The Rust Maidens

by Gwendolyn Kiste

  She paces down the hall and into the center of the living room. “There,” she says, and points to the air. “Can you hear it?”

  I strain to listen. A strange echo lilts all around us, faraway, yet whispering in my ear.

  “It sounds like someone singing,” she says. “Don’t you think so?”

  That’s exactly what it sounds like, but I shake my head. “It’s only the wind whistling through.”

  It’s not them. I tell myself it can’t be them.

  “This isn’t wind, I promise you,” Quinn says, and something moves behind her. The muscles across my back constrict, and everything around us comes into sharp focus.

  Quinn shivering before me, unaware of what comes next.

  The winter air sparkling with ice and regret.

  My breath fogging in front of me, letting me know I’m still breathing, even though I can’t feel it.

  Then she’s here with us, a wraith as much as her mother. Eleanor, materializing from the shadow. I wonder if this is the only way she knows how to appear: swiftly and inexplicably, like she has to surprise people if she has any chance of them not exiling her. She must have seen us come in and followed.

  “So you hear it too?” she asks.

  Quinn whirls around and glares at her. “Of course we do,” she says. “And anyhow, what do you want, Eleanor?”

  I exhale a sigh. It’s no surprise these two know each other. They live in the same neighborhood. They’ve probably argued on this street a hundred times before. But Eleanor wants nothing to do with Quinn. She’s here for me.

  “You think it’s for you, don’t you?” Eleanor moves toward me. “But what if it’s for me? What if it’s my mother?”

  I shrug and push back the moldering curtains on the window, anything to keep my hands occupied. “You can think whatever you’d like.”

  “You were going to tell me something today.” Eleanor keeps inching forward, nearer to me each moment. I can feel her eyes accusing me. Of what, even she doesn’t know. “What were you going to say?”

  I turn to stare at her. She’s blocking the doorway and I can’t get out. All I want to do is run. All I ever want to do is run.

  “It was nothing,” I say, and almost believe myself.

  Quinn glances between us. “Why are you so sure Phoebe knows anything?”

  “Because she was closer to them than anyone,” Eleanor says. “She was there with them that last night. I’m sure of it. That’s why she left.”

  She’s right. Maybe now it’s time to admit it. To say what I saw. What happened that summer, that final evening when I ran. Maybe I should confess it in front of Eleanor and Quinn, and all of the ghosts on Denton Street we’ve tried to forget.

  But I can’t. Because the moon’s pouring in through the window now, and I see what wasn’t clear before.

  There’s a tiny gash on Quinn’s arm. It’s deep and red and glinting with something. I don’t have to look close to know what it is.

  “Phoebe?” Quinn stares at me. “What’s wrong?”

  I swallow a sob. “Nothing,” I say, and wish it were true.

  SIX

  For the next three days, I called Jacqueline. She wouldn’t pick up. I went to the house when Aunt Betty was at work. No answer. Every time I knocked, I would see her shape flutter past her bedroom window, but she wouldn’t look down at me. Not so much as a twitch of the pale lace curtains. I wasn’t worth the trouble.

  This was my fault. I’d invited the tourists in, and I’d pushed Jacqueline to leave when she wasn’t ready. It was almost as if I couldn’t help myself. If there was a bad decision to be made, you could be damned sure I’d run toward it at full speed.

  That night, the women of Denton Street gathered in our kitchen, where they sucked down cigarette smoke and discussed the Fourth of July block party. I huddled in the doorway and listened.

  My mother sat at the table, notes sprawled out in front of her. She was the secretary, and had been for long as I could remember. “Next item of business: shall we secure a permit from the city to close off the road like we did last year?”

  They all voted yes, and my skin buzzed with unease. This event was the cornerstone of our summer, and we were going to pretend that this was indeed like every other year. Though so far, very little about 1980 looked like anything I could even call life.

  “I bet the strike will be over by next week,” Clint’s mother said, apropos of nothing. “Then things can get back to normal.”

  My mother scribbled something to keep her hands busy. “Of course,” she said. “Remember when they fixed up the mill equipment last year? Why bother doing that if you’re going to lay off your whole workforce?”

  All the mothers nodded and gave each other tight, miserable smiles. Nobody wanted to point out the truth: that other than a few gears on the conveyor belt and a new door for the blast furnace that the state inspectors demanded the mill replace or else, there had been no major repairs to the place in almost a decade. The owners were letting our lives rot out from underneath us.

  One of the women at the table hesitated, a pack of Lucky Strikes quivering in her hand. “Do you think it’s our fault?” she asked. “I mean, what’s happening to the girls?”

  The others didn’t say anything. They crossed their arms and smoked the last of their cigarettes and pretended the green and orange geometric shapes on the linoleum were too fascinating to look away.

  “It’s not our fault,” Clint’s mother said finally. “Girls are always trouble.”

  “But what if it’s something in the water?” a voice in the back asked.

  “Or something in the air? The smog’s gotten thick this year,” the preacher’s wife said.

  My mother’s fingers tightened around her highball glass. “Or maybe it’s something at the mill.”

  Everyone went instantly quiet, and I knew, without a doubt, they’d all been thinking the same thing.

  “Don’t say that.” From the corner, Aunt Betty moved toward my mother, and I wondered if she intended to slap her for the mere suggestion. “Don’t blame the men. They didn’t do this.”

  I exhaled a sharp laugh. “Of course not,” I said. “We wouldn’t want to hold them accountable for anything.”

  At this, Aunt Betty turned away from my mother, and glared right through me. “Do you have something to add, Phoebe?”

  “No,” I said, and smiled. “I think I already did.”

  I was out the door before anybody could say another word.

  I went walking. Around and around the neighborhood, part of me convinced if I made enough loops on this street, I could set the world straight, and Jacqueline would come with me. Or better yet, maybe if I could take the right number of steps in precisely the proper order, everything would balance out and the Rust Maidens wouldn’t exist at all. They’d simply be normal girls in a normal neighborhood.

  Not that anything on Denton Street—or in Cleveland, for that matter—was normal anymore.

  ***

  The doctors arrived in the neighborhood on a Thursday afternoon. I was standing in front of Jacqueline’s house when they poured out of a black Cadillac across the street, looking like mourners decked out for a funeral.

  Adrian came out of his rented house and joined me on the sidewalk as the whitecoats took their bags of tricks into Dawn’s. There were too many of them for a routine checkup. My stomach lurched as the realization sank deep into me.

  Clint had meant what he said. She was one of them. Dawn was a Rust Maiden.

  “Will they take the girls away?” I blurted the question before I could stop myself.

  Adrian glanced at me, gauging his next words carefully.

  “That was the initial plan,” he said. “But too many had been exposed by the time we got here. We’d have to quarantine half the city now. It would cause a panic.” He hesitated. “And we’d rather not do that.”

  Rather not. That meant they still might.

  “And in the meantime?” I asked.

/>   “We’ll keep them under observation,” he said, “and wait to see what happens.”

  He was standing right next to me now, close enough that I could reach out and touch him. Not that I would reach out, or did reach out. Just that I could have.

  A good time and trouble. I’d practically replaced his name in my mind with that phrase. With Jacqueline’s phrase. Her voice echoed everywhere I went.

  She was lost to me, and I had to know why. That meant going to the last person in the world I wanted to see.

  ***

  At the corner store, next to a news rack filled with warnings about the Soviets and Dorothy Stratten’s plastic-sealed face on the cover of Playboy, I ordered coffee and stared across the counter at Aunt Betty. She stared back, looking bored at my very existence.

  “What’s wrong with Jacqueline?” I asked, doing my best to steady my voice.

  She popped her pink gum in my face and shrugged. “Nothing, so far as I know.”

  “Something is wrong.” I took a big gulp of hot coffee, and the skin on the insides of my cheeks peeled away from the heat. I only half noticed. “She won’t talk to me. She won’t answer my calls.”

  “Then I’d say something finally went right with that girl.” Aunt Betty shot me a smug grin.

  My fingers tightened around the Styrofoam cup, and I imagined tossing the contents into her face. Not that it would do any good. If Jacqueline didn’t want to talk to me now, I doubted maiming her mother would help my chances.

  The bell chimed again and again, and tourists poured into the store, their cameras slung around their necks.

  Aunt Betty glided off to service their every need. “All in a day’s work,” she mumbled, and I loathed everything about her. But I didn’t leave. I hoped to glean something about Jacqueline yet.

  Another ding of the bell over the door. I turned in time to see Kathleen and Lisa skitter down the farthest aisle. The two of them must have sneaked out. No way had the doctors approved this errand.

  I took another sip of coffee and steadied myself. Now was as good a time as any for a confrontation.

  At a rack of prepackaged fruit pies, I cut Kathleen off. “How could you?”

  Lisa scurried off to the corner to buy smokes, her leaky arms wrapped up tighter than a sarcophagus.

  Kathleen didn’t say anything for a long while. She just glared at me, as if anticipating this. “I didn’t do anything,” she said, and took a heavy step forward. For an instant, a dark glimmer of her father danced behind her eyes. I inched away from her, my stomach cramping, but before I could say a word, she caught herself and retreated, cheeks pink with shame.

  “I wouldn’t do that to Lisa,” she said, quieter now. “What I submitted was a real piece of investigative journalism. The editors gutted it.”

  I inspected her face and realized she wasn’t lying. Though perhaps it wasn’t the editors’ fault. Maybe it was, at least in part, the fault of the writer. How could Kathleen possibly manage an iota of objectivity when she was writing about her own sister? More than likely, she submitted a piece that was more heartbreak than it was facts and figures. The paper might have just done the best with what she’d given them.

  “Why draw attention at all?” I asked.

  “Because,” Kathleen said, her voice heaving, “nobody here cared. Not the doctors or our parents or anyone. I thought if other people knew, they might help us. They might do something. Instead, they came to our street to gawk.” She exhaled a soft moan. “We’re alone in this, Phoebe.”

  A thorn twisted in my heart. She was right. I started to say something else, to question her about all of this, but in the next aisle, Lisa cried out. In the moment she’d been separated from Kathleen, the tourists had circled her near the neon Marlboro sign. With their laughter echoing off the ceiling, they moved in on her, pulling at her bandages and snapping pictures so close to her face that the negatives were sure to come out blurry. But that wasn’t the point. As long as they had some kind of proof, that was what mattered. Lisa screamed out and tried to flee, but there was nowhere to run. Every direction she turned, another hand was grasping at her, eager to pinch off a piece of her skin as a macabre keepsake.

  All the air escaped my lungs, and I stood paralyzed for an instant as something deep inside me shifted. Then, I was weightless and moving across the store. With rage poisoning my blood, I reached into the circle of invaders and pulled Lisa back toward Kathleen. She cried out and tucked herself against her big sister.

  But I wasn’t done. Freeing her wasn’t enough. I was suddenly the one in the middle of the tourists, my arms flailing, ripping their cameras off them, once or twice even snapping the thick, canvas straps against the backs of their necks. My arms overflowed with the wretched devices, but I didn’t hesitate, my fingers nimble and ready. I yanked open the backs of their cameras, exposing the film and spoiling their hard work. They wouldn’t take another image here, not today. The ribbons of film unspooled like viscera from a slit belly. Yards and yards of it, one camera after another, until they were all empty. Then I dropped them to the floor with a clank and stomped on the carcasses of the Polaroids and the Minoltas and the Pentaxes just for good measure. Just to make sure they couldn’t do this again.

  By the time I was finished, Kathleen and Lisa were already gone, though I hadn’t heard the bell ding to signal their exit. Maybe they went out the back. Maybe it didn’t even matter. They were away from here and safe from these tourists, who no longer looked so formidable. One of the older ladies started to weep, quiet little mewling sounds, while the rest of them gaped at me with those same useless expressions. They were only any good to themselves if they were together as a group, tittering cruelly as they tormented the girls. But stun them even a little, and they were as worthless as the film now limp and sullied beneath my feet.

  “Get out,” Aunt Betty said, sneering as she rounded the counter. She pointed at the door like I didn’t know the way. “Now, Phoebe.”

  I didn’t stay to argue. There was no point. She would only call the police if I did.

  At the counter, the pastor’s wife clucked her tongue at me as I passed. To her, I’d proved what the locals had always believed about me.

  “She’s a danger,” they’d said since I was a barefoot five-year-old, squealing and chasing wasps down Denton Street. And they were right. I was a danger. I would always be a danger to people like them.

  ***

  Back home, my mother was waiting at the front door to greet me. “What were you thinking?”

  I stopped halfway up the porch stairs, my heart tugged tight. How did she already know?

  Aunt Betty. She must have called the house as soon as that bell dinged over my head. She hated talking to my mother, but would always make an exception to break bad news. Especially bad news involving me.

  I shrugged and pushed past my mother into the house. “I didn’t do anything.”

  “Really?” She followed me inside, still waiting for a proper answer or apology or something else resembling contrition. When I said nothing, she rolled her eyes and went to the liquor cabinet to pour herself a drink, as though the only way to deal with her wayward daughter was to imbibe heavily first.

  “You can’t keep doing this.” She swirled the amaretto in her glass. “You make yourself too visible to people.”

  My head heavy, I leaned into the corner and tried to make my body smaller, tried to fold into myself, so miniscule and friable that I wasn’t there at all. “Would you rather I just disappear?”

  She pretended not to hear me. “Things are hard enough right now,” she said. “We don’t need this kind of trouble.”

  “And you think the girls need it?” I moved forward, broadening on instinct. “You think they asked for it?”

  She shook her head, not looking at me. “This isn’t about them, Phoebe. This is about us. Our family’s barely hanging on here, and you’re just causing problems.” She pursed her lips, measuring her next words and then saying them anyhow. “So
metimes I think that’s all you’re good at.”

  The words kicked me in my chest.

  All I’m good at.

  The skin on my face tightened, a precursor to the tears I knew would come. I had a choice. I could have said anything to her, or nothing at all. I could have taken the high road. But the rage rose up the back of my throat—rage at her, at the tourists, at the mill, even at the Rust Maidens themselves for daring to exist—and within myself, I reached for whatever could injure the worst.

  “At least I’m good at something.” I flashed a cruel grin at her. “What are you good at, mother? Raising a pretty little family? Because from where I’m standing, it looks rather ugly right now.”

  My mother stiffened, and I hesitated. Her fingers quivered around the stem of her cordial glass, and I was sure she wanted to strike me. Open-handed across the face, as hard as I deserved.

  But she didn’t. She simply set her glass down on the mantle and retreated to the kitchen.

  “Dinner will be ready in an hour,” she said, tossing the remark over her shoulder as an afterthought.

  I settled back in the corner and hated myself a little. I didn’t need to say that to her. It did no good. She had hopes, once, for a life that was more than what this town could ever offer, but she took the obvious way out. Become a wife, a mother, and nothing else. All her dreams turned to cinders, crushed like a cigarette butt beneath a high-heeled shoe.

  After a supper of roast beef and thin conversation, I sneaked out back to my treehouse. I wasn’t alone. Midges, those nasty little flies with no sense of propriety, had started their annual invasion, and if I didn’t do my best to keep them out, they might chase away the other bugs.

  With my bare hands, I cleared them from the milkweed and the walls and even plucked one or two from the wings of the butterflies. It was nasty work, but necessary, I told myself. This wasn’t a place for them. If I didn’t protect my sanctuary from invaders, then nobody would.

  “That doesn’t look very fun,” someone said behind me. I whirled around to see her standing there, an invader all her own. Helena, the preacher’s daughter. Her pale eyes flickered at me, and she almost smiled, but then apparently thought better of it.