Good Girls

by Glen Hirshberg

  That was a pathetic, hopeless hope, Rebecca knew. Although if anyone could possibly do that, it would be Jess. Her phone pulsed again. She glanced down into the ID window and saw Kaylene’s name yet again. With a sigh, she glanced toward the kitchen and saw the three plates laid at the edge of the counter, in the spot where Jess apparently ate whatever meals she ate, just standing there, alone.

  Settling onto the sprung, rust-spotted couch, which was the only place to sit in the entire downstairs other than the floor, Rebecca rested Eddie on her hip and answered her phone.

  “Aren’t you at the Women’s Shelter?” she said, before Kaylene could even speak. “Don’t you have work?”

  “Rebecca, finally, where have you been? I’ve been calling and calling, there’s something I have to tell you and—”

  “I got kicked out of Halfmoon House,” Rebecca blurted, and Kaylene gave one of her Kaylene-squeaks and went quiet. She really was the most satisfying person Rebecca had ever met to surprise, mostly because she was still—and always—so ready to be surprised. “Actually, that’s a little melodramatic. But … Kaylene, I said something so stupid. It just came out. Amanda was trashing Joel, again, as usual, for daring to make us all happy. And he was just standing there, and he looked so pathetic, and she can be so mean. And I couldn’t stand it.”

  “What did you say? You mouthed off to Amanda?”

  “I told Joel he should leave her.”

  “You … what?”

  “And she heard.”

  There was a long silence, broken only by Eddie’s gurgling and tugging at Rebecca’s hair. Rebecca had been on too many fraught phone calls—was too well trained in the art of fraught phone calls, and was also too much her weirdo, intuitive self—not to recognize panic on the other end of the line when she heard it. Or, in this case, sensed it, since she wasn’t actually hearing anything.

  But what did Kaylene have to panic about? “Hey, Kaylene. What’s—”

  “Did we all drop acid last night, Rebecca? Together? And someone forgot to tell me?”

  That should have been funny. But there was something new in Kaylene’s tone—a sourness, a sadness—and it alarmed Rebecca as much as anything else in this whole, insane day. “Kaylene, what the hell? What’s wr—?”

  “Have you talked to Jack?”

  Rebecca groaned, and Eddie squawked. She tickled his stomach as she talked. “He was waiting for me on Campus Ave when I fled Halfmoon House. He—”

  “What did he say? Rebecca, you have to tell me. Because it was really weird, and—”

  Again, Rebecca had to fight down alarm, quiet herself. “He said you were kissing him.”

  “Yeah. That’s completely accurate. I was kissing him. And I’m sorry. I’m really, really sorry.”

  “Huh?”

  “Huh? What do you mean, huh? Rebecca, please, this is hard. I don’t even know what…”

  Kaylene’s voice trailed off, leaving Rebecca staring straight ahead at the empty walls. For the first time in the three years they’d known each other, and for no reason she could pinpoint, Rebecca wanted to hang up on Kaylene. In her lap, Eddie had balled his fists in her shirt and was pulling himself to his feet. Cocking the phone against her ear, Rebecca took hold of his hips, tickled him there, felt as much as saw the grin burst out on his face. She lifted him, held him in the air, and looked right into his eyes.

  “Rebecca? Did he tell you the rest? Because as bad as I feel about what I did, because I know you two—”

  “There is no us two, Kaylene. Not yet. You didn’t do anything to me. Except be honest with me, and be my friend.” She kept her eyes on Eddie’s, tilted him one way, the other. Making him happy, sometimes, was as easy as pushing the stomach on one of those Tickle Me Elmo dolls. And there was his laugh, loud and unabashed as birdsong. So comforting.

  “Okay,” Kaylene said, after a shorter pause than Rebecca somehow expected. “You’re … amazing, Rebecca. You’re a really good friend. And that’s why you have to listen, right now. Are you listening? I’m at work, I only have another minute.”

  “I’m right here,” she murmured, tilting Eddie, bringing him to her shoulder, tapping his back, keeping her focus at least a little bit there to keep from focusing too hard on Kaylene’s voice. Because what was coming out of the phone barely sounded like Kaylene at all.

  “Okay, look. I was drunk, so was he, so it’s possible I have this wrong, okay? As a matter of fact, I don’t even … Rebecca, there was this guy.”

  “The one who came out of the woods?”

  “Wow. Wait. So he did tell you?”

  “He told me a guy came out of the woods. He wanted me to know that you were okay.”

  Abruptly, Kaylene snorted. Or sobbed?

  “Kaylene?”

  “Shit. Oh, shit. He is a coward. I knew it.”

  “Hey.”

  “Just … hang on, okay?”

  Rebecca set Eddie on the floor with his back against the couch, then joined him down there, rolled his ball to him. Eddie gurgled and pushed it back in her general direction. Kaylene stayed gone a long time. Then she was back.

  “Okay. Listen. First of all, the kissing really was nothing, okay? It was all me. My fault. We got wasted at Starkey’s last night, and we stayed out too long.”

  Rebecca’s skin itched, and her heart hurt, and even though she had slept better last night than she had in months, twitchy dreams and all, she just wanted to drop her head back onto the couch’s lone cushion and close her eyes.

  But Kaylene made that new sound again: snorting or sobbing. And whatever that represented—hurt? confusion? betrayal?—Rebecca wasn’t sure she could take more of it right that second. Her eyes drifted toward the chipped side table next to the couch where Jess kept her bills stacked and categorized in a cheap wire organizer. The table had one drawer, and for once, Jess had left it half-open. Pinning the phone against her jaw, Rebecca reached into the drawer and drew out the single framed photograph in there.

  At her feet, Eddie began to squawk, yanking at the ankles of her pants. He threw the ball across the room. In the kitchen, the stove-timer beeped and went on beeping. Near her ear, hovering like a gnat, Kaylene was talking again. And upstairs, Benny—sounding gravelly, growly, much more agitated than usual—shouted, “Jesus, Rebecca, are you here? Is anyone down there?”

  And yet, for just a moment more, Rebecca stared at the photograph: two teenage girls in summer twilight, emerging fully clothed in jeans and tank tops out of the ocean, onto dark, cigarette-strewn sand. The one on the right glowed red-blond in the last of the sun, had her outside arm flung wide and a horizon line for a smile. The other had eyes the exact bottomless blue-black of the darkening sky around and above them, and her wet, black hair streamed behind. She was hip-checking her friend but also holding her hand, both of them rumpled and laughing, as though they’d just poured out of a car after a long drive and not even bothered shedding or changing clothes. Or else they’d just emerged from the sea on new and unsteady legs, like mermaids.

  “God, Rebecca, please!” Benny shouted, and Eddie squealed and started to sob. Rebecca laid the picture on the couch, kept the phone pinned between her shoulder and jaw, scooped the baby into her arms, and stood.

  “Kaylene, I’m so sorry, I’ve got to call you back. I’ve got to go.”

  “Rebecca, are you fucking kidding? I’m at work. And I’ve been trying to get you all—”

  “I’ll call you back. As soon as I can. I’m sorry. I promise.”

  “Rebecca, WAIT. One second. Are you there?”

  She was moving toward the kitchen to shut off the timer, had already bounced Eddie back to relative peacefulness. She’d meant to hang up, but hadn’t. “I’m here,” she said.

  “Just … tell Jack we love him, okay? That I still do. That whatever the hell that was last night…”

  “What? Kaylene, I swear I’ll call you as soon as I can. I love you.” She dropped Eddie into his high chair and grabbed the phone and hit End.


  What the hell? she thought, moving automatically to remove the sauce from the heat, switch off the alarm and then the stovetop. The old electric burner rings sparked, flared redder, then went dark.

  Where was Jack, anyway? When would he come? What hadn’t he said, that Kaylene was about to? Nothing, surely, that could unsettle either one of them more than the things he’d already said.

  Like, I’m too into you …

  She was plating spaghetti, letting everything churn in her head: Jack, and Kaylene’s voice just now, and Amanda’s icy reprimand—or kiss-off—and Joel’s slumped back as he vanished into the woods; the woods themselves; that black Sierra near the abandoned trailers; the photograph she’d just found in Jess’s drawer; the total absence of chairs in this house, because, as Jess had put it when Rebecca asked, “It’s just me, right now. When there’s someone down here to sit with again, I’ll sit.”

  And under it all, that voice, last night’s caller’s voice, whispering over the drums of her ears like air from a fan he’d set blowing inside her:

  I’ll come see you.

  I can see you.

  Knocking. Someone was knocking.

  Almost dropping the dripping colander in the sink, Rebecca turned. She touched Eddie’s hand as he stretched for her, murmured, “Hold on, baby, I’m right here,” and hurried back into the living room. “Jack,” she was calling, hand already stretching for the front door, when she stopped. Held still.

  Nothing. There had been a knock or at least a noise, she was sure of it. But now there was silence, or almost silence, just … the ghost of a song? The reverberations of a single chord, as though heard from the window of a passing car?

  Or maybe actually heard from the window of a passing car? Certainly, there was no one on the porch. She knew that even before she opened the door and checked.

  I hate this house, Rebecca realized, staring around at the barren living room, the scraped walls with their smoke stains. Her second realization hit harder, and disturbed her even more. I love Jess. Poor Jess.

  As in, loved her in the same way she had loved Amanda, once? Maybe even more? Because in all of three weeks, Jess had given Rebecca a stronger inkling of what being someone’s daughter might be like than either Amanda or Joel had allowed themselves or her? Or because making Rebecca feel that way only seemed to make Jess sadder?

  Rebecca closed her eyes and thought of Jess’s face: those eyes, clear blue as lake ice, always dry but rimmed in red. Then Rebecca thought of the photograph from the drawer, the smiles on the faces of both of those girls and the eyes on the dark-haired one, which had struck her so forcefully because they were so familiar. They weren’t Jess’s eyes. Not quite, though close. They were more like …

  Mouth opening, Rebecca turned back toward the kitchen, the child in there, who stopped squawking the second she looked at him. With a grunt, she shut down her thoughts and returned to her duties. She draped a dry noodle across Eddie’s high-chair tray and another across his forehead, so that he laughed and tugged it free of his face and split it in his fingers. She dumped sauce over the spaghetti on a plate, stirred it, poured a full glass of the disgusting sweet tea both Benny and Jess drank by the vat, and put glass and plate on the tray Jess had left waiting on the counter. Donning the baby sling Jess had left draped over the sink, she dropped Eddie into it, grabbed the tray, and headed back across the living room, past that photograph she’d left faceup on the couch. There they were, those mermaid-girls, staring up from their years-ago beach into the dead air of this house. I have understood nothing, Rebecca was thinking as she ascended the stairs. About anyone. Ever.

  But she was learning. Finally. Today, alone, she’d learned more than she ever wanted to know, perhaps, about Jack and Joel, Amanda and Jess, Eddie and Kaylene, maybe even herself. The new knowledge felt hot inside her, rising in her ribs, as though her ribs were electric-burner rings she’d switched on at last. She was gulping for breath as she reached Benny’s door. She knocked with her foot.

  “Finally,” Benny said.

  Nudging open the door with her shoulder, Rebecca edged into the bedroom, which was bare as the downstairs: an iron-frame bed with a drugstore reading lamp clipped to the headboard, an overhead lightbulb with no shade or fixture, a nightstand with three Raymond Chandler paperbacks piled on it. Right in the center of the bed—sideways, as usual, twisted up in the sheets, even though he couldn’t really move his legs in their half casts—lay Benny, scowling the way he generally did when she came in with his food. His ropy shoulders sagged under his wifebeater. Prematurely white hair spilled out all over him like down from a ripped-open pillow.

  “Hi, Benny. Brought you something.” She turned so he could see the sling, and so Eddie could see him.

  Eddie gurgled. Immediately, Benny’s smile caught, flared, blazed out of his train wreck of a body. “Bring that here,” he said.

  Laying the tray on the nightstand, Rebecca set the boy on Benny’s lap as Benny straightened. Steadying Eddie with his better arm, Benny took the iced tea Rebecca offered and sipped it greedily.

  “Need some sugar with that?” she said, and for once, he kind of laughed. But he looked only at Eddie.

  “Hello, son,” he said.

  But not as if this were his son, Rebecca saw now. She’d always seen, but she hadn’t comprehended until today. Yet another new thing she now knew.

  Eddie slapped at Benny’s injured arm. If that hurt, Benny didn’t show it. Somehow, he smiled even brighter. “Oh, yeah?”

  Eddie cackled, and Benny laughed again, their collective racket almost enough to cover the sigh from the hall.

  There wasn’t any doubt, this time. That was a sigh.

  Whirling, Rebecca ducked out the door, staring toward the banister, the empty staircase, the narrow hallway. The whole space was maybe ten feet square, with Benny’s room on this side of the landing and two more doors on the other side of the steps, to the bathroom and the linen closet. Except, how did she know that second door was a linen closet? She’d never once been in there, never seen Jess going in or coming out.

  The sigh had come from there.

  Hadn’t it?

  “Rebecca,” Benny called, “what are you doing? Come back in here, please.”

  But Rebecca stayed put. As she watched, the door down there seemed to slip farther back into the shadows that always gathered at that end of the hall like smoke, or the ghost of smoke. She heard no further sound, but that last sigh had snagged on something in her brain, and now it kept sounding. Sighing.

  Abruptly, she was across the mouth of the staircase. She heard the alarm in Benny’s voice as he snapped, “Hey. Don’t go down there.”

  “Tell me you don’t hear that,” Rebecca snapped back, moving straight to the shut door, stopping outside it with her right shoulder and leg in light and the rest of her in shadow.

  “Rebecca, stop.”

  She twisted the knob and opened the door, which swung back into darkness. As her eyes adjusted, Rebecca made out a window on the far wall with a blackout shade, pulled all the way down. On the low ceiling, she could just see some sort of circular light fixture with no bulb in it. There was nothing else whatsoever in the room.

  So what? That was hardly surprising, given the Spartan nature of the rest of Jess’s décor. Rebecca almost turned away, then moved forward instead, straight into the middle of the room. The darkness hadn’t really shrunk back, that was just her eyes adjusting further. It wasn’t holding its breath, either, or freezing on the walls like a watched spider.

  Nope. This was just darkness, plain old emptiness, no matter how long she stood in it.

  Why was she still standing in it, then? She just was, and that’s why this time, when the sigh came, she heard it loud and clear. It wasn’t just a sigh, either. There was a word in it, stretched all out of shape, barely recognizable as language, except that it was.

  Not only that, but Rebecca had heard it before, though she couldn’t place where. Not yet.

 
“Colllldddd,” it said. Right above her.

  Rebecca’s head flew back on her neck, and she finally saw the outline, unmistakable now that her eyes had accustomed themselves, carved into the flaking paint up there: a drop-down door. To an attic, no doubt. There was even a stub of rope to pull it open, but that had been clipped off and was just out of her reach. Retreating across the hall to the bathroom, she grabbed the stepstool she’d always seen tucked behind the door, there, without ever wondering what it was for.

  Benny was shouting, now. “Goddammit, Rebecca! Rebecc—hold on, Eddie, wait—Rebecca, stop.”

  But she didn’t stop. She marched the stepstool into the dark room, planted it under the drop-down door, climbed up, and put her hand on the string.

  Only then, and just for one moment, she did pause. She wasn’t waiting so much as processing, making sure.

  She was sure. Whatever she’d always heard in this house, it was up there. Not only that, but she now realized where she’d heard that voice before. That icy, stretched-out, chopped-up, alien murmur. In truth she’d been hearing it repeatedly, all day long. She’d heard it in Amanda’s kitchen, in the Halfmoon House yard, in the woods. Anywhere Joel went with his Bluetooth speaker.

  Expecting resistance, she yanked hard on the drop-down cord, but the door seemed to leap from its casing, flakes of plaster flying around it, the folded-up ladder on its other side almost cutting Rebecca in half as it plunged downward. She caught just enough of it with her hand and shoulder to keep it from driving her off the stool. Then she half-stepped, half-staggered down, the stool clattering away as she stabilized herself, eased the ladder to the floor, and stared up.

  There was no blackness up there, just yellow, ordinary, electric light. It wasn’t even flickering.

  “Rebecca, goddammit, get out of there!” Benny yelled.

  But Rebecca went right on staring at the hole in the ceiling. “Hello?” she called, and waited, and waited some more. Whoever was up there was holding still, maybe even holding his or her breath, as though that person, too, were making sure.

  Then came rustling. Person-in-bedsheets rustling. And that was followed by a click, and the chopped-up voice stuttering to life once more.