A Sharp Solitude_A Novel of Suspense

by Christine Carbo

  I feel like there’s something crawling on my scalp now too. I resist scratching behind my ear as I thank her. That’s all I need right now, I think as I head out the side door by the office to the enclosed recess area. I scan the playground. Emily’s climbing on the large and colorful wooden dinosaur in the center of the play area. She’s in deep concentration as she climbs each colorful rung up the dinosaur’s back. I don’t call out her name because I don’t want to distract her and make her fall. I’m still watching her when I hear a man behind me call out, “Byron.”

  I freeze because I have no desire to see or speak to Byron’s father, Will Jones, who is the journalist from the Daily Flathead. I am curious how it went when Brander asked him about Anne Marie. I’d love to ask Will Jones a few questions about her myself, but I realize I need to play it safe. Of all people, Will Jones is the last person who needs to connect the dots as to why I might be sniffing around a case that isn’t officially mine. But when Emily gets to the lower rungs and I take a step toward her, I feel a tap on my shoulder. “Agent Paige,” he says.

  I turn and force a smile. “Will, how nice to see you.”

  “Nice to see you too,” he says. “How’s Emily?”

  “She’s good. How’s Byron?”

  “He’s good. Always a handful. So are you involved on the latest, the North Fork thing?” he asks under his breath, because clearly this is not the place to discuss business.

  “No,” I say. “Sorry, can’t help you there.”

  “I guess I didn’t expect you would,” he says coldly. “Higher-level stuff than you usually handle, huh?”

  It’s not really a question, and he knows it’s not even an accurate statement, although since he covers the crime beat, he probably does know that we’ve been dealing mostly with militia and anti-government issues lately. I just ignore his dig and call to Emily, and when she sees me, she breaks into a wide grin and waves. Her curly hair springs out in all directions, her cheeks are rosy, and the gap between her two front teeth is noticeable. The sunlight is bringing out strands of a burgundy color in her hair. I go a little mushy inside, which is surprising since I’m standing next to someone who makes my blood boil. But there’s something about Emily’s sweet, deep concentration on the simple task of climbing a playground dinosaur that grabs me. “Excuse me, Will,” I say, then go to my daughter.

  Reeve

  * * *

  Present—Friday

  WHEN I GET back to my cabin after leaving Wallace’s house, I fix dinner, clean up, start a fire, and sit beside it to get warm. I could use propane, but it gets pricey because I have my own tank that I need to have filled every now and again. I try to keep the bill down by using the woodstove as much as possible. The mortgage, my truck payments, life insurance—which I’d never have if it wasn’t for Emily—and the child support check I write for Ali every month eats up most of my paycheck, but I’m not complaining. I don’t need much other than the basics: food, warm clothes, a place to live. I’ve never felt the need to keep up with the Joneses: flashy cars, the latest smartphones, granite countertops . . . I’ll admit I’m a sucker for good gear for hiking and camping, though. If you’re outdoors as much as I am, you notice the difference.

  Of course, attorney fees don’t figure into the equation. It’s out of the question. I already threw the note Ali gave me with the attorney’s name into my woodstove.

  Now I can hear the wind whipping up and jostling the tops of the trees. It’s getting to me, making me feel jittery and alone. An edginess keeps working its way up my spine, and I can’t sit still. I keep getting up to look out the window, thinking I’m hearing a car driving up the drive, but I see only tall, swaying trees with their tips all leaning in the same direction as if they’re engaged in some eerie choreographed dance. I know my imagination is running wild. McKay keeps lifting his head up from his paws from where he’s lying to check on me, and I figure I must be giving off a nervy vibe. I’m tired—beyond tired—since I hardly slept the night before and spent a long day in the woods. Usually a day in the fresh air makes me sleep like a baby, but I can feel that’s not going to work tonight.

  After checking the window one more time and seeing only the dark, empty drive beyond my porch light and the pines still bowing with the wind, I decide to call my mom. She lives in Tallahassee, and I don’t know how she’s managed to stay in that city all this time. After they divorced, even my dad got out of there, moved to Gainesville, and found a job at a car dealership. My mom tends to talk a lot in order to avoid anything too serious, and I’m not sure I’m up for her chitchat, but I figure it’s better than listening to the wind pick up and freaking myself out.

  “Hey there, hon,” she says. I hear a long, meted-out exhalation and I realize she’s smoking. Last time I spoke to her, she said she had finally quit.

  “Hey,” I say, “you smoking again?”

  She doesn’t answer right away, and I take that as a yes. “Just one in the evening,” she says. “No more. You happened to call right when I lit one.”

  I want to ask her, Why even one? But with my history, I have no right to preach to her. “How are things?” I ask instead.

  “Good.” She tells me about Ralph, a man she’s been seeing for about six months now. “Went to a movie earlier. The one about the solar flares.”

  I can’t recall the last time I paid attention to a movie, other than the ones Emily is interested in, but I say, “Yeah, yeah,” as if I know exactly which one she’s referring to when I really have no idea. She begins to tell me about the plot—about how the flares eventually end everything.

  “Seems everything’s about the world ending these days,” I say.

  “That’s ’cause everything is going to shit.”

  I’m surprised to hear her say something so negative. Usually that’s me, and she’s the one always putting the positive spin on things. “Everything okay?” I ask.

  “Oh, everything’s fine.” I note that she doesn’t sound entirely fine, but before I can ask her, she changes the subject. “How’s that precious grandchild of mine doing? Still drawing those pretty unicorns?”

  “Pretty isn’t exactly how I’d describe ’em. Fairly certain art isn’t going to be her thing.”

  “Oh, stop,” my mom says. “She’s five. What do you expect? You were drawing hammerhead sharks at that age, but they certainly didn’t look anything like hammerheads.”

  I chuckle at the thought, but consider how she seems to be holding something back. I figure it has something to do with my dad. I know he calls her occasionally, still relies on her to be the anchor like the rest of us, my younger sister and me included. I don’t ask about him, though, and she doesn’t bring him up. Instead, I ask about my sister, and she tells me that she’s been helping Mandy out with the kids. Mandy, married with two children, lives only about five minutes from my mom. You know what they say: A daughter’s a daughter for the rest of her life; a son’s a son till he takes a wife.

  “Other day she had to take Mae to the doctor for a bad cough,” my mom continues. “I watched Noah.” I hear her take another drag. “Talk about art; now, he’s an artist. You should see the detail in the dinosaurs he’s drawing. Drew a big T. rex for me, and I couldn’t believe how accurate he got those little legs.”

  My mom always comes to the rescue for my sister. For me too. It sounds corny but it’s true: if it weren’t for my mom’s stubborn strength, her belief in me, and her lighthearted but steady prodding, I probably never would have turned things around. Reeve, are you studying? Reeve, is that support group tonight? Reeve, you have a counseling session you can’t miss. Reeve, you need to go. Reeve, for god’s sake, pick your head up and walk proud. Reeve, stop with the long face; things aren’t that bad. Smile, hon. Shoulders back. Stand tall. On some level, I’m still relying on her to be my compass by the very fact that I’m calling her on this night. But I don’t want to tell her what’s happened. It’s like a haze in my head—as if my mind is a TV that has been taken over b
y fuzzy static. She doesn’t ask me if there’s anything wrong before we end our conversation, although I know her well enough to know that she probably senses it in my voice, just as I can in hers. When she says, “Call me if you need anything,” and adds, “I mean it, Reeve,” I realize she knows something’s up.

  After I hang up, it takes only a second before I notice the wind again. A branch from one of the aspen trees is banging against the glass. I go to the front window and look out on the driveway. It’s too dark to see past the circle of light my porch lamp creates. I tell myself to calm down, that I’m alone, that nobody’s coming to get me. I close my bloodshot eyes and feel them sting. McKay stands next to me, wondering if I’m going to let him out, so I do.

  I go back in and sit in the same chair Anne Marie was in two nights ago. The fire illuminates the room in the same way, casting orange flickering light and dark shadows. Emily’s pictures are still neatly stacked on the coffee table. I lean over, grab them, and shuffle through them, looking absently at each one. I stop at the one of a mermaid with bright red hair. Emily has drawn a smile with lips so big, they go outside the lines of the mermaid’s face, but the mermaid doesn’t actually look like she’s smiling. Her lips are pulled back, baring large teeth like an angry animal. I’m studying it, wondering if she meant for it to look that way, when suddenly, outside, McKay erupts into a barking fit. I pop up out of my seat, the drawings scattering to the floor. It’s not his usual let-me-in bark; it’s a vociferous, bellowing tirade, one that says, Someone or something’s coming, and I’m protecting you and this place.

  I go to the front window and look outside. I can’t see anyone, just McKay, stiff-legged, looking down the drive, and rearing up with a howl. I go to the kitchen, grab my canister of pepper spray and a flashlight, and step out onto the porch next to him. McKay’s back is edged with a ridge of fur standing straight up. “What’s out here, buddy?”

  His bark turns to a snarl. I squint down the drive, trying to see through the blackness, but everything is swallowed by the dark. The wind hits my face. It still feels like snow, but there’s been no moisture yet. I lean down and give McKay a big whiff. I don’t smell skunk, but sometimes it takes a moment to register.

  I stand up and look down the road again. I wish I had McKay’s sense of smell and knew what was out there. The revelation that I feel like a sitting duck for the cops deeply annoys me—that they’ve been in my house, my space, and that they very well could be out there, posted, watching me. I descend the front porch steps, walk to the corner of the cabin, and shine my light out into the trees. The white light shows skinny pines bending back and forth and casting shadows. The forest looks warped, like dark shapes shifting and sliding sideways in my vision. I’m sure it’s just an elk, a bear, or some other creature, but a part of me can’t shake the feeling that it’s the cops, that they’re watching me, messing with me. “Come on,” I say to McKay, who stays close by my side as we head back in. “Whatever was out there is gone now, with you throwing that kind of a fit.” I open the door, follow him in, then lock it behind me.

  Ali

  * * *

  Present—Friday

  EMILY AND I swing by the store to pick up a lice kit just to be on the safe side, and then a café that I know makes good soup, where I pick up some chicken noodle for Rose. It makes me think of my sister—how, whenever she’d get sick, I also had to stay home from school and watch her so my mom could still go to work. She had a series of jobs: at a pet store, a diner, a call-service facility, a nursing home, one of the local hospitals. Rose tries to take care of me, but there are ways in which I watch over her too. I don’t bring attention to this side of me; I try hard not to succumb to it.

  I have reasons for trying to suppress these instincts. When, as a kid, I admitted to Sara Seafeldt that I looked after Toni or cooked for her, she always got that overinterested do-tell look on her face—the curve of a polite smile on her lips and a small nod to go with it before she’d begin peppering me with questions about how often I’m required to look after Toni. Soon after, we’d get a dreaded visit from the Division of Youth and Family Services, now known as Child Protection and Permanency. I know the department’s name was changed only because of my sister’s current situation with her own daughter, Winnie—short for Wynona. She’s three, and Winnie’s father took Toni to court to get custody, claiming that Toni was unfit to be a mother due to her level of drug use. And he was right. Winnie was much better off with Pete.

  But I can’t always resist the impulse to take care of others. Traditional psychology holds that it’s a way to assert control, especially when you were raised in an unstable or chaotic household. That’s me to a tee. So even though Rose is more than capable, I find myself suppressing the urge to help her out. She’s even younger than Toni, and although she looks absolutely nothing like my sister, she has a silly giggle that sounds identical to Toni’s. Plus, I know Rose has been through a lot. When she was sixteen, a man broke into her parents’ house looking for valuables he could sell to make some drug money. It was in the middle of the week, so the burglar assumed no one was there, but Rose’s older sister, Kimmie, was home sick. She walked in on him in the living room while he was unhooking the TV from the wall. She freaked out, and the guy—some nineteen-year-old named Vince, I learned when I looked up the news story, because Rose is fairly private like me at times and doesn’t like to talk about the incident—fired his gun. The bullet hit her just above the hip in the abdomen, exploding her liver. She called 911, but by the time help came, it was too late.

  I take a white paper bag with the soup, a roll wrapped in plastic, and a pat of butter to her doorstep. I don’t want to wake her or disturb her, so I place it in the space in between the door and the screen and then text her to let her know it’s there. I tell her that it might get cold, so she should just pop it in the microwave before she eats it.

  Then I tackle Emily’s head. First I take a comb and carefully separate her hair at the roots and check her scalp for any crawling creatures. I’m relieved when I don’t see any, so I put the kit away, but make her take an early bath and wash her hair anyway. It takes me about forty-five minutes to work a comb through her thick, tangled hair. Again I’m reminded of Toni and the awful knots she used to get in her hair, how my mom would yell at her for not taking care of herself. She’d come to me crying, and I’d sit and try to work them out, but never could completely get the matted parts out. One day my dad angrily marched her into a hair salon and got her long dark locks chopped off. She wailed then too, as if she were losing an arm. Sometimes I wonder if it’s the smaller wounds, like that one, that leave the deepest scars.

  Since I’m already in worry mode—about Reeve, about Rose’s not feeling well—I call Toni to check on her after Emily goes upstairs to play. She loves her room and all her toys, and I feel fortunate that she knows how to entertain herself, something common in only children. People are quick to point out the flaws in children that grow up with no siblings—that they can be inherently selfish because they’ve never had to share or deal with the constant presence of another child—but they are also often extremely self-sufficient, capable of focusing for long periods of time, and they sometimes don’t develop the manipulativeness and meanness borne of defending oneself from the constant teasing and fighting that goes on between siblings.

  “Hey, chickadee,” I say when she answers.

  “Hey, sis.” Her voice sounds good, direct and sober, and I’m thankful I didn’t get her on a bad night. My mood picks up considerably. “How are things?”

  “They’re good.”

  “Wonderful. How’s work?”

  “It’s good. I’ve been thinking . . .” she goes on, her voice petering out like she’s still considering something.

  I cringe at what it might be. “About what?”

  “I’ve been thinking of trying to get Winnie back.”

  “Hmm,” I say. I don’t add anything else because I know it will pass. She is unlikely to ever g
et it together enough to find an attorney and the money to take Pete back to court, nor do I want her to do that. Our mother does and is always egging her on, I’m sure. I hide my opinion from Toni, and at times I’m nervous that she’ll ask me directly. Deep down, I don’t think she ever will, though, because what I believe she fears the most is further exposure of her own inadequacies, her own shameful behavior—real or exaggerated in her own mind. “Have you taken advantage of your visitation times?” I ask instead.

  “Of course,” she says. “I miss her so much, Ali. I can’t stand it.” She begins to cry.

  “I know you do.” I hang on the line and wait for her to compose herself before saying anything more.

  “When are you coming home? When are you coming back to Jersey?”

  “I’m not sure.” I feel the familiar stab of guilt. I have no desire to go back to Jersey, but not a day goes by that I don’t feel awful for it—that I’m not out east trying to stitch it all together for her and my mother. At least they have each other, dysfunctional or not. I long ago gave up on my ability to make a difference in their lives. Another thing I learned in psychology was exactly how dangerous it is to enable the destructive behavior of the people you love. It suddenly occurs to me that maybe I’m doing the same thing with Reeve. I shake it away. “You know I have to go wherever they send me.”

  “Can’t you put in for a transfer?” she whines, and I want the voice she had at the beginning of the conversation to return. I’m almost tempted to ask about her plans to get Winnie back, to see if it reanimates her, but I know better. “Toni,” I say, “we’ve been over this so many times. It’s not that simple. I have a daughter to think about. She’s in school. She’s doing well here.”