The girl could borrow Georgie’s t-shirt and shorts—they looked to be about the same size. Bella told her to leave her dusty dress on the tile. The girl grasped the ends of her dress and lifted it above her head. Bella looked away and made her exit, but not before noticing that the girl wore nothing underneath.
She closed the door so the boys wouldn’t see and waited until she heard the sounds of water splashing before heading to the linen closet for a towel. She paused and sniffed the extra one they had for spills. She’d done it with the load that day and didn’t fancy having someone else’s sweat on it. Bella went into the kitchen and gathered a load of rags, mostly ripped from clothes she no longer fit into, and thought they’d have to do.
As the boys prepared the couch, Bella knocked on the bathroom door and asked if she could come in to drop off the rags and some clean clothes. There was no response, so Bella pressed her ear against the door. She heard nothing, and imagined, for a moment, that the girl had drowned. That would be a right mess, wouldn’t it? There would be all sorts of people in her home, then. Policemen, a coroner, perhaps even a priest to talk to the boys about the cycles of life, and none of them were likely to wipe their feet at the door or remove their shoes. Plus, it would upset the boys, and they were the type who got into trouble when they were upset.
She turned the knob on the bathroom door and went in and was surprised to see that the girl had not closed the shower curtain, but was sitting in the tub with her knees raised to her chin and her arms wrapped around herself.
“There’s soap,” Bella said, in an attempt to encourage the girl to wash her skin. “Dry off when you’re done.” She dropped the rags at the edge of the sink.
The girl looked at her, eyes so wide and white.
And then, she frowned.
Her lips were pale and thin, and that slight downturn made her whole face into something ugly, something that made Bella wish she herself had eyelids as thick as iron, something strong enough to block out that face, but even as she closed the flesh around her eyes, she still saw the girl, still saw her staring like she could stare right into the center of any living thing and find something wrong.
Bella retreated into her room and went under the covers, something she rarely did to avoid washing the sheets. She curled into a ball and made sure not even a lick of her hair was sticking out from underneath. Can’t hurt you if you can’t see ‘em.
* * *
Bella did not sleep well. Years of practice had taught her the value of not letting her mind wander, not during the day, and certainly not at night when there was no light to distract her. Her mother once told her a wandering mind will inevitably find a trail of sweets, but the more you eat, the more you follow, and eventually you’ll find an oven at the end of it, and a witch with sick-black teeth and one outstretched palm. Bella always thought those stories were dumb, but she took the advice to heart.
She tried, anyway. She closed her eyes, tensed her limbs, and thought about that tree, lonesome on the hill, how it never really left her mind, but sat near the edge of her memory like a soldier, ready always with a rifle, ready always to aim, ready always to explode.
She knew a secret, though. The town fell over themselves with the easy questions—how could a body be so broken to end up in the hollow? None of those found bones were bent, and yet she fit into a space no human should be allowed to. Bella knew. Her own body had twisted and bent like a bow, like a reed in the air, and it had become as small and motionless as a baked pretzel, left on the grass, all that soiling green. Those stains didn’t come out. She had to throw out the blue dress she’d worn. How cruel that grass had been. Why hadn’t it washed out? She should have used lye.
Bella emerged her head from the covers to take a breath of cool air. The girl was there, at the foot of her bed, staring, staring, staring. Bella did not scream. She’d long ago kept that noise buried in her lungs to rot, but she did inhale, in and out, in and out.
“Go to bed,” she said, because that worked on her sons. The girl did not blink, did not twist her face, but she raised her hand and pointed her finger at Bella’s head, like an accusation.
“I said,” Bella repeated, “go to bed.”
The girl turned around and drifted out, and Bella stared after her for a long while, then went back under the covers.
There was something terribly wrong with that girl. It was as if she had seen a ghost.
* * *
The boys argued that they should accompany their new friend to town and Bella only put up a minor protest. In truth, she didn’t want to be alone in the car with the girl.
Because Bella was practical, she loaded up the trunk with the sheets the boys used for a makeshift bed and added the comforters off of their twin beds. Comforters took too long, you had to dry them at least twice, and she did not remember the last time she had them cleaned. She could drop Georgie off at the laundromat to keep an eye on the load. Martha could be trusted to keep him in line. The old woman couldn’t keep her eye on both of them, but Georgie shrank when anyone raised their voice to him, and Martha enjoyed the high cadence she could reach. She handed Artie a scribbled grocery list of nonperishable foods—pastas, mostly, and jars of peanut butter and tomato sauce. The sorts of things you could stock up on. Because they were inclined to whine that their new acquaintance was going bye-bye, she added honey to the list for them to spoon into their mouths. Sweetness to cover their inevitable sour moods.
Bella must have sucked up all the uneasiness into her own belly, because the boys shared none of it. The three of them sat in the back, the boys on either side of the girl, which unfortunately meant that anytime Bella looked in the rear-view mirror, she would see those eyes.
Thankfully, there was no reason to look behind.
Georgie asked the girl all sorts of questions—where was she from? Did she like winter better than summer? What was her favorite color? Has she ever seen a dragonfly? Why didn’t she like to wear shoes? Did she also think the sky was too big sometimes? That the girl didn’t answer, or even acknowledge him, didn’t seem to bother him, but he’d asked those questions of Bella before, and got a similar response. Perhaps he was used to it.
Artie took the girl’s hand and splayed his fingers across hers, holding them up to his face.
“We match,” he said, all wonder. “We’re the same size.”
“Leave her alone,” Bella said, though she didn’t know why she said it.
* * *
Martha frowned at the girl in the back of the car, but she dutifully took Georgie by the hand and lead him to the machines. She gave him a lollipop when he started asking her if she liked ducks. She did, she told him, but not enough to carry a whole conversation about it.
“There’s something wrong with that girl,” Martha said. “Makes my whole throat dry.”
Bella wanted to say the cigarettes were the likely cause, but she only nodded her agreement.
“Something familiar looking about her,” Martha added, tapping her cheek. “But she’s too pale to be from around here. Goodness, her skin looks like it’s paper. Think someone’s kept her locked up in a cupboard?”
“I don’t know,” Bella said. And she wasn’t about to find out. Other people’s pain was just that—belonging to them, and none of her business.
* * *
After dropping off Artie at the store with a wad of singles and fives, she drove to city hall, and the skull. She wasn’t sure where you dropped off unwanted, lost children, but she suspected the people who collected taxes would have some idea.
It was impossible to avoid the skull, not in a place that collected little agonies. There were smaller displays littered in the center of town hall, some perhaps real, and others very clearly made up from bored, sick minds. Discovering that woman in the tree gave them the right to collect and display all manner of local atrocities, like they were immune to horror now, and could col
lect a few more pieces. To the left, a pile of poorly woven cloth from a girl who once lost a weaving contest, which is one of the worst things you can do, if you are a girl. Lose. She hung herself, in her grief, because no one ever let her forget that one time she had not won, that time her fingers slipped the loop, that time she meant to use black thread, but instead had brought so much white. She died doing what she loved, tying strings together around her neck, and knotting them to the rafters above her bed. All those people who made her feel small? They felt bad, too, in that way that grief curls into your throat tight enough to make you choke on it if you inhale too fast. So they undid her last knot and put her body in the ground to nourish the spiders, all those spinning small things. Perhaps they hoped the creatures would spin her out anew, make of her flesh into silk, so they wouldn’t feel so bad anymore.
There was a helpful little sign under the display: Remember to be happy.
To the right, a lump of what was more than likely coal dusted with green and brown paint, but was said to have come from the local reservoir—the fossilized remains of a monster, under consideration for study from the local university’s anthropology department.
Above them hung a wooden flute that was said to produce the most beautiful music in the world, but only people who had died could hear it, so it was floating above them, like a reminder that there was beautiful music in heaven. You’d hear it eventually, if you were good enough.
There, a shrunken head, and over there, golden coins that almost certainly did not have chocolate inside. Different administrations put more effort into the collection than others.
But the main attraction was the first.
Once Bella and the girl entered the building there were printed banners announcing its presence, along with viewing hours, guided tours that lead tourists to the tree and back to the skull again, ending with a meal at the diner, which had become adept at making skull shaped pancakes. There was a garishness to this presentation of pain that made Bella almost apologize to the girl for forcing her to look at it, but she didn’t want to say anything. She never really wanted to say anything.
As Bella attempted to read the directory and figure out where it was best to take her—would the Lost and Found work? It was technically correct—the girl walked towards the skull, as if possessed.
Not wanting to lose her before she got rid of her, Bella trailed after.
The skull was like she remembered, but also unlike she remembered. In her memory, it was larger, and the vein-like fungus near the eye socket pulsated as if blood was running through it. The teeth were smaller than she recalled, but larger than the ones in her own mouth. They looked like a row of weapons. Whoever this woman was, once upon a time, she must have had very thick lips to fully hide those fangs.
Bella wondered if the girl, too, had a row of weapons in her mouth, but the girl’s lips were so pale it was impossible to tell where the smoothness of her cheeks ended and the stitch of those lips began. The girl was frowning, again, in that ugly way of hers, but she was not frowning at the skull, no, she was frowning through the glass at a tall man walking out of the elevator.
Breathe in, breathe out.
He had not grown much since she had seen him full on, not just a glance through the laundromat window before turning around, not since that night in her blue dress, the one that her mother made for her and made her look like a prairie princess. She’d twirled in front of her mirror for hours, just to see the cotton move. She no longer had the dress, but he still sported close cropped hair and a severe line of bangs at the edge of his forehead. She’d called his hair silly that night. He didn’t listen to her then, and it seemed he hadn’t listened since.
He saw her.
It was inevitable. Nothing that is buried can stay in the ground. All sorts of things will bring it to the surface. Worms and germs. It all turns to worms and germs eventually.
He walked towards her. Bella did not move. That’s the sort of thing animals did when they were afraid, freeze or flee, and Bella was not the type of woman who really learned the value of running. Not until it was much, much later.
But he, too, froze, and Bella wondered, for a hysterical moment, if she had made him do that, if her face showed how much she didn’t want him near her, and if he learned how to read her after all, but he did not look at her. He looked at the girl.
Bella held her breath, the same way one does when they are driving past a cemetery, lest you be the one buried next, and backed away. One step under and over the next—there’s no need to look behind you. She felt the door behind her, reached for the knob, opened it and turned, running out into the sun, but not before seeing the girl raise her finger to point at him.
* * *
Even before the body was found crammed inside, the elm tree had been an unsettling site. Most trees grew reaching towards the sky, with long, thick branches peppered with leaves. This tree grew squat and fat, out instead of up, and the branches grew out at angles this direction and that, so it resembled an angry porcupine. Bella’s second trip to the tree was on a bet, the kind with no physical stakes but loads of social ones.
He was the one who asked her there, him and a group of his friends, boys and girls, not the most popular or good looking group, but the kind who were respectful to adults and sometimes able to snatch a small bottle of gin from one of their parents for sharing. He complimented her dress, said she looked nice in the way only a young boy can make such a mundane compliment sound like he was head over heels.
They sat on a blanket in front of the tree as if they were all about to have a picnic, but they only had alcohol, and dared one another to go inside the tree. The girls, including Bella, blanched at the thought, but he smiled at her and asked her if she was a newborn chicken with all the fluff between her ears, and so, after a boy or two tried and failed (too big, their growing bodies) to go in and said there weren’t any worms (they were lying), Bella got up, folded her body, and went into the husk.
* * *
Martha asked if something was wrong when Bella came back to pick up Georgie, but Bella took the boy by his hand and dragged him into the back of the car where Artie was trying, unsuccessfully, to unscrew the honey jar.
“Where’s our friend?” Georgie asked. “Did you find her family?”
Bella slammed the door on him and got behind the wheel. She peeled out of the parking lot so fast she almost hit Martha, who was waving a rag from the pile Bella forgot about.
No time, no time, don’t look behind.
* * *
Georgie pressed himself against her on the couch and intertwined his fingers with her palm, telling her that one day, his hand would be bigger than hers.
Bella allowed him to twist her hand and arm this way and that. She concentrated on her breathing. She took the plate Artie gave her—honey and peanut butter with white bread—but kept it in her lap until Georgie asked her for a bite. The boys asked her if they could watch television and took her lack of a response as permission. Artie sat on the other end of the couch, away from her, but he looked at her from the corner of his eye.
Georgie fell asleep with his head on her lap, and Artie moved her arm so it would rest on his brother’s shoulder. It was late enough where the only thing playing on the few stations they got was infomercials, but neither Bella nor Artie moved to change the channel. He opened and closed his mouth a few times, huffing out breath at the beginning of sentences he never finished.
He gave up on trying and looked out the window instead. Bella closed her eyes and concentrated on the feel of her eyelids pressed together.
“Mom,” Artie said.
Bella was not sleeping, but she did not open her eyes either.
“Mom, wake up.”
He’d said this to her before, on those occasional days when she stayed on top of her bed well past the lunch hour, and she gave him the same response she did then.
&n
bsp; “Georgie,” Artie said, shaking his brother. “She’s back.”
Bella did open her eyes then. The girl was outside their window, staring in at them, eyes so white, so wide.
Bella sucked in the air through her teeth.
* * *
“You oughta be locked up, the way you drive,” Martha cheerfully said over Bella’s small kitchen table. She came bearing gifts for the family—two bright lollipops for the boys and Bella’s forgotten laundry. When she saw the girl, she apologized for not having the foresight to bring three lollipops, but the girl only stared at her until the boys lead her out into the yard to play with a half deflated basketball.
“I’m being haunted,” Bella said.
“That’s no excuse for almost hitting people with your car,” Martha joked, but she turned her eyes to where the children were playing. The girl sat on the lawn while the boys threw the ball with increasing intensity at one another, all while looking back at the girl to make sure she was watching when they caught it.
“She keeps coming back,” Bella said.
“I thought you dropped her off with the authorities yesterday,” Martha said, eyeing Bella’s teapot. “Do you mind if I make myself a cup?”
“I…” Bella said. “He was there.”
Martha frowned and patted Bella on the shoulder. “Let me make you a cup of tea. Where do you keep it?”
Bella pointed to the top of the fridge and Martha busied herself with filling the teapot under the faucet.
“Some things,” Martha said, slowly, tasting each word in her mouth like it was a lemon, “are inevitable. Take my cigarettes, for example. I know each day is closer to the one where I won’t be able to breathe.”
Bella looked at her.
“Goodness,” said Martha, “your stove is old.” She turned the knob. “Like I was saying, some things are inevitable. You’re bound to run into him eventually. No matter how many precautions you take.”
“She keeps coming back,” Bella said.
“So you said,” Martha replied.
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