Little Girls (21 page)

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.

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?”

B
ecause 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.

Susan finished her ice pop and bounced over to him just as he was lowering the sump pump down into the hole. “Can I help?” she asked.

“In a minute.”

“What can I do?”

He could see the surface of the water roughly fifteen feet below. He fed the pump down into it by the cord, hand over hand, until it was submerged beneath the black water. He pointed to the extension cord that was coiled like a snake in the grass. “See the end of that?”

Susan scratched her head and looked blankly at the extension cord.

“The end of the cord, Susan,” he said, pointing to the tri-pronged bulb at the end.

“Yes!” She picked it up.

“Go inside and plug it into the wall. Give yourself enough slack.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Unwind the cord so you have enough of it to take with you.”

She bent, let out several feet of slack, then raced up the stairs and into the house.

“She’s getting big,” Laurie said from the porch steps, watching her go. Ted clearly heard the maudlin tone to his wife’s voice.

Down in the hole, the sump pump began humming beneath the water. Ted had one foot on the garden hose; after a few seconds, he felt the hose swell up as the water funneled through it. He gave up a few more feet of cord and let the sump pump sink to the floor of the well.
Just a few feet of water. Not so deep.
He estimated it would take a couple of hours for the entire well to drain.

Laurie drew up beside him and peered down into the hole. “I threw some things down there when I was a kid,” she said, a hint of melancholia still in her voice. “I wonder if they’ll still be down there.”

“I don’t see why not. Where else would they go?”

“When I was a kid, I thought they would disappear and turn into wishes.”

He liked the idea of that. “Maybe they did.”

“Some, maybe.” She smiled but did not look at him. “Sadie threw things down there, too.”

For a second, he didn’t know whom she was talking about. But then he remembered, and he wondered if she had been honest with him in her reason for wanting to drain the well.

“Thank you,” she said, and kissed him on the cheek. Then she turned, went up the stairs, and into the house.

I hope there’s nothing down there.
The thought came at him like a pop fly to left field.
Nothing but stones and mud.
He didn’t know why he felt this way, and that troubled him further.

Susan bounded out onto the porch. “Did I do it?” she called to him, leaning over the porch railing. “Did it work?”

“It sure did, sugar pie.”

“Yay!” she cheered. “Now what?”

He wiped his hands on his jeans. “Now we wait.”

Steve Markham called about an hour later, and there was triumph in his voice.

“Tell me the good news,” Ted said, grinning to himself. Having just checked on the progress of the well, he was out in the front yard with the cell phone to his ear.

“Here’s the deal,” Markham said. “It’ll be a lunch meeting in the city, face-to-face, this Friday. It’ll be you, me, Fish, of course, and Fish’s agent. She’s a real ball-buster dyke, but she’s also in agreement with us on this, at least to an extent. She knows Fish is a prick and has already convinced him to hear us out.”

“So he hasn’t necessarily conceded to letting me go ahead with the original outline—”

“No, but he hasn’t told us to fuck off, either. And considering that’s his typical modus operandi, I’d say we’re looking like a couple of sweepstakes winners right about now, my friend.”

“Brilliant. I’m sure I can convince him in person.”

“Yes, I’m sure you can, if you do it properly. Kid gloves, you know? These overblown artist types, you have to coddle them, fawn over them, tell them their shit smells like strawberries and their piss tastes like champagne.”

“Is that what you do to me?”

Steve Markham laughed. “You’re still in Maryland?”

“Yes.”

“How soon can you get up here?”

“To the city? I can leave Friday morning and be there for lunch.”

“The meeting is set for eleven-thirty at Rao’s. I suggest you come in the night before. The last thing we need is for you to drive up Friday morning, blow a flat, or if there’s fucking construction on 95, and we both know there’s
always
fucking construction on 95. . . .”

“I’ll have to check with Laurie.”

“There’s one other thing, too.”

“What’s that?”

“I took a shot in the dark here, and nothing’s set in stone yet . . .”

“Spit it out.”

“I had a meeting yesterday with the guys at the production office about this whole mess. Apparently, the producers had no idea John Fish was such an egomaniacal asshole, and they all agreed you were in a tough spot on this. More than that—they agreed that if you pulled this off and got this thing to work, they’d be happy to work with you again.”

“That’s wonderful.”

“No, no—hear me out. I told them about that play you’d been working on before taking the Fish project, the one about the ex-priest and the prostitute.”

“You did what?”

“They want to sit down and talk about it. Right after we’re done with Fish’s bloated ass, we’re heading to their office for a meeting about it.”

Ted’s head felt light and fuzzy. “Are you shitting me?”

“I shit you not, good sir. But let’s not start jerking off about this yet, Ted. It’s a meeting, that’s all. But we’ve got their ear, so let’s make it something more.”

“Count on it,” Ted said.

At the bottom of the well, the pump began making gurgling, belching sounds. Ted peered down and saw the pump propped up on a mound of tarry black muck. The water had finished draining.

“What in the name of Christ is that
noise?”

Ted laughed. “It’s my career coming back up the toilet. I’ll see you Friday, Steve. Thanks.”

 

Laurie and Susan watched as Ted hauled the pump up out of the well. It dripped water and there was black muck stuck to it. Ted set it down in the grass. The black muck smelled incriminatingly like raw sewage. Together, the three of them peered down into the well at the soupy black sludge on the bottom. Laurie handed him a flashlight, which he pointed down into the hole. The shallow beam illuminated the crenellations in the sludge and glistened off clusters of brownish suds.

“Snake!” Susan shrieked. She thrust an arm down into the hole and pointed. “Daddy, snake! Snake!”

Indeed, he caught the smooth black slither wending through the muck. “There’s probably more than one down there.”

“That old man said so,” Susan reminded him. “Remember that day we got here and he said there were snakes in the well? And you said he was lying, that he was pulling on my legs, and that there were
no
snakes in the well, Daddy—”

“Yeah, yeah, I know what I said.”

“What’s that?” Laurie said.

He saw it, too—a quick twinkle as the flashlight’s beam fell upon a particularly nasty-looking mound of sludge. Some plant-life sprouted from the sludge like slick, wet hair, and Ted had to pass the flashlight’s beam back and forth over it a few times before he caught the twinkle again. When he did, he held the beam on it. Something sparkled up at them from the darkness.

“I have no idea what that is,” he said.

“Wishes,” Laurie said.

“Ooh,” said Susan. “Go get ’em, Daddy.”

He clicked the flashlight off. “Why don’t
you
go get ’em, Snoozin?”

“I’m not afraid of snakes,” she countered.

“Yeah, well,” he began, but said no more. He wasn’t all that crazy about snakes himself. Nor was he keen on the idea of somehow climbing down into that stinking pit. It looked like those Vietnamese prisons they showed in the movies. He’d probably break his neck trying.

“It’s a diamond,” Laurie said.

Ted snorted. “Yeah, right. It’s probably a piece of glass or tinfoil or something.”

“No,” Laurie said. “It’s a diamond. One of my mother’s diamond earrings.”

Ted blinked at her. “You . . . threw your mother’s diamond earrings into the well?”

“Not me.”

He opened his mouth to ask for clarification, but then remembered everything she had told him about the girl named Sadie from her childhood. She had told him about the time Sadie had wanted her to steal her mother’s diamond earrings. She had threatened Laurie with a used tampon the girl kept in a shoe box. The story had been too incredible not to be true and, anyway, what reason would Laurie have for making up such a horrific tale? He realized now that he hadn’t heard how that story had ended, though he could piece it together now—she had stolen the earrings, given them to Sadie, and Sadie had chucked them down the old wishing well.
What kind of little girl does something like that?

“There’s a ladder in the basement,” Laurie said.

“Hold on.” Ted grabbed her wrist as she turned to head back to the house. “What are you saying?”

“I’ll go down there if you don’t want to. It’s okay.” The smile she offered him was so innocent and pretty, it nearly shattered his heart.

“You’re out of your mind wanting to go down there. You’ll break your neck.”

“And
snaaa-aakes
,” Susan caroled, wagging an index finger as if to reprimand someone’s naughtiness.

“Those earrings are worth a lot of money,” Laurie said. She didn’t try to pry her wrist free of his grasp. “Not to mention that they belonged to my mother. There’s a lot of other stuff down there, too. I’m sure of it. Ted, I just want to
see
.”

Gradually, his fingers opened up around her wrist. “You’ve got some air of obsession about you,” he told her. “I wish I understood it.”

That sweet smile still lit up her face. “It’s my healing process,” she told him. “Let’s call it that, okay?”

Good,
he thought.
Because “obsession” makes me too uncomfortable.

“Stay here,” he said. “I’ll go get the ladder.”