by Rory Power
“Look at you,” Gram whispers. She bends down, kisses the back of my head, and she’s holding my shoulders so tight that I can feel bruises setting deep under my skin.
I don’t mind. It’s about time love left a mark on me.
Once my curls have cooled, Gram herds me out to the truck. I still don’t want to leave Fairhaven, but she won’t be convinced, and besides, it feels good to walk next to her, looking like her girl. This is what I wanted when I came here.
Gram takes off her heels to drive. I hold them in my lap as she steers us down the highway, past the burned fields and into the center of town. Phalene looks just the same, but it feels entirely different seeing it through the window of Gram’s truck. I know she’s looking at everything and seeing something else. Seeing what it used to be when this was Nielsen country.
Is that how it looked to Mom when she got here? I know she won’t be at the fundraiser—I can’t imagine anything that would draw her there—but I feel a flutter of nerves anyway. What if I see her on the street? What if we pass wherever she’s staying, a motel, or just our car parked by the side of the green? What am I supposed to do then?
But wherever she is, we park in the lot without seeing her. And I have other things to worry about. Tess, for one, the sting of our fight still fresh, and the police, for another. There’s the station on the opposite side of the pavement, and for a second I wonder if Gram’s really bringing me there, if she means to put me in the morgue alonside the girl she let burn, but it passes as Gram leads me in the other direction. Around to the front of the town hall, past the church with its broad marble steps and tall, arched double doors. Next to it, the town hall looks tiny and ordinary. Just a two-story brick building, its small, single door decorated with a pair of drooping balloons and propped open by a garbage can.
I’d think we couldn’t possibly be in the right place if it weren’t for the handful of people lingering outside, dressed up, like me and Gram. Farther down the sidewalk, a mother speaks sternly to her daughter, whose dress is about as wide as the girl is tall. Near the door, a collection of boys my age in blue sport coats and khakis are passing a cigarette around. Strangers, all of them, and I think it’s the most people I’ve seen in this town. I wonder if they know who I am. If they care the way everyone else I’ve meet seems to.
I get my answer as Gram marches me by, her hand clamped around my elbow. The boys watch us approach, wide-eyed, and as we pass, the one nearest the door whispers to the others, smoke trailing from his open mouth.
Vera Nielsen, in the flesh.
I know how they feel.
Gram doesn’t give them a second look. She ushers me inside and across a shabby beige lobby, following a sign tacked to the wall with an arrow pointing toward another door. I barely get a glimpse of the offices branching off the lobby before we’re in the concrete stairwell, the only sound the echo of Gram’s heels with every step.
“What am I supposed to do at this thing?” I ask, straightening the fall of my dress. “ ‘Don’t make a mess’ is kind of vague.”
Gram ushers me down the second flight of stairs, into a small foyer with a flickering overhead light. A warped maroon door is just open, and inside I can hear the build of voices and music. “You and Theresa—would you call yourselves friends?” she asks, pulling me around to face her.
I don’t know what my fight with Tess left us as. I don’t even really know what we were before. I met her two days ago and maybe I should’ve been careful, kept myself away, but I was scared, and Tess was something to hold on to, so I didn’t. And now it could be gone. Like closing a circuit with too much power running through it.
“Friends?” I say. “I guess.” That’s the best I can do.
Gram reaches out and adjusts the lie of one of my curls. “That’s good. It’s important that people see you here, see you with her. I have to have some difficult conversations, and Theresa’s family can go a long way toward making them easier.” She smiles, earnest and warm. “I’m talking to you as an adult here, Margot. I need your help. Can you do this for me?”
I can’t deny the lure of it. The way she welcomes me into what she’s doing, makes me part of it and of her. Like she knows I’d do anything for that. “Yes,” I tell her, before I can catch myself. “I can do that.”
Gram steps back, gives me a firm nod. “Right, then,” she says. “Into the lion’s den.”
The room is packed. Round tables on a linoleum floor, with two well-stocked buffets on the far side and a bored-looking boy my age standing near a smaller table, where a phone is plugged into a pair of speakers playing cheery jazz. Across the walls are displays of children’s artwork and motivational posters, like somebody decorated with whatever they could find on short notice.
All of Phalene is probably here, mothers quieting unruly children, fathers in clutches around the side of the room while a quartet of older couples dances slowly in the center. A table by the side is full of teenagers who would probably be in my class if I went to school here. Most of the police force seems to be here, too, congregated near the front, where one of them is setting up a box for donations.
The dress Gram put me in feels too tight, squeezing my ribs, the zipper rubbing the small of my back. I spot Eli off to the side, but Tess isn’t with him. He seems to be looking for her too, searching the crowd with an anxious frown.
I have to talk to her. I have to apologize and make it right.
I catch Eli’s eye and wave, and for a moment I can tell he’s thinking about pretending he doesn’t see me. But then he lifts a hand, gives me a wave back with a smile that looks like he’s trying very hard to be polite.
“Can I—” I start, but Gram cuts me off.
“Back in the truck at six,” she says. “Behave, Mini.” And then she’s practically prowling across the dance floor, making her way to a group of men bent together as they discuss something in hushed voices.
Mini. It should feel good. It almost does.
Eager to avoid talking to any of the police, I head for Eli, who is rearranging two stacks of cheese on his small paper plate with careful precision.
“Hey,” he says without looking up. “Hang on. This is delicate work.”
“Sure.” I guess I should be glad he’s even speaking to me without Tess here to make him.
“Okay,” he says finally. I watch as he spears a square of cheese and holds it out to me, the colorful plastic frill on one end of the toothpick crinkling between his fingers. “Cheddar?”
I raise my eyebrows. “No thanks. You seen Tess?”
Eli shakes his head. He’s keeping a good distance between us, like he wants everyone watching to know I’m making him uncomfortable. “No,” he says. “But I’m sure she’ll be here soon.”
I check the room, but I just see the crowds of people, the police officers standing out in their dark uniforms. Anderson and Connors are probably here somewhere. I forgot, really, that Phalene would have more police than just them, but I recognize the third cop from the scene of the fire at one end of the table, assembling what looks like a pastrami sandwich.
No Tess. No Millers. I turn back to Eli. “Have you talked to her at all today?”
Eli removes the top layer of cheese from his plate and stuffs it into his mouth. “She texted me last night,” he says. “But it didn’t make a lot of sense.”
Maybe she told him what’s wrong. “Can I see?”
Eli’s pause is too long. The answer is no.
“Never mind,” I say. I bet it was about me. “I’ll find her.”
He looks over my shoulder, and his eyes widen. “I don’t think you’ll have to.”
TWENTY-THREE
I turn around. There’s Tess, coming through the door with her parents behind her. She’s wearing a seersucker dress, a billow to the skirt and a cling to the bodice, with straps that have slipped just off her shoulders. Hair in a knot, and from a distance it seems like somebody was careful with it, but when she looks to one side, her expression oddly va
cant, her eyes bloodshot, I can see a lime-green hair elastic barely managing to hold it up.
Flanking her, Mr. and Mrs. Miller look a sight better. They’re each in fresh summer clothes. Striped shirt and slacks for him, and a pale blue dress for her that looks like a sister to Tess’s. They’re put together in a way she isn’t, but when I look more closely, I see the same redness in their eyes. The same tightness in their shoulders.
What the hell? Tess was a little subdued yesterday, sure, but she looked nothing like this. Neither did Mrs. Miller.
Eli’s watching them too, his mouth pulled tight. “That doesn’t look good,” he says.
They pass us, making for the front of the room. I spot Mrs. Miller’s hand on the back of Tess’s neck, firm and guiding as they head toward the gathered police officers. Her eyes land on Eli, and I’m startled by how cold she looks. No wave, no friendly smile to her daughter’s best friend.
“Great,” he mutters. “She probably got caught doing some ridiculous shit and blamed it on me. Like always.”
It’s possible, but I remember yesterday, the tension lingering in her shoulders. “I don’t know,” I say. “I think it’s more than that.”
“I guess we’ll see.”
An officer in uniform comes in, taking off his hat and scanning the room. It’s Connors. I meet his eyes for a minute by accident and jerk around to face Eli, who wrinkles his nose at me.
“Don’t be weird,” he says. “Okay. I’m getting more cheese.”
“Wait,” I say, because if I’m alone, Connors will come over and try to wring information out of me, information I don’t have. But it’s too late. Eli’s heading for the buffet and Connors is close enough that I can’t reasonably pretend not to have noticed his friendly wave.
“Nice party,” he says, slotting into the space Eli vacated. I glance down at his left hand, where his wedding ring glints. I wonder what his spouse is like, wonder which of the people milling around they could be. If Connors talks about the body, about Vera, when he goes home at night. How real is this to other people? Or is it only happening to me?
“Sure,” I say. I wish I had something to drink, or something to do with my hands. As it is, I fuss with the ends of my curled hair and keep watching Tess. She’s at her parents’ table now, sitting between them, staring ahead. Not a twitch in her muscles, barely a blink. Whatever happened, it’s beaten her down.
“Didn’t see you around town yesterday,” Connors says. “You okay at Fairhaven?”
I tear my eyes away from Tess and look at him. “Go ahead,” I say. I can hear Gram, can feel her shaping the fall of my voice. “Just ask. You want to know if I’ve changed my mind. If I have anything to tell you about my grandmother.”
Connors looks taken aback. “No,” he says. “I want to know if you’re okay. It was a lot, at the station. And you’re a kid out there with Vera. That’s not exactly the place I’d pick to process shit, you know?”
I don’t answer at first; I can’t. He called me a kid. I haven’t thought of myself as one in I don’t know how long. Seventeen, but I raised myself. Although I wonder sometimes if I didn’t grow up at all. If all I did was survive.
“I’m fine,” I say. And then, because the lure of it is too strong, because Connors has seen exactly what I have: “I just keep thinking about the way the girl looked. Her eyes. The burn on her leg.”
“So do I.” A woman passes in front of us, carrying a bowl of ice cream she’s served herself from the dessert table, topped with dark, oozing chocolate sauce. “Really puts you off some things,” he says, laughing a little even though it isn’t funny at all.
“They don’t know what caused it?”
He hesitates. He’s probably not supposed to discuss this with me, or with anyone. But I’m talking where I wasn’t before, and I can see the gears turning in his head—maybe this is how he gets me pointed at Gram. The police haven’t been back to Fairhaven since my first morning there, but after my break-in at the station, I know it’s only a matter of time, and he’ll want more ammunition for when they do.
“Yeah.” He steps back, away from the rest of the party, and lowers his voice. I go with him. “The coroner’s looking at some irregularities that could explain it. Some stuff in her blood that has no business being there. But I don’t know, Margot.”
What he wants to say next is implied: your grandmother does.
I ignore it. “Stuff in her blood?”
Connors waves a hand and then reaches out to snag a glass of water from a passing server—I recognize her as one of Tess’s friends from the town green, dressed in a wrinkled catering uniform. He waits until she’s gone to continue. “A chemical. We just got the results back on it—it’s some farming thing, for planting sterile hybrids. Ridicine. You heard of it?”
I shake my head. Should it be familiar?
“It was banned in . . .” Connors scratches at his jaw thoughtfully. “God, I want to say forty years ago? Exposure killed a couple people out in Kansas. Made a whole big mess in the papers. So what it’s doing here in that girl’s bloodstream we have no idea.”
A chemical. I saw the report, hanging from the drawer in the morgue. I let my eyes drift, turn my focus to that memory, but I can’t make it take shape. And now Connors says it’s been banned since long before she would’ve been born.
“But she was my age,” I say. “That girl. Right?”
“Seems like it.” Connors takes a sip from his glass, his expression grim. “That’s what I’m saying.”
We don’t get any further. Across the room, Tess bursts to her feet. It jostles the Miller table with a clatter, sends a lemonade pitcher tumbling and a glass smashing against the floor, but she doesn’t seem to notice.
“I told you!” she shouts. “I told you and told you.”
“Theresa,” Mr. Miller starts.
“It’s not Eli. I have no fucking idea what’s going on!” Her mother is looking up at her, mouth open, aghast. She doesn’t move as Tess storms away from the table, eyeliner running as tears track down her cheeks.
Connors frowns, takes a step forward, but an officer is already crouching between Mr. and Mrs. Miller, and another two are gathering rolls of paper towels to clean up the mess. I take advantage of the distraction and hurry around the edge of the room, following Tess to where she’s thrown open the back door and disappeared.
It leads to the floor of a stairwell, the flights above running up to the ground floor and beyond. I find Tess sitting on the bottom step, her forehead pressed to her knees. This close I can see a streak of blood down the side of her dress, and the long tear in her cuticle that must’ve caused it. I sidle inside and let the door swing mostly shut behind me.
“It’s me,” I say, and she looks up. Deep hollows under her eyes, sallow skin. She looks like she’s barely slept. I won’t ask if she’s okay—I already know she’s not. She was like this yesterday, too. Before I ruined everything.
“What’s going on?” I ask instead.
For a moment she does nothing, and then she sighs, folds over and presses her forehead to her knees again.
“I can’t believe this,” she says, her voice muffled. “I can’t actually believe this.”
I sit down next to her, careful to leave room between us. “Believe what?”
With a huff, she straightens, her hair coming loose from its threadbare elastic. I watch as she sneaks one hand onto her stomach.
“This is,” she starts, and then she breaks off. Laughs, incredulous and angry and near the edge of something. “I was feeling sick yesterday. I have been for a few days. Just like, on and off. It was nothing. It was absolutely fine. Except my mom freaked out about Eli staying over all the time because apparently that means we’re sleeping together and she made me take a test and. Yeah.”
Oh.
Oh.
“You’re . . .” I trail off. I don’t want to be the one to say it. Tess does it for me. “Pregnant. With child. Owner of one oven containing one bun,” she says, h
ysteria bubbling under every word.
“Um,” I say. “I guess. Congratulations?”
“Go to hell,” Tess says, but she laughs weakly, the air rushing out of her, and her body tips against mine. We fought, but we’re here, and I can be this for her. I can be someone she counts on.
“So it’s not Eli’s,” I say. I remember those boys outside in sports coats. Somehow I can’t imagine Tess with any of them. With anyone. “Is it . . . Can I ask whose it is?”
“Go ahead and ask,” Tess says into my shoulder. “And if you find out, let me know.”
My eyes widen. I fumble for the right words to ask if she’s okay, if she’s safe. To make sure she knows that whatever she needs, that’s what I’ll do, but she keeps going before I can find them.
“I just don’t get it. I don’t know how this is happening.”
“What do you mean?” I ask slowly. There’s something else going on here. Something I’m missing.
“I mean, it’s physically impossible.” She twists her skirt in her fists, knuckles going white for a moment. I lean away from her, try to get a good look at her face. “I thought the test had to be wrong, right? But my mom made me take four, and they all said the same thing. I’m literally the fucking Virgin Mary over here.”
I should say something. But I can’t work past the shock. She’s serious. She’s really pregnant, and if I understand her right, she’s saying there’s no father. No nothing. Just . . . her.
The stairwell light catches her cheeks, pulling shadows across her eyes. Her fingernails have been bitten down, stripped clean of polish. She laughs, bitter and sharp. “How does this happen?”
“Okay.” I do my best to sound calm. In control. One of us should be. “Let’s take it in pieces. You said your mom made you take tests?”
Nodding, she shuts her eyes and lets out a breath. “This morning.”
“And there’s definitely no way there could be a father?” I say slowly. Her eyes flick open, and she shoots me a look that’s half exhaustion, half despair.