The Starving Little Girl Who Saved Her Tribe novel · Chapter 3 of 24
Chapter 3: Mar
Ilu has her first bath and first stove light while Lois argues with herself about calling the police. A man coughs in the dark beyond the wall.
Lois did not call the police.
She stood in her cellar for a long minute with her phone in her hand and her thumb over the nine.
Then she looked at the little girl beside her, who was pointing at the dark hole and talking very fast.
"Cave," Ilu said, in a voice that did not belong to any word Lois knew. "Mama. Cave. Man."
"I know, I know," said Lois. "I don't know. I don't know anything, honey."
She put the phone in her pocket.
Then she pushed the canning shelf back across the hole, and the jars rattled, and the dark was gone.
Ilu made a small crying sound and tried to push it back.
"No. Just for now. I need to think. Coffee first."
She did not know why she said it.
She had said it every morning for thirty-one years, to a husband who was no longer there to hear it.
She carried the girl upstairs and set her on the counter.
Up close in the daylight, the child was tiny.
Her cheekbones stood out, and her wrists were thin enough that Lois could have circled both with her fingers.
Her parka was made of some thick animal skin, stitched with sinew, and it smelled like smoke.
Her leggings were fur too, and her boots were wrapped in hide with the hair turned in.
Lois had been a cafeteria cook for twenty-six years.
She knew what a hungry child looked like.
She had given a hundred of them extra tater tots when the lunch accounts ran dry.
She had never seen one this hungry.
"Okay," she said, pushing up her sleeves. "First we eat. Then a bath. Then we figure out which museum you escaped from."
She made oatmeal with brown sugar, and watched the child eat it with a spoon.
She made toast, and the toast vanished.
She cracked three eggs into a pan, and the girl got up on her knees to watch the whites go from clear to white.
"Magic," Lois said, and pointed. "Egg."
"Ay-guh."
"That's it. Egg."
"Ay-guh. Egg." Ilu took the plate and ate the scrambled egg with her fingers, and looked at Lois with her cheeks full.
She pointed at the loaf. "Bread?"
Lois's hands stopped.
"Oh, you're quick," she said softly. "Aren't you quick."
After breakfast she ran the bath.
The girl would not get in at first, and Lois understood.
Water, where this child came from, was something that could kill you.
She knelt by the tub and swirled the warm water with her hand.
She put her own foot in, sock and all, and made a face of pure bliss.
"Warm. See? Warm."
Ilu touched the surface with one finger.
Her whole face changed.
She climbed in so fast the water sloshed over the side, and sat down to her chin, and shut her eyes.
Lois stayed on the closed toilet lid with a towel in her lap, and tried not to cry.
The girl came out of the water a different shade.
She was not gray any more.
She was a warm brown, with dark curls that Lois combed out gently with her fingers.
There was a scrape on both knees, and Lois cleaned and bandaged them.
She found a flannel shirt of her late husband's that came down to the child's ankles.
It was the only thing in the house that didn't make her stop breathing, and she was a little surprised by that.
Then, with the girl on her lap, Lois made herself say it out loud.
"Honey, I have to call someone. A nice woman, or a doctor. They'd help you find your mama."
She mimed a phone at her ear, and she pointed at the front door.
Ilu understood the last part.
She went rigid and grabbed Lois's sweater with both hands.
"No," she said. "No. Mar. Mama no, Mama."
Then a stream of her own words tumbled out, and tears spilled down her face for the first time.
She pointed at the cellar door.
She pointed at the floor.
She made a motion with her hands, a fox den, a hole, and then she made a gesture Lois had seen in a nature documentary.
Cold, hands tucked under her arms.
Two people sitting in the dark.
Then she held up three fingers, and pointed at herself and at the air beside her.
Three had been left, and she was the only one who had come out.
Lois's mouth went dry.
"Somebody is down there," she whispered.
Ilu nodded hard.
"Man," she said, and coughed twice to show. "Boy. Mar. Please."
Lois looked at the door to the cellar for a long moment.
She was fifty-eight years old and she lived by herself at the end of a county road.
Her husband had been dead for three years, and nobody had asked her to do anything difficult since.
"Well," she said. "I've got a flashlight."
She stood up with the girl on her hip, and got a coat, and got the big flashlight from the drawer.
She took the loaf of bread, too, and a jar of soup, because it felt wrong to go anywhere empty-handed.
The cellar was cold and quiet.
She set Ilu down, moved the canning shelf, and shone the beam into the hole.
The stone beyond was a tunnel, rough and low.
The draft that came out of it was cold at the edges and warm in the middle.
She crouched, shaking, and held the light as far in as her arm would go.
Far back in the tunnel there was a faint orange glint of something that could have been a coal.
And out of the dark, thin and wet and close, a man began to cough.
It was the cough of someone who had been coughing for a long time and was going to stop soon.
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