Where the Truth Lies

by Anna Bailey

  Noah stares at him. None of the passages he memorized last night prepared him for that.

  “As it is written in the First Epistle of John, If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. But God can’t show you forgiveness, Noah, if you don’t show Him you understand what you did wrong.”

  “I told you, I don’t want His forgiveness. And Jesus said—”

  “Jesus isn’t saying this, I am. You can only be fixed if you want to be, so until you want to be, you’re broken. And this church has got no more use for you than your daddy does.”

  * * *

  “Melissa.”

  “Dolly.”

  “What—did you come to bring me another casserole?”

  There’s something about the way she says it that makes Melissa leave a good few feet between them as she follows Dolly through to the kitchen. She reeks of cigarettes; Melissa has to breathe through her mouth.

  “You can just leave it on the side there.” Dolly gestures to the countertop with her elbow, already preoccupied with lighting up a Dunhill.

  “Actually, I didn’t bring anything.”

  Melissa holds up her empty hands, and Dolly just nods mechanically, talking around a mouthful of smoke. “You’ll have to excuse me. I’ve had other things on my mind lately.”

  “How are you holding up?”

  “How do you think? Nobody will tell me anything. Police won’t even tell me if the blood on my daughter’s cardigan belonged to her or not. They must have heard back by now.”

  Oh yes, the poor girl’s cardigan. “These things can take time, Dolly. Especially if it had to go all the way to Denver. I expect they have a lot more of this kind of stuff to deal with down there.”

  “You mean murder?” Dolly shakes her head. “They just don’t care, that’s all. They hardly cared when she first went missing, got it into their heads that she’d just run off. Now they won’t give me any kind of answer.” She leans against the edge of the table, looking Melissa up and down. “What do you want, then?”

  “Well, actually, do you mind if I sit down?”

  “Samuel will be back soon, just so you know.”

  Melissa feels as though that is supposed to frighten her, but she takes a seat at the table anyway, too tired to be afraid or upright. She watches Dolly staring out of the kitchen window, the glass clouded around the edges with ineffable grime. Back in the days when Melissa used to bring Emma over to play, this house always felt like the sort of place that stuck to you and wouldn’t come off. There were always tiles missing by the back door, the plaster bubbling up behind the sink. But it seems worse now—perhaps because a child is missing, or perhaps because Dolly Blake feels like a stranger where once she had been a friend.

  “Do your kids ever lie to you?” Melissa asks.

  “Does yours ever tell the truth?”

  Melissa smiles, because she thinks that might be a joke. “That bad, huh?”

  “Didn’t invite you in so you could sit and judge me.”

  “I wasn’t—”

  “God, you have no idea.” Dolly tilts her head back, eyes half closed, yellow fingernails tapping a faint rhythm on the countertop. “I’m not a bad mother, you know.”

  “I never said you were.”

  “You’re not a bad mother either. Sometimes I think all mothers worry they’re doing it wrong, but then I think about my own mom and I…” She straightens up, as straight as a crooked tree like her can grow. “You’re lucky you’ve only got the one kid. Sometimes I wish I only had one.”

  “Oh.”

  Dolly’s mouth trembles and she sucks hard on her cigarette. “It’s not that I don’t love them, I’m just not good at being a parent, and it pisses me off. I was only ever good with Abi, maybe because she’s a girl… Sam can’t stand those boys, and he can’t stand me for having them.” Her voice comes out thin. “My baby girl. She’s gone now.” Dolly covers her face as it reddens.

  Melissa gets up and rubs her shoulder. “It’s all right, hey, it’s all right.”

  “No, you don’t understand. You think you’re so good and that you can make me good by coming round here and being kind, but you don’t know what I’ve done.”

  “People make mistakes, Dolly, it’s all right.”

  “No, not like this. Not like I did.”

  Melissa puts her arm around her and Dolly slumps against her side.

  “I don’t think I’m good, you know,” Melissa says after a while. “You said I think I’m so good, but I don’t, Dolly.”

  “You are, Mel, you’re a good woman. Not like me. Sometimes I feel like I’m all rotten on the inside, like if you pressed on me too hard my skin would just…” She makes a shrinking gesture with her free hand. “And I’d be all gray and moldy underneath.”

  I know, Melissa wants to say. I know exactly what you mean because that is guilt and I feel it too.

  “Dolly, I did something terrible once.”

  Why have I come here? Melissa wonders. Maybe she simply missed her friend. It’s not been easy watching Samuel shorten her leash over the years, restricting who can come over to the house, how much money Dolly can spend, whom she’s allowed to meet up with and when. Sam really needs me at home, Dolly used to tell her, until eventually Melissa got tired of trying.

  Or perhaps, deep down, what she really wants is for this other woman’s sorrow to break open a chink of light in her own. “You’ve lost your daughter,” she says. “I’m afraid I’m losing mine too.”

  Dolly looks up. “Has something happened to Emma?”

  “She asked me about her father the other day.” God, I could have handled that better. “Ever since then, she just keeps looking past me, you know, like she isn’t really seeing me. Like she’s seeing somebody else.”

  Melissa stares out of the window now, at the wilderness encroaching on the Blakes’ backyard, at the animal bones hung from the trees, at the dead leaves collecting in the hollows. Emma used to play here. There will always be a part of Emma in this house, and she realizes that is why she came.

  “I’m worried Emma’s going to find out what really happened.”

  Melissa thinks she would have been relieved then, for Dolly to ask, to draw the past out of her, like venom from a snakebite. But Dolly doesn’t seem to hear. She is picking at her scalp, dandruff drifting down onto the front of her sweater, and she sounds distracted when she says, “I did something terrible once too. And I think maybe that’s why Abigail is gone.”

  32

  Eleanor!”

  Dolly hears Ann Traxler’s reedy voice from the aisle next to the frozen foods and she lets her shopping cart roll to a stop.

  “Eleanor, is it true about the Blake boy?”

  “Really, Ann. That was a private conversation between my husband and one of his parishioners.”

  Since Melissa’s visit this afternoon, Dolly has been on edge, and she thinks if the pastor’s wife were standing in front of her now, she might just run her over with her cart.

  “But he told you, didn’t he?” says Ann. “Maggie Tucker says it’s all over the sheriff’s station, what that boy did. And Debbie says she saw that awful father staying behind with him after church this morning.”

  Dolly grips the cart handle until she thinks her knucklebones might burst through the skin. Goddamn it, Sam, you said you were just going to talk to Noah. I said, Don’t you take him to Ed Lewis, it’s none of that man’s business, and you said, No, we’re just going to talk.

  “Well, it sounds like you know already,” says Eleanor, “so what can I possibly have to add?”

  But she’s just warming up to it, Dolly thinks—she can hear it in Eleanor’s voice. Getting the crowd pumped like a little cheerleader before the touchdown.

  “All I know,” Eleanor says, and Dolly notes she doesn’t even have the decency to lower her voice, “is that he was rude as anything to Ed. Called him a Fascist and a bigot.”

  “You’re kiddi
ng.”

  “Luckily Ed’s got a thicker skin than most people nowadays, but honestly, you never heard anything like it.”

  “I can’t believe that.”

  Neither can I, thinks Dolly. She can’t imagine slouchy, quiet Noah calling anybody a Fascist.

  “You know what they say, Ann, blood will out. There’s a lack of parenting there. Some kids today just aren’t raised right.”

  In the frozen-food aisle, Dolly feels as though a soccer ball has come out of the blue and hit her right in the head.

  “Still,” says Ann, “gay—that’s quite dramatic. I wonder what the father will have to say about that.”

  “Oh, I doubt he’ll say anything. My guess is he’ll probably just beat the boy stupid, and I for one won’t be sorry. Spare the rod, spoil the son, you know. Oh, the way he behaved with poor Ed.”

  “Poor Ed,” Ann agrees.

  “He was only doing his job—the Lord’s work, at that. A sin is a sin, no matter what sort of times we live in. Someone has to take a stand.”

  Dolly recalls what she said to Melissa that afternoon, It’s not that I don’t love them, I’m just not good at it, and decides that is quite enough. She rounds the corner into their aisle, standing up straight behind her shopping cart like she used to do, before Abigail disappeared. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Ann Traxler open her mouth, but Dolly just says, “Good evening, ladies,” and keeps on walking.

  Behind her, Eleanor mutters, “Now look, Ann. You shouldn’t have been talking so loud.”

  * * *

  Noah pulls up at the trailer park with a tank of gasoline he stole from the back of his father’s truck. He would have come sooner, but ever since the sheriff’s station last weekend, he has felt Samuel’s eyes on him whenever he so much as looked at the front door. After his encounter with Pastor Lewis this morning, though, Noah just doesn’t care anymore.

  Although it is evening, there is no light coming from the RV, and he wonders at first if Rat is even in there, but when he moves closer, he can smell the cigarette smoke coming from inside. As he makes his way to the door, something crunches underfoot. Lifting his boot, he sees broken glass glinting in the moonlight.

  “Hey, it’s me. Are you there?”

  The door swings open when he pushes it, releasing a strip of orange light, and it’s then that he realizes the windows have been taped over. “What happened here?”

  Rat is sitting on the floor, cradling his grandmother’s guitar. All of the furniture that wasn’t nailed down has vanished, and almost everything that was on the ceiling—his postcards and poems, his maps of home—has gone too. The guitar’s fretboard dangles loose like a broken limb, and he strokes one of the tuning keys with his thumb as he says, “Some of your congregation paid me a visit last week. Didn’t you hear?”

  Noah goes to him, cupping his chin in his hand. Despite the fall night, Rat’s skin feels hot, his eyes red around the edges, like he’s halfway between having cried before and being about to cry again.

  “They took your stuff?”

  “Broke it. I had to throw most of it away.”

  “Jesus. You should have called me.”

  “I already got you in enough trouble. It’s fine, they let up after a while. I think they figured I wasn’t home.”

  Noah sits down beside him, suddenly exhausted by the adrenaline that’s kept him going ever since he walked out of Pastor Lewis’s office. “I told you, man. You should have gotten out of town while you had the chance.”

  Rat looks at the broken guitar. “I was doing okay, actually, but then I sat down to play, and… This was everything I had, you know. Everything I had left from before.”

  “Before you came to America, you mean?” Noah watches him carefully, feeling as though he’s trying to coax some animal to eat out of his hand.

  Rat shakes his head. “I didn’t get to thank you properly, did I? For showing up at the station, I mean.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  “Come on, Blake, I know it cost you.” He touches a finger to Noah’s jaw, to the brownish bruise that Samuel left last weekend. “I’m sorry.”

  “In the end, I just figured…” Noah sighs. “Man, you mess me up. You and your bluesy guitar fingers. The way you look at me sometimes, I feel like this whole other person, and, I don’t know, maybe that’s the person I’m supposed to be.”

  “Blake.”

  “Look, I don’t know how to say what I’m trying to say, but I need you to understand that I’m trying to say it.”

  “Hey, now, where’s all this coming from?”

  Noah can’t tell him about what happened this morning, about Pastor Lewis. He doesn’t think he can ever tell anybody about that. The word therapy still feels like an oily thing stuck to him that he can’t get off. It is accompanied by vague images of needles and vomiting, and even though he senses that probably isn’t what conversion therapy means anymore, he can’t make them go away. Not like this, anyway. He left the pastor’s office feeling so angry it was as though someone was digging their nails hard into his scalp. He’d wanted to break everything he came into contact with, and as the day went on, far from cooling, the feeling became something sharp and certain until he knew exactly what it was he wanted to break.

  “I’m sorry about your RV,” he says. “There’s something wrong with those people.”

  “Yeah, well.” Rat reaches down and plucks one of the guitar strings. The note sounds so lonely, it makes Noah’s chest swell.

  “I can make it up to you for real.”

  Rat sighs. “Promises, promises, Blake.”

  “No, I mean it. Do you want to burn down the church with me?”

  * * *

  The radio cuts in and out on the lonely stretches of road between the town and the lumber mill, fragments of voices from mismatched conversations drifting through the car. At one point there is a loud burst of static, and Emma and Hunter glance at one another as a muffled voice says: “And thou shalt eat the fruit of thine own body, the flesh of thy sons and of thy daughters, which the Lord thy God hath given thee.”

  Steep rock faces make everything secret here, collecting the dusk shadows. Disused agricultural buildings bleed into the undergrowth, all broken wooden slats and rusted corrugated metal, with Jesus Saves painted ten feet tall on one side. It seems strange to Emma that a place like the mill, which provides so many jobs and drives most of the town’s commerce, should be so far away. She has never really been out here before. As they drive past a dead coyote strung up on a fence by its tail, it occurs to her that nobody knows she is there, not even her mother, who is working late at the clinic. If something happens, she thinks, it could be days before anyone finds me.

  The mill is bathed in the greasy glow of nighttime industrial lighting. It’s just the outside that’s always lit, Hunter assures her. There won’t be anyone inside. He parks behind a tree so that the car can’t be seen from the road, and then the two of them hurry across the timber yard and in through the emergency exit.

  They creep past the silent machinery, serrated blades glinting slyly in the beam of Hunter’s flashlight. His father’s office is at the top of a flight of stairs, overlooking the main saw room, and the door is locked.

  “Hold this a minute,” he says, handing Emma the flashlight. He pulls out a set of keys and jingles them in front of her face. “Dad didn’t even notice.”

  Emma frowns. “Doesn’t it bother you how easy this seems?”

  “Would you rather it was harder?” He unlocks the door and motions for her to go in. “You check the desk. I’ll stand guard.”

  “I thought you said there was no one here.”

  “And you said it was too easy. I’m just spicing it up a bit for you.”

  Emma rolls her eyes and presses the flashlight back into his hand, using the flashlight on her phone instead. It is not a large office and the desk takes up most of the far end, but her heart sinks as she roots through one accounts ledger after another. “Hunter, it�
�s just books. Books and numbers.”

  “No, come on. There has to be more than that.” With a cursory glance down the stairs, he leaves his post and nudges her out of the way. “Try the drawers. He was looking at something in there the other day, I’m telling you.”

  “Come on, Hunter, there’s nothing. Let’s just go before someone finds us.”

  “Relax, I told you, no one’s here.” He wrenches the top drawer open with a sound that makes Emma wince.

  “I don’t want another run-in with your dad.”

  Hunter pulls a face as he reaches further into the desk. “Hold up.”

  “What is it?”

  He holds out his hand to reveal a little tube of strawberry ChapStick. “Oh man.” She can see Hunter’s throat bob as he swallows. “That’s hers, isn’t it?”

  A light comes on downstairs, suddenly illuminating the office.

  Emma grabs the ChapStick from Hunter and stuffs it back into the drawer. “Hide,” she hisses, “quick, behind the desk. Hunter, come on.”

  She just manages to pull him down beside her when they hear footsteps on the stairs.

  33

  Dolly switches on the kettle and watches her husband stacking logs by the back door. Suddenly she imagines slinging the boiling kettle at him, catching him right in the head with the scalding metal.

  “Wish you’d get a new one of those,” he says, not looking up. “Hate the noise of that one.”

  Yes, she thinks, catch him right in the head and maybe he’d explode, like one of the beer bottles he and Abigail used to shoot off the fence at the bottom of the yard. Break his skull the way he’s broken her spirit. She can’t get it out of her head, what they said at Safeway this evening, Ann Traxler and the pastor’s wife: There’s a lack of parenting there. Before now, she might have agreed. She might have settled into the understanding that she was a failed mother as easily as pulling on a familiar pair of boots, but there was something different about today. Today Melissa had come into her kitchen, stood where Samuel is crouching now, like he didn’t scare her. Years ago, he had made it very clear—with the back of his hand and the buckle on his belt—that they were not to have any more guests in this house, that Dolly could only see who he said she could, yet today Melissa had walked in bold as anything. Samuel wasn’t there, so in that moment he had been powerless to stop her. Now, the very idea of going against him makes Dolly feel reckless.