The Shining Girls

Harper ^{20 AUGUST 1932}

Harper collects Etta from the hospital after her shift and brings her back to the House. Always covering her eyes, always taking a different route. Escorting her back to the street where her boarding rooms are afterwards. She has a new roommate. Molly moved out after the spaghetti incident, she tells him.

He takes his unease out on her. The grunting slipperiness that turns to hot relief banishes everything else. When he is heaving inside her, he doesn’t have to think about how he misread the map, and Catherine who didn’t shine. He killed her quickly with no pleasure or ritual, driving the knife between her ribs into her heart. He didn’t take anything, didn’t leave anything behind.

It was purely mechanical going back and finding her younger self in the park with the fireworks booming against the night sky, taking the bunny clip from her. Little Catherine most certainly did shine. Should he have warned her that she would lose her gift? It’s his fault, he thinks. He should never have tried to turn the hunt around.

They fuck in the parlor. He will not allow Etta upstairs. When she needs to pee, he tells her to do it in the kitchen sink and she hoists up her dress and squats there, smoking and chatting while she voids her bladder. She tells him about her patients. A miner from the Adirondacks who coughs up phlegm spotted with coal soot and blood. A stillbirth. An amputation today; a little boy who fell down into a broken grate in the street and caught his leg. ‘Very sad,’ she says, but she is smiling as she says it. She keeps up a prattle, talking so he doesn’t have to. Bending over and hoisting her skirts without him having to ask.

‘Take me somewhere, baby,’ she says as he puts himself away, afterwards. ‘Why won’t you? You tease me.’ She slides her hand round to the front of his jeans, an irritating reminder that he owes her.

‘Where would you like to go?’

‘Somewhere exciting. You choose. Anywhere you like.’

In the end it proves too tempting. For both of them.

He takes her on brief outings. Nothing like the first time. Half an hour, twenty minutes, which means staying in close vicinity. He ushers her to see the highway and she tucks her chin into his shoulder and hides her face at the roaring traffic, or claps her hands and bounces on her heels in calculated feminine delight at the tumble of the washing machines in the laundromat. The sham of her response is a conniving pleasure they share between them. She is playing at being the kind of woman who needs him. But he knows her rotten heart.

Maybe, he thinks, this is possible. Maybe Catherine was the end. Maybe none of the girls shine any more, and he can be free of it. But the Room still hums when he goes up there. And the goddamn nurse will not relent with her pestering. She rubs her bare breast, flopped out of her uniform, against the skin of his arm where he’s rolled up his shirtsleeves, and asks in that little girl voice: ‘Is it difficult? Is there a dial you turn upstairs, like on a furnace?’

‘It only works for me,’ he says.

‘Then it won’t hurt for you to tell me how.’

‘You need the key. And the will to shift the time to where it needs to be.’

‘Can I try it?’ she pesters.

‘It’s not for you.’

‘Like the room upstairs?’

‘You shouldn’t keep asking questions.’

He wakes up on the floor of the kitchen, his cheek pressed against the cool linoleum and little men with hammers pounding behind his eyeballs. He sits up, groggily, wiping the saliva from his chin with the back of his hand. The last thing he recalls is Etta fixing him a drink. The same potent alcohol he had the first time they went out together, but with a bitter aftertaste.

Of course, she would have access to sleeping drugs. He curses himself for being so foolish.

She flinches when he walks through the door of the Room. But only for a moment. The suitcase is open on the mattress where he dragged it after he noticed that things were going missing. The money is arranged in stacks.

‘This is beautiful,’ she says. ‘Look at this. Would you believe it?’ She crosses the Room to kiss him.

‘Why did you come up here? I told you not to come up here.’ He cuffs her, knocking her down.

She clutches her cheek with both hands, on the floor, her legs folded under her. She flashes him a smile, but for the first time there is uncertainty in it.

‘Baby,’ she soothes, ‘I know you’re peeved. It’s okay. I had to see. You wouldn’t show me. But now I have, and I can help you. You and me? We’ll take this whole world.’

‘No.’

‘We should get married. You need me. You’re better with me.’

‘No,’ he says again, even though it’s true. He wraps his fingers in her hair.

It takes a long time of hitting her head against the metal bedframe before her skull splits open. Like he’s trapped in this moment forever.

He doesn’t see the homeless junkie boy with the bulging eyes, who has crept into the House again, burned by his last score and hoping for a better one, watching terrified from the passageway. He doesn’t hear Mal turn and flee down the stairs. Because Harper is sobbing in self-pity, tears and mucus running down his face: ‘You made me do this. You made me. You fucking bitch.’