Mrs. Starkey scowled. From long experience, Kaylene knew that was Mrs. Starkey’s version of laughing. The woman’s shoulders came down, though not the ladle. She seemed to notice her disheveled apron, reached up with her free hand to pull it all the way off or maybe on, then patted the top of her head instead, where her hairnet wasn’t.
“You have beautiful hair,” Marlene said.
Sighing, Mrs. Starkey twisted fingers through her braid, yanked it once, let it go. “I do,” she said. “I did. Some days, you kind of forget it’s there, you know? No, you don’t know. May you never. The fucking foxes are back.” She gestured at the woods across the yard, behind the barn.
“Foxes?” Marlene asked.
“Last summer, they ate my cats. Both of my cats. This time…” Instead of waving the ladle, she leveled her gaze at the trees, which seemed, to Kaylene, considerably more intimidating. If I were a fox … she thought. Then she said, “Can we use the rink? We really need to Curl.”
Mrs. Starkey turned back to them, raising an eyebrow. “At this hour?”
“See?” said Marlene.
“Just one round?” Kaylene nodded toward Jack. “If there’s no hockey or lessons going on in there? I really need to shove him.”
“Oh. That’s different. Why didn’t you say so?” Fumbling in the folds of her apron, Mrs. Starkey produced a set of keys and handed them to Kaylene. “Make sure the damn door’s all the way shut, please. Don’t let out the cold. Biggest waste of my money…” She moved off toward her kitchen, muttering, almost as if she didn’t collect half the leisure cash spent in this town on either her rink or her food.
“Is it even really possible to shut that door all the way?” Jack said.
“She never locks it, either,” said Kaylene.
Marlene was still gazing at the back door to the pizzeria, looking nervous, though no more than usual. “That’s because we’re usually still in there when she closes.”
“I’m shoving,” Kaylene said to her. “You’re sweeping.”
Across the unmown grass, the barn hummed. In the last of the daylight, the hum seemed unusually loud, and not only because, as usual, the door hadn’t been completely closed and therefore wasn’t locked. The noise carved through the evening cricket-cheep like a Jet Ski motor. Yet again, the incongruity of this place struck home to Kaylene: a 150-year-old, hulking, red-roofed structure, re-sided with sheet metal to keep in the chill and protect the shadowed wonderland inside it, where an entire regional subculture of small-college and tiny-town hockey teams and teen figure-skating academies and birthday party traditions had sprouted and flourished. And also where the future Olympic sport of Human Curling had been born. How fragile it all seemed, right then: a whole world that could melt off the earth with a flick of a switch, or a couple of students’ graduations, or a widow’s passing.
“It really must cost her a fortune,” she murmured as they slid the steel door sideways on its rustless runners. Chilled air gushed over them, carrying that smell that Kaylene had never been able to pinpoint: lake water without muck; sweat without stink; the smell of whiteness. Whatever that odor was, Kaylene had loved it from the first time she’d set foot in there.
“I really, no joke, think she’s loaded,” Jack said. He stepped back in the weeds, lifted the heel of his front foot so that only his toes touched earth, and positioned his arms just so, like a speed skater on his mark, completing his traditional Jack-entrance routine.
“If she was that rich, why would she still be in East Dunham serving pizza and passing out Human Curling brooms to peons like us?” Marlene asked, and Jack let his mouth fall open in mock-astonishment.
“If you were that rich,” he said, “what would you do?” Then he exploded past them and through the door, dropping to his knees and skidding, with a whoop, onto the ice, into the dark.
As usual, it took the single track of overhead bulbs several minutes to spasm awake, even after Kaylene found and flipped the switch along the far-side wall. The lights flickered and slowly warmed to a gauzy gray over the nearest third of the rink. Yet another bulb had apparently blown up there, leaving maybe five functioning ones, as far as she could make out through the spiderwebs layered in the eaves like dense, low clouds. Not once in Kaylene’s whole college career had any of those bulbs been changed or webs disturbed. Every time she and her gang came through this door, they talked about bugging Mrs. Starkey to get new bulbs, or just bringing some themselves. She wondered why none of the hockey teams that practiced here or instructors who coached local skating prodigies all day Saturday and Sunday ever demanded an upgrade.
In a way, though, she already knew: the murk was part of the magic, for everyone. With the sliding door closed (to the extent that it could close) and the rink humming, this really was somewhere far from New Hampshire, or anywhere, really, especially in summer, the closest any of them would ever get to Neverland. Maybe it was their own Neverland, where everyone did grow up, get old, but they did so sliding.
“Jack, please?” Marlene said, still struggling with the door.
But by now, Jack had already gone full-stomach, was sliding headfirst across the strip of light into the shadows over center ice. When he glided to a stop and stood, he was on the blue line two-thirds of the way to the far end, balancing on one foot. Despite his ridiculousness, he looked remarkably graceful at that moment, like an ice dancer frozen in mid-spin, or Peter Pan himself. A Lost Boy, glowing and grinning, limned against the blacker shadows behind him.
“Get back here,” Kaylene ordered. “Get the saucer. Assume the position.”
“Ma’am,” said Jack, saluted, and slid-skidded back toward them to collect one of the scuffed plastic flying saucers out of the closet in the door-side corner.
By the time Jack had selected a saucer—the green one, his favorite, so shaved down and waxed up that it didn’t so much slide as skim across the ice like a hovercraft—and settled at their traditional starting point in the red box that served as a goalie crease when goals were placed there, Kaylene had helped Marlene fix the door as nearly into place as it would go. It was just so rare, so perfect and necessary for this particular session of the game they’d pioneered together, that they had the rink completely to themselves. Collecting the Shoving Implement—it had once been a snow shovel before its promotion to Curling duties—she surveyed the slowly lightening ice, standing shoulder to shoulder with Marlene against the plexiglass and white wooden boards that rimmed the ring. The hum of the motors that kept this place frozen really did seem louder tonight, completely drowning out the world out there, which was exactly what Kaylene wanted: just her and her friends, ice to play on, lights that would last at least a little longer. Not so bad a Neverland to spend forever in.
“Right,” she said, lowering her eyes to Jack, seated obediently in his saucer. She gave a few practice shoves at the air with the Implement. “Bastard,” she said.
“Hey,” said Marlene.
“Ssh. Get your broom.” Stepping forward, Kaylene took up her mark behind Jack’s saucer, prodding his feet into proper cross-legged position. She avoided looking into his eyes, then looked. There he was, not laughing, still silently asking her the question: were they really okay?
The question itself was its own answer. “Better hold tight,” she said, and didn’t smile, didn’t have to. She wasn’t kidding, anyway. “Turn around. All the way facing me.”
Jack did as he was told. At the nearer blue line, Marlene had taken up post with her broom. None of them had ever figured out what the sweeping was supposed to do, exactly. But they all agreed that this activity simply wasn’t Human Curling without it.
“Ready?” Kaylene murmured, fitting the curve of the Implement against the side of the saucer.
“Would it be better for you if I said no?” Jack asked.
She didn’t grin, let him continue seeing the hurt he’d caused her. She wanted him to know she didn’t understand, knew he didn’t, either, and loved him anyway. “It doesn’t matter what
you say,” she told him, hunched over her hips, settled her weight over her feet, and shoved.
It was a perfect shove. Kaylene knew it even before the saucer lost contact with the shovel. The ice slid away at just the right speed, the saucer not even spinning, shooting straight out toward the center. Beyond the blue line, Marlene took a series of dutiful sweeps in the saucer’s path and got out of the way. Off it sailed toward the darkness at the far end, where Kaylene already knew it would come to rest, right in the goalie box, without so much as grazing the boards. Right at the feet of the Sombrero-Man, who had just this second taken shape down there as the shadows slid back to reveal him.
Kaylene dropped the shovel. Her mouth fell open to shriek.
But she didn’t shriek. Couldn’t. She was strangling, instead, on the very sight of that man. He wore the same scuffed work boots as this morning, same tatty jeans, checked shirt: Huck Finn gone old without getting old, and dead-rat sour, mouth pursed as if he were whistling (because he was whistling, Kaylene realized, she could hear it now, even over the hum of the motors under the ice, now that she knew what was making the noise), arms outstretched as Jack—still facing Kaylene, still with no idea what she’d shoved him toward—glided over the far-end blue line into what was left of the dark.
18
From her first moment in the attic—the second the blond woman in the cot, propped up on pillows against the sloped, ash-blackened wall, started talking—Rebecca had wanted to leave. She also knew she should leave. And yet she didn’t, or couldn’t. Partly, she was mesmerized by the awful, impossible things the woman in the cot was telling her, some of which had started to seem all too real, or at least less impossible, even before the woman had flipped up the blankets just long enough for Rebecca to see her legs. But partly, it was simply this woman’s voice, which … lulled, like her caller’s from last night’s, but also sang, almost. Come to think of it, so had her caller’s. But this woman’s singing sounded more natural, more like singing someone might actually do, to herself, to a baby.
And so instead of leaving, Rebecca found herself first leaning, then stepping deeper into the dimly lit room, away from the gaping opening to the drop-down stairs that led back to the world she’d climbed out of and now seemed to be floating above, as though in a gondola in a balloon on its way to Oz, or nowhere. Certainly not toward home, wherever that had ever been.
Instinctively, though, she’d kept her eyes away from the blonde’s. She kept gazing around the room instead, though there wasn’t much to see. Above the cot was a single window draped completely by a heavy black blanket. On the floor lay half a dozen open cardboard boxes. On the nightstand, Rebecca saw open cassette cases and a lone picture frame, but she couldn’t make out what was in it. On the bed was a laptop, lots of cables.
All the while, that voice lapped at her ears, slipped inside them, murmuring, lulling. Also, it got quieter, by slow degrees. And so, without even realizing it had happened, Rebecca edged all the way over to the bed, until abruptly, here she was, practically brushing the cot with her thighs, and there was nowhere else to look except down at this pale-faced, tangle-haired creature with the bruised flower petal for a mouth and the breasts that loomed at the wilting lip of her nightdress. The voice grated and soothed all at once like beehive buzz, mingling in Rebecca’s head with Jack’s voice (“I’m too into you”), and Amanda’s voice, and also that other’s, her caller’s, from the night before. With a sigh, Rebecca gave in, let her eyes slide all the way up to meet the woman’s.
And that was when Sophie rose from the sheets, rocking upright with her whole face yawning open and her arms flung over her head like a Scooby-Doo phantom’s. Gasping, Rebecca tumbled backward, banged her own head on the top of the drop-down ladder, thought she might drop straight through the trapdoor, and dug her fingers into the floor, driving splinters deep under her nails. She bit back a yelp, closed her eyes, and—crazily—kicked up her legs to batter whatever came for her. Then she opened her eyes.
The woman—thing—Sophie—just sat there, a gorgeous person-shaped stump seated fully on top of her pillows, as though the pillows were a dolly she could wheel. She still had her arms raised over her head. Her legs, of course, had stayed under the blankets.
“Boo,” Sophie said, and grinned.
For the briefest second, Rebecca thought she’d been punked, told a Joel-style campfire story, starred in yet another episode of The Orphan Who Really Will Believe Anything.
But she already knew she hadn’t been. She’d been in this house for the better part of a month, after all. She’d seen Benny’s injuries, and Jess with Eddie, and the photograph in the drawer downstairs. She’d taken in this room, Sophie up here alone under the blanketed window with her computer and cables and cassette deck and tape cases arrayed around her. And somehow, in this last little while, Rebecca’s whole world hadn’t so much tilted out of true as finished tilting, because everything Sophie had told her fit a little too snugly into the jigsaw Rebecca had only now begun piecing together. It all made a certain, terrible sort of sense, or not-sense.
All of it formed a single picture: the way Jess seemed to have just been crying every single time she turned around (because, Rebecca now knew, she had been); the noises in the ceiling, which had never been rats or squirrels or ghosts, and which Jess had never shown the slightest interest in checking (because she already knew what they were); the fact that Jess and Benny had rented this charred shell of a house that no one else wanted (because that way, fewer neighbors would come visiting or inquiring); the panic in Benny’s voice, scant minutes ago, when he’d realized where Rebecca was heading; the phone calls neither he nor Jess ever seemed to make or receive; the photographs they didn’t put up or even seem to have, except for that one in the drawer, of a black-haired, shark-eyed beauty stumbling soaking wet, fully clothed, out of the surf, arm in arm and smile in smile with the blonde on this bed.
Once more, Rebecca wanted to leap to her feet, dive down the ladder, grab Eddie, and run. Maybe she would, and soon. Maybe this would all seem funny, ridiculous, as soon as she climbed back down.
But she already knew it wouldn’t. And anyway, Sophie’s eyes were on her again, and Rebecca didn’t seem quite able to move just yet. And her caller from last night really had called, and he hadn’t jumped, which meant …
Sophie had settled back onto—into?—her legs and tucked the sheets and heavy coverlet around herself. Her eyes remained on Rebecca as she tilted her head, her expression as blankly curious and threatening as a snow owl’s.
“Huh,” Sophie said.
Rebecca pushed up to a sitting position and edged away from the trapdoor opening. She could feel the cooler air down there, again fought the impulse to flee, and simultaneously wondered why that impulse wasn’t stronger.
“What?” she said.
“You’re the orphan. Jess told me about you. On one of the very rare occasions she has deigned to come up here.”
And there it was, the other reason Rebecca couldn’t bring herself to leave this room: the hint of mournfulness—or everyday loneliness—in this woman’s voice. Just a hint. But it was there, surely. Wasn’t it? Rebecca, after all, had spent years training herself to recognize that tone, or, rather, to name it, since she already knew it, had practically been born with it.
“I’m … an orphan. Yeah.” Rebecca met Sophie’s eyes, felt them grab her, forced herself to look away.
“Yep,” said Sophie, hollowly.
“Yep what?”
“It’s just, I can feel it. There’s no doubt about it. Natalie would have dug you.”
“Natalie, your best friend.”
“Natalie, my dead best friend.” The hollowness never left Sophie’s voice. Maybe it had always been there, even … before. Assuming any of what she’d been saying really was true. But now, it was unmistakable. “I wonder if that’s why.”
Instinctively, Rebecca ignored that. Whatever Sophie was asking, it seemed to float in the air between them like a beckon
ing finger. And Rebecca didn’t want to go over there again. But she did stand up. “Natalie was Jess’s daughter, right? And she’s … actually dead?” She heard herself say that, almost laughed, realized she actually had no inclination to laugh whatsoever.
Sophie cocked her head the other way, slid down a little in the sheets. One of the legs under there—the nearer one—bumped lower. Sophie reached beneath the blankets and pulled it up, making a face Rebecca couldn’t read. There was something so private in the movement, and in the sound Sophie made, that for a moment, Rebecca felt embarrassed to be there.
Then the photo from the downstairs drawer flashed yet again in front of her eyes: the streaked glass, the faces fading under the streaks as though disappearing into sea-spray. Those girls with their wet clothes, their smiles so bright, Rebecca half-believed she could hear the echoes of their laughter.
This woman—creature—is so much more alone than I am.
Before she could stop herself, Rebecca heard her own voice saying, “Your legs.”
“What about them?” Sophie was busy stroking under the sheets, down her thighs and up them.
“So, I guess they haven’t…”
“Oh. Yeah. No, they haven’t. Serious bummer, too. They still kind of work. I mean, I can feel them. And—this is the really cool part—they feel me. Do you understand? No, you don’t, stop nodding.”
“I wasn’t nodding.”
“Good. Keep not doing that.” Under the sheets, the hands still moved. Each long caress triggered a shudder that seemed to trail up Sophie like a little flare.
“What is it like?”
Sophie clucked. “Now, see, Natalie would have known better than to ask that.” She brought one of her hands out from under the sheets, opened the nearest cassette, and held the cassette in front of her face. “Wouldn’t you?” she cooed to the tape, as though it were a kitten or a stuffed bear. “Yes, you would. Because you would have known you’d get an answer.”
Laying down the tape, Sophie nodded. “It’s like…” Behind her blank bird-gaze, something stirred, then slipped away. “Nope. Damn it, I got nothin’. Even I have not one single thing to compare this feeling to. It’s like, when I connect to them—plug them in, that’s the closest I can get—I can feel the current. It’s like all of me’s still down there. Like the drawbridge is still lowered, and I can cross to Castle Leg and visit whenever I want, and Castle Leg’s inhabitants can wave out their windows to me. But we can’t quite meet. We can … talk to each other. Note each other. But. Hey, you know what’s cool? Or, weird? I almost feel like, now that we’re separate, me and my legs? If my legs had mouths?” She drummed her thighs.
Good Girls Page 18
