The Shining Girls

Kirby ^{18 JULY 1974}

It’s that time of the early morning when the dark feels heavy; after the trains have stopped running and the traffic has petered out, but before the birds start singing. A real scorcher of a night. The kind of sticky hot that brings out all the bugs. Moths and flying ants patter against the porch light in an uneven drumbeat. A mosquito whines somewhere near the ceiling.

Kirby is in bed, awake, stroking the pony’s nylon mane and listening to the sounds of the empty house, groaning, like a hungry stomach. ‘Settling,’ Rachel calls it. But Rachel is not here. And it’s late, or early, and Kirby hasn’t had anything to eat since stale cornflakes at long-ago breakfast, and there are sounds that don’t belong to ‘settling’.

Kirby whispers to the pony, ‘It’s an old house. It’s probably just the wind.’ Except that the porch door is on a latch and it shouldn’t bang. The floorboards shouldn’t be creaking as if under the weight of a burglar tiptoeing towards her room, carrying a black sack to stuff her in and carry her away. Or maybe it’s the living doll from the scary TV show she’s not supposed to watch, tick-tacking on little plastic feet.

Kirby throws back the sheet. ‘I’m going to go see, okay?’ she tells the pony, because the thought of waiting for the monster to come to her is unbearable. She tiptoes to the door, which her mother painted with exotic flowers and rambling vines when they moved in four months ago, ready to slam it in the face of whoever (whatever) comes up the stairs.

She stands behind the door as if it’s a shield, straining to hear, picking at the rough texture of the paint. She has already stripped one tiger-lily to the bare wood. Her fingertips are tingling. The quiet rings in her head.

‘Rachel?’ Kirby whispers, too softly for anyone but the pony to hear.

There is a thump, very close, then a bang and the sound of something breaking. ‘Shit!’

‘Rachel?’ Kirby says, louder. Her heart is clattering like an early train.

There is a long pause. Then her mother says, ‘Go back to bed, Kirby, I’m fine.’ Kirby knows she’s not. But at least it’s not Talky Tina, the living killer doll.

She quits picking at the paint and pads across the hallway, sidestepping the broken bits of glass like diamonds between the dead roses with their crinkled leaves and spongy heads in a puddle of stinky vase water. The door has been left ajar for her.

Every new house is older and shabbier than the last one, although Rachel paints the doors and cupboards and sometimes even the floorboards to make it theirs. They choose the pictures together out of Rachel’s big gray art book: tigers or unicorns or saints or brown island girls with flowers in their hair. Kirby uses the paintings as clues to remind herself where they are. This house has the melty clocks on the kitchen cabinet above the stove, which means the refrigerator is on the left and the bathroom is under the stairs. But although the layout of each house changes, and sometimes they have a yard, and sometimes Kirby’s bedroom has a closet and sometimes she is lucky to have shelves, Rachel’s room is the one thing that remains constant.

She thinks of it as a pirate’s treasure cove. (‘Trove’ her mother corrects, but Kirby imagines it as a magic hidden bay, one you can sail into, if you’re lucky, if your map reads right.)

Dresses and scarves are tossed around the room as if by a gypsy pirate princess throwing a tantrum. A collection of costume jewelry is hooked onto the golden curlicues of an oval mirror, the first thing Rachel puts up whenever they move in somewhere new, inevitably whacking her thumb with the hammer. Sometimes they play dress-up, and Rachel drapes every necklace and bracelet on Kirby and calls her ‘my Christmas tree girl’, even though they are Jewish, or half.

There is a colored glass ornament hanging in the window that casts dancing rainbows across the room in the afternoon sun, over the tilted drawing table and whatever illustration Rachel is working on at the time.

When Kirby was a baby and they still lived in the city, Rachel would put the play-pen fencing around her desk, so that Kirby could crawl about the room without disturbing her. She used to do drawings for women’s magazines, but now ‘my style is out of fashion, baby – it’s fickle out there.’ Kirby likes the sound of the word. Fickle-pickle-tickle-fickle. And she likes that she sees her mother’s drawing of the winking waitress, balancing two short stacks dripping with butter, when they walk past Doris’s Pancake House on the way to the corner store.

But the glass ornament is cold and dead now, and the lamp next to the bed has a yellow scarf half-draped over it, which makes the whole room look sickly. Rachel is lying on the bed with a pillow over her face, still fully dressed, with her shoes on and everything. Her chest jerks under her black lace dress like she has the hiccups. Kirby stands in the doorway, willing her mother to notice her. Her head feels swollen with words she doesn’t know how to say.

‘You’re wearing your shoes in bed,’ is what she manages, finally.

Rachel lifts the pillow off her face and looks at her daughter through puffy eyes. Her make-up has left a black smear across the pillow. ‘Sorry, honey,’ she says in her chipper voice. (‘Chipper’ makes Kirby think of chipped teeth, which is what happened to Melanie Ottesen when she fell off the climbing rope. Or cracked glasses that aren’t safe to drink from anymore.)

‘You have to take off your shoes!’

‘I know, honey,’ Rachel sighs. ‘Don’t shout.’ She pries the black-andtan slingback heels off with her toes and lets them clatter to the floor. She rolls over on to her stomach. ‘Will you scratch my back?’

Kirby climbs onto the bed and sits cross-legged next to her. Her mother’s hair smells like smoke. She traces the curly lace patterns with her fingernails. ‘Why are you crying?’

‘I’m not really crying.’

‘Yes, you are.’

Her mother sighs. ‘It’s just that time of the month.’

‘That’s what you always say,’ Kirby sulks, and then adds as an afterthought, ‘I got a pony.’

‘I can’t afford to buy you a pony.’ Rachel’s voice is dreamy.

‘No, I already got one,’ Kirby says, exasperated. ‘She’s orange. She has butterflies on her butt and brown eyes and gold hair and um, she looks kinda dopey.’

Her mother peeks back at her over her shoulder, thrilled at the prospect. ‘Kirby! Did you steal something?’

‘No! It was a present. I didn’t even want it.’

‘That’s okay then.’ Her mother rubs at her eyes with the heel of her hand, dragging a smudge of mascara across her eyes like a burglar.

‘So I can keep it?’

‘Of course you can. You can do almost anything you want. Especially with presents. Even break them into a million billion pieces.’ Like the vase in the hallway, Kirby thinks.

‘Okay,’ she says, seriously. ‘Your hair smells funny.’

‘Look who’s talking!’ Her mother’s laugh is like a rainbow dancing across a room. ‘When was the last time you washed yours?’