Mrs. Saint and the Defectives: A Novel Read online

  “We’re here!” Jesse called from the side door, and the tone of his voice alerted Markie that she should be prepared when she saw them.

  Her jaw dropped anyway. Her son stood in the family room beside a three-foot-tall call girl carrying a plastic pumpkin. Lola wore a bright-pink bikini top that was at least two sizes too small, and a very tight mauve-satin skirt that ended halfway between her knees and hips. Between her bikini top and skirt was a foot of bare stomach, and on her feet were women’s-size high heels, the same bright pink as the top.

  Her hair was pulled into a high ponytail, and she wore more makeup than Markie had ever had on, complete with bright-pink lipstick, fake eyelashes, purple eye shadow, and long, thick swaths of eyeliner that extended out from the outer corners of her eyes, Aphrodite style. Four different costume jewelry necklaces wrapped around her neck, one of which matched her three-inch-long earrings.

  “Well . . . ,” Markie said, desperately trying to think of something to say other than, Oh no you don’t! Not on my watch!

  Jesse cleared his throat, and when she met his gaze, he said, “Lola’s dressed as a genie.”

  “Ohhhh!” Markie said. “A genie!”

  “Like from the show,” Lola said shyly. “I watch it with Carol.”

  “The I Dream of Jeannie show?” Markie said. “I didn’t know that was still on. I used to love that one!”

  “It’s only on real late at night,” Lola said, in a tone that suggested she didn’t expect Markie was the type who would be up late enough to see it.

  Markie assessed the child’s outfit again. The high ponytail was perfect—she would give her that.

  “Ronda wanted to make me a cape,” Lola said. “But that’s not part of the costume.” She looked at Markie plaintively, seeking support from a fellow fan.

  “Maybe she was worried you’d be cold,” Markie said.

  Lola seemed unconvinced—it was a warm night—but moved on, reaching into her pumpkin. “She made me something.” Turning to Jesse, she said, “I mean, us.”

  “You can keep it,” he said. “It’s your ‘Best! Night! Ever!’”

  He waved his hands in the air as he spoke, clearly imitating something Lola had done earlier. He was smiling, though, not sneering, happy about her excitement, not mocking it. She smiled back as she produced from the pumpkin a small totem of two figures attached together, one holding a paper flashlight, the other clutching a Hershey bar as tall as the figure itself. She held it out to Markie, who admired it and handed it back. Lola set it carefully back in the pumpkin, pushing it with her finger until she was satisfied with its placement.

  “Look at these!” She extended a foot for Markie to admire. “These are Patty’s. She said I could use anything I wanted in the whole apartment to make my costume.”

  “They’re beautiful,” Markie said. “But can you walk in those for an hour?”

  Lola nodded, and Jesse said, “If you consider tripping every few feet to be ‘walking,’ then yes.” He poked the girl gently in her tummy. “I thought I might have to carry her over here. I already warned her that my piggybacking days are over, and no way are we dealing with a scooter tonight.”

  Angel, who had been weaving in and out between the three of them as they talked, spied Lola’s extended leg and attacked it with her tongue. Lola burst into giggles and fell to the floor.

  “Not my makeup!” she squealed, pushing the dog’s face away. Angel wouldn’t be deterred. Turning to the dog, Lola said, “Hey, Angel, can you roll over?” The dog lay down and rolled over, her tongue lolling out the side of her mouth. “Good girl,” Lola said, rubbing the furry belly.

  “You taught her to roll over?” Markie asked Jesse.

  “Patty did,” he said. “Yesterday, while we were carving the pumpkins. So what do you think we should do, Mom?” He pointed directly at the back of Lola’s head.

  Markie nodded conspiratorially. “You know, Lola, I had an idea earlier.” She paused to give herself time to make something up. “I have some old sheets upstairs. Some regular-size ones and some from when Jesse was a baby and had a crib.”

  Lola giggled without taking her eyes off the dog. “Baby Jesse. Baby girl Jesse.”

  “Grandpa Lola,” he fired back, and she giggled harder.

  Markie looked at her son, who shook his head. “It’s just a thing we do. So what was your idea? About the sheets?”

  “You two might think it’s silly,” Markie said, “but I saw it online.”

  It was a shot in the dark, but it hit—Lola stiffened as she listened to hear more.

  “I guess a lot of kids this year are dressing with their dog,” Markie said. “You know, matching costumes.”

  Lola’s hand came to a stop on Angel’s belly.

  “And I was thinking about those old sheets. White ones . . .” Markie paused for Jesse to catch up.

  “Ghosts?” he said. “As in, cut holes in sheets and be ghosts?”

  “Lame?” Markie asked.

  “Brilliant!” he said. “Lola! Right? You and Angel could both be ghosts!”

  Lola turned to look at him, and it was plain she was thinking about it. She gazed down at her pink high heels, then reached up to touch one of her dangling earrings.

  “And,” Jesse said, clearly thinking on his feet, “the beauty of it is, you can still be a genie, too! Only, you’d be a genie under the ghost. A secret genie!”

  “A genie ghost,” Lola whispered, and her hand moved away from her earring.

  “Right, only everyone else would just see the ghost, right?” he said. “And the genie part would be, like, totally covered by the sheet. ’Cause otherwise you won’t match Angel.”

  “Unless she’s a genie ghost too!” Lola said.

  “That would be so cool,” Jesse said. “Except it’s . . . uh . . . already getting late, and I don’t know how long it’d take to rig her up in both costumes. But it sounds like my mom’s got a sheet for her, so I’m thinking we go with pure ghost, right? And you know, if we stopped at Mrs. Saint’s first and got those white running shoes of yours, that would be even better. They’d be harder to see under the sheet than those pink shoes.”

  “It would look like I’m floating on air!” Lola squealed.

  She jumped up and ran to the door, kicking off the high heels before she opened it. “I’ll get them now!”

  Before Jesse could answer, she was tearing across the patio in her skimpy outfit and bare feet.

  “Nice save, Mom,” he said.

  Ten minutes later, they were ready to go, a resigned Angel wrapped in half of an old crib sheet.

  Markie held up her camera. “Lola, can I get a picture of the two ghosts?”

  Jesse stepped away, and Markie knew better than to try to coax him to be in the shot. But at the last second, Lola tugged on his sleeve to pull him closer, and to Markie’s surprise, he not only consented, but he also agreed to hold Lola’s pumpkin so she could pose with her hands in the air.

  “No one sees that one but the three of us,” he told his mother as he walked out the front door, the two ghosts running ahead of him on the walk.

  “I’m pretty sure everyone next door is going to see it if you let Lola have a copy,” she warned. “Maybe everyone at her school, too.”

  He closed his eyes. Clearly, he hadn’t considered the full ramifications of smiling for the camera, pumpkin in hand.

  “You could always tell her there’s only going to be one copy, and it’s going to stay in this house.”

  “Jesseeee!” Lola called from the end of the walk, where she was bouncing on her toes with excitement. “Come onnnn!” She bent to adjust the half crib sheet they had dressed the dog in, then dropped to her knees and hugged Angel around her neck. “Best night ever, Angel!”

  His eyes on the girl and the dog, Jesse said, “Nah, it’s fine. She can have her own copy.”

  Markie reached into the candy bowl, then went with her son to the end of the walk, hands behind her back. Bringing them forward, she bent
down to Lola. “Here, Miss Secret Genie Ghost. I want to be the first person to put something in your pumpkin. These were Jesse’s idea, by the way.”

  Lola pulled her sheet off to get a better view as Markie dropped three Hershey bars into the orange plastic container. Screeching, Lola threw her arms around Markie’s neck, pressing a sticky cheek against her. It felt to Markie as though the child had just glued them together. It wasn’t the makeup—she could feel that, too, and it was slippery, not sticky.

  Lola’s neck and arms and hair had a filmy feel to them, and she had a definite unclean smell about her, although perhaps because she was only eight, it was more sweet than repulsive. She smelled like mushed apples and wet hay, and while it wasn’t something Markie would want to bottle and sell, it was far nicer than the preteen body odor that used to settle in the stairwells at Jesse’s old school.

  Despite the smell of her and the stickiness, Markie held on tight. Hugging Lola reminded her of how it used to be when Jesse was her age, the forceful way he’d throw himself at her, shoot his arms around her, and hold on like he never wanted to let go. No self-consciousness, no concern about whether someone might be watching. It got so much harder as they got bigger. Jesse was skinny, but he had his father’s broad shoulders, so Markie had to approach him from a careful angle in order to get her arms right around him, which only made the entire process that much more awkward and unpleasant for him.

  “Thank you a big billion billion!” Lola said, pressing her cheek tighter against Markie’s.

  “Which is not, in fact, the highest number in the world,” Jesse said, in a way that made clear he was continuing a conversation they’d had before.

  “Is so,” Lola said.

  She tried to pull away, but she and Markie were stuck fast by whatever was under her makeup. Lola giggled and pulled harder, coming free, and Markie felt a cold, empty space where the child’s body had been pressed against her. She told herself she was being ridiculous—she should be relieved to be free of the smell and grime.

  Jesse picked up the discarded sheet from the ground and held it out for her, and Lola wriggled into it.

  “Frappez la rue!” Lola said. “That’s ‘hit the road’ in French,” she informed Markie as they turned for the sidewalk.

  “Not exactly,” Jesse said. “It doesn’t—”

  “Directly translate,” Lola finished for him. “But I still like to say it.”

  “Just don’t—” he started.

  “Say it in front of Mrs. Saint,” Lola finished. “I know. Je pas stupid.”

  “Je ne suis pas stupide,” he corrected, and Markie didn’t know whether to feel pride or dismay at his newfound French-language skills.

  Lola punched him in the side and whispered something Markie couldn’t hear, and the two of them bickered their way down the block as Markie turned back to the house.

  Stepping past the carved pumpkin, she thought about the Halloween nights of her childhood—being dragged too fast around their block by an impatient Lydia while her father remained at work, determined not to return home until “the whole ridiculous waste of money and good molars” was over. “There,” Lydia would say, “we went all the way around the block. That’s more than enough candy for your waistline and for your teeth. And more than enough time for Mommy to have to witness all those mannerless imps grabbing their candy and running, without a pleasant ‘Good evening’ or even a simple ‘Please’ and ‘Thank you.’”

  Markie was allowed to dress in one of four Lydia-approved costumes: nurse, doctor, teacher, or first female president. She was permitted one candy from her pumpkin while they racewalked around the block, one when they got home, and one each dinnertime thereafter until her pumpkin was empty. With her mother’s supervision—the kind that always ended in “Here, why don’t I just fix that part. In fact, I’ll just finish it for you”—she was given the chance to carve one small pumpkin. More of a gourd, really, the size of a baseball. Clayton didn’t like the look of large pumpkins on people’s doorsteps once the squirrels got to them.

  There were no indoor decorations of any kind, though Markie was allowed to display Halloween-related school art projects on the fridge for the same seven-day time allotment Clayton permitted for all drawings, stories, or other items she brought home. Once the week was up, the “clutter,” as he referred to it, went into the garbage. “This is a house, not a nest of pack rats.”

  Inside the bungalow, Markie switched off the porch light and went to the family room to retrieve her book from the couch. She had an hour of reading time in bed before the kids returned. As she bent to pick up her novel, she saw Patty’s pink high heels near the door where Lola had kicked them off, and it occurred to her that she had been luckier than Lola—at least Lydia had taken her around the block each year and helped her with her costume, no matter how uncreative.

  Markie set her book down. In the front hall, she flipped the porch light back on, casting the front of the house in a welcoming glow, and racing to the basement as fast as her crutches would allow, she found the box labeled HALLOWEEN. For the next sixty minutes, anytime she had a break from answering the door and handing candy to tiny Dorothys with red shoes, middle-school grim reapers, and the occasional high-school “hobo,” she strung pumpkin lights around the kitchen window, set out her collection of ceramic witches and ghosts on the counter, and dangled big plastic spiders from the ceiling, along with the tissue-body ghosts Jesse had made in first grade.

  On the fridge, she used her entire magnet collection to post a decade’s worth of “scary” drawings he had created each October during his early childhood: green witches with warty noses and hairy chins and too many googly eyes, graveyards filled with monsters and zombies, the Headless Horseman. As a final touch, she tacked to the guest-room door the construction-paper skeleton with movable joints Jesse had so proudly brought home in third grade, and she set an electric jack-o’-lantern on the table beside the guest bed.

  Lola squealed when she walked in the house and saw the decorations. Dropping her pumpkin, she ran into the kitchen, touched each of the ceramic ghosts and witches, studied every single piece of artwork on the fridge, and jumped up to try to touch each dangling ghost and spider. When Markie suggested the girl might want to check out the guest room, Lola yelped and raced up the stairs.

  “Wait!” Jesse called after her. “You don’t even know where—”

  An excited shriek let him know she had found the room just fine.

  “Thanks, Mom,” he said. “The place looks great.” He set one of the dangling spiders spinning. “I’d forgotten about all this stuff.”

  “She sure seems to be getting a kick out of it,” Markie said, lifting her eyes to the ceiling, through which they could hear Lola’s continued screeches.

  He spun the spider again, then reached out to spin the others, and all the ghosts, before stepping to the fridge. Bending down, he studied each of his old creations carefully, laughing quietly at the witch with her eleven googly eyes.

  “Yeah,” he said. “She really appreciates it.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  When Bruce knocked at eight o’clock the morning after Halloween to tell Markie that Mrs. Saint’s house had been broken into the night before, Markie wondered if perhaps she was asleep on her feet and dreaming. Patty hadn’t come for Lola until after two, and because the noise woke Angel, who then insisted on going out, Markie hadn’t gotten back to bed until close to three.

  “Oh my God!” she said, after making Bruce repeat himself twice to make sure she had heard him correctly. “Did they take anything?”

  “They sure did,” he said.

  He nodded, as though he had now given her all the information she needed, and turned his attention to Angel, who was whining in her crate. “You want me to walk her so you can get your work done? I got some things to do now, but I could come for her later.”

  “No,” she said. “Thanks, but you do too much for me as it is, and you won’t let me pay you.”
/>   He had insisted on changing all the lightbulbs for her after Jesse mentioned the one in the upstairs hallway had gone out and she had almost tripped in the dark. While he was there, he replaced the batteries in the smoke alarms, and since he “just happened” to have brought extras in various sizes, he changed the ones in the TV remotes, too.

  “So what did they take?” she asked. He looked at her blankly, and she said, “From the house.”

  “Oh, right,” he said. “Money, for one. Don’t ask me how they knew where to find that. She keeps it in . . . a place that’s not so usual, let’s just say. They also stole some things from her medicine cabinet. Frédéric says that means it was kids. Because of, you know, drugs. ‘Who looks in the bathroom and leaves all the silver in the dining room?’ That’s what he said. But worst is, they took a little case that was sitting inside the front door. Frédéric was supposed to take it to the hospital for her, but he forgot it.”

  “What was in it?”

  “Family pictures and a few pieces of jewelry from her grandmother. Nothing fancy, no gold or nothing like that. Only worth something to her, which is probably why I found the case beside the garage, lying on its side. There was a couple of her papers inside it still, and I found a photo in the grass a few feet away, but everything else was gone. I don’t know if they took it all or tossed it behind the garage once they realized it wasn’t worth nothing, or what. Anyway, that’s how I knew something was up in the first place—I saw that case. Just happened to be looking in the right direction when I walked up the driveway today.

  “And then I went searching around the house, and I found a broken window, and I called Frédéric, and he told me where else to look, and we pieced it together. I’ll look again in a minute, and maybe more things will turn up missing. Sure hope not. She’s upset enough about the case. I don’t want her getting more worked up. Especially with her, you know . . .” He tapped two fingers to his chest, the same way Mrs. Saint had done.