Good Girls (11 page)

Even if she'd wanted to, she knew she couldn't have made it very far. But as it turned out, she didn't have to. Leaving the construction site, they jostled down a root-riddled path, up a gentle rise to the top of a hill, and there, spilling out below them, lay the whole of Pimlico Valley. Beech trees and chestnut oaks shaded the hillsides from even the moonlight. Swatches of night-mist stretched between the trunks like hammocks. Far below—farther than Jess would have expected—the shingled roofs of the too-perfect houses and bungalows of the Concerto Woods planned community floated on their culs-de-sac. Beyond those, the Pimlico Post Pavilion amphitheater opened its wide white arms to the woods, as though the stage itself was about to erupt in song.

For a long moment, Jess almost forgot or maybe just let go of how she'd gotten here, why she'd come, even who she was. It was as though she were floating in a hot-air balloon, watching the world from the edge of space, with all the needs and hungers and terrors of all those living things down there reduced, simply by distance, to light.

Then, in the towering sweet gum to her left, a woodpecker let loose. The sound rattled Jess like a factory whistle, calling her back, once more, to work.

“Stay here,” she told Sophie.

“Funny,” Sophie said. “Good one, Jess.” Then, as Jess started back toward the road, she called, “Wait.”

Jess turned and waited.

“I actually think I
can
help.”

Jess's laugh might have come out a bark, but it was a real laugh, nonetheless. “Now, who's funny?”

“Me,” said Sophie. Moonlight glowed in her mouth when she grinned. “Always.”

And that was true enough, Jess supposed. Certainly, it had once been true enough.

“Also helpful,” Sophie said.

Returning to the barrow, Jess dragged the shovels and pick from under Sophie, banging her again against the sides in the process. Every new movement made Jess grunt or whimper. But she never stopped moving. If she did, she worried she might never start again.

When only Sophie's stump was left, she turned the barrow, and back they went to the parked Sunfire.

Bad ankles and arm and all, Benny had to hobble and hop around to help drag Natalie and the child she now cradled out of the trunk. The work of centering the bodies and rolling the tarp Jess had found proved too awkward and too painful—for all of them—to allow Jess more than a quick, final glance at the ruin of her daughter's face. But there wasn't much face to see, and most of that was hidden by long black hair studded with bits of skull.

So that was some mercy, anyway.

Somehow, Jess and Benny wrestled the tarp up and into the wheelbarrow. Then Jess turned to lift in Sophie, too, but was startled to find her swinging herself forward along the ground with her arms, lifting her leg-stumps and her ass slightly off the dirt with each new lurch, like an orangutan. As she passed Benny, she patted his calf.

“Nice work, fluffy man,” she said.

“There's probably room for you in here,” Jess said, gesturing at the tarp.

But Sophie never even turned around. “I got this. Feels
good,
actually. Whew.” She twisted through the opening in the fence and started across the construction site, her stumps churning up clouds of dirt in her wake.

“I don't even want to think about what that means,” Benny murmured, leaning on the car, breathing hard, watching Sophie scuttle up and over a stack of metal piping. Abruptly, he sagged sideways, and Jess had to jerk out her arms and catch him, which set her ribs shuddering and stabbing again. She doubled over against Benny's chest, pinning him upright. The car alone supported them both. Eventually, when he could, he slid his arms around her. “Oh, Jess. My God. What—”

“Ssh.” She tried to round the end of that sound, make it softer than she knew it had come out. Eventually, after a long time, she slipped from his arms and eased him back into his seat next to Eddie. “I can't talk now, Benny. I just can't.”

“We have to talk. Sooner or later. Jesus Christ.”

Jess grabbed his eyes and stared him silent. “About what? What, exactly, do you imagine there is to say?”

She expected no answer, and got one immediately. “How about, I'm so sorry, Jess? Or, I love you, Jess? Will those do, for starters?”

Those will do,
she thought, swiping savagely at the wetness that spilled yet again down her cheeks.
There really is no bottom to this well.
She didn't kiss him, mostly because she couldn't imagine leaning over any more than she had to. But she let him see her cry. Then she turned, got the wheelbarrow up and rolling, and followed Sophie toward the woods.

Mostly, on this final trip—the last she would ever take with her daughter—Jess sang to herself, the trees, the bodies in the tarp. The songs were the ones she'd sung to Natalie, and also the ones Natalie had sung to her. She didn't keep track, and in some cases couldn't even remember which was which anymore. Jess had never affixed songs to moments the way Natalie had; Natalie was more like her father, that way. Jess just sang.

Found a Peanut. Both Sides Now.
That whiny newer one teenage-Natalie had always walked around crooning, about being human and needing to be loved. Like everyone else does.

Everyone else does.

When the woodpeckers knocked, she stopped singing and listened to them. Let her daughter listen to them.
“Do you hear?”
she whispered.

At which exact instant did Jess forget about Sophie?

It didn't matter, she would decide later, when she made herself go over and over those next moments. What mattered was that she
had
forgotten. She had let herself love, and grieve, and break, and hum. And so she got caught completely by surprise when Sophie dropped from the low branches of the black cherry tree she'd scurried up—like a spider or a bobcat—and landed on Jess's back and sent her shrieking and sprawling. The wheelbarrow tilted forward, and the tarp with Natalie's corpse in it tipped halfway out, actually propping the barrow in position. Incredibly, Jess got her hands down, even as her wrapped ribs crunched together, and Sophie didn't have her balance right, either; she landed farther forward on her stumps than she'd meant to, and that allowed Jess at least to roll over onto her back before Sophie scrambled over and squatted on Jess's stomach, her hands grabbing Jess's wrists and pinning her arms to the root-riddled dirt.

If she'd been sure her body was still capable of bending, Jess probably could have bucked Sophie off, although the grip in those fingers was ferocious. But in the moment, with this hellthing atop her, Jess couldn't think of a single reason to do that.

Sophie leaned down. Her round, freckle-less face hovered over Jess's, blank and gigantic and remote as the moon. Her raccoon-eyes sparkled in the dark. When she spoke, the air she moved—it wasn't an exhalation, just air with sound riding it—stank, but Jess couldn't have said of what. Although what occurred to her in the instant was …
emptiness …

“Just what,” Sophie said, “were you thinking to do with my Roo?”

“You want the truth?” Jess managed, as her own breathing slowed, quieted. The fact that she
was
still breathing almost seemed the most perfect, defiant response she could make. “The awful truth?”
Because it
was
awful, no matter what Sophie had become, or might have become, or was on her way to becoming.
“I wasn't thinking of your Roo at all.”

“Well, I was. And I want him.”

“You want him.”

Sophie nodded.

Jess's smile felt more barbed and vicious than any she had ever aimed at anyone. She'd never even imagined such a smile could fit on her face. “Sure, hon.” And with that, she pushed Sophie off. She was only a little surprised that Sophie let her. She gestured at the wheelbarrow. “Help me get this thing up.”

Together, Jess tugging the handle while Sophie pushed from the ground at the tarp with Natalie's body—which was holding Sophie's Roo's body—wrapped in it, they righted the barrow. Wincing and gasping with every step, Jess pushed it over the top of the little hill, up to the edge of the patch of soft dirt she'd found between two yards-long ridged roots of the giant sweet gum. Then she let everything fall sideways, and the tarp thumped out onto the ground.

“Now help me unroll it.”

They did that together. The second Natalie's body appeared, Jess bent forward, ignoring the pain. With surprisingly little pressure or effort, she freed the little bundle from Natalie's arms. A gentle tilt, a push on the tiny backside, and the baby was free of Natalie's grip. As easy as sliding a record out of a sleeve. Straightening, grunting as her tortured ribs rang, Jess cradled the bundle one last time. This boy had been hers, too, briefly, after all. He'd been hers, at least a little bit, all his too-short life. A tiny part of her wondered why Sophie hadn't already ripped him from her hands. Jess wouldn't have faulted her for that.

But when she looked up, Sophie was just watching, waiting, with her arms out and her lips flat and no expression Jess knew in her eyes.

“Here you go,” she whispered, to George William, to his mother, and held out the child. Sophie snatched him away and clutched him to her breast.

For a few moments, Sophie leaned over her child, murmuring and cooing. Then she seemed to realize Jess was watching and turned away, even managed to edge deeper into the shadows of the sweet gum. That gave Jess a little more time to sit with her own daughter. She didn't coo or murmur or even hum, now; she just listened to the woodpeckers and held Natalie's icy, lifeless hand. One last time, and one time only, she let herself look at her daughter's face. The lips were still there, and still so expressive: slightly opened, turned down, and yet, somehow, almost smiling. That distinctive Natalie-expression. The ghost of it, anyway.

Eventually, with a start, Jess realized that the sky was starting to lighten. Letting go of Natalie's hand, she stood, picked up the shovel, found the softest dirt she could, and took some time settling into the least painful work position she could devise. Then she began her long, slow dig at the ground. She could have made Sophie help, or at least asked her to. Possibly, Sophie could have done that, just using her hands. But Sophie was with her baby. The baby she had abandoned to Jess's care, and come back for too late. And Jess … Well, Jess was with her baby. The one who had abandoned
her.

That isn't fair,
she thought, as she dug, rested, wept, dug some more. But she kept thinking it.

“Why here?” Sophie finally said, when Jess had been stopped for some time.

In fact, Jess had just realized that she was probably finished. Looking up, she was again surprised—and again, nowhere near alarmed enough—to find Sophie at the lip of the grave. Somehow, silently, she must have sidled closer. Above her head, through the massed branches, Jess noted the pink-tinged whiteness just spreading at the horizon, like the pressed-in quick at the bottom of a nail.

“We can't keep them in the car,” she said, with no emotion in her voice and none in her heart, either, right then. “And I'm figuring, no matter how far the Concerto Woods Development Project develops, if it ever does, they're never going to come up here and move this tree.” She gestured at the Pavilion far below. “Also, there's music.”

By the time she'd clambered awkwardly out of the grave, Sophie had laid her bundled boy gently against a root and moved to help. She took Natalie's feet, straightening her friend as Jess prepared to roll her into the tarp for the last time. Then, abruptly, Sophie turned, took up her own child again, kissed him on the forehead, and slid him back into Natalie's arms, which of course had stayed folded, as though waiting for him.

“I thought you wanted to bury him by the beach,” Jess said.

“He's better off with Nat.”

“You've got
that
right.” The words just flew from her mouth, and Jess regretted them immediately. Kind of. She saw the look that crossed Sophie's face, too, and braced for another lunge.

But Sophie stayed put, still staring down at her best friend, her baby boy.

“How could you do this?” Jess blurted out. “How could you let this happen? Either one of you. You were
good girls,
Sophie. You were such…” She smashed her teeth together, grabbed the shovel. Too late, she realized Sophie might take that as some sort of threat, when all Jess was actually considering was jamming the handle into her own mouth to keep in all these words, the thousands and thousands of them massing at the back of her throat. If she let them loose, she thought she might never get them stopped. They would spirit her straight off her feet and off this hill and drown her.

If Sophie had responded—if she had so much as looked up—Jess would have unleashed it all. She wouldn't have been able to help it.

But Sophie just gazed at her son, and sometimes at Natalie's shattered face. And after a long, long while, Jess felt her churning insides subside, at least temporarily. The words didn't so much evaporate—they would never evaporate, she would never be rid of them—as recede. They would drown her from the inside.

“You were such good girls,” she whispered. She allowed herself a single sob, and turned once more to the task at hand.

It took less time and pain than Jess expected to drag the bodies those last few feet and drop them into their grave. Without being asked or even reacting to the light that was sifting through the branches, now, raising instant and ugly red rashes down both of her exposed arms under the bloody ruin of her dress, Sophie immediately started scraping up dirt with her hands. Jess used the shovel. In what seemed no time, they'd filled in the hole together.

The moment that was done, and the mound of dirt patted close to flat, Jess turned, threw the shovel downhill into the shrubs, and turned toward her Sunfire. She would have offered Sophie a ride in the wheelbarrow, but Sophie had already swung herself around and was moving back up the path, with no grace but surprising speed. Jess wasn't certain, but she thought she could hear Sophie whimpering as she scuttled forward, fleeing the light and the grave of her child and her lifelong best friend.