The Scamp

by Jennifer Pashley

  Ha, no, I say.

  Are you married?

  No.

  Okay, then. He goes back to kissing, closer to my neck. Are you an outlaw, he mutters into my hair.

  I was never very inside the law to begin with, I say.

  Now, what does that mean? he says, but when I turn over in the triangle of space he’s made with his arms, he’s smiling, the dark eye with a heavier crinkle than the blue one.

  I knock on the wall of the trailer. What is this? I ask.

  A Scamp, Couper says, like it’s a puppy, like he’s describing himself, a tramp, on the rails, his belongings in a bundle tied to a stick.

  Where you headed so fast? I ask, and add his word, the word that comes back to me from last night. Pioneer.

  Looking, he says.

  Looking for what?

  Looking for you.

  I spent my childhood summers on the road. I’ve been all over the country, riding in Chuck’s clunker Malibu from state to state as far as Utah, from highway motel to highway motel. It didn’t matter that we were poor, we had a working car. If all else failed, we’d sleep in it, parked at a rest stop under pines, or by a fishing hole, windows cracked open, listening to the rush of water. Some other families from home, even with kids, they never went anywhere. They just stayed in South Lake, like that was enough. But Chuck was restless.

  Some men are, my mother said, like it was a condition of the soul.

  Chuck wanted movement.

  It feels good, he’d say, being someplace strange. Me in the front seat with a bag of chips and a Cherry Coke. It’s nice to be somewhere where no one knows you.

  I never questioned him. I didn’t think he had anything to hide, just preferred not to explain. We’d check in and he’d call me his daughter, and no one knew any different. Not that I couldn’t remember my real dad. Not that Chuck was actually my uncle. Or that my mother and her sister had married brothers from the same family. We wouldn’t say who we were at all. Chuck would pay cash and use a different name. Mike Smith. John Miller. We could be whoever we wanted.

  And then one June, everything changed. I was twelve, a metamorphosis in my own skin, busting out of the cocoon of childhood, wet, and bigger, and new. My uncle Doe had died. The eldest, Khaki’s father, the last thing holding our rickety family together. Once he was gone, it was like we’d been dropped and scattered.

  Then Khaki was tucking her leg into a red BMW, spinning out of town, another Reed gone.

  One shitty month. I lost an uncle and a cousin who was also my best friend. Their house sat empty, the lawn uncut. When school let out, I left all my stuff—papers, mediocre report card, yearbook—just piled in the laundry alley in the trailer and took off with Chuck. He drove farther than he ever had, every day, a long rumble of driving. Past Kentucky. Into the red dirt of Oklahoma. South Lake was dead to him. At least for a few weeks.

  I never saw him cry. But he’d get up in the night, pacing. The glow of his Camel lighting up with each inhale. He was the last Reed male. Technically unmarried, with no offspring of his own.

  I asked him if we should look for Khaki. I thought of that car. I had watched that car all the way down Route 8 till I was staring at nothing. Wasn’t anyone worried? I said.

  Hell no, Chuck said. She left of her own accord, in a car, with a man. Even when that was how I’d imagined life went, that a man came along to take you somewhere, to make something of you, I hadn’t expected it so soon. Henderson had come out of nowhere. Fast and smoky. Dark. On his way to a university down South.

  The worst kind, my mother said.

  I had expected us to be girls a little longer.

  It was the last summer we traveled. Pretty soon, I was graduating by the skin of my teeth, waiting tables, tending bar. When I had Summer, I named her after my favorite thing. A long, hot, lazy day. An endless road. One more blond, chub-faced Reed.

  It makes you wonder what’s passed on through our blood. What kind of sentence you hand a baby, just by letting her be born.

  I remember standing on the side of the road that last summer. It was just me and Chuck, who drove only as far as Oklahoma before he decided to turn around. There were Indians selling turquoise and plastic horses with real rabbit fur-manes, set up on tables along the roadside. The sun was hotter there, closer to the earth than it was at home. The dirt, like red blood, where at home, the driveway was filled with coal and slate. Chuck bought me a toy horse for five dollars. I’d liked them when I was little, but I was twelve. My body was racing toward adulthood. I knew things I shouldn’t have, and no amount of driving across country was going to keep me from knowing more. Chuck tossed the horse into the backseat and turned the car around, right there. I don’t think we talked to each other the whole way home, and I don’t think he stopped except to gas up. We were too busy falling apart.

  After Summer died, the last of the bare bones of my family felt gone. Maybe my spine. There was nothing left anymore to support me. Nothing to hold me upright. Maybe that’s what makes falling into bed so easy.

  Does anyone wonder where you are? Couper says.

  We are a couple of days into this. A couple of days lazing around in bed. In between, he gets up and writes, or just reads. Sometimes, I’ll watch him from the door of the Scamp, while he pauses, his glasses on top of his head, and he’ll stretch his neck to look up at the trees, resting, or searching. I can’t tell.

  There are a million ways to answer him.

  After Summer, I told my mother I’d rather die than go on.

  Well, hop to it, she said, disgusted with me and my mourning. My sad face every day. You ain’t getting much else done, she said.

  I knew they wished I wouldn’t come home. That it would be easier for everyone if I moved on, got my shit together, or even disappeared, whisked off the side of the highway, or into the trees. Picked up by someone who might take care of me finally, move me out to a strange city, or a suburb. Make a real woman out of me. A wife, and a mother again.

  I tell him I don’t always go home. I tell him that sometimes, in South Lake, girls disappear. The town is still haunted by the little girl they never found. Holly. Gone. I look out at the dark center of the lake and think, God, it’s been ten years. She was walking home from a friend’s house. Posters are still up in town, at the ice cream shop, the diner, the bulletin board at the library, yellowed, soft on the edges. Taking them down might mean we’ve given up. It was the same summer, ten years ago, when Khaki left.

  I know, Couper says.

  About Holly? I say.

  He nods.

  Are you from here? I say. I’m sure I’ve never seen him. Never seen anyone like him. Our men look different. Squirrely and rugged at the same time, with rough hands and harsh mouths. Something about Couper looks foreign to me.

  No, he says. But I’ve done the research.

  You’re researching Holly Jasper, I say. I take a step back and cross my arms. For what? Then I blurt it out, Are you a cop? My stomach roils.

  No, no, he says. He smiles, squinting in the sun. I’m a writer.

  And you’re writing about this? I say.

  He puts his hands in his pockets, shrugs. It’s what I do, he says. He turns in the gravel and heads back toward the Scamp and the car.

  Maybe South Lake is no different from any other place, I think. Girls everywhere, expendable. Picked up like a twig and carted off.

  After noon we leave the side of the lake and go to a pancake house that sits between motels. It’s one of those breakfast-all-day places, and I eat like I’ve forgotten how. Good food is hard to come by at my mother’s house. She ignores the fridge except for tonic and limes that go moldy, the cupboards full of mismatched cups and plates. My mother spends the whole day at the kitchen table, smoking and drinking instant coffee, with a little TV going on some news that she’s not even watching. Around lunchtime, she switches to gin. We eat a lot of chips and cookies, or cereal bars. Chuck makes peanut butter and mayonnaise sandwiches on white bread that he pic
ks up at the bakery outlet. Milk goes bad. There’s usually some beer, tall boys of Lite or Genesee in a box. That keeps. I buy a big new box of cheap white wine every couple of days.

  The waitress at the pancake house is sixtyish and frosted and kind of jeweled up and sexy, like old pictures of Tammy Wynette, or even of my mother before she stopped giving a shit. She touches Couper’s shoulder every time she comes over and never looks at me. When she fills his cup a third time, she asks, That your daughter?

  No, ma’am, Couper says.

  Well ain’t you the shit, she says to him. She goes and comes back with a stack of pancakes for me, a plate of eggs for him. A little stainless-steel pitcher of hot syrup. When he eyes my stack with the ball of butter sliding off the top, he asks if he can have a bite. I let him have it.

  When we go back, Couper walks to the edge of the water, where the lake curves out in a heart shape to the widest parts. The shoreline here a lighter, weedy green, the middle such a deep green it’s almost black.

  Is it really bottomless? Couper asks me. He watches me pull a Winston 100 out of a soft pack and light it. I can’t tell if he disapproves. He hasn’t said anything.

  That’s what they say, I say. When Holly disappeared, they dragged what they could, as far down in the middle as the equipment would go, the shoreline cordoned off all summer, the beach, empty and closed.

  Even a weighted body will rise eventually, he says, and then stops looking at the lake. Instead, he eyes my face, my hair, the shape of my arms. Did you know her? he asks.

  No, I say. I was older than she was, I add.

  We didn’t even know the family, but after, everyone did. And then they didn’t stay. First the dad left, found work in Schuylkill and got out. Then the mom and the kid brother. It was clear Holly wasn’t showing up, that the police weren’t coming up with a thing. They were regular people. A couple with kids and a dog. Living in a small ranch on a neighborhood street. Holly was a good girl, her father said on TV. And not one thing, not a sneaker, not a hair tie, nothing was left behind.

  Who do you write for? I say. Like, a newspaper?

  Couper’s face clouds over. I used to, he says. I’m on my own now.

  Writing articles for no one? I say.

  I can’t imagine that he’ll find anything, that there’s anyone left who hasn’t been asked, who doesn’t have a dead-end theory, or hasn’t searched themselves, turning over piles of leaves or stacks of wood, looking in vacant houses and storage units. In the years after, kids would joke about Holly’s ghost, or her half-dead body, coming up out of the woods, covered in leaves, staggering toward us like a zombie. But the town stopped looking; the kids stopped telling tales. There were new things to talk about. A Walmart near the interstate, layoffs at the coal prep plant.

  It’s hard not to be suspicious. A stranger in our town, with a tricked-out car and a shitty trailer, swooping in to solve what we couldn’t by our dumb selves. Like it was our fault all along, for not keeping a better eye on our girls, for not figuring out the danger that was right there among us.

  It’s freelance, he says finally. Investigation.

  Investigation, I repeat. How often does your story change? I ask.

  He smirks. About as often as yours does, he says.

  Well, have you found anything? I ask him.

  Not about Holly, he says, and looks at me with his cold eye.

  I turn a bare shoulder toward him and shrug.

  But, he says then, and he pulls the notepad from his shirt pocket, I think she may be part of a much bigger pattern.

  four

  KHAKI

  I was the last one standing. My mother had four miscarriages and three abortions. One baby born dead. And my sister, Aubrey, who died of an infection at four days old. They brought her home, only to rush her back to the hospital. No one bothered with a car seat. My mother just held the dead bundle on her lap, screaming.

  I didn’t want any more babies. Babies had wrecked my mother from the inside out, and I was still too young to understand why she kept getting pregnant, or why she kept losing them. But by the time Aubrey died in her bassinet, which looked like a casket anyway, all pillowed and tufted in white, I thought I could will them to go away. I thought I was in charge of it all.

  I leaned over her while she was sleeping. She looked like a doll. Like the ugly composition dolls in my grandmother’s dining room. Aubrey was bald, which I thought meant she would be blond like me, like Rayelle, and not dark haired like my mother or my brother, Nudie. Aubrey’s face was fat and smushed, her eyes squinted shut and crusty. One was pinkish, oozing. Her fists never opened.

  You belong to me, I said to her. They don’t want you.

  Aubrey was what my mother called fussy. She’d been home only a day, restless, whiny. She was hot. Feverish. I remember my mother wrapping and unwrapping her, unsure of how to make her comfortable. She sent me to Rayelle’s to play, to spend the night, the two of us in Disney nightgowns, watching TV on the floor in the living room and making a tent out of blankets and couch cushions. In the morning, Aubrey was dead.

  My mother’s body gave out on her. She weakened with every pregnancy, every miscarriage drained her a little more. She spoke less, smoked more, drank more. When she was thirty-five, they told her she had cancer and removed her voice box. She could speak through a robotic straw, but preferred just to whisper. If you weren’t close enough to hear her, or weren’t listening, she wasn’t repeating it.

  When her neck was uncovered, her throat had a red hole that moved with her breathing. If she went out, she wore a scarf. She had to cover the hole with a handkerchief to cough, or to smoke, which she kept doing. What the hell difference is it now? she’d whisper at me. When the opening wasn’t covered, smoke trailed out of her neck, curling at her collarbone.

  Nudie died before she did. She had to live through that.

  She had the abortions after she got the cancer.

  And still, he kept fucking her, even while she had cancer, while she lay in bed, sick from treatment. Her skin was sweaty all the time. Her once curvy body had shrunk down to a rack of bones, loose and empty. Her bed was her solace. Ivory satin sheets, an ivory peignoir I picked out for her at Macy’s. I told her she looked like a movie star. She kept a glass of vodka neat on the bedside table. A row of painkillers. And a bucket to throw up in. And he kept coming in to fuck her.

  Even while he was fucking me.

  When she died, I was the one who found her. If nothing else was, that was how it should have been. I hate—and I mean I hate hard—to think of what would have happened if he had found her instead.

  It was late. Past eight in the morning, and I needed a ride to school. The bus had come and gone, doing its slow creep at the edge of the driveway, waiting to see if I would come rushing out. Sometimes I’d open the door and run down the steps, and the bus driver, she’d wait. She’d also let us smoke at the very back of the bus with the windows down, if we were quiet about it.

  You need women like that in the world. Women who are looking out for you. Women who turn a blind eye when necessary.

  My mother wasn’t what anyone would call well, but she’d been steady. She’d get up in the morning with me, sit at the glass kitchen table. We’d smoke together, have coffee. She’d begun to look breakable, frail under her peignoir. Her wrists seemed snappable, her fingernails, dried out. Sometimes she leaned her elbow on the glass and held her sweaty head. Her hair hadn’t fallen out, but it was brittle, and its dark brown color had lost its red depths.

  She’d whisper to me without her electronic voice box.

  Good Christ, I hurt, she’d say. Sometimes she’d hold her arm, or her hips, like they were springing apart with pain. Mostly, she drank her coffee black in a shallow teacup, one that had come from her mother’s house and had pink-and-black pagodas on the side, leafed with bits of gold. She smoked, and held the handkerchief to the hole in her throat.

  But that morning, we both overslept.

  My dad wasn’t
home. Even if he had been, he wouldn’t have gotten me up for school. Though he’d woken me plenty of times. It was usually in the night, after I’d fallen asleep, when I was too drowsy in my limbs, my throat too dry with sleep to fight him very hard. When I rigged a makeshift lock for my door, he was so angry he took the whole door down, right off its hinges.

  You put that door back, my mother whispered. A girl needs her privacy.

  He roared at her that I was deceitful. That I was stealing from him, undermining him, sneaking boys in through the window.

  She just pointed. Put it back, Doe.

  The house was quiet. The living room, glitzed up like a nightclub, something my mother loved, a red-and-black carpet, red velvet furniture. Lamps that hung from gold chains. The kitchen had a black leather bar, a lit beer sign on the wall. Rows of bottles and shakers and my grandmother’s ice bucket from the fifties, with a heavy weighted bottom and black and white polka dots on the sides.

  He wasn’t there. Not in the basement, or the garage. And the car was gone.

  The back bedroom, where she spent more and more of her time, was different from the rest of the house. Instead of dark, it was all champagne and gold. She liked flowers, and I tried to keep fresh ones for her. Whatever I could get. Soon, the lilacs would be in bloom, and I could bring that smell inside to cover up the usual smell of stale smoke, spilled whiskey.

  My father hated flowers. He said the room looked like a funeral waiting to happen.

  The baby, Aubrey, had died in there. Tucked in satin. Burning with fever.

  There was my mother, tucked into satin sheets. Sweating out Vicodin and vodka.

  He wasn’t wrong.

  I couldn’t miss another day of school. I’d been out so many times—up all night sick, morning sick, hungover sick, taking care of my mother sick, taking my mother to appointments sick—that they were about to fail me for the year on absences alone.

  I missed that day anyway.

  She lay facedown on her pillow, a dark, sticky stain next to her mouth. I moved her shoulder to rouse her, and then rolled her onto her back. All her life she’d been voluptuous, round shouldered and big breasted, with hips and fleshy arms. But in my hand, she felt bony. Underneath the nightgown, her chest was flat and sunken; her rib cage was puffy, like it was filled with water, and the skin showed through, purple, filled with blood.