Little Girls

by Ronald Malfi

  For a time, she thought about Susan. Returning to the house weighed on Laurie, but it distressed her in some inexplicable fashion to have Susan there. It wasn’t a revelation that had dawned on her all at once; rather, it had happened—and was still happening—incrementally, bit by bit. Last night she had awoken to sounds in the house. Low talking, it had sounded like—the whispers of little girls. It had reminded her of sleepovers at friends’ houses in her own youth, and all that hushed giggling behind cupped hands in the dark. But there had been a darker component to that sound last night. She had climbed out of bed and tread out onto the landing for a better listen. She first checked Susan’s room, but she was sound asleep. Then she went downstairs and made sure all the doors were locked and the windows were latched. They were, but it didn’t help quell her anxiety. When Ted had found her five minutes later in the upstairs hallway, she had been convinced she had heard footsteps on the other side of the belvedere door.

  It occurred to her now that she harbored an imprecise concern for her daughter being in that house. This notion reminded her of all the fears she’d suffered at the onset of motherhood, when she worried about all the dangers of the world out there, ready to take a bite out of her helpless daughter. Strange noises in an old house were nothing compared to the brutality of the real world.

  Now, in the bright light of a new day, it was easy enough to believe those noises she had heard last night had been nothing more than sounds carried over from some forgotten dream.

  She was on her third refill when a bleached blonde came into the shop. She was young, perhaps in her late-twenties, and possessed the aquiline profile of a Greek bust. The heavy costume jewelry around her neck and wrists jangled as she approached Laurie’s booth. The girl’s smile was surprisingly earnest despite her sharp features.

  “Mrs. Genarro? I’m Teresa Larosche.”

  “Hi. Please sit down.”

  The girl sat across from her on the opposite side of the table. She had iPod earbuds in her ears, which she popped out now. Her ears were adorned with cheap studs and hoops. A diamond stud twinkled on the left side of her nose.

  The girl must have sensed something wrong with Laurie. “You’re Mrs. Genarro, right? We spoke over the phone?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry, I was just expecting someone much older. Someone more like—”

  “Dora Lorton, right?”

  “Exactly.”

  Teresa Larosche smiled again. Laurie decided she was very pretty.

  “The truth is, I haven’t been doing the whole homecare thing very long. I got my nursing license a few years back and was working shifts at North Arundel up until about a year ago when they laid a bunch of us off. There are other jobs to be had, but I didn’t want to just pack up and move someplace.” She exhaled a soft laugh. She possessed the sensual rasp of a phone-sex operator. “Hell, I didn’t have the money to move nowhere, so I figured I’d see what else was out there.”

  “How long had you worked for Mid-Atlantic?”

  “Just about seven months or so.”

  “Did you quit because of what happened or were you fired?”

  Teresa exhaled again. Laurie could smell cigarettes on her breath. “You know, my boyfriend warned me not to get into too much of this stuff. About what happened that night, I mean. Mr. Claiborne did, too.” She began fidgeting with the cluster of silver rings on her left hand. “Everybody thinks you’re gonna sue.”

  “I’m not suing anybody. I’m just curious about what happened to my father. I’ve got some questions and I was hoping you might be able to answer some. If you’re uncomfortable with any of it, you don’t have to say a word.”

  Teresa nodded and looked suddenly sad.

  “Would you like a coffee?” Laurie offered. She waved over the young waitress.

  “Café Milan,” Teresa told the waitress.

  “Back in a jiff,” said the waitress before moving on to another table.

  “Just so you’re aware, I saw the police report concerning my father’s suicide. Any information I might bring up while we talk today, I got from that report. Admittedly, there wasn’t much to the report, but I want you to know that upfront, and not assume that I had been asking Ms. Lorton or Mr. Claiborne about you behind your back. Because I haven’t, and I wouldn’t do that. Okay?”

  Again, Teresa nodded. “Okay.”

  “And if you want me to sign something saying I won’t sue you, I’ll be glad to, if that puts your mind at ease.”

  Relief came readily to the young woman’s face. She stopped fidgeting with her rings. “Okay. I believe you.”

  “Good.” She offered the girl a warm smile before proceeding. “The police report said you started working the night shift at my father’s house approximately two months prior to his death. Is that correct?”

  “Yes. My previous patient was daycare only—cooking meals, doing laundry, making sure she was able to take a shower without slipping and breaking her hip. Easy enough. Just after Christmas, her family decided she would be better off in one of those assisted living facilities. From there, I was basically a floater until the night shift gig opened up with your dad.”

  “What’s a floater?”

  “It’s what we call someone just picking up other jobs until a steady one comes through. There’s always a window of downtime when a patient . . . well, moves on . . . before we get reassigned to someone else. I would fill in for permanent caretakers if they took vacation days or were sick or something. Mr. Claiborne had me doing some clerical stuff at the office, too, but I was going bored out of my skull with that, you know? I didn’t go to nursing school to sit around and file office papers and sharpen pencils.”

  The waitress brought over Teresa’s coffee. Laurie could smell the alcohol in it.

  “How bad was my father when you started working the night shift at the house?” Laurie asked after the waitress had left.

  “Like, how . . . gone . . . was he?” She pointed to her temple to illustrate that she meant gone mentally. “To be honest, he was fine at first. He went to bed early and by the time he woke up in the morning, Dora was already coming in for her shift. I was really there in case something happened—an emergency or something, you know? It was really a no-brainer for the first few weeks. I mean, I read books, listened to my headphones, stuff like that. The only bummer was that there were no TVs in the house, but I got a lot of reading done those first few weeks.”

  “So what happened after the first few weeks?”

  Teresa’s hands wound around her coffee. She hadn’t tasted it yet, but looked like she wanted to—like she needed to.

  “Well, see, before I got there, Dora had the locks changed. They used to be regular old crank deads on the doors—”

  “‘Crank deads’?” Laurie asked.

  “Sorry. Dead bolts—you know, the kinds with the knob on the inside that you turn instead of having to use a key, which Mr. Brashear could unlock easily enough. Dora had them changed so that you needed a key to unlock them. She said this was because he had tried on a few occasions to sneak out of the house. Folks with dementia sometimes do that.”

  “Sure,” said Laurie, nodding.

  “I was worried about what might happen if he tried to get out. Like, what if he became violent, you know, and I couldn’t stop him from leaving? Your dad, he was a pretty big guy.”

  Laurie remembered him being huge, but of course she had been a much younger and smaller person at the time.

  “Did he ever get violent with you?” Laurie asked.

  Teresa’s eyes narrowed and grew distant. Laurie couldn’t tell if she was trying to remember a specific event or if she were just trying to figure out the best way to relay it.

  “No,” she said eventually, though she stretched the word out which raised more questions than it answered—noooo. “Sometimes with himself, but never with me.”

  “Good. I’m glad to hear it.”

  Teresa sipped at her alcohol-infused coffee, sucked at her lips, then continued. “
He never tried to get out of the house while I was there. By then, he was more concerned with people getting in.”

  “Dora said the same thing to me. I asked her to explain what she meant, but she brushed it off as a symptom of my father’s dementia. It bothers me that I don’t know what he was afraid of.”

  Teresa took another drink, then asked if Laurie had ever spent any time with someone suffering from dementia.

  “No, I haven’t. I hadn’t even seen my father in . . . well, in many, many years.”

  “They’re sort of like children trapped in the bodies of grownups,” Teresa said. “They sometimes say and do things a spoiled child might do.” She lowered her voice. “But sometimes, you know, there’s . . . something else there in their eyes, behind their eyes. It’s like they’re actually prisoners inside themselves, peering out windows, and watching helplessly as their body and mind betray them. That part scares me to death.”

  “Scares you how?”

  “Like, what if that’s me someday? You know what I mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your father was like that sometimes. Not always, but sometimes. He would come in and out of it. It was like there were two people inside him—this evil devil and this helpless old man. I felt pity for him.”

  Laurie brought her own coffee to her mouth. All of a sudden it tasted bitter and she quickly set it aside.

  “You asked about the locks on the doors,” Teresa went on. “I had a copy of the key, of course, just as Dora did. After I’d been there a few weeks, your father would wake up in the middle of the night and insist I go around and relock the doors. He insisted on watching me do it, too. Some nights, I had to do it three or four times.”

  “Did he ever say why he thought people were trying to get into the house?”

  “He didn’t know why. But he was certain of it. Terrified of it, really. And do you want to hear something ridiculous?” The young woman laughed nervously. “After a while, he started to convince me of it. And I started to think, shit, what if he’s right? He seems so certain, what if he’s right? Soon, I started waking myself up just to go around the house and make sure the doors were all locked. And, see, that freaked me out even more because, you know, just like I said—what if his dementia was contagious? What if it had somehow seeped into me?”

  Laurie offered the young woman a pained smile. Inside, however, her stomach felt like it was beginning to boil. She couldn’t help but recall her own recent obsession with checking the locks in the house, fearful that someone could get in . . . or possibly already had. To think that she shared this identical psychosis with her demented and suicidal father alarmed her.

  “Yeah, I know, it sounds crazy,” Teresa said quickly, no doubt discomfited by the look of distress on Laurie’s face. “I’d think I was crazy if I was in your place.”

  “I don’t think you’re crazy at all.”

  “I mean, I know it isn’t possible—I’m not a dummy—but when you’re there alone in a strange house with nothing but time on your hands to think of all these ridiculous things . . .”

  “There’s no need to explain yourself,” said Laurie. “Please go on.”

  Teresa drank down half her coffee in two large gulps. When she set it down, Laurie could see that her hands were shaking.

  “I once saw this movie about a psychiatrist who has these sessions with this mental patient. Only instead of, like, making the patient better, by the end of the movie the patient made the psychiatrist insane. It sort of felt like that, Mrs. Genarro.”

  “Call me Laurie.”

  “Okay.” She pressed her hands flat on the table, presumably to stop them from shaking. “You know, it’s hard to explain. His concern about the doors being unlocked, I mean.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, at first it was no different than how you or I would check to see if the doors are locked before going to bed. He’d follow me around the house and watch as I turned the key in each lock. He had to actually see the key turn before he was satisfied. Then we would check the windows.” The corner of her mouth turned up in a lopsided grin. “There are a lot of windows in that house. And he kept saying they were too easy.”

  “Too easy for what?”

  “For someone to get in.”

  “Is that why they’re all nailed shut?”

  “Jesus, yes. I’d forgotten about that. But he’d nailed them shut before I came on board. I wouldn’t have allowed him to have a hammer and nails.”

  “Of course,” said Laurie.

  “But even with them nailed shut, he didn’t trust them. So we checked the windows. This was fine with him for maybe about an hour or so, when he would forget that we had locked everything up already and he wanted to go through the house again. Like I said, we sometimes did this a couple times every night.”

  Laurie shook her head. “I can’t imagine. . . .”

  Teresa shrugged. It was obvious that whatever had happened after things got worse made this part seem trivial. Whatever it was, it still nested inside Teresa Larosche. She was still afraid of it.

  “After a while, he became focused on one door in particular.”

  “The front door?” Laurie guessed.

  “No. The door off the kitchen. The one that leads out into the side yard. I thought maybe because it was dark and hidden from the road, and if you were a burglar, breaking in through that door would make the most sense.”

  “But my father wasn’t thinking logically by then. He had no sense left in him.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought, too.”

  “Did you ever ask him why he had become obsessed about that particular door?”

  “Yeah, I did. But his answers never made any sense to me.”

  “What were his answers?”

  “Something about locking up the passageways, that passageways let it in and out like a turnstile. He actually said that—like a turnstile.”

  “It lets who in?”

  “Sometimes he called it the Hateful Beast,” Teresa said. “Other times, it was the Vengeance. Most times, though, he didn’t have a name for it, or at least didn’t give me one. God, it sounds so silly now, sitting here in a coffee shop telling you about it—and look at that, my hands are shaking—but it used to spook the hell out of me when he’d say it.”

  “What exactly did he mean? What was ‘the Vengeance’?”

  “Beats me. All I know is it scared the shit out of him and it started scaring the shit out of me, too. I assumed he got it from the Bible. He read the Bible most nights. When he was able to, anyway.”

  “I never realized he had become religious.”

  “You didn’t know him very well, did you?”

  “Not since I was a little girl. And even then I don’t think I really knew him.”

  Teresa nodded. The look on her face was one of understanding. Perhaps she had issues with her own father. “Anyway,” she went on, “I humored him, and that seemed to make us both feel better. Sometimes he’d have me lock that door five or six times. Once, he watched me lock it and when we were headed back out into the parlor, he paused in the kitchen doorway, turned around, and insisted I relock the door. Of course, for him it wasn’t relocking, because he’d forgotten we had already locked it the first time. Times like that, when the forgetting came on him so quickly, I could almost see the memories draining out of his face.

  “He only really became upset when he thought someone had actually gotten into the house. He said he could hear someone, and that they were hiding from him. Sometimes he would go looking for them, shouting and stomping around the house and checking all the rooms. Other times, the poor guy would cower in his bedroom and not come out. It really freaked me out when he would get like that. I mean, it sounds so incredibly naïve, but he started to . . . I mean, there were a few times when he had . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “He had started to convince me.”

  “That someone was in the house?”

  “Sometimes I thought I could hea
r someone talking softly in the next room, or that there’d be footsteps at the far end of the house. A few times I thought I caught movement out of the corner of my eye when no one was there. That sort of thing. Yeah, yeah, I know—jumping at shadows, right? I believe it now, but it was plenty real in that house when it’s the middle of the night and you’re starting to let your imagination run wild. It was like I could hear everything he could hear, and it didn’t matter if you were sane or crazy to hear it.”

  The waitress came over to refill their coffees. Laurie found she was thankful for the brief interruption. She had begun to sweat under her arms.

  “After he was content with the doors being locked,” Teresa went on after a while, “he would sometimes stare at the ceiling. Just randomly, you know? He reminded me of my father when he would do that. I grew up in Havre de Grace, in a big old farmhouse, and one fall a family of raccoons took up residence in our attic. The noises they made were tremendous—you wouldn’t think raccoons could make so much noise—and we didn’t know what was going on at first. Finally, my dad went up there and chased them out. He found the hole they’d come in through and boarded that up, too. That kept them out for good, but my dad spent the rest of that year periodically peering up at the ceiling, his head cocked like an old hunting dog, as if in anticipation of some noise the rest of us couldn’t hear.”

  “Did my father ever say what noises he was hearing?”

  “Dry creaking noises. Like attic beams settling.”

  “That’s how he described them?”

  “No, he never told me what they sounded like to him. I never asked.”

  “Then how do you know what they sounded like?”

  “Because I heard them, too,” Teresa said.

  “Oh.” Laurie blinked. “So . . . then they were real noises. . . .”

  “Yeah. I mean, I thought it was just the house settling . . . but the way your father looked up at the ceiling when he heard it . . .” She shook her head, as if to rid it of the memory. “Like I said before, I was beginning to wonder if I wasn’t losing my mind in that place. I figured if he stayed just one step ahead of me—forgive me for how I say this, but I kept thinking that if he stayed just one step ahead of me on the crazy scale—then I might be able to see the full-fledged insanity coming before it got me.” She hung her head. “I’m sorry. That sounds horrible. I didn’t mean it like that.”