Rust & Stardust Read online

  She fixed upon the squawking bird, that bloody bird in the doctor’s large white palms before she felt another prick of pain and another hot rush of oblivion.

  SALLY

  Sally lay on the bed, waiting to die. She hadn’t stopped bleeding. She’d soaked through the pad the shop girl had given her at Woolworth’s, and had wound up stuffing one of her old socks into her panties in Sammy’s bathroom when they got home. She was certain now this wasn’t just a monthly visitor but rather something awful, the pain crippling. She thought of her mother. Of all that pain she suffered. How did she even get out of bed? It made Sally feel selfish, the way she’d been so impatient sometimes when her mother complained. She swore, if she survived this, she’d never be touchy with her mother again. She’d take care of her.

  She could hear Sammy and Mr. Warner talking downstairs. Sammy was getting ready for work. She’d heard the pipes groaning as he took his shower. Mr. Warner had stayed downstairs after supper, drinking and smoking cigarettes. Listening to a Cubs/Dodgers game on the radio. Mr. Warner had mentioned something once about growing up in Chicago with Sammy.

  She curled her kness to her chest. When she heard the front door slam shut, she held her breath. Wished on the single dim star she could see through the foggy window that he’d stay downstairs until the baseball game was over. For a while, it seemed that maybe her wish had been granted. She could still hear the radio. And after a couple of hours, she started to slip into an uneasy sleep.

  The sound of the door opening startled her, and she sat up, backing into the corner as Mr. Warner staggered into the room. She gripped her blankets with her hands. A wave of pain washed over her.

  Wordlessly, he came to her. She closed her eyes as his hands pulled at her, rolled her over, as the rough pads of his fingers stroked her neck. She held her breath. But when he pulled down her bottoms, he stopped.

  “Goddamn it! What the hell?” He reached over and turned on the little lamp that sat on the nightstand next to the bed. It was too bright. “Jesus Christ,” he said, jumping off the bed, staring at the blood on his hands.

  “I think I’m dying, sir,” she managed. “I think you gone and killed me.”

  At this Mr. Warner scowled. “You’re a goddamned fool, Sally Horner. You ain’t dying. You’re a woman.”

  ELLA

  The call came in the middle of the night, Ella’s phone jangling like an alarm. She shot up in bed, her mind trying hard to connect this sound with its meaning. Was it Russell? What had he done this time? Had he been arrested again? First there was fear, then anger, and then the sudden shocking realization that Russell was dead. That he’d been dead for five years already. How many times would she have to relive this? That particular tragedy was long passed, though it was still the first place her mind went. Usually, when consciousness came, her mind settled again but now it had another place to leap to.

  Sally.

  God, had they found Sally? Al had gone down to Baltimore to look. He said he’d show the photos, see if anybody had seen her with that man. She leaned over to the side of the bed, her shoulders crying out in anguish as she reached first for the light and then for the heavy handset of the telephone.

  “Hello?” She grimaced.

  “She’s here,” the man said, his voice lilting with excitement.

  She felt acid filling her mouth. She shook her head. “Sally?”

  Silence.

  “Ella, it’s Al. The baby came tonight. It’s a girl. You’re a grandmother.”

  “The baby?” she asked, her throat enflamed.

  “Seven pounds. Her name is Dee.”

  “Susan?”

  “She’s still asleep,” he said. “I’ll come get you in the morning after she wakes up.”

  Ella hung up the phone and sat at the edge of the bed, head hanging between her knees, the hot rush of blood to her head pulsating. Not Sally. Sally was still gone. No amount of joy could change that fact. Ella’s shoulders hunched in shame at her next thought: she envied Susan. The dark truth was that first feeling, the hungry pang of envy. Because Susan had been given a daughter, when Ella’s had been stolen.

  SISTER MARY KATHERINE

  On the first day of school, Sister Mary Katherine stood behind her desk and stared at the empty seats, so tidy in their neat rows. The chalkboard gleamed, not yet wearing its hazy scrim of chalk dust. Each piece of chalk was still white, intact, pristine. She felt a tremendous sense of satisfaction at this vision: the world and everything in it somehow right.

  In a few moments, the children would arrive in a chaotic plaid flurry of hair pulling and gum smacking. Scabby knees and black eyes and all the other battle scars of summer. Knee socks and headbands and loose-buttoned shirts. The uniformed group anything but uniform. They would be loud and unruly, and it was her job to bring them to order, to coerce them into compliance with a firm sort of kindness, a gentle type of discipline. She knew this was the greatest challenge any teacher would meet: how to garner both respect and love. From her limited experience, she knew it was generally one or the other most teachers elicited.

  She noticed the new girl right away. Her clothes looked as if they’d just been plucked from a rack, her shoes shiny of both leather and buckle. Her hair, however, was a tangled mess. And she clutched a composition notebook to her chest like a shield.

  Sister Mary Katherine loved her the moment she saw her, something about her inspiring not pity but worry. Her clothing was immaculate, but her eyes (those downcast light blue eyes) were full of sadness, suggesting to the sister that she had been neglected in some fundamental way.

  A motherless girl. That was it. She had the eyes (and uncombed hair) of a child who had lost her mother. Sister Mary Katherine could spot one from a mile away; before she became a teacher, her first appointment had been at an orphanage. Could she be an orphan?

  “Quiet down, quiet down,” she said as the din of the children’s voices came to a crescendo. “Take your seats.”

  The children did as they were told; that was the most wonderful thing about Catholic children, the way they would sit and rise on command.

  She had already memorized the roster; she took great pride in knowing not only all the children’s names in her classroom, but in most of the other classrooms at St. Ann’s as well. Even a few years after teaching a child, she was usually able to conjure their names when she saw them in the market or at the movie theater. It was a gift she had, and further evidence that teaching had been an even louder calling than the one she’d received from God.

  “My name is Sister Mary Katherine. I will be your sixth-grade teacher. When you hear your name called, please answer ‘present’—not ‘yes’ or ‘here.’ Present, because you are now and will be in every moment in my class. Present, meaning fully engaged. Now let’s begin.”

  “Elizabeth Adams.”

  “Present.”

  “Anthony Bertelli.”

  When she called Florence Fogg, there was silence. The girl’s gaze was out the window.

  “Florence Fogg,” she repeated, more loudly this time.

  “Yes?” the girl answered, seeming to snap out of her haze.

  Two girls in the third row giggled, leaning toward each other and whispering. Sister Mary Katherine took the ruler she’d been holding in her hand and cracked it against the desk. Both girls looked startled. Here was where she would establish her rules, and this sort of girlish cruelty would not be allowed. (She knew well the propensity for small brutalities among little girls, had been both witness and victim to it herself as a child, and did not tolerate it in her classroom.)

  “Present,” Florence Fogg corrected herself as Sister Mary Katherine raised an eyebrow (a skill she had mastered just this past year but now a key expression in her arsenal of disciplinary tools).

  She completed the roster and then asked a meek and exceptionally tiny boy with the unfortunate name of Richard Small to hand out the sixth-grade readers.

  Florence Fogg, what an odd little girl, and what
an odd name, like something from a novel. Like an imaginary girl.

  VIVI

  In Camden, those other girls returned to school as well, but the seat up front and center where Sally always sat next to Vivi remained empty, her absence like a missing tooth, tongue worrying over it again and again and again.

  By then they all knew that something terrible had happened to Sally, that she had been kidnapped like that Lindbergh baby before they all were born. Plucked out of his crib, a ransom note demanding money for his return. But Sally’s family was poor, so what would that man want with her? Bess said her parents whispered about Sally after she had gone to bed and that her mother held her more closely—so close she could feel her heart almost pounding its way out of her chest. Be careful. Do not talk to strangers. Irene’s father didn’t allow her to walk home alone from school anymore. You girls need to stick together, he said to them, shaking his head.

  Only Vivi had dared to ask her mother why a grown man would steal someone else’s little girl.

  “Well, Vivi … it’s because…,” she had started, and the expression on her mother’s face was one Vivi had never seen before, so full of angst and fear and something like pity. And that had scared her more than any admonishments to steer clear of strange men.

  “Don’t worry yourself,” her mother finally offered. Or pleaded. “You’re too young to concern yourself with this. You’re just a girl.” She returned to the afghan she was crocheting, the yarn in a bundle in her lap like a kitten.

  “I just feel so bad,” Vivi persisted even as her mother had ended the conversation. “For her poor mama.” She’d never shake the image of Mrs. Horner on the pavement, legs splayed out in front of her. When she’d left her, the mailman struggling to help her stand, she’d been overcome with the same guilt she felt when she left Sally at the Woolworth’s. What kind of terrible girl was she? “We should do something. For her family.”

  “There’s nothing that can be done,” her mother said, lips tightening, hands working furiously. “Those are private matters.”

  SUSAN

  “It was a beautiful service, Mama,” Susan said, kissing her mother’s cool, pale cheek. “We really wish you could have been there.”

  Ella huffed. “Well, come in and have something to eat now.”

  It was early October, and they had just come from Dee’s christening at St. Stephen’s in Beverly. The leaves had begun to turn, and the air felt blissfully cool and crisp. Ella had made a spread with three kinds of finger sandwiches: tuna salad, chicken salad with peeled grapes, pimento and cheese. Sugar cookies and iced tea. It was just the three adults and the baby, but there was enough food for an entire ladies’ luncheon.

  Ella reached out her arms for the baby.

  “You sure, Mama?” Susan asked, but she was so grateful to have her arms free, if only long enough to eat a finger sandwich or two.

  The baby was asleep, still wearing the christening gown Ella had made for her. Susan had told her she didn’t need to make anything new; didn’t she still have the one that she and Sally had both worn? But when Ella found the old gown in the depths of the upstairs closet, it was riddled with moth holes and yellowed with age. The new one was simple, just muslin with some pin tucks, but Susan was touched by her mother’s efforts, though Ella had refused to attend the christening itself.

  Ella had barely left the house since Sally disappeared four months ago. Al had been bringing her groceries, and, until the baby arrived, Susan had been helping out with the housework. The past six weeks since the baby was born were a blur, though—midnight feedings, a million soiled diapers. She figured she’d walked at least a hundred miles pushing the stroller up and down the sidewalk. Never mind the hours of simply watching Dee sleep. Surely Ella remembered what it was like to be a new mother. How consuming it could be?

  Susan hadn’t known what to expect. Of course, she’d imagined herself holding the baby in her arms, pinning diapers, and sterilizing glass bottles. She’d once practiced with her sleepy-eyed baby doll. But this, the way her body ached with longing. This odd, tender bliss took her by surprise.

  Delirious, sleepless, she studied the baby’s fingers, the paper-thin nails, the shivery lines of her palms, and the soft soles of her small feet. Even as her body burned and throbbed in the aftermath, she had never felt so happy in her life. Not even when she and Al fell in love. Though this was similar.

  It wasn’t contentment she felt, rather a sort of restless love. She didn’t know how to contain it. How to hold on. For even as she felt almost swollen with love, it seemed fleeting. Like trying to hold on to breath or fog or the warmth of a beam of sunlight. Strangely, it made her feel bad for Al. She couldn’t explain it, but she felt like she was experiencing something he couldn’t possibly grasp. It made her pity him even, though he was oblivious. Of course, he loved the baby. Took pleasure in holding her, felt pride when their friends said how much she favored him. But his was a faraway love, an abstract affection. This love she felt seemed embedded in every inch of her flesh. Every molecule. She’d heard people talk about God in this way: as if their bodies were made of love.

  It was for this reason she couldn’t understand her mother’s odd refusal to talk about Sally. Whenever she and Al tried to bring it up (the investigation, Al’s own search efforts), Ella clammed up, simply shook her head. And with each day that passed, she seemed to become more and more dismissive. It infuriated Susan, made her feel almost ill. Now that she was a mother herself, she knew that if anyone harmed her daughter, she was certain she could, and would, kill them with her bare hands.

  Ella rocked the baby in the glider while Susan and Al ate. Susan had to slow herself down. She hadn’t been able to eat a meal uninterrupted in so long, she was ravenous. She piled her plate high with sandwiches and went back for more when they were gone.

  “Ma?” Al said, and Susan stopped.

  She had warned Al not to bring it up. Not today, but he couldn’t seem to help himself.

  “Ma, we’re thinking we need to put up a reward. To help find Sally.”

  Ella stopped rocking. Pursed her lips.

  “You know I don’t have no money.”

  “We know that, Mama,” Susan said, trying not to lose her patience. She was exhausted; she hadn’t slept more than two straight hours since the baby was born.

  “Susan and I have a little nest egg we’ve started, but with the baby here now, we’d rather not get into that. We were hoping there might be something you’d be willing to sell? A piece of jewelry maybe? Something you don’t wear?”

  Susan would have laughed if it hadn’t been so sad. Besides her engagement ring from Russell, all of her mother’s jewelry was made of paste. She and Sally used to like to rummage through her jewelry box. Clip-on earrings so heavy they pulled their earlobes down. Strands of fake pearls.

  “She doesn’t have anything,” Susan said, so her mother wouldn’t have to.

  The baby began to stir, her small mouth opening and closing like a baby robin waiting for a worm. Susan left the last tuna salad sandwich on her plate and stood up, went to her mother, and lifted the baby from her arms before her soft cries turned into something louder. She pressed the baby to her chest and bounced up and down, rocking her in her arms, assuring her that she was safe. That her mother was there.

  “We should get home,” Susan said to Al, who was still sitting expectantly at the edge of his seat.

  “Wait,” Ella said, and rose from the chair, slowly making her way to the stairs. “Just hold on.”

  ELLA

  Ella sat at the edge of her bed, with her jewelry box sitting next to her. Inside, there were tangled necklaces, some costume brooches, and a half-dozen single earrings. She wasn’t sure why she kept them. The missing ones never showed up.

  She lifted the small diamond engagement ring from its velvety bed and attempted to slip it onto her finger, though it wouldn’t go past her first misshapen knuckle. She still didn’t know how Russell came up with the money to buy it,
and speculating on it made her stomach twist.

  Come dance with me, he’d said, pulling her up by her two hands. He was drunk (though at the time it had made him charming, fun). She’d resisted at first, but finally, reluctantly, she had given in, rising to her feet and rolling her eyes and letting him lead her onto the dance floor.

  I’m no dancer, she protested.

  I’ll teach you, he countered.

  The music was bright, and he was already pulling her tightly against him.

  I got two children already, she warned.

  I love kids! he parried.

  He held her as their bodies moved across the floor, her feet recollecting other rooms, other rhythms. He smelled like Old Spice and cigarettes. Heady. Intoxicating.

  I’m divorced, she said.

  You’re free! he challenged. He pulled her closer then and whispered into her hair. You’re free.

  She plucked the ring from its nest. It wasn’t worth much, but it was the only thing of value she had. Al said that a reward might loosen lips, might jog people’s memories. He’d take out ads in all the Baltimore papers, he said. Hang Sally’s photo on every light post, every tree.

  She knew exactly what Russell would want her to do. He, like Al, would have given anything he had to help Sally. He’d loved that child as if she were his very own. He’d have traded his very soul if it meant she’d come home.

  It’s just a rock, El. How was it that she could still hear his voice in her ear, as clear as a bell? Just a bit of coal.

  She examined the tiny diamond, the way the gold band had softened and bent over time to fit her finger, how it had worn thin. It’s just a trinket, she thought. Just a symbol, after all. And a silly one at that; every promise it had meant to signify had been broken. The idea that it might be exchanged for her little girl seemed foolish, but what else did she have? So she put it in the pocket of her apron and headed back downstairs.