Better Left Buried

by Frisch, Belinda

  He winked and her heart raced at the public show of affection.

  “You’ve got my vote,” Pete said and gave Jaxon a shot in the arm.

  Becky just shook her head.

  “Well, I won’t get my hopes up.” Brea flashed Jaxon her flirtiest smile. She could be like them, if she tried, though for years she’d convinced herself otherwise. Her mother’s voice rang out in the back of her mind, telling her it was Harmony holding her back.

  Things were easier with her gone, so maybe there was some truth in that.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Harmony couldn’t believe Adam had hit her and she hated him for the effect it had on her mother. For as calculating as Charity was in her stealthy attack, once Adam was gone, she crumbled. A week’s worth of intensive therapy had been undone with a single swift action and it took doubling her mother’s sedative to get her to sleep.

  Harmony threw away the Styrofoam Ramen noodle container she’d been eating from. She needed to talk, to work things out in her head, and to see Lance who she couldn’t stop thinking about. She wasn’t looking for a relationship, not really, but she was no good at being alone. She brushed her teeth, changed clothes, and checked on her mother one last time before heading out.

  A breeze blew through her hair and she pulled up her hood to keep warm. It wouldn’t be long before snow covered the ground. Her hands were red and stiff by the time she knocked on Lance’s door.

  “Harmony, what are you doing here?” He answered the door barefoot wearing nothing but a pair of slim fit jeans slung low on his waist.

  “Am I interrupting something?” It dawned on Harmony that she probably should have called.

  “No, not really.”

  “Can I come in?” She looked around to see if someone else was there.

  “Yeah, sure.”

  She edged past him, lowered her hood, and pulled down her zipper. “What’s all this?”

  Colored drawings ranging from dragons to skulls, birds to butterflies, covered his makeshift tattoo station.

  “I’m working on a new binder for the shop. You know, for when people come in and don’t really know what they want inked.”

  “Seems something that permanent should mean something, don’t you think?”

  “You’d be surprised.” Lance grabbed a t-shirt off his folding chair and pulled it over his head.

  “No need to dress on my account.”

  He gathered a stack of vellum protectors and sat next to her on the couch, organizing his drawings. “How did things go with your mom?”

  “Good, I guess.” She couldn’t believe he wasn’t responding to her. “As good as can be expected.” She almost told him about the incident with Adam, but thought better of it. He didn’t seem in the mood for deep thoughts. “Thanks for the groceries.”

  “What groceries?”

  “The bags on my porch. You didn’t leave them?”

  He shook his head. “It wasn’t me.”

  The sides of his hands were covered in multicolored ink that smeared whenever he left them sitting on the paper too long and he avoided looking directly at her.

  Maybe she’d expected too much, but he had offered her help. The work he’d done was on his own and they’d had sex before so she wasn’t sure what was bothering him.

  “Is everything okay?” she asked.

  “Yeah, sure it is.” The fact that he was chewing the inside of his cheek said otherwise.

  “I mean with us.”

  He bristled at the word.

  She knew the reaction and how to fix things between them.

  The only way to get things back on-track was to pretend, as he was, that there was nothing the matter.

  “Hey, what’s that?” Harmony stopped him from sliding the next sheet into the protector. The page was full of different kinds of wings and a pair of black ones caught her eye. “I like those.” She hadn’t gone there for a tattoo, but the idea quickly grew on her. She couldn’t believe she hadn’t thought of asking him sooner. “Would you do a tattoo for me?” She held out her arm, covered in fingerprint bruises, and saw that he saw them.

  “Harm, I don’t know.” He didn’t mention them or the cuts.

  “Come on,” she said. “Please? Just a small one.” She spread her thumb and first finger across the width of her wrist. “Right here. I swear, I’ll only ask this once and I’ll pay you as soon as I can. It’ll be quick. A set of those wings and one little word.” She hooked her arm under his and stuck out her bottom lip. “Pleeeaasse?”

  “Fine,” he sighed. “What’re we writing?”

  “Summerland.”

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Harmony woke from her first good night’s sleep in weeks and traced the delicate lettering on her wrist. It took Lance almost two hours to get the tattoo perfect, but there wasn’t a dot out of place. Her skin was swollen, red, and it burned, but she was used to pain. She reached for the tube of salve he had given her and smeared it over her skin.

  Summerland.

  The closest to Heaven a person like her could hope to go.

  The tattoo, meant to remind her of what she’d almost done, of what she swore she’d never do again, instead caused her to doubt her fortitude.

  Today was one of them.

  The day before her appointment with Bennett, the goal was to keep her mother clear-eyed and complacent, agreeable with anything the therapist had to say.

  A knock at the front door dragged her out of bed.

  “Mom, can you get that?” She slept in her underwear and bra and put on the previous day’s jeans and sweatshirt out of convenience. A second knock came. She blew out a long breath. “Mom, answer the door.” Two more knocks, a long pause, and the sound of tires on gravel. Harmony peered out the window to see a late model sedan pulling out of her driveway. “Mom, who was that?” She looked around the empty living room and kitchen for signs of her mother. “Mom?” She checked the bedroom. Her mother’s floral comforter was rolled into a wad and the dingy canvas sneakers Harmony had left by the side of the bed were gone. Sometime between her coming home from Lance’s and this morning, her mother had slipped out unnoticed. “Shit.” Harmony opened the front door, hoping maybe she had gone outside for a smoke, but she knew better.

  Things went from bad to worse.

  Someone had taped an eviction notice to their front door. They had seventy-two hours to pack their things and leave. There was no alternative, no amount to pay, and no money to pay it with had there been another way. Everything she’d done had been for nothing. She tore down the paper and closed her eyes, refusing to cry.

  This time tomorrow, she’d be on her way to the Midtown Home where the other juvenile delinquents would steal what little she had, tease her, and goad her into the trouble she already struggled to keep herself out of.

  Adam would be gone and no one would care what happened to her. But that wasn’t the problem. The real issue was that no one cared already.

  Her mother was surely high somewhere, in a by-the-hour motel room or some squalid crack house with a dozen others whose situations were bleak enough for her mother to see her own through rose-colored glasses. She’d always been the kind of addict who insisted she could stop if she wanted to.

  But she didn’t want to.

  And slapping a coat of paint on the trailer didn’t make it a home.

  And sleeping with Lance didn’t make him care about her, not really.

  The Wolcott women were pros in the art of delusion.

  Harmony went inside, flopped down on the couch, and buried her face in her hands.

  She’d been through her mother’s escapes before and one day wasn’t enough to find her. Even if she could, there were other things to answer for.

  “Two days, Ma. You couldn’t wait two goddamned days?”

  Somehow saying the words out loud made her feel even worse.

  She turned on her cell and a slew of messages rolled in, every one of them from Adam.

  “I’m sorry. I’m sor
ry. Please answer me. Where are you?”

  She covered the tattoo with a layer of gauze, put her thumbs through the holes in the cuff of her hoodie, and called Adam back.

  “Harmony, thank God. I’m so sorry, baby. Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.” It was the first of several lies she planned on telling over the course of the next couple days.

  “I mean, are you really okay? You’re not hurt?”

  “It was a slap, Adam.” He acted like he’d beat her.

  “I was up thinking about what I did all night. What if I had hurt you? I kept thinking that’s why you weren’t answering your phone. I was going crazy. I’m so sorry. I promise, nothing like that will ever happen again.” In her experience, the apologies and vows for something to never happen again meant it was only a matter of time. “I’m so, so sorry.”

  “I know you are,” she finally said. “You don’t have to keep apologizing.” She wasn’t excusing him, so much as there was no one else. Lance all but demanded his space and her mother was God knows where. She sat on the edge of her bed, wondering why the wrong choices were always the easiest to make. She had come so far to go back to the only thing she had left.

  “Adam,” she said. “Can you come get me? I want to go home.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  Jaxon parked his Jeep in front of the house at 6 Maple and reached for Brea’s hand. “Tell me why we’re here, again?”

  “Because I need answers.” She couldn’t get the picture of her family and Harmony’s out of her head. “And you said you’d do anything for me.” She smiled, shoved her backpack under the dash, and texted her mother to say that she was with Jaxon in case school called. Her mother was remarkably lenient where he was concerned.

  A blue F150 pulled down the street and the driver glanced over his shoulder as he drove through the construction gate.

  “You know these people work for my father, right?” Jaxon delivered an awkward wave.

  “Think they’ll call him?”

  “Probably, but that’s the least of my worries right now.” He pointed at the new boards covering the front entrance. “Someone’s been here, Brea. And it’s clear they want to keep people out.”

  “Then we better hurry up. Come on. I have an idea.” The back door was still open. “Not the most thorough job. It was probably Charity.”

  The acrid vinegar smell hit her full-on and she opened the single-pane kitchen window, careful not to let it drop. It was one of the few windows not boarded up or busted out. “Hand me one of those jars, would you?”

  Jaxon scanned his options and took the one not leaking and dripping with goo. “Here.”

  She used it to prop open the window.

  A gusty breeze rustled the yellowed papers held to the refrigerator by plastic alphabet letter magnets, giving life to the childish pictures of stick figures holding hands and smiling in front of a white house.

  Brea shuddered.

  “You okay?”

  “I’m good. Let’s go.” She went into the living room, careful not to step too close to the rotting edge of the floor that looked worse in the daylight than she had originally imagined. The sofa and chair she had thought were covered in dust were actually covered in a fine, sage-colored mold. She stifled an oncoming sneeze.

  “What are we looking for?” Jaxon asked.

  “Some old photo albums, maybe?” She didn’t really know other than that she wanted something to jog her memory, which seemed to have been wiped clean.

  There were no bookshelves, no storage to speak of, and no cabinets to look through. There was a side table that doubled as a magazine rack, but the books had been soaked and molded nearly to pulp.

  “We should check the master bedroom. We haven’t been in there, yet.”

  Brea went to the last room on the left, going in ahead of Jaxon.

  A queen-size bed sat unmade and off-center in the room. Two mismatched, dust-covered dressers displayed a series of photos, including Charity and Tom’s wedding photo and a family photo of the three of them from when Harmony was an infant.

  “They look like a normal family,” Jaxon said.

  “Why wouldn’t they?”

  “It’s just that my dad’s stories make you wonder.” He raised one eyebrow.

  “What do you mean?” She picked up one of the photos and blew the dust from the glass. “You never mentioned this before.”

  “I never cared about it before you threw that accusation at me the other day.” He held up his hand. “And before you go getting upset with me again, I’m not trying to bring that back up. We’re past it. It just made me curious is all. I asked him about the house and if he knew why it was abandoned.”

  “Did you tell him we’d been here?”

  “No, though I’m probably going to have to now.”

  “Did he know?”

  He shrugged. “Most of what he knew was secondhand—small town talk and all that. He called Harmony’s father a ‘flip-switch’. That’s what he calls people who are super-friendly one minute and insanely mean the next. He said he tried to kill Charity once.”

  “The night of the accident, my uncle told me.”

  “Then you know as much as I do.” He opened a couple of drawers, sifting through clothes, both men’s and women’s.

  Charity’s and Tom’s.

  “Anything?” Brea searched the shorter of the two dressers, looking at her reflection in the dusty mirror.

  “No, nothing. Like really nothing.” Several cardboard boxes sat piled in the corner, assembled but empty. “Looks like someone considered packing.”

  A large section of clothes were missing from the closet, as though someone took everything on hangers and left the doors open.

  “They must not have thought too much was important.”

  Jaxon wandered into the hall, peered into Harmony’s old bedroom, and headed back toward the front door. Brea listened to his footsteps trail off and become soft on the linoleum.

  “Hey, Brea. Come here.” The basement door screeched when he opened it. “Look.”

  Four inches or so of water covered the cement floor, soaking the limp and misshapen boxes stacked in a row.

  Jaxon took off his shoes and socks and rolled his pants halfway up to his knees.

  “What’re you doing?”

  “You’re looking for mementos, right? Maybe they’re down there.” He tested the top stair’s strength, clenching the railing just in case. “It safe. Come down halfway and I’ll hand the boxes up to you. No reason for us both to get wet.”

  Brea watched as he pried the boxes open, shivering.

  “Are you cold?”

  Jaxon nodded. “The water’s freezing. Here.” He tossed aside two of the boxes and handed her a third full of loose papers and books that might have been photo albums. “Take this one to the kitchen.”

  She cradled the box so the bottom didn’t fall out. It wasn’t soaked like the ones sitting in the water, but the atmospheric moisture eroded the cardboard just the same.

  “Are you coming?”

  He seemed preoccupied, wading through the water until his feet turned purplish red. “I’ll be up in a minute.” He sloshed in a toe-heel fashion around the room’s perimeter.

  Brea brought the box upstairs and set it on the kitchen table. There were folders of old bills inside, a telephone book from the early nineties, and what looked to be the contents of a junk drawer, including several envelopes full of pictures.

  Jaxon stumbled onto the dingy green linoleum, stood on one foot, and dried the other on his pants. He put on his sock and shoe before drying the other foot.

  Brea flipped through the photos, finding more of her and her parents at Thanksgiving dinner and Christmas, confirming their places as fixtures in Charity’s life, a friendship they denied ever existed.

  “Take a look at this.” She held out a domestic incident report written up by her uncle. It was dated over a year before Tom went missing. “There are at least ten of them.”
/>
  “Looks like the rumors about Tom hitting Charity are true.”

  Brea couldn’t imagine why anyone would have stayed in a relationship like that. “What were you doing wandering around down there?”

  “Measuring square footage. The first floor seems so much bigger.”

  “Really?”

  Jaxon shrugged. “Maybe I’m wrong, but the basement seems short.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  Harmony packed the things most important to her, including her mother’s box of photos and the pile of laundry that encompassed most of her wearable wardrobe. She piled the clothes into two garbage bags and waited on the tiny front porch for Adam. He showed up wearing a long sleeve button-down and a pair of dark jeans. His wet hair looked almost black-blue in the sunlight.

  “I’m sorry it took me so long. I wanted to shower and I stopped at the store. Here, these are for you.” He held out the bundle of daisies with a single red rose between them.

  “Thank you.” Harmony took them and reached for one of the bags.

  “I got it.”

  “Are you sure?” He looked so hopeful and she tried to connect, but she just couldn’t make herself genuinely happy to see him. Going back to him was her settling into habit, whether she liked it or not.

  “I’m sure.”

  She carried the box of photos. He loaded the rest into the back of the truck in two trips while she waited.

  He climbed in the driver’s seat. “You sure you have everything?”

  She nodded. “Anything worth taking.”

  He reached across the seat to hold her hand. She reluctantly allowed it.

  The ride to his apartment felt as much like a sentence as if she’d been sent to the Midtown Home. She refused to tell him about the eviction and needed a place to stay that was less likely to be pulled out from under her.

  He smiled, content, humming along to a Pearl Jam song and singing when it came to the chorus. If he sensed the distance between them it didn’t show.

  She fished the keys out of her jacket pocket and was out of the truck as soon as he parked. She left the flowers on the bench seat and hurried up the sidewalk.