The Girl Next Door (26 page)
“Did you tell him?”
“Tell who? Tell him what? What are you talking about?”
“Don’t hack around with me, David. Ruth said you told her it might be Jennings at the door.”
“So who the hell do you think it was, assface?”
Oh Jesus, I thought. Oh shit. And I’d begged her not to scream.
We could have stopped it then and there.
I had to play it through for them though.
“You’re kidding,” I said.
“I’m not kidding.”
“Mr. Jennings? My God, it was just a
guess.”
guess.”
“Pretty good guess,” said Willie.
“It was just a thing to say to get her...”
“Get her what?”
Up there
I thought.
I thought.
“To get her
moving
again. Christ, you saw her. She was like a fucking zombie down here!”
moving
again. Christ, you saw her. She was like a fucking zombie down here!”
They looked at each other.
“She did get pretty weird,” said Donny.
Willie shrugged. “Yeah. I guess so.”
I wanted to keep them going. So they wouldn’t think about my being here alone with her.
“What’d you say?” I asked. “Was he after Meg?”
“Sort of,” said Donny. “Said he just dropped by to see how the nice young girls were doing. So we showed him Susan in her room. Said Meg was out shopping. Susan didn’t say a word of course—didn’t dare to. So I guess he bought it. Seemed kinda uncomfortable. Kinda shy for a cop.”
“Where’s your mom?”
“She said she wanted to lie down awhile.”
“What’ll you do for dinner?”
It was an inane thing to say but the first thing I thought of.
“I dunno. Cook some dogs out on the grill I guess. Why? Want to come over?”
“I’ll ask my mother,” I said. I looked at Meg. “What about her?” I asked him.
“What about her?”
“You gonna just leave her there or what? You ought to put something on those burns at least. They’ll get infected.”
“Fuck her,” said Willie. “I ain’t sure I’m done with her yet.”
He bent over and picked up Woofer’s knife.
He tossed it in his hand, blade to handle, and slouched and grinned and looked at her.
“Then again maybe I am,” he said. “I dunno. I dunno.” He walked toward her. And then so that she could hear him very clearly and distinctly he said, “I
just don’t know.”
Taunting her.
just don’t know.”
Taunting her.
I decided to ignore him.
“I’ll go and ask my mother,” I told Donny.
I didn’t want to stay to see what his choice would be. There was nothing I could do anyway one way or another. Some things you had to let go of. You had to keep your mind on what you could do. I turned and climbed the stairs.
At the top I took a moment to check the door.
I was counting on their laziness, their lack of organization.
I checked the lock.
And yes, it was still broken.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
It was a time when even the guilty displayed a rare innocence.
In our town burglary was unheard of. Burglaries happened in cities but not out here—that was one of the reasons our parents had left the cities in the first place.
Doors were closed against the cold and wind and rain, but not against people. So that when the lock on a door or window snapped or rusted through over years of bad weather more often than not it got left that way. Nobody needed a lock to keep out the snow.
The Chandlers’ house was no exception.
There was a screen door in back with a lock that I don’t think had ever worked—not in living memory. Then a wooden door that had warped slightly and in such a way that the tongue of the lock didn’t match with the lip on the doorjamb anymore.
Even with Meg held prisoner there they’d never bothered to repair it.
That left the metal icehouse door to the shelter itself, which bolted. It was a clumsy, noisy affair but all you had to do was throw the bolt.
I thought it could be done.
At three twenty-five in the morning I set out to see.
I had a penlight flashlight, a pocketknife and thirty-seven dollars in snow-shoveling money in my pocket. I wore sneakers and jeans and the T-shirt my mother’d dyed black for me after Elvis wore one in
Loving You.
By the time I crossed the driveway to their yard the T-shirt was plastered to my back like a second skin.
Loving You.
By the time I crossed the driveway to their yard the T-shirt was plastered to my back like a second skin.
The house was dark.
I stepped up onto the porch and waited, listening. The night was still and clear beneath a three-quarter moon.
The Chandler house seemed to breathe at me, creaking like the bones of a sleeping old woman.
It was scary.
For a moment I wanted to forget about this, go home and get into bed and pull up the covers. I wanted to be in another town entirely. All that evening I’d fantasized my mother or my father saying, well David, I don’t know how to break this to you but we’re moving.
No such luck.
I kept seeing myself getting caught on the stairs. Suddenly the light would go on and there would be Ruth above me pointing a shotgun. I doubt they even owned a gun. But I saw it anyway. Over and over like a record stuck in the final groove.
You’re nuts, I kept thinking.
But I’d promised.
And as frightening as this was, today had scared me more. Looking at Ruth I’d finally seen all the way through to the end of it. Clearly and unmistakably I’d finally seen Meg dying.
I don’t know how long I stood there waiting on the porch.
Long enough to hear the tall Rose of Sharon scrape the house in a gentle breeze, to become aware of the frogs croaking from the brook and the crickets in the woods. Long enough for my eyes to adjust to the darkness and for the normalcy of frogs and crickets speaking to each other in the night to calm me. So that after a while what I finally felt was not so much the sheer terror I’d started with as excitement—excitement at finally doing something, something for Meg and for myself, and something no one I knew had ever done. It helped me to think about that. About the moment-by-moment present tense reality of what I was doing. If I did that I could make it into a sort of game. I was breaking into a house at night and people were sleeping. That was all. Not dangerous people. Not Ruth. Not the Chandlers. Just people. I was a cat burglar. Cool and careful and stealthy. No one was going to catch me. Not tonight and not ever.
I opened the outer screen door.
It made barely a whimper.
The inner door was trickier. Its wood had expanded with humidity. I turned the handle and pressed my fingers against the doorjamb, my thumb against the door. I pushed slowly, gently.
It groaned.
I pushed harder and more steadily. I held tight to the handle, keeping a slight backward pressure so that when it did open it wouldn’t pop and shudder.
It groaned some more.
I was sure the entire house was hearing this. Everybody.
I still could run if I had to. It was good to know.
Then all of a sudden it opened. With even less noise than the screen had made.
I listened.
I stepped inside onto the landing.
I turned on the penlight. The stairs were cluttered with rags, mops, brushes, pails—stuff Ruth used for cleaning, along with jars of nails and paint cans and thinner. Luckily most of it lined just the one side, the side opposite the wall. I knew the stairs were going to be firmest and least creaky right next to the wall, where they’d have support. If I was going to get caught this was the likeliest place, the place there’d be the most noise. I stepped down carefully.
At each stair I’d stop and listen. I’d vary the time between steps so there’d be no rhythm to it.
But each stair had its say.
It took forever.
Then finally I was at the bottom. By then my heart felt ready to burst. I couldn’t believe they hadn’t heard me.
I crossed to the shelter door.
The basement smelled of damp and mildew and laundry—and something like spilt sour milk.
I threw the bolt as quietly and evenly as possible. Metal squealed against metal all the same.
I opened the door and stepped inside.
It was only then, I think, that I remembered what I was doing here in the first place.
Meg sat in the comer on her air mattress, her back against the wall, waiting. In the thin beam of light I could see how frightened she was. And how badly the day had gone for her.
They’d given her a thin rumpled shirt to put on and that was all. Her legs were bare.
Willie had been at them with the knife.
There were lines and scratches crisscrossed across her thighs and down her calves almost to her ankles.
There was blood on the shirt as well. Dried blood mostly—but not all. Some of it seeping through.
She stood up.
She walked toward me and I could see a fresh bruise on her temple.
For all of that she still looked firm and ready.
She started to say something but I put my finger to my lips, hushing her.
“I’ll leave the bolt and the back door open,” I whispered.
“They’ll think they just forgot. Give me maybe a half an hour. Stay to the wall side on the stairs and try not to run. Donny’s fast. He’d catch you. Here.”
I dug into my pocket and handed her the money. She looked at it. Then she shook her head.
“Better not,” she whispered. “If something goes wrong and they find it on me they’ll know somebody’s been here. We’d never get another chance. Leave it for me...” She thought for a moment. “Leave it at the Big Rock. Put a stone on top of it or something. I’ll find it, don’t worry.”
“Where will you go?” I said.
“I don’t know. Not yet. Back to Mr. Jennings maybe. Not too far. I want to stay close to Susan. I’ll find a way to let you know as soon as I can.”
“You want the flashlight?”
She shook her head again. “I know the stairs. You keep it. Go ahead. Go. Get out of here.”
I turned to leave.
“David?”
I turned again and she was suddenly next to me, reaching up. I saw the tears gleam bright in her eyes just as she closed them and kissed me.
Her lips were battered, broken, chapped and torn.
They were the softest, most beautiful things that had ever touched me, that I had ever touched.
I felt my own tears come all in a rush.
“God! I’m sorry, Meg. I’m
sorry.”
sorry.”
I could barely get it out. All I could do was stand there and shake my head and ask her to forgive me.
“David,” she said. “David.
Thank
you. What you do last—that’s what counts.”
Thank
you. What you do last—that’s what counts.”
I looked at her. It was as though I were drinking her in, as though I were somehow becoming her.
I wiped my eyes, my face.
I nodded and turned to go.
Then I had a thought. “Wait,” I said.
I stepped outside the shelter and ran the flashlight beam across the walls. I found what I was looking for. I took the tire iron off the nails and walked back and handed it to her.
“If you need to,” I said.
She nodded.
“Good luck, Meg,” I said and quietly closed the door.
And then I was in the midst of it again, in the close jarring silence of the sleeping house, moving slowly upward to the doorway, weighing each step against the creaking of beds and the whispers of the branches of trees.
And then I was out the door.
I ran across the yard to the driveway, cut through to the back of my house and into the woods. The moon was bright but I knew the path without the moon. I heard the water rushing full by the brook.
At the Rock I stooped to pick up some stones and lowered myself carefully down over the embankment. The surface of the water gleamed in the moonlight, shattered over the rocks. I stepped onto the Rock and dug into my pocket, put the money in a pile and weighed it down with a small neat pyramid of stones.
On the embankment I looked back.
The money and the stones looked pagan to me, like an offering.
Through the rich green scent of leaves I ran home.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
And then I sat in bed and listened to my own house sleeping. I thought it would be impossible to sleep but I hadn’t counted on strain and exhaustion. I dropped off just after dawn, my pillow damp with sweat.
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