The Pretty Ones (18 page)

Harriet Lamont's young daughter stood frozen on the threshold of her open bedroom door, chewing air, ready to scream.

All at once, Barrett came bounding down the hall.

Nell's grip on the kitchen knife increased.

As soon as she felt him rush by her, her migraine bloomed bright enough to render the hallway black. But she could hear the screaming.

Just like her mother. Crying. Shrieking. Wailing as paramedics rushed into their New Jersey home.

Oh God,
she had wept.
My baby, my angel.

.   .   .

Late night had emptied the train car of nearly everyone. Those who rode along in the same space as Nell kept their distance. She felt eyes on her—
they're staring—
but every time she looked up, the riders averted their eyes to read the graffiti scratched onto the windows, scrawled onto the walls:
WHEREVER YOU GO, THERE YOU'LL BE.

She was almost back at the Kings Highway station. She just had to keep it together for a few more minutes. Keep it together so that no one would know what Barrett had done.

She had blacked out, sure she hadn't seen a thing. But bits of recollection were coming faster now.

A pink nightgown turning red.

Harriet Lamont's hysterical screams. Barrett embedding the blade of the kitchen knife Nell had pulled from the block into the soft spot just below her boss's throat.

Nell had lost her nerve. She had turned and run.

She had abandoned her brother, too frightened by what was happening. Too terrified to stop and realize that she was doing to him exactly what she'd feared he'd do to her. And now, on a train hurtling back toward King's Highway, she could hardly keep from shrieking at what was playing out within her mind.

Because somewhere back in Sheepshead Bay, Barrett was covered in blood.

Somewhere back there, they would find him, and they'd take him away.

“Oh God.” The whisper escaped her throat as she stared down at the photo of the two of them. Somehow, it had made it into her pocket along with Harriet Lamont's blank check. Now, the edges of the black-and-white print were tarnished with sticky rust, smeared with the blood that must have splashed up and onto her hands while Barrett was carving Lamont's little girl a bright new smile.

“Oh God,” she whispered again, because there was no coming back from this. This was too much. It would have been safer to travel in the opposite direction of home, to go to Coney Island and figure out what the hell to do next. But there she was, running toward the first place the police would look. And if Barrett didn't come home, if he stayed out because he was upset she'd abandoned him the way she had, there would be no time to run. She'd start packing as soon as she got to the apartment. She'd wait forever, for as long as it took. But Nell knew it was only a matter of time. The cops would find their way there.

She studied the old photograph, did her best to ignore the eyes that were crawling across her skin. The brakes of the B train squealed as it came to a jerking halt. The automatic double doors hissed open. The hollow jingle of a single coin rattling inside a tin cup sounded from the opposite side of the car. One train stop shy of her own, it began its incessant clatter. Nell closed her eyes and tried to block it out. But it got louder; it came closer, underscored by the shuffling of feet.

“Please.” The black man murmured around his own sloppy drunkenness.

“Please.” It seemed to be the only word he knew, that single syllable as sour as his stink.

“Please.”

You give to him and he remember you.

This was the beggar's subway line. She'd given him money once, and now he wanted more.

Maybe he buy knife and kill . . .

The homeless man stopped in front of her. The rattle of his cup came to a curious halt.

Do not give to him.

He watched her for a long moment, as though recognizing her in kind—the receiver regarding the giver. He jingled his cup again, but his action was preoccupied, distracted, a shadow of what it had originally been. He remained fixed on her for a beat longer before he made a sudden move, his free hand catching her by the arm.

“Help,” he croaked. “
Help
.”

Nell started at the contact. She tried to pull away from his grimy touch.

“Get away from me,” she cried, but his grip was tight.

“Help!” He was insisting now, not willing to take no for an answer. Nell's eyes went wide. She couldn't believe it. Of all nights, she was about to get mugged.

“Stop it!” she yelled. “Let go!”

“Help!” he bellowed back, his breath stinking of booze and rotten teeth.

The people on the opposite side of the train were gaping now, but not a single one of them made a move to offer aid. They looked at one another as if unsure of the scene that was clearly an assault.
Losers!
The word hissed through Nell's head.
Stupid idiot rubbernecking losers! He could kill me and they wouldn't care! It could be Sam and they'd watch him slash me up!

Nell tried to shove the man away, but he refused to release her arm. His dirty fingers groped at the weave of her sweater sleeve, continuing to croak
help
and
please
like a spastic parrot. Nell struggled against him and eventually managed to reach into her purse. As soon as the homeless man saw her hand disappear, he let go and took a few stumbling backward steps, his hands held up in apology, as though
she'd
been the one who had assaulted
him
.

“Take it!” she yelled, then reeled back and threw loose change in his face. The coins bounced off his filthy clothes and tinged against the metal floor.

The homeless man didn't move. He gaped instead.

The train began to slow. Nell bounded off the plastic subway seat. She shoved her way past him, squeezed through the automatic doors before they were fully open, and ran full-sprint through the station until she was out on the street. Half a block from the station, a few members of the Puerto Rican bicycle gang sat on a curb smoking cigarettes and drinking beer out of cans. Their bikes lay beside them like sleeping horses. One lifted an arm to point her out to his friends. They sat in relative silence as she bolted past them. One of them murmured “
Que carajo?
” as she ran by. She glanced over her shoulder, noticed a couple of them rising, looking after her as though ready to give chase.

Nearly tripping over a crack in the sidewalk, she kept running, and crossed her fingers that, by some unexplained miracle, Barrett would already be at the apartment waiting for her, if not to assure her that he was okay, then to fend off the boys she was sure were following her home.

You should have seen this coming,
she thought, pushing herself as hard as she could.
You shouldn't have thrown those rocks. You should have left them alone.

“Hey,
bibliotecaria
!” one of them yelled from behind her.

They were on their bikes now. She could hear the clicking of their freewheels as they advanced, getting closer.

She just about leapt up the crumbling concrete steps of her building and tore open the door that led into the lobby. There was a man sleeping at the base of the stairwell. She was moving too fast to avoid him. One of her loafers came to a stop against his thinly T-shirted abdomen. “You!” he screamed as she leapt over him. “Look at what you did! Shame on you!” His voice bellowed in the cavernous apartment lobby. “
Shame
on you, girl!”

Reaching the second-story landing, she whipped around the rickety newel post and up the final flight of stairs. She scrambled to find her keys, surprised that she still had her purse after everything that had happened. Half its contents spilled around her feet in her haste. Bills and receipts, a pack of Wrigley's Doublemint, and Barrett's small yellow notepad.
What? Why . . . ?
But there was no switchblade, even though she was sure she had dropped it into her bag. Sure, at least, that she'd had it the night she had met Dave at the Cabana Club.

“You see a girl come in here?” A Spanish accent.

“Yeah! She kicked me!” The man downstairs.

“Yo, where'd she go, man?” Another voice, another gang member.

“She tried to kill me!” the man insisted. “Put her foot straight into my gut! I got cirrhosis! I'm a dyin' man!”

“
Bibliotecaria!
” a third voice boomed. “Hey,
chica
! We just wanna talk!”

Nell managed to unlock her door with a trembling hand. She stumbled inside the dark apartment, kicking a few of her spilled items inside. She slammed the door behind her, threw all the locks into place. With her back flush against the door, she looked around her dilapidated home for signs of her brother.

Was he here?

Had he returned?

Was he still at Lamont's place?

Someone must have heard Lamont scream. It had only been for a few seconds, but someone
must
have heard it, someone
must
have called the cops.

Nell closed her eyes, the distant wail of a police siren curdling her blood. Above it, a man sang opera out an open window, trying to blot out the underlying harmonies of the Jackson 5 coming from a few doors down.

Her eyes fixed themselves on Barrett's empty chair. He had abandoned his book on the threadbare cushion—the same book, the
only
book he ever read. Beary was sitting in her brother's place, as though waiting for the both of them to return.

Barrett was just like their dad. Leigh Sullivan had read and reread
The Velveteen Rabbit
to them what seemed like a hundred times. They had had an old wingback chair at home too, one that looked remarkably similar to the one Barrett had picked out at the secondhand store. Nell shut her eyes against the memory of his casket glinting in the summer sun. She tried to block out her mother's hysterical weeping. Tried to look elsewhere in the recollection she had played over and over inside her head for so long.

Look away.

She strained to do it, urging her four-year-old self to avert her gaze. To block out their mother's cries—only to spot a difference she hadn't noticed until now. There, in her mind's eye, just beyond her father's casket, was an identical coffin, save for its size. Present-tense Nell and her four-year-old shadow simultaneously gasped. She pushed herself away from the apartment door. Shook her head, not understanding that newly excavated shred of memory.

But it was only Daddy.

It was only him.

She twisted where she stood, letting her attention settle for a second time onto a chair that looked so much like their father's. Her old bear continued to stare at her, its glass eyes blank, soulless, horrible rather than comforting. She grabbed the toy off the chair, her mother's wailing echoing inside her head like a scream in an empty room.

My baby, my angel, my sweet little . . .

“Barrett?” The name slid past her lips in a whisper.

She turned away from his chair, numb.

Because it didn't make sense. Why wasn't he here yet?

Because he's
dead.

Bullshit. He was alive. There was no way the cops would have gotten to Lamont's house so fast, no way he would have sat down and waited for them.

Nell stumbled into her room, dazed by the things she was imagining as if they'd really happened. The little casket beside her father's looked real enough in her memory, but that memory was false. A lie. Only one life had been memorialized that day—her father's.
Their
father's. Nell and Barrett had stood hand in hand together as the coffin had been lowered into the ground.

Except it hadn't been his hand.

The suggestion slithered into her brain.

Four-year-old Nell squinted against the glare of the sun while present-day Nell squinted at her own reflection in the full-length mirror that hung on her wall.

It hadn't been his hand—it had been something else.

There was a bang on the door.

“Hello? Miss?” someone yelled through the wood.

Both little Nell and grown-up Nell looked to their right hand. A fuzzy teddy bear hung limp at their side.

Except grown-up Nell's palm was smeared with blood that continued up, up, up her arm to the crook of her elbow, to her biceps, clear across the front of her blouse and down her shirt.

Nell Sullivan gaped at herself in the mirror, Beary at her side, hardly recognizing the woman she saw before her.

Help.

Covered so completely in blood, it was a wonder she'd managed to get home.

Please, you help.

The looks on the subway.

The homeless man repeating
help, help
as though he had needed it instead of trying to offer it to the girl who had aided him by giving him change.

Bang bang!
The door.

“Miss? Hello? Are you okay in there?”

It had been Nell all along.

Linnie. Mary Ann. Adriana. Harriet Lamont and her daughter.

Nell's fingers flexed. Beary fell to the floor, soundless like her brother.

“Ma'am? We're going to call the police!”

It had
all been her.

That's why her clothes had been scattered along the floor.

How Barrett had known to find her at the Cabana Club that night.

Because he hadn't been there, yet he was
always
there.

Always inside her head.

“But I
saw
him!” The words tumbled out of her in a sudden, incredulous yell. “He was there! It was him! I know it was!”

Suddenly, she was tearing at her clothes. Balling them up and throwing them into the hamper surrounded by scribbled yellow notes, most of them in Barrett's handwriting, some of them in her own.
I won't ever leave you. I can't. It's impossible. Impossible. ­Impossible . . .