The Rust Maidens Read online

  My throat closing up with dread, I pass her my pea coat and look back at the ground. In the rubble, the shapes have shifted slightly. The points of the moon are a little sharper, the curves a bit more elegant. Not because of me or Eleanor, but because of Quinn. These signs aren’t ours. They’re meant for her.

  “Your arm,” Eleanor says and moves toward Quinn. “It’s gleaming.”

  At once, Eleanor recognizes what it is. The daughter of a Rust Maiden doesn’t need this explained to her.

  “What’s wrong?” Quinn asks, but Eleanor just shakes her head.

  She and I both want to break this cycle, but we don’t know where to start. Doctors can’t help. The government can’t help. Archives and museums and the collective history of this city can’t help. If everyone else has tried and failed, who are we to fix it?

  My eyes bleary, I glance down the block at Jacqueline’s house. It stands almost alone now. No homes on either side of it, and a dozen notices tacked to the front door. It’s scheduled for demolition the same day as our house, but it might not be abandoned yet, either.

  The curtains flutter, and I hold my breath, but no one appears in the window.

  “What do we do now?” Eleanor whispers.

  “I wish I knew,” I say, and because I’m too tired to fight it, the tears come.

  They don’t stop.

  TWELVE

  The night the Rust Maidens went into the mansion, a storm descended on the Midwest. It swept across from Omaha, sliding through Cleveland sometime the next morning. Winds hit highs of sixty miles per hour, and the skies went darker than sorrow. People died all over, dozens of them, and campers and boats upended and overturned, their snarled remains left for the junkyard.

  It was an all-out assault on summer, or perhaps it was summer assaulting us. For what we’d done. For what we would do.

  They called it the “More Trees Down” derecho. That year had been a strange one, even without the girls’ transformations. Heat waves and storms by the score, so many that the July Fourth gale was merely one in a line of odd weather anomalies in the region. This particular tempest got its name because some farmers feared that by the time 1980 was done with us, we’d have no trees left. Our oaks and pines and maples just kept coming down, one after another, leaving us with so much firewood that we’d never be able to use it all.

  As I listened to the radio crackle in the Impala, the DJ spouting off updates about the maelstrom, my chest tightened. Although I knew it didn’t make sense, this one felt like it was meant for us. All those people in Nebraska and Illinois and Indiana had gotten caught in a storm that had nothing to do with them. This was our punishment for all the ways we were failing.

  In the afternoon, when the worst of the gusts had passed, I slipped out into the backyard and collected the fallen limbs into a heap on the patio. I piled them next to the Weber grill we’d probably never use again, not after yesterday and all the terrible images already crystallizing in our neighborhood’s memory. Our lives were becoming one long nightmare from which none of us could awaken.

  When I finally couldn’t take not knowing another moment, I climbed up the rope ladder to survey the damage in the treehouse. Protected by the plastic sarcophagus draped over all the windows, my bugs had mostly escaped the winds, but not entirely. A few tattered monarchs were waiting there to greet me, their corpses limp on the floorboards, wings frayed like torn wedding lace. The sight of them, their bodies battered by the wind, clutched my throat so tightly I feared for a moment I’d forgotten how to breathe altogether.

  Someone hollered on the street below, a nothing command that broke this trance, and life trickled slowly back into me, even though I didn’t ask it to. Even though I didn’t want to be here. But there was nowhere else to go. My teeth clenched, I edged around the bodies to the potted milkweed, withered now from the summer heat, and pulled out a flask from the corner. No-name whiskey in this one, cut with water to top it off. For the rest of the day, I sat with the dead butterflies, drinking and sobbing and repeating over and over how sorry I was.

  At sunset, I buried them in a green Tupperware canister beneath the tree. The elm had been a good home to them until it wasn’t. This was what the butterflies had learned the hard way, what I’d learned too. As our lives assumed a new and unwanted rhythm, this became a summer of unlikely lessons.

  Our fathers learned how to stand in unemployment lines.

  Our mothers learned how to smile through bourbon-soaked tears.

  And all of us learned how to live with the reality that the Rust Maidens were not a fad or a fleeting temper tantrum. It was, we soon realized, entirely possible that they had invented a new way to say goodbye.

  “I don’t know why they did this to us,” my father mumbled on his way downtown to look for work. “And right now, of all times.”

  That was the accepted narrative of July: that for everything that had gone wrong that year, the girls were to blame. By their mere existence, the Rust Maidens had condemned us. Not on purpose, of course—I certainly never thought it was on purpose, anyhow—but that day at the chain-link fence was enough to get the mill owners running scared, with their tacky suits wrinkled and their jacket tails tucked. They couldn’t bear the notion of those girls, so they cut the families loose. Better for the bottom line, they said, but that wasn’t the real reason. The real reason was to dispel the nightmares about what might happen to their own daughters, those debutantes clutched close like heirloom pearls, hidden safely in the suburbs of Bay Village and Pepper Pike where the Rust Maidens couldn’t reach them. At least, that was what the mill owners told themselves. It was an intricate web of superstitions and lies we spun for ourselves that summer. All the ways to save the girls—or save ourselves from them.

  But they were still here. The girls moved about the mansion, restless all day and night. We watched them through the dusty windows, but they didn’t return our gazes. Already, they had turned inward. Now that they were together, the outside world mattered less to them. We mattered less.

  On Monday morning, after another round of spiked tea and stale biscuits, the mothers conspired together to call the city and see about having the girls evicted.

  “They are squatters, after all,” the women said, and while no one could argue, the staff in the downtown office were underfunded and overworked and not too worried about a clique of girls, no matter how monstrous, holding an impromptu slumber party in a place nobody cared about.

  “We’ll look into it,” they promised, but never did.

  But others on Denton Street were more than eager to keep track of the girls. The government men had stayed mostly out of sight since July 4th, locked up inside their rented house, but it was easy to imagine what they were doing in there. Analyzing doctors’ reports, making calls back to Washington, and scheming. How their clandestine plans would turn out was anybody’s guess.

  I did my best to keep track of the girls too, or at least keep track of who was bothering them. At night, neighborhood children challenged each other to run up on the back porch of the mansion. You could see the little hellions there at the end of the cul-de-sac, their bikes tipped over on the asphalt, smudged faces glinting in the moonlight as they crept through the shadows and tapped on the door, lobbing an insult or two through the walls before they’d run.

  It was a dare only the bravest would accept.

  The more cowardly kids took to tossing pebbles at the windows, always from a safe distance. I’d catch the wayward imps when I could, slapping their little wrists, hoping I’d leave a big enough welt to warn them not to do it again, already knowing it wouldn’t be enough. If they wanted to torment the girls, any punishment from me—someone no better than a stranger—wasn’t going to change that.

  On Wednesday afternoon, after chasing off three more kids and a few loitering tourists, I paced along the sidewalk. I would give the girls time. That was what I kept telling myself, even though everything in me said to run up and pound on that door, to tear at the lock,
to break out the window. Whatever it took to get them out of there. To get her out. After all, if the bratty neighborhood kids could try to breach the threshold, why not me? I had more right to speak to those girls than anyone else on Denton Street.

  Next door, a baby cried out, and the wail nearly cracked the sky. It was Eleanor. Through the open nursery window, Clint’s mother scurried back and forth, looking lost, as a circus mobile rotated in an endless loop over the cradle. I never realized how close Clint’s house was to the mansion. No more than ten yards separated the properties. If Eleanor could only look out her window, she’d easily see where her mother lived now.

  Eleanor kept crying, and her tears made me want to cry too, so I turned away and started back home. I couldn’t do this to the girls, anyhow. Not yet. I couldn’t take this choice away from them. Jacqueline would leave whenever she was ready. But each night that passed, it seemed less and less possible that I might ever see my best friend again.

  ***

  The days slipped away from us, and July was half over before the first mother on Denton Street confessed what the rest of us had been quietly concealing for weeks.

  Things in the neighborhood were disappearing.

  Not girls this time; they were already long lost to us. These were little trinkets taken from backyards or porches or nightstands. An old necklace with a broken clasp. Lawn ornaments shattered in the storm and destined for the garbage heap.

  “They took an old wheelbarrow from my garden,” Violet’s mother said. “What would they need that for?”

  The women were gathered in our kitchen, taking up the same spaces the men had used for their meeting last month. Our house had become a neutral zone. No girls had changed here. That meant these walls must be safe.

  I stood in the living room next to the empty turntable, listening to the soundtrack of the day.

  “My suitcase,” Kathleen was saying. “Totally ransacked. I’m still not sure what they stole.”

  Probably not they, in this case. Probably Lisa. I couldn’t imagine even the Rust Maidens put together were brave enough to sneak into the Carter house at night.

  There was a long, anguished pause before my mother, her cordial glass trembling between her fingers, asked, “How do they do it?”

  This was what unnerved them most of all. It wasn’t so much that the girls were stealing trinkets. The mansion had been empty when they found it, so of course they needed accoutrements to make their stay there more bearable. Nobody blamed them for that. It was how they procured the objects that bothered us. Not one person had seen the girls since they’d fled the barbeques. Sure, we’d spotted an outline here or there, a scant figure scurrying past a window at midnight. But the girls out and about in the world wasn’t something we could imagine anymore. We didn’t even know if they still looked the same.

  The preacher’s wife spun the Lazy Susan on the table, around and around until we were all half-hypnotized. “We can’t just leave them there.”

  “No, we can’t,” Violet’s mother said. “Something has to be done.”

  I was in the doorway, listening to what they were saying. They weren’t going to tolerate the girls much longer. I didn’t know what the mothers would try next, but I needed to do something first.

  “I’ll talk to them,” I said, and everyone in the kitchen turned to stare at me.

  Aunt Betty exhaled a sharp laugh. “Sure, Phoebe.”

  “They listened to me before, didn’t they?” I steadied myself against the wall. “The night they went into the mansion, I mean. Maybe they’ll listen to me again.”

  Aunt Betty crossed her arms. “If you think you can do so much good,” she said, “why don’t you? Go knock on their door right now.”

  This was the last thing I wanted to hear. After everything. After how long I’d waited, because I thought it was the best way. I thought we should give the girls time. But with all the mothers watching me, these women who already didn’t trust their own daughters, I had to do something.

  “Fine,” I said, and moved for the back door.

  It was one of those hot July days that made you crave Popsicles and ice floes and cryogenic freeze. I went onto the street, and the mothers followed me out. My entire way to the end of the cul-de-sac, their eyes tracked my every movement. Down the sidewalk, onto the front yard, and finally to the stoop of the mansion.

  It was good that I was going in the daylight. It seemed silly to hide what I was trying. If anything, perhaps the rest of Denton Street would stop thinking of the girls as arcane and dangerous if only they took one visitor. If only they accepted me.

  I knocked once and waited.

  Nearby, sprinklers sputtered out water, and a jet heading away from Cleveland roared overhead, leaving a trail of white marshmallow fluff in its wake.

  I knocked again and smiled back at the gawking mothers.

  From somewhere behind me, a child shrieked and tossed a handful of pebbles. The tiny stones cascaded down my back, and I gritted my teeth to stop myself from running after the brat and wringing its neck.

  Knocked a third time and tried not to look concerned, worried, frantic that the girls weren’t going to answer.

  Were they sleeping? Was resting all they did now? Did they rest at all? Really, what did I know of their lives now? Nothing. I knew nothing, and I was nothing.

  “Jacqueline?” I pressed both hands into the door. “Please, are you there?”

  For an instant, there was a fluttering on the other side, like a too-fast heartbeat. I held my breath and hoped. But then the noise was gone, and beyond reason, I understood that I was alone.

  I stepped off the stoop and tried to peer through the windows. That was the first time I noticed it. All the glass of the mansion was blocked off with something gray. Thicker than spray paint, but just as opaque. Whatever this was, it had happened since last night. In just a few short hours, the girls had sealed us out in yet another way.

  This was their way of telling us we weren’t welcome.

  I wasn’t welcome.

  “They probably put up curtains or blankets,” the mothers murmured as I retreated down the street, shamed in my defeat.

  “Well done, Phoebe.” Aunt Betty smirked at me from the sidewalk. “Always the hero, aren’t you?”

  I glared back at her. “At least I did something,” I said, and kept walking, all the way to my backyard where I climbed up to the treehouse to be alone with my bugs, and to have a better view of the mansion. The leaves were starting to thin from the heat, and I could see better from here. My personal box seat as I witnessed the end of our lives playing out.

  Near the window, my foot crunched on something small. At first, my head whirled with the prospect of another injured butterfly, but that wasn’t it. It was only a pod from earlier in the spring, where something went in and something else came out.

  Chrysalises, I thought, and the girls rose up in my mind. Behind those dark windows, maybe their transformations wouldn’t be a matter of degree. Maybe by the next time we saw them, there would be no more girls left. Only monsters.

  I shook my head. No, not monsters. That wasn’t my word. That was the word our fathers and mothers used. But even with the changes swirling beneath their flesh, nothing about the girls was monstrous to me. They were different, to be sure, but also beautiful in their own strange way.

  I envied them.

  Dinner that night was tasteless and unending. My father had left the television on before he came to the table, and a rerun of Barney Miller played in the next room, the laugh track punctuating the silence as my parents and I stared at our plates and tried to remember how to be a family.

  “Did you hear about the graffiti at the mill?” My father jabbed his iceberg lettuce with the tines of his fork. “Pray for the Rust Maidens spray-painted in front of the fence?”

  “They think one of us did it.” My mother took a sip of her bourbon. “Which is ridiculous.”

  “Of course they think that,” I said. After all, who else
would it be? Ever since I’d heard about it, I’d been trying to pick out the culprit on the street, but judging by the downcast expressions on our parents’ faces, they all looked guilty.

  My mother sighed and finally looked up at me. “I know you’re doing your best, Phoebe,” she said, and chewed her Salisbury steak carefully, so that she didn’t have to say anything else. But she was thinking something else. Something she didn’t want to say.

  So my father said it instead.

  “The neighbors have been talking about you. They think you’ve made things worse.”

  I choked up a laugh. “Me? I made things worse?”

  My mother nodded, her fingers wrapped bone-white around her silverware. “You shouldn’t have told the girls to leave. It hasn’t helped any, having them hiding in that mansion.”

  And if they’d stayed? I wanted to ask. Would that have helped them?

  But this time, I didn’t say anything. I didn’t scream or make a scene at the table or beg my parents to be on my side, just this once. Instead, I quietly excused myself from dinner. Then I waited on the front porch until the dark car down the road left its driveway, and Jeffers and Godfrey went out. Headed downtown, probably, to the Rib Room at the Charter House. How nice it must be to dine out every evening on the taxpayers’ dime.

  When I was sure they were gone, I walked down the block, the spare key in my pocket, and unlocked the side door of the government men’s house.

  Adrian was upstairs, poring over the latest doctors’ reports in bed.

  “Still not fond of knocking, huh?” he asked, barely glancing up from the file folders strewn across the mattress.

  I moved toward him, past the window that looked out on the street. In the daylight, you could see the mansion from here, still gleaming as if new and occupied and wanted. But in the evening, there was nothing but shadows.

  “Any updates?” I asked.

  “Nothing useful.” Adrian looked up at me, practically right through me, before he motioned to the tangle of papers. “Feel free to read them yourself, though.”