The Girls (10 page)

“But we can try making one out in the yard,” I said.

The sandy lot behind the garage was sheltered from the wind, wet leaves matted on the seats of plastic chairs. There had once been a fire pit of sorts, the stones scattered among the senseless archaeological relics of family life: add-ons to forgotten toys, a chewed-looking shard of Frisbee. We were both distracted by the hustle of preparation, tasks that allowed for companionable silence. I found a stack of three-year-old newspapers in the garage and a bundle of wood from the general store in town. Sasha toed the stones back into a circle.

“I was always bad at this,” I said. “There's something you're supposed to do, right? Some special shape with the logs?”

“Like a house,” Sasha said. “You're supposed to make it look like a cabin.” She used her foot to neaten the ring. “We used to camp a lot in Yosemite when I was little.”

Sasha was the one who actually got the fire going: squatting in the sand, keeping up a steady stream of breath. Gentling the flames until there was a satisfying burn.

We sat down in the plastic chairs, their surfaces stippled from sand and wind. I pulled mine close to the fire—I wanted to feel hot, to sweat. Sasha was quiet, looking at the jump of flames, but I could sense the whir of her mind, the faraway place she had disappeared to. Maybe she was imagining what Julian was doing up in Garberville. The musky futon he'd sleep on, using a towel for a blanket. All part of the adventure. How nice it must be to be a twenty-year-old boy.

“That stuff Julian was talking about,” Sasha said, clearing her throat like she was embarrassed, though her interest was obvious. “Were you, like, in love with that guy or something?”

“Russell?” I said, poking at the fire with a stick. “I didn't think about him like that.”

It was true: the other girls had circled around Russell, tracking his movements and moods like weather patterns, but he stayed mostly distant in my mind. Like a beloved teacher whose home life his students never imagined.

“Why'd you hang out with them, then?” she asked.

My first impulse was to avoid the subject. I'd have to pin down all the edges. Act out the whole morality play: the regret, the warnings. I tried to sound businesslike.

“People were falling into that kind of thing all the time, back then,” I said. “Scientology, the Process people. Empty-chair work. Is that still a thing?” I glanced at her—she was waiting for me to go on. “It was partly bad luck, I guess. That it was the group I found.”

“But you stayed.”

I could feel the full force of Sasha's curiosity for the first time.

“There was a girl. It was more her than Russell.” I hesitated. “Suzanne.” It was odd to say her name, to let it live in the world. “She was older,” I said. “Not by much, really, but it felt like a lot.”

“Suzanne Parker?”

I stared across the fire at Sasha.

“I looked some things up today,” she said. “Online.”

I'd once lost hours to that kind of stuff. The fan sites or whatever you called them. The stranger corners. The website devoted to Suzanne's artwork from prison. Watercolors of mountain ranges, puffball clouds, the captions filled with misspellings. I'd felt a pang, imagining Suzanne working with great concentration, but closed the website when I saw the photo: Suzanne, in blue jeans and a white T-shirt—her jeans stuffed with middle-aged fat, her face a vacant scrim.

The thought of Sasha gorging on that macabre glut made me uneasy. Packing herself with particulars: the autopsy reports, the testimony the girls gave of that night, like the transcript of a bad dream.

“It's nothing to be proud of,” I said. Recounting the usual things—it was awful. Not glamorous, not enviable.

“There wasn't anything about you,” Sasha said. “Not that I could find.”

I felt a lurch. I wanted to tell her something valuable, my existence traced with enough care that I would become visible.

“It's better that way,” I said. “So the lunatics don't search me out.”

“But you were there?”

“I lived there. Basically. For a while. I didn't kill anyone or anything.” My laugh came out flat. “Obviously.”

She was huddling into her sweatshirt. “You just left your parents?” Her voice was admiring.

“It was a different time,” I said. “Everyone ran around. My parents were divorced.”

“So are mine,” Sasha said, forgetting to be shy. “And you were my age?”

“A little younger.”

“I bet you were really pretty. I mean, duh, you're pretty now, too,” she said.

I could see her puff up with her own generosity.

“How'd you even meet them?” Sasha asked.

It took me a moment to gather myself, to remember the sequence of things. “Revisit” is the word they always used in anniversary articles about the murder. “Revisiting the horror of Edgewater Road,” as if the event existed singularly, a box you could close a lid on. As if I hadn't been stopped by hundreds of ghosted Suzannes on the streets or in the background of movies.

I fielded Sasha's questions about what they had been like in real life, those people who had become totems of themselves. Guy had been less interesting to the media, just a man doing what men had always done, but the girls were made mythic. Donna was the unattractive one, slow and rough, often cast as a pity case. The hungry harshness in her face. Helen, the former Camp Fire Girl, tan and pigtailed and pretty—she was the fetish object, the pinup murderess. But Suzanne got the worst of it. Depraved. Evil. Her sneaky beauty didn't photograph well. She looked feral and meager, like she might have existed only to kill.

Talking about Suzanne raised a rev in my chest that I was sure Sasha could see. It seemed shameful. To feel that helpless excitement, considering what had happened. The caretaker on the couch, the coiled casing of his guts exposed to the air. The mother's hair soaked with gore. The boy so disfigured the police weren't sure of his gender. Surely Sasha had read about those things, too.

“Did you ever think you could have done what they did?” she asked.

“Of course not,” I said reflexively.

In all the times I had ever told anyone about the ranch, few had ever asked me that question. Whether I could have done it, too. Whether I almost had. Most assumed a base level of morality separated me, as if the girls had been a different species.

Sasha was quiet. Her silence seemed like a kind of love.

“I guess I do wonder, sometimes,” I said. “It seems like an accident that I didn't.”

“An accident?”

The fire was getting weak and jumpy. “There wasn't that much difference. Between me and the other girls.”

It was strange to say this aloud. To edge, even vaguely, around the worry I had worked over all this time. Sasha didn't seem disapproving or even wary. She simply looked at me, her watchful face on mine, as if she could take in my words and make a home for them.

We went to the one bar in town that had food. This seemed like a good idea, a goal we could aim toward. Sustenance. Movement. We'd talked until the fire had burned itself into a glowy mottle of newspaper. Sasha kicked sand over the mess, her scout's diligence making me laugh. I was happy to be with someone, despite the provisional reprieve—Julian would come back, Sasha would be gone, and I'd be alone again. Even so, it was nice to be the subject of someone's admiration. Because that's what it was, mostly: Sasha seemed to respect the fourteen-year-old girl I had been, to think I was interesting, had been somehow brave. I tried to correct her, but an expansive comfort had spread in my chest, a reoccupation of my body, like I'd woken from the twilight of pharmaceutical sleep.

We walked side by side on the shoulder of the road, along the aqueduct. The pointed trees were dense and dark, but I didn't feel afraid. The night had taken on a strange, festive air, and Sasha had started calling me Vee for some reason.

“Mama Vee,” she said.

She seemed like a kitten, affable and mild, her warm shoulder bumping against mine. When I looked over, I saw that she was gnawing at her bottom lip, her face turned to the sky. But there was nothing to see—the stars were hidden by fog.

There were a few stools in the bar and not much else. The usual patchwork of rusted signs, a pair of humming neon eyes over the door. Someone in the kitchen was smoking cigarettes—the sandwich bread was humid with smoke. We stayed awhile after we'd finished eating. Sasha looked fifteen, but they didn't care. The bartender, a woman in her fifties, seemed grateful for any business. She looked worked over, her hair crispy from drugstore dye. We were almost the same age, but I wouldn't glance into the mirror to confirm the similarities, not with Sasha beside me. Sasha, whose features had the clean, purified cast of a saint on a religious medal.

Sasha swiveled around on her stool like a young child.

“Look at us.” She laughed. “Partying hard.” She took a drink of beer, then a drink of water, a conscientious habit I'd noticed, though it didn't prevent a visible slump from taking over. “I'm kind of glad Julian's not here,” she said.

The words seemed to thrill her. I knew by then not to spook her, but instead to give her space to dawdle toward her actual point. Sasha kicked the bar rail absently, her breath beery and close.

“He didn't tell me he was leaving,” she said. “For Humboldt.” I pretended surprise. She laughed flatly. “I couldn't find him this morning and I just thought he was like, outside. That's kind of weird, right? That he just took off?”

“Yeah, weird.” Too cautious, maybe, but I was wary of inciting a righteous defense of Julian.

“He texted me all sorry. He thought we'd talked about it, I guess.”

She sipped her beer. Drawing a smiley face in the wood of the bar with a wet finger. “You know why he got kicked out of Irvine?” She was half-giddy, half-wary. “Wait,” she said, “you're not gonna tell his dad, are you?”

I shook my head, an adult willing to keep a teenager's secrets.

“Okay.” Sasha took a breath. “He had some comp teacher he hated. He was kind of a jerk, I guess. The teacher. He didn't let Julian turn in this paper late, even though he knew Julian would fail without a grade for it.

“So Julian went to the guy's house and did something to his dog. Fed him something that made him sick. Like bleach or rat poison, I don't really know what.” Sasha caught my eye. “The dog died. This old dog.”

I struggled to keep my face even. The plainness of her retelling, devoid of any inflection, made the story worse.

“The school knew he did it, but they couldn't prove it,” Sasha said. “So they suspended him for other stuff, but he couldn't go back or anything. It's messed up.” She looked at me. “I mean, don't you think?”

I didn't know what to say.

“He said he didn't mean to kill it or anything, just make it sick.” Sasha's tone was tentative, testing out the thought. “That's not so bad, right?”

“I don't know,” I said. “It sounds bad to me.”

“But I live with him, you know,” Sasha said. “Like he pays all the rent and stuff.”

“There are always places to go,” I said.

Poor Sasha. Poor girls. The world fattens them on the promise of love. How badly they need it, and how little most of them will ever get. The treacled pop songs, the dresses described in the catalogs with words like “sunset” and “Paris.” Then the dreams are taken away with such violent force; the hand wrenching the buttons of the jeans, nobody looking at the man shouting at his girlfriend on the bus. Sorrow for Sasha locked up my throat.

She must have sensed my hesitation.

“Whatever,” she said. “It was a while ago.”

This is what it might be like to be a mother, I thought, watching Sasha drain her beer, wipe her mouth like a boy. To feel this unexpected, boundless tenderness for someone, seemingly out of nowhere. When a pool player sauntered over, I was prepared to scare him away. But Sasha smiled big, showing her pointed teeth.

“Hi,” she said, and then he was buying us each another beer.

Sasha drank steadily. Alternating between distracted boredom and manic interest, feigned or not, in what the man was saying.

“You two from out of town?” he asked. His hair graying and long, a turquoise ring on his thumb—another sixties ghost. Maybe we'd even crossed paths back then, haunting the same well-worn trail. He hitched up his pants. “Sisters?”

His voice barely tried to include me in the purview of his effort, and I almost laughed. Still, even sitting next to Sasha, I was aware of some of the attention washing onto me. It was shocking to remember the voltage, even secondhand. How it felt to be a desired thing. Maybe Sasha was so used to it that she didn't even notice. Caught up in the rush of her own life, in her certainty of the meliorative trajectory.

“She's my mother,” Sasha said. Her eyes were taut, wanting me to keep the joke going.

And I did. I huddled my arm around her. “We're on a mother-daughter trip,” I said. “Driving the 1. All the way up to Eureka.”

“Adventurers!” the man exclaimed, pounding the table. His name was Victor, we learned, and the background wallpaper on Victor's cellphone was an Aztec image, he told us, so imbued with powers that just the contemplation of said image made you smarter. He was convinced that world events were orchestrated by complicated and persistent conspiracies. He took out a dollar bill to show us how the Illuminati communicated with one another.

“Why would a secret society lay out their plans on common currency?” I asked.

He nodded like he'd anticipated the question. “To display the reach of their power.”

I envied Victor's certainty, the idiot syntax of the righteous. This belief—that the world had a visible order, and all we had to do was look for the symbols—as if evil were a code that could be cracked. He kept talking. His teeth wet from drink, the gray blush of a dead molar. He had plenty of conspiracies to explain to us in detail, plenty of inside information he could clue us into. He spoke of “getting on the level.” Of “hidden frequencies” and “shadow governments.”