Femme Fatale and other stories

right hand, and posed for the full-length mirror at the back of the closet. The gun really made the outfit. She went into all the poses she knew from films—the straight-up-and-down Clint Eastwood glare, the wrist prop, the crouch. Each was better than the last.
    A trio of quick, high beeps sounded, the signal that the front door had been opened and closed. Mrs. Delafield always turned the alarm off when she went out because she didn’t know how to program it. Terri, frozen in front of her reflection, wondered what she should do. Call out to the intruder that someone was home? Announce that she had a gun? But the front door had been locked, she was sure of that. Only someone with a key could have entered. Mrs. Delafield? But she never came back early. The housekeeper? It was her day off. Someone was coming up the stairs with a heavy, tired tread. Wildly, Terri glanced around the walk-in closet. The door was ajar; the soft overhead lights, so kind to her reflection, were on. She could lock herself in, but her clothes were folded on an armchair in the Delafields’ bedroom. She could make a run for them, or array herself in some of Mrs. Delafield’s oversize sweats, shove the gun back in the drawer, or—
    “What the fuck?” asked Mr. Delafield, and, at that moment, Terri hated every adult in River Run who had fought his helicopter, even her own parents. If Mr. Delafield still had his helicopter, she would have heard him coming from a long way off.
    “I’m the babysitter. Terri.” She fought the impulse to cross her arms against her chest, as that would only draw attention to the gun in her hand.
    “Oh,” said the blond man with a ruddy face—it was impossible for him to turn even redder, yet Terri thought he seemed embarrassed. For her or himself? “And—that? Do you bring that to all your babysitting jobs?”
    She glanced down at the sweet silver gun, held at her hip as if it were a small purse. “No. No, that’s not mine. It’s yours.”
    “Not mine. You mean it’s Jakkie’s? Jakkie has a gun? Son of a bitch. Why would Jakkie have a gun?”
    Terri shrugged, not wanting to tell Mr. Delafield that she had always assumed it was because his wife feared him, with his big, shambling body and red, red face. Now she wondered if he feared his wife, if she had overlooked some menace in Mrs. Delafield’s ditziness.
    “Where did you find it?” Terri’s right hand, the one holding the gun, gestured loosely toward the open drawer, and he ducked his head, as if expecting it to go off. “With her pretty little panties, huh? Well, no wonder I never saw it.”
    The situation was so surreal, to use a word of which Terri was particularly fond at the time, that she couldn’t figure out how to behave. She put the gun on top of the built-in bureau and slipped on Mrs. Delafield’s most prosaic robe.
    “I was just looking at it,” she said, as if that explained everything. “No one I know owns a gun.”
    “Well, I didn’t know anyone I knew had a gun, either.” He laughed, and Terri joined him, a little nervously.
    “You looked nice,” he said, as if he didn’t mean it but wanted to be polite. “In the gown, I mean.”
    “It doesn’t really fit right.”
    “Oh. Well, you can get stuff altered, right? Jakkie does it all the time.”
    Did he not know that the gown was his wife’s? Or was he pretending to think otherwise, to spare Terri the humiliation of being caught in violation of almost every rule of good babysitting? Or was it possible that he really liked how Terri looked? Terri was terrified that he might come toward her, or touch her in some way. She was terrified he wouldn’t.
    “Hugo’s asleep,” she offered, reminding him of who she was and why she was here.
    “Hugo,” he said. “You know, I have no idea where she got that name. Maybe from Baby Huey. He has too many chromosomes. Or not enough. If I had married what my daughters call an age-appropriate woman, someone thirty-five or forty, she would have had amnio, and we would have known before he was born. Or we wouldn’t have kids at all. But Jakkie was only twenty-three when she got pregnant, and Hugo’s a freak. He won’t live past the age of five.”
    “He’s just big.”
    “He is. Huge Hugo. But he’s screwed up, too. I don’t know what Jakkie’s going to do when he dies. I wonder if that’s why she bought the gun.” He shook his head, disagreeing with himself. “No, she’ll go in a slow, catatonic decline, refusing to