Hardly Knew Her

A trio of quick, high beeps sounded, the signal that the front door had been opened and closed. Mrs. Delafield always turned the alarm off when she went out because she didn’t know how to program it. Terri, frozen in front of her reflection, wondered what she should do. Call out to the intruder that someone was home? A

“What the fuck?” asked Mr. Delafield, and, at that moment, Terri hated every adult in River Run who had fought his helicopter, even her own parents. If Mr. Delafield still had his helicopter, she would have heard him coming from a long way off.

“I’m the babysitter. Terri.” She fought the impulse to cross her arms against her chest, as that would only draw attention to the gun in her hand.

“Oh,” said the blond man with a ruddy face-it was impossible for him to turn even redder, yet Terri thought he seemed embarrassed. For her or himself? “And-that? Do you bring that to all your babysitting jobs?”

She glanced down at the sweet silver gun, held at her hip as if it were a small purse. “No. No, that’s not mine. It’s yours.”

“Not mine. You mean it’s Jakkie’s? Jakkie has a gun? Son of a bitch. Why would Jakkie have a gun?”

Terri shrugged, not wanting to tell Mr. Delafield that she had always assumed it was because his wife feared him, with his big, shambling body and red, red face. Now she wondered if he feared his wife, if she had overlooked some menace in Mrs. Delafield’s ditziness.

“Where did you find it?” Terri’s right hand, the one holding the gun, gestured loosely toward the open drawer, and he ducked his head, as if expecting it to go off. “With her pretty little panties, huh? Well, no wonder I never saw it.”

The situation was so surreal, to use a word of which Terri was particularly fond at the time, that she couldn’t figure out how to behave. She put the gun on top of the built-in bureau and slipped on Mrs. Delafield’s most prosaic robe.

“I was just looking at it,” she said, as if that explained everything. “No one I know owns a gun.”

“Well, I didn’t know anyone I knew had a gun, either.” He laughed, and Terri joined him, a little nervously.

“You looked nice,” he said, as if he didn’t mean it but wanted to be polite. “In the gown, I mean.”

“It doesn’t really fit right.”

“Oh. Well, you can get stuff altered, right? Jakkie does it all the time.”

Did he not know that the gown was his wife’s? Or was he pretending to think otherwise, to spare Terri the humiliation of being caught in violation of almost every rule of good babysitting? Or was it possible that he really liked how Terri looked? Terri was terrified that he might come toward her, or touch her in some way. She was terrified he wouldn’t.

“Hugo’s asleep,” she offered, reminding him of who she was and why she was here.

“Hugo,” he said. “You know, I have no idea where she got that name. Maybe from Baby Huey. He has too many chromosomes. Or not enough. If I had married what my daughters call an age-appropriate woman, someone thirty-five or forty, she would have had amnio, and we would have known before he was born. Or we wouldn’t have kids at all. But Jakkie was only twenty-three when she got pregnant, and Hugo’s a freak. He won’t live past the age of five.”

“He’s just big.”

“He is. Huge Hugo. But he’s screwed up, too. I don’t know what Jakkie’s going to do when he dies. I wonder if that’s why she bought the gun.” He shook his head, disagreeing with himself. “No, she’ll go in a slow, catatonic decline, refusing to eat, wandering around the house in her robe. In that robe. All these clothes, and she spends most of her time in that robe.”

“Oh.” Terri had grabbed it because the blue fla

“It’s okay.” Waving his hands in front of his face, fa

She knew, from the River Run Self-Esteem Project, that this was how such things began. Men gave you gifts or money, then asked for favors in return. Teachers, coaches, neighbors-the girls at River Run had been taught to assume they were all potential predators, far more sex-crazed than their male peers.

“I couldn’t possibly,” she demurred.

“Suit yourself. Put, um, everything back where you found it.”

And with that, he was gone. Terri listened to him leave the room and walk downstairs, then waited another minute before going into the bedroom to change. She then returned to the closet and made sure everything was where it belonged. She assumed Mr. Delafield would tell Mrs. Delafield what she had done, and she would lose this weekly gig, an easy $25 by anyone’s standards. But losing her job did not bother her as much as the encounter itself. It was not unlike a dream she had from time to time. A man, an older one-one taller and darker than Mr. Delafield-found her alone somewhere and just…took over. It was at once a scary and comforting dream, one that always ended a little too soon. That was what she was feeling now-relieved, yet desirous of knowing what might have happened if Mr. Delafield had kept going. Would he have been more insistent with a different kind of girl-someone truly beautiful, like Katarina Swa

Mrs. Delafield came home at seven, as always, and seemed indifferent to Terri’s news that Mr. Delafield was in his den, watching television while working out on his elliptical machine. No one, not even Terri, stopped to wonder why he hadn’t sent Terri home and assumed Hugo’s care. For the next six days, Terri waited for Mrs. Delafield to call and say she wouldn’t be needing Terri anymore, but the call never came. She went back at three P.M. the following week and everything was as it always was-the quiet house, the listless baby (who now seemed more precious to Terri because he was doomed), the gun in the lingerie drawer. Caught once, Terri knew she should turn over a new leaf, but she found herself in the walk-in closet within twenty minutes, modeling lingerie and holding the gun. This time she moved on to Mrs. Delafield’s evening dresses, which she had never dared touch before. She listened for the door to beep, refusing to admit to herself that her ears were straining toward that sound because she wanted to hear it. She had started a diet-for senior prom, she assured her mother, who grudgingly allowed it. Terri’s mom hated diets. But it was working already, she could tell. Mrs. Delafield’s things were not so tight in the waist this week.

Mr. Delafield did not come home early that day, or the next week, or the week after. He never came home early again. In April, he stopped coming home at all. His absence, like most absences, took time to register. First a neighbor realized the Town Car had stopped gliding in and out of the driveway at its usual hours. Then Terri noticed the pile of bundled-up Wall Street Journals in the three-car garage, placed in a basket, as if Mr. Delafield might return and want to work through two weeks, three weeks, an entire month of business news. It was only when Mrs. Delafield put out the whole collection for recycling-on the wrong day, in the wicker basket, and still bundled in their plastic wrappers, in violation of every protocol-that Terri realized Mr. Delafield was never coming back. The following Tuesday, Mrs. Delafield paid her $20 instead of the usual $25 and Terri finally understood that the extra five dollars had always been a tip, one Mrs. Delafield had decided she could no longer afford.