The Rust Maidens Read online

  “I’m an alumnus, class of ’84,” I say, and it’s almost true. If my life had stayed its course, that’s exactly what I’d be. It feels like telling this lie is the closest to the truth I can get without being there.

  With an eyebrow raised, she stamps my hand and lets me in for free. Just like that. Me, the imaginary graduate securing her passage into alien territory. Everything about this city feels alien to me now.

  I wander for a while, not sure where I’ll find what I need. Even with a map, it’s the usual rigmarole, the permanent installations everything I expect.

  In the front room, steel and unions and the dying flame, this history still so potent you can practically smell the rotten-egg stench of sulfur, that familiar aroma all the mills once shared.

  On the second floor, rock and roll and Alan Freed and the payola scandal. “Maybellene” and “Rock Around the Clock” and other Fifties tunes loop on repeat over the speakers.

  The girls are a footnote compared to all of this. Few people caught wind of them outside of Ohio, and even some locals still believe the Rust Maidens are nothing more than a hoax. Five silly little girls who craved more attention than they deserved.

  At least here in the museum, they’re not treated like a prank. But what they are given isn’t much better. It’s one windowless room, small and tucked away in the back.

  I pace up and down the cramped aisles, passing faded pictures and laminated headlines. The scent of these old things clings to me like stale cigarette smoke. I don’t even know what I’m looking for. The truth, I suppose.

  The curator’s done his best with what he had, but there isn’t much to go on. A few declassified government documents and five truncated biographies. The girls never had a chance to find out who they could be, so the museum had to settle with a series of banal facts and dates: when they were born (sometime in ’61 or ’62), where they’re from (Cleveland, of course), and what they did in those eighteen short years (not much of anything, has nobody in this town been paying attention?).

  In the corner, I find myself waiting behind glass. Inside a display case lined with dust, there’s a pair of Polaroids snapped at the barbeque on graduation day. Both of them feature Jacqueline and me at a picnic table, not looking up at the camera, but looking at each other. Scheming our escape.

  There I am, the girl I was. And there’s Jacqueline, the change almost certainly stirring beneath her skin by then. Did she already know it? Was that why she gave me that look that day? A look like goodbye?

  I squint again at the images. This isn’t the same picture Violet gave us that day. She must have kept these two photos for herself, part of a portfolio she never completed. Her camera is here too, a smudged fingerprint still on the black shutter button. I imagine her hand, unsullied from the transformation, waving the undeveloped image in our face. Jacqueline and I weren’t eager to take it from her that day. It didn’t seem to matter then. Maybe it still doesn’t.

  My feet heavy beneath me, I keep going, keep hoping to find something. Down the hallway, there’s another room, one marked with a simple sign.

  Private. Employees Only.

  The door is open, so I go in, uninvited as always.

  These are the archives, the only place that might be able to give me the answer I’m looking for. The walls are arrayed in thick leather binders, dozens of them, maybe hundreds, stacked on metal shelves, their edges bursting with plastic-encased doctors’ files and case reports from despondent family members in the weeks after, each page transcribed by hand. The spines on all these volumes look ready to split from being opened and closed too many times. From somebody viewing and reviewing the facts as they knew them, almost certainly disappointed with each new perusal.

  I pick one binder at random and start reading. After a minute, the docent finds me. The blinking red light of the security camera on the wall must have given me away.

  “Are you sure you belong in this place?” she asks, and we both already know the answer.

  I belong here more than you, I want to say. This little undergrad doesn’t know the first thing about the Rust Maidens, other than the horror stories her parents told her growing up.

  “You heard about those girls from Denton Street, haven’t you? Be a good little girl, or you’ll turn out like them. And you don’t want to end up a Rust Maiden, do you?”

  My friends—the urban legend to beat all others.

  “I already told you,” I say, smiling, “I’m an alumnus.”

  As though that grants me an all-access pass.

  The docent is still watching me. “What did you say your name was again?”

  I hesitate, my lips twisting wordlessly, desperate to form whatever lie will keep me in this room the longest. But I must not have the energy for another fabrication, because I just shrug and say, “Phoebe Shaw.”

  It stifles my breath once again to hear it, but there it is. Who I am. My name, so long a stranger to me, now reclaimed even when I don’t want it.

  The docent nods. “I’ll be right back,” she says, and disappears out the door.

  I only have a couple of minutes until she’s checked out my story and discovers—surprise!—it’s totally bogus. That will be enough time. It has to be enough time. I thumb through the pages, more desperate now, but it does no good. This is the same sort of drivel from the government files years ago. All empty statistics and empty anecdotes. Nothing meaningful. Nothing true.

  Something shuffles down the hall, but I don’t look up. I keep reading, keeping searching for that one piece of the puzzle I’ve always been missing. Whatever will help it all make sense. Whatever might stop it from happening to Quinn or anyone else.

  I don’t find it. Not here, not today. Probably because it doesn’t exist at all. There is no answer for what I’m looking for, no smoking gun that will explain what I couldn’t understand before.

  The shuffling gets closer, and with a sigh, I look up.

  As expected, the docent has returned. “Miss Shaw,” she says, and I roll my eyes.

  “What is it?” I ask, and go back to scanning the last volume I grabbed from the overstuffed bookshelf, eager to glean whatever I can before this moment is cut short.

  I don’t get much, before the docent’s hand is wound around my arm. It’s a tenuous hold, one I could break in an instant, not that that would help me much.

  “The curator would like to speak with you now.”

  “I bet he would,” I say, and place the binder back on the shelf, not hurrying about it, not showing that I care. Then I follow her to an office down the hall where she delivers me to my punishment: the curator sitting at a cluttered desk.

  “Hello, Phoebe,” he says.

  “Hello, Adrian.”

  The docent closes the door behind her, and we’re alone.

  He smiles. “You’re not surprised to see me here?”

  I plop down in the chair across from his. “I thought I heard something about you getting a job at this place.”

  I heard something about you. More like, I heard everything about him. My mother gave me an obligatory update every few months for the past thirty years. When I would call home, she always managed to work him into the conversation.

  “Adrian left his position with the government.”

  “Adrian’s still around, working at the museum.”

  “Adrian is trying to make it right.”

  I always laugh at that last one. None of us can make things right now. That’s what I keep learning, over and over, a lesson I never seem to master.

  I sit back in my chair, one arm slung over the side, and regard him through half-closed eyes. This doesn’t matter to me, I’m trying to say. It’s the same thing I’m trying to believe.

  Seeing him should be the easy part of being home. I hardly knew him then. I know him even less now. This should be no different than passing a stranger in a parking lot.

  He’s almost sixty, practically an old man, his eyes crinkled at the edges and his hair faded to gray. Ye
t nothing about him feels old to me. He feels exactly the same. I shouldn’t still want him. After all these years and all these mistakes and all these regrets, this shouldn’t be happening. A grown woman acting the same as some swoony girl who can’t get over a crush.

  I feel like I should be better than this, but apparently, I’m not.

  My hands fold and unfold in my lap. “Are you going to have me arrested for trespassing?”

  He almost chuckles at this, but thinks better of it. “That wasn’t my plan.”

  We do a volley of niceties—so good to see you, it’s been so long, how is the weather?—and I think I might be able to slide out of here unscathed.

  Then Adrian sets his gaze on me and asks with an offhand curiosity, “What is it you were looking for today?”

  “Anything that could help,” I say.

  Instantly, I wish I could revoke the words. As always, I’ve revealed myself without meaning to. I do my best to silence my face as I fumble with every object within my reach on his desk. A stapler, some generic ballpoint pen, a picture frame that I turn to face me, certain that it’ll be the beaming faces of his family. Instead, it’s just the city skyline.

  Adrian inspects me. “Something’s happened, hasn’t it? That’s why you’re here.”

  I say nothing, but that’s more than enough.

  He leans across the desk, and for an instant, I think he might reach out for my hand. He doesn’t. “I could help,” he says. “With whatever you need.”

  I don’t like the idea of this, anything that could give him entry into my life again. I’ve tried so hard to escape this place, and now I’m whirlpooling back into it, as lost as I was at eighteen. But maybe he’s right. Maybe he can help me. There might be things held back from the archives, secrets gleaned once it was too late, once the girls weren’t around anymore to question.

  But I won’t ask.

  “I should go,” I say, and shift out of the chair.

  Adrian exhales an unsteady breath. My leaving isn’t quite what he was hoping for.

  “I’ll show you out,” he says.

  He walks me to my car. Side by side, I’m close enough to touch him again. I breathe in and discover he still smells of cedar. Of course he does. Of course that wouldn’t change.

  Outside in front of the museum, we pass a half-finished foundation on the green space.

  “What will go there?” I ask, my eyes trained on the spot, half-mesmerized, though not knowing why. It’s only some displaced earth. Nothing remarkable. Nothing at all.

  “We hope to build a monument there,” Adrian says, each word plucked carefully. “Something for the girls.”

  It takes me a moment to process this, to understand that he means my girls.

  “Like you have any right,” I half-growl at him. “After everything all of you did to them. You didn’t even know them.”

  “That’s true,” he says, inspecting the empty spot on the lawn. “But the one person who did know them won’t remember. So somebody has to.”

  He smiles, and all the rage in my heart turns cold. Adrian knows he’s one-upped me this time. I should have stuck around. I should have remembered. But I can’t. It’s too much even being here in this city again, so close I can practically hear the girls giggling. So close I can almost see Jacqueline peeking out her bedroom window.

  I need to tell him this. I need to confess all of this to him and so much more. But instead, I just shake my head.

  “Have a nice day,” I say, and head to my car without another word.

  Back in the driver’s seat, I steer the Impala down Euclid and do my best not to scream.

  One thing I know: I have to tell someone. If not Adrian, then somebody. If no one knows the truth, then how can I expect to change anything?

  I’ll find my mother. I’ll tell her what’s happening now, and what happened before, and what will happen all over again if we don’t do something. If we don’t do better than the last time.

  Sweet Evergreen is only a mile away from campus, and I’m walking across the parking lot before I have a chance to reconsider. The lights are dim inside, all the harshness scrubbed right out of the world. A little too late for that, but nobody seems to care.

  In the all-purpose room, visitors the same age as my mother crowd around spouses who no longer recognize them. Sometimes it seems we’re all destined to spend our golden years saying goodbye.

  I keep walking. This place is everything I expected and all that I feared. The stench of urine-soaked bedsheets doused with gallons of Clorox, as if it’s an exotic perfume. My father, wasting away in a place where he—and everyone here—deserves better.

  An orderly directs me to a room at the end of the hall. Inside, it isn’t a terrible size. A suite, they probably call it, though it’s not large enough to earn that title. At least my father has it all to himself. I wonder if that’s a mercy or a punishment.

  When I walk in, the room is empty, except for my father reclined in bed. There are no pictures on the wall, no décor at all except a couple of machines that beep at random intervals. I breathe deep. I must have missed my mother.

  I’m ready to bolt, but my father opens his eyes and smiles at me. On reflex, I smile back. It’s so easy to do, so easy to match that familiar expression. I can’t leave him, not yet, so I sit for a while.

  “Have you met my daughter?” he asks me, his eyes bright.

  I stare at him. “No,” I say, “I haven’t.”

  “A good girl, that one. Lots of big dreams.” He exhales a laugh that startles the room. “And sure, all kids have big dreams. But my Phoebe, she’s different.”

  Different. He’s right about that, at least.

  His words slur together, but I understand him. I’ve always understood him. Again, I wonder if it’s a mercy or a punishment.

  He babbles on and then tells me about the treehouse he just converted for his daughter.

  “What does she need that for?” I ask, projecting myself outside of this room and this moment.

  “For bugs.” He lets out a vibrant cackle. “I told you my girl is different.”

  I watch him carefully now, not sure I want to ask my next question. “Don’t you worry about what the neighbors will think?”

  Those neighbors, the ones scheming in our kitchen.

  My father smiles. “Who cares about them?”

  You did, I want to say. The urge to run again courses through me, and this time, it’s too much. I excuse myself, but before I’ve reached the door, I turn back. I can’t leave like this. I can’t leave without saying goodbye.

  I start to say something, but my father cuts me off, his gaze wide and bright and suddenly his own.

  “You’ll make it to the stars, Phoebe,” he says. “You’ll make it anywhere.”

  This hits me all at once, and I can’t breathe.

  “Thank you,” I whisper, as his eyes glaze over, and he forgets I was ever here.

  I don’t get any farther than the hallway before my knees give out and I collapse to the ugly mottled tile. Orderlies pass by and nod solemnly at me. They don’t have to guess why I’m in a heap on the floor. It’s probably a normal part of their daily routine.

  I finally collect myself and head to my car and what’s left of my life.

  Back on Denton Street, the Impala cuts out in my mother’s driveway, but I don’t go inside. She’s not home yet anyhow, probably out getting more moving boxes to pack up the rest of the house. I don’t want to be alone in there, so I trudge down the street to survey the construction crew’s damage.

  A figure is already there on the sidewalk, in front of the spot where Dawn once lived. I exhale, relieved to see a familiar shape.

  “Quinn,” I say, my voice cracking in half.

  But then the shadow moves, and I realize it’s exactly who I should have expected. The same person who was here this morning.

  Eleanor.

  “It’s okay,” she says. “I’m never the one people are hoping for.”

 
We stare at the rubble. The broken glass and shards of old window frames have fallen into strange shapes. Things that look like crescent moons. Eleanor probably thinks this is a sign from her mother. I think it’s a sign from Jacqueline. It’s probably nothing at all, just a haphazard pattern we’re reading like wet tea leaves in the bottom of a cup.

  “What happened to them?” she asks, not looking at me.

  “I don’t know.” I edge past the sidewalk and onto what used to be the front yard.

  Eleanor follows. “Maybe if I was Quinn, you’d tell me.” She’s right behind me, her breath hot on the back of my neck. “I know why you’ve taken to her so much. I’ve seen the pictures. She looks like your cousin. You think if you save Quinn, then it’ll be like saving Jacqueline. But you can’t help any of them, and you know it.”

  Every muscle in my body seizes up, and I glare at her. Then one by one, my fingers curl into fists. This should deter her, but instead, her eyes flare, and she looks emboldened by it.

  “Go ahead.” She moves toward me, her chin raised an inch to give me a better target. “Then maybe after, we can talk.”

  Both my hands go limp at my sides. This is ridiculous. I should tell her about her mother. I should tell her everything.

  But when I open my mouth to speak, the words won’t come. The words never come.

  “It’s hard to explain,” I say at last. “You weren’t there.”

  That’s a lie, though. Eleanor was everywhere that summer. She saw more than she knows.

  “She never even got to hold me,” Eleanor says, half under her breath. “What kind of mother never holds her own child?”

  “It wasn’t her fault,” I say. “None of it was her fault.”

  Another shadow, someone else who isn’t to blame. Quinn, appearing in the yard next to us as she dodges around splintered wood and tufts of pink insulation.

  Eleanor grunts. “We were just talking about you.”

  “Hello to you too,” Quinn whispers, but says nothing else. She just moves closer to me, shivering in her short sleeves. No coat in subzero weather.

  I’m removing my jacket for her when I see it. The spot on her arm, the size of a silver dollar now, gray and weeping.