The Girl Next Door (2 page)

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Authors: Jack Ketchum

Tags: #Horror, #Fiction

BOOK: The Girl Next Door
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Though after two divorces, bad ones, the worm is apt to gnaw a little.
Still I like to remember that it was the Fifties, a period of strange repressions, secrets, hysteria. I think about Joe McCarthy, though I barely remember thinking of him at all back then except to wonder what it was that would make my father race home from work every day to catch the committee hearings on TV I think about the Cold War. About air-raid drills in the school basement and films we saw of atomic testing—department-store mannequins imploding, blown across mockup living rooms, disintegrating, burning. About copies of
Playboy
and
Man’s Action
hidden in wax paper back by the brook, so moldy after a while that you hated to touch them. I think about Elvis being denounced by the Reverend Deitz at Grace Lutheran Church when I was ten and the rock ‘n’ roll riots at Alan Freed’s shows at the Paramount.
I say to myself something weird was happening, some great American boil about to burst. That it was happening all over, not just at Ruth’s house but everywhere.
And sometimes that makes it easier.
What we did.
 
I’m forty-one now. Born in 1946, seventeen months to the day after we dropped the Bomb on Hiroshima.
Matisse had just turned eighty.
I make a hundred fifty grand a year, working the floor on Wall Street. Two marriages, no kids. A home in Rye and a company apartment in the city. Most places I go I use limousines, though in Rye I drive a blue Mercedes.
It may be that I’m about to marry again. The woman I love knows nothing of what I’m writing here—nor did my other wives—and I don’t really know if I ever mean to tell her. Why should I? I’m successful, even-tempered, generous, a careful and considerate lover.
And nothing in my life has been right since the summer of 1958, when Ruth and Donny and Willie and all the rest of us met Meg Loughlin and her sister Susan.
Chapter Two
I was alone back by the brook, lying on my stomach across the Big Rock with a tin can in my hand. I was scooping up crayfish. I had two of them already in a larger can beside me. Little ones. I was looking for their mama.
The brook ran fast along either side of me. I could feel the spray on my bare feet dangling near the water. The water was cold, the sun warm.
I heard a sound in the bushes and looked up. The prettiest girl I’d ever seen was smiling at me over the embankment.
She had long tanned legs and long red hair tied back in a ponytail, wore shorts and a pale-colored blouse open at the neck. I was twelve and a half. She was older.
I remember smiling back at her, though I was rarely agreeable to strangers.
“Crayfish,” I said. I dumped out a tin of water.
“Really?”
I nodded.
“Big ones?”
“Not these. You can find them, though.”
“Can I see?”
She dropped down off the bank just like a boy would, not sitting first, just putting her left hand to the ground and vaulting the three-foot drop to the first big stone in the line that led zigzag across the water. She studied the line a moment and then crossed to the Rock. I was impressed. She had no hesitation and her balance was perfect. I made room for her. There was suddenly this fine clean smell sitting next to me.
Her eyes were green. She looked around.
To all of us back then the Rock was something special. It sat smack in the middle of the deepest part of the brook, the water running clear and fast around it. You had room for four kids sitting or six standing up. It had been a pirate ship, Nemo’s
Nautilus,
and a canoe for the Lenni Lennape among other things. Today the water was maybe three and a half feet deep. She seemed happy to be there, not scared at all.
“We call this the Big Rock,” I said. “We used to, I mean. When we were kids.”
“I like it,” she said. “Can I see the crayfish? I’m Meg.”
“I’m David. Sure.”
She peered down into the can. Time went by and we said nothing. She studied them. Then she straightened up again.
“Neat.”
“I just catch ‘em and look at ’em awhile and then let them go.”
“Do they bite?”
“The big ones do. They can’t hurt you, though. And the little ones just try to run.”
“They look like lobsters.”
“You never saw a crayfish before?”
“Don’t think they have them in New York City.” She laughed. I didn’t mind. “We get lobsters, though.
They
can hurt you.”
“Can you keep one? I mean, you can’t keep a lobster like a pet or anything, right?”
She laughed again. “No. You eat them.”
“You can’t keep a crayfish either. They die. One day or maybe two, tops. I hear people eat them too, though.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Some do. In Louisiana or Florida or someplace.”
We looked down into the can.
“I don’t know,” she said, smiling. “There’s not a whole lot to eat down there.”
“Let’s get some big ones.”
We lay across the Rock side by side. I took the can and slipped both arms down into the brook. The trick was to turn the stones one at a time, slowly so as not to muddy the water, then have the can there ready for whatever scooted out from under. The water was so deep I had my shortsleeve shirt rolled all the way up to my shoulders. I was aware of how long and skinny my arms must look to her. I know they looked that way to me.
I felt pretty strange beside her, actually. Uncomfortable but excited. She was different from the other girls I knew, from Denise or Cheryl on the block or even the girls at school. For one thing she was maybe a hundred times prettier. As far as I was concerned she was prettier than Natalie Wood. Probably she was smarter than the girls I knew too, more sophisticated. She lived in New York City after all and had eaten
lobsters
. And she moved just like a boy. She had this strong hard body and easy grace about her.
All that made me nervous and I missed the first one. Not an enormous crayfish but bigger than what we had. It scudded backward beneath the Rock.
She asked if she could try. I gave her the can.
“New York City, huh?”
“Yup.”
She rolled up her sleeves and dipped down into the water. And that was when I noticed the scar.
“Jeez. What’s that?”
It started just inside her left elbow and ran down to the wrist like a long pink twisted worm. She saw where I was looking.
“Accident,” she said. “We were in a car.” Then she looked back into the water where you could see her reflection shimmering.
“Jeez.”
But then she didn’t seem to want to talk much after that.
“Got any more of ’em?”
I don’t know why scars are always so fascinating to boys, but they are, it’s a fact of life, and I just couldn’t help it. I couldn’t shut up about it yet. Even though I knew she wanted me to, even though we’d just met. I watched her turn over a rock. There was nothing under it. She did it correctly though; she didn’t muddy the water. I thought she was terrific.
She shrugged.
“A few. That’s the worst.”
“Can I see ’em?”
“No. I don’t think so.”
She laughed and looked at me a certain way and I got the message. And then I did shut up for a while.
She turned another rock. Nothing.
“I guess it was a bad one, huh? The accident?”
She didn’t answer that at all and I didn’t blame her. I knew how stupid and awkward it sounded, how insensitive, the moment I said it. I blushed and was glad she wasn’t looking.
Then she got one.
The rock slid over and the crayfish backed right out into the can and all she had to do was bring it up.
She poured off some water and tilted the can toward the sunlight. You could see that nice gold color they have. Its tail was up and its pincers waving and it was stalking the bottom of the can, looking for somebody to fight.
“You got her!”
“First try
!
”
“Great! She’s really great.”
“Let’s put her in with the others.”
She poured the water out slowly so as not to disturb her or lose her exactly the way you were supposed to, though nobody had told her, and then when there was only an inch or so left in the can, plunked her into the bigger can. The two that were already in there gave her plenty of room. That was good because crayfish would kill each other sometimes, they’d kill their own kind, and these two others were just little guys.
In a while the new one calmed down and we sat there watching her. She looked primitive, efficient, deadly, beautiful. Very pretty color and very sleek of design.
I stuck my finger in the can to stir her up again.
“Don’t.”
Her hand was on my arm. It was cool and soft.
I took my finger out again.
I offered her a stick of Wrigley’s and took one myself. Then all you could hear for a while was the wind whooshing through the tall thin grass across the embankment and rustling the brush along the brook and the sound of the brook running fast from last night’s rain, and us chewing.
“You’ll put them back, right? You promise?”
“Sure. I always do.”
“Good.”
She sighed and then stood up.
“I’ve got to get back I guess. We’ve got shopping to do. But I wanted to look around first thing. I mean, we’ve never had a woods before. Thanks, David. It was fun.”
She was halfway across the stones by the time I thought to ask her.
“Hey! Back where? Where are you going?”
She smiled. “We’re staying with the Chandlers. Susan and I. Susan’s my sister.”
Then I stood too, like somebody had jerked me to my feet on invisible strings.
“The Chandlers?
Ruth?
Donny and Willie’s mom?”
She finished crossing and turned and stared at me. And something in her face was different now all of a sudden. Cautious.
It stopped me.
“That’s right. We’re cousins. Second cousins. I’m Ruth’s niece I guess.”
Her voice had gone odd on me too. It sounded flat—like there was something I wasn’t supposed to know. Like she was telling me something and hiding it at the same time.
It confused me for a moment. I had the feeling that maybe it confused her too.
It was the first I’d seen her flustered. Even including the stuff about the scar.
I didn’t let it bother me though.
Because the Chandlers’ house was right next door to my house.
And Ruth was . . . well, Ruth was great. Even if her kids were jerks sometimes. Ruth was great.
“Hey!” I said. “We’re neighbors! Mine’s the brown house next door!”
I watched her climb the embankment. When she got to the top she turned and her smile was back again, the clean open look she’d had when she first sat down beside me on the Rock.
She waved. “See you, David.”
“See you, Meg.”
Neat, I thought. Incredible. I’ll be seeing her all the time.
 
It was the first such thought I’d ever had.
I realize that now.
That day, on that Rock, I met my adolescence head-on in the person of Megan Loughlin, a stranger two years older than I was, with a sister, a secret, and long red hair. That it seemed so natural to me, that I emerged unshaken and even happy about the experience I think said much for my future possibilities—and of course for hers.
When I think of that, I hate Ruth Chandler.
 
Ruth, you were beautiful then.
I’ve thought about you a lot—no, I’ve researched you, I’ve gone that far, dug into your past, parked across the street one day from that Howard Avenue office building you were always telling us about, where you ran the whole damn show while the Boys were away fighting The Big One, the War to End All Wars Part Two—that place where you were utterly, absolutely indispensable until the “little GI pukes came struning back home again,” as you put it, and sud denly you were out of a job. I parked there and it looked ordinary, Ruth. It looked squalid and sad and boring.
I drove to Morristown where you were born and that was nothing too. Of course I didn’t know where your house was supposed to be but I certainly couldn’t see your grand disappointed dreams being born there either, in that town, I couldn’t see the riches your parents supposedly thrust upon you, showered you with, I couldn’t see your wild frustration.
I sat in your husband Willie Sr.’s bar—Yes!—I found him, Ruth! In Fort Myers, Florida, where he’d been ever since he left you with your three squalling brats and a mortgage all these thirty years ago, I found him playing barkeep to the senior citizens, a mild man, amiable, long past his prime—I sat there and looked at his face and into his eyes and we talked and I couldn’t see the man you always said he was, the stud, the “lovely Irish bastard, ” that mean sonovabitch. He looked like a man gone soft and old to me. A drinkers nose, a drinkers gut, a fat fallen ass in a pair of baggy britches. And he looked like he’d never been hard, Ruth. Never. That was the surprise, really.

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