Hot Springs Read Online Free Page B

hadn’t figured there was much to worry about. People lived with all sorts of stories they told themselves.
    “I know what I’m doing,” she’d promised him last week. They were at his trailer, in bed, listening to the coyotes. “It’s all going to work out fine. You have to trust me.” She had leaned over the wall of Little Angels to talk to Emily. “I just said, ‘Hi.’ Know what she said? ‘It’s you.’ I asked her, ‘You, who?’ And she said, ‘My real mommy.’”
    “And what did you say?” Landis asked.
    “I didn’t say anything.” Bernice was beaming. “I put out my finger and she gave it a squeeze.” She held up the finger to show him.
    “Don’t you think she might say something about this to the people?”
    “No, no, she won’t. She knows it’s a secret.”
    “Kids aren’t great with secrets.”
    She’d wrapped herself around him and hugged him hard, and he realized with some surprise that by not ever consciously making a decision, he had in fact made one.
    “It was an OK plan,” he said now.

    She went into the bathroom and began running water into the tub. “Go get some ice,” she said. “Get a whole big bag.”
    He was gone less than five minutes. When he returned, Bernice had put Emily in the tub. He reached a hand in and quickly pulled it out. “That’s cold.”
    “What do you think the ice is for? We need to get her fever down.”
    “That can’t be right. Look at her.” He put the bag down in the sink. Emily’s naked body was magnified and flattened by the bluish lens of the bathwater, and she was clearly shivering. Her eyes were shut tight. Landis reached in and scooped her up in his arms. Water splashed all over the floor and all over him. She was so light. He grabbed a towel off the rack, wrapped it around her, brought her back into the room, and sat her on her bed. Behind him, he heard the bathroom door click shut. He dried her off and put her T-shirt back on.
    “Did I do that OK?” he asked.
    “You forgot to dry my toes,” Emily said.
    He dried her toes.
    “And I want underpants.”
    “Right.” He found them on the floor, handed them to Emily, and looked away as she pulled them on. Then he tucked her in, leaving the towel under the back of her head where her hair was still wet.
    Landis knocked, entered the bathroom, and found Bernice staring into the mirror over the sink. “I’ve ruined everything,” she said. “I’m an unfit mother.”
    “Shhh. Nothing’s done that can’t be undone.”
    “It isn’t? Do you know what you are saying? Are you even in the same movie as me? Because mine is a bad gangster one, and it ends in a hail of bullets.”
    “Just stop it. Everything is under control. We’ve got a little money. We’ve got Emily. What we need is to get some sleep.”

    They went quietly back into the bedroom. Emily’s face was still flushed, her closed eyelids fluttering like tiny moths. He couldn’t tell if she was asleep. She was a strange one, he thought, just like her mother. Any other kid would have been screaming in that ice water. Landis took the towel out from under her head and hung it on a chair. “She’s still hot,” he whispered.
    Bernice took off her clothes and got into the other bed, facing away from him. As Landis undressed, he inventoried his body: his chest, hairy and beginning to gray; his appendicitis scar; another scar on his left thigh where a disturbed woman had stabbed him on a Greyhound ten years ago; the flat feet he’d inherited from his father. There’d been a time in his life when he was impressed by his body, the fact that he had muscles, the full head of long hair that made him look like a rock star. Now, he was just glad nothing embarrassed him too much.
    He eased into bed and slipped his arms around Bernice. “Who was he?”
    “Who was who?”
    “The guy. Her daddy.”
    “I’ve told you before, I don’t want to say. It doesn’t matter.”
    “If it doesn’t matter, why not tell me?”
    “Just