by Laura McHugh
“Sorry, boy,” I told him. “We can’t.”
His stamped his front feet, a high-pitched keening building in his throat. I hadn’t seen Gravy so excited since he’d come to live with me. I still had a key to Shane’s house—we’d exchanged spares when he first moved in. And the house was likely empty after the weekend’s purge, making its way through probate so Crystle could sell it. She’d moved her things out immediately after his death, claiming she couldn’t sleep in a place where she’d found a dead body.
I crunched onto the gravel road, passing Pettit Brothers Auto Body & Salvage and continuing deeper into the woods, the landscape a muted palette of winter browns and grays but for the sumac tangled in the ditch, blood-red berries clustered on dead branches. There were no cars in sight as I pulled into the long drive, Gravy clawing frantically at the armrest, wanting out. I made the mistake of opening the door before clipping on his leash, and he flopped out onto the ground, taking off for the house before I could wrangle him. I hadn’t realized he could still move that fast.
The property had the hollow, uneasy feeling of abandonment. The post oaks loomed over the front yard, their leathery brown leaves, shaped like ghosts with outstretched arms, blowing into drifts on the ground. Crystle hadn’t liked living this far from the paved road, too far out for city sewer or trash service or snowplows, but Shane had loved it and Gravy had too. He sniffed his way along a worn deer path and veered toward the front door, his miniature legs moving double time. He scratched at the doorframe, which was marked with deep grooves from years of demanding to be let in.
“Don’t you want to run around?” I asked him. “Mark your territory?” He whined, focused on the door. “He’s not in there,” I said, wondering if Gravy could tell that Shane was gone, or if he sensed some version of my brother’s presence that I couldn’t, something more than a lingering scent.
I dug the keychain out of my pocket and unlocked the door. Gravy trotted inside and disappeared down the hallway. It was dark in the living room, all the curtains drawn, and it took my eyes a moment to adjust as I stepped inside. The space was empty except for Shane’s recliner, which sat in the middle of the room where it always had, surrounded by indents in the carpet where the rest of the furniture had been. Gravy hadn’t bothered with the chair, or the spot where Shane had taken his last breath, and I didn’t pause there, either.
I moved down the hallway to the kitchen. I didn’t see Gravy anywhere, but the pantry door was ajar. I pushed it open farther and stepped into the narrow space, a tiny window letting in light. I hadn’t thought to check the pantry when we’d come for Shane’s things, but like the rest of the house, it had been cleared out, straight into trash bags, most likely, if there was nothing worth selling. A low growl came from behind me and I wheeled around.
“Jesus,” Crystle said, towering over me in the doorway. She wore a thin, glittery sweater that showed a black bra underneath, and spike-heeled boots with impossibly narrow pointed toes. Gravy kept his distance, growling from the hall.
“You’re lucky I didn’t shoot you,” she said. “Want to tell me what you’re doing in my pantry? You need to borrow a cup of sugar?”
“I thought Shane might have had some of our grandma’s dishes,” I lied. “I didn’t find them in the boxes we took home.”
Crystle glanced at the shelves and then stared pointedly at me. No dishes of any kind, nothing but a box of cornmeal and an ancient deep fryer grimed with grease and dog hair.
“Got some dishes over here,” Crystle said, swiveling to the cabinet near the sink and pulling out a stack of plain white plates, part of a set I’d given to Shane as a housewarming gift. “Go ahead and take ’em.”
“Crystle…” I eased out of the pantry. “Since you’re here. There’s something I wanted to ask you.”
Her eyebrows lifted, the tails penciled into sharp points. Gravy whined.
“Could you sign a release so we can access Shane’s medical records?”
“What for?”
“Detective Kendrick said we’d need your permission.”
“Why’s she talking to you?”
“Had he been sick?” I asked.
She snorted. “Allergies, but that was his own fault, because he kept the damn windows open all the time. I was taking care of him. What, you want to blame me for not knowing his heart was gonna give out?”
“We just want to know how he died. Don’t you?”
She slapped the plates down on the counter so hard I thought they would break. “I know how he died,” she said. “Alone, on the floor, his eyes wide open. You ever see something like that? You ever walk in the front door and find your whole world gone to shit?”
Gravy had stopped whining at us and now faced the dark hallway, muttering, his tail low. A puddle of urine darkened the carpet at his feet. He let out a small bark, his hackles rising.
“You think we didn’t love him, too?” I said. “We lost him, same as you.”
Crystle got in my face, blocking my view, looking me dead-on. Up close, her irises were a stunning hazel, green fractured with gold, her breath laced with stale smoke. “Get out of my fucking house,” she hissed. Gravy yipped, and Crystle turned around. Her brother, the one we’d seen in the basement over the weekend, appeared in the doorway, pushing up his sleeves. Gravy was barking furiously, backing up into the kitchen, and I squeezed past Crystle to get to him.
“Stay the hell away from me,” she said, shoving my shoulder with the heel of her hand before I moved out of reach. I fought the urge to turn around and shove her back, instead grabbing Gravy’s collar and dragging him out of the house, his teeth snapping at me the whole way, my heart ricocheting in my chest.
* * *
—
I called Becca from the car to tell her about my run-in with Crystle—that she’d responded about as well as expected when I asked for Shane’s records—and she said Gravy and I should come by. It took her a minute to answer the door when we got to her house. She’d decorated the front porch for Thanksgiving, turning pumpkins into turkeys with a kit from the craft store. The orange birds had fat dangly wattles, googly eyes, and feather fans. An extension ladder leaned against the gutter, probably as far as Jerry had gotten in stringing the Christmas lights like she’d asked him to.
“I think the boys are finally done puking,” Becca said when she let us in. “They’re passed out on a shower curtain in the bedroom watching PAW Patrol—I couldn’t get the sheets and blankets washed quick enough to keep up with them.”
“Poor things,” I said. “And poor you.”
Becca shrugged, heading for the kitchen and opening the fridge. “It’s fine,” she said. “I’m sorry you had to deal with Crystle. That sounds way worse. You want something to eat?”
“Don’t fix anything on my account,” I said. “I know you had a long day.”
“No trouble at all,” she said, pulling out a stack of Lunchables. “Jerry’s bowling tonight, so I don’t have to cook, but I need a little something in my stomach. Soak up the liquor.” She snorted.
“Are you drunk?” I asked. Becca had never been much of a drinker. She’d been known to get light-headed after a single wine cooler.
“Maybe a little.” She handed me a foil pouch that looked a lot like the Capri Suns I used to pack in Lily’s lunch. “It’s a margarita,” she said. “Jerry got them at Walmart and I thought I’d try one. They’re better than you’d think.”
We sat on the living room floor and Becca opened the Lunchables on the coffee table, crackers and bright orange cheese and little circles of pink glistening meat, all nestled in plastic trays.
“Is that ham or turkey?” I asked.
“Doesn’t matter,” she said, stuffing cheese in her mouth. “They all taste the same. How’d it go at the vet?”
“Okay,” I said. “Got some pills to fix what’s fixable. I ugly-cr
ied in front of the doctor for a good five minutes, which was embarrassing, but he was nice about it.”
“But Gravy’s okay?” He had flopped on the rug, his legs splayed out to the side, and was already snoring.
“He’s got some problems, but he’s as good as expected for a fifteen-year-old dog.” Becca looked relieved, and I decided to save his full diagnosis for another time.
“And the vet was nice?”
“Yeah. He was great. Wouldn’t mind having him for my doctor. He’s a better listener.”
Becca smiled coyly. “Any chance he’s single?”
“Wow, you know, somehow that never came up in our conversation about incontinence and depression.”
Becca sighed. She had recently decided that it was time for me to date again and had already tricked me into an uncomfortable double date with her and Jerry and one of Jerry’s work friends. The guy had spent the whole night texting his ex-girlfriend. Becca thought she was being helpful. I wasn’t opposed to meeting someone, but blind dates and websites felt artificial and awkward, and living in a small town limited my options. I was aware that I hadn’t done the best job of picking a partner the first time around, and I didn’t want to repeat my mistakes. Being single was preferable to being stuck in a bad relationship. I’d married Greg in part because he was nothing like my father, which, as it turned out, wasn’t enough to ensure a happy marriage.
We ate in silence for a minute, Wheel of Fortune playing on the muted TV.
“Oh, my gosh,” Becca said, grabbing my arm. “I have to tell you what happened to me the other day.”
Her cheeks were bright pink, and I was starting to wonder how many margarita pouches she’d had before I showed up.
“I was in the shower,” she said, “and I looked down, and there was a gray hair. There. Did you even know that went gray? I mean, I guess it makes sense, but I never thought about it. Jerry just said the other day that he hopes I never wear granny panties—and now I literally look like a granny!”
That was about the last thing I’d expected Becca to say, and laughter took hold in my gut, shaking me until it rattled up my throat and out. It was hilarious, the thought of Becca as an old lady. She was only five years older than me. In my head, Becca and Shane and I were still kids, wearing one another’s hand-me-downs, our dark hair styled in identical shaggy bowl cuts with Mom’s kitchen shears.
“Hey, remember that time we got a bag of secondhand underwear from church? Those big old briefs?”
Becca shrieked. “Oh, my god! Were we really so poor we couldn’t buy underwear?”
“We must’ve been,” I said. “Didn’t Mom make you some pants out of a pair of Dad’s old work pants?”
“Yes! I hated those stupid things! I couldn’t wait to grow out of them.”
“They were so ugly! What ever happened to them?” I asked. “All your stuff got passed down to me, but I don’t remember wearing them.”
Becca laughed so hard she went mute. She slapped the floor, doubled over. “I burned them,” she wheezed.
“You what?” I was laughing again because she was laughing. I tried to imagine Becca, the most prudent and well behaved of the three of us, setting her pants on fire.
“I put them in Mom’s rag bin. They were done. And she took them out and stuck them in your dresser drawer and I just couldn’t stand the thought of you having to wear them.” Becca’s eyes gleamed, her face rosy from laughing, though she wasn’t laughing now. “I stuffed them in the trash and took it out to burn. And when it all burned down I picked through the ashes and took the snap and the little metal teeth from the zipper and I buried them so nobody would ever find out.”
Becca had always tried to keep us out of trouble, concealing the evidence of our minor indiscretions as best she could. After she repaired the angel figurine that Shane and I had broken, she’d put the superglue back exactly where she had found it and rolled masking tape over the carpet to collect any tiny ceramic shards where the wing had hit the floor and broken off. Our father was quick to raise his hand when his temper flared, firmly believing that he could whip the wickedness out of us, so it was in our best interest to behave, but Becca had been the only one of us with the forethought and restraint to consider repercussions before she acted.
One summer our garden produced an ungodly surplus of green beans, so many that Mom ran out of canning jars, and we were all sick of eating them for every meal, the pods so tough and hairy that the only way to make them edible was to boil them until they fell apart and all the flavor leached out. The three of us were grumbling as we picked our way through the rows, Becca and I dreaming up ways to end the scourge—salting the earth, praying for aphids, dousing the plants with weed killer—when Shane said he had a better idea, grabbed the bucketful we’d just picked, and spun in a circle, flinging the beans out into the field. Then he reached down and yanked one of the plants up by the roots, swung it above his head like a lasso, dirt pelting down on us, and let it fly. We’d whooped and hollered, enjoying a gleeful moment of rebellion, though Becca ended up convincing us to pick all the beans back up before Dad found out and salvage the plant the best we could. I understood now. We didn’t have much. Letting something go to waste was a sin. The pants that had already been cut down could have been further winnowed for their useful parts—the snap, the zipper, the fabric. Becca knew that and burned them anyway, for me.
“It sucked,” she said. “Being thirteen years old, wearing hand-me-down undies and old workpants. I wanted a pair of Guess jeans so bad. I thought when I was a grown-up, everything would be different. I could buy cool clothes, go out whenever I wanted. And look at me now!” She wiggled her fingers through the holes in her baggy John Deere T-shirt, raised her leg to show off the bleach stain trailing down her yoga pants. “On the floor eating Lunchables, dressed like a bag lady. Thirteen-year-old me would be pissed.”
“Being a grown-up is a huge disappointment,” I said.
“Nobody told me about gray pubes!” Becca bellowed, forgetting to keep her voice down for the boys.
We were laughing again, sobbing. “This is it, Becca,” I choked, bits of cracker spraying out of my mouth. “This is as good as it gets. We’re living the dream.”
“You want another margarita?” Becca asked, getting to her feet. “ ’Cause I sure do.”
“Absolutely.”
“Be right back,” she said. “I’m gonna check on the boys while I’m at it.”
I sucked my drink pouch dry and grabbed the remote. Wheel of Fortune was over and the news had come on. There was a shot of winter woods, yellow crime tape strung between tree trunks, writhing in the wind. Then live feed of a reporter on the scene, her pale face and red jacket brilliantly lit against the darkness behind her. Her mouth moved silently, the captions on the screen spelling out the discovery of more bones in the woods where the skull had been found. I turned the sound back on in time to hear the word “homicide.”
A photo of Macey Calhoun appeared on the screen, the same shy smile I remembered, her gaze seemingly focused on the photographer rather than the camera, a bright green bow in her reddish hair. She had been positively identified.
“Oh, no,” Becca said, returning with our drinks. She knelt down next to me and grabbed my hand. “No, no, no.”
I squeezed Becca’s hand so hard I couldn’t feel my fingers. I imagined a solemn procession as Macey’s bones were ferried to the morgue, no lights, no sirens. How it must have been when Shane was taken away. Everyone moving slowly, methodically, no sense of urgency for the dead. I couldn’t claim to know what Hannah was going through, how it felt to lose a child, though I could imagine the rough outlines of her pain. The way grief opened up inside you like a crypt, a dark pit with room for one, the torment of questions that might never be answered, secrets the dead alone could know.
Henley rocked on the porch swing, sweating, the night air d
raped over her skin, thick and prickly as one of Memaw’s afghans. A russet moon rose up from the corn, and she wondered where Missy was, if she was still with Ellie Embry, partying in some filthy trailer out in the sticks, wearing borrowed clothes, her phone lost in a stranger’s field, sold for quick cash, or maybe buzzing in her pocket, Henley’s face flashing on the screen and then going dark when Missy didn’t answer.
Missy had known Ellie forever. She’d once gotten out her old yearbooks when Ellie came over, flipping to all the pictures of the two of them together: in matching overalls for Twin Day; secretary and treasurer of Future Farmers of America; driving a tractor in the homecoming parade. They were pretty and flirtatious, qualities that allowed them more popularity than they might have had otherwise, their families not being well-to-do or particularly respected in town. In the pictures, Ellie was willowy with flaxen hair, Missy flaunting her burgeoning hips and sly smile. They smoked cigarettes in the school parking lot at lunch and rode around in Ellie’s pickup on the weekends, putting a hundred miles on the odometer every Saturday night, cruising the loop between Casey’s and the car wash.
That was before Missy got pregnant and Ellie got into meth. The Ellie that Henley knew was unrecognizable from the yearbook photos, her yellow hair now lank and brittle, hollows in her cheeks where they sucked in around missing molars. She had a tanning bed in the living room of her trailer, and it reminded Henley of a casket. Ellie would emerge from it bleary-eyed, like a vampire arising for the night, her skin the color of cured ham. She always told Henley that a tan took off ten pounds, though Ellie was already unpleasantly thin. She’d moved on from meth to oxy like most everyone else, though she didn’t discriminate, according to Missy, against Vicodin, fentanyl, or heroin. Henley hadn’t seen Ellie in a while, since Missy had started taking her sobriety seriously, or pretending to.