by Lori Roy
A single bulb at the bottom of the stairs lights up. It hangs from the ceiling, a bare bulb dangling from a wire. The light shifts, as if her opening the door has caused the bulb to sway. Her eyes are drawn to it first, that single bulb that cuts a yellow cone into the darkness below. And then there is a movement. She lowers her eyes to the floor beneath the bulb. It’s a person. A small person. A child. He, maybe she, looks up at Imogene. The child leans left and right, tips forward as if squinting to see who is standing at the top of the stairs, looking down. Yes, it’s a child.
Chapter 8
BETH
Before
Mama and I have fallen asleep on the sofa. We do that sometimes on Saturday nights. Mama always does her going out on Fridays, so Saturday night is family time and that means only Mama and me. Mama never stays up late on Saturdays because Sunday is church and church is an early morning. We always go because it keeps the lady who started coming after Mama almost drank oleander tea off our backs; that’s how Mama says it. But we also go because Mama can sing there, and Mama is about the best singer ever. People are nice to us there too, and we always see Julie Anna and her parents. Ever since they came to town, Mama likes to tell Mr. and Mrs. Perez all about how good I do in school and how I’m going to go to college just like their Julie Anna.
I know I’m on the sofa because I can’t unfold my legs and that makes my knees ache. We’re all tangled up, Mama and me. And I’m cold. I want Mama’s white blanket, the fuzzy one that reaches all the way around the both of us. I shove at Mama so she’ll scoot over and wrap her one arm around me, let me wiggle up alongside her and rest my head on her shoulder. I say her name, think I say her name, but my mouth is dry and maybe nothing comes out.
It’s loud too. I want quiet so I can sleep, but my hands are stuck and I can’t press them over my ears. My one hip and shoulder throb because I am rolled over on my side. I’m not lying on the soft sofa with pillows stacked all around. I am lying on something hard, and my body is shaking because I’m cold and shaking because something is rattling beneath me. My teeth knock against each other. It’s dark in here, wet and filled with a roar. It’s like lying in the back of Mama’s car when we drive home from Madison, where we go every year to see the houses lit up for Christmas. It’s always late and Mama lets me sleep in the back seat on that one special night only.
The sound changes. I open my eyes but opening them doesn’t work because it’s still dark. The rattle slows. There it is again . . . the slowing of tires on a dirt road. Just like the black truck on our dirt road. I’m in a car, or a truck maybe. It slows some more, and then my teeth stop knocking up against each other, my head stops bouncing. I am still and I remember Mama. Her hair was like fluffed silk before she left the house and her skin sparkled because she polished herself with glittery lotion. She always does that on karaoke nights because a lady needs a little help after a certain age.
Footsteps are growing louder, but not Mama’s footsteps. She walks on the cement sidewalk when she comes home from work and she takes care of old folks so her shoes have rubbery soles and make no noise. These footsteps are loud and growing louder. They come from shoes walking on dirt and gravel. I try to believe they are Mama’s, and I almost do until I remember Julie Anna and the man with the fists. I screamed and he heard me and in a few long steps, he was in my room and now I’m gone.
I know the sound of keys in a lock too, Mama pulling hers from her purse, standing on the porch and sifting through them, and then the rattling as she slides her key into the lock. Except, this time, the keys don’t rattle outside the front door and the sound of the lock popping, those tiny gears lining up perfect so the door will open, is loud because it’s right here near my head. I pinch my eyes closed as something above lifts and cold air washes over me. I suck in a deep breath, cough because it’s too much air.
Something orange glows on the other side of my closed eyes. I hope it’s the Sunday morning sun, waking us up for church. I open my eyes but have to squint. It’s a single stream of light and all around it is darkness. I blink, try to shield my eyes, but my arms won’t move. The light shifts and hands appear. I hope for Mama’s hands. She has tiny wrists and closely clipped nails so she doesn’t snag the old people’s thin skin. But they aren’t Mama’s hands. The fingers are thick. I stare at those hands as they lift me up and out, my head bouncing off a sharp corner. Mostly, I see thumbs, two. And yellow, crooked fingernails.
I’m standing now, and the bright yellow light has slipped off to the side. The thumbs with split yellow nails aren’t denting my arms anymore. Something shakes me. My head is heavy and hangs off to the side. Everything is tilted. I stumble. Those hands grab hold of me again.
“Jesus,” a voice says. “Are you even in there?”
He’s a dark shadow. I see only parts of him. A gold metal circle on his pocket. A rivet, that’s what Mama calls them and gets angry when I dig at them. Yellow stitching on dark denim. The tail of a blue flannel shirt. Black laces, frayed at the end, no plastic tip. I want to say something but can’t. Mama sometimes has dreams like that, where she wants to talk or shout or scream but no matter how deep she inhales or how wide she opens her mouth, nothing comes out. Terrible, she always says when she sees me the next morning, and then she hugs me like I am the reason she was trying to scream. Mama saying that makes me worry that maybe one day those dreams of hers will leak out into the daytime.
“Jesus,” the man says over and over. He shakes me. “Jesus Christ. Are you okay?”
He keeps muttering to himself, and he’s walking now, back and forth, so I must be standing on my own. We’re in the back of a pickup and it moves under my feet as he pounds three steps this way, three that way. I’m like Julie Anna now, like the sock doll I keep on my dresser. Its arms and legs are stuffed with old sheets Mama and I tore into strips. Its hair is made of red yarn. I am a nude-colored stocking doll stuffed with old torn-up sheets, yellowed from too many washings.
“We drove all night,” the man says, grabbing hold of me. I think it’s the man with the pizza who hurt Julie Anna. “And all the next day too. You hear me?”
He shakes me. My head bounces, hangs off to one side and won’t straighten.
“Hey, you hear me? That’s how far we come.”
The man sounds like he’s far away on the other side of something. I want to say I can hardly hear him, but I can’t. I can’t say anything.
“You understand me?” he says, knocking one of his knuckles on the top of my head. His voice is loud again, right next to me. “We’re nowhere near your house. Long ways away. So don’t even think you can run off and find your way home.”
He drops me over the truck’s edge to the ground. And then he’s pulling me so I walk. His boots are loud, and I follow the sound. There are other sounds too. Leaves rustling like they do in the oak tree by the road. Something is buzzing. I smell wet ground and slippery leaves and mossy rocks in a river. When I step onto something hard like the sidewalk outside our house, from somewhere far away on the other side of something, he tells me to stay put. Keys rattle, a door opens, and a light pops on.
“Just for now,” he says.
I’m lifted again, and then I’m sitting on more hard ground. I pull my knees to my chest and rest my head there. The flashlight shines on my legs. Five pecans lay by my feet. They are covered over with a dusty spiderweb. Pecans, brownish red, smooth, just like we have in the trees at home. He hasn’t driven me so far away after all.
“You be good,” he says. The light switches off. His voice floats to me through the dark.
On Sunday, Mama is making baked chicken and pineapple casserole. It’s my favorite. Julie Anna said just tonight she might come over special when Mama is cooking so she can learn how to make it.
The door squeals and closes. And the lock snaps into place.
Chapter 9
IMOGENE
Today
Imogene learned to swim in the lake that runs between the old caretaker’s house an
d Mama’s house, or tried to learn. The lake was once the lifeblood of the farm because just south of it, near the fall line, the land turns sandy and drops steadily until it reaches the river and continues beyond. That piece of land, which Mama’s family once owned, is prone to flooding, being wedged like it is between the lake and the river. It’s what made for good rice-growing land in a place where not much rice was grown, but once slave labor was lost, the economies collapsed. In the wake of the war, much of the acreage, including all the land beyond the lake, was sold off to pay taxes, and Mama’s family took up dairy farming for a time. And now they’re in the business of rental properties. Daddy finds the houses and decides which ones to buy. Eddie cleans them, repaints them, and maintains them best he can without investing any real money, and collects the rents. He isn’t allowed to do any plumbing or electrical work, because he ends up costing more money than he saves. Garland does the accounting and banking and works out the financing.
On the day Imogene learned to swim, the lake was twenty feet at its deepest, likely still is, and even though it had been July, the water was cold enough to shock the air from her lungs. Eddie and Jo Lynne were supposed to be watching over her that day. But Jo Lynne was mostly busy with Garland, the both of them huddled together under the shade of the pines that lined the lake. Even back then, long before they married, Garland was doing Jo Lynne’s bidding. He had been ever since they were kids, growing up together. They both came from suitable families, and their getting married had long been assumed.
Imogene had been hearing the story of the lake from Eddie for as long as she could remember. They’d sit together, she and Eddie, on the sandy patch at the lake’s northern end, on an early foggy morning when he’d maybe taken her fishing or on a late dusky afternoon when they’d been tossing stones, and he’d point to the other end, so far away a person couldn’t hardly see it, and say, your real daddy lives a way over there. A way on the other side. Not your pretend daddy. Your real daddy. You learn to swim, you can see him, if you dare. You’ll finally know who he is. Know where you come from. Can’t you almost see him? Can’t you, Imogene? Are you brave enough? And he’d tell her that the lake, this lake right here on their own property, was magical. It lay nearer to heaven than any other place on earth. That was why Daddy and the other men gathered on that sandy patch, had been for years, even men who came long before Daddy. Just look how the clouds settle here and don’t settle no place else. You dare to find your real daddy, this lake’ll get you to him, and sometimes he’d laugh a little and if Jo Lynne was along, she’d holler at him to quiet himself down.
When Imogene was real young, she’d cry and say she had a real daddy, same daddy as Eddie and Jo Lynne, and Mama would holler at Eddie for telling such stories. Sure, Mama, he’d say, and then to Imogene he’d say, you got the same Daddy as me and Jo Lynne. But once the story was told, it couldn’t be untold, and Imogene always knew her real daddy was out there, maybe across the magical lake that lay nearer to heaven than any other place on earth.
It was her twelfth birthday the day she decided to swim all the way across, and she figured twelve was old enough. The next year she’d be thirteen, and thirteen was near an adult. Wading out toward the middle until she was standing on her tiptoes, she stretched her chin to keep her head above water, all the while keeping her eyes on the farthest southern shore.
“That’s it,” Jo Lynne was hollering from the sandy bank. She was twenty-one and almost done with her studies to become a social worker. She wanted to do something helpful to the community until the day she had children of her own, and then she’d quit working to stay home with them. “You’re doing it. You’re almost doing it.”
Jo Lynne wore a pink dress that day, and her smooth yellow hair was held from her face with a matching pink band. All together, it made her look like she’d just been peeled off a postcard. All her life, Jo Lynne had had that snapshot-ready look about her. Next to her, Garland was on his hands and knees as he brushed the pine needles from the blanket so Jo Lynne didn’t snag her dress. Imogene waved at them both and then went back to drawing her hands forward and back through the water to steady herself, just like Jo Lynne taught her.
“Now swim on back this way,” Jo Lynne said. “No more touching bottom. Swim, Imogene. Swim on back this way. Reach and kick. Reach and kick.”
Jo Lynne didn’t know that was the day Imogene planned to find her real daddy all the way over on the other side.
“Come on back this way,” Jo Lynne shouted. “Reach with your arms. Kick hard now.”
Jo Lynne’s cheering made Imogene want to swim so bad, made her want to draw her arms through the water, smooth like Jo Lynne did when she slipped into her tiny bikini with ties on the bottom and took to the lake. She’d glide through the water with beauty and elegance, her long limbs working together as smooth as if she were dancing on waxed pine. Jo Lynne swam like no other person Imogene had ever seen, and that’s what Imogene wanted to do because that would make her like a real sister to Jo Lynne even if they didn’t have the same real daddy. Them being real sisters would carry Imogene as far as she needed to go.
But as hard as she tried, Imogene couldn’t get her feet to let go of the bottom. With her toes, she clung to it, tiptoeing over the silky-soft mud, and the harder she tried to steady herself by pulling and pushing at the water with her arms, the deeper she drifted. She stretched her legs, wiggled her toes, and then the bottom was gone and there was nothing to hold on to anymore. Her long curls floated like red twine on the water, some of them drifting into her mouth so she had to spit and cough them out. Her red hair, the thing that reminded everyone she wasn’t a real Coulter and that she’d never belong and that she was the unholy one.
And then there was Eddie. Imogene didn’t see him, but she heard him. He was weaving his way along the rocky bank and in among the pines, somewhere out there, watching her slip closer and closer to the middle, where she couldn’t touch. Eddie was seventeen years older than Imogene, and he came and went from Mama and Daddy’s house as he pleased.
“It’s getting dark, little girly,” he shouted, his voice rising and falling like he was singing a song. “It’s getting dark and the earwigs is coming.”
There was no tide, no stream tugging, but still the water was pushing Imogene and pulling her and she was fighting to keep her head above it.
“You got to start swimming now.”
It was Jo Lynne’s voice. And then Eddie again. He was laughing.
“Them earwigs going to get you. Going to claw their way inside your brains.”
Imogene dreamed about the earwigs sometimes, crawling over her white pillowcase, climbing her mountain of red curls. She’d wake some nights, wondering if one of those earwigs had crawled inside her ear, burrowed into her brains, and laid its eggs, because Eddie said they liked young girls’ brains best for egg laying. And she felt them now. One brushed past an earlobe; another knocked up against a shoulder. Or maybe that was her hair, floating with the water that was carrying her deeper into the lake.
“Little earwigs burrowing into your brain.”
Imogene began to swat at the bugs, to swing left and right. She kicked her feet, searching for the bottom, but it was gone. She coughed, choked. The water swamped her, dragged her under. She wasn’t going to make it across. Her lungs ached. She fought the weight of her arms, fought to make her legs move. The day had turned suddenly dark. She was sinking. The world above was slipping away.
And then something clamped on, a hand that grabbed her by the arm and pulled at her. The light overhead grew brighter. When her face broke through the surface of the lake, she gasped, drew in a breath of air. Once back on land, Imogene collapsed on the warm sand and looked up at Jo Lynne. Her pink dress hung limp with water, her blond hair stuck to her face and shoulders, her matching pink headband was gone, and she was hollering at Garland, telling him he was no man of any kind because he was still safe and dry. But that one breath Imogene took after going so long without, that’s wh
at she remembers most from that day, and that’s the breath she takes when she sees a child there at the bottom of the stairs leading down to the basement in the old house where Grandpa Simmons once lived. It’s the breath that starts her going again, shakes loose the panic, and brings the world back into focus. And as quick as she inhales, the child is gone.
Chapter 10
BETH
Before
I know it’s daytime by the slivers of light that leak through the roof. Long-handled tools lean in the corners and the concrete floor is spotted with something black. I shift from one hip to the other and dust lifts into the air and sparkles in those tiny slivers of sunshine. I sleep and wake. It’s dark and then light. In school this year, we learned all about the universe, and overhead, the planets are spinning around the sun, making it day and night and day again. I had wanted to invite Ellie and Fran for a sleepover so we could camp in the backyard and lay our sleeping bags in the grass and stare up at the night sky to see those planets, but Mama said don’t bother because they wouldn’t be allowed.
When the door opens, I think I’m still alive. It’s dark again. Mama, I think I say, but maybe not. A bright light pops on and shines in my face. A flashlight. And a man is moving toward me, slowly, sideways like Mama when she sneaks up on the black racers that like the cool rocks our house sits on. The floor bounces each time his boots hit.
“Good God almighty,” he says. “Stinks to high heaven in here.”