Southern Ouroboros

by Matt Kilby

  She went back to town and looped the courthouse a second time, leaving the traffic circle on the north side. All the parking spots were taken, forcing her to drive up and down the street until someone left one available. With each passing, she glanced to the near-empty lot beside the sheriff’s department and told herself she could be inside and getting the hard work done but remembered his window sat where he would see her and make up his mind how to handle her before she even got out. He would find a reason to be out of the building when she walked in, so she waited ten minutes—and as many passes—before a spot opened in front of the window with the large star in its middle. She pulled in and cut the engine, reminding herself to breathe and walk to the building. A few feet and the hardest part would be over, but she sat another five minutes. Smoothing sweaty hands over her pants, she took her first step in too long onto a Pine Haven street and let the car’s door shut as she stepped across the sidewalk.

  The sheriff’s department was deserted—a bit unexpected six months after one of the worst tragedies in modern American history. Inside, she listened to the silence, unsure of what she expected to happen but determined to wait until something did. There had to be some sign to tell her she made the right choice. In a world where black, mystical rocks dictated the future, a little direction was the least she could ask, but as seconds ticked away, she understood only people like John had that luxury. She was just some ex-junkie trying to decide whether to stay clean or drive some place she understood better, where she could score enough dope for a swan song of an overdose. To the people left who knew her, she could vanish and never be heard from again. They wouldn’t be better or worse for it, her remaining questions answered by infinite silence. With her heart thumping in her throat, the idea didn’t scare her, but she understood the choice didn’t belong to her long before a tall, heavy man filled the doorway leading to the dispatch desk. She recognized Mack Parker as he turned to head down the hall to the break room. Before he did, he glanced at her and stopped short.

  “Sorry,” he smiled. “I didn’t hear you come in. What can I do for you?”

  He didn’t recognize her, but how could he? It’d been ten years since she stood in that building, the kind of life determined to wear her down or break her quick. She felt every day of it as the man who used to bring her chips and a coke from across the street shuffled to an uncertain stop a few feet away. The droop of his jaw told her he was getting there, but she couldn’t be sure until his eyes lit up.

  “Carly,” he managed a simultaneous shout and whisper. “Is that you?”

  The first surge of emotion rolled through her back as she nodded. She pushed it down with a breath, saving the inevitable breakdown for her father.

  “My word,” he shook his head and regarded her as if some miracle. “I thought I would never see you again.”

  “I’m glad you were wrong. It’s great to see you too, Mack—it really is—and I hope we can talk soon, but I’m barely holding myself together. I need to talk to my dad. Is he—?”

  “Lud!” Mack shouted before she finished, walking toward her father’s door. “Come out here right now.”

  “What the hell for, Mack?” a familiar voice, though shaky with age and hard years, came from the other side.

  “Do what I say now,” he answered and regretted it with closed eyes as soon as he did.

  “Listen, you son of a bitch,” Lud barked. “Glance down your shirt and check for a sheriff star before handing me orders.”

  “Lud!” Mack called again, hands on his hips as he shook his head.

  “What?” the sheriff yanked his door open and marched out. He managed one step before his eyes met Carly’s and knees weakened to make him brace on the door jamb, a rare glimpse at the fragile part he guarded behind his scowl. He straightened and covered the vulnerable look in his eyes with the distrust she recognized better.

  “Carly,” he said as if to some vague acquaintance. “What are you doing here?”

  “Great to see you too, dad,” she screwed her lips tight, slipping back into a place he kept warm for her. After all that time, she would always be his disaster before his daughter.

  “I didn’t say it wasn’t,” he shook his head with a defensive flare of his eyes. “I’m just surprised. Ten years, and here you are like you didn’t have a reason to stay away.”

  “Don’t do this to me,” she dropped her eyes.

  “Do what?” he asked. “Hold you accountable for the mess you left when you wandered away from your mother and newborn daughter with nothing but a few words scratched on notebook paper? Or tell you how hard the years went by without a word to say you were somewhere breathing? What exactly do you not want me to do?”

  “Go easy on her,” Mack said.

  “Mind your own damn business,” Lud shot back.

  “I’m going,” she told herself more than them and turned.

  “The hell you will,” her father said as if he had that kind of authority, though maybe the fact she didn’t take another step meant he did. “You’re here, so you might as well stay. We can talk in my office so Mack can go back to nodding off by the radio.”

  “It really is nice to see you,” Mack smiled before he went back to his desk.

  Lud waved her into his office and followed, shutting the door.

  “I went by the house.”

  He took his place behind the desk, slumping into the chair. She tried to prepare herself for how much he changed but didn’t expect the gray in his hair or how mean his face had grown. She wondered how much was because of her and how much was due to last summer. He stared, eyes squinting as he worked her like any other problem.

  “Where are you living?” she tried again, if nothing more than to keep his silence from swallowing the room.

  “I don’t know how to let you see her,” he said, refusing to let the conversation grow civil.

  “Lita or mom?”

  “Either,” he huffed. “Lita might be easier because she wouldn’t know you from Mack’s second cousin from Omaha. We could introduce you like any stranger, but at first sight, your mother will think every prayer she’s whispered since you left has been answered. She was in a bad place before the fires and worse since, but all that might dissolve the second you walk through the door.”

  “You make it sound like a bad thing.”

  “No,” he shook his head. “That would be the best possible thing, but the worst would be you leaving again. In a month or a year. Whenever the old you catches up and your itches get you moving.”

  “That hurts,” she said with a tremble in her lip she couldn’t identify. Anger or sadness, fear or resolve. It might have been all at once, jockeying for position. Fighting for control, she tightened her mouth. “I’m sober and not going anywhere.”

  She felt tough and told herself she was. She fought back to her life and held her own against one hell of a gatekeeper. She couldn’t help but be proud, but his next question staggered her.

  “How long?”

  She played dumb, repeating the question, but of course she understood. Sobriety was quantifiable, measured by moments the lucky saw stretch into years. Hers hadn’t even been a month, though all that happened in those few sober weeks would fit into a lifetime. But he didn’t ask about that. He wanted a number.

  “Two weeks,” she said and couldn’t be ashamed. It was the longest stretch she spent without anything stronger than coffee. She wouldn’t get a parade down Main Street or even an impressed nod from her father, but she was proud and met his eyes as he balked.

  “Not long enough,” he shook his head.

  “Give me a number.”

  “I’ll tell you when you get there,” he offered a half-shrug. “In the meantime, I have to do what’s best for Lita and your mother.”

  “You decide that for them now?” Heat rose into her face. If not careful, she would say the wrong thing, but neither of them would be surprised.

  “Since you left,” he nodded. “No one else was here to do the jo
b.”

  “I’m sure it took you five minutes to settle in.”

  “You think I wanted it?” he sat forward and glared. “Repeating the same lies, telling them you were okay and would be home soon?”

  “You didn’t have to say that,” she shook her head.

  “You’re damned right, I didn’t,” he raised his voice but caught himself, closing his eyes to reset. When he opened them, he calmed but didn’t look warmer. “Do you have any idea how it hurt to reassure them while convinced every morning was a new chance to get a call about your body turning up? After that first year, I was convinced you were dead and that one day I would have to choose whether to lie or tell them the truth.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I appreciate that, but right now I feel like I’m talking to a ghost. You wouldn’t be the first. Maybe tomorrow I’ll wake up in a better mood and we can try again, but tonight I can’t.”

  She nodded as if she understood but needed a few seconds to remember she did. As she stood and turned to walk out, not sure where to go other than to sleep in her car and hope tomorrow did end differently, she looked back.

  “I talked to him too,” she said.

  Confusion settled in the creases above his eyes. “Who?”

  “John Valance,” she said, and those wrinkles smoothed with recognition. In his expression, she understood what the cowboy gave her, worth as much as sobriety and a clean slate. He gave her something in common with her dad, who leaned forward, this time not trying to intimidate her.

  “How do you know about that?”

  “He told me. He said to tell you letting him go was all you needed to have me back and give mom peace.”

  Lud closed his eyes and breathed through his nose. She assumed it his version of crying, if he ever came so close. His eyes were rimmed red enough when he opened them and looked at her, begging for some explanation. She didn’t think she could offer that but gave what she could, figuring honesty was all she had now.

  “He saved me,” she told him, her hand still curved around the doorknob to leave if her truth earned nothing but laughter. “While my husband bled to death and I slipped into what should have been my last heroin overdose, the ghost of Pine Haven came and made me sober. He solved every problem I made and only asked me to drive him to the longest, strangest day of my life.”

  She paused for a breath, but her father didn’t speak.

  “I ran into one of your deputies in Louisiana.”

  “Vick.”

  “He wanted me to tell you he did his best.”

  “Is he dead?”

  She shook her head and hoped it satisfied him, not sure how to explain immortality or how Vick came by it and certain her silence gave no hints to what happened.

  “His friend?” he asked next, and that was harder. In all she planned to say driving toward home, she never considered what to tell him about Eric Vanger in the pastor’s attic or the warden’s death in front of the church. Both involved Starks County citizens and would obligate him to call the Creek Hollow sheriff with information regarding two possible murders. Brandon would be the only one left to answer for what happened that night, and he endured enough.

  “You’d have to ask him,” she shrugged, “but I don’t expect he’ll come back. I don’t think there is anything left for him here.”

  “And you?” His voice softened. John had been as right about him as the rest—about driving away from everything to end up back with all she should have never left.

  “I’m here, right?"

  It took a moment to look at him again, but when she did, she found an expression she didn’t think she saw on him before. Maybe when she was younger, a smile made more of patience than happiness but with room to evolve. His trust budded among the cracks of her past—a smile of hope and one she shared as she took her hand from the doorknob.

  At first, she had trouble reconciling the idea a shared ghost story rather than the remnants of their father-daughter bond changed his mind. Even as he said to give him the day to think about how to bring her home, the embers of their next fight were already inside her, waiting for her to spend those hours dousing them with fuel. She agreed to come back at four and left to kill time riding around town. Pine Haven was littered with constructions sites, some houses almost ready, though many were still frames. The town would be whole again one day, the things that happened a distant memory and another local story outsiders half-believed. Driving north, she thought she shared that with them. She had the same choices: to let burned-out buildings sit as a reminder of the bad things or rebuild into something capable of making even the worst evils fade.

  She held the thought as she pulled into the abandoned prison’s parking lot to stare at the brooding but impotent building, remembering how the man who ran it bashed in Vick’s face with a glowing stone. Memorial Hill Cemetery came next, her attention on the maple on John’s hill, overlooking the field he never finished plowing. Instead of crops, the dead after him were planted on that land, but her mind fixed on three brothers that went long before. If she learned anything from the ancient cowboy, it was that grudges made a person blind and a fight could go forever if someone let it. Sitting in the same place John buried his wife, she let the one with her father die.

  When four o’clock came around, after a day of driving and watching the dashboard clock, she sat outside the sheriff’s department to wait for Lud to come out. As soon as he did, she got out and walked to him, even as he waved her back and said to follow him to their temporary apartment. Instead, she kept going until beside him, arms around his waist and face against his chest. With a broken breath, she hugged him, and his arms draped her shoulders as if he forgot how.

  “I love you, dad,” she told him. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” he whispered. “Just don’t make me regret this.”

  She nodded as she pulled away and wiped her eyes though the tears didn’t come yet. They wouldn’t start until his brake lights flared at the cluster of brick apartment buildings where her daughter sat waiting for grandpa to come home. She imagined the girl she never met who had some version of her in her head, pieced from pictures kept around the apartment. She thought of Snead and the horrible thing he said to make her stay. Take a look at yourself and say she’d be better off never knowing you. Hearing his voice in her head brought back the fears of never being a good mother, the idea showing up would wreck her daughter’s happy life. Her foot twitched toward the gas pedal to drive away, forever this time, to find a place no one would find her or know how close she came to the right thing. She tested the idea by trying to twist the steering wheel, but a familiar pressure on her wrist reminded her of the long drive with John in the passenger seat, his touch the only thing that kept her from puking. He did that for her and more to put her in that moment. If there, he would have said she had a choice, but as things seemed to work out with him, she didn’t have much of one at all.

  So she pulled in and sat with her engine running until her father waved for her to come. He waited until she did and smiled when she stood beside him as if finally accepting she was home. Taking her hand, he walked Carly to the door. With a tug, he pulled her behind him as he walked in, blocking the door and the world behind it.

  “Lud?” a woman said. “You’re letting all the heat out.”

  Carly would always remember her mother’s voice, even as weak and warbled as the years made it. It was the song that sang into her crib and the patient worry that asked so many times for her to just talk to her. Staring at her dad’s back, she wanted to push past him and see her face brighten, but that would be a mistake. Even if the shock didn’t kill her, it would cost the small trust he gave. So for the first time in her life, she listened.

  “In a minute,” he said. “First, I’ve got to show you something, but I want you to stay in your seat. Where’s Lita?”

  “In her bedroom doing homework. What’s this about?”

  “Lita,” Lud called.

  “Yeah?”
a voice answered, deeper than Carly expected. The sound belonged to a girl on her way to becoming a teenager, long past the childhood she should have been around to see.

  “Come in here,” he called again.

  “I don’t like this, Ludlow,” Carly’s mom said just above a whisper. “You’re standing with the door wide open, and it’s strange.”

  “It is,” he said with a short nod.

  “What’s going on?” Lita asked from a few feet away, and Carly couldn’t stand it anymore. She put her hand between his shoulder blades and begged him as soft as possible to let her in. His muscles tensed and relaxed as he stepped inside and gave her room to follow.

  “She’s here.”

  The wail across the room meant her mother had waited to hear those words at any moment over the last decade. Lud stepped aside, leaving Carly in the open, her mother to the left and daughter straight ahead. Lita didn’t know how to react or even to what she should be reacting, her tired eyes the same as Snead’s, his ghost staring through her as she shifted her attention across the room. She worried more for her grandmother, fat tears rolling down her face, than the stranger, though she started to understand.

  “Who are you?” she asked without the same adolescent strength, more the little girl Carly expected.

  “I’m—,” Carly started to answer, but the words stuck. After all that time, she only managed a wistful smile like some stray idiot the sheriff brought home.

  “She’s your mother,” Carly’s mom stood from the recliner. She held her hands in front of her as she walked as if touching her was the only way to prove it real. Carly let her hands caress her cheeks and then fell into an embrace so tight she thought it would break her spine. The pressure eased long enough for her mom to beckon Lita to join them. It was awkward, the poor girl not sure whether to cry, laugh, or scream until something made sense. If nothing else, it proved she was her daughter.