The Weight of Blood

by Laura McHugh

  I walked into Crete’s office at the back of the store, and he got up from his desk to give me a bear hug, lifting me off the ground just like he did when I was little. “Glad you’re finally here, kid,” he said.

  “Me, too,” I said. “Thanks for talking Dad into it.”

  “Honey, I could talk your dad into anything. Just don’t tell him I said so.” He winked. “So, you ready for your first day?”

  “You bet.”

  There was a sharp knock, and I turned around to see Daniel Cole standing in the doorway. My breath caught in my throat.

  “Sorry to interrupt,” Daniel said to Crete. “Judd said to tell you the boat’s ready.”

  “Thanks,” Crete said. “Lucy, you know Daniel? He just started last week.”

  They both turned to me, and I hoped my sunburn masked the sudden blush that heated my face. Daniel had graduated from Henbane High the previous year. He’d never spoken to me at school, though he’d given me a pensive half smile the few times our eyes met in the hall—not ignoring or avoiding me, like most people did. He was always alone when I saw him, but it didn’t seem to bother him, not belonging to any particular group, and I admired him for that.

  Everybody knew that Daniel’s mom took food stamps and his dad and three older brothers were in prison. But I knew him another way. He occupied a line in my book of lists, kiss number four from the time I played spin the bottle. The first three were classmates who never paid any attention to me at school, and one of them was so embarrassed to be kissing me that he only pecked me on the cheek. Daniel had been sitting outside the circle the entire time, not participating, but when the bottle pointed in his direction, he grudgingly came forward and slid his hand along my jaw, gazing down at me with a grim expression before leaning in. It was awkward at first, but almost immediately something shifted, and for the first time in my admittedly brief experience with boys, I felt a kiss beyond the reach of lips; it spread through me, warming, loosening, and my insides fluttered, thwap thwap thwap, like a deck of cards collapsing in a dovetail shuffle. I’d clutched his shirt to pull him closer. Everyone laughed when he gently—firmly—pushed me away, but I was too stunned to care what they thought. Daniel disappeared from the party without speaking to me, and I tormented myself for weeks afterward, embellishing his name in my notebook, replaying the kiss in my mind, scrawling a self-conscious list of reasons he didn’t like me.

  I tried to appear uninterested. It didn’t help that he was even better-looking than I remembered, with his dark chocolate eyes and shaggy hair and tautly muscled arms. He watched me with what looked like amusement, and I remembered to speak.

  “Hi,” I said. “I’m Lucy.”

  “Hi.” He smiled and extended his hand. “I remember you.”

  My stomach knotted. I shook his hand with an extra-firm grip, like my dad taught me, but Daniel was stronger, nearly cracking my knuckles, sending nervous aftershocks through my body.

  “Well, we better get busy,” Crete said.

  Daniel headed out, and we followed him until he disappeared into the boathouse. Crete’s truck was parked out back, a boat trailer hitched to it. “Get on in,” he said.

  We climbed into the cab. “Where’re we going?”

  “I thought for your first day, we’d start with something easy.” He grinned. “How about some fishing?”

  “That doesn’t sound like work,” I said. “Not that I’m complaining.”

  He laughed and held a finger up to his lips. “Don’t tell your dad. And put on some sunscreen. All that skin peeling off makes you look like a goddamn leper.”

  We fished until lunchtime, not catching anything worth keeping, and then headed back to Dane’s for hamburgers. Crete set me up at the front register, and I spent most of the afternoon staring out the window, hoping to catch sight of Daniel. Crete drove me home after work, telling me that he’d be gone the next day and Judd would be in charge. I ran straight into the house to called Bess, and we spent a good hour discussing the way Daniel’s hair hung down in his eyes (sexy), and the fullness of his lips (not too full), and the dimple that appeared in his cheek when he smiled (also sexy).

  Bess complained that no hot guys ever came into the Laundromat. She’d spent her first day, and probably would spend every day after that, watching granny panties and overalls swirl around in the machines.

  There was no mention of Cheri on the Springfield nightly news. Her murder was no longer the top story, and more and more time had started to creep in between updates. I wondered how long it would take her to fade into legend, just like my mother.

  The next morning at work, I found Judd in the kitchen and asked him what I should be doing. “I don’t know,” he said after asking me to repeat myself. A knife trembled in his liver-spotted hands as he sliced a sandwich into crooked halves. “Go watch Debbie work the register.”

  “I already know how to do the register,” I said, extra loud so he could hear me. He had to be getting too old to work, but he’d shown no interest in retiring from his position as assistant manager. “I can help you. Need me to make sandwiches?”

  “Nah, just packing lunch for the new kid. He’ll be doing some cleanup out on the property today.”

  The new kid. Daniel. “Why don’t I go help with that? If you don’t really need me around here. I’ll just make an extra lunch for myself.” I grabbed the jar of peanut butter.

  Judd looked uncertain. “Ain’t easy work, I expect. Don’t know if Crete’d want you out there.”

  “He told me to do whatever you said. To make myself useful.” I spread jelly on bread and rummaged around for paper sacks.

  Judd sighed. “I suppose it’ll get done quicker with two.”

  I finished packing the lunches, and Daniel walked up to the counter, nodding hello. “Lucy’s coming along,” Judd said. Daniel nodded again, his expression unchanged, and the three of us headed out to the parking lot and piled into Judd’s truck. I held my arms in my lap to keep from brushing elbows with Daniel—up close, he smelled like Ivory soap and line-dried laundry—and began to second-guess my impulsive decision. As much as I wanted to be near him, he made me nervous. We’d never had a real conversation, had never spoken about the game of spin the bottle. How could spending the day alone with him be anything but awkward and uncomfortable?

  I was also starting to wonder what exactly I’d volunteered for. Crete’s property contained an abandoned homestead, thickets of impenetrable brush, and a scrap-metal graveyard littered with car parts and appliances. I hated to guess which of those things I’d be cleaning up.

  We bumped along the dirt road that led toward Crete’s house, and Judd turned off on another, narrower road, just two tire tracks with weeds growing in between. The path cut through a stand of cedars and descended into a valley where the Danes first settled in Ozark County. Dad used to tell me bedtime stories about the old homestead, stories passed down from his parents and grandparents. How Emily Dane, upon finding a blacksnake in the chicken coop, cut open the snake to retrieve the stolen eggs and place them back under the hens. How, when the well was dug, John Dane lowered an ax handle on a rope to check the water, and the underground current was so strong he had to let go.

  What was left of the homestead now was a cluster of tin-roofed outbuildings in various states of decomposition, a collapsed barn, a root cellar with its crumbled steps leading into the earth, and the stone foundation and chimneys of the main house. Walnut trees had sprouted in the spaces between the buildings, and blackberry brambles tangled in the field. Judd pulled up behind the barn and parked in front of a single-wide trailer that looked out of place among the ruins but every bit as forsaken.

  “All right,” he said, handing me a key. “Crete’s selling this trailer and needs to get it cleared out. Everything goes. Should be trash bags and whatnot inside.”

  “Since when did he have somebody living out here?” I asked. The
last time I could remember visiting the homestead was sixth grade, when Bess and I had come berry picking. There hadn’t been a trailer then.

  Judd shrugged and fiddled with his hearing aid. “I dunno, some friend of his.”

  Daniel and I got out of the truck. “When’re you coming back?” I asked.

  “’Round quitting time,” Judd said, not elaborating on when that might be. Then he was gone and Daniel and I were alone in the valley, the hills rising up around us and the sun bearing down. We stared at each other.

  Daniel spoke first. “It’s a little spooky out here,” he said, surveying the abandoned buildings.

  “My grandparents thought the house over there was haunted,” I said. “There’d be knocking at the door odd times of the day or night. But when they went to answer it, no one was ever there.”

  “Thanks,” he said, grinning. “That makes me feel better.” He started walking toward the trailer.

  “It wasn’t really haunted,” I said, catching up to him. “When they opened up the old kitchen fireplace that’d been bricked in, they found a poker hanging on a hook. If the wind came down the chimney just right, it’d knock against the wall.”

  “Real ghosts don’t need to knock, I guess,” he said. We reached the trailer and he motioned for me to go first.

  I climbed the steps and twisted the key in the lock. The door swung inward, releasing a wave of putrid heat.

  “Whoa,” Daniel said. “Smells like something crawled in and died.” He pushed past me, and we waded through trash to reach the nearest window. It was covered with heavy drapes that had been nailed to the wall at the top and bottom so they couldn’t be opened. With a bit of effort, Daniel ripped the drapes down, illuminating the living room. A cracked vinyl sofa sat against the wall. Across from that, a TV balanced on a stack of cinder blocks. There was no other furniture. I wrenched the window open and sucked in fresh air.

  To the left of the living area was a tiny kitchenette where a dark puddle spread out like a shadow from the base of the fridge. A narrow hallway led to a bathroom and bedroom, both strewn with beer cans, food wrappers, and dirty clothes, and one empty room with the carpet cut away.

  Daniel found the cleaning supplies on the kitchen counter. “All right,” he said. “How about we bag everything up, toss it out, then scrub the place down as best we can.”

  “No amount of scrubbing’ll fix this carpet,” I said.

  “Yeah, probably not.” He handed me a pair of gloves, and I started filling my trash bag. As I worked my way around the room, I uncovered a stack of Teen Pussy magazines, which told me all I needed to know about the trailer’s former tenants. I’d found a Playboy once in my dad’s closet and was struck by how fake it all looked—the boobs, the blond hair, the poses, the ridiculous ice cream parlor backdrop. But I’d never seen anything like Teen Pussy. The models looked startlingly real, like girls you might see at school. Textbooks and pom-poms and stuffed animals lay scattered in the background to give the illusion that the girls were posing in their own bedrooms. Then it occurred to me that maybe they were. I looked more closely at their expressions. Daniel stood up to stretch, and I quickly chucked the magazines in the trash, not wanting him to see me with them.

  We finished the living room without saying much. It was quiet, just the rustle of our work and the wind lisping through the window screen. I wished we had a radio. Or a fan. Or gas masks. Or that Daniel and I could have a normal conversation. I couldn’t glance at him without reliving our kiss, and I was starting to think maybe we should acknowledge it and move on. Laugh it off. Start over and get to know each other. Surely he was thinking about it, too. Unless the encounter hadn’t been as memorable for him as it was for me. In that case, it was better not to bring it up, to let my insecurity fester in silence.

  “You hungry yet?” Daniel asked.

  My watch showed just after eleven. I didn’t feel like eating, but I was ready to get out of the trailer for a while. “Sure,” I said.

  The air outside was fresh and cedar-scented. We carried our lunches over to the foundation of the main house and sat in the shade. I watched him eat his peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich in four bites.

  “So this was your grandparents’ place?” he asked, wiping his mouth with his hand.

  “They were the last ones to live out here before my grandpa built the house we live in now.”

  “Such a lonely feeling out here,” he said. “Something about abandoned places, I guess. I’d hate to live in that trailer, looking out at these empty buildings every day.”

  “I don’t think they spent much time looking out the window. Not with the curtains nailed shut.”

  “True. I’ve never seen anything like that.”

  He tore open the mini bag of Doritos I’d packed in his lunch sack and bit a huge chunk out of his apple. I watched him eat in silence as long as I could stand it.

  “You said you remembered me.”

  “Yeah,” he said, taking a moment to chew and swallow. “From school. I used to see you on my way to first period. You were always helping that friend of yours with her locker.”

  A lump rose in my throat. Few people referred to Cheri as my friend. It was always “that ______ girl.” Fill in the blank: poor, retarded, dead.

  “I’m sorry about what happened. She seemed like a nice kid.”

  “She was,” I said.

  Daniel stood up, observing my uneaten lunch without comment. “I guess we should get back to work.” We made our way back to the trailer, grasshoppers zinging through the weeds in front of us. I should’ve been relieved that he didn’t remember the night at the bonfire, but I wasn’t. I tried to think of an explanation that had nothing to do with me. Maybe he had kissed so many girls that their faces blurred together after a while. I didn’t really believe that, though. I’d never seen him with a girl at school.

  “Hey,” he said. “Let’s rock-paper-scissors to see who gets to clean the fridge.” I lost, with the fleeting consolation of his hand closing over my fist. Paper covers rock.

  I was in no hurry to get to the kitchen, so I started on the empty back room instead. It was dark, but I didn’t want to bother asking Daniel to help with the curtains if I wouldn’t be in there long. The carpet had been torn out, and the exposed plywood floor was blotched with stains. There wasn’t much trash to pick up, just a few candy wrappers and cigarette butts, and then I moved on to the closet. It looked like it had already been cleared, but when I swept my hand across the top shelf, I felt something crammed into the corner. I pulled down a wad of twisted bedding and heard the clink of metal against the bare floor. I knelt to find a thin silver chain with a charm attached. My spine prickled as I held up the necklace for a better look. A blue butterfly dangled from the chain, a familiar chip missing from its left wing. I recognized the necklace because it was mine. I’d given it to Cheri a couple years back when I cleaned out my jewelry box. It was nothing special, a trinket I’d won at the school carnival, but Cheri had loved it. She wore it every day, up until she disappeared.

  I clutched the necklace in my palm and sank to the floor, my heart thudding. Had she been here, in this trailer, in this room? Or was it merely a coincidence? She could have lost the necklace or given it away. Maybe I was wrong and the necklace wasn’t even mine. Surely there were others; the butterfly charm was cheap—maybe they all had chipped wings. “Tell me,” I whispered to the dark room. I knew Cheri’s bones lay sealed in the earth, that weeds covered her grave, but I was quiet, and I listened. Tell me what happened to you. If she persisted somehow, in some form, within the membrane of this world or the next, she gave no sign. My head throbbed, pressure building inside my skull. I waited until I could no longer stare at the stains on the floor, and I retreated to the bathroom, shutting the door behind me.

  “Hey,” Daniel said, tapping on the bathroom door. “You’ve been in there a while. You do know that’s not a w
orking bathroom, right?”

  He was trying to be funny. “I’m fine,” I lied, rubbing my eyes and sliding down from the counter. “Just finishing up.”

  He pushed the door open a crack. “Need some help? I’m about done out here. Except for the kitchen, I mean. Still saving that for you.”

  “I’m good,” I said, turning my back to the door and shoving it closed with my foot. I pulled out the vanity drawers and dumped their meager contents—Band-Aid wrappers, cotton swabs, crumpled toothpaste tubes. Things Cheri might or might not have used. I peeled a stiff towel from the tub, a pair of socks. Had she showered in here? Changed clothes? In the year she was missing, she’d been living somewhere, doing those everyday things. An entire year, hundreds of days, and on any one of those days I could have found her alive and brought her home. I hadn’t looked hard enough. No one had.

  I didn’t want to talk to Daniel, but I couldn’t hide out in the bathroom all day, so I dragged my trash bag past him to the kitchen and started clearing the cabinets.

  “Whoa,” he said. “You okay? You get something in your eyes?”

  I looked away from him. “I’m allergic to mold.”

  “Maybe you should go outside for a minute, take a break.”

  I ignored him, brushing mouse droppings from the shelves. I couldn’t take a break. If I left the trailer, I wouldn’t want to come back. It would be better to finish early and start walking, meet Judd partway. After a minute, Daniel gave up on waiting for a response and unscrewed the lid from a bottle of bleach. He doused the sink and counters and started to scrub.