Between Here and the Yellow Sea

by Nic Pizzolatto

  I don’t expect her to understand the logic. She calls me a coward. She says that I’m the one who’s afraid. I turn to leave, and she says I’m like an addict: I can’t deal with life so I insulate myself with habit and ideas. I don’t turn around, because there’s nothing else to say.

  What can you say to someone you love who won’t abide her own fear?

  I take to driving past Green Grove during the day, spotting my father sitting at his window where he watches tree limbs rustle with squirrels. It isn’t often that I think of her.

  One day my father isn’t at his window. I look, make a U-turn, and pass again, but in his place I see only a pane of glass that shines back the sun. I know he must be in a different part of the home at that moment, yet I stop to stare, and in that window’s flat, radiant square I ponder my father, perhaps for the first time, with true clarity.

  I get my old schedule back at work.

  I stand at the window when three a.m. comes, tightening my harness. Through the glass, the woods are still and mysterious, stretching boundlessly into darkness, while on the other side of the arch a city beats brightly, steaming and vibrating with implied movement. I raise the scarf over my nose and lower the blue glass of my NVTs and the world becomes a hazed impression of emerald spectres. Now I tell myself that I don’t straddle the dreams of my culture, but that I stand within them.

  I’m like the giant black bird perched on the moon, an idea existing between rumor and imagination, the shape you hope to see when you chance to look up after a late night.

  Now I’m like myth, a UFO, a thunderbird, and this role carries its own concessions, its promise of ritual and discipline, while below, somewhere in the wilderness or in apartments across the river, with telescopes pointed out windows, people wait to see, ready to mold me into whatever they decide to believe I am. I raise the window and let my leg slip out. Wind caresses me. I clutch the pilot chute.

  Now I am a ghost.

  Banzai.

  AMY’S WATCH

  I.

  TWO HOURS BEFORE SHE LEARNED THAT HER BROTHER WAS dead, Amy tried to aggravate North Godcheaux by bringing up the subject of her sister. Amy worked at a drugstore in the afternoons, and North picked her up when her shift ended. To avoid being noticed, North parked his truck a few blocks away when waiting for her. She told her mother a friend from school gave her rides. In the truck North had been silent, had hardly looked at her, and this irritated Amy.

  She said, “I found you and Kara’s prom picture last night.”

  He stopped rolling the toothpick in his mouth. “What are you telling me?”

  “Nothing. I was unboxing pictures from our attic. I just found it.”

  “What are you telling me this for?”

  “Nothing.” The truck braked at a red light, and he held his palms up in a way that reminded her of Father DeBlanc at Nana’s funeral mass.

  “Why are you talking to me about her?”

  She shrugged and, having irritated him, turned to stare out the window. North looked much different in the prom picture. His face had been rounder, jaw smooth, hair in a crew cut. Now his cheekbones were hard edges, black hair curled down from under his fishing cap, and by this time of day his stubble was much thicker than any of the boys’ at Laughton High. In the picture, his hands rested gently on her sister’s hips. Kara, she thought, probably looked the same. Amy had not seen her sister in seven years. Kara had eventually gone to college and married a man in computers, and now they had three houses in two countries. Amy sometimes imagined the houses, and they would be extravagant, vain, so nice they bullied visitors with slippery marble and dramatic lighting.

  North’s truck eased up a shallow hill. They passed a field where for years an abandoned station wagon had sat on cinder blocks instead of tires. Perched on the old automobile, two cattle egrets glowed white through the khaki haze of dried cutgrass.

  “I just want us to have fun,” North said. “I don’t want to talk about her.” He put his hand on her arm.

  Amy knew her demeanor today—sharp, distant—was confusing North, but felt no pity for him. The day before, she’d learned she was pregnant, and that knowledge, unshared, permitted her strength, a new reserve of depth and weight. She stared out the window.

  Plants broke through every surface. Weeds divided concrete parking lots into segments. Grass veined the road’s black tar. Oak, pine, and sumac grew in the spaces between buildings. Every building they passed was a single story and had rust-colored water damage staining its edges. Over two centuries old, the town of Laughton remained a harsh, humid wilderness. Amy fit its spaces. Sixteen, she had muscular thighs beneath her denim skirt, a solid, compact girl with a strong back and a wide, open face. She had soft black hair, combed straight, a good shade, what she thought of as her best feature.

  They descended into wooded terrain bordered by cane fields. Beyond the cane rose the courthouse’s thin clock tower, and beyond that meadows and the small oil derricks that bowed up and down all day like feeding birds. She saw North’s trailer park through the forest vines.

  Her older brother, Christian, had gone hunting with North in this truck, back when it was a shiny sky blue. The paint was a more powdery color now, almost gray against the reddening sunset. Rust flayed the truck’s edges, and the door squealed when she opened and closed it. Amy saw that North had left a black thumbprint on her arm. She stared at the greasy oval before wiping it away with spit.

  Smells crammed the air inside the trailer. Cigarettes, gasoline, sharp odors from the chemical cleansers North used at his job. He folded his bed down from the wall and took off his shirt. In the dim lighting Amy thought he looked once more like the athlete her sister brought home when Amy was six. He’d become leaner in the ten years since, more shrunken. When she took off his cap hair fell around his face and she liked that. She took off her T-shirt, and he moved her skirt up around her waist. She draped her bra over one of the chains that held the bed.

  She touched his arms, the humidity of his skin, ashy taste from his tongue. The bed jostled on its chains. His face was turned up and his eyes closed tightly. Amy watched him from below. At these times she believed that he was thinking about Kara, but she could never bring herself to mind that. She was thinking about Kara too, remembering the night she first saw her sister’s breasts. She often thought of that night.

  Kara had stood in front the bathroom mirror wearing only a pair of purple panties, preparing for a date. In the mirror, she’d smoothed lotion over her gold skin, and her chest shined. Her breasts sloped firmly, curved up to their tips. Her blond hair had been pulled back. Kara patted her stomach and cupped her breasts when she leaned forward to inspect her teeth. Amy had stood beside her with a toothbrush hanging from her mouth.

  Kara had asked if Amy wanted some lotion, too, and she’d squeezed Nivea into her sister’s hands while Amy stared at her nipples. They were dark brown, the size of silver dollars. Amy mimicked her sister when Kara propped one foot on the toilet and began rubbing the lotion into her legs, giving them a white glow. On the bathroom mirror, their mother had inserted prayer cards where the fixtures held the glass. The three children were met by the painted faces of St. Michael and the Blessed Virgin, each morning and night.

  Amy had asked her sister, “Who are you going out with tonight?”

  “North Godcheaux. You remember him?” Kara had looked in the mirror while she talked. She undid her hair and let it fall. She patted Amy’s head and went to her room. Kara had bumped into Christian in the hall, wearing only her drawers, and moved around him and shut the door to her room. Later that night a sheriff’s deputy would bring her home. She’d been sixteen then. Christian was fourteen, Amy six.

  Immediately after he’d finished, North sat on the edge of the bed and pulled up his jeans. He rose and walked to the toilet. Amy zipped her skirt and lay on the sheets. A green-gold ray filtered through the narrow window above the bed, coloring the hand she rubbed lightly over her stomach.

  Amy ha
dn’t decided whether to keep the baby. The newness of the pregnancy created a calm that still felt surprising. Beaumont had clinics that could end the life for little or no money, but for now it was her secret, a thing that made her more powerful.

  North stepped out of the bathroom and said, “I’ll drive you home.”

  Amy barely heard him. She was trying to imagine what it would be like, the moment the baby left her body, what she would feel.

  When they were back in his truck, North asked, “Nobody’s heard from Christian?” He lit a cigarette.

  “Not since Easter,” Amy said. The last they’d heard, her brother was mountain climbing in Washington. Christian had not been home in three years, and then his visit was compelled by a fractured leg and arm he got breaking horses in Brenham, Texas.

  “Every October I take the bows down, I think about that stag. First time out.” North had said that to Amy at least three times since they’d been going out, but she didn’t think he realized. North was four years older than Amy’s brother. After Kara had broken up with him in high school, North had maintained a relationship with her little brother, a blatant attempt to remain connected to her life. But real friendship developed between the two boys, or as much friendship as Christian allowed anyone. North took him fishing and taught him to bow hunt. Amy remembered, as a little girl, seeing them leave one morning before sunrise, wearing camouflage jumpsuits and holding brawny bows in their hands. She’d thought of them the rest of the day, the way they’d looked in the blue morning, their weapons, the clothes that looked like tree bark. She’d wanted to go with them.

  The truck motored past barren lots of scrubgrass and fireweed, moss held like handkerchiefs by branches, farther into the country, past marshes thick with cattails and cypress, stagnant scents drifting through the curtains of ivy. The truck stopped at the top of the street. He let her out and she walked downhill toward her house.

  The neighborhood was a tidy arrangement of single-story homes bordering a large basin of muddy grass. Their parents had bought one of the first five houses here, but a planned lakefront community was aborted when the Corps of Engineers diverted the Vermillion River, eventually making the neighborhood’s small lake into the weedy basin at the end of the street. Her mother’s old Cougar was parked beneath the live oak in their yard, where it had not moved in over a week, as far as Amy could tell. The lawn tangled past the boundaries of porch and driveway. Weeds had cracked through the driveway, splitting its slabs. A four-bedroom with flaking auburn paint around its sides, the house had a front door of thick, burnished wood, and five diamonds of glass built a larger diamond at its center. She called, “Mom?” when she opened the door. She lived in the house with only her mother. Her parents had divorced less than a year after Christian left.

  She crossed the foyer, where pictures lined the walls. More pictures, like the ones she’d found in the attic the night before. Her family’s pictures were disconnected from her own life. From the time they were children, her brother and sister had been recognized as two of the best-looking people in Laughton. They were both tall, had blond hair and bronze skin, lean faces above wide shoulders and thin hips. Amy’s own black hair framed a heart-shaped face, the kind people described as “pleasant.” She had broad hips and eyes that slanted faintly, as if an Asiatic presence shimmered in her genes. Her eyes were blue and her pale skin blushed easily. Her parents said she resembled one of her father’s aunts, a woman she’d never seen. The pictures in the hallway—her brother and sister and parents, most taken before she was born—always carried accusations, made her feel like a trespasser.

  Her mother was sitting in the kitchen, in a floral nightgown. Through bay windows the evening cast a dowdy blue light on her slouched figure. A retired schoolteacher, her mother often sat there, her Bible replaced by books of crossword puzzles she solved while smoking cigarettes.

  “Hey, Mom?”

  Her mother’s head twitched, hands dangling at her sides, a yellow pencil on the linoleum floor. Amy heard a soft bleating from the cordless phone that sat on the table. Beside the ashtray on the table lay a cigarette with a long tube of ash above its filter. The cigarette had burned a shiny black oval into the table’s wood finish.

  When her mother finally spoke, she began crying. “Christian died.”

  Amy fell into a chair. She said “why,” though she’d meant to say, “how.” Her mother kept weeping and put her head into her arms, folded on the table. Amy reached out and turned off the phone, an almost unconscious gesture. She watched the burnt black spot on the table as though expecting it to shift in size.

  II.

  THE SUN SHINED RELENTLESSLY ON THE DAY OF THE FUNERAL. A stiff gulf breeze caressed the few mourners with briny, soothing air. Her mother sat in a formless black dress, frowning with some terminal surrender. Amy’s father, Arthur Placide, stood several yards away, his spine rigid in a dark gray suit, his head lolling now and then. Twice she saw his legs buckle and straighten. His wife, Suzanne, helped him both times. She was a small, extremely thin woman with deeply tanned skin and frazzled orange hair. Her father had married her with no warning, three years after his divorce. He was now a personal injury lawyer in Baton Rouge. He had received the body and made the funeral arrangements.

  A plain brown coffin enclosed Christian. It took three days to get the body from Washington. “I don’t understand,” Amy had asked her father. “They just found him on a street?” The undertaker had cut his hair and shaved his beard. She tried to remember him as he’d been when they were children, but she kept seeing the brooding teenager, the young man with the scar over his lip. “What do you mean he was lying in the street?” She’d asked, voice warbling.

  Altogether, she counted sixteen people at the funeral, most of them old friends of her mother. North stood farther back than anyone else. He wore dark brown corduroy pants and a blue blazer over a white shirt. She watched the wind toss his hair. His face was still handsome, gaining some dignity from its gauntness and the angle of the sun. Amy had cried hardest when she’d told him about Christian.

  She told him they didn’t know who had done it, but her brother had been stabbed. The words had brought out convulsive tears. She remembered her brother showing her how to set crab traps back when Vermillion River still flowed into the lake at the end of their street.

  “Hey,” North had said. “Is Kara coming to the funeral?”

  Amy shrugged. “I guess.”

  After high school, Kara had taken a scholarship to SMU, and three years later she moved to San Francisco and got engaged to Jim, an older man with a company. It had taken her mother an entire day to track down a number where Kara could be reached, her husband’s representatives at first unable or unwilling to provide the information.

  And Kara was not at the funeral today. Sun flared in the priest’s glasses. He made the sign of the cross as the coffin lowered. Alone, Amy’s mother dropped a handful of dirt onto the casket. One of her friends, a very old elementary school teacher, held her by the arm and shoulder as she let the dirt fall.

  On that night when Amy first saw her sister’s breasts, a sheriff’s deputy had woken the family at a very late hour. He’d brought Kara home. Amy and Christian had crept out of their rooms, peering around the corner to the front door. They saw the deputy talking to their parents, Kara silent and furious-looking. Their voices were murmurs to Amy and Christian, but they both understood that the deputy had caught their sister parked in a car with a boy. There was some offense beyond that, though, because the boy didn’t sound like North Godcheaux. When the deputy left, their father locked the door and slapped Kara’s face. He said he didn’t raise her to be a nigger-lover. He’d called her names while their mother remained silent nearby. She stood in her long white nightgown, hands on her big hips and her head bowed, the rosary she took to bed still gripped in a fist.

  Kara pushed past her parents and down the hallway, past Amy and Christian, and she slammed the door to her room. Their mother followed, going to
her own room and leaving their father alone in the foyer. A tall claims lawyer in a small town full of lawyers, Mr. Placide’s neck bowed from looking downward his whole life. Most nights he watched TV alone in the living room, where he would sleep on his recliner. He came into the hall and saw Amy and Christian. Their father would be at a loss to explain his next action. He had meant to say something to the two children, something about how late it was, but instead he struck Christian across the mouth with the heel of his hand. He seemed confused a moment, then told them both to go to bed. He walked back to the living room. They heard the television turn on. Somebody said something and a laugh track played.

  Lying in the dark of her own room, Amy had felt dread, fear for a vague thing that would be worse than what just took place. Her room seemed different around her. She didn’t recognize the shapes on her walls.

  North’s face glistened, freshly shaved. When he’d arrived at the church, Amy had seen him searching the small crowd for her sister, the girl from whom he’d never recovered. She felt his disappointment. She remembered when he came in the drugstore a month ago, bought a box of Band-Aids and at the register said, “Hey, you’re Kara’s sister, aren’t you?”

  Her father appeared at her side. Amy was standing outside the circle of people that had gathered around her mother, and he stumbled forward a little, pressing her close to his chest. He smelled like gin. “It’ll be all right, sweetheart.” His hand thumped her back too hard. Suzanne conveyed sympathy. “He was a tough kid,” her father said, turning his head to his wife, keeping his hand on Amy’s shoulder. “He really was.”

  Amy nodded. He had been. In his later adolescence, after Kara left, Christian brawled continuously. Twice, families of other young men had threatened legal action. When he was seventeen, he’d had to have two teeth replaced and acquired a scar between his nose and lip.

  Her father said, “I’m going to get to the bottom of this. I’m going to figure it out.” He was silent a moment and he turned abruptly to Suzanne, attempting to smile. “I used to beat the hell out of him.” His lower lip trembled. His face collapsed, slowly, like a child who realizes his knee is skinned. “I did.”