by Anna Bailey
“Jesus Christ, Mom.”
“Don’t take that tone with your mother.” Jerry cuffs him round the back of the head. “After the crap you pulled this summer, you haven’t earned the right to be disappointed in your parents.”
“Are you ever going to let me live this down?”
“Drugs, Hunter!” His mother waves her hands as if she’s trying to illustrate what that means. “Marijuana is one thing, but this summer you brought cocaine into this house. Cocaine! We gave everything we had to raising you right, getting you ready for college, for life, and then you just go and throw it all back in our faces by bringing home hard drugs, like none of it meant anything to you. This family has a reputation to uphold, Hunter, so I’m sorry if we’ve hurt your feelings because we didn’t like your little Mexican friend, but what you’re feeling now is nothing—nothing—compared to what you’ve put us through.”
Hunter chews the inside of his cheek. “Dad,” he says. “What did you do with the coke?”
“What?”
“You told me you got rid of it. What did you do with it?”
His father snorts. “So you can go dig it up again? I don’t think so.”
“Well, somebody already found it, so you obviously didn’t bury it deep enough.”
“Somebody found it?” His mother rakes her hair back, pulling until the roots are stark against her scalp. “Jesus, Jerry.”
His father squares his shoulders. “He’s just screwing around, Andie. Don’t listen to him. It’s not possible.”
“Oh, because you hid it so well? You know, Dad, maybe if you didn’t want anyone to find it, you shouldn’t have stashed it in the place Rat Lăcustă takes people to fuck.”
His mother twitches. “Language, Hunter, for heaven’s sakes.”
“How do you know where I…?” Jerry stares at him but he doesn’t look angry anymore.
It’s only a small comfort to realize that’s what his father was doing, burying the coke, when Hunter glimpsed him between the trees that night. If he figures I saw him that night, Hunter thinks, then he’ll know I was out in the woods, too, and he’ll want to know why.
“Hunter, don’t close up on us now, we have to talk about this.” His father’s big face seems softer all of a sudden, void of its usual tension. “You’ve got a bright future, son. There’s no need to lose it over some mistake like drugs. But if there’s something else, we can help you, Hunter. You just have to talk to us.”
He can see his father reaching for this tenuous moment as if it will suture the hole Hunter has torn in his parents’ summer, but he knows—has known right from the moment he stepped through the door, the night that Abigail Blake disappeared—there is nothing he can say to fix what he’s done.
18
Once, in school, Emma had to look at some photographs of what different kinds of tears looked like under a microscope. Most were bizarre amoeba-like images, but tears of grief were like the bird’s-eye view of a bombed-out city. A sparse, abandoned landscape. That, she thinks, is how she feels now.
There’s no sidewalk on the road that heads down from the Maddoxes’ property into town, so she keeps close to the edge of the trees, using the flashlight on her phone to light the way. It’s about thirteen miles, and she knows eventually she will have to call her mother to drive her home, but for now she just wants to walk, to feel the wind in her hair, the certainty of the cold against her skin.
It’s as if she has to lay out in front of her everything that’s happened tonight, pick up every event physically, to get a sense of the shape and weight of it, of all the nuances, before she can decide how she feels about it. First there was Rat, ditching her like a bad prom date, then reappearing in a Polaroid on Hunter’s wall. The only clear thing she can figure out about him now is that he is none of the things she thought he was, just the spaces in between.
Then there’s the other photo: Abigail, her long hair caught up in the breeze, the bright greens and yellows of summer roaring in the background, a daisy tucked behind her ear. Hunter keeps that in his bedside drawer. He sleeps next to it. Did Abi know? What does it mean?
Somewhere overhead an owl hoots, and Emma glances over her shoulder at the black road stretching behind her. Ahead it is just the same. She stands there for a moment, listening to the crack of wood against wood as the wind shakes the aspens, and she wishes she could turn into a tree, and stay right here shouting at the sky the way they do.
Actually, if she’s wishing for things, she wishes she had shouted at the Maddoxes instead. She can get mad about it now, replaying Andie Maddox’s southern drawl, and Jerry’s sarcastic “Does she even speak English?” tossed at her as carelessly as if he were flicking away a cigarette butt. She can conjure all the fury she needs now, until her head feels like it’s about to burst. Now she wants to dash her knuckles against a tree trunk just to get the anger out. But standing there in the hallway she had simply felt tired. A deep sort of exhaustion that seemed to pile down on top of her, so that looking at her life was like looking at this long black road—the same murky view whether she looked backward or ahead.
Actually, if she’s wishing for things, she wishes she had a full bottle of Jack.
She’s been walking for about an hour, give or take, when the low rumble of a car makes her turn. She squints into the headlights just as the police siren squawks once, the emergency lights momentarily painting her in red and blue.
Sheriff Gains steps out of the car, flashlight angled so it doesn’t shine directly in her face. His breath mists in the air as he says, “Emma Alvarez, is that you? What are you doing all the way out here?”
Hey. Weird night.
And then: Seriously, Hunter, I’m sorry for running off like that. I just don’t think we should be seen together right now. My parents would kill me.
Lying in the cool dark of his room, Hunter squints at his phone screen. They’re not the last messages Abigail sent him, but he doesn’t want to look at those right now. These were the ones that made him do something dumb, something he almost let slip tonight, if his parents hadn’t been so hung up about the coke.
Everything seems to have slowed down in Abigail’s absence. It’s as if the town is expecting her back, and they can’t bear to do anything worthwhile until she’s here. But things were different on that promising cusp between spring and summer. That May, Hunter and anyone who mattered to him were finishing their penultimate year of school. It was a liminal time, crammed with fake IDs and hazy music and tasting each other’s saliva. People were about to turn eighteen and everybody wanted to be lovers.
Junior prom, the same night Abigail told him to get lost in the parking lot, Hunter had driven up the mountain with a box of edibles and a bunch of the kids from his father’s trailer park who were too frayed at the edges to get dressed up for a school dance. They had sat in the trees, bare legs dangling, their faces hidden by the branches, looking down at the lights of the town in the valley below. That was the night he had watched Rat Lăcustă, in a pair of white fringed cowboy boots, shoot a Budweiser bottle off a tree branch. Hunter heard applause in the shatter of the glass, and there was something in the ferocity of it that made him feel hot from the inside out. Shana Tyson had made Rat a crown of wildflowers and Hunter had taken a photograph of him, which he would later forget about. Then he’d gotten Abi’s text message.
Rat said, “What’s eating you, Maddox?”
Hunter, high as the moon, had told him he was in love.
“Yeah, that’ll do it. You want to go for a drive?”
There were candles at the Winslow house. He remembers laughing about that: Candles in the woods; it’s like witchcraft. And it was, a little. Rat had flowers in his hair and flowers inked on his hip—Romanian dog roses, he said, to remind him of home—and Hunter had traced the pattern with clumsy fingers, while Rat slid his hand down his pants.
In bed, now, Hunter rolls over and buries his head under his pillow. It’s really not a big deal, he thinks. Everybody’s a litt
le that way, these days, aren’t they? He was just mad about Abi, and Rat was mad about someone, that much was clear from the gunshot and the hard friction of his hand. Clearly not a big deal to Rat either: he’d barely looked at him when Hunter handed him the money for the coke and their fingers touched. It’s just a sick joke that his dad should have hidden it at the Winslow ruin, and that Rat was the one to find it.
“God,” he whispers aloud, and hopes nobody will answer.
Perhaps Rat was high enough that night that he’s forgotten. He certainly doesn’t seem to remember what happened afterward. He doesn’t know what Hunter stole.
Hunter sighs and rolls back over, staring at the dim patterns of the wood grain on the ceiling. There’s nothing for it, he thinks.
He climbs out of bed, pulls on his sweatpants and sneakers, and grabs the flashlight from the desk. In the closet there’s an old duffel bag, heavy on one side with the weight of something he wishes to God now he’d never laid eyes on. He slings the bag over his shoulder before heading out into the night.
From his house, it’s about twenty minutes to Winslow on foot. He doesn’t dare risk his parents hearing the car, but it’s easy enough if he follows the river that runs almost in a straight line between both properties. A gentle rain patters on the dense foliage as he makes his way through the trees, pine needles crunching underfoot, the duffel bumping against his back. The cocaine he dumps in the river, as much for his parents’ sake as his own. He should never have bought it in the first place, should never have driven all the way down to Boulder for it, but his priorities had been different then. His heart had sunk when Emma handed him the bag and he’d seen what was inside, but he’d had no choice except to buy it back. At least now he’s in control of things again. Every last granule of evidence has to go.
Then there’s the other thing.
The Winslow ruin looks worse at night—just a jagged shadow with nothing but his flashlight to pick out the crumbling black stone. The candles are gone, he notes, scrambling over a window ledge and into the bed of damp ferns within. The place is as abandoned as it should be, which suits his needs. He makes a point of not looking at the spot where Rat had leaned him up against the stonework. With a heavy rock in his hand, he hacks at the hard ground, and feels his fingers snagging on twigs and debris, grit collecting under his fingernails, but he keeps digging until the hole is deep enough to bury what he’s brought. The clouds are smudgy from the rain, and there is no moon to illuminate what he drops into the hole and covers over again, stamping down the dirt so that it looks as flat as the surrounding earth.
A raccoon clambers along a branch overhead, black eyes momentarily blazing in the beam of the flashlight: the only witness as Hunter slings the empty bag back over his shoulder and makes his way home.
* * *
The reflection of the headlights on the bedroom wall looks like two giant eyes, and Melissa hears the slow putter of an engine coming to a stop outside. She crawls across the bed and pulls the curtain back. Just a little. It is almost nine thirty, and she knows she has every right to wonder who has kept her daughter out so late at a time like this, but she doesn’t like the thought of being caught spying. At once she’s glad of her own caution, because a cop car is parked there on the street outside her house.
Step number five of What to do when your teenager lies to you was about confronting your child honestly, not trying to catch them in a lie, because that in itself is dishonest and will encourage the same behavior in them. Melissa thinks whoever wrote that article clearly didn’t have a teenager. They probably weren’t even a parent, or they would understand, wouldn’t be so condescending. She imagines that, tomorrow, when she’s sitting across from her daughter at breakfast, and Emma lies about how she made it home tonight, Melissa will know it is a lie and, through all her frustration, that there will be a little chink of glee.
Eventually, Emma gets out of the car and so does Sheriff Gains. They stand together under the streetlamp for a moment longer, heavy breath visible in the cold air, until he puts his hand on her back and steers her toward the driveway.
Melissa jerks back from the window. She knows they can’t hear her from out on the street, but still she seals her hand over her mouth to keep herself from saying: Not my daughter too.
19
Even now—perhaps especially now—Dolly thinks often about how she’d made up her mind to leave Samuel right from their wedding day. For one thing, he screwed up their vows. She still flinches at the memory of standing there in front of all her friends and family, and him calling her Darlene, as if that could in any way be what Dolly was short for. She even confronted him about it afterward, feeling so righteous in her indignation that she was certain he’d apologize. Instead, he’d simply groaned and said, “I sure hope this isn’t what the rest of the marriage is going to be like.”
It would have been impossible to leave him straight after the wedding, of course. Everyone would have shaken their head and said, “I told you so,” like they were so wise for commenting on what she had known all along: Samuel Blake was going to be a lousy husband. If she had chosen him hoping for a good life partner, then she might have been more disappointed, but young Dolly Hopkins had gotten married to prove a point, to prove she could make her own decisions, and as soon as her parents started treating her like an adult, she would make her excuses and leave. That had been the plan, at least.
Sometimes at night, when she hears Samuel’s car pull into the drive, hears him cussing as he drops his keys, pictures him staggering to the front door, bourbon-drunk, she wishes he had taken a bend in the road too sharply. She imagines him slamming on the brakes, heaving the steering wheel, but it’s no good: the car goes skidding over the side of the mountain. Other times, like when he gives her a little kick in the back of the ankles, she wishes those Vietcong had just beaten him to death with their rifle butts.
In that sticky summer of 1992 when Dolly first met Samuel, she was fresh out of college, visiting friends in Shreveport, and he was already thirty-eight. The shabbiness of his solitary life excited her. He had his own apartment in the Riverfront neighborhood, where she would let him pin her down and thrust into her, confusing sweat for arousal. After they were married, however, he had moved her into his parents’ house on the pretext of them having more room there. Really, Dolly knew, it was because Constance Blake, Samuel’s mother, had ordered it.
Constance always criticized Dolly for the way she did her laundry. You were supposed to snap the clothes when you were folding them, she’d say. Get a real good snap when you shake them out. Otherwise they’ll just crease again in the drawers. Dolly didn’t care if Samuel’s clothing got creased, but Constance did. Constance worried a lot about her son. Dolly could tell that Samuel worried a lot about his mother too (her timid husband, Jason, was almost invisible and no longer slept in the same room as her), but still mother and son were unable to say two nice words to each other.
One Sunday after church—the Baptist church now, which somehow felt both lackadaisical and too serious to Dolly, who had been brought up sleepily Anglican—Constance asked, “Has he ever hit you?”
Dolly was quite taken aback, although less by the content of the question than by the fact that her mother-in-law had asked her something about herself. No, she said politely, Samuel had never hit her. But Constance had just sniffed and given the shirt she was folding a good hard snap.
Later that evening, after more sangria than she would ever admit to, Constance said, “It’s like standing on the beach and there’s this great wave building out at sea, and you can see it coming toward you, getting bigger and louder, and you know it’s going to suck you right down but you can’t look away. That’s what it’s like with Samuel. Ever since he came back.”
Looking back, Dolly wishes she’d paid Constance more attention. At the time, she’d disliked her mother-in-law as a matter of principle: Constance made Samuel even twitchier than usual, and always left it to Dolly to calm him down. But the mutu
al distrust between mother and son should have been a red flag, if only Dolly had wanted to see it. In those days she’d thought she understood. She knew about women who were beaten by their husbands, and she had vowed never to let that sort of thing happen to her. Stupid girl, she thinks now, as she presses her face into the pillow—as if that sort of thing is ever something that women allow.
Several months into the marriage, she made up her mind to go through with her plan. She’d had a letter from her mother just days before, saying she was going to phone her at the end of the week to discuss something, and Dolly had gleefully imagined her saying, “I’m sorry we didn’t take you seriously before, Dolores. If you want to be a sculptor, then of course we’ll support you. Please come home.” She would put up some resistance, of course, to make sure her parents were grateful to have her back, but she would go. She would.
But when Mrs. Hopkins phoned, she wanted to know when Dolly was thinking of coming up for Thanksgiving.
“We can’t come on the Monday, Mom. Sam’s got work.”
“Oh, well, honey, I wasn’t thinking of Samuel. We thought it’d just be you. I’ll have to check with your father.”
“Sam’s my husband, Mom,” she said, her Ss hissing down the line all the way from Louisiana to New Hampshire. “You can’t invite me and not him.” It wasn’t fair. Her mother would have been insulted if someone had invited her over but said Dad couldn’t come. “You’ll have both of us or neither.” She had slammed the receiver down so hard it cracked the plastic. It wasn’t as if she even wanted Samuel to come to her family Thanksgiving. He was picky about food, he never made conversation, and he always got a headache. But she’d married him, hadn’t she?, and people had to respect that. It was the lack of respect that got her so riled up, and she hated feeling as though she had to ask for it, as if she were just a child stomping her foot.