Plain Bad Heroines, page 52
Ava liked Aunt Libbie’s friend Sara Dahlgren well enough. Sara had come to see her in France many times and had always brought such delicious presents: Parisian bonbons almost too pretty to eat (though Ava did eat them), a cut-glass paperweight with a flower pressed inside, and a kaleidoscope as big as her arm.
Sara Dahlgren’s specialty seemed to be bringing things places. It was Sara Dahlgren who’d brought her aunt Libbie back from the hospital. She’d come all the way over from France to do it—and to attend one or two of the summer parties in Newport, so long as she was here. Though she hadn’t wanted to stay with them at the house—Ava had overheard Aunt Libbie and Sara arguing about this earlier.
“Ava, is that you?” In her daydreaming, Ava had let herself be found. Aunt Libbie now stood at the base of the tree looking up, one hand held over her face to shade it from the sun so she could better see into its branches. “Why didn’t you answer me?”
“I didn’t hear you, Aunt Libbie,” Ava lied. “Not until just now.”
“I want you to come down from there,” Aunt Libbie said. “I want to talk to you about something important.”
“Can’t I stay up here while we talk?” Ava asked. “I can hear you perfectly.”
“No, you may not. I will not shout up the tree at you. Please come down.”
Aunt Libbie shouldn’t have been home for long enough to find occasion to be angry with her. Even still—Ava could tell that she was. She thought she might offer her aunt a gift before she had the chance to scold her; it had to be before, Ava had learned, or it wouldn’t work. Maybe the moonstone? She hated to part with it but—
“Ava, I’m waiting,” Aunt Libbie said.
Ava recalled some of the unkind, or sneaky, or generally thought-to-be-bad acts she’d done in the last few days and wondered which one of them she’d now have to account for. Is this how it would now be, with Aunt Libbie living here? Because it wouldn’t do.
She flipped fast through the items remaining in the hollow, trying to find the moonstone, but there were too many things in the way. She pulled things out until she was holding the book, the knife, the letters, the papier-mâché doll. Finally, she could see it. Wedging the other items against her body with one hand, she reached in for the stone with the other.
Just exactly then, a yellow jacket poked its twitching head into the dark cave of her ear. It did not linger there, but its unexpected invasion startled her at precisely the wrong moment. Ava wobbled on her perch, and with both of her hands full, she could not properly grip the tree to steady herself.
First, she spilled her things: the book falling heavily onto the apple core she had dropped earlier, the other items following after.
And then Ava herself spilled.
Hers was not a clear fall. She crashed upon or snagged against branches as she went, which at least slowed her speed a little.
Still, it all happened in a matter of moments. Aunt Libbie tried to position herself to catch the girl, but Ava landed against her outstretched arms like a spilled suitcase. The force of this collision smashed them hard against the appled ground.
Other than oofs and groans, Ava’s wan giggle was the first sound either made as they tried to untangle. And then, this also from Ava, “It was not the most graceful way to exit a tree, it’s true.”
“You poor girl,” Aunt Libbie said, pulling herself, as gently as possible, out from under Ava’s body so that she could get a look at her. Ava’s forehead and cheek were gashed red, her shirt ripped at the neck, the skin beneath torn.
“What hurts the most?” Aunt Libbie asked.
“My arm,” Ava said. “I’m sure it’s broken. It feels it.” She was able to squeeze her fingers, though. And in them she felt the moonstone. “But I managed to keep hold of your present!” She opened her palm so Aunt Libbie could see.
“What a thing to worry about,” Aunt Libbie said, though she made a point of carefully looking at the polished stone; round and iridescent, it flashed the pale spectrum of colors contained in the pack of candy wafers the child seemed to favor.
“Feldspar,” Aunt Libbie said, the name floating onto her tongue without her trying for it.
“I thought it was a moonstone.”
“Feldspar is its mineral group. Alex . . .” She seemed to stop herself. Then she said, “Alexandra Trills, the woman who lived here with me, she could have told you all about it.”
“Addie already told me that it’s lucky,” Ava said.
“Only not so lucky today.” Aunt Libbie moved to a crouch. She was clearly in pain—the shoulder that had taken the brunt of Ava, but also, and sharply, her hip. “Do you think you can walk, Ava, if I help to support you? If we can get close enough to home, we’ll call out. When I came, Max was tilling soil in the winter garden. And he has the wheelbarrow with him.”
“I can walk, Aunt Libbie,” Ava said. Her arm throbbed—it already felt too big and strange, as if it was a pillow filled with air and blood, her bones floating around somewhere inside all of that. But her legs felt fine. “You won’t need to bring the wheelbarrow.”
“Let’s try to get near to it and then we’ll see.” Aunt Libbie attempted to gather some of Ava’s spilled items. She saw Harold’s letters first. Then the knife.
“I can put that in my pocket,” Ava said. She watched as Aunt Libbie reached the book, Mary’s book. She watched as she hesitated before picking it up.
“This is what I was coming to talk to you about,” Aunt Libbie said. She was looking at the book, not at Ava.
“I only took it from the stairwell,” Ava said. “I find all my books there.”
“You took it?” Aunt Libbie asked. “Or did someone give it to you?”
“Who would give it to me?” Ava asked in a sniff. “Everyone here acts like it’s an illuminated manuscript. I’ve already read most of it and she’s just a boastful girl convinced of her own genius. I think nothing at all of Mary MacLane.”
“I see,” Aunt Libbie said, tucking the book beneath her arm. “I’m sure you won’t mind me taking it back, then? No point in your wasting more time with it.”
Ava sensed the trick in this suggestion, but her arm was throbbing and she wouldn’t dwell on it for now. Together they worked to get her standing. Then walking. Slowly.
Aunt Libbie was kicking apples from their path so the girl wouldn’t roller-skate upon one when Ava remembered. “Oh, my doll!” she said. “She fell with me and I can’t leave her. Would you look for her, Aunt Libbie?”
“What does your doll look like, Ava?” Aunt Libbie asked as she turned around.
“It’s the one I made with Addie,” Ava said. “The nesting doll. It took us so long to finish her.”
Ava watched her aunt Libbie flinch at this answer.
There were many mashed apples beneath Aunt Libbie’s feet as she bent low to look. Yellow jackets buzzed about them—not a swarm, but many. They seemed to prefer the most-rotten apples, the skin split, their inner flesh soupy and yellow like pus, and their coloring, especially the peels, which had deepened with their time in the sun, making them appear more like hunks of festering meat than apples.
“I’m afraid I don’t see it,” she called to Ava. “What if I send Max back for it later? We’ll be sure to find it before it’s dark.”
“I’d rather have it now, though,” Ava said. Her arm was really bothering her. Funny how quickly that had happened. It was hurting enough to make the rest of her weak with it. Maybe she would need the wheelbarrow ride after all.
“I know, darling, but I . . .” Aunt Libbie started, but then she seemed to see something on the ground. She moved toward it.
“Did you find her?” Ava called.
Aunt Libbie reached for something in the grass. She did so carefully, gingerly. “I think so.” Her voice sounded strange. “You made this with Adelaide?”
“Yes, when I arrived,” Ava said. “Addie said she wanted something for us to do together. I don’t really play with her—I’m too old for that. I just like to have her with me. She’s got so many versions of herself.”
It seemed to Ava like her aunt Libbie wasn’t really looking at the doll, like she was avoiding looking at it, even as she now held it in her hand, even as she walked with it, the doll’s many selves clicking against each other as she went.
“You did find her,” Ava said. “Thank you, Aunt Libbie. I don’t like to be without her.” She held out the hand of her noninjured arm.
“You’ll have to be without her until we reach the house,” Aunt Libbie said.
“But I can carry her fine,” Ava said, her empty hand still waiting to be filled.
“You need to concentrate on carrying yourself,” Aunt Libbie said. She would not relinquish the doll. She now held both it and the book at her side. “Come. Let’s go now, slow as you need—you’re a little pale. While we walk you can tell me all the other things Addie taught you while I was away. It will help take your mind off your arm.”
Ava knew this was another trick, but right now she didn’t care. She just wanted to get back to the house, where Addie would give her something good for her pain and maybe cookies or cake, too.
There was nothing her aunt Libbie could do about it now, anyway. Addie already had her loyalty. And Addie would keep it.
Providence
Our three heroines were always going to wind up in Providence together, savvy Readers. I have to believe you saw this coming.
I mean, here they’ve been, trapped for pages on one estate in the tiniest state, when just thirty-five miles to the north, Rhode Island’s capital city makes an industry out of its hauntings and its homegrown horror writers. Or at least one of them in particular.
I’m talking, of course, about H. P. Lovecraft, who was born in Providence, raised in Providence, and spent most of his rather short life writing weird and horrific tales set in and around Providence. You can’t toss your crocheted Cthulhu* very far in that city without it hitting a building that Lovecraft once wrote about, lived in, or said something racist near.*
So while Bo Dhillon might have come to Rhode Island expressly to exploit the terrors of Brookhants, he was delighted to use Noel’s band as an excuse to take a one-night detour in order to do his own kind of storytelling in the city where, for better or worse, America grew one of its most influential horror writers to date.* How could he resist the chance to make a little (onscreen) terror in the place where so many nightmares had been launched?
He could not.
And Harper, Merritt, and Audrey—wind rattled and bone numb from their convertible ride—knew this. As they stood waiting for Noel on a too-empty street, their noses dripping, they each, to a heroine, knew that something rank and wrong was right now scuttling about this city and waiting for its chance to get at them.
Oh, they wouldn’t have each phrased it this way, Readers, but their collective knowledge ran deeper than any syntax. There would be trouble for them tonight in Providence.
“I wish we’d stayed in the orchard,” Audrey said.
“You wanted to leave.” This from Merritt.
“Not the orchard,” Audrey said. “I only wanted to leave movie night.”
“We’ll go back tomorrow,” Harper said.
“We won’t,” Audrey said. “Not like we left it.”
“You’re sure the car will be fine here?” Merritt asked for the second time to no answer.
They were huddled together on a narrow sidewalk, the block crowded by looming redbrick factories turned lofts, the panes of their massive windows reflecting the wan streetlights. Near them a gingko tree seemed to have dumped all its leaves at once, and recently: the sidewalk beneath was a bright circle of yellow, as if someone had colored it in with a highlighter.
“He’s coming down now,” Audrey said, reading a text on her phone.
Harper pinched out the cigarette she’d been smoking and put it behind her ear as a group of laughing people pushed out the heavy door in front of them. The last one held it open. Our heroines went inside to find Noel just a few steps from the bottom of a wide set of concrete stairs. He looked like he hadn’t been awake for very long, wearing socks and Adidas slides, joggers and a too-tight blue T-shirt from his prep-school days, the logo peeling across its front.
“The Plain Bad Heroine Society,” he said, grinning. “I’m right here where you are.”
When Audrey hugged him, she nearly started crying into his shoulder. Even here in scuttling Providence, he was just so reliably, comfortingly Noel.
He led them up the stairs to a loft lit by strung bulbs that made geometric shadows over faces and left corners dark like caves. There was art, in all forms, everywhere—murals and sculptures and mosaics—even hanging from the rafters. The crowd was too cool to make an obvious thing about Harper Harper walking among them, and yet her presence crackled around the space until it had touched all surfaces. Soon she was flanked by a chatty group of graduate students, craft beers in hand, who shared their theories about ghosts and curses and, of course, filmmaking.*
Audrey scanned the space, still half expecting to find a B-roll crew, cameras up and on, hairy boom mics hovering. She hadn’t yet made a move that Bo hadn’t anticipated. Why should a stop in at this party be any different? (That she couldn’t see such a crew didn’t mean much where Bo was concerned.)
“I wish I had more time,” Noel said. “I don’t even know where half the band is, and we’re supposed to be at the venue. Like now.”
Merritt took this as her cue to let Audrey and Noel have a moment alone, and she headed toward a messy drinks table.
“No, I know you have to go,” Audrey said. “I just wanted to see you before . . .” She let the unfinished part of that sentence do its work.
“The terror unleashes?” Noel scooped a carrot into a jumbo plastic container of hummus.
She nodded. “You don’t know what he’s got planned for tonight, do you? I mean, in specifics?”
“No,” he said. “I wish I did. It’ll be something when we’re onstage, but I hope he at least waits until we’re a few songs in.” He shrugged and added, “Bo Dhillon’s nightmare circus.”
“That’s where I live now.”
“I know. You do look—” He stopped himself, chewed his carrot.
“I do look what, Noel?”
He swallowed. “You look tired. You look really tired, kid.” He peered closely at her face. “Unless that’s just makeup for effect?”
“I wish. I don’t sleep anymore.”
“Audrey, that’s not good.”
“I know.” She couldn’t find the way to say it all so that he’d understand, not in a rush, not with him needing to leave. So instead she said: “In other news, I just had my first sort of threesome like two hours ago. Oh, and somebody’s probably inspecting that footage for picture quality as I stand here.”
Noel stopped mid-chew, looked hard at her. “Wait, what? Are you being serious right now?”
“I mean, we kept our clothes on. Most of them.” She couldn’t take the face he was giving her. It was too close to the face she would give herself if she was listening to this. “It’s fine, Noel.”
“It doesn’t sound like you’re fine. You did this on camera?”
“Maybe—I don’t know. I wasn’t really thinking about it at the time but it’s possible. It’s always possible there.”
“OK,” he said, but like it wasn’t. “Are you OK?”
“No—yes.”
He’d gone from looking sleepy to looking pained. “Are you serious that you’ve not slept at all since you got out here? At all? You haven’t told me it’s been that bad.”
“I have told you.”
“Not that it’s been that bad,” he said again. “Not like you’re saying now. I just thought it was stupid-long hours and the work catching up to you.”
She felt like he was missing the point. “I mean, I’ve slept some here and there.”
“Audrey—”
She was too tired to have this conversation, even though she’d thought she wanted it. “It’s not even that it’s all been bad,” she said. Trying to find the right words was like pawing through silt for them. “It’s been really good, too. But I honestly, and I know how this sounds, but it’s like we’re under a spell there. Or I am—between the place itself and Bo.”
“What do you mean the place itself?”
Now she was annoyed. “I mean what you think I mean.”
He lowered his head and spoke slowly to her in a way that wasn’t condescending but lived in its neighborhood. “That it’s haunted?”
“You’re not out there with us—you don’t know what it’s like with Bo tweaking every surface. I can’t keep ahold of what’s real. I literally don’t know what is and what isn’t.”
“Yeah, that’s called sleep deprivation,” Noel said. “Fuck, Aud, you have to tell them this. Say it’s cracking you in ways you couldn’t have anticipated, and you can’t keep doing it.”
“I tried,” she said. “Bo told me to use it.”
“Then tell him again and tell Heather, too. And Gray—he should be telling them for you. Make them listen to you, it’s their job.”
“I will,” she said. “I know.” She did not mean this. “You should go, you’re late.”
“You have to tell them,” Noel said again as he hugged her. “It’s not worth it. Not if it’s making you question your reality.”
“Isn’t that the whole point?”
“No,” he said as he pulled away. “It’s not the point for you. That’s for the audience.”
“Yeah,” she said and did not believe.
They turned to look for his bandmates. One of them was on a couch next to Merritt, packing marijuana into a ceramic bowl that was sculpted and glazed to look like the folds of a vulva. When he finished packing, he performed basic party etiquette by passing first, in this case to Merritt, who now gestured to Audrey to come sit with them.
