Where the Truth Lies

by Anna Bailey

  “Jesus,” says Melissa, “I forgot what a dump this place is.”

  Emma nods. “Yeah, we can go if you want. I don’t know, I just wanted to see it.”

  “Of course.” Melissa looks over her shoulder as she puts the car into reverse. “I can’t believe I ever used to let you come play here. Feels like forever ago.”

  Eleanor Lewis’s words come back to her now. That whole strange business a few years ago—you remember? Four years, Emma thinks, that’s how long it’s been since she was last inside the Blakes’ house.

  Oh yes. The business with the son. That was strange.

  For days Noah didn’t come to school. Chrissy Dukes said he hadn’t shown up for work at the Aurora diner, either, nor had anyone seen him in church, although a few people had spotted Dolly crying in the parking lot. At first Abigail said that Noah had hurt himself playing basketball, but Noah had dropped off the basketball team when he was a sophomore, and this was in his senior year. Abi got all weird and squirrelly when Emma tried to dig deeper. Then, during a fraught encounter in the chips-and-dips aisle, Dolly had hastily explained to Melissa that Noah was depressed because he didn’t get into any of the colleges he’d picked, and no doubt this was the story she’d spread at church as well. But Emma was the one friend Samuel hadn’t managed to scare away. She knew Noah’s parents: they didn’t believe in kids getting depressed. Said it was all just a scheme to sell them medication they didn’t need. So one day Emma called by to see Abigail, and that was when she saw Noah with his face all bashed in. After that she wasn’t allowed to come over to the house anymore. Nobody was—until the day, four years later, when Sheriff Gains arrived to tell the Blakes their daughter had disappeared.

  Emma watches the house getting smaller in the rearview mirror, and she thinks about Noah with his black-and-purple face, and Abi with the stones in her knees, and all the secrets that ordinary people carry around with them, and she hears Ann Traxler’s voice again: You can’t help but wonder.

  13

  The problem with Abigail is that she’s artistic. (Jude refuses to think of his sister in anything other than the present tense, even though she has been missing for 432 hours now.) He’s been mulling this over for some time, and now, leaning against the shopping cart while his brother deliberates over fajita spices, he thinks he has finally figured it out. Abigail is artistic, and that’s why Noah has always hated her. He hated her even before.

  Their mother was artistic, a long time ago. Jude has a vague memory of her showing them how to make little figures out of modeling clay when they were younger and cooing over Abi’s attempts the most. It’s hard to imagine his mother being creative now, but perhaps that’s why she always seemed to pay Abigail more attention.

  “Hey, Limpy, do you want smoky barbecue or roasted tomato?”

  Jude is glad to have his brother ask him about something, even if it’s only seasoning. “Barbecue,” he says, and Noah tosses it into the cart.

  Abi is good with pencils and charcoal, but she isn’t much good at anything else at school, so Dolly recycles Noah’s old English essays for Abigail to hand in as homework. “Don’t look like that, Noah. It’s not hurting anyone, is it?” Then, when Abi’s grades come back top, their father says things like, “That’s my girl,” and sticks her report card up on the refrigerator. He never says things like that to Noah. So, Jude decides, even if what happened—was it really four years ago now?—had never happened, his brother would still have hated their sister anyway.

  Samuel Blake never says, “That’s my boy,” to Jude either, but then Jude does not expect it. He is the piece of punctuation at the end of his siblings: Noah, Abigail, Jude. A small name, telling him how much space he’s allowed to take up. An accident, his father called him once. His mother did not disagree. So Jude talks quietly, tucks his elbows in, and gives whatever he can, the way Jesus taught him. His parents are like the elk that sometimes come down the mountain and eat the berries in their backyard—you have to be patient with them, and eventually, sometimes, they will let you pet their muzzles. They probably don’t care much about berries, his parents, but he can give them patience. He will give it to them until he has given away enough of himself that he is the right size to fit into their lives.

  And what about Noah? What does Noah need?

  “Hey, wait with the cart, will you?” It’s not really a question, and his brother takes off around the corner of the spice aisle, disappearing before Jude can reply.

  Slowly, he hobbles to the end, leaning on the shopping cart handlebar for support, and peers around an early display of Halloween ornaments. His brother is talking to the Romanian boy, who has six cans of ravioli in his basket and nothing else, so it’s hard for Jude not to feel a little bit sorry for him. Noah’s movements are very jagged, jerking away when the other boy tries to reach out to him. At last Noah says, loud enough for Jude to hear, “I said I don’t want anything to do with it. I don’t want anything to do with you.”

  “But the money, Blake! You could finally get out of here, we could—”

  “Just stay the hell away from me.”

  Noah takes off in the other direction, not slowing even when his sleeve catches on a deal sign and rips down half the display, so he doesn’t see what Jude sees: the Romanian boy standing there, arms hugging his chest, just staring at the space where Noah was.

  Jude retreats back to the spices and seasonings, and thinks, Not again, Noah. Not again.

  * * *

  Emma stares at the bag: a little clear Ziploc of white powder, nestled in the remains of an old Safeway carrier. “You need to take this to the police. Where the hell did you even get it?”

  “Fell out of the chimney,” says Rat, “at the Winslow ruin.”

  “That creepy place up by the Tall Bones?”

  “I’m not going to the police.” He leans against the sink, giving her that cocky half-moon grin. “With a business opportunity like this?”

  “But this is cocaine, Rat. Literal cocaine.”

  “Twenty grams. More or less.”

  “So, what, you’re a drug dealer? Is that it?”

  She thinks about the tin of cash in the cupboard—the cash he’s no doubt been using to pay for their liquor—and suddenly she has a desperate need to be held by her mother, to be as far away from here as possible, away from this bag of coke and Rat’s sharp edges. The feeling arrives so fiercely that she begins to cry.

  Outside, the clouds have grown dark, but only a little rain comes, like a leak in the sky, a weak tapping on the metal roof.

  “Hey,” Rat says softly. “Don’t be frightened. Please don’t.”

  She rubs her eyes with the back of her hand, remembering too late about her makeup, and now, standing in front of him with mascara smeared across her cheeks, she just wants to cry all over again.

  “I’m not a drug dealer, Emma.” For a second, he worries his lower lip between his teeth in a way that reminds her of Noah Blake. “Not since I came to America.”

  “Is that supposed to make me feel better? That’s why you didn’t want me poking around, isn’t it?”

  “I told you, I found this at the Winslow ruin.”

  Emma takes a shallow breath in and lets a long breath out. It could be true, what he’s saying. God, she longs for things to be simple again, to be simple herself, smothering giggles with Abigail as they sipped Samuel Blake’s bourbon, like that was the worst thing either of them had ever done.

  “But…” Emma rubs her eyes again, and her fingers come away all smudged with black. “Are you still going to sell it, though?”

  “We can make a little money, drăgută, you and me. I’ll buy you whatever you like—Jack Daniel’s, Russian Standard, French-fucking-champagne—you name it.”

  “We? What do you mean ‘we’? Don’t involve me in this.”

  Rat scratches the underside of his jaw. “I’ll help you with Hunter Maddox.”

  It’s such an obvious play that it feels like a slap. Emma wants to be ma
d at him, to slap him right back on principle, but she also wants to prove Hunter’s place in all this. More than anything else, she just wants to find out what happened to the only real friend she’s ever had, and somewhere behind all that she wants for it not to be her fault, and God, Jesus, can you believe that Emma Alvarez just left her there? Can you believe? Emma knows it’s not real, but she can hear the coyotes howling again, and there are too many images crowding around her head: Abi in her prom dress dancing at the Tall Bones, Abi in the moonlight about to turn into the trees, Abi with grass on the soles of her feet, with blood on her knees, with a smile on her face, scratching and scratching at her skin, and Emma can feel the weight of all their years together, the love and the boredom and the madness of it, caving in on her like she’s being buried alive and her lungs are full of dirt.

  “Emma—”

  The next thing she knows, she’s on the floor, shuddering with such awful, empty sobs that Rat puts his arms around her and holds her until she stops shaking. She makes strange sounds then, sad sounds as she buries her face in the crook of his neck where he is warm and heady with the smell of incense. Later, looking back, she thinks perhaps she’d hoped he might smell like her father.

  “I won’t let anything happen to you,” he says, as if he doesn’t consider himself an event.

  14

  Much of his past now seems like some vague dark blur at the back of his mind. Samuel has drunk enough to make it that way. But sometimes he can still feel his parents’ kitchen linoleum, hard and cold under his knees, as he picked the remains of a turkey dinner out of the garbage. “You think my cooking’s trash?” his mother yelled. “Then you can eat it out of the trash.” The meat was lukewarm and slimy with the remains of yesterday’s dog food. Even now his throat seizes at the thought of it.

  The skin on the back of his right hand is tight and pale, and he is happy to let folks assume it was something that happened during the war. He’d rather they didn’t know that his mother had walked in on him touching himself, when he was eleven, and pressed his hand down under her clothes iron. “Don’t you ever do that,” she said. “You make God mad when you do that.” When he’d cried, she’d shoved him against the sideboard and gone to swallow Valium alone in her bedroom with the drapes closed. It was not lost on him, even as a child, how the things that made God mad usually pissed off his mother as well.

  That was the first lesson Constance Blake taught him: how easily you can blur the line between the Lord’s wishes and your own. The second lesson was about sex. Constance did not approve of sex, so neither did God, which made things difficult for Samuel because he wanted to have it.

  Georgia Lafitte was the housemaid’s daughter, and she was sixteen when Samuel was on the cusp of manhood. He can still remember it: out on the veranda of the Blakes’ crumbling old plantation manor, cicadas in chorus in the background, her little moans as the sun dipped behind the trees. The Spanish moss swayed in the cooling air. He didn’t realize his mother was home until she came out to call him for dinner.

  She wouldn’t even let Georgia gather up her clothes. Samuel recalls the girl running across the lawn half naked, her hair a tangled mess from where Constance had gripped her by the scalp and torn her away from him. Mrs. Lafitte was fired the following day. Samuel was informed that his attitude needed correcting, and two weeks later he found himself on a navy vessel bound for Da Nang.

  At first it hadn’t seemed like much of a punishment. Samuel had never had many friends at school, and suddenly here he was, part of a brotherhood, and better still, he was thousands of miles away from his mother. Despite the sweat and the rain and the danger lurking in every shadow, it felt as if he had finally been given room to breathe.

  But he thinks now: It’s strange the things we turn to in our darkest moments. And when he was crawling over bodies, holding a dead man’s hand, watching a face—peeled clean off—just floating by in a stream of mud, there were times when he had wished for his mother.

  * * *

  Guilt is a hard body to bury, no matter how many times you might claim God forgives you. You let some things fester long enough, they grow teeth and claws and crawl their way back to the surface again.

  Samuel gets these spasms sometimes now. His arms shoot out and he makes this sudden, awkward noise as though someone has just walked up behind him and dug their fingers into his lower back. Then Dolly says, “Oh, Sam,” and people think she’s being kind.

  He remembers it had happened once in church, right in the middle of Pastor Lewis’s sermon, and afterward Dolly had apologized for him. Little Dalton Lewis, peering out from behind his father’s legs, wanted to know how come he’d made that noise, how come? And Dolly had said, “He was in the war,” and Dalton thought she meant World War Two. Kids these days don’t even know, he thinks, and if they do, they don’t care. It’s all the same to them, sitting on their phones, ignoring the world.

  It’s the fear in their eyes that he can’t stand. Whenever people look at him, afraid, he sees a different face, one he would rather forget. “Dolly,” he says, “all you do is make me feel like shit,” and he teaches her with feints and lunges how to keep her face straight, how to keep the fear away. He has seen too much fear in women’s eyes.

  Except Abigail’s.

  Abi looks him straight in the eye—has done ever since she was born—not like the first son, or the second. When the noises come out, she just looks at him and says, “Daddy, pass the mayonnaise, will you please?” or “Anyway, as I was saying…” and then continues as if nothing ever happened.

  Abigail was his gift from God, while Noah—sweaty-handed, lip-chewing, bookish Noah—was a trial. By the time he was old enough to walk, Constance Blake was phoning twice a week, asking when she could come up to Colorado and meet her first grandchild. Her husband, Samuel’s own father, had passed away the year before, and this, Constance claimed, had been some kind of wake-up call. She was eating better, spending more time with other women in the community, and she was taking this new medication that helped stabilize her moods. But Samuel was having none of it. All that Valium she’d swallowed when he was growing up never seemed to do her any good, why should these pills be any different? It was all the same bullshit with a different price tag slapped on. Besides, Noah would only disappoint her, and that, in turn, would reflect poorly on Samuel.

  “He swooned, Dolly,” Samuel remembers saying once. “There’s no other word for it. He bit his tongue when the ball hit him, and then he swooned. Can’t even stand the taste of blood in his mouth, what kind of a man’s he going to be?”

  And Dolly had just looked at him and said, “He’s three,” like that was sufficient.

  Later, Samuel told his son, “You’re letting God down.”

  But Abi, he really prayed for Abi. He wasn’t expecting a daughter, but when he took her out with his old M-16 rifle and she shot up a row of empty Lone Star cans at twenty paces, bullets pinging in the hot air like lightning bugs, he knew this was the child, this was the one to be made in his image. He had been given a chance to do things right this time.

  Afterward, Abi had collected all the shell casings and Samuel had made them into a bracelet for her. He made a bunch of jewelry for her over the years, although Dolly would not allow her to wear any of it to school. Poor taste, she said. But now, when he goes up to Abigail’s bedroom, chasing Dolly away because she’s filling it with too much of her miserable cigarette stench, he sits down on the bedspread in the gentle silence that his daughter so often provided him, and he finds one of the shell casings tucked under her pillow.

  Sometimes he hears his mother speaking through him. God forgive me, he’ll say, but it isn’t so much a request as a statement. If he repeats it often enough, everyone will believe it. But Abigail, wherever she is now, chose to keep this small memento of their time together. As though she, at least, forgives him.

  * * *

  Jude looks up from his homework to see his father standing in his bedroom doorway.

/>   “Get your shoes,” he says. “We’re going out to pray.”

  The night air smells like winter, smoky and sodden. Standing in the driveway, Jude pulls his scarf tighter around his throat as he looks up at the clear sky, and thinks that if stars were grains of salt, out here it would look as though God had knocked over the shaker.

  His mother helps him get down on one knee. The other leg, already beginning to ache from the cold, sticks out at a stiff angle, and he holds on to his cane to steady himself. Then she and Noah kneel on either side of him in a half circle, which they wait for Samuel to complete. The gravel digs into his shin through his jeans, and when he looks at his mother and brother, dimly lit by the orange glow shining out from behind the drapes, they too are tightening their mouths so as not to wince. It’s been a while since his father asked them to do this. Jude wonders why he’s chosen tonight.

  His father’s Bible is the potent King James Version, bound in black leather with gold edging the pages, and a tattered blue ribbon that he uses to mark his place. Even now Jude can see the tail of it fluttering in the chill breeze, but this evening there are also several scraps of paper marking pages, and Jude swallows. Tonight, it seems, God and his father have a lot to say.

  “Psalm 5:5: The foolish shall not stand in thy sight, thou hatest all workers of iniquity.” Samuel’s voice sounds like it’s been dragged over a dry riverbed. “We are told plainly that our Lord hates those who stand before him in arrogance.”