The Rust Maidens

by Gwendolyn Kiste

  I follow her now, down the sidewalk, past a row of hollow houses.

  “It looks like most people have left already,” I say.

  Quinn nods. “They’ve been leaving for years. Now we’ve only got a week until we have to be out, too.”

  Halfway down the street, she stops in front of a home, quiet and abandoned and familiar.

  “This was where Doctor Ross and his family lived.” She glances at me. “Violet was his daughter.”

  I swallow hard. “I know,” I say, and wish I didn’t.

  Quinn starts toward the front door, but I hesitate in the yard. She looks back at me.

  “Nobody cares if we go in.” She starts up the porch steps. “Like I said, nobody cares about much here.”

  Once they’re empty, houses never look the way you remember them. But the Ross family left pieces of themselves behind, enough to put a bit of them back together. An end table tipped over against a wall. A red sectional sofa left moldering in the corner, the velvet upholstery puckered at the edges. A dingy leather bag with a rusted stethoscope inside.

  “I explore here sometimes,” Quinn says. “That’s how I found this.”

  She leads us down a hall and into a narrow bedroom. Violet’s room.

  “You recognized that symbol in the treehouse,” Quinn whispers, and I wonder who she doesn’t want to disturb. “I think you’ll recognize this too.”

  She points to a spot on the exposed plaster. My throat goes dry, and I creep closer to it. It’s a crude mark, not elegantly etched like the other one, but it’s uncanny how similar it is. A pair of crescents flanking a circle. A triple moon.

  I reach out and touch the symbol. It doesn’t appear to be drawn on the wall. It looks like it’s coming from beneath. Something scratched this from behind the plaster.

  Quinn watches me quietly. “It’s related to the girls, isn’t it?” she asks. “To the Rust Maidens?”

  But I won’t listen. I shake my head and inch away. “You’re imagining things where there aren’t any,” I say. “And you’re bothering me. Please stop bothering me.”

  “But Phoebe—”

  I don’t wait to hear another word. I just put my head down and charge out of the room.

  Quinn calls after me again, but I’m already running down the hall, out the front door, and along the sidewalk, the melody of the construction crew punctuating my every step. This isn’t real. Nothing in this place is real, Quinn least of all. She’s a nobody, the same as me. A silly, superstitious little girl. That’s all. I can’t read into what she’s saying or showing me as being any more than that.

  The front door of my parents’ house is unlocked now, and I go inside.

  “Mom?” In the emptiness, there’s an echo. “Where are you?”

  I want to talk to her. I don’t want to be here by myself.

  But the living room is quiet. No furniture, no parents, only an old Bible left in the corner to collect dust. My mother is gone, maybe for a minute, maybe for the day, and she went without saying goodbye. Now I’m alone in a place I don’t want to be.

  I think again of that house Quinn showed me, and the symbol on the wall. Who drew it? And why? It can’t be them. They can’t be back here. Not now. Not after all these years.

  I breathe in. This is ridiculous. I’m a grown woman, spooking myself with the past. I need to start packing. I need to do something. That’s why I came back, to put these ghosts to rest. That’s what I’ll do.

  I turn toward the steps leading up to my bedroom, just as a shadow moves past the window and across the floor.

  You’re back, I almost say, relief threading through me, but when I look to the front window, dread clogs my throat. The figure outside isn’t my mother. It’s not Quinn, either. There’s someone else on the porch. Someone lithe and sprightly, as familiar as a resurrected nightmare.

  And oh God, I think I know who it is.

  TWO

  The morning of our high school graduation, I crept outside at dawn to feed my bugs.

  With the sunrise dancing in my hair and a Tupperware canister tucked under my arm, I climbed the rope ladder to the elm tree. The industrial skyline hung over me, hazy as always, its veil of smog like an eternal omen. Below, Denton Street was quiet, but the calm wouldn’t last. My parents would be up soon. Everyone would be up. This was a big day for us, the morning another crop of drifting neighborhood kids pretended to matriculate to adulthood. The Class of 1980. I couldn’t wait to see how spectacularly we’d all fail.

  At the top of the ladder, I peeled back the plastic that draped over my treehouse, and slipped inside. The place was a mishmash of accoutrements. A clear tarp over the windows kept in the heat, though a keyhole-shaped incision in the plastic ensured the bugs were no prisoners of mine. Trays of larvae were stacked in corners, and a row of plants along the far wall flourished, ideal for the insect in search of a midnight snack.

  But I had their favorite food. In the center of the treehouse, I slid off the starburst lid on the harvest-gold Tupperware, revealing slices of navel oranges and Gala apples, all bathed in honey water. An exquisite feast, and one that the butterflies devoured with ravenous glee.

  With their breakfast delivered, I reclined on the floor, arms folded over my chest, as I listened to the tiny flapping of a hundred eager wings.

  Nobody in the neighborhood understood this place. None of them understood me, either. They didn’t see these little creatures lapping at sugar and giving thanks with every twitch of their antennae. And it wasn’t just butterflies here. Lightning bugs, cicadas, grasshoppers, praying mantises: almost anything that wasn’t human was welcome.

  “Who keeps bugs in a hovel?” my mother had asked when I’d first requested to convert the treehouse. My father, who’d always been on my side, told me to find something to convince her, so I eschewed issues of Tiger Beat and Seventeen and scoured every Reader’s Digest and National Geographic until I found an article about just such a house in England. The full-color pictures were apparently enough for her to give me a trial run. After the first year, when the insects didn’t perish wholesale, she allowed me to keep the experiment going indefinitely.

  “As long as you keep your grades up,” my mother said, not realizing that these bugs were better than grades. They were my dreams, fluttering to life in the plastic-draped hothouse. This was the only future I could imagine: raising insects in quiet places. Their lives made more sense to me than people’s did. They never quarreled needlessly, and they never excluded someone just for fun. They were decent and gentle and the closest to kind that anything could be, and they followed comforting patterns—sometimes to the day, sometimes even to the hour. Eating, sleeping, reproducing: their lives were all mapped out for them.

  I followed patterns of my own. Behind the potted milkweed, I rummaged around blindly until I pried my treasure free: a red tartan thermos. I unscrewed the yellow cap and took a long sip, not certain what I’d stored inside. It took only a moment for the smooth molasses flavor to settle in before I could identify it.

  Myers’s Rum, mixed with a bottle of Coke, now flat as the Cleveland shoreline. It didn’t matter. I smiled and quaffed another drink. It seemed only fair. There was nectar for the butterflies, and a different kind of nectar for me. Anything to chase away the infinite drone of living in this dead-end city on this dead-end street.

  My head buzzing, I bid farewell to my bugs and climbed back down into the world. There was someone I needed to meet before graduation.

  Out front on the street, the neighborhood was just waking. Or what was left of the neighborhood. After the last layoff at the steel mill, we’d lost almost a third of the families on the street, and the empty houses with no curtains and no souls reminded us every day of their absence. Even a Frank Lloyd Wright-style mansion sat silently at the end of the cul-de-sac, a bleak reminder of what was to come, no matter who you were or how well you’d planned for the future.

  The June morning was chillier than it had any right to be, and I wrap
ped my arms around my body to keep from shivering. On the sidewalk, my feet tracked through something. I stopped on the crumbling cement and stared down at what I’d walked through.

  It was a trail of footprints. The water was dark and strange, like a quagmire. I followed the path as far as I could, but it ended abruptly at the curb. I turned, ready to retrace it, to understand what this was, when a voice floated down from a nearby porch.

  “Hello, Phoebe.”

  I smiled even before I saw her. Jacqueline. Younger than me by three months, she was my cousin, but more like my twin. We’d done everything together—cut our first teeth, spoken our first words, smoked our first cigarettes. We were practically two halves of one girl.

  She was already dressed in her cap and gown, looking eager to get this whole thing over with.

  “You ready?” I asked.

  “I am.” Jacqueline took an uncertain step toward me, gazing backward at her front door.

  “Forget about her,” I said, and laughed.

  “If only that would solve things.” Jacqueline flashed me a smile I didn’t believe. She was the only person I knew who could sometimes look like she was crying, even when her face was still.

  And, in a flurry of curlers and scowls, here was a big reason why: Aunt Betty, shoving her way out of the house to get to me.

  “Out of here,” she said. It was no secret what she thought of me. I wore the wrong clothes, and said the wrong things, and drank entirely too much. Whatever a nice girl would do, I did the opposite. That meant I was bad news. A bad influence. Nothing but trouble for Jacqueline.

  I fled to the sidewalk, the neutral zone where Aunt Betty couldn’t chase me off, even if she wanted to. From there, we stood in a stalemate, her on the rim of the porch and me two steps from the street.

  “You know the rules, Phoebe.” She grabbed Jacqueline’s arm. “She doesn’t go anywhere alone with you.”

  Together they vanished back into the house, and I sighed. This was how it always went. Her appearing out of nowhere to admonish me, and me running away, but not staying away.

  I waited, loitering on the edge of the lawn, and counted slowly to myself. When I reached the number ten, Jacqueline appeared at her upstairs window and waved down.

  “See you soon,” she mouthed through the glass, and I smiled back at her.

  Back home, my mother was waiting for me in the living room, a Virginia Slim dangling between her pursed lips. “Did Betty bother you again?”

  “Always,” I said, and fumbled with the record player.

  My mother hesitated, carefully weighing her next words. “Do you want me to talk to her?”

  I grunted and dropped the needle in the groove. “Do you honestly think it would matter?” The only person Aunt Betty hated more than me was my mother.

  She started to say something else, but Tom Petty cut her off first. His nasally voice poured out of the speakers, and I murmured along to “American Girl.”

  Heavy footsteps plodded overhead, and our eyes shifted upward.

  “He’s coming down soon,” my mother said. “Don’t say anything about tomorrow.”

  “I won’t.” I wasn’t a fool. We all knew not to talk about it until it happened, though of course, it would happen. Every few years, it was the same: the steel union voted in solidarity to go on strike, and the picket lines formed in earnest for weeks. Yet no matter how well they bargained, each time when it was over, there were fewer jobs to go around.

  But you couldn’t talk about it. That was another rule of the neighborhood: never bother the men about work. They went to the mill five days a week and did their time like a chain gang, and we should be grateful to them. Grateful, not questioning.

  My father came downstairs, as my mother gulped the rest of her drink and set the empty glass on the edge of the turntable.

  “Are you ready?” he asked us.

  “Ready enough,” I said with a shrug. “But I want to take my own car.”

  My father raised an eyebrow at me. “That hunk of junk? I’m not sure it’ll make it to the corner store.”

  “That car can go anywhere,” I said. “It could make it to the stars.”

  He grinned. Ever since I’d turned sixteen and bought the Impala with saved-up allowances and lunch money, this had been our game. My father would smirk and disparage the automobile we’d fixed up together, and I’d brag back about it.

  “Naw,” he said with a wave of his hand. “It couldn’t even make it to church on time.”

  “You’re wrong.” I folded my arms. “It could make it to Jupiter.”

  My mother poured herself another drink, downed it, and rolled her eyes. “Are we done now?”

  My father’s grin didn’t falter. “Let’s leave the Impala at home this time, Phoebe,” he said, “and go together.”

  “I guess that’s okay.” I smiled back, and we departed as a family for my graduation.

  ***

  At the football stadium, amidst a sea of black satin monotony, Jacqueline and I found each other.

  “Your mother.” I shook my head. “She never lets up, does she?”

  “Never,” Jacqueline said with a sigh.

  We swapped seats in the last row so we could sit together. It would throw off the order for roll call, but we didn’t care. What could they do to us now? We were almost free.

  As the commencement speaker droned on, I scanned the faces around us, memorizing some of them for what might be the last time. The preacher’s daughter. The doctor’s daughter. The millworkers’ sons. The guy who would become a lawyer because his daddy was. The girl who would be lonely because her mother was.

  None of them noticed me watching, except for one—a girl with bandages wound tightly as a roll of barbed wire around her arms. Lisa Carter. Her father worked on the same line as my dad. Not that that made us friends or anything, but the way she looked at me seemed strangely intimate. From two rows away, she stared until I felt split open, her gaze severing me in half. My flesh tightened on my bones, and I couldn’t stop myself from shivering.

  “You okay?” Jacqueline whispered, and I nodded absently.

  A few seats over, someone took a picture, and the camera flash glistened off Lisa’s body. With both her sleeves rolled up, the exposed flesh on her arms was almost dewy, and the hem of her graduation gown was damp too. It hadn’t rained today, so there was no reason for it, no reason she would be here in such a state.

  I inhaled to steady myself. This was a hot day, so maybe she’d run through the sprinklers before leaving Denton Street. That seemed like the bizarre sort of thing that Lisa would do, drenching herself and not bothering to towel off afterward. Or maybe she’d walked through those same inexplicable footprints as I had.

  Or maybe she’d made the footprints.

  She scratched her bandages and grinned at me, and I gave her a half-hearted smile. My stomach in spasms, I turned away and searched for anything else to look at, anything to keep me from thinking about that odd girl staring at me.

  I found something to look at, all right. In the next row ahead, a couple huddled together. But no, they weren’t huddling. The girl cowered into the guy, her shoulders hunched, while he just sat back, as unengaged as a neutral country. Thanks to the crowd, I couldn’t quite see their faces, but I didn’t need to. It had to be Clint and Dawn. No other pair in the school could sit side by side, hand in hand, without ever really touching each other. I sucked in a breath as someone’s head bobbed out of the way, and I could see Clint clearly. He was watching me, and when he saw me gazing back, he raised one hand tenuously in a kind of listless greeting.

  Jacqueline, the seer of everything, snapped her tongue. “Did he just wave at you?” she whispered, the notion so anathema to her she practically spat the words like tiny fireballs.

  I nodded. After everything, he still liked to pretend we were friends. And part of me—the part I hated most—wanted to wave back, wanted to be friends, wanted to forget.

  But there was Dawn right next t
o him, with her swollen belly, to remind me why that couldn’t happen.

  Clint of the chiseled jaw and broken promises.

  You’re my one and only, Phoebe.

  I’ve never felt this way before.

  I’ll love you forever.

  Of course, I didn’t think forever would end with a backseat tryst when my parents took Jacqueline and me out of town for a weekend on the lake.

  “We went to Put-In-Bay,” Jacqueline said later. “I guess, in his way, Clint did too.”

  I didn’t hear about the rendezvous until after the results came back from the test purchased covertly at the Leader Drug Store downtown. I imagined Dawn struggling with the eyedropper and vial from the e.p.t. kit, and Clint standing over her, frowning and barking orders, as if he knew what he was doing.

  Two hours later, when the bull’s eye in the test tube confirmed it was everything they feared, he abandoned Dawn to cry alone in her parents’ wood-paneled bathroom and materialized at my front door, all swollen eyes and snot-dripping nose and “I’m so sorry, it was just one time, won’t you forgive me?” Like my compassion was the salve that could reverse that one misbegotten night.

  I slapped him so hard across the face that his class ring ricocheted off my finger and landed somewhere in the privet shrubs. It’s probably there still, interred in the dirt with the future I’d never have.

  The news spread like a biblical plague down Denton Street, and once everyone found out about Dawn’s “condition”—that was how they described it, as though the thing coiled up in her belly was a malignant tumor, not a baby—the mothers held an emergency Saturday morning meeting, complete with stale digestive biscuits, Lipton tea, and a flock of knit brows. Since the father in question was now the son-in-law she’d never have, my mother asked to recuse herself (“conflict of interest,” she claimed), but she was conscripted nonetheless. Neighborhood housewives valued nothing if not conformity.

  The meeting lasted exactly forty-three minutes.

  “They were playing rock-paper-scissors with that girl’s life,” my mother told me when she returned home. Only in this game, the choices were “clinic,” “adoption,” or “let her keep it, we guess.”