by Anna Bailey
The clock on the dashboard says it is nearly three in the morning when Hunter gets into the car. He looks at her hair all messed up and tangled with bits of bark, her bra strap hanging loose off her shoulder.
“Abi, what happened?”
Abigail draws her legs up, trying to make herself as compact as she can. “I can’t figure out if I want to fuck everyone or fight them.”
Hunter laughs, but then she looks at him and he stops. “Sorry, I just… That’s kind of funny.”
“No, it’s not. I feel like I’m sinking. I’m so mad all the time. Do you know what it’s like to be pissed off constantly?”
“Sometimes.”
She knows he does, a little bit, so she doesn’t press the matter.
“How much did we make?”
“About a hundred and fifty dollars. Not a bad first night, huh?”
“Not bad,” she agrees.
“Hey, Abi.” He looks very grown-up and serious all of a sudden, and that makes her nervous. “Are you going to tell Emma?”
She digs her nails into her knees. “Leave Emma out of it. She’s got enough to worry about.” I’m the one who’s supposed to be looking out for her, she thinks, and I can’t do that if I’m sinking. Besides, what would Emma think of her if she knew? What would anyone think? She could lose the only real friend she’s ever had.
Hunter doesn’t count. He is a means to an end.
“You know you can talk to me, though, right?” he says. “I mean, do you want to talk about it?”
She looks up at him, and the fading bonfire light through the car window softens the squareness of his face, making him look almost handsome. When you talk like that, she thinks, I wish I could feel some kind of way about you.
“It’s nothing you don’t already know,” she says. But the truth is, as much as she appreciates the sentiment, she’s sick to death of people asking if she’s okay. She feels as if she’s always trying to guess the reactions other people want from her, so conversations become exhausting, with her on a razor’s edge every time. Sometimes she gets it wrong—laughs when she shouldn’t, things like that—and then they know that she has been lying the whole time. That Abigail Blake, they must think, as they look into her young, grinning face, such a liar.
35
NOW
Emma does not say a word, shivering in the back of Samuel’s truck with dirt and sweat streaking her face. Jude keeps turning around to look at her, but she just stares straight ahead.
“Dad, I think we should take her to a hospital.”
“You want me to drive all the way over to Estes?” Samuel glances over his shoulder. “She’ll be fine. Probably just high like the rest of those waster kids. This town’s going to hell in a hand basket, Jude, you hear me?”
They drive to the top of Emma’s street, at which point Samuel lets the engine idle and says, “Go on, get out.” When Emma moves slowly to unbuckle her seat belt, he yells, “Get!” as if she were a dog.
“Dad, what about Noah?” Jude watches Emma grow smaller in the truck wing-mirror as they drive away.
His father grunts. “He’s made his bed, he can lie in it for the night. You lock the door when you get back home and don’t let him in. He can sleep out in the yard. I’ll deal with him tomorrow.”
“Yes, sir.” Then he adds, “Aren’t you coming home?”
“Is that any of your business, boy? I’ll drop you back. Someone’s got to keep an eye on your mom, but I’ve got someplace else I need to be.”
You don’t need to be at O’Shannon’s bar, Jude thinks. You need to help me find my brother. I can’t lose him as well.
* * *
Emma sits in the shower, letting the hot water burn away the feeling of Jerry Maddox’s hands on her wrists, of the body-odor reek of Samuel Blake’s truck, and she tries not to think about what might have happened to Hunter, tries not to worry about him, because what was it his father had said? Hunter had stolen a gun.
Rat had told her about his gun. That afternoon at the trailer park, after the stones had come flying through the windows, she’d been so shaken up, and drunk on cheap liquor, she had demanded answers. His gun had gone missing months ago, he told her. He figured it was probably one of Hunter’s friends messing around, but now Emma thinks she has a decent idea of who took it.
While Emma scrubs the dirt off her face, Jude Blake stands in the hallway full of scattered gemstones and tries calling his brother again, only to hear the automated voice telling him, for the fifth time, that this number is currently unavailable.
Dolly, lying on the couch with half a Valium circulating through her bloodstream, can hear her son sobbing faintly in the hall, but she has no inclination to go to him, or to move ever again. She holds Abigail’s diary pages scrunched up in her hand and thinks she wouldn’t get up now even if the whole house caught fire.
The Lewises, responding at last to an alert from the church alarm system, arrive at the First Baptist Church of Whistling Ridge to find it reeking of gasoline. Apart from that, the church is unharmed and nothing has been taken, the pastor is quite confident of that, but something has been left—a single earring shaped like a wolf’s fang, discarded in haste on the carpet.
* * *
The trail road feels like the backbone of the world. To Noah, sitting in the darkness with his hands tucked into his armpits, it’s hard to tell where the trees end and the mountains begin.
They slept for a little while in the truck, parked up at the side of a county road, leaning against one another. But when Noah woke, he could still smell the gasoline clinging to them, so they drove higher, following the road out past the Tall Bones and up toward the timberline. Now, perched together on the hood, they breathe in the sweet-cold air and the scent of woodsmoke, curling up from unseen cabins in the trees below.
Up here there are snowbanks that never melt, as high as Noah’s waist in some places, and they make everything silent. Rat says it reminds him of Transylvania.
“Is that where you lived?” Noah asks.
“Yeah, I lived in Dracula’s castle. Just lay around draped in furs and went hunting with wolves every day.”
“You’re such an ass about everything.”
“Transylvania’s the arse-end of nowhere, but it does have some good forest. And it had my grandmother, and her guitar.”
Rat’s fingers are turning red, so Noah takes them in his own and blows on them gently.
“Do you ever miss it—Romania, I mean?”
“Not really. I was a kid, so it’s all pretty blurry. England was more of a home.” Rat’s breath makes clouds in the frigid air. “Long church services, though, I remember those. You think the Baptists are bad, you’ve never been to an Orthodox mass.”
“I never knew you went to church.”
“Well, now you do.”
Rat clicks his tongue, smiling down at their hands, palm pressed against palm. “So, you know, I never really got a straight answer from you before. You want to run away with me, Noah Blake?”
Noah takes off Rat’s rings and links their fingers together. “Where would we go?”
“Anywhere you like, anywhere away from here—this town, these people, so pissed because Jesus won’t turn them from water into wine.”
Noah feels as though he’s about to pull the dust sheet off a piece of old furniture, something precious stored away in a room he hasn’t entered in a very long time. “I’ve always wanted to go to California.”
“Oh?” Rat holds up their hands between them. “Could we do this in public in California?”
Noah’s not sure about that. The word public makes the bruise on his jaw sting.
They sit a little while longer, hand in hand, until the sky is blue and yellow, and the wind shoos them back into the truck.
As they drive back down the mountain, Rat props his feet on the dashboard and says, “I tell you something I do miss.”
“Yeah?”
“I never get to hear my own language unless I speak
it myself.”
Noah looks sideways at him. “Well, then, teach me something.”
“You want to learn Romanian.”
“Don’t say it like that. Come on, teach me. If it’s that important to you…”
The way Rat smiles at him then, it feels as if there are flowers budding inside his chest, and he doesn’t hear his phone buzzing on the back seat with another missed call from his brother.
* * *
The house feels stale, and there are pieces of colored stone here and there, fallen between the hallway floorboards. His grandmother’s cross is gone, Noah notes, but someone has tacked a square of Christmas wrapping paper over the hole in the wall. He is grateful. The thought of seeing it again, even after all these years, shocks him in a way he did not expect.
“I thought you might not want to look at it,” Jude says, resting on his stick in the living-room doorway. “Where were you? I’ve been calling all night.” He doesn’t sound angry, but he doesn’t sound like himself either—as if he has aged a year for every hour that Noah’s been gone.
Noah doesn’t like it. “I was just out. Since when do you care?”
He makes to brush past him, but Jude plants his feet and blocks the way.
“Dad and I went out looking for you.”
“Well, that must have been nice for you, some father-son bonding time.”
“Where were you? He just left me here so he could go out drinking. I had to deal with Mom on my own.”
“What do you mean? What’s wrong with Mom?”
“She… I don’t know. I got home and she was just sitting in the hall. She’d pulled out a load of her hair.”
“Well, that’s Mom for you. Supportive as ever in a crisis.”
“No, you don’t get it, she wouldn’t calm down. I had to give her some Valium.” Jude looks at his feet. “I’ve never done anything like that before. It felt like she was a crazy person.”
“Maybe she is.” Noah leans against the doorframe too. “You know one time I found her in the bath with all her clothes on? Like, a few months back, I came home from work and she was just sitting there, wearing all her clothes.”
“Oh man.” Jude’s face gets all pinched, like he’s about to cry. “What’s going on? Why is this happening to us?”
“Don’t say crap like that. You know how dumb you sound when you say that? You sound like a Pilgrim or something, like you’re worried the harvest is going to fail.”
Jude swallows. “God wouldn’t—”
“This has nothing to do with God, you idiot. God doesn’t do anything, He just whispers in people’s ears that they’re worth jack shit, and they pray and pray hoping He’ll stop, but He doesn’t, and in the end they just go crazy. That’s all God does, He makes people go crazy, so get that into your head and grow up!”
Jude stares at him, his eyes growing red and watery around the edges, and Noah feels momentarily guilty. Or perhaps he has been feeling guilty the whole time, ever since a few photos on his computer resulted in his little brother being thrown down the stairs. Perhaps it hurt so much losing out on California that it was easier to be mad at Jude—the sight of him shuffling around on his stick reminding Noah every day that his indiscretion was at the root of all this—than to admit to what his brother has lost as well.
But then Jude presses something into Noah’s hand. His voice is cold—strangely older again—when he says, “You’re the one who needs to grow up.”
Noah looks down at the Polaroid, at Rat all drunk-sweaty and nonchalant with his arm around Abigail in a dress he’s never seen before, the pair of them looking bored at the camera, and for a second longer than he would ever admit, he thinks, Oh God—why is this happening to us?
36
He remembers when he lost his fingers. Eli Gains had got his hand caught in a steel trap on a hunting trip with his brother, back when he still had a couple of people who called him Eli. The brother, Abel, was one of them, and he died of bowel cancer the following year. The other was wild Bonnie Harris, who only had to bat her eyes and he’d be skipping time at the police academy to smoke pot with her in her grungy Denver apartment. He’d proposed to her before the accident, but afterward, when it came to picking out his ring, she’d said, Well, I don’t know what finger you’re going to stick it on, and it was like she’d slammed a door in his face. They broke up two months later. She’d screwed up her mouth every time he touched her with that hand.
Then one afternoon, many years later, he’d put that same hand on Abigail Blake’s back, and she hadn’t flinched. He doesn’t regret it, even now. For a moment he’d felt himself again, normal for the first time in so long, and he remembers briefly thinking, There are still people out there to whom we are not merely the sum of the bad things that have happened to us.
“Chief, are you listening?”
Gains looks up. Pastor Lewis is tapping his fingers on the back of a plastic church chair. “Yes, sir. You were telling me about the gasoline.” He can smell the memory of it in the air.
“We’ll have to have the whole place deep cleaned, of course.”
“And you have no idea who it could have been?”
“Oh, no, it’s just one of those things, isn’t it? One of those mysteries. But we thought it was best to report it, all the same.”
The pastor shakes his head, and it’s probably a trick of the light—probably because Gains hasn’t slept, thinking about Dolly Blake’s miserable voice on the phone—but he thinks he sees Pastor Lewis’s mouth curl up at the edges, like a smile that is trying not to be a smile. It makes Gains’s skin feel cold.
“You boys are busy enough as it is, I’m sure—what with that missing-person case still open.” The pastor leans back and tucks his thumbs into his waistband. “You made any headway with that lately, Chief? Only I hear a lot of folks’ worries in my profession, and I can tell you that plenty of people round here are getting worried. Been over a month now, hasn’t it, since that poor child disappeared?”
“That’s correct, sir. But I’m not at liberty to discuss an ongoing investigation, you understand.”
“Oh, no, of course not. I wasn’t trying to step on any toes. But—well, you know how people can get around here when they start itching to place blame. Poor old Miguel Alvarez, he certainly knew that, not that it did him much good in the end. People want this to be over, Chief, you can appreciate that, can’t you? They just want to have someone to blame.”
Pastor Lewis is shorter than Gains but he raises his chin when he talks, as if he’s attempting to stare down his nose at him. Gains tries to relax into his stance.
“Well now, I’m not sure I understand you, Pastor.”
Ed Lewis just smiles. “Eli, I think you do.”
* * *
“You look like bad news,” Rat says, jumping down from the roof of the RV.
Noah knocks the cigarette out of his hand. “What did you do to my sister?”
“Your sister? Blake, what are you talking about?” Rat looks around, but there is no one to be seen between the rotted rows of metal and clapboard. “Come on, Blake, I was barely even aware of your sister.”
“You’re talking about her in the past tense.”
Everybody is, Noah knows that. Everybody started acting like she was already dead the moment those flyers went up. Just another no-good Blake kid, and if even the pastor couldn’t bring himself to care what happened to them then why should anybody else? But Rat had cared—cared about Noah, at least—and now the thought that he might have been lying all along, that he might have had something to do with the blood they found all over his sister’s cardigan, with his mother curled up like a dead thing on the couch this morning… He could have gone back to the Tall Bones that night, after Noah had left. It wasn’t impossible. Noah feels as if his eyes are about to pop out of his head.
“Look,” says Rat, putting his hands on his hips, “if you’ve got something to say to me, then come out and say it.”
Noah grits his teeth so har
d his jaw hurts, but he can’t get his words out, at least not anything clever—he’s just the boy who pronounces it carmel—so instead he slaps the Polaroid against Rat’s chest.
Rat looks down, eyes wide suddenly. “I don’t remember—”
“Oh, save it.”
“I swear on my grandmother’s bones, Blake, I don’t remember this.”
Noah can see now, in the daylight, the gray circles under his eyes.
“Hunter Maddox used to take photos like this. We hung out sometimes—all of us from the trailer park, and him, like he had nothing better to do. He’d take these photos. But I was always high as the fucking trees, Blake, I’m telling you. I remember, like, a third of those parties at best.”
“Why would you want to hang out with teenage girls anyway? I saw the liquor you bought for Emma Alvarez. What the hell kind of person are you?”
“The kind of person whose trailer gets trashed by half the town, Blake. I take whatever friends I can get.” Rat sticks out his lip. “And for the record, there was never anything between me and Emma. She’s a lonely kid, she just wanted some attention—and, you know, maybe she wasn’t the only one.”
“You get everybody’s attention, that’s your whole problem!”
Rat presses his hand to his forehead. “So, what, you think I was banging your sister? You think I murdered her? I was with you that night, remember? So exactly what are you getting at here?”