by Anna Bailey
She is not expecting what comes next. Hunter sets the diary next to her on the warm metal of the bleachers and then, with a deep breath, sits himself down too. He sticks his legs over the side like hers, and the two of them sway there for a while in the soft spring breeze, fresh with the clean scent of meltwater from up in the Rockies. In the parking lot, the asphalt is white with shredded mountain ash blossom, pressed into it by so many footprints and tire tracks. Grackles pick at the remains of dining-hall fries in discarded Styrofoam, and the sound of cheer practice can be heard floating through the open gym windows. Abigail is glad that Hunter has nothing to say because she knows otherwise he’d just say something dumb, and she wants to let these sounds and smells soak in while they still can.
Everything is going to change now, she realizes. Everything is going to change because somebody else knows what happened to her.
NOW
Eventually, the vibration of her cell phone wakes Dolly. What had Jude given her again? All the colors in the bedroom seem too loud. And the house—the house seems too silent. It’s as if, while she was sleeping, God had picked it up and placed it on top of a mountain. There is nothing—not the sound of birds outside, or the blue spruce tapping on the windows, or wind whistling through the gap under the door. Dolly feels like she’s in the eye of a storm.
But that damned phone won’t stop buzzing. She scrabbles around the folds of the duvet until she finds it, but her fingers are lagging behind what her brain wants to do, so she ends up pressing Answer rather than Decline. She nearly says, Oh, shit, but then she’s very glad she didn’t, because it is Ann Traxler’s tinny voice on the other end.
“Dolly, hey, are you there? It’s Ann, from church.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Oh, you sound half-asleep. Were you napping? I sometimes like to take a nap in the middle of the day. I didn’t wake you, did I?”
Dolly chews the inside of her cheek. “Did you need something?”
“I just didn’t know if anyone else had called, is all. But I thought you ought to know, there’s going to be a special service this evening. At about six, I think Eleanor said. Real important stuff, you know. Everyone’s going to be there.”
“Oh.”
It seems strange that the rest of the world still thinks she is the same person she was yesterday. They have no idea. Ann Traxler, who yesterday in Safeway said, It’s all over the station, what that boy did—Ann has no idea. She’s just called Dolly up as though everything is hunky-dory. (And, really, who is she to be talking about Dolly’s Noah like that, as if Austin Traxler wasn’t a little shit who used to toilet paper their house in the seventh grade?)
She thinks Ann is probably the way she is because of that woman who died in her hair salon a few years back. Just up and died while she was having her hair washed, and Ann said she didn’t even realize until after she’d rinsed out the conditioner. Dolly remembers thinking at the time that there was definitely something quite grotesque about washing a dead woman’s hair, and she understood that Ann had wanted to talk about it with anyone who would listen, to try to make some sense of it. But since then she has talked about everything, anything, as if that woman dying on her broke some sort of dam in her throat.
“So, will we see you there?” Ann asks. “It’d be real nice to see you, Dolly.”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“Listen, Dolly, about what you might have heard at Safeway, me and Eleanor didn’t—”
Dolly ends the call and stuffs the cell phone under her pillow. For the first time, she thinks it can’t have been much fun for that lady who died either, what with Ann Traxler’s reedy little voice being the last thing she ever heard.
She heaves herself off the bed and realizes—with a sense of horror that she is certain belongs to her mother—that she is still wearing yesterday’s clothes. Nobody should go to bed with their socks on. That is for people with gout, or something like that. It makes her feel old-fashioned, then just plain old.
With a sigh, she goes to press her head against the windowpane, watching her breath slowly fogging up the glass. Noah and Jude are out in the yard. She is vaguely aware that today is Monday, and Jude ought to be in school and Noah at work, but she can’t find the energy to care about it too much. Noah is raking leaves outside the shed at the bottom of the yard, its timber so weathered and sagging it seems to be relaxing into the earth. Jude is sitting on the bare ground, staring at the shed door as it swings in the breeze.
He has a dark look on his face, her patient little Jude. Both boys do. For an awful moment she wonders if they know. But then she puts her hand into her pocket and feels the crumpled paper of her daughter’s diary pages, and she is reassured: no, they cannot know. Only I have read this.
She is quite certain now that Abigail is dead. Even if Sheriff Gains hadn’t told her about the blood on her cardigan last night. We still can’t be sure if the shot was fatal, he’d said. Without a body we can’t be sure of anything. But if what’s written on these pages is true, that hardly matters. If it’s true, then Abigail was dead long before she went missing that night.
Such a dark, hollow word: dead. The sort of word that clubs you over the back of the head if you let it, but Dolly knows she mustn’t, not yet. She will open herself up to it later, after she has figured out what to do with these scraps of her daughter’s diary. Until then, she must wrap these feelings up tight and put them in a box for later. The boys are such strange creatures, tougher than her in many ways, but so fragile in others. They will need her to be strong now.
This is not the sort of mother she had imagined she would be when the midwife first put Noah into her arms. Her fear of her husband, of his knuckles and his howling, has made her prioritize his happiness over her own and that of her children, but what sort of love is it if you must be threatened for it first? And what’s wrong with Samuel that he would want to be loved in that way? What a wretched creature she has become as his wife. She feels like love is a very distant concept, and one she doesn’t deserve to reach. But she can see now that it wasn’t Samuel who put down the phone on Melissa Alvarez so many times, who dropped out of the women’s church committee, who turned the comfort of her body away from her sons. It was Dolly all along. He has made her so ashamed that she has isolated herself of her own accord.
And now, she thinks, because of this, her daughter is probably dead. She must tell her sons. She will have to tell everyone at some point, so that nobody can sneak up on her at Safeway and ask, off the cuff, “Hey, Dolly, any news about Abigail?” But how do you tell other people that your child is dead? She can imagine it already: they will want her to be unhappy because that is what they expect, so that is what will make them most comfortable. If she tries to be anything else, it will throw people off, and they won’t be sympathetic. The problem is, Dolly doesn’t even know how she feels yet.
There should be a service, she thinks, watching her sons silently in the yard, not really looking each other in the eye. A service that does this sort of thing for you. A number you can ring, and they will tell everyone on your behalf that you have a dead child so, please, no further questions.
* * *
Emma sways her hips a little as she heads back down Main Street. Watching her outside from the diner, Hunter doesn’t know what he was so anxious about. When he saw her text earlier, he got this awful sick feeling in his stomach: Emma asks so many questions, and it’s cute, really, she’s got a lot of energy he never noticed before, but she doesn’t always give him time to come up with the answers. And he needs time for some of the things she asks.
His phone buzzes in his hand. Unknown caller, it says, but he picks it up anyway—he still gets a few people from school or the trailer park calling about the coke.
“Go for Hunter,” he says.
The line is quiet.
“Hello?”
Nothing.
Hunter swallows. He looks around but the street is fairly empty. He cups his hand around h
is mouth and whispers, “Abi?”
He does not recognize the voice that answers. It could be a man, but it sounds distant, like somebody speaking through a cushion.
“You know what I can do to you.”
“Who is this?”
“You know what I can do to you if you tell.”
Hunter freezes. His throat is painfully dry, but he forces himself to say, “I haven’t told anyone. I swear.”
“Don’t go talking to the Alvarez girl again. You know what I can do to her as well.”
39
Jude wishes he had never shown Noah that photograph. His brother is stamping around the yard in his steel-toed boots, castoffs of their father’s, glaring at the logs and dead leaves, his face as dark as the sky overhead is searing and white. It is a headachy kind of afternoon, when the light seems to get in around the edges of your eyeballs and poke at your brain. Jude wants to go inside. It’s cold sitting on the ground, but he doesn’t like the thought of leaving Noah alone when he’s like this.
It was probably nothing, Abi and the Romanian boy. That guy really liked Noah: Jude could tell by the way he had stood there and stared after him at the grocery store that time, looking like Noah had just punched him in the gut. But that’s how Jude had felt, too, when his brother came home this morning and said, You idiot, God doesn’t do anything. Get that into your head and grow up. Noah doesn’t hit like their father does, but he still has his way of knocking people down.
If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. Jude tugs some grass up and watches the wind sweep it out of his palm. He hopes he won’t stop believing in God. God is like this stick he leans on. In his physio sessions they tell him maybe one day he’ll be able to stand up without it, and that day feels almost frightening in its distance, even though he longs for it too. But if someone took his stick away now, he would fall down. Perhaps he should look forward to a day when he can stand up without God as well, but for now that seems like a much further distance to fall.
The wind picks up, dismantling Noah’s pile of leaves, and he yells something at the sky, just as the shed door bangs shut. The sound makes Jude sit up straight. He has never liked that shed. Their father keeps old bodies in there—raccoons, skunks, sometimes deer, sells their fur to some of the stores in town, saves their bones for decoration—but Jude has liked it even less these last few months. The shed was where he saw it, one night when there was still snow on the ground: a bad thing that he can’t find the words for. The wind dies down now, the door swings open, and Jude has to look away, in case he sees the bad thing again.
His stomach mutters, and he realizes he’s hungry. He had a piece of toast for breakfast (tried to take some to his mother, too, but she was still sleeping off the Valium), but lunchtime has come and gone, and he’s pretty certain Noah hasn’t eaten anything all day.
“We should go to the store,” he says.
Noah leans on his rake and runs a hand through his hair. “I suppose you want me to drive you.”
“I can try and make you a grilled cheese, if you like.” Jude has watched his brother make them enough times, on nights when their parents were too busy or too angry to feed their children. It had almost felt normal then, the three of them sitting on the balding living-room carpet, drinking sweet tea and laughing over long strings of melted cheese. Often their father would bang on the ceiling overhead and tell them to shut their mouths, then Noah would turn stony-faced again and retreat to his room. But for a while, now and again, they had played at being just like everyone else.
Noah sighs and presses his forehead against the top of the rake handle, like he wants to bore a hole right through himself. “Yeah, fine,” he says at last. “Go get in the truck.”
Jude pulls himself up with his cane, but he lingers a moment, watching his brother wipe his face on his sleeve. Has he been crying? Jude hadn’t realized. He wants Noah to know he’s sorry. Sorry for showing him the photograph, or perhaps just sorry that the photograph exists at all. Maybe it reminds him of other photos, years ago now, and all the trouble they caused. God doesn’t hate you for it, Jude thinks, hoping his brother can absorb his thoughts from the air. God doesn’t hate anyone: that’s His whole thing.
But then Noah says, “I told you to get in the truck. Do you want to go to the store or not?” and Jude realizes his brother hasn’t heard what he was thinking at all.
Just for a moment, as he turns to go, he thinks he sees their mother’s face at the upstairs window. He wants to talk to her, but it seems she’s always watching from some unreachable distance. Jude ducks his head and limps quickly across the yard without looking up again. He can’t be sure, but he thinks she was looking at the shed too.
Please, Lord, he thinks, what do I do? What do I do when I know something I shouldn’t?
* * *
Emma hasn’t had a drink for a week. Seven whole days. It doesn’t really occur to her, until she and Melissa pass the beer and wine section in Safeway, and the want is still there, a kind of hunger lurking in her gut, but it feels softer around the edges, fuzzy, like a memory she has half forgotten.
She isn’t kidding herself that it’s over. She had been naive enough to think that last week, until Rat’s trailer and Noah handing her the bottle of peach schnapps. The hunger had flared up again then, gnawing at her until she wanted to tear out her own stomach. When those people came and threw rocks at the windows, and Rat held her under the table, it had all felt so surreal that it was only the very physical sensation of glass breaking under her feet as she walked back across the trailer park that made her certain it had happened. After that, she had just wanted to rid herself of the memory. She had thrown up, downed as much water as her throat could handle, then slept all the way through until morning.
When she’d woken up, Emma had felt that some line had been crossed, that somehow what had happened at Rat’s RV could have been prevented had she been sober. She hadn’t drunk anything that day—but had gone to speak to Hunter, and he had given her things to think about, so she didn’t drink the next day either, or the one after that, and now a whole week has passed. Hunter is good like that. He doesn’t fill her up with liquor and tell her not to ask questions, not like Rat did. Hunter is different. He wants to help her.
“What’s that smile for?” Melissa nudges her gently as they meander through the bakery section.
“I’m just having a good day.”
Emma slings her arm around her mother’s waist and hugs her, breathing in her soap-and-onion smell. It feels as though someone is inflating balloons inside her rib cage and at any moment she might take off.
Then Melissa says, “Oh, it’s Dolly’s boys,” and Emma has to float back down. The melancholy of the Blake brothers always seems to have its own orbit, but this afternoon they look especially grim.
“Noah,” says Melissa, “how’s your mom? She seemed a little on edge yesterday when I called round.”
Emma thinks her mother is being very polite. Dolly Blake is always on edge.
Noah is clutching a bag of sliced bread—perfect for toasting, it says on the side—like it’s a lifesaving ring in the middle of a lake, and when Melissa mentions his mother, he grips it harder.
“Mom’s just been tired lately,” he says. “All this stuff with Abi. It’s been nearly a month now.”
“One month and one day,” Jude adds. “Seven hundred and forty-four hours.”
Emma thinks that sounds too few.
“Your poor mom. I can’t imagine,” Melissa says. “You know, if she’s having trouble sleeping or anything, you just send her over to the clinic. We’ve got a new—”
“No,” says Noah. “She’s not having any trouble sleeping. Thanks.”
Jude has wandered over to a table display of Bundt cakes, but he’s staring at Emma. She leaves her mother, who is smiling awkwardly at Noah, and approaches him the way you would a deer in the forest. “Hey, are you okay?”
Jude taps his fingernails on the handle of
his cane. “What were you doing in the road last night?”
“Oh.” She’s managed not to think about it since she left Hunter at the diner, but now she feels the memory settling over her like a net. “I was just looking for something.”
“Something to do with Abi?”
“What makes you say that?”
“Aren’t you trying to figure it out? I don’t think the police are trying very hard. They barely call anymore. Won’t even tell us what they think happened to her. Sheriff Gains said she was a missing person, but…” Jude has his mother’s slightly wild look in his eyes. He folds his lips together and taps on his cane, but he doesn’t stop staring at her.
“Jude, do you know something?”
He stops tapping.
“What is it?”
Jude is looking over her shoulder now, at his brother squeezing the bag of sliced bread. Noah says, not unkindly, “Come on, kid, we’re going,” and Jude limps away, returning his gaze to anywhere but Emma.
“Those poor boys,” her mother says, as they watch the brothers disappear around the corner. “Weird as all hell, don’t get me wrong, but still. What they must be going through.”
“Yeah.” Emma nods. “Weird.”
* * *
Talking to Jude has brought everything back, so when they get home, Emma tries to call Hunter.
Gun thief—that’s what his father had said. Jerry Maddox had cornered them in his office and called him a gun thief.
Emma doesn’t know any more about bullets and ballistics than she’s seen on TV, but she figures the police probably wouldn’t have rounded up Rat if his gun wasn’t a match for that shell casing they found. She knows Rat had nothing to do with it because he was busy getting it on with Noah Blake, but somebody fired a gun that night. Somebody spattered that blood across Abigail’s cardigan, but it can’t have been Hunter. It can’t. After all, he’s been helping her. He took a beating from his dad for her. There’s something else going on here, she’s certain of it. She just needs to talk to him.