The Familiar Dark

by Amy Engel

  Jimmy Ray smirked at me. “What do you think?”

  I slid off my bar stool and moved closer to him. He threw a look over the bar at Matt, a laugh working its way onto his lips. He always did think women fighting back was funny. He’d usually let you get a few swats in, like a kitten squaring off against a pit bull, before he squashed you. But when I reached out and poked him in the chest, he grabbed my fingers, the smile wiped off his face in an instant. He didn’t bend my fingers backward, not yet. But I felt the threat hovering there, tendons poised to snap. “Watch yourself, girl,” he said under his breath.

  “Do you know anything about it?” I said. “About what happened to Junie?”

  He released my hand and gave me a shove backward. “I don’t hurt kids,” he said. His mouth twisted up, offended. “Jesus.”

  “I think you’d hurt your own mother, Jimmy Ray, if you stood to gain something by doing it.”

  Jimmy Ray snorted out a laugh. “Shit, I’d kill that worthless bitch for free. But that’s beside the point. There ain’t nothin’ a couple of twelve-year-old girls could do to or for me that would make killing ’em worth my while.”

  “Look me in the eye,” I said. “Look me in the eye and swear you didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  “Fuck you,” he said. “I knew that girl when she was in diapers. You really think I could have killed her that way?”

  I knew I shouldn’t believe him. But the thing was, I did. Because Jimmy Ray, for all his casual violence, had a set of rules he lived by, just like everyone else. And killing two twelve-year-old girls violated those rules. He could live with beating his girlfriends until they bled, with hooking kids on meth and heroin, with gunning down his competition and leaving them in the woods to rot. But killing two kids in the park? He’d have a hard time looking in the mirror after that. Because, at the end of the day, Jimmy Ray still thought of himself as one of the good guys.

  “Enough of this,” he said, took a step closer to me. “That the only reason you came here? To accuse me of some bullshit? Or you got something else in mind?” He pushed even closer, the heat of his body leaching into mine. “Because you’re looking good, Evie. Real good.” He ran his hand down my arm, and God help me, my stomach still flipped. Even after everything. For a moment, I considered taking him up on it. Junie was gone. What did it matter? I could let Jimmy Ray beat me all day and fuck me all night and no one would get hurt but me. If I was aiming for self-destruction, Jimmy Ray was the fastest, most obvious choice. But I still owed Junie some justice, and a detour with Jimmy Ray wouldn’t get me where I needed to go. The moment passed, and I took a step backward.

  “You don’t know anything about it?” I pressed and saw the way Jimmy Ray’s fist folded into a knot. I didn’t think he’d hit me here, in front of everyone, not least of all because he preferred hitting women who were attached to him. That way he could watch the painful aftermath, make us beg for his forgiveness and ask for a second chance. It wasn’t nearly as satisfying to punch someone who could turn and walk away. But I steeled myself anyway, readied myself for a blow. Welcomed it almost.

  Jimmy Ray shook his head, spoke through a clenched jaw. “All I know is I didn’t do it,” he said. Which, when I thought about it later, didn’t really answer my question at all.

  SEVEN

  The smell of stale smoke woke me in the morning, and it took me a few bleary-eyed seconds to realize the stench was from my own hair. I could imagine the way those strippers smelled after a night in the club, although smoke might be the least offensive scent they had to deal with. I rolled over with a groan, squinting against the sunlight that pierced through my curtains and jabbed into my eyes. I hadn’t had more than that single sip of beer last night, but my whole body throbbed like I was nursing the world’s worst hangover. Even my skin ached. Maybe it was grief, oozing out through my pores. My body had suffered when Junie came into the world. It seemed only fitting that it suffered when she left.

  I forced myself out of bed, whimpering a little when my feet hit the floor and I shoved myself to standing. I shuffled to the bathroom and was just heading to the kitchen to put on a pot of coffee when my gaze landed on the patterned curtain blocking off the small dining alcove. It was the one spot I’d avoided looking since the night Cal brought me home from the funeral home. Junie’s “room,” such as it was. When Junie had been alive, I hadn’t thought much about the space. But now that she was gone, it taunted me. Not only because I associated it so strongly with my daughter, but because it was a reminder of another way I’d failed her. What child wants to grow up without a room of her own? Wants to make do with a sectioned-off portion of the living room? Even I’d had a room in the trailer growing up. I had to share it with Cal, and it was hot in the summer and cold in the winter and smelled like mildew and urine. But it was still a room. Four walls and a door. More than Junie ever had. She’d shared a room with me until she was eight and then moved into the alcove. I’d mentioned it to her sometimes, said I was sorry I couldn’t give her more, and she’d always scoffed, said she liked her space fine. It had always seemed like she meant it. But now, without her voice competing with the scolding one in my head, I found her assurances hard to believe. If she hadn’t been ashamed, then why had she so rarely invited Izzy to our apartment? And even then, only for a quick dinner or to watch a movie, never to spend the night. She always wanted to go to Izzy’s, never the other way around. That’s another thing no one tells you about dealing with death, how afterward the only voice you can hear is your own, reminding you of everything you did wrong.

  I sidled over to the drawn curtain, slowly, like it was a rattler that might bite. Laid my hand gingerly on the cotton fabric. Yellow-and-white paisley. Pottery Barn. I’d done that one thing right, at least. Worked extra shifts at the diner until I could afford to let Junie pick something nice, quality, not some shiny, polyester crap from the clearance bin. It seemed a silly distinction now, but it had mattered to me at the time.

  I drew the curtain back, the hooks tinkling against the wooden rod Cal had installed one snowy December night. It had been her Christmas present that year, a can of sunny yellow paint for the alcove walls, new bedding, the curtain. A small bookcase I’d rescued from the thrift store and painted white. A pink glass bedside lamp Cal’s contribution.

  The room had changed very little in the ensuing years. The books on the bookcase morphing from children’s to young adult. A small dresser squeezed in against the far wall, the top littered with earrings and spare change and accumulated junk. But the tiny twin bed still had the same quilt, the pink lamp still perched on her bedside table.

  I took a step beyond the curtain, and the smell of Junie smacked me in the face. The scent I’d been searching for when I’d kissed her in the morgue. Her hair, her skin, the mint gum she always chewed, the grapefruit bodywash she loved. A small, choked sound escaped me, and I covered my mouth with one hand, trying to hold it in. The sudden surge of pain was so huge, so monumental, that I feared expelling it would rip my insides out, lungs and heart and stomach gushing out of me, a bloody pile of organs left on the floor. But my hand was no match for my grief, and the bed rose up to greet me as I fell, burying my face in her pillow to muffle my screams.

  I don’t know how long I thrashed on her bed, slamming my face into the mattress and scratching at my own skin. Trying to get away from the anguish that had burrowed into the marrow of my bones. Go ahead and give it your best shot, the pain said. I’ll be here waiting when you give up. And eventually, I did. My sobs winding down like a toy with a dying battery, my body limp and spent, hair sweat-plastered to my skull. The pain was still there, just as it had promised. But I could carry it now. For a little while, at least. And that was something.

  I rolled over, stared through tear-swollen lids at the constellation stickers plastered to Junie’s ceiling. Probably every second kid in America had a set, but we’d both been enthralled by them, as if t
hey were rare gems instead of a random Dollar General find. Spent long minutes lying here side by side at night, heads touching on her pillow, watching the planets glow.

  “Hey, Junie,” I said. “Are you up there?” I hoped she was. Hoped my girl was flying, somewhere beyond the stars.

  The day stretched out before me, empty and pointless. I could go to the diner, but I knew Thomas would march my ass straight back out again. I had to wait a few more days before I could plead my case and beg to go back to work. You find him, my mama’s voice hissed inside my head. But I had no idea how. I’d talked to Jimmy Ray and gotten exactly nowhere. And I’d only thought of him because Land had mentioned him first. I wasn’t a detective. I wasn’t even a cop. I was a thirty-year-old with a high school diploma, a dead daughter, and not much else. Well, then you might as well say, “Fuck it.” Let the bastard get away. ’Cause ain’t nobody gonna give a shit about who killed Junie except you. Not really. My mama’s voice again. And true words, even though she’d never actually spoken them. Well, not exactly true. Cal cared. Almost as much as I did, I suspected. But he was hampered by his status as a cop. Everyone knew him, same as they did me, but he was on the other side of the law now. He might have been the Cal they fished with as kids or stole beers with as teenagers. But he was Cal the cop now, and that changed things. That was a shift you didn’t come back from, not around here. People liked him fine, but they weren’t ever going to tell him their secrets.

  But people might talk to me, crazy Lynette Taggert’s daughter. I was one of them. Had grown up here and still hadn’t managed to claw my way up or out. So, yeah, they might talk. If I could figure out who to corner and the right questions to ask. I thought back to that night at the funeral home, the things Land had said. Asking us if the girls had been acting any different lately, if we’d noticed a change. I truly hadn’t. But that didn’t mean there hadn’t been one. Junie and I had been close, closer than most mothers and daughters. But I wasn’t stupid in the ways of teenage girls. I’d been one myself not all that long ago, and I knew the secrets they squirreled away, the crazy, self-destructive things they sometimes did in the mistaken belief that they were too young for anything really terrible to actually touch them. Hell, I’d been as wild as they come at Junie’s age. Had already smoked my first cigarette and nursed my first hangover by twelve. Had lost my virginity at thirteen to one of my mom’s boyfriends. Not rape, exactly. More of a lazy kind of coercion—come on, baby, you know you want to, I’ll make it good—where it’s easier to go along and get it over with than put up a fight. At least then you can lie to yourself after and say it had been partly your own idea. I knew more than I wanted to about the secret lives of teenage girls.

  I sat up on Junie’s bed, remembering the notebook I’d seen her writing in sometimes. She always said it was for her poetry. Read to me from the wrinkled pages. But whenever I got too close, she hunched over, hugging it to her body, where I couldn’t get more than a glimpse of the words written there. At the time, I’d pictured hastily scrawled notes about boys she thought were cute. Maybe even harsh words aimed at me on the rare occasions when we fought, usually about something stupid like her wearing her coat to school or not staying up too late on school nights. But what if there was something more? Part of me didn’t want to look for fear I would find another way to punish myself after the fact. But I couldn’t let it go, either.

  The cops had already given her room a perfunctory search, but hadn’t found anything as far as I knew. They were looking for some big smoking gun that I could have told them wasn’t there before they ever set foot inside. I was on the hunt for something less obvious. I let my eyes wander around the room, the small space bereft of many hiding places. A quick rummage through her dresser drawers yielded nothing more exciting than a pack of gum and a few loose marbles from a set Cal had given her years ago. I thought back to my own childhood, the places I stashed money or secrets in hopes my mama wouldn’t find either. I slid my hand between Junie’s mattress and box spring and hit pay dirt, pulling out the notebook with Property of Junie scrawled in gold marker across the navy blue cover.

  I pulled back the cover carefully, almost wincing against what I might find. Junie’s presence enveloped me as I read her words, saw the doodles she’d drawn on the edges of the pages. I hoped she didn’t mind, my snooping into her private world. I took my time, running my fingers over places where her pen had dug into the paper, smiling at quick notes she’d jotted complaining about a school assignment or lamenting my inability to cook. Had a fight w/ Izzy, but we’re good now, adorned the top of one page, followed by a heart. There was no mention of boys or drugs or sneaking out. Nothing that set my alarm bells ringing. Nothing until the final pages. Where in a bottom corner, writing cramped like she was fighting to get the words out, Junie wrote: Worried about Izzy. I told her he’s too old. But she’s not listening. To anyone. She says it’s love, but it’s really only lust. Gross. Just thinking about it makes me sick. I wish she would wake up. She’d written the word up with such force that her pen had torn through the paper.

  My breath gusted out of me. Here was something I could grab onto. A place to start, at least. Which was more than I’d had an hour ago. The day opened up in front of me. A reason to stand up and move. A reason to keep going.

  EIGHT

  Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School was twelve miles outside of town, down a winding road off the highway that hid it from view. It served the kids of the entire spread-out county, some riding the bus more than an hour each way to sit in an old, drafty building without enough teachers or anywhere near enough funds. They’d renamed the school a few years ago in a nod to diversity. When I’d attended, the county had been virtually all white. But nowadays, with the chicken-processing plant perched on the edge of the county line, the kids of immigrants roamed the halls, their parents taking jobs no locals would touch, even when other steady employment was almost impossible to come by. I’d listened to plenty of bitching about the name change while serving coffee in the diner, endless complaints about political correctness or, as one old-timer put it, “this bullshit idea that everybody’s got to be equal.” People around here didn’t like being force-fed progress, even when it could be argued that a mouthful was long overdue. I somehow doubted the name change did much to alter the reality for those kids, who were always going to be outsiders. Junie had hated the place, couldn’t wait to start high school in another year. I hadn’t had the heart to tell her that Harry S. Truman High School wasn’t much better, maybe even worse. Too many kids without a lot of hope for the future crowded into an even smaller space. From my graduating class, only a handful of kids had gone on to college. And of those, the majority had come back to Barren Springs without a degree. It’s hard to move up in the world when you’ve never seen it done.

  I counted myself lucky that I’d graduated at all. Seventh grade was the first time I’d set foot in an actual school. Cal and I were “educated” in the holler. My mama taught us our ABCs and not much else. Our closest neighbor, Miss Eileen, taught us to read and to do basic math in exchange for cigarettes from Mama. Seventh grade was the first time I’d realized that there was poor and then there was poor. And we were the second kind. Most people around here aren’t exactly rolling in dough, but there’s a difference between the people who live closer to town and the ones who stay hidden in the hollers. We were the ones who learned to read from the meth addict down the road, if we learned at all; the ones who wore not just hand-me-downs but clothes that didn’t fit or came covered in stains of unknown origin. We had a hungry, feral look about us, even on the rare times our bellies were full, which made us instantly recognizable targets. Or it would have if our mama’s reputation hadn’t preceded us. Our status as the poorest of poor white trash trumped only by our mama’s penchant for casual violence. Everybody remembered the kid who’d thrown a rock at Cal down by the river one day. No one could say if he’d actually meant to hit Cal or it had been an unlucky thr
ow. Hadn’t mattered to our mama, though. Next time we’d seen that kid, he’d been sporting a busted-up hand and scared, skittish eyes. Never would come within a country mile of either one of us again.

  Usually Junie rode the bus home from school, often going home with Izzy on days I worked past dinnertime. On the few occasions I picked her up from school, it had always been controlled chaos when the bell rang, and today was no exception. Kids spilled out of the doors like marbles shot from a cannon as I slid into a parking spot. I noticed a few security guards near the buses, and I wondered if they were a new addition or if I never had a reason to notice them before. Either way, I guessed they wouldn’t look too kindly on an adult approaching the kids, even if I did appear relatively harmless. Which meant I needed to intercept Hallie before they noticed me.

  Junie and Izzy had been an almost closed loop of friendship. A fact that always made me nervous. I told myself my anxiousness stemmed from worrying about what might happen if the friendship blew up and Junie was left adrift and alone. Or wanting her to have more friends so she wasn’t isolated. Growing up, Cal had been my only anchor, and now, as an adult, I still had trouble broadening my circle. Felt unmoored without Cal close by. I didn’t want that for Junie. Those reasons were both true. But they weren’t the truest one. Still, Junie and Izzy’s friendship wasn’t completely impenetrable. There were a few girls who hovered on the outside edges, who received birthday party invites or sat with Junie and Izzy at lunch. The one I knew best, Hallie Marshall, had been to the apartment a few times, had shown up in social media pictures next to Junie and Izzy.

  I stood near my car, eyes scanning the doors of the school until I saw Hallie walk out, her reddish hair covered by a gray beanie. When I called her name, she pivoted, brought one hand up to block the sun as she peered at me.