Dark Terrors 5: The Gollancz Book of Horror

MELANIE TEM Alicia

Puberty hit Alicia early and hard. After two other daughters who’d been more or less impossible in their early teens, we’d been hoping for a late-bloomer, but when she had noticeable if asymmetrical breast buds by the time she was ten and got her period well before her eleventh birthday, we knew we were in for trouble.

‘She’s growing up so fast,’ became my husband’s refrain. At first he’d sound more plaintive or ironic than seriously alarmed; alarm came later.

This annoyed me, because I didn’t want my daughter to be afraid of her adolescence, even if her parents were. I needn’t have worried. ‘She’s growing up at exactly the pace she’s supposed to,’ I’d say a little testily, meaning to be reassuring to both Alicia and her father. But as time went on I wasn’t so sure.

Soon the older girls started pointing out, with equal parts envy and annoyance and with sly glances in our direction, that their little sister had a more respectable cleavage than they did. She started getting hips, couldn’t buy pants to fit her in the girls’ department any more.

The spring she turned twelve, she grew a good six inches between Christmas and the end of school; you could practically see her legs elongating with every lope across the soccer field. For a little while it was obvious from the sidelines that she suddenly wasn’t familiar with her body or her emotions: elbows flew all over the place; when the action was at the other end of the field her attention visibly spumed away like little curls of steam; once she kicked the ball into the opponents’ goal and burst into tears so hysterical she had to be pulled from the game. But it didn’t take her long to get herself together, and before that season was over Alicia was the best forward on the team, because of a truly formidable concentration she learned to bring to bear.

Suddenly ninety per cent of the phone calls were for Alicia, from giddy, snotty girls and boys with squeaky voices; a few boys who sounded alarmingly older didn’t call more than a few times, so I restrained myself to a raised eyebrow. Her big sisters reported that she would say things — statements, never questions — obviously intended to draw them into discussions of sex and love. Her tender age made them decidedly uncomfortable with this; they were just old enough for a dawning perception that parental worries and rules might not be completely arbitrary, but still sufficiently close to Alicia’s age to think maybe they ought to ally themselves with her against us. I must admit I took a certain ignoble amusement in their discomfiture, remembering how difficult they’d been.

A sense began to gather of something impending — not doom, exactly, but something threatening. My husband and I both became vigilant. We analysed Alicia’s every state of mind, her every action. We wondered what she was thinking, even when she seemed to be telling us. We talked about Alicia so much and so fruitlessly that I, beginning to resent her ubiquitousness, would try to change the subject, but my husband was even more obsessed with her than I was and he’d bring it right back to her. It became hard to think of anything else.

Whereas the older girls had been moody — bursting into tears if a waiter brought them regular instead of cherry Coke; having to be sent from the dinner table to get a giggling fit under some semblance of control — Alicia remained relatively even-tempered. The most noticeable change was in her relationship with her father. She’d always been Daddy’s girl. Now she’d talk to him in a tone she’d never use with me, just this side of disrespectful, or she’d give him a rather skilful cold shoulder at his slightest unresponsiveness, actual or imagined, to her slightest desire, whether or not he could possibly have known what it was. At the same time, she was more overtly affectionate with him than usual, often snuggling against him on the couch or grabbing his hand as they walked across a parking lot, and she was openly flirtatious, sauntering past him just out of the shower wrapped only in a towel, soliciting his opinion about whether she could still decently wear last year’s bathing suit.

My husband, a sensible man, tried to remember what he knew from raising the older girls, to give her feedback and set limits for her without taking things personally. I tried to stay out of it, to let them work out their relationship themselves and trust that he had his own ways of dealing with it. After a confrontation with her, overt or subtle, he’d often retreat to his garden, which for some time had been a source of solace and inspiration for him and, now that he was skilled enough to try things like topiary and cultivating more exotic plants, functioned as distraction, too.

But often I couldn’t stand it and would step in to protect him from her. This was, after all, the man I loved, and this nubile young woman was treating him shabbily. Besides that, I was aware of a kind of primal jealousy, the intensity of which shocked me; this was my man, and she couldn’t have him.

One day it came to me what she was doing. She was practising on him, trying out various ways of behaving with men, testing her power. This was all perfectly normal behaviour for an adolescent girl with a trustworthy father, and the older girls had done some of it, too, but something about Alicia’s concentrated version was chilling.

Our house was positively awash in female hormones. I’d started the hot flashes and emotional lability of menopause. Our oldest daughter, living with her new husband in the basement apartment, was pregnant. And Alicia, beautiful and poised and not even officially a teenager yet, exuded a sexuality that took us all aback, at first even her. Palpable as an electromagnetic field, it charged the air, gave her a sort of aura. It changed her voice, her skin tone, the way she sat in a chair and walked across a room and lounged in a doorway. Something new had come into this daughter, and it excited and worried me deeply.

Long accustomed to being the only male in a house full of women, pampered and revered and out of a particular sort of gender-based fondness sometimes not quite taken seriously, my husband was nonetheless finding this almost too much for him, and he’d threaten to run away for the next few years He was joking, but not entirely.

’Men have hormones too, you know,’ one of us would jibe. ‘Men have midlife crises, too. Where’s your red convertible? Gonna go have t a tummy tuck?’

’Who’s got time for a midlife crisis in this family?’ he’d grumble.

Once Alicia took the banter to a quite different level by saying coyly, ’I bet you’ve got a bimbo on the side, don’t you, Daddy? Somebody young enough to be your daughter? Maybe one of our friends?’ She named two or three of her sisters’ friends and even one of her own who’d been wearing a lot of make-up and very tight tank tops since grade school, and fixed her father with a decidedly grown-up leer.

She’d gone too far. She’d pushed an edgy playfulness over into some darker, sleazier territory. There was a thunderous silence. Then her father, face flushed and lips pressed into a hard white line, left the room.

’What’d I do?’ Alicia asked, with an innocence that could have been genuine, and I didn’t know what to say.

‘She’s too young!’ he kept insisting, as if taking a stand on principle would change what was happening with Alicia. ‘She shouldn’t even be thinking about such things.’ But she was. We did hold the line on the accoutrements of sexual development like make-up and braless midriff tops and anything close to dating, but the currents of erotic energy still roiled.

Part of the difficulty for us was language. We heard her saying ‘I love you’ to virtually every boy to whom she took a fancy, however fleeting. She spoke of ‘going out with’ or ‘being with’ somebody when all they were doing was seeing each other at school and talking on the phone. She referred to whatever boy she liked at the moment as her boyfriend and seemed not at all fazed when her boyfriend was somebody else the next week. She’d say with satisfaction, ‘I guess I’m popular, huh?’ and I’d try to gauge whether this was anything more than a healthy self-image awkwardly expressed; I began uneasily to think that it was.

Increasingly bothered, I tried to engage her in conversations about the power of words to shape reality, and she didn’t actively shut me out, but she didn’t say anything, either, and I couldn’t tell whether she’d taken my point or not. Of our three daughters, Alicia was turning out to be the hardest to read; I wouldn’t have called her secretive, exactly, but her private self was virtually unassailable, a cache of thoughts and feelings and knowledge about herself and the world that she guarded like the dangerous treasure it was.

Alicia was a few months into seventh grade when Todd appeared on the scene. Actually, she told me with a hint of smugness that I didn’t at the time understand, they were in the same class and had known each other for a couple of years, but neither had found the other particularly worth notice until now. ‘What’s different?’ I enquired, trying for the right degree of maternal interest. ‘Is it that he’s grown up?’

She shook her head, her sun-streaked brown hair shining. ‘Not really. But I have.’

Todd’s mother told me later, before I realised enough about what had happened between our children to stop talking to her about it, that she was a single mother and Todd was her only child; they’d always been really close. He was such a good kid, a straight-A student, track star and serious artist, never in trouble of any kind, never having needed any but the mildest discipline, kind and responsible and happy. He’d been showing no signs of interest in girls until suddenly one day he fell head over heels for Alicia. It was, she said somewhat wistfully, as if he’d been pulled out of childhood into adolescence overnight, before she was ready for it and, she worried, before he was.

When I told her Alicia was the youngest of three, she said in all seriousness that she’d defer to my experience in this. ‘Oh, my, don’t do that,’ I protested. ‘I don’t know any more than you do.’ She laughed, as though I were being falsely modest. And, in fact, what I said wasn’t entirely accurate; I did know enough about kids to realise that there was something outside the normal range about Alicia.

Todd’s mother and I chuckled wryly together about the power of love, and commiserated with each other about the interesting next few years in store for us both. I was to remember that conversation more than once as the Todd-Alicia story unfolded; in retrospect, wistfulness and amusement, however wry and knowing, came to seem shockingly off the mark, and commiseration a woefully inadequate reaction. But even if I’d been more aware then of what was going on, what would I have said to Todd’s mother? ‘Tell your son to beware of my little girl’?

It started one autumn Saturday when Alicia was out raking leaves. This was not a chore she did willingly, but, unlike her sisters, she didn’t waste time on pouting or tantrums; once it became apparent to her that she couldn’t talk her way out of something odious, she’d set her jaw and do it. If I’d been the one to insist, that would pretty much be the end of it. If it had been her father, she’d make him pay by barely speaking to him for the rest of the day or, if it was late, going to bed without saying goodnight, which especially vexed him. It wasn’t that she thought she’d make him stop telling her to do things she didn’t want to do or saying no to things she did, but she knew her coldness bothered him, and she seemed to relish the excuse to demonstrate her influence over him. I didn’t like this pattern much, but it was fascinating to observe.

Todd came by on his bicycle that morning, as he often did since our house was on the least direct route possible between his house and the grocery store where he was often sent. He sped past as usual, not stopping, probably hardly even glancing at Alicia. I was out in the yard myself, and I saw her follow him with her eyes, though the motion of the rake didn’t falter. Todd came back around the block. In his laboured pedalling and downcast eyes there was a strong hint of reluctance, and I had the distinct impression that Alicia had willed him back, just to see if she could.

He pulled over to the curb, childishly dragging one sneaker in the leaf-filled gutter. They exchanged a few words, inaudible to me. Her sweet high giggle made my heart race, and I could only imagine what it was doing to Todd. Then he rode off. The interlude hadn’t even been long enough for me to complain about her not getting her work done.

But it accomplished its purpose. Todd wandered back again that afternoon, this time ringing the bell and keeping his voice from cracking long enough to ask for Alicia, whom I discovered waiting at the top of the stairs out of his line of sight.

Very soon it became obvious that her feelings for this gangly, awkward kid, a few weeks younger than she was, were something new. It was quite as though she’d decided this would be something new. Nearly all of her formidable attention was brought to bear on Todd, which made me pity him and wonder about his stamina.

Alicia did her homework quickly and correctly, but minimally and without interest, using only the thinnest surface layer of her mind. Despite our remonstrances and the coach’s complaints, she hardly ever went to soccer practice, and I wished she hadn’t turned out to be right, that he’d let her play anyway because she was far and away his best player. At dinner she scarcely interacted with the rest of the family, her mind clearly elsewhere.

‘Earth to Alicia!’ her sisters would tease, or, a trifle snidely, ‘Oooh, little sister’s in love!’ But she’d hardly notice.

Not infrequently we’d come upon her sitting calmly in a chair somewhere, grey eyes very bright and focused on the middle distance, lips and hands moving slightly. Even if we spoke to her or touched her shoulder, it would take a few seconds before she was aware that we were there. ‘Was I like that?’ her sisters asked incredulously, and we said yes, but in truth there was something quite different about this youngest child.

We limited her phone time. We let Todd come over on his bicycle no more than a couple of times a week for only an hour or two at a time, made sure one of us was in close proximity whenever he was there, insisted they leave the door to the family room open and do something other than sitting on the couch listening to music. Alicia didn’t seriously protest any of these constraints. When we’d say no he couldn’t come over today, she might frown or roll her eyes. When we’d tell her to get off the phone, she might push it a little, stay on five minutes longer, but she wasn’t openly defiant, and I had no sense of underlying rebelliousness, either.

‘What do you like about Todd?’ I tried one afternoon when Alicia and I were alone in the house. ‘How is he different from Peter or Javier or, what was his name? Jimmy?’ Jimmy was a stretch; in first grade he’d brought her roses from his mother’s garden.

She smiled and answered without hesitation, ‘I have power.’

Something about the way she said that sent a shiver up my spine. ‘What do you mean by power?’ I asked carefully.

‘I mean, like, he says can he call me tonight and I say no and he doesn’t. Or he asked if he could kiss me and I said we didn’t know each other well enough so he didn’t.’ I risked a direct glance in her direction. Her lovely face was made both lovelier and a little sinister by the flush in her cheeks and the sparkle in her eyes.

I was somewhat relieved to hear that she felt in control, but now there was another concern, a broader moral issue having to do with the character of the woman she was becoming. ‘You be nice to Todd,’ I admonished. ‘You have the power to hurt him, you know.’

‘Oh, Mom, please. I know.’’ But she looked newly thoughtful, and I found myself wondering, with some trepidation, what I’d just done.

Todd started bringing her presents. Flowers from what I assumed was his mother’s’ garden until I discovered they lived in an apartment without one. A rosy lidded soapstone heart, not wrapped and not in a box, from the back of which I glimpsed her peeling what was probably the price tag. A ring with a clear stone she insisted on calling a diamond, though of course it had to be paste; she wore it prominently on a chain around her neck. Her older sisters had dubbed such things ‘friendship rings’, a concept my husband and I had never quite grasped. Alicia said, ‘It shows he belongs to me.’

‘He doesn’t belong to you!’ I objected. ‘Alicia, you don’t own him.’ She just smiled.

The late-night phone calls began sometime in November. We’d decided Alicia wasn’t ready for her own phone though her next-older sister helpfully reminded us in front of Alicia that she’d got one for her twelfth birthday; we said it was because Alicia would be on it with her friends all the time, whereas our other daughter had been pretty much a loner so the phone had been more symbolic than practical to her and not much problem for us. Unspoken, even between her father and me, was the apprehension that Alicia’d be using the phone for unspecified nefarious purposes. When we denied her request, she frowned and started to sulk like any thwarted adolescent. Then a supercilious smile crossed her lips and she shrugged, declaring in every way but verbally that our intransigence was a pain in the butt, but basically irrelevant.

The extension in our room was on my side of the bed, so I was the one who answered it. 11:45 p.m. nearly three o’clock in the morning, less than an hour before my alarm was set to go off so I had no hope of going back to sleep — every time, I’d catapult from unconsciousness to disorienting hyperconsciousness, adrenalin geysering, certain our oldest daughter had gone into premature labour or there was some other sort of bad news, since good news is rarely delivered in the middle of the night. My husband would have shot awake, too, and I’d feel his tension whether I was touching him or not. Often we’d hold hands.

The first time, Todd asked politely for Alicia and seemed surprised and then miffed when I informed him brusquely that she wasn’t allowed to receive phone calls after nine o’clock and that he’d awakened us. He said sorry, minimally. The next few times, he asked for her in a hoarse, urgent whisper, sometimes saying no more than her name, and once he begged me to call her to the phone, which I refused to do on the theory that if he got what he wanted he’d be even more persistent.

This was getting old. I told both kids that if he didn’t stop it I’d call his mother. My husband threatened to take away Alicia’s phone privileges altogether, whereupon she wouldn’t be in the same room with him for several days.

Finally I did call Todd’s mother. This conversation didn’t go well. She listened without comment, and then said icily, My son is no angel, but I know he wouldn’t do something like this.’

‘I’m not accusing him,’ I hastened to say, although I was. ‘I just wanted you to be aware — ’

‘Hey, you know something?’ Startled by how quickly her tone had heated with indignation, I wondered if there was more going on here than I knew. ‘I’m really tired of my son being blamed for all this. It’s your daughter who’s chasing him.’

‘She doesn’t call him in the middle of the night,’ I retorted, though I’d sworn I wouldn’t get into this kind of maternal debate. It was apparent that we were no longer on the same side, and I regretted that.

‘She tells him to. Todd says she tells him to call her, and he doesn’t want to, but he can’t help it. He’s not sleeping much. He looks awful. I’m taking him to the doctor.’ I could tell she’d just now decided to do that.

‘Maybe they should stay away from each other for a while,’ I ventured, wondering even as I said it how we’d ever enforce such a ban.

Todd’s mother, having settled on a plan, was calmer now. ‘I don’t think that’s necessary. They’re just kids. Alicia is a lovely little girl. Todd really likes her, and I do, too. Let’s just help them work this out.’ I agreed, with new hope.

For a while then we got heavy breathing, once or twice a week; we couldn’t prove it was Todd, since Caller ID showed ‘private name private number’ and *69 revealed only that the number was blocked, but we knew it was and Alicia didn’t deny it. We felt harassed, of course, and vaguely threatened. We considered calling the police. By Christmas, though, the calls had stopped. To me there was something slightly ominous about that, too, though sleeping through the night was undeniably a relief.

Soon after Christmas break, Alicia started alluding to behaviour problems Todd was having in school. Offhandedly she’d say something like, ‘Todd got in trouble again today,’ or, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do with that boy.’ Then she’d laugh, or there’d be an expression on her averted face that could be called gratified. Whether I pressed or tried subtly to draw her out, she wouldn’t give details. When we saw Todd during this time, he looked haggard and his eyes were wild.

‘Does it seem to you that Alicia hasn’t been having much homework lately?’ My husband was frowning at her grades, which were not stellar, as in the past they’d sometimes been, but were certainly acceptable.

‘She says they aren’t assigning anything, or she gets it done in class.’

‘No wonder the public education system in this country is such a mess,’ he fumed.

At mid-year school conferences, where they told us Alicia was charming, never a behaviour problem, doing fine although she didn’t seem to take school very seriously, we ran into Todd’s mother. My husband kept edging away, and I found myself decidedly uncomfortable around her by now, but she hardly would let us go even when the teacher was ready for her. ‘Todd has been having an awful lot of homework lately,’ she complained. ‘Has Alicia?’

Before I could say anything, my husband gave a non-answer, ‘I’m always glad to see them having homework.’

‘He hardly has time for anything else. Except your daughter, of course.’ She smiled nervously. My husband and I avoided each other’s eyes until we were out of her sight, then exchanged a long, worried look.

It was the middle of the night on a cold snowless Tuesday, when my husband shook me awake. ‘Todd’s mother’s here.’

I sat up. The dread that we’d been floating in for some time and that had been in my dreams, too, in the form of dangers just out of my grasp, seemed about to coalesce, and I struggled to make sense of it. ‘Why? Where’s Alicia?’

He looked very vulnerable standing there in his pyjamas. Love for him spouted clear and strong out of the swirl of deep troubled sleep and adrenalin in my head. ‘She’s asleep in her bed. But Todd’s missing.’

‘Is he here?’ I had visions of twelve-year-old lovers trysting under our roof, and my sense of sexual morality, not easily offended, prepared to be outraged. Acute anticipatory guilt also swept through me when I thought of facing Todd’s mother; there wasn’t any doubt in my mind that my daughter would have been the instigator.

‘He’s not with her, but I haven’t searched. He took his mother’s car.’

I stalked to Alicia’s room. Despite the anger and anxiety that made me want to shake her, I decided to rouse her gently; believing this to be strategic, I was shaken by the tenderness I felt for this daughter of mine in the moments before I woke her. She was heartbreakingly beautiful, pale lashes against dewy skin, pearly bare shoulder, graceful hand clutching like a talisman the ring Todd had given her.

On a hunch, I bent and whispered so close to her ear that I could feel its whorls against my lips, ‘Alicia, honey, where’s Todd?’

She stirred and murmured something I didn’t catch. Her eyes stayed closed and her breath shallow and even; she appeared to be still asleep.

So I pressed, feeling I was taking a chance though of what I couldn’t have said. ‘Alicia. You know where Todd is. Tell me.’

‘Driving.’ Now she sounded like someone in a trance, or someone pretending to be. I thought of drugs, of course, and of practical jokes.

‘Driving where?’

‘Here,’ she said, and sat bolt upright. Her eyes were glazed. Her chest heaved. She didn’t seem really to know I was there. Her face was set in sheer determination, a look characteristic of her since toddler-hood but alarming now in this distilled form.

I risked grabbing her by the upper arms. Her skin was very warm, her strong young muscles clenched. ‘How do you know he’s driving here?’ Now I did indulge myself in a small, hard shake, which dislodged her from her altered state.

She looked straight at me and, somehow, I was compelled to let go of her, though I didn’t want to. She pushed me aside and was at the door of her room when the front doorbell rang. On her way out, though, she did pause long enough to turn and say to me, ‘Because I sent for him. Cool, huh?’

Todd and his mother, Alicia and her father and I, plus both her sisters who’d heard the commotion, sat in our living room nearly until dawn. The story had many variations, and I still don’t know which if any was the whole truth, but the gist of it was this:

Todd had been having trouble sleeping for weeks, and that night he’d been unable to sleep at all. He’d been tossing and turning, listening to music, thinking of Alicia. His blush at this last admission seemed to me more shame than embarrassment; I saw a little smile cross Alicia’s lips, and I thought she looked proud of herself.

Then, Todd said — and this took a long time and many false starts to emerge — he’d felt her calling him. Not heard; felt. He said it was like being famished and having to get something to eat, or — more furious blushes — like having to go to the bathroom really bad. Except that there were words to it: ‘Todd. I love you. Go get your mom’s car keys and drive over to see me. Right now.’

To which Alicia simply said calmly, ‘I was asleep. I was in bed asleep,’ which the others seemed to take as irrefutable proof of her innocence in the matter.

When it seemed we’d gathered all the information there was to gather — or, at least, all that was accessible to us — my husband wrapped things up. ‘Alicia,’ he began, glancing at me for confirmation but then fixing her with his most level gaze, which she met unhesitatingly. I knew what he was going to say and I could have intervened with a dissenting opinion, but I didn’t disagree. Looking back now at that portentous moment, I still don’t see what reasonable alternatives we had. ‘You and Todd will not be seeing each other any more.’

Alicia sat up straighter, and her face glowed dangerously, but she said nothing. It was Todd who looked stricken and gave a pitiable little cry of protest. His mother started to say, ‘I’m not sure — ’

My husband, though, was sure. He got to his feet, an imposing figure, to continue. ‘They are twelve years old. They’re too young for this. It’s gone too far. She’s not to see him any more. Todd, you’re not to call here or come to the house. It’s over. Do you understand me?’ Todd was crying. Alicia was not. ‘Alicia? Do you understand me?’

‘Oh,’ she said sweetly, ‘I understand you, Daddy,’ and the back of my neck tingled.

The next day, our VCR and camcorder were stolen. The doors and windows were locked and there was no sign of forced entry. The detective asked if anyone could have got hold of a key. Though we didn’t say so to him, my husband and I shared gut-wrenching suspicion of Alicia, but she’d spent the night at a friend’s across town and she didn’t have her own key. The detective said it was probably kids, in and out in a hurry, taking whatever they could grab quickly. Probably somebody who’d been in our house and knew what we had.

Then a pet mouse that Alicia said was Todd’s appeared on our doorstep, slashed throat encircled with a blood-soaked pink ribbon to which was attached a disturbing love-note: ‘I love you more than I love myself.’

My daughter and I stood together on the porch looking at the bizarre offering. I could hardly speak. ‘Alicia, is this from Todd?’

‘Dad said I can’t see Todd any more, remember?’ There were flashes of purple and silver as she cut her pretty grey eyes at me; her irises had always picked up and incorporated ambient colours.

‘Something’s going on,’ I said, an understatement.

‘Like what?’ It was a challenge.

‘I don’t know. But I think you need to see a counsellor.’

‘No way.’ She backed off. ‘Not a chance.’

Not expecting much in the way of support or ideas on how to handle this, I nevertheless tried to call Todd’s mother again. Their number was now unlisted.

I asked Alicia about that, too. ‘I’m not allowed to talk to him on the phone, remember?’ Her pinked upper lip was drawn back in the subtlest of sneers. ‘Why would I have his number?’

For a week or so then, Todd seemed to have been effectively banished from all our lives. Alicia never mentioned his name. I kept thinking about him, hoping he was all right; he’d unexpectedly touched my heart. Alicia’d been too much for him, I feared. Girls notoriously mature faster than boys; he just hadn’t been ready for her.

Then Todd set fire to our house. Alicia was in school when it happened; I called later and was able to verify that she’d been in every one of her classes that day. I came home from work to find the firefighters already there, and my husband holding Todd, who was so ravaged I thought at first he’d been burned. His body, always thin, was positively gaunt, his skin mottled. His hair hung scraggly over his face, with actual bald patches at the temples and crown. His clothes were torn and dirty; I’d often noted how carefully he’d dressed. He was hysterical, not trying to escape but clinging and sobbing, ‘I didn’t mean to do it! I swear, I tried not to do it! But she made me!’

The damage to the house turned out to be structurally minimal, though the contractors declared it complicated and therefore exorbitantly expensive to repair. Nobody was hurt. Most upsetting was the loss of my husband’s tulip tree, burned to the ground. Once shortly after the fire, Alicia and I happened to both be standing at the kitchen window at the same time, and we saw him crouched by the charred stump, mourning. ‘Sometimes,’ she observed dreamily, ‘you have to make sacrifices for love.’

‘Alicia,’ I said, as steadily as I could, ‘he’s your father.’ I wasn’t entirely clear about everything I meant in saying that, but Alicia nodded as if she knew perfectly well.

Todd killed himself on Alicia’s thirteenth birthday. It was a cloudy, chill spring morning, streetlights still on when she came down to breakfast, all of us groggy and rushed. The hyper-vigilance I’d developed over the past year alerted me the instant she came into the room and took her place at the table that something had happened, but I’d learned not to ask directly, instead to watch and listen and create cautious openings until she divulged whatever she had already decided to divulge.

‘Todd’s dead,’ she said, and took a long, shaky drink of orange juice.

Her father said, ‘Jesus.’

Her sister said, ‘Alicia, you are too weird.’

I said, ‘How do you know?’

Her face glowed with tears now, but her weeping had a soft, romantic quality eerier than if she hadn’t been crying at all. ‘It’s for my birthday,’ she told us, her voice breaking. She stopped short of anything like, ‘Isn’t that beautiful?’ or, ‘I told him it was what I wanted for my birthday,’ but I heard those things as clearly as if she’d said them aloud, and I thought her father did, too.

He sprang around the table and jerked her out of her chair. She made no noise and didn’t fight back, just clenched her fists against his chest and narrowed her eyes. He shook her. ‘What’s going on, young lady? You tell me right now what’s going on!’

‘Todd’s dead!’ Now she collapsed into his arms, sobbing like a child, and after a moment of blatant bewilderment he held her, soothed her, stroked her hair.

I couldn’t watch. I left the room, left the house, considered leaving altogether but was held back by commitment to my family, which included my youngest child.

Todd had asphyxiated himself in the family car in the locked garage. Beside him on the seat was a note: ‘Happy Birthday, my love.’ I read about it in the paper.

Alicia is eighteen now, though with her model’s carriage and worldly self-possession she seems much older. There have been numerous other boys since the hapless Todd, none of whom seemed to make much of an impression on Alicia, more than a few of whom hung around long after it was obvious she’d utterly lost interest. One of them, while he was still in hopeless desperation calling, sending letters, ringing the doorbell, parking by our curb for hours at a time, was arrested for raping another girl; Alicia gave every appearance of having known about it before her sister told her, and when my older daughter demanded to know if this guy had been a creep with her, she answered readily that he’d never seemed interested in anything like that. Then she added, ‘Guess this’ll teach him,’ and her sister and I could not meet each other’s eyes.

Then there was a girl named Molly whose devotion to Alicia was quite unrequited. My curiosity as to whether the relationship was sexual seemed almost irrelevant. For a time Molly virtually lived at our house, doing Alicia’s bidding so thoroughly and eagerly that it was hard to watch. She’d get her a glass of ice water. She’d clean her room. She’d fix her hair in beautiful, elaborate styles, while her own hung stringy and untended. At first Alicia would issue orders, no less direct for being phrased politely: ‘Go get me a large ice tea with lots of lemon, would you, Molly?’ Then she had only to express a preference: ‘It’s chilly in here,’ and Molly would rush to close the window my husband had just opened for fresh air. As time went on, their need for ordinary communication was extinguished altogether and Molly would do what Alicia wanted without being prompted in any way apparent to anybody else. This accomplished, Alicia got bored. From one day to the next, Molly vanished from our lives.

‘What’s happened to Molly?’ I ventured to ask.

Alicia shrugged. ‘I guess she dropped out of school. I haven’t heard anything else.’

‘I thought she was your friend.’

My daughter gave a crisp laugh. ‘What made you think that?’ Molly’s name has never been brought up in our house again.

Molly and the boys were just diversions. Practice. Alicia’s real quarry was more intimate and her pursuit of him, I see now, all but lifelong. It was subtle, though, and subtly cumulative; every time I thought I saw something worrisome, a half-dozen reasonable explanations came into my mind at the same time. She was the youngest child. It was good for a girl to be close to her father. And what if I had understood what was happening? Alicia always had been Daddy’s girl.

Always interested in all the girls, my husband gradually became obsessed with Alicia. He hung on every word she deigned to say to him. He brought her little treats. He began leaving work to pick her up from school, and I began to suspect he often didn’t go back. He took to buying her impulsive, expensive presents — a brand new white sports car, real diamond earrings — without consulting me, always swearing we had discussed it and I must have just forgotten. It became easier and easier for her to manipulate around every rule we’d ever set for her — curfew, chores, provocative attire, minimally civilised behaviour — and she did it for sport, because he couldn’t bring himself to discipline her; when I complained, which for a while I did bitterly, he’d talk about choosing your battles and keeping your priorities straight.

I’d enter a room where they were together and there’d be the strong aura of a conversation abruptly suspended, though I wouldn’t have heard them talking. On the increasingly rare occasions when she went out, he’d always wait up for her, and I had the impression they spent time alone together before either of them went to bed. Each of us had always made a point of doing things alone with each of our kids; eventually Alicia and her father were going out every Saturday night, and the time he and I had together devolved from seldom to never.

Alicia graduated from high school last June. She has no career or educational goal, though it wouldn’t be accurate to say she has no plans. She’s never asked if she could stay here; we’ve all just accepted the ongoing arrangement, Alicia as though there’d never been any question, I with decidedly mixed feelings, my husband with palpable, even pitiable relief. I doubt she’ll ever leave.

I miss my husband. I scarcely recognise him any more; he acts hardly at all like the man I thought I knew, and he’s aged, paled, greyed. He takes interest now in nothing but Alicia. He lost his job some time ago, is nothing more than dutiful towards anybody else in the family, doesn’t garden or read or even watch television. We haven’t shared a bed in a long time; I couldn’t say exactly when he started using the guest room at the end of the hall, next to Alicia’s. Often I hear footsteps at night, but there seems no point in rousing myself to investigate.

At the same time, I have come to feel closer than ever to Alicia. This is odd, but I am too pleased to allow myself real worry. She has been concentrating on her father, and I’ve been occupied with a new grandson, our middle daughter entering college and a job promotion of my own, so we’re rarely in each other’s company, but when we are I am caught, not to say trapped, in the warm beam of her attention. Gradually I’ve come to crave it, even as I sense in it something beyond a normal mother-daughter bond.

She works me. I ought to feel manipulated, I suppose, but what I feel is chosen. From the other side of a room crowded with family, I’ll suddenly feel her gaze on me and, as if on command, raise my eyes to hers. She smiles. My breath catches with something I can only call gratitude, though why I should be grateful to my own child for nothing more than smiling at me I couldn’t say.

‘I’m glad you’re my mom,’ she’ll say in passing, just touching the small of my back, and I’m aglow for days.

This morning, my husband and I were in each other’s presence without her, a rare thing and, for some reason, dangerous. He looked at me with haunted, sunken eyes and whispered, ‘What’s happened to us?’

‘Ask Alicia,’ I heard myself say.

‘I don’t mean to do these things. I don’t want to. She makes me.’ I affected incredulity and concern for his mental and physical health, but I knew what he meant.

We heard Alicia coming down the stairs then, and I had to get to work. It was with a certain savage relief that I left them alone together.

But throughout the workday, I’ve been able to think of little else. Restlessness vivified by jealousy has been building. I hear my daughter’s voice in my mind, no words but with inflection and timbre whose intent is unmistakable. I feel a persistent tug, as though her hands were on me, or her gaze. She wants me. Alicia wants me. There are knives in the kitchen; I feel the heft of the butcher knife across my palm, and revulsion only adds an erotic limn. Alicia wants me. I’ll go home at lunchtime and get rid of the man who’s between us, and Alicia will be pleased.