“He ate a fine meal,” said Ginnie to me. “Didn’t you?”
“There was pie,” I told my parents. “For dessert.”
My father’s brow was creased. He looked confused. Then he put his hand into the pocket of his car coat, and pulled out something long and green, with toilet paper wrapped around the top. “You forgot your toothbrush,” he said. “Thought you’d want it.”
“Now, if he wants to come home, he can come home,” my mother was saying to Ginnie Hempstock. “He went to stay the night at the Kovacses’ house a few months ago, and by nine he was calling us to come and get him.”
Christopher Kovacs was two years older and a head taller than me, and he lived with his mother in a large cottage opposite the entrance to our lane, by the old green water tower. His mother was divorced. I liked her. She was funny, and drove a VW Beetle, the first I had ever seen. Christopher owned many books I had not read, and was a member of the Puffin Club. I could read his Puffin books, but only if I went to his house. He would never let me borrow them.
There was a bunk bed in Christopher’s bedroom, although he was an only child. I was given the bottom bunk, the night I stayed there. Once I was in bed, and Christopher Kovacs’s mother had said good night to us and she had turned out the bedroom light and closed the door, he leaned down and began squirting me with a water pistol he had hidden beneath his pillow. I had not known what to do.
“This isn’t like when I went to Christopher Kovacs’s house,” I told my mother, embarrassed. “I like it here.”
“What are you wearing?” She stared at my Wee Willie Winkie nightgown in puzzlement.
Ginnie said, “He had a little accident. He’s wearing that while his pajamas are drying.”
“Oh. I see,” said my mother. “Well, good night, dear. Have a nice time with your new friend.” She peered down at Lettie. “What’s your name again, dear?”
“Lettie,” said Lettie Hempstock.
“Is it short for Letitia?” asked my mother. “I knew a Letitia when I was at university. Of course, everybody called her Lettuce.”
Lettie just smiled, and did not say anything at all.
My father put my toothbrush down on the table in front of me. I unwrapped the toilet paper around the head. It was, unmistakably, my green toothbrush. Under his car coat my father was wearing a clean white shirt, and no tie.
I said, “Thank you.”
“So,” said my mother. “What time should we be by to pick him up in the morning?”
Ginnie smiled even wider. “Oh, Lettie will bring him back to you. We should give them some time to play, tomorrow morning. Now, before you go, I baked some scones this afternoon . . .”
And she put some scones into a paper bag, which my mother took politely, and Ginnie ushered her and my father out of the door. I held my breath until I heard the sound of the Rover driving away back up the lane.
“What did you do to them?” I asked. And then, “Is this really my toothbrush?”
“That,” said Old Mrs. Hempstock, with satisfaction in her voice, “was a very respectable job of snipping and stitching, if you ask me.” She held up my dressing gown: I could not see where she had removed a piece, nor where she had stitched it up. It was seamless, the mend invisible. She passed me the scrap of fabric on the table that she had cut. “Here’s your evening,” she said. “You can keep it, if you wish. But if I were you, I’d burn it.”
The rain pattered against the window, and the wind rattled the window frames.
I picked up the jagged-edged sliver of cloth. It was damp. I got up, waking the kitten, who sprang off my lap and vanished into the shadows. I walked over to the fireplace.
“If I burn this,” I asked them, “will it have really happened? Will my daddy have pushed me down into the bath? Will I forget it ever happened?”
Ginnie Hempstock was no longer smiling. Now she looked concerned. “What do you want?” she asked.
“I want to remember,” I said. “Because it happened to me. And I’m still me.” I threw the little scrap of cloth onto the fire.
There was a crackle and the cloth smoked, then it began to burn.
I was under the water. I was holding on to my father’s tie. I thought he was going to kill me . . .
I screamed.
I was lying on the flagstone floor of the Hempstocks’ kitchen and I was rolling and screaming. My foot felt like I had trodden, barefoot, on a burning cinder. The pain was intense. There was another pain, too, deep inside my chest, more distant, not as sharp: a discomfort, not a burning.
Ginnie was beside me. “What’s wrong?”
“My foot. It’s on fire. It hurts so much.”
She examined it, then licked her finger, touched it to the hole in my sole from which I had pulled the worm, two days before. There was a hissing noise, and the pain in my foot began to ease.
“En’t never seen one of these before,” said Ginnie Hempstock. “How did you get it?”