Little Girls(71)

It took her about fifteen minutes to locate the stone. It was a simple marble marker wedged between two larger headstones on a parcel of ground that, judging by the height of the weeds, probably hadn’t been attended to since last fall. Dead brown leaves were bunched at its base and there was the milky spatter of dried bird shit on the marker’s face. Still, she could make out Sadie’s name along with the dates of her birth and her death. There was no kitschy epitaph, no saccharine poetry—just the name and the dates. At the top of the headstone, perched there like a crown, was a daisy chain of flowers woven together to form a circle. Black-eyed Susans.

At the center of her head, it felt like a series of rubber bands, which had been slowly stretched to their breaking point, began to snap one by one. Five or six headstones away, the squirrel stood on its hind legs and stared at her, as if in anticipation of something momentous.





When she returned home, Ted was napping on the sofa. Susan was seated at the dining room table drawing pictures in a spiral-bound notebook. Laurie leaned over the girl’s shoulder and saw that all the pictures were of circles.

“Why are you drawing those?”

“It’s fun.” Susan set down a red crayon, picked up a black one, and began tracing the original circle. She was pressing so hard that the paper crinkled. “Abigail showed me how to do it.”

“Was Abigail here today?”

“No.”

“What’s so fun about a circle?”

“It’s not a circle,” Susan said. She set the black crayon down and picked up a green one.

“It isn’t? What is it, then?”

“That thing out front.”

“What thing?”

“You know,” said Susan. “The wishing well.”

Laurie had been stroking her daughter’s hair. Now she stopped, her fingers pausing in mid-stroke.

Susan dropped the green crayon, then selected a sparkly gold one from the box. “That’s a pretty color,” Susan said admiringly. “Don’t you think that’s a pretty color, Mom?”

“Yes,” she said. “Very pretty.”

Laurie turned and walked back through the house. She felt like an ambulatory corpse. In the kitchen, she stood staring at the refrigerator, which was burdened with more drawings of circles. After a time, they began to look like eyes staring out at her.





Dusk had cooled the air. Laurie located a flashlight in the basement, threw on a sweatshirt, and went out the front door. She trampled the high grass as she crossed the yard, stopping at the foot of the old well. Ted had placed bricks on each corner of the plywood cover to give it a bit more security. Laurie knocked the bricks off with her foot. She squeezed her fingers between the plywood and the stone rim of the well and gave it a shove. The plywood scraped along the stone, revealing a semicircle of darkness underneath it.

Laurie dropped to her knees, clicked on the flashlight, and shone it down into the hole. Far below, a pinpoint of light winked back at her. The surface of the black water looked like it was maybe fifteen feet below the mouth of the well. How deep the water was, she could only guess.





In bed that night, after a quick session of lovemaking—something they hadn’t done in quite some time—Laurie said, “What would it take to drain that well?”





Chapter 23


Because she’d been on edge lately, Ted asked very few questions. (There was another reason, too, although he didn’t like to think about it; each time the thought surfaced in his head, he found himself batting it down like a fisherman swatting at the hump of an approaching crocodile with the oar from his johnboat.) Humoring her, he found a hardware store in town where he purchased a portable sump pump, an extension cord, and a fifty-foot garden hose. Back at the house, he attached the garden hose to the pump, then trailed the opposite end of the hose down the driveway and out into the street. He tucked the final few feet of hose down an open storm drain. If a cop happened to cruise by he might catch a fine, but he didn’t care.

“Please note that I am being a good husband and doing everything you ask without question,” he said as he removed the bricks from the plywood board over the opening of the well. “So, with that in mind, will you please tell me what this is all about?”

Laurie and Susan sat on the porch steps watching him work. A red ice pop dribbled down Susan’s hand and her mouth looked like a vampire’s.

“You mentioned Liz Rosewood’s realtor friend,” said Laurie. “I think you’re right—we should call her out here to look at the house as soon as possible. But first, I’d like to get it in better shape. That well is not only an eyesore, it’s a hazard. We’re going to have to fill it in.”

He shucked the sheet of plywood off the well. A smell like old garbage rose up and tugged at the hairs in his nose. “I can get a bunch of dirt and just fill the sucker in.”

“Maybe. Or it might have to be cemented at the bottom. You sometimes have to do that to old wells so they don’t collapse and become sinkholes.”

“Yeah?” He had no clue. This was the first well he’d ever encountered in his life. However, he wasn’t going to balk. He was glad she was in agreement with him that they needed to unload the house, even if it meant taking a hit because of the lousy market. Money from the sale could buy him a few more years working on his writing without having to supplement their income by taking on additional jobs. He even indulged himself in a fantasy where he quit the Fish project by walking up to the overblown beluga and telling him what a rambling piece of self-indulgent garbage his novel was. This notion, however unrealistic, brought a thin smile to his lips.