Good Girls (10 page)

Then it was back to the swelter inside the car, the traffic-choked road north. Eddie kept screaming, and Benny stayed unconscious, one hand sliding off his abdomen to rest against Sophie's bloodied legs, which lay atop the pans and stuffed suitcases. In the front, next to Jess, Sophie mostly tried to curl away from the sunlight streaming through the windshield and windows. But there wasn't much of her to curl, so all she could really do was press against the door. Jess could tell the sun hurt her, saw the tears sneaking down her face. The girl made almost no sound, though, and never said a word.

Not only did Jess have to give her credit for that, she was also grateful for it. This way, with Eddie shrieking and the road spooling away and away toward nowhere in particular, none of them had to think.

Right at dusk, she swung them off the Beltway onto a two-lane road winding through trees into low hills. They passed a sign proclaiming the place to be
Concerto Woods,
and a mile or so past that, she spotted a rutted track spoking away into the shadows. Jess bumped them down that and parked under a gnarled, towering oak that seemed to stretch its branches over them like a canopy. For at least the sixth time since morning, she got out, unhooked Eddie, rocked him and fed him his bottle and some Cheerios and a jar of greenish mush. She kept herself turned three-quarters away from Sophie, her eyes on the forest but her ears pricked. The air smelled of pine resin and sap, old animal scat and wet earth. Living-thing smells.

“Sssh,”
she heard herself saying as she swung Eddie back and forth, both the gesture and the sound automatic, instinctive. So, too, the burping him, the extra pressure on his back so he could feel her loving him. Little Eddie. Natalie's boy. The last of Natalie.

Finally, as the vanishing sun sucked the daylight over the horizon behind it, Eddie settled. He stopped hiccupping and complaining. When Jess lowered him to look into his face, he even smiled, or seemed to. His gurgling might have been a laugh. After that—for perhaps his very first time without a mother—he slept.

And for one moment—and one, only—Jess felt almost peaceful.

Settling the child back in his seat, she pushed Sophie's feet sideways so she could get at the paper bag of food she'd salvaged from the condo. One of those feet was, insanely, still in its flip-flop, and the flip-flop kept dangling over the lip of the bag until Jess stripped it off and chucked it out of the car. She rummaged, eventually coming up with some celery and a jar of peanut butter. Returning to her place behind the wheel, she forced herself to eat one entire stalk. Beside her, Sophie seemed to unfold, to the extent that she could, into the evening.

“Benny,” Jess snapped, harder than she meant to, more fiercely than she could control. “Benny, wake up.”

Eventually, he did, rolling fully onto his back, jerking his hand off Sophie's legs and then crying out at the sudden movement before tucking the broken arm Jess had attempted to sling against his ribs. Judging by his wooziness, Jess was pretty sure that in addition to his busted arm and ankle—or ankles—he probably had a concussion. It occurred to her, too late, that she probably should have kept him awake.

She peanut-buttered a stalk for him, turned, knelt on the seat, and leaned over the back. She had the celery clutched in her teeth like a dagger so she could help Benny arrange himself. Eddie woke up and burbled. Jess actually removed the celery from her mouth to ask Sophie for help. And that's when she realized that Sophie's head was already turned in her direction, her teeth maybe two inches from Jess's left breast.

Jess straightened so fast that she banged her head on the overhead light and cried out. That set Eddie screaming again. Jess ignored him, dropped the celery, kept her eyes locked on Sophie and her arms raised and crossed uselessly in front of her.

Sophie didn't lunge or bite. In truth, she'd barely moved, except her head, not that she had much else left
to
move.

But she was watching, all right. Quite possibly smiling. She knew what Jess was thinking. Even more—Jess was certain—Sophie wanted her to think it.

For a long moment, the two of them watched each other while Eddie screamed and Benny moaned. Then, with a sigh, Sophie looked down at her lap or, more accurately, at her hands, which were playing with the thready, dangling red bits at the tops of the stumps of her legs.

“Ooh,” she said. And, “Huh.”

At least Jess felt alert again, now. Carefully, she edged her arm over the seat until she could stroke Eddie's face. In her lap, Sophie kept doing … whatever she was doing. But she was watching Jess, too, her head cocked, brown eyes ringed by lack of sleep—
did she even need sleep, now, or was that a permanent state?—
but huge, like a raccoon's. The thready bits at which Sophie picked were still wet, apparently. At least, they sounded wet.

When Sophie saw where Jess was looking, she grinned. “Celery, huh? Never understood it.”

“How's that?” Jess had neither meant nor wanted to respond, was still too rattled by how close she'd let Sophie get.
Almost everything we do,
she thought,
is absolutely automatic. We think we act. But we mostly watch ourselves act.

“Crunch, stringy bleah, dribbly-juicy insides, swallow. It's like gnawing a bone.” Then, when she saw the look on Jess's face, Sophie laughed and grinned wider. “Actually, it's nothing like gnawing a bone.”

“Oh my God, you horrible, monstrous little—”

“Joke,” Sophie said, and to Jess's surprise, she actually shrank back, put up her hands, palms out, like a little girl. Like the little girl she'd been right up until the moment she'd become no one, or this new thing.

“I have never gnawed a bone,” Sophie assured her. “Nor do I have plans to.”

Jess started to answer but instead inhaled a mouthful of the stink just starting to seep from the trunk. Her first impulse was to gag, which sent fresh pain shearing across her ribs, as though she'd ripped herself along some hidden perforation.

Her second impulse, once she'd recovered, was to weep, but she didn't do that.

Her third was to get up, go around back of the Sunfire, pop the trunk, and just crawl in, curl around her daughter and Sophie's son, and let herself sleep.

Instead, she grabbed the steering wheel and caught sight of her arms, striped and streaked where the sun had baked her daughter's blood into her skin. “Okay,” she breathed, tasting that smell, feeling the whole horrid, unimaginable day just past melting into her. “Okay.” Keying the ignition, she backed the car out from under the oak and up the path and returned them to the road. Instead of turning toward the freeway, though, she aimed them deeper into the forest.

Amazingly quickly—she always had been bright, so much brighter than her teachers or her mother or even Natalie had realized—Sophie understood what was happening. “Wait,” she said. “Jess. I want to bury my Roo by the beach. Not in some lonely, stupid woods.” She was sitting up straight in the seat now that the sun had gone, her blond hair frizzed and kinked and full of sand, twisted into knotty dreadlocks. Her too-round, sunshine face seemed different, almost frail, younger than Jess had seen it look for years and years. For a moment, Jess couldn't figure out what was causing that effect, and then realized: no freckles. How could there be Sophie with no freckles?

Mostly, though, the difference was those raccoon eyes, the
nothingness
inside or behind them.
God, you can really
see
it,
Jess thought, then thought maybe she was making that up. She sucked in more sickening air. That, she realized, might be her last physical experience of the child she had birthed and raised.

“Go ahead,” she snarled, and returned her eyes to the road.

A few minutes later—all at once, as though a switch had been flipped—night dropped on the forest. In the car's headlight beams, the trees looked painted onto the dark, utterly motionless. Not a single other vehicle passed them. More than once, Jess's eyes flicked to the rearview mirror, but Sophie was always looking out the window or else over her shoulder at the trunk where her baby lay.

Unless she was looking at Benny?

They passed a series of rust-riddled white signs announcing the
Pimlico Post Pavilion Expansion Project,
and then a long stretch of sagging cyclone fencing around what looked like a completely abandoned construction site. Jess noted a lone bulldozer, some scattered stacks of discarded lumber, three filthy blue Porta-Potties with their doors swung open to the dark. Just as they came to the edge of the site and the end of the fence, Jess saw the wheelbarrow.

Which so much depends upon,
she thought, half-chanting the lines to herself: some poem Natalie had loved in high school. She was already slowing the car before realizing she meant to. Gravel kicked up under their wheels, drumming the undercarriage of the Sunfire like little fingers. They stopped under yet another rusting sign:
Concerto Woods Development Authority. Future site of Pimlico Pavilion Oaks. Country comfort, urban sophistication, 3 and 4 bedrooms, from the low $500k's.
The words were filmed over with at least a year's worth of muck and dried sleet.

Jess looked back over her shoulder, making sure. The wheelbarrow was leaning up on its wheel against the cyclone fencing. And there really was a gaping hole in the wire, right next to it.

For once,
she thought.
Just this once, life was going to be kind.
A sort of kind. It had taken her whole world, her husband, her daughter. But it had left her a wheelbarrow.

Even from the car, she could see that the thing was crusted with rust and bird shit. Silvery spiderwebs glinted in its handles like bows on a birthday present.

Sophie said nothing. Once again, she already understood. Together, they watched the site. There were more junk piles of wood in there, collapsing mountains of dirt, another Porta-Potty. Way back where the forest floor sloped down, they saw some kind of tractor or bulldozer, parked sideways. But there were no lights, no sounds, no sign of a night watchman or of anything worth watching. Some of the trees were oaks, some black cherry. Jess recognized those from road trips up this way with Joe, in the first year of their marriage. Their one year as just a married couple, with no one but themselves. Those days almost unimaginable, now.

“Pimlico Post Pavilion,” Sophie murmured. “My mom brought us up here once, when I was like ten. To see Fleetwood Mac. She said Stevie Nicks was her soul sister.”

“Stevie Nicks,” Jess murmured. That wailing, coked-up, little gold-dust fairy. “Perfect.”

Sophie's voice dropped lower. “What are you saying about my mom?”

Raising a hand to her forehead, Jess squeezed her eyes and was surprised by the moisture she found there. She'd thought she was past that, for now.

“I liked your mom, Sophie. In spite of herself.”

The second she stepped out of the car, Jess knew she'd found the right place. Partially, the feeling came from the trees. They just
felt
like Natalie, even if Natalie had never seen them. Also, the Post Pavilion had to be somewhere nearby, maybe right over that hill down there, which meant Natalie would hear—or at least be lying near—music on summer nights. More than anything else (except her life, and her child), Natalie would have wanted music.

And in addition, there was
that.

Knockknockknockknockknock. Knockknockknock.

The sound came from everywhere, bursting out in unpredictable rhythms all over the woods. In their trailer in North Carolina, when Natalie was a little girl, she had sometimes punched her mother awake to listen to that sound; she'd even done that into her teenage years. Every time, Jess would grumble, pull her close, and they'd lie there together in those too-short, nearly silent times before their neighbors flooded the world with arguments and Twisted Sister and Rush Limbaugh.

In truth, those probably hadn't actually been the happiest moments of Natalie's life. But they really might have been the happiest of Jess's. And given the current circumstances, that would have to be close enough.

“Anyway, you're not really around to argue, are you?” Jess snapped, under her breath, at nothing. At the knocking summer air.

Leaving Benny to watch Eddie, she slipped through the hole in the fencing, collecting shovels and a tarp and a pick. She placed the shovels and pick in the wheelbarrow, wiped the handle of the barrow with the blood-soaked bottom of her blouse, and wheeled everything back to the fence opening. The whole time, she felt Sophie watching. Eventually, Jess forced herself to meet that raccoon-gaze. Once again, she had a choice to make, and no good options. But leaving that thing here with her man and Natalie's child was out of the question, so really, there was no choice whatsoever.

Returning to the car, she opened the door so Sophie could half-drag, half-spill herself onto the ground, then let her follow as best she could back to the fence. Only after Sophie had somehow scraped through the twisted chain-link did Jess squat, suck in breath to steel herself, jam her hands into Sophie's armpits, and hoist her into the wheelbarrow. Sophie went in sideways, clunking against the tools and the sides as Jess straightened. She grabbed at her screaming ribs as if her hands could help. Meanwhile, Sophie managed to tilt upright so that she stuck up out of the well like a jack-in-the-box, her blouse also streaked with blood, her shoulders and breasts raked with scratches, as though she'd been snatched up and then dropped by a bird.

“Not one word,” Jess breathed. “You hear? And I don't care. Legs or no: if you're coming, you're helping.” Then—biting the indentations her teeth had already gouged in her lower lip to help her keep from screaming—she got the barrow up on its wheel and nudged it ahead of her down the track the workmen had left into the woods.