Little Girls (6 page)

“Hell,” she muttered to herself when she realized she didn’t have a key for the padlock. She walked down the hall toward the other closed doors and opened each one systematically, not surprised by her lack of sentiment in peering in and seeing the blank walls and sun-bleached carpets. Just like in the rest of the house, the furniture in these rooms was minimal and functional at best—another desk and chair, an armoire, a small bed in the room at the end of the hall. The windows here were all nailed shut, too.
I had no idea he was this bad. Who did he think was going to break in through a second-story window?
This last room had been hers when she had been a young girl. She assumed it was where the night caretaker, Ms. Larosche, had stayed during the night shift. Again, she was unsurprised by her lack of emotion in seeing it all.

A door slammed downstairs. Again, Laurie jumped. Was someone trying to drive her mad? She went back out onto the landing and was about to shout down over the railing when she heard Ted and Susan giggling together. Given the bare wooden floors and the overall emptiness of the large house, sound traveled with almost supernatural efficiency. A moment later, Susan’s high-pitched voice called out for her. Laurie heard the girl’s rapid footfalls racing along one of the hallways.

Thoroughfare,
she thought coldly.

“I’m upstairs,” Laurie called back. She went down the stairs and nearly collided with her daughter in the foyer. “There you are, kiddo.”

Susan’s face was bright and beaming. She had her hands clasped together and held out in front of her. She thrust them toward Laurie now. “Guess what I caught!”

“Caught?” Laurie said. “As in, something is alive in your hands?”

“A baby frog!”

“Oh, my . . .”

“There was a whole bunch of them in this little pond by the woods!”

“Don’t let it loose in the house.”

“I won’t,” Susan said, and spun away back down the hall. Ted was washing his hands in the kitchen. Laurie folded her arms and leaned against the kitchen doorway, watching him for several seconds before he observed her reflection in the windowpane over the sink. Outside, it was beginning to grow dark.

“It’s very pretty out there,” he commented, shutting off the water and drying his hands on a dishtowel. Laurie thought it might have been the same dishtowel Dora Lorton had been carrying around with her in the pocket of her frock. “The lawn’s a little overgrown and the trees and shrubbery need trimming, but the grounds are very nice. That Felix Lorton knew how to maintain the property.”

Laurie smiled weakly at him. She felt suddenly very tired. “Most likely, it was my father. He fancied himself a gardener and an amateur horticulturist.”

“There’s some water out beyond the trees in the back, too.”

“That’s the Severn River,” Laurie said.

“There were some kids flying kites on the other side. We saw them through a break in the trees. Susan yelled to them and I think they heard her. I think they waved, too.”

“Go ahead,” she said. “You’re going to propose something, aren’t you?”

He came and kissed the side of her face. He smelled like his cologne and there was a piece of dead leaf in his hair. She left it there and said nothing about it.

“It makes no sense to throw money away on a hotel,” he said. “Unless, of course, you’re that uncomfortable with the idea of staying here at all. . . .”

“I don’t know, Ted. . . .”

“And the place is great. It’s the first time Susan’s smiled since she learned she was forfeiting summer vacation with her friends.” He shrugged. Laurie noted how young he looked when he was excited about something, as if the boy within him was given permission to peek out on these infrequent occasions. More and more, she found she was astonished by Ted’s persistent youthfulness. He was three years older than she was yet he looked younger than her. In another five years, she would look like his mother.

“You have a leaf in your hair.”

“Also, we don’t know how long it’s going to take to get everything squared away with your father’s estate.” He raked fingers through his hair but did not disturb the leaf. “I could really get some good work done here. There has to be a million rooms to choose from. Trying to work on this adaptation in some cramped hotel room . . .” He made a face that finished the sentence for him.

“A million and one rooms,” she said. She was thinking of the windows nailed shut, the crosses gouged into the walls of her father’s study. “This is what Susan wants, too?”

“It was her idea!” He stood beside the counter with his hips cocked, his arms folded just as Laurie’s had been a moment before. “She thinks the place is great.”

“All right,” Laurie said.

“But only if you’re comfortable with it.”

“I said all right. I’m okay.”

“And only if we take down that creepy empty picture frame.” He grimaced but there was still joviality in his eyes.

“I already have.”

“Wonderful. You’re a saint.” Again, he pecked a kiss on her cheek. Then he bellowed into the next room, “Hey, Snoozin! Guess what!” His voice boomed down the empty halls of the house.

“It got loose!” Susan shouted from somewhere in the house. Then she squealed. “Daddy! The frog got loose!”

Laurie shivered. “Oh, Jesus . . . Ted . . .”

“I’ll get it,” he said, still grinning his boyish grin. He rushed past Laurie and galloped down the hall. “Where are you, Snoozin?”

He’s going to outlive me.
The thought lightninged into her brain out of nowhere.
He’ll be like Benjamin Button. I’ll get older and he’ll just keep getting younger and younger.

She knew dementia was hereditary, and not for the first time since learning of her father’s illness, she wondered if the horrible affliction waited for her somewhere in the future. The last conversation with her father had taken place about six months ago. By then, she was already well aware of the dementia settling cloaklike around him. Eighteen months earlier she had hired a full-time caretaker to look after him from a well-reputed service in Baltimore, which had turned out to be Dora Lorton, and Laurie had since received a few phone calls from Dora’s boss, Mr. Claiborne, on a number of occasions concerning his recommendation and ultimate inclusion of a night nurse in order to provide her father with twenty-four-hour care. But Laurie had not known the true severity of Myles Brashear’s senility until that final telephone conversation with him. Midway through their phone call, the old man’s speech became garbled. Several times she had asked him to repeat what he’d said. When his speech became clear again, the words were there, but they were arranged now in a patternless jigsaw, a litany of nonsense. Twice he called her Tanya. Biting her lower lip, Laurie had remained on the phone and did not interrupt the man until he was once again back in his own head. His apology was pitiable, and she thought that maybe he was crying on the other end of the line. She told him not to worry about apologizing to her . . . though what she really wanted to tell him was that if he’d been more available to her as a father all these years, he could have moved in with her, Ted, and Susan, to live out his remaining years with family instead of in a cold and lonely house with no one but paid caretakers to look after him. It had been on the tip of her tongue. She had watched the seconds tick by on the kitchen wall clock. She hadn’t said it.

The phone call about his death came a week ago from Charles Claiborne, managing director of Mid-Atlantic Homecare Services. Laurie had been reading a Janet Evanovich novel in the living room when the call came in. Ted had answered the phone. She listened and could tell it wasn’t a typical phone call. Just hearing the tone of Ted’s voice, she had thought,
It’s about my father. He’s dead. And now I’m going to have to deal with all that.

After he hung up the phone, Ted had come into the living room and sat beside her on the couch. He rubbed her back and told her what Mr. Claiborne had said. She had thought that maybe his heart had given out or that he’d suffered a stroke, but it wasn’t to be that simple. Laurie listened to it all in stunned silence. She tried to imagine what he must have looked like lying there on the stamped concrete pavers, all twisted and broken and useless . . . but then realized she had no idea what the man had looked like in old age, and was only able to summon images of him from her youth, when he had been her father and not some desperate recluse barricaded inside some aging old manse. Later, her father’s lawyer, David Cushing, called and spoke with her. The house in Maryland—that aging old manse—was now hers, along with all of her father’s belongings, as well as what money was in the man’s accounts. There were papers to be signed and things to go over, but David Cushing had promised to make it as simplistic and painless as possible. Cushing had given Laurie his condolences and then hung up the phone.

Now, standing in her dead father’s kitchen, Laurie was overcome by a tidal wave of erratic emotion. At least guilt wasn’t one of them. Not that she could tell, anyway. It angered her that this had been her
mother’s
house for a time, too, but the entire place seemed wholly and solely infused with her father—that singular haunting entity. Her mother had been a kind and intelligent woman who did not deserve to have her memories overshadowed by her father’s.

Before the anger turned volatile, Laurie went into the parlor to find her husband and daughter on their hands and knees looking under the sofa.

“Don’t tell me,” Laurie said.

“Mommy, it’s under the couch,” Susan said, looking up at her mother. The expression on her face was one of worry, as if the sofa had designs to eat her poor frog alive.

“You better get it.”

“It’s so
tiny,”
Susan whined, and Laurie didn’t know if the statement was meant to allay Laurie’s fears about having a rogue amphibian loose in the house or to state Susan’s own concerns about the poor little frog’s helplessness.

“There!” Ted said, and vaulted up onto his feet. “It’s getting away!”

Susan shrieked and Ted laughed. They both darted between the sofa and loveseat and chased after the tiny black dot that bounced toward the hallway. Still laughing, Ted told Susan to be careful and not to accidentally step on the little fellow.

A phantom coldness overtook Laurie. Shivering, she turned and saw through the adjoining sitting room that the storm door that led out into the side yard stood open. Laurie went to the door and shut it. There was a locking mechanism on the handle which Laurie thumbed to the locked position. Out in the side yard, the slope of the lawn had darkened as the sun began to set. The sky beyond the trees was a brilliant panorama of orange and pink threaded with scudding white clouds. The green moss on the fence now looked black and the trees that drooped over the fence swayed in what looked to be a strong summer wind. On the other side of the fence, she could see the green car in the neighbor’s driveway. The second car was still parked at the curb, and she could see now that the emblem on the door was a dark green BGE logo—Baltimore Gas and Electric. There was a light on in the window of one of the upstairs rooms of the house, too. A silhouette stood framed in the center of the lighted window. The longer Laurie stared at the silhouette, the more she was able to convince herself that the silhouette was staring back at her. For the first time in what seemed like an eternity, she thought of a dead girl named Sadie Russ.

L
aurie prepared dinner while Ted and Susan brought their bags in from the car. When Susan learned they would be staying in the big house with the nice yard that sloped toward the woods and the gray river beyond, she cheered for joy and hugged Ted around the hips. Laurie told her that there would be ground rules, which they would address in time, but Susan, now basking in the simple pleasures of childhood vindication, was only partially listening. Ted asked where he should bring the bags and Laurie informed him that Susan’s stuff could go in Laurie’s old room at the end of the upstairs hall, since there was still a bed in there. Ted could take their stuff and put it in the master bedroom, though she confessed that she hadn’t yet been in there to look around and did not know the state of it.

Dora had done a noteworthy job stockpiling the refrigerator and cupboards with suitable groceries, so Laurie whipped up some stir-fry with shrimp, which was Ted’s favorite, and promised Susan they could make brownies together after dinner. Again, Susan cheered—it seemed the world was smiling down on this young girl who, as recently as yesterday evening, had planted herself obstinately in her bedroom closet with her headphones on and cried about having to leave Hartford and all her friends for the summer. Susan helped Laurie set the dining room table—there were good Wedgwood dishes in one of the cupboards—and the three of them ate with great relish. It had been a long and exhaustive day, and they hadn’t realized just how ravenous they’d been.

“So what’s the deal with the locked door upstairs?” Ted asked after he’d finished eating, setting his fork down on his plate. “You got a deformed stepsister locked away up there or something?”

Susan’s mouth made an O.

“There’s a set of stairs behind it leading up into a little room above the second floor,” Laurie said. “My father called it the belvedere.”

“That tower-looking room on the roof?”

“The very same.”

“How come it’s locked?”

“I’m not sure.”

“What’s a . . . a belve—” Susan asked.

“It’s like a loft,” Ted explained. “A little room.”

“I’ll have to call Dora Lorton and see if she has a key for the lock,” Laurie said. Yet for some reason she couldn’t explain, the idea of speaking to Dora Lorton again made her uncomfortable.

After dinner and dessert were finished, they retired to the parlor. Susan’s cheerfulness was short-lived when she realized what not having a television in the house actually meant. Even Ted grumbled about this under his breath but didn’t make an actual show of it. Instead, Susan played the piano while Ted addressed the antique liquor cabinet with a hungry sort of curiosity. Laurie sat on the sofa and looked over the paperwork the lawyer David Cushing had FedEx’d to them back in Hartford. The meeting with Cushing was set for tomorrow afternoon. Back in Hartford, during the phone call with Cushing, Laurie had agreed to have her father’s body disposed of as expediently as possible. Myles Brashear was cremated, and that had been the end of him. There had been no funeral, since there were no family members alive who might be willing to attend—none that Laurie was aware of, anyway.

Laurie only hoped the meeting with Cushing wouldn’t be too strenuous. Cushing had already agreed to assist Laurie in organizing an estate sale . . . for a nominal fee, of course. She had no use for any of her father’s belongings, minimal as they were. As for the house itself, they would put it on the market and hopefully be rid of it as soon as possible. Once it was all over, she would never have to think about this place again.

“Will you look at this stuff?” Ted said as he peered into the liquor cabinet. “Harvey’s Bristol Cream, an unopened bottle of Hiram Walker triple sec that looks like it was pillaged off an old pirate ship. . . .” He whistled. “This stuff is ancient.”

“Was granddad a pirate?” Susan asked while seated at the piano. She was chugging through minor scales with a slow, unpracticed concentration. Now she stopped and turned sideways on the piano bench to look at her father.

“Do you see any parrots flying around?” Ted responded. “Do you see any eye patches or peg legs in the umbrella stand?”

Susan turned red faced with laughter. The whole thing made Laurie uncomfortable. She didn’t like hearing Susan refer to Myles Brashear as “granddad,” and the young girl’s laughter echoing hollowly through the house struck Laurie as offensive, though she didn’t understand exactly why. “Why don’t you go upstairs and get ready for bed?”

“It’s still early!”

“It’s been a long day. No talkbacks, Susan.”

Susan whined to Ted, who shrugged his shoulders offhandedly. “Listen to your mother. No talkbacks.”

“Can I at least check on Torpedo? Please?”

It was the name she had given to the frog. Earlier, following the little creature’s escape, Ted had cornered it in the dining room and managed to trap it underneath a Tupperware container. “Speedy little torpedo,” he’d said, and Susan had liked the name, though Laurie did not think the girl understood its meaning. Laurie had retrieved the old cigar box from her father’s study, poked some holes in it, and had given it to Susan for her pet. Now, the cigar box sat on the front porch. Susan had filled it with twigs and grass and some small crickets she had chased around the yard so the frog would have something to eat.

“Okay,” Laurie relented, “but do it quickly. No dillydallying.”

Susan hopped off the piano bench and raced down the hall. Laurie heard the front door swing open.

“Are you feeling okay?” Ted asked. He was replacing the bottles back inside the liquor cabinet.

“I feel fine.” She set the legal paperwork down on the coffee table. “This paperwork is just making my head spin.”

“I’ll have a look for you.”

“It’s fine. The lawyer will tell us all we need to know tomorrow.”

“Is it something else?” He came up behind her and massaged her shoulders. “Is it about your dad?”

“No. Strangely, no.” She hadn’t been thinking of her father at all, in fact. She had been thinking of Dora Lorton. The way the woman had looked at the house as the Cadillac pulled out of the driveway . . .

Ted kissed the top of her head. “If you change your mind about staying here . . .”

“It’s okay. I’m okay.” Wearily, she smiled up at him.

Susan appeared in the doorway. Her cheeks were slick with tears and her chin was a wrinkled knot—what Ted often called her “walnut chin” when she was upset, because that’s what it most closely resembled.

Laurie sat up stiffly. “What?” she said. “What is it?”

“He’s dead. Torpedo’s dead.”

“Oh, honey,” Ted said. Susan ran to him and he scooped her up in his arms. She sobbed against his neck. Ted made shushing sounds and swung her gently from side to side.

Laurie got up and went down the hall to the front door. Susan had left the door open. Laurie stepped out onto the porch and immediately felt the chill in the air. Beyond the porch, the world was comprised of infinite darkness. This sort of darkness did not exist back in Hartford, where the suburban streets were overcrowded with houses and vapor lamps and there were always cars cruising up and down the neighborhood streets. This darkness was nearly primordial in its depth and magnitude. Just beyond the porch, the lawn resounded in a chorus of crickets.

Laurie bent down to examine the cigar box that sat on the porch beside the door. She opened the lid and there it was, the little thing gray and stiff among a spongy mat of dry grass and bits of twigs. The frog’s eyes bulged, its mouth frozen open. Laurie could see its individual ribs, thinner than toothpicks. Some of them appeared broken. She jostled the box until the stiff little amphibian rolled obediently onto its back.

She considered tossing the contents of the cigar box off the porch, but then thought better of it. If she knew anything about her daughter, it was that the girl possessed unwavering sentimentality. Susan would want to dispose of the frog herself. And Ted would humor her. He would probably help her dig a hole in the yard, maybe even say a few words: a makeshift funeral for a stiff little amphibian. That this frog might receive the service her dead father had not was a notion that was not lost on Laurie. Yet the thought did not upset her.

Back in the house, Ted was still cradling Susan in his arms. Susan had stopped crying but Laurie could hear her snuffling against Ted’s shoulder.

“Okay, Susan,” Laurie said. “Calm down, hon. It’s just a frog.”

Susan’s grip around her father intensified as she issued a shrill whine. Ted frowned at Laurie from over Susan’s hair.

“Come on,” he said, patting Susan on the back. He moved past Laurie and out into the hall. “Let’s go upstairs and brush those teeth.”

Laurie listened to him climb the stairs to the second floor. The whole house creaked.
We baby her too much. We’re turning her into a needy, spoiled child.
Perhaps she had agreed to stay here instead of the hotel too quickly. Susan was as fickle as any ten-year-old; she would have wound up adjusting to the hotel just as easily as this old house. In fact, probably more so, since there would have been a lot to keep her occupied in downtown Annapolis, not to mention a TV in the hotel room. What was there for a ten-year-old to do hanging around an old house all day?

In the kitchen, Laurie loaded the dirty dishes from dinner into the dishwasher. The plate of leftover brownies looked as unappetizing to Laurie as a plate of charred wood. Disgusted, she dumped them into the trash pail beneath the sink. They had turned into hard little cassettes and sounded like stones striking the bottom of the pail.

She went into the hall and paused, listening to Ted and Susan talking in hushed voices upstairs. Quietly, she climbed the stairs and stood at the top. The bedroom door at the far end of the hallway was open and there was a light on in there, but she couldn’t see Ted or Susan. Holding her breath, she listened.

At first, it sounded like Ted was consoling her in the loss of her frog, but then Laurie realized they were talking about her—she could hear Ted saying “mommy” over and over again to their daughter in a placating tone. Heedful of loose floorboards, Laurie crept closer to the open bedroom door. She paused halfway down the hall when she heard the squeak of bedsprings.

“It’s like when Sissy O’Rourke’s dog was hit by that car,” she heard Ted say. “Remember? You had to be extra nice to Sissy for a while. Remember how we went over and brought her those chocolate chip cookies?”

“I helped bake those cookies,” Susan said.

“Yes. And you did a splendid job,” Ted said. “But now you have to be that way for Mommy, if just for a little bit. Does that make sense?”

“Yes,” Susan said, her voice hushed now. “I think so.”

“That’s good. So we’ll try to be a little tougher for Mom, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Let’s see your tough face.”

Susan must have pulled a face, because she began giggling and then Ted laughed, too.

“Good,” Ted said. “Now plant a kiss right here, sugar-pie.”

The bedsprings squealed again.

Something solid seemed to wink into existence in the upper part of Laurie’s chest. She didn’t approve of Ted talking to Susan about her that way. It made her feel weak and feebleminded. She had spoken to him about it in the past, particularly after an inexplicable episode had happened to Laurie last year—the episode Ted referred to as the “highway incident.” At the time, Ted had agreed with her, yet wound up doing what he wanted later on. She considered confronting him about it again, but the thought made her weary. She didn’t have it in her. Not tonight. Not here in this house.

She went downstairs, locked up the house, and then crawled back up to the second floor. This time, the bedroom door at the far end of the hall was closed, which meant Susan had gone to sleep. To her right, the door to the master bedroom stood open. She realized that it was the one room in the house—with the exception of the basement—that she had not gone into yet. She approached slowly, hesitant to enter her father’s old room. There was a four-poster bed, the sheets fresh and crisp. On the wall above the headboard was a massive wooden crucifix. Jesus was a wraith with a look of idiot madness on his face. Laurie pried it from the wall and slid it under the bed.

Exhaustion settling fully down around her now, Laurie went to the side of the bed and sat down. She kicked off her shoes and tucked them neatly beneath the bed. She pulled her shirt up over her head and draped it over the footboard. The button on her jeans required some finesse and, given her distracted state, it took her nearly a full minute to get it undone and the jeans off. Movement across the room drew her attention to the bedroom door. It eased silently closed on its own accord, until only a vertical sliver of dark hallway remained. The door to their bedroom in Hartford did the same thing: It never wanted to stay open. There was a full-length mirror on the back of this door, and it displayed to her the bedroom in reverse, including her own reflection. In the mirror, she looked like some boardwalk artist’s hasty rendition of a human being. Even from across the room, she could make out the terrible dark hollows beneath her eyes. Her skin was the color of old parchment.

Her eyes were then drawn to the reflection of the ornate vase on the nightstand. It was shaped like a cocktail shaker but carved from shiny beige stone marbled with blue veins. There was a lid on it. Vases didn’t have lids. Laurie rolled to the other side of the bed and looked closely at the vase that was, in actuality, not a vase at all.

In the adjoining bathroom, the shower turned off. Ted’s melodic whistling sounded from behind the bathroom door. When he stepped out amidst a billow of steam, he had a towel wrapped around his waist like a sarong and his hair slicked back. His reddened body was beaded with water.

Laurie was still staring at the urn. She hadn’t moved.