomuch to keep it up. For five minutes I don’t say a word, just flip through the pages of a
Reader’s Digest;
then I try to make my voice sound as normal and conversational as I can. I decide not to ask why she called me instead of her lover man.
    “What were you doing up here anyway?”
    “I came to see a friend.” She bends forward as though her stomach hurts.
    “In Norristown? Your friend lives here?”
    “No. Nearby.”
    “You find him?”
    “Her. No. I never found her.”
    “Who is she?”
    “Somebody from a long time ago. She wasn’t there. Probably dead by now.”
    She knows I know she’s lying. Why wouldn’t an attacker take her money? Something has rattled her brainpan otherwise why would she tell me such fucked-up lies? I guess she doesn’t give a damn what I think. When I stuffed her little white skirt and top into the shopping bag, I found a rubber band around fifty hundred-dollar bills, an airline gift certificate and samples of YOU, GIRL not yet launched. Okay? No species of would-be rapist would want Nude Skin Glo, but free cash? I decide to let it go and wait until she’s seen the doctor.
    Afterward, when Bride holds up my compact mirror toher face, I know what she sees will break her heart. A quarter of her face is fine; the rest is cratered. Ugly black stitches, puffy eye, bandages on her forehead, lips so Ubangi she can’t pronounce the
r
in
raw
, which is what her skin looks like—all pink and blue-black. Worse than anything is her nose—nostrils wide as an orangutan’s under gauze the size of half a bagel. Her beautiful unbruised eye seems to cower, bloodshot, practically dead.
    I shouldn’t be thinking this. But her position at Sylvia, Inc., might be up for grabs. How can she persuade women to improve their looks with products that can’t improve her own? There isn’t enough YOU, GIRL foundation in the world to hide eye scars, a broken nose and facial skin