Good Girls (14 page)

Poor Danni,
was Rebecca's thought, watching the teenager lean closer to the keyhole, her waist-length blond hair spilling all over her back, hiding her face.
Too smart for her own good. Lonelier than most people imagined it was possible to be.

And, most days, nasty as fuck.

Which was very likely why Amanda and Joel had held off filling the other two beds, Rebecca realized. Danni needed too much minding. They would never, ever send her back to whatever orphanage they'd found her in. But they would also never let her hurt anyone else in their care.

For a few months this past spring, Rebecca had actually felt like she was forming a connection with Danni. She'd introduced her to Smackdown online, Danni had shown her Minecraft, and they'd secret shared eye rolls and sighs about Amanda. But then Trudi had arrived and given Danni a target.

Even from the bathroom doorway, Rebecca could hear the little girl in her room, murmuring and chirping away to herself, though less loudly than she used to; at least she'd listened to Rebecca about that. She was saying something about leaves, about leaping into leaves. Then came a high-pitched, half-whispered “
Waaaaahhhh…”

Snorting into her hands, Danni stood, started slowly turning the doorknob.

“Get away from there,” Rebecca snapped. She'd meant to say it lightly. Danni still needed her, too, or needed someone, anyway. But right now, Rebecca's own priorities were absolutely clear.

Danni didn't flinch or even seem surprised, and she didn't step away from the door. Instead, she turned. Under the cascading hair, she was grinning. “The Loon's at it again,” she mouthed, pointed at the door, and pulled her too-small pink T-shirt down, glancing at her own breasts as she did. The gesture was still self-conscious, at least, and would probably stay that way a little longer.

Laying her bucket against the wall and her sponges in the bucket, Rebecca edged forward. She kept her voice low and tried to warm it up. “She's playing, you mean? Putting on a play to entertain herself? Being creative, the way brilliant girls like her do? Like you probably did?”

“She's talking to her socks.”

Trudi's door burst open so hard that even Danni flinched back, stepped sideways. And there Trudi was, kinked hair pulled back, Amanda-style, into hard braids at either ear, so that the part along her scalp looked like a half-open lid, something you could pry up and climb into. She had her hands—encased in yellow socks—on the hips of her thrift-store jeans, the ones Amanda bought in bulk and kept in clean, tight stacks, separated by size, on shelves in the basement coat closet. The pants had too many pockets for a nine-year-old, or anyone, and too much torso; they made whoever wore them look—and feel—like a cartoon character. Sponge-orphan Square-butt.

“Better than talking to you,” Trudi spat.

Rebecca burst into applause. To her surprise, Danni did, too. In that instant, she was once more what every kid who'd ever come here had been: just another kid who'd never been a kid, no one's daughter, maybe no one's friend. Rebecca stopped clapping. She wanted to gather both these girls to her.

But she was no one's mom. Not even anyone's caretaker.

“Come on, Rebecca,” Trudi barked, marching past her down the hall toward Amanda, who had just come up the stairs. “We're going out.”

Rebecca watched the little girl's receding back. The white scratches Trudi still gave herself in her sleep slanted through her black skin like leftover scrawl on a badly erased chalkboard. Amanda didn't touch or say anything to the little girl as she marched past. She just stepped out of the way.

“Well?” Amanda said to Rebecca. “You heard her.”

“I'm coming, too,” Danni said, generating an impressively defiant tone as she faced Amanda's folded arms, even though she knew what that stance meant as well as Rebecca did.

“In a couple hours, maybe,” Amanda said. “When you're done with the work I'd have Rebecca doing if I could trust you to take care of other people, yet.”

Danni opened her mouth, actually gathered breath for a response, before Amanda lifted a warning finger. The finger waggled in the air between them.

“Ah-ah,” Amanda said.

In her day—which, Rebecca supposed, was still this day, since she was still here—she would never have dared test that finger, despite the fact that she actually considered herself tougher than Danni. She still wouldn't.

And so it startled her when Danni erupted into a stutter. “Luh-luh-luh …
LOVE ME!
”

Only after she'd snatched up the sponge bucket and sauntered down the hall did Rebecca realize she wasn't quite talking back, and she certainly wasn't pleading. No. She was, in fact, singing. Not only that, but Rebecca knew whose voice she was imitating, and where Danni must have learned that particular annoying tone.

Amanda had recognized it, too. “I hate that radio show,” she murmured to Rebecca. “I honestly hate it, I don't know where Joel finds these
fucking
things, or why he likes them.”

If Danni's stuttering was startling, Amanda's swearing was positively alarming. Even with Trudi already downstairs and headed for the front door, Rebecca stayed rooted, trying to remember if she had ever once heard Amanda curse before.

“It … really is really weird,” she said eventually, remembering the voice Danni had just mimicked pouring out of Joel's speaker, lurching up- and down-register: teenager, temptress, babbling baby, sometimes all those things in the space of a single word.
Buh—… cat-dah … TONGUE!

And now, the memory of that voice stirred her memory of that other's: her caller, from last night. The whistler from Lonely Street. “I better go after Trudi,” she said, more loudly than she needed to, just to fill her ears with sound.

“Don't let her go by those trailers. I don't know why she keeps going down there.”

But of course, by the time Rebecca got outside, Trudi was already halfway across the lot, pointed exactly that way. She stomped past the barn where Joel probably was if he was out here right now, headed straight for the trail that cut through the heart of the woods, right past the campground where those tipping, collapsing trailers hunkered in the same spots they'd occupied since Rebecca had first come here more than a decade ago. Probably, they'd been there long before that.

“Hey,” Rebecca called. “Trudi, wait.”

If anything, Trudi sped up, barging through the evergreen branches into the forest. Swearing to herself, Rebecca followed. By the time she reached the tree line, Trudi had vanished completely.
Luh-luh-luh … Love Me,
Rebecca thought—almost hummed, in her head, to drown out the other voices—and pushed through the needle-pines and grabbing pricker branches after the little girl.

She caught up right at the edge of the clearing where the trailers huddled around the campsite's blackened fire pit, and only because Trudi had had the good sense to stop there. When Rebecca reached her, she was crouching almost
inside
a pricker bush. Thorns rested against but apparently did not penetrate her skin, like half-retracted cat claws. Rebecca crouched beside her. The little girl didn't say anything or even acknowledge Rebecca's presence.

“What?” Rebecca whispered. She reached out a hand to touch Trudi's back, then decided not to. Rebecca herself had never liked those automatic grown-up's touches—the ones Amanda never gave—that were meant as reassurance but probed like a dental tool, tugged like a leash.

“Ssh,” Trudi hissed.

So Rebecca shushed, and they crouched together. For the first time that afternoon, Rebecca noticed the heat, which was high-summer humid and had long since permeated her skin, slicking it with sweat. Three minutes outside, and she already felt like a puddle of popsicle left on a counter. Midges rose and swirled, sipping at her ears and the corners of her eyes. Except for those, and the fire ants hurrying around and under her feet, swarming the pricker branches and nearby tree trunks, nothing moved. Even the single squirrel Rebecca spotted had draped itself along the lowest branch of the nearest evergreen like a pelt hung out to dry. A pelt that had hung out itself. Rebecca slapped at her neck, felt that familiar wet squish, the midge she'd just killed not so much smearing as drowning.

Quite some time passed before Rebecca realized she was looking anywhere but into the clearing. The truth was, she didn't like this place any more than Amanda did, and never had. She made herself look.

It was just as she'd remembered: the crumbling fire pit, still blackened all the way around and inside the rim, but possibly crumbled even more, now, like the mouth of a forgotten well; the curled, colorless drifts of dead leaves that always seemed deeper and denser around the pit, as though they'd been gathered rather than blown there, ages ago. As though neither squirrels nor birds nor time nor wind had disturbed them since.

Worst of all were the trailers themselves, angled together as though they'd been circled, their windows shattered or shot out, some of the openings covered over with warped, fire-blackened wooden boards. The trailer on the left, the one she'd always hated most, remained tipped forward almost off its blocks, its front door hanging open, nearly touching the ground, like a hand extended to break a fall. Instead of wooden boards or cracked glass, the windows on that trailer were barred with chicken wire, suggestive of some abandoned circus-train car, the one for big cats. Sometimes, as a kid, she'd found herself imagining that those cats might still be in there, curled and starving in the heat, trapped where they'd been left, tails whapping. Just waiting.

“Why do you come here?” Rebecca whispered.

“It's
scary,
” Trudi whispered back.

“Right. Exactly. So why come here?”

It was less the ferocity of Trudi's I-just-told-you look than the way her braids jiggled that caused Rebecca to laugh. And it was her laugh that woke the clearing.

In a blast of breeze—
was that breeze?
—the leaves in the center of the trailers stirred, flapped, and settled right back where they'd been. The bent-wire antenna atop the tipped-over trailer waggled as though warning, or beckoning. The open front door edged farther open, drifted almost shut, and it occurred to Rebecca that this place almost certainly
was
inhabited, at least sometimes. It was probably the best squat in town, especially in summer, when the Salvation Army/UNH-D shelter closed down.

“Why are you clutching me?” Trudi snapped—still whispering—and Rebecca looked down at her arms, which had encircled the little girl.

“Why are you letting me?” Rebecca whispered back, and Trudi squirmed free. For one more moment, they stared together into the clearing. Only then did Rebecca understand, at last, why Trudi had stopped here today instead of tramping through on her usual march to the lake, and why both of them were whispering, and what was wrong.

Tugging at the little girl's shoulder, she started edging back. “Trudi. There's someone here.”

“What?”

But Trudi knew, even if she hadn't figured out exactly how or
what
she knew. Rebecca could see it in the uncommon curl of her shoulders, and also the fact that she was edging back, too. Following a grown-up's directions, for once.

“That truck,” said Rebecca, still retreating, hoping the
shush
of her feet in the leaves was less loud than stepping and crackling would be. She gestured past the trailers to the far side of the clearing where the sugar maples and evergreens crowded together, closing out the light almost completely.

The hulking black Sierra over there had been tucked so deeply into the clustered branches that the pine needles seemed to have assumed its shape, blanketing it like camouflage netting. Rebecca could see just enough of the windshield and driver's-side window to know that they were all the way tinted; even if she'd been standing right beside that cab, she couldn't have seen inside it or made out who was in it.

“You mean that pickup? Wasn't that here?”

“I don't think so, Trudi. Come on.”

Grabbing the girl's hand, Rebecca stood and tugged her away up the path. She started to jog, felt Trudi glance back but not resist, and then she heard the footsteps.

Not their footsteps, but someone else's, off to their left. Steady, and gliding.

Squirrel,
she thought furiously, except it couldn't have been. There was no scurry-scatter, no stop-and-start; this was more of a trot. And whoever was in there, trotting, was maybe ten feet off the trail on the other side of the wall of evergreens. When Rebecca accelerated, the footsteps did, too. Like something stalking, moving ahead of them, now.

Fox?

Nope. Whatever it was, it was bigger than that. A big thing, moving light.

Bear?

“Rebecca, wait.”

“Trudi, come on.”

“Rebecca, there's someone in that tree—”

“Oh,
shit,
” Joel said, tripping on a low branch and spilling out of the evergreen where he'd been hiding directly in their path. As he fell, he twisted sideways to protect the Bluetooth speaker in his hands. He landed hard and lay there a second with his back to them as Rebecca yanked Trudi to a halt, heart flailing under her ribs, beating its wings.
Like the loon on the lake,
she thought, grabbing hold of the thought, using it to anchor her.
Reminding itself it can go, but deciding to stay.

Rebecca breathed slow, made herself settle. Joel rolled over on his back and looked up at them. He was grinning.

“Spider races?” he said.

Trudi glared, looking ready to lunge forward and jump on him. Joel laughed.

“What the hell are you doing, Joel?” Rebecca barked. But barking made her feel like Amanda, and anyway, she didn't seem to want to bark, anymore. She fought for control of her own smile and lost.