Twenty-three girls, ages three to four, stamped their tap shoes.
I watched my daughter, Emma, in the large mirror through the window of the side door. There’s a bigger viewing window around the corner, in the main hall of the Tiny Stars Dance Club, but it’s always mobbed with other parents filming and taking photos of their kids.
I got sick of jockeying for position, and nobody else seemed to have figured out the side door viewing option. If only I hadn’t, then maybe things wouldn’t be so fucked up now.
At first, I thought I simply counted wrong: Twenty-three in the mirror. Yet, when the kids switched to the softer jazz shoes for the second part of class, one kid was missing. She’d been beside my daughter. I’d noticed her because she talked a lot to Emma and they were both giggling so hard I could hear it through the glass.
I’ve always had trouble making friends, and things haven’t improved since becoming a father. Other parents seemed to bond so easily over their mutual experiences as parents. I felt like an intruder whenever I brought my daughter to the park, and tap class, or anywhere really. Scrutinous looks from mothers always seemed accusatory.
I couldn’t tell them my wife would love to be here too. She just happened to have died giving birth to my only remaining reason to live clomping around with everyone else’s kids. Ella made a choice; she chose Emma.
So maybe that’s the real reason I went to the side door in the adjacent hallway. It had to stop though. My lack of community had impacted Emma.
She isn’t starting JK until this coming September. I don’t need to work. It’s her and me all day, every day, which is fine for me. Not so great for her, I imagine.
I’d never seen her so positive with another kid, and when I couldn’t see Emma’s new friend as the group crowded near my vantage point, I looked everywhere for the girl with bright, almost white hair, and green leotard.
I counted the bunch as they moved away from the bench and back onto the floor, viewable only in the mirror. Twenty-two crossed my line of sight. I was sure of it.
But then the girl was back in the reflected version of the class and beside Emma. They were holding hands. She saw me in the mirror and blew me a kiss with her tiny hand.
I had to find the parent of the blond girl. Nervous, but resolved to do something important for my daughter, I went around the corner and into the main hall where a dozen parents had dispersed onto couches and chairs and the floor. Apparently, they’d gotten enough pictures and video. I could actually see the large window.
Finding the parent in question would be easy, I figured, if they looked anything like their distinctively maned child. Yet no one there even had blond hair. I would have to ask, and I did not want to.
To procrastinate, I went to the viewing window. The whole class had joined hands to form a ring which now skipped around to music from an old ghetto blaster. Again, I couldn’t find the blond kid in the green leotard. It didn’t make sense.
Sometimes, however, kids had to go to the bathroom, and they would be taken by one of the teacher’s teenage assistants. The bathroom was in the other hallway, where I just came from. Nature must have called in the brief span of time I hadn’t been watching the class.
But then, I didn’t notice any other absence in the class. A fast count said twenty-two bodies leaping about. The kid might have gone by herself, I thought. Emma never would. She still wore diapers when she felt like it and had to be coaxed into using the toilet.
Only a few minutes left. I could wait until next week. That would be procrastinating. Emma deserved better.
“Excuse me, everyone,” I said, and no one looked. “Excuse me.” I got a little louder, and every parent looked, and not too kindly. “Um, the child with the bright blond hair… my daughter and she seem to have become friends and…” This was not going well. “And I was wondering if the parent would like to set up a playdate or something?”
The women exchanged looks and smiled as if in on a joke I would never know. Nobody claimed the blond kid, or even the dirty blond haired girl with her finger up her nose. More importantly, none of them said anything. Kind of devastated, I slunk around the corner to the side door again.
She was back, whispering in Emma’s ear before they both started giggling. Class ended and I watched their reflections until the tap teacher opened the door in the viewing area and the kids started exiting.
Parents crammed together to receive their kids, and once more, I could not find the blond kid.
“I got a unicorn sticker!” Emma proudly announced as I picked her up.
I smiled, letting her innocent wonder fill me. “That’s awesome!” Children are the best medicine for depression. If you let them be.
I looked through the big window. It wasn’t possible or, at least highly unlikely, the kid had been whisked away already.
“Emma, where’s your friend?”
The sticker was more interesting than the question.
I needed an answer though. “Emma.” I took her hand gently, and looked her in the eyes. “Emma, where’s the girl you were having so much fun with? I’d like to set up a playdate for you and her. Don’t you want to play with her some more?”
She nodded, rather somberly, I thought. Kids will do that. Say whatever they think you want to hear. Or, in this case, give a quick answer so you’ll get your coffee breath out of their face.
“Okay, okay.” I picked her, somewhat relieved I wouldn’t have to talk to another parent, a mother probably, who sadly wouldn’t want to talk with the unshaven, disheveled dad.
Next Saturday, I will try, I told myself. To alleviate the constant parental guilt I felt, I planned to get as much info from Emma as I could.
I buckled her into the back, and made her drink some water. When we were backing out of the tiny, gravel parking lot, I began the investigation.
“Emma, who was the blond girl in the class?”
It took a moment for her to process the question. “Mommy. But it’s not mommy.”
I hit the brake too hard and the whole car jerked.
Emma told me off. “Daddy!”
I turned around. “What did you say?”
She didn’t understand.
“What was the girl’s name?”
“Her name is…” Emma appeared to be thinking about it. “It’s a hard name.”
“You said it was mommy?”
“No, listen.” We were close to nap time. Her patience was running low. A car honked because I was blocking the exit. I finished backing up and finally pulled onto the road.
“I’m listening,” I told her. “Can you tell me? Emma?”
“It’s not mommy.”
“Yes. I know.” How could it be? Kids say weird shit all the time. So why was I starting to freak?
“Her name is hard. It’s like a Abadalia.”
“A Abadal?”
“Aaibadal,” a guttural voice announced in my ear. An awful ringing sound followed and I could hear nothing else. I slammed the brakes and we skidded to the edge of a ditch on the wet pavement.
Emma started to cry. Not the usual whiny whimper for attention but a quiet weeping as if she were trying to be quiet. My hands trembled and I couldn’t remember how to breathe. I moved the rear view mirror to capture Emma’s reflection and there were tears on her cheeks and a pale, rotted hand holding hers.
“J-j-j…” I couldn’t form the syllables of the curse I wanted to say. It took every ounce of will to turn the mirror some more, follow the decaying arm from the putrid hand to the creature in the backseat beside Emma.
Her hair, at least, was the same, platinum blond. The rest simply couldn’t exist. Skin like porcelain veined with black and green roots and eyes full of moving darkness, inky liquid. When it smiled, the mouth was the same, and I understood the body to be a shell. The oily thing, that’s what it was, and what it is.
“Drive, daddy, drive,” Emma begged. “It hurts.”
“S-st-stop it,” I said. “Don’t.”
“Daddy.”
I drove. I’m not sure how but certainly not safely. I continually checked the rearview, hoping it’d be gone. It didn’t seem to move at all. It was like an old photograph, slightly blurred at the edges.
“What do you want?” I managed as we neared our house.
“Take her home, daddy,” Emma said.
I had to grip the steering wheel as hard as possible to stop my shaking and prevent the building scream scratching an exit from behind my clenched teeth.
“Where does she live… sweetheart?”
“Wasp house,” Emma said. She sounded scared, obviously, but no longer pained.
I knew the place. It was an empty house around the corner, boarded up and dilapidated since before we’d moved into the neighborhood. We’d named it Wasp House for an obvious reason: A huge wasp nest hung from the porch, right above the nailed shut door.
The nest, like the house, was empty. Despite a creepy vibe, there was nothing else notable about our experience walking by the big wreck from time to time.
Maybe if I’d made some friends, they could tell me more about the house. Maybe I’d understand why a malevolent entity sat behind me.
I pulled up to the house and waited, building the nerve to look again in the mirror. When I did, the space was empty. I shoved my foot through the floor, figuratively, and got us the hell away.
When I finally stopped screaming, I pulled into McDonalds and got Emma from the car. Inside, with lots of other people around, I ordered a happy meal and a coffee. We sat in a booth, and I watched Emma get excited about the cheap plastic toy in the box.
I struggled to put it together. My hands would not stop spasming until I wrung them out and took seven deep breaths.
Emma played happily for a minute and then stopped.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, instantly alarmed, and still in such a state of shock that I could only ask stupid questions.
“Abadalia,” she said. If not for my ribs, my heart would have fallen on the floor. “She says something.”
“She says something?”
“She says she’ll see us next week.” Emma’s head sank until her chin touched the table. I got up and held her, assuring her we’d never go back to dance and were going to leave town, go far away.
Emma shook her snotty nose into my shirt and pushed back to say, “We have to go to dance, daddy. Abadalia wants us to go.”
She couldn’t bring herself to say exactly what would happen if we didn’t go, if we didn’t pick up Aaibadal next Saturday,
“Hurt,” she said.
And that was enough for me. That was enough to park out front of Wasp House next Saturday and type out this message.
Then we went to dance.
Then we drove her home.
I’m so ashamed. I didn’t look in the rear view mirror. I stayed with the other parents in the main hall where I couldn’t see all the little dancers.
When Emma left the class she looked sick with purplish bags beneath her eyes. I hugged her close and then I saw it: A bright, almost white, lock of hair down the center of her scalp.
I went to Wasp House and took Emma home, where she developed a fever. It worried me because it wouldn’t come down until I gave her Tylenol and Advil.
The fever broke on the wrong side of midnight, and she slept until dawn. When she awoke, she was quiet, reserved, and watched me with a guarded expression.
I don’t know how to write this, but it’s not my daughter. Something has changed dramatically. Emma stares out the window. She holds her tap shoes in her tiny fingers. Or someone does. Something.
It’s Sunday night.
“Six more days till the next tap class,” she tells me.
I start to cry.
I don’t think we’ll have to stop by Wasp House on our way to dance next time.