Good Girls (30 page)

That was true, of course. All of it. But what amazed Rebecca most was that Sophie apparently wanted her to say so. Needed to hear it.

“Okay,” she said.

“Is she right, little man?” Sophie said, releasing Rebecca, returning her full attention to the bundle in her arms. “Do you think she's read the situation correctly, little Nat-man?”

“Keep him safe, Sophie. Please.”

Down the hall, Benny started shouting, pleading, “Rebecca, don't go. Don't leave Eddie with
that.
”

But Rebecca was already flying down the stairs, out the front door onto the crumbling porch, into the surprising darkness, where she stopped in amazement, staring across the street at the battered blue truck parked there. She recognized it instantly, of course, even though she'd only ridden in it once, a few months ago, when she'd come off her late shift feverish and flu-ridden, started across campus, and met Oscar, as usual—sad, sweating, coated in leaves—under the black gum trees. With hardly a word, he'd parked his rake against a tree, left his bags in the grass, and driven her the five blocks home.

If she considered what she was seeing at all, now, she thought maybe he'd taken handyman work in the neighborhood: cleaning gutters, painting fences. No matter what he was doing, Rebecca knew, he would take one look at her face and then take her wherever she needed to go, without asking.

“Oscar!”
she shouted, and sprinted straight for the truck.

 

24

In the backseat of the LeSabre, the children Caribou had selected—only three, it was enough, Miss Ju and the dark-haired, gray-eyed brother and sister in matching Spider-Man pajamas—bounced up and down in their seats, played cat's cradle, squirmed around and leaned over one another to point at telephone poles, black horses in long grass, glimpses of moon: the world they'd barely even heard tell of popping up around them as though from the pages of a children's book, as though the world were the fairy-tale place, not their crumbling, hidden, parentless house way back in the woods, or Aunt Sally's camp, tucked away in the last expanse of lost Delta.

In the front, meanwhile, leaning half out of her seat belt toward him, one alabaster hand splayed on the vinyl like a sliver of moon marbled with beautiful blue, sat the children's caretaker. Again, he'd brought only one, left the others; it was enough. And by the time the women he'd allowed to stay behind stirred from the dreams he'd draped over them, realized it was morning, and understood that their companions weren't coming back, the Party would be over, the partygoers dispersed. The camp itself, which had been his and Aunt Sally's home for more than thirty years, would be dismantled, drowned in the river, buried in the fertile Mississippi mud, where it would sprout stories, someday.

The caretaker had white hair streaked with blond, or lighter white. Whatever those colors were, they were natural, their pattern as unmistakable and un-creatable as sediment lines in a riverbank. Beautiful. She'd told him her name more than once, but Caribou had been distracted. He kept thinking about Aunt Sally's voice—the hint of trembling in it, Aunt Sally
trembling
!—at the moment she'd tasked him, sent him forth to bring back children. Also, every time he glanced in the mirror, he found Miss Ju's eyes staring back, bright green, unblinking, as though painted on the glass or hovering in the air. She was playing with the other two. He could hear them all giggling, slapping hands, calling out, “
Pizza!
” when they passed a pathetic little strip mall in some disintegrating town. And yet, she was always looking at him. At first, he'd thought it was her stillness that captivated him so. But she wasn't ever really still. So it was something else.

“Hon?” the caretaker cooed, like a mourning dove, like a lover. “You all right? You want me to drive?”

Ann, Caribou decided. He'd call her Ann. Or think of her as Ann.

In the back, the Spider-Man-sister, too, kept darting glances at him, snatching at
his
glances. Her gaze held no mystery whatsoever. Almost, Caribou had left her behind, precisely because she'd started grabbing at his gaze from the moment he'd appeared out of the night and the woods, as if he were some white knight in his dark chariot, come to spirit her away. Her eyes winked with little-girl mischief, but also with longings and loneliness and hungers she barely even realized she felt, let alone had names for, yet. And that, he knew—though even he couldn't have said how
,
and Aunt Sally certainly hadn't specified—made her not quite the sort of guest he'd been commanded to fetch.

But she'd wanted so to come, this girl, had twined her arms in Ju's, wrapped herself around Ju like kudzu. And it had seemed easier, somehow, to bring her, and also merciful. For Ju, at least. At least she'd have companions.

And now that the Spider-Man-sister was here, Caribou knew it was also merciful, at occasional intervals, to look away from Ju or the road and actually give this girl a glimpse of what she thought she wanted. He did it only in flashes, only for a moment at a time, long enough to stir her, to let her know that he knew, and saw. But not long enough to set her climbing over the seat to get at him.

And there it was. The girl couldn't help it, of course. If what was happening to her was anyone's fault, it was his. She gave a little wriggle of her tiny shoulders, a near-wink. A smile twitched, too wide, across her heart-shaped face. All wrong. Aunt Sally would not want this one, not tonight. She was too close to conscious maturity, to the woman she would one day be.

Would have been.

To his own surprise, Caribou had a fleeting but powerful urge to turn the wheel. He actually had to fight, for a second, to keep the LeSabre pointing forward toward camp, to keep from spinning them around and speeding straight back past the shuttered pizza joints, the useless towns, through the woods to the orphanage, where he could eject them all from the car and vanish from their lives. Of course, if he did that, he'd have to vanish from Aunt Sally's life, too—oh, yes, he'd have no choice—and from his own, the only one he could remember, and evaporate into the Delta night.

How delicious this feeling was. How startling. Almost
new.

It was Ann's hand, sliding over his on the steering wheel, pressing gently down, that brought him back to himself, settled him inside his glowing, ageless skin. She was singing, too, now, just like the children, though not along with them: some old, old song Caribou might have recognized, thought he did, though songs always blurred together for him. Ann's voice proved surprisingly supple beneath the crackles, like a voice on a record; she was singing about tears in vain, regrets absurd. It was that sort of song. Turning his palm gently beneath hers, he shot a quick glance in the mirror and saw Ju, green-eyed Ju, just staring, not stirring. On impulse, Caribou winked. Then, squeezing Ann's hand, he turned his attention fully on the older woman.

She rocked back without letting go. In fact, she clung harder, just as he'd known she would. And despite the fact that he knew it, he found himself marveling all over again. The monsters—the buffoons who stayed close to Aunt Sally's camp, even Mother and her Fool, when they'd been around—always read that reaction as a purely sexual response: primal, ravenous, ungovernable. For them (or, more accurately, their respondents), maybe it was. But though Caribou remembered virtually nothing and no one from the life he'd had before this one, he had held on to this: the idea, for some reason, of anyone other than Aunt Sally responding to him sexually was either absurd or perverse. And Aunt Sally, after all, was like God, and therefore loved and was bored by all other living creatures in equal measure. Her arousals were her own.

And yet here were these girls and this woman, enthralled, mesmerized, anesthetized, just as he needed them to be, but maybe by something even more elemental than lust. It was in the way they stared at him, which was the same way he himself stared down the Delta some long, summer evenings at a thunderhead, a funnel cloud, an incoming storm: with awe, in other words. With terror, certainly.

But most of all, with wonder.

That
was the way Ann watched him now. The irony, of course, lay in the effect that look had on
him,
the tingle it produced inside, all over, where so little else tingled. Surprising, impossible, delicious, tinged with an ache very like what he imagined melancholy to be, plus something else even more hurtful, even more luscious. Maybe that was regret.

But it was definitely the sensation of
himself
stirring, and not in awe, or wonder, either. He gazed openly at this woman, his Ann: the shades of white in her hair; the lines crisscrossing as they funneled sideways over her face, over skin she had actually lived in, ballooning into beautiful blue veins that plunged down her neck, over her breasts, which he imagined suspended in their support cabling under her red zip jumper, heavy and lopsided, each its own individual shape, a shape only this person's particular life could have left as it moved over and through her, filled her, and devoured her.

So beautiful.

The moon caught her, lit her up, and Caribou couldn't help it. He laughed. And Ann, delighted, dazed, tilted her white head sideways and laughed with him. Such tingling, that caused. What a wonder life still was, just now and then, on rare, charged nights like this one when something—anything—changed.

“Grace Holler!” Ju called from the back, planting her hand against the window glass, lighting the dark with the green in her eyes.

Caribou shuddered and felt it again, whatever this was. Arousal, regret, tingling, wonder. Joy.

That was it, he suddenly knew. That was the secret of Ju's magic, that intoxicating, impossible, and impossibly rare combination, even in children: real curiosity married to unpracticed joy.

“You know that story?” he said, couldn't help saying, as they hurtled through this place that was now no place, with its sideways shacks slumping into the night-shadows of the magnolia trees, its gas station with no building, no pumps, no lights, just an arch and a cracked cement platform threaded with spiky weeds.

“It's a terrible story,” Ann said, shuddering. And then—oh, wondrous night—she grinned. “We tell it every Halloween.”

The Spider-siblings laughed. Ann laughed. And Ju stared back at Caribou out of the rearview mirror like a will-o'-the-wisp, a fairy thing. They had the windows open so the night could pour in. And so, from fully half a mile down the dirt track to camp, Caribou heard the music.

Cretins,
he thought.
Buffoons.
Thudding bass drums shook the grasses like dinosaur footsteps while guitars buzzed, deafening and ineffectual as chain saws waved in the air, and some cartoon-yowlerman grunted about his cat-fever, something. Why was Aunt Sally even allowing this? She usually didn't. And why did they even bother, the monster-morons, with this non-music, this sludge of sound that could neither stoke nor accompany an Aunt Sally Party, because it was nowhere near wild enough?

Just as they reached the turn in the dried-mud track that would lead them into camp, Ju leaned forward and put a hand on Caribou's shoulder, not to stroke him, not to communicate anything at all, but just to get a better look, take in more world. And that really did almost do it. Caribou felt his foot hit the brake, and he glanced around at Ann, the Spider-siblings, his Ju. He was remembering a story Aunt Sally had read him, once, her favorite, she claimed, about some doomed idiot family, the Misfit they met when their car broke down, the fates they had always deserved. That no one deserved. He was actually turning the wheel, starting to spin them around and away from this place, when the camp came into view, and he saw what the monsters had done.

It had been so very long, before tonight, since Caribou had been surprised. But tonight, the surprise seemed never to end. As though of its own volition, the car bumped forward over the dirt into the ring of glittering, sparking torches planted like flags in the ground, and juddered to a stop in precisely the place marked out for it.

“It's beautiful,” Ann murmured, her voice audible because even the chain-saw-music had vanished abruptly. And in its place … a calliope? Was that what that was?

The tents—both the giant Party tent and Aunt Sally's white pavilion—were festooned, everywhere, with red and white balloons, the balloons and tent fabric spangled all over with glitter. The glitter caught the torchlight and showered it all over the grass, creating firefly-sparks amid the fireflies, as though the stars themselves had accepted Aunt Sally's invitation, come for the Party, and scattered over the Delta to dance. Between the tents, metal poles had been erected and red ribbon strung between them, creating a sort of gestural labyrinth. Off to the left, down near the bank, Caribou saw a new, gigantic, leaning structure that billowed and breathed in the barely-there night wind.

A bounce house? Bouncy castle? Whatever it was, there were monsters in it already. And they were bouncing, all right.

Leaning out his window, Caribou took it all in. Aunt Sally had even had them tend to the smells: the Styrofoam-sweet of circus peanuts; that newfangled sugarsalt popcorn; something else, too, acrid and fairgroundy, that he couldn't identify; and underneath all of that, yet another odor, this one … animal? As though Aunt Sally had directed her monsters to rent tigers, just for the night. Or elephants?

At that moment, it seemed entirely possible that an elephant, or a great-maned lion, would surface in the river, part the reeds, wander out of myth into camp. All of this, just for a Party, intended not so much to disguise this night as to make it festive, like a birthday. To render the world new, or less old, or at least aglitter with firefly light, one more time.