The Rust Maidens Read online

  “Hello?” the voice calls out brightly. “I can see you. What’s wrong in there?”

  Though the curtains on the windows are pulled shut, they’re too gauzy, old floral-printed linen that was never nice, not even when it was new. That means while my figure is blurred too, I’m still visible. Of course I am. Fabulous scheme, Phoebe. Hiding in plain sight.

  This is ridiculous.

  My hands still shaking, I drift forward and creak open the door, but I leave the chain on. Just in case.

  On the other side is a face I don’t recognize. It’s a girl, older than any of the Rust Maidens were, but probably fifteen years younger than me. I don’t know her, haven’t ever seen her before, though she looks strangely familiar. Everything on Denton Street is an echo of itself, the past repeating into the present, like mirrors set up to reflect one another into eternity.

  She smiles at me. “Is Mrs. Shaw here?”

  “Who are you?” I blurt out the question and immediately regret it. This is no way to start. I’m trying to be someone better than myself. Better than a middle-aged woman who fears ghosts who don’t fear her. I swallow hard and try again. “What is it that you need?”

  This somehow doesn’t seem much politer, but the girl’s smile only broadens before she answers both my questions.

  “I’m Nora,” she says. “Mrs. Shaw and I have tea every Thursday at eleven.”

  This whirls around my brain for a second. Is it Thursday? Is it eleven? Does my mother even drink tea?

  A long moment passes as I recalibrate myself to a reality in which my mother still hosts regular social occasions like a regular woman.

  Nora purses her lips, a shadow crossing her face. “But if she’s not here—”

  “No, she’s not.”

  I want to send her away. I want to be alone in this place, where I can fold up my bedroom and wallow in whatever self-pity is the order of the day. Poor Phoebe, too lonely for friends and family. Poor Phoebe, too old for hopes and dreams. Poor Phoebe, too haunted to even close her eyes and rest.

  On the other side of the door, Nora fidgets and looks ready to turn away on her own. That would make this easier, if she had the decency to leave me in peace. But no, that’s not the way this should go. Again, I’m trying to be a better version of me.

  “My mother should be back soon.” I hesitate before sliding the chain off the door. “If you want to come in and wait.”

  This last part isn’t exactly an invitation. More like an incomplete thought. But Nora takes it as an offer anyhow, and crosses the threshold.

  There’s a stranger in my house. But she’s only a stranger to me, not a stranger to the house itself, or to my mother, or to probably anyone else in the neighborhood. That makes me wonder if after all these years, I’m the stranger here.

  “You said Mrs. Shaw is your mother?” Nora inspects my face, cataloging my features, as though she were expecting to discover me here. “That means you’re Phoebe, right?”

  I nod, but say nothing else. It’s not surprising she knows my name. My mother used to have pictures of me arraying the living room. Newborn me above the mantle. Me on the first day of kindergarten, cluttering a corner. Me at graduation over the turntable, though why she’d want to remember that day, so close to when everything disintegrated, I’ll never know.

  The pictures are gone now, packed away with the rest of our lives, but the outlines of their frames remain on the walls. Over one of their dubious teas, my mother probably mentioned me too, mentioned that once upon a time, she had a daughter. I’m a cautionary tale in the neighborhood, a “what not to do” if you’d like half a chance at a good life.

  We linger in silence as I try to remember how to act in a situation like this. Nora smiles again, and I start to wonder if her friendliness in odd circumstances is almost a strange kind of nervous tic.

  “Do you want me to get the tea?” she asks.

  I shake my head. Pretend to be a good hostess, Phoebe.

  My nervous hands clasped in front of me, I wander into the empty kitchen and stand disoriented for a moment. Tea. I didn’t know my mother liked tea. She always drank cordials and amaretto and whiskey straight from the bottle when things got bad. But then, who isn’t a fan of tea? I suppose everybody enjoys a cup of Earl Gray or chamomile now and then. .

  I can’t imagine my mother having a weekly meeting with this girl, either. It seems like something she would have told me about, an offhand snippet to punctuate the end of another stifled phone conversation.

  “Oh, darling, I have to go now. Nora’s here, and I can’t keep her waiting for her Twinings.”

  But nothing like that was ever mentioned, not even once. Of course, I don’t know my mother these days. I haven’t known her for years. And maybe it’s a new habit, one she’s picked up since my father went into care. Someone to keep her company one day a week, because her only daughter wasn’t good enough to do the job.

  The cupboards are dusty, and I wipe away a handful of cobwebs as I search through them. In the last one over the stove, I strain on my tiptoes and peek inside. A yellowed box of Lipton sits sullenly in the corner. I swear it looks like the same box that was here when I was a kid.

  At the sink, I fill the kettle and pretend everything is normal.

  When I bring in the pot and two mugs to the dining room, Nora’s already seated at the card table in the corner, a bright smile on her face. But somehow, I get an odd sense of movement about the room, the air churning and restless, as though she were searching the corners and crevices, and only rushed to the chair when she heard me lumbering in with the teapot.

  “Almost all packed up,” she says, her hands patting her thighs in a strange kind of rhythm. “I can’t believe your mom’s really leaving.”

  “I can’t believe it myself.”

  The Lipton over-steeps and ends up bitter, but Nora doesn’t complain. She has plenty else to talk about. Her words ring in my ears like the fallout of a too-loud rock concert.

  “This was a beautiful house in its day. I hear it’s got quite a history.”

  “This whole neighborhood has history, they say. But it was before my time.”

  “It has to be hard for you to be back here, Phoebe. After all these years. After everything.”

  I fidget in the folded chair. She’s asking things without ever saying them. It’s a clever skill, one I almost admire.

  She stirs sugar in her tea. “That summer had to be awful for you.”

  “Yes,” I say, and my mouth aches with confessions I’ve needed to make for almost thirty years, “but I imagine it was worse for them.”

  The spoon stops turning in the mug. “For whom? For the girls?”

  “Yes, for them.”

  I breathe in, ready to say something, ready to tell this stranger, this peculiar girl everything. All the things I’ve been hiding for almost three decades. But when I look up, my mother is standing there in front of us, her jaw slack, her fiery gaze fixed squarely on Nora.

  “You,” she says.

  Slowly, Nora stands from her chair, her face twisted somewhere between agony and quiet rage. “I told you I’d get in here someday, Mrs. Shaw.”

  My chest tightens, and I look frantically between them. My mother moves toward Nora, hands curling into fists.

  “You waited until I left, didn’t you?” she asks. “You’d do anything to get into this house. Wouldn’t you, Eleanor?”

  I can’t move. I can’t breathe. That name steals my breath away.

  Eleanor.

  “You’re Dawn’s daughter,” I whisper, and the words taste of ash.

  A harsh smirk twitches across her lips. “I would’ve thought you’d call me Clint’s daughter.”

  I should be wounded by this, a slight against my past romances, but I’m not. Eleanor’s probably accumulated a lifetime of stories about me and how I was more than acquainted with her father.

  “You were about to say something.” Eleanor moves toward me. “Tell me what it was.”

/>   “Enough.” My mother cuts between us. “You weren’t invited in, my dear.”

  “But I was, Mrs. Shaw.” Eleanor grins. “Your daughter invited me.”

  Her jaw set, my mother seizes Eleanor by the shoulders. With one strong arm in her back, she hustles the invader to the door and shoves her through it. “Try it again,” she says, “and I’ll call the police.”

  The door slams, and the figure on the porch vanishes almost as quickly as it appeared.

  But that doesn’t mean she’s gone. I close my eyes and see her there.

  Eleanor, all grown up. The girl I thought was a stranger is instead someone I know. I wish I could respool this day and try again. Not let her in at all, or have her be someone else. Someone I truly don’t know and never will.

  “It seems unreal,” I say.

  For some reason, it never occurred to me that it would happen, that the baby from that long-ago summer would ever be anything but that same woebegone infant.

  “That girl.” My mother snaps her tongue. “Sneaking into places she doesn’t belong.”

  I try to catch a steady breath. “She’s done this before?” I ask.

  “Too many times to count.” My mother rolls her eyes. “She’s like a cockroach, always trying to find a way in.”

  I hesitate. “What does she want?”

  “The truth, I guess.” My mother chirps up a laugh. “Like any of us know that.”

  I swallow hard, and wish I didn’t know.

  My mother tells me of Eleanor, of her series of dead-end jobs at places that always folded up almost as quickly. First at the corner store when she was a teenager, probably working under Aunt Betty, poor kid. Then a small clothing factory on the outskirts of Lakewood that didn’t stay open more than a couple years. Now she’s at a gas station a few blocks away, where she trades cigarettes for spare change under a plastic window, but that’s not likely to stick around either. Management’s already talking about making cuts due to “the economy,” that favorite Rust Belt excuse for conscripting people to the unemployment line.

  I listen quietly to the checklist of Eleanor’s life, all of it so painfully banal that it makes me want to cry.

  “Don’t feel bad, Phoebe.” My mother watches me, her gaze almost pitying. “It’s not your fault. How can she expect anything better? She’s nothing but a troublemaker. Just like—”

  Her voice cuts out abruptly, and I stare at her.

  “What were you going to say?” I ask.

  She waves one hand at me and turns to the place where the liquor cabinet used to be. “Nothing, dear.”

  “It wasn’t nothing.” I take one step toward her. “You were going to say ‘just like her mother.’ Right?”

  “Yes, it happens that I was.” She purses her lips and brushes past me toward the card table. “But I didn’t say it.”

  That’s what she meant, though, and that’s all that matters.

  She clears the kettle and the mugs and takes them to the sink, where she eagerly rinses away every trace of Eleanor from the house.

  I watch her from the doorway. “Does she live with Clint?”

  My mother scoffs. “No,” she says, half-lashing the word. “Clint doesn’t really live anywhere these days. Not unless you count a barstool as an apartment.”

  This revelation should tug at something deep inside me, my lost first love, but instead it’s neither jarring nor interesting to think of him that way. If anything, it’s the most obvious and boring punctuation on the end of a most obvious and boring life.

  “So where does Eleanor stay?”

  “With her grandmother.” My mother hesitates before clarifying. “Clint’s mother. They’re almost moved out already, from what I hear.”

  I nod absently. Naturally, Eleanor would be with Clint’s parents. Dawn’s family moved away that fall after everything that happened. Moved away and never looked back.

  “Eleanor’s not a child anymore.” My mother turns from the sink to face me. “She’s an adult, Phoebe. She could leave here or stay or do whatever she pleases.”

  “I guess,” I say, but I wonder how much leaving would help her. Look at how much it helped me.

  The dishes scrubbed clean of Eleanor, my mother dries her hands on the only dishcloth left in the house, a fusty thing dotted with faded strawberries pouring out of a pitcher.

  “By the way,” she says, her eyes going dark, “where were you this morning?”

  “Just outside,” I mumble, and motion for the door. I can’t think of anything better to say. I didn’t expect her to be awake and gone so early. I certainly didn’t expect her to ask me about it.

  My mother shakes her head. “I get up and you’re gone, and you know, for a minute, I thought—”

  Everything goes suddenly still in the house, and she doesn’t finish this sentence. She doesn’t have to. We both know what she thought, how she was sure I’d joined them at last, those girls we can’t forget.

  “I didn’t go far,” I say. “I was just down the block. You could have come looking for me.”

  She lets out a strident laugh that sets my blood buzzing. “Did looking for you help me before? When you left without saying goodbye?”

  She leans over the sink to steady herself.

  “Where did you go?” I ask, desperate to change the subject.

  “To see your father.” She glances up at me. “I’d hoped you would come with me.”

  I shake my head. I don’t know that I’m ready yet to see him like that. My strong father, now thin and frail and gone. At least, gone in all the ways that count.

  “Maybe tomorrow,” I say, and hope the day never comes.

  ***

  For dinner, we order takeout and eat at the little card table. My mother wipes it down twice before she sets out the Styrofoam containers of linguini, and though she says it’s just because of dust, I know it’s to ensure we get no trace of Eleanor in our pasta.

  Afterward, she turns in early, but I stay downstairs. I won’t go into my bedroom. I haven’t been back there since last night, when things were different somehow. Before I met Eleanor. Before Quinn showed me what’s in that house.

  I’m not ready to take apart my room yet, to dig through boxes of keepsakes and secrets. But I am ready to take apart something else.

  In the backyard, winter blisters in my lungs. I always forget how cruel Decembers in Cleveland are. What an unrelenting thief the weather can be.

  But I have something to do now. Something that matters. The treehouse hangs over me, a reminder of that summer. I don’t care what the investors do with this strip of land. They can leave it to rot, for all that it matters. But these memories are mine, and it’s time for me to dissect them. To leave the treehouse in pieces, so nobody else can inherit my mistakes.

  I climb up, armed only with sheer will and a hammer I found in the garage. That’s enough to do this job.

  Piece by piece, I dismember my life. It feels better than it should.

  Rusted nails and shards of wood slough off to the yard below. Over and over, I remove these fragments of the past, remembering everything in spite of myself.

  Here’s the plank where the potted milkweed sat.

  Here’s where I used to hide my flask.

  Here’s the triple moon sign etched in the heat of that summer.

  Here’s where Jacqueline and I curled up side by side and pretended we could outlast forever.

  Specters swirl around me as I pry up a board in the corner. The water damage is extensive here, and there’s a rotted-out section in the middle of an old knothole, just enough for my fingers to slip through. Just enough to find what’s waiting there for me. Wood and decay, and what feels like bone.

  For the longest moment of my life, something inside the decay is holding my hand.

  I exhale what must be a scream, or the closest thing to it, as my body lurches against what’s left of one wall. The board tumbles to the ground below, and my hands quiver in front of me. They’re mine, they’re mine,
they’re mine. What was there isn’t touching me now, if it was anything at all. It’s hard to tell in this place. Even when I’m really alone, I might imagine someone is here in the darkness. I might imagine that I know who it is, and that’s why those fingers felt cold and damp and withered, yet strangely familiar too.

  I clutch the hammer to my chest and decide to call it a night. It’s not even midnight yet, and the treehouse isn’t entirely dismantled. It’s half here and half gone, an appropriate relic for Denton Street. I might just leave it that way. I might not be brave enough to risk another rotted board.

  My coat bundled tight, I climb down. Quinn is waiting there to greet me.

  “I found something else,” she says. “Something new.”

  I shouldn’t go with her. I just spent the last hour obliterating the past. But I can’t help myself. If she’s discovered another sign, then I have to know.

  I don’t even agree. She just starts walking, and I follow. We travel past Jacqueline’s house. There’s a notice on the door about the demolition that no one’s bothered to remove or read. All the lights are out inside, but that doesn’t mean the place is abandoned. The same upstairs curtains remain across Jacqueline’s bedroom window, and I turn away, terrified if I count to ten, they might flutter and reveal someone I once knew.

  “This way,” Quinn whispers, and leads me through the open back door of the preacher’s house. Like Violet’s, it’s empty now, and ready to crumble, maybe as early as tomorrow.

  I’ve never been in here before, even though I’d been invited to Helena’s birthday party every year. My mother had begged me to go, just to keep the peace, but I always refused, leaving her to invent a new excuse each August. It wasn’t Helena’s fault, really. It was just that I spent enough time in her father’s other house on Sundays, and that was bad enough. No way was I spending my Saturday with the family too.

  Now, standing in what’s left of their lives, I regret not RSVPing. It wouldn’t have hurt me, not like it ultimately hurt her, anyhow.

  I run my hands through my hair. “Why are we here, Quinn?”