Local Girls (17 page)

Gretel goes out to the patio, where they'll be having drinks and dessert. There's the smell of grass and of a barbecue in someone else's yard.

“What a moron Eddie is,” Terry says as she pours Gretel a glass of wine. It's still light enough so that Terry's husband can toss a ball around with Leonardo, light enough so that Gretel can see tears in Terry's eyes.

“Sorry.” Terry wipes at her tears. “I get this way when I think of your brother.”

Gretel knows this often happens when someone dies young, before he's had time to completely disappoint or betray those who love him.

“You wouldn't have been happy with him,” Gretel tells Terry, and it's the truth. Her brother, Jason, was too wounded and too pure for anything as simple as happiness. “You would have been miserable.”

Out in the grass, Tim throws the ball to Leo, who manages to catch it every single time.

“I've got it!” Leo shouts. “Look at. me!”

“I try to tell myself the past is the past. Let it go.” Terry wipes her eyes with the back of her hand and pulls herself together.

Gretel stares past the fences which separated her yard from Jill's. It was so long ago when they used to climb out their windows at night. In the summer, everyone else would be fast asleep with their windows wide open or their air conditioners turned on, but not them. They had too much to accomplish; they had their whole lives ahead of them.

“You know what they're calling this street now?” Eddie asks when he comes out with some plastic chairs and a cooler of beer. “Suicide Alley.”

“What's suicide?” Leonardo calls from the grass.

“Thank you so much for that lovely addition to his vocabulary,” Jill says to Eddie. She's brought out the cheesecake she fixed early that morning, which she cuts into slices and serves on the little rose-patterned plates that her mother always said were too fragile for everyday use.

“Hey, it's life. You want to protect him from everything.”

“That's right,” Jill says. “I do.”

Gretel cracks up, and Jill joins right in.

“Was that funny?” Eddie asks. “Did I miss something?”

“Two girls killed themselves right down the street,” Terry informs Gretel. “Was it last week?”

“The last day of May,” Jill says. “Easy,” she calls to Tim after he pitches a fastball to Leo. “I want him to keep those teeth.”

“We had
Newsday
here interviewing everybody, and who do they pick to talk to? Those creeps who bought your old house, Gretel. They said this is an alienating neighborhood. Well, they're definitely alienated now. No one will ever talk to them—not on this block. That's for sure.”

“Sounds like they don't care,” Gretel says.

Twilight is already falling, like ashes, in wavy purple clouds.

“Everybody cares,” Jill says.

 

 

 

 

That night, in the lower bunk of Leonardo's bed, Gretel can't sleep. It's not the heat, or the sound of Leo grinding his teeth, that keeps her awake. It's the deepness of the night; it's the way her memories won't leave her alone. A long time ago, Gretel set up a tightrope in her backyard, stretching a jump rope between two pine trees. She wore black ballet slippers that her grandmother had given her, and she carried a small paper parasol. She practiced for hours, but she couldn't take a single step on the rope without falling. Once, as she was falling, she looked up to see Jill out in her yard. Through the grid of metal fences, Jill had been watching, but she never mentioned Gretel's failure. In fact, if Gretel remembers correctly, Jill was the one to turn away.

Who will watch her now and not fault her for falling? Who will she call in the middle of the night? Who will talk until there's nothing more to say? Gretel gets out of bed in the dark, silent and careful not to wake Leonardo. She pulls on some shorts, tucks in her T-shirt, and makes her way through the house, navigating with one hand on the wall. When she gets out to the yard she can see her old house, the angles of the roof, the chimney, the ivy. There is her bedroom window. There is the front door. There are the roses, whose scent carries in the thick night air.

It's no surprise to find Jill out on the steps, drinking a cold beer. Jill always had trouble sleeping. Some people said it was a complete and total waste when Jill got pregnant and dropped out of school, and if truth be told, Gretel was one of them. Now, she's not so sure.

“Bad dream?” Jill asks.

Gretel wishes nightmares were all that kept her awake. She cannot tell which disturbs her sleep more, the future or the past.

“It's too hot,” she says.

If this were Gretel's last night on earth she would want the moonlight to be like this, spilling out over the lawns.

“Too hot to handle.” In the silvery light, Jill looks as young as ever. She hands Gretel a cold beer from the cooler and grins. “I was the pretty one, you were the smart one.”

“Screw you,” Gretel says. “I was the pretty one.”

Jill starts to laugh. “Sorry,” she says when Gretel shoots her a look. “I love you anyway. Even if you are smart.”

They walk around to the front of the house, barefoot, and although Jill has finished her beer, Gretel brings hers along. They're both tired, but the night is so hot, and by now they know they'll never get to sleep. Gretel has to leave for the airport at five-thirty a.m., so she may as well stay awake and catch a nap on the plane. In only a few hours, she and Jill will cry beside the boarding gate, but now they're sharing Gretel's beer and taking their time, walking slowly, like tourists, even though this is a landscape they know inside out. The streetlamps cast a hazy glow, the light of a dream you're not quite finished waking from. Fireflies drift across the lawns.

“This is the place where the two girls died.” Jill points across the street to a house that looks exactly like all the rest. “They killed themselves in the garage.”

Gretel wishes now that she'd worn shoes. The concrete retains heat; if anything, it seems to grow hotter at night. “What a way to go.”

“They made a secret pact. Their lives were screwed up. Boy problems. Family problems. The same exact troubles we had.”

Jill sounds calm, but her face looks funny. If she were anyone else, Gretel would swear she was about to cry.

“Stupid girls.” Jill shakes her head. “They should have just waited. That's all they had to do. They would have grown up, and everything would have been all right.”

“I'm glad we waited,” Gretel says.

They stare at the garage where the two girls died. There's a car parked in it now, and the door is locked, just in case any neighborhood kids get it into their heads to claim a souvenir. But there hasn't been a news story about the incident in days, not even in the town paper, and over at the high school most people have dropped the subject completely. It's only Jill who still comes here, and after tonight, even she won't return. She's glad that the weather is so perfect. The air is mild and wraps around you; it's sweet when you breathe in and when you breathe out.

“Hey,” Gretel says. “Look at this.” She holds out her arm to show Jill that a firefly has landed on her skin. It blinks a pale yellow light—an SOS. A signal to the soul.

“Should we kill it?” Jill says.

They laugh like crazy at that. Two crazy girls on the sidewalk in the middle of a June night when everyone else in the neighborhood is safe in bed. As they're laughing, the firefly floats away; it rises so high it's impossible to tell where it is among the stars.

“It decided to live,” Gretel says.

Some things, after all, are as simple as that.

“Well, good for it.” Jill stares up through the trees, even though she knows she'll never see that firefly again. “Good for us,” she says.