“There’s no money for college. Find a man to take care of you,” Sigrid said one day, preparing dinner. “Find a husband.”
“A husband?” Quinn asked and wrinkled her nose in disgust. “I’m nineteen.”
“I know what you’ve been up to, so don’t play me for a fool.”
Quinn’s throat closed up on her thinking about marriage. Her reflection in the windowpane was vague, like her sense of self, and she barely recognized the now thin and emaciated body that belonged to her.
“Sneaking out at night,” Sigrid went on, “doing who knows what. I’m not stupid, you know. It was just a matter of time until something bad was going to happen.” She was silent for a while. “Did that boy do that to you? The boy who worked on the rose beds?”
Something bad. Quinn knew what would happen to the men who had done this to her if she were able to identify them, but many hunters came to this part of the county during the early summer months, especially when the deer population got out of control. Every year open season started and the woods were overrun with local and out-of-state hunters looking to make a kill. She had never seen the men who raped her before and she knew just about everybody in town. At times, their faces merged into one grotesque face, combining their features, and she was no longer sure if she could pick them out of a lineup if she were asked to.
But it wasn’t that simple. Nothing was ever simple anymore. Quinn pushed the thought of that day aside like a plate of pot roast she didn’t ask for, was determined to keep the rape a secret, not out of misplaced shame, no, she had managed to cope with the shame—that part was straightforward enough—and all those weeks on the porch, staring into the distance, waiting for Benito’s truck to show, she had come to accept the girl those hunters had turned her into. She just didn’t want to deal with it, couldn’t even imagine the police questioning her, having to describe what they had done, said, made her do. The horror of imagining the way people would look at her, what Benito would think of her, how this small town never let anyone live anything down. First they’d lower their eyes, then they’d turn and whisper. Forever she’d be that girl. What did she do in those woods? What was she wearing? She should have stayed home. Not one question as to why the men took those liberties, hurt her, raped her, beat her, humiliated her, as if her mere presence in the woods was justification for the crime they’d committed.
“Men take what they want, every woman knows that. And I know you’ve been messing around with that boy,” Sigrid continued on.
“He had nothing to do with any of this. I haven’t even seen him since,” Quinn said.
“And you won’t either.”
“What does that mean?”
“He’s gone, that’s what that means.”
“Gone?”
“If he tries to contact you, you have to tell me.”
Quinn held back her tears. Sigrid would think she turned them on, was crying on cue, wanting sympathy, weeping crocodile tears. And faced with such judgment and callousness, she sat stoically, removed from herself.
“Change and wash your face. Put on a nice dress.”
Quinn didn’t think she’d have the strength to even get up and walk upstairs.
“And smile, for heaven’s sake, will ya? Doesn’t cost a thing.”
“Where are we going?”
“Out,” Sigrid said.
The corners of Quinn’s lips fought for a split second, but then she managed a smile. She kept practicing that fake smile, knowing nobody would be able to tell a forgery from the genuine thing. Her cheeks hurt but Quinn knew that eventually it would all come natural to her.
In a dress, her hair in a ponytail, she accompanied Sigrid to a nearby estate sale at a white monstrous Greek revival of a house that belonged to the widow of a man who had made a fortune as a cattle farmer, then an even larger fortune in oil. There were lots of floral prints and an old dusty phone with a large dialing disk and curled cable dangling from the receiver on a console table. Above it, on the wall, there was a mirror framed with what looked like golden leaves from a willow; atop the frame, a cherubic face stared down at her. The mirror was tarnished and Quinn wasn’t sure if it had been polished a few times too many or maybe that’s just what happened with age, but her reflection looked nothing like her—she even thought she was looking at a painting of a woman, didn’t recognize herself at all. The bony frame made her feel light and the hollowed face now showed her cheekbones, making her oddly beautiful. The console table itself was, though heavily ornate, nothing but a Chippendale look-alike with cabriole legs.
“Today is the preview but you can put in a sealed bid. It has to be at least half of the asking price. You’ll get notified if the bid is accepted,” a raspy voice greeted them, and Quinn turned around.
Sigrid visibly vibrated with anticipation. Their house was large and beautiful, yet nothing like this mansion with gazebos, a greenhouse, and a pond out back. There was a sunroom, a garden with topiaries, and something resembling a ballroom, even. She watched Sigrid lick the seal of the envelope for a bid on a piece of furniture. Like a cat about to pounce on a mouse, Quinn thought as they walked through the old dusty mansion. A man approached them, his right leg fluid but the left one moving jaggedly, as if he couldn’t control it. He wasn’t much over thirty and had a strong look about him with his dark hair and glasses, his clean-shaven face with a square jaw. If it wasn’t for the cane and the limp, he’d have passed as attractive.
“Are you the executor?” Sigrid asked in her most classy voice, almost without an accent.
“It’s my aunt’s estate; I’m just settling it for her.”
The conversation drifted off into the distance as Quinn turned the other way and ended up in a sitting room where floorboards creaked underneath. Quinn felt removed from the world, this house, the furnishings; even her feet felt as if they weren’t touching the ground at all. Smiling at people was one thing but her insides were dead. She felt no need to do anything; just moved about waiting for the day to end, to go to bed, and then get back up. She was a ghost, waiting to go to the other side, wherever that was, to join the dead.
From across the hall she watched Sigrid and the young man in deep conversation. Sigrid was sparkly while the man smiled with ease and made fluid arm movements to accompany whatever story he was telling. He seemed out of place, as if he typically didn’t wear a suit or usually didn’t stand in mansions such as this one, looking to sell its contents. His flailing arms exaggerated his speech and finally he shook Sigrid’s hand, then turned and shuffled toward her.
“Hello,” he said. “My name is Nolan Creel. You mother just put in a bid on that console table over there.”
Quinn smiled her fake smile, the one she’d been practicing. She squinted ever so slightly so it looked right, including the wrinkles around the eyes. She maintained the smile while he told her of his aunt’s estate and his being the last Creel in the family. It was the first day of the sale, the very first hour, and there were only a few people to see the furniture and the mansion.
When Nolan held out his hand for Quinn to take, she complied, but instead of shaking it, he brought her hand to his lips and kissed it. Something stirred inside of her. Not a burning of love like she’d felt for Benito, nothing like that, but something stirred. She didn’t know what the feeling was; it was a rather bizarre sensation once she allowed it to unfold, and it wasn’t unpleasant at all. Nolan Creel adored her in some way, was enamored, even.
Nolan Creel and Quinn walked and talked and she listened to his raspy voice. He seemed kind and so were his eyes, and for a while she got lost in their conversation. At one point Quinn looked past him and met Sigrid’s gaze from across the room, who in turn watched her like a hawk. Quinn’s smile never left her face, lips perfectly curled over perfect teeth, and she was surprised how easy it was. She felt as if she’d stepped out of her body and constructed an imprint of herself, a second
skin with a much more cheerful demeanor. At times reality drifted off completely and Quinn imagined this man to be her husband, children’s feet running through these halls, filling the shells that were this house and her body with life. It was just a game she played in her mind, yet something took hold, an epiphany of sorts, of having no choice but to go on with life. It wasn’t a matter of hope for the future, just the extension of the person she had created, seeing her through until the end.
“Where are you from again?” Quinn asked and took the arm he offered her, hooking her hand into the crook of his elbow.
“Aurora, Texas. A small town west from here. Creel Hollow Farm.”
He told her of his estate in the country, and she wanted her life to have something more to offer her than those nightmares, and waiting on porches for lovers who don’t show, and living in her childhood home where she was merely tolerated. It didn’t sound glamorous at all, Creel Hollow Farm, but it seemed peaceful and safe. Nolan told her of his late father, who had been an artist, painting hundreds of paintings of the farm and the surrounding estate. Quinn listened and smiled when it was appropriate, especially when he mentioned that he wasn’t married.
“Will you be delivering the table to our house if we win the bid?” Quinn asked.
“I wouldn’t mind a bit,” Nolan Creel said, and he struggled to keep himself steady as Quinn strode ahead of him over the creaking floorboards. Quinn slowed her steps, making him believe he could keep up with her.
—
Quinn Creel. She repeated the name over and over as she, suitcase in hand, stepped on the front porch of Creel Hollow Farm. Quinn Creel sounded like the name of a boat, one of those paint-chipped tourist skiffs tied in choppy rows at the Corpus Christi Harbor, where they’d just spent a week on their honeymoon. It was October 1970. Quinn was nineteen, Nolan thirty-one. The farm was run-down and she wanted to cry.
“You’ll love it,” he had said on the drive up. “There’s a meadow by the side of the house, full of buttercups,” Nolan had told her on the five-hour drive from Corpus Christi to Aurora. “Buttercups,” he had recited as if he was being quizzed in some silly botany class in school, “Ranunculus in Latin, meaning little frog. The name buttercup comes from the belief that the plants give butter its yellow hue when the cows eat it.” Nolan paused as if some revelation was to follow. “Not true. In fact, they are poisonous to cows and livestock in general. Did you know that?”
Quinn neither cared nor planned on retaining any of this useless information, but she smiled and looked at him adoringly as he kept going on and on, until they had reached the farm. She was appalled by the state of things; had imagined a stately property; not this.
“Some people call them coyote’s eyes,” Nolan said, then preceded to tell her about some legend in which a coyote tossed his eyes up in the air and an eagle snatched them up, leaving the coyote without eyes, and so he made himself new ones from the buttercups he found. “Buttercups are poisonous when they’re fresh, but their taste is quite unpleasant anyway so they are usually left uneaten. Cattle only eat them when they are abundant and there’s not much else growing, so it’s pure desperation when they do and—”
“Nolan.”
“What?”
“I didn’t imagine it like this.” Quinn heard her shaky voice, was taken aback by it.
Nolan paused for a long while. “Cold feet, babe?” He then laughed and kissed her hand with the shiny gold band. “A bit late for that, isn’t it?”
Cold feet, Quinn thought and glanced around the farm, the weathered barn, and the grooves in the ground from the flash floods. How muddy it must be after it rains, she thought, and she felt as if she was floating. There was nothing to keep level around here, no familiar thing, no comfort—even the soil below and the sun in the sky above were unfamiliar. So were Nolan and this marriage she had entered into.
“It’s, it’s . . .” Quinn didn’t find the words to express her disappointment.
“I love you. And you love me. It’s not really that complicated. We’ll have children, raise them; they’ll grow up the way my father grew up here, the way I did. This farm is solid and it keeps people grounded. We can do some fixing up and make it look just like the way you want it.” He paused, then said, “I can’t imagine it any other way.”
Quinn thought she was going to snap, just break apart. The pain in her lower back was unbearable and suddenly everything seemed like a really bad idea, something she had agreed to in a moment that had passed. Yet here she was, on the steps of Creel Hollow Farm, and she sat her suitcase on the front porch and stared at a wooden door. The knocker was rather large, shaped like a lion above the letter C, and the name Creel started to grow on her. Quinn Creel didn’t sound so bad and some paint might do wonders, and there was a farm and a door knocker with an initial involved.
Nolan came from behind and scooped her into his arms. His cane leaned against the door frame. When Nolan moved slowly, his limp was barely noticeable. Quinn thought of it as him moving with care more than a disability, and it seemed as if he didn’t dwell on his limp at all. He was a strong man and he’d keep her safe, she was sure.
“Mrs. Nolan Creel, how do you like your new home?” Nolan said and took Quinn’s hand in his, leading her through the door.
“I like it,” Quinn lied, and it struck her as odd that there weren’t any farmhands rustling about or cows in the meadow. There was no smell—isn’t there supposed to be a smell on farms?—and the barn sat silently by the side of the house.
Quinn entered the farmhouse, hitting the light switch by the front door. She tried to ignore the wallpaper with the vertical stripes that was competing with the occasional dots of mold and, once she looked closer, she saw how the wallpaper peeled at the seams and the house smelled slightly of mildew. Nolan made for the stairway as if he was about to take two steps at a time, not holding on to the railing, like a boy looking to claim his room upstairs, but then he thought otherwise and calmly ascended the stairs. Quinn crossed the foyer, the hardwood planks underneath her feet producing unnerving sounds: a creaking from her heel pressure, a clacking and groaning as she rolled her feet toward the tips, as if the wooden strips meant to get her attention, wanting to tell her some old story. She quickly entered the kitchen—the floor was tiled, and though it was chipped, it made no sound—and opened the grimy curtains with a swift flick of the wrist, exposing blind and warped windowpanes coated with a layer of dust. She pulled open the oven door and was startled by the screech it made. Oddly enough, the interior was immaculate. She walked around the kitchen and touched every surface, opened every drawer, and even gave the tap a try. Nolan appeared behind her, making her jump.
“There’s a well behind the house,” he said and dipped his finger into the water stream. “We’ll never run out of water.”
“I see,” Quinn said, staring at the deep sink stained with rust. The house seemed strong and worthwhile but it was neglected in many ways, as if Nolan hadn’t bothered to maintain but its very basic functions, like the roof and walls, water and electricity. It was a house, but it wasn’t a home. She turned off the tap, wrapping her arms around herself. The house seemed to make her shiver, and the air had a chill to it even though it was barely fall. The window above the sink had six panes on the bottom and six on top. The panes seemed organized and structured and Quinn noticed that the frame had been painted multiple times and the paint was caked on, running in spots like tears, and so she made no attempt to open the window and let the warm air in. The view was beautiful, that she had to admit—the barn was to the left, a big tree to the right, and the winding dirt road snaked toward the main road straight ahead. A lacy curtain drooped off a crooked rod and when she pulled it to the side, she flinched. She wanted to cry—she was nineteen and not capable of doing any of the things that needed to be done on a farm and then there was the pain. Excruciating pain. In her stomach, and stretching and twisting and turning al
ways made it worse.
“It’s all ours. Just needs a bit of work,” Nolan said and hugged Quinn from behind.
“Looks like it,” Quinn replied, pressing her stomach against the sink. Pressure seemed to take away the pain at times, but now all she wanted was to go to sleep. The farm made her shift in place, as if it was difficult to find the right spot, the right room to be in, as if she didn’t belong here at all. Like a fish out of water, she felt as if she were suffocating, not getting enough oxygen to sustain her. “What’s in the other rooms upstairs?” she asked and unwrapped herself from Nolan’s embrace.
“There’s one bed in the second bedroom.” Nolan stood in silence for a while. Then he said, “But we’ll have to buy a crib.”
Quinn smiled but didn’t say anything and later, after they stocked up the fridge with the groceries they’d picked up at a store in town, they sat and ate supper, fried eggs and potatoes, and Nolan laughed and giggled, holding her hand across the narrow table. Tired from the long ride, they went upstairs to bed while it was still daylight. Quinn watched Nolan’s chest rise and fall, then he moaned in his sleep. She pressed her body against his until there was no more space between them. Such closeness usually made her feel uncomfortable but Nolan was asleep and she felt safe even though she couldn’t explain those emotions.
Quinn woke early and couldn’t go back to sleep, the pain in her stomach getting worse. It was sometime between night and day, a liminal moment, and she felt her heart beating rapidly inside her chest. She got up and stood by the window, looking at the winding driveway, and the small shed to the right. She opened the window, gently as not to wake Nolan, and a flapping shutter in the distance made her heart skip a beat. She watched the night dwindle, the first sun rays of the day were about to appear and in the meadow to the right of the house the colors were melting from an ominous array of grays into pale yellows and smoky browns. There was no sign of buttercups, not a single yellow dot, and the grass seemed dead, as if nothing was going to grow there ever again. It seemed early in the year for a meadow to be dormant but Quinn didn’t dwell on it. She smiled and resolved that soon she’d get to know everything about this place. Quinn Creel of Creel Hollow Farm. It was something—not perfect, but something. What else was there for her?
The Good Daughter Page 11