She senses the past is territory Travis doesn’t venture into at all if he can help it. She can’t blame him. His past isn’t exactly compatible with his present. She recalls finding him on her doorstep passed-out drunk one time, vomit on his shirt and her daughter’s name on his lips. She recalls the numerous times she was called to the school or to the police station to retrieve Clary, caught doing something crazy with Travis, the two of them intent on rattling the cage of youth every chance they got.
Faye hasn’t thought about that Clary—her wild child—in so long. She’s become used to the current version, the one who came back from Charlotte, where she went to nurse her wounds after Travis ended things. She’d wanted to escape the reminders of Travis at every turn in Ludlow, so she’d gone to the closest big city, found a job and a place to live. Though she’d missed her, Faye had understood. Clary had come back from Charlotte different. Faye had attributed it to her growing up, maturing. But she wonders now if perhaps it was something else. She’d been so relieved to have Clary back she hadn’t pushed her on anything, afraid that if she did, Clary would leave again. But now she wonders if maybe she should’ve pushed harder.
“I guess it’s weird, being back here,” she says to Travis, because she can’t think of anything else to say.
“Yeah, I don’t get back often enough. So much going on with the church and stuff. And with my parents gone, there’s just never really a reason.”
“I was sorry to hear about both of them.”
“Yeah,” he says. “After my mom died, Dad lost the will to live. You hear about that happening, but I’d never seen it for myself. It was like he just faded away.” Travis looks wistful for a moment. “I guess I never realized how much he loved her till then. I just remember all the fights.” He shrugs. “So it was nice, even though it was hard, to know that he really didn’t want to live without her.” Travis smiles proudly. “He died six months to the day after she did. And I’m happy to say I know where they both are now. They both got saved the year before.” He nods. “Of all the things I’ve accomplished since I left here, I’m proudest of that.”
“I heard they gave up drinking,” she says.
“Yeah. Sometimes I wonder if that’s not what killed them. Their bodies had gotten so used to the alcohol they didn’t know how to operate without it.” He looks at her. “Do you think that’s possible?”
She gives him a small, sad smile. “I think anything’s possible.”
He smiles back, this time with his whole face, and she can see what draws people to him, what makes his followers want to buy what he’s selling. “That’s what the Bible says.”
“Well, I hope it’s possible that I’ll get some sleep tonight,” she says, and gives a little laugh to lighten the mood.
“Good night, Faye,” Travis says. “I sure do appreciate the hospitality. If you ever get down to Florida, maybe I can return the favor.”
“Sure thing,” she says, giving him a little wave as she retreats to her room. She removes her shoes and crawls into bed without even taking off her clothes. She tucks the pillow under her head just so, pulls the covers to her chin, and closes her eyes, listening to the complete silence. She thinks of Hal leaving in a hurry, off to save Cordell Lewis from an angry mob. She wonders if he’s thinking of her or if he’s already put their tryst out of his mind. Hal is good at compartmentalizing. She closes her eyes again, trying not to think about Hal or Cordell Lewis or her lost niece, who sits at the center of all this.
She lost Annie once when she was little—just the one time, which she thinks is a pretty good track record. Throughout Annie’s childhood, she felt Lydia there, watching her, judging her performance, rating her motherhood efforts. Lydia, the not-so-angelic angel on her shoulder, saying things like, “You sure that candy is a good idea? You don’t want her to get a cavity, do you?” Or, “How could you forget to sign that paper? Now she’s not going to be able to go on that field trip!” Or, “You lost my child? I trusted you with her, and you lost her?”
Things like that. Lydia, her annoying sister in life, could be just as annoying in death, if you got right down to it.
In her own defense, she’d turned her back for only a second. (Isn’t that what they all say?) They’d been at the fair. Clary had tugged on her to go one way, and Annie had tugged on her to go the other. Clary wanted the carousel, and Annie wanted the Tilt-A-Whirl, the pair of them always pulling her in different directions, nearly splitting her in two in the process.
She’d turned to scold Clary (she always scolded Clary first, always more comfortable faulting her own child instead of her niece, making Annie the perpetual guest in her own home), and she’d dropped Annie’s hand when she did. Clary had argued (Clary always argued), and after she had finished with Clary, she’d turned back to speak to Annie. But Annie was gone.
She can still recall what it felt like to look at the empty space beside her, then look past that space—to the right and to the left—to see swarms of people. To scream Annie’s name as people gave her quizzical looks, to grasp Clary’s hand so tightly that Clary cried out in pain. But she paid Clary no mind; she just called Annie’s name louder, scanning the crowd. So many faces and none of them Annie’s. All the while, she could feel Lydia on her shoulder, shaking her head in disappointment. Though Annie was missing for maybe three minutes (they found her—where else?—over by the Tilt-A-Whirl, where she’d wanted to go), it was the longest, most terrifying three minutes of her life.
And that is what it feels like all over again. Except three minutes has turned into three days, and she cannot shake the panic, or the fear, or the sense of failure. She has let her sister down, her poor dead sister who never got to live her life. The one thing she could do for her was to take care of her daughter. And she has failed at it.
She sighs, thinking that perhaps she should ask Travis to pray with her. Maybe that would calm her nerves. But she doesn’t want to pray with Travis. She doesn’t want to pray with anyone. She just wants to keep moving, keep busy, keep her mind off things as much as possible. Because thinking of Annie’s disappearance is making her think of lots of other things, too—things she’s spent the last twenty-three years telling herself to forget about.
She got to Ludlow and wrote herself a new story, one she could control, one that had a happy ending, even though it began in tragedy. She and the girls became a family, a phoenix rising from the ashes. They became synonymous with hope and triumph in the town, and that is just what she wanted. Though in those first few weeks, she kept telling herself she’d go back to Virginia, return to her marriage, do what was expected of her by the people back home. But when she looked at Annie, she couldn’t imagine taking her away from all she knew. She couldn’t imagine plunking the child down in a home that was growing increasingly volatile with a man who was growing increasingly dangerous.
This is the part she has told no one except Hal. When people tell her how good and kind she was to uproot her life to help Annie, she just smiles and says it was nothing. She lets people believe she was this altruistic, giving soul who put Annie above all else. She never told anyone that the same night she’d gotten the phone call, her husband had punched her in the stomach—he was always careful to hit her in places where bruises didn’t show—so hard that she’d blacked out for a moment and woken up in a heap on the floor.
She doesn’t remember now why he’d punched her. It could’ve been for no reason at all. It could’ve been because he had a bad day at work, and she didn’t smile at him right when he walked in the door. She’s never told anyone that, as she fell asleep that night, she’d been thinking of ways to kill him and get away with it. And she’d been serious about it.
Then the phone had rung on the bedside table, its ring piercing the silence, splitting her life in two: before and after. Her husband had fumbled for the phone, answered it with a gruff “Yeah?” Then sat straight up when the person on the other end identified themselves as a cop. That person—she knows now—was Hal York,
a young beat cop desperate to find someone who’d come get this kid who’d attached herself to him like Velcro.
Her husband allowed her to go see to Annie—but with the expectation that she would bring Annie home once things were sorted. That’s what she’d told him when she left: she would take Clary, go get Annie and Lydia’s body, and bring them both back—Lydia to be buried and Annie to be raised. She hadn’t even known that she was leaving him when she threw clothes in a bag, lifted a sleeping Clary into her booster seat, got into her ancient Honda Accord, and drove through the night to reach her traumatized niece. This was a mercy mission. It had taken years to admit to herself that the object of that mission was really herself.
And yet, when people started telling her how amazing she was, she’d soaked it up; she’d practically preened under their adoring gazes. In Ludlow, she became someone new, someone different. She wasn’t T. J. Wilkins’s wife; she wasn’t her father’s daughter. She was anyone she wanted to be. In Ludlow, she began to understand why Lydia hadn’t returned after her husband died in that motorcycle accident. Lydia, she knew now, had reinvented herself. And so had Faye. The longer she stayed, the more she settled in, the more she saw the good that came with the tragedy of her sister’s murder. It was just like people said—there was a silver lining: Lydia’s death had given Faye a chance at a whole new life, apart from who she’d been, a ticket out of a marriage and a life she’d been miserable in.
She flourished there, as if Ludlow’s soil were richer, more conducive for her growth than her hometown had been. She wasn’t just a mediocre hairstylist in a two-bit salon, a girl who went to cosmetology school because her parents weren’t rich enough to send her to college. In Ludlow, she became a business owner of one of the most popular salons in town. She’d joined the Chamber of Commerce for crying out loud. She was somebody—and not just somebody, an altruistic angel somebody. An extraordinary person.
As Annie grew up, she heard this from just about everyone. And Faye stood by and let that become her truth—hers and Annie’s. She was someone who sacrificed for a child, who gave up everything to relocate and care for her so she didn’t go through more trauma. Annie was beholden to Faye for what she’d done, to hear people tell it. The girl accepted this truth, Faye absorbed it, and it became who they were. It informed their dynamic. And here is what she knows: the more you think something, the more it becomes truth in your life—whether it’s actually true or not.
You should be grateful, she’d said to Annie—in both words and actions—the child’s whole life.
She pushes back the covers and rises from the bed, which is no refuge after all. Her thoughts follow her there as well as anywhere. She cannot escape them, and she cannot get away from the fear that she will never have a chance to set things right with Annie. She swings her feet to the ground and rests them there for a moment as sadness swoops down on her, like a hawk swoops down on a field mouse, overtaking her. She feels a heaviness fill her body. She will never get the chance to confess how wrong she has been to let Annie believe anything except that Faye benefited from their arrangement every bit as much as Annie did. Possibly even more.
Laurel
It is very late, and she and Damon are in the Ledger’s office working on the story about Annie’s vigil, and all that happened there, when she hears the alert on the police scanner: Sheriff York has been summoned to Cordell Lewis’s house. An angry mob is there, demanding he produce Annie, convinced he has taken her. There’s a new angle to this ever-unfolding story, and no matter the hour, she must follow it. She grabs her purse and goes toward the door without a word to Damon, assuming he heard the scanner, too, that he knows exactly what she’s doing. But she has assumed wrong, and Damon comes running after her.
“Hey! Hey!” he calls, his voice anxious.
She freezes as he catches up to her just before she reaches the door. They are so close she can see the faint traces of lines beside his eyes. They are the beginnings of what will be full-blown wrinkles one day. But right now, they are just the barest hints of a maturity that is coming. She can see in his eyes that he is tired. She still doesn’t understand why he stayed to work with her. She’s told him more than once that he doesn’t have to. But he wanted to add his pictures to her story.
“I’m sorry I said that about us making a good team. I hope you didn’t . . . read anything into it,” he says, referring to something he said moments before she heard the scanner. He moves so that he is now standing in front of the door, blocking her exit, concern on his face. He thinks, she realizes, I’m leaving because of what he said.
“N-no,” she answers. He is her boss. Her younger, spoiled, undeserving, annoying boss. She hasn’t read anything into the evening. They are working together. It’s business. “I figured you just wanted to be in on this part of the process.” She gives him her most sincere smile.
He nods. “When I was a kid, I loved taking photos. I used to say I wanted to be a photojournalist, tell an entire story with just one photo. A picture’s worth a thousand words and all that. I said I wanted to travel all over the world. Ya know?” He shakes his head. “I forget who I’m talking to—you’re the one who invented the dream.”
“Invented the dream?” she asks.
He blanches, tries to recover, but fails. Caught, he sputters. “I-I mean, you’re the one who was always talking about seeing the world, about being a journalist. You were the one who made it sound so exciting. I guess it rubbed off on me.”
She gives him an amused expression. “Really? I never knew you cared two flips about what I said.”
He nods. “Yeah. Of course. I thought you were the coolest, with all your big plans.”
“Huh,” she says. “And here I thought you were just an annoying pest.”
“Ouch,” he says.
She crosses her arms. “Do I need to catalog the various ways you tortured me? You were awful.”
He holds his arms up like a man surrendering. “I had a huge crush on you, and I was immature. Didn’t your mother ever tell you that’s how boys act when they like you?”
She feels the conversation going sideways and hurries to rein it back in even as her mind processes what she just heard. Damon? Had a crush on her? When they were kids? This is news.
“Well, good thing we’re not kids anymore,” she quips, hoping it’ll work. They look at each other, and a memory plays in her head from when they were fourteen and thirteen. They were at a party at the country club, in a group of kids all sitting around. There was a boy sitting beside Damon who Laurel thought was cute. She was hanging around Damon to be near him, hoping he would talk to her. A server brought out a tray of ice cream to the group of kids asking, “Who wants chocolate?” When Laurel raised her hand, Damon said, “Laurel, put your arm down,” waving his hand in front of his nose as if she had BO. Everyone laughed as Laurel, red-faced, quickly lowered her arm and fled for the bathroom.
“Yeah,” Damon says now, his voice gone softer. “Good thing.” They look at each other again, and she decides to forgive him for being a little shit back then. But that is as far as she will go.
“And here we are,” she says. “Look at us—both in the newspaper business.”
He shakes his head. “Yeah. The newspaper business.” He rolls his eyes. “I’m hardly a photojournalist.”
“Well, I’m hardly an award-winning writer.”
“Aren’t we a pair?” he says. And they both give a half-hearted laugh. But then Damon’s smile fades, and he starts talking again.
“When I was a senior at Clemson, my dad showed up one day and took me to lunch. I’d just won a photojournalism contest, and I thought he was there to congratulate me, to tell me he was proud. Instead he was there to set me straight.” He deepens his voice in what she assumes is his impression of his father. “‘Your mother and I both feel that you should come back to Ludlow after graduation and help out with the family business. I’ll let you run the paper, but that’s as far as this photography interest of yours
can go. You’re our only son, and I won’t have you traipsing around the world like some nomad.’”
Damon is silent for a moment, and when he speaks again, it is in his normal voice. “I didn’t fight him on it.” He looks around the office as if he’s surprised he’s there. “I’m not sure why I didn’t. But I didn’t. I used my camera collection as decorations for my office and did exactly what he wanted.”
He laughs, injecting a little levity to dispel his vulnerability. “Now I just try to keep the advertisers happy and make sure people still subscribe to our little paper.” He rolls his eyes, and she gives a laugh to match his, to help them both out of this awkward moment. He claps her on the back. “’Course with your coverage of this story, I haven’t had to worry about that recently.”
His clap is a bit too forceful, but she isn’t going to admit that to him. No sense showing weakness just because he has. She ignores the stinging sensation and forces a smile. She’s had enough vulnerability for one night. Time to get back to business. “I’m going to go see what’s going on at Cordell Lewis’s house,” she says.
“Cordell Lewis?” he asks. He must’ve been so focused on working that he hadn’t heard the scanner. Her mother always says that men can’t do two things at once, and this is proof.
“Yeah,” she says. “Apparently there’s an angry mob there demanding Annie.”
“An angry drunk mob if I know this town,” he says.
“Either way, it’s a story.”
She watches as Damon strolls back over to her desk where they were working and types for a moment, then looks up. “Okay,” he says, “the story is filed. Let’s go.”
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