by Laura McHugh
Henley thought of the black-and-white image of the baby, wondered if it was Earl’s. If he knew. She slugged some Mad Dog straight from the bottle and gagged. Why hadn’t her mother told her about the nature of her relationship with Earl? Missy had encouraged Henley to take her place at the Sullivan house without mentioning what it was that she did there. Henley remembered Earl saying something about her mother that day in his bedroom, a look of confusion on his face. Had Missy implied to him that Henley would be replacing her in every way?
“I’m gonna go beat the shit out of him right now,” Jason said.
“No.” She shook her head. “You can’t. He’d probably charge you with assault.”
“I don’t care,” he said.
“I do. It’s not worth it. He already apologized.” She didn’t want Jason to confront his father and find out that Earl had paid her off. It was a secret she wanted to keep from him, that she had the means to leave anytime she wanted, that there was no longer anything holding her here.
“I have an idea,” she said, her throat burning from the liquor. She wrenched open the door to the cellar and walked down the steps, stopping when her bare feet met the cool dirt floor. She reached out, her fingers spidering into the darkness in search of the beaded chain, and yanked three times before the bulb clicked. Its dull yellow light haloed around her.
Pawpaw’s sledgehammer leaned against the hand-hewn workbench, draped with dusty cobwebs. She wiped the scarred metal head with her T-shirt, hefted the sledge, and carried it up the stairs.
“Really?” Jason asked, the corner of his mouth turning up in a smile when she told him. “Of all the things we could do, this is what you want?”
She nodded, her face numb, her head humming.
“All right. It’s your party.”
They drove to Sullivan Park with the windows down, sledgehammer weighted on the floorboard between them, Henley gripping the handle to keep it from knocking against their knees. No one was around at this lonely hour, the river tarnished black and silver under the waning moon.
Henley climbed out, the hammer scraping the running board, metal on metal, and stood before Emily Sullivan. They were no longer face-to-face, Henley having outgrown her long ago. Emily was so small, much smaller than she remembered. A little girl, her outstretched stone hands holding a trio of abandoned snail shells and a dented bottle cap. She thought of what Earl had said, Emily watching him, wordless, her mouth full of blood. Part of her understood how that must have damaged him, the sorrow that draped over his life like a dark caul, yet it wasn’t right that he was using his sister as an excuse for his behavior all these years later, hiding behind her angelic image, invoking the Sullivan family saint.
“I’m sorry,” she said, brushing the tips of her fingers over Emily’s eternally open eyes as if to close them, like people did for the dead, out of respect, in movies. She cocked the sledgehammer like a baseball bat and swung, the impact working its way back up the handle and shuddering through her arms to her core. She swung harder, dust and debris raining down as cracks erupted, and kept swinging until she’d knocked loose the head.
It felt good. Rage burned through her with each strike, and she smashed the broken pieces into the ground until she was spent.
Back at home, Jason insisted on washing her off in the tub like a child, and she was too tired to resist. He rinsed the grit from her hair, made her drink a glass of water, carried her to bed, kissed the shiny skin on her hands where blisters were beginning to form. He tucked the covers tight as a straitjacket, Memaw’s itchy afghan pulled up to her chin, and as soon as he left, she kicked them loose.
She remembered years back when she and Missy had read the Twilight books together, telling her mother she wished she could have a boyfriend like Edward. Missy had snorted. That all sounds great when you’re thirteen and dreaming, but in real life you couldn’t go a day with some guy kissing your eyelids and keeping tabs on you before you’d wanna kick him in the balls.
She wondered what Missy would think of her and Jason together, if that was something she’d ever considered. Had her mother thought about what might happen when she left Henley alone with the Sullivan men in that big house? Was her mother thinking of her at all as she sobered up in jail? She felt around on the floor for her discarded jeans and fished the sonogram from the pocket, squinting at it in the faint moonlight, at this being that was part of her mother, and by extension, her. Was there a child out there somewhere with the Pettits’ honey hair and hazel eyes, living a different life with a different name, its destiny unblemished by the preconceptions that would have tainted it in Blackwater? Missy clearly hadn’t forgotten about it, but she hadn’t told her about it, either, and she must have had her reasons. Henley traced the gray bones with her fingertip, wondering which of them had been luckier.
I stopped at Casey’s for coffee on my way to Leola’s, scorching my tongue as I swerved on the gravel road to avoid a possum frozen in the headlights. A light burned in the front window of the farmhouse, a small beacon in the vast darkness of the countryside. It was too dark to see the stone angels that surrounded the house, but I knew they were there, huddled against the wind. The dogs yipped and whined when I knocked on the door but lost interest once Leola opened it.
The living room was noticeably brighter and warmer than it had been the first time I’d visited. Someone had changed the flickering light bulb, dumped the ash bucket, and had the stove burning hot enough to sweat, and I guessed that it had been Charlie. Either that, or Leola had gotten everything in order before he arrived, so he wouldn’t worry that she was struggling without him at home, like Mom did when Becca came over.
Charlie ducked into the room right after Leola let me in, chewing on a cookie and wiping crumbs from his mouth. He was pallid and rail thin, rangy enough that he had to mind the low doorframe. He was dressed in a denim jacket with a sheepskin collar and Wranglers. Acne scars peppered his jawline, where a pale, incomplete beard struggled to grow. His eyes were sleepy and shadowed, irises amber as a cat’s.
“Hey,” he said, offering his hand. “Sadie. Nice to meet you.”
Leola patted his arm and adjusted her apron. “I’ll let you two talk a minute. I’ll be right in the kitchen if you need me.”
“Leola told me how close you and Shane were,” I said to Charlie. He sucked in his lower lip, nodding. “I thought you might know what was going on in his life recently…things I might not know about. Maybe you could help me understand what happened.”
“Sure.” He hooked his thumbs through his belt loops and studied the worn path on the floor.
“Do you know if he was using drugs, maybe?”
Charlie eyed me warily.
“You can be honest. I’m only asking because we don’t know how he died. We’re trying to figure that out, but it’s difficult because we don’t have a lot to go on.”
He scratched his jaw and shrugged. “I dunno. He drank, like anybody. Smoked weed. I don’t know about anything else.”
“Had he been sick?”
“He wasn’t feeling great last time I saw him,” Charlie said. “But he told me it was just allergies acting up, or a cold coming on.”
“How long was that before he died?”
“Maybe a week.”
“Your grandma said…you don’t get along with Crystle.”
He made a throat-clearing sound that was almost a laugh. “Yeah. That’s fair.”
“Why’s that?”
“Look, I don’t know how good you know her, or what you think of her, but I’m friends with her cousin, so I’ve known her a long time. She never liked me, right from the start, because I could see through her bullshit. She’s a liar, and I’d call her on it,” he said. “She didn’t want me hanging around Shane when they got together. He tried to make her happy and do what she wanted, but toward the end he saw her for what she was. He wanted out.”
“You mean he wanted to leave her? Why?”
“I don’t know, exactly, if it was anything in particular. They weren’t getting along,” he said. “He said he couldn’t trust her. I’d been telling him that the whole time.”
There was a dull thud, logs shifting in the fire.
“But you’re sure he was going to leave her? Did he tell you that?”
“Yeah,” Charlie said. “He was trying to figure things out, be smart about it. He’d been putting money aside she didn’t know about.”
A sharp pain needled through my gut. Her behavior had seemed off even before I knew about her infidelity, about Shane’s plans. She might have been angry if she suspected he was leaving and taking what money he had left along with him, worried that he wouldn’t be supporting her anymore. Would that be enough, though, that she’d do something drastic to stop him? Maybe Shane had been taking pills like Crystle said, except that he wasn’t stressed over a crime he’d committed but over his failing marriage, the secrets he was keeping from his wife as he planned his escape.
“Do you think she knew he wanted to leave?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “He was gonna tell her, but I don’t know if he’d got around to it yet. He wanted to have everything in place first.”
Leola came back in with a plate of cookies and held them out to me. They had the same crosshatching on top as the peanut butter cookies my mom used to make. Mom had let Becca and me press the marks in with a fork, until she’d gotten sick of me asking why we only did it for peanut butter and not chocolate chip or molasses. That’s just how it is, she’d told me. You ask too many questions for things that don’t have answers.
“I hope Charlie was able to help?” Leola said.
“Yes,” I said. “He was. Oh—” I turned back to him. “I wanted to tell you, I found something you made for Shane. I thought you might like to know he’d kept it all these years. It was some sort of craft, made out of paper plates. I can bring it by sometime, if you’d like to have it back.”
Charlie cracked a grin, the first time I’d seen his expression lighten. “I remember that,” he said. “Granny made me go to Bible camp. Didn’t end well.”
“Show her what he made for you,” Leola said, nudging Charlie. “Go on.”
I followed him down the hall to his room, which smelled of wintergreen chewing tobacco and sweaty boots. It was small and tidy, the bed loosely made with a plaid comforter, the desk bare except for a lamp with no shade and a peanut can stuffed with pencils and pens. On a pine shelf above the desk were several pieces of metalwork.
Charlie handed me a dog figurine made from nuts and bolts. “This is one of the first projects we did when I started hanging around his workshop,” he said. “And this is what he made for me when I gave him that dumb paper plate thing.” I set down the dog and took the heavy metal block with Charlie’s name engraved into the shining surface.
“Did he make lots of things like this?” I asked. I knew he was a welder, but I’d never really seen any of his personal projects, the kind of metalwork he did for fun.
“Oh, yeah,” Charlie said. “He had all the tools and equipment in his workshop. The coolest thing he made was a rifle—machined it himself. He was real proud of it. Said if the government ever came for his guns, they wouldn’t get that one.”
That sounded like Shane. His love of guns was one of the few things he hadn’t kept from us, apparently.
“He let me try it out. Said he’d make another one sometime for me, show me how to do it. Hadn’t got around to it.” He picked up the metal block and the dog figurine and carefully placed them back on the shelf, his hand unsteady. I wondered if the rifle had been pawned with all the rest, if it was even legal to sell a homemade gun, though I couldn’t imagine that would have stopped Crystle.
When I called Mom from the car to tell her about meeting Charlie, she remembered Shane bringing a friend along one time when he’d come to get some car parts out of her shed. He had been a quiet young man with shaggy hair that kept falling in his face, and boots with the soles coming off. She might not have remembered him at all, except that he’d eaten her boiled cabbage without complaint and asked for seconds, something her own children had never managed to do. She couldn’t recall his name, but she felt sure it was Charlie. “Give him the Firebird,” she said. “Shane would want it that way.”
I drained the cold dregs from my coffee cup on the drive back. Stars had emerged from a scrim of clouds and the moon had risen through the trees, bright enough to cast skeletal shadows over the frozen fields. A northern gust whipped the branches and the shadow fingers skittered along the edge of the road.
I turned over everything Charlie had said, about Crystle being a liar, Shane seeing her for what she was and wanting out. Did she really believe he had something to do with Roger and Macey’s murders, or had she only brought that up so Becca and I would stop questioning how Shane had died?
I thought of our brother sealed in his casket, a photo of Crystle wedged beneath his stiff fingers for all eternity, close to his heart. It was possible that the timing of his death—just before he’d planned to leave her—was pure coincidence. It was equally possible that it wasn’t.
I had trouble falling asleep when I got home. The wind rattled the windowpanes and crept in through the gaps, billowing the curtain just enough that I kept startling awake, thinking someone was standing there. Shane, perhaps, watching over me or asking for help, haunting me one way or the other.
A flock of starlings cackled in the trees outside the Pettit Brothers garage. There must have been hundreds of them, moving restlessly from branch to branch, swooping through the leaves. Uncle Denny had once told her that starlings were witches in disguise, that they shed their wings for cloaks in the night, and Raymond had smacked him on the back of the head, knocking his hat in the dirt. She imagined Raymond would do something worse to Earl Sullivan if he found out what Earl had done. She wondered how her mother would react when she told her, whether or not she would look surprised.
Crystle’s Jeep was parked in the gravel lot, the top still off though the weather was cooling down. Crystle had always run hot, sleeping with the bedroom window cracked in the winter, even when it snowed. Shane sometimes joked that he made Gravy lie on his feet to keep from getting frostbite, but he didn’t mind the cold if it made Crystle happy. She liked the feel of his icy hands. You know what they say, Shane had teased, stroking Crystle’s flushed cheeks. Cold hands, warm heart. Henley wondered if the saying went both ways, if Crystle’s sweating flesh meant her heart was stone-cold.
Inside, the garage was quiet and the door to the office was shut, so Henley proceeded to the kitchen area for a Dr Pepper. When the door was closed, it was closed for a reason, and she knew better than to knock. A translucent Walmart bag sat on the counter by the sink, a package of tissues and a box of cough syrup inside. Raymond’s allergies always acted up this time of year, aggravated by ragweed and cocklebur and lingering until the first hard frost knocked the pollen down. Junior joked that Memaw had coddled him too much, that he was out weeding the garden and cleaning chicken coops while Raymond stayed indoors, suckling at the teat he’d kicked Junior off of.
Henley drank her Dr Pepper and studied the map on the wall, tracing her fingernail along the blue vein of the Missouri River up into the Dakotas. She heard a noise, and it sounded like someone was coming out of the office, though when she peeked around the corner, there was no one there. As she moved closer, she heard Junior’s voice, and Raymond’s, and a third she didn’t immediately recognize. Crystle wasn’t in there, because she was always the loudest in any conversation, and if the men had their voices raised, she’d be yelling right over the top of them. Henley crept up next to the door and listened. She heard the name Calhoun, and she remembered Hannah on the local news, standing in front of Emily’s statue in Sullivan Park, pleading to get her daug
hter back.
She inched as close as she dared, her back flat to the wall. She didn’t know Hannah, but she’d seen Roger in the garage now and then. Junior was saying something about Calhoun, and then his voice dropped, and she thought she heard him say Shane’s name. The third man interrupted, and this time she knew who it was—Dex, who always got on Junior’s last nerve.
The knob turned and she scurried backward. “Hey,” she said calmly as Raymond came out of the door. “You wanted to check my tires?”
“Oh. Yeah,” he said, shaking his head as if to clear it. “Gotta make sure you still got some decent tread left—especially if you’re gonna be travelin’.” She hadn’t told him that she now had the money to leave whenever she wanted, only that it wouldn’t be much longer. He put his arm around her shoulders to lead her outside. “Let’s go take a look.”
Raymond squatted in the gravel, then stuck his hand in the wheel well and ran his fingers over her rear tire. He moved around the car, checking each one, lifting the windshield wipers and examining the blades.
“Your allergies bothering you?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Nope, not too bad.”
Crystle’s Jeep started up, Dex at the wheel, gravel spitting out from under the tires. Junior stood in the doorway, watching.
“Everything okay?” Henley asked.
“Sure,” Raymond said. “Yeah.”
She knew not to ask about her uncles’ business. She would certainly never say anything to Junior. But Raymond was softer, and she couldn’t help herself.
“I thought I heard Dex say something about Calhoun,” she murmured. The starlings shuffled from one tree to another, screeching.
“Yeah,” Raymond said, forcing an uncertain smile. “He owed some money when he ran off.”
She thought of Dalmire, how he had owed some money, too, how they had joked about the one long bone being all that was left of him. She thought about how she’d never found that joke funny; how Dalmire hadn’t been seen in years; how nobody’d come looking for him. You didn’t make someone else’s business your business, Junior liked to say. Life was easier that way.