The Roanoke Girls

by Amy Engel

  “I don’t know. It’s not like I have a specific plan. But I don’t picture living here with Gran and Granddad when I’m older. That would be weird.”

  Allegra was already shaking her head. “I don’t think it’s weird. They’re our family. This is where we belong.” She pulled her legs up and hugged her knees to her chest. “I’ll never leave here. Not until the day I die.”

  —

  It was no longer a given that Cooper would be there when Allegra and I met up with Tommy in town. Sometimes he was. Sometimes he wasn’t. Sometimes he was there with some other girl on his arm, her tongue swirling inside his mouth while his blank eyes followed me. This was where we were now. And somehow I’d always known it was where we would end up.

  But tonight it was only the four of us at the park, sharing a bag of food from the hamburger stand and a bottle of bourbon. At some point Tommy and Allegra disappeared, and Cooper drove me home after a stop at the old silo that left us sweaty and sore. Cooper pulled my hair as he came, jerking my head backward, not gentle, not kind. “No matter what, I had you first,” he whispered, his hips bucking, teeth scraping against my throat. “Don’t ever forget. I had you first.” Lately it felt like we were trying to break each other, see who’d be the first to cry uncle and end it once and for all.

  Cooper didn’t linger when he dropped me off, didn’t kiss me good-bye or touch my cheek with the backs of his fingers. He left me with a see ya around, and no backward glance. Roanoke was mostly dark when I let myself in the front door. A faint light glowed from the kitchen, but when I went in, no one was there. I stumbled up the back staircase, drunk on sex and bourbon, the smell of Cooper clinging to me like some exotic perfume. The scent made me feel close to tears, heavy with a melancholy I couldn’t explain, and I was anxious to wash it away.

  I didn’t bother to turn on any lights as I made my way through the dark second floor. Most of the time I showered in the new bathroom down the hall from my bedroom, but sometimes I preferred the old, claw-foot tub at the other end of the house. I picked my way gingerly through the sleeping porch, careful not to snag my toes on the frames of the metal bunk beds. Once in the bathroom, I kept the lights off. The moon peeked in full and bright through the uncovered windows. Allegra hated this bathroom, thought it was old and gross. But I loved how big it was, the wall of windows giving a view of the sky, the cold, white tile floor, the tub with its cracked rubber stopper on a rusted metal chain.

  I sank into the lukewarm water and let my hair drift out behind me. Since the bathroom I usually used had been added on after my mom left, I sometimes imagined her floating in this same tub, me growing inside her. The water nudged over my face, and I closed my eyes. Did she ever think of trying to go under? I have to think she did, knowing how she ended up. I let my head sink lower, the water lapping at the edges of my nose.

  Someone tapped lightly on the bathroom door, and I bolted upright as Gran slipped inside. She carried a half-full crystal highball glass in her hand. I’d never seen Gran with alcohol before.

  “Mind if I join you?” she asked. She didn’t turn on the light. Before I could answer, she’d lowered herself onto a tiny wooden chair at the end of the tub by my feet. It was a child’s chair, and even Gran’s petite frame looked too big for it, her legs bent like a grasshopper’s.

  “Did you need something?” I asked.

  Gran shook her head, took a swallow of her drink. “No. I heard you come in. Thought maybe you wanted to chat. We don’t talk enough, you and I.”

  It took me a second to realize Gran was drunk. Not falling-down, puke-in-a-toilet drunk like Allegra and I got, but definitely not herself. There was a slight slur to her words, and a chunk of her hair had loosened itself from her chignon to lie along her cheek. That’s something a sober Gran never would have allowed. I rarely saw Gran at night. She usually made herself scarce after dinner. For all I knew, this was her usual routine. She could spend her evenings getting quietly sloshed and I’d be none the wiser.

  “Where’s Allegra?” I asked. “Is she home?”

  “Who knows?” Gran said. “I never know where Allegra is. Or if I do, I’d rather not.”

  “She was with Tommy earlier.”

  “Tommy,” Gran scoffed. She waved her arm dismissively, and a bit of alcohol splashed out of her glass, forming a tiny amber puddle on the floor. “He doesn’t know the first thing about who Allegra really is. If he did, he’d run away screaming.”

  I took the bar of soap from where it sat on a metal stand hooked over the side of the tub and lathered my neck and under my arms. I could feel Gran’s eyes on me.

  “You probably think Cooper Sullivan’s always going to be wrapped around your finger, don’t you?” she asked.

  I hadn’t known Gran was aware of Cooper. Until now, Granddad was the only one who’d mentioned him. I finished soaping myself, rinsed with water cupped in my hands. “I don’t think that,” I said finally. In fact, I thought Cooper was probably about done with me. The sheer relief that thought brought was tempered only by the corresponding ache in my breastbone.

  The crystal glass in Gran’s hand caught the moonlight as she lifted it up, swirled the liquid inside before taking another sip. “Probably think that body, that face, will always get you what you want. That men will forever be mesmerized by what’s between your legs.” Her eyes pierced my flesh, probing, judging. “That’s what your mother thought. Always so proud of herself.”

  The girl my gran described was not the woman I knew at all. My mother wore her beauty like a punishment. She couldn’t escape it, so she tried to disguise it, decorated her face with tears instead of makeup, wore clothes designed to conceal, rather than flaunt. I think perhaps the worst day of her life was the morning she woke up and discovered I was destined to look exactly like her. Maybe if I’d been ugly instead, she could have found a way to love me.

  Gran and I stared at each other, and her face folded in on itself, wrinkles hidden in daylight making an appearance in the near darkness. She closed her eyes, pinched the bridge of her nose. When she opened her eyes, her face was impassive again, as if I’d only imagined her momentary loss of control.

  “You be careful, Lane,” she said, pointing at me.

  “What are you talking about? I don’t—”

  “You be careful,” she repeated, stood on unsteady legs. “I’m just about done raising other people’s children.”

  I’ve started taking long walks through the fields surrounding Roanoke during the day. I tell myself I’m looking for clues about what happened to Allegra, but really, I don’t know what else to do with myself. I was stupid to think I could be the one to help Allegra. It’s more obvious every day that I can barely manage to take care of myself. Did I actually think I’d ask a few questions, make people a little uncomfortable, and the truth about Allegra would come tumbling out? I’ve exhausted my ideas, and the entire town of Osage Flats feels off-limits after my fight with Cooper anyway. It’s more his territory than mine, and I don’t want to run into him, see that cold, distant look on his face. And Roanoke is just as bad, Granddad weepy-eyed and quiet, Gran drifting from room to room like a ghost.

  It was clear and hot when I left the house after lunch, but only an hour later dark clouds are rolling in fast from the western horizon, blotting out the sun. I try to beat the weather back, but I’m soaked through to the skin by the time I reach Roanoke, the rain falling in thick sheets that obscure the ground only steps in front of me. I’ve never seen it rain anywhere else the way it rains in Kansas, like the sky has something to prove, each thunder crack in a contest to be the loudest, the ground quivering under the aim of angry lightning bolts.

  I drip my way up the back stairs and shiver even in the heat. I leave my wet clothes in a heap on my bedroom floor and change into dry shorts and a T-shirt, wrap my soaking hair in one of the plush mint-green towels from the bathroom. The storm has made the house dark as twilight, deep shadows in every corner, and I move through the empty hallway switchi
ng on lamps as I go. The sharp tap of hail begins against the window panes like bony fingers trying to find a way inside.

  The sound of the rain draws me up to Allegra’s turret room. The few times it rained the summer I lived at Roanoke, Allegra and I would sit in her windows and let it blow in on us through the screens. I turn on her bedside lamp and curl up on her unmade bed. The damp towel around my head soaks her pillow, releasing the scent of Allegra’s hair, and I close my eyes, breathe her in.

  “Help me, Allegra,” I whisper. “I can’t do this without you.” There’s no answer, of course, only the sound of rain slamming into the roof and windows. It’s like being in a tiny boat, adrift on storm-tossed seas. Sleep overtakes me, and when I wake the rain has stopped, although the sun has yet to make a reappearance. I should probably get up and see what time it is, do something besides sleeping away another wasted afternoon, but I can’t make myself rise. I’d forgotten the strange inertia of Roanoke, the way being inside its walls makes you stop caring very much about what goes on outside.

  My gaze lands on Allegra’s bedside table, and from this angle a double-paned picture frame peeks back at me. I reach out and lift it closer. The photo on the left is of my mother and Allegra’s mother, Eleanor. I slide the photo out of the frame, looking for a date or indication when it was taken, but there’s nothing written on the back. I would guess they are about fifteen and sixteen in the shot, both of them in bikinis. They stand hip to hip with their arms slung around each other’s shoulders. Their dark hair blows in the breeze, Cheshire cat grins stretching across their beautiful faces. There is something faintly seductive in both their smiles, in the come-hither tilt of their slim hips. Which means it was probably my granddad behind the camera. Another day of wholesome family fun at Roanoke.

  The second picture is of Allegra and me, taken the summer I lived here. We are both in bikinis, too. Mine red and hers black. We are standing exactly as our mothers did fifteen years earlier, white teeth flashing, coppery highlights in our hair catching the sun. I remember posing for this photograph, Tommy behind the lens, Cooper off to the side, smirking. It had been the only time the four of us had visited the swimming hole together, and Allegra had insisted on this photo, had moved me around like a department store mannequin, trying to get my limbs in exactly the right position. I hadn’t known she was attempting to re-create a photograph of our mothers. Maybe she’d hoped we’d be the same girls with a happier outcome.

  I remove the back of the frame and pull out the picture of Allegra and me, meaning to take it downstairs, keep it safe until she comes home. Two more photographs fall onto the bed from their hiding spot behind the original picture. The one on top is of Allegra and Tommy, a close-up of their faces, cheeks smooshed together as they grin crazily for the camera. I can’t help smiling at the sight of it. Underneath is a photo of Cooper and me. He’s lying on a towel spread across the trampled grass near the edge of the swimming hole, one arm hooked behind his head. I’m on my side, my head resting on his chest, my hand starfished on his bare stomach. I don’t remember this picture being taken, would probably have objected had I known. We both look relaxed, easy in a way I can’t remember ever actually feeling. The image burns my eyes, makes them sting, as Cooper’s words whisper in my brain. I think we had something, Lane, even way back then…Something good.

  I take all three photographs and shove them into the back pocket of my shorts, hop off Allegra’s bed, and leave the green towel on her pillow. My hair is still wet, and I pile it up on my head using a handful of bobby pins from Allegra’s vanity. After a stop in my room to grab my sunglasses and car keys, I race downstairs and out to the garage.

  “Hey, Charlie,” I call. “If you see Gran or Granddad, tell them I won’t be back until later.”

  Charlie looks up from where he’s working inside the barn. “You heading into town?”

  “No.” I jangle my keys with impatient fingers. “I’m driving out to the old swimming hole.” I have no idea why I want to go, what the urgency is, but now that the idea’s got ahold of me, it’s digging in deep.

  Charlie shakes his head, takes a few steps closer to me, out into the slowly returning sunlight. “That hole’s about dried up, Lane. Had a few years of bad drought and it never recovered. Not safe to swim in it. Hell, might not have any water in it at all this summer.”

  My heart sinks, but I say, “That’s okay. I just want to see it again.” I don’t even know why, exactly. It’s not as if looking into the swimming hole’s weedy depths will bring Allegra home, turn back time to the days when Roanoke held such promise, when I had yet to destroy what was growing between Cooper and me. But I still want to stand on its banks, even if it’s no longer the same place. Stand there and remember what might have been.

  It takes me a long time to find it. It’s been more than ten years, and there’s no clear marked path. But finally I spot a familiar withered tree in the distance, discover the hidden ruts through the long grass. My car bounces and rattles over the ground, not meant to cover such rough terrain. I’ll be lucky if I don’t lose my muffler.

  The wind hits me when I get out of the car, whipping across the prairie and tangling around me like vines. The sun has come out again, although clouds still race across the sky, making strange, misshapen shadows slide along the ground. From where I stand, I can see Charlie was mostly right—the swimming hole doesn’t live up to its name anymore. But it’s not completely dry, the dark, dirty water probably still a good six or seven feet deep. Long cattails grow out of the water’s edge, and the sides of the hole are cracked and crumbling, sending tiny avalanches of rock and soil into the water.

  I turn in a slow circle, trying to get my bearings and remember exactly where Cooper and I were lying when that photograph was taken. I feel it in my back pocket, but I don’t pull it out. Not much has changed out here other than the level of the water and the passage of time, but somehow it’s enough to skew my entire perspective. Nothing is the same as I remember it. Or maybe I remember it wrong.

  The air smells of dust and decay. I pick my way closer to the edge of the swimming hole, and something splashes into the water, probably a frog or tumble of dirt, marring the surface with a few faint ripples. There’s something tangled in the cattails, and my breath snags in my chest as I stumble forward. I sink to my knees, a desolate cry bursting out of me. My eyes catch on a coil of dark hair wrapped around the weeds just beneath the murky surface of the water, and a flash of white bone disappearing into the shallow depths.

  —

  “Lane,” Tommy says, “why don’t you go back to the house? Wait with your gran and granddad.”

  “No.”

  Tommy sighs, holds up a finger to the ring of cops waiting behind him. “They could use you there, Lane. They’re falling apart.”

  My eyes don’t move from the swimming hole. “I don’t care. I’m not leaving. Not until you get her out of there.”

  “It might not even be Allegra,” Tommy says, and I hear the edge of desperate hope in his voice.

  I turn my head, finally, to look at him. “It’s her, Tommy.”

  “You stay right here.” Tommy draws an invisible line across the ground. “No matter what. You don’t cross it. You hear me?”

  I nod, back up a step for good measure. I won’t leave until she’s out of that water. If they try to make me, I will lose my mind, a flush of panic and sorrow already swirling in my chest.

  It seems like lifting her out of the swimming hole should be quick and easy, but the minutes tick away and nothing happens. A cluster of county sheriff’s deputies talk quietly near their cars, and a few people in black T-shirts crouch down near the edge of the water, one big-boned woman with a camera taking photograph after photograph.

  “You didn’t touch anything?” a cop with a notebook asks me. It’s at least the tenth time I’ve been asked the same question.

  “No. I saw her body and tried to call Tommy, but I couldn’t get a connection on my phone, so I drove back toward R
oanoke until I could call. Then I came right back here and waited for you to show up. I never touched the water, or her, at all.”

  The cop’s writing down what I say when he glances over my shoulder and his body stiffens. “Excuse me a minute,” he says, walks fast to Tommy. I look behind me and see puffs of dust in the near distance, a truck slamming over the ruts toward us. I steel myself for my granddad, his tears and heartbroken eyes, but when the truck finally stops, it’s Cooper who jumps out.

  “No,” Tommy calls as he walks toward Cooper. “Nuh-uh, this isn’t a spectator sport. You need to get the hell out of here, Cooper.”

  Cooper holds up both hands, but doesn’t stop walking in my direction. His face is pale and his eyes cut right through me. “I’m not here to gawk, Tommy,” he says. “Jesus Christ. I won’t get in the way, and I won’t say a goddamn word.”

  Tommy reaches him, and they stand in a tense little huddle. I return my gaze to the swimming hole, and although their voices are low, I still catch a word here or there. Can’t have you…She needs…Worried…Let me…

  Cooper must win the argument because Tommy returns to the edge of the swimming hole, and Cooper comes to stand beside me where I’m leaning against my car. His arm brushes mine and he takes my hand, laces our fingers together and squeezes. A few tears overflow and run down my cheeks, as if the pressure of his hand has forced them out of me.

  “Hey,” he says. “I’m here.” All of the bitter anger wedged between us the last time we saw each other has evaporated. Now, Allegra’s sodden corpse bridges the space between us.

  I don’t trust myself to speak, give a quick nod instead. He squeezes my hand again, keeps my fingers tight in his, and I let my head fall onto his shoulder.

  It’s evening by the time they lift what remains of Allegra from the water, her dark hair clotted with weeds. “Don’t look,” Cooper says, but I can’t look anywhere else. He raises our still-joined hands to his chest, presses my fingers against his thumping heart.