by Amy Engel
I navigated around the bend in the road, slowing down in deference to potholes big enough to swallow a tire. Small rocks pinged off the undercarriage of my car, and my heart began its slow ascent into my throat. One more curve in the road that was really more of a track at this point, and my mother’s trailer appeared. It was set back slightly from the road, ringed by tall grass and heaps of trash, old tires, and a rusted-out car that has been there for as long as I had memories. I used to hide in the footwell when things inside the trailer got too bad.
I bumped over the uneven ground and parked in the grass, next to a black pickup truck with a dented passenger door. Not my mama’s. My stomach cramped up at the thought she had company. The people my mother invited inside were never people you wanted to meet. But my mama was sitting on the front steps of her trailer alone, a beer can in one hand and a cigarette in the other. She stared at me as I unfolded myself from the car, took a long drag off her cigarette as I approached.
My mama was sixteen when Cal was born. Seventeen when I came along, a year younger than I’d been when I brought Junie into the world. She’d almost died from a bad infection after my birth and there were no more kids after me, a fact she always brought up when she was drunk and angry. As if not being able to have more kids she couldn’t afford and didn’t want to take care of was the great tragedy of her life. She was forty-seven now, but looked sixty. Lank dishwater hair, summer-sky eyes, skinny arms and legs framing a loose pouch of belly and saggy breasts. Rumor was she’d been pretty once, maybe even beautiful. Her face the wellspring of Cal’s own good looks. Had men panting around behind her until they figured out her wild streak wasn’t the sassy-comeback type of attitude they saw in the movies. Mama’s wild streak could tear you limb from limb. Even now, with skin dull and pockmarked from too much alcohol and too many drugs, her eyes were sharp. Watchful. She was a woman you underestimated at your own peril.
“Hey, Mama,” I said.
She took another drag off her cigarette, blew the smoke in my direction.
“Hey, yourself.”
I waited for her to say something about Junie, some acknowledgment of what had happened, and realized she was waiting for the same thing. “Cal called you,” I said, more a statement than a question.
“Yep,” she replied, and after another drag from her cigarette, “Sorry about it.”
I sucked in a breath, looked away. The rear of the trailer had a big uneven gash in the siding. My mama had stuffed the tear with plastic bags and newspaper, but it probably did next to nothing to keep the cold out. I hadn’t been inside the trailer in years, but could still picture every inch of it. Could probably navigate it blind, if I had to. Dark and dank, ratty brown carpet, food-encrusted dishes piled in the sink, faint smell of urine from the busted pipe in the bathroom. And always some man who’d be gone in a few months. Not that we ever wanted them to stick around any longer. As daddy candidates, they’d all left something to be desired.
“What?” my mama demanded, drawing my attention back to her. “What else do you want me to say? I didn’t even know the girl. Every time I spotted you in town, you practically dragged her across the road to get away from me. You never would bring her around here.” Something flashed in her eyes, some emotion that didn’t quite match her words, but she looked away before I could catch hold of it.
“To all this?” I threw out an arm. “You’re damn right I didn’t.”
My mama tsked under her breath, held up her beer can, and shrugged when I shook my head. “Suit yourself,” she said.
“Whose truck is that?” I asked. “Boyfriend of the month?” I glanced at the bumper, where a Make America White Again sticker was plastered up against My Other Toy Has Tits. “Looks like you’ve picked a real winner.”
My mama’s eyes narrowed as she leaned forward, poked me hard in the thigh with her bony knuckle. “Better watch your mouth,” she said. “You ain’t so grown I can’t still beat your ass.”
Fear slithered through me; defiance, too. A kind of muscle memory taking over, transporting me back to childhood, where I’d spent half my time trying to dodge her fists and the other half daring her to hit me again. Five minutes back in her presence and already I felt dirtier, harder, than I had when I drove up. Somewhere in the near distance a dog barked, a harsh, ugly sound, like he was swallowing nails. Even without seeing him, I could picture a flea-bitten, half-starved pit bull chained up in a muddy yard. That was the thing about this part of the world: You didn’t have to actually see something to know exactly how it would play out.
“What did you come here for, anyway?” my mama asked. “You even gonna sit down?” She scooted over on the rickety plywood step. Her version of a peace offering. I hesitated and then lowered myself next to her. She smelled like old cigarettes and dirty hair.
“I was wondering where Jimmy Ray hangs out these days,” I said, eyes on my ragged nails and torn-up cuticles. Working in the diner always had played hell on my hands. Junie used to put lotion on them before I went to bed, lulling me to sleep with the scent of lavender.
“Why you asking?” My mama paused, ground out her cigarette on the step between us. Lit another one before she spoke again. “You think he had something to do with what happened?”
“Not really,” I said, praying it was the truth. I’d brought Jimmy Ray into our lives, led him right up to our doorstep. I wasn’t sure how I’d manage to keep on living if he’d been the one to hurt Junie. “But Sheriff Land asked about him. Got me thinking is all.”
“Sheriff Land.” She snorted. “Why you listening to anything he has to say? That man’s as worthless as tits on a nun.”
I smiled at that, held out my hand for a drag off her cigarette. She rolled her eyes, but handed it over.
“You know where Jimmy Ray lives,” she reminded me. “Why you asking me?”
“Yeah, but you know I can’t just roll up there. Not if I want my head to stay attached to my body.” Jimmy Ray’s house, tucked even farther into the holler than my mama’s, was more like a fortress. No one approached without an invitation. No one who wanted to keep breathing, at least. Truth was, I didn’t care much about breathing anymore. But I was the only one who could speak for Junie. I didn’t trust anyone else, not even Cal, to see this through, to follow this path to the dark place where it surely led.
My mama glanced at my hand. “Are you going to give that back or should I light another?”
“Light another,” I said, holding the half-smoked cigarette out of her reach. I hadn’t smoked a cigarette in more than a dozen years, and the nicotine rushed through me, leaving me light-headed.
She shook her head, lit up a fresh cigarette. “Jimmy Ray could be anywhere. But I hear he spends a lot of time at that titty bar down the way, on 50. You know the one?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I know it.” Grimy and dark and full of desperate women. Exactly the kind of place, and women, Jimmy Ray loved. I experimented with blowing a smoke ring, but netted only an amorphous cloud.
“What was she like?” my mama asked, her gaze fixed on the woods creeping up around the trailer as if the trees were anxious to reclaim the ground they’d lost. “Your girl?”
Her words pierced me, but for once I didn’t think she was trying to be cruel. I flicked the cigarette away, watched it smoke on the dirty gravel at our feet. A bird cawed nearby, and another answered in the distance. “She was smart,” I said. “So much smarter than the rest of us.”
“Huh, guess that wouldn’t be too hard.” My mama bumped her shoulder gently against mine.
“She was curious about everything. She loved animals, could sob for days over every stray dog I wouldn’t let her bring home. All the kids liked her, but she was picky about who she became friends with. Science was her favorite subject. She wanted to know how things worked. She wrote poetry. Kept it in a little notebook she carried around.” My words were coming too fast, slopping out o
f my mouth like water from a broken faucet. “Her hair was prettier than mine, thicker. She had the same freckles across her nose.” I ran my fingers over my face, surprised when they came away wet.
“She sounds like a special girl,” my mama said. “Like you raised her the way you thought best.”
“I tried,” I choked out. “I tried hard to do better than you did. I read to her every night when she was little. I never hit her or ignored her. She always had enough to eat, even if it meant I went to bed hungry. I told her I loved her every day.” A wail burst out of me. “But it wasn’t enough. Cal and I are here, we’re grown and alive, and my daughter is dead.” I turned and looked at her. “After everything, you still did better than I did. Go ahead, I guess you can have the last laugh now.”
She shook her head, her eyes soft in a way I barely recognized. “I’m not laughing.” And that was the thing that undid me—not my daughter laid open on a stretcher, not Cal’s voice beside my bed, a kindness from my mother. Shame washed through me. I hated that it was comfort from her that I needed in order to cry. She leaned over and pulled me toward her, and I fell into her lap, buried my face in the dirty denim of her jeans. She stroked my hair while I sobbed, her muffled voice murmuring bits of childhood songs.
She’d always been good at this, waiting until you’d about given up on her once and for all and then reaching out with a tender hand. It reminded me of the few times she’d read to me as a child, tucked me up against her body on the couch and gave different voices to the characters in the secondhand picture book I’d gotten for Christmas. Once, she even made me a mug of hot chocolate to sip while she read. Her rare affection an offering I never could resist, even when I knew better. Because her sweetness was always short-lived, always out of the blue, so you could never predict or count on it. And that made the rest of the hours and weeks and years that much worse. Because you knew she was capable of something more, something different. And you were left always hoping for it, waiting for that rarely glimpsed side of her to show itself. Never quite able to let go.
When I finally pushed myself upright, face swollen and tear-smeared, my mama looked at me. Set down her beer, tossed her cigarette to the side, and held my face between her thin hands. “You were a good mama,” she said, stared at me until I gave a weak nod, and then tightened her fingers until I wanted to pull away, the edges of her sharp nails digging into my skin. “But the time for being good is over,” she said. “The time for bawling and feeling sorry for yourself is over. Do you understand?” This time she didn’t allow for nodding, didn’t give me any room to move or look away. Her cigarette-smoke breath bathed my face and her ice-chip eyes cut into mine. “You’re made of stronger stuff than that. You find him, Eve. Whoever did this. You find him. And you make him pay.”
FIVE
An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind had never been one of my mama’s mottos. Her version of justice was less forgiving, more Old Testament. An eye for an eye. Or maybe even a life for an eye. People knew not to mess with my mama. Not unless they wanted far worse than what they’d given. She’d been known to beat the shit out of men twice her size. Had no qualms with fighting dirty or going for the jugular. Once, she’d snatched a fist-sized patch of hair off a woman’s head for calling us white trash. Her advice wasn’t a surprise to me. It was why I’d gone, really. The information about Jimmy Ray just an afterthought. What I’d really wanted was a second opinion to echo the voice in the back of my head. Permission to follow my own worst urgings.
When I pulled up to my apartment, Cal was waiting for me on the steps, bouncing his keys in his hand. “Where have you been?” he demanded.
“I went for a drive,” I said. “I needed to get out.”
He cocked his head at me. “Where did you go?” I could tell he suspected, but I didn’t want to say. Cal’s relationship with our mama was as tortured as mine, but in a completely different way. He had always been her favorite, her shining star, even when she was mocking him or making him feel small. And for his part, he loved her in a way I couldn’t. A way that involved actually being a regular presence in her life. But he also knew her, wasn’t blind to her many and varied faults. And he wouldn’t want me around her right now, not when I was vulnerable to her brand of poison. But if I didn’t admit where I’d been, I knew our mama wouldn’t, either. She liked her secrets. Leverage was always more useful than honesty. Another one of her lessons I’d be wise to remember.
“Nowhere.” I shrugged. “Just driving.”
“I tried to call you. About ten times.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I turned my phone off.” I held up my dark phone as evidence.
I could tell he wanted to press, but to his credit, he didn’t. Probably scared he’d push me right over the edge. “I was worried,” he said finally. “And you need to hurry up and change if we don’t want to be late.”
I stared at him and then down at my threadbare jeans and gray T-shirt. “Why do I need to change? Where are we going?”
He took a step closer to me, his face softening. “Izzy’s funeral, remember? It starts in less than an hour.”
“Oh, shit,” I said. “Give me ten minutes.”
I didn’t have a black dress, or any dresses, for that matter. I pulled on a pair of black slacks, shiny and cheap, and changed my T-shirt for a plain white button-down blouse with yellowing deodorant stains in the armpits. I scraped my hair back into a ponytail. In the mirror I looked thin and exhausted, my freckles standing out against my pale skin. The scariest part was how easily I recognized myself. As if the woman who’d looked in this mirror every day for the past twelve years had been the imposter and this broken, dead-eyed version was the real me, the Eve who was always destined to reappear.
“People are gonna ask about Junie’s funeral,” Cal called from the living room as I was slipping on a pair of scuffed black pumps. “They don’t understand why you’re not having one. Think it’s strange.”
“I don’t care what people think,” I said. For so long, that had been all I cared about. Measuring every action, every word, every thought against how it might reflect back on Junie. It was a kind of relief not to have to worry about it. Nothing I did, or didn’t do, could hurt her anymore.
The church parking lot was already full by the time we arrived, but I refused Cal’s offer to drop me off out front. Small groups were clustered along the sidewalk, and I didn’t want to stand there alone, have to nod and accept condolences and hugs. I wanted to be whisked inside like a criminal before anyone had time to notice me. Cal sat with me in the car parked a block down the road until everyone else had filtered inside, and we snuck in right as they were closing the doors for the service.
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been inside a church. My mama had the same opinion of religion that she did of the law—nothing good ever came from either one of them, and they both used fear to persuade fools to follow their rules. If she had indulged an urge to bring us closer to God, this bland Methodist chapel would have been her last choice. She would have taken us to one of the “churches” scattered throughout the holler, instead. The kind of place with dirt floors and snakebit parishioners speaking in tongues. Something with a little fire to it. Something with teeth.
I slid into one of the back pews before Cal could pull me forward, kept my head tilted down into the hymnal I’d opened on my lap. I was scared to look up, scared to see all the people filling the church. Scared of my own reaction. Because in a town this size, the person who’d killed Junie and Izzy was bound to be sitting right there among us. Praying and singing and crying as if they hadn’t wielded the knife themselves. Slowly, I raised my head. Ran my eyes along the rows of mourners. Jack Pearson from the tire store, with the gaze that always followed young girls a little too close. Sally Nickels, who’d hated me since I’d slept with her boyfriend in tenth grade. Dave Colson, whose love affair with the bottle made him mean and unpredictable. It cou
ld have been any of them. It could have been none of them.
“Hey,” Cal murmured. “Hey, breathe.” He reached over and rubbed my back, his hand warm and rough through my shirt.
I looked back down, kept my eyes on the hymnal until my vision blurred. When I looked up again, Zach and Jenny were approaching their daughter’s casket. It felt like the entire church was holding its breath, the only sound Jenny’s hoarse sobbing. A mean, hateful part of me wondered if she ever stopped. Her shoulders hunched as she placed a hand on Izzy’s closed (thank God) casket and Zach reached forward, supporting her. He whispered something into her ear and began to guide her gently away. Everyone else averted their eyes, dying to look but not wanting to be caught staring. But I stared, and Zach’s gaze caught mine, his face pulled taut with grief. A bright shock of anger pulsed under my skin. Who was going to hold me up? Who was going to put their arms around me? Cal couldn’t do it forever, that was asking too much of him, but who else was there? I jerked my eyes away.