Good Girls (6 page)

“Why?”

“Jess. Please. Go back right now and get my goddamn legs.”

 

4

Around 2:00 in the morning, still slumped beside her desk and staring at the phone, Rebecca realized she hadn't actually asked the 911 dispatcher to call her back. She had just assumed that someone would, that she was part of the team of late-night people she'd never actually met but who watched over the town together, saving others from themselves or each other.

Part of the team. What, in her entire life, would have led her to assume
that
?

She picked up the Crisis Center phone, then put it down. For at least the fifth time, she raised a hand to her right ear, which still tingled painfully. It had been tingling ever since her conversation with her caller, as though scorched.

No. As though freezing. Frostbitten, almost.

Is it beautiful there?

Had she really said that to a man standing on a precipice, staring over the edge of the end of his life?

Lonely street.
That's what he had sung, or said. And that was all she'd been able to tell the 911 dispatcher about where he was. The woman on the other end had shouted at her, at that point, told her to stop babbling.

But Rebecca had been babbling inside her own head ever since, replaying the entire phone call but jumbled up, her own comments shuffled into her caller's, shuffled again. As though rearranging the words might change the ending.

She picked up her cell phone, now—this was her own business, not the Crisis Center's; she'd done all the damage she could for one night under
that
persona—and started to dial 911 again. Then she stopped again. This wasn't an emergency. The emergency had already happened. She had, in fact, helped cause it. This was just Rebecca, age twenty, in over her head, needing to know exactly what she'd done.

Nudging her computer awake, she Googled the non-emergency front desk number for the East Dunham police station. But of course, dialing that got her only the automated answering service, which instructed her to call 911 in case of emergency, or to please try again during normal business hours. She snapped her phone shut and stared into its little window until it went dark.

Next, she clicked on her chat window, typed
still there??
and waited. But Joel didn't answer. That surprised her. The fact that one of his girls was facing an emergency—even if the emergency wasn't hers, and even if she wasn't technically one of his girls, anymore—should have been enough to keep him right where he was. In fact, she was surprised not to find her screen filled with her name. With his typings of her name.

Only then, as her chin sank into her hand, did Rebecca realize how tired she was, how little she'd been sleeping, lately. Joel had taught her a little too well, in that regard. She wondered where he was: down by Halfmoon Lake, maybe, sitting on one of the overturned rowboats in the muck and reeds, or possibly puttering on one of his projects in his shed out back. Or maybe he was right where she'd left him, chatting with and challenging random Smackdown opponents online and listening to one of his crazy Internet radio stations on headphones, while his current girls and his wife slept. The only thing she couldn't actually imagine him doing was sleeping. He just couldn't seem to do that, as far as Rebecca had seen, until there really was no one in his world left to check on or play with.

No. Wherever he was, he was awake.

Pushing herself upright, Rebecca opened her phone, and just as she hit Speed Dial 1 and Send, she caught sight of the clock in the corner of her computer screen.

3:22? How had that happened?

Twitching in her chair, Rebecca fumbled with the phone, hit End, prayed she'd cut off before Joel's phone had rung or even logged her call. She didn't want him to see that she'd needed him. Not at 3:22. Partly, that was pride, and partly, she knew that the sight of her name, when he saw it, would worry him out of his mind.

Abruptly, she glanced over her shoulder, staring around the empty Crisis Center, out the giant windows onto campus. The black gums had swallowed their shadows, now, and stood still and dimensionless in the inevitable, unearthly, small-hour light Rebecca always dreaded most. If she was awake for this light, she always knew that meant that she would not sleep at all. This, she thought, was the real midnight: dead center between night and morning, part of neither; the moon gone, the sun absent, the light so flat that the world went flat, as though all air and movement and blood had been siphoned out of it, leaving everything just leaning where it had been left, like rakes in a garage, props in a prop room for a play that had long since ended. Or never started.

4:03?

With a cry that came out startlingly loud—and therefore felt reassuring—Rebecca smacked herself in the face, then did that again. She shook her head and dragged the Crisis Center logbook to her. Fishing a pen out of the desk drawer, she let herself pause only long enough to bite the inside of her cheek as she considered. In the
Calls Taken
column, she wrote,
“Unidentified, singing man in obvious confusion and distress, from a rooftop somewhere in the vicinity.”
She noted the time in the appropriate box and took one more very brief breath as her pen hovered over the
Actions Taken
section before writing, “
Discussed roofs. Convinced him to jump.
” Then she crossed that out and wrote,
“Called 911.”
Then she slammed the logbook shut, powered down her computer, locked up the Center, and fled Mooney Hall.

Just as she hit open air, the Clocktower bells erupted, and Rebecca stopped in the center of Campus Walk, threw back her head, closed her eyes, and let the peals rain down on her. She stayed in that position even after the ringing was over, letting the echoes reverberate in her ears, clearing them, drumming out the whistling she'd been hearing all night, through the hours she had somehow brooded away. Even after she opened her eyes, the echoes continued misting down, seemed to settle like dew on her face and the leaves and the just-mown grass.

It was already morning. Almost. Morning really was coming.

And that was that why she had always loved the 4:15 Clocktower bells so much. A lot of UNH-D students hated them, especially the ones who lived on campus, and a few started petitions every year to have them silenced. And no one Rebecca knew had ever offered a satisfactory explanation of how or why or even when the tradition had started, or whose idea it was to unleash a cannonade over the empty streets of East Dunham, New Hampshire, exactly once a night, exactly at 4:15 a.m.

But Rebecca had been awake at that hour far too often in her life. And hearing those bells had never failed to soothe her. They signaled the end of the nothing-hour, the return of shadows, movement, voices. Already, with day not even broken, she could feel the August air warming on her skin. Glancing down, Rebecca was surprised to see that her hands were still shaking. She lifted her palms and turned them in front of her face, fighting the feeling that these weren't even her hands. They were too flat, stripped of sensation. Nothing-hour hands.

 … a little girl … with a night-light … alone up there in the middle of the night …

Here it went again: the conversation with her caller, replaying and replaying, threading itself through her brain like cassette ribbon.

Because she knew it was her caller's
last
conversation?

Jamming her hands in the pockets of her light summer hoodie, Rebecca started down Campus Walk, past the stirring gum trees. She thought maybe she should go home to her one-bedroom basement apartment and sleep at least a little, because she wouldn't have another chance until at least nine tonight. But she knew she wouldn't sleep, anyway. Not after this Crisis Center shift, and not in that room, with the water heater clanking and the Rudzinskis' babies burbling and chattering upstairs and the two cardboard boxes full of photos and old sweaters and cat toys and paperback Penguin classics that constituted the Complete Collected Mementos of the first nineteen years of Rebecca's life sitting half-opened, still completely packed at the foot of her futon. Not under the window fan that passed for her air-conditioning, which clanked and stuttered and chopped the air into whispers. She wondered what that fan would have whispered to her tonight—what it would have done with the conversation she couldn't seem to eject from her brain—and stopped to watch a robin hopping around what looked like a fallen nest at the foot of one of the trees. And so she was already still when the man stepped around the trunk and grabbed her.

With a yelp, Rebecca twisted, wriggled loose, shoved her palms into the man's chest, and only then processed who he was.

“Oscar?”

Her shove had barely even moved him. But his arms retracted immediately to his sides. Rebecca caught her breath, saw the horrified expression on Oscar's sweet, grooved face, and almost burst into tears. Instead, she balled her quivering fingers into fists, steadied her breathing, and called herself back to herself. From wherever the hell she'd apparently been, this whole damn night.
“Lo siento mucho,”
she said.

“En al,”
he answered immediately, tapping his red campus maintenance uniform right over his heart, in the center of his name tag.
“Lo siento.”

She shook her head, wondering how she'd managed not to see him, since he had appeared almost exactly where he always did, at the end of Campus Walk, in the midst of his rounds. Tonight, though, it felt more like she'd conjured him from some nothing-hour shadow, a sort of Oscar-faerie, trash bags at his feet as he stooped for wrappers or cigarette butts, the top of his uniform already unbuttoned to the surprising morning heat, tuft of black-and-gray hair swept sideways over his scalp and matted with dirt.
Like Santa Claus,
she thought, and not for the first time. Exactly the sort of Santa an orphaned Jewish girl might indeed invent: bone-skinny, groove-faced, and arriving not on Christmas Eve but every single night, bringing nothing anyone wanted. But taking away all kinds of things no one wanted.

“
Hola,
Oscar,” she said.

“
Hola, Señorita Rrrrebec.
” As always, he grinned after rolling the
R,
knowing that would make her grin back. And here she was doing that. She could feel it.

“Como esta, Oscar? Es su hija sienta major?”

Right on cue, Oscar's grin widened. But this morning, it took a split second too long. And because it did, Rebecca saw clearly, understood properly for the first time in all the five-minute exchanges she'd had over the past three years with this man: that smile
always
came late, and took too long
.
In a way, Rebecca supposed she had her Crisis Center caller to thank; it was that conversation that had ignited every sense she had, as though she had just awoken, having sleepwalked her entire life away until right now, so that today, she not only noticed Oscar's hesitation but understood what it meant:

Oscar's daughter was not here. She had never been here. Oscar's daughter was in Guatemala. And all the thousand things he'd told Rebecca these last few years were made up, or maybe remembered, or imagined, or experienced from afar, culled from letters or carefully timed, parceled-out cell phone calls.

So much for her fabled intuition. Jack and the 'Lenes would have been astounded.

“Sí, sí, gracias,”
he was saying as he picked up the trash bags,
“ella quiere…”
Then he stopped, because she was touching his arm, squeezing his wrist once before letting go.
“Ella es asi. Gracias, Señorita Rrrebec.”

He didn't tear up or anything, just stood there smiling. His smile settled her, some, though it did little to calm the next shockwave of guilt. Of astonishment at her own myopia. He'd told her once—several years ago, before she'd officially enrolled at UNH-D but was already working triple shifts at the food service—that she was often the only person who spoke to him during his entire 3 a.m. to 11 a.m. shift, or after that, either, most days. And instead of sorting what that actually meant, Rebecca had indulged in a pride that embarrassed her, and that she'd tried to dismiss. And felt, still. She felt it even now, standing beside him, knowing what she knew.

Abruptly, Oscar lowered one of the trash bags off his shoulders, stepped forward, and the smile vanished from his craggy face.

“Es tu molesto?”

“I'm okay,” she said, too quickly. She had to get out of here, find somewhere to get herself settled. “I have to go, Oscar.
Besa a su hija para mi.
” Even as she said the words—the same words she always left him with—she wondered if she should. She no longer liked the taste of those words in her mouth: rubbery and flaccid, like old gum. Leaning up on tiptoes, she kissed Oscar on the cheek, lingered just a moment in his heat, the smell of garbage and leaves and cigarettes and pears that was simply
him,
to her.

Then she was walking away over the grass, not looking back, not letting him see. Because he wasn't
her
father, or Santa. And he had his own daughter to miss and worry about.

She did note, in some corner of her churning brain, the movement behind Oscar. In the shadows of the Clocktower's arched stone doorway, someone had stirred. But as she hurried away toward her room or the lake or maybe—though it was too early, even Joel and Amanda were probably still sleeping—Halfmoon House, she hoped only that whoever was in there would be thoughtful of Oscar. She hoped they would acknowledge his presence, or at least have the decency to clean up their own mess.

 

5

In her tent amid the reeds, in her sleep that wasn't sleep, was instead a sort of succumbing, the only succumbing she had ever allowed herself or would ever, Aunt Sally listened for the day-music. It seemed a long time coming on this suffocating late-summer early morning, the muddy river just out of sight down-bank thick as sap, silent as it slid past, the reed-shadows on the tent walls lolling like ripped-out tongues licking soundlessly at the air or each other. There were days—whole decades, even—when Aunt Sally had willed herself, during pre-dawn hours, into a sort of stillness beyond sensation or sleep, so that she was no longer herself or even self at all, but an absence in the shape of herself, like dead grass.