The Girls

PART FOUR

SASHA AND JULIAN AND ZAV left early, and then I was alone. The house looked as it had always looked. Only the bed in the other room, the sheets scrabbled and smelling of sex, indicated anyone else had ever been here. I would wash the sheets in the machine in the garage. Fold and slot them on the closet shelves, sweep the room back to its previous blankness.

—

I walked along the cold sand that afternoon, stippled with broken bits of shell, the shifting holes where sand crabs burrowed. I liked the rush of wind in my ears. The wind drove people off — students from the junior college yelping while their boyfriends chased down the ripple of a blanket. Families finally giving up and heading toward their cars, toting folding chairs, the poky splay of a cheap kite, already broken. I was wearing two sweatshirts and the bulk made me feel protected, my movements slower. Every couple of feet, I’d come across the giant, ropy seaweed, tangled and thick as a fireman’s hose. The purging of an alien species, seemingly not of this world. It was kelp, someone had told me, bull kelp. Knowing its name didn’t make it any less strange.

Sasha had barely said goodbye. Burrowing into Julian’s side, her face set like a preventative against my pity. She had already absented herself, I knew, gone to that other place in her mind where Julian was sweet and kind and life was fun, or if it wasn’t fun, it was interesting, and wasn’t that valuable, didn’t that mean something? I tried to smile at her, to speed her a message on an invisible thread. But it had never been me she wanted.

—

The fog had been denser in Carmel, descending over the campus of my boarding school like a blizzard. The spire of the chapel, the nearby sea. I had started school that September, just as I was supposed to. Carmel was an old-fashioned place, and my classmates seemed much younger than they were. My roommate with her collection of mohair sweaters arranged by color. The dormitory walls softened with tapestries, the after-curfew creeping. The Tuck Shop, run by seniors, which sold chips and soda and candy, and how all the girls acted like this was the height of sophistication and freedom, being allowed to eat in the Tuck Shop from nine to eleven thirty on weekends. For all their talk, their bluster and crates of records, my classmates seemed childish, even the ones from New York. Occasionally, when the fog obscured the spires of the chapel, some girls could no longer orient themselves and got lost.

For the first few weeks, I watched the girls, shouting to one another across the quad, their backpacks turtled on their backs or slung from their hands. They seemed to move through glass, like the well-fed and well-loved scamps of detective series, who tied ribbons around their ponytails and wore gingham shirts on weekends. They wrote letters home and spoke of beloved kittens and worshipful younger sisters. The common rooms were the domain of slippers and housecoats, girls who ate Charleston Chews cold from miniature refrigerators and huddled by the television until they seemed to have psychologically absorbed the cathode rays. Someone’s boyfriend died in a rock-climbing accident in Switzerland: everyone gathered around her, on fire with tragedy. Their dramatic shows of support underpinned with jealousy — bad luck was rare enough to be glamorous.

I worried I was marked. A fearful undercurrent made visible. But the structure of the school — its particularities, its almost municipal quality — seemed to cut through the dim. To my surprise, I made friends. A girl in my poetry class. My roommate, Jessamine. My dread appeared to others as a rarefied air, my isolation the isolation of weary experience.

Jessamine was from a cattle town near Oregon. Her older brother sent her comic books where female superheroes burst out of their costumes and had sex with octopuses or cartoon dogs. He got them from a friend in Mexico, Jessamine said, and she liked the silly violence, reading them with her head hung over the side of the bed.

“This one’s nuts,” she’d snort, tossing a comic to me. I’d try to hide a vague queasiness incited by the starbursting blood and heaving breasts.

“I’m on a diet where I just share all my food,” Jessamine had explained, giving me one of the Mallomars she kept in her desk drawer. “I used to throw half of everything away, but then the dorms got a mice infestation and I couldn’t.”

She reminded me of Connie, the same shy way she plucked her shirt away from her belly. Connie, who’d be at the high school in Petaluma. Crossing the low steps, eating lunch at the splintered picnic tables. I had no idea how to think of her anymore.

Jessamine was hungry for my stories of home, imagining I lived in the shadow of the Hollywood sign. In a house the sherbet pink of California money, a gardener sweeping the tennis court. It didn’t matter that I was from a dairy town and told her so: other facts were bigger, like who my grandmother had been. The assumptions Jessamine made about the source of my silence at the beginning of the year, all of it — I let myself step into the outline. I talked about a boyfriend, just one in a series of many. “He was famous,” I said. “I can’t say who. But I lived with him for a while. His dick was purple,” I said, snorting, and Jessamine laughed, too. Casting a look in my direction all wrapped up in jealousy and wonder. The way I had looked at Suzanne, maybe, and how easy it was to keep up a steady stream of stories, a wishful narrative that borrowed the best of the ranch and folded it into a new shape, like origami. A world where everything turned out as I’d wanted.

I took French class from a pretty, newly engaged teacher who let the popular girls try on her engagement ring. I took art class from Miss Cooke, earnest with first-job anxiety. The line of makeup I could sometimes see along her jaw made me pity her, though she tried to be kind to me. She didn’t comment when she noticed me staring into space or resting my head on my folded arms. Once she took me off campus for malteds and a hot dog that tasted of warm water. She told me how she had moved from New York to take her job, how the city asphalt would reflect sheets of sun, how her neighbor’s dog shit all over the apartment stairs, how she’d gone a little crazy.

“I would eat just the corners of my roommate’s food. Then it would all be gone, and I would get sick.” Miss Cooke’s glasses pinched her eyes. “I’ve never felt so sad, and there was no real reason for it, you know?”

She waited, obviously for me to match the story with one of my own. Expecting a sad, manageable tale of the defection of a hometown boyfriend or a mother in the hospital, the cruel whispers of a bitchy roommate. A situation she could make heroic sense of for me, cast in older and wiser perspective. The thought of actually telling Miss Cooke the truth made my mouth tighten with unreal hilarity. She knew about the still-unsolved murders — everyone did. People locked doors and installed dead bolts, bought guard dogs at a markup. The desperate police got nothing from Mitch, who had fled in fear to the South of France, though his house wouldn’t be razed until the following year. Pilgrims had started driving past the gate, hoping to pick up horror like a vapor in the air. Idling in their cars until weary neighbors shooed them off. In his absence, detectives were following leads from drug dealers and schizophrenics, bored housewives. Even enlisting a psychic to walk the rooms of Mitch’s house, straining to pick up vibes.

“The killer is a lonely, middle-aged man,” I’d heard the psychic say on a call-in show. “He was punished as a youth for something he hadn’t done. I’m getting the letter K. I’m getting the town Vallejo.”

Even if Miss Cooke would believe me, what would I tell her? That I had not slept well since August because I’d been too afraid of the unmonitored territory of dreams? That I woke certain that Russell was in the room — taking soggy gasps for breath, the still air like a hand over my mouth? That the cringe of contagion was on me: there was some concurrent realm where that night had not happened, where I insisted Suzanne leave the ranch. Where the blond woman and her teddy-bear son were pushing a cart down a grocery store aisle, planning a Sunday dinner, snippy and tired. Where Gwen was wrapping her damp hair in a towel, smoothing lotion on her legs. Scotty clearing the hot tub filters of debris, the silent arc of the sprinkler, a song floating into the yard from a nearby radio.

The letters I wrote my mother were willful acts of theater, at first. Then true enough.

Class was interesting.

I had friends.

Next week we would go to the aquarium and watch the jellyfish gape and parry in their illuminated tanks, suspended in the water like delicate handkerchiefs.

—

By the time I’d walked the farthest spit of land, the wind had picked up. The beach empty, all the picnickers and dog walkers gone. I stepped my way over the boulders, heading back to the main stretch of sand. Following the line between cliff and wave. I’d done this walk many times. I wondered how far Sasha and Julian and Zav had gotten by then. Probably still an hour from L.A. Without having to think about it, I knew Julian and Zav were sitting in the front seats and Sasha was in the back. I could imagine her leaning forward from time to time, asking for a joke to be repeated or pointing out some funny road sign. Trying to campaign for her own existence, before finally giving up and lying back on the seat. Letting their conversation thicken into meaningless noise while she watched the road, the passing orchards. The branches flashing with the silver ties that kept away birds.

—

I was passing by the common room with Jessamine, on our way to the Tuck Shop, when a girl called, “Your sister’s looking for you downstairs.” I didn’t look up; she couldn’t be talking to me. But she was. It took me a moment to understand what might be happening.

Jessamine seemed hurt. “I didn’t know you had a sister.”

—

I suppose I had known Suzanne would come for me.

The cottony numbness I occupied at school wasn’t unpleasant, in the same way a limb falling asleep isn’t unpleasant. Until that arm or leg wakes up. Then the prickles come, the sting of return — seeing Suzanne leaning in the shade of the dorm entrance. Her hair uncombed, her lips bristling — her presence knocked the plates of time ajar.

Everything was returned to me. My heart strobed, helpless, with the tinny cut of fear. But what could Suzanne do? It was daytime, the school filled with witnesses. I watched her notice the fuss of landscaping, teachers on their way to tutoring appointments, girls crossing the quad with tennis bags and chocolate milk on their breath, walking proof of the efforts of unseen mothers. There was a curious, animal distance in Suzanne’s face, a measurement of the uncanny place she’d found herself.

She straightened when I approached. “Look at you,” she said. “All clean and scrubbed.” I saw a new harshness in her face: a blood blister under a fingernail.

I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t. I kept touching the ends of my hair. It was shorter — Jessamine had cut it in the bathroom, squinting at a how-to article in a magazine.

“You look happy to see me,” Suzanne said. Smiling. I smiled back, but it was hollow. That seemed, obliquely, to please Suzanne. My fear.

I knew I should do something — we kept standing under the awning, increasing the chance someone would stop to ask me a question or introduce herself to my sister. But I couldn’t make myself move. Russell and the others couldn’t be very far away — were they watching me? The windows of the buildings seemed alive, my mind flashing to snipers and Russell’s long stare.

“Show me your room,” Suzanne announced. “I want to see.”

—

The room was empty, Jessamine still at the Tuck Shop, and Suzanne pushed past me and through the doorway before I could stop her.

“Just lovely,” she trilled in a fake English accent. She sat down on Jessamine’s bed. Bouncing up and down. Looking at the taped-up poster of a Hawaiian landscape, the unreal ocean and sky sandwiching a sugary rib of beach. A set of the World Book Jessamine had never opened, a gift from her father. Jessamine kept a stack of letters in a carved wooden box and Suzanne immediately lifted the lid, sifting through. “Jessamine Singer,” she read off an envelope. “Jessamine,” she repeated. She let the lid bang shut and got to her feet. “So this one’s your bed.” She stirred my blanket with a mocking hand. My stomach tilted, a picture of us in Mitch’s sheets. Hair sticking to her forehead and neck.

“You like it here?”

“It’s okay.” I was still in the doorway.

“Okay,” Suzanne said, smiling. “Evie says the school is just okay.”

I kept watching her hands. Wondering what they’d done exactly, as if the percentage mattered. She tracked my glance: she must have known what I was thinking. She got abruptly to her feet.

“Now I get to show you something,” Suzanne said.

—

The bus was parked on a side street, just outside the school’s gate. I could see the jostle of figures inside the bus. Russell and whoever was still around — I assumed everyone. They’d painted over the hood. But everything else was the same. The bus beastly and indestructible. My sudden certainty: they would surround me. Back me into a corner.

If anyone had seen us standing there on the slope, we would have looked like friends. Chatting in the Saturday air, my hands in my pockets, Suzanne shading her eyes.

“We’re going to the desert for a while,” Suzanne announced, watching the flurry that must have been visible on my face. I felt the meager borders of my own life: a meeting that night for the French Club — Madame Guevel had promised butter tarts. The musty weed Jessamine wanted to smoke after curfew. Even knowing what I knew, did a part of me want to leave? Suzanne’s dank breath and her cool hands. Sleeping on the ground, chewing nettle leaves to moisten our throats.

“He’s not mad at you,” she said. Keeping a steady simmer of eye contact. “He knows you wouldn’t say anything.”

And it was true: I hadn’t said anything. My silence keeping me in the realm of the invisible. I had been frightened, yes. Maybe you could pin some of the silence on that fear, a fear I could call up even later, after Russell and Suzanne and the others were in jail. But it was something else, too. The helpless thoughts of Suzanne. Who had sometimes colored her nipples with cheap lipstick. Suzanne, who walked around so brutish, like she knew you were trying to take something from her. I didn’t tell anyone because I wanted to keep her safe. Because who else had loved her? Who had ever held Suzanne in their arms and told her that her heart, beating away in her chest, was there on purpose?

My hands were sweating, but I couldn’t wipe them on my jeans. I tried to make sense of this moment, to hold an image of Suzanne in my mind. Suzanne Parker. The atoms reorganizing themselves the first time I’d seen her in the park. How her mouth had smiled into mine.

No one had ever looked at me before Suzanne, not really, so she had become my definition. Her gaze softening my center so easily that even photographs of her seemed aimed at me, ignited with private meaning. It was different from Russell, the way she looked at me, because it contained him, too: it made him and everyone else smaller. We had been with the men, we had let them do what they wanted. But they would never know the parts of ourselves that we hid from them — they would never sense the lack or even know there was something more they should be looking for.

Suzanne was not a good person. I understood this. But I held the actual knowledge away from myself. How the coroner said the ring and pinky fingers of Linda’s left hand had been severed because she had tried to protect her face.

Suzanne seemed to look at me as if there could be some explanation, but then a slight movement behind the shrouded windshield of the bus caught her attention — even then, she was alert to Russell’s every shift — and a businesslike air came over her.

“Okay,” she said, urged by the tick of an unseen clock. “I’m taking off.” I had almost wanted a threat. Some indication that she might return, that I should fear her or could draw her back with the right combination of words.

I only ever saw her again in photographs and news reports. Still. I could never imagine her absence as permanent. Suzanne and the others would always exist for me; I believed that they would never die. That they would hover forever in the background of ordinary life, circling the highways and edging the parks. Moved by a force that would never cease or slow.

Suzanne had shrugged a little, that day, before walking down the grassy slope and disappearing into the bus. The queer reminder in her smile. Like we had a meeting, she and I, at some appointed time and place, and she knew I would forget.

—

I wanted to believe Suzanne kicked me out of the car because she’d seen a difference between us. That it was obvious to her that I could not kill anyone, Suzanne still lucid enough to understand that she was the reason I was in the car. She wanted to protect me from what was going to happen. That was the easy explanation.

But there was a complicating fact.

The hatred she must have felt to do what she’d done, to slam the knife over and over again like she was trying to rid herself of a frenzied sickness: hatred like that was not unfamiliar to me.

Hatred was easy. The permutations constant over the years: a stranger at a fair who palmed my crotch through my shorts. A man on the sidewalk who lunged at me, then laughed when I flinched. The night an older man took me to a fancy restaurant when I wasn’t even old enough to like oysters. Not yet twenty. The owner joined our table, and so did a famous filmmaker. The men fell into a heated discussion with no entry point for me: I fidgeted with my heavy cloth napkin, drank water. Staring at the wall.

“Eat your vegetables,” the filmmaker suddenly snapped at me. “You’re a growing girl.”

The filmmaker wanted me to know what I already knew: I had no power. He saw my need and used it against me.

My hatred for him was immediate. Like the first swallow of milk that’s already gone off — rot strafing the nostrils, flooding the entire skull. The filmmaker laughed at me, and so did the others, the older man who would later place my hand on his dick while he drove me home.

None of this was rare. Things like this happened hundreds of times. Maybe more. The hatred that vibrated beneath the surface of my girl’s face — I think Suzanne recognized it. Of course my hand would anticipate the weight of a knife. The particular give of a human body. There was so much to destroy.

Suzanne stopped me from doing what I might be capable of. And so she set me loose into the world like an avatar for the girl she would not be. She would never go to boarding school, but I still could, and she sent me spinning from her like a messenger for her alternate self. Suzanne gave me that: the poster of Hawaii on the wall, the beach and blue sky like the lowest common denominator of fantasy. The chance to attend poetry class, to leave bags of laundry outside my door and eat steaks on parents’ visiting days, sopping with salt and blood.

It was a gift. What did I do with it? Life didn’t accumulate as I’d once imagined. I graduated from boarding school, two years of college. Persisted through the blank decade in Los Angeles. I buried first my mother, then my father. His hair gone wispy as a child’s. I paid bills and bought groceries and got my eyes checked while the days crumbled away like debris from a cliff face. Life a continuous backing away from the edge.

There were moments of forgetting. The summer I had visited Jessamine in Seattle after she had her first child — when I saw her waiting at the curb with her hair tucked into her coat, the years unknit themselves and I felt, for a moment, the sweet and blameless girl I had once been. The year with the man from Oregon, our shared kitchen hung with houseplants and Indian blankets on the seats of our car, covering the rips. We ate cold pita with peanut butter and walked in the wet green. Camping in the hills around Hot Springs Canyon, far down the coast, near a group who knew all the words to The People’s Song Book. A sun-hot rock where we lay, drying from the lake, our bodies leaving behind a conjoined blur.

But the absence opened up again. I was almost a wife but lost the man. I was almost recognizable as a friend. And then I wasn’t. The nights when I flicked off the bedside lamp and found myself in the heedless, lonely dark. The times I thought, with a horrified twist, that none of this was a gift. Suzanne got the redemption that followed a conviction, the prison Bible groups and prime-time interviews and a mail-in college degree. I got the snuffed-out story of the bystander, a fugitive without a crime, half hoping and half terrified that no one was ever coming for me.

—

It was Helen, in the end, who ended up talking. She was only eighteen, still desirous of attention — I’m surprised they stayed out of jail as long as they did. Helen had been picked up in Bakersfield for using a stolen credit card. Just a week in a county jail and they would have let her go, but she couldn’t help bragging to her cellmate. The coin-operated television in the common room showing a bulletin of the ongoing murder investigation.

“The house is way bigger than it looks in those pictures,” Helen said, according to her cellmate. I can see Helen: nonchalant, thrusting her chin forward. Her cellmate must have ignored her at first. Rolling her eyes at the girlish bluster. But then Helen kept going, and suddenly the woman was listening closely, calculating reward money, a reduced sentence. Urging the girl to tell her more, to keep talking. Helen was probably flattered by the attention, unspooling the whole mess. Maybe even exaggerating, drawing out the haunted spaces between words, as in the incantation of a ghost story at a sleepover. We all want to be seen.

—

All of them would be arrested by the end of December. Russell, Suzanne, Donna, Guy, the others. The police descending on their tent encampment in Panamint Springs: torn flannel sleeping bags and blue nylon tarps, the dead ash of the campfire. Russell bolted when they came, as if he could outrun a whole squad of officers. The headlights of the police cruisers glowing in the bleached pink of morning. How pitiful, the immediacy of Russell’s capture, forced to kneel in the scrub grass with his hands on his head. Guy handcuffed, stunned to discover there were limitations to the bravado that had carried him that far. The little kids were herded onto the Social Services van, wrapped in blankets, and handed cold cheese sandwiches. Their bellies distended and scalps boiling with lice. The authorities didn’t know who had done what, not yet, so Suzanne was just one of the skinny jumble of girls. Girls who spit in the dirt like rabid dogs and went limp when the police tried to handcuff them. There was a demented dignity to their resistance — none of them had run. Even at the end, the girls had been stronger than Russell.

It would snow in Carmel that same week, the barest slip of white. Class was canceled, frost crunching thinly under our shoes as we tromped across the quad in our jean jackets. It seemed like the last morning on earth, and we peered into the gray sky as if more of the miracle were coming, though it all melted into a mess in less than an hour.

—

I was halfway back to the beach parking lot when I saw the man. Walking toward me. Maybe a hundred yards away. His head was shaved, revealing the aggressive outline of his skull. He was wearing a T-shirt, which was strange — his skin flushed in the wind. I didn’t want to feel as uneasy as I did. A helpless accounting of the facts: I was alone on the sand. Still far from the parking lot. There was no one else around but me and this man. The cliff, starkly outlined, each striation and pulse of lichen. The wind lashing my hair across my face, dislocating and vulnerable. Rearranging the sand into furrows. I kept walking toward him. Forcing myself to keep my gait.

The distance between us fifty yards, now. His arms were honeycombed with muscle. The brute fact of his naked skull. I slowed my pace, but it didn’t matter — the man was still heading briskly in my direction. His head was bouncing as he walked, an insane rhythmic twitch.

A rock, I thought crazily. He’ll pick up a rock. He’ll break open my skull, my brain leaking onto the sand. He’ll tighten his hands around my throat until my windpipe collapses.

The stupid things I thought of:

Sasha and her briny, childish mouth. How the sun had looked in the tops of the trees lining my childhood driveway. Whether Suzanne knew I thought of her. How the mother must have begged, at the end.

The man was bearing down on me. My hands were limp and wet. Please, I thought. Please. Who was I addressing? The man? God? Whoever handled these things.

And then he was in front of me.

Oh, I thought. Oh. Because he was just a normal man, harmless, nodding along to the white headphones nested in his ears. Just a man walking on the beach, enjoying the music, the weak sun through the fog. He smiled at me as he passed, and I smiled back, like you would smile at any stranger, any person you didn’t know.