Good Girls (25 page)

“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 beckoning 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.

Again, Rebecca felt herself leaning forward. And again, she couldn't resist the silence. She needed to know. And this woman needed to tell her. “Yeah?”

“If my legs had mouths,” Sophie said, all but whispering, “you'd be running. Because they can't do anything about it, but they are
hungry.
” Then she burst out laughing. Grabbing the cassette again, she waved it over her stumps like a lamp or a wand. “That-a-girl, Nat Queen Cold.
Scowl
.”

Nat. Queen Cold. Old.

Rebecca stared anew at the cables, the laptop on the blankets, the little black box connected via USB cable, the headset microphone on Sophie's pillow.

Buh—… cat-dah. TONGUE.

“It's
you,
” Rebecca said. “That voice. That Internet radio station. It's—

“See, here's what I don't get.” Sophie looked up, hands in her lap, hair a wild nimbus of yellow around her too-pale, almost childlike face. Her eyes drank Rebecca in.

Like Miss Havisham,
Rebecca thought,
only young. Not young Miss Havisham of the doomed, blind love, but old, vengeful Miss Havisham, younger.

“What I don't get,” Sophie said, “is what you just did.”

“What? You mean, figure out that—”

“Don't get me wrong, I'm glad about it. I like you, I mean it. And anyway, it's kind of intriguing for me, too. Also, honestly, when I jumped up at you back there? And when I said that about my legs? I was just playing. Really. So maybe that's it? Although I really
am
hungry; it definitely is getting near that time. Maybe that's why, and it has nothing to do with you at all.” Somehow, Sophie's gaze, which had never quite left Rebecca's, seized her fully now. She lifted a finger, waved it in the air between them, and her voice dropped back into its almost-whisper. “But I don't think so. I'm new to all this, I admit it. And I'm a little beat up just now. And pretty fucking confused, or sad, or something. But still. I'm pretty certain you shouldn't have been able to do that.”

For a baffling, then frightening second, Rebecca couldn't remember how to speak. She literally couldn't locate her voice. Then, somehow, she did. “Do what?”

“Jump back. Get yourself away from me.” Sophie stopped whispering. “Not that it would have mattered, if I'd really wanted you. I know, I know what you're thinking, my legs. But you will be surprised.”

“You
will,
” Rebecca noted, somehow controlling a shiver of her own. Not, “you
would
.” She forced her eyes away from Sophie's—which wasn't hard this time,
she let me go
—and back to the cassettes and the headset microphone. “You're the girl on the radio. The voice.”

Surprised again, Sophie grinned. “You've heard my show! Do you like it?”

“I … What's it…”

“Well”—Sophie patted the cassette cases—“that's Nat.”

“Nat.”

“-alie.”

“Natalie. Your best friend.”

“Would you cut that out? Wound, salt, wound, salt. I thought Jess said you worked at some kind of crisis center or something, and knew how to be sensitive to people in pain.”

“But you … said she was dead.”

Sophie's grin hardened. Her head swung to the window. She pulled back the blanket curtain an inch or two, letting in just a little of the gathering dark out there. “That isn't the right question. But the answer is, with great care. With fucking painstaking labor, actually. See, Jess—you wouldn't peg her as sentimental, would you, but she's a goddamn
baseball
fan, if that tells you anything—when she fled Charlotte? When the thought of ever seeing her daughter or me again chased her clean out of town? Practically all she brought with her was this bag of cassettes. Tapes and tapes and tapes of Natalie talking, at all different ages. God knows what she thought she was going to do with them. But I'm sure glad she has them, because I've had three weeks of ten thousand hours each of
nothing better to do.
So I've been … cataloging. Grabbing snippets. Conjuring up my Nat.” Once more, she lifted her eyes to Rebecca's. “Baiting my hook.”

“Baiting. For what?”

Sophie sighed. “Again, with the wrong ques—”

“You're just keeping yourself company.”

Even before the blonde rocked upright again, leaned out over the space between them—which wasn't nearly space enough—Rebecca wanted that comment back. Her feet edged backward, felt for the top step, the opening of the trapdoor. But she already knew Sophie was right: there was no way she'd be fast enough.

Sophie didn't leap at her, though. She seemed, instead, to push herself back into herself, as though stuffing one of those spring-coil snakes back into a can. Abruptly—amazingly—she smiled, not her nasty grin but the smile from the picture in Jess's drawer downstairs.
Exactly
that smile, just for a second. A sweet and shimmering thing.

“You really do remind me of her. Actually, you completely don't. But I'm serious, and it's a compliment: Natalie would have dug you. Probably a lot more than she dug me, in the end.” And Sophie laughed, but
not
the laugh of the girl in the photograph.

How did Rebecca know that? She just did. Even so, there was something so close to gentle in Sophie's expression, something so much like affection without
being
that, that Rebecca heard herself say, “Thank you.” Even though she had no idea what she meant.

“There are ironies,” Sophie said. “Like this one: if I was the one gone, and Natalie had wound up stashed forever in this attic? She would have been just fine. She'd have had her baby to be with, her music to play, silences to fill, or actually,
not
fill, Jesus Christ, that girl could
not
talk when she wanted not to.”

Yet again, Rebecca had an opening. And yet again, her curiosity, her sense of the creature in the bed's barely acknowledged desperation, and her nagging sense that there was something else, something more, kept her where she was. What came out of her mouth was a Crisis Center question, a conversation extender. “Natalie didn't like people?”

Sophie shrugged, petting the tape in her hands. “
I
liked people. And I don't even get to have my son.”

Every question Rebecca could think of next seemed cruel, suicidal, or both. Except, just maybe, the most important one.

“Do you still like people, Sophie?”

It took a long time. But in the end, Sophie laid the tape in her lap, resting her palms atop it. “I guess we'll find out when the time comes. When
he
comes.”

“When—”

“The whistling asshole. I told you, you keep asking the wrong questions. I said,
baiting.
What you
should
have asked is, ‘Baiting what, Sophie?' And my answer, thank you for asking, is, my trap. Because I am betting my boredom—which is all I have left, it is all that motherfucking fucker left me—that whatever he decided he felt for my
dead best friend Natalie,
his motherfuckedup ‘Destiny,' he still feels it. And he's a social-networking, music-obsessed, whistling, wanking fuckball. And sooner or later, I don't know how or when but I'm betting sooner, he's going to hear my radio show. He's going to hear these songs. He's going to hear his Destiny's voice. And when he does … I don't know what he's going to do. But I know he'll come for her. And when he comes, you and anyone you've ever loved better get out of the way, unless you have a bazooka handy. Because you can't stop him. You have no chance.

“But me? Do you see? He doesn't know I'm still here. I'm sure he hasn't expended a single thought on me since the moment he ripped me in half. I'm pretty sure he wasn't expending any thought on me, then, any more than he does on stairs he climbs or roads he crosses.

“And that means he won't be expecting me. And I'm thinking it's just possible that I'm just enough like
him
that if I get a jump, catch him by surprise…”

At no point, Rebecca realized, through her own swelling panic, the voices echoing in her head—the
one
voice, now, that had crept, in the middle of last night, out of the Crisis Center receiver and straight down her eustachian tube into her brain, murmuring,
‘My Destiny killed my mother'
and ‘
My Destiny's mother killed her'
—had she seen Sophie breathe. She certainly wasn't breathing now.

But she did stop talking long enough for Rebecca to ask one last question. It was the one, she realized, she'd been waiting all this time to ask. The one on which so much hinged:

“Are you sure you're still enough like
us
to want to?” she said.

This time, when Sophie's eyes grabbed Rebecca's, they snagged her completely. Rebecca tried turning her head, lowering her lids, forcing a shudder. Then she gave up, gave in, gazed back.

“If you stick around long enough,” Sophie murmured, “I think
I
might even decide I like you.”

“I hope so,” Rebecca said as her phone went off in her pocket and goose bumps erupted all at once, all over her skin, as though she were a lake bombarded by a rainstorm. “Because he's already here.”

 

19

In an ordinary month—
any
other month—Caribou would never have done it. Not consciously. He had, in fact, spent the past forty years avoiding precisely this action, burying even the possibility of this action.