Little Girls(70)

Laurie went over to one of the benches and sat down. Absently, she wished she’d possessed the foresight to bring a book, as she had done in the days of her pregnancy with Susan when she would go down to the neighborhood parks to watch as the children congregated at playgrounds and flocked to ball fields and cul-de-sacs like creatures sharing a single brain. Liz Rosewood had mentioned that there weren’t many kids in town for Abigail to play with. To Laurie, it seemed like there were plenty of kids around. They were like stunted wild men rooting through the debris of some fallen civilization. Maybe they just don’t want to play with Abigail Evans.

This scenario was so much like what she had done during her pregnancy that it was nearly like déjà vu. Yet she thought she was able to see her motivations more clearly now, without the lies she had told herself early on. Had it been fear of motherhood that had caused her to seek unspoken counsel from the women on the playground and the consolation of the church on King Street, or had she feared something else, something darker? Children change, she knew. Girls change. It had been Sadie who had taught her that lesson, and that lesson had been at the heart of it. Children were the problem, little girls were what terrified her. They constantly stared with the slack, insensate faces of dullards. Dried food on their cheeks and mouths, mealy crust in their eyes, rogue bulbs of snot yo-yoing in and out of narrow little nostrils, bright orange vegetation sprouting sporelike from ear canals.... It was children she feared, with their thin, probing paws, fingernails ground to nubby scales tinged in dried blood. The notion of motherhood had left her feeling helpless and imprisoned, like a chunk of pineapple suspended in Jell-O.

Had she been frightened for Susan . . . or frightened of her? Scared of her potential, of what she could become?

She was loathe to admit this to herself now, as if the revelation siphoned something vital from her relationship with her daughter, her beautiful daughter. But there could be no denying it. The horrible things Sadie had done to her made her fearful of the dark and hidden potential within her own daughter.

I won’t let that happen to her.

It was around three in the afternoon when a soccer ball rolled over near Laurie’s bench. A little girl of about seven or eight chased after it, little auburn pigtails bouncing, her shirt decorated with smiling Elmo faces. The girl’s eyes were bright as headlamps and she had a pointy little tongue cocked in one corner of her mouth.

“Hello,” Laurie said to the girl as she watched her gather up the soccer ball. “What’s your name?”

“Meagan.”

“Hi. I’m Laurie. I like your shirt.”

“Elmo,” said Meagan.

“Is your mother here?”

“Elmo. Elmo.” The girl pointed to the gaggle of women by the picnic tables. “Over there.” Meagan had a tough time pronouncing the r’s.

“Do you know a girl named Abigail Evans? She lives just down the street here.”

Clutching the soccer ball to her chest, Meagan shook her head. A snail-trail leaked out of her right nostril and that pointy little tongue darted up and lapped at it, much like a frog would slurp up a particularly tasty dragonfly.

“Have you ever heard of her?” Laurie asked.

“I have to go now.”

“What about your friends?”

“Good-bye,” said Meagan. She spun around and ran back toward her friends, her stubby little legs pumping furiously.

Laurie looked up and saw that none of the women by the picnic tables were paying her any attention. If I were a man, they would notice. She got up to head back home. It had been her intention to come down here and ask a few of the neighborhood kids about Abigail. Instead, she had lost her nerve after speaking with Meagan, realizing how ludicrous it all was, and she had wound up wasting two hours on a park bench. At least the weather held up.

Instead of going back to the house right away, she walked around the swings and seesaws and over to a woodchip pathway that wound around the circumference of the park. Two joggers in brightly colored spandex ran past her. At the farthest point of the playground area, the path diverged, one pathway continuing back around to complete the circle while the divergent path graduated up the slight hill toward the wrought-iron fence of the cemetery. It was the cemetery on Howard Avenue, visible now only because the neighborhood had conspired to raze this section of the woods and build a playground. As a child, she had known of the cemetery, but hadn’t realized it had been just on the other side of the street she’d lived on. Roads made things seem farther away than they actually were.

She expected to find the cemetery gates locked, but they weren’t. The footpath continued onto the cemetery grounds and Laurie followed it. A single glance at the nearest headstones informed her that this was the newer section of the cemetery. The stones were smoothly polished, low to the ground, and shaped like the type of nameplate you might find on a banker’s desk. The dates on some of the graves were as recent as this year.

She was careful crossing over the plots toward the older section of the graveyard. There had been a few people back at the newer section—mostly children who had gotten bored playing on the swings and now searched for more stimulating adventures—but the older section of the cemetery was a ghost town. Here, the headstones were as gray and craggy as rotting teeth, disconsolate beneath the shade of stately pines, elms, and maples. Birds tittered and a lone squirrel loped from headstone to headstone a few rows away, seemingly oblivious to her presence.