Authors: Megan Abbott
“Louise,” Marion said, “I promise, we will get whatever money we need. We will. I will make sure of that. Dr. Seeley is on his way here. He will be here by Easter and he can help us. He will.”
Louise didn’t say anything, but her hands on Marion were so tight.
“I’m sorry, darling,” Louise said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t want him to do it. I didn’t think it would really happen. I thought you were just silver trimmings for him to eye. And then he won you over, as he does. You were my friend, but there it was. He took you and it worried me. It grieved me. But there it was. You see what he is now. You see we must fasten ourselves to each other. Tie each other post to post. We must.”
Neither of them was looking at Ginny, both so wrapped in their girl forgiveness and Marion daubing Louise’s tears with thumb and forefinger and Louise vining her arm around Marion’s waist and they pressed forehead to forehead. Back somewhere, though, Marion could feel Ginny, could feel her watching, watching like the green tuning eye on the radio, flickering hot.
“We’re hitched wagon to wagon for the long haul, aren’t we, Meems? Don’t you know?” Louise murmured and nuzzled nose against Marion’s lips and it turned to kisses and Marion felt a funny flush but before she could think twice, Ginny’s voice came crackling out.
“Look at you now, arms all over Louise, after what you’ve done.”
Arms all over,
Marion thought. A flash came to her of that private tableau, Ginny’s white thigh slung and Louise’s arm sliding between bent leg, dimpled knee.
Something quivered in Marion’s chest and she pulled fast from Louise’s arms, eyes on Ginny, who was like a snapped trolley wire sparking on the pavement.
All that rabid energy that had been rushing through Ginny all night—like before, like before, in the cold bathtub, she drawling, ugly,
I might do anything when it’s like this…. Just you see what I can do.
Then, seeing her and Louise like that, somehow worse than her and Louise fighting, much worse. And now there she was, like a cornered thing, teeth bared.
“Propping up that polluted nurse for his pleasures,” Ginny spat at Marion, voice jumpy and rough. “You’re the pretty little leech. Drawing him dry for us. A sharp-toothed little bloodsucker. Must supply Gent Joe with fresh gash. Bring in that slanty little gash. Infecting us all with her, stealing Joe’s charms and dancing high kicks while we can’t make rent and the wheeze from the lungers’ camp, I can hear it from here.”
It was the ugliest words she’d ever heard and Marion wanted to cover her ears.
“No, Gin-Gin, it ain’t—,” Louise started, turning as Ginny rose from the sofa, muslin twining between bare legs.
“She may fool you, Louise, because you are softhearted, but I have long had this prairie flower in my keen sights,” said Ginny, and her face had that aspect Marion had seen but once before, like a white sheet pulled taut and eyes slanting to black arrows and mouth but a red line. “Trying to get her dainty hooks in. She’s been at it for months. And here I get sicker and she slinks closer, playing the innocent, like I don’t know.”
“Ginny,” Marion said, but she couldn’t focus. Ginny’s face, torn flat, was like a stranger’s, some strange girl you’d see in a high-up window at the state hospital and she’d be tapping at it, tapping at you.
“Ginny, don’t you dare,” Louise snapped. “Marion isn’t doing any such thing. She loves you. No one’s doing the things you’re…No one’s doing—”
“Now I know! Now I know!” Ginny crowed, and Louise, as if realizing something, rushed toward Ginny, grabbing her shoulders.
“I wonder who’s been filling your ear with tongue oil,” Louise said, holding Ginny fast between strong hands. “I wonder. Was it really the milkman who gave—”
Ginny pulled herself free, face coloring with angry blood.
“She’s fooled and enticed you, Louise. She has her way, you’ll light a shuck with her and leave me to wither. But I will put a stop to it. She’s Pandora, come to town with her dirty little box to bring us all to ruin. She’s a plague and she has ruined us all.”
“No, Ginny,” Louise tried again, voice edging into panic, which edged Marion’s further still. “Ginny, you’re all roostered up and you don’t know what you’re saying. You’re not to do this. You’re not to do this.”
“Just you wait until Dr. Seeley returns and I give him an earful of what his wife has been up to in his absence.”
“Don’t you dare, don’t you dare speak of such things,” Marion said, so hot now she felt like her skin was curling from her. “Don’t you dare mention his name.”
“Oh, won’t he like to hear of what dirty deeds under coverlet with Jack Lanigan. Filthy things, abominations, the stuff of whorehouses. Oh, and won’t I add about the pills and tonics and goodness knows. Knowing Joe Lanigan there was a shakerful of snow, wasn’t there, Marion? Wouldn’t he like to know his dear-heart wife was spending her evenings back flat on heaving mattresses, blowing like Cocaine Lil? Wouldn’t he like to know what his wife—”
Marion’s hand shot out and slapped Ginny hard in the face.
“You won’t say a thing, Ginny, you won’t, else you’ll hear what I can broadcast, wild tales.” And once Marion started, she couldn’t stop herself and it came out. It just came out, even as Louise kept pulling on her and Marion tried to wriggle away roughly.
She did not know she was going to say it and never would have thought she would ever say it, but she did.
“I have things I can tell, I have things I can shout to high heavens to shame you,” Marion burst out, grabbing Ginny’s spindly arm with one hand and with the other jabbing her own chest with her thumb. “You know what they say about you two at the
clinic, don’t you? Love’s labor’s lost, that’s what they say. Oh, the whispers and winks, and everyone knows how unnatural you two—”
As if in one move, Ginny tore Marion’s arm away and, squirming like a silverfish, she reached in the side-table drawer and drew out the girls’ famed pistol.
“Oh, sweet Mary, Ginny, put that thing away,” Louise said, and it was nearly a wail. “She doesn’t mean it, she doesn’t mean it.”
Marion’s heart galloped wildly and the little gun looked so big and Ginny’s face so frightening, her veins rising from her arms as she lifted the weapon, cording blue up her neck and to her forehead.
“I will do no such thing. I will not have this, Louise,” Ginny said, voice curdling, her cough threatening to overtake her.
Watching her and heart lashing, Marion began backing away, but Ginny was upon her. “Don’t you run, Marion Seeley. Don’t you dare run from me.”
Ginny upon her so fast, Marion felt the back of her head knock against the wall and the pistol pointing straight at her chest. Wriggling away and shoving Ginny, she turned to face Louise, stock-still and white with terror, and Marion heard the sound, the short report, before she could even gasp, and the sound of flesh tearing from her hand. She grabbed desperately at the pistol, singeing hot, and she and Ginny fell to the floor, Marion on top and looking down at twisty little Ginny, that minxing blond thrush, now beneath her, churning under her and spitting and hacking and cursing Marion and cursing her so. “I’ll shoot you, Marion Seeley, for what you’ve done. You will be sorry. I’ll shoot that pretty face to pieces.”
Both pairs of hands wrapped tight on the burning pistol and Louise shouted something in the background, the second shot
came like a bolt in Marion’s ears, and her hand felt as if pierced in two and then the gun flew up and there was a third shot.
Ginny’s face crumpled like shiny paper and Marion felt her blood screaming and Ginny’s face, it turned black, and in an instant it was gone.
Marion felt herself spring backward like a jack-in-the-box and thud against the wall. Lifting her head, she saw Louise, looking down at her, fingers to lower lip. Then Marion’s eyes fell to her own hand, her burning hand with gun still wrapped tight. Her other hand torn to pulp, like a bloody keyhole in the center.
“Marion,” Louise said, and that was when Marion saw the gaping red ring on Louise’s dress, just above the hip.
“Louise, you have been shot.” Marion heard her voice say these words.
Looking down at herself, Louise saw the blood, which was blossoming, and then her legs gave out on her and she collapsed to the floor.
J
OE
L
ANIGAN
was leaning over her and his hand was open and was he going to slap her?
The crack came at her and the burning on her face something fierce.
“Don’t hit me, Joe,” she murmured. “How’d you get here, Joe?”
“You telephoned me, Marion,” he was saying, and he stood back up straight. He still had his hat on, that one with the brim, he said the brim was felted under water by hand, but that couldn’t be, could it, and his linen suit was so white, like vanilla ice cream.
Her hand was in her lap, but it was not her hand but the hand
of a carnival clown, big and spongy and not hers at all. And the red from it was everywhere.
“I did? I telephoned you, Joe?” Then she remembered wrapping Louise’s housecoat around herself and running down the street to the soda fountain, which was closed. The old man mopping the floor saw her and let her in. “I burned myself,” she had said, “but my husband is a doctor.” The man shrugged and kept mopping.
She went in the booth and whispered, “Mr. Lanigan, it’s a dreadful thing. Her face is gone. It’s just gone and my hand is hot.”
“Mrs. Seeley, what…”
“Mr. Lanigan, Louise is lying still but what of Ginny and that elfin face crushed like a cigarette?”
“Marion, where are you?”
“I’m in hell, Mr. Lanigan. You never told me how it felt. You should have, so I’d’ve known.”
N
OW
J
OE IN HIS ICE-CREAM SUIT
looked down at her, and wet, oh, her temple felt wet, and reaching up she felt the thin tuft of Ginny-blond hair stuck to her forehead.
“Marion, what, what—”
She tried to tell him but the words were floating from her and she couldn’t hold on to them, her blood still rushing so hard, her chest still heaving, and Joe Lanigan’s face, his eyes darting, his mind working, trying to piece it together.
“And the gun exploded, and her face went too.”
“And Louise?”
“I don’t know how. The gun exploded three times. And click-clacked about.”
“I see,” he said, but how could he? He started to walk toward Louise but stopped several feet before her body, sprawled.
“We were fighting about such dreadful things and they were saying these things about you. These horrid things. And Louise, she…”
“What were they saying, Marion?”
“It doesn’t matter, for I am lost. I am lost. I shall go to Mexico,” she said, even as she said it remembering Dr. Seeley was well on his way up north by now. Two, three days away from here.
“Marion, stand up and let me see your hand,” he said, and he helped her to her feet and put his tender hands on hers and she felt certain now he would save her. He would save her.
“You’ve been shot, Marion,” he said. “I can see the bullet.”
“Oh, Joe.” And she leaned toward him, and then his eyes, she caught sight of them, and they were so dark and lost.
I have thrown him,
she thought.
He does not know what to do.
He looked down at the floor and saw the gun there. He picked it up delicately, as though it were a wounded sparrow. Together, they looked at it.
“Marion, what have you done?” he said, and she’d never heard such lostness in his voice.
“I was to be killed,” she said.
“They were base women,” Joe said, still staring at the pistol. “They were degenerate women and I should never have let you traffic with them.”
At that moment, she saw the blur out of the corner of her eye, the pale flash of Louise’s blood-fronted dress from behind Joe.
“Louise,” Marion said, clutching her chest with one hand and reaching out with the other.
Wan as Lazarus, Louise had climbed to her feet.
Joe’s eyes seized on Marion’s and he half turned and saw Louise, like some forlorn ghost, blazing red hair and flushed chest and advancing upon them and it was all only seconds.
It was the way his arm extended, like he was batting off a fly, but the gun in his hand came with it and the crack from its barrel sizzled in Marion’s ears.
Louise slumped to her knees like at a church pew.
Marion and Joe watched her and Marion felt herself go toward her, to lean down and catch her, but the look in Louise’s eyes, the awful surprise in them…
Her mouth opened as if to speak but then nothing came and Marion saw the smoke rising from the hole in her chest. Then Louise buckled and pitched to the floor.
“I
WILL TAKE CARE OF IT,
M
ARION,”
Joe was saying, as he dragged Ginny’s doll-like body across the room. The sight was one Marion knew she would never forget.
“I will repair this,” he said, his suit jacket now off, his sleeves rolled up, his forearms pocked with blood. “I will repair this as if it were solely mine to repair.”
He had piled the bodies in the corner. They were a heap of worn silk and curls and blood-rimmed sorrow.
“Joe, what can you mean?” Marion managed. “We must explain to the police. Accidents. Accidents. We must explain it.”
“No good, Marion, and don’t think about it or I will have to shut you up about it,” he said, and he lifted the coffee table and moved it off the rug. “Look what you did. Look what you did, Marion. You took a gun to your friends and you’ve made me share a part and you think the police will understand? But I will take care of it. Because you are a sick, sick thing.”
“I am not,” Marion said, wrapping the dish towel around her hand tighter. “Why did you shoot Louise?” Her voice edged into a scream. “Why did you shoot her?”
“Marion, you told me they were trying to murder you. Do you think I’m the kind of man who would not protect you from violence?”
“I don’t understand, I don’t understand,” Marion moaned.
“I think you do,” he said, and his eyes were cold.
H
E ROLLED
those girls up in the carpet.