The Rust Maidens Read online

  We needed to head back to Denton Street, to get the girls home, but I didn’t consider that neighborhood a good home to any of us right now. I couldn’t take the girls back to the place everyone expected them to die. Not yet. So I took us somewhere else instead.

  Bayton Beach was as quiet as the grave, and that was what I wanted. A chance for us to relax, just for a moment, and for me to figure out what we were going to do next.

  A small laugh bubbling up her throat, Lisa wandered along the beach, dipping her bare feet into the dirty sand. Kathleen plodded behind, always watching.

  Just beyond the shore, the water blossomed in vibrant shades of green. An algae bloom, from the cocktail of chemicals all the factories couldn’t stop churning into the water. According to the hopeful do-gooders across the city, things were getting better. They kept telling us the lake was cleaner now than it had been when we were kids. Days like this made you wonder what kind of fools they took us for.

  Sitting cross-legged in a sea of old crumpled Plain Dealers and broken beer bottles, Jacqueline cleared a spot and traced a triple moon in the sand with the tip of one sharp finger.

  “It’s not your fault,” she said.

  I studied her ever-changing face, glimmering in the sun. Since this morning, a thin seam had appeared along her left cheekbone, exposing a sliver of rusted bone beneath. “What isn’t my fault?” I asked.

  “Everything.” She laughed. “You blame yourself for all of this, but it isn’t you. And you can’t stop it. Nobody can.”

  “I won’t believe that,” I said. Nearby, Lisa splashed in the verdant water, and Kathleen called something indistinct after her. “There’s always hope.”

  Jacqueline smiled, and the whole world lit up around us. “That’s true. But maybe hope doesn’t look the way you expect it to.”

  I wanted to ask her what that meant, but I knew she wouldn’t tell me. So I asked her something else instead, something familiar.

  “I’ll race you to the sun?”

  Jacqueline shook her head, the edge of her thumb rubbing the place on her arm where the doctors had removed vial after vial of blood.

  “Too tired to run,” she said, and I nodded, a knot in my throat.

  “Lisa?” Kathleen’s voice down the beach, strained and scared. “Where are you?”

  I shielded my eyes from the sun and searched the water, but there was no one there. No splashing in the waves. No form at all. Lisa was gone. Devoured by Lake Erie.

  Kathleen screamed, and I scrambled to my feet to help her search. Together we dove into the water, sinking beneath the waves, our eyes open, desperately looking for someone who wasn’t there. The murk and algae rose up into our mouths, and we spewed out the waste of Cleveland, but still, we searched, coming up for air only when we needed it.

  “Lisa?” I screamed her name to the sky, but it seemed so useless. If she didn’t want to be found, why would she answer?

  “Phoebe, where is she? Where is she?” Panic sliced through Kathleen’s words, and she dove down deeper this time, so deep that I was afraid she wouldn’t come back either.

  “Kathleen?” I bobbed on the surface, my body suddenly cold. “Are you here?”

  The whole world went still, and I couldn’t breathe. I looked to the shore, where Jacqueline was still sitting, the same way that I’d left her. From here, I couldn’t see her expression. What was she thinking? What did she know?

  At once, Kathleen surfaced, her face pale, almost blue. She’d stayed under too long. I grabbed her with both hands, taking her by the collar, the only part of her I could keep hold of, and I dragged her through the water and back to the sand. Jacqueline clambered to the edge of the shore to help me.

  “Don’t,” Kathleen murmured as we cleared out a clean space for her. “We have to find Lisa. Have to find her.”

  “There,” Jacqueline said and pointed out to the lake with her glassy finger.

  Lisa waded there, blinking up at us from the depths. As if she never went anywhere at all. Or as if the water gave her back to us. This time, anyway.

  Without a word, she returned to shore, and still half-delirious, Kathleen wrapped her arms tight around her little sister, not noticing where the edges of Lisa’s body jutted into her.

  Over Kathleen’s shoulder, Lisa gazed at Jacqueline, and Jacqueline looked back at her, the two of them knowing something, but not saying it. Their secrets were barbed thorns they couldn’t share with anyone, least of all us.

  The sky clouded over, and thunder rumbled in the distance.

  “We need to leave,” I said. “Now.”

  The rain arrived before we got back to the Impala. Together, we took another drive across town in silence. In the backseat, a still-panting Kathleen curled into Lisa, and for the first time, she looked like the younger sister.

  At the interstate crossing, Euclid Avenue was closed down, a detour for our day from hell. With a sigh, I followed the signs, not realizing until it was too late where it would take us.

  Right past the picket line.

  In a flurry of screams, there were the men, marching back and forth, chanting with their signs, everything as it had been only a few days ago when I was there, and Dawn and Lisa put their fingers through the chain-link. Except now, with no girls on site, they could pretend that things were normal, that this was a normal strike, not one where they had to return each evening to daughters they no longer recognized. Kathleen and Lisa’s father was there, and Dawn’s father too, the picket duty their excuse for not being with the girls at the clinic today.

  And, front and center, there was my father. My strong father with his stern face, chanting for his job. Chanting for our future.

  As the Impala passed, he looked right at me. Then his eyes shifted, and he saw Jacqueline in the passenger’s seat, her gaze set blindly on some faraway point.

  He knew. He knew I’d disobeyed him and Aunt Betty, that I would keep on disobeying them for as long as I could help Jacqueline. That she was all that mattered to me.

  I expected him to scream or scowl or run after the car. But he didn’t. He only turned away, pretending never to have noticed in the first place. I exhaled and kept going, back around to the other side of Euclid and down to Denton Street on the West Side.

  Staying quiet. That was the only way my father could say he was sorry.

  Back home, Lisa and Kathleen skittered away to their house, not even bothering to say goodbye. After everything this afternoon, I couldn’t blame them.

  Jacqueline had to leave me, too. Aunt Betty’s shift at the corner store was ending soon.

  “I love you, Phoebe,” she said.

  Then she disappeared down the sidewalk. I watched her go, and wished I could do anything to make her stay.

  Upstairs, my calf aching, I shivered out of my jeans and sat on the edge of the tub, cleaning out the cut from the lattice. It was oozing yellow and probably needed stitches, but no way was I going to a hospital, not after today’s appointment. I never wanted to go to a doctor again.

  Footsteps in the hallway, and the bathroom door swung open. No knock, no other warning. My mother was on the other side.

  “Phoebe, I was wondering if you could go down to the corner store and pick up—”

  There was no end to that sentence. She just stared at me, her mouth slung open and face gray.

  I stared back, a brown bottle of peroxide still poised in my hand. “I’m just cleaning a cut,” I said, before I realized it. She didn’t know it was from the lattice. She thought it was something else. Something worse.

  “I’m fine.” I reached up and pulled her closer. “See? No rust or glass or anything in there. Just normal blood and pus.”

  It should have been the grossest explanation. She should have turned up her nose at me and sashayed out of the room for another drink.

  Instead, she let out a tiny howl and collapsed in my arms. The scents of cheap gin and her favorite Avon perfume hung heavy in the air, clinging to my body, as she held me close and sobbe
d.

  “I thought…”

  “I know,” I said.

  “This summer,” she whispered, her voice thin and afraid, “with the strike and the girls and everything, I already feel like I’ve lost your father. I can’t lose you too.”

  I entwined her fingers with mine. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m right here.”

  She held me tighter, and I buried my face in her long hair. I wanted this moment to matter. I wanted to tell her everything, how frightened I was, how lost. But I said nothing, and I felt nothing too. All I could do was wish my mother had been right. That I was changing. Then I could be like Jacqueline. Then I could understand my best friend the way that I used to.

  That night, it was TV dinners and TV news, the bad kind. As if there were ever any good updates about the world. Washington State was still cleaning up the mess that Mount St. Helens had made last month, and another old-time actor had died. They all seemed to be doing that lately, like it was the latest Hollywood trend and everybody who was anybody had to get in on it. One foot in the grave or bust.

  Then “Union Update” flashed across the screen in black, block letters, and all the breath in the room seized up at once. My parents and I watched the flicker of the screen, waiting for what would come next.

  The newscaster with the shellacked hair and the Miami tan cleared his throat, anything to delay him from having to say it, those words we always knew we’d hear.

  “At the steel mill, union negotiations have broken down, and management announced today that it will close the doors to the mill indefinitely sometime next week.”

  The newsman turned to the second camera, a shift that spanned an eternity.

  “This story is developing, and we’ll provide more information as we receive it.”

  He moved on to the Indians score, another loss to the Detroit Tigers, and that was it. The update we were waiting for, the one we’d feared. Sometimes the only satisfying answer, the only one that would make you stop wondering, was the only one you never wanted to come.

  But I couldn’t believe it. My ears ached with the echo of those words, and I was certain I’d misheard the far-too-cheerful newscaster.

  I looked frantically between my parents. “What does that mean?”

  My mother swallowed the rest of her drink in one gulp, the best answer she could give, and my father’s mouth was a straight line, so stiff and emotionless that I couldn’t understand it. In this moment, in this house that was so familiar, I couldn’t understand anything. It was like I’d stumbled onto a set that was made to look like my life, but it was only a cheap imitation. Push on the corners, and it would all collapse around you.

  “They’re closing down the mill,” my father said. “That’s what it means, Phoebe.”

  I collapsed back in my chair as the green beans and veal parmesan turned cold in my lap. Our future, new and ugly and wrong, settled over me, so much heavier than I’d ever expected it.

  Then I imagined her. In the house down the street, behind lock and key, Jacqueline was probably in front of the television too, her TV dinner growing as cold as mine, as she heard the same news and realized the truth.

  That everything bad was about to get so much worse.

  TEN

  The neighborhood wives had made up their minds. Over Virginia Slims and pitchers of before-noon Bloody Marys, they held a meeting during the last weekend of June and took a vote to make it official.

  The Fourth of July block party would go on as planned. They announced it in front of the congregation on Sunday.

  “No reason not to celebrate,” they said, and in the back pew, I chirped out a laugh.

  No reason. Not the closing of the mill, not our girls transforming into monsters, not the end of everything as we knew it.

  No reason at all.

  We were going to pretend that our lives were normal, even if it killed us, even if it suffocated what little lingering hope we had left. Bring on the barbeque.

  A permit was obtained from the city to close off the street, and every house broke out the Weber grills and twenty-pound bags of charcoal. Dozens of grim-faced parents and jubilant tourists lined the streets. Our fathers, their hands no longer holding picket signs, gripped onto metal tongs for dear life and pretended one good cookout today could be enough to make up for all our loss.

  By nine a.m. on July 4th, Denton Street reeked of charred flesh, and it turned my stomach to acid. With my knees folded into my chest, I sat in the middle of the sidewalk with my tartan thermos, topped off with whatever I could funnel from the liquor cabinet. These days, my mother was emptying every bottle in the house faster than I could keep up, so today’s cocktail was a noxious mix of Jim Beam, vermouth, Maker’s Mark whiskey, and the last three drops of Triple Sec. I swallowed the concoction quick so I didn’t have to taste it.

  Across the street, the government men’s house was dark. All three of them had departed after breakfast, a mountain of file folders in their arms.

  “Heading to the clinic,” Adrian told me when I saw him in the driveway, loading up the backseat with his questionable papers. I’d been hanging around Jacqueline’s house, hoping and failing to catch a glimpse of her. I looked at him in the rising sun, and a string of questions budded on my lips: what are you doing? What are you planning? Can I come too and eavesdrop on your conversations?

  But with his eyes dark, Adrian didn’t look eager to answer, and I wasn’t eager to ask—not this early, not on this terrible, celebratory day—so we just waved goodbye to each other and went our separate ways. I could always break into the house later and steal his notes.

  Besides, there was plenty to keep me busy. All down the block, there were helium balloons and homemade relish and crowded picnic tables, each one bedecked with citronella candles to ward off the mosquitoes, as though they were our only problem today. And there was enough liquor for every man, woman, and child in the neighborhood to drown in. Whatever the other mothers hadn’t already quietly gulped down wholesale was up for grabs.

  By noon, you couldn’t find an eye on Denton Street that wasn’t glassy.

  Even the tourists imbibed on our generosity, pretending they had the same woes as we did. They milled about the neighborhood, their ever-flashing cameras dilating like eyeballs in our faces.

  Unlike a week ago, nobody wanted them here, not anymore. We’d prefer to mourn what was left of our lives in peace. But with our spare bedrooms rented out and bake sales popping up every other day, we needed the money. Right now, not one family on the street could afford to turn away a single penny. So in spite of ourselves, the tourists stayed.

  The Rust Maidens, though, weren’t welcome to the festivities.

  “They wouldn’t enjoy it anyhow,” the preacher’s wife said, her smile twitching at the corners. “Helena prefers solitude these days.”

  More like everyone on Denton Street preferred solitude for them.

  Now with everything cascading away from us, there wasn’t any make-believe acceptance left for the girls. Kathleen shepherded Lisa through the crowd, the ratty afghan draped over the tiny girl. Nobody offered them a drink or a slice of apple pie or a kind word.

  “Why didn’t she leave her at home?” someone whispered. The other families had been far more considerate. Their girls were where they belonged—not among us.

  Violet opened her bedroom window, and her camera lorded over us as she captured the faces of her captors.

  Helena sat on the porch with nothing but her Bible for company.

  Dawn paced in the darkness of her parents’ parlor, back and forth, her feet probably wearing away the varnish from the floorboards.

  Jacqueline was marooned out of sight in her room, the locks on the doors sealing her in, while Aunt Betty socialized and smiled and acted like nothing was wrong.

  In the street, we all acted like nothing was wrong too. We sipped our drinks, spiked with whatever was convenient, and we chewed our burgers, tasteless and dry. We wanted to talk about them. We wanted to say
the truth, to scream it, to confess our fears. But we couldn’t. We’d practiced keeping quiet for so long that now, when we needed to speak the most, we’d forgotten how. And anyways, what was the proper way to bid farewell to everything you’d known? Even if we hadn’t sewn our lips shut years ago, there still might not be words for what we needed to say.

  Not everyone was so harried. Clint roamed free-range down Denton Street, drinking up whatever cup was passed to him. Part of me hoped somebody would lace one of the punchbowls with arsenic and put him out of the misery he caused the rest of us. In mid-June, he’d started in on a new girl in Parma Heights. He’d met her downtown at Kaufmann’s, and everybody knew she was the destination when he took the city bus each night after dark. Even in her seclusion, Dawn had figured it out too, though I doubted she cared at this point. It was probably a relief that Clint’s clumsy hands would never again try and fail in the dark to flick open the clasp on her bra, or that she would never have to hear his voice, like a dull razorblade, making hollow apologies for his backseat failures.

  Sometimes, change was a mercy.

  Just before dusk, somebody lit a pack of sparklers and handed them out to the smaller children, and for a bit, the whole neighborhood looked like it was on fire. The rest of us ate until we were stuffed, and then we waited an hour and ate some more. There was nothing else to do besides dine and drink and pretend we weren’t dying. While grubby faces piled condiments high on stiff hamburger buns, Eleanor curled in a bassinet and sobbed. Her cries set everything in my body humming, and I wanted to tear at my own skin to make the feeling stop.

  Poor little Eleanor, unwanted and motherless. And more or less fatherless too.

  “Why do babies do that?” Clint sneered at her. “What does she have to be upset about?”