You tell, and I’ll tell, he said. And it’ll be worse for you than me, let me tell you that.
If I tell, everybody will know. It’ll be all over school, how you came over here, how you got drunk and came to bed with me, practically dragged me into bed. I’ll say you said you were eighteen. I’ll say you lied to me and then tried to get money out of me. Drank all of my whiskey while you were at it. I bet Billy wouldn’t like—
She turned away from him and threw open the front door, beating her fists against the sticky latch of the screen door until it popped and she left ran down the steps, twisting her ankle sllighty on the last step, but running anyway, despite the limp.
He didn’t have to bring up Billy. She didn’t even remember telling him about Billy. She’d probably said something last night, in that blur of slurry talk and kisses that she could hardly remember. The thought of Billy waiting for her by the General Store, worrying about where she was and thinking she’d abandoned him, made her flush with shame. She ran as hard as she could until the salt in her mouth and tears and mucus at the back of her throat choked her and she went down on her hands and knees and threw up.
14
Colleen smoked. Emily hadn’t smelled it on her clothes before, but this was probably because her clothes carried other dominant smells—Icy Hot, peppermint, and cheap polyester yarn. Colleen smoked Swisher sweets, those skinny, brown cigars, and their smell filled the house with cherries.
She held the cigar between her fingers and leaned forward.
Frannie loved your Mother, you should know that, Colleen said. She wished she could take Connie for herself, she told me so. Your mother’s parents were nothing to get excited about. They worked your mother, and all the kids, like dogs.
Emily knew those stories. Connie waking at dawn to make breakfast for her young brothers and sisters while her older brother went to work with her father, a job he’d gotten at sixteen, when Connie’s father had decided he’d had all the school he needed and that it was time to contribute. It wasn’t so much that Emily hadn’t believed the stories as that she hadn’t paid attention to them. The contours were so familiar, as were the rhythms of her mother’s voice when she told the stories, that their content had largely gone ignored. They were just another set of stories her mother had told to memorialize herself, to make her life seem more beleaguered than it had been. Emily had not thought of the stories as being related to real events. They were anecdotes pointing to Colleen’s victimization, a theme that Emily had already grown tired of by Middle School.
So, Colleen said, when Connie went missing, it was Frannie who made a stink about it. Your grandparents couldn’t be bothered. She went to the courthouse and insisted that Connie wasn’t just off partying, that she wouldn’t just up and leave like that, she was a responsible girl. Still, nothing much happened. They searched the woods around the school and found nothing. Still, even that wouldn’t have happened without Frannie.
When your mother came back, Frannie was the one who nursed her back to health.
I thought she was fine when she came back. Emily said. I thought she wasn’t hurt. That’s what the papers said.
Colleen laughed, a short, dry sound, and blotted out her cigar. She wasn’t physically hurt, but she was hurt in other ways. She couldn’t talk, for one thing. She just stared, her eyes big like this. Colleen opened her eyes wide and and thrust her head toward Emily.
I didn’t know your mother well—she was too young—but I went to school with Frannie and talked to her over at the store where she worked, a general store that burned down years ago over by the Free Will Baptist. She was sick when she told me about Connie. Your aunts and uncles all had their moments, and Frannie wasn’t any stranger to running away. She’d made off with the youth pastor was she was sixteen, but she came back after a week, saying he was a pervert, that he’d wanted her to do things in the bedroom that she’d never even heard of. Let him tie her up and all that.
When your mother came back, I thought at first she just keeping her mouth shut because she was afraid. Girls who disappeared for days and didn’t say where they were were probably in one place—out with some man, having more fun than they should. But Frannie said this was different: your momma seemed scared, as though she’d seen something she couldn’t even understand. She didn’t say she couldn’t remember, the papers had that wrong. She said she didn’t know.
Emily sipped her tea when Colleen paused, though it had grown cold and bitter. She imagined her mother as Colleen painted her, wide-eyed and too afraid to speak. It didn’t seem like the woman she had known.
15
Connie knew where she was: Near the lake, and from there, she could get back to the road. She could hear it close by, the vague sound of water against rock.
Her stomach felt empty, yet filled with something heavy in the place of food. She didn’t want to eat. She didn’t want to think. She didn’t want to go home yet. She was close to the part of the lake where the shore had washed up many tiny pebbles. The shore here hurt to walk on barefoot, so it was usually empty. She made her way toward it. She needed some cold water against her face.
She emerged from the trees and was exactly where she’d though she would—beyond the shore, on the pebbly beach where broken, black trees stood in the water, tipping and rotted but still upright and sharp enough to tear a hole in the bottom of a boat. To her left, Connie could see the bridge and the highway. She was close to home.
She crouched by the edge of the lake, cupping her hand into the surprisingly clear water. In the middle, it grew murky, a blue/brown mixture that you lost your hand in after just a few inches. Here, the water was clear like river water.
She splashed it on her face.
She didn’t understand what had happened with James. He had treated her well, he had fed her whiskey, he’d listened to her. And then, the day after, he’d told her to leave. Why? So she wouldn’t tell on him. So he wouldn’t have to go to prison for trying to steal some rolls of quarters and dollars from the general store. As if she would tell such a silly thing anyway.
He didn’t have to do it. That was what made her angry. He could have let her go. She would’ve been with Billy that afternoon, instead of him. She would’ve woken up in her own bed. She would’ve had something to look forward to. Now, she couldn’t think of her life beyond this moment in the woods, her hands and knees dirty, her underwear sticky.
She closed her eyes, feeling the water drip from her lashes and down her cheeks, though she was well past crying now, having gotten it all out back in the woods. She was not the kind of person who enjoyed indulging in a good cry.
She wanted to go back and shout at him, hurl something heavy at him and make him feel it, but she also wanted to be far away from him, at home in bed, listening to the sounds of her mother in the kitchen slamming and yelling.
She cupped lake water in her hands, splashed it on her face and poured a handful into her mouth, though she knew she shouldn’t: her mother had warned her against dirty lake, the insects and germs inside it, the worms that went into your mouth tiny and emerged in great ropes in your guts, turning you into a skeleton with a hungry worm inside. Her stomach, empty, rumbled.
As soon as she noticed the ache in her stomach, other symptoms followed. Her skin became hectic, hot and sticky. It wasn’t just the heat of having run through the woods—it was as though her skin had its own source of heat just below the surface.
Her head, too, began to fog. She forgot, for a minute, where she was, and panicked, her hands searching her empty pockets. But then she remembered, remembered everything intensely, her thoughts red-tinged and beating against her skull like physical objects. She could not control them. The memory of James pulsed in her head and she imagined her forehead bulging. She pressed her thumbs into her temples to relieve the pressure. She’d read in a history book about fossil remains of people with holes drilled in their skulls to let the devils out and wished in that moment that she had a small hand-drill to do the procedu
re to herself, the devils inside her were so insistent.
She did not know how long she sat there, the sickness running through her. She tasted salt in her mouth and wanted to tear off her skin, it felt so tight against her muscles and bones.
I’m sick, she thought, but the anger swept her up again in waves like fever. She bent over, her stomach rioting, and threw up a stream of amber liquid: she’d had nothing to eat for hours and nothing to drink but liquor and water. The water made me sick, she had time to think, before she felt a burst of energy in the form of heat prickling at her arms and face. She stood up, shaking her head, tearing at her arms with her fingernails to relieve the itching.
She had to go back to James. She had to show him what he had done to her. But what had he done? The question clattered in her head and dissolved. There wasn’t room to ask why she had to go back or why her head felt as though she had stuffed it with cotton or why her skin prickled and went from goosebumps to slick to itch or why it felt as though every hair on her body was standing on end. She felt the urge to move back toward James’ house as well as the urge to stand still and vomit as well as the urge to roll on the ground and put out the fire that seemed to pour from her skin.
Just go back. Show him.
Another voice, smaller and more basic, a sound that seemed to come from the base of her skull, said go back and show him and tear him apart.
She began to run. It felt good to run. It calmed the sickness in her stomach and gave the heat direction. She was close to the small clearing, where she could just see the edge of his trailer-house through the trees. She moved through the woods now as an animal did, through any impediments instead of around them, jumping over fallen logs and running straight through branches, the sharp sticks and thorns tearing at her face and chest and bare arms and legs. But her body did not have the animal agility it needed to keep going like this through a dense forest littered with fallen trees and branches. Her foot caught in a bundle of exposed roots and she toppled over. She had enough time to turn her face away from the rock she knew she would hit and shielded her temples with her hands.
The rock glanced the back of her head, hard enough to make an egg-sized bruise. She didn’t feel in pain in that moment, but instead a great desire to sleep. Her stomach settled and her skin cooled. She closed her eyes. The anger dissolved away.
16
Colleen sipped her tea and made a face at the bitterness.
I don’t much like this stuff, she said, but I read it’s good for you. Fights cancer and all that.
Colleen set the mug down on the end table, a bare, chipped thing decorated only with a bone-colored cordless telephone, fingerprints smudged around the receiver, and a photograph of a young girl, maybe eight or nine, in a cheap frame, the layer of fake gold covering the frame peeling away.
Here is everything I know, Colleen said. Frannie told me after your mother had been back for a few days, after she’d kept her mouth shut for so long everyone figured it was just a case of girl being afraid to make a fool of herself, Frannie told me she knew what had happened. She was the only one who Connie had told.
Emily leaned foward. What? What was it?
The old woman smiled. She probably didn’t have much opportunity to tell stories, to leave somebody in suspense like this. Emily wanted to shake her. It wasn’t just a story, was it? A real woman had disappeared and come back. A real person had died shortly after. A real woman had lived the majority of her life afraid, moving from trailer to trailer, from job to job, never believing she was wanted or worthy of whatever she had managed to get.
But Emily only nodded, encouraging her. Colleen didn’t know everything that had passed, all of the sad, lonely rest of it. Her hands shook as she held the cup. Her eyes had the opaque glaze of cataracts. Her joy in this was small and sharp and ugly, and Emily was too tired and sad to feel much beyond pity.
It was a man, Colleen said. But it wasn’t like everybody thought.Your mother hadn’t run away with one. A man had forced himself on her. Had left her so scared she hadn’t dared to tell anyone. Beat on her a little bit, too, that’s what Frannie told me. Or so she told Frannie, eventually, after Frannie wouldn’t take no for an answer.
The man who did it was James Blackshaw. The young man who was found shot, thrown in the lake, soon after. You probably saw things in the newspaper about him when you were doing your searching.
Emily set down her tea. She had a quick image of her mother, the first time Emily went out on a date, telling her to be careful, pressing a long cylinder of pepper spray into her hands. Connie had been shaking, then. Emily had taken it as more proof of her paranoia, her inability to trust that kept her away from any semblance of a normal life, but it had been something more. Emily wished then that she could go back and respond with more empathy then she had when she was sixteen. Then, she’d only rolled her eyes and walked away.
But what does this mean? Emily asked. What’s the connection? Are you saying my mother killed somebody?
Colleen shook her head. That girl was hardly in a state to go to school for weeks, let alone kill somebody. She didn’t have to do it herself, of course. She had family looking after her. Colleen leaned into the sofa’s back. It was a too-soft, enveloping kind of sofa that made Emily feel as though she were sinking down into the fabric when she leaned back.
Back then, people took care of each other, Colleen said. We didn’t need to get the police involved, bring them in just to the let the son-of-a-bitch who done it go free because of no evidence or because he’s kin or a good friend of the sheriff. Nowadays, you aren’t allowed to take care of your own business anymore.
So you’re saying my family did this—Fran, my grandparents, somebody in the family?
Colleen shrugged. Honey, there’s no telling who did it exactly. It didn’t work like that, just one person walking up to someone and putting a bullet in their useless head. Families had their friends in town. Families stuck with their own kin, people who understood what needed to be done and how to do it. All I know’s that once Frannie knew the man and the story, it was only a matter of time before that boy either disappeared or turned up dead.
In her day, Frannie was a force, Colleen said, her eyes glittering. You couldn’t just push Frannie around. She got things done. Colleen nodded, smiling. You couldn’t get anything past Frannie.
17
Connie woke with her left cheek pressed into the ground. Her ankle burned and felt swollen. Her arms and throat stung from scratches.
She remained on the ground for a few moments, unsure exactly where she was. She didn’t want to rise while that fever still had her, made her run back to a place she didn’t want to go and do—what?—something that would splatter her with blood. The word blood echoed in her head and she felt the last prickles of the fever flare and die. It had wanted her to kill James, to take out her anger on his body.
It had wanted her. What was it? Her head felt swollen and slow. She gritted her teeth and tried to determine where she was and how she had gotten there.
But the feeling, that burning violence, was gone now. Her stomach felt bruised, as it did after hours of vomiting. She placed her palms on the ground and lifted herself up to her knees, then stood upright.
She heard, in the distance, the sound of men talking, their boots crashing.
They’re looking for me, she thought, but she didn’t want to be found yet. She was still in a fog. The thought occured to her, as though whispered by somebody else; you aren’t ready to see people yet.
She made her way back toward the lake, though she remained in the woods, skirting the sound of sloshing water. She followed it until she reached the road.
A rare police officer out on the highway picked her up by the general store as she tried to stumble home, the hunger and thirst slowing her, her cuts stinging, her head throbbing from pain and heat. It didn’t occur to her to stop at anyone’s house, to say where she had been and what had happened. She only wanted to go home, a place that she usually w
anted to be as far away from as possible.
The police officer recognized her from the flyers in the post office and urged her into the car, where she lay in the backseat, her knees pressed against her stomach.
When her parents held her, hugged her hard, her mother crying (had she seen her crying before? The woman’s face was usually as immobile and dissatisfied as a frown cut into rock), her father, even, choking on the sounds of her name, the first thing they asked was where have you been? What happened? Should couldn’t answer. She opened her mouth, but the words wouldn’t come, so she simply shut her mouth and shook her head until they stopped asking.
The more she tried to remember anything that happened after she had left James’, the foggier and more fragmented it became. Had she drunk from the lake or just splashed the water on her face? Had she stripped down and swum in it? This didn’t seem likely, but she had an image of herself in just her underpants, wading into the water. Why had she fallen? She had a lump at the base of her skull. She remembered the fiery feeling in her face and hands, the desire to go and do without knowing exactly why or what she’d do when she got there, but why had she woken up on the ground?
She only knew that something had taken over her body, like how the old people in the church sometimes spoke about the devil entering somebody’s body if they suddenly had seizures or acted in a way that didn’t become them, such as the music minister running away with an eighteen-year-old girl from the choir. It was like a devil had been in her body, emanating its heat and anger through her, replacing her own thoughts and intentions with his.
But she couldn’t say that, and the words didn’t seem quite right. It wasn’t a devil so much as the desire of a devil, something pure and bodiless without any real direction. James had seemed almost incidental to the anger, a handy thing to hang it on, but her desire to go to him and make him bleed had been irresistible. If she hadn’t fallen, she would have done it, too. So she had no words to explain what had happened and she couldn’t mention James. She had nothing to tell them.
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