Little Girls

by Ronald Malfi

  At one point, she went downstairs to find Abigail standing in the parlor. For a moment, Laurie believed she was actually still in bed and dreaming. It was all one big dream—the missing wedding band and Abigail Evans standing in her childhood home. Abigail smiled at her and Laurie felt her entire body surge with an icy numbness. The girl was dressed in an adult’s chambray shirt, the sleeves coming down past her fingertips, and a pair of faded jean shorts tasseled with string at the hemline. Brown sandals were on her feet. And then the girl blinked out of existence and Laurie realized she had been dreaming.

  Ted was in the kitchen cleaning up from lunch. When he looked up and found her in the kitchen doorway, he toyed with a crooked smile, though she could tell he wasn’t completely happy to see her out of bed. She was determined to buck any suggestion from him that she consult a doctor.

  “Can I get you something to eat?” he asked.

  “I want to show you something,” she said, and handed him the photo of her and Sadie.

  Ted looked at the photo and smiled offhandedly. “Look at you. You’re a little cutie,” he said.

  “Do you recognize the other girl?”

  Ted brought the photograph closer to his face. “No,” he said eventually. “Should I? Who is it?”

  “It’s her,” she said, meaning Abigail.

  “Her,” Ted repeated, still staring at the photo. Then he said, “Oh. That girl Sadie. The one who did all those . . . those horrible things.”

  “You don’t think she looks like the girl next door?”

  “Abigail?” He scrutinized the photo again. Slowly, his head began to shake. “No. Not really.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Well, I mean, they’ve both got dark hair and fair complexions, I guess, but I don’t think they look too similar beyond that. Why?”

  She took the picture from him and looked at it more closely herself. Similarities or not, there was no denying what Abigail had said to her in her bedroom that had brought on her trance. Haven’t you missed me, Laurie? After all these years, haven’t you missed me? There was no denying it . . . unless she allowed herself to believe that she had imagined the whole thing, that she had already been slipping out of consciousness and had dreamed it.

  “Maybe you should go back upstairs and lie down,” Ted recommended.

  Instead, she got herself a glass of water from the tap. She decided she wouldn’t say anything more about this to Ted. She didn’t like the way he had been looking at her lately, and didn’t want to add fuel to that fire. “Really, Ted, I’m fine. I just got dehydrated the other night. I’m feeling much better now.”

  He cleaned his hands on a dishtowel as she went to the kitchen table and sat down.

  “I think I just needed the rest,” she added, thinking she sounded false to her own ears.

  “Good to hear.” He folded his arms as he watched her from across the room.

  “What?” she said. “What is it?”

  “Steve Markham called this morning. Looks like I’m going to get that face-to-face with John Fish after all.”

  “That’s great. That’s what you’ve wanted from the beginning.”

  “It means I have to be in the city for the meeting.”

  “New York?”

  “It’ll just be for the day. I could drive up in the morning and come back that evening.”

  “That’s a lot of driving all in one day.”

  “I don’t like the idea of leaving you and Susan here alone.”

  “We’ll be fine.” When she saw his eyes slide sideways, she knew there was something else. “Tell me,” she said. “Spit it out, bub.”

  “I don’t think being in this house is good for you.”

  “That’s silly.”

  “Is it?”

  “It was your idea in the first place, remember? It was what you wanted.”

  “Yeah, well, I was wrong.”

  “When do you have to go to New York?”

  “Steve said he’d get back to me once they finalize a time. Most likely it’ll be sometime in the next couple of days.” He pulled out one of the kitchen chairs, but didn’t sit in it. “Why don’t you and Susan come to the city with me? I could drop you back in Hartford and you can stay at the house. Susan can see her friends.”

  As much as she liked the idea of taking Susan away from Abigail, Laurie now had something else she felt she needed to do, something she couldn’t do back in Hartford. “I’ll think about it,” she said.

  “Yes. Please do. I’m being serious.”

  “So am I,” she told him. “I promise.”

  “Good.” He clapped his hands together, then ran them both through his hair. “I’m going to try and get some work done.”

  “I’m going to get a shower, then maybe go for a walk.”

  “Okay, but don’t go too far from the house.”

  “Okay, boss.”

  He kissed the top of her head. “Yeah,” he said, playfully wrinkling his nose. “Take that shower.”

  Before heading to the bathroom for a shower, she found herself back in her father’s study, the dead man’s photo album opened before her while she sat cross-legged on the floor. She progressed slowly through each of the photos. She took her time, studying the alien faces of the people in the photos, the unfamiliar locales. When she came to the last few pages with the empty panels, she slipped the photograph she had found in her father’s Bible into one of them. When she was done, she looked down at the line of white flesh on her ring finger. The absence of her ring made her whole hand look naked. She thought of Sadie Russ, making evil wishes by throwing things down into the well. Things that belonged to other people.

  After her shower, she walked north along Annapolis Road. The day was cool and the sun felt good on her face and shoulders. She heard the shouts and laughter of children before she actually saw them, crossing the street and standing in the parking lot which overlooked the park grounds. Little girls hung upside-down from the monkey bars. A young boy rolled toy cars through the patchy grass. There were some women talking by one of the picnic tables, but they looked old enough to be grandmothers.

  Laurie went over to one of the benches and sat down. Absently, she wished she’d possessed the foresight to bring a book, as she had done in the days of her pregnancy with Susan when she would go down to the neighborhood parks to watch as the children congregated at playgrounds and flocked to ball fields and cul-de-sacs like creatures sharing a single brain. Liz Rosewood had mentioned that there weren’t many kids in town for Abigail to play with. To Laurie, it seemed like there were plenty of kids around. They were like stunted wild men rooting through the debris of some fallen civilization. Maybe they just don’t want to play with Abigail Evans.

  This scenario was so much like what she had done during her pregnancy that it was nearly like déjà vu. Yet she thought she was able to see her motivations more clearly now, without the lies she had told herself early on. Had it been fear of motherhood that had caused her to seek unspoken counsel from the women on the playground and the consolation of the church on King Street, or had she feared something else, something darker? Children change, she knew. Girls change. It had been Sadie who had taught her that lesson, and that lesson had been at the heart of it. Children were the problem, little girls were what terrified her. They constantly stared with the slack, insensate faces of dullards. Dried food on their cheeks and mouths, mealy crust in their eyes, rogue bulbs of snot yo-yoing in and out of narrow little nostrils, bright orange vegetation sprouting sporelike from ear canals.... It was children she feared, with their thin, probing paws, fingernails ground to nubby scales tinged in dried blood. The notion of motherhood had left her feeling helpless and imprisoned, like a chunk of pineapple suspended in Jell-O.

  Had she been frightened for Susan . . . or frightened of her? Scared of her potential, of what she could become?

  She was loathe to admit this to herself now, as if the revelation siphoned something vital from her relationship with her daugh
ter, her beautiful daughter. But there could be no denying it. The horrible things Sadie had done to her made her fearful of the dark and hidden potential within her own daughter.

  I won’t let that happen to her.

  It was around three in the afternoon when a soccer ball rolled over near Laurie’s bench. A little girl of about seven or eight chased after it, little auburn pigtails bouncing, her shirt decorated with smiling Elmo faces. The girl’s eyes were bright as headlamps and she had a pointy little tongue cocked in one corner of her mouth.

  “Hello,” Laurie said to the girl as she watched her gather up the soccer ball. “What’s your name?”

  “Meagan.”

  “Hi. I’m Laurie. I like your shirt.”

  “Elmo,” said Meagan.

  “Is your mother here?”

  “Elmo. Elmo.” The girl pointed to the gaggle of women by the picnic tables. “Over there.” Meagan had a tough time pronouncing the r’s.

  “Do you know a girl named Abigail Evans? She lives just down the street here.”

  Clutching the soccer ball to her chest, Meagan shook her head. A snail-trail leaked out of her right nostril and that pointy little tongue darted up and lapped at it, much like a frog would slurp up a particularly tasty dragonfly.

  “Have you ever heard of her?” Laurie asked.

  “I have to go now.”

  “What about your friends?”

  “Good-bye,” said Meagan. She spun around and ran back toward her friends, her stubby little legs pumping furiously.

  Laurie looked up and saw that none of the women by the picnic tables were paying her any attention. If I were a man, they would notice. She got up to head back home. It had been her intention to come down here and ask a few of the neighborhood kids about Abigail. Instead, she had lost her nerve after speaking with Meagan, realizing how ludicrous it all was, and she had wound up wasting two hours on a park bench. At least the weather held up.

  Instead of going back to the house right away, she walked around the swings and seesaws and over to a woodchip pathway that wound around the circumference of the park. Two joggers in brightly colored spandex ran past her. At the farthest point of the playground area, the path diverged, one pathway continuing back around to complete the circle while the divergent path graduated up the slight hill toward the wrought-iron fence of the cemetery. It was the cemetery on Howard Avenue, visible now only because the neighborhood had conspired to raze this section of the woods and build a playground. As a child, she had known of the cemetery, but hadn’t realized it had been just on the other side of the street she’d lived on. Roads made things seem farther away than they actually were.

  She expected to find the cemetery gates locked, but they weren’t. The footpath continued onto the cemetery grounds and Laurie followed it. A single glance at the nearest headstones informed her that this was the newer section of the cemetery. The stones were smoothly polished, low to the ground, and shaped like the type of nameplate you might find on a banker’s desk. The dates on some of the graves were as recent as this year.

  She was careful crossing over the plots toward the older section of the graveyard. There had been a few people back at the newer section—mostly children who had gotten bored playing on the swings and now searched for more stimulating adventures—but the older section of the cemetery was a ghost town. Here, the headstones were as gray and craggy as rotting teeth, disconsolate beneath the shade of stately pines, elms, and maples. Birds tittered and a lone squirrel loped from headstone to headstone a few rows away, seemingly oblivious to her presence.

  It took her about fifteen minutes to locate the stone. It was a simple marble marker wedged between two larger headstones on a parcel of ground that, judging by the height of the weeds, probably hadn’t been attended to since last fall. Dead brown leaves were bunched at its base and there was the milky spatter of dried bird shit on the marker’s face. Still, she could make out Sadie’s name along with the dates of her birth and her death. There was no kitschy epitaph, no saccharine poetry—just the name and the dates. At the top of the headstone, perched there like a crown, was a daisy chain of flowers woven together to form a circle. Black-eyed Susans.

  At the center of her head, it felt like a series of rubber bands, which had been slowly stretched to their breaking point, began to snap one by one. Five or six headstones away, the squirrel stood on its hind legs and stared at her, as if in anticipation of something momentous.

  When she returned home, Ted was napping on the sofa. Susan was seated at the dining room table drawing pictures in a spiral-bound notebook. Laurie leaned over the girl’s shoulder and saw that all the pictures were of circles.

  “Why are you drawing those?”

  “It’s fun.” Susan set down a red crayon, picked up a black one, and began tracing the original circle. She was pressing so hard that the paper crinkled. “Abigail showed me how to do it.”

  “Was Abigail here today?”

  “No.”

  “What’s so fun about a circle?”

  “It’s not a circle,” Susan said. She set the black crayon down and picked up a green one.

  “It isn’t? What is it, then?”

  “That thing out front.”

  “What thing?”

  “You know,” said Susan. “The wishing well.”

  Laurie had been stroking her daughter’s hair. Now she stopped, her fingers pausing in mid-stroke.

  Susan dropped the green crayon, then selected a sparkly gold one from the box. “That’s a pretty color,” Susan said admiringly. “Don’t you think that’s a pretty color, Mom?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Very pretty.”

  Laurie turned and walked back through the house. She felt like an ambulatory corpse. In the kitchen, she stood staring at the refrigerator, which was burdened with more drawings of circles. After a time, they began to look like eyes staring out at her.

  Dusk had cooled the air. Laurie located a flashlight in the basement, threw on a sweatshirt, and went out the front door. She trampled the high grass as she crossed the yard, stopping at the foot of the old well. Ted had placed bricks on each corner of the plywood cover to give it a bit more security. Laurie knocked the bricks off with her foot. She squeezed her fingers between the plywood and the stone rim of the well and gave it a shove. The plywood scraped along the stone, revealing a semicircle of darkness underneath it.

  Laurie dropped to her knees, clicked on the flashlight, and shone it down into the hole. Far below, a pinpoint of light winked back at her. The surface of the black water looked like it was maybe fifteen feet below the mouth of the well. How deep the water was, she could only guess.

  In bed that night, after a quick session of lovemaking—something they hadn’t done in quite some time—Laurie said, “What would it take to drain that well?”

  Chapter 23

  Because she’d been on edge lately, Ted asked very few questions. (There was another reason, too, although he didn’t like to think about it; each time the thought surfaced in his head, he found himself batting it down like a fisherman swatting at the hump of an approaching crocodile with the oar from his johnboat.) Humoring her, he found a hardware store in town where he purchased a portable sump pump, an extension cord, and a fifty-foot garden hose. Back at the house, he attached the garden hose to the pump, then trailed the opposite end of the hose down the driveway and out into the street. He tucked the final few feet of hose down an open storm drain. If a cop happened to cruise by he might catch a fine, but he didn’t care.

  “Please note that I am being a good husband and doing everything you ask without question,” he said as he removed the bricks from the plywood board over the opening of the well. “So, with that in mind, will you please tell me what this is all about?”

  Laurie and Susan sat on the porch steps watching him work. A red ice pop dribbled down Susan’s hand and her mouth looked like a vampire’s.

  “You mentioned Liz Rosewood’s realtor friend,” said Laurie. “I think
you’re right—we should call her out here to look at the house as soon as possible. But first, I’d like to get it in better shape. That well is not only an eyesore, it’s a hazard. We’re going to have to fill it in.”

  He shucked the sheet of plywood off the well. A smell like old garbage rose up and tugged at the hairs in his nose. “I can get a bunch of dirt and just fill the sucker in.”

  “Maybe. Or it might have to be cemented at the bottom. You sometimes have to do that to old wells so they don’t collapse and become sinkholes.”

  “Yeah?” He had no clue. This was the first well he’d ever encountered in his life. However, he wasn’t going to balk. He was glad she was in agreement with him that they needed to unload the house, even if it meant taking a hit because of the lousy market. Money from the sale could buy him a few more years working on his writing without having to supplement their income by taking on additional jobs. He even indulged himself in a fantasy where he quit the Fish project by walking up to the overblown beluga and telling him what a rambling piece of self-indulgent garbage his novel was. This notion, however unrealistic, brought a thin smile to his lips.