Little Girls (20 page)

“What are you doing in here?”

Laurie whirled around, a scream ratcheted midway up her throat. Abigail stood in the doorway, her small white face expressionless except for a fiery simmer behind her eyes. She took two steps into the room, her gaze still locked on Laurie. “This is where I sleep,” said the girl. “But this isn’t really my room. It’s just where they let me stay.”

Laurie realized her hands had involuntarily clenched into fists, and she slowly relaxed them now.

“This is just where they put me down,” Abigail went on. She sat on the edge of the bed and rattled her friendship bracelet—the one that Susan had made for her.

“Earlier today, you said you had a secret,” Laurie said. “Tell me what it is.”

“You should guess,” said Abigail. “I think you know it.”

“We need to stop playing these games now,” Laurie said.

Abigail’s mouth unhinged and a small pink tongue darted out and moistened her lower lip. The plastic beads of the friendship bracelet sparkled. “Did you see my drawings?”

“You’re not Abigail Evans at all,” Laurie said. She felt herself trembling. “Your name’s Sadie Russ.”

“Who do you want to be?”

“This isn’t a game,” Laurie said. “I’m not playing a game with you. I know who you are.”

Abigail swung her feet back and forth. There were socks and a single black shoe under the bed. “What games do you like?”

“I don’t like games.”

“No games?”

“No. You did something to my father, didn’t you? You were in his house. You’ve been in there recently, too, haven’t you?”

“My favorite is hide-and-go-seek. Do you know that one?”

“I don’t want to talk about games. We’re done pretending now.”

“Sure. Do you like my drawings?”

“Please stop.”

Abigail frowned, but there was a devil’s trickery embedded within the expression. “You didn’t even look at them.”

Not wanting to turn her back on the girl, Laurie backed up against one wall so she could look at the drawings while keeping Abigail in her periphery. The drawings were rudimentary renditions of horses with too many legs, people with the wrong number of eyes in their eggplant-shaped heads, houses that looked like pyramids with windows.

“No,” said Abigail. “You’re looking at the wrong ones.”

“Which ones?”

“Lower. The ones on the bottom. Those are the good ones.”

“These are—”

Her voice died in her throat. She was looking now at the bottom row of drawings, and noticed that half of these drawings were of the same multiwindowed breadbox surrounded by some hastily drawn trees. The other drawings were of great looping gyres done up in many colors—circles, spheres, funnels that spiraled off into infinity.

“Do you like them?” Abigail’s voice was suddenly right behind her. Laurie turned to find that the girl had crept up on her and now stood less than two feet away. “That’s the little house in the woods.”

“The greenhouse,” Laurie whispered.

“It’s not a green house. It’s a
glass
house. But it’s very dirty.”

Laurie swallowed a lump that seemed to burn her throat. “What do you want from me?” The words croaked out of her.

Abigail went back to the bed, sat down, crossed one ankle over the other, and proceeded to swing her legs.

“I want you to leave me alone,” Laurie seethed through her teeth. “I want you to leave my daughter alone.”

Abigail’s legs stopped swinging. “Haven’t you missed me, Laurie?” she said. “After all these years, haven’t you missed me?”

Laurie merely stared at her. She could no longer formulate words. Again, as it had done earlier at the park, her vision threatened to splinter apart. She felt instantly hot and her entire body tingled. A high-pitched keening filtered into her ears. Around her, the walls began to balloon inward. On the bed, Abigail’s face seemed to inflate as well . . . and then her features rearranged themselves, sliding and melting wetly into one another. One of her eyes bled down her cheek in a dark greasy ribbon while her left nostril widened and widened until it was no longer a nostril at all but a massive sinkhole in the center of her face. Only the girl’s hideous smile remained unchanged.

“H
on? Honey?” It was Ted’s voice, swimming back to her through the ether.

She blinked open her eyes. Faces congealed before her. Ted’s was closest, concern stitched across his face. He rubbed her cheek with one smooth hand.

“Where am I?” Her throat was sore. “What happened?” When she tried to sit up, Ted held her back down.

“Don’t,” he said. “Just give it a minute.”

There was a faint vibration, like the strumming of guitar strings, in the center of her head. Her entire body was clammy with perspiration. “Did I pass out?”

“Not exactly.” Ted slipped a hand under her neck and helped her sit up.

She found she was in a strange room, on a strange bed crowded with stuffed animals. People she did not recognize stood just behind Ted, staring down at her in concern. After a moment, she recognized the couple as Derrick and Liz Rosewood. Then she recognized the room as Abigail’s bedroom. When she looked across the room, she could see the drawings of the greenhouse and all those concentric circles on the wall.

“Mom?” Susan appeared beside her father, her eyes moist with tears. The girl looked frightened. “Are you okay, Mom?”

“Yes, love.”

Abigail approached the bed, peering at Laurie from between Susan and Ted. The girl’s face was hollow.

“How long was I out?”

“Only a few minutes,” Ted said.

From the doorway, Derrick said, “Should I call an ambulance or something?”

“No,” Laurie said quickly. Then she softened her voice. “I’m okay. Extremely embarrassed, but okay.”

Liz came up behind Abigail and put a hand on the girl’s shoulder. “Go on downstairs and get Mrs. Genarro a glass of water.”

Abigail’s eyes hung on Laurie for a moment longer. Then the girl spun away and hurried out into the hall and down the stairs.

Laurie eased her legs over the side of the bed. Her clothes were drenched in sweat and the strumming at the center of her head had reduced to a light buzzing.
It happened again.

“Are you sure you should get up?” Ted said. “There’s no rush.”

“I’m fine, Ted.” Nonetheless, she braced herself against his shoulder in order to stand. Her legs felt as unreliable as toothpicks.

In the doorway, Derrick stood with a portable telephone in one hefty paw. His big octagonal face was mottled red in his confusion. He kept looking down at the telephone, as if he was unsure how it had gotten in his hand.

Abigail returned with a glass of water. She crept through the small crowd and arrived before Laurie, holding the glass out to her in both hands. There was a dark shine in her black eyes. Her hand shaking, Laurie reached out and took the glass from the girl, brought it to her lips. She did not take her eyes off Abigail as she gulped half of it down.

 

Back down the street, Ted helped her into bed. While she lay there, he peeled off her shoes, then tugged off her pants as Susan, still looking frightened, stood watch in the doorway. Laurie kept promising Susan that she was fine but her words didn’t seem to allay the girl’s fears.

“My head hurts,” she said. “Did I bump it when I passed out?”

“You didn’t pass out. When I came into Abigail’s room, you were just standing there staring at the wall. You were awake, but when I called your name, you didn’t answer. Your pupils were dilated.”

“Oh.” Chilled by the image this put into her head, she was glad when Ted piled the blankets on top of her. “How did I get on Abigail’s bed?”

“I put you there.”

“Did it take me long to come back around?”

“A couple of minutes, I guess.”

“I’m not even tired.” But her voice was already someone else’s, floating through darkened corridors and across the vast recesses of space.

Ted went to the door, a grim expression on his face. Out in the hall, Susan hovered like a shadow.

“Yes, you are,” he told her, and turned out the light.

 

She lay in the dark, accompanied by night sounds. A muted thump above the bedroom ceiling. A muffled sliding sound, like bare feet gliding against hardwood floors. She came fully awake, a scream caught in her throat, and realized she had been dreaming.

S
he spent the next day and a half in bed, resigned to have Susan or Ted bring her food and water. Of course, she insisted that she was perfectly fine and that there was no need to wait on her, but she would be lying to herself if she said she didn’t like the attention. Ted even brought up his laptop so she could watch DVDs. For dinner, Ted went out and picked up Chinese food, and the three of them ate in the big bed in the master bedroom while they watched a Jim Carrey movie on Ted’s computer.

She was aware that at one point Liz Rosewood came over, presumably to ask about her condition. Laurie had heard Ted speaking with Liz downstairs in the parlor, their voices carrying up the stairwell and into the bedroom. Though she couldn’t make out what was said, she could sense a conspiratorial undercurrent to their hushed tone. Was Liz suggesting she see a doctor, much as she had suggested the realtor to help sell the house? It seemed likely. It was only a matter of time before Ted would suggest she see a doctor, just as he had after the highway incident last year. That horrid little intermission. One of the doctors whom she had seen had stated concisely,
When you’re dealing with the brain, even the smallest thing could be a reason for concern. Imaginary odors, seeing or hearing things that aren’t there, unprovoked blackouts—these are all things that might seem harmless but could actually be a symptom of something quite dangerous.
But he hadn’t found anything dangerous. He hadn’t found anything at all. None of the doctors had found anything. At the time, she had joked that it was probably nothing more than plain old crazy . . . but now, in the wake of this second incident—another horrid intermission—it didn’t seem so funny. Probably because she was starting to wonder if it wasn’t actually the case....

That night, when Ted came to bed, she feigned ignorance and asked if someone had stopped by the house earlier that day because she had thought she had heard him talking with someone.

“Liz came by to see how you were feeling,” he said. “She dropped off her friend’s business card, too. You know—the realtor? Harmony somebody. We should give her a call when you’re feeling better.”

Laurie said nothing, just continuing to stare at the ceiling.

“Despite how crummy the housing market is, I think we should put the house up,” he went on. “Do you feel okay about that?” He cleared his throat. “Laurie?”

“I guess so.”

“This place is haunting you,” he told her.

You just want the money,
she thought.

“I think maybe it’s haunting me, too.” It was easy to tell he was smiling to himself in the darkness. “Isn’t that funny?”

Laurie made a
hmmm
sound, rolled over, and went to sleep.

 

On the second day, she realized her wedding band was no longer on her finger. She tried to remember the last time she saw it, but she had never been consciously aware of it and couldn’t remember. She tore the sheets off the bed, the pillow cases from the pillows, and looked under the bed itself. The ring wasn’t there. She checked the bathroom—the sink, the tub, the toilet. A friend of hers back in Hartford had once set her wedding ring down in a Kleenex after cleaning it, then accidentally chucked the Kleenex along with some other trash into the toilet. She hadn’t realized what she’d done until she had already depressed the flusher. Laurie thought of that now. Had she carelessly dropped it in the toilet and flushed it down into the sewers, out into the bay? No, she didn’t think that was possible. . . although she had taken it off a few times while cleaning up around the house. Had she mistakenly left it somewhere else? It seemed likely, and she had been similarly careless in the past. Once, she had lost it for a whole week—never telling Ted—until she finally found it in her purse, in the little nylon case that held her sunglasses. So yes, it was most likely in the house somewhere. Yet panic shook her. She felt like she was underwater, breathing through a tube.

 

At one point, she went downstairs to find Abigail standing in the parlor. For a moment, Laurie believed she was actually still in bed and dreaming. It was all one big dream—the missing wedding band and Abigail Evans standing in her childhood home. Abigail smiled at her and Laurie felt her entire body surge with an icy numbness. The girl was dressed in an adult’s chambray shirt, the sleeves coming down past her fingertips, and a pair of faded jean shorts tasseled with string at the hemline. Brown sandals were on her feet. And then the girl blinked out of existence and Laurie realized she
had
been dreaming.

 

Ted was in the kitchen cleaning up from lunch. When he looked up and found her in the kitchen doorway, he toyed with a crooked smile, though she could tell he wasn’t completely happy to see her out of bed. She was determined to buck any suggestion from him that she consult a doctor.

“Can I get you something to eat?” he asked.

“I want to show you something,” she said, and handed him the photo of her and Sadie.

Ted looked at the photo and smiled offhandedly. “Look at you. You’re a little cutie,” he said.

“Do you recognize the other girl?”

Ted brought the photograph closer to his face. “No,” he said eventually. “Should I? Who is it?”

“It’s
her
,” she said, meaning Abigail.

“Her,” Ted repeated, still staring at the photo. Then he said, “Oh. That girl Sadie. The one who did all those . . . those horrible things.”

“You don’t think she looks like the girl next door?”

“Abigail?” He scrutinized the photo again. Slowly, his head began to shake. “No. Not really.”

“You’re sure?”

“Well, I mean, they’ve both got dark hair and fair complexions, I guess, but I don’t think they look too similar beyond that. Why?”

She took the picture from him and looked at it more closely herself. Similarities or not, there was no denying what Abigail had said to her in her bedroom that had brought on her trance.
Haven’t you missed me, Laurie? After all these years, haven’t you missed me?
There was no denying it . . . unless she allowed herself to believe that she had imagined the whole thing, that she had already been slipping out of consciousness and had dreamed it.

“Maybe you should go back upstairs and lie down,” Ted recommended.

Instead, she got herself a glass of water from the tap. She decided she wouldn’t say anything more about this to Ted. She didn’t like the way he had been looking at her lately, and didn’t want to add fuel to that fire. “Really, Ted, I’m fine. I just got dehydrated the other night. I’m feeling much better now.”

He cleaned his hands on a dishtowel as she went to the kitchen table and sat down.

“I think I just needed the rest,” she added, thinking she sounded false to her own ears.

“Good to hear.” He folded his arms as he watched her from across the room.

“What?” she said. “What is it?”

“Steve Markham called this morning. Looks like I’m going to get that face-to-face with John Fish after all.”

“That’s great. That’s what you’ve wanted from the beginning.”

“It means I have to be in the city for the meeting.”

“New York?”

“It’ll just be for the day. I could drive up in the morning and come back that evening.”

“That’s a lot of driving all in one day.”

“I don’t like the idea of leaving you and Susan here alone.”

“We’ll be fine.” When she saw his eyes slide sideways, she knew there was something else. “Tell me,” she said. “Spit it out, bub.”

“I don’t think being in this house is good for you.”

“That’s silly.”

“Is it?”

“It was your idea in the first place, remember? It was what you wanted.”

“Yeah, well, I was wrong.”

“When do you have to go to New York?”

“Steve said he’d get back to me once they finalize a time. Most likely it’ll be sometime in the next couple of days.” He pulled out one of the kitchen chairs, but didn’t sit in it. “Why don’t you and Susan come to the city with me? I could drop you back in Hartford and you can stay at the house. Susan can see her friends.”

As much as she liked the idea of taking Susan away from Abigail, Laurie now had something else she felt she needed to do, something she couldn’t do back in Hartford. “I’ll think about it,” she said.

“Yes. Please do. I’m being serious.”

“So am I,” she told him. “I promise.”

“Good.” He clapped his hands together, then ran them both through his hair. “I’m going to try and get some work done.”

“I’m going to get a shower, then maybe go for a walk.”

“Okay, but don’t go too far from the house.”

“Okay, boss.”

He kissed the top of her head. “Yeah,” he said, playfully wrinkling his nose. “Take that shower.”

 

Before heading to the bathroom for a shower, she found herself back in her father’s study, the dead man’s photo album opened before her while she sat cross-legged on the floor. She progressed slowly through each of the photos. She took her time, studying the alien faces of the people in the photos, the unfamiliar locales. When she came to the last few pages with the empty panels, she slipped the photograph she had found in her father’s Bible into one of them. When she was done, she looked down at the line of white flesh on her ring finger. The absence of her ring made her whole hand look naked. She thought of Sadie Russ, making evil wishes by throwing things down into the well. Things that belonged to other people.

 

After her shower, she walked north along Annapolis Road. The day was cool and the sun felt good on her face and shoulders. She heard the shouts and laughter of children before she actually saw them, crossing the street and standing in the parking lot which overlooked the park grounds. Little girls hung upside-down from the monkey bars. A young boy rolled toy cars through the patchy grass. There were some women talking by one of the picnic tables, but they looked old enough to be grandmothers.

Laurie went over to one of the benches and sat down. Absently, she wished she’d possessed the foresight to bring a book, as she had done in the days of her pregnancy with Susan when she would go down to the neighborhood parks to watch as the children congregated at playgrounds and flocked to ball fields and cul-de-sacs like creatures sharing a single brain. Liz Rosewood had mentioned that there weren’t many kids in town for Abigail to play with. To Laurie, it seemed like there were plenty of kids around. They were like stunted wild men rooting through the debris of some fallen civilization.
Maybe they just don’t want to play with Abigail Evans.

This scenario was so much like what she had done during her pregnancy that it was nearly like déjà vu. Yet she thought she was able to see her motivations more clearly now, without the lies she had told herself early on. Had it been fear of motherhood that had caused her to seek unspoken counsel from the women on the playground and the consolation of the church on King Street, or had she feared something else, something darker?
Children change,
she knew.
Girls change.
It had been Sadie who had taught her that lesson, and that lesson had been at the heart of it.
Children
were the problem,
little girls
were what terrified her. They constantly stared with the slack, insensate faces of dullards. Dried food on their cheeks and mouths, mealy crust in their eyes, rogue bulbs of snot yo-yoing in and out of narrow little nostrils, bright orange vegetation sprouting sporelike from ear canals.... It was children she feared, with their thin, probing paws, fingernails ground to nubby scales tinged in dried blood. The notion of motherhood had left her feeling helpless and imprisoned, like a chunk of pineapple suspended in Jell-O.

Had she been frightened
for
Susan . . . or frightened
of
her? Scared of her potential, of what she could become?

She was loathe to admit this to herself now, as if the revelation siphoned something vital from her relationship with her daughter, her beautiful daughter. But there could be no denying it. The horrible things Sadie had done to her made her fearful of the dark and hidden potential within her own daughter.

It was around three in the afternoon when a soccer ball rolled over near Laurie’s bench. A little girl of about seven or eight chased after it, little auburn pigtails bouncing, her shirt decorated with smiling Elmo faces. The girl’s eyes were bright as headlamps and she had a pointy little tongue cocked in one corner of her mouth.

“Hello,” Laurie said to the girl as she watched her gather up the soccer ball. “What’s your name?”

“Meagan.”

“Hi. I’m Laurie. I like your shirt.”

“Elmo,” said Meagan.

“Is your mother here?”

“Elmo. Elmo.” The girl pointed to the gaggle of women by the picnic tables. “Over there.” Meagan had a tough time pronouncing the
r
’s.

“Do you know a girl named Abigail Evans? She lives just down the street here.”

Clutching the soccer ball to her chest, Meagan shook her head. A snail-trail leaked out of her right nostril and that pointy little tongue darted up and lapped at it, much like a frog would slurp up a particularly tasty dragonfly.

“Have you ever heard of her?” Laurie asked.

“I have to go now.”

“What about your friends?”

“Good-bye,” said Meagan. She spun around and ran back toward her friends, her stubby little legs pumping furiously.

Laurie looked up and saw that none of the women by the picnic tables were paying her any attention.
If I were a man, they would notice.
She got up to head back home. It had been her intention to come down here and ask a few of the neighborhood kids about Abigail. Instead, she had lost her nerve after speaking with Meagan, realizing how ludicrous it all was, and she had wound up wasting two hours on a park bench. At least the weather held up.