Little Girls (23 page)

Susan kicked one leg of the piano bench. “That’s not fair! I hate it here!”

Laurie laughed. “You’re the one who wanted to stay in this house.” She looked at Ted. “The both of you.”

“I hate it here and I hate
you
!” Susan shouted.

“Susan—”

“You’re always so
mean
!” she cried, then took off down the hall.

Laurie shouted her daughter’s name once more, demanding that she return to the room until she was excused, but Susan’s footfalls were already pounding up the stairs. A moment later, the bedroom door slammed.

“Disrespectful brat,” Laurie breathed.

“Hey.” Ted stood from the bench and went over to her. When she tried to sidestep him, he gripped her by the wrist and tugged her toward him. “What the hell’s the matter with you?”

“
Me?
Oh, that’s rich. Our daughter’s running wild, with no discipline whatsoever, and
I’m
the problem?” She jerked her wrist free of him.

“Susan is
not
running wild and she has
plenty
of discipline. She’s a damn good kid and you need to loosen up a bit. Enough is enough, Laurie. We’ve both been very patient with you throughout this whole thing, but I can’t sit idly by while—”

“
I’m
the mother and
she’s
the child! It’s not you and her against me, it’s supposed to be you and me against
her.
”

“No one needs to be against anyone.”

“All you
do
is sit idly by. That’s all you’ve ever done, leaving me to be the heavy. You play with her, you teach her piano, you have a great relationship, she hugs and kisses you, and that’s wonderful for you, because Mommy’s the bad guy. Mommy’s the monster.”

“That’s incredibly unfair.”

“And what the hell do you mean you’ve both been patient with me throughout all of this? My father died. What do you want, a medal?”

“Keep your voice down,” he told her.

“If that girl comes by the house asking for Susan, you send her home. I don’t want her coming around here.”

She fled from the room before he could say another word. In the kitchen, she put the remaining slices of pizza in the fridge, then crushed up the pizza box and stuffed it in the trash. There was cold coffee in the pot on the stove. She poured some in a mug and heated it in the microwave. Her hands shook as she brought the mug to her lips.

Ted came in, a grim expression on his face. What bothered Laurie most was that he didn’t look angry. It was how he had regarded her in the days after the highway incident—a combination of concern and pity. He folded his arms and wandered toward the kitchen table, looking like he contemplated pulling out one of the chairs, but remained standing in the end.

“Can I ask you something?” he said. The timbre of his voice matched the quality of his expression.

“What?” It came out in a bark.

“Are you planning to leave me?”

She set the mug of coffee on the counter but didn’t answer. What surprised her was that Ted’s question
didn’t
surprise her. She couldn’t quite say why that was . . . but she had sensed the tension between them for some time now, even before coming to this house.

“Don’t take it out on Susan if this is really about us,” he said.

“Ted—”

“And don’t think I haven’t noticed,” he said, gesturing toward her. “You haven’t been wearing your wedding ring. You haven’t bothered to contact a realtor about selling the house. . . .”

“We just got the name and number from Liz the other night.”

“Come on, Laurie. You didn’t need to wait for Liz’s friend’s business card. You could have called someone on your own, someone else. And when I brought up selling the house, you brushed me off, but you wouldn’t tell me why.”

“You think I’m planning to leave you and move in here?” she said. The idea wasn’t just absurd—it was frightening. The thought of staying here permanently, living in this house again.... It would be like being sucked into a vacuum and suffocating.

Ted dragged a chair away from the table but still didn’t sit in it. “I’m at a crossroads here, Laurie. I can’t figure you out. It’s like you’re . . . punishing me. . . .”

She said nothing.

“I don’t know if you want me to say it and put it out on the table, or if you rather I say nothing and you go on quietly torturing me.”

And then suddenly she knew. “Don’t say it,” she told him. Her voice trembled.

“I had an affair, Laurie.”

The
No!
she wanted to shout at him got caught halfway up her throat. She stood there with her mouth hanging open, no sound coming out.

“It was a stupid, selfish, careless thing. It’s been over for a long time now and I haven’t seen her since.”

It was as though she were listening to him from the other side of a padded sanitarium wall. His voice was distant and her ears were plugged with balls of cotton.

“You’ve always been closed off to me, Laurie. You’ve kept your secrets and I’ve kept mine. But those secrets are breaking us apart. I’m telling you about what I’ve done because I want the admission to save us.”

“I don’t want to hear this.”

“That’s the problem! A year and a half ago, you and I were living two separate lives. That’s no way to sustain a marriage and it’s certainly no way to raise a little girl.”

She couldn’t look at him. Her face burning, her eyes leaking, she looked at the floor.

“I can only do my half, Laurie. We’re a team. We’re partners.”

“Some team.”

“We
both
need to come clean, Laurie. Not just me.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I’m talking about secrets. I’ve told you mine. Now you need to tell me yours. If we’re going to survive it, we’ve got to be straight with each other. No more secrets, no more separate lives. We’re one, Laurie. We’ve got to come clean.”

“I’ve got no secrets. I’ve never had an affair. I’ve never cheated on you.”

“Then what is it? It’s something else.”

“It’s
nothing
!”

“Is it about your father? Or that girl? That . . . Sadie?”

“There’s
nothing
!”

He released a shaky exhalation. The chair legs scraped across the floor as he slid it back toward the table. “Then we’re both doomed,” he said. His footsteps were nearly silent as he left the room.

You fucking creep, you fucking coward,
she thought . . . yet she was unsure whether she meant Ted or herself. . . .

At the counter beside the sink, she looked down on the corroded items that still soaked in the acid bath. In the pot, the water had turned a milky greenish-yellow. She strained the water into the sink, then placed the cleaned items on the paper towel beside the others. The decapitated doll head glared blindly at her from the countertop. Laurie’s hands shook. The metal backing of the brooch looked newer from the bath, but the cameo picture was gone forever; the blank white bulb on which it had been etched looked like a single eye, blind with cataract. The keys had come clean as well, though there were still remnants of calcification along the teeth and stuck in the grooves. Yet of all the items, it was the key with the number 58 engraved on it that held her attention.

When she returned to the parlor fifteen minutes later, the lights were off and the room was empty. She went down the hall and looked up the stairwell to the second-floor landing. The door to the master bedroom was shut, which meant Ted had gone to bed.
Bully for him.
She returned to the parlor to sleep on the sofa, but first she made sure all the doors were locked and all the windows were secure. She went upstairs and made sure the padlock was still on the belvedere door. If Abigail was getting in through the busted window, she at least wanted to make sure she couldn’t get into the rest of the house. She checked the lock on the side door, too. Teresa Larosche’s words ghosted up through the fog of her brain—
something about locking up the passageways, that passageways let it in and out like a turnstile. He actually said that—like a turnstile.

Passageways. In her mind’s eye, she saw Sadie scaling the tree and crawling out on the limb to peer down into her father’s greenhouse. She saw her lose her balance and swing down off the limb, falling, falling.... The sound she made crashing through the glass roof of the greenhouse was like two automobiles colliding.

My secret is that I was happy you died, Sadie. You Hateful Beast, what do you want from me now? Have you come back to torture me some more?
She peered out the window in the door, expecting Abigail to emerge from the darkness, her hair done up the same as Sadie’s, wearing the same oversized and outmoded clothes, and pointing a damning finger at her.

 

The dreams that plagued her that night as she slept on the sofa were unforgiving in their brutality. Sadie made a guest appearance in a few of them, the flesh flayed from her face in gray and red ribbons. Her eyes were gelatinous white orbs that wept snotlike yellow fluid that congealed in her lashes. She wore one of her outdated checkerboard dresses, just as she had in real life. As Laurie gaped at her, the girl hiked the hem of the dress up to her chest. Her belly was a flat white canvas lacerated with startling crimson hash marks. Like Christ on the cross, a rib-exposing wound gaped along her left side. It suppurated a fluid as dark and fibrous as menstrual blood, the nearly black streaks ribboning down her hip, thigh, calf. A blackish discharge dribbled down her inner thighs.

I want to touch you and I want you to touch me,
the Sadie-thing said,
and if you don’t, I will wish horrible things to happen to your parents. I will wish them to die and you’ll have no one left. You’ll go to an orphanage, Laurie, and you’ll be all alone for the rest of your life.

And then Ted was there with Sadie, the two of them copulating like beasts, Ted’s dark skin in perfect juxtaposition against the slick colorless white of Sadie’s flesh. Ted humped and his back arched, each notch in his spine cut in sharp relief beneath his sweat-slickened flesh. As Laurie looked on, horrified, Sadie turned her head and grinned at her. Her teeth had been replaced with sparkling diamonds. Her eyes were black onyx stones.

I feel it in me,
Sadie said just as a swarm of white moths burst from her diamond-encrusted mouth.
I feel it in me and it hurts, Laurie. It hurts.
The laughter that followed was not of this world.

 

Laurie made the grand discovery the following afternoon, just as Mr. McCall’s movers were upstairs in the master bedroom disassembling the bedframe and a gnomish woman carried out the Wedgwood china, each piece individually wrapped in brown paper, from the curio in the dining room. The house was slowly being liberated of its last remaining clutter, leaving behind woundlike spaces where furniture had previously been. Laurie chose to think of it as a holy cleansing, a rebirth, a baptism.

Susan was out playing in the backyard. Alone. Abigail Evans hadn’t come by and Laurie was silently grateful. Ted had left early that morning, while Laurie pretended to be asleep on the sofa, dressed in his running gear. He had been gone for hours now. He went running more frequently when he was having a difficult time with his writing, but also when there was trouble between them. That was preferable to his excessive drinking, which was his other crutch. She found she didn’t care, and was thankful that the son of a bitch had taken to the streets while she’d slept instead of trying to confront her again. With them both gone—and with the exception of McCall’s movers shuffling about upstairs while the gnomish woman (whose name Laurie had forgotten) scuttled back and forth from the dining room to the front door—the house was mostly silent. The business card for Harmony Simmons, Liz’s realtor friend, was still on the refrigerator. Laurie considered calling the number, if only to prove Ted wrong, and even went as far as picking the phone up off the wall, but then decided against it.

One of McCall’s men poked his head in through the kitchen door. He was a sturdy-looking dark-skinned fellow with the muddy black eyes of a hound. “We got the bedframe loaded in the truck, Mrs. Genarro. We’re just gonna take the cabinet and then we’ll be out of your hair.”

McCall had decided to purchase the liquor cabinet as well, so Laurie had spent some time removing the liquor bottles—most of which were now empty—and placing them in a rough metropolis on the top of the piano. Laurie came out into the parlor and watched McCall’s men work. One man—this one blond guy with hypnotizing blue eyes—tipped the cabinet into the waiting arms of the other man. Together, they maneuvered the item around the sofa, the loveseat, the piano, and out into the hall. Something clattered on the floor in their wake but the men didn’t seem to notice. Laurie peered over the couch and saw it was the shattered picture frame and the folded photo of her father and his two business companions, which Ted had found in the sleeve of one of the record albums.

“Ma’am,” one of the men called to her from the foyer.

Laurie hustled down the hall in time to open the front door for the two men. They grunted as they negotiated the cabinet out the door and down the porch steps. She followed them out—the day was overcast and the trees seemed to reach up and claw at the sky, desperate for rain—and tipped them four dollars each. When the truck pulled away, Laurie saw the Wedgwood woman standing behind it, peering down the open throat of the well. Ted hadn’t closed it back up after his spelunking expedition. Laurie approached the woman—Martha? Marsha?—and saw the almost hypnotic appearance of her face.

She reached out and gently touched the woman’s arm. “Are you okay?”

“This,” said the woman as she jabbed a finger at the open well, “is very dangerous.”