Bitter Sun

by Beth Lewis

  What should I do?

  You don’t want to go to prison, do you, Johnny?

  I don’t want to go to prison.

  But Momma. I remembered her face, under the water, so afraid. Of me. Her eyes were Momma’s eyes, the monster fled in that last moment and it was her. She was Momma deep down inside and I loved her and she loved me and I killed her. I killed her. I held her under the water until she stopped breathing.

  Because she killed me, my sister said.

  The monster did. Momma didn’t. Momma didn’t. She never would. She loved us both. Oh God. I can’t breathe. What have I done? What have I done? Take it back. I want to take it all back. Press rewind on it. Go back in time, they do it in the movies, why can’t I?

  ‘Do you understand me, John?’

  ‘What about Wakefield? He’s a murderer.’

  ‘He deeply regrets it. He’s working through his guilt.’

  ‘Why did he do it? What did Mary Ridley ever do to him?’

  Frank’s jaw clenched and I heard his teeth grind. ‘She was pregnant.’

  Of course. I closed my eyes, saw the eel squirm out of Mary Ridley’s stomach. Out of a bullet hole. It was all right there. A great wave of nausea rushed up my throat, left me gasping for breath, clutching my gut.

  ‘He’ll never go to prison, will he?’ I choked out the words. ‘Not for murder. Not for … Jenny … She’s fourteen, Frank. Younger than his own daughter.’

  ‘This is the deal.’ Frank’s tone hardened and he stood up. ‘You keep your mouth shut and you stay out of prison, you get to have some kind of life.’ Then he sighed. ‘Besides, who would believe you?’

  I let out a long, shaking breath and knew he was right.

  ‘Now,’ he said, ‘do you understand?’

  ‘I understand. But it’s not right.’

  ‘It doesn’t have to be right. You just have to do what they say. You know how dangerous they are.’

  ‘I thought you were a good man,’ I said as he crossed the room to the door.

  He turned, finally looked me in the eye. I remembered the man I’d played cards with, the one who’d saved us from Samuels, the one I’d thought of as a father.

  ‘So did I,’ he said.

  He looked broken. Defeated. A man so deep in his own shame, no act of kindness could ever pull him out. I hated him. But I loved him. And I didn’t know what to do any more. I had no guiding hand but my own and that hand had killed my mother.

  Frank shook off the sorrow and his voice brightened. ‘Your house is still a crime scene so you can stay here tonight. Samuels wants to take your statement. I’ll take you over there later and I’ll drive you home tomorrow. Sit tight.’

  ‘Did you care about me? Or Jenny?’ I asked, fresh tears straining against my eyes. ‘Did you ever really care?’

  Frank tried to smile but it just twisted his face further, turned him darker. ‘More than you know.’

  Then he was gone, the door closed softly behind him.

  29

  Pastor Jacobs dropped me at the end of my farm track and drove away as soon as the car door closed. I watched his car disappear, obscured by a cloud of dust, and I knew I wouldn’t see him again. My home, my farm, was a mile from town in an ocean of silent cornfields. Just the wind and the birds for company.

  My mailbox had been knocked over. Maybe by the police, maybe by kids who’d heard what had happened in my house. The faded red ‘Royal’ was dented, coated in dust, the wooden post freshly splintered. We’d gone to Samuels yesterday but I’d barely spoken. Frank did all the talking and I nodded along. Signed papers, made it official. Samuels was almost kind. He gave me a brown evidence bag full of cash, said the AMX matchbox was evidence but the money wasn’t. I didn’t count it. It didn’t seem to matter any more.

  My clothes went into evidence bags and they took my fingerprints. Frank let me pick out what I wanted from the church’s goodwill jumble. A blue and yellow striped t-shirt, a pair of short denims and Keds with the sole flapping loose on the right heel. The sneakers pinched my toes as I walked the track to my house, half a size too small but better than opening up the cuts on my feet again. I kept my eyes on the ground, didn’t want to look up, didn’t want to see my home, my farm. What would I find there?

  The smell of burning, just like the morning after that terrible night, still filled the air. It was the corn stalks, they had a particular flavour I could taste a mile off. To the north, in the distance, a wall of white smoke drifted south. Someone nearby was burning the stubble in his field. It was too early for harvest, which meant his crop must have been lost. The fire would do its work, cleanse the ground, kill the rot and make it ready for next year. Good as new.

  I stopped when I reached the yard. Momma’s truck stood where it always had. The frayed rope was still despite the breeze. All just the same, but for the torn-up grass, all tyre tracks that didn’t belong. A ripped piece of police tape fluttered, still nailed to the front door like a flag signalling my arrival. Vivid yellow against the brown door, like army banners after the battle, I thought with a dim smile.

  My sister’s voice filled my head. Why do they always make such a mess?

  I can’t go inside.

  You don’t have to.

  I watched the rope and was suddenly sick of it. I couldn’t stand it any more. I started walking. Past the house, through the west field, toward old man Briggs’ farm. I took a route to Briggs that went nowhere near Three Points. I couldn’t face that. Not now, not ever.

  I found a good-sized tyre on Briggs’ pile and rolled it back home. I replaced the rotten, grey rope with one from our barn and hung the new tyre. When I was done, I sat back, felt the sun on my shoulders and closed my eyes.

  I heard the rope creak. Heard a soft laugh. Opened my eyes.

  Jenny swung on the tyre, giggling with every sway. Her voice was distant, an echo inside my head. She was blurred at the edges, not quite there but at the same time so real, so perfect, I was suddenly crying. She’s here. She’s back with me and I laughed. I laughed with her through hot tears, through a deep ache in my chest.

  She’s not really there, you know that, the old voice in my head said. This is what going crazy looks like.

  Then let me be crazy. Maybe I always have been.

  I sat on the ground and watched. Joy leapt from my sister, burst from her smile and shining eyes, real or not I couldn’t take my eyes off her. It was how I always imagined she’d play and laugh if the swing was ever fixed. Maybe that’s why she was there. I’d changed the landscape of our lives and she’d come back to me but I should have done it months ago, years even, maybe that would have made a difference. The yard, at least, would not look the same any more. It wouldn’t be the same yard that existed when my family existed. Even if replacing the swing would have changed nothing, it was a small mercy that I wouldn’t have to look at the rope any more and remember my real pa hanging it, or Eric promising he would fix it, or the way Momma flicked it with her finger when she passed, her little ritual. Its swing told us she was home and though it brought me happiness, it brought Jenny fear.

  Never again.

  I sat watching Jenny until the sun sank and the dusk midges swarmed. They bit me and I let them. There were no night birds singing. No rustle in the trees. No starlings pulsing in the orange sky. As darkness came and Jenny quietened, her laughter faded, her shine dimmed, a crushing weight lowered onto my shoulders.

  I was alone. A different, absolute kind of alone that made my stomach drop and my breath catch if I thought too long on it. It was like the time Jenny ran away and Momma went after her and the house felt, sounded, smelled wrong. This time she and Momma would never come back, and that emptiness was all the deeper, all the darker, a black chasm opening between hip and heart.

  The house behind me was full of them both. How could I go in there? Into the bathroom? Into mine and Jenny’s bedroom? Into the kitchen where I saw the carving knife? So I slept in the crawlspace, in the dirt, with my back against t
he brickwork, Rudy’s flick knife in my hands, opening and closing it, over and over. Once I pressed the blade against my wrist. Pressed hard and dragged. A shot of pain ran up my arm but the knife wasn’t that sharp. It was as if Rudy himself was in the blade and refused to hurt me. I kept it in my pocket.

  I dreamed of Momma. Of playing Euchre and gorging on a quart of mint-choc-chip. Of her calling me ‘baby’, holding me, even in the heatwave summers, her arms around me, her murmurs of ‘I love you, I love you’. The bird book she’d given me just because.

  I love you, Momma. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.

  I woke up at dawn, my cheeks wet with salt tears, my eyes raw.

  I don’t remember much of that day. Twice a reporter van snuck up the track like a slug sliding to lettuce. I hid in the crawlspace and watched two men get out. They started poking around, knocked and shouted but left when no one responded. The second time, they brought a crowbar and prised open the front door, went inside my house. I followed their movements from the crawlspace, heard the shutter snap on their camera. In the family room, snapsnap. In the kitchen, snapsnap. Then up the stairs to the bathroom, snapsnapsnap. Mumbled exchanges between them, something about the front page, but I didn’t care enough to listen.

  Other people came around and I kept hidden. Some I recognised. Mrs Lyle from the post office. Miss Eaves. Al Westin. Even the gossipy curtain-twitchers Margo Hyland and Jennette Dawes. I never answered, just watched through the gaps beneath the porch. They left dishes covered in tinfoil, usually with a note about heating at three hundred for twenty minutes. I ate it all cold.

  I wondered for a while if Pastor Jacobs would ever think to check on me. Wondered whether all this would become part of his sermons. Wondered too if everyone in town knew the full truth of what happened. Probably. Keeping secrets in small towns was like holding ants in your hands. They’ll always find a gap, a way out, even if they have to bite you to do it. I expected most of the town knew what Mayor Wills, Bung-Eye, and the rest of them were doing, which meant they probably knew how Momma was involved and how the mess spiralled from there. Guilt visits. Guilt casseroles and pies and mac n’ cheese. Easier to say nothing and pretend it’s all roses and cream than speak up, blow that whistle and call down the dogs. Easier. Safer. The quiet life is all these people want. Larson was a Cyclops with one big blind eye.

  You’re being cynical, Johnny, Jenny’s voice in my head, her hand on my arm. When tragedy hits a small town, they close ranks around their own and look after each other. Haven’t you noticed that? When the Easton mill exploded, every man in Larson took up a bucket and hauled water. When Mark and Tracy died, the town mourned together. Larson may be rotten at the core but some of the fruit is still good.

  Nothing feels good any more, I told her, took her hand in mine. Except this. Except us.

  30

  The next morning I sat on the porch steps with my sister, eating cold mashed potatoes Mrs Ponderosa from the Gardening Society had left me, when I heard them. They rode into my yard on bikes. Rudy’s rusted-up Schwinn finally fixed but still looking like a piece of junk. Gloria on her Raleigh, basket on the front, the garish pink frame covered with green and blue stickers. They jumped off the bikes without braking, let them clatter into the dust, and ran to me. In a second their arms were around me and mine around them and I felt life in my body. Life and heat and grasping hands and tight, tight embraces. My friends had come and I couldn’t let them go, I’d never let them go. Jenny, apart from us, watched, smiled, and I felt her absence in my arms so keenly I almost cried out.

  ‘What took you guys so long to come round?’ I asked.

  Gloria shook her head. ‘My mom and dad said it was too dangerous for me to be out by myself after … you know … so I finally snuck out.’

  ‘Same,’ Rudy said. ‘My old man’s away and Perry is just as much of a bastard. He locked me in my room the other night, kept giving me these crazy chores, threatened a hell of a beating if I left the yard. If I didn’t know better, bud, I’d say our folks don’t want us hanging around you.’

  Bung-Eye. Wakefield. Of course they didn’t want me around their kids. I knew all their dirty secrets.

  ‘I don’t blame them,’ I said.

  The three of us were mostly quiet. There wasn’t much to say and I’d done enough talking, enough thinking about what happened. I couldn’t bring myself to tell Gloria the truth about her father. It did no good to ruin another family. So we told stories about Jenny. When she tried a cigarette for the first time and coughed up a lung. When she caught her first fish in Big Lake and screamed so loud we couldn’t get near her, then demanded we set the perch back in the pool. When she got an A minus on the history test she’d been dreading, all about Gettysburg, and it was the highest grade of all of us. When she laughed and the world seemed at once brighter.

  With true friends, like with family, there are things you don’t need to say, they are known from the tiniest expression, the simplest word. We had a secret language, the four of us, one that existed in moments and looks and silence. We cried together. I held Gloria as she wept. Rudy too. And they held me. All the while, my Jenny, my shining sister, watched us from the other side of the porch, a look of serenity on her face like saints in church paintings. I knew not to tell them I could see her. I knew this was something special, some gift from God that allowed me to keep her with me. God’s way of apologising for one of His pastors, for His failure to this town and to my family. He’d given me an angel.

  We were talking about the Roost when Gloria started, as if bitten by a rattler. She jumped up, ran over to her bike to get something from the bag in her basket. She handed me a photograph.

  My heart stopped, then beat all the harder.

  There we were. All four of us. Standing outside our Fort after we’d finished building it. It was black and white but I knew every colour and detail of that day. I smelt the summer again, tasted the air. Gloria had taken the picture on a timer and set the camera on a tree stump. Me, Rudy and her were twelve and Jenny was eleven. It was the summer before the body and the police and the darkness. Rudy was just the same, but with less weariness in his eyes. A movie star. Blond hair and wide smile. His arms raised and flexed, showing his biceps like a strong man. Gloria in a light green dress, her red hair puffed out wild, standing next to Rudy with her arms crossed, grinning.

  Then me on the other side of him, three inches shorter, skin and bone to his muscle. Halfway to mimicking his pose, the camera caught my arms out wide, blurred, all loose fists and an awkward, incomplete smile on my face.

  And Jenny. Next to me, arms clasped behind her back in her sundress. The one dotted with yellow flowers. Her hair long and straight and flowing in a frozen breeze. I ran my finger over her face.

  ‘I thought you’d like to have it,’ Gloria said.

  Sadness choked my words. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘You know, Johnny,’ Rudy said. ‘You should come crash with me. You can’t stay here alone.’

  I winced at the thought of being anywhere near Bung-Eye. ‘It’s okay. I’m fine here.’

  ‘Sleeping in the crawlspace is not fine,’ Gloria said.

  I panicked for a moment that she’d offer to put me up too. She didn’t but she wouldn’t look at me either. She kept her eyes down, shuffled her feet, something she did when she was uncomfortable. I felt, with a cold drop in my stomach, she was hiding something.

  ‘Serious, man.’ Rudy stood in front of me and stooped, made me meet his eyes. ‘If you need me, I’m there. Blow a whistle or ring a bell and I’ll come running.’

  I nodded. I trusted him more than almost anyone and knew he would sprint down the track in the middle of the night if I needed him. Rudy gave me a bear-hug and said he’d be back tomorrow morning with a surprise and I’d better like it. Before he left I gave him back his flick knife. With my friends back, with Jenny safe, I didn’t need it any more.

  Gloria stayed. We returned to the porch and watched the sun dip. The air chilled.


  ‘Have you been inside yet?’ Gloria asked.

  I shook my head.

  ‘Would you like me to go in?’

  ‘Okay.’

  She came back with a pair of Cokes, a packet of saltines I didn’t know we had, and a blanket. The one from the back of the couch for when Momma fell asleep in front of the TV or stumbled in after a night at Gum’s. I held it to my chest. Breathed it in. Her smell. The real smell, not mud or blood or hate. It was whiskey and strawberries and Lucky Strike smoke and that heady, body scent behind it all. That was Momma. And it was all that was left. I cried again.

  Gloria held me until the sun was gone and the night was full. I apologised for not being good company and she told me to shut up. Being so close to her again after so long, something sparked in my chest and warmed me from the inside. I held her hand and she stroked my thumb with hers. A tiny, absent-minded movement that sent shocks of heat through me.

  When the night chill came Gloria led me into my house. I kept my head down, face buried in the blanket so I wouldn’t have to see what had happened to my home, and followed her upstairs. I knew the way even with my eyes closed, felt the swollen boards under my feet outside the bathroom, the creak on the fourth step up to our attic room. Nothing had changed but everything had.

  Gloria and me lay side by side in mine and Jenny’s bed, wrapped in the blanket despite the summer heat. The windows were open, letting in a sweet, smoky breeze that made me think of chestnuts at Christmas. We stayed like this, not talking, just breathing, being, for a long time. Gloria’s fingers played in my hair and her other hand held mine. For the first time in days, I felt the pieces of me come back together. I knew I’d never be fixed, how could I be without my heart, without my soul? I was a glass smashed against a wall, some pieces gone, some turned to dust, but a few shards still intact enough to try to repair. Rudy was my steady hand. Gloria was my glue.

  I woke beside Gloria. She was sat upright on the bed, knees drawn to her chest under her dress, staring at the poster of Joni Mitchell. She didn’t realise I was awake and for a blissful minute, I watched her. Gloria’s face, usually bright, cheeks plumped by a smile, was slack and sad. She scratched at her knee, picked at a scab from a graze I didn’t recognise. Empty eyes. Staring but not looking, the same darkness across her expression she had last night. It looked like she was fighting with herself, rocking slightly, frowning, troubled. A year ago, with Gloria in my bed, I’d have been a wreck. Shaking and nervous and babbling about being caught, what would Momma do, what would Jenny think, but that worry seemed so distant now. So small.