Abruptly, Rebecca whirled in her chair, banging her knee on the desk as she took in the empty carrels surrounding her, the long, dark Crisis Center room, the linoleum corridor beyond it where the lights hadn’t flickered and nothing had moved.
Nothing at all.
On the other end of the phone, she heard neither whistle nor whimper nor breath. Swallowing her panic, keeping it out of her voice, she said, “Are you still there?”
“I think she’s gone to bed. Our little girl, in her attic room. All my girls have gone to their beds.” And there was that whimper again. Rebecca was almost certain he was crying, now.
“Except—” she started, but he overrode her.
“Except you.”
And suddenly—again—Rebecca had no idea what to say. Also for no reason she could understand, she wanted off of this call. And that made her feel like shit, and also rallied her. This guy wasn’t creepy; he was desperate. “You know,” she tried, slow and gentle, “one thing I really have learned, talking to people who phone here: no matter how bad you feel, no matter what you think you’ve done, it’s never too late to—”
“My Destiny killed my Mother.”
Rebecca stopped talking. She sat in the chair and waited. But her caller said nothing more. This was nothing new, she told herself, nothing she hadn’t dealt with before. So often, what the callers said didn’t make sense. And yet, the sense was there, if you listened. And the sense didn’t matter much, anyway. Not at the crisis moment.
And so, when she sensed it was time, she said, “I guess destinies do that to mothers. Sometimes.” She was leaning on her elbows again, pressing the phone against her ear, her mouth to the receiver. It was almost as though her lips were resting right against her caller’s ear. Her words didn’t even feel like words she would say; they were someone else’s words, pouring through her. “At least, that’s what I’ve been told. It’s what people told me about mine.”
Then she jerked, twitched her shoulders in alarm. Never, ever, insert yourself into a Crisis conversation. DO NOT EVER rule #2, right there in bold at the top of the chart.
“Then my Destiny’s mother killed her,” said the caller, and Rebecca gave up even trying to make sense of this conversation. She just listened.
But there was no sound in her building, and none on the other end of the line. The black gums waved silently out there, in a breeze she could neither hear nor feel.
“And yet, it’s a beautiful street,” she heard herself say.
To her relief, the person on the other end of the line whistled again; this time, there was no mistaking that sound for wind or anything else. “Yes it is,” said the voice. “You’re right. Again.”
“On a beautiful night.”
“So beautiful. Yes.”
“Full of people worth talking to, staying up late.”
This time, the silence felt different, seemed to yawn open against her ear: he-just-jumped silence. Panicking, Rebecca scrambled to her feet.
But he hadn’t jumped. “You’re very good at this,” he said, and then he said something else. “What you do.”
Or, Oh, you’ll do?
Rebecca pushed out the breath she’d been holding and closed her eyes, gripping the phone as if it were her caller’s hand. A hand she had somehow, in spite of all the mistakes she had made, managed to grab. “Tell me where you are,” she said. “I can have someone with you in five minutes. There are people just waiting to help. People who really want to help. Let me…”
The caller whimpered again. Unless that was giggling. Hysteria setting in.
“Will you let me send them?” Rebecca asked. “Please?”
“I’ll come see you,” said the caller.
And then he was gone. Rebecca could tell. He hadn’t hung up, just wasn’t there. Which meant he really had gone and …
“DON’T!” Rebecca shouted, grabbing uselessly at the edge of her desk. She waited for the splat. But none came.
And yet, her caller was gone. Had she just babbled some poor guy right off a ledge and out of the world?
Her eyes flew to the window, Campus Walk, the trees out there. Her own shadow, barely visible among them.
She’d lost one. Failed somebody, in the most brutal way one person could fail another.
She didn’t bother second-guessing herself or hesitating. She punched the speed dial on the Crisis phone and called the police.
3
(THREE WEEKS EARLIER)
The most immediate problem, Jess realized, swaying, somehow staying on her feet as sea wind blasted through her and scoured her bloody face with spray and sand, was her ribs. Every time she started forward or shifted Eddie in his baby blanket against her shoulder or just breathed, something else inside her popped: cartilage, or more bone, as though she were stepping on Bubble Wrap.
Catching movement to her left, she turned, too fast, her ribs not just popping this time but pulling apart, and she cried out. Again. She was hoping to see Benny stirring, pushing himself up out of the sand. Instead, she saw three seagulls, their feathers gray, not white, in the misty, moonless shadows under the creaking Ocean Beach pier. As she watched, helpless, they hopped closer to Benny. One of them shrieked as though demanding breadcrumbs. Or—worse—as though calling in flock mates so they could all feast together on Benny and the body of Sophie’s son.
Jess’s free hand flew to her mouth, and she bit it, held her skin in her teeth to keep from screaming more, or just to have something to bite. She didn’t want to glance toward the shadowed pillar just beyond Benny, where Sophie’s baby lay like a discarded doll. But she did, anyway.
There he was where he’d been flung, against the post where the monsters that had come for all of them had dashed out his brains: Sophie’s Roo, with the seagulls and crabs creeping toward him, not ten feet from the spot where Natalie had fallen.
From the spot where Jess had blown the top of Natalie’s head off.
Biting almost through her skin, Jess screamed into her palm, let her bloody hand drop to her side, and remembered Sophie. Finally, slowly, she turned that way.
Sophie was still perched—if that was the word—where she’d landed after plunging from the pier. The only thing propping her upright was the sand, certainly not the one leg at that insane angle behind her, which didn’t even look attached to her anymore. Her other leg was nowhere in sight. But her brown eyes kept blinking, slowly. Then they stopped blinking. One of her hands lay outstretched toward Jess, but palm down, as though she were trying to pull herself forward.
Sweet sunshine-Sophie, Jess thought, biting back another scream. Sunshine-Sophie, who made my daughter laugh.
Who made my daughter …
Then Jess was staggering forward, jostling Eddie, who stirred, started shrieking, and Jess cuddled him as best she could against her shoulder but kept moving. Her ribs, she realized, could not be broken, at least not all of them. They hurt—horribly—but they were letting her walk. By the time she neared Sophie, the gun had already risen, as if of its own accord. She glared down into Sophie’s face, which wasn’t sunshiny anymore, wasn’t even Sophie, really, and maybe hadn’t been for a long time, even before all this had started. Maybe that was how she and Natalie had wound up the way they had in the first place.
A few feet away, Jess stopped, the gun half-lifted. Eddie still screeched, and worse, he squirmed, but he was settling, slowly. Jess waited for him a little longer, but she kept her eyes on Sophie.
Sophie, meanwhile, just stared back. In disbelief, Jess realized, surprised, because of course she knew every one of Sophie’s expressions. In horror, and wonder, at what I’ve done. At what I just made myself do.
This time, when the shudder came, it wracked her ribs so hard that Jess thought she could feel them crossing over each other, banging together inside her like badly shipped oars. The pain almost drove her to her knees.
But it didn’t.
In wonder, she thought. So they could still wonder, these creatures. That was good to k
now. Crouching agonizingly, she laid Eddie in his blanket in the sand. He squirmed but made no sound. Only when she looked up again, her eyes now level with her target’s, did she realize that Sophie wasn’t looking at her at all. In fact, she had never been. She was looking beyond Jess toward the other blanketed bundle, in the shadows of the pier. The bundle that had been her son. The horror, wonder, and disbelief on Sophie’s face were for him.
“That’s right,” Jess snarled, the taste of the words like bile in her mouth. “That’s what you’ve done.”
How had she imagined Sophie might respond? With a heartbroken cry, or a laugh? With a lunge, maybe, except on no legs, because the one in the sand was no longer part of her, either; Jess could see that, now.
But Sophie—the stump that had been Sophie—did none of those things. She didn’t even seem to hear. She just kept watching the blanket under the pier. She wasn’t even blinking.
Because she was dead? Really dead?
But Sophie wasn’t. Jess knew that only because she also knew, with absolute certainty, that life would not give her even that much mercy. She would not be relieved of the necessity of acting, even after the action she had taken. That just wasn’t how her life had ever worked.
Fuck that, she thought abruptly, and jerked the hand that wasn’t holding the gun up to her cheek. She pressed her palm into the splotch where her daughter’s blood was drying and crusting in the sea-spray. There were little shards scattered through it, and some gooier bits, too, gray on her fingertips when Jess made herself look at them.
With a whimper, Jess rubbed the whole mess into her face, smearing it over her cheeks and nose and forehead, painting herself with it. Not like a warrior. She just wanted to hold on to it, somehow, to absorb it, because soon there would be nothing left. Her cry not only sounded birdlike in her ears but felt that way, too: automatic, instinctive, anguished. Helpless.
She stood up, raised the gun, pointed straight down into the top of Sophie’s skull, and clicked the safety back. But she didn’t shoot.
Why not?
She knelt again. Sophie continued ignoring her, watching the birds encircle her own dead child. Jess shoved the nozzle of the gun hard into Sophie’s forehead.
That, at least, made her look up. She blinked as though coming awake, became aware of the gun. Jess saw the moment Sophie understood. Just as Natalie had, right before Jess had pulled the trigger.
“Good,” Jess said.
Except that the expression on Sophie’s face was not Natalie’s. Natalie had been … grateful? Relieved? Sad beyond the power of human beings to express? Partly, Jess knew, Natalie had been grateful. She’d still been herself, still Jess’s daughter, right to the end. Jess would hold on to that conviction all the way to her own grave.
But Sophie—this Sophie—just looked scared, and also as though she had something to say.
“Well?” Jess shoved the gun deeper into the cleft between Sophie’s eyes. “Speak up.”
When Sophie gurgled, though, Jess almost dropped the gun, scuttled back. How could that thing—half a thing—make sound? Be living?
Of course, she knew the answer to that: it wasn’t living. Not really.
But it was pleading, working its mouth. Sophie’s mouth. Trying to get shape around sound once more. And there were tears in its eyes, on its cheeks, unless that was sea-spray. Same stuff, Jess thought crazily. Just salt water. She clutched the gun, felt the crust on her own face, heard the awful, ravenous birds, stared down into the face of the only best friend her daughter had ever known.
“Wait here,” she said, and somehow pushed to her feet. Collecting Eddie, she nestled him against her shoulder, as far as she could from the bruises all over her midsection. Sophie’s eyes followed her every move.
Turning her back, gnashing her bottom lip, Jess stumbled across the sand toward the pier, snarling birds away from Sophie’s Roo, and also from Benny, who—oh, finally, one positive thing—was waving at them himself. He was still lying prone, his arm-sweeps so weak that he wasn’t even startling the gulls, let alone deterring them. His arm itself seemed boneless, too limp, like washed-ashore kelp stirring in a breeze.
But it was stirring. At this moment, that was enough.
For the first time since she’d fired the gun, Jess’s own tears spilled down her face. She sketched a wave, almost smiled through her gnawed, bleeding lips like a little girl. Who’d just murdered her daughter. Benny hadn’t seen that, she realized. He had been unconscious by then. Would she tell him? Over dinner tonight, maybe? So, hon, here’s what you missed …
Somehow, the thought of that conversation—the insanity of it, the fact that she already, absolutely knew that was going to happen—drove her forward. Stumbling into the shadows, hearing the ocean hiss as it crawled up the beach, she pocketed the gun, crouched, waited for her ribs to stop stabbing her, resettled Eddie yet again, and scooped up the bundle of bones that had been Sophie’s Roo. She glared the seagulls back, started to stand, and then, on impulse, peeled back the blanket so she could see this baby’s face. She wanted to remember it. Someone had to. And now, she would never forget. Any more than she would forget her own child’s.
The one she had shot in the head.
George, she realized abruptly. George William. For a month, she’d been calling this kid Roo because that’s what his mother had always called him. For a month, Jess had cared for him, loved him, assumed she would raise him. She had learned his laugh, which was so different from little Eddie’s: a set of short, snapping firecracker bursts, shiny-loud. That laugh had made Eddie giggle, and Benny. And Jess, also. Constantly. Every time. And yet, only now had she remembered his real name. Because only now, when he was gone, did Jess realize how much she had let him feel like her own, from the first second Natalie and Sophie had left him with her, trusted him to her.
She was whimpering again, grinding her teeth to keep from collapsing. To somehow keep from collapsing.
“Good night, little William George,” she was whispering, almost singing as she clutched the baby’s motionless body against her chest next to Eddie, who kept squirming away, kicking her in the ribs. Lowering her head, ignoring the battering, she just kept taking, nuzzling the blanket, cooing, “Good night, Little Roo,” as though he were a stuffed animal.
Only when she’d finally gotten both kids—that is, one kid and one corpse—settled against her body and managed to stagger to her feet once more did she let herself look at Benny again. To her relief, he was sitting up, though slumped over. One arm hung wrong, and one foot pointed way too far out to the side. His bent head rested on his left shoulder, and his crazy white hair was flying everywhere. He looked like a Mr. Potato Head—a fuzzy one—with all the appendages slid into the wrong slots.
“Come here,” he said, and lifted his not-broken arm maybe three inches off the sand. With a sob, she went to him, squatted slowly, and allowed herself one long moment. She put her face in Benny’s hair and breathed it in, while Eddie wriggled gently between them. Benny’s hand rested cool and surprisingly steady on her hip. His other, dangling hand had found the top of Eddie’s head and started stroking it, calming him down. So that hand still worked, too.
“Okay,” she whispered, blew out breath, sucked in more, tasting sand and Benny’s hair on her lips. Along with Natalie’s blood. “Okay.”
That next hour, or however long it took … those next tasks … Jess would never understand how she managed them, or how Benny managed to help. All she would ever know, for certain, was that the tasks got done. She and Benny did them together. They dragged Natalie’s body across the sand, somehow bumped it up the steps to the boardwalk, across that to the trunk of Jess’s car. Somehow—without screaming, either one of them, from pain or from heartbreak—they hoisted her inside. Then, while Benny sagged against the bumper, Jess spent some time arranging her daughter. Making her comfortable. Weeping over her. Eventually, she took Sophie’s Roo and tucked him into Natalie’s arms. She let her hand rest for one more moment a
top her daughter’s hands, atop the dead child. Then, her mouth moving, she’d closed them in.
Night, babies.
Sleep tight, my brooding, beautiful, shining girl.
In all that time—on the beach, on the boardwalk, by the car—were they seen? Certainly, Jess noted other figures in the pre-dawn mist: a homeless man squatting against the seawall next to the stairs; an old woman with a little dog on a leash way down the beach, both of them just watching the water from right at the tide line, like yesterday’s sand castles left for the sea. But no one came over to see what Jess and Benny were doing, and no one helped, and no one called the police. It was as though the marine layer had thrown a blanket over everything, turned each living, moving thing into its own shadow. At some point, Jess remembered the decapitated kid back in the condo where she and Benny and their children, who weren’t their children, had lived for the past few weeks. She briefly considered what to do about that, her hand on her screaming side, and eventually decided she could do nothing. She wasn’t going to drag that body to her trunk, and even if she could, she wasn’t going to lay it next to Natalie. Nor would she be dealing with the other body down on the beach, the big woman who had broken Jess’s ribs. The woman Jess had stuck scissors through, which had barely affected her at all.
The woman Natalie had ripped and chewed to pieces.
No. That one, Jess would leave for the police to sort out. Would they track her and Benny down someday? she wondered vaguely. Did anyone here know their actual names? These weeks of hiding—of hunkering down in a burrow she and Benny had made, with just themselves and their own for company—had come surprisingly easily. In some ways, the condo-time in this place hadn’t felt so different from the trailer-years with Natalie in North Carolina after Joe died, except now she had Benny with her. One thing the police would find was the Twitter page the homeless kid had been accessing just before Jess had bashed his forehead halfway in with a frying pan. Which had happened just a few minutes before the big woman had removed the kid’s head entirely.
Good Girls Page 3