Little Girls(27)

The final box, which was the largest of all the boxes, contained two three-ring binders. The first was full of her father’s paperwork, including the deed to the house, his medical information, bank records, a copy of his will, and various similar documents. The second binder was slimmer than the first and contained grainy photographs as well as a few more recent ones of Susan when she was younger. The photos of Susan were still in the envelopes in which Laurie had mailed them. The older photographs were housed in protective plastic sleeves held in place by the binder rings. She flipped through a number of them. The only people recognizable in any of them were her parents and herself as a little girl. And there were only a slim few of those. One of the photos was of a family trip they had taken to Ocean City one summer. The photo showed the three of them at the cusp of the ocean, smiling widely for the stranger whom her father had enlisted to take the picture. Laurie recalled being worried that the stranger would run off with her father’s camera, but he hadn’t. In the picture, her parents looked lively and healthy and happy. It was not how she remembered them at all.

The last few pages of the album were comprised mostly of photos of strangers. Some were of men working at the old steel mill. Others were of various automobiles. A few strange faces flashed smiles at her. Other photos were more esoteric—a long stretch of blacktop fading to a point at the horizon; an unidentifiable young girl smiling as she leaned out from beneath the shadow of an overpass; two dogs on their hind legs engaged in a fight in a grassy field; several photos of the mill’s stately smokestacks. The next few pages were empty, the protective plastic sleeves holding no photos. She flipped past them to the back of the album. The final few photos were of Laurie, when she had been about Susan’s age. There were no dates printed on the backs of the photographs, but Laurie surmised it was the year before her parents’ separation.

She replaced the photograph binder back in the box, then went upstairs with the keys she had found in the first box. One by one, she tried them on the padlock on the door that led up to the belvedere. None of them was the right key. Frustrated, she made a mental note to call Dora and then went into the bedrooms where she sifted through the drawers of the nightstands and dressers. Most of the items she came across were articles of clothing. Curiously, the top drawer of the nightstand beside her father’s bed contained a silver crucifix and a Bible. The crucifix was perhaps five inches long and it felt weighty and substantial in Laurie’s hand. She had never known her father to be a religious man, and the discovery of the items right there beside the old man’s bed surprised her. She supposed some people became more easily accepting of a higher power the closer they got to death. Wasn’t that why churches were mostly filled with the elderly? Did it become easier to believe in God the older you got or were you just hedging your bets? She set the crucifix on the nightstand, glad to be rid of it.

She proceeded to dump the clothing out onto the floors of the various rooms and then went back downstairs to retrieve a box of trash bags from the kitchen. On her way through the parlor, she found Ted on the sofa, a pen propped in the corner of his mouth, a notebook in his lap. There was the thick John Fish paperback on the table in front of him, the pages dog-eared and tabbed with countless yellow Post-it notes and index cards. She knew he was having a tough time of it. Ted was a true artist at heart, which meant he required constant encouragement and coddling. She had done her best back in Hartford, often to the detriment of her own artistic pursuits, but she just didn’t have it in her at the moment. When he looked up at her despondently, the pen now clutched between his teeth, she could offer him only the most rudimentary nod of consolation. She felt bad about it a second later, but her mind was too overcome by all that now surrounded her to indulge her husband’s practiced sense of humility.

There were two unopened boxes of Glad trash bags beneath the kitchen sink. She took out one box and was about to head back upstairs when she paused midway across the kitchen. Out the bay windows, the day was beginning to grow old. The color of the lawn had deepened, as had the apparent depth of its incline. The lush richness had been drained from the trees. Sodium lights at the far side of the river caused the horizon to glow a vaporous and inhospitable orange.

Two girls were kneeling in the yard, their heads bowed close together as if they were whispering secrets to each other. One was Susan, dressed in one of her long-sleeved cotton tops, her dark-skinned legs folded up under her. She had her dark brown hair pulled back into a stunted little ponytail that curled like a comma from the back of her head. The other girl’s identity remained a mystery, up until Laurie approached the bay windows for a better look.

It was the girl she had seen running across the yard yesterday, the one who had watched her from behind a stand of saplings while Laurie had been examining the remains of the old greenhouse. The girl whom she had thought to be a ghost. She knew this strictly by the girl’s clothes, which seemed outdated, unseasonable, and the wrong size. From her angle at the window, Laurie could not make out the girl’s face.

Laurie backed away from the windows, setting the box of Glad trash bags on the kitchen table. Her feet carried her over to the screen door that led out onto the square slabs of concrete at the back of the house. A chill in the air caused gooseflesh to rise up on her arms. She thought it was awfully cold weather for the beginning of summer. At the center of the yard, the two girls remained with their heads bowed toward one another. Susan appeared to speak while the other girl listened. Then the other girl spoke while Susan cocked her head to one side like an inquisitive dog. Laurie could hear none of what they said. The other girl was dressed improbably in a muted yellow frock with puffy sleeves that reminded Laurie of the title character from Alice in Wonderland. The frock was too big for her and drooped down around the girl’s pale, narrow shoulders, exposing the smooth white rim of her collarbone. The girl’s hair was a striking auburn color, made even more remarkable in the diminishing sunlight, and spilled in waves down her back. The girl’s feet were bare and dirty.