And so here she stood, folding the sheets and towels at Amanda’s long table in the Halfmoon House kitchen, because Amanda needed help upstairs taking care of the girls, who needed a hell of a lot more help. When Jess was done with this task, she would go straight up to those girls and spend some time with them. She’d concentrate especially on the older one, Danni, whom Amanda didn’t seem to know how to reach, since Rebecca was already well on her way to saving Trudi, the little one. When that was done, Jess would come back down and finish the dinner dishes and sweep and clean until her time here was up. And then she would go home (what a stupid word for that splintery, cindery place) to her baby (who wasn’t her baby) and her broken man (who was indeed her man, maybe more so than her husband had ever really been) and her grief (that would never leave her or lessen) and demand that Rebecca clear out her pathetic apartment. She’d tell Rebecca to bring her ridiculous, clueless guy—who had no idea what he had, yet, but would before Jess was through with him—and move in.
As … what? Governess? Surrogate daughter, to the extent that such a thing was even possible? How about different daughter?
Or just friend? When was the last time Jess had allowed herself one of those?
Whichever, it was going to happen. Because no matter what Jess wanted—and what she wanted most was still just to stop, drop to her knees in the middle of the street in the middle of this town, throw back her head, and wail until her voice gave out, forever—she couldn’t seem to shut out everything else for long enough. For fifteen years, she’d walled herself up in a trailer and a Walgreens after losing her husband; then she’d lost her daughter and fled the only town she’d ever lived in, leaving not so much as a working phone number. And she’d still wound up surrounded by people who needed her, and whom she could help, and whom she loved, or knew she would love, given time: Eddie, of course, and Benny, too, but also wounded, wooden Amanda and funny-lonely Joel. And Rebecca, almost more than any of them.
How had that happened? When would it stop? That’s what she was thinking as her hands went on folding and smoothing the still-warm sheets in their basket and her voice hummed some song Natalie had loved about not singing this song, no-nnnn-no-no-no-no, no-no, when the phone rang.
Jess looked up, stopped humming. As a general rule, the phone, like everything else in Amanda’s house, obeyed the routine Amanda had set for it; it rang at occasional and specifically appointed hours but no others. And this wasn’t one of them.
Amanda appeared at the other end of the room in her work apron, pushing away whatever single stray hair had dared slip free of her headband. With a glance at Jess, she lifted the receiver. “Hello?” she said. “What? Rebecca, for God’s sake, slow down.” Then she just stood there.
Freeing her hands from the blankets, Jess peeled off her own apron, feeling herself coil. Amanda was shaking her head and sighing. “Rebecca, what are you even … what do you mean, lock up the … you’re not making … Who? Who’s going to—”
Jess hadn’t meant to hip-check Amanda, certainly hadn’t meant to send her flying. That’s just what happened when she swooped in and grabbed the phone.
“Rebecca, it’s Jess.”
“Oh. Jess. Good. That guy. The one. Your … Jess. Listen, I’m so sorry. I think—”
“It’s him, isn’t it?”
And there it was, Jess thought: the secret source of the calm she knew she exuded, and really did almost always feel. She hadn’t been born with it. It was nothing she’d cultivated or summoned. She had simply learned, very early in her life, exactly how much good wishing or pretending or praying would do. Or fighting, either, for that matter. And then she’d gone on fighting anyway.
And now he was here: the whistling freak who’d driven her daughter out of Charlotte and then back home, so Jess could murder her.
“Rebecca, I’m coming right now. Hold on, kiddo.”
She started to hang up, then jammed the phone back against her ear and yelled, “Wait!”
“Jess, Sophie thinks he—”
“Don’t listen to what Sophie thinks. Jesus Christ, even before she was … what do you mean, Sophie thinks? How do you know what—”
“I went in the attic.”
“You went in the attic. Of course you did.”
“I’m sorry. Jess. She’s … it’s real, isn’t it … and—”
“There’s no time for that.” Jess punched the wall so hard that Amanda’s butcher knives jumped in their block on the countertop. A glass fell and broke. Jess stared down at her hand. Her small, useless hand, good only for folding diapers, pulling triggers. “There’s no time. Rebecca, listen. Shit. Listen. You have to get it together. Do you hear me? You have to—”
“I am together,” Rebecca said.
She was; it was true. And Jess loved her.
“I know. Good. Okay. Understand, please. There’s no time. Get Eddie out of there. You hear me? That’s your one and only job, Rebecca. Get Eddie out!”
The pause lasted a split second. Less. “Okay. You get Trudi out,” Rebecca said.
Slamming down the phone, Jess stared past Amanda at the back wall of this hopeless, indefensible house with its warped window casings, its falling-off doors. Then she felt herself laugh, just once, savagely, as the world gushed in and filled her once more.
Amanda had stayed sprawled against the cabinets where Jess had knocked her, staring up in confusion or maybe amazement. She stirred, now, but Jess held up a forefinger, gave her a look she could only hope Amanda understood.
But of course, she couldn’t. How could she? She’d never seen the man in the sombrero, never heard him speak or whistle or sing, never felt his bobcat eyes on—in—hers, probing and perusing. Amanda had no idea what was coming, or how much Jess regretted having brought him here, to this tragic, magical place where people really did occasionally save each other, however briefly.
Damn it. This woman’s house had seen more than enough loss already. Like most houses, Jess supposed.
“I’m sorry,” she said. From the butcher block, she grabbed the carving knife and the bread knife. She slid the bread knife toward Amanda. “Get up. Lock everything. Get Joel inside.”
“Jess—”
“Get up!”
Amanda was on her feet by the time Jess hurtled past her and flew for the stairs, shouting, “GIRLS?” Amanda yelled for Joel, and Joel answered from somewhere outside, in his gentle, gravelly voice that always seemed to rise like smoke off the ashy embers of his heart, because it really was—had been—a father’s heart. The back door opened, and then came the satisfying, useless sound of windows lowering, latches getting twisted, bolts shooting home. None of which would matter when the bastard came.
But he’ll be sorry, Jess thought, grinding her teeth, clenching her fists as she soared up the stairs, knowing he wouldn’t be.
Right at the landing, Jess stopped, not knowing why. She stared down the hall at the closed bedroom doors, out the window toward the woods, the massed green leaves at its border, which were surging, folding over and around themselves. Birnam Wood, to Dunsinane, Jess thought crazily, shouting yet again, “Trudi! Girls!”
Then she stopped again, realizing what she’d just seen out there, barely glimpsed vanishing into the trees, and refused at first to accept or acknowledge.
“Girls,” she said once more, whimpered, really, and moved the last few steps to the bedroom doors, already knowing. She threw open Danni’s door first. Trudi’s she opened more gently, as though doing that could change what she knew she would find, and found:
The girls were gone.
22
The truth was, the Whistler almost didn’t want the conversation to end. All the way through town, he’d chattered, laughed, pointed past both his companions out the rolled-down windows at the little white houses and shops he’d already come to feel were his, now: his pizza place, where he’d lurked outside to watch his new, Still One’s companions; his bench, where he’d first introduced himself to them; the Clocktower,
where he’d first heard his Still One’s voice, which was indeed still, so unlike his Destiny’s. His Destiny had spoken like whipped-up water, her inflections full of waves and crests and flashing, reflected light. But this new woman was, in her way, even more inviting or, at least, the right kind of inviting for the days after his Destiny’s death: a lake rather than an ocean, mysteriously deep underneath, but on the surface, almost preternaturally still. A surface that motionless, that peaceful and glassy and quiet: what living creature could possibly resist diving in and shattering it?
Not him.
“Not you guys, either, huh?” he asked his companions, glancing sideways to see their faces. They nodded along to the hum of the truck, the buzz of his iPod in the truck’s speakers. Yes, indeed. They’d all had too much to dream last night.
Past them out the passenger window, he saw the forest, all those pines linking branches like worshippers at a service. A service he was leading. In his mouth and nostrils, the wet, muddy odor of leaves and lake mixed with the after-tang of blood—bloods!—and the dry-mouth burn of his hunger, which he hadn’t allowed himself to sate. Oh, no. Not yet. He’d barely whetted his appetite, which was huge, tonight, as though he were brand-new, a still-growing Whistler.
On impulse, he rolled his window down, waved and Whistled at two college girls in summer running Ts as they jogged past, practically begging them to glance right into the cab of this creaking wreck of a truck. It was the performer in him. And the girls, both of them, they did it, looked right at him, right past him, and then away, fast, without quite seeing. “Don’t Gild the Lily, Lily” burbled out of the Bluetooth speaker linked to his phone, and he supposed he might be guilty of exactly that. Mother had always chided him for going too far, giving too much of himself when he set out to perform, to affect the people he encountered, even the ones he wasn’t going to eat. Change and haunt them; give them dreams.
But that’s who he was, after all: a Whistler all the way down, heartbroken heartbreaker. And he’d allowed Mother to deny this part of his nature—let himself deny it—for way too long. Or maybe it had simply taken the deaths of Mother and his Destiny to uncover it.
He turned onto the street where he’d followed his Still One earlier this evening. So bravely early he’d set out and done that, with the world still alight, the light scalding. But he had been strong, and anyway, there’d been no prospect of returning to sleep. Not after his Destiny herself had called to him from out of the trees.
He’d almost introduced himself to his Still One a couple hours ago, as she’d lingered for one of her strange, still moments outside that scorched house. But he’d experienced yet another of those tingles of Destiny, of Aunt Sally’s Policy, something, because he already knew this house, of course. He’d spent his first several nights just mooning around outside it, looking in the windows at the all but empty rooms, at the mother-murderer of his Destiny moving blankly from kitchen to staircase to single couch, where she sat for hours on end, staring at nothing, or sometimes at a photograph she pulled from a drawer.
Undeniably fascinating, that woman. Frightening, even. But not nearly as compelling as this new, still one, if only because she was already broken.
That didn’t mean she couldn’t be useful, though. Yes, it was true: he’d finally found a use and a place for his Destiny’s murdering mother. “This’ll be the day-ay-ay,” he said-sang to his companions, waited for them to join in as he parked the truck just a few houses down the block from Jess’s house.
“Wait here,” he told them. “She won’t be long.” And he giggled as he popped open his door and hopped down.
A child skateboarded past, not even glancing up. Across the street, kneeling amid her drooping late-summer flowers, an old woman nudged at and sang to a tomato plant in its cage. Oh, yes, she was singing, though with hardly any tune, not even enough voice for the Whistler to make out the song. So often, he’d seen the solitary ones do that, thinking music would comfort them, not realizing that the songs themselves were tearing them to pieces. Because music, in the end, was just a tease, even for him, a come-on, not an action. The greatest tease, greatest come-on, closest anyone might ever come to expressing, or using, what they’d forgotten they had while they had it. But a come-on, all the same.
The Whistler waited until the old woman looked up, and then he waved, freezing her there in the dirt with her dried-up heart flooding. What wondrous playthings people made. Aunt Sally would never realize what she was missing, just sitting in her tent down there in the Delta, sedentary as a bullfrog on a lily pad sucking flies out of the air.
The Whistler so much wanted to stay where he was. His companions wanted him to stay, too; that way, they could all surprise his Still One together, see the look on her face. “I know,” he said into the cab of the truck, reached in, and straightened them there against each other, like a florist finishing a bouquet, arranging the last baby’s breath around it. “There. You’re beautiful.” He patted each of them on the legs, shut them in, allowed himself one last glance toward that house.
“Ohh,” he sighed.
But he had promises to keep: to his Destiny, who’d come back for him after all, to point the way, to guide and care for him; to Mother and Aunt Sally, who had given him the world and all the creatures in it to play with; to his new, Still One. Most of all, to himself. Never again would he forget what he had in him.
And besides. He didn’t want to gild the lily, Lily. Turning, Whistling, all but skipping, he lit out back up the block through the evening toward the woods.
23
By the time she’d finished talking to Jess, Rebecca had somehow gotten herself quiet and located her Crisis Center self inside the seething rest of her. At least that made her feel as though she was still the person she’d willed herself to be, even if the world beyond Halfmoon House had proved even more terrifying than experience had trained her to expect. Snapping her phone shut, she stood for just a few breaths in the empty bedroom beneath the attic, staring out the fly-specked, spider-cracked window at the dogwoods and hemlocks across the street sagging with the weight of their own living, drooping toward autumn.
“Okay,” she murmured, whirled toward the hallway to go get Eddie, and stopped in her tracks. She clung to the splintery sides of the fold-down attic stairs, and she stared.
How had Sophie even gotten down the stairs? Never mind silently, without Rebecca noticing. How had she done it at all? Rebecca had no idea. But there Sophie was, blocking the doorway to the hall, head cocked, corn-straw hair spilling past her shoulders. More than anything, she looked like a matryoshka doll: dead-faced, pale, draped in a hideous yellow T-shirt from some bar somewhere. The shirt had a drooling, foaming smiley face on it, and the words Halfway Out! emblazoned across the chest.
She was holding Eddie in her arms.
“What are you doing?” Rebecca said.
Against the drooling smiley face, in his blanket, Eddie squirmed and fussed. Because he’s cold, Rebecca knew, without knowing how she knew. Because it’s freezing cold in those arms.
“How’s our Jess? Jessie Supermom?” Sophie chirped. Something snapped in her mouth, and Rebecca shuddered, hunched to throw herself across the room, then realized it was gum.
“Sophie, when did … how did you…?”
The next snap from Sophie’s teeth triggered louder fussing from Eddie. Rebecca started forward, but stopped as Eddie settled.
Because her spell could hold him, too? Or—and was this worse?—because he knew those arms, cold as they were? He knew their weight, had no doubt felt them around him, heard that chirping voice almost every single day of his life.
“What?” said Sophie. “You mean this?” She leaned over Eddie, crushed him against her breasts, and warbled. To Rebecca, it sounded like pigeon-cooing, less comforting than wild. Or hungry.
“Give him to me,” Rebecca said. “Jess wants me to get him out of here.”
Without looking up, Sophie hugged Eddie tighter, lowered her head farther. �
�In a sec,” she murmured. And she stood—if that was the word—in the doorway on the stumps of her legs in her yellow drooly-face shirt, holding her dead best friend’s son. After a while, she put her nose in Eddie’s hair, her mouth against his scalp; Rebecca made herself wait. And that’s when she realized Sophie wasn’t cooing, but singing. Rebecca could even make out some of the words, this time.
“Armless … boneless … chickenless egg … Georgie I hardly…”
The singing stopped, but Sophie stayed put, her nose in Eddie’s hair. Eddie stirred again, and this time he laughed, or maybe burped. Finally, Sophie lifted her head. She wasn’t crying, not like Rebecca had thought, or hoped, she might be. She was grinning.
“Tang!” she said, half-sang. “It’s lime Tang. That’s what that smell is. Is there lime Tang? There should be. They should make something we can drink that smells and tastes exactly like this.” One more time, she buried her face in Eddie’s hair.
He’s here, Rebecca screamed inside herself, to wake herself up, shred this haze that Sophie seemed to generate just by being in the room. And he’s met my friends. Her half trance shattered, and she fumbled her phone out of her pocket, woke it up. But no one had called. Why had no one called?
“Give him to me.” Rebecca stepped forward, arms outstretched.
Sophie snapped her gum and swung Eddie farther out of Rebecca’s reach, though still cuddled against her chest.
“No problem,” she said. “As long as you’re leaving.”
“Obviously, I’m leaving. Give—”
“As long as you’re not going where Jess is. Or to your … caretakers? Is that the word for them? Or your friends, either.”
“Why shouldn’t I? What do you care?”
“I don’t. Except.” She glanced sidelong at Eddie, touched his face with a purple polka-dot fingernail. He shrieked. With a shrug, Sophie looked back at Rebecca. “You need to understand this, girlfriend. You need to believe it. You need to know it. There is nothing you can do out there. If he really has come, and if he’s with your friends, you can’t help. The best thing you can do—the only thing you can do—is run.”
Good Girls Page 21
