Anna Noyes - Goodnight, Beautiful Women

“Whatever,” Liz says.

“Mixed company, I mean,” he says, his voice low. Liz looks at Jenny.

“I just mean, how old are you?” Freddy asks.

“Nah, man, she’s cool,” says Jake. He throws his arm over Freddy’s shoulder.

Jenny nods. “I’m old enough,” she says, so quiet she’s not sure if they hear.

Freddy drops his voice. “They said this girl, Adelaide, was douched by this guy, after he, you know.” He laughs like the air is being pressed out of him.

“What a douche bag,” Jake says. Freddy punches his arm, and Jake lurches into Jenny.

“Sorry, too soon,” he says, stumbling. He steadies himself, looping his arm around Jenny’s waist, slowing the two of them down. “I missed you in sailing today.”

“I hate sailing,” she says. “Thanks to you.”

“Wow,” he says. “Big talk. Feisty.” His hand teases the belt loop on her jeans. Linked like this, they are clumsy. They can’t keep up.

“You scared?” he asks.

“No.”

“You didn’t ask what of.”

“What, then?”

“You know,” he says. The laces of his sneaker have come undone. They flick at her ankle.

“Maybe they’ll catch him,” she says.

“Doubt it. Not without the DNA. The douche, right? You get that?”

“Sure,” she says.

“So how old are you now?”

“Thirteen in August.”

“OK,” he says, slow, nodding.

“You?”

“Too old for you.” His hand is under her shirt now, on the curve of her hip. “I’m just kidding,” he says. “You should have seen your face. You’re dangerous.”

The rest of the group is far ahead. Freddy turns and whistles back at them as he rounds the bend in the road, out of sight.

“You don’t need to be scared,” he says.

“I’m not.”

“Sure you are.” He puts a hand on her head, stopping her. “But he doesn’t want you. You’re white. So don’t worry about it.”

She watches the moon’s reflection tracking across the water behind him. She watches the slow blink of a satellite move through the sky.

“I want your picture,” he says, pulling her to face him. He rocks her in the road, a slow dance. “What are you thinking about?”

“Why?”

“Because I want to know.”

“Why do you want my picture, I mean.”

“To show my friends back home how hot you are.”

She smiles at her sneakers.

“Who made you so sweet?” he asks. He pushes her bangs back from her forehead.

“I don’t know,” she says.

“Come on.”

“My parents, maybe.”

He throws his head back to laugh. “That’s good,” he says. “That’s really good.”

“Shouldn’t we catch up?” she asks. She wipes her palms on her shorts.

“Don’t worry,” says Jake. “I’ll walk you home.”

He licks his lips each time he leans in to kiss her. His kisses taste like smoke and sesame seeds. He leads her down to the beach. She’s thought about this kind of thing, but now that it’s happening all she can think is how relieved she will feel to be back in her bedroom, in her pajamas, under her quilt. The rocks on the beach are still warm. A loon wails across the water. Jake gets his hand under the cup of her bra, and then his mouth. When he fumbles with his buckle and pulls his pants to his ankles she sits up and straightens her shirt. He pulls her hand over to the hole in his boxers.

“This OK?” he breathes. She shakes her head.

“No? You want to stop?” Her hand is in his hand, she has let him lead her, and now she is touching him. It is a curiosity to feel it, small and soft, this thing she has never seen up close. They are touching him together. At first her hand is loose in his, but when her fingers start to understand what he wants they can’t help but move in the right way. He grows inside her palm. When his hand darts into her shorts and under the elastic of her underwear, she is mostly embarrassed that he is feeling the thatch of hair.

“Wanna kiss my neck?” he asks. “Like that.” Jake’s skin is salty. His belt buckle jabs into her leg. His fingers begin to move against her. She is dry and closed to him, and then she is full of his fingers, their pressure and their ache. She lies still but then, as with her hand, her body moves on its own without her, hips back and forth, rocking against his hand. Her breath knocks out of her and into his ear.

She can feel her pulse in the sockets where they pulled out her teeth.

* * *

Harold wakes to Jenny in his bedroom doorway.

“Dad,” she says, the hallway light on behind her, the web of her hair illuminated. He can’t see her face. “There’s someone at my window.”

He is too slow rising to the surface, getting out of bed, fumbling with the lamp.

“I’m scared,” she whispers. She is crying. “Someone’s there.”

His grandfather’s shotgun is hidden in the back of the closet, an unloaded heirloom, its bullets secreted in a leather pouch inside a shoebox. He does not know if it will fire.

“Stay here,” he says, walking down the hallway to her bedroom, heart snapping. “It’s probably nothing.” But as he says this he hears scrambling in the branches of the apple tree that grazes Jenny’s open window, and there it is, a figure shifting in the outside darkness, a black outline against the black branches. He moves slowly toward the window, waiting, not breathing, watching as the dark shape develops into a fat raccoon.

“Get out of here,” he shouts, pounding the window until the glass cracks. The tree squirms with life. Behind the one raccoon, he realizes, are a dozen more, unafraid, slinking from the branches to snatch fallen fruit on the kitchen roof, climbing the drainpipe paw over paw, some of them hanging upside down. He watches them clean the tree of apples, its shaken limbs dropping ripe fruit.

“Dad?” Jenny calls from the hallway. Eyes glint in the tree’s leaves. “Is it safe?”

He can hear the soft wet sound of the raccoons chewing, but beyond that there is something else. He holds his breath, listening. A noise in the night: deliberate and human and close. Like the blade of an ax hacking into a tree. When he reaches out to close the window a branch grazes his hand and he recoils involuntarily, shuddering with revulsion. Sound carries easily across the bay. The noise must be a boat, he thinks, waves knocking its hull, or some clanging loose part.

After he tucks Jenny back in bed he steps outside for some air. He hasn’t locked the house since he bought it, thirty years earlier, because no one in the town locks anything. But now he locks the door on his daughter even though the threat is, in all likelihood, long gone.

The strange noise has disappeared, replaced by the shrill din of crickets crawling in their field. His eyes won’t adjust to the dark circle of surrounding pines. Close, very close now, a sound presents itself. A body brushing boughs. Twigs cracking, then silence. Like footsteps circling.

“Hello?” he says. He hears, in the word, how his spit has gone tacky. He feels absurd. Frightened, probably, by another raccoon. He doesn’t move. He watches. The motion sensor light on the porch flickers on and off. There is no denying a rustling in the leaves. Dew from the grass climbs up the legs of his pajamas. The moon slips out from the clouds. He imagines how he would look to someone watching from the woods — a gray-haired father in reading glasses, pajamas, and slippers, but he feels animal. If someone came at him he could tear them apart. Ten minutes go by. Twenty. The woods are full of night noise, crawling and skittering, just that, and the wind blowing through the tops of the pines.

Jenny wakes to “Wild Horses.” When she was little they would slow dance to this song, her feet on her dad’s feet, and when she got older they would still dance a little, in their own private way, to wake her up before school. She knows the deal is that she’ll come downstairs before the song is over, but she stays in bed until the last chorus. He is waiting at the bottom of the stairs, and when he sees her he starts to dance, like he hasn’t been waiting.