The bottoms of Hazel's feet are covered with broken blisters and dried blood that has seeped out of cracks in her soles in the night, and she has fresh bruises on her face and arms and probably other places that I can't see. She ignores her injuries but holds herself like she expects someone to add to the collection at any moment. When I see her on the morning of January 1 I am taken aback - I didn't see any of that in the dim light of the television the evening before. The graceful, confident, angry girl I met before is gone, and in her place is a quaking child who seems to want to crawl under the bed and hide like my cat.
I have already been to the store and am making us bacon and eggs. Hazel has just crawled out of her makeshift bed on the couch and seated herself at the table. Her hair sticks up in odd places.
"Who did that to you?" I say.
"Doesn't matter." She won't look me in the eye, but stares down at the coffee table instead
I decide that this changes things, but I'm not sure what the changes need to be, or really, what the plan was in the first place. I put a plate down in front of her and she eats and eats until I stop feeding her, but she doesn't seem to notice the food at all.
****
"We have to talk," I say. We're sitting at the kitchen table and Hazel is mopping up ketchup with the remains of a hamburger. She doesn't leave a single thing on her plate, not even condiments. As soon as the words are out of my mouth, she pauses mid-wipe and looks at me like I am about to do something horrible.
We've spent the weekend in parallel activity, reading or watching television, doing nothing that requires either of us to acknowledge the other's existence. Hazel seems to require little of me beyond my presence and hasn't said four words since she arrived, and it's such an all-around strange situation that I suspect that both of us need a better understanding of what's going on. "It's Sunday evening," I say. "I have to go to work tomorrow."
She nods deeply, looking down at the swirl of ketchup on her plate. It's her third hamburger.
"Something's wrong in your life. And I'm not sure I'm fully equipped to help you with it. But I don't want you going back to whoever gave you those bruises."
"Don't worry about it," Hazel says. "Look. Thanks." She pops the bit of hamburger into her mouth and chews it, and I can see the corners of her mouth turn down. She's trying not to cry.
"How about you just tell me what the problem is, and I'll help you find a solution?"
"It's fine."
"Where are you going?" I say. She's gotten up and put her plate in the sink, and gone to the arm of the sofa and is pulling her jacket on. "Wait a minute." This isn't going as planned. I had intended to drive her to social services in the morning, but she is leaving now, and without me having gotten a story out of her. Hazel gets to the door before I do, and I reach out and grab her by the upper arm before she can open it. She turns her bruised face on me, and I can see the terror all over it, and suddenly I know what happened to her. "Who is he?"
Mute, scared, she stares at me.
"Hazel." I steer her toward the couch, knowing both that I am making a mistake and that I have to follow it through. We sit, and I release her. "Tell me who he is."
She wrings her hands and looks up at me helplessly. "It doesn't matter. I'm not going to see him again."
"Exes and fathers have a way of coming back around," I say. I should know. "Where do you have to go, anyway? Do you have somewhere? Because you've been here for three nights and you've never asked to use the phone once."
She looks at me for a long, long time, and then, in the first request she's made of me, says, "I don't want to go to a foster home." And then, to both our dismay, she begins to cry, great gasping sobs that compel to me reach out a hand, awkwardly, and pat her on the back. If she's a grifter, I think, she's doing a damn good job of it.
She spends the night and the next morning she is gone.
