Lost Girl, Found

We don’t call it a rain, not at first. In the purpled night, stowed away behind weatherboard walls, we imagine it's anything else. An incessant pattering against the asphalt: children throwing stones. A shatter that pulls us headfirst from our sleep: a drunk losing grip on his bottle. The scrape of objects sliding over dew-glossed footpaths: roller skates, scabbed knees, feral cats’ claws. Speculations which make sense. In the mornings, we pull lost things from the gutter like hair from a shower drain. Ring Pops which have already begun to blister in the liquid gold sun. A silver teddy bear charm from a bracelet, clasp snapped in two. A half drunk bottle of peach schnapps, faded label peeling. Australia’s finest, the 1970s lettering claims. Australia’s finest. My mother lifts a pair of white panties from the branch of a banksia and spits onto the brittle, summer-bitten lawn. 

“Ain’t no respect,” she kneads the skimpy cotton into a ball and throws it at her feet, “Thinkin’ it's their goddamn town. Ain’t no respect.”

When she turns her back, I tuck the lost panties into my bra. 

When I ask Bennie what she thinks happens to Killibee girls, she laughs. A mouth lined with crooked pearls, half gums, all bite. 

“I think the town swallows them on its fat fucking tongue. Don’t you ever feel like that, like this place is sucking you dry?”

In the gape of a street light, she seems older than she is. An artificial sun shatters and constellates over her cheek, her birthmark as flat and red as spilt nectar. Torn jacket cuffs, eyeliner like two thumbprints of ash. The town is soft and quiet under the hazy curtain of sundown, sky like a two-day-old bruise. Between her fingers, a cigarette glows a hot, amber dart.

“Yeah,” I say, and take it from her, curl the smoke behind my lips, “Yeah, I do.”

When the cigarette collapses into a pile of ash, we stand, dust ourselves off, place three mints on each other’s halved-strawberry tongues. We pass the posters tacked to utility poles, corner store windows, each citizen detective’s front veranda. We pass the posters and pretend we never knew the girls smiling up from them, it’s easier that way.

The night spits up a prayer card, a damp stick of incense, two glittering sixteenth birthday candles and the crescent tip of a pink-chipped thumbnail.

In the morning I swallow three caps of vodka and pull the panties on in front of my mirror. They make me look pretty. They make me look like someone else. There’s the shadow of a stain on their seat, a memory, an idea. I imagine what left it came from me, that I’m the sort of girl brave enough to wear white. I imagine sweaty bush parties, dollar store perfume, someone’s hands on my hips, cigarette smoke. The pastel print of Marie Antoinette tucked into my brass mirror frame looks down on me and I imagine her whispering fabulous. It takes a while to notice the name sharpied on the inner seam, letters bloated. When I do, I throw up three times into the porcelain bowl of my toilet. I’m sick, but not sick enough to take them off.

Over dinner my mother talks about lost girls, avoiding their names like tiny blasphemies.

“Lucille Miller’s girl was the latest, you know?” she says, more to my father than me, “Hear she was a right little shit too, rumour is she was knocked up.”

My mother is a woman of dimpled flesh and acetone. If you peeled her skin back, I’d half expect there to be nothing underneath. Her shapeless floral dress suckers itself to rolls of fat, hangs limp at her knees. She spears a small cut of meat with her fork and dangles it before her open lips.

“Ask me,” she says, biting down, “This ain’t nothing more than the trash being taken out. I’d bet you anything these are the kids leaving their shit over our neighbourhood. If I found out whoever was takin’ them, I’d give him a hug.”

 “Bad girls, huh?” My father says. He is quiet and unassuming, a face half composed of glasses, limbs of twisted twine.

“That’s right. Bad girls.”

The table clears, the tulip shaped lights dim. I return to my room and splinter my fingers on my windowsill slipping out onto the roof. I pull the wooden needles from my fingertips as I wait for the rain. It trickles in slowly. A tin of clementine-tinged blush, shattered, muddying. A pair of wire headphones. A slip from the inside of a fortune cookie. Three pink-cased tampons. A squat bottle of cerulean nail polish. I let them fall between my blood-pricked fingers, smash into my palmy flesh, trip past my lifeline. The nail polish bottle splits open on the corrugated iron roof, blue varnish as thick as corn syrup catching in the dips.

Bad, bad, bad, I think, bad, bad, bad.

Bennie walks like a 1920s hooker, hips rocking like a hardwood horse, arms slicing the air. The watery morning light catches onto our bent necks, pearls at the back of my thighs. The streets are as full of lost things as I have ever seen them, and we are looking.

“Look,” she says, lifting a cut of hair, fine as a dead citrus peel, from a pothole, “What the fuck.”

Her mouth has always been too big for her face, her ears too small for her head. She’s like the long-past idea of a girl, not quite clear, a little too roughly drawn. A pendant shaped like a human heart beats between her breasts, everything she needs, she carries on the outside. In her cupped hands, the hair rests like an injured bird; curled in on itself, empty. Departed. And I think, not for the first time, that I could love her. If I tried. If I wanted to.

“It’s probably nothing.” I say.

She frowns.

“Don’t be like them, man. Don’t give me that shit.”

I look down at the piece of hair, blonde as cornsilk. Hair from a photo, hair from a distant P.E class memory. 

It’s probably nothing.

We probe the gutters, the bug-embroidered undersides of mailboxes, the gaps between dead grass where anything might fall and hide. A piece of grape bubblegum, chewed, teeth marks included. A jump rope which looks like it hasn’t been used in years. Lace brasseries marked with lovers’ names. A half-swallowed tray of birth control pills. Bennie slips a tattoo choker around my neck.

“Look at you, punk rock.” She says, and then, “Marla Benett used to wear those, I remember.”

I rip the plastic choker off so urgently that it snaps. I rip it off before I can think of the words HAVE YOU SEEN THIS PERSON? White cotton burns beneath my skirt.

When Julia Miller disappears, my mother locks our tall french doors and folds me into my room. She was a good girl, she says, a good girl. Julia Miller, preacher’s daughter. Child of ruffled dresses and hand-knit sweaters. Child of seashell-tinted rosary beads. Julia Miller, good girl until the end. She’s the tenth, I figure out. I trace the numbers onto my paint-chipped walls, the names. She’s the tenth. 

Her father goes on TV, our local news shows, eyes flat and glazed. He’s an old man, older than I expect a father to be, varicose veined and with the jowls of a bloodhound. He pours out prayers, pleadings. He brings a priest with him once or twice, lets him loiter in the background of the dreary scene. The priest’s black robe bellies in the afternoon breeze, his clerical collar the brightest garment this side of mourning. She’s the first to get this treatment. The point here, I think, is that no one mourns the wicked.

I watch everything on my bedroom floor, nose nearly pressed to my computer screen. Video after video, forum after forum. I drink lemonade straight from the jug, and chew at the plastic cap when it empties. I syphon boxed wine from the top shelf of the kitchen pantry and store it in Powerade bottles beneath my bed. I call Bennie, stomach flattened to my mauve-shag carpet. She calls me.

“How’s it feel, Belle?” She asks through the phone screen, “Being all locked up in that castle?”

“Well,” I say as lemonade misses the gap between my lips and veins down my throat, “My mother is certainly a beast.”

When a string of heart shaped rosary beads smacks down onto my windowsill, I drape them around my neck like a line of pearls. The madonna sits between my collarbones.

Good, I think, good, good, good.

One lilac ballet flat. A pair of white-gold hoop earrings. A camisole which reads ‘hysteric angel’. A tube of menstrual-red lipstick, sharpened to a point by the feather of a makeup brush. A loose french tip press-on which perfectly fits my ring finger. I pull these things on in front of my mirror, it is patchwork, it is quilting. With each night, I Frankenstein myself. What is left in the mirror is another girl entirely, I lean forward and kiss her glassy lips.

When I find the ear, triple pierced and lying in the gutter of my roof, I keep it. Severed by the lobe, skin like ripped rubber sheeting. I hold it to my chest. I let it decay in my pocket until it becomes me.

This is Bennie, I’m not at the phone right now, call back later. Or just text like everyone else, man.

I call her three times, then seven, then eighteen. Monday sinks into Tuesday, sinks into Wednesday, sinks into Sunday. I want her to see me like this, different, bolder. A clusterfuck of all the best parts of other girls. I watch the preacher’s news segments on replay, rebuild his words in my mouth until I can recite them like a prayer. With the glass beads pinched between my thumb and forefinger, I am so very sorry for him.

Hey, just…uh, pick up your phone? Okay? I miss you. 

A slice of skin, tattooed with a stick-and-poke heart. The colour of a girl’s hair. A university acceptance letter which will never be opened. Three sets of wisdom teeth. A finger, purity ring intact.

I press other girls’ skin to the underside of my jaw, I slip colours over myself like holy water. My closet grows and bulges. I am lost, I am found. I am both as empty and full as I’ve ever been.

The mailbox of Bennie Rivera is full and cannot accept any messages at this time.

When the pendant catches on my windowsill, I know. The size of a peach stone, it glints up at me from weather-chafed wood. I centre it in my palm, cheap faux-gold in the shape of a human heart. The greening chain is knotted and I unpick it with the stick of an earring, hunched over against my bed head. It unfurls and relaxes in my hand like a docile python and I clasp it tight at the nape of my neck. There are streets beyond these four walls that haven’t hidden just because I have. They branch beyond the square of my window, out into mould-tracked corner stores and fields of dying cane. Dimpled asphalt, the cicada like chatter of middle aged rumours. Sunday mass, playground drug deals and houses in the shapes of homes. It buzzes, the steady bloodbeat of a place alive. I imagine the roads splitting open across its ley lines. It breathes and then opens, a diesel-slick tongue unfurling from the earth beneath. And upon it, it swallows her. It swallows all of them.

In the mirror that night, my mouth looks a little larger than usual.