The priest is quiet. Thinking it over the way he holds the whiskey in his mouth for a beat, two beats, before swallowing it. The priest brain is like a sieve, some things shake through, of no consequence. Other things remain that are of consequence.

  Mikhail sees the sidelong appraising look, familiar to him, too.

  Feeling a sexual charge, in the groin. That sidelong look of an adult in a white clerical collar …

  Mikhail explains: He’d had to cut his hair and get it bleached. He’d had to change his look. His name.

  In case he was observed. On some surveillance tape.

  Well, says Father McKenzie, sighing.

  Mikhail waits for the priest to continue but that’s all: Well.

  Then, laying his hand on Mikhail’s clenched hand. After a swallow of whiskey: My son, I am praying for both of us. And for Bernard. May God forgive him.

  Him!—that fucker. Don’t pray for him, Father.

  Mikhail is hurt, aggrieved. An old stab of jealousy, he’d never outgrown.

  In a raw young voice telling the priest: What I should have done is kill the bastard a lot earlier. The fucker. You should’ve sent me. I’d have done it for you, Father. After Michel. Why didn’t you send me!

  My son, no. Don’t look back.

  The whiskey has warmed both men. Glowing sensation, like the sun waning in the sky. Out on Woodward, late-afternoon traffic. Like a river, lulling. Maybe a nap: in Father Mac’s arms. Christ he’d like that, so tired.

  Father Mac does this thing he’d do sometimes, covers his face with his hands like his praying is so fierce it hurts. Mikhail can see just his lips finely shaped like a woman’s lips moving.

  God forgive us our sins. God we are in Your service. God instruct us. God we are empty vessels in Your hand. Amen.

  Something is being lifted out of Mikhail’s arms, a burden taken from him like a boulder so heavy it was breaking his spine.

  Oh God: This is pleasure. Like those first strokes of a man’s fingers, on his groin. Through his pants. He’d wanted to push the fingers away, he did push away, you did but then you didn’t, or it was a later time and you’d been drinking the fancy whiskey, it was something that just happened and not your fault, God would understand.

  That’s how it is, Father McKenzie had told him, years ago. Nothing else matters in life, that’s all that life is—who comes along …

  Still it’s a surprise, Mikhail has to smile, the priest has no more questions for him. As if possibly, Father McKenzie already knows as much as he needs to know about Mister R___ from another source.

  Him, too?—should I kill him?

  This question hovers in the air, unanswered. Father McKenzie doesn’t have to ask who Mikhail means by him.

  He doesn’t say yes, but he doesn’t say no.

  Mikhail thinks—If I had permission to kill Mister R__, I will have permission to kill Hawkeye.

  In the hotel suite, tomorrow. He will! Before Mrs. J__ arrives with the money.

  With the money, or without. Let Mrs. J__ ring the doorbell, no one will answer.

  She will go away, if there’s no answer. Like a sleepwalker, stunned. Not a clue what has happened. Won’t report to the front desk.

  If Mikhail has permission and it seems maybe he does. How’d he do it? Crack the skull with something heavy, that urn in the hotel bedroom. Not a knife, too messy. Blood might soak through the carpet, leak through the floor, drip down through the ceiling of the room below.

  Easily he can do it, come up quiet behind Hawkeye. Wait until the fucker is on the phone. Bring the urn down hard, crack the skull in an instant and the coldhearted bastard will fall like dead weight. Not even a cry.

  This is pleasure: doing what you can do, why you were born. To save the innocent.

  Mikhail tries to stand, his knees are weak. His face is streaked with tears, he’s been crying like a little kid without realizing.

  Meant to leave by now but instead he has climbed onto the bed as Father Mac has encouraged. Those pillows, he remembers—goose feathers—tight-packed like sausages about to burst. He’d never seen luxurious pillows like these.

  Exactly how this has happened Mikhail has no idea. Just, crawling up onto the priest’s bed, a good-sized bed for a single person. Lying very still atop the quilted coverlet hearing his breath come ragged.

  In silence, but breathing audibly, Father McKenzie unties Mikhail’s (waterstained, running) shoes, gently tugs them from Mikhail’s feet, sets them on the carpet side by side, neatly. Always Mikhail has been embarrassed of his feet, like his hands, smaller than most other guys’, and his cock, too, smaller. But just at first.

  There was always that way about Father McKenzie—the unexpected. He could kneel before you but he could slap your face so hard tears flew out of your eyes. He could cry with you, relenting. He could cradle your feet in his hands, he could kiss your feet.

  Washing the feet of the damned with his tears, our savior might do. Until the least of you, I will bless you.

  But no: unto the least of you.

  Climbing onto the bed beside Mikhail, bedsprings creaking beneath the middle-aged priest’s weight. For his chest is fat, his thighs and belly. Crease of fat at the collar. Always the strangeness of Father Mac’s thick pillows, where Mikey and the other boys had only cheap flat foam-rubber pillows on their beds. Never seen any bed with a fancy carved mahogany headboard like Father Mac’s, had to be his own, special-shipped to the Mission.

  Slow-easing his arm around Mikhail, at Mikhail’s waist. Tentative at first, then more forcibly, embracing Mikhail from behind. The priest’s face, his warm breath, a comfort, calming, against the nape of Mikhail’s neck where hairs stir, pleasurably.

  Good not to see the face. Up close faces confuse.

  And Mikhail guesses, it’s a comfort for Father Mac, too. Pressing the tremor-hand against Mikhail’s chest, hard enough so it won’t shake. So he can feel his heart beating, Mikhail thinks.

  So weird! How life happens, he’d been ready to murder the Goddamned pervert, all of them. Strangle this one with his two hands right here in this room, crack his skull against the wall and ram his knee against the fucker’s trachea so Mrs. Laskey would discover him in the morning on the floor and his mouth open and she’d run screaming for help but it hasn’t worked out that way, not today, tomorrow Mikhail vows he will expedite justice but not today, kind of just sleepy right now, maybe a little drunk.

  That velvety voice. Soothing like Mikhail remembers. Nothing changed.

  Son, you are safe here. You are safe with me.

  God can’t see in the dark, son. You remember.

  Do Not Disturb

  On the sixty-first floor of the hotel tower he awaits her.

  She is the sole passenger in the elevator, which is a sleek glass cubicle rising rapidly and silently into the atrium as into the void.

  Below, the crowded hotel lobby sinks away like a dream rapidly fading. Beside her, open floors and railings fly downward.

  A sleek new way of elevating, so different from the larger, slower-moving, cumbersome elevators of her childhood.

  In those elevators, there were likely to be uniformed operators who wore white gloves. In elevators like these, you are your own navigator.

  Lingering in the elevator a faint aroma, is it cigar smoke?

  It is December 1977. Smoking in the public areas of private hotels has not yet been banned.

  She feels a thrill of vertigo, nausea. Cigar smoke as faint as memory. She shuts her eyes to steady herself.

  Her sleek Italian leather handbag, she carries not slung from her right wrist but snug beneath her right arm, and steadied and supported by her left hand, for it is heavier than usual.

  Still, the handbag is so positioned that its gleaming brass label shines outward—Prada.

  By instinct, unconscious, vanity’s gesture even on this day—Prada.

  A large bag, perhaps large enough to be crammed with ten thousand dollars in large-denomination bills.

  He must be led to think so, opening the door to her.

  At the sixty-first floor the cubicle stops with a hiss and a jolt. The glass door slides open, Hannah has no choice but to step out. Something irrevocable has been decided, she has no choice.

  Gripping the (heavy, bulky) handbag beneath her arm. Has she no choice?

  You can still turn back.

  If now, no one will know.

  But her lover will know. He is expecting her. Ten thousand dollars.

  If she’s a day late, fifteen thousand …

  Hopeless, Hannah knows. No way for Hannah not to know, he has trapped her like a rat in a maze.

  No matter how the rat makes its way through the maze, there is no way out of the maze.

  No way except the death of the rat, or the death of the maze-maker.

  Facing the row of elevators, a plate-glass window overlooking the riverfront, the river, a fierce white sun. Foreshortened view of Woodward Avenue far below, soundless traffic.

  She’d been at the Far Hills bank that morning at nine. Waiting to see a teller. Sweating inside her beautiful flawless clothes. She’d made out the withdrawal slip, to present to the teller for a ridiculous figure: Nine thousand, nine hundred, ninety-nine dollars.

  If she must speak her numbed lips had prepared I would like to withdraw from this account …

  Before the (friendly, woman) teller she’d stood paralyzed. Too frightened to speak. At last turning aside, fleeing from the bank.

  Impossible! The bank would call Wes, she was sure.

  No choice. He is giving her no choice.

  In the Prada bag, the Smith & Wesson Magnum. Always heavier than it appears.

  Lifting the gun cautiously out of the drawer of the bedside table, her fingers icy cold, stiff. In terror that she will drop it, the gun will discharge, exactly the kind of “gun accident” that happens to persons unfamiliar with firearms, reckless persons, fools. But Hannah has no choice.

  No idea how she will manage to remove the revolver from the handbag, in his hotel suite. How she will dare to lift, aim the barrel at him.

  Not possible, she thinks. At the last moment she will grow faint, she will fail.

  And if she misses? And if he wrenches the revolver from her.

  He will beat her with it. He will beat, beat her face bloody, bruised. He will close his fingers around her neck …

  How stupid could you be, to imagine that I’d loved you.

  How stupid could you be, to imagine that you could kill me.

  Her life has become a dream. Shimmering like the sun’s reflection on a white wall. It is a mirage, it will pass. Yet, it will come again.

  And yet, no matter how many times it has happened, it has never (yet) been impossible.

  A sleepwalker making her slow careful way on stiletto heels along a windowless corridor. It is the curse of beauty, the stiletto heels. 6133, 6149, 6160 … So slowly do the numbers rise, Hannah begins to feel a thrill of relief, she will never arrive at 6183.

  Faint odor of cigar smoke in her hair, in her nostrils that pinch with nausea so remote as to be merely residual, memory.

  Joker Daddy. Buried deep in the marrow of her bones.

  A costume she has chosen with care, white linen is always discreet, a silk shirt, red silk Dior scarf at her throat like the scarf worn by (very young) Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday.

  Elegantly impractical stiletto heels, sinking into the carpet. If Hannah must turn and run, run desperately for her life, the tight-fitting shoes and the carpet will impede her.

  One of those dreams in which she is a child again. She runs, runs. Her feet sink into something like sand, soft-seeming but not soft.

  Never making any progress. Each time she has run.

  Each time, he looms behind her. Daddy’s strong hands threaten to seize her, lift her by her ribs …

  Approaching 6183 she begins to shiver.

  The nape of her neck rests against a stainless steel table, there is a drain just beneath. Her eyes stare open, unseeing. Only when your eyes are unseeing do you see all.

  Yet, she presses on. In the Saint Laurent heels it is still December 1977, she has not yet entered the room for the final time. She is determined that she will come to the end of the riddle.

  The brass plaque on the doorframe is 6183, each time it has been 6183.

  She rings the doorbell. She listens.

  Her heart beating very hard, she rings the bell again. She listens.

  Hearing no one, nothing inside. And again ringing the bell, but now also knocking, hesitantly.

  Yet still, no one. But he has been expecting her, Hannah thinks.

  She wonders if this is a reprieve? He is not answering the door, perhaps he has departed.

  He has decided to pity her. Forgive her and release her …

  He has decided that he loves her, he cannot bear to hurt her. But he is angry with her, they’ve had a lover’s quarrel. He will contact her.

  Is this the correct door? Hannah checks again, yes: 6183. And there is the sign hanging from the doorknob, silver letters on lacquered black she has come to know so well—

  PRIVACY PLEASE!

  DO NOT DISTURB

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Babysitter was first published as a short story in Ellery Queen (2005); reprinted in Horror: Best of the Year (2006), and subsequently in Sourland: Stories (2010).

  Excerpts from Babysitter were published in Inque (2021).

  About the Author

  Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, the Pen/Malamud Award, the L.A. Times Book Award (2018) and the Jerusalem Prize (2019). Her books include We Were the Mulvaneys, Blonde, Carthage, A Book of American Martyrs, Hazards of Time Travel, My Life as a Rat and Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars. She is Professor of Humanities at Princeton University.

  NOVELS BY JOYCE CAROL OATES

  Breathe

  Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars.

  Pursuit

  My Life as a Rat

  Hazards of Time Travel

  A Book of American Martyrs

  The Man Without a Shadow

  Jack of Spades: A Tale of Suspense

  The Sacrifice

  Carthage

  The Accursed

  Daddy Love

  Mudwoman

  Little Bird of Heaven

  My Sister, My Love: The Intimate Story of Skyler Rampike

  The Gravedigger’s Daughter

  Black Girl / White Girl

  Blood Mask

  Missing Mom

  The Stolen Heart

  The Falls

  Take Me, Take Me with You

  The Tattooed Girl

  I’ll Take You There

  Middle Age: A Romance

  The Barrens

  Blonde

  Broke Heart Blues

  Starr Bright Will Be with You Soon

  My Heart Laid Bare

  Man Crazy

  Double Delight

  We Were the Mulvaneys

  You Can’t Catch Me

  What I Lived For

  Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang

  Snake Eyes

  Nemesis

  Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart

  Soul/Mate

  American Appetites

  Lives of the Twins

  You Must Remember This

  Marya: A Life

  Solstice

  Mysteries of Winterthurn

  A Bloodsmoor Romance

  Angel of Light

  Bellefleur

  Unholy Loves

  Cybele

  Son of the Morning

  Childwold

  The Assassins: A Book of Hours

  Do with Me What You Will

  Wonderland

  them

  Expensive People

  A Garden of Earthly Delights

  With Shuddering Fall

  About the Publisher

  Australia

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  Canada

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  India

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  United Kingdom

  HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

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  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  United States

  HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

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  New York, NY 10007

  www.harpercollins.com

 

 

  Joyce Carol Oates, Babysitter

 

 

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