‘Is this your little sister?’
‘She ran after me,’ Dee says. ‘I couldn’t stop her.’ Lulu swings, bored, from Dee’s hand. She says something to herself under her breath. She squints in the sun, eyes serious and far away. In one sweaty palm she clutches her straw sun hat with the pink ribbon tied around it.
‘How old is she?’
‘Six,’ Dee says. ‘Put your hat on or you’ll burn,’ she tells Lulu.
‘No.’ Lulu loves her hat but it is an object to be treasured, not worn.
Loathing strokes Dee, feather light. Why does she have such an annoying family? She takes the hat from her sister and puts it roughly on her head. Lulu’s face crumples.
Trevor bends down and addresses Lulu. ‘You want to go get some ice cream?’
Lulu nods twenty or thirty times.
Dee considers, shrugs. They queue. Trevor and Dee don’t get ice cream. Lulu gets chocolate, which Dee knows will spread all over her face and clothes, and then her mother will scream at them both. But right now she finds that she does not care. Trevor’s hand hangs a millimetre from hers, then brushes, finger to finger. Something is coming, it is in the air like heat haze, like thunder.
Dee does not argue when Trevor steers them away from the ice-cream stand, through from the burger-scented, colourful crowds, towards the trees. Dee thinks of what her parents would say, but defiance wins out. Just this once, she thinks, I want to do something all my own.
In the pine-striped shadows the three of them move soft as tigers. The crowded beach falls behind them quickly, is lost in the tapestry of hushing leaves. Soon there is only the sound of the black water kissing stones. They track the pebbled shore, climbing over rocks, fallen branches, nests of briars. Even Lulu is quiet, excited, possessed by the sense of trespass. Her white flip-flops are too flimsy for the rough terrain. But she doesn’t complain as her feet and ankles become beaded with scratches. The yellow-headed boy lifts Lulu when she cannot get over.
Dee grows impatient. She pushes on ahead, pulling him by the hand. They come to a place where the trees open out somewhat, where the pine needles look soft and there aren’t too many thorns. A rock shaped like a canoe pushes out into the water. Dee and the boy look at one another. The time has come for whatever is coming.
‘I want to go home,’ Lulu says, scrubbing one eye with a fist. Her cheeks are pink, sunstruck. Somewhere in the shadowed pines she has lost her hat.
‘You can’t,’ Dee tells her sister. ‘You followed me so now you have to wait. And if you tell about this, I’ll say you’re lying. Now go play by the lake.’ Lulu bites her lip and looks like she might cry. She doesn’t, though. She knows Dee is still mad at her, so she does what she is told.
Dee turns to the boy. What is his name again? Her heart is racing. She knows she is risking everything. Lulu is a true tattle-tale. Doesn’t matter, she tells herself. This is real, it is happening. She will figure out how to silence her sister.
The boy leans in close. Now he is no longer a face but a series of features, giant and individual. His lips are wet and trembling. Dee thinks, Is this French kissing? There are moments, flashes of excitement which make it seem like they are just about to get good at it, but then they both miss the moment and it goes on, mouths pushed against one another, spitty and loose. He tastes faintly of hot dog. Dee thinks maybe it doesn’t get good until you do the other stuff so she puts his hand up her top. Her bathing suit is a little wet and his hand is warm. It’s nice, so she considers that a success. Next, his hand makes its way into the tight confines of her denim shorts. It is too tight, his hand gets stuck there, so she unbuttons them and wriggles them down. They are both still for a moment, aware that they are moving quickly into unfamiliar territory. She giggles because it is so weird to be in her swimsuit in a forest with a boy looking at her.
Dee hears a sound. It is like a spoon tapping an egg, just once. Dee pulls her shorts up, calling, ‘Lulu?’ There is no answer. Dee runs towards the shore. The boy follows her, stumbling on his jeans.
Lulu is lying half in and half out of the lapping waves, submerged to the waist, as if she was trying to dive back onto land. Blood clouds and blooms in the water. Dee is not aware of jumping in, but somehow she is standing, waist deep in the water, beside her sister’s small form. The sound it made was quiet, but her skull must have hit the boulder with great force. It is dented, as if punched by a fist. Dee tries not to look at that part.
She presses her lips to Lulu’s and breathes, in a half-remembered impression of first-aid classes at school. But she thinks it’s too late. Lulu’s skin is changing, even as Dee watches. Her face grows pale and waxy. Threads of blood trickle out of her hair. They look kind of like red birds in flight; the way children draw birds, lines against a white sky.
The yellow-headed boy whose name Dee still cannot recall begins to breathe fast, like a woman giving birth. He runs from them, crashing away through the forest.
Dee touches Lulu’s hand where it lies on the gritty sand. Loosely grasped in Lulu’s palm is a deep green stone, shot through with veins of white. It is oval and planed smooth by water and time. Pretty pebble. Dee moans. Threads of fresh blood seep from Lulu’s head into the water. They blow up into crimson clouds.
Dee’s legs and arms are slick with lake water, with blood. She bends again and breathes into Lulu’s mouth. A sound comes from Lulu’s chest. It is deep like the creak of a tree branch.
From under Lulu’s body there comes a flexing thing, a line of dark. The snake curls over Lulu and brushes against Dee’s thighs. It looks like a cottonmouth, but there are no cottonmouths round here. Small shadows follow it. Young hatchlings. Now Dee sees the puncture wounds on Lulu’s swollen ankles. That’s why she fell.
Dee is a stone in the water. She feels the bodies glancing gently against her thighs. The snakes seem to regard her as part of the lake or the land. Then she hurls herself up and out, throwing great sheets of spray. She claws up across the warm rock. A very small snake is coiled six inches from her hand. It opens a white mouth at her then flows away, down into a dark crack in the rock. Dee screams and runs blindly, leaving Lulu where she lies, half in, and half out of the water.
Dee can’t see; there’s something in front of her eyes like a cloud of flies or a hurricane. She tries to blink it away but she can’t so she slows, and then stops. The cold trickles of bloody lake water keep coming down the backs of her legs, and she is panting. She thinks she might faint so she stops for a moment. She leans against a broken stump, silvered and dead with age. All she can see at her feet are snakes. Stop, she commands her body and mind. Stop. No snakes here. She has to think.
A new little voice speaks in her mind. At least Lulu can’t tell Mom and Dad on you now. She sobs. How can she even think such a horrible thing?
Gnats swarm greedily at the blood on her. She tries to scrub it off. But she is shaking and it has stained her shorts. Instead she ties her sweater round her waist to hide it as best she can. Blood, blood, Dee thinks in a fog. Fresh threads of blood. The next thought shines out, knifes through her hard and quick. Lulu was still bleeding. Dee has watched enough TV to know what that means. She is not dead.
Dee turns and runs hard, back towards Lulu. Her lungs are bursting with effort and the scalding air. How could she have left her like that? But Dee will make it right, she swears. She will stay by Lulu’s side and scream until someone comes. It is not too late. Events are not yet final. But she has to be fast.
Dee feels like she has been running and climbing and stumbling back towards her sister for her whole life. But eventually the undergrowth thins and the canoe-shaped rock comes into view. Dee goes even faster, taking long hare-like leaps over the shore debris. She falls more than once, skinning palms and knees and elbows. She does not notice, pushes herself up and runs on. When she comes to the rock she stops for a moment, too frightened to set foot on the rock.
‘Come on, Dee Dee,’ she mutters. ‘You baby.’ She climbs over the canoe rock.
>
In its shadow, where Lulu should be lying, there is nothing. Water laps cold at the granite. Gnats buzz above the water, grey punctuation marks. No Lulu, alive or dead.
Maybe this isn’t the right place, Dee tells herself. But it is. On the rock she can see a slender thread of drying blood. In the water, one white flip-flop bobs. Then Dee sees that there is a footprint at the muddy edge. The heel is already filling with brown lake water. The footprint is big, much too large to be Lulu’s, or Dee’s. It could be the boy’s, maybe. But somehow Dee knows it’s not.
From nearby there comes a familiar, homely sound – it takes Dee a moment to place it in this nightmare. A car engine starts, then idles. A door slams closed.
Dee runs across the clearing where, what seems like a lifetime ago, she fooled around with the boy. She pushes through a stand of brush, and falls out onto a dirt road. Dust billows and dances in the air as if recently kicked up by tyres. Dee thinks she glimpses a car bumper vanishing down the track. The roaring in Dee’s ears almost drowns the engine, her ragged screams for the driver to stop, stop, and let her sister go. But the car is gone. At Dee’s feet, in the dust, lies a deep green stone; a perfect oval shot through with veins of white.
A short distance away through the scrub, sun gleams on ranks of chrome and glass. Dee wants to shriek with laughter. They thought they were so far from everything, but they were right by the parking lot.
In the bathroom, the women look at her, disapproving. She leans against the white-tiled wall. Over the roar of the hand dryers, she tries to understand what has happened. It is impossible. She retches briefly into a basin, and earns herself more disapproval from the line. I have to tell someone, she thinks, and the thought is cold and numbing.
She pictures the expression her mother’s face will wear as she tells her parents. Tries to imagine the tone of her father’s voice as he tries to forgive her.
The little voice says, If you tell, there will be no Pacific ballet school. Even through her fear for Lulu, Dee feels the molten creep of fury. They have always loved Lulu best, ever since she was born. Dee has always known it. It is so unfair. She didn’t do anything wrong, not really. This is real life, not one of those old books where a girl makes out with a boy and then someone has to die because it’s so sinful. She knows, deep down, that making out with the boy wasn’t what she did wrong.
What can she tell them, anyway? Dee does not have any real information. She couldn’t even see the car through the dust. Was there a car? She is not sure, now. Maybe Lulu’s body floated away in the lake. Or it was taken away by an animal. Like, a bear. Maybe Lulu woke up and went back to Mom and Dad. Yes, Dee thinks with a rush of relief. That’s it. Dee will go back to her family and Lulu will be sitting on the blanket playing with pebbles. She will greet Dee with an affronted look, because Dee left her alone, to do boring big-kid stuff. But Dee will tickle her and Lulu will forgive her in the end. So there really is no point in telling.
A fresh snail of watery blood crawls out of Dee’s shorts, down her leg. ‘Does anyone have a sanitary towel?’ Dee tries to sound pissed off instead of scared, which she is. She takes her shorts off in the bathroom in front of all the women and rinses them at the basin. She makes a big deal out of it, so they will remember her later. Dee was here, and nowhere else. She doesn’t ask herself why this is necessary, if Lulu is waiting with Mom and Dad. The word alibi drifts through her mind. She banishes it, firmly.
Her period, she tells herself over and over. That is where the blood comes from. It is like rehearsing a dance – putting a story into the steps. Can she make herself believe it? She constructs, carefully in her mind, a day where the yellow-haired boy stood her up for ice cream, where Lulu never followed her into the woods.
Once the decision is made, everything becomes simple. A tired-looking woman washes her hands at the neighbouring basin, while her three children jump up and grab her sleeves. At the woman’s feet is a wicker basket, from which spill tissues, granola bars, buckets, spades, toys and sunscreen. Dee takes the white flip-flop out of her pocket and slips it into the woman’s bag where it blends with the chaos. It will go home with the woman and she will assume she picked it up by accident with her kids’ stuff. It will never be connected with Lulu. Dee knows that if the shoe is found by the canoe-shaped rock, they will do police stuff, like forensics and they will know that Dee was there.
As she heads back towards her parents, she tosses the smooth green stone into the thick brush that hems the beach.
Dee wipes her mouth with the back of her hand and gets up. She seems to be in a different part of the forest, now. It is darker, denser. Groundsel and ivy are knee-deep. She must remember to keep blazing the trees. A giant fern brushes her face. She thrusts it away, impatient. Why does everything in this part of the world have to be so wild and scary?
She can hear feet ahead, frightened, uneven. A child running.
‘Lulu,’ she calls. ‘Stop!’
Lulu laughs. Dee smiles. It’s good that she’s having fun. Dee doesn’t mind playing tag for a while longer.
Later, when Dee had time to think, the horror of what she had not told settled into her like disease. It’s too late to tell now, the little voice said. They’ll send you to jail. After her mother left and her father died there was no point in Dee telling, because there was no one left to forgive her.
Dee realised what she had to do. She had to find the person who took Lulu. If she could do that, there was a chance she could be a good person again. It was something to cling to. But tired Karen kept clearing people of Lulu’s disappearance. And as the years went by the possibilities, the list of suspects, was whittled down and down. Dee grew desperate.
She had almost given up, until Ted.
Karen said that Ted had an alibi. Dee didn’t believe it. She suspected that Karen was trying to throw her off the scent, stop her repeating the Oregon incident. Dee knew she had to be careful. She would watch him. She would get proof before she acted, this time. Dee got a little ahead of herself, however. She may as well admit that.
It was the anniversary that pushed her over the edge. 10 July, every year, the day Lulu went missing; that day is always a black hole for Dee. It’s all she can do not to get sucked down into the dark. Sometimes she isn’t strong enough to resist. That was what happened in Oregon. Loss had Dee in its black grip and someone had to be punished.
She had been watching Ted for some days before she moved in. She saw his eyes in the hole in the plywood, every morning at first light, watching as the birds descended. She saw the care he took with the feeders, the water. There’s a lot Dee doesn’t know but she knows what love looks like. So she knew what to do.
She needed Ted to feel something of her savage grief. That was why she killed the birds. She didn’t like doing it. She retched as she put out the traps. But she couldn’t stop. She kept thinking, Eleven years today. Eleven years that Lulu never had.
Afterwards she watched as Ted cried over the birds. His bent back, his hands covering his face. She felt the sorrow deeply in herself. It was awful, what she had been forced to do.
Now, Dee stumbles on after Lulu. She grabs at the slender sappy branches, pulling herself along.
‘Stop,’ she calls. ‘Come on, Lulu. No need to be afraid. It’s Dee Dee.’
The sky turns red and the sun becomes a burning ball, sinking into the horizon. Dee’s breath comes short and her fingers are swollen where they grip the branch. She blinks to clear her vision of the black edges.
Come on, Dee Dee.
She vomits but there is no time to stop. Instead Dee starts to run again, even faster this time, careening gracefully through the trees, speeding so smoothly over the uneven ground, the fallen branches that her feet leave the earth. She flies silent and fast, piercing the air like an arrow. All she can hear is wind and the tapestry of forest sound: cicadas, doves, leaves. Why didn’t I know I could fly? she thinks. I’ll teach Lulu how and we can fly all over, never landing. We can be together and they w
on’t catch me. I’ll have time to explain to her why I did what I did.
Dee sees Lulu at the top of the next rise, silhouetted against the low sun. The little figure, the sun hat. Dee can just make out the white flip-flops on her feet. Dee hurtles through the air towards her. She comes to rest lightly on the grassy rise.
Lulu turns and Dee sees that she has no face. Red birds explode from her head in a cloud. Dee shrieks and covers her eyes with her hand.
When at last she dares to look, she is alone in the forest. Night has come again. Dee looks about her in terror. Where is she? How long has she been walking? She sinks to her knees. What has it all been for? Where is Lulu? Where are the answers that are her due? Dee screams out her horror and her sorrow. But her screams are no louder than papery whispers against the patter of rain. Her cheek is cold. She is lying on the forest floor, slick with rain. Her arm is swollen dark and heavy as a block of stone. I’m dying, she thinks. I just wanted there to be some kind of justice in the world.
As her vision clouds to black and her heart slows, she thinks she feels the lightest touch on her head. She seems to catch the scent of sunscreen, warm hair, sugar. ‘Lulu,’ she tries to say, ‘I’m sorry,’ but her heart stops beating and Dee is gone.
The thing that was once Dee lies far from any trail. The can of yellow spray paint is still held in what was her hand, swollen black with venom.
The birds and the foxes come, the coyotes, bears and rats. What was Dee feeds the earth. Her scattered bones sink into the rich changing humus. No ghost walks under the spreading trees. What’s done is done.
Ted
I am not dead, I can tell, because there is a strand of spaghetti on the green tile floor. What happens after death may be bad or good but there won’t be spilled spaghetti. The white hospital bed is hard, the walls are scuffed, and everything smells like lunch. The man is looking at me. The light glints on his orange-juice hair. ‘Hi,’ he says.
‘Where’s the woman?’ I ask. ‘The neighbour lady? She was saying the girl’s name. She was sick.’ Her arm looked snake-bit. I think she used the kit from my bag, but everyone knows those kits don’t do anything. I don’t know why I carry it. The memories are very confused, but there was something wrong with the neighbour lady – inside and out.
The Last House on Needless Street Page 24