The Girls (16 page)

No one was out on the bank. Then I heard, over the water, a distorted echo. And there they were, both of them, splashing in the waves, the water foaming around their legs. Mitch flapping around in his white outfit, now like soggy bedsheets, Suzanne in the dress she called her Br'er Rabbit dress. My heart lurched—I wanted to join them. But something held me in place. I kept standing on the stairs that led to the sand, smelling the sea-softened wood. Did I know what was coming? I watched Suzanne shed her dress, shrugging it off with drunken difficulty, and then he was on her. His head lowering to lick at her bare breast. Both of them unsteady in the water. I watched for longer than seemed right. I was buzzy and adrift by the time I turned my back and wandered into the house.

I turned the music down. Shut the refrigerator door, which Suzanne had left open. The picked-over carcass of the chicken. Kona chicken, as Mitch had insisted: the sight made me a little nauseous. The too-pink flesh emanating a chill. I would always be like this, I thought, the person who closed the refrigerator. The person who watched from the steps like a spook while Suzanne let Mitch do whatever he wanted. Jealousy started to oscillate in my gut. The strange gnaw when I imagined his fingers inside her, how she'd taste of salt water. Confusion, too—how quickly things had changed and I was the one on the outside again.

The chemical pleasure in my head had already faded, so all I recognized anymore was the lack of it. I wasn't tired, but I didn't want to sit on the couch, waiting for them to come inside. I found an unlocked bedroom that looked like a guest room: no clothes in the closet, a bed with slightly mussed sheets. They smelled like someone else, and there was a single gold earring on the nightstand. I thought of my own home, the weight and feel of my own blankets—then a sudden desire to sleep at Connie's house. Curled up against her back in our familiar, ritual arrangement, her sheets printed with chubby cartoon rainbows.

I lay in the bed, listening for the sound of Suzanne and Mitch in the other room. Like I was Suzanne's thick-necked boyfriend, the same ratchet of righteous anger. It wasn't aimed at her, not exactly—I hated Mitch with a fierceness that kept me wide-awake. I wanted him to know how she'd been laughing at him earlier, to know the exact degree of pity I had for him. How impotent my anger was, a surge with no place to land, and how familiar that was: my feelings strangled inside me, like little half-formed children, bitter and bristling.

I was almost certain, later, that this was the same bedroom that Linda and her little boy were sleeping in. Though I know there were other bedrooms, other possibilities. Linda and Mitch were broken up by the night of the murder, but they were still friends, Mitch delivering an oversize stuffed giraffe on Christopher's birthday the week before. Linda was only staying at Mitch's because her apartment in the Sunset was crawling with mold—she'd planned on being at his house for two nights. Then she and Christopher would stay in Woodside with her boyfriend, a man who owned a series of seafood restaurants.

After the murders, I had seen the man on a talk show: face red, pressing a handkerchief to his eyes. I wondered if his fingernails were manicured. He told the host he'd been planning to propose to Linda. Though who knows if that was true.

Around three in the morning, there was a knock on my door. It was Suzanne, stumbling inside without waiting for an answer. She was naked, bringing a gusty smell of brine and cigarette smoke.

“Hi,” she said, pulling at my blankets.

I'd been half-asleep, lulled by the sameness of the dark ceiling, and she was like a creature from a dream, storming into the room, smelling as she did. The sheets getting damp when she crawled in beside me. I believed she had come for me. To be with me, a gesture of apology. But how quickly that thought disappeared when I took in her urgency, her stoned, glassy focus—I knew this was for him.

“Come on,” Suzanne said, and laughed. Her face new in the strange blue light. “It's beautiful,” she said, “you'll see. He's gentle.”

Like that was the most you could hope for. I sat back, grabbing the covers.

“Mitch is a creep,” I said. It was clear to me that we were in a stranger's house. The oversize, empty guest room, with its unsavory off-gassing of other bodies.

“Evie,” she said. “Don't be like that.”

Her nearness, the dart of her eyes in the dark. How easily she pressed her mouth to mine, then, edging her tongue past my lips. Running the tip along the ridges of my teeth, smiling into my mouth, and saying something I couldn't hear.

I could taste the cocaine drip in her mouth, the brackish sea. I went to kiss her again, but she had already drifted away, smiling like this was a game, like we'd done something funny and unreal. Playing lightly with my hair.

I was happy to twist the meanings, willfully misread the symbols. Doing what Suzanne asked seemed like the best gift I could give her, a way to unlock her own reciprocal feelings. And she was trapped, in her way, just like I was, but I never saw that, shifting easily in the directions she prompted for me. Like the wooden toy, clattering with the silver ball I'd tilted and urged into the painted holes, trying for the winning drop.

Mitch's room was big, and the tile floor was cold. The bed was on a raised platform, carved with Balinese figures. He grinned when he saw me behind Suzanne, showing a quick flash of teeth, and opened his arms to us, his bare chest foaming with hair. Suzanne went right to him, but I sat on the edge of the bed, hands folded in my lap. Mitch raised up on his elbows.

“No,” he said, patting the mattress. “Here. Come here.”

I scooted over to lie beside him. I could feel Suzanne's impatience, how she sidled to him like a dog.

“I don't want you yet,” Mitch said to her. I couldn't see Suzanne's face, but I could imagine the swift hurt.

“Can you take these off?” Mitch tapped at my underwear with his hand.

I was ashamed: they were full-seated and childish, the elastic limp. I lowered them down my hips until they were around my knees.

“Oh God,” Mitch said, sitting up. “Can you open your legs a little?”

I did. He crouched over me. I could feel his face close to my childish mound. His snout had the wet heat of an animal.

“I'm not going to touch you,” Mitch said, and I knew he was lying. “Jesus,” he breathed. He gestured Suzanne over. Murmuring low, placing us like dolls. Announcing fussy asides to no one in particular. Suzanne looked to me like a stranger in that strange room, like the part of her I recognized had retreated.

He sucked my tongue into his mouth. I could stay still, mostly, while Mitch kissed me, and accept his probing tongue with a hollow distance, even his fingers inside me like something curious and without meaning. Mitch lifted himself and pushed inside me, groaning a little when it was difficult. He spit on his hand and rubbed me, then tried again, and how sudden it was, his jacking between my legs, and how I kept thinking to myself with some surprise and disbelief that it was actually happening, and then I felt Suzanne's hand snake over and grab mine.

Maybe Mitch nudged Suzanne in my direction, but I didn't see. When Suzanne kissed me again, I was lulled into thinking she was doing it for me, that this was our way to be together. That Mitch was just the background noise, the necessary excuse that allowed for her eager mouth, the curl of her fingers. I could smell myself and smell her, too. A sound deep in her throat that I believed was meant for me, as if her pleasure were at some pitch Mitch couldn't hear. She moved my hand to her breast, shivering when I touched the nipple. Closing her eyes like I had done something good.

Mitch rolled off me in order to watch. Kneading the wet head of his dick, the mattress slanting toward his weight.

I kept kissing Suzanne, so different from kissing a man. Their forceful mash getting across the idea of a kiss, but not this articulation. I pretended Mitch wasn't there, though I could feel his gaze, his mouth as slack as the open trunk of a car. I was skittish when Suzanne tried to push apart my legs, but she smiled up at me, so I let her. Her tongue was tentative, first, then she used her fingers, too, and I was embarrassed at how wet I was, the noises I made. My mind fritzing from a pleasure so foreign I didn't know how to name it.

Mitch fucked us both after that, like he could correct our obvious preference for each other. Sweating hard, his eyes crimping with effort. The bed moving away from the wall.

When I woke up in the morning and saw the soiled twist of my underwear on Mitch's tile floor, such helpless embarrassment bubbled up in me that I almost cried.

Mitch drove us back to the ranch. I was silent, looking out the windows. The passing houses seemed long dormant, the fancy cars shrouded in their putty-colored covers. Suzanne was sitting in the front. She turned around to smile at me from time to time. An apology, I could tell, but I was stone-faced, my heart a tight fist. A grief that I didn't fully indulge.

I was shoring up the bad feelings, I suppose, like I could preempt sorrow with my bravado, with the careless way I thought about Suzanne to myself. And I'd had sex: so what? It was no big deal, another working of the human body. Like eating, something rote and accessible to everyone. All the pious and pastel urgings to wait, to make yourself into a present for your future husband: there was relief in the plainness of the actual act. I watched Suzanne from the backseat, watched her laugh at something Mitch said and roll down the window. Her hair lifting in the rush.

Mitch pulled up at the ranch.

“Later, girls,” he said, raising a pink palm. Like he'd taken us for ice cream, some innocent outing, and was returning us to the cradle of our parents' house.

Suzanne had gone immediately in search of Russell, cleaving from me without a word. I realized later that she must have been giving Russell a report. Letting him know how Mitch had seemed, whether we'd made him happy enough to change his mind. At the time, I only noticed the abandonment.

I tried to busy myself, peeling garlic in the kitchen with Donna. Smashing cloves between the flat blade of a knife and the counter like she showed me. Donna slid the radio knob from one end of the dial to the other and back, getting varying degrees of static and alarming strains of Herb Alpert. She gave up finally and returned to jabbing at a mess of black dough.

“Roos put Vaseline in my hair,” Donna said. She gave a shake and her hair barely moved. “It's gonna be real soft when I wash it.”

I didn't answer. Donna could tell I was distracted and catted her eyes over at me.

“Did he show you the fountain in the backyard?” she said. “He got it from Rome. Mitch's place has high vibes,” she went on, “all the ions, 'cause of the ocean.”

I reddened, trying to concentrate on separating the garlic from its woody husks. The buzz of the radio suddenly seemed nasty, polluting, the announcer talking too fast. They'd all been there, I understood, to Mitch's strange house by the sea. I'd enacted some pattern, been defined, neatly, as a girl, providing a known value. There was something almost comforting about it, the clarity of purpose, even as it shamed me. I didn't understand that you could hope for more.

I hadn't seen the fountain. I did not say so.

Donna's eyes were bright.

“You know,” she said, “Suzanne's parents are actually real rich. Propane or something. She never was homeless or anything, either.” She was working the dough on the counter as she spoke. “Didn't end up in any hospital. Any of that shit she says. Just scratched herself up with a paper clip, on some freaky jag.”

I was queasy from the stench of food scraps softening in the sink. I shrugged like I didn't much care either way.

Donna went on. “You don't believe me,” she said. “But it's true. We were up in Mendocino. Crashing with an apple farmer. She'd done too much acid, just started working away at herself with that clip until we made her quit. She didn't even bleed, though.”

When I didn't respond, Donna slammed the dough into a bowl. Punching it down. “Think whatever you want,” she said.

Suzanne came into her bedroom later, while I was changing. I hunched myself protectively over my naked chest: Suzanne noticed and seemed ready to mock me but stopped herself. I saw the scars on her wrist but didn't indulge the uneasy questions—Donna was just jealous. Never mind Donna and her stiff Vaseline hair, shanky and foul as a muskrat's.

“Last night was a trip,” Suzanne said.

I pulled away when she tried to sling her arm around me.

“Oh, come on, you were into it,” she said. “I saw.”

I made a sick face—she laughed. I occupied myself with tidying the sheets, as if the bed could ever be anything but a dank nest.

“Aw, it's fine,” Suzanne said. “I got something to cheer you up.”

I thought she was going to apologize. But then it occurred to me—she was going to kiss me again. The dim room got airless. I almost felt it happen, an imperceptible lean—but Suzanne just hefted her bag onto the bed, the fringe pooling on the mattress. The bag was full of a strange weight. She gave me a triumphant look.

“Go on,” she said. “Look inside.”

Suzanne huffed at my stubbornness and opened it herself. I didn't understand what was inside, the odd metallic flash. The sharp corners.

“Take it out,” Suzanne said, impatient.

It was a gold record framed in glass, much heavier than expected.

She nudged me. “We got him, huh?”

Her expectant look—was this meant to explain something? I stared at the name, engraved on a small plaque: Mitch Lewis. The
Sun King
album.

Suzanne started laughing.

“Man, you should see your face right now,” she said. “Don't you know I'm on your side?”