The Girls (18 page)

I kept a lunatic calm on my face, afraid someone might be watching me, alert for signs of weakness. Though I'm sure it was obvious—a tightness in my features, a wounded insistence that I was fine, everything was fine, that it was just a misunderstanding, girlish high jinks between friends.
Ha ha ha,
like the laugh track on
Bewitched
that drained the look of horror on Darrin's marzipan face of any meaning.

It had only been two days without Suzanne, but already I had slipped back so easily into the dull stream of adolescent life—Connie and May's idiot dramas. My mother's cold hands, sudden on my neck, like she was trying to startle me into loving her. This awful carnival and my awful town. My anger at Suzanne was hard to access, an old sweater packed away and barely remembered. I could think of Russell slapping Helen and it surfaced as a little glitch at the back of certain thoughts, a memory of wariness. But there were always ways I made sense of things.

I was back at the ranch the next day.

I found Suzanne on her mattress, bent intently over a book. She never read, and it was odd to see her stilled in concentration. The cover was half-torn and had a futuristic pentagram on it, some blocky white type.

“What's that about?” I asked from the doorway.

Suzanne looked up, startled.

“Time,” she said. “Space.”

The sight of her brought flashes of the night with Mitch, but they were unfocused, like a secondhand reflection. Suzanne didn't say anything about my absence. About Mitch. All she did was sigh and toss the book down. She lay back on the bed, studying her nails. Pinching the skin of her upper arm.

“Flabby,” she declared, waiting for me to protest. As she knew I would.

I had a hard time sleeping that night, shifting on the mattress. I was returned to her. So alert to every cue in her face that I made myself sick, watching her, but happy, too.

“I'm glad I'm back,” I whispered, the darkness allowing me to say the words.

Suzanne laughed a little, half-asleep. “But you can always go home.”

“Maybe I never will.”

“Free Evie.”

“I'm serious. I don't ever want to leave.”

“That's what all the kids say when summer camp is over.”

I could see the whites of her eyes. Before I could say anything, she let out a sudden heavy breath.

“I'm too hot,” she announced. Kicking off the sheet and turning from me.

The clock was loud in the Dutton house. The apples in the netted basket looked waxy and old. I could see photos on the mantel: the familiar faces of Teddy and his parents. His sister who'd married an IBM salesman. I kept waiting for the front door to open, for someone to identify our intrusion. The sun lit a folded paper star in the window so it went bright. Mrs. Dutton must have taken the time to tape that up, make her home nice.

Donna disappeared into another room, then reappeared. I heard the shudder of drawers, of things being moved.

I saw the Dutton house that day as if for the first time. Noticing that the living room was carpeted. That the rocking chair had a cross-stitched pillow on the seat that looked handmade. The wonky antennae of the television, a smell like stale potpourri in the air. Everything was waterlogged by the knowledge of the family's absence: the arrangement of papers on the low table, an uncapped aspirin bottle in the kitchen. None of it made any sense without the animation of the Duttons' presence, like the blurry glyphs of 3-D pictures before the glasses knocked them into clarity.

Donna kept reaching to bump something out of its place: little things. A blue glass of flowers moved four inches to the left. A penny loafer kicked away from its mate. Suzanne didn't touch anything, not at first. She was picking things up with her eyes, ingesting it all—the framed photos, the ceramic cowboy. The cowboy made Donna and Suzanne weaken into giggles, me smiling, too, but I did not get the joke; only a queer feeling in my stomach, the starkness of the hollow sunlight.

The three of us had gone on a garbage run earlier that afternoon, in a borrowed car, a Trans Am, possibly Mitch's. Suzanne turned up the radio, KFRC, K. O. Bayley on the big 610. Both Suzanne and Donna seemed energized, and so was I. Happy to be back among them. Suzanne pulled into a glass-fronted Safeway that was familiar to me, the cant of its green roof. Where my mother shopped occasionally.

“Grubby grub time,” Donna announced, making herself laugh.

Donna hoisted herself over the lip of the dumpster, avid as an animal, knotting her skirt around her hips so she could dig deep. She got off on it, happy to muck around in the trash, the wet squelch.

On the way back to the ranch, Suzanne made an announcement.

“Time for a little trip,” she said, loudly recruiting Donna into the plan.

I liked knowing she was thinking of me, trying to placate me. I noticed a new desperation around her after Mitch. I was more conscious of her attentions, of how to keep her eyes on me.

“Where?” I asked.

“You'll see,” Suzanne said, catching Donna's gaze. “It's like our medicine, like a little cure for what ails you.”

“Ooh,” Donna said, leaning forward. She seemed to have understood immediately what Suzanne was talking about. “Yes, yes, yes.”

“We need a house,” Suzanne said. “That's the first thing. An empty house.” She flashed a look at me. “Your mom's gone, right?”

I didn't know what they were going to do. But I recognized a tinge of alarm, even then, and had the sense to spare my own home. I shifted in the seat. “She's there all day.”

Suzanne made a disappointed hum. But I was already thinking of another house that might be empty. And I offered it up to them, easily.

I gave Suzanne directions, watching the roads grow more and more familiar. When Suzanne stopped the car and Donna got out and smeared mud on the first two numbers of the license plate, I only worried a little. I gathered an unfamiliar braveness, a sense of pushing past limitations, and tried to give myself up to the uncertainty. I was locked into my body in a way that was unfamiliar. It was the knowledge, perhaps, that I would do whatever Suzanne wanted me to do. That was a strange thought—that there was just this banal sense of being moved along the bright river of whatever was going to happen. That it could be as easy as this.

Suzanne was driving erratically, rolling through a stop sign and gazing away from the road for long stretches of time, caught in a private daydream. She turned onto my own road. The gates like a familiar string of beads, one following the other.

“There,” I said, and Suzanne slowed the car.

The windows of the Dutton house were plain with curtains, the flagstone path cutting a line to the front door. No car in the carport, just a glisten of oil on the asphalt. Teddy's bike wasn't in the yard—he was gone, too. The house looked empty.

Suzanne parked the car down the road a little bit, mostly out of sight, while Donna went briskly to the side yard. I trailed Suzanne, but I was hanging back slightly, shuffling my sandals through the dirt.

Suzanne turned to me. “Are you coming or what?”

I laughed, but I'm sure she saw the effort it took. “I just don't understand what we're doing.”

She cocked her head and smiled. “Do you really care?”

I was scared and couldn't say why. I mocked myself for letting my mind range furiously to the very worst thing. Whatever they were going to do—steal, probably. I didn't know.

“Hurry up,” Suzanne said. She was getting annoyed, I could tell, though she was still smiling. “We can't just stand here.”

Afternoon shadows were starting to slant through the trees. Donna reemerged from the wooden side gate. “The back door's open,” she said. My stomach sank—there was no way to stop whatever was about to happen. And then there was Tiki, scrambling in our direction, barking in wretched alarm. Yips shook his whole body, his skinny shoulders twitching.

“Fuck,” Suzanne muttered. Donna backed off, too.

The dog could have been enough of an excuse, I suppose, and we could've piled back into the car and gone back to the ranch. A part of me wanted that. But another part wanted to fulfill the sick momentum in my chest. The Dutton family seemed like perpetrators, too, just like Connie and May and my parents. All quarantined by their selfishness, their stupidity.

“Wait,” I said. “He knows me.”

I squatted, holding out my hand. Keeping my eyes on the dog. Tiki approached, sniffing my palm.

“Good Tiki,” I said, petting him, scratching under his jaw, and then the barking stopped and we went inside.

I couldn't believe nothing happened. That no cop cars were whining after us. Even after shifting so easily into the Dutton domain, crossing the invisible boundaries. And why had we done that? Jarred the inviolate grid of a home for no reason? Just to prove we could? The calm mask of Suzanne's face as she touched the Duttons' things confused me, her odd remove, even as I fluoresced with a strange, unreadable thrill. Donna was looking over some treasure from the house, a bauble of milky ceramic. I peered closer and saw it was a little figure of a Dutch girl. How bizarre, the detritus of people's lives removed from their context. It made even things that were precious seem like junk.

The lurch in me made me think of an afternoon when I was younger, my father and I hunched over the shoreline at Clear Lake. My father squinting in the harshness of midday, the fish white of his thighs in his swimming shorts. How he pointed out a leech in the water, quivering and tight with blood. He was pleased, poking at the leech with a stick to make it move, but I was frightened. The inky leech caused some drag on my insides that I sensed again, there, in the Dutton house, Suzanne's eyes meeting mine across the living room.

“You like?” Suzanne said. Smiling a little. “Wild, right?”

Donna came out into the entryway. Her forearms shone with sticky juice, and she held a triangle of watermelon in her hand, the spongy pink of an organ.

“Greetings and salutations,” she said, chewing wetly. There was an almost feral percolation emanating from Donna like a bad smell, her dress whose hem was ratty from being stepped on: how out of place she looked next to the polished coffee table, the tidy curtains. Drops of watermelon juice fell on the floor.

“There's more in the sink,” she said. “It's real good.”

Donna picked a black seed from her mouth with a delicate little pinch, then flicked it off into the corner of the room.

We were there only a half hour or so, though it seemed much longer. Snapping the TV on and off. Paging through the mail on the side table. I followed Suzanne up the stairs, wondering where Teddy was now, where his parents were. Was Teddy still waiting for me to bring him his drugs? Tiki banged around in the hallway. I realized with a start that I'd known the Dutton family my whole life. Under the hanging photographs, I could make out the line of wallpaper, just starting to peel, the tiny pink flowers. The smear of fingerprints.

I would often think of the house. How innocent I told myself it was: harmless fun. I was reckless, wanting to win back Suzanne's attention, to feel like we were arranged again against the world. We were ripping a tiny seam in the life of the Dutton family, just so they'd see themselves differently, even if for a moment. So they'd notice a slight disturbance, try to remember when they'd moved their shoes or put their clock in the drawer. That could only be good, I told myself, the forced perspective. We were doing them a favor.

Donna was in the parents' bedroom, a long silk slip pulled over her dress.

“I'll need the Rolls at seven,” she said, swishing the watery fabric, the color of champagne.

Suzanne snorted. I could see a cut-glass bottle of perfume tipped on the nightstand and the golden tubes of lipstick like shell casings in the carpet. Suzanne was already sifting through the bureau, stuffing her hand inside the flesh-tone nylons, creating obscene bulges. The brassieres were heavy and medical looking, stiff with wire. I lifted one of the lipsticks and uncapped it, smelling the talcum scent of the orangy red.

“Oh, yeah,” Donna said, seeing me. She grabbed a lipstick, too, and made a cartoonish pucker, pretending to apply it. “We should leave a little message,” she said. Looking around.

“On the walls,” Suzanne said. The idea excited her, I could tell.

I wanted to protest: leaving a mark seemed almost violent. Mrs. Dutton would have to scrub the wall clean, though it would probably always have a phantom nap, the receipt of all the scrubbing. But I stayed quiet.

“A picture?” Donna said.

“Do the heart,” Suzanne added, coming over. “I'll do it.”

I had a startling vision of Suzanne then. The desperation that showed through, the sudden sense of a dark space yawning in her. I didn't think of what that dark space might be capable of, only a doubling of my desire to be near it.

Suzanne took the lipstick from Donna but hadn't yet pressed the tip to the ivory wall when we heard a noise in the driveway.

“Shit,” Suzanne said.

Donna's eyebrows were raised in mild curiosity: What would happen next?

The front door opened. I tasted my own stale mouth, the rancid announcement of fear. Suzanne seemed scared, too, but her fear was distant and amused, like this was a game of sardines and we were just hiding until the others found us. I knew it was Mrs. Dutton when I heard high heels.

“Teddy?” she called. “You home?”

They'd parked the ranch car down the road, but still: I'm sure Mrs. Dutton took note of the unfamiliar car. Maybe she thought it was a friend of Teddy's, some older neighborhood pal. Donna was giggling, her hand pressed over her mouth. Eyes bulged in mirth. Suzanne made an exaggerated shushing face. My pulse was loud in my ears. Tiki clattered through the rooms downstairs and I heard Mrs. Dutton cooing to him, the heaving sighs he made in response.

“Hello?” she called.

The wake of silence that followed seemed obviously uneasy. She'd come upstairs soon enough, and then what?

“Come on,” Suzanne whispered. “Let's sneak out the back.”

Donna was laughing silently. “Shit,” she said, “shit.”

Suzanne dropped the lipstick on the bureau, but Donna kept the slip on, hitching the straps.

“You go first,” she said to Suzanne.

There was no way out but to pass Mrs. Dutton in the kitchen.

She was probably wondering at the pink mess of watermelon in the sink, the sticky patches on the floor. Maybe just starting to pick up the disturbance in the air, the itch of strangers in the house. A nervous hand fluttering at her throat, a sudden wish for her husband at her side.

Suzanne took off down the stairs, Donna and I hustling behind. The racket of our footsteps as we plowed past Mrs. Dutton, barreling at full speed through the kitchen. Donna and Suzanne were laughing their heads off, Mrs. Dutton shrieking in fright. Tiki came barking after us, quick and hectic, his nails skittering on the floor. Mrs. Dutton backed up, nakedly afraid.

“Hey,” she said, “stop,” but her voice wavered.

She bumped against a stool and lost her balance, sitting down hard on the tile. I looked back as we banged past—there was Mrs. Dutton splayed on the floor. Recognition tightened her face.

“I see you,” she called from the floor, struggling to right herself, her breath going wild. “I see you, Evie Boyd.”