“You are not going anywhere, child,” Quinn said, immediately embarrassed at having called her child, hoping Tain didn’t feel put down in any way.
“Why does he not like me?”
“He likes you just fine. He’s just grumpy, is all.”
“Is it because of the baby?”
Quinn froze, her eyes stinging with tears. She didn’t know how to word it just right; the baby that died? The stillbirth? The baby Quinn never had, never would have?
“He wants a baby, I know he does,” Tain said.
Quinn collected her feelings, swallowed down her tears, and continued to fold sheets. “Well, sometimes we don’t get what we want. We have everything else, don’t we?” Quinn said and made a sweeping gesture around the room, including the house, the farm, everything. “No need to cry about what we can’t change, right?”
Tain spoke in a meek and small voice. “I’ll have a baby for you,” casually, as if she was offering to hang up Quinn’s coat.
“You what?”
Tain just stared at her, cocking her head is if to say, You heard me. “I’ll have a baby for you?” Tain eventually repeated.
“Stop that nonsense right this minute,” Quinn said.
Tain shrugged, her eyes red but void of any expression, as if she was unable to choose a fitting emotion for what had just occurred. Quinn doubted the girl even knew what she was saying. And they continued folding sheets, moving backward as they pulled the seams, stepping toward each other, matching the corners, Quinn grabbing edges as Tain smoothed the fabric, stacking them on top of the kitchen table, in the most perfect and organized pile.
—
Christmas and New Year’s came and went and Nolan was unrelenting in wanting Tain gone. Quinn figured it was the strain of another mouth to feed, a stranger roaming around in the house, forcing him to keep up the facade of having something to do.
Nolan frequently disappeared all day long, tinkering in his shed, and Quinn felt like pinching her nose shut when he returned for supper at night. The pungent odor seemed to seep out of his pores, but Quinn managed a cheerful smile even though her stomach turned. She wanted Nolan to allow Tain to stay, and if that’s what it took, so be it. But Nolan remained cold and eventually ignored Quinn as he did Tain. Day in and day out he strolled around the farm, inspecting nooks and crevices, or he disappeared into the shed for hours on end. She’d seen him with a magnifying glass, had seen him inspect the house and the porch, and Quinn thought he was checking for bugs.
“Are there termites?” Quinn asked. She knew termites fed on wood and over years were capable of compromising the strength and safety of any wooden structure, leaving it unlivable. She suggested calling the exterminator, but Nolan never acknowledged any of her questions and so she just let it go.
She could no longer stand for Nolan to touch her. Quinn was willing to bide her time, cook his meals, wash his clothes, be his wife for all intents and purposes, but she couldn’t bear his hands on her body. When he reached for her, she turned away from him, not a word was being said, but he understood. Weeks went by without them talking, and soon Quinn and Nolan lay awake at night, pretending to be asleep. Quinn was capable of taking his cold demeanor, but what he did in that shed, she felt she couldn’t live with. Now that she had heard the stories from Aella, she knew the Creel men weren’t made to be farmers and had their very own peculiar hobbies and that eventually the farm was going to fall into complete disrepair. Secrets they had, Aella had said, dark vices, even. And Quinn became increasingly suspicious of Nolan and his doings out on the farm, especially in the shed.
Years ago Nolan had built the structure, not bigger than a bathroom, as a playhouse for children. He had painted the wooden planks in a soft yellow and even put shingles on the roof. After the years passed and Quinn never got pregnant, he had eventually allowed the chickens to settle in and used it as a paddock for the animals. Last time Quinn remembered setting foot in it, the ground was covered in chicken poop, feathers, and pieces of eggshell. Maybe it was time to find out just what Nolan was doing with his time, and even though it had been years since Quinn had been out to the shed, she had to know.
The shed was warped and she wondered how only four years—she did the math twice in her head—was all it took to distort the rafters and turn the walls and door crooked. She opened the door, fiddled with the temperamental lock, tugged and pushed, and leaned against it until the door swung backward. There was utter darkness. Not a single ray of sunlight fell through the cracks; it seemed as if this was a world that didn’t allow for any light to penetrate. The smell of some sort of chemical was strong and suffocating, making her temples pound.
The windows had been removed—she just realized that now, standing there—and Nolan had nailed the openings shut. Once her eyes got used to the dark, she observed old sash windows leaning against the walls like paintings in a gallery. Some of the panels had been removed and now functioned as glass panes for numerous shadow boxes. The table was covered in glass squares and pieces of wood, hammers and nails and glue. Quinn expected saws and scythes and axes with honed blades, tools propped up against walls and the smell of grease and gasoline. There was a scent of ether and chloroform hanging in the air and she immediately covered her nose.
The bench underneath the window was covered in jars, some open, some closed, with a white residue on the bottom and black flecks of something Quinn couldn’t make any sense of. There were numerous metal and rubber rings, as if Nolan was canning clandestine objects, but there was none of the electricity or hot plates or wood stoves needed for canning.
Quinn stepped closer, still covering her nose with the hem of her shirt. On the floor, underneath an old table, were storage cases, some wooden boards, unopened boxes of Mason jars, a basket full of vials, and plastic containers filled with powders. One of the boxes—it reminded Quinn of a box of Biz, used for presoaking laundry—said Plaster of Paris in bright orange letters. On the wall above the table hung three shadow boxes, crooked and rudimentary creations of weathered wooden boards and window panes. A net leaned in the corner.
Quinn stepped farther into the shed. When her eyes zoomed in on the contents of the shadow boxes, she jerked backward. She wanted her breathing to slow, but it didn’t—her breaths came out in gasps, her heart hammering inside her chest like a rabbit thumping its hindquarters. The shed began to spin and she squatted on the floor, and her thoughts tumbled about in her head as if she was free-falling from the sky. Then they accelerated.
She remembered being pinned to the ground, one cheek chafing on the branches and sticks and rocks. Bony Fingers’ hand on her neck, his fingers so long they reached across to her other cheek, forcing her mouth to remain open, swallowing pine needles and bark flakes. And as she lay immobilized, Bony Fingers on top of her, a cricket came her way, like a worm wiggling its way to freedom, fighting acorn caps and chestnuts on its way to the top, the cricket crossed the threshold, entering her gaping soundless mouth. Her mind exploded, the antennae tickling the roof of her mouth, its body moving toward her throat, and then her mind collapsed. It had nowhere else to go but turn to madness and like a house of cards, she had tumbled and became someone else, this other person, a ghost of herself. But that day, standing in the shed, looking at what Nolan had been doing, all those hours not tending to the farm and to her, she saw what he was all about.
Quinn had an epiphany, a sudden awareness that a mistake had been made. That instead of turning into a ghostly shadow of herself she should have become a warrior. A fighter with shield and war paint and headdress and a prayer on her lips. But instead she had turned into a ghost and ghosts are powerless except for their ability to haunt the living. Like the trees that had whispered to her that the wind cannot break her if only she bends, she had tried to remain fluid and become someone else, or something else, but here she was, in this shed, surrounded by crickets, some stiff pinned inside frames, some trapped ins
ide a jar. Crickets.
Out of all the insects and bugs—colorful butterflies and dragonflies with lacy wings as clear as glass—Nolan chose to collect crickets. And soon they’ll all be in frames, behind old warped window panes, all over her house. In every room.
Ever since that day in the woods when those men had tortured her body and humiliated her, Quinn had been unable to even look at crickets. She would avert her eyes when she saw one. The sound of their chirping was something she could barely handle, but the thought of the long antennae and their spike-like tails touching her skin took her to a dark place altogether.
And here Nolan was, his hands nothing but an extension of the crickets’ antennae, soiling her body even more. Stirring up all that didn’t need rousing because it covered every surface of her and everything around her every day of her life, but Nolan had to stir it up some more, kicking it up like the dust on the cracked road leading to the farm, blinding her, suffocating her, making breathing impossible. She might as well be in that jar, like a cricket, trapped.
Damn him. Damn Nolan and his lofty ways, not knowing how to run a farm or hold a woman the way she ought to be held, unable to lift a tool or hammer a nail, or stain a floor. And once, just this once, Quinn found the strength to blame Nolan for not being pregnant—she no longer saw any reason as to why she was the guilty party here, and if he were the man he ought to be, she’d be pregnant by now. The doctor had told her as much, had told her that a pregnancy would do her good, keep her from bleeding for nine months, allow her body to recover. No one had said it was impossible—difficult, yes, extremely difficult the doctor had said—but never impossible. And she knew it was a matter of time until the bank foreclosed on the farm, nothing but expenses and not ever a profit from anything, but a shed full of crickets and chemicals, and other claptrap and nonsense that did nothing but deplete the little bit of money they did have.
And then Quinn devised a plan, a plan of becoming that warrior she should have been so many years ago. She had to become stronger and gather resolve and then she’d put an end to all this nonsense, these crickets and Nolan acting like he was in charge of everybody. No need to make life complicated. Maybe Tain was all the child she was ever going to have and so be it, and she wasn’t going to allow Nolan to send her away. Tain would stay and they’d all live on the farm and if Nolan wanted to leave—so be it.
And Quinn wanted to test her resolve, test her newfound strength. She wasn’t going to leap forward, but take baby steps. She thought of the creek on the property behind the house, toward the woods, not in the woods, but close enough. She hadn’t dipped her feet in a creek in years and she wondered if it was like Nolan had described it, so clear you could see the smoothness of the rocks underneath. She longed to cup her hands, not to submerge them quite yet, that would take it too far, but trap the water in her hands and dump it back into the creek on her own accord. That she could manage. She’d think about it one more day, one more night to gather more courage, and then she’d go out to the creek.
As Quinn stood in the shed, her eyes zoomed in on a wooden crate full of Mason jars. She grabbed one and scanned the ground around her until she found a few dead crickets with their legs poking up toward the sky. With a leaf she found nearby, she scooped the dead carcasses into the jar and closed it tight.
At the house, she put the jar in the kitchen window and she cut up peaches and pitted the cherries and waited for Tain.
Hours passed, but Tain didn’t show, and Quinn began to worry. What if it was too late? What if Nolan had driven her into town, or a nearby train station, or the bus depot in Palestine? Quinn went outside and circled the barn, then went to the back of the house but Tain was nowhere to be found. Minutes later she found Tain in the kitchen, dipping her fingers into the bowl of pitted cherries, fishing out a handful and stuffing them into her mouth. When Quinn asked her where she had been, Tain, she just shrugged, licking the juices off her fingers.
Just when she was about to question her further, she saw Nolan’s truck coming up the dirt road. He stopped, climbed out with a large package in his hand. Something was off about him, different; his lips were relaxed, as if he was happy for once. There was a hint of joy in his smile, his cheeks not quite so stiff, but when she called out his name, he froze, turned his back toward her, slipping the package in the bed of the truck, underneath some odds and ends covered up by a large burlap cloth.
Almost as if he had tucked it away in shame.
Thirty
DAHLIA
BOBBY helps move furniture, he fixes stuck drawers, nails down some loose floorboards, and before we know it, it’s a nightly thing: we have a couple of drinks, then we go to my room.
We don’t even turn on the lights, just stumble toward the bed while my mother putters around the house.
That night, my head rests on Bobby’s chest as we lie in the darkness. Our bodies entwine like copper wiring and shimmer with a layer of sweat. Across from us, I catch the shadowy contours of the wall of the missing. I untangle myself from his body and I go downstairs to get some ice and come across a bottle of Johnnie Walker in the freezer compartment.
“Look what I found,” I say and pull the door shut behind me, handing him the bottle.
“Remember this?” Bobby asks and grabs the bottle of whiskey after I climb back in the bed. He pulls the golden bottle closure deliberately, circling around exactly three times, starting at the lip, ending at the collar. We both start laughing, remembering a scene from a James Bond movie we’d seen many years ago. He pours two fingers into each glass and I stare at the rich gold color and the amber glints. I inhale notes of soft raisins, toffee, fresh malt, and light cream. I take a sip, feel the whiskey on my tongue, smell a hint of oak and almonds. I’m still processing this Dahlia-Bobby thing, something that I’m not quite used to yet.
Bobby drops some ice into my glass to take the edge off the hard liquor. He empties his glass and pours himself another one. We both haven’t eaten and within minutes I go into a buzzy trance, letting the softness flow through me. My body feels pliable and my movements are smooth, and nothing matters but the two of us.
We make love. We are silly. We drink and shower. Bobby talks about his mother dying from cancer, his warm spicy breath in my ear, but we immediately circle around to the funny memories, as if we must have it all and everything at once. He hums a song we used to listen to in high school. My lips creep into a grin and I hum along until he kisses me.
If we’d just met, we’d lie here just the same, questioning each other about our childhoods, parents and siblings, how our parents have failed or saved us, all our teenage indiscretions and lovers we’ve had, which ones we could have done without and those that got away, but we know so much about each other already. There’s something about the two of us that feels right as we kiss and our mouths alternate between laughing and kissing and suddenly I’m overcome with a feeling I’d rather die than let go of him, rather wither away than lose him.
Later, I listen to his breathing, hear it stutter, followed by a sigh, then it goes back to its permanent restful rhythm. The way we are in this world has a pleasant rhythm, a familiar tone, a harmony. It feels comforting. And just when I think I know myself, I realize that there’s so much more that’s possible, so much more that I haven’t even touched on, like the song he hummed that I hadn’t thought of in years, the way he opened the bottle in Bond fashion, a memory that would not have returned to me if it hadn’t been for him. The past somehow remembers us, it flows and moves us forward, like a sweet cantata, melody and synchronization, waxing and waning—something that tells me there’s more. So much more.
I close my eyes and eventually doze off. When I awake, the sun comes at me all at once, not a gradual trickle of rays, but as if someone has switched on the lights, violent and harsh.
Someone has opened the curtains. Bobby stands naked in the middle of the room, staring at the wall of the missing. He is mo
tionless, as if paralyzed.
I get up, stand next to him. We both behold the wall—the composite in the center, my Jane fanned out around her like wispy stems of a dandelion.
“Bobby,” I say softly, wondering for a second if he’s sleepwalking. I see him shaking his head as if to say not now. “What’s wrong?” I ask.
“How does this even happen?” He lifts his hand, taking a sip straight from the bottle. “No one looking for her. No one coming forward.”
“The police are investigating.” I feel a glimpse of satisfaction; I am not the only one asking questions, not the only one bothered by this dead end that is the identity of my Jane.
“They are just playing a waiting game, counting on her waking up. If I had it my way . . .” He doesn’t finish the sentence and takes another swig from the bottle. “They’ve never cared.”
“I don’t understand.”
“There were other women, Dahlia. Over the years. As far back as when my dad was sheriff.” He raises his hand when I open my mouth. “No, wait. Not what you think. Not like Jane Doe, nothing like that. There were no investigations, nothing concrete. Some were illegals; one girl disappeared after she aged out of the foster system. They were women no one cared about, they disappeared and poof”—he makes a gesture with his hand—“never to be seen again. No bodies. No missing persons reports. But there was talk. My dad told me when I became a cop, when he still knew left from right. He was adamant about it, made me promise him. Keep an eye on him, he said.”
“Keep an eye on him?”
“Bordeaux’s father. As we got older, Bordeaux took over for him more and more at the hotel. He spent his last years in a wheelchair. I think he had MS. He died five years ago.”
I reach for Bobby’s hand and he allows me to hold on to it. I recall Bordeaux’s father. We gave him a lot of hell, brought alcohol to the hotel, partied, and left a mess behind. Bordeaux Sr. was clean-shaven, a small man, quiet. Long thin fingers. There were tremors, even back then, and that was twenty years ago.
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