The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares Read Free

name but he seemed to like her.
    Dairy products, a box of tissue. Canned tomatoes. Two six-packs of beer, cold. For all he knew, Leah had a husband. He was the beer drinker, the husband.
    Leah saw that her hands were trembling. She needed a drink, to steady her hands,
    “Ma ris sa!”
    She was thirty-four years old. Her daughter was eleven. So far as anyone in Leah’s family knew, including her parents, she had been “amicably divorced” for seven years. Her former husband, a medical school dropout, had disappeared somewhere in northern California; they had lived together in Berkeley, having met at the university in the early 1990s.
    Impossible to locate the former husband/father whose name was not Bantry.
    She would be asked about him, she knew. She would be asked about numerous things.
    She would explain: eleven is too old for day care. Eleven is fully capable of coming home alone . . . Eleven can be responsible for . . .
    At the refrigerator she fumbled for a can of beer. She opened it and drank thirstily. The liquid was freezing cold, her head began to ache immediately: an icy spot like a coin between her eyes. How can you! At a time like this! She didn’t want to panic and call 911 before she’d thought this through. Something was staring her in the face, some explanation, maybe?
    Distraught Single Mom. Modest Apartment.
    Missing Eleven-Year-Old. “ Learning Disabilities .”
    Clumsily Leah retraced her steps through the apartment another time. She was looking for . . . Throwing more widely open those doors she’d already opened. Kneeling beside Marissa’s bed to peer beneath in a burst of desperate energy.
    And finding—what? A lone sock.
    As if Marissa would be hiding beneath a bed!
    Marissa who loved her mother, would never never wish to worry or upset or hurt her mother. Marissa who was young for her age, never rebellious, sulky. Marissa whose idea of badness was forgetting to make her bed in the morning. Leaving the bathroom mirror above the sink splattered with water.
    Marissa who’d asked Mommy, “Do I have a daddy somewhere like other girls, and he knows about me?”
    Marissa who’d asked, blinking back tears, “Why do they make fun of me, Mommy? Am I slow ?”
    In public school classes had been too large, her teacher hadn’t had time or patience for Marissa. So Leah had enrolled her at Skatskill Day where classes were limited to fifteen students and Marissa would have special attention from her teacher and yet: still she was having trouble with arithmetic, she was teased, called “slow” . . . Laughed at even by girls she’d thought were her friends.
    “Maybe she’s run away.”
    Out of nowhere this thought struck Leah.
    Marissa had run away from Skatskill. From the life Mommy had worked so hard to provide for her.
    “That can’t be! Never.”
    Leah swallowed another mouthful of beer. Self-medicating, it was. Still her heart was beating in rapid thumps, then missing a beat. Hoped to God she would not faint . . .
    “Where? Where would Marissa go? Never. ”
    Ridiculous to think that Marissa would run away!
    She was far too shy, passive. Far too uncertain of herself. Other children, particularly older children, intimidated her. Because Marissa was unusually attractive, a beautiful child with silky blond hair to her shoulders, brushed by her proud mother until it shone, sometimes braided by her mother into elaborate plaits, Marissa often drew unwanted attention; but Marissa had very little sense of herself and of how others regarded her.
    She had never ridden a bus alone. Never gone to a movie alone. Rarely entered any store alone, without Leah close by.
    Yet it was the first thing police would suspect, probably: Marissa had run away.
    “Maybe she’s next door. Visiting the neighbors.”
    Leah knew this was not likely. She and Marissa were on friendly terms with their neighbors but they never visited one another. It wasn’t that kind of apartment complex, there were few other