The girl kicked her legs against the side of the mattress. The whirlpools on the ground churned faster, slapping against Mary’s thighs. Making her numb. “My mother abandoned me,” the little girl said.
“Maybe she didn’t know any better. Thought what her husband said was law.”
“I’ve got no place to go,” the girl said.
“This can be your home,” Mary said, because it didn’t matter that this girl stank like something foul. It didn’t matter that she wasn’t eager to please, as her own Susan had once been. It didn’t matter that her clothes were muddy and her skin was washed out and gray, or that every sane part of Mary was telling her to run right now because this child was a gift. She had to be.
The girl smiled. “No place like home, Mom. Home sweet home. I’m hanging my hat. Home again, home again, jiggety-jig.”
“I’m glad, Susan,” Mary said, and she couldn’t remember. Had Susan died? Was this little girl Susan?
“Are you really glad?”
“So glad,” she said. “We can set up your room and I’ll clean it for you and I baked you a cake, Susan.”
“This room here, in the basement?” Susan asked. Her feet rocked so hard now that her whole body was swinging.
“Wherever you want.”
The little girl’s smile spread wider. So wide that her lower lip split open, and black blood trickled down her chin. “Show me how glad you are.”
Mary’s panic returned, and this time she could not marshal it. She blinked, and saw for an instant that this thing was not a little girl at all. It was a woman. Her blond hair was gone—there was only the pale white of scalp and the black of sutures. A terrible thing. A godless thing. A familiar thing. She blinked again, and the little girl returned. The happy, sweet, beautiful little girl.
“Show me,” the child commanded. She beckoned Mary to the bed with a pudgy little arm. Her aspect shifted, at once a child, and then a tiny woman, and then both. Mary looked around the room, expecting to see blood or plague or the end of the world, or a man, her husband, but there was nothing.
Mary followed her daughter to the bed. She hugged the girl. Sweet Susan. Lovely Susan. The stench of paper mill and rotting meat was so strong she gagged, and Mary realized, too late, that this was no gift and it was no dream. The house began to moan, then, and through the air and the walls and the deep blue holes of this little girl’s eyes, Mary could hear the sound of laughter.
TWENTY-TWO
Acid Test
In homeroom at the Bedford School Wednesday morning, Liz Marley expected a few raised eyebrows, a nod or two of sympathy, and perhaps a mention of Susan’s name. But although more than half the class was absent, it was another day as usual and no one said a word to her. Instead, they watched the rain. After the pledge, some of the kids stuck their hands out the windows and opened their mouths wide as if to breathe it. Andrea Jorgenson hurriedly wrote out the homework she had not done the night before, and Owen Read threatened to spit on her in a light-hearted, flirty kind of way, but sucked it back into his mouth instead. “You’re gross,” she told him. “You’re easy,” he told her, and she hid her head behind her notebook.
In math class they talked about derivatives. Liz scribbled out her notes, and tried, repeatedly, and failed, to solve for y. In English class they talked about The Great Gatsby. Dori Morrison said that talking about the moral implications of running a woman over in a car on the way to East Egg starts to become irrelevant when you’re dealing with amoral people to begin with. “I know he’s supposed to be some romantic American dream and all that, but isn’t it really egotistical to buy a house and throw parties just so some chick will notice you?”
In gym they played dodgeball. As usual, no one tried to peg her with a Nerf. In the locker room she changed back into her corduroys, realized that those thick, velvet ribbings made her look like a cow, and began to wonder if she had lost her mind. Perhaps the reason no one had mentioned Susan today was because she had never died. She was still alive, wandering through Main Street or else sitting in her apartment, chain smoking and acting professionally weird.
After she finished changing, Andrea Jorgenson approached her. Andrea lived with her aunt and mother in the Halcyon-Soma Tent and Trailer Park on the south side of town. She also wore thigh-high FM boots, that stands for Fresh Meat, and all the graffiti on the bathroom walls said she was a slut.
She touched Liz’s shoulder. “Are you okay?” she asked, tucking her thin auburn hair back behind freckled ears.
“I don’t think so,” Liz said. “My sister died. Did you know that?”
Andrea shuffled on her high-heeled boots. Around them was the surreal white noise of chatter; lockers being shut, makeup being applied in front of mirrors, and bodies being appraised by friends: No, you don’t look fat.
Andrea lowered her voice. “Yeah. It’s not right.”
“What isn’t right?”
“I feel her. Can you feel her? It’s like she’s inside me. Is there a word?” Andrea furrowed her brow. “Possessed. That’s the word.”
Liz’s mouth felt like dust.
Andrea looked like she wanted to say more, but instead she left the locker room. The other girls were now watching Liz. Carrie Dubois and Laura Henrich, Louise Andrias and Jaine Hodkin. All of them. There was something about their eyes that was empty. Lifeless. They reminded her of Susan. Liz closed her locker. When she turned around again, the girls had gone.
Because of the intensity of the rain, school was letting out early. Fourth period chemistry would be Liz’s last class of the day. She sat at her lab station in the back of the room and tried to listen as her favorite teacher, Ms. Althea Gonya, who had platinum blond hair that was black at the roots, recited the lesson.
The fluorescent lights above buzzed, and the rain pounded against the windows. A half mile away was the cemetery, whose black gates she could see from her seat. She doodled in her notebook, squiggly lines and figure eights.
Ten minutes later, she was at work on her experiment. She was supposed to find the saturation point of a stable solution when a solid is added. The theory was that while most heated solutions suspended and dissolved a certain amount of solid material, once they reached a certain point, their saturation point, they can hold and dissolve nothing more. At this point, all the suspended solid in the solution falls to the bottom of the beaker. It was a universal truth that held not just for chemistry but for life: There is only so much crap that anybody can take.
She filled her beaker with solution and readied her solid suspension. The lit Bunsen burner glowed like a prayer candle at church. When she lifted the beaker, it slipped through her fingers and bounced against her hip before shattering on the floor. Hydrochloric acid stained her blue sweatshirt. Fragments of glass scurried across the freshly waxed floor like the legs of a crab. Fearing that the acid would burn her skin, Steve McCormack, who’d once informed Liz that her sister fucked for money, filled a liter-sized beaker full of water. She might have told him that the HCl was diluted for a reason, and that the only thing it might eat through was a chewable aspirin, but there wasn’t time. Steve poured the water all over her lap. It soaked her pants and ran down her legs.
The classroom went silent. They were all looking at her. Just like the night at the mill. Just like the faces she’d seen inside the mirrors of her sister’s apartment. Just like the girls in the locker room today. Faces.
Looks like you wet your pants. The thought was almost funny. She covered her mouth and started to laugh, not hard laughing, just giggles. Looks like you’re a joke. Now nobody’s gonna like you. Almost funny, not as funny. She laughed harder. You fat, stupid cunt. Now they’ll never stop talking and they’ll tell Bobby you’re an idiot. They’ll tell Bobby and he’ll finally leave you because he’ll figure out the truth. He’ll wake up and see you for what you are. A fake. A loser. A waste. A nothing. These thoughts raced through her mind. They were not her own. Close, but not hers. She laughed harder. Looks like you wet your
pants. They think you wet your pants. She looked down at her wet corduroys, and now she could not remember: Had she wet her pants? No, she couldn’t have; she’d feel warm. You got so upset you wet your pants and now they all know you’re fucked up. They know everything. They see how you wet your pants. Whose voice was that?
You worthless piece of shit, it should have been you.
Susan. The voice belonged to Susan. She was not dreaming. It was daytime. And Susan was in her head. Holy crap. Susan was inside her head. Liz was laughing so hard now it sounded like crying.
Ms. Gonya made her way to the back of the room. Instead of smiling she looked at Liz with a vacant stare. She reached out and lifted Liz’s chin. Long, hot-pink painted fingernails grazed her neck. Liz jerked away, for an instant thinking: This woman is going to slice my throat right open. “Elizabeth?” Ms. Gonya asked.
“Looks like I wet my pants,” she said, and then she started to cry.
After her episode, it was agreed that Liz should go to the teachers’ lounge, where the school psychologist would call her mother to take her home. But her mother could not be reached over the phone, and so it was Bobby who stopped by the lounge, carrying her backpack along with his own.
They left the lounge together, and as they walked, the bell rang and the halls filled with people going home early because of the rain. She could hear echoes: laughter, shouting, and underneath that, a buzzing. An electrical whine. The sound was familiar—this buzzing. It was the same sound she’d heard in her dream the night before Susan died, and she thought that it came from the people in the halls. It belonged to them, was underneath their laughter and polite conversation. Things started to come together for her then, and she began to understand what was happening.
As she walked, she rubbed her hand against Bobby’s. He picked it up and squeezed. “I love you,” she whispered, because it was one of the only truths she could believe in right now: wood made a particular sound when you knocked on it unless it was on fire; things fell down instead of up unless you were in space; bloody sisters did not visit you in cemeteries unless they were Susan Marley; and she loved Bobby Fullbright no matter what.
When they walked outside the front doors to the school where her mother had parked only two hours before, every student and teacher stopped what they were doing. Mr. Brutton dropped his briefcase onto the wet pavement, and did not bother to pick it up. The seniors in the parking lot stopped running toward their cars, and the ones who were driving slammed on their brakes. The buses did not move forward, and the kids standing under the awning did not climb aboard. “Let’s go to the mill tonight,” Liz heard Louise Andrias tell Owen Read and Steve McCormack amid the general murmur of conversation. “In my dream—” and then the words died on Louise’s tongue. All the words died.
It went completely quiet, except for the sound of the falling rain and the buzzing, still that buzzing. No cars moved. Only faces, watching them. Every person at the Bedford High School, watching them. Familiar faces. Angry faces. She remembered the faces in the mirrors at Susan’s apartment, and from out her window the night Susan died, and from the locker room this afternoon, and from chemistry class twenty minutes ago. Faces. They looked like Susan. Every one of them.
Bobby squeezed her hand tighter. “What the hell?” he whispered.
She yanked him forward, and together they ran to his car. As they drove away, she looked out the window and saw that slowly, people were starting to move again. Like a trance that had been lifted, they trembled, and then opened car doors and drove off, or picked up their briefcases, or perhaps they even resumed their conversations. “In my dream,” she could almost hear Louise Andrias say, “Susan Marley came back.”
Liz knew what was happening. Just like tapping her ruby slippers three times, she’d known the answer all along. She fought the urge to scream.
TWENTY-THREE
The Road to Kitty Dukakis Is Paved with Good Intentions
Around four o’clock on Wednesday, Paul woke up in his study with the kind of headache that feels like internal bleeding. Pound, throb, pound. Each time his heart beat, he could feel it like a drum smashed open inside his temples. The DTs. Yes, here they were, the real thing. Not the kind where you wonder if you’re having them. You know you’re having them. Just about right: forty-eight hours since he’d had a drink. Just like clockwork, this perfect machine of his.
The house was dry as a bone, and he had not had so much as a shot since he’d polished off his emergencies-only stash of scotch two nights before. Tempting as dropping by the liquor store may have been, he’d decided he’d rather eat paint thinner than answer pointed questions from the locals about Susan.
There had been some changes in the Martin household over the last few days. On Friday Brutton had called to tell him that if he showed up on school grounds, he’d be physically removed by police escort. On Sunday Cathy told him she was leaving. “Write when you get work, dear,” he’d told her, because he really had thought she was kidding. What kind of person leaves a man when his luck is the worst it’s ever been? But then he woke from his nap on the couch, and found two Post-it notes taped together on the refrigerator that read:
Dear Paul,
Gone to April’s with James.
Take care,
Cathy
PS—The AA hotline is open twenty-four hours (207) 774–3034
Tammy Wynette she was not. And how had Cathy explained this to his son as she took him away from the only home he’d ever known? What had she said to him? Best not to think about that now. Best to add that to the ever-growing list.
He spent the next few days drying out, which sounded like a lot more fun than it actually was. And now here he was, a soon-to-be-divorced alcoholic with a dead ex-mistress, standing in an empty kitchen on a rainy afternoon in Bedford, Maine. Who would have guessed? Certainly not him. This occasion called for a beer.
He opened the refrigerator. No, not the moldy blue cheese. Not the greasy clam chowder. Nothing in the crisper. Nope. He searched the cabinets. His head was really pounding. The thing he’d considered a headache a few hours ago, compared to this, was a too tight hat. He tossed things out. Oatmeal, bottles of condiments, canned chicken soup; they fell to the floor. Nothing there. And then he remembered: the cooking sherry.
There it was. Behind the Heinz 57. Usually by this time, he would have had a nip. A sip. Not to get drunk, just to stay neutral. But never cooking sherry. Never had he gone the way of Kitty Dukakis. This was an all-time low.
He turned the bottle over in his hand. Tide you over, a voice whispered in his ear. You’ll feel so much better once you have a little nip.
“Christ,” he said out loud because he knew that hearing his voice would make him feel better. “Jesus Christ.” He looked at the bottle. Almost funny. Truly funny. Funny because you can see cherry red stains running down the white label of a dusty old bottle. Funny because you’re smart enough to know exactly the kind of failure you are but not tough enough to figure a way out. Pathetic funny.
He dropped the bottle to the floor. It didn’t shatter. It rolled. He gave it a kick. It just kept rolling and no matter how hard he kicked, he just couldn’t make it break.
It was wet out. Not just the rain, but the air. And dark. He could hear water rushing like a river on the ground. He absentmindedly rubbed the place on his arm where Susan had bitten him. It itched with healing and he could feel the hardness of scab underneath his bandages. After the incident with the impenetrable sherry, he’d had to get out of the house. He took the car. As he drove down the hill, more and more water filled the streets. The car swerved, hydroplaned. He pulled over a few blocks from his house and walked to town.
It was still daytime, probably around three o’clock, but it felt much later. The black clouds overhead were full and threatening. Lightning lit up the sky every few minutes and was closely followed by the crackle of thunder. Each time this happened, his path to town was illuminated for a few seconds, maybe less, by a yellow, electri
cal light that, were his hair dry, would have made it stand on end.
Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Utah. Those were the names of some of the license plates mounted on the wall behind the bar. He read all thirty-seven of them, trying to focus, as he wiped down his wet clothes with the brown paper towels he’d acquired from the sawdust-covered men’s room.
The television was tuned to the local news. The main story was the flooding in Bedford. There were interviews with people from the town, saying in that slow, man-of-the-people way they had of saying everything: These things happen. We’ll make out all right. There were also a few inside-the-house disaster sequences that showed flooded basements. Cameras panned in on cardboard boxes and stored furniture floating across water-corroded floors.
As an end piece, the anchor reported that the Clott Paper Mill had recently closed, and the future of the town was in question. A clip showed a small caravan of cars heading south on I–95. Strapped to their trunks were bike racks or extra boxes, and it looked like many were abandoning the place. Would people stay in Bedford, the anchor intoned, or with a population that had been dwindling over the last fifty years, would future maps mark the area as deserted woodland?
Paul muttered something about inbreds, morons, and looked back at the license plates. Only he, Montie, and some old-timers were in the bar right now. There was The Duke as in John Wayne, so named because he grew increasingly silent as he drank, and that guy, Cancer Dan, who had this growth on his nose like he’d been out in the sun all his life but had never heard of the word “cancer.” He was the greenskeeper at the Corpus Christi Country Club. Last was Sean, whose low-slung jeans revealed the hairy fissure of his ass. They were playing cards. Each had his own bottle of something, what they’d brought with them and didn’t want to have to pay extra for, and a beer, which they sipped, just in order to stay in the bar.
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