All Gone

THE ONLOOKER

His daughter puts her arms out, waves her hands, shakes her feet, wants to get out, so he unbuckles the strap around her, takes the shopping bag off the back of the stroller so the whole thing won’t tip over when he takes her out, takes her out, stands her up, puts the bag on the seat and follows her with the stroller down a corridor of the mall.

“Stella, let’s go in here a second,” he says when he sees there’s a sale going on in the classical record store, but she continues walking, looks back, wants to be chased her expression says, so he follows her, saying “I’m going to get you, I’m going to get you,” she stops in front of an ice-cream store and looks at him. She wants to go in her expression says. “I’m sorry, we can’t,” he says. “Stella, don’t! Come here!” She goes in. He leaves the stroller outside the store, goes in, takes her hand, she already has several small peppermint canes in her other hand. He holds out his hand, she drops the canes into it, he puts them into their box near the floor. He walks her outside the store, points the stroller to the record store, sets her behind the stroller so she can push it, she pushes it a few feet and then turns around and starts walking. A short man around seventy is looking at her, smiling. “She wants to go her own way,” he says to Will.

“Always her own way. I want to go this way, she wants to go that. You always know which way I want to go by the opposite way she’s going.”

“Goodbye, goodbye,” she says to the man, stopping to wave to him.

“What a cute doll.” He goes over to her, puts his hand in front of her waving hand and waves to her. “Bye-bye, honey. But where you going bye-bye to? Home? Your mommy?”

“Goodbye, goodbye,” and she goes down the corridor, stops, does a few dancing-in-place steps while looking at her shoes, says “Ishi, ishi,” which is her word for feet, socks, boots and shoes, goes on. The man walks with Will behind her.

“How anybody would want to hit those kids,” the man says.

“You mean parents? I’m sorry. Child abusers?”

“I’ve seen it on TV. A whole article about it. Parents, relatives, friends of the mother even. You know, living with them. Why would they?”

“The children are vulnerable. You beat her — what does she know? Not ‘know,’ but what can she say? She can’t talk back and she can’t tell anybody she’s being beaten. So no one knows she is unless he sees the marks, which can be explained away by the beater as ‘She fell’—something. Really, maybe not as simple as that, but the beater, for his or her own reasons, has to beat someone smaller than himself.”

“It’s awful. I can’t understand it and I never will.”

“Oh, I can. Child abusers, wife abusers — beat your wife, beat your kid. The beater’s frustrated, things aren’t going well, someone beat him or her as a kid. He can’t work it out any other way, so he beats up his child or wife or both. Old people too in wheelchairs get beaten up by their families.”

“That the program didn’t say. It did mention the wives. But a baby! An old person like me you might get disgusted at. We can be a pain like them sometimes, but we’re also ugly. But look at her. She could never be disgusting-looking. How old is she?”

“Fourteen months.”

“Fourteen months. Why in the world anyone — even if they did want to, as the impulse must be there with every parent sometimes—”

“That’s true.”

“But why would they carry it out? That’s what I don’t understand. How could they? It’s more than crazy.”

Stella’s going down another corridor. “Excuse me — you’re probably right. — Stella, come here! — It is probably more complicated than we could ever know, but I better go after her. Going this way?”

“No, my store I’m going to’s over there.”

“Nice talking to you then.”

“Bye-bye, Stella,” he says.

She’s standing outside the optician’s door, pointing inside. “He’s busy,” Will says, going after her and waving goodbye to the man. “Don’t go inside, sweetheart.” She goes inside.

“Goodbye, goodbye,” she says, going up to the optician. He’s sitting facing a woman at a small table, spraying the lenses of a pair of glasses with glass cleaner. “Ah, my steadiest customer. Come in for trifocals this time, Sarah?”

The woman turns around in her seat, smiles at Stella. Stella reaches for the glasses in his hand, says “Yeyes, yeyes.”

“Stella, sweetheart, come with daddy,” Will says and takes her hand and says to the optician “Thank you, sorry for the bother.”

“Stella. That’s right.” He puts the glasses on the woman. “Look straight into my eyes,” he says as Will takes Stella into the corridor.

She uses her other hand to pull her hand from Will’s and goes back the way they came. He follows her with the stroller. She goes up to the side window of the bookstore at the end of the corridor, puts her hands and forehead on the glass and looks inside. Will stands behind her, sees the elderly man from before at a paperback rack about twenty feet past the narrow window. He’s reading a book. Stella looks at Will, points to the man or just to the store or something in the store. “Yes, the man,” Will says. She puts her head up against the glass again. The man has two paperbacks in his hand now, puts one back in the rack, quickly looks behind and in front of him, puts the other book into his side coat pocket and without looking at it makes sure the flap is over the pocket. Then he walks down the paperback aisle, looking at books, and starts for the door.

Will doesn’t want the man to see them there if after he leaves the store he walks this way. He grabs Stella’s hand to steer her toward the optician’s, she waves her other hand to the man as he passes. He didn’t seem to see them. “Goodbye, goodbye,” she says. He stops, looks back at her, Will, then at the window they’re in front of, turns around as Will nods at him and continues walking.

“We have to go now,” Will says to her, taking her coat and sweater out of the shopping bag. He looks at the man. The man keeps walking, doesn’t turn around. Will’s on his knees. People pass them. Stella’s flapping her hands and saying goodbye to them as Will’s trying to get her arm through the sweater sleeve.

At home he tells his wife about the man.

“I think he’s a child abuser,” she says. “To what extent I can’t say, or even if he is still one — but that’s why he brought it up.”

“I don’t buy that. He didn’t have anything of the abuser of any sort in his mannerisms or on his face.”

“No. Being so small, he was probably picked on as a boy and maybe as an adult and maybe even still. So he lets or at one time let very little people have it — maybe his own children — when he got the chance.”

“I think he was just a shoplifter. But not because he wanted to save money. He was too nicely dressed. For the thrill of it I’ll say, or because he’s a little crazy that way. As for child abuse, he was just a sad lonely guy who wanted to talk to someone and child abuse was the first subject he could think to talk about with me. Maybe, as he said, because of some TV program he saw recently about it, and also because he knew it’d be something I’d be interested in because I have a small child.”

“You didn’t think of reporting him to the bookstore?”

“Of course not. Would you have?”

“If he was a child abuser, yes. But if he was only a sad shoplifter as you think that’s all he was, then I guess they can take the loss better than he can.”

“That’s a good way of putting it.”