On the back porch, on our second date, Carter asked me what my secret was.
To the sweet tea? I said, coy. Superfine sugar.
He held my hand over the table between us. I was barefoot, and goddamn it was hot, a hundred, a hundred and five. He rubbed his thumbs over my fingernails. No, he said. Your secret. What brought you here.
I told him a truth. I needed a fresh start, I said. I wanted to live quietly on my own. To clear my head. To think. To relearn what was important.
He nodded like what I’d said was a prayer.
I was burning up with anger and resentment and shame. I wanted time alone to cull that into something manageable. Something I could use. Hurl at someone.
I wanted to see what I could get away with. In a town like Summersville, where a woman like me gets noticed in the best ways. I made a quiet splash. Went to church. Dated the right man. Made the right acquaintances, but kept to myself.
By the time I left there, afraid of what was happening in a town so small and godly, and needing to care for my sick mother in Virginia, Summersville didn’t know what hit it.
Nevada arrived as I was closing. I had shut down the machines, counted out the register. She was there on the sidewalk when I came out the front door with my key, locking up. It was a little coffee shop on the corner. Espressos and cookies and sweet tea. The owner was a fiftyish woman with daughters. I told her I had a mean ex, and needed to work for cash to stay under the radar.
You need to play on people’s compassion.
She asked me if he knew where I was and I said no. I’m laying real low, I said. She rubbed my shoulder, said it was fine. That she would keep an eye out for me. I worked there for eight months.
Cash in my pocket, I was closing, and there she was. Nevada. With near-black hair and eyes that were green like a cat’s. She wore white shorts and Vans sneakers. A T-shirt that said As I Lay Dying. She had a blue streak in her hair that came from under her ear and hung over her collarbone.
Oh, you’re closed, she said to me.
What were you looking for? I said.
She looked at me a long time before she answered.
What she wanted was chai. I gave her my address and told her to meet me on the back porch in twenty minutes. I’d make her some tea. I wanted to change. I wanted to go home alone, and not be seen on the street with her. I wanted to forget which direction she’d come from and see her manifested only on my porch, under the yellow light, a small patch of grass and a clothesline behind her.
For the record, when it happened, it was she who kissed me.
She was the only one I left like that. Where they could find her. Where everyone could wonder Why? And who.
It made the casual kissing, the minor petting that I did with Carter, more bearable. He was chaste. He made it clear that he desired me, but he kept it in check. It was unlike anything I’d seen.
I played with the buttons on his shirt. I said, I’m not a virgin.
And he laughed. I’m not either, he said.
I meant it as an apology to him. A warning. I said, In college, and he nodded.
When he fixed my kitchen sink, he found a small bottle of bourbon and the pack of cigarettes I kept in a junk drawer.
Jordan, he said.
I covered my mouth with my hand. Old habits, I mumbled.
He stopped the faucet from running a steady thin stream. I rubbed my hands down the length of his arms and laid my cheek on his shoulder blade.
Jessa, I met at church. She was shy, literally beat down by a second husband. She’d married at seventeen, had a baby, and then remarried at twenty-five and had another. We talked in the parking lot one Wednesday night, a long time. After ten o’clock. Standing under the streetlamp by her car. She told me about the new baby, about the older girl. She talked about books and about TV shows and nail polish. Her words had a warp speed to them, like she was thirsty, and I was water.
I touched her elbow. What’s bothering you? I said.
We had done a study on Ephesians. Be kind. I carried my Bible tucked under my arm. Wore a rayon dress with a small flower print. Flat sandals.
Oh, she said. Sometimes I don’t want to go home.
You want some tea? I said.
I would love some.
I took her home. And then I talked to her every day. Every day, until the end.
They’ll never find Jessa.
I never met Nevada at my own house again. We met everywhere else. The cemetery. The quarry. The mill yard. Behind the fire station. On the baseball field.
I gave her the name Nevada that first night. She had an Indian look to me. She looked like a desert flower. One that blooms, full open and purple, at night.
I love it, she said. Is Jordan your real name? she asked me.
No.
Is it close to your real name?
Nope.
Her mouth was on fire. Her hands, small and square and strong. She had a tattoo on her hip, a blackbird, perched and watching me when I pressed my mouth on her. While I held her hips in my hands. Her spine, arched. Her mouth, open and singing.
With Jessa, I prayed. We sat at my kitchen table, which had come with the house, round and shell pink from the 1960s with pink vinyl chairs. We had coffee and a lemon cake she’d brought me. I held both her hands and she lowered her head, her eyes squeezed.
Lord, I said, deliver this woman from the evil that overpowers her life. Guide her with Your loving hand. Protect her and make her whole again.
Henderson used to talk about paradox. In his philosophy years. About how sometimes you couldn’t be clean until you were dirtied. Couldn’t be free until you were enslaved. Couldn’t be whole until you’d been broken to pieces.
I kept that in mind.
Jessa’s husband was mean in terribly usual, predictable ways. He called her stupid in public. He talked over her. He hushed her when she tried to assert an opinion. When no one looked, he pulled her hair and pinched the backs of her arms. He’d hit her on top of her head, which left her dazed, her brain ringing like a bell. She’d lost hearing in her right ear from him boxing it. It buzzed and if she plugged her left ear, everything was muffled, stuffed.
Why? I asked her. There was no reason why. But I wanted her to try to answer it. Why does he do this?
If I refuse, she said. She looked up at the ceiling, ashamed. Her body was soft and white. Her hair, reddish and long. She had freckles on her shoulders, on her eyelids. If I disagree. If I spend too much. She chewed the side of a thumbnail.
I wanted to yell at her. I’d seen my own mother, weakened from radiation, fall down the stairs to the basement when my father pushed her. She dislocated her shoulder, the blade sticking out at a frightening angle, my mother howling in pain, crumpled at the bottom of the stairs.
Oh, you got enough fat on you still to cushion a fall, Doe had said.
I pushed it back in for her, with a loud snap. I did it quick, afraid, acting without thinking. It was in the wrong spot; I put it back.
We sat there after, the two of us on the cellar floor. My mother, wiping at her face. Me, stunned. Thank you, she said to me.
It was the least I could do.
Carter wanted daughters. He never outright talked to me about marriage, but he’d hint sometimes. He wanted to know about my sisters, about my mother.
My mother lives in Virginia, I told him. In a little town, like this one, I said.
How come you didn’t go there, he said, instead of here?
Well, you know how it is, I said. Everybody knows you.
You know all that’s behind you, he said. Carter was a dedicated believer in forgiveness, ongoing. A clean slate. A state of grace.
About my sisters, I told him I had two: one in Texas, with four boys, and one in California, who was married but didn’t have a baby yet.
And that’s it? he said.
That’s it.
Where’s your daddy?
Oh, I said. I felt my throat tighten. My daddy passed, I said. When
I went to college.
Carter nodded.
Broke my mama’s heart, I said.
And yours too, Carter said.
Mine too.
I made sense to him. The way I talked about back home. My sisters, my mother. He knew that I spoke with Jessa, and thought I was doing right by her, to counsel her, to be a good friend to her. Nobody knew about Nevada. And I was the only one who ever called her that.
What I knew about Nevada was that she lived now with her daddy, who worked at the mill. That before, she’d lived with her mother and her mother’s boyfriend, and that now, her mother was in jail. That her father was trying to undo some of the damage her mother had done, or let be done. I knew she was unsatisfied, living in this little town, that she had wanderlust in her soul. That she liked to save kittens from the shelter, or baby rabbits when the mother died. She painted her toenails electric blue, and her fingernails green. She wouldn’t go to church, and ate her meals fast and greedy, like a kid who had grown up the youngest in a house of men.
I left her in the old part of the cemetery. There was a front part, newer, close to the road, and another gathering of stones farther back in the trees. It was deep and wet back there, the grass long and moldy. The stones, hardly legible. The oldest graves were hidden by thick sumac and wild raspberries around the perimeter. If you were just driving by, you wouldn’t know there was another part.
I made one clean hard cut to her throat, and only after took the blindfold from her eyes. It was loose around her temples, around the back of her hair. Not meant to bind. Meant only to cover her eyes. To shield her from the look on my face when rage took over. I took her clothes, and I burned them.
She was missing, and Jessa was gone. They found Nevada within two days. But over Jessa, there was just whispering.
Do you know, Carter asked me, where she went?
I shook my head.
There’s a baby, he said.
I know.
And by then, my fictional mother was ill. My sisters were coming home, from Texas and California, to spend time with her in Virginia. I had never stayed so close to what was going on.
The officer who came to my back porch asked me when I’d talked to Jessa last.
We had coffee last Friday, I told him. And we prayed, I said. She was often distressed, I said.
They had found Nevada, naked, with her throat cut, he said, clear into the spinal cord. Her head was nearly detached. Dear God, the cop said to me, hesitant to suggest a connection, but it was there. People were talking. Who would do such a thing? he said.
I went to a prayer vigil, but couldn’t stay. Carter put his coat around my shoulders and took me home. What was happening? How could it be so dangerous just to be a young woman?
I’m scared, I told him.
You should be, he said.
He walked me to my door and said he’d wait on the porch until I’d turned the deadbolt. A shame, he said. We don’t lock our doors here.
And after that, I left. I called him once, to tell him I’d arrived safely, relieved to be away from what was going on in Summersville, and that I was in the company of my sisters, and my mother, that my California sister was expecting her first baby after all, that there was joy to be had, there among us, a family of women.
I called him on a prepaid cell phone that I smashed and threw out.
But first, from that same phone, I called home and told Chuck to wire me money.
Now why in the hell would I do that? he asked me. I could hear Rayelle chattering in the background. Rayelle, about to graduate from the high school we should have gone to together.
Why don’t you put Rayelle on the phone and I’ll tell her why, I said.
I could hear him move away from them, heard the click of a door, the hollow sound of his voice in a small, closed room.
I don’t know why you are hell-bent on ruining things, he said. You could have stayed, he told me. We would have had you.
You can’t rescue me, Chuck, I said. I ain’t a kitten no more.
I asked him to wire a thousand dollars to a Western Union in Morristown.
I can’t send you a thousand dollars, he said.
Yes you can, I assured him. You sure as hell can.
What kind of trouble are you in? he said. I imagined him sitting on the toilet, lid down, his head in his hands. His voice echoed like he was inside a cell.
You pay me, and you’ll never find out, I said.
When I got to the counter inside a Kmart, it was there, all of it. I didn’t ask him again for eight months.
At a Motel 6 in Kentucky, I shaved my head. I was in mourning. My head, cold and buzzed to just a shadow. The absence of hair, of the bangs I’d gotten used to, made my eyes look huge. My mouth, wide and soft. I flushed the light ash-brown locks down the toilet. In the morning, I pulled out in the truck that was still registered to Henderson, still insured by him. I kept it running, kept a jug of water inside for when it overheated. It was a mistake, the truck, its connection. But I knew he wouldn’t report it stolen. Not with what I knew.
nine
RAYELLE
Wherever I went, those summers with Chuck, I sent postcards. I carried a bunch of colored Flair markers in my little-girl purse and bought cards I thought Khaki would like. Pictures of mountains or a main street in town. A waterfall, a river, a sunflower. Dakota, Carolina, Tennessee. I signed them with hearts. Miss you. Love you. xoxo Rainy.
Rainy was a phase. I sometimes signed them Rainy Day Blues, dotting the i with a heart. I thought if I ever got famous—for what I don’t know, I can’t sing for shit—that maybe I could use that name. When I got back, I’d find that Khaki had kept them, tacked up in her room, or stuck into the mirror frame on her dresser. All the places I’d been, the places she never went.
The shower stalls at the truck stop are tiny cells with only a plastic chair, a toilet and a shower, towels rolled on a rack, soap and shampoo in a pump dispenser on the wall. There’s a mirror, and bright fluorescent lighting. Couper pays for two rooms and takes me down the hall.
It shuts off, he says at my door, and nods his head at the stall behind me. It’s an eight-minute shower.
I lean my back against the doorjamb. I don’t know if I can get my hair rinsed in eight minutes.
I can’t believe you’re going in alone, I say, even though I’m dying to get in by myself, aching for a hot soapy shower, to wash my hair.
Couper shrugs. I’m over fifty, he says. Shower sex is overrated. Plus, he says and points, these stalls are small.
Over fifty? I say, my mouth open. Over?
But he ignores it. Instead, he plants his hand on the open door beside me. You know what I like better than sex in a shower where truckers jerk off? he says.
Ugh, I say to an instant picture in my mind.
Don’t think about it, he says. He raises his eyebrows. I like you, he says, in the Scamp. On our bed, he adds.
Over fifty.
He laughs. Is that going to be a sticking point for you? he says.
I guess not.
The shower is cleaner than I expected. In fact, it looks hosed down, everything white and gray and chrome. I wish I could wash my clothes, but I take them off and shake them out and hang them over the chair to steam up with the room. The water is hard and hot, and I stand under it, trying not to think about the floor or the drain, trying not to waste time, even though what I really want is just to stand still.
The shower in the maternity ward was the opposite. They work real hard at keeping it nonclinical, having it look like it might be the bathroom in your home instead of in a hospital. It wasn’t even called a maternity ward; it was a birthing place. You were supposed to bring your whole family, and people did. There were women with all their sisters, their mother, and their mother-in-law surrounding the bed, a whole world of women, birthing. Everything was pink and blue and beige, with baskets of silk flowers and teddy bears, and in the bathroom, a bunch of shower gels that smelled like peach and melon and s
omething called sweet pea or freesia.
Summer came in the middle of the night and by the next afternoon they finally let me shower. I stayed in so long, my head against the tile, the water pounding on my back, that I bled even harder, the blood trailing down the drain and then after too, sitting in my bed, wearing a huge hospital-provided pad and giant mesh underpants that they gave you one pair of and you had to wash out every day. Someone else was walking Summer around, feeding her, putting her down in a glass bassinet. I didn’t nurse her. I bound my breasts up with a sports bra and an Ace bandage; inside, half a cut pantiliner over each nipple, to catch the milk.
I spent most of the first days and weeks handing her off. First to the nurses, and then, after I left the hospital, to June Carol. I don’t know if Eli’s father ever held her. I’d hand her to June Carol, and his dad would take Eli away.
Let the women do what they’re best at, he’d say.
June Carol would come in the morning and stay all day. It was her house. She had a key. I’d find her in the kitchen, jouncing Summer, with a full pot of coffee for Eli, and scrambled eggs on the stove. I’d stumble out in a nightshirt that barely covered my ass, wanting a cigarette.
She came from a huge family of girls in Miss’ippi, as she pronounced it. When there was a new baby, they rallied together, joyful and excited. She told me all about Elijah as a baby. He burped sitting up. He preferred to sleep on his belly.
Of course now, she said, they tell you they should sleep on their backs. They’ll change it again, she said, not to me, but to Summer, who stared into June Carol’s face with wide eyes and a half smile.
I was in constant hesitation. Second-guessing. If I paused, June Carol didn’t even ask, she just picked Summer up, fed her, changed her, and managed to do so while making breakfast for Eli, and wearing a twin sweater set.
All I wanted was a dark room to myself.
And a cigarette.
And a drink.
When my mother finally came to see Summer, it was nearly February. The cold hadn’t broken. There was a thin layer of snow that was like hard, frozen dust. My mother parked her car out front. The driveway and sidewalk were clear, salted, swept. She came in smelling like her own house, like smoke and something fried, like maybe Chuck had made pork chops the night before. Her hair was up, in a ponytail she might have slept in.
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