The Girls (23 page)

I learned that Russell had been harassing Mitch for the last few weeks. Showing up unannounced at his house. Sending Guy to knock over his trash cans, so Mitch came home to a lawn junked with flattened cereal boxes and shredded wax paper and tinfoil slick with food scraps. Mitch's caretaker had seen Russell there, too, just once—Scotty told Mitch he'd seen some guy parked at the gate, just staring, and when Scotty had asked him to leave, Russell had smiled and told him he was the house's previous owner. Russell had also shown up at the recording engineer's house, trying to cadge the tapes from his session with Mitch. The man's wife was home. Later she'd recall being irritated at the sound of the doorbell: their newborn was asleep in the back bedroom. When she opened the door, there was Russell in his grubby Wranglers, his squinty smile.

She'd heard stories of the session from her husband, so she knew who Russell was, but she wasn't afraid. Not really. He was not a frightening man when first encountered, and when she told him her husband wasn't home, Russell shrugged.

“I could just grab the tapes real quick,” he said, straining to look past her. “In and out, just like that.” That's when she got a little uneasy. Plowing her feet deeper into her old slippers, the fussing of the baby drifting down the hall.

“He keeps all that at work,” she said, and Russell believed her.

The woman remembered she heard a noise in the yard later that night, a thrash in the roses, but when she looked out the window, she didn't see anything except the pebbled driveway, the stubble of the moonlit lawn.

My first night back was nothing like the old nights. The old nights had been alive with a juvenile sweetness in our faces—I'd pet the dog, who'd nose around for love, give him a hearty scratch behind his ears, my coursing hand urging me into a happy rhythm. And there had been strange nights, too, when we'd all taken acid or Russell would have to get in some drunk motorcycle guy's face, using all his flip-flop logic on him. But I had never felt scared. That night was different, by the ring of stones with the barest of fires going. No one paid any attention when the flames dissolved to nothing, everyone's roiling energy directed at Russell, who moved like a rubber band about to snap.

“This right here,” Russell said. He was pacing, dinking out a quick song. “I just made it up and it's already a hit.”

The guitar was out of tune, twanging flat notes—Russell didn't seem to notice. His voice rushed and frantic.

“And here's another one,” he said. He fussed with the tuning pegs before letting loose a jangle of strums. I tried to catch Suzanne's eye, but she was trained on Russell. “This is the future of music,” he said over the din. “They think they know what's good 'cause they got songs on the radio, but that's not shit. They don't have true love in their hearts.”

No one seemed to notice his words unraveling around the borders: they all echoed what he said, their mouths twisting in shared feeling. Russell was a genius, that's what I'd told Tom—and I could picture how Tom's face would have moved with pity if he were there to see Russell, and it made me hate Tom, because I could hear it, too, all the space in the songs for you to realize they were rough, not even rough, just bad: sentimental treacle, the words about love as blunt as a grade-schooler's, a heart drawn by a chubby hand. Sunshine and flowers and smiles. But I could not fully admit it, even then. The way Suzanne's face looked as she watched him—I wanted to be with her. I thought that loving someone acted as a kind of protective measure, like they'd understand the scale and intensity of your feelings and act accordingly. That seemed fair to me, as if fairness were a measure the universe cared anything about.

There were dreams I had sometimes, and I'd wake from the tail end assuming some image or fact to be true, carrying forward this assumption from the dreamworld into my waking life. And how jarring it would be to realize that I was not married, that I had not cracked the code to flight, and there would be a real sorrow.

The actual moment Russell told Suzanne to go to Mitch Lewis's house and teach him a lesson—I kept thinking I had witnessed it: the black night, the cool flicking chirps of crickets, and all those spooky oaks. But of course I hadn't. I'd read about it so much that I believed I could see it clearly, a scene in the exaggerated colors of a childhood memory.

I'd been waiting in Suzanne's room at the time. Irritable, desperate for her return. I'd tried to talk to her at multiple points that night, tugging at her arm, tracking her gaze, but she kept brushing me off. “Later,” she said, and that was all it took for me to imagine her promise fulfilling itself in the darkness of her room. My chest tightened when I heard footsteps enter the room, mind swelling with the thought—Suzanne was here—but then I felt the soft glancing hit and my eyes flew open—it was just Donna. She'd thrown a pillow at me.

“Sleeping Beauty,” she said, sniggering.

I tried to settle back into pretty repose; the sheet overheated from the nervous shuffle of my body, ears suggestible for any sound of Suzanne's return. But she didn't come to the room that night. I waited as long as I could, alert to every creak and jar, before passing into the drowsy patchwork of unwilling sleep.

In fact, Suzanne had been with Russell. The air of his trailer probably going stuffy from their fucking, Russell unraveling his plan for Mitch, he and Suzanne staring up at the ceiling. I can imagine how he got right up to the edge before swerving around the details, so maybe Suzanne would start to think she'd had the same idea, that it was hers, too.

“My little hellhound,” he had cooed to her, his eyes pinwheeling from a mania that could be mistaken for love. It was strange to think Suzanne would be flattered in this moment, but certainly she was. His hand scratching her scalp, that same agitated pleasure men like to incite in dogs, and I can imagine how the pressure started to build, a desire to move along the larger rush.

“It should be big,” Russell had said. “Something they can't ignore.” I see him twisting a lock of Suzanne's hair around a finger and pulling, the barest tug so she wouldn't know if the throb she felt was pain or pleasure.

The door he opened, urging Suzanne through.

Suzanne was distracted the whole next day. Going off by herself, face announcing her hurry, or having urgent, whispered conferences with Guy. I was jealous, desperate that I couldn't compete with the fraction of her that was deeded to Russell. She'd folded herself up and I was a distant concern.

I nursed my own confusion, tending hopeful explanations, but when I smiled at her, she blinked with delayed recognition, like I was a stranger returning her forgotten pocketbook. I kept noticing a soldered look in her eyes, a grim inward turning. Later I'd understand this was preparation.

Dinner was some reheated beans that tasted of aluminum, the burned scrapings of the pot. Stale chocolate cake from the bakery with a hoary pack of frost. They wanted to eat indoors, so we sat on the splintered floor, plates crooked on our laps. Forcing a primitive caveman hunch—no one seemed to eat very much. Suzanne pressed a finger to the cake and watched it crumb. Their looks at one another across the room were bursting with suppressed hilarity, a surprise-party conspiracy. Donna handing Suzanne a rag with a significant air. I didn't understand anything, a pitiful dislocation keeping me blind and eager.

I'd steeled myself to force a talk on Suzanne. But I looked up from the nasty slop of my plate and saw she was already getting to her feet, her movements informed by information invisible to me.

They were going somewhere, I realized when I caught up to her, following the play of her flashlight beam. The lurch, the gag of desperation: Suzanne was going to leave me behind.

“Let me come too,” I said. Trying to keep up, following the swift rupture she cut through the grass.

I couldn't see Suzanne's face. “Come where?” she said, her voice even.

“Wherever you're going,” I said. “I know you're going somewhere.”

The teasing lilt. “Russell didn't ask you to go.”

“But I want to,” I said. “Please.”

Suzanne didn't say yes, exactly. But she slowed enough so I could match her stride, a pace new to me, purposeful.

“You should change,” Suzanne said.

I looked down, trying to discern what had offended her: my cotton shirt, my long skirt.

“Into dark clothes,” she said.

The car ride was as slurred over and unbelievable as a long illness. Guy at the wheel, Helen and Donna beside him. Suzanne sat in the backseat, staring out the window, and I was right next to her. The night had dropped deep and dark, the car passing under the streetlights. Their sulfur glow gliding across Suzanne's face, a stupor occupying the others. Sometimes it seemed like I never really left the car. That a version of me is always there.

Russell stayed at the ranch that night. Which didn't even register with me as strange. Suzanne and the others were his familiars, loosed out into the world—it had always been that way. Guy like his second in a duel, Suzanne and Helen and Donna not hesitating. Roos was supposed to have gone, too, but she didn't—she claimed, later, that she'd gotten a bad feeling and stayed behind, but I don't know if that is true. Did Russell hold her back, sensing a stubborn virtue in her that might yoke her to the real world? Roos with Nico, a child of her own. Roos, who did become the main witness against the others, taking the stand in a white dress with her hair parted straight down the middle.

I don't know if Suzanne told Russell I was coming—no one ever answered that question.

The car radio was on, playing the laughably foreign soundtrack to other people's lives. Other people who were getting ready to sleep, mothers who were scraping the last shreds of chicken dinner into the garbage. Helen was jawing away about a whale beaching down in Pismo and did we think it was true that it was a sign a big earthquake was gonna happen? Getting up on her knees then, like the idea thrilled her.

“We'd have to go to the desert,” she said. No one was taking her bait: a hush had fallen over the car. Donna muttered something, and Helen set her jaw.

“Can you open the window?” Suzanne said.

“I'm cold,” Helen whined in her baby voice.

“Come on,” Suzanne said, pounding the back of the seat. “I'm fucking melting.”

Helen rolled the window down and the car filled with air, flavored with exhaust. The salt of the nearby ocean.

And there I was among them. Russell had changed, things had soured, but I was with Suzanne. Her presence corralled any stray worries. Like the child who believes that her mother's bedtime vigil will ward off monsters. The child who cannot decipher that her mother might be frightened, too. The mother who understands she can do nothing for protection except offer up her own weak body in exchange.

Maybe some part of me had known where things were headed, a sunken glimmer in the murk: maybe I had a sense of the possible trajectory and went along anyway. Later that summer, and at various points throughout my life, I would sift through the grain of that night, feeling blindly.

All Suzanne said was that we were paying Mitch a visit. Her words were spiked with a cruelty I hadn't heard before, but even so, this was the furthest my mind ranged: we were going to do what we'd done at the Dutton house. We'd perform an unsettling psychic interruption so Mitch would have to be afraid, just for a minute, would have to reorder the world anew. Good—Suzanne's hatred for him allowed and inflamed my own. Mitch, with his fat, probing fingers, the halting, meaningless chatter he kept up while looking us over. As if his mundane words would fool us, keep us from noticing how his glance dripped with filth. I wanted him to feel weak. We would occupy Mitch's house like tricky spirits from another realm.

Because I did feel that, it's true. A sense that something united all of us in the car, the cool whiff of other worlds on our skin and hair. But I never thought, even once, that the other world might be death. I wouldn't really believe it until the news gathered its stark momentum. After which, of course, the presence of death seemed to color everything, like an odorless mist that filled the car and pressed against the windows, a mist we inhaled and exhaled and that shaped every word we spoke.

We had not gone very far, maybe twenty minutes from the ranch, Guy easing the car along the tight dark curves of the hills, emerging into the long empty stretches of the flat land and picking up speed. The stands of eucalyptus we passed, the chill of fog beyond the window.

My alertness held everything in precise amber. The radio, the shuffle of bodies, Suzanne's face in profile. This is what they had all the time, I imagined, this net of mutual presence like something too near to identify. Just a sense of being buoyed along the fraternal rush, the belonging.

Suzanne rested her hand on the seat between us. The familiar sight stirred me, remembering how she'd grabbed for me in Mitch's bed. The spotty surface of her nails, brittle from poor diet.

I was sick with foolish hope, believing I would ever stay in the blessed space of her attention. I tried to reach for her hand. A tap of her palm, like I had a note to pass. Suzanne startled a little and jarred from a haze I had not noticed until it broke.

“What?” she snapped.

My face dropped all ability to costume itself. Suzanne must have seen the needy swarm of love. Must have taken the measure, like a stone dropped in a well—but there was no sound marking the end. Her eyes went dull.

“Stop the car,” Suzanne said.

Guy kept driving.

“Pull over,” Suzanne said. Guy glanced back at us, then pulled into the shoulder of the right lane.

“What's the matter—,” I said, but Suzanne cut me off.

“Get out,” she said, opening the door. Moving too fast for me to stop her, the reel snapping ahead, the sound lagging behind.

“Come on,” I said, trying to sound bright with the joke. Suzanne was already out of the car, waiting for me to leave. She wasn't joking.

“But there's nothing here,” I said, circling a desperate look at the highway. Suzanne was shifting, impatient. I glanced to the others for help. Their faces were lit by the dome light, leaching their features so they seemed as cold and inhuman as bronze figures. Donna looked away, but Helen watched me with a medical curiosity. Guy shifted in the driver's seat, adjusting the mirror. Helen said something under her breath—Donna shushed her.

“Suzanne,” I said, “please,” the powerless tilt in my voice.

She said nothing. When I finally shuffled along the seat and got out, Suzanne didn't even hesitate. Ducking back inside the car and closing the door, the dome light snapping off and returning them to darkness.

And then they drove away.

I was alone, I understood, and even as I tended some naïve wish—they would return, it was only a joke, Suzanne would never leave me like that, not really—I knew that I had been tossed aside. I could only zoom away, to hover up somewhere by the tree line, looking down on a girl standing alone in the dark. Nobody I knew.