The Roanoke Girls

by Amy Engel

  —

  Tommy stays at Roanoke long after everyone else has gone. He sits at the kitchen table with me, both of us staring at a half-empty bottle of vodka, but neither of us making a move to drink it. Gran and Granddad went upstairs after Tommy gave them the news, climbing the main staircase together. Granddad leaned on Gran like he didn’t trust his own legs, and she bore his weight all the way to the top. I know their love is twisted and ugly at its roots, but at least they have something. At least they have each other. It hardly seems fair when Allegra is lying alone somewhere in the back of a police van.

  “What happens now?” I ask Tommy. My voice is scratchy, like I haven’t spoken in weeks. Tears push against my vocal cords, but other than the few I shed at the swimming hole, my eyes have remained dry.

  Tommy, on the other hand, is leaking like a broken faucet, a steady stream of tears washing down his face, tripping over his stubble before landing on the tabletop. “We’ll be back out there at first light.”

  “No, I meant with Allegra.”

  “Oh.” Tommy releases a hiccuping breath. “Now there’s an autopsy.”

  I nod, trying not to think about someone piecing Allegra back together, looking for the secrets of her death hidden on her body. “How long will that take?”

  “Depends on the backlog, but I wouldn’t think more than a few days.” He lets out a shaky sigh, wipes both hands down his face. “Why would she have gone way out there to do it?” he asks. “We might never have found her.”

  “You think she killed herself,” I say, my voice as lifeless as Allegra’s body.

  Tommy cuts his eyes in my direction, swings them back to the bottle of vodka. “Yeah, I do.”

  For someone who claimed to love Allegra, I don’t know how he can be so stupid. I thought it was possible Allegra killed herself, too, before we actually found her. But Allegra would never have chosen to end her life in the dirty water of the swimming hole, hair knotted with weeds, flesh puffy with rot. Someone else left her there, forced that final indignity upon her. But I’m not going to say that to Tommy, who has a lifetime of anger at Allegra barely hidden beneath his love, whose wife despised Allegra with every bone in her second-best body. Or maybe Tommy just wants me to believe that Allegra committed suicide.

  “I’ve got to get home, Lane,” Tommy says. “When I know something, you’ll know something.”

  After Tommy leaves, I swear I can hear the sound of my granddad weeping, although I know it’s not really possible. But the thought of him shedding tears over Allegra makes me want to scream, and I burst out through the screened porch breathing hard, muscles tight with the need to escape.

  —

  I arrive at Cooper’s dark doorstep without knowing how I got there. I certainly didn’t have his house in mind when I sped down the lane away from Roanoke. We’d parted ways at the swimming hole once the cops were done. When he let go of my hand, I could still feel the beat of his heart against my fingertips.

  I knock without giving myself time to think about it. From beyond the door I hear the sound of footsteps, and then Cooper is there in the open doorway, the spill of light from his house making me blink.

  “Hi,” I say and give a ridiculous, halfhearted wave. I have no idea what the fuck I’m doing here.

  Cooper says nothing, steps back and waits for me to come inside. I walk into his living room. He’s been reading, a book tented on his coffee table, an open beer next to it.

  “Sorry. You’re busy.” My voice catches, and I keep my eyes on his couch, my back to him. “I don’t know why I came. I just…I should go.” His warm hands settle on my shoulders as I speak, and he turns me in to his body, wraps his arms around me, his lips pressing against my hair.

  The sobs spill out of me like gushing blood, raw and violent and threatening to tear my chest in two. I was never a girl who cried, grew into a woman who was scared of her own tears, scared of letting them go. Scared of becoming my mother. But now I can’t stop. The sounds I’m making, wild animal moans, embarrass me, but there’s no way to control them.

  Cooper moves toward the couch, pulling me along with him. He sits, and I crawl into his lap, bury my face in his neck. I cry until there’s nothing left, my tears gone, and hollow, hiccupy sobs all that remain. My head feels fuzzy and overstuffed, my nose so clogged I can’t breathe through it. I push back, off Cooper’s lap, although I keep my legs across his, and run my hands over my tear-swollen face.

  “God,” I say. “I’m sorry. That was…”

  “It was okay,” Cooper says. One of his hands rubs my bare foot. I lost my flip-flops somewhere between his door and couch. “It’s okay, Lane.”

  I drop my hands and look at him, and he doesn’t even flinch away from what I know has to be my wreck of a face. “She’s dead,” I tell him, as if he wasn’t standing next to me when they pulled her from the water. “Allegra’s dead.”

  “I know.”

  “You don’t seem surprised.”

  Cooper sighs. “You’re not surprised either. Not really. Allegra was never going to end well, you know that. Whether it was her body in the swimming hole or a handful of pills, a razor blade…” His voice trails off.

  “She didn’t kill herself,” I say, before I think about whether I should.

  “You think someone hurt her?” Cooper asks. When I don’t answer, he traces my foot from big toe to ankle and back again. “What happened inside that house, Lane? What made you run?”

  I can’t tell him the truth he’s asking about. Not yet, maybe not ever. But I can tell him a different truth. One more painful for him, but easier for me. Which, given our history, sounds about right. I slide my hand down to my belly, lift my shirt up slightly. Cooper’s gaze follows my movement, his brow furrowed. My fingers find the tiny, smooth marks, like strands of delicate silver thread sewn into my skin. No one else has ever noticed them, not even Cooper these past weeks, when his hands and mouth have roamed over my body endlessly.

  “I had a baby,” I say. The words slide out of me like air leaving a balloon, gone before I’m able to snatch them back. I don’t look at him as I speak. “A little girl.”

  I feel Cooper’s body tense. “You have a kid?”

  “No. I gave her up.”

  His hand shifts against my foot, restless. “When?”

  “The spring after I went away.”

  Cooper’s hand leaves my foot. His head falls back against the couch, and he closes his eyes. “Was she mine?” he asks finally.

  The question hurts in a way I didn’t anticipate, although it’s a fair one for him to ask. “Yes,” I tell him. She had a dusting of blond hair and lips too plump for her tiny face. She was three days old when I gave her up, and already a single dimple had formed in her cheek, just big enough for me to rest the tip of my pinkie finger in when I held her. I would have named her Elizabeth.

  He lifts his head back up, looks at me, and this time I hold his gaze. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  I feel something ugly poised right on the end of my tongue. Something designed to injure in the worst possible way. I take a deep breath, fight against the need to damage ingrained in me from birth. “I was scared,” I say when I can speak without hurting, or at least not hurting on purpose. “I didn’t think it mattered, Cooper. I didn’t think you cared anymore. We were like two animals by the end, circling around each other, waiting to see who would die first.”

  “I would have cared,” Cooper says. “I always fucking cared.”

  “I couldn’t…I couldn’t be a mother.” I hold my hands out to him like I’m asking him to understand. When I recognize how pathetic it looks, I let my hands drop. “I didn’t know how. I didn’t want to raise another girl like us. Another Roanoke girl.”

  “But she wasn’t a Roanoke, Lane, she was a Sullivan.”

  “Trust me,” I say with a cold little laugh, “if she’d been born in this town, she would have been a Roanoke. And you wouldn’t want that for your daughter. Not ever.”

 
; “That’s why you left? Because you were pregnant?”

  I nod. And it’s not a lie. But it’s still only half the truth.

  “Are you sorry you gave her up?” he asks.

  “No.” I take a deep, uneven breath. “But I’m sorry I didn’t know how to keep her.”

  Cooper shifts away from me, pushes my legs off his lap. His bare feet make a hollow slapping sound against the wood floor as he stands. “Well,” he says, drawing out the single word until it takes on the weight of a larger declaration. “We would have made shitty parents, anyway.”

  —

  Here’s what I remember: horrible bouts of morning sickness where my stomach curled and rolled like ocean waves, the inside of my mouth left salty and slick; snipping the waistbands of my cheap maternity pants so they would still fit as my stomach grew beyond what I had previously imagined possible; endless nights of no sleep, straining arms and legs crushing my lungs; pain as big as the world, searing, unbearable beats of hell I managed to endure only because I had no other choice; the nurse’s eyes, equal measures pity and scorn, as she held my hand in place of someone who actually cared about me; the relief that came when my body was finally rid of her, empty again and free; a cry like winter wind, searing and bare, a lonely howl, when they took her from my arms.

  These are all the same things I wish I could forget.

  If you opened up a dictionary to the word normal, you’d find Tommy Kenning’s picture there. He was apple pie and football, homecoming king and white teeth, two kids and a minivan. He always claimed he saw Allegra first, when she was in second grade and he was in fifth, noticed her out of all the other girls. Allegra let him believe that, but she’d actually been the one to set her sights on him. Allegra had always known normal wasn’t a regular stop on her crazy family train. But when she was next to Tommy she could pretend, if only for a little while, that her world spun in the same orbit as his.

  As they grew older, she even entertained thoughts of actually marrying him, the way he always suggested. Occasionally went so far as to talk about it with him, what her dress would look like, where they would live, what they would name their first baby. Tommy’s eyes would light up, he’d get that eager, puppy-dog look on his face. She could practically see the wheels working in his head as he tried to figure out how to make it happen before she changed her mind. And then she would dance away from him. Not for good, not too far. But enough to throw a bucket of cold water on his fantasies of the future.

  She had to give Tommy credit, though. She didn’t think he’d ever actually have the balls to cut her loose. But when he started dating sad little Sarah Fincher, he’d told Allegra they were over, said he wouldn’t be coming to see her anymore. He couldn’t wait any longer for his life to start. She’d watched him drive away, police cruiser slipping over a sheen of midwinter sleet. She’d had no urge to run after him, sure he’d be back. She’d always had Tommy right where she wanted him, couldn’t imagine this time would be any different. She’d carved a notch on the front porch railing every day, waiting. Stopped when she ran out of room. Two hundred and sixteen days and word from town that Sarah Fincher was Sarah Kenning now.

  When she heard, Allegra went up to her room and howled. Buried her face in her pillow and writhed against the grief and rage. She couldn’t say whether she loved Tommy, had no real idea what that word even meant. But what she did know was that Tommy was hers. She got to decide when it was over, not him. Her granddad was right—boys like Tommy couldn’t be trusted. They pretended to love you and left you behind.

  But she’d shown Tommy who was in charge. It took only one night, her lips on his neck, her hand down his pants, and he’d caved. Like she knew he would, his precious wedding vows so much dust in the wind. It was almost sad how predictable he was. Plain Jane Sarah just an afterthought when he had Allegra Roanoke spread wide in front of him.

  She thought such a triumph might ease the gnawing emptiness inside her, but it didn’t. Not even a pink plus sign on the pregnancy test could do that. She suspected the baby was Tommy’s—somehow it already felt more settled inside her than all the lost babies that had come before. But she doubted the true paternity would matter much to her granddad. Any baby born in this house belonged to Roanoke, simple as that. And a baby would make her granddad so happy after all the disappointments over the years. But she kept putting off telling him the good news. Waiting, maybe, until she could manage to summon some of that happiness for herself.

  She considered telling Tommy, but she couldn’t picture living in his crappy house, making him casseroles, and changing diapers. And despite Tommy’s frantic, and then increasingly angry, phone calls, she wasn’t sure he would want that, either. Because if there was one thing Tommy loved as much as he loved Allegra, it was his idea of himself as a decent guy. And dumping sweet Sarah and shacking up with already-pregnant Allegra would shatter that image forever. No more apple-pie Tommy after that.

  She found herself longing for Lane in a way she hadn’t for years. She fantasized that Lane would walk through the front door again and know exactly what to do. Lane might be able to help Allegra have the strength to leave, to give her child a different kind of life. Or maybe Lane would stay and Allegra wouldn’t have to be alone anymore. They could bear it together. But reality always intruded, and she was left with the fact that Lane was gone, like all the rest of the Roanoke girls, and it would take more than a baby in Allegra’s belly to bring her back.

  So Allegra spent her mornings crouched over the toilet, vomit thick on her tongue. After, she splashed icy cold water on her face, pinched color back into her pale cheeks, set her mouth into a smile. She went downstairs and ate breakfast with her grandparents. Opened her door, and then her legs, when her granddad knocked in the night. Woke up in the morning and did it all again. Watched the days flow by. Told herself this was what she’d always wanted. But the baby hidden inside her felt heavy, a leaden weight out of all proportion to its actual size.

  A looming, inevitable disaster.

  My hands shook as I tore open the small package, and I told myself to breathe, calm down, get it together. I was locked in the bathroom down the hall from my bedroom, the house silent around me. Gran had gone to Wichita for the day. Allegra was supposed to go with her, but backed out at the last second, making an excuse about seeing Tommy that caused Gran’s mouth to pinch up. And Granddad was working in some distant field, having driven off in a cloud of dust and country music not long after the sun rose.

  I’d never taken a pregnancy test before, but it didn’t take much skill. Just pull out the stick and pee on it. But honestly, I didn’t even need the test. I already knew. Had known for the last week every time my sore breasts brushed against Cooper’s chest, ever since the morning I woke up and spewed vomit into the toilet before my first bite of breakfast.

  Peeing on the stick was only a formality. The question was what I was going to do afterward. Would I have it? Would I find a way to get to Wichita and get rid of it? Would I tell Cooper? I’d had my period since that night with Nick, so I knew the baby was Cooper’s even if he might not believe it. What would flash across his face at the news, horror or joy? I wasn’t dumb enough to think a baby could fix what I’d broken between us, our relationship already circling the end like water down the drain. But some stupid, childish part of me still hoped, for what I wasn’t even sure.

  I managed to pee on the stick with only minimal splashing onto my own fingers. I set the test on the back of the toilet, rinsed my hands in the sink. My face in the mirror was ashen, my eyes luminous. I couldn’t stand there and count the seconds ticking by.

  I opened the bathroom door, and the house breathed around me, old wood settling. Roanoke always felt slightly alive, especially when I was there alone, as if it could lead me astray down unused corridors, whisk me away into the unknown, never to be seen again. I padded down the hall to my room, the wooden floor sticky under my feet. A hint of warm air swirled across my ankles, and I paused, confused. Gran alway
s kept the windows of the unoccupied rooms closed. But air was flowing out from under the door at the end of the long hall. A guest room Allegra’d told me no one had used in years.

  I tiptoed to the door, set my hand on the cut-glass knob. My heart slammed against my ribs, agitated in a way that made no sense. At most, someone had left open a window that should’ve been shut. There was no reason for the clammy touch of fear. No reason more than half of me was screaming to walk away, keep the door closed. Leave well enough alone. Don’t look. Don’t look.

  I opened the door, slowly, gently, and it swung inward without a sound. All the room seemed to contain was a bed, although I knew that wasn’t the case. But that’s where my eyes landed, and after that there was nothing else to see. They were on top of the covers, asleep, tangled together. Naked. Granddad and Allegra. Her head on his chest, his arms wrapped around her, their legs entwined. His pale feet, usually covered by boots, her sun-brown toes, the nails painted bubble-gum pink. The summer-warm breeze wafted the pale blue curtains inward, blew the earthy scent of sex into my face, ruffled the ends of Allegra’s hair. Her body looked long and liquid. She was the most peaceful I’d ever seen her.

  I stumbled backward, shut the door with barely a click. I ran on silent feet back to the bathroom, closed the door and locked it behind me. My brain roared. Roanoke girls. Special. You look exactly like your father. I loved him so much. It’s supposed to mean that you’re his favorite. Your mama was always my favorite. The best and worst secret. I barely made it to the toilet before I was sick, heaving up ropy strings of bile, slick and acrid. In one corner of my brain I registered the bright pink plus sign on the pregnancy test. But the baby growing inside me felt very far away compared to the memory of Allegra and Granddad, the image of their bodies burned into my closed eyelids like a nightmare vision.

  I knelt before the toilet, gasping and sweaty. My knees ached where they pressed against the hard tile. Tears ran into my mouth, and their salt gagged me, another round of nausea threatening. The real horror wasn’t seeing them, wasn’t finally knowing what deep down in the darkest part of myself I’d suspected all along. The horror came in acknowledging that my initial flush of shock hadn’t lasted long, had been overtaken almost immediately by a neon flare of envy. Why wasn’t it me? I covered my mouth with both hands to hold in the hysterical laughter. Why hadn’t he picked me? That’s how fucked up I was. That’s how badly Roanoke twisted us all.