* * *
Two weeks later, Jo stands by her bay window. The days are getting longer, but slowly, and it’s already dark as she watches the girls glow in the graveyard. They’ve ignored her ever since she asked for their help. The real estate stager is coming in the morning, to rearrange the furniture that Jo has kept the same, just the way she likes it, for the past ten years. How will the stager get the marks out of the carpets from the places where Jo’s china cabinet, end tables, dressers and desks have stood for so many years? Jo’s sure she has some kind of real estate stager trick. Not that it matters: if Marcie gets her way, soon this house won’t even be Jo’s anymore. If only the girls would help her, use the seething power of the dead that she knows accompanies their graceful games and bookish ways…well, then, of course they could stop Marcie. So why do they race off every time she squelches into the graveyard?
What if they can sense that line that leapt through Jo’s mind: In New York City, ghosts drift through the streets like steam through manholes. And there it is again, running through Jo like a train that can’t be stopped. What if they’re angry, because she keeps having this thought? What if they’re angry because as Jo shook the glass from Adie’s broken bottle off her socks, something lifted from her shoulders, as though the bottle had been a burden instead of a precious thing? But those were just thoughts. She kept the bottle shards. She wants to stop Marcie, wants to prevent her cousin from sending her out into the vast world of skyscrapers and manhole covers alone, prevent her from leaving her girls to fend for themselves.
Jo turns from the window, pulls on her boots and coat, and marches outside. She flings open the gate and stomps into the graveyard. The girls are draped around and over the graves, listless.
“The real estate stager is coming tomorrow.” Jo crosses her arms over her chest. Adie, who’s lounging on a grave adorned only with the faded outline of a winged skull, fiddles with her card and hisses. “Do you know what a real estate stager does?
She’s going to move around all my furniture, throw away a bunch of my things. Get the house looking like some stupid catalog, to prepare for some new people moving in here. Is that what you want?”
They ignore her. They fidget and shift and sigh and none of them make a move.
“I would think you’d help me,” Jo whispers. “Why won’t you help me?”
She trudges back inside, a sick feeling clenching at her stomach, that feeling before the drop, when you’re about to lose something bigger and more monumental than you ever dreamed of losing.
She sits at the kitchen table, fiddles listlessly with the shards of Adie’s bottle.
The bay window rattles. Jo looks up.
Adie’s standing outside the window, her palms pressed against the panes, her face stony and her teeth gritted, her arms already trailing into silvery ribbons. Jo leaps up. The girls never leave the cemetery and lose their forms. What are they doing? Have they changed their minds? Are they coming to help her?
A rattling at the front door, and Jo flees through the house, knocking over her chair in the process. She flings the door open. The girls stream inside, their footsteps making no noise against the faded carpet in the front hall. Their hair trails behind them, and they’re holding hands, and their dresses are shredding before Jo’s eyes, disintegrating into mist.
“Girls,” she says, “I—”
Adie hisses, and knocks a vase off an end table.
The vase falls to the ground and shatters.
Jo only has time to gasp in a breath before the girls emit a collective shriek, a long and lonely and horrible keen that maybe comes from the earth itself.
And then they tear through the house.
They sweep books off shelves and the pages grow hoarfrost and melt away beneath their fingers. They shatter wine glasses and cut-glass decanters, they rip down paintings and put their fists through the canvas, they turn Jo’s African violet upside down and shake the plant onto the floor.
“Why are you doing this? What—why?” Do they want her to leave them? Have they come to hate her? Do they not need her anymore?
Jo screams at them to stop, as she watches her life smash and shatter and disintegrate around her, but they ignore her.
As they destroy the house their forms fall away completely, until her girls are nothing but swirling shadows, ripping through her extra blankets and smashing a snow globe. When they sweep the three remaining catching bottles off the china cabinet, when Jo watches the hardy green-tinted glass explode against the floor, she fights back tears.
At last the howling, spitting shadows sweep down the stairs and flood out the front door. Jo’s left with her own thudding heart and the erratic tick of her injured grandfather clock and the wreck of the things that she once held dear.
And her shoulders relax. Her clenched stomach loosens.
It bursts through her, this identification of the feeling sweeping through her body, the same feeling that swept through her when Adie’s bottle smashed. It’s relief.
Why? Why are parts of her glad to see her precious things broken?
She steps out the front door, tiptoes to the cemetery. The girls are gasping, their howling shapes resolving back into ghostly arms and fingers and legs and hair. Adie’s on her hands and knees, and Prudence is leaning her head against Samantha’s shoulder, quaking. Em’s off to the side, stony-faced and straight-backed against the chicken wire fence.
“Why did you do it?” Jo whispers to the night, to her girls.
Samantha shifts, sits up. She looks almost ordinary now, the same old Samantha, although her edges still quiver slightly. She palms her chalk and scrapes its edge against her chalkboard.
YOU ARE NOT US.
The hard mud beneath Jo seems to tilt. The scene burns into her mind: the acrid smell of wood smoke drifting from some other house, the glint of lamplight on dirty snow, this moment, when she loses them.
When they give her permission to be lost.
Jo leaves the graveyard, carefully closing the chicken wire fence behind her. She steps back into her silent, destroyed house. She pulls black garbage bags from beneath the sink, and she picks up glass, torn books, all her scattered broken memories, drops them into the voluminous plastic. She sweeps the floor with her old splintery-handled broom. She wipes down the counters.
Light is seeping into the house when she packs her sleek leather suitcase, laying in just the few things she needs. No shredded books. No bottle shards. She clunks down her stairs for the last time, pushes out her front door, and steps into sunlight, into fragile hot dawn. She’s sweating in her coat and vines are twining around her front railings. The trees are heavy with the dusty leaves of mid-to-late summer, and bees buzz around the bluebells dotting her lawn. How did she become so suspended in time? How did roots and seeds shift within the earth, trees burst forth in bloom and spring rains wash away the snow, without her noticing?
At the back of the house, she pauses, memorizing the slumped bodies of her sleeping girls. As she turns to go, Adie stirs, stands, and slinks between the gravestones. She presses her playing card into Jo’s palm, and before Jo can do or say anything, she’s gone, slinking back to her ghost-sisters.
And Jo closes the gate for the last time behind her, wondering what time the train rumbles out of town heading for points south.
* * *
The next time Jo walks up the moose path from Old Route 17, she’s wearing a new coat. Her hair is short. She carries the playing card in her wallet, but it's creased and stained by hundreds of coins and bills shuffling past it.
An unfamiliar car idles in the driveway outside the house.
The chipped white paint has been replaced by pale yellow. Jo hears a little boy’s shout, long and sustained, from somewhere inside.
She sneaks around back, past beds full of unfamiliar plants.
Ahead of her looms the old gap-toothed graveyard. The wire pen is gone, the barn dismantled, but there, among the gravestones, glimmer her girls: Em, flipping through t
he pages of Emily Dickinson, Adie pricking her finger against a strand of Christmas lights, Prudence and Samantha leaping their way through a game of hopscotch.
“Girls,” Jo calls. “Girls.”
They look up. They cock their heads at her, frowning. And they turn back to their pursuits.
“Girls,” Jo whispers again.
This time, only Adie looks up. For half a second, her face changes, her cheeks soften and she gives Jo half a nod, a bashful smile. And then she holds up her Christmas lights, turns her back on Jo.
Jo shoves her hands in her pockets, sneaks out from behind the house and walks back out the moose path to Old Route 17 and to other lives.
THE HEART MACHINE
A rat skittered on the pavement inches from Aliona’s bare foot, but she didn’t flinch. In two blocks, she’d be at the Storefront, with the loaf of mealy bread under her arm, and she would open the door to the sight of Ray and Katrin sitting cross-legged beneath the cracked white basin of the heart machine.
But no, Katrin wouldn’t be there. Katrin wouldn’t be there ever again.
Aliona clenched the bread tighter between her arm and ribcage, her stomach twisting like she might throw up. No. Not again.
Since Katrin had left last month, Aliona had been tossing stuff into the heart machine every day, trying to stave off the dead, sick feeling in her stomach. She couldn’t keep doing that. She had to push away thoughts of Katrin, concentrate on Ray.
She leapt over broken glass and ducked beneath dying palm trees until the blacked-out windows of the Storefront loomed through the humid night. She unlocked the door and slipped inside.
Ray sat cross-legged on the cement floor, her high heels teetering next to her. The light glowing from the embers in the heart machine illuminated the mascara smeared beneath her eyes.
“What’s wrong, pal? Did that fucker Victor do something to you? You need me to mess with the heart machine?” Aliona jabbed her dirt-rimmed fingernail at the white ceramic basin, with the three hollow metal wires strung across it, one end of each attached to a syringe and the other snaking down into the basin, each twined with a strand of Aliona’s, Ray’s and Katrin’s hair and adorned with glued-on baby teeth.
Ray wiped her manicured hand across her cheek. “You brought bread?”
“’Course. I’ll probably need to use credits to get new shoes next time. But the bread’ll last longer without...with only two people.” Without Katrin, gentle Katrin with her soft voice for reading them books. Katrin who had taken an Aptitude Test last month and tested out of the streets and left them for an air-conditioned government flat and a job caring for orphans.
Katrin who had decided she cared more about those children than she did about Aliona and Ray. Aliona knew that Katrin had wanted that job, that someone needed to look after those reject kids, the way someone had looked after Aliona, Ray and Katrin before they all failed round one of the Aptitude Tests and the government dismissed them to live on the street.
“I’m not hungry anyway.” Ray held out a battered tube of lipstick. “I have this, for the heart machine. It’s empty.”
“Wonderful.” Aliona snatched the tube and dropped it into the basin, where it clattered against the ashes and charred remains of everything she’d ever used to fuel the heart machine: books whose spines had broken and cracked-heeled shoes, outgrown tank tops and empty beer cans. She poured in a little packet of oil, threw in a paper cup full of Epsom salt, and dropped a match. The basin leapt up in silver flame, and Aliona knelt down, pumped the plunger attached to the syringe that was plugged into one of the wires. She sucked up just enough fumes so she and Ray would feel better again, but not enough to overwhelm them. She had perfected it, over the years, pulling up just the right amount. As the fumes flooded into the wire, her tight stomach unclenched, and she heaved a deep breath.
“This is good,” Aliona said to Ray, “'cause I wouldn’t want you to get too sad, now that Katrin’s...”
She reminded herself: Katrin’s gone. Time to focus on Ray. “Anyway, you want to go down the boulevard? I heard there’s a fête down there. They might have beer and pills and stuff.”
Tears bubbled out of Ray’s lower eyelids.
“What’s wrong, pal? You want to sneak in?” Aliona didn’t >want to head uptown, to scale the stucco walls of the Oasis and spend the night ordering drinks on other people’s tabs by the pool until she got kicked out, while Ray disappeared with Victor into a world of white sheets. But she also didn’t want Ray to cry anymore, and if Ray wanted to sneak into the Oasis, they would sneak into the Oasis.
“I just came from there.”
“All right.” Why had Ray sneaked into the Oasis without her? “So what do you want to do?”
“Victor wants me to marry him.”
“What?” Aliona laughed. “Oh, pal, I know you feel bad about hurting his feelings, but—”
“I said yes.”
The floor tilted beneath Aliona.
In a book Katrin used to read to them, a book written by a woman named Virginia centuries ago, two young girls “spoke of marriage always as a catastrophe.”
That line leapt through Aliona’s mind, clenched around the pain that had leapt from her stomach and started shaking, shaking, shaking in her chest.
“I never wanted to stay here forever.” Ray unfolded herself and stood. “And now Katrin’s gone. This is my chance to go live—”
“But pal—”
“You should leave too.” Ray seized Aliona’s hand. “You should take the Aptitude Test again, find someone to vouch for you so you can go live in the—”
“Maybe, I guess. Maybe.” Who was Ray kidding? No one would marry a dirty-mouthed, coarse girl like Aliona. No one would stamp her Aptitude Test when her only talent was rigging up this heart machine, a broken governmental model from a few generations back that Aliona had stumbled across in the back of the Storefront when they’d moved in. “What about the heart machine?”
“Leave it. We’ll lock the door and take the key. We won’t need any more new stuff thrown in there, now that...well, the new heart machines in the Oasis are real sophisticated, Victor says, and I’ll be hooked up to one within a few weeks.”
Aliona clenched the chipped basin edge, ran her finger along the dried-out hair coiled on the wires above the machine. I’m the reason Katrin and Ray can feel enough to care for kids and fall in love in the first place. I figured out how to set up the heart machine, feed it stuff, give them feelings when most people on the street never even take another Aptitude Test cause nobody on the street has a heart machine to fill them up with anything. And now...now...Ray doesn’t need it anymore. She doesn’t need me anymore.
“Allie.” Ray slipped her delicate, high-arched feet into her heels. “You should leave and find someplace to go. I really—I want that for you. I love you, ‘kay?” She wrapped her arms around Aliona and Aliona squeezed her, breathed in the sweat on Ray’s neck.
Leave and find someplace to go. Without them she was just a fierce girl in the gutter. Without them she was nothing.
She swallowed. “Good luck, pal.” She clapped Ray on the shoulder, her head swimming. Ray kissed her on the cheek and clip-clopped out of the Storefront. The door slammed behind her.
Aliona sank to the floor as her mind played a lifetime of reading and secrets, Katrin’s soft breath, Ray’s crying jags, giggling as they vaulted walls into worlds where they didn’t belong, sharing a feast of bread when they returned to the Storefront.
Pain flared in Aliona’s chest, sharp as saltwater poured on an open wound.
They were gone. They were gone. It was over. Her life with them receded as though it had never been there at all.
* * *
Aliona waited in the bread line, her arms crossed over the tightness in her chest. In front of her, two other street girls were exchanging their food credits for a bottle of lye sham-poo from the man in dirty overalls who ran the distribution booth. Aliona had seen those girls around before. A few y
ears younger than her, snot-nosed, eyes flat. They never touched each other on the arm, never snorted or giggled. Their mouths hung open at half-mast and their breathing was always steady and regular. Because they didn’t have a heart machine to light up their eyes.
Aliona envied them like a punch in the throat. She envied their dead eyes, their empty faces.
If she’d never messed around with that chipped old machine and rigged it up for them, she never would have loved Ray and Katrin, fierce as her own desire to survive, and she never would have hurt when they left her.
“Bread?” Overalls asked her when she reached the booth.
“No. Those instead.” Aliona jabbed her finger at a cracked pair of white sneakers. She handed Overalls her crumpled food credits, then hurried back to the Storefront, flinching at the rats that snuffled in the shadows.
She knelt over the heart machine, threw in the sneakers, threw in the oil and the Epsom salt and a match. She gritted her teeth as the flame leapt around the sneakers’ canvas.
“You don’t need them. You don’t need them. You can do this on your own,” she said to the empty Storefront, as she pumped the syringe. “At least they’re happy. At least they’ve moved on to something better.”
She clenched at the tightness still popping through her chest.
* * *
Leave and find someplace to go, Ray had said. Well, how was she supposed to do that, exactly? She was good for one thing: helping Ray and Katrin. Bringing them bread when Katrin wouldn’t leave the Storefront 'cause she was scared of the men on the street. Knowing just what to throw in the heart machine when Ray came home crying after Victor told everyone how she bled the first time he fucked her.
Was she supposed to take an Aptitude Test, show the government she was worth something after all by listing all the curse words she knew, or showing them her skill with a pocketknife? Was she supposed to charm some Oasis boy with her callused feet?
What exactly was she supposed to do?
The truth of it was that some people were born in the Oasis, and some people were born in the street. The people born in the Oasis were set, with their plastic and silicone heart machines, and the people born in the street were given the chance to prove that they should be taken off the street, plunked into a clean and safe life. Some people, like Ray and Katrin, were born pretty and gentle enough to pass that test, to escape the life they were given, while others just weren’t. That’s the way it was.
Speaking to Skull Kings Page 7
