by Lori Roy
My thighs ache from having squatted for so long, and holding myself half-up and half-down is going to be difficult. I’ll straighten my legs but bend at the waist so I’ll still be half my size and shorter than the grass. As I’m pushing myself into this posture, the ache in my back springs up, but I can bear that better than trying to force the muscles in my thighs to continue to carry my weight. They’ve done all they can do.
I make my way to the row of grass that runs along the worn patch of dirt outside the back of the house. No light comes from inside, but the moon is bright enough that I can clearly make out the back door. And then I smell something. It’s familiar, like some of those faces I see on the television. It’s smoke from a chimney. Mama used to build fires in our fireplace during the coldest months, but not often because the wood was expensive and she wasn’t cutting her own. It must be coming from the main house, and that means it isn’t so far away.
My legs feel stronger now, and I think they’ll work when I need to run. I can see the door to the house and he hasn’t shouted out at me and the smoke means we’re not far from help. It’s adrenaline. I thought I had run dry, but it’s giving me a second chance. Another one of my spelling words. Adrenaline. Being careful not to let my breathing get away from me, I smile. I’m ready to run now and can carry Christopher as far as I have to. And then just as I smelled something I remembered from a long time ago, I hear something too. It’s crunching and tiny rocks splattering. It’s tires on a gravel road.
“Don’t you say a word.”
My knees buckle and I’m on the ground again, pressing against the thick blades. They scratch my cheeks and eyelids, stick between my lips. He’s close. I hold my breath or, rather, I stop breathing. I don’t have time even to take in a lungful of air to tide me over. He must not know how close he is—warm, hot, boiling over—or he’d have grabbed me. Moving slowly, only my head and nothing else, I look up because it sounded as if his voice came from directly overhead. The space above me and as far as I can see is empty, but I’m hemmed in on all sides by the stalks. They tower over me and I don’t know where he might be.
“If you can hear me, don’t say a word, don’t move a Goddamn muscle, or the boy is dead.”
I close my eyes, squeeze them as tightly as I can so I won’t cry. I squeeze them until they burn because I can’t scream.
Headlights come next. They splash across the field and then are gone, and the tires crunching over the dirt and gravel go silent. I can see the east side of the house from where I am, and the faintest yellow glow leaks around that corner. Someone is here. They’ve parked but they’ve left their lights on. Maybe it’s Eddie and now there will be two of them against the one of me.
Chapter 53
IMOGENE
Today
In the kitchen, Imogene sits and waits for Warren to arrive so she can show him Mama’s necklace. She’ll have to explain to him that it disappeared four or five years ago and turned up hanging from Tillie’s register this morning and that Christopher said he’d seen his mama wearing the very same necklace. It’s only been a day since Imogene found Christopher down in that basement, and she has no more answers than when she first carried him up those stairs.
Once Christopher was still and quiet, Imogene crept from the room, and now she sits at the kitchen table and Jo Lynne sits across from her, where she’s jotting notes in a small notebook. Mama is dishing up the fried corn and smothered chops that no one ate and putting it all in the refrigerator. The radio sits nearby, drowning out the sound of her heart. Outside, night has settled in early because of the thick clouds that have blown in. The wind has continued to pick up and is catching in the roof vents and making them rattle. Every so often, a bright flash is followed by a low rumble. Imogene pushes away from the table.
“Don’t trouble the boy,” Jo Lynne says, looking up from her notebook when Imogene starts to stand. “If he wanted to sleep, leave him be. Warren will be here soon enough, and then we’ll have to fetch him.”
Imogene walks to the door onto the front porch instead, pushes aside the curtains, and looks down the dark drive.
“What do you suppose is taking him so long?” she says, because Warren should be here by now.
“It hasn’t been long, Imogene,” Jo Lynne says. “Just calm yourself. Might be raining already in town. You know how bad these roads can get.”
Sitting back at the kitchen table, Imogene twists her hair at the nape of her neck and then presses her hands on the Formica top in hopes of steadying herself. The picture she showed Christopher earlier in the day, before she and Warren left for Tillie’s, is still lying upside down, just as Warren left it. Sliding it toward her, Imogene picks it up. If Christopher was right about the necklace having been the one he’d seen his mama wear, that would be more proof Daddy had been keeping them down in the basement. He had obviously taken the necklace from Mama and given it to Christopher’s mama as some sort of gift, and then, all these years later, somehow it turned up at Tillie’s. Five years later. Christopher and his mama may have been down in that basement for five years.
But the necklace didn’t just turn up. Someone broke into Tillie’s and left it there, and it had to have been Christopher’s mama. But if she’s still out there, why not come for Christopher? Fear. She must think Daddy is still alive and that’s why she’s afraid. She must think her boy is in danger and she’s reaching out to Imogene. Or maybe not. Maybe Imogene has no business trying to figure what any of it means.
Still holding the picture, Imogene stands and walks back to the door, opens it, and steps outside. She moves slowly and quietly as if the hope that Christopher’s mama is out there will get frightened away by any sudden movement. The screened enclosure billows, and the rattling vents are louder out here. As if Imogene might find some answer there in her father’s eyes, she looks down on the picture. It was taken before Imogene was born. Grandpa Simmons was still living and so Daddy hadn’t yet become the one who men traveled the country to meet. Grandpa was still the link to those men who climbed Stone Mountain and lit a cross on fire to reignite the Klan. Studying Daddy’s face, Imogene searches for that thing, the one special quality, that would mark him as a man who could do this thing he has done. But all she sees is a handsome man with dark hair and a squared-off jaw.
The something that has been nagging Imogene since Christopher recognized Mama’s necklace is growing stronger. It’s lifted into her heart, which has begun to beat harder, and it’s pressing on her lungs so that each breath comes faster than the last. She throws open the door and runs through the kitchen toward the hallway leading to her room. Jo Lynne startles and jumps to her feet, her chair tipping backward. Mama drops something. Imogene doesn’t stop when they call out to her. What is it? What’s wrong? Holding tight to the picture frame, she rounds the corner at the end of the hall and throws open her bedroom door. The bed is empty. She stumbles into the room, looks in every corner. She runs back into the hallway, where she pushes past Jo Lynne and Mama, and throws open the bathroom door. It’s empty too.
“Imogene,” Jo Lynne says. “What in God’s name . . .”
Back in Christopher’s room, Imogene shoves the picture in Jo Lynne’s hands, points for Mama to check the closet, and begins yanking blankets off the mattress, shaking them as if Christopher might be hiding there. Then she drops to her knees and looks under the bed. Nothing. Mama shakes her head. She’s found nothing in the closet either. Imogene sits back onto her knees, hands resting on the mattress, and straight ahead she sees it. The curtains are rustling because someone has opened the window and the wind is catching them. She scrambles over the bed, yanks back the heavy drapes. The window is open and the screen is gone.
“Please, Imogene,” Mama says, her arms wrapped around herself. Jo Lynne stands next to her, the picture in one hand and her free arm wrapped around Mama’s shoulders. “What’s going on? Where’s Christopher?”
Imogene yanks the picture from Jo Lynne’s hands and holds it up to both of the
m. “Christopher wasn’t seeing Daddy in this picture,” she says. “He was seeing Eddie.”
Chapter 54
BETH
Before
There is silence again, and then someone, probably the same someone who drove up, is stomping through the giant reeds that grow along the west side of the house. I know they’re there because I would see them on my Sundays. They grow on the west side, but not the east. Nothing grows on the east side.
His feet begin to shuffle. It’s the first I’ve heard of him since he spoke. He’s only a row or two away, and I realize I’ve made another mistake. I’m upwind, although there was no wind when I first ran. He likes me to wear perfume for him. I have a bottle I keep on the one shelf I have. Every Christmas, since I was fourteen and he decided I was old enough, he’s brought me a bottle. Now he might smell it, but his footsteps fade. He’s moving away, and I wonder if he’s moving toward whoever has come here. I wonder if he or she is in danger like me.
Whoever was stomping through the weeds has stopped, but they haven’t left, because the headlights still glow along one side of the house. I don’t think it’s Eddie because he would call out to Eddie for help. There were a few times over the years when I heard someone on the other side of the boarded-up windows. I always imagined, maybe hoped, it was a person and not some sort of animal, or something much worse. There would be a banging, as if someone were trying to pry off the boards. They likely wouldn’t have known they were boarded up on the inside as well. When I was first in the basement, Eddie told me vagrants might happen along, crazy people who’d escaped a hospital. He said they were cold and hungry, mostly hungry. He said those people wouldn’t help me because they couldn’t even help themselves. Goddamn drain is what they are, he would say, and no telling what they’d do to a little girl, living all by herself in a dark, damp basement. Even though I didn’t know what a vagrant was yet—though it would one day be on my spelling list—or why he called them a drain, whenever I heard the banging outside one of the windows, I would turn off my light, sink into the corner of the sofa, and close my eyes until it stopped.
Thinking about crazy people lurking outside the windows, maybe smelling a little girl on the other side, maybe clawing at those boards to dig their way in, was enough to keep me quiet in the beginning, before Christopher came along. I was one person, a child, before Christopher. After, I was another. I was old. Not older, but old. Instantly old. And when that happened, that change in me he surely noticed—the way I carried my shoulders, spoke with my chin high, sometimes buckled my fist—he told me he might be the one banging around. He might be testing us, and if he ever heard me or Christopher, ever heard a single sound or knock or cry for help, he’d take Christopher from me. Christopher changed things in more than one way. Before Christopher, I didn’t care about living. I had been willing to give up on my own life. But Eddie knew I would never be willing to give up on Christopher’s.
The breeze has grown stronger and smoke still tints the air. I draw my knees close, wrap myself up as best I can for warmth. He is as quiet and as still as me. His footsteps fade until I can’t hear them anymore, and now he’s somewhere nearer the other side of the house. Him on one corner, me on the other. A stirring in the yellow glow from the headlights is what makes me turn.
A person appears from around the corner and walks along the back of the house. She, I think it’s a she, walks quickly as if she knows where she’s going. The person goes directly to the back door. The screen squeals like it always does, and as quickly as it slaps closed, another shadow runs from the grass, across the worn patch, and up to the door. It’s him. He stands to the side of the door as if ready to run for cover again should the person inside reappear and leans close to the screen but doesn’t open it. The shadow of him is larger than the real him I left naked in the bed. Though he’s changed over the years, doing things now like rubbing his left knee when he reaches the bottom stair on the days he comes to see me or pressing a hand to his lower back as he stretches and complains, the shadow of him looks large again, as large as the day I first saw him. I don’t know how long he stands there, watching, but something happens that makes him turn and walk, not run, back toward the grass.
“Listen to me,” he says. It isn’t a whisper and it isn’t a shout but instead something in between. It’s a hiss. “Just go. Run. You do that, the boy’ll be fine.”
I don’t look at him. From where I’m crouched, I make myself as small as I can and tuck my head. It’s like it was when I hid from Mama in the pampas grass outside our house. I thought if I couldn’t see her, she couldn’t see me, and I don’t ever want him to see me again. He wants me to leave Christopher behind, and that scares me more even than the thought of him grabbing hold of me and throwing me back in the basement.
As if waiting for me to answer, he pauses. When I don’t, he continues. He must be turning his face slowly across the field because some words cut through the night air and are clear, while others are muffled and drop off before they reach me. I want to cover my ears. If I can’t hear, he’ll be gone and I’ll never feel his hands on me again. It will all be gone. But I can’t. No matter what I don’t hear or see, he will still be there and so will Christopher.
“He’ll forget all this. He’ll forget you too.” Another pause. It’s a long pause, so I force myself to look. He has stepped back to the door to take another look inside. He pulls away quickly.
“Run, Bethy,” he says, crossing into the middle of the open patch of ground. “Run away and don’t never come back here. Never and I swear I won’t harm the boy.”
His shadow moves slowly the rest of the way across the worn patch and melts back into the grass, and for the first time since I ran from the house just as dark was settling in, I don’t feel fear. If he finds me now, he’ll kill me like he killed Alison, but Christopher will live. He understands Christopher is young and can’t do him the harm I could or that Alison could have. During all my planning, I made sure Christopher understood the rules. I told him bad things would happen if he ever broke them, bad things like losing outside time on Sundays and frozen waffles for breakfast or even me. It was the most terrible thing I ever did, making him think I might get taken away, but I did it so he’d always listen.
The rules frightened Christopher, but that fear is also what would save him. He’ll know he isn’t allowed to say the name of the man who comes Sunday and lets us outside for twenty minutes. And I don’t think he knows the name of the man who comes on Wednesday. I only know because sometimes Eddie uses it, and when he does, he acts like it was a mistake, but really I think it isn’t. Eddie resents him because he works with his head while Eddie works with his back. Christopher can’t say my name either. He once asked me who would want to know. Someday, somebody will ask you your mama’s name, I told him, but you can’t tell. You can never tell. Even then, I knew I’d already be gone when that day came. I never told Christopher my last name. It was instinct. There would come a day that I’d be gone, and if I disappeared, so would all the terrible things that happened. That would make Christopher safe.
The cold has exhausted me, and every muscle aches from having to stay still. Fear was the only thing feeding my adrenaline, and now that it’s gone, my arms and legs are empty. They’ve done all they can do, maybe for forever. I lie on my side on the narrow dirt path that runs between the grass, pull my knees to my chest, and rest my head on the ground. I don’t see him anymore. I don’t hear him. I breathe the outside air, something I used to dream about. The smell of dirt and the slippery insides of dandelion stems and the magnolias that grew outside Mama’s house. Just like breathing in life itself. I tuck my hands under the side of my face, and from there, I watch the back door. Whoever is inside will surely find Christopher unless he hides. Surely he or she will find the basement door, see the locks on the outside of it, have seen the single line of electricity running through one window.
“I’ll go,” I shout, my face still pressed to the ground. I’m not sure how loud
ly I say it, or if he heard. “I promise I’ll go.”
When the screen door closes, I don’t see it, but I hear it, and I recognize her straightaway. It must be the hair. It was hidden by something before, a hat probably or a hood. In the dark, I can’t make out the color, but the shape of it, full and thick and frizzy in the damp night air, gives her away. Looking from this angle, my head resting on the ground, it makes me dizzy. I think I’ve fallen asleep and that maybe I’m dreaming. I push myself up, lean on one hand. The swirling in my head settles. I’m not dreaming, though I think the sound of the door closing did wake me. It’s Imogene, and Christopher is cradled in her arms. His head is limp against her shoulders. He’s asleep, just asleep.
I drop to the ground again. The dirt is cool on my face, but I’m not cold anymore. I draw my hands up under my chin. I want to stay awake until the engine starts and the lights disappear and gravel kicks up again under the tires. My eyelids are heavy. I’ll close them for just a moment while I wait for Imogene to make her way back to the front of the house.
Chapter 55
IMOGENE
Today
Leaving Mama and Jo Lynne behind in Christopher’s empty room, Imogene runs down the hallway, into the kitchen, and lunges for the sink. Christopher had been seeing Eddie, not Daddy, in that picture. Her stomach spasms, but she’s empty inside.
“Imogene.” It’s Mama. Her warm hands gather Imogene’s curls, hold them away from her face. “Imogene, what is it?”
“For goodness’ sake,” Jo Lynne says, her heels clicking across the linoleum floor and circling Imogene as she hangs over the sink. “You’re scaring Mama near to death.”