The Roanoke Girls

by Amy Engel

  “I don’t know.”

  I tilt the phone up, away from my face, to keep him from hearing the ragged sound of my tears. “Allegra e-mailed me, right before she disappeared. She wanted to talk to me. And I didn’t even write her back.” I swipe the flat of my hand against my wet cheek. “I didn’t help her.”

  Cooper hesitates. “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t like thinking about Roanoke. I wanted to pretend that summer never happened. Allegra was a reminder, of so many things. I just…I didn’t know how to make room for her in my life. It’s not exactly like I have my shit together.”

  “Even if you’d called her back, it might not have changed anything.”

  “I guess we’ll never know, though, will we?”

  “No.” Cooper sighs. “I guess we won’t. But I think you need to give yourself a break.”

  I slide down the wall until my butt hits the floor, rest my forehead against my bent knees. “Cooper?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Thanks for listening to me. And for not pushing.”

  I hear his smile through the phone. “Anytime.”

  My skin feels raw. My heart throbs a mournful tune against my ribs. “So where do you think I should look?”

  “Hell, I have no idea,” Cooper says with another sigh. “Maybe you should be looking in places you’d think to hide something. Your favorite spots, instead of hers.”

  “I don’t have any favorite spots. Not here.”

  “I’m spitting into the wind, Lane. Just throwing shit up to see if anything sticks, that’s all. Your guess is as good as mine.”

  “You don’t think it was random, do you? Her murder?”

  This time Cooper doesn’t pause. “No. Do you?”

  “No.” My voice is barely a whisper now. “What are the odds some stranger knew about the swimming hole? I had trouble finding it, and I knew it was there.”

  I hear his mouth moving, and despite the subject matter I smile into the phone. “Toothpick?” I ask.

  “Yep. Sorry. Trying to give up cigarettes.” Before I can get a word in, he continues, “And no, it’s not because you told me only stupid people smoke.”

  I laugh and it feels good, a lightness in my chest that somehow burns like a flame. “I should go. I have to keep looking.”

  “Be careful,” Cooper says. “I’m here if you need me.”

  —

  I’ve searched every square inch of Roanoke, run my fingers and eyes over every soft-enough-to-carve surface. Even gone so far as to venture up into the attic with a flashlight, netting me only sweaty limbs coated with cobwebs and stray bits of insulation. I’ve found plenty of Allegra’s words— —but none of them mean anything within the context of her death. Or at least nothing that I can decipher.

  Eventually, I give up on Roanoke and drive aimlessly around Osage Flats instead, desperate for a change of scenery. I stop at the hamburger stand for a lime slush and sit at one of the empty picnic tables in the parking lot to drink it. This was never a place Allegra liked to hang out, but I take the time to check the tables anyway, make sure she hasn’t left anything carved into their worn surfaces. Nothing. My slush is too sweet, with not enough ice, and I end up tossing it in the trash can on the way to my car. I don’t want to let go of Allegra, hate the thought of turning my back on her again. But I’m running out of ideas. There’s only one place left I can think to look.

  The afternoon air is sluggish, but not as brutal as it has been, and a cluster of children brave the heat to play on the slides at the park. Their shrieking laughter slices through my skull as I approach. Two mothers watch me with narrow-eyed vigilance as I make my way around the slides, still searching for any sign of Allegra. I can’t remember if I ever told her this was the spot of my first kiss with Cooper, but she and I did our fair share of sliding down these slides over the course of that summer. But none of the graffiti here is hers. When I walk away, I wave to the kids, now bunched into silent knots at the top of the slides as they wait for me to finish my strange errand. No one waves back.

  I head toward the carousel, wiping the sweat from my forehead when I reach the shade of the trees. The gate is open, but all the horses are empty. A lanky teenage boy with a face full of acne lounges on the bench nearby. “You wanna ride?” he asks, barely looking up from his phone.

  “No, not really. Is it okay if I go sit for a minute?”

  He waves me toward the carousel, probably glad he doesn’t have to move his ass. “Sure. Whatever.”

  I find Allegra’s horse. The white one with the pink mane. I walk around it slowly, taking in every scratch and mark of graffiti, but as with the slides, none of them are Allegra’s. I pull myself astride the horse, touch the chipped paint of its ears and hold the cracked reins in my hand. If Allegra tried to leave me any sort of message, I have failed her. Just like I failed her when I left her behind. I should have tried harder. Broken her promise. Somehow undone the chains that bound her, even if she claimed to love them.

  All these years, she’d stayed at Roanoke, given her life away to the man who ruined her. And in the end, what did she have to show for it? I’m not sure there’s a single person who is unselfishly grieving the loss of her, no one whose heart is truly broken. Certainly not Sarah, who probably ran a victory lap when she heard the news, Sharon right on her heels. As for Tommy, he claims to love Allegra, but her absence from the world makes his whole white-picket-fence life easier. Now he can convince himself the baby was never his anyway, move on with a wife who adores him, and finally forget about the troubled girl who smashed his heart between her hands. Gran can’t be anything but happy that Allegra is out of the picture. One less Roanoke girl for her to compete against. And Granddad. He lost his Allegra, but he has me, instead. The only one he never completely controlled. I’m not dumb enough to think that’s because I’m stronger than the rest of them. It’s only because he ran out of time to work the full extent of his awful magic on me. But now he has a second chance. All the time in the world. And if I’m being honest, I can’t exempt myself from the list. Because even as I’ve tried to avoid my granddad since I’ve been back—telling myself I hate him, willing myself to believe it—isn’t there a part of me that craves his undivided attention? That basks in the glory of being the only one left? After all I know, after all I’ve seen, there remains a small, rotten-to-the-core piece of me that wants what Allegra had. God, I make myself sick.

  I slide off Allegra’s horse, my own failure, my own shame, clotting my throat. There’s nothing left for me to do but give up. I turn to step off the carousel, and my eyes are pulled to the black, aqua-maned horse. My favorite. A stillness overtakes me. I am suddenly very aware of the tiny hairs standing up on my skin, the blood pumping through my veins. Maybe you should be looking in places you’d think to hide something. Your favorite spots, instead of hers. I told Cooper I didn’t have a favorite spot here, but maybe I was wrong.

  The carousel operator calls out, asking me if I want to go for a spin, but I can’t shift my focus enough to respond. I approach my horse, run a hand down her warm metal back, already searching. The side facing me reveals only a smattering of wear-and-tear scratches and the emphatic exclamation that AMBER IS A SLUT! I move around to the far side, my heart thumping like a relentless fist against my rib cage. A strip of missing paint. PUSSY on the flank. JACK WAS HERE along the tail. And below that, down near the hoof: .

  It’s like taking a punch to the stomach. A direct hit that pummels the air from my lungs. I drop to one knee, heart worming its way into my throat. I run my suddenly sweat-slick fingers over the word. . No rust around the letters, the exposed metal clean and fresh. I know it’s Allegra’s work, have seen enough of her word treasures to recognize the slant of the writing, the exact shape of the capital letters. It’s hers. It’s recent. And she left it here for me to find.

  —

  Gran is in the kitchen when I return to Roanoke, pouring herself a glass of wine. I guess she does her drinking o
ut in the open now. She holds up the bottle as I come through the back door. “Would you like a glass?”

  “Allegra left me a message.”

  Gran doesn’t even flinch. She sets the bottle down on the counter, picks up her glass, and takes a sip. “Where was it?”

  “Somewhere you never would’ve looked.”

  Gran toasts the empty air with her wineglass, a wry smile skating across her face. “Sounds like Allegra.” She sinks down into a chair at the kitchen table, runs her finger around the rim of her wineglass. The setting sun bathes her face with red and pink. She nods toward the chair beside her. “Come here. Sit down.”

  I’m not afraid of her. Although I probably should be. I feel electric with rage and sorrow. Steel running through my veins instead of blood. If she tries to hurt me, I will hurt her back. I pull out the chair next to her and sit, my hands knotted on the table in front of me. “What?”

  “Let me tell you a story,” Gran says. “It starts out nice, but it ends…badly.” Another tiny sip of wine. “When I met your granddad, I thought he was all my dreams come true, dreams I didn’t even know I had until he walked into my life. He was the type of man who was impossible to resist. Kind. Rich. Handsome. So handsome it actually hurt me sometimes to look at him. A little twinge in my heart.” She shakes her head at the memory. A bead of condensation gathers at the bottom of her glass, slides down the delicate stem to land on her finger. “But I’d known handsome men before your granddad. Rich ones, too. That wasn’t enough to win me over. It was how your granddad made me feel when I was with him that did the trick. Alive, like I’d woken up from a long sleep. Wanted. Special.” Her mouth thins into a bitter smile. “You know exactly what I mean, don’t you?”

  I nod, unable to speak. That’s always been his most powerful gift. Making each one of us feel like we’re the one he can’t live without.

  “His younger sister Jane was gone before we ever met. Left her daughter, Penelope, as a parting gift. I didn’t even mind, although being a mother wasn’t something I particularly cared about. But it was important to your granddad, to have a family. So I pretended like it was important to me. And maybe it would have worked out, but his youngest sister, Sophia, lived here, too. Always floating around, on the edge of everything, waiting for her chance. Sometimes I think things might have been all right if not for Sophia. Maybe without her here he would have forgotten what he had before me.”

  I seriously doubt that. Magical thinking was never going to change this family’s hellish destiny. I wonder if my granddad had Gran pegged right from the start, recognized that she was the kind of woman who would always put him first. Maybe that’s why he chose her, because he somehow knew she would allow him to have his Roanoke girls and love him anyway.

  Gran takes another swallow of wine, bigger this time. “I hated Sophia, right from the start. She was a jealous, spiteful thing, always finding ways to hurt me, to try and turn your granddad against me. At first, I had no idea why. Not until I caught them.” Gran’s throat works and she pauses, stiffening her spine. “In my own bed. Can you imagine?” She doesn’t wait for me to respond. “Sophia drowned a few years later. I still think she did it on purpose, couldn’t stand sharing him.”

  “Why didn’t you leave?” I whisper. “Why on earth would you stay?”

  “I loved him,” Gran says, like it’s the most simple explanation in the world. But it’s not simple, what she’s saying. She loved her husband more than her children, cared more about keeping him than protecting her own daughters. Perhaps that’s my granddad’s real power, making the women in his life do terrible things to one another.

  Gran goes on: “I loved him enough to keep trying, and after Sophia died, I thought it would stop. But Penelope grew up, and every day she looked more and more like her mother.” Gran reaches over, and I flinch back, but she just waves her fingers toward my hair. “That hair. Those eyes. That body. That face. How could he resist? It was like screwing a version of himself.” I’ve never heard Gran curse before, and it scares me more than anything else she’s said, shows how much her control has slipped. “He told me later he couldn’t help falling in love with her,” Gran continues. “He stumbled into it like falling into a hole.” She laughs, a harsh rasp. “How could I argue with that? It’s the same way I fell in love with him.”

  It takes me a second to find my voice. “One phone call, that’s all it would have taken to end it.”

  Gran’s perfectly plucked eyebrows shoot up. “Like the call you made after you left here? Don’t lecture me, Lane. You’re no better.”

  Guilt, I’m discovering, is an emotion that’s almost impossible to kill. It’s like a poisonous weed that keeps on growing, burrowing into every vulnerable spot. Always reminding you of all the ways you’ve failed. “I was sixteen and scared. But you were a grown woman. They were your daughters.”

  “They were never mine. They were always his. From the second they were born. I nursed them, held them, rocked them, but from the first breath they always belonged to him. By the time Emmeline was born, I knew what was coming. He’d started disappearing with Eleanor, both of them showing up to dinner with flushed cheeks and shared smiles. There wasn’t any way I could stop it from happening with all of them, one after the other.” Gran pauses. “No easy way,” she amends.

  For a second I don’t dare breathe, the confession so delicate one wrong move would shatter it into nothing, render it mere words with no admission behind it. “You killed Emmeline?” I say finally.

  Gran’s eyes slip closed, just for a moment. “It was fast. It didn’t hurt her. It was better that way. At least she died before I started hating her. She was the only one I cared about until the end.” Gran’s mouth twists up into a mean little bow. “Not like the rest of you. Always hanging all over him, batting those long eyelashes and crawling into his lap. Baiting him. Even you. Before you got here, I’d hoped you’d be different, that maybe you wouldn’t even be his. But one look at you killed that dream. And you went and acted like all the rest of them, prancing around in those short shorts.” Gran’s voice turns high and girlish. “Granddad, will you teach me to drive? Granddad, let me help you feed the horses.”

  My fury leaves me breathless. My limbs shake with rage. “I can’t believe you’re blaming us!”

  Gran goes on like I haven’t even spoken. “Your mother was the worst. She practically drove him to it. She worshipped him, wouldn’t let him out of her sight even after I told her to stay away. I tried to warn her, but she did what she wanted, and look where it got her. Every last one of you made your own beds.”

  I wonder how long she’s been telling herself this version of the story, skewing the facts so she can live with what happened right under her roof, sloughing off any responsibility like shedding a second skin. “And Allegra’s punishment was death?”

  “I couldn’t do it again, not again,” Gran says. “Forty years I’ve lived this life. Watched your bellies grow fat with babies. I couldn’t do it, not even one more time.” Gran’s lips tremble, and I think she’s going to cry, finally, but her hand lashes out instead, knocks her wineglass off the table to where it shatters against the floor.

  “You told me you didn’t hurt Allegra, that you could handle her.”

  Gran huffs out a laugh. “I could. Allegra was easy. All I had to do was wait her out. Eventually she would have run or killed herself. Allegra wasn’t made to last.” Her voice is indifferent, as if Allegra is a piece of trash to be discarded instead of the girl she raised from birth. “But that baby. That baby would have ruined everything, right when it was so close to finally being over. Allegra’d never been able to stay pregnant, always lost them early. But this time…I kept waiting for her to miscarry, but she didn’t. This one was going to stick.” Gran shakes her head. “Which means it probably wasn’t even his. Not that it would’ve made a difference to him. It would still have been his baby, no matter who the actual father was.”

  “How did you even know she was pregnant?�
� I feel sick, like I might have to vomit into my cupped palms before I can go on speaking.

  “Sharon found the pregnancy test in the trash and brought it to me.”

  Good old Sharon. Still Gran’s lapdog after all these years. “So you threatened Allegra?” And Allegra felt the danger. Enough that she tried to contact me, left Gran’s name carved into my horse in case the worst happened.

  “I didn’t threaten her,” Gran says, as if I’ve accused her of some social faux pas. “I simply told her no more. No more babies. But Allegra wouldn’t listen. She never did. Always so goddamn stubborn. I told her I wouldn’t have another baby in this house. I told her.”

  My body is tense with fear and anticipation, ready if she reaches for me. “What did you do? Get her drunk so you’d have an easier time killing her?”

  “She got drunk all on her own. She was drunk most of the time, this last year.” Gran eyes me with a little smirk. “Sound familiar?”

  My cheeks flame, but I hold Gran’s gaze. “If anybody had a reason to drink, it was Allegra. I won’t fault her for that.”

  “No,” Gran says, “you wouldn’t. You girls always did stick together. Not one of you ever thought of me. What it was doing to me. Just spread your legs and didn’t care that it broke my heart.”

  “You have no idea, do you?” I ask. “What a horrible person you are.”

  Gran shakes her head. “I’m loyal, something you girls have never been. I made promises to him and I’ve kept them.”

  “Does he know?” I ask. “What you did?”

  Gran’s hands shift restlessly on the tabletop. “No. He had nothing to do with it.”

  I choke out a laugh. “He had everything to do with it.” I’m bone weary. So tired of this conversation, this place, this life. I close my eyes, cover them with my hands. “I can’t believe you killed her. I can’t believe you would do that to her.”