The Rust Maidens Read online

  I took another sip from my thermos. “To start with, I’d say a great deal.”

  Clint’s mother did her best to rock the cradle carefully, like a good grandmother, or at least the best grandmother she could be under the circumstances. But it didn’t matter. Eleanor wouldn’t stop crying.

  The air shimmered with heat, and the cocktail-drenched voices rose and fell around us. Everything was normal one moment, barbeques sizzling, parents laughing nervously, the baby sobbing. Then suddenly, the world split in two, and she was here, a ghost in our midst.

  “I can help her,” Dawn whispered.

  No one had seen the shadow disappear from her parlor window or heard when the front door creaked open. She simply strolled down Denton Street, her body dripping and her gaze sharp, set on one thing in this entire world.

  Eleanor blinked up at her mother and cooed.

  Clint hesitated before a smug grin curled on his lips. “Sure, darling,” he said. “Give it your best try.”

  He held the baby while Dawn moved nearer. She wasn’t allowed to embrace Eleanor, but this didn’t seem to disappoint her. After all, this was the closest she’d been to her daughter since the delivery.

  All around us, no one else spoke a word. The whole neighborhood watched, hearts frozen, as Dawn peeled up the front of her tank top and breastfed Eleanor. The baby fussed for a moment before latching to her mother.

  I stepped forward and held my breath. I wanted this for Dawn, but not here. Not with an audience of so many people that didn’t trust the girls.

  But Dawn didn’t seem to notice anyone except her daughter. She moved closer still, and the exposed bits of her cracked flesh glinted in the flash of the children’s sprinklers, her skin gray and peeling and damp, all of it concealing the corroded metal beneath. When she finally pulled away, a thin stream of milk the color of rust and brackish water dripped down her chest, and Eleanor’s babbling lips were stained red.

  Clint’s mother stared at Dawn. “What are you?” she asked, her voice blistering with disgust. “And what are you doing to her?”

  “I’m trying to be like you,” Dawn said, almost whimpering. “I’m trying to be a mother.”

  The neighborhood women were all together in a line now, their mouths pursed like rosebuds.

  “You’ll never be like us,” they said, and they didn’t have to say more. Like them. Like good mothers. Dawn would never know the simple pleasure of just rocking her child in her arms, holding her baby as she fell asleep.

  In a flurry of acrylic hands, they yanked Eleanor away, swooping in to rescue the child from her own mother. Wailing, Dawn tried to fight them, tried to keep some part of her body tethered to her child. The palm of one hand, or a tip of a rusted-out finger, anything to be near her. But the other mothers were too fast. They’d already closed ranks around Eleanor.

  “We’ll make sure she’s safe,” they said, and that was it. The cruelest insult, the words that pressed the thorn deep into Dawn’s heart. Her future was lost to her before she’d even had a chance to fully imagine it. To imagine being a mother to a child she never asked for.

  Dawn’s face twisted, and something in her shifted. Though she didn’t look entirely human—hadn’t looked human for weeks now—that didn’t matter. The expression that washed over her was unmistakably her own. For a moment, she was just the same scared girl she’d always been, a girl with more pain than one person should ever have to carry. Nearby, Eleanor started to weep in the circle of mothers, and Dawn was weeping too. Dark tears stained her cheeks, and her whole body quivered, the thrum of her anguish vibrating through what was left of her bones and into the hot concrete beneath us.

  I inhaled a sharp breath, realizing it was too late to stop what was coming next. What had always been coming perhaps, even if we hadn’t realized it until now.

  With her head tipped back, Dawn let out a wail, and the sky cracked open.

  This was different than Jacqueline’s scream, deeper somehow, and stranger too. It was the hot screech of metal and the carriage of heavy earth and a thousand restless waves at midnight.

  The sound pierced my skin and went into my marrow, shaking me the same way it shook her. But hers wasn’t just a howl of agony—it was a cry for help. A beacon to the others. Something meant to bring them together.

  And in their solitude, they heard her. Each of the girls, ready and waiting for this. At once, there was no one in Violet’s bedroom window, or on Helena’s porch swing, or in Jacqueline’s house. They were here instead, materializing among us, both part of the throng and somehow estranged from it.

  Lisa, the only one who hadn’t taken to her expulsion, was the last to go to them. She looked from the girls to her sister and back again before she steadied herself and shed her afghan like an unnecessary skin. With Kathleen pleading quietly behind her, Lisa threaded through the crowd and joined the others.

  There they were, together for the first time in front of us. They didn’t speak. They didn’t have to. They were everything we’d never realized. All five of them, gorgeous and fearsome and not at all the girls we thought we knew. We remembered them as quiet, as sweet, as familiar.

  We didn’t remember them as powerful.

  Their flesh steel-plated shields against us, their bodies leaking gray water that could fill up our lungs in a heartbeat. Those eyes that watched us and saw everything. There were more of us, to be sure, but against them, we somehow doubted our odds.

  Aunt Betty shoved through the crowd. “What are you doing?” She glowered at Jacqueline. “Go back home. Now.”

  But that wasn’t going to work. Her eyes dark, Jacqueline shook her head, and the other girls mimicked the motion. Five faces swinging back and forth, pendulums that measured our world, that divided us between the moments before this and all the terrible moments that would come after.

  The parents and the tourists stared at them, plastic cups suspended in midair and hot dogs sizzling into char on the grills. Something had changed. We understood this, even if we couldn’t string the syllables together to say it. The girls were no longer safe. They were our enemies now, here and ready to make a stand. Not that any of us, even the Rust Maidens, knew what that meant.

  The neighborhood moved closer to the girls, a random smattering of parents flailing this way and that. They were desperate to take hold of them, to do their best to stop the blossoming insurrection, even if they weren’t sure they could win. Winning almost didn’t matter. We certainly couldn’t stand back and let them rebel like this, not with an audience of outsiders. There was decorum to maintain, a sense of authority over our own. Because what kind of men would our fathers be if they couldn’t control five little girls? And what kind of women would our mothers be if they didn’t stand behind their husbands?

  They were closer to the girls now, expecting at any moment that the five of them would scatter. Every moment, they were disappointed. I knew I had to do something. I couldn’t stand here and watch, a bystander in my own life. I couldn’t let them grab the girls and never let them go.

  With a single, fluid movement, I surged forward and blocked the girls from the gathering crowd. I wasn’t enough by myself, but at least there was someone standing in our parents’ way. Sneering, the mothers and fathers fell back a few steps, uncertain what I had planned. I was uncertain too, but I had to do something before the crowd closed in around me.

  All my muscles constricted, and I seized Jacqueline’s arm.

  “Go,” I whispered. “Get out of here. Together.”

  This turned an invisible knife deep in my chest. Jacqueline, headed where I couldn’t follow. But it wasn’t permanent. It was just for now. Until we could figure out how to stop this, how to make all this better somehow.

  With our parents pushing nearer, their breath heavy and stinking of booze, I squeezed Jacqueline’s arm once more, a bid for her to go before it was too late. What was left of her skin felt cold and unfamiliar, but strong. She stared into me, and without a word, she understood. The girl
s joined hands and walked down the street as if there was no other way.

  I wanted the five of them to run and not look back. Away from Denton Street, away from Cleveland, away from the so-called Great Lakes. I wanted them to flee to somewhere they didn’t know, and that didn’t know them.

  But that wasn’t how this worked, and I should have realized that. They were girls who belonged here, maybe more than we did. The five of them marched to the end of the cul-de-sac and, without hesitation, they opened the front door to the abandoned mansion. Like this had always been their plan. Like the place was waiting for them, unlocked and eager, brimming with the hope for a new family to reside within.

  Not one parent went after them.

  We’d seen their strength now, their collective power. Nobody could separate them, not tonight, not if they wanted to be together.

  With idle chitchat seeming altogether impossible now, the barbeques soon broke up. Charcoal was doused with water, and everyone murmured their goodbyes, pretending nothing out of the ordinary had happened, not saying what they were thinking. Thank you for the hamburgers, Midge. Hope your mutating daughter comes home in the morning.

  Not that anyone really expected the girls to come home.

  Nearby, the tourists lingered in the street, looking wearier now, as though suddenly questioning themselves on why they were even here in the first place.

  My head heavy, I turned away from everyone and followed the outlines of wet footprints, gazing at Jacqueline’s most of all. Her steps were different than the rest, always soft as a ghost’s, like she was never really there.

  But these prints weren’t the only markers of the girls. All along Denton Street, I saw what else they’d left behind, the pieces of who they were and might not be again.

  Bible pages fluttered in the wind. Helena’s faith, abandoned on a porch swing.

  Empty film canisters lined up on Violet’s window sill.

  Shame, and not much else, hidden behind the blinds of Lisa’s house.

  For her part, Dawn had nothing to leave behind. Nothing except the wide-eyed infant who cried out again in the night, wanting only one thing in the world and having that one thing denied to her over and over.

  Because I couldn’t help myself, I stopped in front of Jacqueline’s house. Aunt Betty was collapsed on the front porch, sobbing. Everything she’d tried had failed. Even the prison she’d built for her only daughter hadn’t been strong enough. The exterior locks, brand-new only a week ago, were now rusted out and broken, as if Jacqueline’s touch through the door was enough to destroy their power.

  Enough to set her free.

  “What have you done?” Aunt Betty wailed, and I didn’t know if she was asking me or Jacqueline or herself. I just stood on the sidewalk, my hands folded and quivering in front of me, and said nothing, but wondered the same question.

  Overhead, a light dimmed. With the last of the temporary workers filed solemnly through the back door, the flame above the steel mill winked out. I glanced up and saw it happen. It was just a moment. There, and then vanished. Snuffed out. Our beacon gone, our lives gone.

  But there was another light now. Inside the mansion, a single candle illuminated the front room. I inhaled, and even from here, I could smell the citronella. A pillar swiped from a picnic table on the girls’ long walk down the street, something to guide their way. I crept closer until I was standing right in front of the mansion’s cobblestone driveway—me, the guest who wasn’t invited—and for an instant, I could see her there, watching me out the window. Jacqueline, a face like a lost wraith. But like my friend, too. Like the only one I’d ever trusted.

  Then the moth-eaten curtains fluttered closed, and she was gone.

  ELEVEN

  Back in my parents’ nearly empty house, I replay the evening, the unreality of it all.

  The three of us trespassing in Helena’s house, listening for lost voices.

  The glimmer of that wound on Quinn’s arm, still fresh and weeping.

  The quiet expression of her face, perhaps already an acceptance of what’s to come.

  It’s on repeat. This whole city is stuck on repeat. A cycle that, no matter how hard we try, we can never seem to break.

  I didn’t tell Quinn what I saw. I don’t know if it would have helped if I had.

  Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe that glint beneath her skin isn’t what I think it is. Even after all these years, I still can’t invent better lies to tell myself.

  I curl in the corner of the living room, tucked inside my orange-lined sleeping bag, purchased on sale at Sears forty years ago. It was the best my mother could find for me, the only thing she hasn’t sent to storage or to her new one-bedroom apartment in Lakewood. She traded down to have enough money for my father’s care.

  Upstairs, the floorboards creak. My mother’s awake, haunting the house that used to be hers. The wreckers are due at our doorstep in six days. Now we’re practically squatters in our own lives.

  I turn over on my stomach and stare into the dark. It won’t be long until we’re gone from here. This isn’t my battle to fight. It’s never been mine.

  But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t still feel like mine.

  I squeeze my eyes closed and tell myself this time will be different.

  This time, I’ll stop it.

  ***

  The next morning, my mother leaves early to visit my father. She asks me to come with her, but I shake my head.

  “I’ll meet you there later,” I say.

  Once her car heads down the street, I hesitate in the living room. I know what I should do: I should go upstairs and finally clean out what’s left of my life. The bedroom needs to be emptied before the construction crew tears it all down.

  But that’s not what I’m going to do today.

  In the garage, I slip into the driver’s seat of the Impala. The key is still tucked in the visor, and, holding my breath, I slide it into the ignition. The engine roars to life. Like it remembers. Like it always knew I’d come back.

  As I pull out of the driveway, another house down the block collapses. Dawn’s. The wrecker swings so effortlessly, and everything falls. In an instant, the picture window where she used to walk shatters in a spray of diamonds.

  And there on the sidewalk, at the end of the cul-de-sac is Eleanor, watching her mother’s childhood home fall. She doesn’t see me leaving Denton Street. She doesn’t see anything except what she’s lost.

  A wave of unease chills me. I want to drown out the sound of the construction, but I don’t dare turn on the radio. I’m scared of what song will be waiting there to greet me if I do. I just keep going, and I don’t look back.

  The drive across town is worse than I expect. Even in daylight, this town looks like a funeral. I guess a lot of towns look like that now. They’re saying this recession is the worst since the Great Depression. Though it’s hard to tell the difference in a city that hasn’t been in its prime for half a century.

  According to the news, people are doing the smart thing and getting out. People on Denton Street, and people elsewhere too. They’re fleeing to anywhere there are jobs, or they’re simply being evicted from their lives in spite of themselves.

  Then there’s Quinn. She’s getting out any way she can, too. Give it a week or a month at most, and she’ll be gone. It’s a familiar tale, and not just on this street, not just the Rust Maidens. Girls vanish all over. Odd girls, forgotten girls, runaways, the ones nobody cares about. She’ll be another tally mark. There are too many places in the world that never stop tallying loss.

  My fingers tighten around the steering wheel. This all seems so pointless, thinking I can help. What can I do? Is it even possible to break a cycle that’s stronger than all of us?

  Maybe not, but I’ll try. It’s all I can do now.

  On the East Side, University Circle is the only area in the city that hasn’t changed as much as I expected. The Case Western campus is still what I remember from my college visit in the fall of ‘79, everything
so neat and proper, the brick buildings with their spiky turrets looming as reminders of the city’s history, a past that isn’t as tinged with tragedy as mine. It isn’t all calamity in Cleveland. Sometimes I have to remind myself of that. Given a long enough trajectory, things have a way of working out. But so rarely is one lifetime long enough.

  At the far end of East Boulevard, I find a narrow parking spot and feed the meter until it’s full. That buys me two hours. Nowhere near as much time as I need, but it’ll have to do.

  Out on the sidewalk, I tug my pea coat closed as my breath smokes around me. December is in full swing, kitschy lights and garland fleecing every streetlamp. I pay no attention to the make-believe cheer. The place I’m going is the last building in a snarl of storied institutions: The Center for Northeastern Ohio History. It’s the smallest of the museums here, less than a quarter the size of the Museum of Art or the Museum of Natural History. But none of those bigger places have what I’m looking for.

  I burst through the rotating door, and the cold of winter follows me in, my feet tracking ice and melancholy into the lobby. I’ve never been here before, but my mother’s told me all about this place.

  “It’s a nice little exhibit. Nothing crass at all,” she says every time she brings it up on the phone. “Maybe I should donate some of your old keepsakes to them. Your diaries and pictures of the girls.”

  I always sigh. “Do whatever you want,” I say, knowing my response means nothing at that point. I’ve already been excused from the conversation.

  “No, I think I’ll wait until you come home. Then we can go through everything together.” A long pause. The same pause she always takes when we talk about the museum. “I’ve told you before who the curator is, right? You know, I’m sure he’d love to talk with you.”

  “I bet he would,” I always say, and hang up the phone.

  Now here I am, in this place I promised myself I’d never go. I promise myself a lot of things. I can never keep my word about any of it.

  At the front desk, a smiling docent, probably an undergrad preemptively working off her student loans, nods a greeting to me. I don’t have any spare cash for admission, so I improvise.