Still Mine

by Amy Stuart

  It took half a day. An afternoon for Malcolm to brief her and use the kit he carried with him to make her fake identification. Clare O’Dey. Half a day to brief her on the story. To talk her through the clippings. All Clare could do was listen to the bass of this man’s voice, baffled at why he would trust her to take this on, at how the arrangement benefited him. If she had questions to that end, he did not allow for them.

  When do I start? was all she could say.

  Now. Drive west into the mountains, he said. Then cut north to Blackmore.

  And so Clare set out that afternoon, leaving Malcolm in that parking lot, the bald tires of her car kicking up a cloud of dust so that she could not see him in her rearview mirror. For the first hour of that drive, she fingered the cell phone he’d given her, unable to keep rein on her heartbeat, to focus on the road. At every intersection she debated veering off course, shaking him, running again, never showing up in Blackmore at all. But something compelled her. Anticipation and fear. Her mother’s voice in her head. Trust it. This man, Malcolm Boon. This woman, Shayna Fowles, alike in looks and basic circumstance, vanished with the same swiftness as Clare. Finally a destination, a place to go after months of existing in the empty distance between nowhere and here.

  You knew it all along. Admit it. It suited you that I was bad at being married. I have to tell the stories I know will make you mad. I think back to the first time Charlie gave me a pill. The night of his mother’s funeral. What are you going to do now? I kept asking him. You’ve lost everyone. He pulled this pill from his pocket. Prescribed to keep his mother calm. Try it, he said to me. The next day I asked him for another one. You sure, Cunningham? he said.

  I don’t blame Sara for hating me. I like the way Charlie always comes to me first. That night I ended up in the hospital, I’d been to see him. We met in the barn. She wants another kid, he’s telling me. Thinks it’ll solve things. He told me I was the easiest on him, the only one who understood. He tucked a baggie of pills into my pocket, free of charge. Told me he’d never liked Jared. Then we were in the storeroom and I was pressed up on the worktable. It was cold enough to see my breath. I wasn’t even thinking of you.

  I know you don’t want to hear this story, but I’m writing it down anyway. You look for color when everything is dulled. That’s my only excuse. I don’t know why I’m telling you this now. Maybe because these words are supposed to be the truth, because you seem to love me no matter what I do.

  MONDAY

  Twenty-four pictures. Even a sliver of light and it won’t work. The dark of the trailer is so absolute that Clare can’t see her own hand waved in front of her face. Still, it feels familiar, the steps in blindly handling the roll so as not to expose the film, motions as rote as brushing her teeth. She thinks of her brother and his do-it-yourself photography, her teacher from a young age, all the little tricks he showed her, the alchemy in conjuring an image from liquids and the absence of light.

  As she works Clare traces how far back the photos on this roll will carry her. It took her the rest of September to heal from the birth, three months to save her money and plot her escape. After burying her son she’d managed to stay clean, to go back to running, her brain too rigid with grief and purpose to take note of any ache the abstinence might have brought upon her.

  The trailer fills with the smell of the chemicals. Clare aligns the photo paper in the enlarger. One by one the photographs count her back through time, Malcolm’s hand lifted in the car, then Jared on the road, his head craned to the side, Louise in the gorge, strangers at the parade, the bowl of the mine, Wilfred storming away, Louise in her garden, Charlie receding down the hill from the trailer, and then the blur of towns between here and home. The first picture on the roll, she knows, will be Jason.

  In the last days before she left, Clare descended to the cellar to dig an unused roll of film out of the same box of Christopher’s castaways where she’d found the camera. Jason dozed on the couch, his hands folded almost daintily across his chest. Peaceful. Drunk. She could tell by the pink in his cheeks. Clare loaded the film in the kitchen, then snuck up and stood over him, framing his portrait with the camera, emboldened by his long and slow breathing. Click, she said, actually said it out loud as she took the picture. He didn’t flinch, and Clare stood over him, thinking of the gun secured over the doorway in the mudroom. In their entire marriage she’d never pointed a gun at Jason. She’d dreamed of it many times, but the actual logistics of his death remained unfathomable.

  Now his form takes shape on the photo paper, fingers interlaced on his chest, his head dipped to one side. Clare can feel a bulb rise to her throat. Despite the hard drinking Jason always kept his good looks, his skin honey brown even in winter. His lips red and full. This black-and-white photo betrays nothing of those colors, the shades of his face, but still Clare is taken aback by the sight of him. Hatred. She is used to the hatred. But there is longing too, a stab of longing so unexpected that Clare must look away to stave it off.

  All those conversations with herself in the car, Christopher’s or Grace’s voice in her head: Why did you stay? Why didn’t you fight back more?

  Because I was afraid he’d kill me.

  But the other answer, the one she never actually uttered, is about love.

  The first years with Jason built up so much of it in her, lust and yearning and devotion, that it lingered for too long after he proved himself unlovable. And then the dependence, Jason the only one who never questioned Clare’s use, who enabled it, allowed it, enjoyed it, even celebrated it. Even now she feels it, the thrill, whatever small wave this photograph brings. She draws the picture from the solution before it is fully saturated and hangs it next to the ones of Malcolm and Jared, of Wilfred’s back. These men, each angry in his own way. The stench of the chemicals burns her nose now, this space too enclosed, too claustrophobic. Clare knocks the trailer door open and stumbles out into the fresh air.

  Slouched in the lawn chair, facing her, his hands gripped to the armrests, is Jared Fowles. Clare recoils back toward the trailer, swinging the door closed so that Jared can’t see inside.

  “Jesus!” Jared says. “Watch yourself.”

  “You scared me.”

  “You looked scared before you saw me.”

  Clare’s eyes ache from the onslaught of light.

  “What are you doing here?” she asks.

  “Checking on you. I was driving past. I’d have called, but apparently you don’t have a phone.”

  “I’m kind of in the middle of something.”

  “What?”

  “Developing pictures.”

  “Come on. How?”

  “I have some portable darkroom equipment.”

  “In there?”

  “It’s a tight space. The chemicals got to be a bit much.”

  “So you really do take pictures,” Jared says.

  Where is your grief? Clare would like to say to him. She thinks of her father’s coldness in the aftermath of her mother’s death, his wife’s clothes dropped at a consignment shop the same day as her funeral, as though he’d held her in no higher regard than one of his barn hens.

  Everyone has their own version of grief, Clare’s brother said in their father’s defense, and yours is no better than his. Carrying on, Christopher said, doesn’t make him a bad man.

  “Where are you headed?” Clare asks. “If you’re just driving past.”

  “Uphill.”

  “To the mine?”

  “To commune with the dead.” Jared smiles. “The miners, I mean. You want to come?”

  Whatever that photograph of Jason incited in Clare, the mix of hot and cold, Jared brings out the same. She hesitates, leaning against the trailer.

  “I’m not done here,” Clare says. “I should finish up.”

  “You are scared.”

  “I know better than to go to dark places with a stranger.”

  “Am I a stranger?”

  “Your wife is missing.”

 
“Ah,” Jared says. “And you think you might be next.”

  “Why not?”

  “Meyer’s got you on board. I’m the murderer in plain sight.”

  “Are you?”

  Clare cannot detect her own tone, whether she is being bold or foolish, or worse, coy. The sensation of her heart wild in her chest has the effect of warming her body.

  “Come on,” Jared says. “I promise you’ll come out alive. Good enough?”

  Reckless, Malcolm called her. Clare’s mother used to call her much the same, the young Clare who jumped into the hay from the height of the barn roof or fired at targets dangerously close to her brother. You don’t think of the consequences, her mother would chide her. You just dive headfirst. Reckless; Clare’s entire life unfolded as it has because of it.

  “Give me a minute,” Clare says.

  In the trailer Clare scrubs her hands and face in the sink. Last night she made a rudimentary effort to bandage the gash, slathering it in ointment, but she can feel it, the oozing, the heat of it creeping outward from the cut. She puts on a clean shirt long enough to cover the silhouette of her phone in her pocket. Then she rests her hand on the wood paneling. Her gun. Will she bring her gun? No. Clare knows too well what can happen when you bring a gun, how easily it can end up in the wrong hands.

  Outside, Jared waits for her some distance away.

  “Sara’s expecting me at her place later on,” Clare says. “It’s her birthday.”

  “You think she’d notice if you didn’t show?”

  “Stop it.”

  “Where’s your camera?”

  “I’m almost out of film,” she says. “There’s nowhere around here to buy more.”

  Clare follows Jared downhill to where his truck is parked next to her dead car. He unlocks the passenger door for her. A sharp bark startles her, the dog running at them from Charlie’s porch until his tether yanks him back.

  “Go on!” Jared says to the dog. Timber stands there, expectant, his tail wagging. A dog much like his owner, Clare thinks, friendly only until his fangs must be bared. The truck starts with a long rumble. In the driver’s seat Jared’s shirt shows his form, his broad shoulders, and it stuns Clare that she danced with him on Saturday, pinned herself up against him shamelessly, and that Malcolm was watching as she did.

  “Do you go to the mine a lot?” Clare asks.

  “Once a year. To honor it.”

  “Honor what?”

  “Five years ago today.”

  “The accident?”

  “No. The accident was weeks earlier. Five years ago today I got pulled out alive.”

  “So you come here alone?”

  “The first anniversary there was a ceremony,” Jared says. “The whole town was there. The second year it was just me. It’s been just me ever since.”

  “Sara brought me up to the mine the other day,” Clare says.

  “I heard about that. Charlie’s keeping an eye on you.”

  “It’s easy to guess what he’s doing there.”

  “Reclaiming the family grave?” Jared says.

  “If he’s cooking drugs, shouldn’t he at least try to hide it?”

  “There’s no one to hide from. Everyone’s afraid of him.”

  “Are you afraid of him?” Clare asks.

  Jared taps on the steering wheel, thinking. “Charlie’s loyal,” he says. “He’s got a strange way of showing it, but he is. He’s loyal to his people. I swear he thinks he’s keeping the town afloat. That he’s being benevolent. Giving people what they want. Whatever they need to dull the pain.”

  “He gave me a pill to try yesterday. Something he cooked up. A prototype, he said.”

  “Did you take it?”

  “No.”

  “Good. It’d put you through the roof.”

  When they reach the gate, Jared jumps out to unlock it and pull it open. As they drive down the switchbacks, Clare detects a change in Jared’s breathing. A slowing. A wave of nausea hits her, the quiet of this place, the ache in her shoulder. Jared parks. He climbs out of the truck and wanders alongside the larger building, waving at her to join him. There is a ringing in Clare’s ears. She jogs to catch up.

  “You look pale,” Jared says.

  “I’m not feeling great.”

  “Are you afraid of me?”

  “You keep asking me that. Like I should be.”

  “I didn’t kill my wife,” Jared says.

  “Every husband says that.”

  “For some stupid reason I need you to believe me.”

  “I’m not sure I do,” Clare says. Again, coy.

  Jared laughs. “You’re here. That says something. You came with me.”

  “I did,” Clare says. “Maybe that was my mistake.”

  They’ve walked beyond the large building to where a fence squares the perimeter of a smaller structure with steel doors. DANGER, the sign beyond the fence reads. MINE SHAFT. Jared points just beyond it to a manhole covered and bolted shut.

  “We popped out right there,” he says. “Eighteen of us. Five years ago today.”

  “Do you remember much of it?” Clare says.

  Jared eyes her. “What do you want to know?”

  “Why are you alive?”

  “Because I got lucky,” Jared says. “It was a toss-up. Heads or tails. I made the right call.”

  “And Charlie’s family didn’t?”

  “Guys thought they could get out. Your instinct is to get out.”

  “So what happened?”

  Jared shakes his head. “We heard the blast and everything shook,” he says. “You have nightmares about it and then one day, it happens. I followed the guy in front of me out of our tunnel. All I could see was this line of headlamps. My father-in-law was the foreman. Wilfred. He was trying to radio up top, but he couldn’t get through. He was doing this mad head count. By who’s missing we figured the first explosion must have been in the third tunnel. Fifteen guys died right there. And then there was this standoff between Wilf and Russ Merritt, Charlie’s dad. Wilfred was yelling at us to get in the chamber. Wilfred was technically in charge, but Russ had two of his boys there and his chest was puffed out. He said we should climb the shaft, get the hell out of Dodge. Or if the shaft was blocked off, then we’d make our way to the egress.”

  “What’s the egress?”

  “An escape tunnel that runs out the side of the mountain. For emergencies.”

  “Didn’t Wilfred see the logic in trying to get out?”

  “He knew the deal. The tunnels are gonna fill with methane, he said. It’ll blow again. He ordered us into the chamber. It’ll hold us all for thirty days, he said. Four days of reserve oxygen. I’m thinking, Thirty days of what?”

  “But you stayed.”

  “Wilf and Russ were yelling at each other, and you could see the group parting like the Red Sea, forty-some men split right down the middle. I was picturing popping out and trying to explain to my new wife why her father was stuck deep in the mine.”

  For a long moment, Jared is silent.

  “Once the door was sealed, that was it,” he continues. “Wilf called it a submarine. You can’t open the hatch underwater. You have to wait until someone comes to get you. The group split clear in half. Mikey was gone. Mike Gorman, Sara’s guy. He went with Russ. I remember thinking, I hope he’s right. I hope he gets out and meets that baby of his.”

  “And he never did,” Clare says.

  “Mike was this really good guy, you know? The rare kind, salt of the earth. I pictured him up there, leading the charge. I told myself he’d made it for sure. That he was up there trying to rescue us.”

  “That’s what people do,” Clare says. “We tell ourselves what we need to hear.”

  “In there, especially. Eighteen of us like sardines in that chamber. I was the youngest by ten years. Wilf found the control panel and made us sit down along a wall. He told us, ‘Once that chamber hatch is closed, it cannot be reopened. Get it?’ He repeated that over an
d over, like he had some sixth sense. He sealed us in, turned on the oxygen, the fans, these overhead lights. It was like the inside of a jet engine. Wilf kept telling us not to worry, he was up there like a teacher, describing this goddamn rescue chamber and how it all worked, how we were all gonna be just fine. But when he sat down you could see the fear in his eyes. Like he knew it was fifty-fifty if we were lucky. The guy next to me was an oldie. ‘Six more shifts and I retire,’ this guy kept saying to me. Wilfred sat down between us. He said nothing but he kept patting me on the back. Trying to be fatherly. Wouldn’t look me in the eye. Then, boom. Everyone screams bloody murder. The lights go out and come back on.”

  “Another blast?”

  “He knew it. Wilf knew it. Methane buildup. Trapped gas is like water. It looks for a way out. Up the shaft. Probably caught a flame. The lights were flickering and all the guys were freaking out. But Wilf was calm. You could see his look. Doing the math on the time between blasts. Maybe twenty minutes. He knew it would take thirty to climb the shaft ladder if you’re fit, twenty to walk the egress if the path is clear. On a good day. He said to us, ‘I’m sure they made it.’ The guy next to me wanted to be assured. ‘You think so?’ This old man, he said that fifty times in five minutes. ‘You think they made it out?’ What was I supposed to say? How do I know?”

  “Why is Wilfred the bad guy in this story?” Clare asks. “He did everything right, didn’t he?”

  “No one blamed Wilf for the split. But some people said the blast was his fault in the first place. He failed to perform the right safety checks. That’s how Charlie won his case in court. The jury found Wilfred negligent.”

  “Even so,” Clare says. “If they’d followed his orders they’d still be alive.”

  “Right. But it wasn’t the split that caused the war.” Jared fixes his eyes on the shaft door. “It was the banging.”

  “What banging?”

  “A few minutes after the second blast, we heard this knocking. Wilf cupped his ear against the hatch. He said, ‘There’s methane out there. If we open it, we all die.’ We couldn’t hear actual voices, but the knocking got really loud. Pounding. We knew there were guys on the other side. The guys with time enough to turn back before the second blast hit. Maybe one, maybe all seventeen are behind the door. We knew they had their gas masks, but those things don’t last long. Five minutes, maybe. The old-timer ordered Wilfred to open the hatch. He stood up and yelled ‘Those are our men!’ or some righteous crap like that. Wilfred was calm. He held his ground by the door. ‘We can’t open it,’ he said. Over and over. ‘If we open it, we all die.’ People can say what they want about Wilf. But he owned it. He didn’t open that chamber door. Guys in the chamber were weeping, pressing their hands to their ears, begging it to stop. You knew the guys on the other side were suffocating, choking, wondering why the hell we weren’t letting them in, and you knew one of those guys was probably your friend. Maybe one of them was Mikey. Some part of me was screaming it. Why weren’t we opening the goddamn door?”