Echo Lake

by Letitia Trent

  When she finally spoke, she told everyone that she had woken up in the woods, covered in scratches, and remembered nothing from school that afternoon until the moment she woke up. She pointed to the purple and green bruise, egg-like and throbbing. She didn’t remember getting the bruise, she said, and she didn’t remember where she’d been.

  •

  She stayed in bed for days. Her family insisted she lie down until the bruise on her head had faded and the cuts on her arms had healed. It was the first time she’d been encouraged to rest since a childhood bout with the chicken pox. It had the opposite effect it should have—she had nothing to do but the think of the night she’d spent with James (it had only been one night! It seemed like much more and loomed so large) and the morning after, and everthing after that, which was considerably less clear.

  She sometimes caught herself thinking of what she might say if she went back to him. She might tell him what had happened to her, the anger that had boiled up and how she’d almost run back to his house to do something crazy—break a beer bottle on the porch and cut his throat, for example—and how her falling had saved them both. Would he see then how unkind he’d been then? Would he ask her to come back?

  She’d replay scenes in her mind, scenes of him aplogizing, getting down on his hands and knees after wiping his hands on his jeans, asking her to marry him. He’d push the hair away from his face as he knelt down and try to tuck it back behind his ear where it would escape the moment he looked up to see her face and hear her say—

  But this was stupid, Connie thought, unable to entertain such desires that she knew to be idle. He’d been fooling her. It was stupid to expect anything different and stupid to want him to want her. Did she want to live in a trailer in the woods with a guy who stole cash registers and ate straight from cans without even bothering to heat the food inside them? Whose greasy hair hung in his eyes? Who probably hadn’t even graduated from high school? Why would she even bother with such a boy sober?

  As she rested, she grew angrier. Instead of scenes of apologies, she imagined herself older, in possession of a husband and a job and a house away from Heartshorne, visiting the trailer by the lake where he still lived, growing older and balder as she grew more beautiful.

  Look what you gave up, she’d say, making a show of wiping the bottom of her shoes on the tattered mat before his door.

  Frannie was the most curious of all of her family members. She had time to visit and keep Connie company by bringing magazines and cigarettes to the cramped bedroom. She worked at a convenience store during the day and was a waitress in Keno on Saturday nights. When she came, her frizzy hair piled up in a tight bun, her cats-eye glasses flaring away from her face like wings, she’d throw open the windows.

  Shit, I’m going to suffocate in here, she said, and carried her stacks of movie magazines to the bed, where they would both spend hours smoking and paging through them.

  Frannie wanted to know what had happened, and she didn’t believe that Connie couldn’t remember. Connie’s parents had been strangely silent around her, as if she were now damaged and they must be very careful not to break her completely. Connie imagined that they thought something so terrible had happened to her that she couldn’t bear to tell or honestly couldn’t remember. They thought she’d been raped, probably, and she had only barely missed the sheriff insisting that she be checked for rape. She insisted she had been alone. She was surprised that her mother had agreed; nobody would “poke around down there.”

  It was just a fainting spell, she told them. This was the new story. The doctors checked her blood, she was cleared as healthy, and they released her. She had started bleeding a couple of days later, to her relief. Maybe it could all be over if she just kept quiet and waited.

  Frannie, though, wanted to know everything. What was the last thing Connie could remember? Could she really remember nothing? At first her questions had been innocent, the simple questions that everyone asked that Connie could easily avoid or evade or flat-out lie about.

  She told Frannie that she remembered walking through the woods on her way home after school, then, suddenly, she woke up in the woods. That’s what she’d told everyone else. But Frannie wasn’t satisfied. It took her two weeks to chip away at the truth, or part of it.

  She figured Connie was hiding something. God knows Frannie had hidden things from her parents when she was Connie’s age, though it was truly a more innocent time then and there was less to hide that didn’t become quite evident in a few months anyway. Still, Frannie had hidden things—long car rides with boys, staying in places she shouldn’t, drinking when her parents thought she was studying.

  She imagined that something had happened to Connie that she didn’t want to tell. She’d come home with an egg on her head and scratches. Something had to have gone wrong.

  She hit on something close to the truth by accident.

  You know, she said casually, paging past a five-page spread of Elizabeth Taylor in pancake makeup and a black wig, you know, if a boy hurt you, you can tell me. If he did something wrong, you should let me know. I won’t tell. I know how it is.

  Connie had not planned to tell. Fran had suggested boys before, but she hadn’t come out and said it like this. And something about the way she said it made Connie look up, surprised, and then made her eyes fill, which startled her into lowering her head into her hands. She hadn’t meant to react so strongly, but once it started, she couldn’t stop.

  Is that it, honey? Was it a boy? Did he beat you up, is that where the bruises came from?

  Connie couldn’t stop crying.The days she’d been back, she’d had to lie so long. It didn’t come naturally. It was a relief to stop. She would only tell a little and swear Fannie to secrecy.

  He treated me so good at first, she managed to choke out, sniffling and wiping the edge of her quilt against her nose and eyes. Frannie nodded, her face hardened into the look she got when she’d decided something and had fixed that decision tightly in her mind.

  Your aunt Frannie is like a mule, Connie’s mother would often say. She can’t be moved once she’s decided something. If she hates you she hates you forever. If she decides she loves you, she’ll do anything for you.

  Connie would remember this later, long after Frannie had left that night and Connie realized she hadn’t told the story right at all, though Frannie had nodded and patted Connie’s hair and said I know honey, I know, let it all out. As Connie cried and said that she’d belived he cared for her, that he’d been so sweet, that she’d been so surprised when he’d been so cruel, such an asshole, she’d said, and Frannie had nodded vigorously, as though the word couldn’t contain everything that he was.

  Connie hadn’t ever said, though, that she’d gone to his bedroom. She didn’t explain that the scratches and bruises weren’t from him. She hadn’t been possessed enough to say anything coherent with Frannie there holding her head and urging her to cry and telling her that he was a jerk, that he should pay. She realized later that night that Frannie probably thought he had beaten her. Worse, that he had raped her. She ran the words over in her head later, extracting each combination of words that would Frannie to that wrong conclusion.

  At first, in the days after she realized that Frannie had taken it wrong, she planned on telling Frannie the truth, that he hadn’t forced her into anything, but he had been unkind. But how could she explain the bruises and the cuts?

  And wasn’t it better for Frannie to believe that she’d been (the word made her feel sickly, made her face redden) raped? It was best Frannie thought her a victim and not a common slut (she knew she was—girls who gave in so easy were, but she could change, she wouldn’t be a slut anymore, not after this).

  But still, at first, she did not imagine that Frannie would do much of anything about it. What could be done? She only hoped that Frannie would keep her mouth shut and let it all go away.

  18

  Colleen shrugged and sat up in her chair. She was tiring, the hard glint fading
from her eyes. Soon Emily would have to leave.

  So you think Frannie got the boy killed? Because he did—something—to my mother?

  Colleen shrugged. She was coy again, unwilling to repeat herself. All I know is the boy ended up dead, she said. Frannie wanted him dead. I don’t know what happened in between. All I know is that we used to take care of ourselves. Not like now. She shook her head.

  Emily remembered Mr. Rodriguez’s name in the newspaper, his suicide, and the death of the girl. Do you think the murders happening now are happening for the same reason? She asked. Somebody trying to get back at somebody else?

  Colleen squeezed her eyes closed and made her mouth prune tightly. It didn’t happen that way in our day, cutting people’s throats in their own homes, and that girl with two children found all cut up on the shore of the lake. Colleen shook her head again. When somebody needed to be gone, they deserved it. We made sure of that. And we didn’t make it something awful that a child might stumble on.

  Emily felt she should say something, defend the idea of justice and sanity and civilization, in which people were entitled to a fair trial. But Colleen was an old woman, certainly, and entitled to her opinions and her prejudices. Emily’s stomach churned anyway. She should have let it go, but her mouth wouldn’t let her.

  But does that go along with what they preach at your church? Are you allowed to just get rid of people you think are guilty?

  The old woman looked at her sharply. Emily had made her disdain too clear. She felt the air change around her. She wasn’t just a curious out-of-towner. She was judging, thinking herself above them all. She’d closed herself off to Colleen’s help now, she could feel it.

  Colleen pressed her lips together again.

  Pastor Richardson is a good man, but he doesn’t understand how it works sometimes. And neither do you.

  Emily nodded. I didn’t mean to suggest—

  You think we’re a bunch of idiots, down here killing each other willy-nilly, no reason at all?

  Emily shook her head. No, of course not.

  The old woman leaned forward. Let me tell you, when somebody here dies, it’s for a reason. You think we can trust the law to do it? If we could, we’d be happy to let that happen. But they’re easy to buy. They have kin, like everyone else, and they want to protect them. You can’t trust them to do something when one of their own is in on it. And everybody’s kin to everyone.

  Except now, she said, these new ones, these young people, these women found all cut up. We don’t do it like that.

  In the old days, it was clean and quick and they deserved it. This isn’t like the old days, she said. This is bad. And we don’t know how to stop it.

  19

  James and the Richardson brothers had divided the money up evenly among the four of them. After all of that effort, it wasn’t much, 100 dollars each, hardly enough to buy beer and pay the bills and get a new pair of boots. But it did give James of month of free time before he had to find work again. He could find work. That wasn’t a problem. The problem was that the work made him want to kill himself by the end of the day. He could fill potholes in the heat, standing out amongst the fresh blacktop in a hard hat, shoving the hot goo down into the breaks in the concrete. He could haul logs. He could even be a handyman, a free laborer offering his services where they were needed to mow lawns or mend fences. It was just that those jobs made him miserable. Not miserable so much as angry. By the end of the day, he could barely stand to do anything but drink and curse the people who had hired him and stand under the shower to wash away the sweat and stink of tar or pieces of woodchips from his hair.

  It seemed like such a waste of time, this going to work everyday and coming home and doing it all over again. Maybe it was worth it if you had something to come home to besides the stink of your own dirty workclothes and the dishes and the dogs whining from under the porch and the pounding in your head from last night’s drinking. He had a kid somehwere, but the girl he’d knocked up wasn’t the kind of girl you could settle down with. He didn’t know what she’d done with the baby. She had cut herself with razors in hidden places (her ribcage, her upper thighs) and told him she had, sometimes, imagined running out into the road in front of a log truck. He wondered about the baby, but knew it was better off living with somebody else. He wasn’t fit to be a husband and didn’t want a wife. But it made life lonely. He didn’t know what else there was to want to make life worth showing up for.

  He remembered Connie storming from his house, her face all red, an angry child, almost: it made him sick to think of what he’d done to her when he thought of it. So he didn’t think about it. He drank instead.

  He was drinking the last of his whiskey, thinking that he should probably just go to sleep afterward (what would be the point of staying awake now?), when he heard the car pull up. He figured it was someone he knew, maybe Rick, who sometimes came over to drink and play cards or drive them both out to the bar by the highway, the one with the country band that did Hank Williams covers and a dancefloor that James was never going to get on, dancing seemed like such a pointless way to draw attention to yourself.

  He set down his glass and opened the door. He didn’t have a chance to see who they were—and maybe they were wearing masks, he wasn’t sure, maybe just hats pushed down so they shadow fell on their faces. It was dark out anyway, and he was blinded by the glare of the headlights. He put his hand up against his eyes and said Who’s— before somebody grabbed him and then another pulled his hands behind his back and bound them with handcuffs (he knew the familiar click and the heaviness of the metal on his skin). He thought it was the police until they put the stocking cap over his face and wound the tape around his throat and the fabric to keep it secured. The police didn’t do that. There were laws against this kind of thing. It isn’t the police, he thought at first with a surge of happiness, and then, he realized that this was even worse.

  I’m going to die, he thought, already choking on the fabric that pressed against his nose and mouth. He fought the men, though they had caught him by surprise and had already bound his arms and ankles. He thrashed his head, feeling the muscles in his throat tighten and strain. He kicked with his legs tied together and wriggled in the confines. He could not hold a thought in his head. He felt his bladder close to giving. The cotton dried his mouth and he couldn’t get it out without use of his hands. He imagined with each breath that he would choke, but his body kept breathing.

  They put him in a truckbed. He recognized the metallic clunk his body made when he hit the bed and heard the roar of the car’s motor echoing through his ears. He rolled himself over on his back. He pressed his head against the truckbed and tried to catch on the grooves to pull up the fabric over his face, but he felt a quick thrust of something solid and square to his ribs. The pain flared—his ribs were broken. He tried roll back on his other side, to curl himself in closer to his body, but the pain would let him do anything but kick his legs feebly.

  Stay still, you little fucker. He wasn’t alone back there. He felt his bladder give and no longer cared. He pleaded with the other person in the car, a voice he didn’t recognize.

  Please let me go, he said. Let me go. I didn’t do nothing. I can give you money.

  He didn’t register what he said completely before saying it. Everybody thinks of the same silly things when they’re gonna die.

  The man didn’t speak but jabbed an object into James’ broken ribs, probably the heel of his shoe or a bat. James tried to move away and hold back the sickness, but couldn’t: he vomited from the pain and choked on it, unable to escape the fluid filling his nose and mouth.

  The truck stopped and the man inside it pulled him up by his bound wrists and threw him from the truckbed. He landed on his elbow and heard the crack as he felt it, a pain like heat moving liquid up to his shoulder. He screamed repeatedly, though the screaming only made the men hit him, this time in the face, though the pain registered as movement backwards, as he fell again, breaking somethi
ng else.

  His mind, knowing now that he was beyond what a human being can take, let his eyes close and his mind dim and his body become a faraway throbbing. He didn’t felt the press of the small, metal circle at the back of his head. He certainly did not feel it go off.

  20

  Connie heard about his death from the newspaper, which her family usually didn’t buy—what’s the point, her mother would say, when you can just ask what’s happening and somebody tells you for free? But the newspaper was folded neatly on the kitchen table when Connie woke up at eight AM, earlier than she had in weeks, and came downstairs fully prepared to look everyone in the face and no longer be the invalid, the girl recovering from cuts and bruises and a big hole where her memory was or whatever else had happened that she could not or would not tell.

  Her mother had made oatmeal. She stood in front of the stove, stirring the mess with one of the many wooden spoons that filled the drawers. The kitchen was bright and hot already, the windows up and curtains blowing. Connie took a cup from the cabinet and put the kettle on.

  Can I help, Momma? Need me to make the toast?

  Her mother turned and pushed her hair away from her face and tucked it behind her ears. She’d had long, dark hair for as long as Connie could remember. It always seemed to be falling from whatever knot or twist she’d made to hold it.

  She was beginning to look old. She had never seemed youthful, never beautiful or fresh, but had seemed solidly middle-aged for all of Connie’s life—her breasts and hips matronly, her waist thick, her face broad and plain and unwrinkled. Now, Connie could see crow’s feet around her eyes and wrinkles in rings around her throat. She was growing thinner, the chest of her dress sagging where it used to burst.