Little Girls (8 page)

T
hey picked up a pizza on the way home and were back at the house by six o’clock. Laurie was quiet for much of the drive back from downtown and Ted was in no mood to goad her into talking. Susan kept opening the pizza box in the backseat and plucking off slices of pepperoni which she stuffed into her mouth and then giggled to herself. The house loomed up over the incline as the Volvo approached it up the winding driveway. They had left some lights on, and the downstairs windows glowed now in the darkness like eyes. The moonlight glinting off the windows of the strange little room at the top of the house—the belvedere—made it look as though there was a soft light burning from within.

They ate at the dining room table in silence. Ted had never realized how much they relied on the TV back in Hartford for background noise until they had come to this place, where televisions, radios, and computers were things of science fiction. What kind of whack job had Laurie’s father been, anyway? Ted ate two slices of pizza, then went to the liquor cabinet in the parlor, selected one of the ancient bottles—this one a dark cognac—and poured himself a couple of fingers into a crystal rocks glass. His laptop was in the bedroom upstairs, still packed away with their luggage. It had wireless Internet, and he supposed he could attempt to harness a signal from one of the neighbors, though he did not hold out much hope for this endeavor; the other houses along Annapolis Road looked even less contemporary than this one, particularly the rundown little cottage next door. Even on the drive back from downtown, he had only spied a few houses with lights on in the windows. Was this part of the city nothing more than a graveyard waiting to happen?

He knew he should sit down at the computer and work on the Fish adaptation, but his head wasn’t in the game at the moment. It had taken him months to wend through John Fish’s bloated tome and, upon finishing it, he’d been left with a hollow dissatisfaction he knew would be nothing short of a miracle to overcome. Overcoming it was necessary to his role in adapting the work for the stage, and his inability to lose himself in Fish’s novel reflected in the ambiguous treatment and the uninspired pages he’d already written himself. Add to that the extra stress he felt in the knowledge that this could prove his biggest break to date, and he found himself reticent to make a single false move. Was he being overly careful with the pages he wrote, the outline he’d drawn up? Of course he was. His future depended on the moves he made. Yet he knew from experience that too much caution rendered him useless.
Writing was easier when I was younger and none of it truly mattered.

Taking on the adaptation of John Fish’s bestselling novel
The Skin of Her Teeth
was his biggest compromise to date . . . but it had been five years since his play,
Whippoorwill,
had seen its final performance at the little Greenwich Village theater, and an equal amount of years since Ted had received a steady paycheck.

Now, carrying his cognac down the front hall and out onto the porch, Ted wondered if the death of Laurie’s estranged father hadn’t been a godsend. Over a half-million dollars for the house? Laurie was right—even if they sold it for half that amount, the money would afford him enough peace of mind to really focus on the Fish adaptation and whatever waited for him on the horizon after that. As it was, he laid awake at night worrying about money when he should be worrying about the play.

Things had been tougher since Laurie had quit teaching. Her quitting was the result of a singular episode that had occurred during the stasis of time between
Whippoorwill
’s off-Broadway run and the John Fish gig—what Ted eventually termed the “highway incident.” Despite the insecurity of his burgeoning profession and worry over the influx of money to the household, Ted had agreed that it might be a good idea for Laurie to take some time off and eliminate some stress from her life. What he hadn’t realized at the time was that her time off would turn into a full year of unemployment. Moreover, she still showed no desire to return to work. She used to paint from time to time, but they never saw any substantial money from the small Hartford galleries that hung her work. He couldn’t remember the last time she had sat down to paint something, let alone the last time she had sold a piece. So here he was, selling his creative soul to write an adaptation of someone else’s lousy story.
Funny how life can reach out and grab you like that.
Yet he couldn’t bring himself to say anything to Laurie because there was a part of him that believed he might have been the cause of what had happened to her on the highway that afternoon....

Her name was Marney Owen. She was twenty-three, and possessed a slim figure and a face that reminded Ted of a wide-eyed Disney heroine. Yet she was anything but unworldly. She was a Marxist or a Maoist (Ted hardly understood the difference) and she wore kitschy berets and wool scarves even in the springtime. She was also a grad student at CUNY and quite talented. She had also had a small role in
Whippoorwill,
which was how they’d met. He knew very quickly that he could sleep with this girl if he so desired. And, of course, he desired.

He had been at Marney’s one afternoon, lazing naked beside her in bed, when his cell phone rang. It was Laurie’s number, but there had been a man on the other end of the phone. The man was a coworker of Laurie’s, and he’d found her car parked up on the shoulder of the highway, Laurie seated in a catatonic state behind the wheel.

What had happened? To this day, no one knew for sure. Not even Laurie herself. She had been heading to work at the university when she had been suddenly overwhelmed by what her doctor would later term a “fugue state.” She remained buckled into the driver’s seat, her hands on the steering wheel . . . but for an undisclosed amount of time, she was unsure of who she was or where she had been headed. Later, she would describe it to Ted like having the power go out in the middle of a television program. “And when the program finally came back on,” she had told him, “I was a little lost, having missed the part in-between.”

There were some CT scans, an MRI. Yet nothing was found to be wrong with Laurie. It seemed everyone was ready to chalk it up to stress—Laurie included—but Ted began to wonder if she hadn’t grown wise to his unfaithfulness and had suffered a moment of collapse, a mental breakdown. If this was the case, she never admitted such a thing to him, nor could he summon the courage to ask her. If she had learned of his infidelity and was willing to put it aside, so was he. And if she didn’t know, then he certainly wasn’t going to burden her with it. Overwhelmed by this unspoken guilt, he ended his relationship with Marney, who seemed hardly surprised or disappointed, and he had supported Laurie with her decision to quit work in order to give her mind some relaxation.

That had been roughly one year ago. There hadn’t been another recurrence of the incident, whatever the incident had actually been, since that first time. At least as far as Ted knew. . . .

He downed the rest of his cognac, then dropped down off the porch and into the damp grass. The sky was alive with stars. Taking a deep breath, he could smell the river over the crest beyond the property. Once again, he was stupefied at just how much the house and the property was worth. Why hadn’t Laurie ever mentioned this place to him?

His bladder full, he waded across the driveway and stopped at the edge of the old well. Briefly, he contemplated kicking the plank of wood off to the side, unzipping his fly, and pissing down into the black chasm. But that seemed like too much work. Instead, he crossed the lawn and sidled up in front of the wooden fence that separated the two properties. Through the heavy foliage that grew over the top of the fence, he could see the house next-door, dark against the night. There was a flickering bluish light in one of the ground-floor windows that Ted recognized as the glow from a television set. Maybe they weren’t all hillbilly Luddites around here after all.

Still watching the house, he unleashed a stream of urine against the fence. Above, small bats darted across the starry sky. He listened and thought he could hear the distant growl and mutter of boat engines along the river, even at this hour. Ted knew nothing about boats.

Something struck him squarely in the chest. He looked down but found nothing there. He hadn’t seen anything, either, which caused a pang of fear to rise up in him as he considered that the sensation might have actually been internal. They say you feel a heart attack in the left arm first, but was that true one hundred percent of the time?

When something whizzed by his right ear, stinging the rim of cartilage there, he knew it wasn’t a heart attack. He quickly shook off and zipped up his fly. Taking a few steps back from the fence, he tried to peer straight into the darkness and through the tangle of overgrown foliage above the pickets. A moment later, he saw something shoot out from the darkness and rush toward his eyes, quick as a bullet fired from a gun. He blinked and jerked his head to one side just as something hard struck his forehead, just above his left eyebrow. It stung.

He scrambled back toward the driveway, his hands up over his face now in a defensive posture. He listened but could hear nothing. The item that had struck him rolled across the lawn and came to rest beside the old well. It was a small stone.

“Hey! Is someone over there?” His voice was both a whisper and a shout. “I see you,” he lied. “Come out.”

There was a rustling sound on the other side of the fence, like someone treading on a carpet of dead leaves.

But no one came out.

Slowly lowering his hands, he looked up and surveyed the surrounding greenery, pitch-black now in the darkness. The trees rose high over the small fence, their boughs weighty with leaves and birds’ nests. He listened and could hear squirrels or birds or bats moving around up there. Had they dropped acorns or stones down on him? He supposed it was possible, though it seemed unlikely. Besides, the force with which that last stone had hit him couldn’t have been from a bird or a squirrel. And it hadn’t fallen from above, either. It had come from over the fence.

Embarrassed by his own apprehension, he laughed. Then he trotted back across the lawn to the house, where there were lights on in many of the windows and where his girls awaited his return.

T
he next morning, Laurie awoke to find Ted’s side of the bed empty. His running shoes and preposterous-looking spandex shorts were gone, too. She washed and dressed in the adjacent bathroom, then stood for a moment looking at the rumpled bedclothes while trying to remember what it had been like when her parents had still been together and she had lived here. She found it nearly impossible to do so.

As she stepped out onto the second-floor landing, a muted thump caused her to pause. She went down the hall to Susan’s bedroom, opened the door, and was surprised to find the bed empty. Susan rarely got up early on her own accord.

Back out in the hall, Laurie lingered for a moment, waiting to see if the sound would repeat itself. Old houses suffered all sorts of ailments, made all sorts of noises. It could have been the clang of a water pipe or the struts settling in the attic. It could have been anything. Yet her eyes arrived at the locked belvedere door. The padlock was still in place.

She went to the door and pressed her ear against it. The sound on the other side of the belvedere door was no different than the imaginary murmurings of the sea in a conch shell—muffled nothingness.

She looked down. A hazy strip of daylight filtered from beneath the door. Laurie got down on her hands and knees and peered beneath the door. On the other side of the door, she could see the bottom of the first step that ascended into the belvedere. Daylight glowed on the wood floor from above. She pressed the right side of her face down against the hall floor to attempt a better view of the stairwell on the other side of the door. As she did so, a shadow passed quickly through the panel of sunlight.

Laurie gasped and sat up. She felt her scalp prickle. Bending back down to the floor, she peered beneath the door again. There were no shapes, no shifting shadows. What she had seen must have been nothing more than the shadow of a tree branch in motion, projected through one of the belvedere windows and onto the floor like a strip of film on a screen.

Downstairs, Laurie found Susan seated alone at the kitchen table eating a large bowl of Cheerios. Laurie smiled at her daughter. “You’re up early.”

“It’s after ten, Mom.”

“Is it?” She looked around and realized there were no clocks in the kitchen. “I guess I’m just being a bum then.” Laurie went to the sink and rinsed out the percolator, then refilled it with fresh coffee, opting this time for raspberry swirl.
Who the heck comes up with these coffee flavors, anyway?
She imagined a gnomish old man hunched over a series of test tubes and Bunsen burners in the basement of some remote warehouse in the New Mexico desert.

“How did granddad die?”

The question caught Laurie off guard, not because of the inquiry itself but in just hearing Susan refer to Myles Brashear as “granddad” once again. The girl had never met the man, and the familiarity with which she referred to him struck Laurie as absurd.

For a moment, Laurie considered how to respond, including an evasiveness she didn’t think Susan would swallow. In the end, she opted for the truth.

“He fell out of a window and broke his neck.”

Susan set her spoon down in her bowl. “What window?”

This is why I wanted to stay in a hotel,
Laurie thought, sucking on her lower lip. She went to the refrigerator and took out a carton of milk and some eggs. Briefly, she considered lying to her daughter. Then she decided against it. “The window upstairs, in that little room above the second floor. The belvedere, remember?”

“In the
house?”
Susan said.
“Here?”

“Don’t tell me you’re a superstitious old biddy, too.” Laurie was thinking of what Felix Lorton had said to her about his sister, Dora, on that first day:
She was uncomfortable returning here alone after . . . well, what happened. My sister can be foolishly superstitious.

“What does that word mean?”

“Superstitious means you believe in spirits and omens and karma. And karma is like, you know—what goes around comes around.”

“No. The other word.”

“What word?”

“Biddy.”

“Oh.” Laurie realized she didn’t actually know the true definition. “A nosey old lady, I guess.”

Susan scrunched up her face. “Why would you call me
that?”

“It’s just an expression. Eat your cereal.”

“Did the police come here?”

“Why would the police come here?”

“I don’t know. But that’s what that lawyer said, remember? That’s what they do on TV when someone dies, too.”

Laurie took a frying pan out from the cupboard and set it on the stove. She turned the burner on, then went to the fridge and took out the butter. “Yes, Susan, there were police here. When someone has a bad accident like . . . like granddad did . . . you’re supposed to call the police. And an ambulance, in case they need medical attention.” As an afterthought, Laurie added, “We’ve talked about you watching those kinds of programs on TV, haven’t we?”

“Did that lady find him dead?”

“What lady?”

“The lady who was here in the house when we got here, Mom.” She sounded exasperated.

“Dora Lorton? No, honey.”

“Who did?”

“There was another woman here when it happened.”

“Do you like her?”

“Who’s that?”

“The Dora lady,” said Susan. “Dora the Explorer.”

“I don’t even know her.”

“Did she seem nice?”

“I suppose,” said Laurie.

“Oh.”

“What’s with all the questions this morning?”

“I’m just bored.”

Laurie could see the wheels continuing to turn behind her daughter’s eyes, but no more questions followed. It was the closest Susan had ever come to dealing with death. Ted’s parents had died before he and Laurie had married, and Susan had been too young when Laurie’s mother had passed away.

“You know,” Laurie said, knocking a pat of butter into the frying pan, “if you have any questions about it, you can ask me.”

“I already did,” Susan said matter-of-factly.

“I mean any other questions.”

“Like what?”

“Do you know what it means when someone dies?”

Susan wrinkled her face at her mother. “When you’re dead, you’re dead,” said the girl. “Like Sissy’s dog.”

“That’s pretty logical.”

“Like Torpedo, too.”

“Ah,” said Laurie. “Torpedo the frog.”

“He died and now he’s not coming back. He’s in frog heaven with all the other dead frogs. It’s different than human heaven. There’s just frogs there. And maybe some flies, so they can eat.” She clanked her spoon against her bowl. “Do you believe in heaven?”

“For frogs?”

“For people, too,” Susan said. “People mostly, I guess.”

No, Laurie did not believe in heaven. Neither she nor Ted was religious and they had decided long ago that they wouldn’t impinge any organized religion’s contradictory and judgmental sentiments on their daughter. Now, however, in the face of Susan’s question, she wasn’t sure what the right response should be. There was a latent hopefulness in her daughter’s voice and Laurie didn’t want to be the one to smash that hope.

“What do you think?” Laurie said, turning the question around on her daughter.

Without missing a beat, Susan said, “I think Torpedo is still buried in the yard where me and Daddy put him. I bet if I dig him up, he’ll still be there. And if there was a heaven that people go to, then who is buried in all those graveyards? If they’re in the ground, they can’t be in heaven, too.”

“Some people believe only your spirit goes to heaven,” Laurie said. “Not your whole body.”

“Oh.”

“Do you understand the difference?”

“I don’t know.”

“Does it bother you staying in this house now that you know what happened here?”

“No way. It’s a neat house. I like it a lot.” The girl didn’t appear to fully understand the question. “Daddy said it’s ours now.”

“Well, yes, but we’re going to sell it.”

“How come?”

“Because we don’t live in Maryland. We live in Connecticut.”

“Can’t we just move here? I like it here. I like Maryland.”

“Wouldn’t you miss your friends back home?”

“I could make new friends.”

“You don’t know anything about living here.”

“I do! I know there’s a river on the other side of the woods and Daddy said he would take me out to swim there someday. And I know there’s a neat little house made out of glass in the woods, too.”

Laurie had just broken an egg into the frying pan and now held the two halves of the eggshell in midair, frozen. She looked up sharply at the girl to find her wrinkling her nose again. “You saw it?” Laurie’s voice was nearly a whisper.

“It looks like a big dollhouse,” said Susan enthusiastically. “But it’s all old and dirty and covered under a big tent.”

“When did you see it?”

“The day we got here. Daddy and I went walking down a path through the woods and we found it.”

“I don’t want you to go back there.”

“Why?”

“Because I said so. It’s dangerous and there’s broken glass everywhere. I don’t want you playing back there.”

“I’m careful.”

“No. This is not up for discussion. Promise me you won’t go back there.”

Even at ten, it seemed Susan was able to harness some sense of trepidation from Laurie’s voice, or perhaps from the look on Laurie’s face. The young girl’s eyes hung on her, slightly wider than they generally were. One palm lay flat down on the tabletop beside her bowl of Cheerios and Laurie could see the little pink fingers working in agitation. “Okay,” she said quietly and at last. “I promise.”

To lighten the tension, Laurie raised her right hand and said, “Girl Scout’s honor?”

“I’m not a Girl Scout.”

Laurie lowered her hand. She felt coldly removed from her daughter. On the stove, the egg sizzled in the pan. “I know you’re not. I was just being funny.”

Susan shrugged and looked down at her cereal. “Wasn’t very funny to me,” she said.

The front door slammed at the opposite end of the house. Ted shouted a friendly
halloo
down the hallway, his baritone voice full-bodied with reverberation. When he appeared in the kitchen doorway, he was mopping sweat off his brow with a towel. His sweaty T-shirt clung to him and his spandex shorts looked too tight. “Good morning.” He seemed to be in a good mood. “It’s a beautiful day out. How are my favorite ladies?”

“There’s butterflies,” Susan piped up from her chair.

“Yeah? Where?”

The girl pointed to the low bushes outside the bay windows. There were yellow flowers with fuzzy brown centers bristling from the bushes. “Right out there,” Susan said. “I saw them earlier. They were lots of different colors.”

Ted went over and kissed the top of Susan’s head. “Do you know what those flowers are called?” He pointed to the yellow flowers with the brown centers.

Susan shook her head.

“Black-eyed Susans.”

The girl giggled. “You’re lying!”

“I’m not,” Ted said, placing one hand over his heart. Beads of perspiration glistened on his forehead. “Bet you a dollar.”

Susan got up from the table and stood before the windows. She peered down at the flowers that swayed calmly in the early summer breeze. “Wow,” she said. “How come they’re named after me?”

“Because the people who name flowers tried to think of the most beautiful name in the whole world,” Ted said. “But then they realized that ‘Rose’ was already taken.”

“Daddy!” Susan chided, laughing.

Laurie smiled and turned back to the stove. A part of her longed for the easy affection Ted and Susan shared.

“Do you want breakfast?” she asked Ted. “I’m making eggs.”

“Eggs sound wonderful,” he said, coming up beside her and kissing her on the cheek. “I’m gonna grab a quick shower.” He turned back toward Susan as he backtracked out of the kitchen. “You shout for me if you see another butterfly, okay? I don’t wanna miss ’em!”

Again, Susan beamed brightly.

 

Later, Laurie telephoned the estate liquidator, Stephanie Canton, and set up an appointment for her to stop by at her next available opportunity to conduct a preliminary assessment of her father’s belongings. Laurie assured the woman that everything would have to go because they were selling the house. “Our place back in Hartford is very small,” Laurie confided over the telephone, “and we don’t have the room for anything else. I don’t see me leaving here with a blessed thing.”

“Nonetheless, I always advise all my clients to conduct a comprehensive inventory prior to my arrival.” Stephanie Canton spoke with the frank diction of a military officer. “Things can
hide,
Mrs. Genarro.”

“Well, okay, but I’m certain we won’t be keeping anything.”

“The earliest I can be there is Friday afternoon.”

“That’s fine,” Laurie said.

“If there is any paperwork for any of the items, please have that on hand.”

“Paperwork?”

“For example, if you have antique furniture, some documentation as to its authenticity would prove beneficial in terms of resale. The same goes for any autographed memorabilia—books, baseball cards, paintings—and the like.”

“Oh, okay. I understand. Sorry, I’ve never done this before.”

On the other end of the phone, Stephanie Canton made a noise that could have been interpreted as either endorsement or derision. “Is there any clothing left behind?”

Left behind,
Laurie thought, and shivered. “Yes. All of his clothes.”

“I don’t handle clothing. My recommendation would be to contact the Salvation Army or Purple Heart or any such organization and have the articles donated. It’s a tax write-off.”