by Anna Bailey
“Why did you do it?” she asks.
Samuel stands up, wiping his hands on his jeans, getting bits of bark all over the floor. “Do what?”
“I told you last night I didn’t want you taking Noah to see Ed Lewis, but I overheard Eleanor at Safeway, Sam. She was talking about it.”
Samuel rolls his eyes as he turns away. “The women round here need to learn to stop running their mouths.”
“But why did you do it? I told you I—”
“A cripple and a queer, that’s what you’ve given me, Dolly. Those are the boys I’m supposed to raise. Damn it, you can’t blame me for wanting to fix them.”
“I gave you? You threw Jude down the stairs!”
“And you were totally blameless, were you? It had nothing to do with your parenting, the way things got out of control? You’re always so soft with them, like nothing I say matters in this house. I’m only trying to show them what the Lord wants, Dolly. I’m thinking about eternity here—I’m thinking about their souls.”
“That’s what you’re doing, is it?”
“If you want them to join us in heaven, Dolly, then you have to put the time in now.”
Dolly bites her lip. She had enjoyed the look on Ann Traxler’s face when she walked past her in the grocery store earlier. She had enjoyed being on her son’s side. “What about your soul, Sam?” she says. “If heaven’s full of men who beat their children, I’ll take my chances elsewhere.”
“You—!”
It’s been a while since he smacked her. The indents of his knuckles feel almost familiar, and she closes her eyes because it is just as much of a release for her now as it is for him. There is some wild sensation bubbling up inside of her, and just for a moment, a very small voice that sounds like some younger version of herself whispers: Go on, smack me again, and maybe this time I’ll smack you back.
“Mom?”
Jude stands in the doorway, leaning on his stick. His face is pale, and Dolly knows, from the way his eyes keep drifting to his father, that he saw everything.
“What is it?” she says, and Samuel huffs.
“Your mother and I are trying to have a conversation.”
“I… I know, but…”
“Spit it out, kid.”
Dolly can see her son’s throat bob as he swallows, glancing at his mother’s throbbing cheek, and then again at his father.
“Noah’s not answering his phone. He’s just… gone.”
* * *
Rat is dancing in the church. Noah pours gasoline over the chairs and the carpet and the podium where Pastor Lewis always stands, as Rat tosses his head back and shakes, like he’s getting slain in the spirit. The gasoline fumes make Noah light-headed and he says, “Give me your lighter.”
Rat looks suddenly serious. “You’re not really going to burn it down, are you?”
“What did you think we were going to do?”
“I don’t know, break in and trash the place a bit.”
“This isn’t all for nothing. They deserve it. This whole town deserves to go up in flames.”
“They’ll crucify you.”
Noah laughs, but Rat tangles his fingers in his hair. “They’ll kill you this time, Blake, I mean it. Your dad and that bullshit preacher man. They’ll kill you. It’s not worth it.”
“So, what? We just do nothing?”
“So we pack up and go, Blake. Come on, run away with me.”
“You don’t understand.” Noah presses their foreheads together. “I have to. They have to know what it feels like.”
Rat’s breath is warm against his mouth. “There are other ways, dragă.”
When one thing smells like gasoline, everything smells like gasoline, Noah thinks, even Rat, who takes his face in both his hands and kisses him, swiftly, sweetly, whispering, “Here—here,” and he kisses him again. “This is how we burn it down.”
And while his mother feels the back of her husband’s hand across her face, Noah runs his own hands over a body he has learned by heart, like a nursery rhyme in Braille, and in the red and blue pools of stained-glass light, he takes Communion on his knees. His God knows his name and calls it at the top of his lungs, arms outstretched like Christ on the cross, while their affirmations echo in the empty room that smells of gasoline.
* * *
Samuel has taken Jude out to help him look for Noah, so it is Dolly who answers the phone to Sheriff Gains.
“I see,” she says.
“Dolly, I’m sorry.”
“No. Thank you. Goodnight, Sheriff.”
She is glad, then, that there is no one in the house to hear her as she collapses to the floor and wails.
Is it all her fault? She told Melissa she’d done a terrible thing once. Done a terrible thing to Abigail. But is this her God-given punishment—to have lost her only daughter? She wants to tear her hair out, leave chunks of bloody scalp all over the living-room floor for Samuel to find when he comes home. What part of this is God’s plan? she will say. Why did God shoot our little girl?
Out loud she says, “I’ve just about had it with you.”
In the hallway, the colored stones on the cross wink at her, as if they know something she doesn’t, the smug light dancing off each chintzy facet. Until Dolly picks up the kettle and smashes it right through the middle. Her arms move with a tireless anger, the ball of fury burning white-hot in her chest once again.
At last she drops the kettle, hears it clatter against the floorboards as she stands, panting, surrounded by flecks of stone. The hole in the wall looms like some dark throat leading to the recesses of the house. She has never looked behind the cross, not since the day she hung it up, but she is sure that ball of paper wasn’t there all those years ago.
The flame in her chest is doused right out when she sees her daughter’s handwriting. The long loops of the Gs and Ys, the heavy rightward slant, the way she drew full little circles on top of the Is and Js—Oh yes, yes, she thinks, pressing the pages to her lips before she’s even read them. They even smell like her still, just a little. The pages are all ragged along one edge, as though they have been torn out, and Dolly knows at once that this is her daughter’s diary.
Tell me, she begs as she begins to scan the lines, tell me your secrets, sweetheart.
Tell me what happened.
* * *
“Hunter, I know you’re in here.”
Behind the desk, Hunter’s eyes are wide and pale in the dark.
“I know it was you who took my keys,” his father says, taking another heavy step into the office. “You really didn’t think I’d notice?”
Emma puts her hand over her mouth to quiet her breathing. Hunter bites down on his lip.
“I don’t know what possessed you to come snooping around here at night.” The floorboards groan as Jerry makes his way further into the room. “But just come on out, and we can talk about it like adults.”
Emma feels Hunter squeezing her hand and then he mouths, Run. She shakes her head. The office is too small and Jerry’s a big guy: there is no way she’d get past him. Hunter looks at her like he understands, but before she can stop him, he stands up.
“There you are,” says Jerry. “What do you think you’re up to in here?”
“Dad, did you do something to Abigail Blake?”
“For God’s sake, Hunter, she’s irrelevant. I thought we’d been over this.”
“She was relevant enough for you to hang on to her ChapStick.”
“Ah. Look, Hunter, it’s not what you think. Come on now, come with me. Your mother’s worried about you.”
“Shit, Dad. The town’s going to want your head when they find out.”
“Find out what? It’s just a lipstick, it doesn’t mean anything.”
“How can you keep saying things like that? How can you keep lying?”
“Oh, so now my son the drug dealer, the gun thief, is going to give me a lecture about honesty.”
At the mention of the gun, Emma gasps, and from
behind the desk she feels the room go still.
“Is there someone else here, Hunter?”
“No.”
“Yes, there is, there’s someone here.”
The floor creaks as Jerry elbows past his son and leans over the desk. Emma tries to push herself further underneath, but it’s too late; he grabs hold of her wrist and hauls her up.
“Well now, look at that, like father like daughter.” He squeezes her wrist so hard she thinks her hand might pop off like a champagne cork.
“Dad, let her go. She hasn’t done anything.”
“You think you know something?” Jerry takes hold of Emma by the shoulder now, shaking her slightly. “You think you know something about me? I can deal with you just like I dealt with your daddy, little girl, and don’t think that I won’t.”
Emma can’t speak, can’t even breathe.
“Come on, Dad, let her go. We won’t tell anyone, I swear. Just put her down.”
“You stay out of this. These people have to learn someday.”
“Jesus, Dad,” Hunter says, and clocks him in the face.
Jerry lets go of her and Emma bolts for the door, not even stopping to check if Hunter is following. She bursts out of the emergency exit and runs until her chest hurts and her throat is so dry she can taste blood in the back of her mouth. Branches snag on her clothes and hair as she tears through the woods, her heart beating so fast she swears she can feel it thumping against her ribs, certain that any second now it’s going to give out.
She knows she can’t have run much more than half a mile—she can still see the mill chimney beyond the tops of the trees—but it feels like she’s been pushing herself for hours by the time she stumbles out into the road, hands on her knees to steady herself as she gulps down air, and coming round the corner in his pickup truck, Samuel Blake only just manages to slam on the brakes in time.
34
THEN
Abigail, sitting with her bare legs dangling out of her bedroom window, feels sick with the hazy sameness of July. The sun going down over the mountains looks like God cracked an egg over the peaks and the yolky light is running down through the grooves left by glaciers long ago. A weak breeze stirs her father’s bone wind chimes in the trees below, and Abigail digs her nails into her thighs.
At eight thirty, her mother comes in to say goodnight. “School tomorrow, sweetheart. Don’t stay up too late.”
“Goodnight, Mom.”
Her mother waggles her fingers at her as if she were saying goodbye to a baby. Abigail grits her teeth and grins.
A little while later, Noah stands in her doorway, stooped, like he isn’t sure how to fill up the space. There is a big tender-looking mark just above his eye. He asks if he can borrow her foundation powder.
“What did you do?” They both know what she means is: What did you do to piss Dad off?
“I put all the leftovers in the same Tupperware box.”
“Rookie mistake,” says Abigail. Their father does not like his food touching; but she knows this because she asked him once and he explained (something about a turkey dinner and a garbage can, a long time ago). She’s never had the knowledge beaten into her.
Noah narrows his eyes. “Are you going to give me the makeup or not? I can’t go to work tomorrow with my face like this.”
“Hey,” she says, when she’s given him the compact and he’s turning to go. “When did you start smoking?”
His cheeks color as red as the budding bruise on his forehead. “I don’t smoke.”
“You smell like you do.” She gives him a look that she hopes is sympathetic. “You should get one of those spray-on deodorants and just spray it all over. And always brush your teeth first thing when you get in. If they ask, just say you had one of Mom’s Dunhills.”
Noah stares at her. “I don’t smoke,” he says again, and he doesn’t close the door behind him.
She’s glad he didn’t ask her how she knew about covering it up like that.
* * *
At eleven she gets a text. End of the road, it says. She changes out of her pajamas and puts on the little black velvet dress that she keeps at the back of her closet. She has to hitch it up over her hips as she shimmies down the trellis, but there’s nobody around to see. That is always the first excitement of the night: it gives her a little thrill, being exposed like that in the dark.
Hunter is waiting for her at the end of Hickory Lane. He cuts a line of methadone on the dashboard of his car and they snort half each, then roll down the windows and howl like coyotes as they take off into the night.
“You haven’t told me how it went,” she says, while they slip through miles of black forest.
“Kind of weird, I guess. I had to meet the guy on the third storey of some parking lot. And the light overhead was real glitchy, kept flickering on and off. It was like a horror movie.”
Abigail nods to say, Yes, I expect it was, you’re very brave, because men need to be treated with kid gloves. She understands that now. “Did you get it, though?”
“Oh, your boy got it, don’t you worry.” He grins at her. “Cleared out my allowance for the last few months, but it’ll be worth it.”
Abigail doesn’t feel sorry for him: he’s probably the only kid in town who gets a hundred dollars in pocket money every month.
“Thirty grams of coke. Nobody can get that kind of shit up here. We’re going to make all sorts of profit. We’re laughing, Abi.
“We’re laughing,” he says, although neither of them does.
They drive on, past cabins and outbuildings slouched in the tall grass, like skeletons of long-dead animals, their lights flickering with a hum that Abigail swears she can hear even from inside the car.
After a while she asks, “What was it like in Boulder?”
“You’ve been to Boulder.”
“Feels like years ago.” Maybe it was.
Hunter sighs. “Yeah, I mean, it was Boulder, you know? I tried to order a muffin and it was gluten-free and sugar-free. I mean, come on. A sugar-free muffin. As if the world isn’t disappointing enough already.”
Abigail smiles at that. Hunter can make her smile, sometimes, and that is enough. She wishes she had gone with him, but just the sight of a road sign to Denver might have made her want to take off then and there, and she knows they can’t do that, knows they have to be smart about it.
She tries to imagine what it will be like when they cross the state line. Last night she looked it up online, and she hopes it isn’t true—that Kansas is just miles and miles of nothing, empty roads and rows of silent corn and rest stops that all appear the same. Is that really what freedom will look like? At least it won’t look like here.
There are kids between the trees up at the Tall Bones. They drive each other wild, rutting up against one another like dogs in heat, snorting lines off each other’s arms and stomachs and collarbones. Some of the boys smack each other about a bit, grinning with blood between their teeth.
Hunter gets out his Polaroid camera, takes pictures and, as always, no one offers to take any of him. When he gets bored—Abigail knows he’s bored because he starts drinking—he sits on the trunk of his car and sells bumps of their new coke for twice as much as these kids could buy it down in Boulder. They’d probably smack him about, too, if they knew he was scamming them like that, but then most of them have never been to Boulder. Most of them have never been anywhere.
Abigail prefers getting high to getting drunk. All these people ever have to drink is beer, and that makes them smell like her father. She likes it when she gets to snort something out of a rolled-up dollar bill. It makes her feel like what she is: Trash, she thinks. I’m as trashy as they come.
Two lines in and she gets up on top of Hunter’s car and starts dancing, because this is where everyone is congregating to buy his cocaine, so this is where she will be seen. Cole and Luke Weaver holler at her to take off her dress. She hitches the skirt up a little higher and shakes her ass, tossing her hair back, runnin
g her hands over her body. Bryce Long yells that he loves her. Yes, she thinks, I’m beautiful. I’m trash and I’m beautiful and you all want me, but it’s me, I’m in control, I can take it away just like that.
* * *
“Stop it,” she says. “No, I don’t—stop it.”
Bryce pins her against the tree with one arm and shoves his other hand up between her legs. “Yes, you do,” he says. “You don’t dance like that if you don’t want it, so just keep still now.”
She can see the lights of the party a little way off through the branches and she tries to scream, but he pushes his mouth down over hers and kisses her hard, swallowing the sound.
No, no, no, this isn’t how it’s supposed to go, she thinks frantically. You want me because I make you want me, but you don’t get to have me, that’s not how it’s supposed to work, you’re ruining it, you’re ruining everything. She sinks her teeth into his tongue, and he jerks back with a cry.
“You bitch!”
She can taste his blood in her mouth. He swings his arm like he’s going to hit her, but she drives her knee up between his legs and makes a break for it while he’s still staggering around in the pine needles.
After that she locks herself in the car and curls up on the seat waiting for everyone else to go home. She stares at the dust collected in the grooves of the steering wheel, the dirty imprint of Hunter’s hands at ten and two on the old white leather, and she feels as if Bryce’s handprints are branded on her like that. Maybe that’s how Noah feels when their father hits him. A little part of her wants her brother now, but in a much more real sense she wishes Emma was here, curled up with her, talking about what they will do for the rest of the summer. Drink lemonade with their feet in the river, perhaps, or drive up to Trail Ridge Road and enjoy the last of the season’s snow on the peaks; wake up early to look for moose in the national park, or hire a boat over in Grand Lake. Maybe they could even head down to Boulder, go shopping or something. Whatever it is that normal girls do. She misses the gentleness of their youth. Emma only ever put her hands on Abigail to hold her.