Everything That’s Underneath

by Kristi DeMeester

  Must have been a trick of the afternoon sunlight because there she was again, those legs in the dirt and a smile streaked across her face.

  “You asked for it,” she said and brushed her hands over her thighs. “Shit. SHIT. Godammit, Willa,” she said, her fingers spread wide.

  “Nope. Not falling for it again.”

  “No. My ring. My mom’s aquamarine ring. It’s gone. She’ll kill me.”

  “It must have fallen off when you fell. Hold on. We’ll find it.”

  Later, Lea and I would chew Klonopin and tell each other that there was nothing strange about the day Beth stumbled into our lives. We were just two girls kneeling in the grass, hands outstretched. We must have felt her. Positions of supplication. Must have noticed the moment the sky went darker and the birds fell silent. I don’t think we ever got up from that place. Not really. I think there will always be the two of us seeking something that will not be found.

  “There’s a hole here.” Lea said, and I peered over her shoulder.

  “Looks like an animal den or something.”

  “I think I see it,” she said and poked her fingers into the entrance.

  “Don’t just shove your hand in there! It could be a snake hole. Don’t you pay any attention in school?”

  “Doesn’t matter any way. Hand’s too big. Help me find something to hook it. A long stick.”

  We have different memories of the first time we heard Beth’s voice. For me, Beth sounded like someone trying very hard to not be heard. A quiet rush of words that she hoped would fall from her lips and into the dirt. Lea said that Beth's voice sounded like water. Something that slipped into your head and sloshed around so that you couldn’t get it out no matter how hard you tried.

  “I can get your ring for you.” Beth looked whitewashed. Skin the color of oatmeal. A beige jumper that brushed a pair of knobby knees over a white T-shirt and a pair of crummy, knock off Keds. The kind of girl you see but don’t spend too long looking at.

  Lea turned to me and rolled her eyes. “I can’t deal with this weirdo right now. My mother is going to hit the fucking roof. I’m not even supposed to touch the damn thing.”

  “I don’t think we need your help,” I said and turned my back to her. Message sent loud and clear.

  “I’m Beth. I just moved here,” she said, and Lea muttered something under her breath about being a homing beacon for idiots.

  “Really. I can,” Beth said and pushed her way between us.

  “Is she fucking serious?” Lea said, but Beth only smiled and thrust her hand inside the hole.

  “No way your hand is that small,” Lea said.

  “Maybe she has baby hands or something,” I said.

  Even now, I wonder if it was the lot acting on Beth. Leaking into her like venom into blood. Most of the time, I think that it was Beth all along. That the darkness we came to know was already a part of her. That she released herself into that place. Into us.

  I think I’m still choking on her.

  When Beth handed the ring to Lea, the gem cast glittering flecks across Lea’s cheeks. She stood before us, head bowed, while Lea stuck the ring in her mouth to suck off the grit.

  “Thanks. Really. You have no idea the shit storm that was coming my way. Your hands must be fucking tiny,” Lea said once the ring was safely back on her finger.

  “I’m Beth,” she said again.

  We should have never told her our names. Sometimes, things are meant to be lost. There are things you aren’t supposed to go looking for.

  Sometimes, it doesn’t matter.

  * * *

  Always, Beth was in the background. Hovering behind us while we tested the waters of adulthood. Always watching with her quiet, pale smile. For four years she’d been with us. We didn’t tell her to leave.

  Even after all that time, we didn’t know much about her. She didn’t answer most of our questions when we asked them. There were the things that she told us: that her father moved the two of them here after her mother died; that he stood outside of her bedroom at night—to be sure she was breathing; that her favorite color was yellow. Sunshine yellow. The color of joy.

  There were the things that she did not tell us: why we weren’t allowed to come into her house; why she never spoke of her father after the first time she told us about him; why we never saw him—not at school to pick her up, not at the grocery store, not at PTSA meetings or driving his car or the hundreds of other ways you’ll see someone’s father; why she had scratch marks on the inside of her thighs.

  Eventually, we stopped asking questions, and Beth faded into the background of our lives until we needed her.

  During those four years, Beth found all of the things we lost: my favorite lipstick that I thought was in the bottom of my purse; a safety pin earring Lea’s first boyfriend gave her before she let him feel her up for the first time; a pair of yellow sunglasses I bought with my babysitting money. Nothing important. Nothing that we couldn’t live without, but it was amusing. Lea and I had something that set us apart from everyone else. It made us different. Interesting.

  We would end up at the empty lot, and Beth would sit next to the hole and presto, just like magic, whatever item we’d been searching for would emerge clutched in her fist.

  “She’s stealing that shit. Trying to convince us she’s special,” Lea said after the second time.

  “I don’t think so. She’s never excited when she finds something. Or proud of herself. If anything, she looks ashamed. Like she’s just done something dirty.”

  “Uh. Yeah. She stole our stuff.”

  We hid random things in secret places: in shoe boxes in the backs of our closets, stuffed down garbage disposals, thrown into the woods on our way to school, eyes closed. We didn’t tell each other where they were, but when we told Beth about what we had lost, she would lead us to the lot, put her hand in the hole, and pull out each and every trinket.

  I’m not sure if she knew that we were using her. If she understood that was the only reason we let her hang around. Because she could find lost things and bring them home again like our own personal magic trick.

  We liked to think that we were doing her a favor. That without us, she’d languish in social hell. No friends. No one to talk to. We adopted her because it amused us. We curled her hair to see if we could, put coral lipstick and liquid eyeliner on her as if she were a doll, and then gave her the crumbs of our affection. Still, she smiled at us and took us down to the lot when we had something that needed finding.

  * * *

  “Don’t ask Beth to come. She gives me the creeps when we have boys with us. The way she sits there and stares. Like she’s never seen a pair of tits before,” Lea said.

  “Maybe don’t pull your tits out then,” I said, and she flipped me the bird.

  Lea and I were in love with the feel of warm hands against the small of our backs and the musty scent of Acqua Di Gio, and the boys who had lied to us could give us both. We were going to meet them down at the lot.

  I can’t remember the boys’ names—they were generic, Chris or Mark or James. What I do remember is a swoop of strawberry blond hair, freckles, green eyes. Hands in my hair and on my waist. Laughter. Someone brought a radio and Pearl Jam was singing in the background about last kisses. Everything moving in slow motion, like a dream. Beth somewhere in the background, humming along.

  When the other boy, Lea’s boy, started screaming, I thought I had fallen asleep, slipped into the half shadow world of nightmare. Beth stood beside him, her arms cradling something I couldn’t see, and the boy screamed again.

  “What the fuck? What the fuck?” He scrambled backwards.

  “I’m sorry,” Beth said and extended her arms outward, offered him whatever she held.

  “Please. I thought I could do it. I could feel him. Down there in the dark,” Beth said, and the boy recoiled.

  “Get her the fuck away from me,” he said, but no one moved.

  “Beth,” Lea said and reached out fo
r her, but she turned away, clutched the thing in her arms to her chest.

  “I’m sorry. I thought I could bring him back for you. You miss him so much. I can feel it,” she said, and I saw what she carried. The rotting body of a small, white dog rested in her arms. Eyes glassed over like two dark marbles.

  If the boys ran, I don’t remember. There was only Beth, sobbing, her fingers tangled in the dog’s white fur. It took two hours to get her to let go of it, to convince her to bury it under a pile of dead leaves, and get her on her feet.

  We took her home; walked under moonlight that turned Beth’s hair silver, the streaks of mud on her fingers into ink. I don’t ever remember her as beautiful, but that night, her beauty was a terrible thing.

  “What did you do?” I said when we got to her porch. Her eyes were translucent. It was like looking through glass into something with no bottom.

  “Father made me a door,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “She’s there. Behind the door. But I can’t open it completely. Not yet,” Beth said and disappeared into the gloom of the house.

  That night I dreamed of Beth. She crawled out from between my legs, her fingernails digging against my thighs.

  * * *

  We never talked about the night with the dog. That year, when something went missing, Lea and I let it go. Didn’t wonder about where it had gone or tear apart our rooms searching. The lot and the things we did there faded into the myths of our childhood.

  I was going to New Orleans for school that fall. Lea was headed to Atlanta to chase a bass player in a shitty rock band. “He’s really good, Willa. They’re going to make it. You’ll see.”

  Beth was going to stay home. Take care of her father.

  “He’s sick,” she said, but she never told us with what. Only that she had to help him. The idea of her in that house, alone with her father—a man I’d never seen—nauseated me.

  “You need to be out. On your own. You know, live,” I told her. The way she smiled at me—lips chewed open and bleeding—made my skin itch.

  In three weeks, I’d be far away from all of it: from Beth, from the lot, from all the lost things she had found. From the nightmares that were coming more and more frequently. From the new fear curling hard and sharp in my belly.

  Lea went home early. Her rock and roll boy had told her that he might drop by later. She wanted to be sure she shaved her legs in case he did.

  One by one, the partygoers stumbled out into the night, followed the moon back to their beds, until there was only Beth and me.

  “Walk me home?” she asked.

  I don’t remember getting up to leave, my feet falling into the familiar path to Beth’s house. Right onto Lakshire, left on Hope Circle, left again onto Cumberland Way. We were standing on her porch, when I realized that I had dropped out for a bit. I dismissed the lost time as being more than a little drunk.

  Beth turned to me, took my hand, and opened her front door.

  “Come inside,” she said, and I hesitated, my foot brushing against the threshold. Warm air pressed against my face, heavy with something that smelled like yeast, like bread baking.

  “I shouldn’t,” I said.

  “It’s okay.” Her hand was hot over mine, and she pulled me inside. “I want to show you something.”

  The door closed.

  “I want you to meet my father. He’ll be so happy to see you again. It’s been so long,” she said, and I wanted to tell her she was mistaken, that I had never met her father, but my tongue was heavy and her hand pulled me into the dark.

  “This way.”

  She led me into a hallway. Pictures lined the walls. A series of Beth at various ages, her hands and arms covered in dirt as she offered them to whomever stood behind the camera. In some she was smiling, her teeth long and wolfish. In others, she looked down, her hair covering her face.

  “We’ll go through the door. And then everything will be fine. Like it was before. Before everything was lost.”

  Beneath our feet, the carpet had given way to hard packed dirt, the walls covered with moss. A man stood at the end of the hallway facing a door, his back to us. Dark hair streaked with silver, clipped short. A white shirt tucked into jeans.

  “This is my father,” she said, dropping my hand. The man turned, bending to place a kiss on his daughter’s lips. When she opened her mouth to him, I tried to turn away, tried not to hear Beth moan, but my arms felt heavy and would not move to cover my ears.

  Beth paused before the door, her hand pressed against the wood.

  “You always were my favorite, Willa. Will you help us? Will you help me find something that we lost?” Beth opened the door.

  The doorway opened into Harper’s old lot. We were inside the hole, the one where Beth found lost things, looking out and up into the night sky. No moon. No stars. Only the sound of something vast moving just beyond the hole. Something dragging itself along dirt paths.

  “He made me a door. And I went searching. Hands seeking in the dark. Looking for what we lost. It took a long time, but I found her. She was so small. So quiet. Curled up like a cat at the bottom of a well,” Beth said, and her father took her hand.

  My mouth tasted of blood, sweet and hot and full of iron.

  “Who did you find?” I asked, but she didn’t answer.

  Beth went down on her belly with her father behind her. They crawled up, up, up and through the hole and into the night, leaving me behind.

  Whatever crawled along in the dirt laughed.

  “Mother. We found you,” she said, and I closed my eyes.

  We bury our dead in the ground. We tend to the seeds and water them with our tears. We wait and watch. Sometimes, what we find is beautiful. Other times, all of the hope we put inside the seeds rots and decays. Then, we mourn all we have lost. The things we can never find. What we have thrown into the woods with our eyes closed.

  The next morning, I woke up in my bed with no memory of how I got there and the fuzzy leftovers of a champagne headache. My thighs burned, as if someone had clawed their way out of me, but there were no scratches. No blood.

  Three weeks later, I boarded an airplane for New Orleans. Neither I nor Lea heard from Beth after the night of the party.

  Over the next three years, Lea and I drifted apart and came together with the strange consistency of childhood friends. We called each other when the men next to us were sleeping, and we whispered the lies that we had rehearsed, the fabricated stories we’d adopted to keep ourselves sane. If Lea had her own secrets to keep, I didn’t ask, and she never asked me either.

  “I dream about her,” Lea said.

  “Me, too.”

  “I called her house once. About a year ago. A woman answered. Said that she was Beth’s mother, but her mother died. Didn’t she? I think about her, but everything blurs together, and I can’t be sure if what I’m remembering is real,” Lea said. We didn’t have to say that we were afraid.

  Neither of us went back home. Out mothers begged us to visit, but we came up with reasons to stay away. Finals to study for. A new job that wouldn’t give us the time off. A cold that I just couldn’t shake. If Beth even still lived there, we didn’t know. We didn’t ask our mothers, and they never mentioned it. It was like she had never existed—a ghost.

  Eventually, I convinced myself I had dreamed that night, down in the hole, with the stars so clear, but every couple of months, I would wake to the taste of dirt in my teeth and Beth’s voice in my ear, her nails digging into my thighs.

  It took twenty years for me to come home.

  * * *

  Terrin was four when we lost him. An accident. Sun in the eyes of the driver behind us. Didn’t see the brake lights. No one’s fault.

  Five months went by, and I could not move. Could not speak. Vasily packed his things. In the story I tell myself, he kissed me when he left.

  “Come home, Willa,” my mother said over the phone. She sounded like an old woman, and I thought of what it
would be like to bury her. It would feel right. Not like the world had just slipped inside out.

  “Did Beth move away?” I asked her, but I knew the answer.

  “Who? Oh, Beth. I see her every now and then at the store with her mother and father. She takes care of them I think. Always was a strange girl.”

  I went home and slept in my mother’s house. It was no longer mine. There was a bed that she kept, but the girl who had slept there was not me.

  Lea came. Took a red eye in from Charleston. My mother let her into the bedroom, and Lea sat on the edge of the mattress, picked at a loose thread. Neither of us spoke, and she went away when the sun began to set, told me that she loved me, that she would be back.

  I slept, and I dreamed of a little boy with dark hair like his father, a small hand curled in mine, the sound of his laughter. I waited. I spoke his name and hers into the silence.

  It took nine days for Beth to come to me. I woke up to her crouched on the bed. Her feet were dirty, and she’d left dark streaks on the white quilt.

  “Can you still find lost things?” I said. She took my hand, and I followed her out the door, down the streets I memorized as a girl and then followed when I was a teenager.

  The lot had not changed. Broken bottles, cigarette butts, and candy wrappers still tangled in the grass. The ghosts of two girls and a third who came to them, who brought them nightmares. And somewhere in all of that, a door.

  “There’s more than death in the ground, Willa,” she said and knelt down.

  “Yes,” I said, and watched as she reached beneath the earth and pulled.

  Acknowledgments

  These stories would not exist without a myriad of people. Damien Angelica Walters has offered constant feedback and encouragement and without her input much of my writing would not exist. Michael Wehunt is an invaluable resource and a writer who is so good in his own right I don’t actually know how I’m able to be friends with him instead of living in constant jealousy.

  A huge thank you to the editors who published these stories in their magazines: Elise Tobler, CM Muller, Scott R. Jones, Paul Michael Anderson, Justin Steele, Laird Barron, Kelly Abbott, Jonathan Laden, Andrew S. Fuller, Simon Strantzas, Michael Kelly, Ken Wood, Sam Cowan, Jacob Haddon, Andy Cox, and Sebastian Rudolph. Many thanks to Ken Wood and John Boden of Shock Totem for being there at the beginning and seeing something in my little book.