Sleeping Brides Page 10

  ***

  I drove, and I drove far, past the towns and their canals, past the windmills in the fields. My country was not large, but my journey was not linear. I circled and wound, refusing to stop until I was in a place that had everything I wanted to be familiar with.

  Then I found it. The town was flat and rural with admirable farmhouses and modest neighborhoods, but it was not small. There were plentiful businesses spread out between the farms, allowing for the possibility of employment. And if those businesses would not hire me, the city of Tilburg wasn’t too far.

  I parked the motorhome on the side of the road next to a farmyard and got out to breathe in my new home. A horse drudged towards me, its ears folded back. I picked a handful of tall grass and fed it through the fence.

  “We’re here,” I said to my child, rubbing the horse’s muzzle. “Our nest.”

  Chapter Ten

  Empty Tables

  Fifteen Years Later

  “Mama!” Rosalind called as she bounded down the stairs. “I need money!”

  I took a deep breath as I prepared a cup of coffee in our little, overly-blue kitchen. I had planned to renovate the kitchen after I bought the house, but neither time nor money had allowed. I’d grown used to it. The blue kitchen gave the house character, and it was calming. It had become my respite when I failed to find an off-button for my curious, talkative daughter.

  “I don’t have any money to give you,” I told Rosalind when she entered the kitchen. I took a long sip of my coffee so I didn’t have to see her disappointment. Coffee was not as euphoric as powder, but it was the only drug I surrendered to these days. The roar of the snow I had once known was strong. I ached for it most in my bed at night, friendless, but I didn’t have the will. Losing Rosalind was not worth the risk.

  “You work all week long. How come we never have any money?” she grumbled as she grabbed a croissant from a plate on the counter.

  I didn’t reply. There was no point explaining minimum wage, bills, and a mortgage to a teenager, not even one as astute as Rosalind. I regretted very little being a single mother, but I did regret the pocket change I could not give her.

  “I have an assignment due tomorrow,” she announced as she pulled out a slice of cheese and jam from the fridge to slather on her croissant. “I won’t be able to stop by for tea. I have too much work to do on the assignment.”

  “Mr. Hartono will understand,” I assured her, speaking of my boss at the office I worked in.

  Like everyone at the office, Mr. Hartono had raised Rosalind with me. When Rosalind was younger, I had refused to allow her to sit at home alone after school, so she would take the bus to the office. Now that she was fifteen, I gave her much more freedom to wander, but with that freedom she chose to sit with Mr. Hartono most afternoons so they could have tea together, a tradition they had shared since she was ten.

  When she was finished with her breakfast, I handed Rosalind her backpack, walked her to the door, and watched as she fixed the chain of her battered red bicycle with the reverence of someone tending to their first car. Her bike was her independence, and her independence was her vitality. In that way, she took after me, so I gave her independence to her freely, knowing that if I held on too tight, she would resist, but if I didn’t hold on at all, she would flee. A bike was much better than a motorhome.

  Is she really so close to the age I was when I had her? I thought, aghast at how fast the years had sped forward, like a broken watch that had unsynchronized time.

  “Don’t work too hard,” she said to me as she finished with the chain and hopped on the bike.

  I watched her pedal away, her chestnut curls tossing in the wind, and I looked forward to when I came home to be with her again. It would be many hours before that happened, long hours sitting at a desk older than Rosalind, scratching numbers into an archaic logbook.

  Locking the door of the house, I went to my own independence—a silver hatchback—but a man standing on the curb across the road caught my attention. Rosalind was still in sight, growing small as she pedaled through a neighborhood built of suburban homes and wholesome values. The man, who didn’t live in the cul-de-sac, transfixed on her with a distorted appreciation.

  My hands began to shake, making it impossible to open my car door. It was lucky for him, otherwise I would have backed out and ran him over. I reached down to grab a cricket bat lying in the neighbor’s yard, and I stormed across the road to confront him.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I screamed, the bat raised high.

  The man turned to me. He was startled, but he was not frightened. He didn’t have to be. I stopped in the middle of the road and dropped the bat, speechless.

  It was Daan. I hadn’t seen him since he was in prison. The years had not been kind to him. He’d held onto his good looks, with his untroubled blonde hair and arms that could protect as well as they could hurt, but he was beaten down. His face had premature lines, his clothes looked secondhand, and when he walked towards me, he had a limp.

  “Baby, you’re as foxy as ever.” He spoke with a familiar affection and confidence. It bothered me. It was as if he assumed nothing between us had changed, as if he had never told me not to visit him in prison again, as if he hadn’t failed to find us after he’d been released.

  Afraid Rosalind would turn around and see him, I grabbed him by the arm and hurried him into the house. “What the hell are you doing here?” I demanded after I slammed the door shut.

  “I came back for you, baby. For both of you.”

  It was a good thing I had dropped the cricket bat outside. “Don’t call me baby,” I said with the anger of a thousand swarms. “I haven’t been your baby since I gave birth to your actual baby. And no, you didn’t come back. To come back means you’ve been here before, but you haven’t. Our daughter doesn’t even know what her papa looks like.”

  “I know. I haven’t been there. I want to change that.”

  I didn’t believe him, not after all this time. “If you need money, I don’t have any. And I don’t have any drugs.”

  “No. No money. No drugs. Just my family, my blood.”

  “Get real. Family has to be earned,” I snapped, and I fell onto the stairs, overwhelmed. “How did you find us?”

  “The letter.”

  The letter. It was the last I’d sent him. Keeping the promise I’d made to him in the interrogation room after the robbery, I’d visited Daan in prison as soon as Rosalind was born, parking the motorhome outside the caged yard of the delinquent, a young doe drifting into hunting grounds with her fawn tucked to her breast. I was impatient to see Daan. I was grey without him, doomed if not for our child.

  When we met over a table in a dim room, he refused to look at Rosalind, and he was hard. He told me not to visit, that prison was no place for his girls. I did not understand. We weren’t locked away with him. We were safe, protected by the army of guards who ran the prison, so I refused, but it wasn’t a request. When I went to see him again, he didn’t show.

  For years, I tried to lure him out of his own confinement, sitting at an empty table, waiting, but the table remained empty. When I bought the house, I wrote the letter. I gave him our new address, and I told him how much he meant to me, that he was still my man, that our love was unbreakable. I was certain he’d join us when he was released, so much so that the nights did not seem lonely, not when I could count down the days until I saw him again. When his release came, I stayed up all night waiting, but just like the table in the prison, my house remained empty of him.

  “I sent that letter over a decade ago,” I reminded him. “Things have changed.”

  “You got a man?”

  “No, but that’s not what I mean,” I said, standing from the stairs, finding myself again. “It’s been too long, Daan. You’re vapor.”

  “So no man?” he asked, grinning.

  “Don’t look so pleased. Staying single helps me stay whole. I have to stay whole for our daughter. My daug
hter,” I corrected. Daan had no claim to her.

  He stepped closer to me, as if the absence of a man in my life tore down the wall of hurt between us. “You really do look good. Curves suit you.”

  I couldn’t do this. Thankful that I was running late for work, I pushed Daan aside and opened the front door. “Do you have somewhere to go?”

  “Nowhere I want to. I want to be here.”

  “Fine. You can stay, but don’t tell Rosalind you’re her papa, not until I can figure this out. I don’t want to get her hopes up. Tell her you’re a friend. Or a burglar. Tell her anything but the truth.”

  “That’s bogue.”

  “I mean it, Daan.” It felt strange saying his name out loud. It’d been so long since I had.

  He frowned, insulted by my insistence. “Chill. I won’t tell her.”

  Unable to cope, I went to my car, and I sped away, but I didn’t go to work, not straight away. I pulled into a parking lot a few streets down, and I cried. Love must have been immune to time. My feelings for Daan were still there. I wanted him to leave, to sentence him to a life of solitude, as much as I wanted to fall into his arms. But things had changed. I was no longer a soulful teen. I was a single mother in her thirties. And I was late for work.

  ***

  Four lorries were parked in the loading zone outside the office of the shipping company where I worked. On a busy day, there were two lorries at a time. Four was a siege. It was my job to input the numbers of each load into the logbook. I didn’t have to be there when the drivers arrived, but I did have to get their sheets off of them before they left. Loners by nature, few drivers had the tolerance to navigate the office to turn their sheets in directly to me, so I had to chase them down.

  Except for this morning, it seemed. The sheets had already been collected and lay in a neat pile upon the rifts of my desk. Babetta had come to my rescue, the stain of her red lipstick visible on the top sheet, her signature.

  “Thank you,” I mouthed to Babetta, who sat across the office, a Spanish vixen tucked into the corner of a dreary cave.

  In acknowledgement, Babetta held up a piece of stationary with a heart drawn in the center, but she dropped it when her cigarette began burning a hole in the paper.

  The shipping company had once been the largest of its kind in the province, but it had faced difficult times in the last decade and had downsized, turning an old loading dock into an office space a dozen of us shared. The open space reminded me of a newsroom floor, but it was nowhere near as impulsive as a newsroom. The high concrete walls did not buzz; they flat-lined. The atmosphere was friendly, but it was as monotonous as a retirement home. Babetta sat at the far end with the account books, but we found ways to make the workday less tedious, like two schoolgirls refusing to sit apart.

  I flipped through the sheets, triggering a well-known pain in my wrist. My job was little more than data entry, but the entry was done by hand. With the company barely staying afloat, Mr. Hartono didn’t have the means to invest in computers for the office, not unless we were willing to sacrifice part of our wages. I understood it, but I also worried that without computers, it would be impossible for the company to stay competitive. Everyone had computers. Even Rosalind’s school had opened a computer lab last year—computers with color monitors, not the thick green screens. I would take a green screen if it meant saving me the pain that formed in my wrist each day I was forced to scribble into the logbook.

  I shoved the sheets away, feeling sick. Daan stuck to my mind like dirty gum. I couldn’t sit still knowing he was in my house, so I went to Babetta.

  “Daan’s back,” I informed her.

  With her vivacious red lips, Babetta seldom dropped her smile, but she did then. She passed me her cigarette. “You need this.”

  “Thanks,” I said, inhaling as I leaned against her desk.

  “So what does the bastard want?” she asked, lighting another stick for herself.

  “His family.”

  Babetta scoffed. “You haven’t seen a check off that man. He doesn’t deserve his family. Tell him to hand you a check or fuck off.”

  I flicked the ash from my cigarette the way I wish I could flick Daan out of my memories. “That would be easy to do, but I have to think of Rosalind. She’s wondered about Daan for years. I don’t think I can deprive her of the opportunity to know her papa.”

  “He’s not her father. Deddy Hartono is more father to her than Daan is.” She pointed a long manicured nail to the renovated security room Mr. Hartono called his office. “Hell, even Michael the janitor is more father to her than Daan is. Has Daan even met Rosalind?”

  “No, not since she was a newborn. He saw her this morning from across the road, but they didn’t meet.”

  Babetta shook her head as she tapped her cigarette. “I don’t like it. You don’t know what he’s been up to. When a man suddenly reappears, he either wants something, or he’s full of regret.”

  “There was no regret,” I admitted. “He said what he needed to say, but there was no apology.”

  “Then he wants something, and not just his family. I’m sure of it.”

  I wanted to chat more, but Mr. Hartono called for me over the intercom. Quickly, I put out my cigarette and straightened my skirt. Mr. Hartono cared little about creases. He was informal. He had to be, with so many cutbacks, but I wanted to be professional, to show him I cared about the company and my position in it.

  His office was a restricted, untidy space with a window that overlooked the rest of the building. In it, Mr. Hartono was like a shoemaker stuck in his own shoe, but if it bothered him, he never let it show.

  “Good morning,” I greeted.

  “Good morning, Miss Cloet,” Mr. Hartono returned. From on top of a file cabinet, he retrieved a box of tea. The box was made of bamboo with a lotus flower carved on the top, a jewel amongst the junk that littered his office. With it, and the electric kettle that was already boiled, he prepared a cup of chamomile tea and handed it to me. “To calm the nerves. You seemed upset when you walked in. Do you want to go home? You can take a personal day.”

  “No, thank you. Home is the last place I want to be.”

  “I see,” he hummed as he prepared a cup for himself. “Would you like to talk about it?”

  His voice was soothing and enriching, like a bard full of pretty verses. I didn’t keep much from Mr. Hartono, he was a confidante as much as he was a boss, but I restrained telling him about Daan. There wasn’t much to tell, not until I figured it out.

  “It was a bad morning,” I responded. “Nothing more.”

  To change the subject, I asked him about a painting on his wall. It was of a parasol with a gold dome and a light pink canopy the color of cherry blossoms. “Is that new?”

  “To the office, not to me,” he answered, admiring it. “It belonged to my mother, before she passed. It symbolizes protection wherever protection is needed. The skin of the parasol shields us from the rain and the sun.”

  I set the cup of tea on his desk, untouched. Tea was a taste I had never acquired. “Does the company need protection?”

  Mr. Hartono smiled, refracting the sudden cloud I’d brought. “All small businesses do. We’ll survive.”

  If the company did survive, it was because of the long hours Mr. Hartono put in. With no wife or children, his employees were his priority. I should be grateful for his ethos, it was what made him so receptive to Rosalind spending her days here after school, but it was hard to be grateful for something that left a good man alone at his desk late into the night.

  “The skin of the parasol may shield us from the rain and the sun, but it is the person holding the handle who is the true protector,” I professed before dismissing myself.

  ***

  Rosalind was home. Her bike leaned carefully against the side of the house like a patient friend. I had hoped she’d gone to a classmate’s house to complete her assignment. It would have given me more time to figure out what I would do with Daan, whether I woul
d tell him to leave or give him a chance to be her papa. I thought about calling Babetta and asking if she would take Rosalind for a few hours, but it wouldn’t make a difference. Rosalind was in there with him, and she’d want her voice to be heard.

  I touched the handlebar of her bike, wishing it still had tassels. If the watch keeping track of my life was broken, I’d very much like it to wind backwards, to before I sent Daan the letter. What did I really know about him? He was her father, but that didn’t exonerate his absence or offer cause for his sudden appearance. He could be a fugitive. Or a drug dealer. He could be snorting coke right now…

  I hurried inside, reprimanding myself for allowing Daan to stay and for putting Rosalind in a vulnerable position with a man she did not know. I found them sitting on the sofa in the front room. She was tucked into his arm with a story she’d written at school, laughing over some character in it.

  “Look, Papa’s here!” she cheered.

  “You weren’t supposed to say anything,” I reminded Daan, conflicted at the sight of them together.

  “I didn’t tell her,” he contended.

  “He didn’t,” Rosalind confirmed. “I knew instantly. I look just like him.”

  She was his image. She didn’t have his blonde hair. Hers was much darker, inherited from her grandfather, but she did have Daan’s empowered blue eyes and firm chin. She was a softer version of his masculinity. I’d pushed it aside to cope with his abandonment of us, but it was undeniable with them together—Rosalind resembled him more than she ever had me.

  “Mama has gotten brave,” Daan said, amused. “She used to be lenient, like cotton. Now she’s fierce, like a lioness. I like it. She wears it well.”

  His compliment had no value to me. At least, I pretended it didn’t. “Of course I’ve gotten brave. I’ve had to raise our child on my own.”