Tall Bones

by Anna Bailey

  ‘Abi’s dead.’

  Her mother, whose friends are still alive, says, ‘I know. I’m sorry.’

  ‘She didn’t want to tell me what was going on with her because apparently I had too many of my own problems. Did you know that, Mom? Did you know about all my problems?’

  Melissa presses her lips together for a moment, and Emma doesn’t trust how quiet she’s being. She thinks, I stole this liquor, Mom. I lied to you. If I were you, I would be so mad, I’d want to scream.

  But her mother says, ‘I think Abigail was going through something none of us could really have understood.’ Then she adds, ‘Give me the bottle, please, Em. We don’t have to talk about where you got it right now, but please give me the bottle.’

  Oh, Emma thinks, she’s trying to be gentle, like I’m crazy or something. It makes her want to be ungentle in return.

  ‘I know you know something about Dad and you’re not telling me.’

  ‘Not this again, Em. I thought we were done with this.’

  ‘I’m tired of people not telling me things. It’s all right for you, you got to be someone before my dad, but all I’ve ever had is the lack of him!’

  ‘Emma—’

  ‘My whole life people in this town have treated me different because I’m Latina, and the one person who could have explained that to me, who could have helped me, he just disappeared. I know something happened to him. Something happened and you won’t tell me.’

  Melissa rubs her elbow. ‘I have told you, Emma. He left.’

  ‘People don’t just … They can’t just keep leaving me. That’s not fair. What happened to him that night, Mom? What did Jerry Maddox do to him? What did you do?’

  When Emma says that, her mother sits down. She actually sits down, as if Emma had walked across the room and pushed her on to the couch.

  ‘Em …’ Melissa puts her head into her hands. ‘It wasn’t meant to be like this. I thought I was helping … I never meant to hurt you.’ Her mother stares at some distant spot on the carpet, her hands splayed out over her knees as she takes a deep breath. ‘He was bleeding when he came home, your dad. They’d cut him up so bad, Jerry Maddox and the others. He still had bits of glass in his hands, and I had to pull them out with my eyebrow tweezers.’

  ‘Mom.’

  Emma sits down at her feet. She feels very much like a child, looking up at her mother’s face, but the pale creases there remind her that they are both older now, so she puts her hands over Melissa’s white knuckles.

  ‘Your dad, he worked at the mill, and business was bad then. A lot of people were unhappy since they’d had to take a pay cut, and they got this rumour going that Jerry Maddox was skimming money. But Miguel took it seriously, started poking around. I think he must have found something, too, because he got Sheriff Gains involved – although he wasn’t the sheriff back then, just some deputy – and Gains went and told his boss. Sheriff Ringer, as it was back then, he spilled it all to Jerry Maddox because the man offered to give him a leg up. Got him working for City Hall down in Denver, last I heard. Gains probably thought he was doing the right thing, I guess, but he should have known better in a town like this. If he hadn’t said anything …’

  Melissa sucks in her breath, and Emma isn’t sure she likes the way her mother’s looking at her.

  ‘You know what they did to that Romanian boy? See, Jerry’s always been pally with the pastor and he had him saying the most awful things in church back then. People listened to Ed Lewis every Sunday, and eventually they got it into their heads that migrant workers were the real reason they weren’t making as much money as before. Miguel wasn’t even a migrant worker, he was from Albuquerque, for Christ sakes, but these people couldn’t tell the difference, or maybe they didn’t care. One night, your father came home all bloody, said a bunch of guys from the mill had jumped him and …’

  Melissa’s eyes begin to water, although she is not crying properly, not yet.

  ‘He wanted us to go. Wanted us to take off just like that in the middle of the night, said it’d never be safe for him here. But, you see, I’d just got my qualification. I’d worked so hard and spent so much money, and I was going to be a doctor, that was my thing, I’d earned that all by myself, and I wasn’t about to give it up. We got married so young, and God, Emma … Your dad, he wanted to take you with him. He didn’t want to leave his little girl behind. He said it didn’t matter how white I was, you would never have it easy here. But you heard us shouting and you came down and saw him like that, with the blood on his hands, and you were so frightened. Oh, Em, you were so scared, you didn’t want to go with him, you just held on to me and cried, and I held you right back and wouldn’t let you go.’

  Emma stares at her. Her mother’s mascara is running.

  ‘I loved your dad, I really did, just … I thought …’ Her voice breaks and she paws at her eyes. ‘I thought, if I could keep it a secret, what those bastards did to Miguel, you wouldn’t have to grow up knowing that some people can be so hateful. I just figured they would leave you alone, if you had me. And I was ashamed of what I’d done, letting him go like that when he had nobody else. I let myself think I was helping you, but in the end all that’s happened is you’ve grown up thinking your father never loved you, that people never loved you, and that’s not true, Em, it’s never been true.’

  Melissa covers her face with her hands, sloping forwards in a way that feels like a landslide to Emma kneeling at her feet. Emma puts her arms around her mother, pulling her as close as she can like she’s trying to contain her.

  ‘Oh, God, Em, I’m so sorry.’

  Emma has said sorry herself so many times this last month, she knows what it is her mother needs to hear.

  ‘It’s okay.’ She says it for both of them. ‘It’s not your fault.’

  After a bland dinner of soda crackers and banana, Hunter looks up to see his father standing at the foot of his bed. He has recently dyed over the strands of grey in his hair and he is wearing a tie.

  ‘You didn’t have to get all dressed up for me, Dad.’

  Jerry Maddox smooths out a non-existent crease in his shirt. ‘There’s a journalist from Boulder, wants to do a story about the stabbing. It’s dramatic stuff, Hunter. Your mother and I had our photo taken.’

  ‘Cool, I guess. Do they want a photo of me?’

  ‘They already got one while you were sleeping off the anaesthetic. Apparently you look more sympathetic unconscious.’

  Hunter gives a low whistle and flops back against his pillow. ‘So I take it you’re still mad at me for breaking into your office?’

  ‘Can I sit?’

  He feels the weight of his father settling on the far end of his bed. Jerry appears to be attempting to cross his legs, but seems to think better of it.

  ‘Hunter, I’m concerned you might have gotten the wrong impression the other night. That lipstick, or whatever it is – I wasn’t keeping that because I … She dropped it, see. It was ages ago now, but the Blake girl was all strung out on something, so I gave her some water and we talked a little, and then she dropped that lipstick when she was walking away. Now,’ Jerry holds up his hands, ‘I’ll admit that I shouldn’t have hung on to it, that was just plain dumb, but I need you to understand: I never laid a hand on her. It was nothing. Just an appreciation of a pretty girl. You can understand that, can’t you?’

  ‘Does Mom know about your appreciation of pretty girls?’

  ‘Come on now, don’t be difficult.’

  ‘Well, someone has to be.’

  ‘You know, Hunter, I can’t figure you out. Samuel Blake didn’t come round and rip your guts out for nothing. If you were mixed up with the Blake girl, you could have told me. I would have helped you. I’m doing everything I can to keep your name out of it – hell, what do you think the journalist is for? But now you’ve lost out on the state championships, you can kiss goodbye to ever playing competitive sports again with an injury like that, and you don’t even seem to care.’

/>   ‘Because I don’t. Dad, you’re the one who wanted me to play basketball, because that’s what you did in high school, but nobody’s ever asked me what I want.’

  ‘Well, what do you want?’

  Hunter sighs and turns his face away. ‘I don’t want to end up like you.’

  He feels the mattress shift as his father stands. ‘This journalist that’s come up to talk to us, if she does pay you a visit, I would appreciate it if none of this business with the lipstick came out. You know how they are down in Boulder. She’s got very liberal sensibilities.’ At the door his father pauses. ‘And your mother. Don’t mention it to her either.’

  Hunter closes his eyes and nods. Whatever you want, like always, Dad. Maybe he owes his father that much. He had been so desperate to believe that Abigail might have survived that fall – to believe what happened to her in the end might have been somebody else’s fault – he was prepared to accuse his own father, because of, what, an overheard conversation behind the Tysons’ trailer? Because Hunter had seen him in the woods as he trudged home that night?

  It was probably the rough waters of the river that had pulled her cardigan off, he thinks. And yet, when he squeezes his eyes shut now, he remembers the strange curve of Abigail’s mouth as she disappeared over the rocks. How she’d said, You’re not saving me, you’re helping. There’s a difference.

  Jerry drives home with the radio on to keep him from thinking too much. He only slows the truck when he sees the journalist’s car turning out of Elkstone Bend, and he pulls over to flag her down.

  ‘You get everything you need?’ he says, rolling down the window.

  ‘Oh, yes.’ She smiles. ‘It’s going to be a great story, Mr Maddox.’

  He sighs with relief and doesn’t care if she sees it. ‘You take care now,’ he calls, waving as she speeds off towards town, although she does not wave back. Women today, he thinks. This new-wave feminism is not a replacement for simple manners.

  He parks in the staccato of late-afternoon shadows stretching across the yard, but he keeps his hands on the wheel a moment longer, even after he’s killed the engine. I am not a bad husband, he thinks. Not a bad father. I am a man, and the Lord would not have made me this way if He had such a problem with it.

  Sitting there, he can see that some of the aspens near the porch need pruning back: he’ll have to get on that before winter sets in. The tarp over the garage roof has come loose, flapping in a wind that smells deeply of woodsmoke. That will need fixing too, and the loose board on the deck that Andie’s always nagging him about. He leans back in the driver’s seat and closes his eyes. Life will go on. Hunter will come around.

  It’s only when he climbs out of the truck that Jerry sees the writing on the front door. For one horrible moment he thinks it might be blood, and he gags, remembering the great hole in Hunter’s abdomen when they first brought him to the hospital. Looking closer, he sees it is only red spray paint, but he thinks he wouldn’t have minded so much whatever the hell it was written with, if only that journalist hadn’t seen, in big block capitals: ‘RACIST JERRY LIKES TEENAGE GIRLS.’

  Melissa holds her daughter’s hair back while she throws up Jack Daniel’s.

  ‘Mom.’ Emma’s voice has a slight echo in the toilet bowl. ‘I think I need help.’

  ‘Can I get you some water or something?’

  ‘No, I mean, like … I mean professional help.’

  It strikes Melissa cold for a moment, that word, ‘professional’. As if what she has to give isn’t good enough. As if what she’s been giving all this time has never been good enough and that is how they’ve ended up here. If her daughter needs professional help, what will people think of her as a mother?

  But this makes her think of Dolly – poor Dolly who had said the same thing. For an awful moment she pictures Abigail lying pale and silent in the dirt, her lips blue, her eyes glassy, sodden leaves tangled in her brilliant hair. Then suddenly it is Emma lying there instead.

  Melissa shakes her head and rubs her daughter’s shoulders, to reassure herself that her little girl is still there. ‘Whatever you need,’ she says. ‘We’ll figure this out.’

  When the phone rings, they are curled up together on the couch. Emma has her head in her mother’s lap while Melissa strokes her hair. It smells mildly of vomit, but that hardly seems to matter when her daughter is alive.

  Emma’s cellphone continues vibrating in her purse, and eventually, tired of the sound, Melissa picks the bag up off the floor, rummaging between scrunchies and tampons and a can of red spray paint. She doesn’t recognize the number, but she answers anyway, thinking it could be Emma’s friend from the hospital. At first she can’t hear anything, but then, faintly, comes the sound of someone breathing.

  ‘Who is this?’ she asks. ‘Do you want to talk to Emma?’

  The breathing stops and there is just the faint crackle of static.

  ‘Hello?’

  The line goes dead.

  51

  THE DAY AFTER Halloween, when pumpkins still sit grinning from every porch and loose candy wrappers rattle down the sidewalks in the mountain wind, a crowd gathers outside the Whistling Ridge cemetery to watch the Blake family put Samuel into the ground.

  They tug on their scarves and stamp the cold out of their feet, whispering. There is Dolly all in black, the heels on her best shoes still worn down unevenly, but she stands straighter now, one arm around her younger son, who holds his head up, daring anyone to look at them for too long. And there is Noah, his lips still chapped, his nose still broken, but beside him, Rat takes off a pair of big dark glasses, tilting his head up slightly to feel the bleary sunlight on the puckered side of his face.

  People are looking at Rat. They are looking at Pastor Lewis too, as he reads the burial service. There is a sense of resentment in the air, Dolly thinks, as she watches a Hershey’s wrapper alight on the edge of her husband’s coffin. Folks resent Ed Lewis for inciting them to do what they did that night at the trailer park. They feel guilty, but they can’t all blame themselves, so they will blame him instead. A week later, people will begin asking when the last time was anybody saw the Lewis family.

  ‘In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for dust you are, and to dust you shall return.’

  Dolly isn’t sure what she’s expecting – a sense of closure, maybe, at seeing Samuel lowered into the earth. It’s not as simple as that, she knows. Closure comes with understanding, and she will never really understand why he was the way he was. There will be people down the years who nod knowingly and say it was because of Vietnam, or because Samuel was a ‘something-o-path’ or a ‘something-ist’, and she will say, ‘Yes, maybe you’re right,’ but it won’t make things any clearer. In that sense, Abigail is not the only thing he has denied her burying.

  As it is, she can only burn his plastic angels and his bone wind chimes and have someone plaster over the hole in the wall, and that will have to be enough for now.

  After the service, Noah says, ‘You go on, Mom. I’ll see you back at the house.’ He stands by the grave with his hands tucked up under his armpits, while everyone else files out slowly, as if there is still some part of them that doesn’t quite want this to be over yet. He understands that. Transitional moments like these give the impression that things will be different next time around, but what if nothing’s really changed?

  Rat leans on a nearby headstone and pulls out a carton of cigarettes so scrunched up that Noah doesn’t even realize what they are until he hears the click of the lighter.

  ‘Hey, stop that.’

  ‘Blake, you’re killing me here. Just one. I won’t tell if you don’t.’

  ‘You know what the doctor said about your eye.’

  ‘My eye’s fine.’ Rat lowers his sunglasses and waggles his one remaining eyebrow.

  Noah sticks out his leg and taps the toe of his boot against the little plastic cross currently marking his father’s buri
al plot.

  Rat says, ‘Come on. Let’s go for a walk.’

  The cemetery is empty now so the two of them meander among the graves, arm in arm, while the winter wind catches up their hair and makes their jackets flap.

  ‘Do you talk to your parents at all?’ Noah asks.

  ‘I haven’t spoken to them since I was … eighteen, I think?’

  ‘Is it better that way?’

  ‘Oh, I see. This is about your mother, isn’t it?’

  Noah nudges him. ‘Don’t change the subject.’

  Rat nudges back. ‘You’re upset because she won’t have a proper row with you. I think you’re just going to have to accept that she’s sorry.’

  ‘Right, but it’s not that simple. I mean, she screwed up, you think she should just get away with it?’

  Rat frowns, which always makes him look more severe than he means, these days, the one side of his face crinkled like old newspaper. ‘You think that’s how the world gets fixed,’ he says, ‘people just getting mad and staying mad? I know we’ve all got that fantasy of telling the people who hurt us just how much it hurt, but most of the time they’re not even sorry, and then what? You’re just going to be pissed off for the rest of your life?’

  ‘But aren’t you still mad? About the fire, I mean?’

  ‘Now who’s changing the subject.’ Rat turns his face away so that Noah can see only the unburned side.

  They have slowed to a stop, and Rat stomps on the dead leaves collecting by his feet, getting mulch all over the pointy patent boots that Dolly bought for him, perplexingly, when he got out of hospital.

  Noah says, ‘You never talk about your mom.’

  ‘I was living in an RV on a whole other continent. I imagined that spoke for itself.’