by Kara Thomas
Then I call Jana, my manager at Chili’s, and tell her I need some more time off because of my father’s death. She tells me to take all the time I need. What I really need is the money, but I take her word for it that my job will be waiting for me when I get back—even though it’s Orlando and there’s no dearth of Disney rejects willing to bus tables at a chain restaurant.
If there’s anything I’ve learned about life, it’s that not everyone gets to wear the Mickey Mouse suit.
I wait for the sound of water running upstairs before I turn the computer on, the same Dell the Greenwoods had ten years ago. It’s been through so many system restores that the thing runs like a lobotomized patient. Rick used to have a serious Internet porn addiction. The therapist Maggie made him see suggested online poker.
When the computer sputters to life, I search for the address on my sister’s driver’s license: 34 E Federal Street, Allentown, PA.
According to Google, 34 E Federal Street in Allentown is for sale. It’s a foreclosure. The pictures show bare, poorly spackled walls. Carpeting that was probably beige, once. Kitchen with the appliances ripped out.
INCOME SUITE AVAILABLE! the listing boasts. There are photos of an attached one-bedroom apartment.
According to the listing, the house has been on the market for eighty-four days. Whoever lived at 34 E Federal Street has been gone for a while. Joslin could be anywhere by now.
I click through every picture anyway. The place is a shithole by most standards, but I’m so jealous of Jos, I’m practically shaking. At some point, she lived here. On her own. She probably rented the apartment.
I think of Jos and me mashed together on a twin bed upstairs in our house. I think of the chopped-up rocking chair on our old porch, an act of desperation to fill the wood-burning stove in our living room. The house always smelled of smoke, and liquor, something foul in the carpets from the previous renters.
Jos got away from all that. Away from us.
I delete 34 E Federal Street Allentown from the search history. Then, before I can talk myself out of it, I Google Black Rock Tavern.
I get an address and phone number for a restaurant in Clearwater. It has an even lower average rating on Yelp than the Chili’s I work at in Florida.
Anyway, it looks like my mother didn’t get quite as far as Jos did. Clearwater is about a half hour north of Fayette. I dial, triple-checking each number as I punch it in. A man picks up on the second ring.
“Black Rock.”
When I decided I needed to find my sister, I didn’t consider the possibility that I’d need to do it through my mother—a problem for two reasons.
One: The only person from my past I want to see less than my father is my mother.
Two: I’m a pussy.
I hang up.
My father wrote me a letter from prison, once. A single page front and back, detailing my life as he remembered it. He said I was a “screamer” as a toddler, and when he’d stick the nipple of a bottle into my mouth to shut me up, Jos would say, “No, Daddy, this way,” and demonstrate proper bottle use on her baby doll.
And then there were our daddy-daughter nights at the Boathouse, a restaurant on the river. We’d share a bowl of ice cream and play tic-tac-toe with the paper place mat and crayons on the table.
I remember everything differently. I remember my father shouting at Jos that she was almost ten and too old to carry a goddamn baby doll around everywhere. I remember him coming home every couple of months with a little extra money, and dragging me to the Boathouse before my mother got home from cleaning houses. He’d park me in a booth with a bowl of ice cream while he spent the rest of what was in his pocket on whatever the bartender had on tap.
And more than anything else, I remember how my mother reacted when she found the letter under my pillow, the edges stained with greasy thumbprints and the ink fading where I’d folded and unfolded the paper. She threw it into the woodstove while I sobbed for Daddy; she grabbed my shoulders and shouted, “Daddy is never coming back.”
I knew even then that it was what she’d always wanted, to have Jos and me to herself. My mom always wanted to believe we were more hers than anyone else’s; it’s probably why she resented Joslin and my father so much. Joslin turned out just like him, despite not even being his blood. Jos and my father both liked to laugh at crass things: episodes of South Park, my father clipping his toenails with a wire cutter while my mother shrieked about how disgusting he was.
Most of all, she hated that Joslin didn’t need her. Whenever my mother panicked about us, like she often did when our cuts were deep or when one of us couldn’t stop puking, my father would snap at her, “For Christ’s sake, Net, pull yourself together. Kids are tougher than you realize.”
I always knew that he was really talking about Joslin when he said that.
I never did get another letter from him. My mom probably intercepted them and burned them.
In any case, I’m not afraid of my mother. I’m afraid of what I’ll do when I see her.
She was all I had left, and she let Gram take me away from the only home I’d ever known. Time hasn’t healed that wound. Instead, time has armed me with enough anger to self-destruct and take her down with me if I have to.
Time has made me more like my father.
I inhale and redial.
“Black Rock.” The man sounds annoyed this time.
“Um. Does someone named Annette work there?”
“Not in more than a year, no.”
“Oh. Okay. Sorry.” I tug at one of the threads in my jeans. “Do you know where she might be now?”
The Greenwoods’ house phone starts ringing, nearly drowning out the man’s response. I stick a finger into one ear.
“…living over at Deer Run,” he says. “But that was more than a year ago, like I said.”
“Okay. Thanks.”
•••
Deer Run is a mobile community, located on the outskirts of Clearwater. It’s got its own Walmart, which means my mother wouldn’t have had to venture to Fayette, famous for its mega-store skid row.
I can’t say I’m surprised Annette wound up there; you’d have to head farther north for the cozy complexes of one-bedroom apartments for rent. Around here there’s just empty homes with BANK OWNED signs on the lawns, and trailer parks. Lots of trailer parks.
It’s quiet downstairs in the Greenwoods’ house with Maggie still in the bath. For once, maybe I can slip out without having to explain myself. I don’t like lying to Maggie, but I’d rather die than tell her the truth, that my mother hasn’t called, written, or come to see me once in the past ten years, and I don’t even know for sure where she’s living now.
There’s a creaking on the stairs as I’m getting ready to leave. Maggie tightens her bathrobe and cocks her head at me.
“Are you leaving?” she asks.
“Just…out for a bit.”
“You know, if you won’t let me drive you, Callie’s bike is in the garage,” Maggie says. “She hasn’t used it in years.”
“Thanks. That would be awesome.”
I detour out of the living room and make for the door off the kitchen instead. The sunflower bike she rode when we were kids hangs upside down from a rack on the garage ceiling. An adult-sized bike—baby blue and retro-looking—with a white basket is in the back corner, propped against the side of Rick’s tool bench. A daddy longlegs skitters out of the basket when I touch the handlebars. I kick away the cobwebs on the wheels and walk the bike out of the garage and down the driveway.
I haven’t been on a bike since I was a kid. I swing myself onto the seat, overshooting my landing and almost falling to the pavement. I really hope no one saw that.
They say “It’s as easy as riding a bike” for a reason, I remind myself as I wobble down the street, willing myself into a straight path. After several pumps of the pedals I’m steadier, but I do a practice lap around the block just because I don’t want to die today.
The ache in my
calves and breeze on the back of my neck wake me up instantly. I’m thrilled not to be walking anymore. I raise the gears and pump harder; the chain groans beneath me, and it occurs to me that I should have oiled it if Callie hasn’t ridden in years.
The light at the corner of Main Street sneaks up on me, and I skid to a stop, an unsettling pop sounding below me. The street is empty, but I carefully wheel the bike onto the shoulder of the road to inspect it.
“Goddamn.” I let out my breath in a slow hiss. “Shit. Frigging son of a bitch. Damn it.”
There’s no way I’m making the twelve-mile trip to and from Deer Run with a flat tire. I’m only ten minutes away from the Greenwoods’, if I want to turn around and head back. Though the gas station is a few hundred yards up the road; I could try to put air back into Callie’s tires there. Maybe they’re just old and need to be inflated a bit.
I wipe the sweat from my eye with the shoulder of my T-shirt. I have to get to Deer Run, and I’m not walking, so I really have one option. I step off the bike and walk it up Main Street to the Quik Mart. The guys who watched the police outside of Ari’s house with me yesterday are riding their skateboards in the parking lot. Decker Lucas watches from the curb, a bag of Twizzlers in his lap.
“Hey.” He waves me over with a Twizzler. “You again.”
“Me again,” I say.
“Whoa, how are you riding with that?” Decker nods to Callie’s tires.
I accept a Twizzler from Decker as he examines the front tire. “Nice hole,” he declares. “I’ve got a patch kit.”
“You do?” I could hug him. For some reason, the desire to get to Deer Run right now is a throb in my chest.
“It’s at my house, though,” he says, and I deflate.
“Oh.” I tear the candy in half with my teeth.
“I live right around the corner, behind the school,” Decker says. “We can walk there.”
“Great. Thanks. I’ll buy you more Twizzlers, or something.”
Decker laughs and waves me off. He doesn’t tell his friends where he’s going, and they don’t seem to care. I walk Callie’s bike alongside the curb as Decker takes off down the street on his skateboard.
“So, are you, you know…back?” Decker stops suddenly and waits for me to catch up, probably realizing that it was rude to leave me back there.
“In Fayette?” It’s not a hard question, but I’m having trouble answering.
“Yeah. Are you here for good?”
“No.” I pick at the rubber peeling from Callie’s handlebars. “My dad was sick. I came to say goodbye.”
I look up at Decker. His eyes are wide. “That really sucks,” he says. “Here, we can cut across the soccer field.”
I follow him, thankful to be able to leave it at that. On our right is a chain-link fence blocking off the elementary school playground. They’ve replaced all the equipment since I was a kid.
“I’m just across the street,” Decker says. “Watch out for the geese poop.”
We pick our way around the green piles like we’re in a minefield and pass through a wooded area at the edge of the soccer field. It leads to a quiet road. I follow Decker across, once a car has passed.
His house is a ranch-style painted forest green. There’s an old-fashioned car in the driveway; when Decker undoes the padlock on the garage door and lifts it open, I see why the car isn’t parked inside. There’s no room for it. Wall-to-wall cardboard boxes rotted with water stains. Stacks of old phone books. It looks like a scene from one of those shows Gram watches where some guy goes into a house in a hazmat suit, maybe finds a dead cat or two, and by the end everyone is crying happy tears.
“Ah,” Decker says, “my mom doesn’t like to throw stuff out.”
“It’s cool,” I say, because the tips of his ears are red.
“A lot of it’s my dad’s crap,” he rambles. “Eleven years, and my mom still thinks he’s coming back to get it or something.”
Decker taps the indent in the center of his chin, as if he’d forgotten why we’re standing here. “Oh yeah! The patch kit.”
I just sort of stand there, hands in my pocket, as Decker disappears into the cavern in the garage. There’s some rustling, then he emerges with a patch kit. I sit on the lawn, pulling my knees up to my chest as he works on the bike.
“So how long are you here for?” Decker asks.
“I’m supposed to be gone by now. I wanted to stick around for Ari Kouchinsky’s funeral.”
“I kinda remember you guys playing with those little plastic bears in Ms. Brogan’s kindergarten class. She said they were for practicing counting, but you guys always made bear armies out of them.” Decker rocks onto his heels, his tongue poking out the corner of his mouth as he moves from Callie’s tire to inspect her chain. “I can’t believe she’s dead. Who’d want to hurt her? She was so nice.”
Nice girls are always the ones who get hurt. It’s like the universe gets some sort of perverse pleasure out of taking out the nice girls one by one, while the whole world watches and gets some perverse pleasure from mourning the loss of yet another nice girl.
“It was probably a random creep,” I say.
Decker pumps air into both of Callie’s tires. “I heard a rumor that it’s the ORM again.”
Decker takes my silence as confusion. “The Ohio River Monster. Sorry, I keep forgetting you moved when that was happening.”
My toes curl. “Where did you hear that rumor?”
“My mom.” Decker looks sheepish. “But she, like, reads a lot of stuff. Conspiracy theories about how the cops know they probably got the wrong guy but won’t admit the Monster’s still out there.”
So Decker doesn’t remember that I testified against Stokes, I realize. Or maybe he never knew. The papers never named Callie and me as witnesses, since we were minors, and the judge issued a gag order for our testimony, to protect us. A lot of people knew Callie and I were involved in the trial somehow, but most of our classmates were clueless as to why we were being taken out of class so much. Jealous and clueless.
I pick up a twig from Decker’s lawn and snap it over my thumb. “I don’t think it was the Ohio River Monster. The cops seem convinced it was Ariel’s ex-boyfriend.”
“Nick Snyder?” Decker looks thoughtful. “That guy’s a tool. He punched me in the face in the tenth grade. I didn’t even deserve it. That time, at least.”
I feel a small smile creeping up, in spite of myself. “What did you do?”
“Nothing,” Decker says, wiping his greasy hands on his shorts. “I was just smiling to myself, ’cause I do that sometimes, and Nick saw me and said I was laughing at him. So he punched me.”
My smile fades. I feel bad for Decker; it must be hard to have a spirit in this town. Everywhere you turn, there’s someone who wants to kill it.
I’m light-headed as I stand up.
“Thanks, for this.” I gesture to the bike and nod to Decker. He beams.
“Anytime. Hey, I might get a job at this bike shop in town. I could hook you up with new tires.”
He looks so desperate to be helpful that I don’t want to say that it’s not even my bike. “Sure. Okay.”
Decker scratches the back of his neck, his shirt pulling up to expose a sliver of pale, hairy tummy. “Where’s your cell? I’ll give you my number.”
I fumble in my back pocket. My phone falls onto the driveway and skitters at Decker’s feet. He reaches it before I can bend to pick it up, his brow furrowing as he flips it open, begins adding his info.
I want to snatch it back, just in case he sees that the Fayette County Penitentiary is in my contacts. But his expression doesn’t change. When he’s finished, he hands the phone back to me, its screen still flipped open.
He’s put himself in my contacts as “DECKER, YOUR FRIEND^_^”
I wave goodbye and hop back onto Callie’s bike. I think I’ll leave his number in my phone; you never know when you can use a friend around here.
•••
; The ride to Deer Run is a straight shot south. Brown, parched earth follows me for miles on each side. We’re in need of a good soaking, my mother would always say. Then when the rain finally does come to Fayette, it feels like it lasts for days.
The sign says WELCOME TO DEER RUN: A MOBILE COMMUNITY. Two shirtless guys, probably in their twenties, look up from playing beer pong on the lawn to stare at me.
Deer Run isn’t the meth-y type of trailer park. Mostly families live here—I can tell by the clotheslines hanging outside each home. Pajama pants, cloth diapers, a Thomas the Tank Engine T-shirt.
I imagine my mother and Jos sitting in one of the trailers, like some sort of messed-up family reunion that I wasn’t invited to, and I almost turn around.
I follow the noise—kids shrieking, accompanied by splashes, a radio playing a Top 40 station—to a white building labeled MAINTENANCE. Inside, a woman sits near a fan, reading a copy of People. She looks up when I clear my throat.
“I’m looking for Annette Lowell.”
The woman’s eyes flick down toward her magazine. She flips a page. “Doesn’t live here anymore.”
I could have figured that much out on my own. Any other day I’d duck out, embarrassed at even having opened my mouth, but I didn’t ride all this way in Death Valley-ish heat to be told no.
“I need to find her.” I’m shocked by how forcefully it comes out.
The woman sets down her magazine. “Yeah, well, when you do, tell her she owes two months’ rent.”
I clench my hand into a fist. “Fine. I’ll knock on every door here until I get someone who knows where she is.”
I expect her to give me more attitude, or maybe tell me it’s useless, that no one here knows where Annette Lowell is. Instead, she shrugs. “Probably should start with Nicki.”
“Nicki?” An awful thought strikes me: Is Nicki my mother’s daughter? It’s been long enough that my mother could have started another family.
“Babysitter,” the woman says. “Around back.”
I nod to her and go out the way I came in. I circle around the building, where there’s a concrete slab with a swing set and a sandbox. A sorry excuse for a playground. Beyond it is a pool, where a group of older kids are shouting “Marco Polo” back and forth.