Spotting Eli, Sean fumbled with his keys, which fell onto the street, then down the storm drain.
“You never were very fast,” Eli said, slowing down to a stride. “You just knew how to hook and not get caught.”
* * *
“I don’t see what’s funny about it,” Lara Bishop said, wiping a slick of cream from the corner of her mouth.
“No, it’s not funny,” Tom said. “I just haven’t seen a grown-up drink a white Russian since 1978. I think that was what my dad used to seduce the neighbor women.”
“Well,” Lara said, tilting her glass side to side, “I haven’t had anything to drink in so long, I figured it’d be best to have something I’d never want two of.”
“I know what you mean,” Tom said.
“But it turns out,” she continued, that whisper of a smile, “I was wrong.”
Tom smiled, waving for the bartender. “Two more, please?”
He tried not to let his eyes fix on his phone, silent and gleaming on the bar top.
“Bad taste in drinks, bad taste in men,” she said, winking.
“Bottoms up,” Tom said, clinking his glass with hers.
They finished just as the second round arrived.
“So,” Lara said, “did you stay till the bitter end?”
One of them had to bring it up eventually, though he was sorry for it. And then felt guilty for feeling sorry for it.
“Long past when I should have,” he said, flicking his phone on the bar, like the pointer on a board game. Like spin the bottle.
“I figured I’d duck out,” she said, looking at her own phone, “before Goody Osbourne took the stand.”
Tom smiled, surprised. He wasn’t sure what to say.
“And how’s Deenie doing?”
“Well,” Tom said, then added, “under the circumstances.” Eyes back on his phone, he said, “Georgia would kill me if she knew I was here.”
“Well,” Lara said, tilting her head and leaning back a little. “She’s not here, is she?”
“She is definitely not here,” Tom admitted.
“Besides, look at me.”
Somehow, he found himself taking it literally, his eyes resting on hers, her fingers touching her necklace delicately. In the dim bar light, he couldn’t see the scar, but he could feel it. It was an odd sensation he couldn’t quite name.
“And, anyway,” she said, “it’s good they’re together.”
“Who?”
“The girls. Gabby had me drop her at your place on the way to the meeting. I couldn’t leave her at the house alone.” She looked at him. “Didn’t you know?”
“No,” Tom said, a little embarrassed but also relieved for Deenie. “So.”
And her smile, under the light of the peeling Tiffany, was so warm, so inviting.
“So,” she repeated.
* * *
“So, tell me. Are you one of the girls?”
The woman was gaping at Deenie from under her trickling rain hat.
Deenie felt her head jerk. “No. No, I’m not.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure,” Deenie said, wiping the mist from her eyes.
And it was then that she finally recognized the woman.
She had seen her many times at the public library, sitting in the stacks. Kids used to make fun of her, the way she’d tear off scraps of pink Post-its and mark pages of books no one had looked in for years.
Then one day she saw Jaymie Hurwich talking to the woman and someone told her it was Jaymie’s mom, which couldn’t be true, because Jaymie’s mom lived in Florida, everyone knew. No one had ever seen her.
She was just piecing this all together when it began.
Tire thuds, a swirl of headlights from opposite directions, the long coil of reporters tightening around the neck of the hospital’s stone steps.
With alarming swiftness, the woman fled Deenie’s side, dashing across the parking lot, the Tupperware cradled in front of her, pressed against her slicker.
But Deenie didn’t move.
Moving seemed unsafe, with her head muddled and her throat plugged with humid air and with whatever it was in that container, which felt, suddenly and powerfully, like the thing inside her.
A thing twitching, haired, squirming, fatal.
Before she could let those thoughts take hold, she heard a crackle of static in the distance, saw the pair of security guards bolting toward the front of the hospital, radios to their mouths.
Her eyes returned to the employee entrance. Unmanned.
It felt like it can in a dream sometimes, where you know the door is there just for you. Maybe it wasn’t even there until you needed it.
Once inside, the doors shushing behind her, Deenie found herself in some white corner of the hospital she didn’t know.
Briskly, she walked through a series of random rooms, one with laundry bins, another with fleets of flower vases on long racks, a tangle of brittle petals in each.
Soon enough she found the Critical Care sign, its long red arrow stretched along the wall.
She walked with purpose, head down, and it was easy because there were jumbles of people everywhere, everything rolling, the clicking casters of IV stands, gurneys, trolleys.
Once, she caught sight of a girl she recognized, a freshman abandoned in a wheelchair, her head dropping to her chest then jerking up again.
The girl’s hand was in her mouth, like she was trying to swallow her fist. Lise always could do it, her bones soft like a baby’s.
Another corner and everything started to look familiar. The cartoon Band-Aid figure on the bulletin board, the big red lips on the Shhh…Silent Hospitals Help Healing sign. And posters with dire warnings.
It May Be a Spider Bite.
Would You Put Her at Risk?
You Don’t Have to Be Next.
All the posters she must have passed on Tuesday without noticing. Now they felt pointed, urgent, damning.
Turning the last corner, she heard the radio first.
Another security guard, his back to Deenie, stood at the nurses’ station talking to a woman with hair hoisted back into a large clip, hand clenched at her side, her face kneaded red.
It was Mrs. Daniels, forty feet away, and no place to hide.
Head turning slightly, her eyes rested directly on Deenie.
For a split second, Deenie thought the guard would turn his head to follow Mrs. Daniels’s gaze.
But then Mrs. Daniels’s mouth opened, and she was saying something to him.
The guard started nodding.
And Mrs. Daniels kept talking, sliding her phone into the pocket of her coat.
It was like she knew Deenie was there.
Knew and was letting it happen.
“You can’t!”
It was Lise’s grandmother, standing in front of a room, an empty plastic water bottle clutched to her chest.
The collar of her shirt was gray, her neat white hair now flat like a wet otter’s. Deenie wondered if she had even left the hospital since Tuesday. Her eyes, her skin had the look of someone who had not seen the sun in a long time.
“You can’t!” she said again.
Deenie didn’t say anything, only nodded, walking past her, into the blue swallow of the room.
* * *
The swaying way she’d been sitting, the bloom on her face, it had been Tom’s idea to make sure Lara got home safely, driving behind her through the black fen of Binnorie Woods.
Walking her to her front door, he’d hit his head on a porch eave, and now he was on her living-room sofa, ice pack to his forehead, water tickling his face.
“But Gabby’s dad liked to drink it with peppermint,” Lara said, grabbing for a sofa cushion. “Rumple Minze. Which isn’t a white Russian anymore. Do you know what it is? A cocaine lady.”
“Never a subtle fellow, that ex of yours.”
Leaning back, she looked at him, the whisper of a smile amplifying.
“You know, he alway
s liked you.”
“Charlie?”
As surprised as he was to find himself sitting, so closely, with Lara Bishop on her sofa in her cozy matchbox of a house, he was even more surprised to watch as, scar blazing up her neck, she began reminiscing about the man who’d put it there.
“Yeah.” Then she smiled a little, as if remembering something. Shook her head. “But he always thought you were a secret tomcat.”
“What?”
“Well, he said it wouldn’t surprise him. He saw you once with somebody. Or something.”
“No,” Tom said, setting the ice pack down. “He didn’t.”
She looked at him.
“But that was the thing about him,” she said, after a pause. “That was always the thing.”
He had no idea what she meant, but he was glad she’d changed the subject.
She tucked her legs under herself, one shoe falling to the floor, her face newly grave.
“You think I’m a terrible mother, right?” she said.
“God, no,” he blurted. “What are you talking about?”
“It’s not that I’m not terrified,” she said. “Just not about those things.”
“I know,” he said, though again he wasn’t sure he did.
“At the hospital, Gabby said they kept asking her about drugs,” Lara said, “and she said, ‘Mom, like I would ever do that stuff.’ I was so relieved I almost burst into tears.” She paused. “I mean, I loved drugs at her age.”
She looked at him expectantly, but his thoughts had slingshotted. “Who asked her about drugs? The doctors? Lara, did the police talk to her?”
Lara nodded. “There was someone from the police there. What did they call her? Public health and safety liaison? But the girls just kept coming in. The looks on their faces.”
His thoughts blurred back to earlier in the day, to watching the girls in line at the nurse’s office. The eerie feeling of something unstoppable, feeding on itself.
“She hated being back in that hospital. All this is making her crazy. I heard her up all night, pacing the house.”
“I’m sure it’s brought back a lot of bad stuff.”
“It’s funny,” she said, “when you think there’s a whole other kid you’d have had if you hadn’t done all the things you did to them.”
“But you didn’t do anything to her,” Tom said, leaning forward. “It wasn’t you.”
She smiled, a smile filled with things he couldn’t hold on to.
“You’ve protected her, you…” he started, but the words felt too heavy in his mouth and she didn’t seem to be listening exactly, reaching down to the floor to seize the bottle of whatever they were drinking.
He couldn’t help but notice the way her shirt pulled, the delicate skin there, a bristle of black lace.
“You know what else is funny?” she said, pouring a little into her glass. “Last week I was worried about what she was up to with boys. Doesn’t that seem silly now?”
“No. That is something that never feels silly.”
She covered her face, embarrassed. “Can I tell you? I found something on her phone.”
He felt himself leaning forward.
“I can’t believe I’m telling you.”
“What?” he said. “Sext—sexts?” The word fumbled from his mouth and she laughed, poking him with her bare foot.
It shouldn’t have been funny, but it was because it didn’t feel remotely possible. Gabby with her serious face and her cool-girl acumen, her silver-sprayed cello case and her meant-for-college-guys gravitas.
“Sort of,” she said, looking at him from behind the hand still covering her blushing face. “A picture. Of her in her underwear.”
Tom felt himself go red now. “Well, girls, they…”
“I never saw such lingerie. The most alarming purple thong. You couldn’t see her face, so I told myself, That’s not her. But if it wasn’t her, why was it on her phone?”
“I don’t know,” Tom said, and he couldn’t quite separate out all the complicated feelings, the uncomfortable idea of Gabby in a thong, even the word thong in the context of a friend of his daughter’s.
And then here, Lara Bishop, the top button of her blouse having slid open and the way her body kept squirming girlishly and the way her face and neck bloomed with drunkenness. The way it made that scar look even darker, more striking, a red plume, and he wanted more than anything to touch it.
His head thick and mazy with whiskey and liquors unknown, he couldn’t stop himself, reaching toward her. She nearly jumped but didn’t stop him, her eyes wide and puzzled and not stopping him.
He put his fingers to it, the scar. Touched the soft fold, which felt warm, like a pulse point, like he was somehow touching her heart, or his.
“I’m sorry,” he said, starting to pull his hand back but then feeling her hand grip his wrist, holding it in place.
There was a long, puzzling moment when neither spoke.
“Everyone’s sorry,” she said, smiling faintly. “The whole world’s sorry.”
And he could feel the goose bumps on her skin and wondered when was the last time he’d felt that.
Charlie Bishop had been right about something. Tom had had chances, many chances. There were women, other teachers, even a friend of Georgia’s who sometimes called after she’d been drinking, told him how lonely she was and that she knew he was too. But he’d never done anything about it.
Hell, he’d had a hundred chances, but he’d never done what Georgia had done. Even though he bet he’d had twice the opportunity.
A few kisses, sure. One with the guidance counselor behind the sugar maple at the faculty picnic, high on foamy keg beer. Five years later, he could still taste the caramel malt on her tongue.
But he’d always stopped himself, and Georgia hadn’t. She just did what she wanted and now she treated him, all of them, like they were the blight. That house, its residents, they were the thing. The affliction. The scourge.
“Your eyes,” Lara Bishop was saying to him, her skin like a living thing, “are so sad.”
* * *
It was like a doll, a rubber doll, or a vinyl one puffed with air.
Deenie couldn’t see most of Lise’s face, directed toward the window.
Only the round slope of the cheek.
A bulbous head, the sloping brow of a baby or a cartoon character.
Deep down, she must have thought Lise would look like Lise again, or at least like the girl from the other day everyone said was Lise. The Lise with the dent in the center of her forehead.
But this wasn’t either girl, or any girl.
She moved closer, because she could. Because this wasn’t Lise. Clearly Lise had been moved to another room, or had left the hospital entirely. And been replaced with this.
Or maybe was in the bathroom, in her monkey pajamas, and would pop out any second and say, Here I am, Deenie. Here I am.
Like her outgoing voice-mail message:
“It’s Lise!…Leave me a message or I’ll die!”
As it was, without seeing her face, without Lise’s strawberry-cream skin and marble-blue eyes and the flash of her teeth laughing—well, it looked less like Lise than anyone, or anything, in the world.
Except.
Except, getting closer, there was the scent of something. Beneath the tubes and wires and the pulp of her ruined face, she caught a scent as distinctive as a thumbprint. A smell of Lise that Deenie couldn’t name or define but that was Lise as sure as that butter curl of an ear.
“Lise,” Deenie heard herself crying out.
And slowly, slowly, she made her way around the bed.
If I can see her face, she thought, I will know. I will know something.
The head so round and enormous, purpled through like the largest birthmark ever, spreading from the center of her face up to her scalp.
The scalp half shorn, tiny baby hairs like soft chick feathers blowing, the gusting air from all the machines.
And, fi
nally, reaching the far side of the bed, too dark to see anything at first, but then something glowing there.
Lise’s eyes, open.
Open and wandering, like those plastic wiggly eyes on puppets.
Her mouth a wet rag. A tube snaking in and a violet lattice around it and the puff of her lower cheeks, and it was like something was inside the cavity. Or many things, packed tightly there, like a toy stuffed with sawdust.
It reminded Deenie of the girl Skye had told them about.
The one with the mouth filled with cinders, eggshell pieces, the tiny bones of animals. The things no one would want but that were inside of her.
That girl must have swallowed them, all of them, Deenie realized, her head light with the revelation. She’d swallowed all of them. And now they were hers.
Deenie heard a noise, a loud noise, a loud oooh, which had come from her own mouth, from somewhere inside her.
Because there was Lise, one wet eye suddenly on Deenie, its lid pitching higher, as if stuck there.
And Deenie’s own mouth opening, as if a cinder would fall from it, moss clumps, leaf smut, grass blades powdered with spores.
“I didn’t mean to, Lise,” she said. “Don’t be angry. I didn’t mean it.”
* * *
“And you think it was me?” Sean said, his face grimy from bending over the storm drain, holding up his phone for the light. “With Lise Daniels?”
“I don’t know,” Eli said, sitting on the curb. “We look a little alike, I guess. And you asked me about her once.”
“Why do you care?” Sean said, sitting beside Eli, kicking his car tire ruefully.
“If people think it was me with her…” But Eli didn’t know how to finish the sentence. The truth was, he wasn’t sure why he cared, but the knot in his chest felt tighter and tighter. The sense he was circling something, drilling in.
Sean sighed, leaning back, his elbows on the sidewalk.
“We didn’t…we were just messing around. We didn’t fuck.”
Eli nodded. He couldn’t say he’d never thought of Lise like that. But he’d always pushed it away. There were other girls. Girls his sister didn’t share clothes with, tell secrets to, keep secrets for.