She gritted her teeth and thought of the woman with the tinkling earrings. How could he demand her honesty when he withheld his own? “Not yet.”
“If we tell him, he’ll watch out for you.”
She blinked, confused. Why would he need to watch out for her? Then slowly it dawned on her—if Dad knew, he would make sure Cash didn’t hurt her. Wasn’t asked to betray her to earn his cut. She swallowed. “That’s a risk.” Dad might just make it worse.
“I want to kiss you,” he whispered and groaned all at once. “I want to . . . ,” he murmured the rest in her ear.
She grinned, heart jumping alive. “We don’t have to actually figure this out for that to happen.”
But his eyes flickered away and he frowned without saying anything. As if she hadn’t said what he’d hoped.
After a few seconds, they heard Virginia start downstairs. “Y’all. Did you hear me?” She paused at the door, raising her eyebrow at Tourmaline before going outside.
“Would you ever tell him? If it was up to you?” Cash asked.
“Yes,” she said immediately. But as her voice fell away, they both heard a tremor of untruth. Would she tell Dad? She tried to envision it, but she couldn’t get a clear image.
This wasn’t just about Cash. It was that she didn’t feel as if she had a right to say what she wanted—that she didn’t just want him, she wanted him with loyalty. She couldn’t bring herself to demand it. She couldn’t even bring herself to ask for it. All she could do was hope for it. And in that position she’d never planned on being, she had to look at the world, in the face, as it truly was and stop thinking of herself as something different, something special, and join the long line of girls with all the same faces.
“Yeah?” He rubbed his hand over his jaw and looked away. “All right. You tell me when.” He straightened off the counter.
He wasn’t going to kiss her.
She frowned, following him into the hum of bugs and humidity. She could pretend that Cash was different. That Aubrey and girls like her held no power over him and would never hold sway between them. But she knew too much. Squaring her shoulders, she walked ahead, wishing she could just go home and bury herself under her covers. She’d not thought her life would be this way.
“Hey.”
Tourmaline only turned her chin.
“Forgot. The keys to the truck.” He tossed them, clinking silver in the dark.
Tourmaline held out her hand for the stamp and waited with the rest of the visitors to go through processing. The air-conditioning was broken, and her back pressed against the sweating concrete wall. She tipped her head to the light, the words she’d rehearsed circling around her mind.
“In an orderly fashion, now,” the CO said as the gates unlocked.
Tourmaline roused, pushing off the wall. She passed the guard, standing silent and firm. Then she stood in the empty visitors’ room, watching as they brought her mother out, one in a long and shackled line.
“Hot enough for you?” one of the COs said to the other.
“I don’t want to hear it,” the woman droned, as if he were always trying to talk her up and she was tired of coming up with ways to get him quiet.
The male CO—Roberts—caught Tourmaline watching, and his features tightened.
She smiled prettily and looked away. Suck up to the bulls.
Tourmaline’s mother sat across from her under the green fluorescents. Scabbed elbows on a bolted-down table. Veined hands dragged themselves through the greenish-blond hair with black roots as she mouthed the precious words to the walls, to the bars, to the guards.
Our fate cannot be taken.
It used to be a thing of power, for Mom to say that. Now it just seemed like words.
Finally, her eyes found Tourmaline. Their expression was flat and sort of lost. But she wasn’t high—at least Tourmaline didn’t think she was.
Tourmaline smiled. “Want something from the vending machine?”
“Diet Coke. And one of those bear claw thingies.”
The vending machines sat across a painted gray line the prisoners weren’t allowed to cross. Tourmaline got the last smashed-looking pastry and an already sweating can of pop, suddenly remembering those socks sinking into the trash can liner.
It was good she hadn’t made it this far with the socks last time; it only got harder on this side of the gate.
“How did graduation go?” her mother asked, taking the bear claw first.
“Pretty good. I didn’t get a chance to order pictures, though. I’ll get them next trip, I promise. I’m sorry.”
Her mother swallowed a mouthful of pastry and opened the Coke with a loud pop. “How was prom? You and Anna May have fun?”
Prom? It felt like ages ago. Years, even. How had it only been two months? “I didn’t go. I went mini-golfing with some friends from youth group.”
“Anna May went without you? What happened? Are you two fighting?”
“No. We’re fine. She just wanted to go with Dalton and I didn’t have anyone I really wanted to do that with.”
“You couldn’t wrangle anyone up?” her mother asked.
And the truth was that no one had wanted to take the daughter of the Wardens’ president to prom. “Dad didn’t really want me to go.”
“You should have gone anyway. Your dad probably didn’t know how important it was to Anna May. I’m sure she missed you.” Tourmaline’s mother finished off the pastry in one huge mouthful, crumpling the plastic. She snapped the pop-top open and took a long swallow with her eyes closed, smiling when she pulled the can away. “That’s the best Diet Coke I’ve ever had, I think.”
Tourmaline smiled, even though she wanted to cry just a little bit.
Her mother took another long, relishing drink.
“I’m . . .” And immediately her words gave out. What was she? Dating? Seeing? Talking to? She swallowed. “I’m in love with a boy.”
Margaret blinked over the top of the can. “You are? With who?”
“His name is Cash.”
“Oh, thank God it’s not that Allen guy. He sounded very nice, just not for you.” Her mother’s shoulders sagged and she put the Coke down. “Cash? As in, like, Johnny Cash?”
“As in a conscript.”
Her mother’s eyes widened. “Old Hawk’s kid,” she said. “Oh, my God, Tourmaline.” She reached across the table and gripped Tourmaline’s fingers. “And your dad is okay with this? How old is he, again?”
“Dad doesn’t know. He’s twenty-three.”
Margaret nodded. A faint smile on her face. “Okay. Okay, my baby is . . . growing up. Are you waiting for him to patch out to tell your dad?”
Tourmaline nodded. “Yeah.”
“Well, at least we know he’s vetted pretty well, right?” She laughed and then stopped short. “You’re nervous.”
“I’m scared out of my mind. This is so much more serious than I expected. It’s good, it’s just . . . not what I planned.”
Her mother smiled softly. “Life hardly ever is. Talk to Shelly, Sauls’s wife, if you get a chance; she’ll keep it quiet. If you love him, I know he’s a good guy and won’t jerk around with you. And bring him? Maybe?”
“I will. We’ll get that started. I know he wants to come meet you. He’s asked about it a few times.” Tourmaline swallowed and looked at her hands on the table. “I have something to ask. And it’s important you don’t react or raise your voice or do anything unnatural.”
Margaret stilled.
“Have another drink.”
She did, gaze fluttering away from Tourmaline.
“Do you have any idea where your ex-boyfriend would be, if he isn’t at the place he used to stay?”
Tourmaline’s mother blinked at the ceiling and then put down the drink. “God Almighty, that is better with every swallow.” She spun the can on the grated table and traced a finger in the condensation beading on its side. After a long pause, she asked, “Why?”
Tourmaline shook her head and stayed sil
ent.
Her mother sniffed and wiped her nose. She put her chin in her hand and drew more invisible lines on the can. “Is your dad asking?” She looked so hopeful for a moment.
“No, ma’am,” Tourmaline said quickly.
Her shoulders sagged. “What for?”
“It’s just something I need to know.”
Tourmaline’s mother looked away and didn’t answer.
Tourmaline bit the inside of her cheek. Why wouldn’t Mom tell her, if she knew? You’d think she’d want to help her daughter, who’d come asking. “Are you angry at me?” Tourmaline asked finally.
“For what?”
“For putting you here.”
Her mother nodded slowly. “I’m mad at you. At Wayne. At the cops. At the judge. I’m mad at your dad. At the doctor who wrote that first prescription. At the doctor who gave me a year’s supply of Oxy with no follow-up when I had the surgery. At the doctors for not doing more for my pain. At the first person who sold me that shit. I’m mad at everyone in here. I’m mad at my cellmate. The COs. God.” She swallowed and cleared her throat. “But really, honey, I’m mad at myself. Someday, I’ll have to forgive myself.” She tapped the can and frowned, the sharpness in her eyes pushing toward the unknown. “Someday.”
“Not today?” Tourmaline asked through her tight throat. She wanted to be forgiven, but it seemed unfair to ask for forgiveness from her mother when her mother didn’t even have it for herself.
Margaret reached out a thin hand and pulled Tourmaline’s fingers into her own. “I just wish you’d called your dad first. But I can’t blame you for panicking. I know that. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
But she’d not done anything right.
Tourmaline looked away, staring at the blank wall. It was not what she needed to hear. How could she have put someone in hell? Someone she loved and cared for and knew didn’t belong there, not really. She’d have to live with that night forever, even when Mom got out. She squeezed her eyes tight and wiped the tears off her cheeks.
“What’s going on, baby?” her mother murmured.
“Oh. Just . . . stupid stuff,” Tourmaline said, horrified it came out in a half-wail.
“It’s not stupid.”
Tourmaline nodded, keeping her eyes closed until she could stop crying. “It’s nothing. Really.” It was shards of fragile happiness and of spun-sugar ecstasy with Cash—threatened under the crush of reality she couldn’t escape. It was a strange sort of friendship with Virginia—old friends who were new together. Nothing for hell, all things for the living. But she wanted to explain. She wanted to be mothered, instead of having to do the mothering. She wanted everything to be okay. To have the past healed instead of just forgotten.
“Talk to me,” Margaret whispered.
Tourmaline opened her eyes and sniffed. She put her elbows on the table and clutched her mother’s hand. “I need things from you.”
“What?”
“Truth.” Her mother held the key. The histories. The fates. The answer was clutched down deep beyond the edge in her mother’s eyes.
Tourmaline met her eyes and let go of her fear, diving straight into that tar, slipping through, deep into her mother’s soul.
“What truth?” her mother whispered without blinking.
She couldn’t say, “The Wardens.” She couldn’t explain. She and her mother were sitting here with fifteen COs just bored out of their minds, listening while they babysat. Licking her lips, she plucked out the circling words. The only ones she could remember. The club’s motto. “Our fate cannot be taken . . .”
“Did someone send you?” her mother snapped.
“Stay calm,” Tourmaline said softly. A rush of electricity ran up and down her spine. There was meaning here. Not just coincidence. “No one sent me. I just need to know.”
Margaret’s jaw set. “There’s nothing for you to know. Not even if you were an ol’ lady.”
Tourmaline lifted her chin. “My life depends on it.”
Her mother held very still. Her spiny fingers tightened into a cold sweaty clamp on Tourmaline’s hands, and Tourmaline refused to cringe against the skeleton sense of her mother’s touch.
“I need the truth,” Tourmaline repeated. She pulled away, very near tears. This could not be happening. Her mother had let her down so much; why had she expected that her mother would be there now? “Please, Mom. You don’t under—”
“It’s not something I can just explain,” her mother snapped. “Even if I wanted to.”
“Everything in my life depends on it.”
She shook her head, lips tight. “It’s not what they do, it’s who they are.”
“Who’s Ray?” Tourmaline asked.
Her mother shook her head.
“Is he alive?”
Her mother shook her head.
“Did Dad?”
Margaret’s eyes opened wide and she pursed her mouth. “Stop.”
“Yes or no. Did he?”
Her mother stayed still. Silent. Slowly she nodded.
Dad had killed Ray. A slow, sinking beat throbbed in Tourmaline’s chest. “Who was he? Why?”
“Sometimes the systems we have in place to protect the vulnerable break down. They don’t work, for whatever reason. And it’s especially tragic when it happens to children. Everyone knew Ray. Everyone knew what Ray did to his baby girl. To his wife, too. The community turned its eyes away, the courts and police couldn’t get involved with how the wife protected him . . .” Tourmaline’s mother shook her head. “Ray wouldn’t leave. He refused to be reasoned with. So . . .” She fell silent, allowing Tourmaline to finish.
So they killed him. Her dad killed Ray.
Virginia’s dad.
Despite the heavy heat and the smell of people and the murmur of twenty intimate conversations around them, the hair on Tourmaline’s arms and neck stood up straight. All she could think of was the wickedly twisted crowned skull with a rattlesnake around its neck, in green and white threads on the black leather of Dad’s jacket.
Her whole life, the father who tucked her into bed and smoothed her hair and smelled like wood smoke and beer and leather, walking away with the empty eyes of that skull being the last thing she saw as he turned off the light—her father. Death . . .
Ray.
Virginia’s dad?
Tourmaline had to clamp her hands tight to the edge of her seat to keep herself from bolting up and running back through the gates to call Virginia and cry—I think my dad killed your dad.
“We are all that can truly stand where justice fails.” Tourmaline’s mother still clenched her fingers tight. “Everything else breaks down. Justice becomes about other things—about who holds value and what profit will come to the community. We do not falter. The law tried to use me against your father, but I held firm. It’s the only good thing I’ve done. It is the only thing I don’t regret.”
Tourmaline’s chest heaved. She had to get to Virginia. She had to get to Virginia. She had to—
Tourmaline’s head snapped up. “Wait. What?”
The couple at the table beside them looked over.
“What?” she whispered. Urgent. If only she could speak plainly instead of having to dance around the truth.
“The cops thought if they got me, they’d get him. That he’d be willing to barter for me.”
Dad?
“But they did not understand what the stakes were.” Her mother smiled a trembling, proud smile. “They do not understand loyalty.”
“But I . . . ,” Tourmaline trailed off, staring with her mouth open. She couldn’t breathe. They’d never been after Mom. They’d used Mom to try and get at Dad. Her mother’s fate had been decided before she’d done anything. They’d brought it all down around her mother’s head, and her father had cried, and Tourmaline was nothing.
Nothing.
No. She was blowback. She was a girl among all the other girls. She was a face in a sea of faces. Words in the middle of more important words. The p
arts you skim. The nonrelevant part to the story.
She was nothing. Tourmaline took a deep breath. All this time, the act she believed to be the most important mistake she’d ever made, the decision that took away everything she had and took everything after—it did not matter.
If she did not find Wayne, it would all continue the same. Things would happen around her, because of her, to her, but they would never be changed by her.
Tourmaline leaned forward, pleading. “Where is he?”
“Hey, you two are up,” the guy taking photos called to someone. “Four-oh-four—that’s you.”
Margaret jerked up.
The guy lifted his Polaroid. “I ain’t got all day.”
Her mother looked at Tourmaline, cautiously hopeful.
Tourmaline slid out from the table.
They stood together in front of the painted palm-trees-at-sunset background. Margaret’s arm slid around Tourmaline’s waist, her body nothing but sharp edges and points. Nothing of the softness Tourmaline remembered snuggling against.
It wasn’t until the man held out the picture that Tourmaline realized she’d forgotten to smile.
“Oh, you’re so beautiful,” her mother said, the Polaroid in her hand. Even her smile seemed sharper. More lined. Tourmaline forced herself to freeze the image as her own photo: a deeply detailed memory of her mother right now, with those deep lines in her makeup-less face and the curl in her hair.
Tourmaline handed the photo back. “Tell me where.” She did not ask. She did not plead. She simply and softly made the demand.
Margaret bit her lip. “A cabin in the woods off Sheep Creek Road. In the mountains.”
The wardens killed my father? Virginia blinked at Hazard’s office door, phone heavy in her limp hand.
The Wardens killed my father.
The meaning of Tourmaline’s veiled questions and halting answers rang in her ears. They had intervened, all those years ago. They had stood up for her, when no one else would. And they’d freed her just long enough for her to fall back into the same fate. All the same people. All the same places. It was up to her to change it. No one else could.
Opening the door to the law office, she stepped into the air-conditioning with her head high.
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