The Rust Maidens

by Gwendolyn Kiste

  The mothers on Denton Street had always been like that. With their housewife-boredom and their so-called good intentions, they took it upon themselves to make decisions for everyone, especially the girls, and we tended to do whatever it was they wanted. After all, our own mothers were usually in the room when the vote was taken.

  Indeed, Dawn’s mom was there that day, though she didn’t say much, instead cowering back in the corner, head down and eyes damp. You didn’t get a say when your child caused this much of a scandal for the neighborhood.

  The meeting ended when the iced tea ran low, and the mothers oh-so-charitably resigned to letting Dawn finish high school and deciding what to do after the baby was born, as though all the options would still be on the table then.

  Dawn wasn’t in the house for this discussion. She wasn’t even in the city. A well-meaning aunt from Akron had arrived on Denton Street that morning and spirited her away to the Towpath Trail, twenty-five miles out of Cleveland, to ensure there was no chance the girl might overhear the discussion. Like the gossip was as potent as Cleveland smog and the wind might carry a toxic whiff of it to her if she were too close. Nobody thought to consult the one person whose opinion mattered most. Dawn had caused enough trouble, the mothers reasoned; she was lucky anybody was still speaking to her at all.

  Up at the graduation podium, the whining voice announced my name, and I turned away from the past to retrieve my diploma.

  After the ceremony, Denton Street brimmed with barbeque and good tidings. Today was a banner day.

  “Biggest graduating class this neighborhood’s ever seen,” the adults marveled.

  That meant no dropouts, no suicides, no tragic accidents. We’d all made it. Plenty of people in this city couldn’t say the same.

  To celebrate, we opened hastily-wrapped presents purchased on sale at Higbee’s and listened to promises that “we’d all go great places,” even though we knew there were so few places to go and far too many of us to fit into what was available. Us girls knew this better than most. If there was limited space in the world, then we were the first ones on the team to get cut. No room for us at the steel mills, the boardrooms, the operating rooms. No room for us anywhere. We’d become wives and mothers, and only if we were lucky—and smart enough to do it in that order. Dawn had learned that lesson the hard way.

  She didn’t get a graduation party. Sequestered at home, she paced back and forth behind her parlor window. Clint, however, had no problem enjoying himself, flitting from one cooler to another until the beer ran out and he saw no need to stay.

  After an hour of Kraft cheese-slathered burgers on flimsy paper plates, I saw no need to stay either. It was always the same at these Denton Street celebrations. Parents imbibing until their eyes filmed over, kids sneaking whatever booze was left. The preacher stopped by to remind us what sinners we all were, his only daughter at his side. Helena. She was a walking baby doll, with her rosy cheeks and pretty pink dresses her mother sewed at home on a treadle. Almost the same age as Jacqueline and me, Helena was a summer baby, so she was a year behind us in school. She acted older, though, always telling us how to be, always for our own good. Just like her dear old dad.

  Jacqueline shook her head. “I bet she’ll head over here in a minute.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe we’ll get lucky today,” I said, but I already knew we wouldn’t.

  When Helena got close to us, Jacqueline and I turned our backs to her, trying to hide in plain sight. It did us no good. She stopped at the picnic table where we were sitting, and nodded at the outline of the flask in my pocket.

  “Do you really need to drink that, Phoebe?”

  I grinned. “If you’re around, I sure do.”

  At this, Helena crinkled up her nose and scowled. Jacqueline inched closer to me, not saying a word, both of us waiting to see what she did next. If she’d tell on us to my parents. Or worse, to Aunt Betty.

  With a smug smile, Helena started to say something, but a camera flashed a searing white light in our faces, and we shielded our eyes, half-blinded.

  When my vision returned, Violet, the doctor’s daughter, was standing next to us. Of course it was her. She was probably the one who’d taken Lisa’s picture at the ceremony today, too. Ever since freshman year, Violet had been omnipresent with that camera, cataloging the whole neighborhood. Why you’d want to remember this place was anybody’s guess.

  “For you,” she said and handed over the Polaroid.

  I stared at it, two faces emerging from nothing. No Helena in this one, just me and Jacqueline. I was clear enough, my eyes wide, but not her. She’d turned away at the last instant. Now it was a picture of me with a blur at my side.

  “Thanks, I guess,” I said.

  “Come on, Violet,” her mother called across the lawn. “Stop bothering people with your pictures.”

  I grimaced. She’s not a bother, I wanted to say, but Violet was already gone.

  Helena was gone too. She’d moved on to a couple of younger girls lounging nearby in lawn chairs.

  “Shouldn’t you be crossing your legs at the ankles?” she asked them.

  “Let’s get out of here before they come back,” Jacqueline whispered, and she and I huddled together at the picnic table, waiting until Aunt Betty turned her back for a second helping of corn on the cob. This was our chance. With the picture shoved in my pocket, we broke from the crowd and sneaked like river rats to my Impala.

  We weren’t even off Denton Street before Jacqueline twisted the silver dial on the radio to WDOK. “Top of the World” blared across the stereo. I shuddered. Easy listening. It was the worst.

  “But I like the Carpenters.” She laughed. “What’s so bad about that?”

  “Everything,” I said, grinning, but it didn’t matter. I never changed the station when Jacqueline was with me. I couldn’t bear to see a moment of her joy fade away. We drove the rest of the way across town, the windows down, breeze in our hair, and Jacqueline singing syrupy sweet songs at the top of her lungs.

  ***

  Bayton Beach was empty when we got there. Not a shock these days; no self-respecting parent would take a child anywhere within a square mile of this place. Jacqueline and I had come here years ago as kids, before everything fell apart. Before the mills all across town started the layoffs. Before the Cuyahoga River swallowed so much poison that it couldn’t extinguish itself anymore. Before the people started moving away to the sterile, open arms of the suburbs.

  We shouldn’t be here now. We should know better. We certainly shouldn’t go into that water, as dark and wicked as heartbreak.

  Our shoes landed in the dirty sand as we dove in, headfirst and fully clothed. The water rose up into my mouth, and I swallowed the tang of earth and brine.

  We were alone in a way we so rarely were. Girls were babysitters, but we were also babysat, constantly watched and never trusted on our own. It was nice to be here. Though we were isolated, it felt safer somehow.

  Jacqueline did a backstroke in circles around me. “Are you excited about the fall?”

  I watched her dizzying movements, my breath coiling in my chest. She never talked about the future. I was the one that had everything worked out. A soon-to-be biology major at Case Western Reserve, the best school in the state. I was the bad girl with the good grades. An enigma to everyone, sometimes even myself.

  “It’ll be great,” I said, and doggy-paddled near her. “I’ll only be across town. I’ll visit every weekend.”

  She smiled. “Sure you will.”

  Back on the shore, we cleared out a clean space and settled into the secret places we used to burrow and play.

  Jacqueline dug her wet feet deep into the sand. “The union votes tomorrow,” she said, and her voice quivered. Unions and mills and strikes made all our voices quiver.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “It’ll work out.”

  Jacqueline peered up at me. “How can you be sure?”

  “Because it has to.”

  We watch
ed the sun dip in the sky, and sorrow fizzled in my chest. This was a day I didn’t want to let go of, not yet. It was the last day, and the first too, a marker that bisected our lives.

  I wanted to tell Jacqueline that we should stay here in this moment, never stirring from the sand. Become mermaids, perhaps, or some other gorgeous yet gruesome beasts.

  But as the day faded away from us, I said something else instead.

  “I’ll race you to the sun.”

  Jacqueline glanced up at me. Grinning, she scrambled to her feet and started running.

  For an instant, I watched her go, her thin body gliding across the sand like a pale stone, her feet barely touching the ground. Then I squealed and ran after her. Across the divots in the trash-laden shore and over broken Miller Lite bottles, all to see which of us could reach the edge of the world first. With the shore stretching out to what might as well have been infinity, we both lost, but together, we won.

  ***

  It was night by the time my Impala lurched down Denton Street, creeping back into the neighborhood under the thin veil of the never-fully-dark evening. We always had light here, thanks to the flame over the mill. Less than a mile away, it burned bright and tireless in the sky, all day and all night. Our sentry, our beacon everywhere we went. No matter how far Jacqueline and I strayed—out past the Flats, or skipping along the lake, gin and laughter brimming in our bellies—we could always find our way by the wink of that fire. It was the North Star that guided us home.

  We pulled into my driveway. All the charcoal grills had gone cold, and there was no one left on the street. As she climbed out of the car, Jacqueline cradled herself and shivered.

  “Where is everyone?” she asked.

  I shook my head. It was unnervingly quiet, as if we were the only people left in the world. That was what the neighborhood was slowly becoming: abandoned. There were nineteen houses on Denton Street, and the bank owned eight of them. To keep our lives intact, we were all holding on with both hands, not that we honestly believed that could help us if our number was called.

  “Let’s not go home yet,” I said, and Jacqueline nodded.

  Hand in hand, we moved through the shadows of the neighborhood. The two of us always took the long way: down my side of the street, around the end of the cul-de-sac, and back up the opposite side. As we went, we indulged our superstitions, avoiding all the many cracks in the crumbling sidewalk, our fingers tapping the fire hydrant at the end of the street, holding our breath past the abandoned Frank Lloyd Wright-style mansion.

  We ended, as we always did, at the empty house next to Jacqueline’s. Three winters ago, the bank had seized the property, apparently with the sole intention of letting it rot away. A warning for what would happen if you were foolish enough to lose your job.

  What they hadn’t seized was the spare basement key the former owners had kept hidden outside. Next to a piece of half-rotten lattice in the untilled garden, I uncovered the toothed silver, and we let ourselves in to a house that belonged to no one.

  Downstairs, everything was as we’d left it. Two crooked lawn chairs we’d salvaged from a long-ago Wednesday garbage pickup, a dusty bottle of Old Crow bourbon, and a Coleman lantern that was liable to gas us to death if we weren’t careful.

  “Don’t turn it up too high,” Jacqueline said.

  “I won’t.” If we were lucky, we could get the fuel to last us the whole summer.

  She and I sat together in the lawn chairs, giggling and celebrating and tossing back shots quick so we didn’t have to taste them.

  “I’ll miss this,” she said, and I almost corrected her, almost reminded her that there would be nothing to miss. That I’d be back every weekend, just like I promised.

  But then she looked past me, and something shifted in her face.

  “Phoebe,” she whispered, nearly gagging on my name.

  My throat closed up as I followed her gaze. The lantern glow flickered over a shape at the bottom of the stairs. Someone was standing there, watching us for longer than we cared to imagine.

  With a guttural moan, Jacqueline fumbled for my hand, anything for us to be closer to each other and farther from this thing gawking at us.

  “Who is it?” she asked. “Who’s there?”

  Her arms still bandaged and damp, Lisa emerged as if from nothing. “The moonlight’s singing to us tonight,” she said, and her fingernails dragged across the crumbling walls. This set my guts churning. Something about the sound made me think of a corpse digging its way out of a shallow grave.

  I braced against the crooked lawn chair, and it lurched under my weight. What was she doing, hiding here in the dark?

  “Lisa?” I said, but she didn’t look at me. Instead, she moved into the center of the room and settled on the floor, stretching her long legs out across the cold concrete.

  Our hands still locked, Jacqueline’s gaze shifted from Lisa to me and back again.

  I sniffed in a heavy breath, and the scents of mildew and faded Lysol filled my lungs. Stay calm, I told myself. After all, this wasn’t a specter or even a stranger. It was Lisa. We’d known her since grade school. An odd one, to be sure, but she was only a girl, just like us. Besides, this wasn’t so odd. We’d left the door at the side of the house unlocked. She must have slipped in after us. Still, neither Jacqueline nor I had heard her come down the stairs. How could she move without making a sound?

  I shrank back in my chair, desperate to pretend this was normal. “Congratulations on graduating today,” I said. “How’s everything with your family? How’s your sister, Kathleen?”

  Jacqueline attempted a smile. “Yes, how is Kathleen? Is she still at the Chicago Tribune?”

  Her eyes vacant, Lisa stared at the wall, not seeing us, maybe not seeing anything.

  “Things change,” she whispered at last. “Sometimes it’s for the better, and sometimes it’s not.”

  Jacqueline tightened her fingers around mine, squeezing my hand until it throbbed. I knew what she was thinking. We should run. Tethered together, we could sprint for those stairs and get out of here before something happened.

  But there was Lisa, right in front of us. The one who’d always been forgotten. I didn’t want to be the same as everyone else. I didn’t want to abandon her if something was wrong, and by the looks of her, something was most definitely wrong.

  I tried to steady myself, but my voice trembled anyhow. “Do you need us to call someone, Lisa?”

  At this, she looked up, and her eyes flashed before going dark again.

  “Who would you call?” she asked. “My father? Because I don’t think he can help me now. I don’t think he could ever help me.”

  Lisa rose to her feet, somehow taller than only a moment ago. Shadows danced about the room. Maybe hers. Maybe not. We watched, dumbfounded, as she fiddled with the gauze on her arms, carefully at first, until a strange look twitched across her face. Then with her gaze on me, she smiled and ripped off the damp bandages. They peeled away from her body like dead flesh. Instantly, water gushed out of her, as though someone were wringing out a sponge.

  I sat there, my insides twisted up and useless. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe. But Jacqueline was quicker than me, and smarter too, like she practically knew it was coming. Her hand on mine, she yanked me backward out of the chair and pulled us toward the wall, but nowhere in the room was safe. The gray liquid kept coming, kept seeping down Lisa’s body, spilling on the concrete in thick rivers, coating the toes of our shoes.

  “Don’t worry,” Lisa said and wandered back toward the stairs, her leaking body making plink-plunk sounds as she went. “I’m fine. Everything is fine.”

  For a bottomless moment, Jacqueline and I didn’t move. The quiet footsteps retreated out into the night, and the basement went still again. Everything was almost as it had been—the Coleman lantern still flickering, the dust-caked bourbon bottle in the corner, the broken lawn chairs at our feet. But there, in the center of the room, was the trail of Lisa, of who she
was and what she left behind.

  Fear unraveled from Jacqueline’s wide eyes, and we stared at each other, hoping that one of us could utter the words to reverse what we’d just witnessed. But there was no magic spell to undo it, so with our hands clasped tighter than ever, we took the long stairs back up into the night.

  Outside, Lisa was halfway down the block. Heading home, I guessed. I wanted to run after her. I wanted to find out what was wrong and ask her how to fix it. But something else was happening out here. In her wake were red lights, so bright they were almost blinding. An ambulance. At first, I stood there stock-still, dumbly assuming that someone thought to call a doctor for Lisa, as if anyone but us knew what had happened. Then I heard Jacqueline exhale at my side.

  “Dawn,” she whispered, and I realized she was right. The paramedics were gathering up someone, and though the lights obscured all the faces, a sliver of moonlight glistened off that belly, as round as the world.

  That pint-sized beast must have finally torn its way out of Dawn’s womb. Something in my chest twisted, and for the first time, I felt so very sorry for her. For where she’d been and where she was going. At least it waited until after graduation. A small mercy.

  “Why the ambulance, do you think?” I asked.

  Jacqueline shook her head. “Maybe there were complications.”

  Complications. That was a nice word for it, for this entire night.

  Down the street, the last paramedic on the sidewalk hollered something indistinct to the man in the driver’s seat before he secured the stretcher and closed all the ambulance doors. As the engine roared to life, I held a superstitious breath, convinced if I exhaled too soon, the world might cascade away from me, and I’d suddenly be like Lisa, dripping dark water and heartache.

  But I didn’t exhale in this moment, and the world stayed put, at least for now. With Dawn tucked safely inside, the ambulance wailed on its way, and Jacqueline and I stood shivering on the street as we listened to the sirens fade into the night.

  We couldn’t linger here for very long. After everything, it didn’t feel safe out in the open.