The Shining Girls A Novel

He lies there, face in the mud, the rain pelting down on him. The shouts have moved away, although the air reeks of smoke, and the light from a half-dozen fires mixes with the gray of the dawn. A fragment of music drifts through the night, carrying from an apartment window, perhaps, with the tenants leaning out to enjoy the spectacle.

Harper crawls on his belly through the mud, lights flaring in his skull from the pain – or maybe they’re real. It is a kind of a rebirth. He graduates from crawling to hobbling when he finds a heavy piece of timber the right height to lean on.

His left foot is useless, dragging behind him. But he keeps going, through the rain and the darkness, away from the burning shantytown.

Everything happens for a reason. It’s because he is forced to leave that he finds the House. It is because he took the coat that he has the key.

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.