Free The Longings of Wayward Girls by Karen Brown Page B

pan,
congealed and mottled with mold, the can on the counter. “she didn’t even clean up?” sadie says.
“This place gives her the creeps,” ray replies.
The morning sun bounces off the chrome handles on the
stove and the refrigerator. ray turns to sadie. “we used to
come over here and play hide-and-seek when we were little.”
He tells her how beth found a secret hiding spot behind a
panel. one of those places in old houses that held stores for
the revolutionary war or escaping slaves. she called it her
hidey spot. He points to the open, nearly empty room that
sadie imagines is the main living area, the chestnut floorboards wide and scarred. “There, beside the fireplace.” “what happened?” sadie asks.
ray smiles. “old Grams and Gramps Filley used to tell
us they had a ghost. when we were playing one day beth got
stuck in the hidey spot and just freaked out.”
“Didn’t anyone know she was there?” sadie says. ray shakes his head. “My grandfather was dead by then.
My grandmother never knew about it. we were little—beth
was probably about seven. I would have been nine. I had quit
playing the game when I couldn’t find her and gone outside.” The panel beside the fireplace is sealed up and painted and
looks exactly like the one on the other side. sadie imagines
how sylvia might crawl into such a place to hide, and then she
tries not to think about sylvia. outside the wind picks up and
rattles something against the house.
“How did she get out?” sadie asks.
ray tells her he heard beth crying, and eventually, he figured out where the sound was coming from. “After that, it was
our secret, me and beth’s.”
sadie remembers the glee beth took in frightening her
with the old house’s ghost story, back when laura loomis
had been missing only a year, and sadie had mentioned, more
than once during their backgammon marathons, her fear of
what might have happened to her. “beth never seemed like
the type to scare easily,” sadie says.
ray laughs. “Horseshit,” he says. He laughs some more
and crosses his arms. “I can’t believe I just said that. My father
used to say that.”
sadie smiles. she likes to see him laugh. she realizes she
rarely saw him laugh when they were younger—he always
seemed preoccupied, older than his years.
“It’s my house now,” ray says. He takes sadie in his arms.
“And I always liked the ghost. I used to imagine it was like
Georgie, in those books I read as a kid.”
sadie wants to remind him that the ghost is a woman,
emely Filley, but like many of the things she seems to recall
so clearly, she decides not to bring it up, to let him know she
remembers. He leans in and kisses her then, his hands moving
along her waist, up over her breasts. He tugs her toward the stairs and then up, sadie barely taking account of the rooms they pass, their doors opening off the long hallway, most of them empty. ray takes off her clothes, keeping his mouth busy with hers. she feels his fingers, quick and desperate, working the buttons of her blouse, and she thrills at his desperation, the person she imagines she’s become. He pushes her down onto a bed that has been slept in, the quilt hastily shoved back, the sheets wrinkled and smelling of him. she nestles in his arms, warm, safe, the house’s timbers groaning like an old ship, the windowpanes, buffeted by the wind, banging in their frames. outside, the crocuses peek from between the wall’s fallen stones, the grass brightens, the leaves unfurl like little green cloths, all wet and wrung out and wrinkled. The smell of manure fills the fields. ray tells her he remembers when she was a girl and would come swimming at the house. He
says he used to like watching her.
“watching me where?” she says. “In the pool?” He says nothing for a moment. His hand keeps moving
over her thigh.
“when?” she asks him. “How old was I?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “How old are you now?” “you know how old I am,” she says.
The