Bad Candy

“I’ll never grow up… not me, not I, not me!”

                                                            - Peter Pan (1953)

Hannah’s parents are missing.

She doesn’t remember when they first went away or why. Only that she woke up one day and they were gone.  She went down to the kitchen for breakfast (eggs, bacon, toast) but no one was there and there was nothing on the stove. The living room was empty, the bedroom too. She padded around the empty house quietly, calling out her parents’ names. No one answered.

Hannah tells me this in English as she sits backwards in her chair, her elbows propped up on the edge of my desk. She asks me for help. She gives me a picture of her family. “So you can recognize my parents if you see them,” she says.

The picture is one of Hannah at about age eight. She is standing by herself in front of a white wall. She is wearing a red party dress speckled with white dots. Her dark hair is pulled back into two tight braids; a smile is plastered across her freckled face and her hands are folded neatly across her lap.

“This is a picture of you,” I say.

Hannah looks at the picture and says, “No,” she insists. “It’s a picture of my parents. That’s my mother in the red dress, see?”

I look at her, not understanding if it is supposed to be a joke, some kind of childish game. “So it is,” I say. “She looks just like you.”

*          *          *

Hannah takes me home with her after school. I have been friends with her for two years, but I have never seen her house and never met her parents. I don’t even know where she lives.

We leave through the back entrance of the school and cut through an alleyway I have never seen before. The buildings on either side of us are made of brick and the passageway is long and twisting; each time I think we must have come to the end we round a corner and I see that there is another stretch of passageway, another corner. I begin to feel as if the walls are closing in on me, inching closer together, and that eventually Hannah and I will be crushed between them.

Gradually I become aware that the walls are in fact closing in on us. The tops of the walls curve gently inwards, the slope becoming more pronounced the father we walk; they meet, and we are walking through a brick tunnel.

Our footsteps echo. There are torches burning on the walls at evenly spaced intervals. We slosh through water, the light from the torches reflecting off of its surface. The tunnel slopes down and we go down and down until I think we can’t be in Kansas anymore.

The water flows downward with us, at first a thin trickle, then a steady current building power until it is up to our knees and I am struggling to keep my balance in the flood. 

“Are we there yet?” I have to shout to Hannah to be heard over the rushing water.

“Almost,” she says.

The way becomes harder. I trip over one rock, and then another.

*          *          *

When the stream emerges from the tunnel we are in a forest. Hannah and I clamber over the slippery stones to the bank. I wring my shirt out, but my shirt is dry.

“My house is this way,” says Hannah.

The ground is soft and moist beneath our feet; the air smells green and wet and lush. The trees are very tall, and the sunlight filtering through the canopy barely reaches the forest floor. Small shrubs line the path, loaded with fruit so ripe and heavy that the branches droop and spill the fruit at our feet. I crush one under my foot as we pass, and it emits a sweet, sticky odor.

On the edge of the jungle we come upon a house. It is small and inviting, with a white picket fence and gate; its neatness looks utterly out of place in this dark and wild jungle.

The interior is just as orderly: everything in its proper place, no books scattered in the living room, no papers burying the dining room table. And there are pictures everywhere. There are pictures of Hannah at every age: school photos, snapshots from family trips, candid pictures, Hannah riding a horse, Hannah as Pippi Longstocking, Hannah at the zoo. Photos every type, from every place imaginable, but with one common theme; Hannah is always alone.

I follow the trail of pictures through the living room, up the stairs, and through the hallways of the second floor. Her parents are absent from every single one.

When I return to the first floor, Hannah is standing at the dining room window, looking out at the front lawn. There is a woman standing just outside the gate, gazing at the house. She is wearing a red and white party dress. Her dark hair is pulled back into two braids.

“Isn’t that your mother?” I ask.

Hannah shakes her head. I stare at her for a minute, then take her arm, and gently steer her outside.

The woman doesn’t look at us as we approach. She doesn’t seem to register that we are there. I elbow Hannah to make her talk, but she refuses and looks stubbornly at her feet.

“Excuse me,” I say, “are you Hannah’s mother?”

At first I think the woman hasn’t heard me because she continues to stare at the house, but then slowly, slowly, she turns to face us.

I repeat, “Are you Hannah’s mother?”

The woman looks at me blankly, then opens her mouth and begins to scream. She starts on one note and holds it, but soon her voice begins to rise in an ear-splitting crescendo. Shouldn’t we help her? I mouth at Hannah, but she has closed her eyes and clapped her hands over her ears.

The woman’s face begins to swell as she screams, her eyes bulging, her features stretching and deforming as if she is being pumped full of air. The woman’s scream gets higher and higher, until I can hardly believe that it is a human being making that sound. My head wants to explode; the woman’s head, swollen as a balloon, explodes instead.

The bang echoes through the jungle. Pieces of confetti rain down on us. We blink. The woman’s headless body is slumped on the other side of the gate.

Hannah unlatches the gate and steps outside. She bends down beside the body.

“It’s made out of paper maiche,” she says wonderingly.

She props the body upright so I can see it and peers inside the neck; it is hollow. The empty space inside of the woman is filled with colorfully wrapped candies.

A small hand pushes Hannah aside and reaches into the woman’s neck. The hand belongs to a small girl who pulls one of the candies out.

The girl is wearing a red dress with white dots; she has dark hair. She punches Hannah with her free hand, a tiny balled up fist.

“Cheater, cheater, pumpkin eater,” the small girl chants.

“What do you mean?” Hannah sputters.

“You ruined my party. You broke the piñata but you looked.” The small girl points to the woman’s body. “Cheater.”

As Hannah stares in astonishment the small girl pops the candy in her mouth and makes a face. “Cherry,” she says. “I hate cherry.” She picks another candy out form the headless woman shaped piñata. It is wrapped in waxy green paper.

She examines it, then offers it to Hannah. “Do you want it? I think it might be apple.” 

Hannah looks at it. “No thank you,” she says, shaking her head.

“Eat the candy, Hannah,” says the little girl.

“I don’t want to,” says Hannah.

“Eat the candy,” says the little girl again, this time more forcefully.

Hannah shakes her head. “I’m not supposed to take candy from strangers,” she says. “It’s bad. It’s bad candy.”

“Don’t be silly,” says the little girl. “There’s nothing wrong with it.”

She reaches into the woman’s neck and brings out another green candy. She shows it to Hannah. “I’ll prove it.”

She puts the candy on the middle of her tongue and closes her jaw. She sucks on it once, then pushes it to the right side of her mouth so she can speak. The candy makes her cheek puff out like a chipmunk’s, and she has some difficulty talking around it. “See? Nothing bad,” she says. “Now eat up.”

With a shaking hand, Hannah reaches out and takes the candy. She begins to unwrap it. There is a crash from behind us; Hannah does not acknowledge it. I turn toward the house; the roof is tipped at a rakish angle, the left side now several feet lower than the right. Part of the wall beneath it has crumbled away.

            “Hannah, maybe you shouldn’t,” I say nervously.

            She ignores me and eats the candy anyway.

The clamor begins as a dull roar this time, the walls folding in upon themselves and slowly giving way. The top floor goes first; I can see beds and bookcases being crushed by the roof, but then the floor gives out and they tumble down into the living room below. The destruction lasts only seconds, and in the time it takes to say “hello” and “goodbye” the house is gone. There is nothing left of Hannah’s life but some rubble on the jungle floor. And even that quickly begins to disappear as the jungle begins to take over again. As we watch, long, thin vines begin to snake across the rubble, weaving over and under each other in intricate patterns until the refuse is blocked from view.

Hannah stares openmouthed at the space where her house used to be. I reach out to touch her, but she shrugs my hand away. She spits the candy on the ground, and swings to face the little girl.

“You said there was nothing wrong with it!” she shrieks. “You said it wasn’t bad!” Hannah sinks to the ground, sobbing and shaking. “Everything’s gone now,” she chokes out through her tears. “They’ll never come back; I’ll never see my parents again.”

The little girl pats her shoulder comfortingly. “Oh, Hannah,” she says sympathetically. “I know how you feel. But it isn’t bad; it’s just part of growing up. And isn’t it time you grew up?”