The Rust Maidens Read online

  Nearby, everyone clambered for a closer look at the fence, pretending the chain-link was the problem and not the girls. Her head down, Dawn skittered out of the way. People should have been crowding around her, demanding how she did it, but nobody bothered. She slid so easily through the crowd, and it was almost as if she’d made herself invisible, unseen by everyone except me.

  I kept staring at her, kept wondering what it would be like to be her. She scanned all the faces around us, slowly, before her gaze turned to me. Instantly, I felt caught. In a way, I was, because she took my staring as permission to shuffle over to me. We stood quietly together as she gathered the courage it took to speak.

  “What’s she like?” she whispered at last.

  I gaped at her, not certain who she meant. Then the answer twisted deep in my chest.

  Eleanor. Dawn had given birth to her, but other than the delivery, they must not have let her see the baby, or hold her, or do any of the normal things that other mothers take for granted. The doctors probably felt they couldn’t trust Dawn, not with those arms of cut steel and that body where her water never stopped breaking. That meant she didn’t even know her own child. But I did.

  My heart heavy in my chest, I shrugged. “She’s a baby,” I said, grasping for something better. “Aren’t they all the same?”

  This was the wrong answer, and I knew it. Dawn wouldn’t complain, though. She probably didn’t remember how. With her face down, she just nodded, ready to return home soon. Ready to go back to prison.

  “She looks like you,” I blurted. “Or… how you used to look.”

  This wasn’t what I’d meant to say, and it wasn’t even really true, but it was the right answer, because Dawn instantly brightened. She reached out for my hand, and it took everything in me not to recoil from those fingers, each one trimmed with jagged metal and glass.

  “Thank you, Phoebe,” she said, and I thought how much her hands felt like Jacqueline’s. Painful and dangerous, but familiar too.

  Dawn smiled, the first real smile I’d ever seen on her, before she disappeared back into the crowd, at ease in spite of everything.

  Behind me, some of the men gathered closer to the chain-link fence, testing the metal with their own hands, discovering to the surprise of no one that their fingers weren’t so nimble as the girls’.

  “How did they do it?” they asked. “And what does it mean?”

  “It was just a trick,” the mothers whispered, and they all tittered in agreement, because it was easier to do that than try to understand the truth.

  But Lisa was right: it was too late. Too late to convince anyone that the Rust Maidens were like us, just normal girls feeling a bit under the weather. Our fathers jolted away from the fence, suspicion boiling in their eyes, and the mothers’ whispers turned to ugly barbs in their mouths.

  “This isn’t safe,” someone said. “They aren’t safe.”

  In an instant, our lives had changed. Lisa put her hand on that fence, and the girls became something else. Something dangerous in ways we couldn’t understand.

  Things couldn’t last like this. Not for much longer, not if the strike didn’t clear up soon like some nagging cold.

  Though the summer swelter draped heavily on my shoulders, I crossed my arms in front of me and shuddered. The flame of the mill burned bright overhead, but its warmth might as well have been a thousand miles away.

  NINE

  On Wednesday, I dressed before dawn. It was the most important morning of the week. The day the Rust Maidens were due at the clinic.

  After the debacle at the picket line, I’d offered to take Kathleen and Lisa to the doctor’s appointment. Their father was too drunk to drive anywhere any time of day, and nobody else would ride alone in a car with them. Everyone used Lisa’s trick with the chain link fence as their reason, but after years of not trusting the Carter girls, that was only an excuse.

  I wanted an excuse of my own. A pretext for going to the clinic. Anything to have a chance to see Jacqueline. I was the opposite of everyone else on Denton Street, but in a way, just as bad.

  Downstairs, my mother was already awake.

  “It’s hot today,” she said. “You sure you want to wear that outfit?”

  I glanced down at my heavy bell bottoms and scoffed. “Since when does me being overdressed bother you?”

  She gripped her second morning cocktail tighter, not looking at me. “Just trying to be helpful, Phoebe.”

  Shame burned my cheeks. For once, she was only being a mother, concerned and kind and brimming with unwelcome advice. But I didn’t want to explain why there would be no skirts or dresses for the next week, temperature be damned. This was my punishment for toppling from the lattice. Any way to conceal my still festering wound.

  A knock at the door. Lisa’s crystalline giggle leaked through from the other side. My mother and I both froze, caught off-guard by that sound, so metallic and otherworldly.

  Then my mother grunted out a laugh.

  “Have fun with them today,” she said and poured herself another drink, as I went to the door alone.

  Outside, in the driveway, Lisa slid into the backseat, humming a nursery rhyme out of tune. Kathleen got in next to her, leaving me to chauffeur.

  With all the doors locked, I exhaled for courage and turned the key in the ignition. The Carpenters’ “We’ve Only Just Begun” blared through the speakers. This jolted me. Had it been that long since I’d driven anywhere? Was that day at the shoreline, graduation day, the last time I’d started the engine? It must have been. I wouldn’t have left it on this station.

  Maybe this was a good sign, though. A sign from Jacqueline. After all, we would be together today.

  What I didn’t expect was to see her so soon, not even a half mile away from the house. Except I wasn’t the one who spotted her.

  “Should we stop for Jacqueline?” Lisa asked, her long gnarled finger pointing languidly at the bus stop.

  There Jacqueline was at the end of Denton Street, waiting alone for the RTA.

  The Impala shrieked to a stop, and I threw open the driver’s door.

  She wouldn’t look at me. Nearby, a red-nosed man in tattered corduroys lumbered past, gripping a brown bag-wrapped bottle and cursing at the sun for daring to shine.

  “What are you doing?” I asked Jacqueline.

  “I’m fine, Phoebe,” she said. “I don’t need a ride.”

  That was a message from Aunt Betty. She was working at the corner store and couldn’t take Jacqueline to the appointment herself. But she wouldn’t let her come with me, either.

  Kathleen cracked the backseat window. “Get in,” she said. “We’re going to be late.”

  I stepped out of the Impala and moved toward Jacqueline on the sidewalk. Not too fast, not too close. I didn’t want to push this time.

  “Please,” I said. “Besides, it’s not safe for you to ride the bus looking like that.”

  Looking like you, I meant. Since the last time I saw her, the skin across her face had thinned, just like Lisa’s, and hints of pewter-colored bones peeked out behind the apples of her cheeks.

  But Jacqueline didn’t budge. “You and I aren’t the same now, Phoebe,” she said. “We haven’t been the same for a long time.”

  I stared at her, pain churning inside me. “That’s not true,” I whispered.

  “But it is,” she said. “You can’t keep trying to save me all the time.”

  I exhaled, ready to say something else, to argue with her, but the red-nosed man in the corduroys was right next to me, groaning in my ear. With a careless, greasy hand, he shoved me into the gutter and lurched forward to take hold of Jacqueline. She cried out, but he didn’t let go, not even when her body sliced open his palms.

  “You’re one of them freaks,” he slurred. “This is all your fault. Everything going wrong is your fault.”

  I pulled myself to my feet, furious that I hadn’t anticipated it, that I hadn’t been able to stop him in time. By now, Kathleen w
as out of the car too, and together, she and I screamed and did our best to pry the man off Jacqueline. He struck me across the face, his fingers smudged with nicotine and smelling of Boone’s Farm apple wine. But I didn’t stop, I wouldn’t stop, not until she was safe.

  An open palm to his jaw—my palm this time—and he stumbled backward, but didn’t let go. Instead, his hand tighter than before around Jacqueline’s wrist, he yanked her farther from us, down the sidewalk and into an alley. With dark tears streaking her cheeks, she cried out, that discordant but horribly beautiful wail.

  The sound buzzed through our veins, doubling us over, but it wasn’t enough. Though half-dazed, this man wasn’t done with her yet. He pulled her body closer to him as he thrust his face at hers.

  “I’ll stop you, I’ll stop all of you,” he was saying, and I struggled toward them, dizzy and terrified I’d be too late to help her.

  Then a voice behind us stopped the world.

  “Please leave her alone.” Lisa, now out of the car. Ethereal but calm. “Or you’ll be very sorry.”

  The man stopped and gazed at Lisa, at the unknowable look on her face. He didn’t understand much, but he suddenly realized he’d gotten more than he expected here. His grasp gone slack, Jacqueline yanked her hand free and wiped his blood from her puckered skin, but she didn’t run. She just stared into him, something dark brewing behind her eyes.

  Lisa pushed past me and joined Jacqueline in the alley. The man backed slowly away from them, until he hit the wall and his trembling body slid down the crumbling brick.

  “I hope they take you all away,” he mumbled.

  “Do you now?” Jacqueline asked, and moved toward him. Lisa moved toward him too. They were both standing over him now, their bodies sharp and dangerous and ready.

  With a smile, Jacqueline lifted one arm over her head, those broken glass fingernails glinting in the sun. Lisa made the same motion. The man’s eyes grew wider, and he let out a strangled moan, but he didn’t fight back. He already knew that against these two girls, he was going to lose. They would rip him to shreds with no more than a flick of their wrists.

  Everything in me seized up. I couldn’t let this happen. Jacqueline wasn’t a monster. She was my best friend. I still knew her, even if she believed we weren’t the same anymore.

  “Jacqueline?” At her side now, I reached out and carefully took her hand, holding it in mine the same way I used to. The way that reminded her who she was.

  Sighing, she lowered her other arm. “Let’s go, Phoebe,” she said.

  The Impala took off down Denton Street, the bleeding man back on the sidewalk and lobbing insults at us until the car was out of sight.

  We drove the rest of the way across town in silence.

  ***

  The clinic was like every other medical facility. The labyrinthine layouts, the inexplicably beeping machines, the stench of bleach masking the slow crawl of death. Hospitals were confusing places that pretended to be orderly, that pretended to make sense. Places that told us to trust them, even though they offered us little reason to do so. People went there to die, didn’t they? Shouldn’t that give us all the reason in the world to be leery? Even cemeteries were more honest. At least people who entered those gates for a stay were already dead.

  At nine o’clock sharp—the official appointment time—all the Rust Maidens were here, one after another, kept apart in their separate rooms. We didn’t even see Violet or Helena, but Lisa was housed next to Jacqueline. We knew because we could hear her babbling nonsense through the paper-thin walls.

  “Can you hear them all?” Lisa asked. “Their heartbeats sound like symphonies.”

  Kathleen cooed. “It will be all right, baby,” she said. “Everything will be fine. Just lie still for a little longer.”

  In our own tiny prison, I stood against one blank white wall. This was a courtesy they extended to us: the doctors let us stay with the girls for a while as they drew test tubes of blood and took vital signs and biopsied samples of their skin without anesthetic. It hurt us more than it hurt the girls.

  “How are you feeling?” I asked Jacqueline when we were alone, and I hated myself a little for sounding just like the others. The doctors, the nurses, all the people with so little investment in them. I should have had something better to say.

  “I’m tired, Phoebe,” she said. “We’re all tired.”

  All. The five of them.

  “How do you know?” I stared at her. “Did they tell you that?”

  She shook her head. “I can just feel it. It’s strange. It’s like I’m still me, but I’m something else now too.”

  I clasped my hands in front of me to keep from shaking. “Are you scared?”

  She chewed her bottom lip and pondered the question, a curious expression twitching across her brow. I held my breath. But when she finally looked ready to answer, another orderly thrust into the room, a needle in hand, and the moment between us was lost. I didn’t know for sure if she was afraid of her own body and what it was doing to her, or if she was afraid of everyone else who couldn’t understand, or if she wasn’t afraid at all.

  When it was time for the X-rays and the stirrups and all the things too invasive to mention in polite company, the doctors put the Rust Maidens on stretchers, one by one, and stole them away from us. I held Jacqueline’s hand for as long as I was able, until the nurses wrenched us apart. Even then, Jacqueline watched me all the way down the hall, flashing me a small, sad goodbye just before they rounded the corner and she was too far for me to reach.

  I lingered in the waiting room for three hours with the other family members. Kathleen, and Dawn’s mother, and the pastor and his wife. Doctor Ross, too. No longer armed with his scrubs and stethoscope, he looked just as lost as the rest of us.

  In the early afternoon, five doctors, all of them men, brought us what they pretended was news.

  “There isn’t a name for what the girls have,” they said, and this explanation went on a long time, with talk of case files and official procedures and things that only mattered if you were a ticker-tape bureaucrat.

  “Their bodies have already changed so much,” the doctors said. “We can’t remove all the foreign body substances without—”

  They didn’t have to finish that sentence. We could finish it for them. Without killing the girls.

  The girls, our girls, the one who might be too far gone now for our help.

  I stepped forward. “If we can’t reverse it,” I said, “then how do we stop it? Or slow it? Or do anything?”

  The doctors all gave me the same stiff, patronizing smile. “That was why we brought them here today. We obviously don’t have all the results yet—”

  “But?” Everything in my body was chilled. “You already know something, don’t you?”

  “Yes. Or at least we have an initial prognosis.”

  Incurable was a word nobody in the room was brave enough to use. Terminal was another. But we all soon understood both of these things to be true.

  “We’ll send them home with some supplements,” the doctors said. “That might help to slow the progression.”

  They passed out prescriptions like they were consolation prizes. Well done on the chintzy game show of life! Though we’re sorry you’ve lost your daughters, please enjoy this parting gift! But first a word from our sponsor: the city of Cleveland, where young girls wither to rust and die just to get out of town.

  With my eyes squeezed closed, I swallowed the fury in the back of my throat like it was a glob of snot before I looked at the doctors again, everything in me shaking and furious.

  “You already knew this,” I said. “You already knew from the home visits that this was hopeless, didn’t you? Why bring them here? Why poke and prod them like that?”

  The doctors weren’t expecting this. They weren’t expecting me to say the truth. The older ones were smart enough to shut up, but one of the younger doctors just shrugged.

  “For research,” he said. “It’s benef
icial to track these things.”

  These things. These girls. These guinea pigs.

  I was already across the room, my fist buried in the young doctor’s smart mouth, before anybody could stop me. Of course, with the blood running down my hand and him wailing like a swaddled infant, they stopped me soon enough, wrestling my still-flailing body into the hallway and pinning me against the wall. They waited on security to do the rest.

  But a minute later, it wasn’t security that arrived. It was the government men, all three of them. The two I didn’t know, and the one I wished I didn’t.

  “That will be all for now,” Adrian said, and dismissed the doctors, who glared at me and grumbled and went back into the waiting room to answer more pointless questions from equally pointless parents. After all, soon they wouldn’t have daughters anymore. And what was the purpose of a parent if they didn’t have a child?

  Adrian stared at me, a bemused smirk growing on his lips. “You really get yourself into it, don’t you, Phoebe?”

  I should have been grateful. In county jail, I would be no use to Jacqueline. But all I could feel was the rage sizzling in my veins. Rage at how everyone, me included, had failed the girls.

  “Don’t talk to me like that.” I spat the words at him. “Don’t pretend we’re friends.”

  Adrian hesitated. “I’m here to help you.”

  “Please stop,” I said. “You can’t keep trying to save me all the time.”

  Instantly, those words took my breath away, the fact that out of all the possible things to say, I’d chosen that. The same thing Jacqueline said to me only hours ago. The same thing that cut me to ribbons inside.

  Adrian took it better than I had. “I apologize, Miss Shaw.” He smiled at me. “Next time, I’ll be sure to let them arrest you.”

  He turned away, and I didn’t stop him. I just leaned against the wall and tried not to bang my head repeatedly against it.

  After the appointment, with the Impala rocketing down Cedar Avenue, Kathleen and I said nothing to the girls. It didn’t matter. Jacqueline and Lisa watched each other in the rearview, their eyes swirling with secrets, and it was clear they already knew. They probably knew the truth before the doctors did. That they were hopeless cases. We were losing them even as they sat right in front of us, dying in plain sight.