Dark Road Home

by Anna Carlisle

  Lily had disappeared before the advent of texting, before she ever owned a cell phone. The evidence of her life was forever frozen on the cusp of a world that had completely changed. What would she think, if instead of spending the last two decades in the lonely grave not two miles away, Lily were to return today? What would she make of her mother’s success, her father’s constancy?

  What would she think of the woman her sister had become?

  Gin paused on the wide landing at the top of the stairs, staring down the hallway at the closed door to her parent’s bedroom. It took up the left wing of the house, a lovely room with a glassed-in porch and arched windows. The door had been kept resolutely closed all through Gin’s childhood, entrance by invitation only. Richard never emerged from that room unless he was showered and neatly dressed; Madeleine stowed her exquisite treasures—gloves and perfume atomizers and hair ornaments and dance cards from her debutante season—in the furniture she had brought with her from Philadelphia. Led by Lily, the girls had investigated on a few occasions, looking for clues to their mother’s unknowable depths.

  Gin entered the bathroom she’d shared with Lily and stripped, dropping her clothes on the floor. She turned on the shower as hot as it would go and stood under the stinging spray, thinking about the afternoon when she’d come into the bathroom to find her sister, huddled naked in the corner of the shower, crying so hard she couldn’t speak.

  4

  The next morning, dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt she’d hastily packed the day before, Gin decided to walk into town for breakfast. From the house to the intersection of State and Elm, where Veterans’ Park was bounded on three sides by the carcass of the old downtown, was a lovely, tree-lined walk of less than half a mile. The worst of Trumbull’s disgrace was to the east of town, a grid of run-down buildings and shuttered shops in the shadow of the old cola-processing plant.

  A modest renaissance, championed by her mother, had taken tenuous hold downtown. Last time Gin had been here, a little organic café had appeared where the copy shop used to be, and Gin headed for it, hoping to get some decent coffee.

  She was waiting for one of the town’s three stoplights to change when the truck pulled up in front of her. Big and hulking and exactly the same shade of green it had been twenty years ago, the old Ford was like a stone tossed from the shore of her past, landing with a resounding splash—and there was Jake at the wheel.

  He did a double take that might have been comical under other circumstances, old friends meeting by chance. But they weren’t old friends, exactly. They had been so much more—until they were nothing.

  Jake. Fury welled up inside her, hurt so powerful it had a taste, like rust in her mouth. As for Jake, his expression darkened even as he flashed a thin smile, then passed by her to park.

  She walked toward the truck as Jake climbed out, fixing what she hoped was a neutral expression on her face while the old engine popped and banged. They looked at each other uneasily. “Hello, Jake.”

  He reached for her hand, pressing her fingers between his large, callused palms. She jerked her hand back after a second.

  “You got in last night?” he asked.

  “Yes. Mom and Dad stayed up.”

  “They must be . . . I’m glad you’re back here, for them.”

  His voice was steady, with no trace of the bitter barbs that had once landed between them. He had retained the wholesome good looks from his high school years, but maturity had brought a kind of hardness to his features, a few lines to his sun-burnished skin. Same stick-straight thick brown hair, a few strands of silver at the temples.

  She hadn’t been prepared for the emotional impact of seeing him again. Madeleine had slipped in allusions to Jake’s welfare over the years, always from a safe remove. Usually, she mentioned him in an e-mail, which was the default form of communication between the three surviving Sullivans.

  Saw Jake at the records office pulling permits.

  Judge Banner told Dad that Jake’s added another crew. They got the demolition job. Imagine, no more roller rink!

  Ida mentioned Lawrence got that flu. Seems like folks are getting it this year whether they got the vaccine or not. Lucky he’s got Jake to look in on him.

  “You look good,” Gin said, recovering her composure. She could do this—she could act like seeing him meant nothing.

  “You—well, no one would believe that almost twenty years have gone by.” Jake shifted his weight restlessly. “Listen, are you doing anything right now? Want to get a cup of coffee?”

  Gin cast her gaze across the park, where a handful of young mothers were gathered with their toddlers and babies, and a small group of teenagers were clustered by the basketball court. She could turn him down. She should turn him down. Except that everything she thought she knew about Jake Crosby had been flung violently into question again, the moment the cooler was unearthed. The old doubts were exposed, the painful knotted threads of loyalty and loss, blame and longing. If there was a chance to find out what had really happened to Lily, it once again looked like Jake might hold the key.

  “Yes, actually,” she said. “Mom’s still making the decaf she gets in a can at the grocery store.”

  “There’s an organic coffee company in Trumbull now.”

  “Still no Starbucks?”

  “Not on your mom’s watch.”

  That made her laugh despite herself, and Jake joined in, and for a moment her defenses wavered. “God, it’s good to see you,” he said, and then before she could respond, he added, “The Triangle’s still probably our best bet,” and walked into the street to stop traffic for her, as though it was 1960 and Trumbull was still thriving and they were just a couple of nice kids with time on their hands.

  ***

  The Triangle Diner was only vaguely triangular. It was more of a blunt-tipped polygon carved from what had been the lobby of the old theater. When the multiplex cinema had opened in the new mall in nearby Greensburg in the seventies, the theater closed, and a handful of businesses had tried to make a go in the beautiful old building.

  Only the Triangle survived, though the faces were all new to Gin. They were greeted by a young Asian man with full-sleeve tattoos. The girl who seated them was pretty enough to walk a runway in New York City, but when she opened her mouth, her flat accent gave her away as a local.

  “Hi, Mr. Crosby,” she said. “You want the buckwheat and over hard?”

  “That’ll be great, Ell,” he said. “How’s your mom?”

  “Good, I guess.” The girl looked shyly down at her order pad. “Ma’am, what can I get you?”

  Gin glanced at the menu chalked on a board behind the register. It had been updated some since the nineties, one side still devoted to eggs and flapjacks, the other venturing bravely into organic fare. “How about the spelt French toast?”

  The girl nodded and left them alone.

  Jake was watching her carefully. “Gin . . . I don’t even know where to begin. I would say I know this must be a shock to you. I mean . . . it is for me. I never thought—I guess I never thought they’d find her.”

  Gin’s emotional state had been chaotic in the months after Lily’s disappearance. Anger, blame, grief, and loneliness—a toxic brew of emotions too complex for any adolescent to untangle, much less one like Gin who’d never been good at showing her feelings. When she went away to college that fall, it was a relief to shut her former life out, to lie to her new friends and say that she was an only child. As for Jake . . . when the girls in her dorm asked if she had a boyfriend at home, it was easy to shrug and say no.

  Jake was staring at her, waiting for her to respond. “It’ll be good for Mom and Dad to have closure,” Gin said woodenly, a variation of the things she and her colleagues said when they had to interact with the families of their cases. No one liked dealing with the families—forensic pathology tended to draw introverts, people more comfortable behind the mask in the noble silence of the morgue than outside it.

  Jake quirk
ed one eyebrow up. He wasn’t fooled. “Look, I’m glad I saw you today. I didn’t know if it would be . . . welcome, for me to come around to see you. How your folks would feel.”

  Everyone knew how Richard Sullivan felt about Jake. What surprised Gin was that Jake would want to see her at all. “Your dad’s coming over this afternoon,” she said, avoiding the topic of her father. “Look, Jake, have you had a chance to find out? Is it our cooler?”

  He nodded, running his hand through his hair in frustration. “Dad already called Lloyd in, and he gave a statement to the county cops. Dad offered to step off, but so far they haven’t taken him up on it.”

  “And Lloyd . . . ?”

  “Took one look and pointed out where he’d carved his initials with the wood burner. But he also told the detectives he didn’t have any idea what happened to the cooler when he got rid of it. His memory’s not what it used to be.”

  Gin’s own memories of Lloyd were of a kindly old man, but he couldn’t have been more than sixty then. A lifetime of sun damage spotted and creased his Irish skin, but he still took off every chance he got to fish and hunt. He’d been Lawrence’s partner before Lawrence got promoted to chief, and to hear them tell it, they’d spent as much time hunting deer and drinking beer as working in the old days. After his wife left, Lawrence was too busy raising Jake to hunt, but Gin remembered more than one Sunday dinner at the Crosby’s when Lloyd arrived wearing a clean shirt buttoned up to his chin, his hat in his hand, with a couple of plucked and cleaned ducks ready to throw on the grill.

  Jake had found the cooler on Lloyd’s trash heap after Lloyd decided to treat himself to a new one, in anticipation of a fishing trip down to the Florida Keys. The older man encouraged Jake to take whatever he liked before he drove the rest to the dump. It had been so long ago, no wonder the details were murky in Lloyd’s mind.

  “Well, that pretty much put the matter to rest. The county boys questioned Lloyd for an hour or so, Dad said, but in the end he couldn’t really give them much.”

  “They can’t think he had anything to do with it—”

  “Of course not. Look at it from their perspective, Gin.”

  She thought about it for a moment. Jake had fired the first volley—acknowledging the ugly question between them. “I guess from their perspective, you’re still their best bet,” she said coolly. “Since you were with her that night.”

  He nodded. “I imagine they’ll want to talk to me today. Dad told me to keep my phone handy.”

  What are you going to tell them? Gin wanted to ask, but another question crowded her thoughts:

  Will it be anywhere close to the truth?

  5

  July 3, 1998

  Gin was helping her mother make red, white, and blue crepe-paper starbursts to decorate the porch when Tom and Christine arrived. Her fingertips were blue with the dye from the paper when they walked in the door.

  The twins were slathered with sunscreen, smelling like piña coladas. Christine had a summer job at the medical center, filing and answering phones for her dad, and could only work on her tan on the weekends, so Tom was well ahead of her. His blue eyes sparkled with life and his hair had gone a peculiar green-tinged shade of pale blond from chlorine, a side effect of his lifeguarding job. The last two Septembers, he’d ceremoniously shaved his head for the pep rally that kicked off the school year, and this year—his senior year—he would be a cocaptain of the football team.

  But the pep rally was still two months away, an eternity when measured by the slow, sultry clock of summer in Trumbull. Gin had been helping her mother set up the backyard all day; tomorrow at ten o’clock, a few dozen friends and neighbors would gather for brunch, and then they would all walk to town to watch the parade. Tomorrow night there would be fireworks in Veterans’ Park.

  Tom and Christine didn’t bother to knock. They’d been regular visitors to this house for years, ever since their father, Spencer, had arrived in town, a grieving widower with infant twins in tow. Spencer and Richard had worked together in Chicago, and Richard convinced him to take the director of clinical operations job at the surgery center he was starting.

  Madeleine had cared for the twins along with baby Virginia, since they were all born within months of each other. When Lily came along, Madeleine said she barely noticed, so busy was she with diapers and bottles and laundry.

  “Hi, Mrs. Sullivan,” the twins called, their voices an echo of each other, separated by an octave. Christine pulled her tank dress self-consciously lower, trying to cover up her bikini; Madeleine frowned on skimpy swimsuits. Madeleine came out of her little office off the laundry room, wiping her hands on her apron, already reaching for the list tacked to the fridge with a magnet, and kissed them each absently.

  “Hi, kids. Listen, Virginia, will you ask Jake to bring the ice on the way back? I’ll give you some money. I think three of the big bags will be enough, and your father can get more in the morning if we need it.”

  Gin accepted the folded twenty that her mother dug from her big white purse, and then they all clattered up the stairs and into Lily’s room.

  It had always been the four of them. They had taken baths together, napped together, gone on camping and Disney trips together. At first, Mr. Parker had come along on these adventures, the Sullivans folding him into their own family as though their hale goodwill would be enough to cure him of his melancholia. And it had seemed to work. Gin remembered countless summer evenings chasing fireflies with her sister and their friends while the three adults talked and drank wine.

  Occasionally Mr. Parker brought a friend of his own, some woman who taught school or worked in a bank or sold real estate, as exotic as a spy in her summer dress and lipstick and cloud of perfume, and then the children would skulk solemn and tentative at the edges of the yard, watching. But these girlfriends never lasted long. Mr. Parker seemed destined to be a bachelor forever, and Gin’s parents seemed content to be the shore on which he perpetually washed up.

  That phase ended, of course. Gin couldn’t remember the change, so gradual had it been, but each of the adults seemed to find their own distractions. All four kids started school, and the years ticked by. Tom was good at every sport he picked up, Lily was in trouble as often as not, Christine was in student government, and Gin was content to be left to her pursuit of good grades. The dynamics of their four-way friendship ebbed and flowed, leaving room for fits of pique and moody détentes, screaming battles and passionate apologies, pranks and dares, betrayals and crushes. When Gin started dating Jake halfway through her junior year of high school, their little quartet had made room for him, his presence barely causing a ripple in the placid surface of their friendship.

  Gin had thought of the twins as family right up until the day she found Tom and Lily kissing in the garage over Christmas break, when Lily had just turned sixteen and Tom was weeks shy of his eighteenth birthday. But that, too, seemed inevitable in retrospect. Reckless, passionate, bubbly Lily; popular, headstrong Tom—the two of them seemed to understand each other. Even their parents were delighted, with the exception of Madeleine, who was dead set against the pair’s romance; but the rest of them laughed her off, much as they’d laughed off her idea of a cotillion at the country club or her pleas for Lily to cut her hair or for Gin to take Latin.

  Now it was summer, and it was dawning on them all that life as they knew it was coming to a close. Jake and Gin had been accepted to Ohio State, Christine was going to Temple, and Tom seemed remarkably unfazed to be headed to Duquesne after none of the athletic scholarships he had hoped for materialized. Only Lily would be left behind, and—in typical Lily fashion—she was expressing her displeasure with frequent fits of temper interspersed with moody afternoons sequestered in her room, complaining of mysterious pains that inevitably turned out to be nothing.

  At the moment, as the rest of them burst through her door, Lily was leaning out the window, her toes barely touching the floor. Gin’s heart flew to her throat as only an older sister’s c
an: she’d been in charge of wild Lily’s safety since Lily was an eighteen-month-old determined to climb out of her crib.

  “Lil!” Gin shrieked, while Christine sorted through the tray of barrettes on Lily’s dresser—the three girls were constantly trading hair accessories that summer. Tom seized Lily around the waist, picked her up, and twirled her. Lily shrieked and held on, laughing, and Gin bit back the scolding that had been on the tip of her tongue.

  She took Lily’s place at the window. There, idling in the circular drive in front of the house, was Jake Crosby in the old truck he’d bought with his lawn-mowing money. His arm hung out the window, and he was craning his neck to look up. When he saw Gin, he tapped his lips—shorthand for a kiss, and a promise for later.

  Gin smiled down at him and felt her heart swell up like a sponge soaking up pure sunshine. Jake was hers—finally she had something that no one else had.

  “Look what I got from Lloyd!” he called. In the bed of the truck was the biggest, filthiest cooler Gin had ever seen, a dented plastic box plastered all over with bumper stickers. “We can take it to the creek. Keep the sodas cold.”

  He winked when he said it, and Gin knew it wasn’t soda in that cooler. Tom and Jake liked Heineken when they could get someone to buy it for them, but mostly they settled for PBR, $2.99 for a six-pack at a gas station on the far side of town.

  An hour later, they were sitting on the long, flat sand bar in the middle of Bear Creek near the water tower, their feet in the water, sweating in the humid afternoon. A storm threatened in the distance; the sky to the east was thickening with clouds. No matter; it would be gone by tomorrow. Secretly, Gin wished for a storm, for the excitement of the purpling sky, the plummeting temperature, the whipping of dust into the air and green acorns shaken from the trees to roll down the creek bank into the water.