Little Girls

by Ronald Malfi

  “Will you look at this stuff?” Ted said as he peered into the liquor cabinet. “Harvey’s Bristol Cream, an unopened bottle of Hiram Walker triple sec that looks like it was pillaged off an old pirate ship. . . .” He whistled. “This stuff is ancient.”

  “Was granddad a pirate?” Susan asked while seated at the piano. She was chugging through minor scales with a slow, unpracticed concentration. Now she stopped and turned sideways on the piano bench to look at her father.

  “Do you see any parrots flying around?” Ted responded. “Do you see any eye patches or peg legs in the umbrella stand?”

  Susan turned red faced with laughter. The whole thing made Laurie uncomfortable. She didn’t like hearing Susan refer to Myles Brashear as “granddad,” and the young girl’s laughter echoing hollowly through the house struck Laurie as offensive, though she didn’t understand exactly why. “Why don’t you go upstairs and get ready for bed?”

  “It’s still early!”

  “It’s been a long day. No talkbacks, Susan.”

  Susan whined to Ted, who shrugged his shoulders offhandedly. “Listen to your mother. No talkbacks.”

  “Can I at least check on Torpedo? Please?”

  It was the name she had given to the frog. Earlier, following the little creature’s escape, Ted had cornered it in the dining room and managed to trap it underneath a Tupperware container. “Speedy little torpedo,” he’d said, and Susan had liked the name, though Laurie did not think the girl understood its meaning. Laurie had retrieved the old cigar box from her father’s study, poked some holes in it, and had given it to Susan for her pet. Now, the cigar box sat on the front porch. Susan had filled it with twigs and grass and some small crickets she had chased around the yard so the frog would have something to eat.

  “Okay,” Laurie relented, “but do it quickly. No dillydallying.”

  Susan hopped off the piano bench and raced down the hall. Laurie heard the front door swing open.

  “Are you feeling okay?” Ted asked. He was replacing the bottles back inside the liquor cabinet.

  “I feel fine.” She set the legal paperwork down on the coffee table. “This paperwork is just making my head spin.”

  “I’ll have a look for you.”

  “It’s fine. The lawyer will tell us all we need to know tomorrow.”

  “Is it something else?” He came up behind her and massaged her shoulders. “Is it about your dad?”

  “No. Strangely, no.” She hadn’t been thinking of her father at all, in fact. She had been thinking of Dora Lorton. The way the woman had looked at the house as the Cadillac pulled out of the driveway . . .

  Ted kissed the top of her head. “If you change your mind about staying here . . .”

  “It’s okay. I’m okay.” Wearily, she smiled up at him.

  Susan appeared in the doorway. Her cheeks were slick with tears and her chin was a wrinkled knot—what Ted often called her “walnut chin” when she was upset, because that’s what it most closely resembled.

  Laurie sat up stiffly. “What?” she said. “What is it?”

  “He’s dead. Torpedo’s dead.”

  “Oh, honey,” Ted said. Susan ran to him and he scooped her up in his arms. She sobbed against his neck. Ted made shushing sounds and swung her gently from side to side.

  Laurie got up and went down the hall to the front door. Susan had left the door open. Laurie stepped out onto the porch and immediately felt the chill in the air. Beyond the porch, the world was comprised of infinite darkness. This sort of darkness did not exist back in Hartford, where the suburban streets were overcrowded with houses and vapor lamps and there were always cars cruising up and down the neighborhood streets. This darkness was nearly primordial in its depth and magnitude. Just beyond the porch, the lawn resounded in a chorus of crickets.

  Laurie bent down to examine the cigar box that sat on the porch beside the door. She opened the lid and there it was, the little thing gray and stiff among a spongy mat of dry grass and bits of twigs. The frog’s eyes bulged, its mouth frozen open. Laurie could see its individual ribs, thinner than toothpicks. Some of them appeared broken. She jostled the box until the stiff little amphibian rolled obediently onto its back.

  She considered tossing the contents of the cigar box off the porch, but then thought better of it. If she knew anything about her daughter, it was that the girl possessed unwavering sentimentality. Susan would want to dispose of the frog herself. And Ted would humor her. He would probably help her dig a hole in the yard, maybe even say a few words: a makeshift funeral for a stiff little amphibian. That this frog might receive the service her dead father had not was a notion that was not lost on Laurie. Yet the thought did not upset her.

  Back in the house, Ted was still cradling Susan in his arms. Susan had stopped crying but Laurie could hear her snuffling against Ted’s shoulder.

  “Okay, Susan,” Laurie said. “Calm down, hon. It’s just a frog.”

  Susan’s grip around her father intensified as she issued a shrill whine. Ted frowned at Laurie from over Susan’s hair.

  “Come on,” he said, patting Susan on the back. He moved past Laurie and out into the hall. “Let’s go upstairs and brush those teeth.”

  Laurie listened to him climb the stairs to the second floor. The whole house creaked. We baby her too much. We’re turning her into a needy, spoiled child. Perhaps she had agreed to stay here instead of the hotel too quickly. Susan was as fickle as any ten-year-old; she would have wound up adjusting to the hotel just as easily as this old house. In fact, probably more so, since there would have been a lot to keep her occupied in downtown Annapolis, not to mention a TV in the hotel room. What was there for a ten-year-old to do hanging around an old house all day?

  In the kitchen, Laurie loaded the dirty dishes from dinner into the dishwasher. The plate of leftover brownies looked as unappetizing to Laurie as a plate of charred wood. Disgusted, she dumped them into the trash pail beneath the sink. They had turned into hard little cassettes and sounded like stones striking the bottom of the pail.

  She went into the hall and paused, listening to Ted and Susan talking in hushed voices upstairs. Quietly, she climbed the stairs and stood at the top. The bedroom door at the far end of the hallway was open and there was a light on in there, but she couldn’t see Ted or Susan. Holding her breath, she listened.

  At first, it sounded like Ted was consoling her in the loss of her frog, but then Laurie realized they were talking about her—she could hear Ted saying “mommy” over and over again to their daughter in a placating tone. Heedful of loose floorboards, Laurie crept closer to the open bedroom door. She paused halfway down the hall when she heard the squeak of bedsprings.

  “It’s like when Sissy O’Rourke’s dog was hit by that car,” she heard Ted say. “Remember? You had to be extra nice to Sissy for a while. Remember how we went over and brought her those chocolate chip cookies?”

  “I helped bake those cookies,” Susan said.

  “Yes. And you did a splendid job,” Ted said. “But now you have to be that way for Mommy, if just for a little bit. Does that make sense?”

  “Yes,” Susan said, her voice hushed now. “I think so.”

  “That’s good. So we’ll try to be a little tougher for Mom, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Let’s see your tough face.”

  Susan must have pulled a face, because she began giggling and then Ted laughed, too.

  “Good,” Ted said. “Now plant a kiss right here, sugar-pie.”

  The bedsprings squealed again.

  Something solid seemed to wink into existence in the upper part of Laurie’s chest. She didn’t approve of Ted talking to Susan about her that way. It made her feel weak and feebleminded. She had spoken to him about it in the past, particularly after an inexplicable episode had happened to Laurie last year—the episode Ted referred to as the “highway incident.” At the time, Ted had agreed with her, yet wound up doing what he wanted later on. She considere
d confronting him about it again, but the thought made her weary. She didn’t have it in her. Not tonight. Not here in this house.

  She went downstairs, locked up the house, and then crawled back up to the second floor. This time, the bedroom door at the far end of the hall was closed, which meant Susan had gone to sleep. To her right, the door to the master bedroom stood open. She realized that it was the one room in the house—with the exception of the basement—that she had not gone into yet. She approached slowly, hesitant to enter her father’s old room. There was a four-poster bed, the sheets fresh and crisp. On the wall above the headboard was a massive wooden crucifix. Jesus was a wraith with a look of idiot madness on his face. Laurie pried it from the wall and slid it under the bed.

  Exhaustion settling fully down around her now, Laurie went to the side of the bed and sat down. She kicked off her shoes and tucked them neatly beneath the bed. She pulled her shirt up over her head and draped it over the footboard. The button on her jeans required some finesse and, given her distracted state, it took her nearly a full minute to get it undone and the jeans off. Movement across the room drew her attention to the bedroom door. It eased silently closed on its own accord, until only a vertical sliver of dark hallway remained. The door to their bedroom in Hartford did the same thing: It never wanted to stay open. There was a full-length mirror on the back of this door, and it displayed to her the bedroom in reverse, including her own reflection. In the mirror, she looked like some boardwalk artist’s hasty rendition of a human being. Even from across the room, she could make out the terrible dark hollows beneath her eyes. Her skin was the color of old parchment.

  Her eyes were then drawn to the reflection of the ornate vase on the nightstand. It was shaped like a cocktail shaker but carved from shiny beige stone marbled with blue veins. There was a lid on it. Vases didn’t have lids. Laurie rolled to the other side of the bed and looked closely at the vase that was, in actuality, not a vase at all.

  In the adjoining bathroom, the shower turned off. Ted’s melodic whistling sounded from behind the bathroom door. When he stepped out amidst a billow of steam, he had a towel wrapped around his waist like a sarong and his hair slicked back. His reddened body was beaded with water.

  Laurie was still staring at the urn. She hadn’t moved.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Please,” she told him in a small voice. “Please get this out of the bedroom.”

  “What?”

  She continued to stare at the urn.

  “What is . . .” he began, moving around the bed to the nightstand. He stopped when he realized what she was looking at.

  “It hadn’t occurred to me to ask what happened to his ashes,” Laurie said. She drew her bare knees up under her chin. “That was stupid of me.”

  “No,” said Ted. “It was stupid for someone to put this in here. It was probably one of those two from earlier today. That Felix Lorton, most likely. Stupid son of a bitch.”

  “It’s not their fault. Just please take it away.”

  “Where should I—”

  “I don’t care, Edward.” It was his real name, and he hated it. She knew to use it only when she was deadly serious about something and wanted to show it. “Just put it downstairs for now. It makes me uncomfortable.”

  He scooped it off the nightstand. Still clutching his towel to his hip with his other hand, he went quickly out of the bedroom and down the stairs. She heard him fumbling around down there. In agitation, he mumbled something to himself, though his words were unintelligible. It was a big house. The echo was terrible.

  She was asleep by the time Ted came back upstairs.

  Chapter 6

  She saw what she believed to be a ghost the next morning.

  Laurie rose from bed before Ted and Susan were awake. Early morning sunlight streamed through the bedroom windows. She looked around, momentarily disoriented. Then it all came back to her in a solid wave. She sat up and climbed out of bed, careful not to wake up Ted. He was snoring soundly and looked very peaceful. She was almost envious of his apparent tranquility. He never had trouble sleeping. At the foot of the bed, Laurie rooted through her suitcase in silence, opting for a pair of sweatpants and a long-sleeved cotton jersey. She dressed quickly and, without stopping in the bathroom to brush her teeth and wash her face, she went downstairs.

  Her father’s urn was in the parlor, on the mantel of the fireplace. She paused slightly as she walked through to the kitchen, her gaze lingering on the veined ceramic jar.

  With its large bay windows that faced east, the kitchen was bright. Peeking in the cupboards, Laurie found them stocked with various flavors of coffee. She selected a hazelnut blend, then spent the next several moments searching around the countertop for the coffee machine. There was none. It wasn’t until she located an old pitted percolator among the pots and pans did the prospect of coffee look feasible again. A wry grin tugged at the corner of her mouth. She filled the percolator at the sink, then dumped in several spoonsful of coffee into the basket. She set the whole contraption on the stove, cranked the dial until the click-click-click of the gas gave way to a substantive whump! as the gas ignited into blue flame.

  When she turned around, she saw a girl of about ten or eleven—Susan’s age—run across the yard beyond the bay windows. The girl darted up the incline of the yard and disappeared behind the rippling tendrils of a willow tree. She had long, wavy hair the color of the hazelnut coffee and wore a knee-length dress of a breezy, light blue fabric. Before she disappeared behind the willow tree, the girl had cast a look over at Laurie through the bay windows, as if able to see Laurie standing there through the darkened glass.

  Laurie’s heart seized. It took her several moments before she was able to regain her composure. There was a door that led from the kitchen out onto a series of cement slabs that formed a porch in the backyard. Laurie went to the door now, unlatched it, and hesitantly pushed it open. The day had warmed considerably from yesterday, even at this early hour, though there was still a strong and chilly breeze in the air. She could smell the trees surrounding the property and, far beyond, the brackish scent of the Severn River.

  In bare feet, she stepped out into the yard. She let the kitchen door slam against the frame behind her as she walked up the slight incline toward the shaggy willow tree. The grass was damp with dew and cold against the bottoms of her feet. She reached the willow tree and saw that the girl was nowhere in evidence. There were many trees on both sides of the property, and it would be easy for someone to hide . . . but why would someone want to hide from her?

  “Hello?” She wasn’t surprised to find that her voice was horribly unsteady. She lifted some of the willow tree branches and saw that there was a hinged gate in the fence. It was closed but not properly latched. Laurie let the boughs slap back into place and then took a few steps backwards to where the lawn swelled so that she could better see over the fence and into the neighboring yard. The house next door was in poor condition, its siding overgrown with vines, its roof patchy with missing shingles. Some of the window shutters hung at crooked angles. From this vantage she couldn’t see if the dusty green car was still in the driveway.

  Looking at the house, it was impossible not to think of the Russes, and of Sadie Russ, who had once lived there. The visage of the girl running across the yard just a moment ago only encouraged such memories. Sadie Russ, Laurie thought, feeling the bare flesh of her arms prickle despite the warmth of the morning sun. Sadie Russ, the girl next door, the horrible little wretch. A nanosecond later, she hated herself for thinking such thoughts about the dead.

  Laurie turned and continued up the incline toward the crest of the backyard. At the top of the hill, the property was overcome by sparse trees through which, after a distance, the vastness of the Severn River could be glimpsed. From what she could make out, the water looked to be the color of slate and filigreed with a fine cap of fog that made it nearly impossible to see across to the other side. Much of the shoreline was overrun by thick s
hoots of bamboo. As a little girl, she had played in these woods and along the riverbank quite often. With Sadie, her mind reminded her. For a while, anyway.

  Shivering, Laurie cut to the left and followed the wooden fence as it trailed off into the woods. The damp cushion of the lawn surrendered to a rutted dirt footpath that wound through encroaching trees. It diverged from the moldy fence and wended deeper into the trees. Being early summer, the foliage was already bright green and thick. She followed the path, knowing from memory where it would ultimately end, though she was uncertain of what she would find when she arrived there. Her bare feet kicked at small stones and prickly balls that looked like cherries covered with sharp teeth. She looked up and saw the sunlight shining in dazzling arrays through a canopy of semitransparent leaves. Carved hastily in the trunk of a large oak was the word FUCK. The base of the tree was wreathed in wildflowers.

  And then she came upon the clearing and saw it.

  Her heart became infused with equal parts amazement, disbelief, and terror at the revelation that the thing still existed after all these years. One could call it a temple, a house of worship which had been constructed as a testament to her father’s obsession. When she was just a child, it had been a shimmering glass box that reflected the sunlight and looked like something out of a fairy tale. She could go to any of the windows and look inside at the profusion of plants with their waxy green leaves and colorful explosions of flowers. Often, her father would spend hours here, tending to his flora.

  It was the greenhouse.

  Now, the little glass house was like a bad secret that had been hidden from the world. The glass panels were brown and grimy with muck so thick they were opaque. The glass itself was thick and unforgiving, unlike the polycarbonate panels used in modern greenhouses. Some of the panels were riddled with cracks, while others had been busted out completely. Triangular shards of glass lay scattered atop the dirt and grass. The roof of the greenhouse, once a cantilevered A-frame, was now a partially sunken pit beneath a weathered sheet of heavy brown canvas. The canvas itself was held in place by a series of long chains that ran down the side of the structure and were bolted to the bottom of the frame.