Good Girls (29 page)

“Okay,” she murmured, whirled toward the hallway to go get Eddie, and stopped in her tracks. She clung to the splintery sides of the fold-down attic stairs, and she stared.

How had Sophie even gotten down the stairs? Never mind silently, without Rebecca noticing. How had she done it at all?
Rebecca had no idea. But there Sophie was, blocking the doorway to the hall, head cocked, corn-straw hair spilling past her shoulders. More than anything, she looked like a matryoshka doll: dead-faced, pale, draped in a hideous yellow T-shirt from some bar somewhere. The shirt had a drooling, foaming smiley face on it, and the words
Halfway Out!
emblazoned across the chest.

She was holding Eddie in her arms.

“What are you doing?” Rebecca said.

Against the drooling smiley face, in his blanket, Eddie squirmed and fussed.
Because he's cold,
Rebecca knew, without knowing how she knew.
Because it's freezing cold in those arms.

“How's our Jess? Jessie Supermom?” Sophie chirped. Something snapped in her mouth, and Rebecca shuddered, hunched to throw herself across the room, then realized it was gum.

“Sophie, when did … how did you…?”

The next snap from Sophie's teeth triggered louder fussing from Eddie. Rebecca started forward, but stopped as Eddie settled.

Because her spell could hold him, too? Or—and was this worse?—because he
knew
those arms
,
cold as they were? He knew their weight, had no doubt felt them around him, heard that chirping voice almost every single day of his life.

“What?” said Sophie. “You mean this?” She leaned over Eddie, crushed him against her breasts, and warbled. To Rebecca, it sounded like pigeon-cooing, less comforting than
wild.
Or hungry.

“Give him to me,” Rebecca said. “Jess wants me to get him out of here.”

Without looking up, Sophie hugged Eddie tighter, lowered her head farther. “In a sec,” she murmured. And she stood—if that was the word—in the doorway on the stumps of her legs in her yellow drooly-face shirt, holding her dead best friend's son. After a while, she put her nose in Eddie's hair, her mouth against his scalp; Rebecca made herself wait. And that's when she realized Sophie wasn't cooing, but singing. Rebecca could even make out some of the words, this time.

“Armless … boneless … chickenless egg … Georgie I hardly…”

The singing stopped, but Sophie stayed put, her nose in Eddie's hair. Eddie stirred again, and this time he laughed, or maybe burped. Finally, Sophie lifted her head. She wasn't crying, not like Rebecca had thought, or hoped, she might be. She was grinning.

“Tang!”
she said, half-sang. “It's lime Tang.
That's
what that smell is. Is there lime Tang? There should be. They should make something we can drink that smells and tastes exactly like this.” One more time, she buried her face in Eddie's hair.

He's here,
Rebecca screamed inside herself, to wake herself up, shred this haze that Sophie seemed to generate just by being in the room.
And he's met my friends.
Her half trance shattered, and she fumbled her phone out of her pocket, woke it up. But no one had called.
Why had no one called?

“Give him to me.” Rebecca stepped forward, arms outstretched.

Sophie snapped her gum and swung Eddie farther out of Rebecca's reach, though still cuddled against her chest.

“No problem,” she said. “As long as you're leaving.”

“Obviously, I'm leaving. Give—”

“As long as you're not going where Jess is. Or to your … caretakers? Is that the word for them? Or your friends, either.”

“Why shouldn't I? What do you care?”

“I don't. Except.” She glanced sidelong at Eddie, touched his face with a purple polka-dot fingernail. He shrieked. With a shrug, Sophie looked back at Rebecca. “You need to understand this, girlfriend. You need to believe it. You need to
know
it. There is nothing you can do out there. If he really has come, and if he's with your friends, you can't help. The best thing you can do—the
only
thing you can do—is run.”

“Give me Eddie.”

“Tell me you're running.”

“Give him to me.”

“Tell me you'll let them all die. Say it. Say, ‘Sophie, I understand, I will let everyone I have ever loved die to save this kid I barely know who isn't mine.' Say those words, and he's yours.”

Growling in exasperation, Rebecca grabbed her phone again and speed-dialed Jack, but got his idiot voice mail: “
Up the beanstalk. Take care of my cow
.”

“Jack, where are you? I need you,” she snapped, clicked End, watched Eddie wriggle and Sophie quiet (or mesmerize) him with a wave of her fingers across his tiny eyelids. Rebecca dialed Kaylene.

This time, she got nothing, not even a ring. “
The number you have reached is not available…”
And that was just plain ridiculous. Impossible. Kaylene not available was like saying … was like Kaylene not breathing … was …

“Looks like you've got a choice to make,” Sophie said, stroking Eddie's hair. The action looked surprisingly comfortable, casual, automatic. Motherly. And all the more disturbing for that.

“How about a compromise? Let's give him to Benny,” Rebecca said.

Sophie burst out laughing. “'Cause he was so good at keeping him away from
me
five minutes ago, for starters? Wasn't he, little man? Little Nat-man.” She did it again, dropped her head like a chicken pecking feed and nipped Eddie's cheeks. She might have been kissing them.

The effort of
not
flinging herself at Sophie—bowling her over, grabbing the baby, and bolting downstairs, out of this horrible house and through the woods to reach her friends—was causing Rebecca physical pain. She felt as though her skin might split, unleashing her skeleton from its straitjacket of brain and membrane so it could just get out there and
do something.

“What did you do to Benny?” she whispered.

Again, Sophie laughed. “Nothing he didn't enjoy. Much as he hates himself for it.”

Rebecca gaped. A little more of whatever she had inside her—of the woman she had been, an hour ago—escaped through her mouth.

“Oh, don't be such a prude.” Sophie tickled Eddie, smiled at him. “It wouldn't have been the first time. And he can't really help it when I come for him, after all. It's our secret, and it can stay that way as far as I'm concerned. It's been good for both of us: relief, for him; practice, for me.”

The image solidified in front of Rebecca's eyes, as clearly as if she had been in the bedroom closet, watching stump-Sophie—like the incubus in that
Nightmare
painting—climbing astride Benny. Crawling up his broken legs.

“Also,” Sophie continued, “it's my little private revenge on Jess, for being such a black-and-white, hell-on-wheels bitch half the time.”

“For not killing you, you mean. For saving your life.”

“I said half the time.” Sophie caught Rebecca's eye. Or—no—Rebecca caught
hers,
this time. Sophie blinked, looked away. “When she's not being the mom I didn't have, and really thought I was going to be.”

For a single moment, Rebecca wavered. The scene in front of her kept shifting, then shifting again, as if she were looking through a pinhole at a kaleidoscope. She shook her head, closed and opened her eyes, her fists. None of that helped. And there was no time.

“Nope. I'm sorry, Sophie. I'm taking him.”

“Only if—”

“You said you'd give him to me if I run. I'll run.”

In Sophie's arms, in his blanket, in the sleep she'd somehow caressed him into, Eddie shivered. And Sophie looked up, dead-eyed or maybe just tired. She certainly wasn't grinning. “Really? You think you can make yourself do that?”

“Look at me,” Rebecca said, and Sophie did. “You said you liked me. You told me why you liked me. What do
you
think?”

“I think I'm impressed,” Sophie murmured. “I couldn't have done it. And neither—despite what she would have claimed—could Natalie. But then, I guess, you're not really a … Not like we were…” She lowered her own head to Eddie's one more time. She was holding him out toward Rebecca when Rebecca's phone blared.

Rebecca's reaction was immediate, instinctive, multipurpose. So much in her life—her parents' death, her years at Halfmoon House, the Crisis Center—had trained her for this moment, to somehow do everything that needed doing at the same time in one unbroken movement. She swept the phone to her ear with one hand and flung up a warning finger to Sophie with the other, along with a glance that said,
Don't move,
and also,
hold on
. And,
I'm still running.

“Where the hell have you—” she started, and the giggling cut her off.

“Guess where we are?” Trudi said.

Rebecca heard more giggling, accompanied, in the background, by outright cackling, which was louder and nastier.

“
I saw what you did!
” the nastier voice taunted. Danni's voice. “Ooh, Amanda's mad at you.”

In an instant, Rebecca understood, knew what had happened so precisely, it was as though some of her really had slipped out of her skin, but hours ago, and stayed behind at Halfmoon House to see the whole ridiculous, utterly predictable episode unfold. She could perfectly imagine the reaction to her phone call of just a few minutes prior: it had triggered Jess, who had launched Amanda into action mode, set both of them sprinting through the house, slamming doors, locking windows, shouting for Joel, for the children upstairs.

Shouting. The thing that almost never happened at Halfmoon House, and that pretty much every girl who had ever lived there hated most. And Danni—who could be so mean—hated shouting even more than most, because she'd heard so much of it wherever she'd been before she came to Amanda's.

She'd have been lurking on the landing, probably; that's where she generally lurked. She'd have seen everything that happened. And when the shouting had started, and Jess and Amanda started whirling around and Joel yelled from outside to see what was wrong, Danni would have stood up and crept down the hall to Trudi's room, not to torment—not this time—but to enlist.

To cling to. Like a sister.

Because that was the only relationship—the one person—Danni was absolutely sure she understood, Trudi the only living creature Danni was absolutely certain would respond to her, would neither judge nor fail her.
Like
I've
failed her,
Rebecca thought. And of course, Trudi would indeed come when Danni beckoned, for most of the same reasons.

So Trudi had come, and she and Danni had fled together out the patio door none of the kids was supposed to have a key to, down the back steps of Halfmoon House, across the lawn into the woods to escape the shouting. Once there, they'd chuck pinecones at wood rats and rip bark off birches, or else head to the lake to shriek with the loons, just to prove, once and for all, to anyone who would notice, that they were free.

“Trudi.” Rebecca cleared her throat, punching her finger toward Sophie again to nail her in place. “Trudi, listen. This is no jok—”

“Amanda's mad at you,” Danni sang in the background. “Amanda's mad at you.”

“Guess where we're going?” Trudi said.

Not to the lake,
Rebecca realized, as her stomach rolled all the way over.
The lake wasn't forbidden enough. Oh, Trudi, no.
She sucked in air, thought she might throw it up, commanded herself not to. “You can't go there,” she said. “Trudi, don't go there. Not the clearing. Not those trailers. Trudi, please. You have to listen. Go back to the house. No, wait. Put Danni on. Or, come here, to town. I need you. I need you both. We can—”

The phone shrieked in her ears, three short bursts, like laser-fire in one of Kaylene's idiot arcade games. Rebecca knew what she'd see even before she looked at the screen
.
She'd lost the call. She started to hit Redial but froze with her thumb over the button, watching as Sophie slowly drew Eddie back to her chest.

“Looks like you've got a choice to make,” Sophie said.

And no time.
Tears came. Rebecca let them, ignored them, stared at the creature in front of her, and made her decision. In the instant—and the only thing she forgot, she would realize later, was how long Sophie had said it had been since the night Jess's daughter had died, and what that would have to mean about Sophie's hunger—she was as confident as she could possibly be that it was the right one.

And even if it wasn't, the Crisis Center had trained her to keep acting, doing something, instead of wasting time regretting.

“You'll protect him?” she whispered.

Sophie shrugged. “Better than you can. You do understand that if he's there—the Whistler—and you go to him, you're not going to be able to do anything except die, right? I've made that clear?”

Rebecca was already moving. Sophie somehow scooted out of the way on her stumps.

“You don't know that.”

“Sure,” Sophie said, cradling Eddie. “I don't know that.”

“If anything happens to this baby—”

Sophie shot out a hand, grabbing Rebecca's wrist as she tried to pass and swinging her viciously around, pinning her to the very air with her gaze. “I can't promise, girlfriend. No one can. But if you really thought
I
was your problem—if you thought
I
was Eddie's problem—you wouldn't be going. Would you?”