Good Girls (8 page)

“Bring a fresh bouquet to Vanushka when you visit your mother's grave,” he would instruct her, always, at the end of their perfunctory conversations. Carlota always promised that she would, or assured him that she already had, that week. And Oscar would hang up imagining the gypsy woman's grave in the Xela cemetery, bestrewn with his daughter's flowers, every one of which—so Xela's matriarchs had always told him—brought wanderers a step closer to home.

In the days between those calls, Oscar did his work and smoked his cigarettes and spoke to virtually no one—except Rebecca, the orphan from the Crisis Center who seemed to have adopted him, for some reason—and watched the campus from deep inside himself, the way an indoor cat stares out a window. He noted everything, still. He could even feel himself leaning forward, sometimes, tensing before settling back. Like an indoor cat, he knew that whatever was out there, in
this
world, for
these
people, he could never reach it.

And so, though he noted the shadow detaching itself from the deeper shadows of the arched entryway of the Clocktower, he reacted only by dropping his cigarette into the grass at his feet, grinding it out, then scooping up the butt with the stray leaves and dumping it all into his garbage bag. Even when the shadow left the gravel of Campus Walk and started across the grass in his direction, Oscar assumed it would simply glide over and past him, the way shadows did in this place, this other dimension he had only recently realized he might never escape. He tied the top of the garbage bag, hoisted it to his shoulder, started forward, and so walked right into the outstretched hand that stopped him in his tracks. Fingers splayed themselves across his chest, their touch so cold that they stung, even through his uniform, like the paintball pellets the fraternity boys shot at him and all the other maintenance guys during Rush Week.

Oscar looked down at those freezing fingers, then up at the person attached to them. The fingers stayed on his chest.

“That girl,” said the boy who'd stopped him, from underneath his sombrero. “Tell me about her.”

Not a boy,
Oscar decided, but slowly; his thoughts felt glacial, as though clogged with ice. This guy was thin like a boy, and taller than Oscar, but his voice was older—old, really—despite the eagerness in it. Also, his mouth looked too round, too dark under the shadow of that sombrero, like an open manhole. The eyes stayed completely hidden in the shadow of the hat, which wasn't even a sombrero, really. Machine-made American approximation.

“You know her,” said the man. He wasn't asking. “Is she as … I mean, of course she is. Right?” And then, to Oscar's astonishment, the man whistled. The whistle melted into a tune, a
cumbia,
of all things. Oscar knew it but couldn't place it, though he remembered some of the words, or one word, anyway.

Jacarandosa.
Person of grace.

His response was instinctive, powered less by protectiveness of Rebecca than longing for his daughter, grief for his wife, and it almost came quickly enough to be convincing. “
No habla Ingles.
”

The whistling man whistled to the end of the chorus, and when he reached that last, long note, he trilled it like an ocarina player, or a bird. The sound sizzled straight into Oscar's veins.

Then the man smiled, tilting back his head so Oscar could see his eyes. “Come on, now,” he said. “You poor, lonely man. You'll see. It's so much better when you share.”

And Oscar knew—even before his killer knew—that he was going to die.

 

7

In another hour, Rebecca figured, she could head for Halfmoon House. Her shift there didn't officially start until noon. But maybe Amanda would allow an exemption to the ban on overnight stays for former residents—part of the Amanda Plan for Orphan Self-Sufficiency—and let her sack out on the cot downstairs in the “guest” room. That room, after all, had been a staple of Rebecca's chore-list for years, and was always kept hospital-clean and freshly flowered in case a long-lost or newly rehabilitated relative of one of the current residents showed up to visit. And Rebecca wouldn't technically be staying overnight, anyway, just … taking a nap. Recovering.

Even if Amanda refused to lift the ban, she'd almost certainly let Rebecca take up her familiar seat at the end of the grooved, warping wooden worktable in the kitchen to fold sheets and sip homegrown peppermint tea while Amanda washed and cooked and folded and scrubbed counters and ignored her. Sooner or later, Joel would finish his morning outside-chores, wander in for his coffee, smile at her or stick out a tongue at his wife's rigid back, and wink. Then he'd head off to the stairs to yell his daily wake-up absurdity to Trudi and Danni, his current not-quite-daughters.
There's a hole in Nantucket, dear Danni, dear Trudi.
Or,
Freight train, gone so fast. Ate my spaniel, kicked my …

Just remember,
Amanda would say after that, maybe not right away but at some point, perhaps in the middle of a conversation later in the morning, the chill in her voice like an ice cube dropped down Rebecca's back,
Halfmoon House is not your home. It never was. It's a
path
to the home you'll make on your own, one day.
Hers would be a less kind but more bracing awakening than the one Joel offered
.
And that was exactly the sort of awakening she needed today, because the voice in her head—her caller's voice—kept threading through her thoughts. It wasn't even his words, just his voice, lilting and smooth, sticky as a spiderweb.

In the meantime, here she was at Halfmoon Lake. She'd barely noticed leaving campus or cutting through the forest. She had hoped, vaguely, that she might find Joel on his tipped-over rowboat, legs to his chest, chin on his knees, watching the dawn. But if he'd been here at any point last night, he was gone, now.

In the center of the lake, a lone family of loons glided through the morning mist toward the stripe of light that wasn't really daylight, yet, just a pinker patch atop the gently rippling water. The woods behind her weren't exactly still but almost silent, the leaves shuddering in place like restless sleepers. Rebecca sat down on top of Joel's overturned rowboat at the edge of the reedy muck that passed for the swimming beach. She listened to leaves, the lapping water, her caller's voice.

I'll come see you.
That's what he'd said. That's what she was murmuring to herself, now. She knew she was doing it, but she couldn't seem to stop, didn't even seem to want to. The beat of it was weirdly comforting, or maybe just insistent. Irresistible.

I'll come see you.

On the lake, the smaller adult loon—the male—rose up and flapped its wings, its feet almost leaving the surface of the water before it folded back into its resting state as though it had never so much as stirred. Then he was gliding, not even crying out. Ever since she could remember, Rebecca had loved that particular loon behavior even more than she loved loon calls: the rising up, as though reminding everything around them—including themselves—that they were free, could just
go.
And then the deciding not to, the electing to stay.

I'll come see you.

The metal of the rowboat felt slick under her fingers, against her jeans. Cool, but not cold, like sweat on skin.

I'll come see you.

The woods hushed still further, except for the footsteps. Startled, Rebecca glanced back, put a sneaker on the ground.

Whoever that was, he wasn't close, possibly all the way back at the top of the path at the edge of town. But he was heading this way. Of course, anyone using that path would be heading this way. Fifty joggers a morning did that.

And yet Rebecca was standing, now, holding still, leaning toward the leaves, ready to vault the rowboat and run.
Why?

But she knew why: the conversation in her head had finally come untangled, stopped layering itself over itself, so that she could hear what her caller had
actually
said, right at the end, for the first time.

Not
I'll come see you.

I can see you.
That's what he'd said.

Tripping on the bow of the boat, Rebecca stumbled through the muck that sucked at her shoes toward the smaller path to her left, the one toward Halfmoon House. Her eyes never left the opening in the trees from which she'd emerged, except once, to look up into the branches, which was even more ridiculous, except that her caller had been up high last night, on some rooftop, looking down.
At her?

She saw nothing but froze to listen as the footsteps pounded closer.
I'm being stupid,
she thought. Then she bolted into the woods. Right as she hit the tree line, one of the loons let loose, its call erupting overhead and triggering birds all over the trees, all at once, as though she'd blundered through a trip wire.

Those sounds, though, were anything but alarming to Rebecca. They were, in fact, part of her every-morning sound track: Clocktower bells, stirring town, the birds of Halfmoon Lake. She made herself stop again, just out of sight, to watch the beach. A few seconds later, the runner appeared, and he was just a runner, a bearded professor-type in a hoodie. Very possibly, he
was
a professor in a hoodie, someone she probably knew by sight if not by name. She didn't let the man see her, and she didn't step out of the trees until he'd circled back onto the town path and pattered off. But her breathing eased. By the time she'd made her way through the denser stretch of woods back to the outskirts of town and the long, dirt lane that curved away toward Halfmoon House, she was almost strolling, and she'd stopped glancing over her shoulder, although bits of conversation continued to roil in her head.

People worth talking to, staying up late.

I can see you.

Well,
she thought, and this time, she almost smiled. Her ruefulness felt habitual, practiced, utterly familiar:
I bet that's thrilling for you.

Halfmoon House nestled amid carefully clipped hedgerows at the lip of the woods, in its own nether-zone between the trees and town, located in both but not quite part of either. Reaching the end of the lane, Rebecca caught her first glimpse of the flaking red roof, the white clapboard shingles fading to beige but somehow solid. The whole place reminded her of a fallen birds' nest. She saw a shadow detach from the porch, long and work-gloved despite the heat, bucket in one hand and Bluetooth radio in the other as it moved around back toward the henhouse: Joel, gliding into his morning. He hadn't seen her. It didn't matter. She had seen him. That was enough.

Crossing the lawn, sidestepping the creaks on the front steps that she knew so well to avoid waking the girls upstairs—although Trudi, she suspected, was probably awake, already donning the sock puppets to whom she did the lion's share of her speaking, at this point—Rebecca slipped into the house. She moved through the foyer to the kitchen and sat herself at the long wooden table, which was already piled high with morning laundry still warm from the dryer. Wordlessly, she plunged her hands into the fabric, grabbed some socks, and started matching and folding. She could hear cans and pans being banged around in the pantry, but several minutes went by before Amanda emerged, blond hair already yanked back into that brutal ponytail that made her look twenty years older than she was and seemed to stretch the corners of her wide, blue eyes and pull her thin mouth all the way flat, as though she were perpetually walking into wind.

A solid minute of silence went by before Rebecca said, “Thought I'd stop in on my way home from the Center.” Amanda, of course, hadn't even nodded acknowledgment or said hello, and wouldn't until she saw a reason to. Most mornings, Rebecca didn't mind; sometimes, Rebecca not only admired but almost loved this woman's reserve. With just her silence, Amanda created so much space for everyone around her. And space and silence were exactly the commodities the children she cared for—fresh from other, failed foster homes or government institutions or overzealous or abusive or incompetent relatives, sometimes still reeling from the separate tragedies that had orphaned them in the first place—had had the least, and needed most.

But this morning, Rebecca very much wanted to communicate, say anything—to anyone—that wasn't what she'd been saying to herself, endlessly, for hours. Even more, she wanted someone familiar to answer back.

“I didn't expect you until this afternoon,” said Amanda, splashing oil into the pans. Half-turning, she slid a mug toward Rebecca without seeming to have paused to heat or fill it.

“And yet you have tea for me.” Rebecca lifted the mug, and fresh mint smell wafted into her nostrils, opened her up.

“You work here, you get tea.”

“You so much as set foot here, you get tea.”

Amanda nodded. “There you go.”

From outside, where Joel was, came the end of some chugging, tilting '50s train song, and then, as it faded, a girl's voice. Or—woman's. Girl's? Two different voices? “
Before
heart 
… grow … QUEEN COLD … old…”
Then drum smacks, ringing guitars, a new song with another '50s rocker guy yelping about thinking it over.

Whatever comfort Rebecca had just started to feel drained from her. She glanced toward the open window. “What kind of DJ is
that
?”

For once, Amanda actually stopped working long enough to look where Rebecca was looking. “Tell me about it. It's his latest Web find. He listens all day.” She gestured toward the stairs. “Freaks the girls out, I'm not kidding.”

“How do you even learn to talk like that? What
is
that?”

But Amanda was back to business, pulling a bowl of batter out of the industrial fridge, lining up mugs for the morning serving. “What are you doing here, Rebecca?”