Illustration by Edel Rodriguez

This happened here in our town. A friend of mine—we were on the cheerleading team together—married a local farmer, and right away they wanted to have a baby, though the doctor said she shouldn’t. She was a bleeder, he said, and if she started he might not be able to stop it. But she didn’t listen. She went ahead and got pregnant, then bled to death during childbirth and was buried out by the farmhouse, under a crabapple tree. It was very sad. I cried for a week. But the baby survived, a pretty little boy; his dad called him Dickie-boy, but I don’t know if that was his real name.

His dad was a hard worker and a nice guy—I went on a movie date with him once when we were young—but he sometimes drank too much and he was hopeless at ordinary household chores and raising babies. So pretty soon he found another wife, either through a dating service or else he picked her up in one of his bars somewhere, because none of us girls knew her. She was a tough, sexy lady, a hooker, maybe. She made no effort to be one of us or to make us like her. I guess she considered us beneath her. We called her the Vamp. She got around, and it was said that she’d taken half the men in town to bed, my own ex included. They all denied it, like cheating husbands do, but, when the subject came up, little shit-eating grins would appear on their faces and their eyes would glaze over as if they were remembering the wild time they’d had.

Maybe Dickie-boy’s dad knew about all that, and maybe he didn’t. He was mostly either drunk or out in the fields, and he left the raising of the kid to his new wife. He loved Dickie-boy to the extent that the child reminded him of his dead wife, but resented him for the same reason, just as he resented the boy’s mother for selfishly dying on him. He had hoped for a sturdy fellow to help around the farm, but Dickie-boy was a sickly, fine-boned child who had trouble lifting a finger to pick his nose, forget pitchforks and shovels. Certainly he didn’t get on with the Vamp, who had a mean temper and slapped him around, with or without an excuse.

The Vamp had a daughter from a previous relationship, a cute kid with big dreamy eyes, called Marleen. I never knew what to make of her. Marleen seemed to live in a storybook land of her own. When she spoke, she spoke to the world, the way singers do, and what she said seldom made any sense. You probably had to be a kid to understand her at all. My little girl—she’s a young woman now and has her own little girl—was the same age as Marleen, and sometimes the two of them played together, my daughter pedalling her bike out to the farm and back, or sometimes I took her and picked her up. My daughter had a lot of stories about Marleen, but I didn’t always understand those, either.

Marleen settled right in with her new little stepbrother. They were as tight as crib siblings and had a way of talking to each other that didn’t use words. My daughter said it might be bird talk, which Marleen had offered to teach her. Some people said that Dickie-boy wasn’t all there, others that he had something almost magical about him. Once, for example, he somehow crawled up onto the barn roof, and they had to call the Fire Department to get him down. The fire marshal said he had no idea how the boy could have got up there, unless he flew. Marleen said he did it because the birds wanted him to. She told my daughter that the crabapple tree had helped him, though it was over near the house, not the barn. I had no idea what she meant. My daughter didn’t know, either, and Marleen never announced it in her peculiar way of speaking.

My daughter and Marleen played dolls and house and nursie, just like all little girls do, and sometimes they used Dickie-boy in their games. In nice ways and maybe not-so-nice ways. Strange Marleen might get up to anything, and my own daughter had a mischievous and curious streak, so things probably happened. Kids are kids, after all. I figured it was best to mostly look the other way. Children have to be allowed to grow up on their own—I’ve always believed that.

Marleen wanted a doggy, for example, so she put a collar and a leash on Dickie-boy and walked him around on his hands and knees with his clothes off and did circus tricks with him. She even taught him to wee with his leg in the air. He never complained. When he did bad things, like biting the mailman or pooping on his stepmother’s bed, Marleen swatted his behind with a rolled-up newspaper just as you would a puppy. Then he’d whimper until she scratched between his ears and gave him a cookie. My daughter said that Dickie-boy seemed to do bad things on purpose so as to get swatted. I suppose he was just looking for attention, given the kind of parents he had. His dad was never around, and the Vamp hated him, so all he had was Marleen and her games.

Dickie-boy wasn’t very healthy, but whenever he got sick Marleen made him well again. It was a gift she had. It sometimes worked on others, too. One time, my daughter had a bad case of tonsillitis, and I thought her tonsils would have to come out, but Marleen somehow brought her fever down and she hasn’t had tonsillitis since. Marleen couldn’t do anything for my ingrown toenail and canker sores, though.

Dickie-boy had gifts, too, and one of them was finding lost things. Once, I lost an earring, and my daughter brought Marleen and Dickie-boy over to the house to find it. He got down on all fours with his face near the floor, and Marleen showed him the matching earring and made a chirping noise that probably meant “Fetch!,” because that’s exactly what he did. It had fallen into one of my old sneakers in the closet. He also found a nail brush I didn’t even know was lost. Hide-and-seek wasn’t any fun at all, my daughter said, because Dickie-boy always went straight to where they were. Same with blindman’s bluff—it was as if he could see right through the blindfold. And ghost-in-the-graveyard, if you played it at night, could be downright scary, because he could give you the feeling that he was there and not there at the same time.

Marleen could be scary, too. Whenever she was around, staring her wide-eyed stare and talking aloud to nobody in particular, I kept stumbling and dropping things. My daughter said the same thing happened to their schoolteacher, who sometimes sent Marleen out of the room so she could clear her head.

Marleen often played with Dickie-boy the way you’d play with a rag doll, tossing him floppily about, dangling him by an arm or leg, he looking glassy-eyed and like he’d lost his bones. It was funny, really. They could have taken the act on television. Playing with Dickie-boy like a rag doll was my daughter’s favorite game.