Mississippi Rose | Book 1 | Into Darkness

by Lopez, Rob

  Darla was so confused she didn’t know where to begin. Was this woman really the sister she thought she knew? “You’re not a disaster, Jo. And when did you learn to shoot?”

  “Ever since Jeff took me to a range. He’s very keen. Come on, we’ve been in the rain long enough. Come over to the house and bring your new friends. I like the look of one of them. He’s very handsome. Sally will definitely be taking an interest in him. Is he available?”

  “Only if Sally’s a guy.”

  “Ah. I’ll drop a hint to her so she doesn’t make a fool of herself.”

  “Don’t worry, I already made that mistake.”

  “At least you tried. I don’t want to see you give up, sis. Now, obviously you remember Jeff, even if he appears strange with the beard. I’m trying to get him to shave it off but he’s infatuated with the whole pioneer look. I honestly think he’s enjoying this whole situation. And this is his brother Brad. Don’t be put off by the name, he’s lovely. Brad, I’d like you to meet Darla, my sister. She has her own boat, you know. And she’s single.”

  Brad’s smile faded a little at the attempted matchmaking, and Darla winced.

  “Sis,” she warned.

  Jolene pulled a face. “Sorry, my mouth’s running away with me again. I can’t help it, I’m just so excited to see you.”

  “Yeah, I can do without your attempts to hook me up. The last date you pushed me onto was a disaster.”

  “I didn’t push you! And Brad’s not like that. Look, he’s offended now.”

  Brad looked like he wanted to be someplace else and Jeff nudged him, laughing.

  Carl and Zack walked over and everybody got introduced to each other. In the ensuing conversation Darla learned just how many people there were in this loose community, including the aforementioned Sally, an artist who rented a cabin on the edge of Jeff’s family’s land. Darla was bewildered by the dinner-party vibe as Jolene reeled off more names and detailed their connections. As they walked through the damp wood, Darla felt like she was in a dream. Her sister was so chatty, it was like the last couple of months hadn’t happened. It was surreal.

  The mother’s house was an L-shaped ranch-style house with a large yard, flanked by fir trees. A modern pickup and a couple of sedans sat by the double garage. Covered in pine needles and with flat tires, they were clearly no longer in use. The garage was now filled with sawed logs and the yard was covered in wood chips and sawdust. Another large field stretched from the house to the road, where a couple of other houses stood. The back yard was taken up with the relocated outhouse, a greenhouse with late season vegetables and a summer house with large windows. The fluffy white alpacas were in a nearby fenced clearing. They looked like small llamas to Darla and they didn’t appear friendly. They certainly didn’t look cute.

  The sound of raised voices brought Stephanie out of the house, her hair wild and unstyled. Darla only ever remembered seeing her in fashionable clothing, with a phone glued to her hand, but now she wore heavy work pants, rolled up to fit, and a double layer of sweaters.

  “Aunt D!” she called, running to hug Darla. “Did you bring the boat?”

  Darla was still a little stunned. “No other way to get here,” she mumbled.

  “Oh I know that. Can I go down to see it?”

  Darla thought about all the bullet holes. “Looks a little different now.”

  “I don’t mind that. Ooh, wait a minute.”

  Stephanie dashed back inside and returned with a toddler in her arms.

  “Look,” she said breathlessly. “You can meet my little sister now. Isn’t she a doll?”

  The toddler stared at Darla and Darla stared back, the blood freezing in her veins. Time stopped and she caught a glimpse of what Rose might have looked like if she’d lived. The toddler had the same lips, the same color eyes. Vertigo gripped Darla and she suddenly felt unsteady on her feet. Stephanie was saying something and offering her the toddler to hold, but Darla couldn’t hear the words. The image of Rose reached out to her and Darla nearly fainted.

  Jolene was suddenly at her side, holding her up.

  “Sweetie,” said Jolene to Stephanie, “take Mary back inside. Uh, and the rest of you guys too. Go on in out of the rain and we’ll join you later. Jeff, fix everyone a drink. We won’t be long.”

  32

  Jolene took Darla to the summer house and sat her down on a chair. Darla stared out through the rain-streaked windows, her heart pumping hard.

  “I’m sorry,” said Jolene. “I didn’t realize she was going to do that. I should have warned you, or introduced you properly, I don’t know.”

  “It’s okay,” managed Darla. “Just … a few too many shocks in one day.”

  “It’s not okay. I can’t believe I was so thoughtless …”

  “No, really.” Darla took a deep breath. “I should be over this, you know?”

  “I understand if you’re not. It’s a terrible thing to lose … someone close. Listen, if it had happened to me, I don’t know how I would have coped. Really. I think you’ve been so strong —”

  Darla gave a mirthless laugh. “I haven’t been strong, Jo. I’ve been a mess. I completely screwed up my life.”

  “That’s not true. Nobody bounces back easily from something like that.” Jolene put her hand on Darla’s knee. “I worried so much that it would break you and I’m so proud of you for what you did. You didn’t give up. You kept going. I couldn’t have done that.”

  Darla looked at her. “You wouldn’t have gotten yourself into my situation in the first place. You’re smarter than I was.”

  It was Jolene’s turn to laugh. “Trust me, I’m not. I’ve made mistakes.” Jolene grew introspective and awkward, as if not wanting to admit something. She walked to the window and put a hand to the cold glass, looking out. “Nobody’s perfect, sis.”

  She left the words hanging, inviting the question, but Darla declined the invitation.

  “Let’s just forget about it,” Darla said. “And don’t get mad at Stephanie. She couldn’t have known. I mean, she’s too young to understand —”

  “No,” said Jolene quickly. “You’re right. I wasn’t … I’m not that kind of … no, it’s fine.”

  There was a moment of uncomfortable silence.

  Darla took a deep breath. “So, how have you been?”

  Jolene gave a bitter chuckle. “Great. And you?”

  “Peachy.” Darla fidgeted in her chair. “Talking of peaches, I’ve brought a ton of canned goods up for you.”

  Jolene looked across the distance between them. “That’s great. The food situation’s been … a little tense.”

  “I can imagine. I guess it’s too late in the season to plant anything in your fields.”

  “We did plant something. You, uh, walked up through the winter oats we sowed.”

  “Oh. I thought they were weeds.”

  “Don’t worry, I’d have made the same mistake. Luckily, Jeff’s mom remembers what it was like when this was still a working farm. I hope she makes it to see it become one again.”

  “She not doing so good?”

  Jolene sucked in a breath. “We ran out of her blood pressure medication some time ago. And she gets hypo sometimes from her diabetes, which isn’t pleasant to see. Jeff’s worried about her, but we’ve reached the limit of what we can do. She’s a tough old bird, though. We give her all the love we can so she can hang in there.”

  Darla nodded. “I’ll try to keep you guys supplied with whatever I find.”

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  “I do. You looked after me, Jo, and I didn’t really give much back. Now it’s my turn to do something for you.”

  “Darla,” said Jolene seriously, “I didn’t look after you as much as you think, and certainly not as much as I should have.”

  “What are you talking about? I lost count of the times you were there for me.”

  “No, I really wasn’t. I made mistakes, Darla. Huge ones.”

  “Come o
n, ain’t no way you made more mistakes than me.”

  “The biggest mistake I made,” continued Jolene, “was not realizing the effect that Dad’s leaving would have on you.”

  “That wasn’t your fault.”

  Jolene hesitated. “Actually, it was,” she said.

  The darkness in Jolene’s voice alerted Darla. “What do you mean?”

  Jolene paced the summer house, the boards creaking under her feet. “I’m not the perfect sister you’ve made me out to be.”

  Darla didn’t like the sound of that. “Just leave it there, Jo. It doesn’t matter now.”

  “It does. I’ve thought about it a lot, and I’ve been carrying this for a long time. I remember all those times you ran away from home, and I think, deep down, you were looking for Dad.”

  “That’s not … how I remember it.”

  “It’s probably not, but you were young when he left, and I never fully explained to you what happened. I look back now at your behavior in those days, and it makes sense now. I just didn’t figure out at the time that you were acting out. If I had, I could have helped you more.”

  “You were young too, Jo. I don’t see how you could help.”

  “I could have told you the real reason Dad left.”

  Darla shook her head, uneasy. “That’s not relevant now.”

  “It is. I watched you blame yourself for so many things, and run yourself down. Sometimes you were so confused. I should have realized sooner. I thought that because you were so young, you wouldn’t remember, and it was better to leave it that way.”

  “Leave it what way? I don’t understand.”

  Jolene gathered up the courage to say what she had to say. “Dad abused us.”

  Darla was stunned. “I … don’t have any memory of that.”

  “No. Like I said, you were too young, and you probably buried it. I thought that was a blessing at the time, for you anyway, but I remember it all too well. Dad abused me for years. I don’t remember how many, and it was usually when he was drunk. Usually. But when he did the same to you, well, that was the last straw. Mom wouldn’t do anything, you see. She was so weak and I hated her for that, but she was worried about bringing the law into the house and maybe having us taken away from her. Dad was a piece of work and she was afraid to throw him out, so I made damn sure he left.”

  “What did you do?” asked Darla cautiously.

  “I confronted him. I told him I’d told my teacher about what he’d done, and that the cops were on their way to arrest him. I told him I found the Polaroids he’d taken of me and given them to my teacher. It was a lie, but I wanted him to be afraid.”

  “And he left?”

  “He beat me first — enough to put me out of school for a week, I had so many bruises. Then he took off. We never saw him again.”

  It took a while for Darla to digest what she’d heard. “I heard about how he died.”

  “Yeah, I did too. He deserved it. After that I knew he couldn’t come back. I thought that would be the end of it.”

  Darla conjured up the mental image of Jolene as a child — and she couldn’t have been more than nine or ten at the time — confronting a grown man with a local reputation for being a brawler. Her sister, the apple pie mom.

  “You coped with that by yourself?”

  “I got therapy. I mean, later. A lot later. I was pretty screwed up before that, but eventually it put me on the straight and narrow. If I’d told you what happened, you could have gotten the right help too. That was my mistake. I let it slide. I was supposed to be looking after you.”

  “That was Mom’s job, not yours.”

  “Mom got bitter. She didn’t want to speak to us in her later years.”

  “But … she left us her money.”

  “Mom didn’t have any money. It was my money I sent you.”

  “Mom put you through college, though. I … I always thought she favored you because she didn’t even offer to pay for me.”

  “I worked my own way through college, along with a scholarship. I was working crazy hours and I lost track of what you were doing and … who you were doing it with. You were pretty latchkey back then and I didn’t pay enough attention to what was happening to you. I was so focused on one day getting away from that life, and that house. I didn’t think that Mom would be as mad at you as she was at me, and that she would just abandon you and let you run wild like that. I let you down, Darla. It should have been two of us against the world, and I dropped the ball. I moved on and left you behind.”

  Darla cast her mind back, trying to pin what Jolene had told her to some sort of timeline, but her childhood was hazy and dark, with few bright spots. She got uncomfortable exploring it, and she realized there were containers there she never wanted to open, caskets with darker memories still. And she’d always known about them and had deliberately steered clear of their toxic contents. She’d been running from them all her life.

  “How come you never told me any of this before?” she asked.

  “I didn’t want you to be angry at me,” said Jolene contritely.

  Darla slowly rubbed her face. “You’re an idiot, Jo.”

  “I knew you wouldn’t be happy.”

  “No, you don’t understand. How can you have felt guilty all this time about something you had no control over?” Darla looked at her. “Can you not see you did a hell of a thing surviving that? You survived that and …” Darla looked around, “you built something.”

  “It didn’t seem fair when I watched you suffer, though.”

  Darla looked up at the wooden beams of the summerhouse roof, and suddenly she laughed, a great weight dislodging itself from her heart and dissipating.

  “I didn’t suffer, Jo. I avoided suffering. That’s what got me into trouble. I could have come out of it the way you did, but I didn’t want to work that hard. I preferred to party and not think about it.”

  “That’s because it was too painful for you.”

  “It was painful for you too. I’ve got no excuses, sis. Nobody made me do what I did. I made all those mistakes myself. In fact, I’m the idiot for not seeing the path you laid for me. You didn’t quit and you didn’t feel sorry for yourself.”

  “I did. Many times.”

  “But you didn’t let it stop you. You were my biggest inspiration and I didn’t even realize it. Zack was right. Goddamn it, he was right.”

  Jolene looked confused. “About what?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Jo, quit feeling guilty. Nobody took care of me the way you did. You’ve got nothing to feel sorry for. I honestly couldn’t have asked for a better sister. No, you were more than that. You were awesome.”

  Jolene smiled. “There were times when I thought you resented me.”

  “I did, but I was an ass. Come on, I’m getting tired of feeling sorry for myself. How about we leave all that crap behind us and start over?”

  “It’s the end of the world, sis. Strange time to start over.”

  “Can’t think of a better time. If we survived what we had to go through, we can survive anything.”

  “I guess. Let’s get in the house. If … you’re ready, that is,” added Jolene quickly.

  “I am,” said Darla, “and I’m sorry I didn’t want to see your little girl when she was born. That was harsh of me.”

  Jolene dismissed that. “I understood at the time.”

  “I know you did, but it was still uncalled for.”

  “I thought we were done with the apologies?”

  “I was, but I just wanted to add that one, you know? To completely clear the air.”

  “I wasn’t going to hold that against you, sis. Losing Rose was going to hurt.”

  Darla looked away for a moment. “Still does, a little.”

  “I suspect it always will.”

  “But we gotta live, right?”

  “Those of us that can, yes.”

  Darla took a deep breath. “I want to say hello to my new niece. What was her name?”


  “Mary.”

  “Okay. Let’s say hello to Mary.”

  They left the summer house together and crossed the yard. In the living room of the house, everyone was sitting around on a collection of couches. A fire burned in the hearth and all conversation ceased when Darla entered. Little Mary was on Stephanie’s lap, and Darla got a sudden pang at the sight of that beautiful upturned face. Swallowing, she squatted down to the girl’s level. She cleared her throat.

  “Hi, Mary,” she said, forcing a smile. “We haven’t met but, I’m your Aunt D.”

  The little girl stared blankly at her.

  “I wanted to read her a story about boats,” said Stephanie, “but we only had this.” She held up a children’s book about pirates.

  “Pirate,” said the girl.

  “That the only name you know, huh?” said Darla, her smile warming. “Let me tell you a story about riverboat captains.” She winked at the girl. “They’re way cooler, trust me.”

  Epilogue

  Darla stayed for a week. Word got around that a steamboat had arrived, and folks from other homes and farms came to the river to take a look and introduce themselves. Darla traded arms and ammunition from the boat’s arsenal in exchange for other supplies, and connections were made for the future. When it came time to leave, a small crowd gathered at the shore to wave her off.

  “You’re welcome to stay for good, you know,” said Jolene, adjusting Mary’s position in her arms. “You brought so much canned food for us that I’m pretty sure we can last the winter, even with extra mouths to feed.”

  “I’m a river rat,” said Darla. “I need a deck under my feet. I’ll try to get back to visit before the worst of the winter hits.”

  “What will you do?”

  “What I’ve always wanted to do: ply the river. There’ll be other communities out there, in time, and they’re going to want to trade. That’s what this boat was made for.”

  “I knew I shouldn’t have read Huckleberry Finn to you as a kid.”