by Casey Dunn
I was small for my age, undernourished and constantly in motion. In this picture, my younger self is drowning in fabric. Once my clothes were too small, I had only my father’s to wear. There was no in-between, save the random jacket or pair of shoes some woman from the church would drop off when the weather turned each year. I was covered in acne and ghostly pale. My hair was lighter then, too, mousy brown, stringy and long, and constantly covering my face. I remember the photographer coming around the camera to tuck the curtains of it behind my ears when I refused to do it myself. I’d shaken my head just before the picture, and greasy clumps of hair had framed my cheeks like prison bars.
The school never did ask when I planned to reenroll, and the women from the church, who once brought over fresh-baked casseroles and pies every Sunday and Wednesday for years after my father’s funeral, shifted to dropping off nonperishables once a month following the verdict. The bags were more like donations to a food pantry, and I remember wondering what ate at them so much that they were bound and determined to keep us just enough alive.
My father’s death.
My mother’s sight.
Me.
Maybe Mother was right. They saw the bruises and burns on my limbs. They watched my pants become too loose and too short, the fronts cut out of my shoes to keep from rubbing sores on the tops of my toes. They explained away the time Ms. Nichols caught me with her cat tucked inside my jacket in the dead heat of summer, limp and foaming red spittle. This town had taken enough from me and my mother, they’d decided, so they would not take my future, too.
All this time, Ama thought she’d won, when really she was never going to lose.
A card catalog slams shut, and my mind returns to the library, my eyes to my reflection on my computer screen, my face parallel to the image of my teenage self. Even side by side, I wouldn’t consider these two faces one in the same. Similar… a relative familiarity, maybe. But in coming home, I have been born anew. I will have to claw out from neither Mother’s shadow nor her thumb. I am not of her any longer. I am born of Lady Fate, and she has named me Jonathon Walks.
I leave the library and drive to my old street. My childhood home comes into view, a brick corner peeking out from behind a magnolia tree. The squat house seems even smaller now, quieter. The windows are dark, but I can see the same checkered curtains on the other side of the bay window off to the right side of the front door, so chances are my mother still owns it.
I should’ve searched for her obituary. In retrospect, her health had been in a tailspin since before my baby sister was born. It just didn’t become obvious until her sight failed and her hair grayed and began falling out by the handful. Even then, though, I didn’t think she was sick, just that she was poisoned with regret of me.
I spy a potted flower on the stoop, and my toe pushes down on the brake pedal. I idle in the road, staring. Pink blossoms are visible even from this distance. The plant is thriving under my mother’s care. This is perhaps a larger surprise than finding out this town thinks I’m dead.
I let off the brake and roll past my house. If everyone thinks I’m dead, I can’t very well walk up the three steps to Janie Walton’s house and knock on the door. There is only one place I can go, one place I can stay out of sight until I figure out how Fate means for me to complete our song.
I have to think about how to drive to the factory; I have only ever walked there. I pull down the dirt road and leave the Jeep in a cluster of trees. The factory looms ahead. I imagined it would be covered in kudzu or moss, nature slowly slaying the concrete beast. But it is just as stark as the day I last saw it. The wind picks up and sends dust spinning in the empty lot. Even though I am alone, I swear I hear boots on gravel, the laughter of men grateful for a break in the day. I turn, feeling like a child, too small in my clothes, the air too big in my lungs, but no one is there.
I raise my shoulders around my face, turn from the factory, and stride for the entrance to my father’s underground shelter. The grass grows taller and thicker the farther back I walk, and I have to trace several circles before I find the metal cap, which I do with my toe—it’s a sudden rise in the ground, a change in tone underfoot.
Kneeling, I wipe away the dust and dirt, and the cap appears. More dirt and small pebbles have filled the gap between the cap and the frame, and I have to scrape it out with my pinkie finger. At last I pry the cap loose and set it aside. The tunnel down is shallower than I remember. I don’t even need the ladder. I just hop down. With my feet flat on the dirt floor, I can reach back out and touch the grass. I don’t remember my father’s head being quite so near the surface. Am I now taller than he was then? I can’t imagine the possibility.
The hatch door to the shelter is located ninety degrees from the ladder. Indirect light spills down the hole and across the door in a diagonal slice. I turn the dial, pull the door open, and step through.
I let my eyes adjust in what dim light filters in from the hatch door. The square table is still in the middle of the room, one chair pulled out like someone got up for a glass of water and hasn’t come back yet. I struggle to remember the last time I was here. Had I left a chair out? I can’t imagine being so careless, but my head was spinning, my hands trembling at the idea of leaving my home, my song, behind. I had only just discovered my instrument. I had nearly bolted up the ladder, my father’s stick knocking against the rungs as I ascended.
The cabinet doors are all closed. I open the closest one. Cans of beans and bags of rice, years expired, are stacked in rows. I will need to throw these out. I make a note to add trash bags to my shopping list, the black kind that stretch no matter what you put in them. I’ll need to do my shopping elsewhere, somewhere bigger; box stores, younger employees, higher turnover. Somewhere that I am but a face among thousands.
I bypass the next few doors and open the next-to-last one. It’s shallower than the others, but the back wall is false, a place my father once hid a handgun and where now my first bone carvings are stored. I remember Timmy’s radius breaking when I cut down too hard and deep. His ribs were better for me to learn on, flatter and denser. I carved a conductor’s wand out of one. I pick it up now, noting the rough, uneven surface. I smile, remembering my pride, my wonder. Now, I see a rudimentary effort, a beginner’s work.
I crouch to open the lower cabinet. Timmy’s lungs and throat are still pinned to a board. More mess, jagged edges and places the tissue tore. Everything is shriveled now, brown, dry, and cracking. I’d sprayed them with a sealant I’d found in my father’s tools. Considering the chemicals I’d used and the time that had elapsed, I’m surprised there’s anything left at all. Perhaps it’s a gift from Fate, a reminder of how far we’ve come.
One day my compositions will be worth millions. I could put them on eBay and watch the price skyrocket. I won’t have to hide my work anymore. People will understand. The masterpiece will be reason enough. People will line up. Take me, they’ll cry. I want to be part of your song. I want to be remembered for all of time.
The vision fades and the bunker returns, dark and quiet. In the back corner, a generator sits under a blue tarp. My father showed me how to start it, made sure I committed every step to memory, and as I walk to it and pull off the tarp, I wonder if he hadn’t made this shelter for himself… if all along he had made it for me. Why would he have shown me how everything worked, how to connect each appliance to the generator, made me memorize a list of priority uses for the limited electricity supply, revealed where every tunnel led to, where his weapons were stowed, if he had planned on being here, too?
Father must have made this for me.
MARTIN Chapter 42 | 2:00 AM, December 3, 2006 | Tarson, Georgia
GO HOME, MARTIN.
Captain’s orders chased Martin out of the office and into the night. The same three words followed him down the two-lane roads between the station and his street, up the porch stairs, and through his front door. He slammed it shut, and the sudden disturbance in the stale air made the stack of
paper he’d left on the ground light a few inches above the carpet. He tossed Ama’s file into the room ahead of him, feeling brief satisfaction as her picture and his notes scattered across the floor.
How could Captain send him home with Eddie sleeping on a damn couch in an office, with six faces staring out from their investigation board and absolutely zero in terms of leads?
Ama’s voice slipped into his head—I don’t remember anything. She was lying, he knew. It was the way she said it, so sure about not being sure. He wanted to take her by her shoulders and shake her, to show her a picture of Hazel and Eddie and make her understand what she was costing them. If this woman had been willing to tell the truth, this case could be cracked wide-open. Hell, it could be solved and done. What could a stranger in the woods have said to her in a matter of hours that would spook her—a defense attorney, who had no doubt seen some shit in her career—so bad?
His ears rang. The floor beneath him began to tilt. He walked unsteadily to the bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet. It was empty. Of course it was. There was no pill fairy that would magically conjure a prescription and fill it. Martin shut the mirrored door and took stock of his reflection. His eyes were bloodshot, his skin sallow and hanging from the peaks of his cheekbones. It had been two days since he’d eaten something that hadn’t come out of a vending machine.
He didn’t want to eat. He wanted to work. He turned his back on the mirror and took out his cell phone. No service. He tilted his chin to the ceiling and closed his eyes. Did he have any prescriptions with refills left?
Stop it.
He needed something. A meeting, maybe. But he hadn’t looked into NA since arriving, and to look it up he’d have to drive back to the station. If he got in his car, it wouldn’t be a meeting he’d go looking for. It would be a fix. And even though he didn’t yet know much about Tarson, he knew the usual places to start asking. Push came to shove, he could always go drown himself in a case of cheap beer.
Get it together, Martin.
He returned to the living room, and his eyes caught on the picture of Ama he’d printed out at the station—her gray eyes, her tight-mouthed smile. He growled down at her, then moved out the door, down the steps, past his car, to the end of his driveway, and into the middle of the road, his breath and footsteps punctuating the quiet of the night. He pulled his phone from his pocket and selected the only number left on his speed-dial list.
“Hello?” his ex-wife’s voice was groggy with sleep.
“Don’t hang up,” he said.
The line went dead.
Martin pressed the phone to his middle and doubled over, hunger and desperation churning in his stomach. He wanted to scream or throw the phone or run into the darkness and not stop. He was chasing a ghost—a theory. Was it any wonder he couldn’t catch it?
Martin stared at the ground, his hands in fists. He’d have a better chance sleeping at the station than he would here, and at least if he locked himself inside, he’d have to think a little longer before going to hunt down some kid with a backpack pharmacy.
He climbed in his car and cranked the ignition. His phone rang. He fished it out of his pocket and answered it without looking.
“This is Martin.”
“What did you take?” his ex-wife, Stacy, asked.
“Nothing.” A tremble began inside him. “I’m clean, I swear. I didn’t want to be. I’m still… I’m fighting it.”
“What’s wrong?”
The burn of tears came to Martin’s eyes, and he had to stifle a laugh of relief at the sound of her. Someone who knew him. Someone who had once loved him.
“It’s… it’s a case,” he started.
“Go ahead,” she said, and he could hear her settling into her favorite chair, the creak of leather, the shift of a heavy blanket. Only his wife was cold year-round in Savannah.
Ex-wife, he reminded himself; then he relayed everything he knew about the case.
“Go to sleep, Martin,” she said once he was finished. “It’s three thirty in the morning. You sound delirious. Go to sleep, and when you wake up, tell Eddie what Ama said. He’s known all this time what no one else has seen.”
“Or he killed his daughter and shot Ama in cold blood,” Martin countered, Stacy’s sudden certainty somehow having the opposite effect on his own.
“He didn’t. At least, you don’t think he did,” she said.
“You don’t know that.”
“Yes, I do. I know you, Marty. I still know you. Can you imagine how upset he’d be if he found out from anyone else that you have evidence Hazel might still be alive?”
Martin breathed out, weighted down and buoyant at the same time. “Okay. So I tell him. Then what?”
“I don’t know,” she answered, her voice soft and far away. Martin caught himself pressing the speaker tighter against his ear, closing his fingers around the phone. “You’ll just have to wait and see,” she said. “Go get some rest.”
“Okay,” he answered, knowing full well he wouldn’t.
“I mean it. Eddie is going to have questions, and maybe good information you’ll miss if you’re tired when you hear it. He deserves to have you at your best.”
Martin breathed in, out, remembering all the times she’d tried to save him from himself, tried to save what they had. How she deserved to have him at his best and how he had let her down.
“Okay,” he said again. This time, he meant it.
MICHAEL Chapter 43 | October 2004 | Tarson, Georgia
SOMEONE HAS LAID FLOWERS AT the foot of my tombstone, which relays only my name and the dates of my birth and death. I cannot imagine who might have brought these here. My father’s and sister’s graves each have a single flower propped up on their markers. Mine is different, a cluster of blossoms tied with a ribbon. There’s no fourth tombstone for my mother. I’m not yet sure whether she’s still living in my old house, but it would seem she’s still alive.
My gaze lingers on my sister’s grave, and I can still imagine the boundary line of where they pulled the earth up, how short it was compared to all the other visible graves. By way of comparison, my father’s grave seemed impossibly long, the mound of dirt behind it a mountain. How would he claw his way through all of that when at last he woke up and came home?
I know now that he was working to prepare me. Mother, too, in her own way.
“You were wrong, Mother. The third time isn’t mastery. We don’t master. Not in this life. The very best we can hope for is to understand how to allow Fate to work her plan, to forfeit control. Three isn’t mastery. Three is Fate.”
I find myself wishing I was speaking to her grave.
A gust of hot air sails across the cemetery, and in it I hear echoes of my mother’s wail the day we put my sister in the ground, her hands and forehead pressed to the wet earth, her black dress hunching around hips still wide with recent pregnancy.
G. My mother grieves in G.
MARTIN Chapter 44 | 7:30 PM, December 3, 2006 | Tarson, Georgia
MARTIN AWOKE FACEDOWN ON HIS mattress, still wearing his work clothes, his shoes dropped on the floor at the foot of his bed, the heavy curtains drawn across his window shrouding the room in darkness. He felt around for his phone and, squinting, brought it to his face. The screen was black, the battery dead.
“Shit.” He struggled to sit up. Even though he’d spent most of the past couple of days sitting down or standing still, he felt as though he’d lost a boxing match and then been hit by a truck on the way home. He slid out of bed, plugged his phone into the charger, and shuffled into the kitchen to check the time. The clock on the microwave read seven thirty. Martin stared at it, then swung his gaze to the window, where morning sunlight should be streaming through, but it was black as night outside.
“Shit,” he repeated, louder this time. He’d slept all day. He cursed a blue streak under his breath as he littered a trail of musty clothes from the kitchen to the shower. He stepped under the spray of water the second he turned it on. It
was so cold it snatched his breath, and in his mind he could imagine Hazel running her guts out through torrential, frigid rain, heaving breaths, too scared to chance a look over her shoulder as she tried in vain to escape whoever had hunted her down in Tarson Woods.
Within fifteen minutes he was dressed and jogging out the door, his hair wet, the papers and pictures from Ama’s file jammed back inside the folder and hugged to his chest. He’d missed more than a dozen phone calls before his phone died, half of them from the precinct, several from an Atlanta phone number he didn’t recognize, and one from his ex-wife. She hadn’t left a message, but she had called. It was message enough.
The voicemails that had been left could wait until he got to the station. He was sure the captain was plenty pissed he’d been MIA, and Martin knew he’d plead his case for forgiveness more successfully in person.
He recited his speech in his head as he pulled into the parking lot. The heart of it came from what Stacy had said: Eddie deserves me at my best, sir. Hazel and Ama, too. I’m fresh now. Just give me one more day.
He pushed through the doors, determined to show how alert he was, how fresh, but no one else was there. His desk phone immediately rang. He hurried across the floor and snatched the receiver.
“Detective Locklear,” he said.
“Detective, I’ve been trying to reach you,” an unfamiliar woman’s voice said. “I spoke with Ama Chaplin last night about her attempted murder.”
“Formal charges haven’t been filed,” Martin responded, but uncertainty flared inside him. Anything could’ve happened in the past seventeen hours. “Who am I speaking to?”
“What’s the delay on that?” the voice continued. “Are you trying to decide if you’re also going to charge Eddie Stevens with the murder of Hazel Stevens?”