by Julia Keller
Carla wanted a can of Diet Dr Pepper. No: She had to have a can of Diet Dr Pepper. It was a symbol, not a liquid. It was her reward to herself for having gotten this far, and it was her incentive to keep going. As her agitation had increased, she’d persuaded herself that if she could just get a can of Diet Dr Pepper, she’d be okay. It would be a sign—a sign that she was on the right track.
After that, she told herself, her mind would lie quietly for a while. She’d be able to make it the rest of the way home. And once she was home, she could figure out how to fix the mess she’d made of everything.
She had spotted the store on the right-hand side of the road just after she crossed the West Virginia state line. JUNNIOR’S, the sign said. A misspelling, she surmised. Or the petty revenge of a sign painter who had yet to be paid for the last job he’d done for Junior. Or maybe it really was how the guy’s mother had spelled his name on the birth certificate. Could be. Anyway, Carla turned in. She parked between ruts of snow. She struggled through the shin-high mounds of it that Junior or Junnior—or whoever was in charge here—had not bothered to clear away from the entrance.
She headed for the rumbling cooler in the back. She searched in vain for a white-and-maroon can of Diet Dr Pepper. There had to be one, right? She picked through the assortment. Her distress was growing.
Dammit. They were out.
Maybe they had more somewhere else. In a back room, maybe. Maybe it was just a matter of replenishing the stock.
Carla returned to the front of the store. The old woman was having a frisky go at a thumbnail with a pair of rusty clippers, grunting with satisfaction at each tiny snip. She finished her grooming, such as it was, before looking up. Carla had to ask twice about the Diet Dr Pepper. The first time, the woman frowned and shook her head, as if whatever language Carla was speaking was not spoken here.
Then the clerk delivered the blow: No Diet Dr Pepper.
Carla felt a rising panic. She knew she was being ridiculous—for God’s sake, she told herself, it’s a freakin’ can of pop—but she had been so focused on getting it, so intent on procuring this one small token as a sort of reward for the progress she had made on the drive, that this bulletin that it would not be forthcoming had devastated her.
The panic gave way to outrage. How the hell could they be out of Diet Dr Pepper? A dump like this was supposed to keep staples in stock. It had an obligation. Why else would it even exist, except to assuage specific cravings for items with no nutritional value? Carla took a quick disdainful glimpse around the dilapidated store and its three rows of plywood shelves, shelves featuring little more than a couple of pyramids of dusty Spam cans and six jumbo rolls of Hefty paper towels and a shiny red clutch of Wavy Lay’s and several packages of Double Stuf Oreos.
“We got fresh coffee if that’ll help,” the old woman added.
At least she was trying. But that made Carla feel even worse: Was her fragile emotional state that obvious? The surly old woman would not be offering alternatives had Carla not seemed right on the edge—ready to faint or puke or pitch a fit. The clerk surely did not want any trouble in her store this morning. The snow was bad enough. Who needed to deal with a lunatic in a rage because they were all out of Diet Dr Pepper?
“You okay, honey?”
This time the old woman’s voice broke into Carla’s thoughts like as broomstick crashing through a plate-glass window. The clerk seemed honestly concerned about her.
Carla flinched. The unexpected kindness had caught her off-guard. And so, just like that, she started to sob.
* * *
The first hour of her trip from the D.C. area had been on the interstate. Plenty of traffic, even on a cold Sunday morning, with plenty of places to stop. Carla did not stop. She kept right on going.
The exit showed up a little before she was expecting it to. It dumped her out on another four-lane highway. Not an interstate, but close. Forty minutes later, she made another turn. Now all resemblance to an interstate disappeared. She felt as if she had driven off the edge of the world—and landed, weirdly, not somewhere in outer space, bobbing amidst stars and planets and dark matter, but in another universe altogether. A universe with its own special brand of dark matter.
This road was a shortcut to Raythune County, used by natives or by people whose GPS systems had spitefully betrayed them.
Gone were the outlet stores with their endless iterations of brand names—Chico and Nautica and Pottery Barn—and the soulless strip malls offering tax prep and pizza by the slice and tanning beds and picture framing and PC repair. Gone, too, were the fast-food places that tended to pop up in multiples, as if the initial one had released spores that lodged in the soil and grew a new franchise every month or so, just to keep the first one company.
The back roads of West Virginia were very different from the interstates that coiled around big cities. That was obvious. But it was the degree of the difference that always astonished Carla, even though she had made this trip so many, many times, first as a child in the backseat of her parents’ car and now as an adult driving her own car.
How could everything change so quickly, so absolutely? She meant the road—but right now, the same question could be applied to her life.
She was surrounded by dense white scribbles of woods and by the occasional gray zipper of a train track. In the distance, the mountains crowded along the horizon, sheepish-looking giants doing their best to meld seamlessly with a sky that arched over this remote and mysterious world. Today those mountains had snow on their shoulders, a mantle of white that helped them disappear into the bleak winter backdrop.
Yes, Carla knew this road well. And yet she was struck anew by its absolute singularity. Interstates were ubiquitous; driving on an interstate, you could be in St. Louis or Phoenix or Atlanta or Dallas or Baltimore. You could be in Miami or Chicago. Anywhere. A back road, though, had its own flavor and color and character. Its own brand. It was more than a matter of what you saw out the window. It was also a feeling. Leaving the four-lane highway, she could have sworn she had felt a shift in the barometric pressure. There was a raw new element in the air once she headed down the road to Acker’s Gap.
To her home.
Granted, she had not lived there for several years—but it was still home. It would always be home. Had her mother tried to convince her of that, back when she had first decided to leave Acker’s Gap and go live with her father, Carla would have rejected the idea, instantly and fervently. She might have even been nasty about it, sprinkling in a few profanities, just for the shock value.
No, she would have declared hotly to her mother, scowling, pouting, don’t you dare say that. Don’t you dare try to tell me that this hellhole is my home, my destiny. It’s not. I don’t belong here. Maybe you do, Mom—but I don’t. And I never will, okay?
She did not feel that way anymore.
Now Acker’s Gap was her only hope.
The headaches had started about four months ago. Furious, merciless headaches that created a sort of nonstop mayhem in her head, a relentless expansion and contraction, expansion and contraction. After that came the insomnia. It made her crazy. One of her roommates, Kurt Leftwich, gave her one of his Ambien tablets. He meant well, but it was a disaster. She woke up on the back porch at three in the morning, screaming and flailing. Kurt and his girlfriend, Beverly, heard the commotion and ran out and caught her fists, subdued her, brought her back inside. They settled her down. Or at least they tried to.
What she did not tell them—what she did not tell anyone—was that she was having flashbacks. Was that the right word? It didn’t sound right. Because she did not relive the events themselves, the terrible events from four years ago.
She did not see, once again, three old men murdered in a fast-food joint.
She did not see, once again, her best friend, Lonnie Prince, dying as the bullets pierced his chest. She was not forced to watch his eyes one more time as the light fell out of them.
She did not have to repea
t the moment when the shooter tied her to a chair in the middle of an abandoned building and pointed a gun at her face.
No. Her flashbacks were not like that.
What she relived were the emotions. The feelings were what came pounding back, splitting her, like hard stakes driven into the softest parts of her brain. The memories were all sense-memories: panic and fear and an acid-drip of dread.
Her mother had saved her life. Her mother had rescued her from the drug dealer who called himself Chill, the punk with the gun. And Nick Fogelsong saved her, too. He was sheriff at the time, and he was the one who’d fired the shot at Chill. Carla had been woozy and confused from a severe concussion, but she had roused herself in time to watch Chill stagger and fall, blood bubbling from his perforated torso.
For the next few years, things had been okay. She had dealt with the memories. Pushed them back. Locked them away. She was helped by a good counselor, a woman her dad had found for her. Carla saw her twice a week. Three times, if she needed it. And a lot of times, she needed it. Being away from Acker’s Gap made a difference; that was Carla’s theory, anyway. She was in a new place with a new life.
She graduated from high school. She had good friends. She had a serious boyfriend—his name was Greg Balzercak—but neither one of them was sure about where things were going, or where they wanted them to go. So they were taking a break. He was in Paraguay now, in the Peace Corps. They kept in touch. Sort of. Who knew what would happen when he got back? She had decided that college was not what she wanted right now. Maybe later. Half-sick with apprehension, she had told her mom about her decision. She knew Bell wasn’t happy about it, but she did not argue. Same with her dad: disappointment, but no fireworks. Your life—your call. That was the essence of what both of them said. It was a relief.
She had moved into the house in Arlington. She had an okay job. Eventually she quit that one and got a better one. Everything was going fine.
And then, as of four months ago, it wasn’t. It wasn’t going fine at all.
The symptoms hit: the headaches. The insomnia. The feeling-flashbacks. With no warning the world would lurch sideways, and when it did, she ended up doing odd things to try to shock it into getting upright again. Things she had never done before. Bad things. One especially bad thing. She knew better, but she could not help herself; she was desperate, and she had to do something to steady herself. Something outlandish. Something to knock her crazy spinning thoughts back into a normal rhythm. Something wild and shocking and hard.
Something that would serve as a sort of emotional defibrillator. That was how she rationalized it. She needed something to stun her back toward normalcy.
She lost weight, because she could not eat, because the thought of food revolted her, and instead of expressing concern, most of her friends asked her what her secret was: Atkins, South Beach? Vegetarian? Vegan?
Many times, out of the blue, she could not catch her breath. She would be at work or hanging out with her housemates and she would start sweating. She could not focus. She thought she was going to pass out. She was barely twenty-one, but the first time it happened, she was pretty sure she was having a heart attack. The second time, too. And the third and fourth. The moment eventually passed, but that did not matter.
The fact that it wasn’t a heart attack the last time it happened did not mean that it wasn’t a heart attack this time. Or maybe a stroke. Or something.
Saturday afternoon, she had crawled under the thick down comforter on the bed in her tiny room. She closed her eyes. She waited to die.
She did not die.
A few hours later, she got out of bed and fired off an e-mail. About a job she’d seen advertised. A job in Acker’s Gap. And then she called her mother and told her she was coming home.
* * *
Sunlight smacked the peaks of piled-up snow lining the road, bouncing back into her eyes and momentarily blinding her. Carla adjusted the visor. She hadn’t brought her sunglasses. She hadn’t brought a lot of things. In fact, she had left a ton of junk behind. More than just sunglasses. She’d only taken her laptop and a makeup kit and a couple of books and some bras and panties and an extra pair of jeans and a few sweaters. She’d just stuffed everything into her backpack and thrown it onto the passenger seat and taken off. She’d text Skylar later. Skylar had the room next to hers. Skylar would dump the rest of her stuff in a box and ship it to her in Acker’s Gap. No rush, she had told Skylar. Whenever.
This was a rare straight stretch of road. Carla was able to see a long way down it. She had left the store an hour ago. She’d finally finished crying, wiping her nose with the sleeve of her coat. Gross, she had thought, even while she was doing it. The clerk watched her. Then the old woman forced her to take a can of Diet Coke, even though Carla didn’t want it. Here, honey, c’mon—it’s free, okay? You don’t look so good and you need sumpin’. Here. She had pushed the cold wet can into Carla’s flaccid hand. Sorry we don’t have no Dr Pepper but this’ll do ya right ’til you can get summa that.
And then Carla was back out on the old country road, which for the most part wound around and around in tight corkscrews, wriggling and twisting around frozen-over creeks and snow-matted fields and abandoned barns that looked seconds away from total collapse. That’s why this sudden stretch of straightness felt like a gift. For once, she could actually see where she was headed.
The bumpy walls of snow on both sides of the road created a kind of tunnel effect. Instead of feeling closed in or trapped, though, instead of feeling suffocated, Carla found the narrowing to be … comfortable. Peaceful. It cushioned her. Protected her.
She was going home.
Kurt and Skylar, two of her roommates she liked the best and was closest to, had tried to argue her out of it, telling her that she was going back into what Skylar called “the belly of the beast”—returning to the very place where all the bad things had happened, and where things never changed. Skylar was an African-American woman from Brooklyn, New York. She had family members, she told Carla, who lived in places where a black face was an anomaly—and not a welcome one. On her visits to those relatives, she explained, she had realized that you can’t make people be what they don’t want to be. You just have to live your life somewhere else. It’s not worth the energy to be angry and upset all the time. Skylar could not imagine why anybody would want to go back to a tiny mountain town in the middle of nowhere, once she had managed to get out.
Especially not after Carla told her what she had gone through there.
But Carla persisted. “I’m going,” she had said. “First thing tomorrow. It’s what I have to do, okay?”
She did not tell Kurt and Skylar the rest of the story: I’m afraid I’m losing my mind. And when she did lose her mind, she wanted to be in a place where they knew her. She wouldn’t be able to tell her mother what was really going on—Bell would feel responsible, she would feel guilty about it all, and Carla could not do that to her, and nor could Carla deal with her mother’s apologies and her sadness—but she wanted to be home.
No. She needed to be home.
Her cell rang. When she’d started out that morning, Carla had flipped it onto the passenger seat, and it landed on top of her backpack. The backpack was surrounded by a fringed blue flannel scarf and a pair of gloves and, as of an hour ago, an unopened can of Diet Coke.
She took a quick glance at the lighted screen.
The caller ID made her shudder.
She did not touch the phone. The rings continued. Carla had intended to shut off the damned thing, but forgot. She stared straight ahead with an extra intensity, like someone ignoring a heckler.
She had made a mess out of everything. An absolute fucking mess. She could blame the chaos in her head, but the truth was, a few days before, she had done something really, really stupid. More stupid than usual. That’s what this call was about.
She knew she would have to face the consequences. Eventually.
For now, all she wanted to think about wa
s the big stone house on Shelton Avenue. She pictured the wraparound front porch, and the lopsided porch swing, and the ginormous wooden door with the tarnished brass knocker that sometimes reminded her of the one in the Christmas Carol movie—the one that morphed into Jacob Marley’s pinched and squinty face. The knocker on the door at Shelton Avenue, though, was not creepy. It was not forbidding. It was heavy and old-fashioned and sort of cool.
And the sight of it would mean she was home.
She wondered if her mother had shoveled the long front walk yet. Carla hoped not. The moment she got back, she wanted to plunge into something physically demanding, even grueling, something that would leave her totally wrecked with exhaustion, blitzed with bone-deep, brain-numbing fatigue, so that at long last she would have a chance—unlikely as it seemed right now—to actually sleep all the way through the night. Just one night, freed from her memories. That’s all. That’s all she wanted.
Those memories would be waiting for her the next morning, of course, ready to pounce. She knew that. But she would be stronger, after a long good rest. She would be able to deal. To fight back. Yes, she would.
Wouldn’t she?
Chapter Four
There were two kinds of drunks. The first kind lurched through the world with no shame. They made no attempt to hide the extent of their dependence on alcohol, a dependence that had begun the very first time they took a drink and felt that astonishing calm that canceled out all of their anxieties, pushed away all of the awkwardness and the insecurities; it left them shining, elevated, the true self revealed at last.
And the second kind was—
Bell paused. Damn, it was cold out here. Deputy Oakes had left an hour ago, having exhausted his supply of bad news, and now she was trying to clear the front walk. With every shovelful, she tunneled deeper into the heart of her thoughts about Darlene Strayer. Which meant she also chipped and picked her way past her convictions about alcoholics, with which she’d had, to her displeasure, far too much experience.