The Girls (25 page)

“Please,” she said, “I can get you money.” But Suzanne didn't want money. The amphetamines tightening her temples, an incantatory throb. The beautiful girl's heart, motoring in her chest—the narcotic, desperate rev. How Linda must have believed, as beautiful people do, that there was a solution, that she would be saved. Helen held Linda down—her hands on Linda's shoulders were tentative at first, like a bad dance partner, but then Suzanne snapped at Helen, impatient, and she pressed harder. Linda's eyes closed because she knew what was coming.

Christopher had started to cry. Crouching behind the couch; no one had to hold him down. His underwear saturated with the bitter smell of urine. His cries were shaped by screams, an emptying out of all feeling. His mother on the carpet, no longer moving.

Suzanne squatted on the floor. Holding out her hands to him. “Come here,” she said. “Come on.”

This is the part that isn't written about anywhere, but the part I imagine most.

How Suzanne's hands must have already been sprayed with blood. The warm medical stink of the body on her clothes and hair. And I can picture it, because I knew every degree of her face. The calming mystic air on her, like she was moving through water.

“Come on,” she said one last time, and the boy inched toward her. Then he was in her lap, and she held him there, the knife like a gift she was giving him.

By the time the news report was finished, I was sitting down. The couch seemed sheared off from the rest of the apartment, occupying airless space. Images blistered and branched like nightmare vines. The indifferent sea beyond the house. The footage of policemen in shirtsleeves, stepping from Mitch's front door. There was no reason for them to hurry, I saw—it was over. Nobody would be saved.

I understood this news was much bigger than me. That I was only taking in the first glancing flash. I careened toward an exit, a trick latch: maybe Suzanne had broken off from the group, maybe she wasn't involved. But all these frantic wishes carried their own echoed response. Of course she had done it.

The possibilities washed past. Why Mitch hadn't been home. How I could have intersected with what was coming. How I could have ignored all the warnings. My breath was squeezed from the effort of trying not to cry. I could imagine how impatient Suzanne would be with my upset. Her cool voice.

Why are you crying?
she'd ask.

You didn't even do anything.

It's strange to imagine the stretch of time when the murders were unsolved. That the act ever existed separately from Suzanne and the others. But for the larger world, it did. They wouldn't get caught for many months. The crime—so close to home, so vicious—sickened everyone with hysteria. Homes had been reshaped. Turned suddenly unsafe, familiarity flung back in their owners' faces, as if taunting them—see, this is your living room, your kitchen, and see how little it helps, all that familiarity. See how little it means, at the end.

The news blared through dinner. I kept turning at a jump of motion in the corner of my eye, but it was just the stream of television or a headlight glinting past the apartment window. My father scratched his neck as we watched, the expression on his face unfamiliar to me—he was afraid. Tamar wouldn't leave it alone.

“The kid,” she said. “It wouldn't be so bad if they didn't kill the kid.”

I had a numb certainty they would see it on me. A rupture in my face, the silence obvious. But they didn't. My father locked the apartment door, then checked again before he went to bed. I stayed awake, my hands limp and clammy in the lamplight. Was there the merest slip between the outcomes? If the bright faces of planets had orbited in another arrangement, or a different tide had eaten away at the shore that night—was that the membrane that separated the world where I had or had not done it? When I tried to sleep, the inward reel of violence made me open my eyes. And something else, too, chiding in the background—even then, I missed her.

The logic of the killings was too oblique to unravel, involving too many facets, too many false clues. All the police had were the bodies, the scattered scenes of death like note cards out of order. Was it random? Was Mitch the target? Or Linda, or Scotty, or even Gwen? Mitch knew so many people, had a celebrity's assortment of enemies and resentful friends. Russell's name was brought up, by Mitch and by others, but it was one of many. By the time the police finally checked out the ranch, the group had already abandoned the house, taking the bus to campgrounds up and down the coast, hiding out in the desert.

I didn't know how stalled the investigation was, how the police got caught up following trivia—a key fob on the lawn that ended up belonging to a housekeeper, Mitch's old manager under surveillance. Death imbued the insignificant with forced primacy, its scrambled light turning everything into evidence. I knew what had happened, so it seemed the police must know, too, and I waited for Suzanne's arrest, the day the police would come looking for me—because I'd left my duffel behind. Because that Berkeley student Tom would put together the murders and Suzanne's hissing talk of Mitch and contact the police. My fear was real, but it was unfounded—Tom knew only my first name. Maybe he did speak to the police, good citizen that he was, but nothing came of it—they were inundated with calls and letters, all kinds of people claiming responsibility or some private knowledge. My duffel was just an ordinary duffel, and it had no identifying feature. The things inside: clothes, a book about the Green Knight. My tube of Merle Norman. The possessions of a child pretending at an adult's accrual. And of course the girls probably had gone through it, tossing the useless book, keeping the clothes.

I had told many lies, but this one colonized a bigger silence. I thought of telling Tamar. Telling my father. But then I'd picture Suzanne, imagine her picking at a fingernail, the sudden cut of her gaze turning to me. I didn't say anything to anyone.

The fear that followed the wake of the murders is not hard to call up. I was barely alone the week before boarding school, trailing Tamar and my father from room to room, glancing out windows for the black bus. Awake all night, as if my labored vigil would protect us, my hours of suffering a one-to-one offering. It seemed unbelievable that Tamar or my father didn't notice how pale I was, how suddenly desperate for their company. They expected life would march on. Things had to be done, and I got shunted along their logistics with the numbness that had taken the place of whatever had made me Evie. My love of cinnamon hard candies, what I dreamed—that had all been exchanged for this new self, the changeling who nodded when spoken to and rinsed and dried the dinner plates, hands reddening in the hot water.

I had to pack up my room at my mother's house before I went to boarding school. My mother had ordered me the Catalina uniform—I found two navy skirts and a middy blouse folded on my bed, the fabric stinking of industrial cleaner, like rental tablecloths. I didn't bother to try on the clothes, shoving them into a suitcase on top of tennis shoes. I didn't know what else to pack, and it didn't seem to matter. I stared at the room in a trance. All my once beloved things—a vinyl diary, a birthstone charm, a book of pencil drawings—seemed valueless and defunct, drained of an animating force. It was impossible to picture what type of girl would ever have liked those things. Ever worn a charm around her wrist or written accounts of her day.

“You need a bigger suitcase?” my mother said from my doorway, startling me. Her face looked rumpled, and I could smell how much she'd been smoking. “You can take my red one, if you want.”

I thought that she'd notice the change in me even if Tamar or my father couldn't. The baby fat in my face disappeared, a hard scrape to my features. But she hadn't mentioned anything.

“This is fine,” I said.

My mother paused, surveying my room. The mostly empty suitcase. “The uniform fits?” she asked.

I hadn't even tried it on, but I nodded, wrung into a new acquiescence.

“Good, good.” When she smiled, her lips cracked and I was suddenly overcome.

I was shoving books into the closet when I found two milky Polaroids, hidden under a stack of old magazines. The sudden presence of Suzanne in my room: her hot feral smile, the pudge of her breasts. I could call up disgust for her, hopped up on Dexedrine and sweating from the effort of butchery, and at the same time be pulled in by a helpless drift—here was Suzanne. I should get rid of the photo, I knew, the image already charged with the guilty air of evidence. But I couldn't. I turned the picture over, burying it in a book I'd never read again. The second photo was of the smeary back of someone's head, turning away, and I stared at the image for a long moment before I realized the person was me.

S
ASHA AND
J
ULIAN AND
Z
AV
left early, and then I was alone. The house looked as it had always looked. Only the bed in the other room, the sheets scrabbled and smelling of sex, indicated anyone else had ever been here. I would wash the sheets in the machine in the garage. Fold and slot them on the closet shelves, sweep the room back to its previous blankness.

I walked along the cold sand that afternoon, stippled with broken bits of shell, the shifting holes where sand crabs burrowed. I liked the rush of wind in my ears. The wind drove people off—students from the junior college yelping while their boyfriends chased down the ripple of a blanket. Families finally giving up and heading toward their cars, toting folding chairs, the poky splay of a cheap kite, already broken. I was wearing two sweatshirts and the bulk made me feel protected, my movements slower. Every couple of feet, I'd come across the giant, ropy seaweed, tangled and thick as a fireman's hose. The purging of an alien species, seemingly not of this world. It was kelp, someone had told me, bull kelp. Knowing its name didn't make it any less strange.

Sasha had barely said goodbye. Burrowing into Julian's side, her face set like a preventative against my pity. She had already absented herself, I knew, gone to that other place in her mind where Julian was sweet and kind and life was fun, or if it wasn't fun, it was
interesting,
and wasn't that valuable, didn't that mean something? I tried to smile at her, to speed her a message on an invisible thread. But it had never been me she wanted.

The fog had been denser in Carmel, descending over the campus of my boarding school like a blizzard. The spire of the chapel, the nearby sea. I had started school that September, just as I was supposed to. Carmel was an old-fashioned place, and my classmates seemed much younger than they were. My roommate with her collection of mohair sweaters arranged by color. The dormitory walls softened with tapestries, the after-curfew creeping. The Tuck Shop, run by seniors, which sold chips and soda and candy, and how all the girls acted like this was the height of sophistication and freedom, being allowed to eat in the Tuck Shop from nine to eleven thirty on weekends. For all their talk, their bluster and crates of records, my classmates seemed childish, even the ones from New York. Occasionally, when the fog obscured the spires of the chapel, some girls could no longer orient themselves and got lost.

For the first few weeks, I watched the girls, shouting to one another across the quad, their backpacks turtled on their backs or slung from their hands. They seemed to move through glass, like the well-fed and well-loved scamps of detective series, who tied ribbons around their ponytails and wore gingham shirts on weekends. They wrote letters home and spoke of beloved kittens and worshipful younger sisters. The common rooms were the domain of slippers and housecoats, girls who ate Charleston Chews cold from miniature refrigerators and huddled by the television until they seemed to have psychologically absorbed the cathode rays. Someone's boyfriend died in a rock-climbing accident in Switzerland: everyone gathered around her, on fire with tragedy. Their dramatic shows of support underpinned with jealousy—bad luck was rare enough to be glamorous.

I worried I was marked. A fearful undercurrent made visible. But the structure of the school—its particularities, its almost municipal quality—seemed to cut through the dim. To my surprise, I made friends. A girl in my poetry class. My roommate, Jessamine. My dread appeared to others as a rarefied air, my isolation the isolation of weary experience.

Jessamine was from a cattle town near Oregon. Her older brother sent her comic books where female superheroes burst out of their costumes and had sex with octopuses or cartoon dogs. He got them from a friend in Mexico, Jessamine said, and she liked the silly violence, reading them with her head hung over the side of the bed.

“This one's nuts,” she'd snort, tossing a comic to me. I'd try to hide a vague queasiness incited by the starbursting blood and heaving breasts.

“I'm on a diet where I just share all my food,” Jessamine had explained, giving me one of the Mallomars she kept in her desk drawer. “I used to throw half of everything away, but then the dorms got a mice infestation and I couldn't.”

She reminded me of Connie, the same shy way she plucked her shirt away from her belly. Connie, who'd be at the high school in Petaluma. Crossing the low steps, eating lunch at the splintered picnic tables. I had no idea how to think of her anymore.

Jessamine was hungry for my stories of home, imagining I lived in the shadow of the Hollywood sign. In a house the sherbet pink of California money, a gardener sweeping the tennis court. It didn't matter that I was from a dairy town and told her so: other facts were bigger, like who my grandmother had been. The assumptions Jessamine made about the source of my silence at the beginning of the year, all of it—I let myself step into the outline. I talked about a boyfriend, just one in a series of many. “He was famous,” I said. “I can't say who. But I lived with him for a while. His dick was purple,” I said, snorting, and Jessamine laughed, too. Casting a look in my direction all wrapped up in jealousy and wonder. The way I had looked at Suzanne, maybe, and how easy it was to keep up a steady stream of stories, a wishful narrative that borrowed the best of the ranch and folded it into a new shape, like origami. A world where everything turned out as I'd wanted.

I took French class from a pretty, newly engaged teacher who let the popular girls try on her engagement ring. I took art class from Miss Cooke, earnest with first-job anxiety. The line of makeup I could sometimes see along her jaw made me pity her, though she tried to be kind to me. She didn't comment when she noticed me staring into space or resting my head on my folded arms. Once she took me off campus for malteds and a hot dog that tasted of warm water. She told me how she had moved from New York to take her job, how the city asphalt would reflect sheets of sun, how her neighbor's dog shit all over the apartment stairs, how she'd gone a little crazy.

“I would eat just the corners of my roommate's food. Then it would all be gone, and I would get sick.” Miss Cooke's glasses pinched her eyes. “I've never felt so sad, and there was no real reason for it, you know?”

She waited, obviously for me to match the story with one of my own. Expecting a sad, manageable tale of the defection of a hometown boyfriend or a mother in the hospital, the cruel whispers of a bitchy roommate. A situation she could make heroic sense of for me, cast in older and wiser perspective. The thought of actually telling Miss Cooke the truth made my mouth tighten with unreal hilarity. She knew about the still-unsolved murders—everyone did. People locked doors and installed dead bolts, bought guard dogs at a markup. The desperate police got nothing from Mitch, who had fled in fear to the South of France, though his house wouldn't be razed until the following year. Pilgrims had started driving past the gate, hoping to pick up horror like a vapor in the air. Idling in their cars until weary neighbors shooed them off. In his absence, detectives were following leads from drug dealers and schizophrenics, bored housewives. Even enlisting a psychic to walk the rooms of Mitch's house, straining to pick up vibes.

“The killer is a lonely, middle-aged man,” I'd heard the psychic say on a call-in show. “He was punished as a youth for something he hadn't done. I'm getting the letter
K.
I'm getting the town Vallejo.”

Even if Miss Cooke would believe me, what would I tell her? That I had not slept well since August because I'd been too afraid of the unmonitored territory of dreams? That I woke certain that Russell was in the room—taking soggy gasps for breath, the still air like a hand over my mouth? That the cringe of contagion was on me: there was some concurrent realm where that night had not happened, where I insisted Suzanne leave the ranch. Where the blond woman and her teddy-bear son were pushing a cart down a grocery store aisle, planning a Sunday dinner, snippy and tired. Where Gwen was wrapping her damp hair in a towel, smoothing lotion on her legs. Scotty clearing the hot tub filters of debris, the silent arc of the sprinkler, a song floating into the yard from a nearby radio.

The letters I wrote my mother were willful acts of theater, at first. Then true enough.

Class was interesting.

I had friends.

Next week we would go to the aquarium and watch the jellyfish gape and parry in their illuminated tanks, suspended in the water like delicate handkerchiefs.

By the time I'd walked the farthest spit of land, the wind had picked up. The beach empty, all the picnickers and dog walkers gone. I stepped my way over the boulders, heading back to the main stretch of sand. Following the line between cliff and wave. I'd done this walk many times. I wondered how far Sasha and Julian and Zav had gotten by then. Probably still an hour from L.A. Without having to think about it, I knew Julian and Zav were sitting in the front seats and Sasha was in the back. I could imagine her leaning forward from time to time, asking for a joke to be repeated or pointing out some funny road sign. Trying to campaign for her own existence, before finally giving up and lying back on the seat. Letting their conversation thicken into meaningless noise while she watched the road, the passing orchards. The branches flashing with the silver ties that kept away birds.

I was passing by the common room with Jessamine, on our way to the Tuck Shop, when a girl called, “Your sister's looking for you downstairs.” I didn't look up; she couldn't be talking to me. But she was. It took me a moment to understand what might be happening.

Jessamine seemed hurt. “I didn't know you had a sister.”

I suppose I had known Suzanne would come for me.

The cottony numbness I occupied at school wasn't unpleasant, in the same way a limb falling asleep isn't unpleasant. Until that arm or leg wakes up. Then the prickles come, the sting of return—seeing Suzanne leaning in the shade of the dorm entrance. Her hair uncombed, her lips bristling—her presence knocked the plates of time ajar.

Everything was returned to me. My heart strobed, helpless, with the tinny cut of fear. But what could Suzanne do? It was daytime, the school filled with witnesses. I watched her notice the fuss of landscaping, teachers on their way to tutoring appointments, girls crossing the quad with tennis bags and chocolate milk on their breath, walking proof of the efforts of unseen mothers. There was a curious, animal distance in Suzanne's face, a measurement of the uncanny place she'd found herself.

She straightened when I approached. “Look at you,” she said. “All clean and scrubbed.” I saw a new harshness in her face: a blood blister under a fingernail.

I didn't say anything. I couldn't. I kept touching the ends of my hair. It was shorter—Jessamine had cut it in the bathroom, squinting at a how-to article in a magazine.

“You look happy to see me,” Suzanne said. Smiling. I smiled back, but it was hollow. That seemed, obliquely, to please Suzanne. My fear.

I knew I should do something—we kept standing under the awning, increasing the chance someone would stop to ask me a question or introduce herself to my sister. But I couldn't make myself move. Russell and the others couldn't be very far away—were they watching me? The windows of the buildings seemed alive, my mind flashing to snipers and Russell's long stare.

“Show me your room,” Suzanne announced. “I want to see.”

The room was empty, Jessamine still at the Tuck Shop, and Suzanne pushed past me and through the doorway before I could stop her.

“Just lovely,” she trilled in a fake English accent. She sat down on Jessamine's bed. Bouncing up and down. Looking at the taped-up poster of a Hawaiian landscape, the unreal ocean and sky sandwiching a sugary rib of beach. A set of the
World Book
Jessamine had never opened, a gift from her father. Jessamine kept a stack of letters in a carved wooden box and Suzanne immediately lifted the lid, sifting through. “Jessamine Singer,” she read off an envelope. “Jessamine,” she repeated. She let the lid bang shut and got to her feet. “So this one's your bed.” She stirred my blanket with a mocking hand. My stomach tilted, a picture of us in Mitch's sheets. Hair sticking to her forehead and neck.

“You like it here?”

“It's okay.” I was still in the doorway.

“Okay,” Suzanne said, smiling. “Evie says the school is just okay.”

I kept watching her hands. Wondering what they'd done exactly, as if the percentage mattered. She tracked my glance: she must have known what I was thinking. She got abruptly to her feet.

“Now I get to show you something,” Suzanne said.

The bus was parked on a side street, just outside the school's gate. I could see the jostle of figures inside the bus. Russell and whoever was still around—I assumed everyone. They'd painted over the hood. But everything else was the same. The bus beastly and indestructible. My sudden certainty: they would surround me. Back me into a corner.

If anyone had seen us standing there on the slope, we would have looked like friends. Chatting in the Saturday air, my hands in my pockets, Suzanne shading her eyes.

“We're going to the desert for a while,” Suzanne announced, watching the flurry that must have been visible on my face. I felt the meager borders of my own life: a meeting that night for the French Club—Madame Guevel had promised butter tarts. The musty weed Jessamine wanted to smoke after curfew. Even knowing what I knew, did a part of me want to leave? Suzanne's dank breath and her cool hands. Sleeping on the ground, chewing nettle leaves to moisten our throats.

“He's not mad at you,” she said. Keeping a steady simmer of eye contact. “He knows you wouldn't say anything.”