The Shining Girls A Novel

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 f*ck 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 f*cking bitch.’





Alice

1 DECEMBER 1951

‘Alice Templeton?’ he says, not sounding sure.

‘Yes?’ she turns.

It is the moment she has been waiting for her whole life. She has played it out in the cinema in her head, rewound the reel, played it again and again.

He steps into the chocolate factory and all the machines grind to a halt in mechanical sympathy, and all the other girls look up as he strides towards her and dips her low, and before he presses his mouth against hers and takes her breath away, he says, ‘I told you I’d come back for you.’

Or he leans rakishly across the cosmetics counter, while she is applying rouge to some society lady who will spend more money on a lipstick than she earns in a week and say, ‘Excuse me, miss, I’ve been searching all over for the love of my life. Can you help me?’ And he will reach out his hand for her and she will climb over the counter, past the tutting matron. He will spin her round in his arms and set her on her feet, looking at her in delight, and they will run through the department store, hand-in-hand and laughing, and the security guard will say, ‘But, Alice, you’re still on shift,’ and she will unclip her gold name-tag and fling it at his feet and say, ‘Charlie, I quit!’

Or he will walk into the secretarial pool and say, ‘I need a girl! And she’s the one.’

Or take her hands and lift her gently from scrubbing the diner floors like Cinderella on her knees (never mind that she used a mop) and say, with terrible tenderness, ‘There’s no need for that now.’

She was not expecting him to come to her while she was tramping to work. She wants to weep with relief. But also frustration, because she is so awfully unglamorous at this moment. She has a scarf tied over her hair to hide that it’s unwashed and limp. Her toes are frozen inside her boots. Her hands are chapped, her fingernails bitten. She’s barely wearing any make-up. Having a job where you talk on the phone all day means people only judge her by her voice. ‘Sears Wish Book sales, what would you like to order?’

She once had a farmer phoning in to order a new tachometer for his John Deere who ended up proposing to her. ‘I could wake up to that in my ear,’ he declared. He begged her to see him when he next came up to the city, but she laughed him off. ‘I’m not all that,’ she said.

Alice has had bad encounters before with men who were expecting her to be more and less than what she is. Some good ones too, but usually when they already knew what they were letting themselves in for, and usually only for brief passionate clinches. She wants ‘A Sunday Kind of Love’, as the song goes. One that lasts past the gin-flavored kisses of Saturday night. Her longest relationship was ten months and he kept breaking her heart and coming back. Alice wants more. She wants it all. She’s been saving up to go to San Francisco where it’s easier, the rumors say, for women like her.

‘Where have you been?’ She can’t help herself. She hates the petulance that comes rushing into her voice. But it’s been over ten years of waiting and hoping and reprimanding herself for pinning her dreams on a man who kissed her once at a county fair and then vanished.

He smiles, rueful. ‘I had things I had to do. They don’t seem so important now.’ He links his arm in hers and turns her round in the other direction towards the lakefront. ‘Come with me,’ he says.

‘Where are we going?’

‘To a party.’

‘I’m not dressed for a party.’ She stops and wails, ‘I’m a frump!’

‘It’s a private affair. Just the two of us. And you look wonderful.’

‘So do you,’ she says, flushing, and lets him lead her down towards Michigan. She knows with a pure certainty that it won’t matter to him. She could see that in the way he looked at her back then, all those years ago. And it’s still in his eyes, bright desire and acceptance.





Harper

1 DECEMBER 1951

They swan into the lobby of the Congress past the non-functioning escalators that have been covered like corpses under burial cloth. No-one spares the pair a second glance. The hotel is renovating. The soldiers must have taken their toll on the rooms during the war, Harper imagines. All that drinking and smoking and whoring.

The rotary dial above the gold elevator doors adorned with ivy wreaths and griffons lights up the floor numbers, counting down to them. The minutes she has left. Harper clasps his hands in front of his pants to hide his excitement. This is the most brazen he has been. He fingers the white plastic disk of Julia Madrigal’s pill packet in his pocket. There is no undoing it. Everything is as it is meant to be. As he determines it.

They step out onto the third floor and he pushes the heavy double doors open wide enough to guide her through into the Gold Room. He fumbles for the lights. It hasn’t changed so much as a fitting since he drank spiked lemonade here with Etta a week ago, twenty years ago, although the tables and chairs are stacked now and the heavy curtains over the balconies are drawn shut. Renaissance arches with naked figures amid carved greenery stretch out to each other across the room. Classically romantic, Harper supposes, although to him they look tortured, reaching for a comfort denied them, lost without the music.

‘What is this?’ Alice gasps.

‘The banquet room. One of them.’

‘It’s beautiful,’ she says. ‘But there’s no one else here.’

‘I don’t want to share you,’ he says, swinging her round, to defray that note of doubt in her voice. He starts humming, a song he has heard that hasn’t been written yet, and moves her across the floor. Not quite a waltz, but something like it. He learned the steps the way he does everything, watching other people and constructing a semblance.

‘Did you bring me here to seduce me?’ Alice asks.

‘Would you let me?’

‘No!’ she says, but she means yes, he can tell. She looks away, flustered, and glances up at him sidelong, her cheeks still pink from the cold. It makes him angry and confused because maybe he does want to seduce her. Etta has left him feeling wretched.

‘I have something for you,’ he says, fighting through it. He takes the velvet jewelry box out of his pocket and pops it to reveal the charm bracelet. It glitters sullenly in the light. Hers all along. It was a mistake to give it to Etta.

‘Thank you,’ she says, a little shocked.

‘Put it on.’ He is too aggressive. He grabs her wrist, too tightly, he sees, by the way she winces. Something in her shifts. She is aware, now, of being in a deserted ballroom with a stranger from a decade ago.

‘I don’t think I want to,’ she says carefully. ‘It’s been lovely to see you again … Oh God, I don’t even know your name.’

‘It’s Harper. Harper Curtis. But never mind that. I have something to show you, Alice.’

‘No, really–’ She twists her hand out of his grip and when he lunges for her, she pulls one of the chair stacks down in front of him. While he fights his way through the tangle of furniture, she runs for the side door.

Harper goes after her, shoving the door open to reveal a dim maintenance corridor with wiring dangling from a scaffolding of pipes above. He unfolds the knife.

‘Alice,’ he calls, his voice full of friendly cheer. ‘Come back, darling.’ He walks slowly, unthreateningly down the corridor, his hand tucked slightly behind his back. ‘I’m sorry, sweetheart. I didn’t mean to frighten you.’

He rounds the corner. There is a quilted mattress with a brownish stain propped up against the wall. If she was clever, she might have hidden behind it, waited for him to go past.

‘I was too eager, I know. It’s been so long. Waiting for you.’

Further along, there is a storage room, the door ajar to show more stacks of chairs. She could be hiding in there, crouched between them, peeking out between the legs.

‘You remember what I said to you? You shine, sweetheart. I could see you in the dark.’ In a way, that’s true. It is the light that gives her away – and the shadow it casts on the stairs leading up to the roof.

‘If you didn’t like the bracelet, you only had to say.’ He feints right as if he is going to walk away, deeper into the bowels of the building, and then darts up the rickety wooden stairs, three at a time, to where she’s hiding.

The neon light is naked and unflattering. It makes her look even more afraid. He lashes out with the knife, but only catches the arm of her jacket, drawing a long graze along the sleeve as she shouts in terror, and flees further up, past the clanking boiler with its copper taps and the soot stains on the walls.

She yanks at the heavy door to the roof and bursts out into blinding daylight. He is a second behind her, but she slams the door on his left hand. He shrieks and snatches it away. ‘Bitch!’

He emerges quinting into the sunlight, his injured hand tucked under his armpit. Only bruised, not broken, but it hurts like a bitch. He no longer bothers to try to hide the knife.

She is standing by the little lip of the wall at the edge between a row of round air vents, their fans spinning lazily. She has her fist clenched around a piece of brick.

‘Come here.’ He motions with the knife.

‘No.’

‘You want to make this hard, sweetheart? You want to die badly?’

She lobs the brick at him. It goes skeltering across the pitched tar, missing him by a mile.

‘All right,’ he says. ‘All right. I won’t hurt you. It’s a game. Come here. Please.’ He holds out his hands and gives her his most guileless smile. ‘I love you.’

She smiles back, brilliantly. ‘I wish that was true,’ Alice says. And then she turns and leaps off the edge of the roof. He is too shocked to even yell after her.

Pigeons burst into the air from somewhere below. And then it’s just him and the empty rooftop. A woman screams from the street. Over and over, like a siren.

This is not the way it is supposed to be. He takes the contraceptive packet out of his pocket and stares at it, as if the circle of colored pills marked by the days of the week might be an omen he could read. But it tells him nothing. It is only a dull, dead object.

He squeezes it so tightly that the plastic cracks. Then he throws it after her in disgust. It drifts down, twirling like a child’s toy.