“What?” She shifted her body a bit closer to him.
“Well, when I was walking around I came up on this old house. It was a ragged place that probably hadn’t been lived in for years. The windows were all broken out, but there was some old furniture still inside. It was a creepy looking old place. I didn’t want to go near it, but I did anyway.”
“Why did you?”
“I don’t know. It was like something was making me. I wanted to see it up close. I wanted to see what was inside. I’d never seen anything like it. Like it’d been fancy a long time ago. I thought the door was locked, but it turned out it was only jammed. The door made an awful screeching sound—like an old woman crying. It was so dark when I got inside. I could barely see anything at first. Then I saw something. It was a really tall grandfather clock against the wall—you know, like the one we have at home?”
She nodded.
“At first I couldn’t tell what it was. I was scared it was a person. But then I knew for sure it was a clock.”
“How did you know it was?”
“Because it started...ticking,” he whispered, his face coming close to her ear, “and that was worse.”
“Why was it worse?”
“Because it wasn’t ticking before. It started up out of nowhere on its own.”
“Oh no, what did you do then?” she whispered.
He looked at her with a flash of amusement before becoming serious again.
“You really want to know?”
“Yes. Well, I think so—unless—is it really horrible, Danny?”
“Pretty horrible. Like you said, why else would I make myself forget?”
“Oh then, I don’t want to hear—I couldn’t stand it.” She shook her head.
“Oh but you have to. You’re the one who made me remember. I think you have to hear it now, so I can make peace with it all, right?” He shrugged. She took a deep breath and braced for the words to come.
“Okay, tell me.”
“Well, I tripped back over something once I heard the ticking. I thought I would lose my balance so I reached out for whatever I could catch myself with. But I didn’t fall, something kept me.”
“What was it?”
“Well, a hand.”
“A hand?” she gasped.
“Yeah. It was cold, but for sure a hand. It caught me and pulled me up—a strong, cold hand.”
“Oh Danny, it wasn’t really was it?”
“It was, and when I looked up…I saw a face.”
“Whose face was it?”
“A little girl. Her face was so white, like a…”
“A ghost?” she finished off for him.
“I think so, had to have been. I looked at her face, looked away, and then she was gone.”
“She disappeared?”
“Yes. Isn’t that what ghosts do?” he asked. Not really knowing what ghosts did or didn’t do, she couldn’t answer.
“What did she look like, Danny?”
She watched him think for a moment as his eyes looked over her.
“You really want to know?”
“I think so.”
“Well, she was white, like I said. The whitest skin I’d ever seen.”
“Was she hideous?” she asked, unable to stop her morbid curiosity.
“Oh yes, I’d say so...hideous in so many ways. Her face was covered in this—slime I guess. But there was one thing about her face that was the most awful. A terrible thing, but—no…I don’t think I should tell you.”
“Oh for god’s sake, Danny, just tell me.” she shouted, feeling she would burst if he didn’t finish the strange tale.
“Ok then, don’t say I didn’t warn you. The most horrible thing was...her nose.”
She glared at him, the eerie thrill of the story having evaporated.
“Her nose? What was wrong with it?”
He leaned into her, examining her face with careful scrutiny.
“Well it just wasn’t right. It looked like...an acorn.”
She hit him, strong enough to his shoulder that he tumbled back a bit. Rather than resist the momentum, he rolled to his back, laughing.
“You’re terrible, Danny. I’ll hate you forever for teasing me like that.” She rose to her feet and began to climb down.
“Oh c’mon, Katie,” he said still laughing, “it wasn’t so bad, under all the slime she looked an awful lot like Esther Ralston.”
She walked briskly back towards the club.
“Awe, Katie, it was just a joke. Don’t be such a pill,” he called happily from behind.
“I’m not speaking to you. You’re a liar and a horrible boy.”
He picked up his pace until he caught up from behind.
“Well, I wasn’t completely lying. I was there—in Catalina at least. And the nimrods did leave me to freeze.”
“Good. I’m glad for it.”
“C’mon, you just seemed like you wanted some big story, so I gave you one.”
Katie stopped abruptly at the club’s elaborate doorway. She glanced up, not believing they were back to where they’d started.
“Was any of that really true, any of it at all?” she asked. He stopped smiling. Placing his hands in his pockets, he took a step towards her.
“What do you think?”
She considered him, waiting for his seriousness to break at the edges towards his teasing nature. But his face didn’t falter. The same horrible notion as before gripped her: the moment was not real. Maybe this version of Daniel Gallagher was just a hopeful rendition she’d invented while she lay dying beneath the Dancer’s heavy body.
“I don’t believe you,” she said, not believing anything that would come from Daniel Gallagher—or any version of him she’d manufactured.
“I’m not lying,” he smiled.
“Then why did you tell no one?”
He touched the small of her back and opened the door for her with his free hand.
“Because. Not everything that happens is worth talking about,” he said as the doors shut behind them.
As they drove home, she glanced at Daniel’s face barely visible against the inky pane of glass. They had never returned to the party. They sat in the coatroom under the bottom fringes of hanging jackets until the Kittredges were ready to leave. When Irene spotted her, she’d looked her up and down like soiled laundry. She’d gotten that look before. Usually when people met her and realized she wasn’t what she appeared to be in the movies. They didn’t know that the image they expected wasn’t real either. Their version of Katie Webb had been man-made, fabricated by hundreds of people over the years. A pretty sugar egg with only oddities inside…and Irene had finally sensed what wasn’t right about her like a bad smell.
“Well there you two are. We’ve got to be along now,” she’d said in a way too similar to the sing-songy voice of her mind. She pilfered through the jackets until she found the flimsy shawl Katie had taken from the house in case of chill. She looked at the thing as it curled around her arm like strands of a broken cobweb. She tossed it to Danny before gathering the rest of their things. Mr. Kittredge followed his wife, but a different Mr. Kittredge too. The man who’d been so chipper hours before, now followed Irene with shuffling, dispirited steps—hat in hand. Danny smiled when they were alone again in the coatroom. He handed her the shawl. It was a trivial gesture, but in some small way it meant they were no longer at odds with each other. When they arrived home, Mrs. Gallagher’s car was in the driveway and a soft light glowed from the downstairs windows. Albert had fallen asleep in the backseat, and when his mother slammed the car door, he stirred and groaned against the noise. She looked at Daniel. He nodded, and they followed behind. When Mrs. Gallagher opened the door, her hair was undone and swaying at her waist. She was barefoot, but still stood inches taller than Irene Kittredge.
“Well hello, Irene,” she said, the sweetness of her greeting at odds with Irene’s fussy façade.
“Hey, Ma.” Danny said and ducked past her into the
house. Katie hesitated for a moment before greeting Mrs. Gallagher and following behind. Katie stopped for moment at the foot of the stairs. There, she heard enough of the conversation to know that she didn’t want to hear any more. The last bit she caught was Mrs. Kittredge’s shrill voice saying his name. It hadn’t been his real name, of course. They’d both been given better names, names that fell across the tongue in just the right way. He’d been fond of talking to her afterwards. He sometimes wept strange, boyish tears and told her secrets—a lot of them she didn’t understand. Mostly she didn’t listen to them. Mostly she stared while his hand clung to his flat cap, his head bent in shame. But once he’d told her his real name. It was strange-sounding, clunky in its Irishness—just as her own had been
She put on her pajamas. Irene and Mrs. Gallagher were still talking downstairs, but the sound was barely audible. Then there was silence. Headlights blazed through her room then fell away with the sound of the Kittredge’s car pulling from the drive. As she brushed her hair, the swingy sounds of Danny’s jazz records played from down the hallway.
“Katie, doodah, come down for a moment,” Mrs. Gallagher called from below. Katie clamped her eyes shut at the sound of the kind, but firm voice. She put down her hairbrush and sadly descended the staircase. Mrs. Gallagher sat with her tangled ladybug pattern in hand, her slender fingers working at untangling the threaded mess.
“There you are. Did you have a nice time this evening?”
“Yes,” she answered, a little too quickly.
“This is good work. You won’t finish it?”
“I don’t know. I’m stuck in the middle. It only irritates me to move forward.”
“I see. Do you not like the work?”
Katie thought about it. It was the kind of question she’d never really been asked before.
“I guess I don’t like it. It’s like when I dance. The rules for what to do next just pile on top of each other and I get confused. I know what I need to do, but I can’t make myself do it.”
“Yes, I suppose it is the same as this,” she said holding up the ladybug, “you must know how to weave each thread together to make a shape. It is a hard dance to learn.”
“But you’re so good at it. You’re so good at everything. You’d never know what it is to be bad at something,” Katie replied, and quickly grew ashamed of the sulky comment.
“But you are wrong, Katie Webb. When I was young, as you are now, all of the girls I knew loved to dance. Yes, I loved to move and play and make my own dances. But my friends said that was not real dancing. They made a big bag of rules of it all: rules for when to move and when to not, when to be silent. When to be still. I thought that dancing was something that came without rules. My friends teased me for that. It made me sad. Until one day I thought, if that is what it means to be a dancer, I’d rather just drift and bend like the trees—and I was happy then. And you know what happened to all the little girls who were dancers?” She smiled with a wicked tilt to her lips.
“What?” Katie asked.
“They ended up bow-legged and cross-eyed for all their silly rules—and all before any boy could invite them to dance along.” Katie giggled as Mrs. Gallagher crossed her eyes into her smallish nose.
“That can’t be true.” Katie laughed, and Mrs. Gallagher’s dopey expression settled back into the still beauty of before.
“Well maybe not for all. But if it was true, then would it not be better to dance and bend like the trees?”
“Yes, I suppose.”
Mrs. Gallagher crossed her eyes again and puffed out her cheeks. Katie giggled again, but soon found herself laughing loudly from her belly while Mrs. Gallagher ran through a series of sillier and sillier faces. Over their laughter, she hadn’t noticed Daniel’s clomping down the stairs until he walked past them into the kitchen.
“Well, hello Daniel—I thought you’d gone to bed?” Mrs. Gallagher said.
“I’d like to know who could sleep with you two making so much racket.”
Danny opened the refrigerator door to scour the contents inside.
“There’s nothing to eat in this house.”
“Hardly, Daniel. It is only food you have to work to prepare.”
“That’s worse than having nothing,” he said. He shut the door and joined them in the living room. He plopped down in a heap next to his mother. Mrs. Gallagher smiled warily at the companionable display of affection so unlike him.
“Make us something, won’t you Ma?”
“You like my cooking again, do you?”
“Not just for me. Katie’s hungry too, right?”
“Don’t bring Katie into your trickery.” She smiled. “It’s almost midnight—if you eat this late you’ll have nightmares.”
“I’ll risk it.”
“Well, I will make something—but it’s not because you pulled me in with your swindling. I’ll likely forget after tonight. When Katie leaves, I’ll have no one left to cook for.”
Katie looked at Danny, his body in a lazy crumble, hand resting on his cheekbone, pressing the skin of his face into childish folds.
“So what have you two been squawking about down here anyway?”
Mrs. Gallagher rolled her eyes at her son’s teenage bluntness.
“Dancing, if you must know,” Mrs. Gallagher answered.
“Dancing? Why? Katie hates dancing…couldn’t dance her way out of a paper bag.”
“Danny!” Katie shouted.
“Well you can’t.”
“Well you can’t either, Daniel.” Mrs. Gallagher said over the sound of sizzling meat on the stove range. “When you were small, they tried to teach you tap dancing and oh how you would cry and bellow. He threw a tantrum when he had to take a lesson.”
“What boy ever wanted to tap anyways?”
“True enough,” she replied. “But they had told us it would broaden you.”
“Broaden me?” he groaned, “broaden me into a goon like—”
It didn’t register at first that he’d said the name. Actually said it out loud. Not the secret name the Dancer had shared with her again and again, but the one the whole world knew him for. Mrs. Gallagher gave a short-lived, but amused laugh, “Well, I think Mrs. Kittredge would disagree with you.”
“Big deal,” Danny yawned.
“Well, she was quite crazy with seeing him tonight.”
“What? Where? At the club?” he asked, turning in his seat.
“Yes. You didn’t see him?”
Danny didn’t answer. Katie felt his eyes on her, but she could only stare at the ground. The blood rushed to her ears and she wrapped her arms around her waist.
“Irene said he was cut by some cheap crystal when a waiter dropped a tray. You didn’t see?” she asked, but her voice was flat as though she already knew the answer.
“No,” Daniel said.
Mrs. Gallagher sighed. “Oh, Irene is a nice woman, but she talks a lot about things that don’t matter. I would say he drank too much champagne and fell into the poor boy. Such things happen at parties. Nothing to hang on the Christmas tree. She must be over the moon for him to care so much.”
The heat in Katie’s ears cooled, and she looked up. Mrs. Gallagher’s dramatic eyes were on her as she’d expected they would be.
“Cross-eyed and bow-legged, didn’t I say Katie? Such people fall into trays,” she said. Katie gave her a sad smile. Mrs. Gallagher began to hum her strange music and put plates onto the kitchen table. Katie followed in to help—a task she did now without much thought.
“Thank you, Katie.” Mrs. Gallagher stroked the back of her head before placing the last of the food on the table. Danny joined them at the table, but seemed to have little more to say.
“Velbekommen, Daniel.” Mrs. Gallagher said. Danny looked up at his mother oddly, but accepted when she passed him a serving dish.
“Velbekommen, Mama.” he replied softly.
And so began their strange, late-night meal. A mostly silent meal that seemed to roll ou
t and put away everything horrible that had happened.
Chapter Eight
Pacific Palisades, California
1949
The men in grey suits came ten days later. Things were not so different that final week. She worked in the garden with Mrs. Gallagher and helped with the chores. The only thing that changed was Danny had stopped disappearing. Apart from the Saturday he went to Wrigley Field to watch the Angels play, he spent every day in the backyard building a trellis for his mother’s grapevine plant or playing jazz records in his room. In the afternoons, she watched him work from the porch swing and stitched at the ladybug she was bound to finish. She’d come to like the swing more than the upstairs window seat. The window seat had sheltered her while she needed sheltering—but she found she no longer wanted to hide.
She pushed herself with a dirty bare foot—back and forth, back and forth—every movement followed by a short swinging creak. She stole glances at him between needle strokes, his back bowed over while he hammered away as though they were working toward the same fixed deadline. Soon she would go back to crinoline petticoats and Spoolie curlers—back to cold lot classrooms and hot can lights. The old Katie Webb was unmarred and pale—even under the peach-colored stage lights. She was taller now, her skin tanned and knees rough. She looked down at the chain of healing scabs on her shin bone, then up again at Danny. The telephone rang from inside. His hammering hand stopped mid-air, and then followed through to tamp another nail into place. It was a sound she’d feared only a short time before. Yet now she only glanced toward the kitchen—then turned her chin down toward her needlework. Her mind had gone blank with the sunset by the time she heard the screen door slap behind her. She didn’t need to look up at Mrs. Gallagher’s face to know what the call had meant. They had found her father’s holographic will, of course. Written in longhand, her father had left her to Tilda and Ornan Meltsner. The aging couple who came to all the parties on Nestle Avenue.
Sometimes she wondered if she should have thought of her father more. The tears at the funeral were for press standing along the cemetery’s shrubbery lines. The same way she cried again and again for the camera until her tears read the way the director wanted. Crying at night while Mrs. Gallagher held onto her—she supposed that those tears had been real, but they hadn’t been for her father—not really. They were just confused, scared tears. She hadn’t known where she would end up or what would become of her. Now she knew the Meltsners would take her. There was some peace in that. They weren’t so scary. They were film people—like her. They would understand. People who didn’t understand what she was…were the ones who tried to hurt her. She looked up at Mrs. Gallagher and smiled.
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