The Rust Maidens Page 9

  I froze in the corner, bug guts still dangling from my fingers. Out of all the neighbors on Denton Street to be up here in my treehouse, she was one of the last I expected. I barely knew Helena. Did she think my butterflies and I wanted an impromptu sermon?

  I stared at her, waiting for her to start lecturing me, but she just settled down and sat cross-legged in the doorway, like a Girl Scout about to break into a verse of Kumbaya.

  “Is there something you need?” I asked.

  She inhaled deeply. “Are you still planning to run away?”

  This question tightened around my heart. No one should know about my plan. No one except Jacqueline and me. I wouldn’t look at Helena now. I just kept clearing away the midges. “Who said I was ever planning that?”

  She giggled. “It’s a small neighborhood, Phoebe. People know things, even if you don’t tell them.”

  I wiped my hands on the hem of my dress. “What does it matter to you?”

  “If you want to go,” she said, “then I think you should leave. But you should do it alone. No one else needs to be bothered with your schemes.”

  My gaze flicked up at her. “My schemes?”

  “You can’t save everyone,” Helena continued, her words echoing in the preachy cadence of her no-good, do-gooder father. “It might be difficult for you to accept that, but in the end, it’s best for all of us.”

  My fingers twitched into fists. “What are you talking about? Why are you even here?”

  I glared at her, but it didn’t matter. There she sat, an uninvited sentry in the doorway, and I suddenly got the sense I was trapped inside my own sanctuary.

  I shifted against the wall, pretending I didn’t care, that I didn’t feel oddly afraid for no reason. “Isn’t it almost past your curfew? You wouldn’t want to scandalize the congregation.”

  She shrugged. “I’m not so worried about that anymore.”

  “Really?” I scoffed. “You, of all people, not concerned about fire and brimstone?”

  She smiled. “Things change. Sometimes it’s for the better, and sometimes it’s not.”

  A midge landed on my cheek, and I tried to shoo it away. “That’s odd,” I said. “Lisa said the same thing the other night.”

  Dread seized up inside me as I realized it. Just to be sure I knew, she shifted, and the collar of her cardigan drooped, revealing a patch of leaking bandages wrapped around one shoulder.

  Helena, a Rust Maiden.

  With a wide grin, she stood up and took a step toward me. And another step, and another, until I was backed against the shadows of the far wall, where I couldn’t see anything in the dark but her.

  “Don’t look so afraid, Phoebe,” she whispered, and her breath tasted of salt and ash. “It’s only me.”

  My lips parted to scream, but I didn’t have a chance. Behind her, a new shadow emerged. And a soft voice, at once alien and familiar.

  “Leave her alone, Helena.”

  The figure in the doorway moved toward the window, where the moonlight drenched her face. Jacqueline. After all these days apart, she was here, like she’d never left.

  For a moment, Helena didn’t budge. She steadied herself, almost expecting this. “We were only talking. What’s so wrong with talking?”

  “Just go,” Jacqueline said. “Now.”

  Helena snapped her tongue. “You’re no fun,” she said, retreating. Before climbing back down, she looked once at Jacqueline and grinned. “See you later.”

  I exhaled a breath I didn’t know I was holding. And then we were alone. Just the two of us, just like it had always been. I stared at Jacqueline, half-convinced she wasn’t real, that this was only a wishful vision conjured in the moonlight.

  “Hey, you,” I whispered, and inched closer, fearful she’d dissipate into smoke right in front of me if I wasn’t careful.

  But she didn’t vanish. She kept watching me. “Hello, Phoebe,” she said.

  I reached out for her hands, but she pulled away. “Let’s get out of here, please.” Panic split my voice in two. “I can get the car. We can leave tonight.”

  The cold evening air coiled around me as I waited for her to say something, to tell me she was ready.

  She only shook her head. “I can’t.”

  I felt my face twist in pain. “Everyone’s going crazy here, Jacqueline. We can’t stick around this place anymore.”

  “I don’t have a choice,” she said.

  Everything in the world slowed, and I couldn’t hear a sound, not the whir of the steel mill a mile away or the cicadas crooning outside the window or even my own breathing. It was so simple, what came next. Her movements almost random, almost meaningless. Face heavy with shame, tipped to the earth, not looking at me. One hand, trembling on the hem of her denim shorts. That hem peeled up, only an inch or two.

  But even in the dark, it was enough to see what Jacqueline was hiding.

  A gash in her thigh, wide as the palm of my hand, weeping tears the color of smog.

  SEVEN

  In the dark, I walked Jacqueline home, asking her an endless series of questions.

  “What’s happening?”

  “How do you feel?”

  “What’s it like?”

  But every time, she shook her head. “I don’t know, Phoebe,” she said. “I can’t describe it. I don’t know any more about this than you do.”

  We lingered on the sidewalk in front of her house. This wasn’t the best place for her, but she insisted it was where she needed to go.

  “I need some time,” she said.

  Desperation swelled through my voice. “Why come to me at all, then?”

  “I had to.” Jacqueline gnawed the dead flesh from her bottom lip. “I couldn’t let Helena bother you like that.”

  I stared at her. “But how did you know she was with me?”

  A gray expression crossed her face, as if she’d been caught in a lie. “Because,” she said, “I could hear her.”

  My throat constricted. “You heard her halfway down the street in my treehouse?”

  “Yes,” she said, and turned toward the porch. “I have to go.”

  I wanted to argue with her. I wanted to tell her it wasn’t too late. We could still get out of this place. In fact, that might be the only thing to do under the circumstances. But she wouldn’t listen.

  “I need time,” she kept repeating.

  “Jacqueline, please.” I surged toward her, catching her fingers. Her hand felt strange and rough against my palm. “Don’t leave me.”

  She gazed back at me, flashing that same look of sadness she’d always had, ever since we were kids. “Come by tomorrow,” she whispered. “We’ll talk then.”

  And with that, she was gone. Into the house, out of my reach. I stood there silently on the sidewalk. All I ever seemed to do now was watch her walk away from me.

  I counted to ten, but she didn’t come to the window.

  Back in the treehouse, I curled in the corner. This was the place I used to feel safe, but nowhere could protect me now.

  The world was simpler. Uglier too, but simpler. My life was no longer about tolls and highways and easy escapes. Everything had winnowed down to one thing only: how to protect Jacqueline.

  Maybe that was all that had ever mattered to me. Maybe that was why I’d been so set on getting us out of Cleveland in the first place. She was the one I worried about. Jacqueline, my cousin, my best friend, the girl I considered my sister. I could still save her from whatever was happening. From whatever came next.

  The treehouse seemed smaller that night, as if the ceiling dropped a few inches each hour. I would doze for a bit and then open my eyes, convinced this would be the time that the butterflies and cicadas would have fled, abandoning me to suffocate beneath the wooden planks. A coffin of my own making.

  Morning arrived, however, hot and cruel as it was, and I was still here, the same Phoebe.

  If only Jacqueline was the same, too.

  There was only one way we could do
this. No government men, no doctors, and most of all, no Aunt Betty. None of them could know about her. I had to make sure of that.

  But I didn’t have to be alone. Some things I could do on my own. Not this, though.

  I needed to talk to my father. To tell him what was happening. He’d always understood everything when I was young: the treehouse and the Impala and the strange restlessness in me. We were the same, in our own way. This was something we could figure out together.

  He was in the kitchen with the other men when I found him. They didn’t see me in the doorway at first. That was the only reason they said the things they did.

  “Those girls couldn’t have picked a worse time for this.”

  “This isn’t making the company want to sign a contract and call us back to work any quicker.”

  “They’re probably doing it on purpose. For the attention.”

  These were men who should know better. The good dads, the good providers. And there my father was. He didn’t participate, but he didn’t disagree either, and he’d given them the forum—our kitchen—to do this. That was almost worse: him not having enough conviction to choose one side or the other.

  Then the last of the conversation, a final remark to punctuate the rest, this one from Lisa and Kathleen’s father, his gaunt body gnarled in the corner.

  “We should just let the doctors have what they want.”

  What they want. At this, I choked down a breath. My father’s gaze shifted across the room, and he saw me there.

  “Phoebe,” he said, my name on his lips as empty as an apology.

  I stared at him, unblinking, until the edges of my vision wobbled. Then I gathered what was left of me and said in a voice steadier than I could believe, “Mom wanted me to tell you that dinner will be late tonight.”

  This was a lie, an off-the-cuff fabrication, and we both knew it. But the other men didn’t. They smiled and thought I was just being a good daughter, here to relay a message. I suppose, in a way, I was. I wanted my father to know that I’d seen him in his complicity, that I knew who he’d become. How he’d toss the girls aside for making a mess, and would probably toss me aside the same way, given the chance.

  The men resumed their conversation, lobbing useless theories about the girls back and forth as I watched my father, who was different in every way now. With our gazes locked on each other, he opened his mouth to say something, but I wouldn’t listen. Whether he was about to speak to me or to the others, it didn’t matter anymore. I vanished through the back door and headed to Jacqueline’s house. All the way there, I thought about what Mr. Carter had said.

  What they want. What the doctors wanted. What our parents wanted. Never what the girls wanted.

  I knocked on Jacqueline’s door, but she didn’t answer, so I retreated to the sidewalk, hoping to spot her in her window. No luck.

  I glanced around me and spotted someone else instead. Toward the end of the cul-de-sac, Dawn waited behind the sheer curtains of her parlor. A prisoner behind a white picket fence, her Farah Fawcett haircut all grown out and limp around her shoulders. Nobody had taken her to a beauty salon in months. It was one of an infinite number of punishments for all the trouble she’d caused.

  She stared out into the daylight she couldn’t penetrate, and at first, I thought perhaps she was watching me. But no, she was looking at something behind me, on the other side of the street. I followed her gaze to Clint’s house.

  I turned back at her. “There?” I pointed, and Dawn broadened as if she hadn’t expected me to speak to her or even see her. Maybe she didn’t believe she was visible at all anymore.

  She nodded and pointed in the same direction, her finger thin and crooked and not her own. It was the first time I’d seen evidence of her transformation, but I didn’t stare. She was motioning so ferociously that I couldn’t ignore her. After all, she couldn’t go there herself. But I could.

  My steps heavy, I crept onto the front porch. No one was there. All I saw was an old milk crate in the far corner, stuffed with blankets.

  My gaze shifted back to Dawn’s window, and I turned up my palms in confusion. But she nodded again, like I was in the right place, like I just had to keep going.

  Then, at my feet, something babbled inside the crate. I hesitated, unable to look, even though I knew what I’d find. Another babble, and another after that, and finally, I peered into the tangle of blankets.

  Eleanor, all pink cheeks and bundled-up fists.

  It was the first time I’d seen the baby. I was expecting something odd or remarkable about her, something to reveal what a problem she’d been. A giant scarlet B for burden on her forehead. How terrible to be a nuisance just by being born, but that was what she was. A burden to Dawn, to Clint, to all of Denton Street.

  I looked down at her, tucked inside the makeshift bassinet. She cooed back. The sound trilled right through me, and something about it made me want to weep.

  Behind me, the screen door flung open. Clint was standing there, a pitcher of tea in his hand. The Long Island variety, no doubt, almost certainly left over from his mother’s morning meeting with the other Denton Street housewives. As the gossip and heat indexes ticked higher in the neighborhood, so did the alcohol content of the before-noon drinks.

  Clint motioned at Eleanor. “You can take her for a while if you want.”

  My urge to cry suddenly washed away from me, replaced instead with the overwhelming desire to wrap my hands tight around his throat and not let go.

  “She’s not an automobile, Clint,” I said, half growling. “You don’t just let people take her out for a spin. You don’t leave her alone on the porch in a crate, either.”

  The pitcher shook accusingly in his hand. I glanced back to Dawn’s parlor window, but she was gone.

  Clint moved to the opposite side of the porch, as far from Eleanor as he could get. “What do you know, Phoebe? You don’t have a kid.”

  You don’t get to judge was what he meant. Poor Clint, having to suddenly take responsibility for his own actions. What a terrible inconvenience that must be.

  He set the pitcher on the chrome Formica table and dropped into a wicker chair.

  “You know, my parents will babysit her if I need them to,” he said. “Maybe you and I could catch up a little.”

  At first, I didn’t know what he meant. Then as he grinned, his intention clear, I stared back at him, remembering everything. Us together, us as close to happy as you could get on this street. Clint hadn’t changed. He was the same aimless boy he’d always been. The same boy I’d once loved.

  I inched toward him. “Can I have a drink too?”

  One eyebrow arched. “Sure,” he said, “if you’d like.”

  I moved across the porch, one careful step at a time. He watched me approach, shifting in his chair, more eager than he had a right to be.

  When I was in front of him, the table at my knees, I smiled, and he smiled back. A tremble ran straight though him, a kind of primal anticipation. I looked down at him and kept smiling. Then I reached out, and with a single swipe, my hand glided across the table, sending the plastic pitcher tumbling to the concrete floor. As the sticky sweetness pooled at our feet, Clint exhaled a pitiful little moan, and he might as well have been mortally wounded.

  “Things aren’t the same anymore,” I said. “You’re a father now. Start acting like it.”

  I turned and trudged down the steps. I didn’t want to hear his response. I didn’t want to hear anything from him. By the time I reached the sidewalk, he’d already disappeared inside the house again, probably in pursuit of more refreshments. Eleanor fussed inside the crate, alone in ways no child should ever be. The urge to rush back and rescue the baby from her own father nearly overwhelmed me. But what would I do with her? Take her home and rear her myself? The kid would be better off raised by wolves than by me.

  I wished from the pit of my soul that Jacqueline and I had gotten out of here when we’d had a chance.

  Halfway home, I passe
d Doctor Ross’s house, where Kathleen was crouching outside in the bushes. I stared at her a while, thinking how this was one of the most normal sights I’d seen all day.

  When she noticed me standing there, she looked back for a moment, before rolling her eyes and sprinting out of her so-called hiding spot.

  “Come with me,” she whispered, and before I could argue, she seized my arm and pulled me into the shrubs.

  Frowning, I regarded her through the stalks of overgrown chickweed, waiting for an explanation.

  “They’re interviewing the families,” she said, half-defensive, and motioned to the window over us. With a sigh, I poked my head up and peered inside.

  In the family den, Godfrey and Jeffers loitered against the walls while Adrian was front and center, seated on a red sectional with Violet. He kept talking at her, but all Violet did was gaze at the carpet, her eyes so far downcast she might as well have been sleeping.

  I squinted harder. The edges of the cushions were dripping and stained. Violet’s inadvertent doing.

  Another Rust Maiden. That made five of them: Lisa, Dawn, Helena, Violet, and Jacqueline. We were losing girls quicker than we could keep track.

  As Adrian kept droning on, Violet shifted in her seat and held back tears, even as her body did more than enough weeping for her. In a way, she looked the same as Lisa had in her bedroom that night. The gray water, the withering hair, the soft skin that peeled away, no longer needed. It was an unfolding set of symptoms, but as the girls changed, you could still see each of them hidden there behind the decay. Somehow, nothing about them was ugly. They were just different. Simple as that.

  At the next window over, two shadows passed by, and Kathleen pulled me down by the waist to keep us from being spotted.

  Voices seeped through the glass.

  “What are they doing here, John?” Violet’s mother. “Can’t you ask them to leave?”

  “I’m sorry,” Doctor Ross said, and honestly sounded like he meant it. “You know I can’t.”

  “I hate this.” His wife was sobbing openly now. “I hate those men being in there with her. I want them out of our house.”