Sycamore

by Bryn Chancellor

  “Did you find her?” Her voice surprised her: steady and clear, despite the Chablis, despite the lurch of her heart into her throat.

  “We don’t know yet, Maud.”

  “But you found something.”

  “We did. I didn’t want to call. But it’s late now, and you can come on down tomorrow.”

  “I’ll come now.”

  “It’s dark. We’re not going out now.”

  “Where is she?”

  “We don’t know it’s her—”

  “Where?”

  “In the wash. Past the bridge, past the old lake. It’s dark—”

  “So get a goddamn flashlight.” Maud grabbed her keys and purse from her passenger seat and climbed into the front seat of his cruiser.

  At the old lake, Maud followed him into the darkness. The flashlight beam jerked across the path. The sky had cleared, but the waxing moon was a mere thumbnail sliver. She kept her eyes on the ground, stepping only where Gil stepped. The thud of his footfalls seemed to come from a distance.

  They reached the dry wash. Gil scanned with the beam, and he pointed at the trail down the slope. “Watch your step.”

  Maud started down. Her shoes skidded on the loose dirt, and she threw her arms out, stumbling the last few feet but staying upright. As they walked through the wash, she stayed close to Gil’s back, and she almost bumped into him when he stopped. He lifted his arm.

  The beam lit the wall of the wash, cordoned by yellow-and-black police tape. Maud stepped forward and lifted the tape.

  “Maud, please don’t touch anything. The forensics team is coming up tomorrow from Phoenix. We need to keep it clean. I don’t need to tell you how much trouble I could get in for bringing you here like this.”

  She leaned against the sloped wall, her knees pressing into the dirt. “Shine the light.”

  He did. A pack of coyotes began to yip. The high-pitched calls bounced across the air, sounding to Maud as if they were feet away.

  “We don’t know it’s her.” Gil’s voice, low, behind her. No, he leaned next to her.

  “But it’s someone,” she said. Even through the dirt and brush, she could see the notched bone.

  He clicked the flashlight off. The negative image floated in her vision, unearthly black, bone white.

  “The rain,” she said. “The whole town was flooded that night.” She remembered the sky as vengeful, mythic with rage and thunder, as if it wanted to punish the earth, pummel it into submission. Body drowned, body bloated, body buried alive.

  “We just don’t know yet. Those folks coming tomorrow, they’re good. They can tell a lot with bones. We’ll know more soon.” He patted her arm, his hand warm and assuring. He stood up. “Come on. It’s late.”

  The coyotes howled. The sounds moved in from all sides. She pressed her finger against her ear, closing it off.

  But she could not mute the sound of her own breath, as shallow as the crude grave just a few feet away in the dark. She could not stop the voice that lived on: Mama, look! Mama, Mama, watch me! X marks the spot. You Are Here. For god’s sake, don’t disappear.

  The New Girl

  Workdays, Angie Juarez left the house before sunrise, long before Rose or Hazel woke. That early, Angie could take her time setting up the shop, drink coffee, read the paper, hum low in the silence. Early mornings had been her papa’s habit, too, and she used to think it was an awful chore to get up before dawn, but now she understood. There was nothing quite like waking with the sun, in her own special quiet place, watching the world yawn and stretch around her.

  Half asleep, in the glow cast by the nightlight, Angie pulled on her flannel shirt, jeans, and boots. Rose lay sprawled across the bed, the sheets twisted and tangled like a clump of seaweed. Angie sat on the corner of the bed and patted her bare leg, but her girlfriend didn’t budge. She’d been up late again. She’d been up late a lot, prowling the living room and eating handfuls of dry cereal and watching reruns, which meant something was bugging her. When Angie had asked, “What’s wrong, hon?” Rose teared up and said, “I don’t know.” Angie tried to let her be. Rose would talk when she was good and ready, not a second before. Could be anything: her mother selling her home and moving into the guest house, the two-year anniversary of her father’s death, something to do with the motel and her sister Stevie, more bullshit from her boss at the bank, her upcoming birthday. Angie worried if she pushed too hard, Rose would run. After all, there was a time when Rose had run. Even now, so many years into their life together, those dormant memories erupted: waiting up until the sun seeped through the blinds when Rose didn’t come home, waking up to find her gone. A night, a couple days, sometimes longer, young Hazel oblivious in the crib. The last episode had been four years ago, when Hazel was away for a week at the YMCA camp in Prescott. Three days, no note, and then Rose was home without a word. Then Angie had told her if she did it again, that was it, she was gone, and Rose had fallen to her knees in sobbing apology, begging, promising. That morning, though, as Angie squeezed Rose’s warm foot, recognizing those signs, she wondered if she would ever stop waiting for the moment she’d wake up to find Rose gone. Her throat tightened, a familiar lava heat and fear tinged with anger. She pressed at the hollow of her neck where unspoken words lodged, poised and sharp as a scorpion’s tail.

  After Angie let out the dogs, and fed them, the cat, and their new turtle, she stopped in Hazel’s room. She kissed her on the forehead and stroked her smooth brown hair. Hazel was the one good thing to come out of Rose’s disappearing acts, the product of a brief affair with a feckless young man when Rose had moved to Phoenix for a couple years. Hazel, now fifteen, whom Angie had helped raise since she was two—though Hazel called her Ang, not Mom. Hazel, her almost-daughter, whom Angie’s father had missed meeting—he’d died the month before Rose came back to town with Hazel on her hip. Papa and Hazel were bound in her memory by the proximity of his death and her arrival, his terrible absence offset by Hazel’s wondrous presence, by the enormity of both what she’d lost and what she’d found. Hazel half woke and said, “Can we practice driving later?” and Angie said, “Sure thing, hon. Sure thing.” She smoothed her hair harder, tucked her blanket tighter. “Don’t forget to feed the zoo this afternoon.”

  As Angie backed the Impala out of the driveway, a lamp in Rose’s mother’s garage apartment clicked on. The rest of the town, though, slumbered as she drove through its streets, the houses and stores dark except for Yum Bakery, where she caught a glimpse through a glowing window of Esther Genoways leaning over her stainless steel prep table. The other place alight was the office at the Woodchute; Angie knew Stevie was inside, brewing coffee and setting out Esther’s bite-size muffins and rugelach for guests. Stevie may have been an odd duck, but no one could argue with how she’d turned the motel around. Listed in the Best-Of tourist guides, booked solid through Christmas with visitors en route to Tuzigoot Monument or Jerome, college parents in for visits, tourists headed to Sedona who couldn’t afford to stay there.

  At the shop, Angie set the coffee to brew and flipped through the day’s invoices. Iris Overton’s jeep was up first. Yesterday, Iris’s son Paul had dropped it off. She had told him how sorry she was about his wife. They’d known each other since kindergarten, though they hadn’t been friends in high school. Such youthful divisions faded as time slipped away and nostalgia crept in, as they settled deeper into their adult lives, her growing white-haired and him bald—and now losing his wife to cancer. He was in town with his young son, not sure how long they’d be there. They chatted about the heat, about who from high school was still in town or had come back, a little gossip about who was dating whom. About the jeep she’d said, “It’s on its last legs, but your mom won’t listen.” He’d smiled and said, “Yeah, she’s stubborn.” Angie had laughed and said she’d do what she could. “Take care of yourself,” she told him when he turned down a ride back to the orchard and jogged off down the sidewalk.

  The newspaper landed with a fat thump
outside the door as the coffee finished brewing, and Angie waved at Beto—Roberto—as he pedaled off on his ten-speed. Roberto now. She smiled. He’d been trying to get that to stick. It was true he looked nothing like the scrawny, shy kid he once was—he was tall and lean now, ruggedly handsome in his low-slung jeans and snap-button cotton shirts—but in her heart he’d always be Beto. He’d be at work here in a couple hours, and then after the shop closed, he’d pick up a shift at the Pickaxe. Angie didn’t know how he did it all. “Keeps me young,” he said, rubbing at his ever-thinning hair, at his broad forehead that seemed to be growing broader, but Angie knew, too, he was helping with his mother’s doctor bills, not to mention hooking up with college students, those clueless, sweet young women who didn’t give him any trouble. Exasperating as it was, part of her couldn’t blame him—envied him, even. Roaming, free of commitment, no worries about being left behind.

  Angie slid the rubber band off the paper and smelled the fresh ink. Her fingers would be black by the time she’d finished reading, but then again, they’d be black all day long until she got out the orange pumice, and even then, hints of grease would linger in her cuticles and stain her knuckles. She sat in her father’s old reclining rocker and unfolded the front page.

  She blinked and pulled the paper taut. She turned on the desk lamp and put on her reading glasses. The article was brief: Bones found in dry wash by a Sycamore College professor out for a walk. Would be tested by forensics team. Police investigating whether the bones belong to Jess Winters, a seventeen-year-old girl who went missing in December of 1991. Had lived with mother at time of disappearance. Mother, Maud Winters, unreachable for comment. No arrests or charges ever made in connection.

  She touched her finger to the page. There it was, the news most everyone in town worried they would see some day, the news they’d been waiting for even when they forgot they were waiting. That girl. Angie rubbed the paper until ink smudged her finger.

  She’d waltzed into fourth-hour Humanities midway through class, wearing red-framed sunglasses, a red puffy jacket over an orange baby-doll dress with zebra-striped leggings, and worn purple Chucks. Silver star- and moon-shaped studs lined her lobes, up into the cartilage, and she twisted them as if tuning the pegs of a guitar. Her long, curly hair was the honey brown of fresh motor oil. She was as tall as, or taller than, most boys, slim up top but broad at the hips, like a chemistry beaker.

  The girl slid into the desk next to Angie. She smiled and said, “Hey,” as if they’d been friends forever. Surprised, Angie’s face heated up, and she smoothed down her bangs, where she had already sprouted a slim silver streak. Like her father, she went white by thirty-five, but at sixteen she had only that streak like a stick of spearmint gum. A clump of girls whom Angie thought of as the Ra-Ras turned and gawped, their eyes sparkling with glitter shadow and malevolent intent.

  “She doesn’t talk,” one of the Ra-Ras said, indicating Angie.

  The new girl didn’t answer. She pushed her sunglasses to the top of her head and cracked a piece of neon-green gum until the Ra-Ra turned around and slid down in her seat. Angie kept her eyes on her graffiti-carved desk but snuck a sideways peek at the girl. Despite the earrings and the gum, with her riotous hair, oval face, large brown eyes, and tiny mouth, she reminded Angie of a figure in a Renaissance painting, like the ones Ms. G had shown them. Sort of glowing but sad. For some reason, Angie thought of xylophones. Perhaps because of all the bright colors, or perhaps because of the sudden range of notes in her percussive heart.

  After school, Angie worked in the bay at her father’s auto shop. With the garage door open, she could see the white steam of her breath, but she didn’t care. She layered up with a down coat, wool hat, and gloves with the fingertips cut off. Under the hood of a car she was no longer the quiet girl in the back row. Here, with the thrum of an idling engine, she was animated, singing low to the pop songs on the radio blaring from the shelf behind her. She was going to run her own shop someday, somewhere far from this place where kids spit in her hair or bumped her with brick-weight backpacks or elbowed her in the throat in auto shop, even though she knew more about cars than any of them. “Shitheads, all of ’em, mi’ja,” Papa said. “Don’t know nothing from nothing, verdad?”

  She worked on the belts and filters on her ’69 Impala, checking the tension on each part as her father had taught her. Cuidado, he’d say, easy now. He’d been protective even before her mother ran off to California in search of a bigger life with a man who sold real estate. That according to her letter, anyway. Angie didn’t see her mother or her bigger life at all. It’d been her father and her alone so long she hardly remembered it any other way. At the shop, he let her work on her own. If he did help, he leaned next to her at an alert distance, gave her quick pats on the back. Pat, pat. Used to be she could sit on his lap and hug him close, breathing in his smell of orange pumice and sweat. Still, he was always around. Lately he had been making noise about how he wasn’t sure what he’d do without her there, and she didn’t know what to say, so she didn’t say anything, as usual.

  Papa came out of the office into the bay. He had circles under his eyes, and his shirtsleeves bagged around his skinny arms. He stumbled on an errant pipe wrench. Though no one saw but Angie, she had the urge to defend him, to announce how much he could carry, everything from tires to bedsprings to even her, like the time she had her wisdom teeth yanked and had to be hauled, drugged and dead-weight, from the dentist’s chair to the truck.

  He held up an invoice. “Can you run over to Eddie’s for me? His guy’s out sick, and I need this belt.”

  “Sure.” She set down her crescent wrench.

  He handed her the invoice and gave her a quick pat on the shoulder.

  Slow and careful, she backed the Impala out of the garage. Outside the bay, the day shone bright despite the cold, and the sun heated her face and hands through the windows. As she pulled away, Angie glanced in the side mirror. Papa stood in the bay, smiling and waving, his white hair tinged gold by the sun. Cuidado, she could hear him saying, and she resisted the sudden urge to gun it.

  Eddie’s Auto Parts was on the south side of town, the newer side, off the intersection of the highway that led to Sedona, Flagstaff, and the Grand Canyon. The town had had a growth spurt, with cheap motels and gas stations and a few chain eateries cropping up like crab grass along with a SuperMart and the HealthCo and a new medical complex. Most of the town, though, still seemed the same: the college and the District, with historic brick stores and houses and tree-lined neighborhoods; her father’s shop on Main south of the District; the slag heap hunkered low and black behind the fairgrounds; one supermarket, one movie theater, one high school, one pecan orchard, one cement plant, one nice restaurant—Shane’s on the Bluff, with a nautical-Western theme—and one river, a lazy, curling thing that smelled of fish and moss, where the sycamores and cottonwoods grew dense, setting loose their fluffy white seeds in the spring and summer. All tucked tight against the rolling Black Hills range with its rough ridges, the Woodchute and Mingus Mountains, the town of Jerome nesting on its side.

  On her way back from Eddie’s, caught up in the roar of the engine and the sun warming her through the windows, Angie decided to make a quick detour out to Arroyo Lake and took the dirt turnoff next to Sycamore Bridge. Few other kids went there—they all headed to the river or to Peck’s Lake outside town to fish and swim and slug cans of cheap beer and then drive home fast on graveled roads. She preferred Arroyo, which was smaller, right in town but secluded behind trees and shrubs.

  Coming around a bend, she swerved to avoid a person walking on the side of the road. Her tires skidded on the gravel, fishtailing, and she yanked the wheel too hard. The back end swung until she turned into the spin and braked hard, screeching to a dusty halt. Her body unleashed a flood of adrenaline, and she sat panting at the wheel.

  She jumped when someone knocked on the passenger-side window. With a dumb blink, she realized the person was the new girl. Angie
leaned across the seat and rolled down the window.

  The girl leaned in the car, frowning and looking at Angie over the tops of her sunglasses. She said, “Whoa. That was quite a spinout. Are you all right?”

  Angie nodded, trying to catch her breath. The girl’s eyes were almond-shaped, more hazel than brown, Angie saw now. Despite the cold, the girl’s brow was sweaty, her cheeks flushed. Angie squeezed her arms tight against her sides, feeling the same warmth as when she stood in the school bathroom and smelled the other girls’ perfume, their hair spray, their glistening strawberry breath. She’d never once had a boyfriend, nor had she wanted one, but she wanted to believe Papa when he told her: “Ah, Angie, just you wait, mi’ja. You’ll find love. You’ll find the right boy.” Pat, pat. He was her father. She wanted to believe him.

  The girl stared at her with raised eyebrows.

  Angie said, “I didn’t see you at first.” Her voice came out tiny, warbly as a cricket.

  The girl grinned, and Angie saw that her two front teeth protruded. Not bucked exactly. Tilted, Angie thought, feeling heat in her neck.

  “So you do talk,” the girl said.

  Angie shrugged. She wanted to talk. She always could feel the words. She thought of them as glass beads, a constant marbled roundness in her throat.

  The girl gave her another toothy grin. “I’m Jess.” She threw one arm out. “Jessica Violet Winters, all the way from Phoenix, Arizona.” She said it loud and twangy, a beauty pageant contestant. “Jesus, it’s cold today.” She blew into her gloveless hands. She wore only a jean jacket and thin striped scarf. She snapped a red rubber band at her wrist and then took it off and popped it in her mouth.

  Jess thumped the door. “This is a great car.” She chewed on the rubber band and drew out the words with a long sigh. She paused, ruffling her hair. “Definitely makes you look like you’re from somewhere way cooler than this place. Light-years beyond.”