The Rust Maidens

  THE

  RUST MAIDENS

  Gwendolyn Kiste

  Copyright 2018 © Gwendolyn Kiste

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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  The views expressed in this work are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

  ISBN: 978-1-947654-44-0 (sc)

  ISBN: 978-1-947654-45-7 (ebook)

  Trepidatio rev. date: November 16, 2018

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018908118

  Printed in the United States of America

  Cover Artwork: Daniele Serra

  Cover Design: Jess Landry

  Ebook layout: Lori Michelle

  Edited by Jess Landry

  Proofread by Scarlett R. Algee

  To Bill, for inspiring the words

  &

  To Jess, for polishing the words

  ONE

  Pray for the Rust Maidens.

  Even after all these years, those words suck the breath right out of my chest.

  I shiver in the street near the old steel mill, reading and rereading those graffiti letters on the crumbling asphalt. The red spray paint is faded now, but time hasn’t erased it the way it should have.

  Instead, here are my memories, waiting to greet me.

  There’s a rusted-out chain link fence in front of me, and past that, the industrial stacks that graze the sky. But I don’t look there. My eyes won’t move past these words.

  Pray for the Rust Maidens.

  As though all the blessings in the world would have done those girls any good.

  My breath fogs around me as the December chill settles deep in my bones. Cleveland. It’s the same as I left it: cold as a broken promise, and just as cruel. This is a city that remembers everything, even what’s best forgotten.

  I shiver in the dark, clutching my entire life in one duffel bag. I could have called my mother from the Chester Avenue Greyhound station across town when I got in, half an hour ago. But I didn’t. I wanted to come here first, and I wanted to come alone. Somehow, I thought seeing this place after all these years would change something, but now that I’m here, I feel worse than before.

  I turn away from the graffiti and look to what’s left of the skyline. The mill is almost a mile from my parents’ house. That’ll be a long mile too, especially with the wind whispering its dark lies over the lake.

  I pull up my jacket collar. If I stay out in the cold much longer, I’ll risk pneumonia, and that won’t do at all. Cleveland couldn’t kill me before. I’ll be damned if it murders me on my first night back.

  It’s not quite midnight yet, and my mother would still pick me up if I called her. I grimace at the thought. Here I stand, forty-six years old, and still needing a lift. Nothing’s gotten better for me since I left. I’ve grown older, but no wiser.

  So I start walking alone, past all the places I once knew.

  The Presbyterian Church, with its pockmarked walls and missing shingles and stained glass window with a crack down the middle. I can’t help but smile. After everything that congregation did to us, the decay is exactly what this church deserves.

  The corner store, once open twenty-four hours, with coffee always on the burner and a little gold bell over the door to announce everyone as they came and went. The whole place is boarded up now, though you can still see the old advertisements peeking out of half-broken windows. The prices are all wrong. It’s 2008, and smokes are at least a dollar more than what’s advertised. This place must have closed ten years ago, but the prices in the window remain the same. It’s trapped in-between. Trapped like me.

  Past the shell of an old Bell Atlantic phone booth. The receiver is long gone, but I’m almost sure I hear a giggle crackling from the end of the severed cord. I shake my head and tell myself it’s the wind.

  ***

  I’m on the last block now, which means there’s no way to avoid it. Denton Street dead-ends in a cul-de-sac, so the only way to my parents’ is past the one place I don’t want to see.

  The house where my cousin Jacqueline grew up.

  I tip my face to the sidewalk, my boots shifting between the jagged cracks in the cement. As I draw nearer, these are the things I promise myself:

  I won’t look at her split-level up ahead.

  I won’t think of her inside, waltzing barefoot down the hallway, her steps softer than a ghost’s.

  I won’t listen for her laugh, crystalline and sweet as a summer day.

  I won’t, I won’t, I won’t.

  It doesn’t matter, though. By the time I climb the front steps to my parents’ house, I’ve broken all three promises.

  At the door of my own home, I knock, and my mother answers.

  “Why didn’t you call me?” She sighs at me. “I would have picked you up, Phoebe.”

  Hearing my own name—especially back in this place—gives me a start, like a spider crawling up my spine. “It’s fine,” I mumble. “It wasn’t very far.”

  That’s not true, and we both know it, but my mother doesn’t argue. She doesn’t do anything. She doesn’t move to hug me, and she doesn’t invite me in. We linger on either side of the threshold, studying each other. Her face hasn’t changed as much as it should have. It’s been so long, yet she still looks like my mother. I wonder if I still look like her daughter.

  Inside, the phone rings, an old-fashioned jacked-into-the-wall kind, and she goes to answer it, leaving the door open in her wake. I stand here, not certain what to do. I shouldn’t have expected any more than this. My mother and I were never ones for affection. That’s a good thing. Right now, the thought of anybody touching me—here, in this city, on this street—makes me almost too queasy to stand.

  With a deep breath, I slip into the house and latch the door behind me.

  “Thank you,” she says from the kitchen. “Please tell him I love him.”

  The phone clunks back into its cradle, and she returns to the room, her face more lined than before.

  I don’t ask her who it was. It’s easy to guess. Someone from the Sweet Evergreen Nursing Home, no doubt. I’ve always loved those chipper names for places where people go to die. Like calling my father’s last home and testament something upbeat will stop his mind from shrinking into itself. No matter where he goes or what the doctors there do, his past will still crash further away from him every day, like driftwood in the lost recesses of Lake Erie. The last time I spoke to him on the phone, he couldn’t even fathom me, the voice of his only child. In the background, my mother was sobbing so hard that she couldn’t take the phone from him, which left me to hear the endless loop of his questions.

  “Who is this? Do I know you? Where are you from? Who is this?”

  I was too numb to answer. The next week, my mother took him on the long ride to Sweet Evergreen on Cleveland’s East Side, and now here I am in his stead, back to help her clean up what’s left of their lives. So much for my parents’ golden years.

  “It’s too late to order takeout,” she says. “But there�
��s pizza in the fridge.”

  I shake my head. “I’m not hungry.”

  I might as well have not bothered to answer, because my mother returns to the kitchen, where she reheats two slimy slices of yesterday’s dinner and delivers them to me on a yellowed paper plate. I sit at the flimsy card table in the corner and don’t complain. The dining room furniture has already retreated to storage, along with the couch where I sprawled out every summer growing up, and the Montgomery Ward stereo I cranked so loud that Bob Seger nearly blew out the speakers. There’s an echo in this house where my childhood used to be.

  After I’ve choked down stringy cheese and grease, we linger together in silence. There’s plenty for us to discuss, but no way for us to cut through the marrow of years to get to it. We certainly don’t want to talk about them. Those five girls. The so-called Rust Maidens. As my mother tosses my plate in the trash, I sneak upstairs to my bedroom. I expect it to be empty too, but I’m wrong. Everything is as I left it when I was eighteen, not a single knick-knack out of place. Along the far wall, a Jaws poster stares back at me, tape peeling at the edges but somehow intact. When I was thirteen, I spent a month’s allowance to bribe the usher at the old theater at Kamms Plaza to save this poster for me when the film’s run was over.

  “Worth every penny,” I’d told Jacqueline when we were walking home afterward. She just laughed.

  That sweet clear laugh I can still hear.

  My mother materializes next to me in the doorway. “I thought it would be rude to move your things,” she says, as though I asked for an explanation. I didn’t. I’d rather not have anything about this place explained to me.

  “I’ll sleep downstairs,” I say, and close the door.

  But before I can move toward the steps, my mother catches my hand.

  “Phoebe,” she says, and pulls me into her arms. The weight of the time we’ve lost is suddenly heavier than I ever imagined it. The weight of twenty-eight years. That’s how long it’s been: twenty-eight years, four months, and eight days. I always remember the exact number, adding another tally mark each morning over my coffee and creamer, like I’m a bored prisoner tracking the incarceration of my own life.

  “I missed you.” She holds me a little closer. “Thank you for coming back.”

  “Thank you for having me,” I say, and don’t know whether or not I mean it.

  We stand a long time this way, pretending we’re a proper mother and daughter. It’s a passable lie.

  “I should go to bed,” she says, and disappears across the hall without another word.

  ***

  All night, I wander up and down the stairs and through hollow rooms, a specter in my own life—or what used to be my life. Now it doesn’t belong to anyone.

  Last month, my mother sold the house to an investment firm. They’re tearing down the whole street and converting it to condos. Or they were, until the recession got the best of them. But since they’ve already got the permits and paid the construction crew, they’re still tearing it down. Just for the fun of it, I guess.

  In the kitchen, I tiptoe through the darkness and open the door to the attached garage. My breath lodges in my chest.

  My Chevy Impala, split-pea green and somehow in pristine condition. My father, his calloused machinist’s hands always eager to tinker, must have kept it this way for when I came home and we could work on the car together. No matter how many times I told them otherwise, my parents always thought I would be back.

  “Maybe this Christmas,” they’d say on the phone, but every December came and went without a visit, until this one. Now here I am, but my father’s gone. Everything I do always feels a moment too late.

  I shut off the garage light and close the door behind me.

  Outside, I sneak through the backyard, overgrown and gray, already knowing where I’m going. A place I’m astounded still exists. In the dark, it’s no more than a shadow high up in the elm tree, but I could close my eyes and see it clearly any time of day.

  When I was a kid, other girls had vanities and oversized makeup kits and closets bulging with flared jeans and culottes and bow blouses. I had a bug house. For my thirteenth birthday, my father and I converted a treehouse into a summer sanctuary for butterflies and lightning bugs and annual cicadas. This was my past, and it was supposed to be my future. A girl obsessed with insects, who would go to school to learn about insects, who would raise and study and love insects. Now all that’s left of that dream is rotting in an old tree that stands alone in my parents’ yard, surrounded by empty lots where houses used to be.

  My feet unsteady, I start climbing the rope ladder. It’s frayed and shaky, and I’m half-convinced it won’t hold my weight, but I manage to get to the top, where I stand at the threshold of what used to be mine. Then I step inside, the ceiling just high enough that I don’t have to hunch. The place smells musty, a heady blend of rotten leaves and earth and a past best left forgotten.

  Here, in the gloom, I should be alone, but I’m not. There’s something curled against the far wall, something that seems to be moving. The night whirls around me, and I wheeze out a gasp, convinced I’ve cornered a ghost.

  But the figure shifts, and I see it’s only a sleeping teenage girl. She’s smaller than a shadow and nearly as insubstantial. Her eyes open and flick up at me.

  “I’m sorry,” she says, and scrambles to her feet.

  I stare at her shape, still half-obscured in darkness. “What are you doing here?”

  “I don’t know,” she says, and shrugs. “I just come up here sometimes. To think.”

  “Does Mrs. Shaw know?” I ask, and the question sounds all wrong to me. It’s always weird to call your mother by a formal name. Even weirder when you don’t know your mother anymore.

  The girl shakes her head. “Nobody really knows,” she says. “Nobody really cares, either. Have you seen this neighborhood lately?”

  I exhale a laugh in spite of myself.

  The girl hesitates, studying me in the moonlight. “You’re Phoebe, aren’t you?”

  I don’t say anything, but she knows she’s right. She’s in my backyard, after all.

  The girl keeps watching me, her face bright and hopeful. Given that starry-eyed look of hers, she’s liable at any moment to pull out an autograph book and a red pen. A gruesome and obscure celebrity—that’s what I’ve become.

  “I’m Quinn,” the girl says, as though I asked her. I realize I should have—that would have been the polite thing to do, the thing anyone with even the most elementary manners would have done—but these days, I interact with so few people that I don’t remember what’s normal anymore. I’m a woman with almost half a century of life experience, who still can’t do a convincing impression of a human being.

  “I’m Phoebe,” I say, not because she doesn’t know my name, but because I feel like I don’t. I tell myself it’s good to keep practicing it, to keep reminding myself what’s what. Quinn moves out of the shadow and sits cross-legged next to me. I expect her to ask me about the girls, about what happened to them, but instead, she does the opposite. She talks about herself. Her whole life story pours out of her in an instant—she’s eighteen and aimless and desperate to escape this town—and from the way her voice keeps rising higher, I wonder if I’m the first person she’s ever had to listen to her, to really listen.

  I sit with her, not saying a word, and I suddenly feel bad for no reason. It’s probably because I don’t even care about myself these days. That means this girl certainly can’t rely on me to care about her.

  “I can’t believe it’s you,” she says, breathless from spinning the yarn of her life. “We thought you were never coming back.”

  I almost ask who we are, but then I’m not sure I’ll like the answer, so I just sit back on my heels and stare at the floor, saying nothing while my fingers follow a shape etched into the floorboards. A triple moon. It’s a beautiful sign: two crescents on either side of a full moon.

  “I didn’t carve that,” Quinn s
ays, as though I accused her. “It’s always been here. At least since I was a kid.”

  I nod. I know it isn’t her work. That’s because I remember who did this, whose hand made this mark that can never be erased.

  “I should go.” I withdraw my fingers from the etching and move toward the doorway. “You should go home, too.”

  “Home?” Quinn scoffs and gazes out into the haze of the city. “Nobody on this street has that anymore.”

  I climb back down the fraying rope ladder, but that doesn’t stop her. She follows behind me, chattering the whole way, though I do my best not to listen. I’ve got enough problems of my own. I don’t need hers.

  I get to the back step, desperate to be free of her, but the door’s locked. Of course it is. This latch always caught. My dad never did fix it like he said he would.

  I shift into the space between houses and move for the front door. I’ll have to knock again. This is becoming a strange habit: requesting to be let into my own home. Quinn keeps pace behind me.

  At the end of the cul-de-sac, the bulldozers are ready to start their work for the day. Next to the rubble-filled lot where the old mansion used to be, an abandoned house is being prepped for demolition. Glass and wood and plaster and all those other things that gave shape to our lives will be crushed to dust in an instant.

  “Phoebe.” Quinn puts a hand on my arm and I turn toward her.

  Please just leave me alone, I want to say. Go away, go away, go away.

  But out here, the sun is starting to rise, and in the vague glow of daylight, her face is clear to me for the first time. She looks like someone I used to know. The way her copper hair falls across her eyes, how she chews her bottom lip, the quiet movement of her steps, like she’s dancing just above the pavement.

  I don’t know this girl. Her family didn’t move to this street until after I left. But that doesn’t change how much she reminds me of her. In a way, she reminds me of all of those girls. How out of place she seems, even at home.

  “Can I show you something?” she asks, and I can’t stop myself.

  I say yes.