Good Girls (33 page)

She withdrew her gaze from him, like a needle from a vein, the poison already delivered, pouring into his bloodstream. She saw him watching, watched him understand. And then—astonishingly, even sweetly—he nodded. He …
accepted.
Just let go of her arms and settled back.

“Okay,” he whispered. “Go ahead. Take me. Just … afterward…” He wasn't lecturing or pleading, knew there was no point, but he was going to ask. “Tell me you'll save—”

Abruptly, still cuddling Eddie with one hand, she dropped the other hand over his mouth to shut him up. Then she brushed the white whiskers smooth along the curve of his face. She felt herself smile at him, one more time. “Does Jess, do you think, know what she had? What you gave her?”

Whiskers quivering, eyes overflowing, Benny … smiled? Was he smiling?

“A man worthy of her?” he said, as Sophie's palm lifted. “I hope I was. Save that boy, Sophie. Tell me that when you're done, you'll save the boy.”

For answer, Sophie swept Eddie to her open mouth, clamped her lips to his skin at the open zipper of his onesie, and farted against his neck. He jerked, laughing his surprise. That laugh! Along with her Roo's laugh, it had once—not so long ago—formed a river of laughter right down the middle of Sophie's life, one that promised to carry both her and Natalie everyplace they'd always heard those rivers really might run. Without thinking, looking, giving herself a single second to reconsider, she dropped Eddie onto Benny's chest and vaulted off the bed, scuttling straight down the hall, down the stairs, and out the front door into the shrieking summer night.

*   *   *

The hardest part for Rebecca, as she tore through the woods, wasn't deciding whether to sprint straight for the trailers—because she already knew that's where Trudi and Danni would be—or to Halfmoon House to get help. The hardest part was keeping from turning around. Because that was what she most wanted to do. It was, in fact, the only thing she wanted to do.

She didn't want to escape, but to return to Oscar's truck, throw open the door once more, and stand there. She wouldn't shout or even cry. Eventually, she'd climb into the cab, slide into the space between her guys, and sit amid the ruins of them: Oscar and Jack, who had supported more of the life she'd barely begun staking out than either of them had ever imagined, because she'd never managed to communicate it, hadn't even realized it, really. And now that it was too late—which, apparently, would always be her cue—the only acknowledgment she could think to make was to be there, sit among them, wind her hands through their knotted, ripped-out entrails, untangle what she could, tuck in what was possible, and when that was done, slip her arms around their shoulders and pull them to her. Then she would hold them until every last trace of heat, of the magnificent people both of them had been, had streamed, softly, away.

That
was her proper place, as far as she could see, possibly the one role her whole life had prepared her for.

Unless it was to keep running, get to the clearing or Halfmoon House, dangle her whole self over the lip of the void that she'd always known was there, and pull anything that was still living back out of it.

And that was why she didn't turn around. She tore down the forest path, hurtling past startled scurrying things underfoot and overhead, the birches with their individual mottlings, the oaks with their mosses, each pattern on each trunk as familiar to her as faces in wood grain on a bedroom closet door. These tree trunks
were
her closet-door faces, this woods her bedroom, those loons—
oh, hello, loons!
—her overheard, downstairs, grown-up conversations.

Was that her voice, shouting? Was she shouting?

Flinging aside the fronds of the weeping willow at the bottom of the lane, Rebecca burst onto the grounds of Halfmoon House, hurtled across the yard, and yes, that was definitely her voice, she really was shouting. But she stopped short of the porch and stood in the too-long grass, panting, sweating, weeping—-how long had she been doing
that
?—until she felt like herself again, detached, almost calm: Crisis Center Rebecca, on the scene, for whatever the hell good that was going to do.

Jess came out first, flying down the little porch stairs, all five feet of her, eyes blazing. She had a steak knife in one hand and what looked like a pinking shears in the other. Behind her, at the door of the house they had built—which hadn't even quite become
their
home, either, Rebecca realized—stood Amanda and Joel. Amanda had Joel's broken-toothed rake and Joel a shovel, which made them look, for one second, like younger versions of the couple from that
American Gothic
painting. Like that couple's children, except that the second they saw her, they smiled,
both
of them, the smiles relieved, frightened, fleeting. But they'd been there, and Rebecca had seen them.

“Oh, good, you're here,” Amanda said.

“I know where the girls are,” said Rebecca, already turning, knowing the rest of them would follow. She hadn't even made it back to the willow before the screaming started.

 

27

In the dappled moonlight, on the low, leaning stump between the tipped-over trailer and the American flag trailer, with his hat pushed back and one hand in the air, the Whistler stood like a fly fisherman on a bank, and he waited. Ooh, he waited, watching the two girls across the clearing—the little one in the braids with the sock on one hand, and the blond, reedy one with the shards of broken glass for eyes—as they fought him, tried to fight him. So
much
fight in them. The reedy one radiated so much fury that she distracted, even mesmerized him momentarily, and that allowed the little one to get off a scream.

So
exciting.

Even now—after the tall one had finally started to give, he could feel it—the little one wriggled, almost as if she still thought she could run. Such a mighty little hooked thing. The Whistler thought she might even be the stronger of the two.

Then a new thought burst over him, bright and brilliant as a holiday firework: maybe the struggle wasn't being caused by these girls at all! Was it possible that he himself had lost something when he lost his Destiny? Or even Mother? Had his grief—and he
had
grieved, hadn't he?—weakened him, somehow, made him less? Was that what grief did? Left him lonesome, orn'ry, even meaner?

From somewhere close, off in the trees, his new, Still One's voice sang out. “Truuuueeee,” she was calling, in her blue, hollow tone. “Truuuu.”

And with a shiver in his shoulders—another spasm of his boundless grief—the Whistler understood, or rather remembered: his Still One was no replacement for his Destiny, never had been, never could be. No. She was for something else entirely. And grief, it turned out, hadn't weakened him at all.

Grinning wider as the girls fought him, the Whistler bore down, lowered his arms. Using only his will, he gave a little tug, and watched as Shards-for-Eyes staggered toward him. She was still fighting, but not even trying to hang on to anyone or anything. This one wasn't scared or sad; she was simply enraged.

Delicious.

He watched her get her head turned even as she continued stumbling toward him. Her clawed fingers scratched at the moonlight her eyes and hair reflected. How very like people, really, to resist the very things that lit them up, the desires that made them who they were. They spent their entire existences battling the engine they called “life,” whose only actual function was to drive them toward death. The girl snarled something over her shoulder at her little braided companion.

“I
can't,
” the braided one said.

“She really can't,” said the Whistler to Shards-for-Eyes, and he sat down on his stump and raised his arms to greet her.

And then he made himself wait, poised right at the most ravishing moment, his favorite moment: the split-second silence between verse and swelling chorus; the breath (theirs, of course) between kiss and bite. He did not move again, nor did he direct the girl to move again, until everyone else—the others he'd heard coming—poured out of the trees into the so-bright clearing, which he had transformed into this perfect, glorious stage.

How he had missed performing for them. He really was going to have to go back to doing that.

First out of the trees was the tall black man who had been here this afternoon, waking him to (or from?) his dream of his Destiny's voice; behind him, a pale, once-pretty blond woman with a frown etched so deeply into her face that it looked carved, seemed almost driven
through
her face, like a jack-o'-lantern's mouth. Such a face!

Then came his new, Still One, her mouth still rounded around her last “Truuu,” brown eyes churning like just-turned soil. Nothing about her seemed still, now. And just when he thought it couldn't get any better, be any more perfect, his Destiny's mother stepped clear of the trees. Call it Destiny, Policy, God, whatever, but it really did seem as though something had guided him here, landing him exactly where he needed to be.

He smiled at the assembled as he hooked and quieted them, like a pastor settling his congregation. He did love them in his way, every one. Especially, he loved and smiled at his new, Still One. Really, this was all about her, now, all
for
her. He watched her take in the tableaux he had created. And yes, oh, yes, she knew what was about to happen. He could see it in her face. The sight sent a shock through his bones. And that was exactly right,
her
destiny, the very reason she'd been born: to be his very own doe-eyed pincushion, sin-eater, the thing he could hurt, over and over, until he stopped hurting.

He watched her wriggle, fight him, but not like Shards-for-Eyes, or even the girl with the sock puppet. Not as though she thought she could win; her life had already taught her better.

When he was sure she saw, and knew, and was watching—when he'd drunk deeply from all of that—he returned his gaze to the furious child in front of him. This one still exhibited so much rage, he almost felt like singing as he pulled her to him. He was tempted simply to Whistle her to sweet, sweet sleep.

He broke her back over his knee instead.

*   *   *

The
crack
rattled through Rebecca so forcefully, it might as well have come from her own bones. In disbelief—or, worse, belief—she watched Danni's broken body spill off the Whistler's lap and fall at his feet, all her fire and fury doused, just like that, without even smoke to suggest it had ever been there. Yet another piece of Rebecca's world—the one she'd assembled from the box of discarded pieces of other people's worlds that life had given her—swept away.

Like Oscar.

Like Jack.

All of them, gone, in less than an hour.

The Sombrero-Man wouldn't stop staring at her. He looked thin, had so many leaves sticking to his denim jacket and the outsides of his raggedy boots that he looked more like a stick insect than a person, except that he had even less expressive eyes. He watched her watching. A smile spread over his face, and his lips puckered, and that sound came out. Partially, it was whistling, but also it was nightingale's mating cry, owl's murder-song, all in one. He opened his arms, and somehow, she sensed immediately what he wanted from her: a cry of anguish, then a useless charge across the clearing.

Of course, that's what she wanted, too. It was the only thing left to do, except the thing she did.

With a gasp—it was like she'd imagined tearing out an IV would be, and it
hurt
—Rebecca lunged not forward but sideways, not toward the Whistler but Trudi. She didn't exactly see the Sombrero-Man twitch, but she heard the hiccup in his whistle, knew she'd surprised him. He lurched off the stump, and that sudden movement freed everyone else, too, just momentarily, but long enough for Jess to shout, “Rebecca,
yes
!”

Grabbing Trudi around the waist, Rebecca uprooted her, yelled “
Run!
” to the rest of them, and bolted between trailers toward the woods. Trudi startled awake, started squirming and screaming. Rebecca kept hold, kept running, expecting the Sombrero-Man to land on her back any second: the moon, with claws, come to lift her away and away.

But he didn't come, and she made the trees, and then she was in them, crashing through roots and whipping branches, rattling the world the way loons did when they reared at last, at the end of their summers, flapped their desperate wings, rose out of Halfmoon Lake into the air, and vanished.

*   *   *

A split second after Rebecca made her move—
brilliant girl, good girl, nothing like Natalie except in the way she was
exactly
like Natalie—
Jess made hers. It was almost as though she and Rebecca had planned it beforehand. As if
they
were the ones who had shared a past, and still hoped to have a future.

And you will have one,
Jess thought.
Run, Rebecca.
She threw herself right into the bastard's path, between him and the fleeing girls, pinking shears raised. They wouldn't do enough, she knew, even if she drove them through the fucker's eye. Whatever she was doing now, it wasn't about surviving or even stopping the monster in front of her; it was about Natalie. About what the good girl Jess had raised had done to save
her
son. About hurling herself under the wheels of this careening truck and maybe puncturing just one as it crushed and released her. Maybe that would buy Rebecca and Trudi a little more time. Maybe even enough time.