Amazingly quickly—she always had been bright, so much brighter than her teachers or her mother or even Natalie had realized—Sophie understood what was happening. “Wait,” she said. “Jess. I want to bury my Roo by the beach. Not in some lonely, stupid woods.” She was sitting up straight in the seat now that the sun had gone, her blond hair frizzed and kinked and full of sand, twisted into knotty dreadlocks. Her too-round, sunshine face seemed different, almost frail, younger than Jess had seen it look for years and years. For a moment, Jess couldn’t figure out what was causing that effect, and then realized: no freckles. How could there be Sophie with no freckles?
Mostly, though, the difference was those raccoon eyes, the nothingness inside or behind them. God, you can really see it, Jess thought, then thought maybe she was making that up. She sucked in more sickening air. That, she realized, might be her last physical experience of the child she had birthed and raised.
“Go ahead,” she snarled, and returned her eyes to the road.
A few minutes later—all at once, as though a switch had been flipped—night dropped on the forest. In the car’s headlight beams, the trees looked painted onto the dark, utterly motionless. Not a single other vehicle passed them. More than once, Jess’s eyes flicked to the rearview mirror, but Sophie was always looking out the window or else over her shoulder at the trunk where her baby lay.
Unless she was looking at Benny?
They passed a series of rust-riddled white signs announcing the Pimlico Post Pavilion Expansion Project, and then a long stretch of sagging cyclone fencing around what looked like a completely abandoned construction site. Jess noted a lone bulldozer, some scattered stacks of discarded lumber, three filthy blue Porta-Potties with their doors swung open to the dark. Just as they came to the edge of the site and the end of the fence, Jess saw the wheelbarrow.
Which so much depends upon, she thought, half-chanting the lines to herself: some poem Natalie had loved in high school. She was already slowing the car before realizing she meant to. Gravel kicked up under their wheels, drumming the undercarriage of the Sunfire like little fingers. They stopped under yet another rusting sign: Concerto Woods Development Authority. Future site of Pimlico Pavilion Oaks. Country comfort, urban sophistication, 3 and 4 bedrooms, from the low $500k’s. The words were filmed over with at least a year’s worth of muck and dried sleet.
Jess looked back over her shoulder, making sure. The wheelbarrow was leaning up on its wheel against the cyclone fencing. And there really was a gaping hole in the wire, right next to it.
For once, she thought. Just this once, life was going to be kind. A sort of kind. It had taken her whole world, her husband, her daughter. But it had left her a wheelbarrow.
Even from the car, she could see that the thing was crusted with rust and bird shit. Silvery spiderwebs glinted in its handles like bows on a birthday present.
Sophie said nothing. Once again, she already understood. Together, they watched the site. There were more junk piles of wood in there, collapsing mountains of dirt, another Porta-Potty. Way back where the forest floor sloped down, they saw some kind of tractor or bulldozer, parked sideways. But there were no lights, no sounds, no sign of a night watchman or of anything worth watching. Some of the trees were oaks, some black cherry. Jess recognized those from road trips up this way with Joe, in the first year of their marriage. Their one year as just a married couple, with no one but themselves. Those days almost unimaginable, now.
“Pimlico Post Pavilion,” Sophie murmured. “My mom brought us up here once, when I was like ten. To see Fleetwood Mac. She said Stevie Nicks was her soul sister.”
“Stevie Nicks,” Jess murmured. That wailing, coked-up, little gold-dust fairy. “Perfect.”
Sophie’s voice dropped lower. “What are you saying about my mom?”
Raising a hand to her forehead, Jess squeezed her eyes and was surprised by the moisture she found there. She’d thought she was past that, for now.
“I liked your mom, Sophie. In spite of herself.”
The second she stepped out of the car, Jess knew she’d found the right place. Partially, the feeling came from the trees. They just felt like Natalie, even if Natalie had never seen them. Also, the Post Pavilion had to be somewhere nearby, maybe right over that hill down there, which meant Natalie would hear—or at least be lying near—music on summer nights. More than anything else (except her life, and her child), Natalie would have wanted music.
And in addition, there was that.
Knockknockknockknockknock. Knockknockknock.
The sound came from everywhere, bursting out in unpredictable rhythms all over the woods. In their trailer in North Carolina, when Natalie was a little girl, she had sometimes punched her mother awake to listen to that sound; she’d even done that into her teenage years. Every time, Jess would grumble, pull her close, and they’d lie there together in those too-short, nearly silent times before their neighbors flooded the world with arguments and Twisted Sister and Rush Limbaugh.
In truth, those probably hadn’t actually been the happiest moments of Natalie’s life. But they really might have been the happiest of Jess’s. And given the current circumstances, that would have to be close enough.
“Anyway, you’re not really around to argue, are you?” Jess snapped, under her breath, at nothing. At the knocking summer air.
Leaving Benny to watch Eddie, she slipped through the hole in the fencing, collecting shovels and a tarp and a pick. She placed the shovels and pick in the wheelbarrow, wiped the handle of the barrow with the blood-soaked bottom of her blouse, and wheeled everything back to the fence opening. The whole time, she felt Sophie watching. Eventually, Jess forced herself to meet that raccoon-gaze. Once again, she had a choice to make, and no good options. But leaving that thing here with her man and Natalie’s child was out of the question, so really, there was no choice whatsoever.
Returning to the car, she opened the door so Sophie could half-drag, half-spill herself onto the ground, then let her follow as best she could back to the fence. Only after Sophie had somehow scraped through the twisted chain-link did Jess squat, suck in breath to steel herself, jam her hands into Sophie’s armpits, and hoist her into the wheelbarrow. Sophie went in sideways, clunking against the tools and the sides as Jess straightened. She grabbed at her screaming ribs as if her hands could help. Meanwhile, Sophie managed to tilt upright so that she stuck up out of the well like a jack-in-the-box, her blouse also streaked with blood, her shoulders and breasts raked with scratches, as though she’d been snatched up and then dropped by a bird.
“Not one word,” Jess breathed. “You hear? And I don’t care. Legs or no: if you’re coming, you’re helping.” Then—biting the indentations her teeth had already gouged in her lower lip to help her keep from screaming—she got the barrow up on its wheel and nudged it ahead of her down the track the workmen had left into the woods.
Even if she’d wanted to, she knew she couldn’t have made it very far. But as it turned out, she didn’t have to. Leaving the construction site, they jostled down a root-riddled path, up a gentle rise to the top of a hill, and there, spilling out below them, lay the whole of Pimlico Valley. Beech trees and chestnut oaks shaded the hillsides from even the moonlight. Swatches of night-mist stretched between the trunks like hammocks. Far below—farther than Jess would have expected—the shingled roofs of the too-perfect houses and bungalows of the Concerto Woods planned community floated on their culs-de-sac. Beyond those, the Pimlico Post Pavilion amphitheater opened its wide white arms to the woods, as though the stage itself was about to erupt in song.
For a long moment, Jess almost forgot or maybe just let go of how she’d gotten here, why she’d come, even who she was. It was as though she were floating in a hot-air balloon, watching the world from the edge of space, with all the needs and hungers and terrors of all those living things down there reduced, simply by distance, to light.
Then, in the towering sweet gum to her left, a woodpecker let loos
e. The sound rattled Jess like a factory whistle, calling her back, once more, to work.
“Stay here,” she told Sophie.
“Funny,” Sophie said. “Good one, Jess.” Then, as Jess started back toward the road, she called, “Wait.”
Jess turned and waited.
“I actually think I can help.”
Jess’s laugh might have come out a bark, but it was a real laugh, nonetheless. “Now, who’s funny?”
“Me,” said Sophie. Moonlight glowed in her mouth when she grinned. “Always.”
And that was true enough, Jess supposed. Certainly, it had once been true enough.
“Also helpful,” Sophie said.
Returning to the barrow, Jess dragged the shovels and pick from under Sophie, banging her again against the sides in the process. Every new movement made Jess grunt or whimper. But she never stopped moving. If she did, she worried she might never start again.
When only Sophie’s stump was left, she turned the barrow, and back they went to the parked Sunfire.
Bad ankles and arm and all, Benny had to hobble and hop around to help drag Natalie and the child she now cradled out of the trunk. The work of centering the bodies and rolling the tarp Jess had found proved too awkward and too painful—for all of them—to allow Jess more than a quick, final glance at the ruin of her daughter’s face. But there wasn’t much face to see, and most of that was hidden by long black hair studded with bits of skull.
So that was some mercy, anyway.
Somehow, Jess and Benny wrestled the tarp up and into the wheelbarrow. Then Jess turned to lift in Sophie, too, but was startled to find her swinging herself forward along the ground with her arms, lifting her leg-stumps and her ass slightly off the dirt with each new lurch, like an orangutan. As she passed Benny, she patted his calf.
“Nice work, fluffy man,” she said.
“There’s probably room for you in here,” Jess said, gesturing at the tarp.
But Sophie never even turned around. “I got this. Feels good, actually. Whew.” She twisted through the opening in the fence and started across the construction site, her stumps churning up clouds of dirt in her wake.
“I don’t even want to think about what that means,” Benny murmured, leaning on the car, breathing hard, watching Sophie scuttle up and over a stack of metal piping. Abruptly, he sagged sideways, and Jess had to jerk out her arms and catch him, which set her ribs shuddering and stabbing again. She doubled over against Benny’s chest, pinning him upright. The car alone supported them both. Eventually, when he could, he slid his arms around her. “Oh, Jess. My God. What—”
“Ssh.” She tried to round the end of that sound, make it softer than she knew it had come out. Eventually, after a long time, she slipped from his arms and eased him back into his seat next to Eddie. “I can’t talk now, Benny. I just can’t.”
“We have to talk. Sooner or later. Jesus Christ.”
Jess grabbed his eyes and stared him silent. “About what? What, exactly, do you imagine there is to say?”
She expected no answer, and got one immediately. “How about, I’m so sorry, Jess? Or, I love you, Jess? Will those do, for starters?”
Those will do, she thought, swiping savagely at the wetness that spilled yet again down her cheeks. There really is no bottom to this well. She didn’t kiss him, mostly because she couldn’t imagine leaning over any more than she had to. But she let him see her cry. Then she turned, got the wheelbarrow up and rolling, and followed Sophie toward the woods.
Mostly, on this final trip—the last she would ever take with her daughter—Jess sang to herself, the trees, the bodies in the tarp. The songs were the ones she’d sung to Natalie, and also the ones Natalie had sung to her. She didn’t keep track, and in some cases couldn’t even remember which was which anymore. Jess had never affixed songs to moments the way Natalie had; Natalie was more like her father, that way. Jess just sang.
Found a Peanut. Both Sides Now. That whiny newer one teenage-Natalie had always walked around crooning, about being human and needing to be loved. Like everyone else does.
Everyone else does.
When the woodpeckers knocked, she stopped singing and listened to them. Let her daughter listen to them. “Do you hear?” she whispered.
At which exact instant did Jess forget about Sophie?
It didn’t matter, she would decide later, when she made herself go over and over those next moments. What mattered was that she had forgotten. She had let herself love, and grieve, and break, and hum. And so she got caught completely by surprise when Sophie dropped from the low branches of the black cherry tree she’d scurried up—like a spider or a bobcat—and landed on Jess’s back and sent her shrieking and sprawling. The wheelbarrow tilted forward, and the tarp with Natalie’s corpse in it tipped halfway out, actually propping the barrow in position. Incredibly, Jess got her hands down, even as her wrapped ribs crunched together, and Sophie didn’t have her balance right, either; she landed farther forward on her stumps than she’d meant to, and that allowed Jess at least to roll over onto her back before Sophie scrambled over and squatted on Jess’s stomach, her hands grabbing Jess’s wrists and pinning her arms to the root-riddled dirt.
If she’d been sure her body was still capable of bending, Jess probably could have bucked Sophie off, although the grip in those fingers was ferocious. But in the moment, with this hellthing atop her, Jess couldn’t think of a single reason to do that.
Sophie leaned down. Her round, freckle-less face hovered over Jess’s, blank and gigantic and remote as the moon. Her raccoon-eyes sparkled in the dark. When she spoke, the air she moved—it wasn’t an exhalation, just air with sound riding it—stank, but Jess couldn’t have said of what. Although what occurred to her in the instant was … emptiness …
“Just what,” Sophie said, “were you thinking to do with my Roo?”
“You want the truth?” Jess managed, as her own breathing slowed, quieted. The fact that she was still breathing almost seemed the most perfect, defiant response she could make. “The awful truth?” Because it was awful, no matter what Sophie had become, or might have become, or was on her way to becoming. “I wasn’t thinking of your Roo at all.”
“Well, I was. And I want him.”
“You want him.”
Sophie nodded.
Jess’s smile felt more barbed and vicious than any she had ever aimed at anyone. She’d never even imagined such a smile could fit on her face. “Sure, hon.” And with that, she pushed Sophie off. She was only a little surprised that Sophie let her. She gestured at the wheelbarrow. “Help me get this thing up.”
Together, Jess tugging the handle while Sophie pushed from the ground at the tarp with Natalie’s body—which was holding Sophie’s Roo’s body—wrapped in it, they righted the barrow. Wincing and gasping with every step, Jess pushed it over the top of the little hill, up to the edge of the patch of soft dirt she’d found between two yards-long ridged roots of the giant sweet gum. Then she let everything fall sideways, and the tarp thumped out onto the ground.
“Now help me unroll it.”
They did that together. The second Natalie’s body appeared, Jess bent forward, ignoring the pain. With surprisingly little pressure or effort, she freed the little bundle from Natalie’s arms. A gentle tilt, a push on the tiny backside, and the baby was free of Natalie’s grip. As easy as sliding a record out of a sleeve. Straightening, grunting as her tortured ribs rang, Jess cradled the bundle one last time. This boy had been hers, too, briefly, after all. He’d been hers, at least a little bit, all his too-short life. A tiny part of her wondered why Sophie hadn’t already ripped him from her hands. Jess wouldn’t have faulted her for that.
But when she looked up, Sophie was just watching, waiting, with her arms out and her lips flat and no expression Jess knew in her eyes.
“Here you go,” she whispered, to George William, to his mother, and held out the child. Sophie snatched him away and clutched him to her breast.
&n
bsp; For a few moments, Sophie leaned over her child, murmuring and cooing. Then she seemed to realize Jess was watching and turned away, even managed to edge deeper into the shadows of the sweet gum. That gave Jess a little more time to sit with her own daughter. She didn’t coo or murmur or even hum, now; she just listened to the woodpeckers and held Natalie’s icy, lifeless hand. One last time, and one time only, she let herself look at her daughter’s face. The lips were still there, and still so expressive: slightly opened, turned down, and yet, somehow, almost smiling. That distinctive Natalie-expression. The ghost of it, anyway.
Eventually, with a start, Jess realized that the sky was starting to lighten. Letting go of Natalie’s hand, she stood, picked up the shovel, found the softest dirt she could, and took some time settling into the least painful work position she could devise. Then she began her long, slow dig at the ground. She could have made Sophie help, or at least asked her to. Possibly, Sophie could have done that, just using her hands. But Sophie was with her baby. The baby she had abandoned to Jess’s care, and come back for too late. And Jess … Well, Jess was with her baby. The one who had abandoned her.
That isn’t fair, she thought, as she dug, rested, wept, dug some more. But she kept thinking it.
“Why here?” Sophie finally said, when Jess had been stopped for some time.
In fact, Jess had just realized that she was probably finished. Looking up, she was again surprised—and again, nowhere near alarmed enough—to find Sophie at the lip of the grave. Somehow, silently, she must have sidled closer. Above her head, through the massed branches, Jess noted the pink-tinged whiteness just spreading at the horizon, like the pressed-in quick at the bottom of a nail.
“We can’t keep them in the car,” she said, with no emotion in her voice and none in her heart, either, right then. “And I’m figuring, no matter how far the Concerto Woods Development Project develops, if it ever does, they’re never going to come up here and move this tree.” She gestured at the Pavilion far below. “Also, there’s music.”
Good Girls Page 8
