Little Girls(79)

My secret is that I was happy you died, Sadie. You Hateful Beast, what do you want from me now? Have you come back to torture me some more? She peered out the window in the door, expecting Abigail to emerge from the darkness, her hair done up the same as Sadie’s, wearing the same oversized and outmoded clothes, and pointing a damning finger at her.





The dreams that plagued her that night as she slept on the sofa were unforgiving in their brutality. Sadie made a guest appearance in a few of them, the flesh flayed from her face in gray and red ribbons. Her eyes were gelatinous white orbs that wept snotlike yellow fluid that congealed in her lashes. She wore one of her outdated checkerboard dresses, just as she had in real life. As Laurie gaped at her, the girl hiked the hem of the dress up to her chest. Her belly was a flat white canvas lacerated with startling crimson hash marks. Like Christ on the cross, a rib-exposing wound gaped along her left side. It suppurated a fluid as dark and fibrous as menstrual blood, the nearly black streaks ribboning down her hip, thigh, calf. A blackish discharge dribbled down her inner thighs.

I want to touch you and I want you to touch me, the Sadie-thing said, and if you don’t, I will wish horrible things to happen to your parents. I will wish them to die and you’ll have no one left. You’ll go to an orphanage, Laurie, and you’ll be all alone for the rest of your life.

And then Ted was there with Sadie, the two of them copulating like beasts, Ted’s dark skin in perfect juxtaposition against the slick colorless white of Sadie’s flesh. Ted humped and his back arched, each notch in his spine cut in sharp relief beneath his sweat-slickened flesh. As Laurie looked on, horrified, Sadie turned her head and grinned at her. Her teeth had been replaced with sparkling diamonds. Her eyes were black onyx stones.

I feel it in me, Sadie said just as a swarm of white moths burst from her diamond-encrusted mouth. I feel it in me and it hurts, Laurie. It hurts. The laughter that followed was not of this world.





Laurie made the grand discovery the following afternoon, just as Mr. McCall’s movers were upstairs in the master bedroom disassembling the bedframe and a gnomish woman carried out the Wedgwood china, each piece individually wrapped in brown paper, from the curio in the dining room. The house was slowly being liberated of its last remaining clutter, leaving behind woundlike spaces where furniture had previously been. Laurie chose to think of it as a holy cleansing, a rebirth, a baptism.

Susan was out playing in the backyard. Alone. Abigail Evans hadn’t come by and Laurie was silently grateful. Ted had left early that morning, while Laurie pretended to be asleep on the sofa, dressed in his running gear. He had been gone for hours now. He went running more frequently when he was having a difficult time with his writing, but also when there was trouble between them. That was preferable to his excessive drinking, which was his other crutch. She found she didn’t care, and was thankful that the son of a bitch had taken to the streets while she’d slept instead of trying to confront her again. With them both gone—and with the exception of McCall’s movers shuffling about upstairs while the gnomish woman (whose name Laurie had forgotten) scuttled back and forth from the dining room to the front door—the house was mostly silent. The business card for Harmony Simmons, Liz’s realtor friend, was still on the refrigerator. Laurie considered calling the number, if only to prove Ted wrong, and even went as far as picking the phone up off the wall, but then decided against it.

To hell with Ted. To hell with him.

One of McCall’s men poked his head in through the kitchen door. He was a sturdy-looking dark-skinned fellow with the muddy black eyes of a hound. “We got the bedframe loaded in the truck, Mrs. Genarro. We’re just gonna take the cabinet and then we’ll be out of your hair.”

McCall had decided to purchase the liquor cabinet as well, so Laurie had spent some time removing the liquor bottles—most of which were now empty—and placing them in a rough metropolis on the top of the piano. Laurie came out into the parlor and watched McCall’s men work. One man—this one blond guy with hypnotizing blue eyes—tipped the cabinet into the waiting arms of the other man. Together, they maneuvered the item around the sofa, the loveseat, the piano, and out into the hall. Something clattered on the floor in their wake but the men didn’t seem to notice. Laurie peered over the couch and saw it was the shattered picture frame and the folded photo of her father and his two business companions, which Ted had found in the sleeve of one of the record albums.

“Ma’am,” one of the men called to her from the foyer.

Laurie hustled down the hall in time to open the front door for the two men. They grunted as they negotiated the cabinet out the door and down the porch steps. She followed them out—the day was overcast and the trees seemed to reach up and claw at the sky, desperate for rain—and tipped them four dollars each. When the truck pulled away, Laurie saw the Wedgwood woman standing behind it, peering down the open throat of the well. Ted hadn’t closed it back up after his spelunking expedition. Laurie approached the woman—Martha? Marsha?—and saw the almost hypnotic appearance of her face.

She reached out and gently touched the woman’s arm. “Are you okay?”

“This,” said the woman as she jabbed a finger at the open well, “is very dangerous.”

“Is it?”

The woman’s pinched face turned toward her. Their noses were less than five inches apart and Laurie jerked her head back.