Women of the Mean Streets

by J. M. Redmann

  Probably if I hadn’t slapped Georgiana, with her smug, mean smile, she wouldn’t have started yelling and she wouldn’t have gone to Sister and there wouldn’t have been the calls to the house and everything would have gone on as it had been, with me and the cats and the closed doors. But that slap was like the thrown light switch—everything just blew up after that. And people drew the wrong conclusions.

  Ever notice how on those news stories there’s always someone who says, They kept to themselves or We didn’t really know them that well or She was always a little strange or We knew something like this would happen. It was only a matter of time. Only a matter of time…

  *

  Later, the thing the police got stuck on was that pile of clothes on the floor of the bathroom by the bathtub after I came home from trying to hang myself in the woods and they drew the wrong conclusions. They thought because I was only thirteen, I couldn’t figure things out, that I just went on instinct, because children are just the smallest step up from feral animals and go on instinct, rather than logic. They forgot that thirteen is that blurry line between kid and adult. They forgot that when you live in a crazy house, you grow up fast. Faster than all the other kids your age. They forgot that you know things from living in a crazy house that other people—adults—don’t know. All they could see was the blood and the clothes and the bathtub.

  I’m not sure how that led them to the conclusion that I was the killer, but it’s where they stopped. Because I was the only one left alive—just me and a few cats, although two of the cats were killed, too, and all the others would have to be put down, according to the police, because they had tasted human blood and now they might turn feral and kill.

  Like me.

  *

  Police stations look very different on TV and in the movies than they do in real life. I sat on a wooden chair next to a detective in a room with flat fluorescent lights and a low dropped ceiling with patches where leaks of something ugly had stained the pocked squares. There was a loud buzzing in the room—the drone of computers and Xerox machines and those fluorescent lights. Everything was gray or beige or a washed-out green and everything was ugly.

  I don’t know how old the detective was. Older than my father. Not as old as my grandfather. Older than the parish priest, but then he was around the same age as my parents. But the detective leaned in toward me, which made me want to lean back away from him, but I knew I was supposed to stay still, so I didn’t move. The detective told me he had two daughters of his own and I sat and listened as he told me about them. Two little girls just like me, he was saying. I was pretty sure that the detective didn’t live in a crazy house and that all the doors to all the rooms were open and that his daughters and his wife all sat in the living room together and watched TV or sat at the dining room table and ate dinner together and that no one sat and waited while the food got cold for the phone to ring but it never rang and that the detective, the father, came home for dinner, even though he was a policeman and his job was to open the doors on the rooms with the flies and maggots and blood in them.

  So I was pretty sure that his daughters were nothing like me. Because they weren’t there, in the police station, with the detective, were they? They were home with a mother who wasn’t crazy and where there was probably no screaming. And probably no creepy quiet, either. And definitely no blood.

  I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to feel when the detective was telling me his story and I was just sitting there, still and quiet and not moving and thinking how the nuns always said I was fidgety, but if they could see me now, they would be impressed and I would probably get a better grade than B- for self-control and obedience, which I don’t think should be graded like history and religion and math anyway because they’re what you call subjective. And the nuns didn’t know how to be objective. When you’re thirteen you’re old enough to tell who is objective and who isn’t, and almost no one is. Which is why there really isn’t anyone to help like a friendly owl or a wise professor or a kindly wizard except in books. And those books are written just for kids like me, so we can think that maybe someone like that will turn up and everything will be different.

  The nuns weren’t those people. Neither was the detective.

  I was certain the detective was trying to get me to say something—maybe anything—that would make him nod his head and type phrases in on his computer and make him think now I get it, now I understand, except no matter what I said, he wouldn’t get it, he wouldn’t understand. So why should I say anything? What was there to say, really? Things should have been said long before this, but just as I hadn’t known who to call when I walked back from the woods rubbing my neck from where the rope had almost-but-not-quite killed me, I didn’t know who to call when things were just crazy, before they switched over to that level of awfulness like when you have a really super-awful dream and it sticks with you when you first wake up and you think you are still in it.

  I was still in it. I was in it before and I was in it now. This was the bad part of the books—the part where you aren’t sure that someone is going to save the boy or the girl in the story. Except usually someone does. But the only person who might have saved me was dead. And even if the other people were alive, they wouldn’t have saved me. They were why things were the way they were. They were why it was all so wrong. They were why thirteen wasn’t a magic number or a special number but the number that people are afraid of, the number that has a special name—triskaidekaphobia—and why some buildings don’t have a thirteenth floor, just a twelfth and a fourteenth, because no one wants to be on the thirteenth floor. No one wants to be near that number, thirteen. Because for some people it’s something to be afraid of, something that makes people shudder and turn away and hide behind the easier, safer numbers, that don’t have some ancient taint to them.

  The detective seemed stuck on that number, too, just like the other police officers had been stuck on the pile of clothes. Because it seems that the law is as confused about thirteen as everyone else. Thirteen is blurry and indistinct—you could be a kid or you could be an adult. The detective was trying to explain that to me. Explain to me that without much effort on anyone’s part, I could be an adult in the eyes of the law, that I could go to prison. Which didn’t really mean much to me, since I didn’t have anywhere else to go except back to the blood and the closed doors which had all been opened. There were no cats now—I had seen them taken away in carriers by some official looking people in coveralls. They looked scared. I hoped they would be all right. I hoped if they were killed that it would be quick and painless and that there would not be blood.

  *

  As I listened to the detective explaining things to me, I wanted to explain things back, but didn’t. I wanted to tell him that the thing of it all was, I thought about killing all of them all the time. I thought about taking the knives in the kitchen and stabbing them in their sleep. Stabbing and stabbing and stabbing. I thought about turning on the gas and then leaving and hoping someone would flip that switch. I thought about setting fire to all the curtains in every room and then taking the cats and running. I thought about making dinner and putting something in the food, except I didn’t know what to use. I thought about some kind of killing all the time. I thought about the rhyme we used to jump rope to: Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her mother forty whacks and when she saw what she had done she gave her father forty-one. Except I had read a book that had said it was really only twenty-nine whacks and that there were a lot of mitigating circumstances, except I wasn’t entirely sure I understood what that meant. But I had definitely thought about killing them like Lizzie Borden must have on that hot morning with the house smelling like the rotting meat in the kitchen with lots of flies and other terrible smells from the time before plumbing and fans and air fresheners. So yes, I had definitely wanted to take up my own axe. Because I was tired of the crazy house and my grandfather was dead and my dog was dead and the bad things just kept getting worse and worse and there wa
s no one else I could count on, no one else I could trust, no one else who might say, “Don’t do that to her, you know it’s not right. Leave her alone.”

  But I had come home to the blood, it was already there. And I had left and gone to the woods with the rope. And they had found the rope, right where I said it was, but not the man and the dog, and besides, they decided the rope was just remorse, but not real remorse, that the deep mark around my neck was just an attempt, not a serious effort, because I was still alive and they were all dead. Cut to bits, said the detective. You understand they were cut to bits? I want to be sure you understand what happened here. He said this to me over and over, like I somehow hadn’t been there, hadn’t seen what was behind the doors before I closed them and hoped they would never be opened again.

  A grisly, incomprehensible scene of carnage and mayhem, said the reporter on the news in that hushed voice they get when they can’t quite believe what they are reporting. Details are still unfolding.

  They weren’t unfolding for me. I knew the details that the detective and the other adults did not. I knew why there was all the blood. I knew about the trigger. I knew things that no one else knew except the other people who lived in the crazy house and not even all of them knew but they were all dead now so it didn’t matter what they knew. But I still knew.

  We never used the word secret in my house. But we just knew that you didn’t say certain things, tell certain things. There were things you could say and things you couldn’t: I tripped and fell on the stairs not My mother pushed me down the stairs. Or I hurt myself riding my bike or climbing a tree or getting over that fence not He comes into the room late at night when he’s really drunk and my mother said I made it up, that I’m trying to steal him, that I’m just a little thief, just a pathological liar. Pathological. Liar. Thief. Pathological.

  No one used any of those words on the news. I sat watching story after story that was my story but not my story and still no one talked to me, no one asked me, and I was pretty sure no one would and even more sure that if they had, I wouldn’t have said anything, anyway. Because secrets are secrets and it doesn’t pay to tell. I learned that long before I was thirteen. Long before crazy turned to mayhem.

  *

  When I had first woken up from that dazed and unpleasant and nightmare-filled sleep, I had decided to call the police. I had. Really. But I was still disoriented from the sleeping and the trying to hang myself and all the other things. I had lain in my bed with one of the cats and I had been stroking her fur and she was purring and everything felt normal for a time and I held on to the cat as tight as I could without scaring her and I tried to smell nothing but her furry animal smell. But the smell—the other smell—was beginning to seep up into my room and it made me want to retch and I was sure that the smell would begin to permeate everything and that it would start to seep outside and someone else would notice and call the police and it seemed better if it was me, not them. Because I knew about those news stories where the neighbors say And we had to call the police. The smell, you know. It was so awful. We had to call.

  I knew I should be the one to call. I knew it should be me.

  When I punched in 9-1-1 on the keypad, I tried to remember the tone of each number. Somehow it seemed important—it was the first real sound I had heard since I had come back home. There was the shower and the purring and the sound of the tones of the numbers before they connected to the operator who said, “9-1-1, what is your emergency?” in a voice that was both surly and dismissive. She said what like What could you possibly tell me that I haven’t already heard a million times?

  So then I said, “Sorry—it’s not really an emergency” and hung up. Because I knew then that everyone would have that same tone—surly, dismissive, not helpful at all. That there was not going to be any rescue—not for me. Not like in all the books I had read where someone finally comes and rescues the girl or the boy and takes them away and everything gets better, or you think it will get better, because the book ends before things get better but it’s implied—you know it will happen. You know it will all be okay. You know that life will start to feel normal.

  But there is never any normal in a crazy house and I knew as soon as I heard the operator’s voice that there was probably not ever going to be any normal for me. That there just was no one to call. No one to help. That it was just me and the blood and the cats and I was going to have to figure it out on my own. Just like I always had done in the past.

  I thought about what I would have said: That my family was dead, that there was so much blood. I imagined that the operator might be quiet for a time, that there might be an actual moment of silence, and that then she would ask me to repeat it, and that then I would say it again—that my family had been murdered and that someone should come. Now.

  On TV, the operators always ask in that same toneless voice if anyone is still alive. If they had asked me that, I would have said no.

  They always ask the young girl in the movie who calls 911 from the house where she’s babysitting and a maniac is in the basement or the attic to stay on the phone until the police got there, but the girl always says she wants to go to the door and wait for the police and that she’s going to hang up. And then she hangs up and someone comes up behind her and slits her throat or stabs her or puts something over her head and everybody screams.

  *

  I could have called the police. I should have called the police. But I didn’t. I didn’t know what to say. I still didn’t know what to say once I was at the police station eleven days later, as the news reports kept saying in an incredulous kind of way. She continued to stay in the house with her murdered family for eleven days. Details are still unfolding.

  It didn’t seem that long to me, eleven days, but I had kind of lost track of time. It was just me and the cats and that unpleasant smell, and eleven days is either a really short time or a really long time, depending on what you are waiting for or hoping for or dreading.

  They weren’t sure what to do with me, once the police took me in. Was I a killer or a victim, a lunatic or a survivor, satanic or saintly?

  *

  The detective finally stopped talking to me. He decided he wasn’t getting anywhere, that there probably wasn’t anywhere he could get with me. Because I basically just sat there and didn’t say much of anything and didn’t cry or sob or scream or kick or act crazy or any of the things he seemed to expect from the thirteen-year-old girl who had been taken from a house with three murdered adults, two murdered children, and a couple of dead cats. Cut to bits.

  But they didn’t know what to do with me. Someone said I was obviously injured, look at her eye, look at her neck, so they took me to the hospital to be checked out. At the hospital a really nice doctor came in and talked to me and then they told me to take off my clothes and I wasn’t really okay with that because the doctor was a man and it was making me kind of shaky, even with the nurse there, so they sent in two women who weren’t doctors but social workers and they asked me if I would take off my clothes to be examined. And they were really nice and kind and their voices were low and soft but not with that creepy edge that you sometimes hear in adult voices when they get low and soft and you know something else is coming.

  They told me they had to look at me naked, that the doctor had to do a full exam. So I took off my clothes and stood there and I saw the look, they both got it, although the one with the dark red hair, not the brunette, she tried to hide the look. And then one of them, the redhead, handed me a gown and a sheet—kind of shoved them at me, then kind of apologized in a kind of strangled way, and that one backed out of the room and went for the doctor while the other one just stood there and tried not to look at me funny but I could tell she wanted to run, too.

  I knew what they saw, of course. They saw the marks. It’s not like I could hide them. It’s not like on gym day when I would wear the top of my gym uniform under my school uniform so that when we got undressed in the locker room there was nothing to se
e. Teresa did the same thing, because her family was so religious that they thought it was somehow perverted that we all had to undress together and put on our gym clothes because only God and your parents should ever see you naked. I used to think that maybe Teresa had the marks, too, but there was no way to find out for sure. It just made me feel better to think there was someone else with them. I think probably the saints felt that way, too, and that’s how everyone started to get involved in flagellation as part of penance—because then you couldn’t tell the real saints from the fake ones and everyone felt more equal in God’s eyes. Or at least that’s what I think caused it to happen. Because it just feels safer to know other people are going through what you’re going through. Because then maybe it’s not so crazy.

  Maybe.

  The other woman came back to the exam room and I could tell she had started to cry because her eyes were wet and glisten-y and the doctor had a different look on his face—a serious, concerned look, while before he had a kind and open look, like he was welcoming me into his house and ready to feed me dinner or tell me a bedtime story like I was small or something sweet like that.

  Would you mind removing the gown? His voice was low and soft like the women’s, who I now knew were from some child protective agency because the nurse said it when she came back in the room. There was a policeman outside the door, but no one mentioned him.

  I sat on the edge of the examining table and closed my eyes and took off the gown and tried not to feel like I was in my room with the eyes of the raccoons glowing at me and the sound of the door creaking open late at night and the smell of the scotch and cigarettes seeping into the room. I tried to remember that was all over and that now I was in a hospital and the man coming over to me was wearing a white coat and had a stethoscope and was talking low and soft but not those kinds of words but normal things like Tilt your head back, please and Open your mouth and stick out your tongue, please and Take a deep breath, please, and now let it out slowly. That’s good, that’s fine.