Where the Truth Lies

by Anna Bailey

  “What is it?” Emma asks. “You looked like you were going to say something then.”

  Hunter glances over his shoulder at the dark windows of his parents’ house. “There was someone else,” he says quietly. “I saw my dad in the woods.”

  Burying that bag of coke at the Winslow house, so it turned out, but Jerry could easily have flushed it down the toilet instead, so what was he doing out there? The track where Hunter spotted him leads to all sorts of forest trails. He recalls that evening in June, the way his father put his hand on Abigail’s shoulder behind the Tysons’ trailer, the way he looked at her, even as she walked away. Jerry Maddox would have taken her clothes off then, if he could.

  He chews his thumbnail to keep his hands and mouth occupied. It makes him squirm to think what his father might have witnessed. But, worse now, he wonders: What else might his father have done?

  30

  Speak of the devil and he shall appear, Emma thinks, on her way back down the mountain, as she spots Jerry Maddox hammering a sign into the dead grass outside the trailer park. In large, handwritten letters it reads: Americans Only. For a moment she can hear the shouting again, feel Rat’s arms around her as the two of them huddled under the table, while photographs and paperbacks rained down around them, light bulbs shattered and candles toppled, spilling hardened wax along the floor. It is the memory of the pulse in his wrist, quick and terrified, as someone yelled, Go back to your own country, that makes her stop the car.

  “Hey!” She winds the window all the way down and leans out. “Hey, you can’t do this.”

  “You’re on my property.”

  “This isn’t legal.”

  “It’s my land, I can do whatever I want, young lady, including shooting you for trespassing, so start that engine back up and get on out of here.” Jerry jerks his thumb down the road in the direction of town. “And you leave my son alone while you’re at it.”

  As she ducks back in, Emma mutters, “Is that what you said to Abi too?”

  “What?”

  She looks up to see him towering over her. He has dead eyes, she thinks, shark-like, as he places a hand on the roof of her car and leans in.

  “You shouldn’t go accusing people of things like that. Might get someone into real trouble someday.”

  He is staring at her, not like he was the other night, when his wife was standing there beside him. This is different: it makes her feel as though she’s only wearing underwear. Sharks feed in a frenzy, and she can feel something a little frenzied about him, something disruptive in the air between them. Is this the way he looked at Abigail? Maybe Hunter was onto something there.

  Emma swallows. Her mouth is dry, her voice quiet: “Leave me alone.”

  Jerry straightens up. “No, you leave me alone, young lady. And you keep your mouth shut about things you know nothing about.” He shakes his head, light bouncing off the patches where his hair has thinned. “As bad as your daddy, you are, and just look where that got him.”

  That hits her like a bucket of cold water. “My dad?” She stares at him. “What do you mean?”

  But Jerry delivers a sudden kick to the side of her car that makes her jump in her seat.

  “I told you, get out of here. Can’t you read the sign? ‘Americans only’—go on, get!”

  * * *

  Emma watches her mother’s chest in its uneven rise and fall and wonders if Melissa is dreaming. She almost doesn’t want to wake her. Her mother smells of hand soap and faintly of onion, and Emma clings to the familiarity of that, unsure if she will be allowed to after she has said what she needs to say.

  Melissa’s pale hair is splayed out across the pillow, but in the late-morning light gently filtering through the blinds, Emma can see there is more gray around the temples than there used to be. It shocks her a little, this obvious sign of aging. She has always felt that her mother’s age was something reliable, that she would always be roughly forty years old, that she always had been. That feeling isn’t helped by the fact that she knows nothing about her mother’s life before she came into it. But then, she thinks, that’s the whole problem, isn’t it?

  “Em, is that you?” Melissa rolls over, slowly opening her eyes. “God, did I fall asleep?”

  “It’s okay, you always sleep in late in the fall.” Emma says it like she’s proud of knowing this detail, which she is—proud of knowing something private about her mother. She will keep all of these little facts like treasures, she decides, when Melissa is mad at her, which she inevitably will be.

  “You’ve got that face on, Em. Are you okay?”

  “I need to ask you something. About Dad.”

  “You know I don’t like…” Melissa sits up, pushing her hair back off her face. “I prefer not to talk about him, you know that.”

  Emma swallows, taking a deep breath of her mother’s soap-and-onion scent. “He didn’t just leave, did he? Something happened to him.”

  “Oh, he left all right.”

  Emma has one memory, and even that is only fragments: the angle of her father’s shoulder, the light from the streetlamp outside the open door, the blood on his hands.

  “I remember him yelling at you the night he left.”

  Melissa worries the duvet between her fingers.

  “Please, Mom, this is important. Do you know where Dad is now? It’s just, Jerry Maddox made it sound like—”

  “Jerry Maddox? What have you been talking to him for? You keep away from that man, Em. He’s as rotten as they come.”

  “You’re always telling me to keep away from people, but you won’t tell me why. Did he do something to Dad? Did Sheriff Gains?”

  “Emma, that’s enough.” There’s a tearing sound, and loose threads of cotton come away in her mother’s hand. “I said I don’t want to talk about it. Christ, why can’t you respect that?”

  Quietly, Emma says, “I do respect you, Mom,” because she knows that’s what her mother really meant.

  “You’re poking your nose in somewhere you don’t want to go, trust me.” Melissa shakes her head, wiping her cheek with the back of her hand. “Your father left. Just leave it at that. For your own sake.”

  “But he’s my dad.”

  “Oh yes,” Melissa laughs faintly, “and what a good job he’s done, helping me raise you. Goddamn father of the year, that’s Miguel. Em, he wouldn’t even know you if he passed you on the street.”

  “Mom—”

  “For Christ’s sake, Emma, just leave it.”

  * * *

  Hunter phones her during lunch. “I got your number from Shana.” His voice is husky, like he’s been smoking, and she can hear the distant sound of chatter echoing under the bleachers. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah.” Emma sits cross-legged on her bed. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “My dad got back before I left for school and he was pissed. Said you snuck up on him at the trailer park and started making accusations.”

  “Oh.”

  “Did you?”

  “What? No. I mean, I might have mentioned something about Abi, but it was nothing. Seriously. He’s the one who put up that sign. Have you seen it?”

  “I saw him draw it himself.”

  “That’s kind of lame.”

  Hunter laughs, which seems to surprise them both.

  Don’t get too comfortable, she reminds herself. Even if he was telling the truth about Abi, even if he didn’t force himself on her, he still let her get off her face on cocaine. What sort of a friend does that? And besides, he’s one of them. The memory of prom night still makes her face warm with shame. Pastor Lewis’s son and the other boys from the basketball team, the way they circled her in the school gym, the things they said… That’s the world Hunter Maddox comes from. She mustn’t forget that.

  “Hey,” he says, and the soft uncertainty in his voice makes her want to ignore everything she’s just told herself. “Were you for real about that cardigan thing?”

  “Of course I was. Sheriff Gains told
me they found it in the river. Were you for real about seeing your dad that night?” She wraps a piece of her hair around her finger until the skin turns white.

  “Yeah, I did see him. He told me he went to the Winslow house, but… I don’t know, now I’m not so sure.”

  The same place I saw the light, she thinks. “Maybe you can find out. Does he have somewhere he might keep stuff he wouldn’t want anyone else to see?”

  “Not really. I mean… Oh, dude, his office at the mill. When I was there the other day he was being all shady about his desk.”

  “Do you think you can get into it?” Hunter is quiet again for a moment and Emma winces. “Sorry. I’m getting carried away. This is all kind of crazy.”

  After a moment he says, “You know I saw them together? Abi and my dad? At the trailer park back in the summer.”

  “What do you mean ‘together’?”

  “They were just talking, but it was weird. He was weird.” Hunter groans. “This is all such a mess. That coke you and Rat found, it was mine to begin with.”

  What surprises Emma most is how little this comes as a shock. After all she’s heard in the last few days, she isn’t sure what to think about anybody in Whistling Ridge anymore.

  “I can’t get into that right now,” says Hunter, “but my dad buried the coke at Winslow—at least, that’s what he said. He made out like that’s why he was in the woods the night Abi disappeared, but I can’t stop thinking about the way he was with her. Something’s off.”

  Down the line, Emma hears the school bell signaling the end of lunch break. Hunter says, “The mill’s always empty on Sundays. If I go next weekend, after it gets dark, it should be fine. You want to come with me?”

  “What—break into your dad’s office?”

  “Might make you feel better about his dumb sign.”

  Through the open bedroom door, Emma can see her mother lying in bed with her back to her. Earlier she got up, showered, dressed, made a bit of late breakfast, but then she had moved around like a ghost, following, trance-like, some route through the house that only she understood. Then she had gone back to bed—still wearing her socks, her makeup, her earrings, and Emma thought that was as bad as seeing her naked.

  “Sure,” she tells Hunter. “Not like I’m doing much around here anyway.”

  “Cool. Well, we should go in my car—that way it won’t look weird. I’ll pick you up at six next Sunday. But keep it to yourself, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Hey, Emma?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m sorry about my dad.”

  Emma flops back onto the bed and screws up her face. It’s much harder to hate him when he talks like that. Is this why Abi chose to confide in him? But look where that got her, Emma thinks. I mustn’t make the same mistake.

  31

  On Sunday, as church is getting out, Samuel grips his eldest son by the arm and says, “Wait here.”

  The people filing past pretend not to look at them, these rough-cut men standing together by the door. Noah makes a point of not looking at his father either—keeping the tender side of his face directed at the wall so that nobody can see—so he doesn’t know Samuel is staring at him. Doesn’t know that when Samuel pictures himself, he is always Noah’s age, looks just like him, and then it comes as a shock to see his reflection and realize that he is practically an old man. My son has all my youth and he’s frittering it away. Samuel thinks that sometimes, but then other days he reckons he never had any youth to speak of. Shot a woman in the back when he was only eighteen. How do you stay young after that?

  When everyone has gone and there is only the wind blowing armfuls of dead leaves through the parking lot, Samuel says, “I didn’t want it to come to this.”

  Noah simply chews his lip, like he always does.

  “You’re going to give yourself an ulcer, boy, stop that.” Samuel shakes his head. “Some of the things I saw over in ’Nam… I understand shame, don’t think I don’t. The Lord understands shame. He will not suffer you to be tempted above that you are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that you may be able to bear it. There is no condemnation for those who truly walk in the light of Jesus Christ, just you remember that. But as a rule, boy, you don’t shit where you eat. This is my place of worship. I didn’t want it to come to this.”

  Noah says, “Yes, sir.”

  “But after what you pulled at the sheriff’s station last week, after your little publicity stunt with that gypsy boy, I don’t see as we’ve got much of a choice.”

  We have to be seen to be doing something about it, he thinks, otherwise what kind of a father would I be?

  “You listen to Pastor Lewis now. He’ll know how to help you. Remember your Isaiah: For the Lord God will help me; therefore shall I not be confounded: therefore have I set my face like a flint, and I know that I shall not be ashamed.”

  Noah puts his hands into his pockets.

  “Go on, then,” says Samuel. “I’m going over to O’Shannon’s. Text me when you’re done—I’ll come pick you up.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Samuel thinks his son sounds tired.

  * * *

  “Noah.” Pastor Lewis smiles at him. “Come on in and sit down.”

  The heating in the church hall still hasn’t been fixed, but here in the pastor’s office there is a small electric fan heater whirring away, and Noah feels too hot in his thick corduroy jacket and scarf. He takes a seat on the little plastic chair—a child’s chair from the Sunday school—and watches the pastor steeple his fingers together over his desk.

  “So, your father told me over the phone a little about what’s been going on with you. I should tell you, whenever I go to conferences and meet with others in my line of work, it’s evident that this sort of thing is becoming much more common these days. You shouldn’t place all the blame on yourself, Noah. The society we live in celebrates—even encourages—homosexual behavior, and you poor kids have got it coming at you twenty-four-seven, left and right, with your social media and TV shows. It’s not surprising there’s so much confusion among young people today.”

  Noah shifts on the tiny chair, trying to get some air into his jacket. It feels as if he’s being slow-cooked.

  Pastor Lewis is still smiling at him. “I’ve known you since you were born. I know you’re a good kid. You don’t want to go worrying your parents, do you? You don’t want to give them this kind of stress when they’re busy dealing with what’s happened to your sister.”

  “No, sir.” Noah thinks, What do you know about what’s happened to my sister?

  “That’s good to hear, young man. That’s good to hear. Now, your father said you were interested in some of the therapy options that our church has to offer?”

  “Therapy?” In the stuffy office, Noah can feel sweat sticking his clothes to the contours of his body. This isn’t how it was supposed to go. He’d overheard his parents talking, knew his father was angling to take him to the pastor, so Noah had stayed up most of the night memorizing quotes from Leviticus, Romans and Revelation, learning like some awful nursery rhyme every argument Pastor Lewis might make and every one of Jesus’s own words that he could use in rebuttal. He’d had it all figured out (and, hell, he wished he’d done it sooner, because Jesus sure had a lot to say about love, and Noah had even begun to feel, if not better, then at least less bad), but now he realizes he and the pastor have been reading from two separate scripts long before Noah ever walked into his office.

  “You look worried there, son. Did your father not talk this through with you?” Pastor Lewis nods sagely. “I understand if you’re concerned: honesty between family members is important, but you must understand that through your actions you have been dishonest. Not just with your family but also with yourself.” He smiles again. “Your father only wants what’s best for you, to help you see the love of God and Jesus Christ.”

  Noah can’t believe what he’s hearing. “My father?” He sticks h
is neck out, tilting his face up so the pastor can see him clearly, and points to the healing scabs on his cheek. “My father did this.” Turning the other way, he shows Pastor Lewis the bruise on his jaw from the previous week. “And this. And it’s not the first time either. My brother walks in here every week on his busted leg and you’ve never said a word about that. Now my sister is missing and you—you want to talk about God’s love? Well, where is it? Because hell knows we’ve never seen any of it.”

  Pastor Lewis’s smile has gone. “As a father shows compassion to his children, so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear Him. He reserves His love for the God-fearing, Noah. It seems to me you are no longer one of them.”

  Can it really be love if God has to threaten you for it first? Noah thinks of the way, months ago now, he had asked Rat if he could kiss him, standing in the Winslow ruins with the sunlight coming through the trees. And Rat had smiled—a real smile, not that cocky thing he does with his tongue between his teeth to get people’s attention—and stood up on the balls of his feet to kiss him first. There had been no bargaining, no intimidation, none of God’s usual tricks. That was love, and Rat had never demanded he grew some backbone to receive it either.

  “No,” Noah says.

  Pastor Lewis blinks at him. “Excuse me?”

  “I…” He can feel himself hovering slightly above the chair, not standing, but no longer sitting either, like he can’t quite decide where he wants to be. “If I want fear, I’ll go to my father. I’m done with the fear of God.”

  “Then, son, I’m afraid to say”—Pastor Lewis spreads his hands out in the air in the same lackadaisical way Noah sometimes does when he has to tell customers at the diner that they’re all out of bagels—“you’re broken.”