The Shore Girl (19 page)

“Do you want me to walk with you up the hill?”

“No, no, no,” waving my arms like I was on fire. “I'm all right. Really.”

“I know,” she said. “Right as rain.”

We both stood and brushed ourselves off and I turned and looked up the hill and took in my impressive skid marks in the moss. Every tree looked the same except for the praying lady, standing out like a scorched thumb. Rebee must have followed my eyes, because she mumbled,
Harmony's
tree
, but didn't explain.

“Weird how it could somehow burn itself up without starting the whole forest on fire,” I said.

“Whatever. It's dead.”

She swung her backpack high like it was as light as air and adjusted the straps on her shoulders and said, “See you, Joey.”

“Sorry for the trouble,” I said. Idiot.

But by then she was gone.

* * *

The gash looks like an upside down purple V above my left eyebrow, a “this way up” arrow for dummies. It will probably leave a scar, a handy reminder that I'm a piece of turd. A part of me hopes it's permanent. Maybe when I look in the mirror from now on I'll only see her.

Grandma was really sweet to me when I came out of the bathroom. I was surprised her old eyes picked up on my scruffiness, that she could see how my forehead was even puffier than hers. She poured me a glass of funny-smelling milk and told me to sit and rest.

I slumped at the kitchen table.

“You have to be more careful when you play outside,” Grandma said, patting my elbow.

“I was with Rebee, Grandma. Rebee Shore.” Just a regular barf fest back there on the hill.

Grandma shuffled out from behind me and sat down heavily at the table. “Rebee Shore. Elizabeth's child? She's a nice girl?”

Nice was not quite the word. “Yeah, she's nice.”

“And Elizabeth. Has she gone then?”

I didn't want to get into the whole Harmony name change thing. “Yeah, she's gone.” Coincidentally, so was Carla.

“She didn't come to see me,” Grandma said.

“Maybe she thought. . .”
you were dead
. But I stopped myself and said instead, “. . . thought you'd go see her. At the old — at the Judge's funeral. Or afterwards. Like, next door. Maybe she doesn't know you don't get out much anymore, Grandma.”

Grandma nodded as though she were thinking how maybe she didn't get out as much as she should. “I was glad when Elizabeth left here. And she raised that child right. She's a nice girl?”

She really wanted Rebee to be a nice girl. “You were glad Rebee's mom left? How come? Chesterfield being such a swell place and all.”

“That house next door.”

I fidgeted in my chair, waiting for her to spit it out. She moved the top peas can to the wax bean row. I was afraid she'd start rearranging the vegetables, which could take all week.

“What about the house next door,” I yelled.

“It was a long time ago. I'm an old woman now.”

She was an old woman then. “Sounds like the Judge was an asshole.”

I shocked her into dropping her hand to her lap.

“Everybody says so, Grandma. The whole town.”

“This town loves its tittle-tattle.” She stamped her slippered foot under the table. It was a slow motion stamp, but it came down hard enough that it probably hurt. “They're a hungry bunch hoping for a nibble of anything repeatable. I will not give them the satisfaction of speaking about Albert that way.”

“Whoa,” I said. She had gotten herself worked up all of a sudden. Her lips were sweating.

“Albert loved his wife. Elizabeth.”

“Okay. I believe you.”

“Albert kissed the ground she walked on. They used to stroll down Main Street with Victoria, first a bundle in Albert's arms, then toddling between them in her frilly sun-frocks and matching bonnets. Back then, everyone would say there goes the Judge and his lovely wife.”

Weird. Hearing my grandma talk about Rebee's grandma like that, the lady that died in the bedroom next door, like she might float by the window and wave hello. Her name was Elizabeth, too. Rebee's grandma, Rebee's mom. It seems stupid to me when families do that — Bob Senior, Bob Junior, Bob Baby Junior — like they're
A&W
burgers. Victoria, the kid in the frilly outfit — that would be Rebee's auntie, the scary one with the long black hair and skintight jeans. The one who drove the Shore girls up the drive after the funeral and then stomped back and forth from the porch to the car for three days yelling stuff to Harmony like, “Goddamn bitch,” and, “Least the old fucker had the decency to end it,” and to Rebee, “You're getting out of this hell hole if I have to drag you by your hair.”

Grandma missed all that ruckus.

“So he was a great guy,” I said. “The Judge. A nice little family.”

Grandma looked up at me rather harshly, as if she didn't know whether she should go on. I nodded to her encouragingly. “It crept up on them slowly — the town. How Elizabeth had stopped showing herself, how the Judge was walking down Main Street alone, going about his business, not bothering to tip his hat or inquire as to everyone's health. They all wanted to know what went on in that house those months before Elizabeth died.”

“So,” I said. Waiting. “What went on?”

Grandma rocked back and forth in her creaky chair, head down, chins bobbing.

“Bad business.”

Bad business. What did that mean? The Judge? Maybe he was a great guy until he had a little vodka in him, all buddy buddy, joking around, and then he'd turn, mean as a snake, and throw you into a wall.

The sky outside the window looked dull and grey. I touched the gash on my forehead and sat shivering in the sweltering kitchen.

Grandma stopped her rocking. “Albert was decent.” She looked at me, really looked at me. Her glasses were covered with splotches, but her eyes were clear and soft inside their wrinkled pouches. “He was a man with a broken heart. A man like that, his world cracks open. Don't let them tell you otherwise.”

She stood slowly, leaning on the table, and limped towards the counter. She poured the black liquid from the teapot into her cup.

“Do your knees hurt?”

“These old aching bones,” she said, her back to me. Then she stared out the window and slurped her cold tea. “I wished she would have come to see me.”

Well, she's gotta come back, I thought. She left her kid here. Mothers can't just dump their kids and not come back.

* * *

After my freakshow in the forest, I stayed clear of the hedge spot. I didn't want to run into her again. It was almost worth the puking incident to have her blazed to the back of my eyeballs, the picture where she's lying in the grass with her breasts pointed up. I didn't want to wreck it by seeing what she sees when she looks at me.

I did scrub my knuckles raw on Rebee's
XSMALL
made in India
100
percent cotton
T
-shirt, using scoops of blue-speckled laundry detergent from one of the three six-gallon drums stacked in Grandma's hallway. By the time I got done, it looked white as milk, all traces of puke gone. I wrapped the
T
-shirt in tissue I found in one of Grandma's shoeboxes of crinkled paper. My plan was to wait for a cloudy night. After Grandma did her curlers and got settled in bed, I would cleverly sneak over to Rebee's doorstep and leave the
T
-shirt on the landing, same as that dropoff cherry pie.

I chose a perfect night, so still and dark up here on Blueberry Hill the whole world seemed to have sucked itself down a black hole. Rebee's lights were off, and I stared out my bedroom window and tried to guess which room she slept in, whether she wore panties under her nightie. Grandma kept shuffling into the bathroom and flushing. When she finally started snoring, I was a bundle of nerves. I did one planned puke in the toilet, then stuffed my bony arms into my black hoody and tiptoed around the obstacle course of boxes and stepped out into nothingness. I felt my way along my side of the hedge, stretching my arms out like a zombie. Every few steps I'd get whapped in the face with a sticky branch and have to straighten myself out again. When the hedge ran out and my feet hit gravel, I turned around, and slunk back along her side of the overgrown clumps. I made it to her porch step without hearing any stomach rumbles, or feeling the Judge's dead fingers clawing down my pants. So far so good, I thought.

“Hello, Joey.”

I squealed, an octave higher than possible, flinging my arms, and Rebee's
T
-shirt, high into the night.

Rebee sat on the porch step, small as a baby bird, arms hugging knees. My heart stopped beating. What was she doing out there all alone in the pitch black when a perfectly good house stood right behind her? I wanted to run — run far, far away — but my legs were rubber. So was my penis.

“Do you know how to drive?” she asked.

That was her question? Not, “What the crap are you doing on my porch in the middle of the night? or “How come you scream like a kindergarten girl?” I mumbled something incoherent about my excellent driving skills.

Rebee stood, lightning fast. She was wearing a white blouse and a flimsy little sweater. I could feel the whites of her eyes, a flash of teeth, her wintergreen breath. Then she seemed to float down the steps and pass on by into the soupy night. “Come on,” she commanded, like I was her dog. Like a dog, I followed.

We ended at the garage — a rundown version of the grandfather's house, only smaller. Peeling white sides and a green roof. It sat close to the cliff at the back of the property, so saggy a good kick might push it over the edge. That building was creepy enough at lunchtime, let alone on a night like this.

She said, “If a van's in there, I'll smash all the windows.”

I stood frozen to her side. I wondered what weapon she'd use and whether she'd be able to stop smashing once she started. She jiggled the handle and the door cracked up an inch and she got her fingers underneath and yanked, so I did too. It took considerable heaving, but when the door finally squealed upwards a rush of musty air escaped. Gasoline and wet rag and old man and other smells crawled up my nose. I stumbled back a few steps, trying to get away, but I only had a few seconds before I bent over and retched, a symphony of dry heaves, loud enough to wake all of Chesterfield. Rebee peered into the garage, ignoring my hullabaloo. Then she disappeared inside. I was empty before I started, just spit lumps, and when I finally got upright I stepped inside too. A shiny silver car took up nearly the whole garage. It was one of those old-fashioned pointy types with a great wide hood and fins like wings that could launch into space. I stood in front of it, my hand clutched over my nose, and watched Rebee open the car door and slip in behind the steering wheel. I thought, this is how a deer in the headlights feels, except without the headlights. It occurred to me she might start the engine and floor the gas. But then she leaned across the seat and the passenger door creaked open, and I felt a flood of relief, partly because I was still alive, but mostly because she didn't expect me to drive us out of there.

I squeezed myself into my side of the car, closed the door, and buckled my seatbelt, which was a waist-only kind like airplanes have. First I thought, well that's great, if we get in an accident I'll be sliced in half. Then I thought, idiot. There were no keys in the ignition. I'd never sat in anything like it. An antique for sure, like the Judge. The dashboard was jukebox glitzy, polished; the steering wheel round and skinny, like a bicycle tire. Everything was spotless, as if no fingers had touched anything. The smell was bearable, pleasant even, just a faint trace of old man cologne mixed with Rebee.

“Nice car,” I said. Rebee said nothing. She stared straight ahead, like we were driving down a highway. It was black out there. The world had disappeared. “I wonder what kind of mileage this thing gets.”

Her eyes were on some imaginary road, oblivious to everything, including me. Her little sweater was unbuttoned and from my side view I could see the points of her nipples pressing against her white blouse. I looked down to be sure the folds of my hoody hid the raw potato sprouting in my pants.

I didn't know what she wanted me to do, but it got too hard to just sit there and imagine her and keep my mouth shut. “I guess this car used to belong to your grandpa. Doesn't look like he's driven it in a while. Right. Sorry. He's dead. Of course not. Sorry. But good for him that he kept up the maintenance.”

I couldn't stop. I prattled on, same as Grandma when she's doing her cutouts.

“The rides I'm used to are more — disorganized,” I said. “Cracked windows, beer bottles, Timmy's cups. You know, cigarette butts, burger wrappers, that kind of thing.”

Rebee ran her finger in a circle around the skinny steering wheel and I couldn't help staring at the way it curled over at the end, like a claw.

“Billy, that's my mom's last boyfriend, he kept a deer head in the truck named Ned.” My hair was sweaty and my ears prickled. “Ned had his eye gouged out and a broken antler and a red scarf around his neck.”

I was mesmerized by her finger going round and round. I wondered if she'd trained it to bend over like that. “I don't know how his antler snapped in half, whether it was before or after he got shot, and whether it hurt, or if it was more like when your nail rips off at the tip, and you don't even notice until you try to scratch something.”

She turned to me, and when I finally tore my eyes away from her crooked finger she said, “Seen enough?” Then she made a fist and pressed it into her stomach like a slow motion punch.

I felt dumb as a truck. Sweat trickled down the sides of my arms. I didn't dare look at her. Then I felt even dumber because I thought maybe I'd embarrassed her into hiding her finger in her stomach.