Page 43 of The Intruder

I whirl around to face her, my heart doing jumping jacks in my chest. “Yes?”

She comes all the way out, my T-shirt ridiculously large on her delicate frame, the sleeves nearly down to her wrists. “Do you have a Band-Aid?”

“Yes, of course. Just a second.”

The first thing I do is run to the kitchen sink to wash off the blood that got on my hands. If she sees that, she will for sure know I was nosing around her backpack. When my hands are clean, I grab the entire first aid kit, which has Band-Aids and antiseptic, from under the sink. I try to bring it into the bathroom, but Eleanor stands in my way.

“It’s fine. I just need the Band-Aid.”

“For what?”

“I have a cut on my arm.”

“I’d like to see it. I have a lot of experience administering first aid to kids.”

She frowns up at me. “I can do it myself.”

“I’m sure you can. But I’m here, so you should let me help you.”

Eleanor stares at me, and I can’t tell if she’s considering it or not. But then she reluctantly pulls up the sleeve of the T-shirt.

She has an impressive abrasion on the back of her left elbow that is still oozing blood, although nowhere near the amount that is in her backpack. She must have fallen at some point and scraped it up. It’s going to take more than just a Band-Aid, and I’m glad she’s letting me disinfect it.

“That looks painful,” I comment as I open up the kit.

She nods wordlessly.

I roll the sleeve of her T-shirt all the way up so that I can get at the wound, and that’s when I have to stifle a gasp. She’s got a dark bruise on her upper arm. And it’s in the unmistakable shape of somebody’s fingers.

I struggle not to react because I don’t want to upset her. But inside, I am absolutely fuming. It’s bad enough that somebody was starving the girl. The cigarette burns were horrible. And now this angry bruise. If she were one of my students, I would have called CPS the minute I laid eyes on her.

“You know,” I say, “if somebody is hurting you, you don’t have to go back to them.”

Eleanor shoots me a withering look. “Really.”

There is something very jaded about her expression that makes me sad. “I mean it. I know it might seem like you don’t have any options, but you do. I promise.”

She doesn’t answer me. Instead, she is staring up at a painting I have hung on the wall of my bathroom. It’s a painting of two bluebirds and a birdcage—one bird slightly larger and about to fly out of its cage, and another smaller bird waiting for the other bird to join her. It’s a very simple, amateur painting—nothing you’d ever see in an art gallery—but I feel happy every time I look at it.

“I like your painting,” she says.

“Actually,” I say, “my father painted it.”

He gave it to me when I moved out to get my first teaching job. I hope this makes you think of me in your new place, he said. You’re about to do great things.

She winces as I brush iodine on her abrasion. “Are you close with him?”

“I was,” I say. “He died last year.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Thank you.”

As I open up a bandage, I allow myself to think about my father. After my mother passed, it was just him and me. He wasn’t perfect, but he did the best he could. I miss him so much, it’s painful. If he were still around, I wouldn’t have gone off the rails. I would probably still have my job, and I wouldn’t be stuck in a cabin in the woods during a storm with a dodgy roof. Even now, my first instinct is to pick up the phone to ask him what to do for this girl, and it aches to know that I’ll never be able to ask for his sage advice ever again.

“I don’t know my father,” Eleanor pipes up.

It’s the first piece of personal information she has shared with me, and I eat it up, happy to have more of a distraction. “Oh?”