STONES by Becky Hagenston
It happens when she’s in the checkout line at Kroger: the child ahead of her – a toddler, no more than three, says loudly, “Mommy, did that lady eat a baby?” He’s staring at Gretel’s bright red sweatshirt.
The toddler’s mother is in high heels. Her hair is perfect. She smiles at Gretel and says, “I’m sorry about him. When are you due?”
“I didn’t eat a baby,” Gretel informs the toddler. Then, to his mother: “I’m not pregnant, I’m fat. You should teach your son that it’s rude to ask personal questions.”
Then she leaves her cart where it is and steps out the sliding doors into the Mississippi sunshine.
* * *
You tried to eat well; you filled your cart with spinach and tofu and free-range chicken, and some baby-asshole in the checkout line thinks you’re pregnant so you’re forced to go home and order a large pizza with extra cheese, and something called Fudgie Stix, what the hell. So much for swimsuit season, but when has she ever worn a swimsuit? Never. Her ex-husband was always telling her he “appreciated” her body; he said he wanted to coat her in frosting. She had married him when she was trying to be a different person, before she realized she had already turned into the person she was. When he made the crack about the frosting, she’d stared at him as if he was insane (which now she thinks maybe he was, for marrying her) and he laughed and said, “Joking!” Because he knew her history with frosting. He even said her book, Out of the Forest, “moved me to tears” but when she quizzed him on it she found out he didn’t really read it. “Old witch threw you in the oven,” he said. “After making you eat her house.”
“You’re an idiot,” she said. Because obviously, she – Gretel – threw the witch in the oven, didn’t she? And she rescued her brother. Which was a lot for a ten-year-old girl to deal with. That was the point of the book, the forest being mostly a metaphor, though also a real forest.
But that was long ago and far away, as the fairy tales say. Mississippi has forests, but she doesn’t live any where near one. She prefers flat, cleared land. She likes civilization and academia and driving a black Prius. She likes calling roll and locking her classroom door at exactly thirty seconds past eight o’clock, and telling the crying students in her office that they should have met with her earlier in the semester, not waited until final grades were due, and she’s sorry, but they can always re-take the class.
She turned her spring grades in earlier today. Yesterday, a student stopped by her office to say she’d “really enjoyed the class, and learned a lot, but I’m going to change my major from psychology to business.”
“You don’t have the brains for that,” Gretel said. “Or for psychology, either. But good luck.”
Her student evaluations always say things like, Dr. Hausen is obviously brilliant but she is not especially nice, and I was afraid to come to her office hours, and I think she hated me.
“Do you have children, Dr. Hausen?” the student had asked her yesterday, tremulously. Of course they always wondered that, but they rarely had the nerve to ask.
“God forbid,” she said. “Shut the door on your way out, please.”
* * *
When the doorbell rings, she is staring at the last piece of pizza, wondering if she has the willpower to save it for lunch tomorrow. But is she really only going to eat just one slice for lunch? She should have stayed at Kroger, gotten a hold of herself, not over-reacted. Dr. Hausen will leave the classroom when someone makes her angry. At first we thought it was one of her experiments, but it wasn’t.
She peers out the window, expecting the UPS truck – her neighbor across the street is always ordering things and not being home to collect them, and Gretel has refused to sign for anything else. “If you’re not going to be home,” she informed the man (a slacker-looking type, unshaven, greasy-haired) when he came over to pick up a package last week, “then stop ordering things from UPS. Or have them delivered to your job.” He took the package without even saying thank you.
But there’s no UPS truck in the driveway, just a beige Honda with a Connecticut license plate. The bell rings again. She peers into the peephole and sees a middle-aged man who looks just like her father. When she opens the door, the man who looks like her father says, “Hey there, Gretel.” He’s standing there with a boy who looks exactly like her brother. “We thought we’d pop in for a visit.”
* * *
The last time she saw Hansel was at their father’s funeral, sixteen years ago. She was living in California, with her brand new PhD and assistant professor job, and had put her father in assisted living in San Diego. She had flown him in from the Old Country, where he was subsisting on the little treasure left from what Hansel and Gretel brought back from the witch’s cottage.
“What about your brother?” her father wanted to know, when he’d been in the nursing home for two months. “Why doesn’t he come visit?”
Hansel had informed Gretel that his therapist thought it best if he “put the past behind me” and “focused on moving forward and healing.” Then he added, “I’m a vegan now,” as if that was something she ought to congratulate him for.
Gretel told their father, “He’s busy. Travelling the world. I think he’s in India now.”
He nodded, pleased. “I always knew that boy had an adventurous spirit,” he said. “But you should really get out more.”
When he died a year later, she told Hansel he hadn’t suffered, though of course his whole life had been nothing but suffering. Hansel flew in for two days, stayed in the Comfort Suites, and said, “Send me a bill for half the funeral.” When she did, it came back marked “No such person at this address.”
Hansel is gaunt and wide-eyed; his fingers are thin as sticks. But his son, Kyle, looks ruddy and well-fed (though not too well-fed) and his clothes are clean and his sneakers look new. If it wasn’t for the furrow in his brow, he would seem like a normal little boy.
“How are you?” she says to Kyle.
He shrugs. “Do you have a TV?”
“Second room on the right.” She’s trying to think if she has any DVDs a ten-year-old boy might want to watch. The English Patient, The African Queen, Silence of the Lambs? “I think I get Nickelodeon, but I’m not sure. Just flip around and do whatever you want.”
“Be careful,” Hansel says, looking anxiously at his son.
“Quit telling me to be careful! You’re getting on my nerves. I want to call Mom.”
“You’re not calling Mom!” Hansel shakes his head. “Geez,” he says, as Kyle slams the door. “Shit. Where’s your landline?”
“No landline,” Gretel tells him. “Just my cell. Why can’t he call his mother? Did you kidnap him or something?” When he doesn’t answer, she says, “I’m not harboring you, if that’s what you’re expecting. I’m supposed to be working on an article.”
“I didn’t kidnap him, he’s my son,” says Hansel. “His mother is married to a jerk and Kyle would be much happier with me. We need each other.”
“So what’s the problem with the ex-wife and the jerk?”
“They think I’m unstable.”
“And taking your son and running away isn’t unstable?”
He glowers at her, his eyes a sunken, jaundiced yellow around the sockets.
“Okay,” she says. “That question obviously doesn’t need an answer. So how about this: What made you decide to come here?”
“Because,” says Hansel, giving her a weary smile, “it’s the last place anyone would ever think to look.”
* * *
She has the odd sensation that she is trapped in one of her own experiments in violating social norms. Choose one of the following, and write a paper about the reactions you receive as well as your own feelings: Tie a shoe to the top of your head, sing loudly in the elevator, cut in front of someone in line. Now she can add, Pay an unexpected visit to a relative you have not seen in sixteen years. For extra credit, bring a stolen child!
While Hansel snores on the sofa – after refusing her repeated offers of leftover pizza, Cracklin’ Oat Bran, or even plain rice – she plays the Responsible Aunt and helps Kyle make a snack in the kitchen. “Dad’s sick,” Kyle tells her. “He only eats raw veggies anyway, but lately he hasn’t been eating anything. Do you have any crackers or Keeblers or anything?”
“Cupboard above the microwave,” Gretel says. She has never lacked for crackers. “And a can of whipped cheese is in the fridge.”
Kyle beams at her. “I’m not supposed to eat that.”
“According to your mom, or your dad?”
He shrugs, dragging out a chair from the table and standing on it to get to the cupboard. Resourceful boy. “Mom lets me eat more junk food than Dad does, and Uncle Gary says raw carrots are for rabbits.” He laughs and leaps off the chair.
“Let’s not tell your dad I let you do that,” she says, and he rolls his eyes at her and says, “No duh.”
* * *
“Everybody does it,” her husband had said to her when she was pregnant. “Even monkeys. And you’re much smarter than a monkey.”
“Thanks,” she said.
“And teenagers. Idiot teenagers raise children. My own mother thought smoking only a pack a day during pregnancy was taking care of herself.”
This was supposed to reassure her that she would be a wonderful mother. That she would not turn into a wicked witch. Better to be a teenaged monkey!
“What are you so afraid of?” her husband asked her, and she said, “Everything.”
But then the baby was born, and they named her Emily, and her husband said, triumphant, “See, you love her!”
“I wasn’t afraid of not loving her,” said Gretel, but she had been – and what a relief, that she loved this baby.
It was terrifying, how much she loved this baby.
She refused to let Emily out of her sight; she told her husband to leave them alone, and she sat in the dark and rocked her daughter and sang to her and fed her. She told her husband to move the crib out of the room; she slept with Emily next to her in the bed. She told her husband to leave the bed. She clung to Emily until the baby’s flesh bruised and the child cried, and still she clung. She skipped office hours, then she skipped classes. Her department head told her she would be fired; she didn’t care. She quit her job. Her husband slept in the living room.
One night, she awoke to the sound of him shouting – the baby was hurt. The baby was suffocating. Gretel had rolled onto Emily in sleep and broken her tiny arm.
“Take her away and don’t tell me where,” Gretel sobbed, and she tossed away her heart like a pebble on a path. “Tell her I’m dead.”
Her husband (her ex-husband) obeyed. Gretel went on the job market and found another job, in Mississippi. She published papers. She got tenure. She sometimes found herself wondering if a child would show up on her doorstep – a seven-year-old runaway, or an eight-year-old, or ten. Twelve now.
“I love you so much I could just eat you up,” the witch said to them, before they were afraid of her.
“Why?” Hansel asked, snuggling under her arm.
“You’re what I want more than anything in the whole world,” the witch said, and Gretel laughed and broke off another piece of caramel windowpane. She wanted a real home more than anything, and here she was, devouring one! It all made perfect sense.
* * *
“Hey,” she says to Hansel, shoving him on the sofa. “It’s ten o’clock, and I’m going to bed. Kyle says he wants to sleep on the floor, like camping. I put out fresh towels in the bathroom.”
“Mmf,” he says, and sits up, rubbing his eyes. “Thanks. We’ll leave early in the morning.”
“And go where?”
“Mexico, I guess.”
Gretel sits next to her brother’s scrawny form. “Kyle is going to hate you and escape, if you don’t die of malnutrition first. Either way, it’s not a good idea.”
“I don’t care.”
“You’ll get arrested. You hate being locked up, remember?” She grabs one of his stick-fingers. It’s supposed to be a joke.
Hansel shakes his head. “I don’t care,” he says again. “I need to do this. I have a plan.”
Hansel and his plans! Always stuffing his pockets and hoping for the best.
“Okay,” she says. “Sleep well.”
* * *
When Hansel and Kyle are asleep, she leaves quietly, locking the door behind her. In her car, she dials 911 on her cell phone and says, “My brother kidnapped his son and he’s planning to take him out of the country.” She gives her address.
Then Gretel heads east on the dark stretch of Highway 82, toward Alabama. Did her ex-husband have relatives in South Carolina? Florida? She has no idea where she’s going, but she can almost convince herself she does; she can almost believe that she just needs to keep following the white lines of the highway, bright as silver stones.
Becky Hagenston is the author of the story collections Strange Weather (Press 53, 2010) and A Gram of Mars (Sarabande Books, 1998). She has had fiction in Southern Review, Crazyhorse, Gettysburg Review, Mid-American Review, and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. This is her second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.