Along the Indigo

by Elsie Chapman

  The work was simple. And in between bouts of small talk, Jude fell silent and seemed utterly lost in thought. Marsden found her mind wandering, too, to this puzzle of a boy walking beside her, and the way he carried his tragic family around like a layer of invisible bruises set over being tough.

  The dead of the covert remained silent, refusing to speak to her. Despite his brother being there with her, there was no hint of Rigby. No hint of her father, either.

  Marsden wished it didn’t bother her as much as it did, never being able to hear voices despite supposedly having the ability to. If anything, she should be happy—she was in the covert enough that the last thing she needed were ghosts trying to get her to pass on messages to the living. Or listening to them tell her just how wrong her skimming was.

  And what if she did hear Rigby one day? And the things he wanted her to tell his brother only made Jude sadder? What if he wanted her to tell him about his note that she was hiding? What if she finally heard her father and he told her the thing she dreaded most was true? That he had hated being a father more than he wanted to be alive?

  But all it took to make her keep trying was the single hope of hearing him tell her it really had been accident. And that he didn’t regret her and hadn’t meant to leave them.

  She passed the detector over a stretch of dried-out dandelions, their blooms gone a mustard yellow, and tried to ignore how Jude stayed close enough that she could still smell his damn soap.

  “Read any good books lately?” he asked, his tone deliberately flippant. It didn’t make him appear any less tense. She knew he was imagining all the terrible things that would have happened around him, was seeing his brother in the covert’s midnight corners and the depths of its strange foliage. “Or been to the movies? What do you do when you need a break from this place?”

  Marsden kept her eyes on the ground. Dying dandelions disappeared as she and Jude moved on to crush a small patch of sweet woodruff. The detector rumbled in her hand, and she thought of trucks driving along the highway, shaking the beds of the Indigo (no signs of gold, though). “I don’t. I’m here. I work. And summer means Wynn’s home—I have to babysit a lot.”

  She couldn’t tell him the rest. About having to fit in skimming, about juggling Wynn against the schedule of the boardinghouse. She didn’t want to mention how going out for fun was the very opposite of how she liked to blend in. She dreaded running into groups of kids from school whose whispers to one another held echoes of Shine’s name, who would cheerfully call out to her the same stupid questions about serial killers and people gone missing. Kids who only seemed whiter on account of her own whiteness, the side of her that did nothing but emphasize the part that wasn’t. She thought about people staring at Jude and, if they did, whether it was for the color of his skin as much as it was for Rigby and his father.

  “My best friends, Owen and Karey, drag me out as often as they can.” Jude ran the detector in long arcs over a raised ridge of ground. “But reality just sits there in my brain, waiting to remind me as soon as the movie’s over. He’s still gone. The credits will roll, the lights will come on, and he’ll still be gone.”

  “They probably don’t know what else to do.” Marsden attached faces to the names of his friends, both of them white like nearly everyone else in Glory: Owen, tall and handsome, his face the kind made to gaze from magazine ads; Karey, with his long blond hair and drowsy drawl of a smile, America at its beachiest. She knew them, and yet she didn’t, exactly as she’d known Jude before the forever absence of his brother drew them together.

  “We’ve been to enough movies over the last couple of weeks that the food counter down at the Cineplex knows our popcorn orders by heart. There’s an Eddie Murphy playing tonight.”

  “You like him?”

  “Yeah, he’s funny as hell. Bill Murray, Chevy Chase, Steve Martin—I’ll watch them all, but Murphy’s my favorite. Dude’s black, and he’s on the big screen—it’s cool seeing that.”

  Marsden heard it in his voice, the simple acknowledgment that he knew he was different, and found herself nodding. She could count on one hand families like theirs in town, had always been able to. The quota was low in Glory.

  “You’re Chinese, right?” he asked. “Half?”

  “Yes.” She was surprised but not surprised that he knew enough to guess. For years, they’d never had real reason to connect, despite having shared lots of the same spaces at school. But they were also two of a very small club, noticing each other the same way shy new kids in class couldn’t help but notice each other, united in their not belonging.

  To keep Jude from asking anything else about her family, she asked first. “You moved here from out East?”

  He nodded. “I still have family out there, my uncles—my mom’s two younger brothers—and my aunts. A couple of cousins.”

  “All on your mom’s side?”

  Another nod.

  She waited for him to add something about his father’s side of the family, knowing that Leo Ambrose had also been born and bred out East. But he stayed silent, and she decided the omission was purposeful.

  Marsden went along with it, and decided to ask him about safe things again.

  “Your friends are Murphy fans, too?”

  “Yeah, but not like me. And not like Rig was. We used to make a point of watching his movies whenever they came on television, or we’d rent a bunch and just play them on a loop. And Owen and Karey know that. Which is why they won’t let me get out of going tonight. They’re worried I’ll be especially . . . I don’t know, fragile, I guess. The thing is, I’m still too mad to be fragile.” Jude’s features were drawn beneath the burnished brown of his skin. His words seemed pulled from him. “Like you said, I might not have been able to stop him, no matter what. But I can still be angry at him for getting what he wanted.”

  Marsden stopped walking, dragged to a halt—not by the fury she heard, but the plea for answers she knew too well.

  “There were no clues?” She sensed the ghostly weight of Rigby’s letter, as heavy and dangerous as a bomb. “Your father. Maybe he knows?”

  “My father?” Jude’s smile was cold, bitter. “Whatever drove Rig to do what he did, who do you think played a part in it?” He began to walk again, staring only at the ground as he swept and swept. “Not only him, but me, too.”

  The echo of her father blaming her for his misery, for being a trap, pounded in her ears. She walked alongside Jude, her throat dry. “What do you mean you played a part?”

  “I was nine, it was the science fair, and I had this project, and . . . something happened that night, and it made Rig change.” His voice had gone choppy, full of tiny little breaks. “He just kind of . . . faded or something. He was there, but he also wasn’t, like he’d run out of things to say. I joked with him once, about living with a ghost.”

  Her father, also only ever half there. “What did he say?” she asked, her lips stiff.

  “He said everything was fine and that nothing was going on. That I needed to quit imagining things.” Jude was still sweeping the detector, circling over fields of ginger. The plants grew thick, turning the ground springy. “A kid gets first prize at the science fair—it’s supposed to be a good day, you know? And a lot of that day was. Dad didn’t even crack his first beer until we got home from dinner. But then I remember leaving to get root beer floats and falling asleep in our truck somewhere along the way. I remember Rig carrying me back inside the house, feeling safe as I slept against his shoulder. Then he and my dad, talking in whispers—I dreamed their voices were like fish, darting around in the river. I still don’t know what they were talking about.”

  “Why can’t you ask your dad?” Marsden recalled the stories about Leo Ambrose’s temper, how it and his fists had been fueled by alcohol.

  “I did, once. He also had nothing to say about it, just like Rig didn’t.” Jude’s gaze lasered into the ground, his hair falling back down over his forehead as he used the detector. It made a high, thin
buzz as it worked. “He actually stopped drinking for a long time after that night. Maybe it was what he and Rig were whispering about after we got back, but I don’t know.” He shrugged. “And he’s drinking again, now that Rig’s gone. So I can’t ask him.”

  Everything he left unsaid rang throughout the woods, came back at them like a boomerang. She saw an image of a little boy with wavy raven hair and a bruised cheek, huge eyes streaming as he ran past shelves of books toward the one person who would keep him safe.

  “But, I’m confused,” she admitted. “Your dad did stop for a while, you said. From when you were nine until now—so why would that make your brother unhappy?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Except . . . I remembered something else. It was when I first came here to ask you about the covert, and it happened while I was driving over.”

  The sudden gift of a memory, the crack of a seal—why did the air seem to chill? “What was it?”

  “I passed by a broken-down car along the highway, so I pulled over to see if I could help or something. But the driver wasn’t anywhere—he must have gone to call for a tow truck, I figured later—so I sat there in the truck waiting to see if he’d show, just looking around. I noticed how the part of the shore the car was on was really narrow, and how it seemed like the river could practically pull the car right in if it didn’t get picked up soon. I thought about how the driver was lucky the car didn’t break down at night, since being stuck on the highway in the dark isn’t much fun. And how if there’s a storm, it’s even more dangerous.” Jude let out a tight, humorless laugh. “I’d cranked the window open, and that metal stink of the Indigo rolled in, you know? I could taste it in the back of my throat, even. And hundreds of times I’ve driven past that point along the highway without . . . It came in flashes, Marsden. The memory. Science-fair night.”

  “Go on.” She was rapt. Daylight had fallen away, the covert was gone, she was standing on a muddy beach watching a storm roll through the town.

  “I was in the backseat of the truck, half-asleep. We were parked—from the smell in the air, I could tell we were close to the river. It was raining outside, coming down fast in sheets, I could hear it pounding on the truck’s roof. Then Rig was there again, scrambling into the front seat, and we were racing down the highway toward home.

  “He would have only been thirteen, but he was big for his age, and he’d learned to drive at Evergreen, spinning the shop trucks around the parking lot.” Jude turned off the detector then, and the covert fell dead silent. When he spoke again, his voice was full of defeat. “Whatever happened that night, I was right there with Rig. And whatever happened, it took place out there along the highway, along the Indigo.”

  seventeen.

  The next day, the sun rose and attempted to burn the whole place down.

  Townsfolk joked uneasily about Glory now being hell on earth for real, before darting back indoors, away from a heat that made the surfaces of buildings and cars ripple like water.

  But still the covert called, and still guests needed to be fed.

  By dawn, Marsden had made her way back to the boardinghouse. No bodies to report that morning, and she’d met this with her usual mess of emotions—relief, frustration, panic, guilt. She tried not to think about Jude just being there yesterday, how aside from a handful of coins and various metal bits, they’d come up empty, too.

  He would be back tomorrow afternoon, ready to keep looking.

  She couldn’t deny that she wanted to see him again.

  Breakfast was served in the dining room—eggs, toast, Canadian bacon, Bloody Marys—while she and Wynn ate in the kitchen. Not Lucky Charms this time, but Cap’n Crunch and strawberry milk. They ate like furtive mice, trying not to get caught. Like ghosts in the house, there but not there.

  “Can you come shopping with us today?” Wynn asked, blowing milk bubbles with her straw. The pink spheres climbed the inside of her glass, threatening to spill over. “It’s Dany’s turn to make lunch, not yours, right?”

  “Hmm?” Marsden was distracted. She was still thinking about Jude and how he was different from what she’d expected. Nicer. Easier to talk to. More open. She wondered if he thought the same thing about her. If she was less closed off than the person he knew from school and heard about in town. She wondered if, outside of the covert, he thought about her at all.

  “Are you okay?” Her sister was leaning in close, her expression more exasperated than concerned. “You look funny.”

  Because I’m thinking of funny things, Wynn. Waste-of-time funny things. She had to remember that Jude was a blip during this overly hot summer, a once-in-a-lifetime disturbance that would soon be dealt with and eventually forgotten. “Sorry, just watching your bubbles die a quick death. What’s up?”

  “Can you come shopping with us this morning? I like Peaches and Lucy, but I want to go with you, too.”

  A shard of ice formed in Marsden’s stomach. “You’re clothes shopping?” Shine had promised to take her younger daughter to the farmer’s market. Wynn had been excited, her mother’s time a rare thing. Marsden had intended to go down to Seconds, armed with questions for Fitz, her father’s old friend. I need you to tell me about that night.

  “Yes! For a dress! I want one just like the ones they wore last night to dinner. Mom said fine and gave me some money—I think she felt bad that she forgot she was busy. Peaches and Lucy also said that if there was time afterward, they’d treat me to the salon to get my hair and nails done.” Wynn’s grin was a beam of delight, huge and enveloping, and it left Marsden frozen.

  “You already have a lot of nice clothes, you know,” Marsden whispered through the hollow in her stomach. “Dany always finds them for you. And dresses—you won’t be able to run around as easily, or climb—”

  “Sure I can—why wouldn’t I? So, will you please come with us? Please?”

  Marsden silently willed Nina, Peaches, and Lucy into aging massively overnight. She prayed all the johns in town would lose every single cent down at Decks. Finally, she pictured Shine, and she wasn’t sure what to feel at all.

  “I’ll come,” she said, trying to sound normal, doing her best to hide the panic that welled. Seconds and Fitz and her questions would have to wait one more day. “I just need to do the dishes first, okay?”

  Her little sister beamed again, slid off her chair, and began to clear the table. “I’ll help you so we can leave earlier.”

  “And Wynn?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I don’t think Peaches and Lucy would mind if we ask them to come along another time. Just you and me, okay?”

  • • •

  She knew it was sabotage, and she didn’t care.

  Being heartless came easily when the alternative was losing her little sister to the clutches of Nina, to the desperation of their mother, to the clueless but obviously good intentions of Peaches and Lucy.

  Not that one, Wynn, the collar is too loose.

  No, the material is too shiny.

  The color is too bright.

  You’ll get sick of the print.

  It was close to noon, Marsden had seen enough dresses to last her for multiple lifetimes, and Wynn had gone mostly silent.

  “We can look again when the stores get fall stock in.” Marsden wheeled her bike along the sidewalk—beside her, Wynn pushed her own along, her face clouded. “But for now, how about some lunch? We have the money Dany gave us to buy coffee, remember? And if you don’t care about saving the dress money, we can use that, too.”

  “We’ll need that money for a dress the next time we go,” her sister muttered. “And we’re not supposed to spend kitchen money on ourselves, or Dany’s going to stop trusting you with it.”

  “I’ll tell her she can take it out of my pay.” Marsden knew full well Dany wouldn’t, not after she told her it was for lunch for Wynn. Dany was especially soft with her sister, indulgent when it came to making up for Shine as a mother. “The Burger Pit is right up the block—sound good?�
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  They rarely ate out, but when they did, and when it was up to Wynn to choose the place, it was always in the running. With its bottomless drinks bar, its long wooden tables covered with rolls of coloring paper, and the oversize cow jar at the front counter that mooed with the removal of each cookie from its belly, the Burger Pit was one of Glory’s busiest restaurants with its locals if not its tourists.

  What her sister didn’t know was that each evening, halfway through dinner service, the Burger Pit’s side entrance opened for business and the basement floor came to life.

  Five dollars bought someone fifteen minutes with one of the viewing slots and his choice of peep video.

  Ten meant a viewing slot and a live show.

  A whole twenty meant a private booth and choice of live performer.

  Marsden knew Nina’s johns were frequent visitors of the place—they’d come crawling into the boardinghouse after they were done, smelling of fried cheese and the Pit’s house beer, their eyes and hands especially friendly. On those evenings, she would drag Wynn even farther away from the premises and sit outside the covert, trying not to be horrified by the future while her sister played beside her, making houses of leaves and sticks for the bugs, for her much-longed-for pets. She would sit there and recall Shine sitting on a bench in the bus depot, frozen.

  Now the sun was straight overheard, searing noon into their scalps—the Burger Pit would be safe for hours.

  Wynn gave in, unable to sulk in the face of cheeseburgers and tater tots. “Can we get the bottomless sodas?”

  “Fine, twist my arm.”

  Her sister scrambled onto her bike and took off down the sidewalk, weaving around other people on the sidewalk with a speed that had Marsden cringing.

  “Hey, slow down,” she called out, “you’re going to—”

  Too late. A group of guys stepped onto the sidewalk at exactly the wrong moment, and Wynn careened toward them like a rocket with too much fuel. There was a squealing of brakes and a muffled oath and Marsden blew out a sigh, climbed onto her bike, and rode over.