The Shining Girls

Kirby ^{12 JUNE 1993}

The temperature is brutal, even worse in the basement where Rachel’s clutter seems to absorb the heat and swill it around with cloying nostalgia. One day her mother will be dead, and it will fall to Kirby to sort all this crap out. The more she can get rid of right now, the better.

She’s started moving boxes out onto the lawn so she can go through them. It’s bad on her back, hauling them up the rickety wooden ladder staircase, but it’s an improvement on being cooped up in there with towers of stuff threatening to cave in on her. This is her whole life of late, going through boxes of remains. She suspects that these will be even more painfully evocative than the broken lives documented in Detective Michael Williams’s defunct evidence files.

Rachel comes out onto the lawn and sits down cross-legged beside her, in a pair of jeans and a black T-shirt, like a waitress, her hair pulled back in a messy ponytail. Her long feet are bare, the nails painted with a glossy red polish so dark it’s almost black. It’s a sign of the times that she’s taken to dyeing her own hair, so the brown, more chestnut than usual, is shot through with gray.

‘Goodness, that’s a lot of junk,’ she says. ‘We’d be better off setting fire to it.’ She digs her rolling papers out of her pocket.

‘Don’t tempt me,’ Kirby says. It comes out with more venom than she intended, but Rachel doesn’t even notice. ‘If we were smart, we would set up a table for a yard sale and move it straight from the boxes onto display.’

‘I do wish you wouldn’t dig into all this stuff,’ Rachel sighs. ‘It’s so much easier to deal with when it’s packed away.’ She tears the end off a cigarette and sprinkles the paper with half marijuana and half tobacco.

‘Are you hearing yourself, Mom?’

‘Don’t play therapist. It doesn’t suit you.’ She lights up the joint and absently hands it to Kirby. ‘Oh, sorry, I forgot.’

‘It’s okay,’ she says, and takes a drag. She holds it in her lungs until it turns the inside of her head sweet and staticky, like switching the TV to white noise. If white noise turned out to be encoded signals from the CIA transmitted through treacle. She’s never had her mom’s tolerance for pot. It usually makes her paranoid and overanalytical. But then she’s never got stoned with her mom before. Maybe she’s been doing something wrong all these years, and she’s been missing out on some secret mother-daughter knowledge that should have got passed along years ago, like how to do a French plait or keep boys guessing.

‘You still banned from the paper?’

‘I’m on probation. They let me compile a list of some college sports awards but I’m not supposed to come in until I’ve met my class requirements.’

‘They’re looking out for you. I think it’s sweet.’

‘They’re treating me like a fucking child.’

Rachel starts pulling a bunch of old board-game pieces and Christmas tree decorations out of a box, all tangled up in a menorah. Brightly colored dots of plastic Ludo pieces scatter all over the lawn.

‘You know, we never had a bat mitzvah for you. Would you like a bat mitzvah?’

‘No, Mom. It’s too late for that,’ Kirby says, yanking open the tape on another box that has lost its stick over the years but still makes a terrible tearing sound. Little Golden books and Dr Seuss. Dean’s Treasury of Cowboys, Where the Wild Things Are, Revolting Rhymes.

‘I’ve been keeping those for you. For when you have kids.’

‘Not very likely.’

‘You never know. You weren’t planned. You used to write your dad letters. Do you remember?’

‘What?’ Kirby fights through the drone in her head. Her childhood is slippy. Memory is curated. All this paraphernalia you collect to ward off forgetting.

‘I threw them away, of course.’

‘Why would you do that?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. Where was I going to send them? You might as well have been writing to Santa.’

‘I thought So-John was my dad for the longest time. You know. Peter Collier. I tracked him down.’

‘I know, he told me. Oh, don’t look so surprised. We stay in touch. He said you went to see him when you were sixteen and impressed the hell out of him, demanding a paternity test and insisting that he pay child support.’

Actually, Kirby remembers, she was fifteen. She figured out who he was by reassembling a passionately ripped-to-shreds magazine profile she’d found in Rachel’s dustbin the day after her mother went on an all-time epic crockery-smashing crying jag for three days.

Peter Collier, creative genius at a major Chicago agency, according to the puff piece, responsible for ground-breaking campaigns over the last three decades, loving husband to a wife tragically crippled with multiple sclerosis, and, the article did not mention, notable motherfucker (literal definition) who had haunted much of her childhood.

She’d phoned his secretary, using her deepest and most professional voice, and made an appointment to discuss ‘new business on a potentially very lucrative account’ (vocabulary she stole from the article) at the swankiest restaurant she could think of.

He was at first baffled when a teenager sat down at the table, then irritated, then amused when she laid out her list of demands: that he resume seeing Rachel because she was miserable without him, start paying child support, and admit in print to the same magazine that he’d fathered a daughter out of wedlock. She informed him that regardless of said admission, she would not be changing her name because she’d gotten used to Mazrachi and it suited her. He bought her lunch and explained that he’d met Rachel when she was already five years old. But he liked her style and if there was anything she ever needed… She’d retorted with a stinging one-liner, something Mae West-y about fish and bicycles, and left with the upper hand and pride intact, or so she thought.

‘Who do you think helped pay your medical bills?’

‘For fuck’s sake.’

‘Why are you taking this so personally?’

‘Because he used you, Mom. For nearly ten years.’

‘Grown-up relationships are complicated. We got what we needed from each other. Passion.’

‘Oh God, I don’t want to hear it.’

‘A safety net. Some kind of solace. It’s lonely out there. But it ran its course. It was lovely while it lasted. But everything is finite. Life. Love. All this.’ She waves her hand vaguely at the assorted boxes. ‘Sadness too. Although that’s harder to let go of than happiness.’

‘Oh, Mom.’ Kirby puts her head in her mother’s lap. It’s the weed. She would never do this normally.

‘It’s okay,’ Rachel says. She seems surprised. But not unpleasantly. She strokes Kirby’s hair. ‘These crazy curls. I never knew what to do with them. You didn’t get them from me.’

‘Who was he?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. There were a couple of options. I was at a kibbutz in the Hula Valley. They farmed fish in ponds. But it could have been afterwards in Tel Aviv. Or on the road in Greece. I’m a bit foggy on the dates.’

‘Oh, Mom.’

‘I’m being honest. You’d be better off doing that, you know.’

‘What?’

‘Trying to hunt down your father instead of the man who… hurt you.’

‘You never gave me the option.’

‘I could give you names. Five at most. Four. Five. Some of them are first names only. But the kibbutzim would probably have a register, if it was one of them. You could do a pilgrimage. Go to Israel and Greece and Iran.’

‘You went to Iran?’

‘No, but it would be fascinating. I’ve got photographs in here somewhere. Would you like to see?’

‘Yes, actually.’

‘Somewhere…’ Rachel nudges Kirby off her lap and paws through the boxes until she finds a photo album, the red plastic printed to look like fake leather. She flips it open to a picture of a young woman with her hair whipping round her, in a white bathing suit, laughing and scowling into the sun that slices a sharp diagonal of contrast across her body and the concrete pier she’s scrambling up. The sky is a washed-out azure. ‘This was at the harbor in Corfu.’

‘You look annoyed.’

‘I didn’t want Amzi to take a photograph of me. He’d been doing it all day and it was driving me crazy. So of course that was the one he let me keep.’

‘Is he one of them?’

Rachel thinks about it. ‘No, I was feeling nauseous by then. I thought it was all the ouzo.’

‘Great, Mom.’

‘I didn’t know. You must have been there already. A secret to me.’

She flips ahead – the photographs aren’t in any kind of chronological order, because she goes past Kirby’s crushingly embarrassing punk prom photos to a picture of her as a naked toddler, standing in an inflatable paddling pool, holding a garden hose and looking impishly into the camera. Rachel is sitting in a stripy canvas deck chair beside the pool, her hair cut boyishly short, smoking a cigarette behind oversized tortoiseshell sunglasses. The glamorous malaise of the suburbs. ‘Look how cute you were,’ she says. ‘You were always a sweet kid, but naughty too. You can see it radiating out your face. I didn’t really know what to do with you.’

‘I can tell.’

‘Don’t be cruel,’ Rachel says, but without heat.

Kirby takes the album out of her hands and starts going through it. The problem with snapshots is that they replace actual memories. You lock down the moment and it becomes all there is of it.

‘Oh God, look at my hair.’

‘I didn’t tell you to shave it off. They nearly suspended you from school.’

‘What’s this?’ It comes out sharper than she intended. But the shock of it is terrible. Dread like a swamp.

‘Hmmm?’ Rachel takes the photograph from her. It’s mounted in a yellowed card with a looping friendly font: ‘Greetings From Great America! 1976’. ‘That theme park. You were crying because you were scared to go on the rollercoaster. I hated that we couldn’t go on roadtrips without you getting motion sick.’

‘No, what’s that in my hand?’

Rachel peers at the picture of the wailing girl in a theme park. ‘I don’t know, honey. A plastic horse?’

‘Where did you get it?’

‘Honestly, I can’t remember the genesis of all your toys.’

‘Please think, Rachel.’

‘You found it somewhere. Carried it around for ages until you fell in love with something else. You were always fickle like that. Some doll with turnaround hair, blonde and brunette. Melody? Tiffany? Something like that. She had the most gorgeous outfits.’

‘Where is it now?’

‘If it’s not in one of these boxes, then it must have gotten thrown out. I don’t keep everything. What are you doing?’

Kirby tears through the boxes, dumping the contents on to the overgrown grass.

‘Now you’re just being selfish,’ Rachel points out calmly. ‘It’s going to be much less fun cleaning that up later.’

There are cardboard poster tubes, a hideous tea set with brown and orange flowers from Kirby’s grandmother in Denver, who she tried to live with when she was fourteen, a tall copper hookah with the tip of the mouthpiece broken off, crumbled incense smelling of decayed empires, a battered silver harmonica, old paintbrushes and dried-out pens, miniature dancing cats that Rachel painted on tile blocks, which actually sold well for a while in the local craft shop. Indonesian bird cages, an engraved bit of elephant tusk or possibly warthog (real ivory regardless), a jade Buddha, a printer’s tray, Letraset, and a ton, probably, of heavy art and design books bookmarked with torn-off bits of paper, tangles of costume jewelry, a weaver bird’s nest and several dreamcatchers that they’d spent a summer making when Kirby was ten. Some kids have lemonade stands, Kirby tried to sell fake spiderwebs with dangly crystals.

And she wonders why she turned out like she did.

‘Where are my toys, Mom?’

‘I was going to give them away.’

‘You wouldn’t have got round to it,’ Kirby says, brushing the grass off her knees. She heads back into the house and down to the basement, clutching the photograph.

She finds the discolored plastic trunk, eventually, stuffed inside the broken freezer that Rachel uses for storage. It’s under a garbage bag full of assorted hats that Kirby once played dress-up with, half-crushed by a wooden spinning wheel that must be worth something to an antiques collector.

Rachel sits on the top of the stairs, resting her chin on her knees, watching her. ‘You’re still a secret to me.’

‘Shut up, Mom.’

Kirby pries open the lid, like an oversize school lunchbox. Inside are all her toys. A baby doll that she never really wanted, but everyone else at school had them. Barbies and their cheap generic cousins, in all kinds of career variations. Businesswoman with a pink briefcase or mermaid. None of them have shoes. Half of them are missing a limb. The doll with the reversible hair, naked, now, a robot that turned into a UFO, a killer whale in a trailer truck stenciled with the logo for Sea World, a wooden doll with DIY knitted plaits of red wool, Princess Leia in her white snowsuit and Evil Lyn with her golden skin. There were never enough girls to play with.

And there, underneath a half-built Lego tower manned by die-cast lead Indian braves, also from her grandmother, is a plastic pony. Its orange hair is matted with something dried and sticky. Juice, maybe. But it has the same sad-looking eyes and the goofy melancholy smile and the butterflies on its butt.

‘Jesus,’ Kirby breathes.

‘That’s it, all right,’ Rachel shifts impatiently on the steps. ‘And now?’

‘He gave this to me.’

‘I shouldn’t have let you smoke. You’re not used to it.’

‘Listen to me,’ Kirby shouts. ‘He gave this to me. The fucker who tried to kill me.’

‘I don’t know what you’re saying!’ Rachel shrieks back, confused and upset.

‘How old was I in that photo?’

‘Seven? Eight?’

Kirby checks the date on the card: 1976. She was nine. But younger when he gave it to her. ‘Your math is terrible, Mom.’ She can’t believe she hasn’t thought about it in all these years.

She turns the horse over. There are stamps under each of its hooves in all-caps. MADE IN. HONG KONG. PAT PENDING. HASBRO 1982.

Everything goes cold. The static from the weed cranks up the volume, buzzing in her head. She moves to sit on the stairs just below Rachel. She takes her mother’s hand and presses it against her face. Her veins stand out like blue tributaries amongst the fine hatched lines and first liver spots. She’s getting old, Kirby thinks, and this is somehow even more unbearable than the plastic pony.

‘I’m scared, Mom.’

‘We all are,’ Rachel says. She hugs her head to her chest and rubs her back as Kirby’s whole body racks and shudders. ‘Shhh. It’s okay, honey. It’s all right. That’s the big secret, don’t you know? Everyone is. All the time.’