Some Kind of Animal

by Maria Romasco-Moore

  But Aggie’s eyes are tight with barely contained fury, her mouth pressed into a thin hard line. “I’m not falling for that old lie.” She turns away, rubs her face with her hands. “You were right,” she says to the pastor. “I’ve been an idiot.”

  “No,” says the pastor gently. “She’s out of control. But this stops now. All of it.”

  She strides over to the door that leads to the basement, stomps down the stairs. I can hear her banging around down there.

  I rub my cheeks dry with my sleeve. “You told her I’ve been sneaking out the window.” I scowl at the pastor. “I thought you said you were on my side.”

  “Now hold on,” he says. “I’m still on your side, but you tricked me. You disappeared. What was I supposed to do?”

  He looks sheepish. Extra young, slouching in his chair. As if he actually thinks I believed we were in this together. But I never did.

  “I hate you,” I say.

  “Hey,” he says, looking genuinely crestfallen, which makes me feel just the tiniest bit better.

  Aggie stomps back up from the basement. She’s got a couple of warped boards tucked under one arm, leftovers from the old renovation, and a toolbox swinging from the other arm. She marches right past us and into the kitchen. We hear her clomping up the stairs to the second floor.

  By the time I catch up to her, Aggie’s in my room, pressing one of the boards against my window.

  “What are you doing?” I ask.

  “Help me out here,” she says. The pastor shoots me an apologetic look, then goes to hold the board still.

  I stand in the doorway and watch as Aggie picks up the hammer and drives a nail into the board. Then another. And another.

  She doesn’t stop until my whole window is boarded shut. She won’t say a word to me, even when I try to talk to her, to plead my case, to apologize.

  After the pastor and Aggie leave, I check Savannah’s phone. There are three messages from her sister Dakota’s number, although it is clear they are actually from Savannah.

  where are u

  bring my fuckin phone back

  u bitcch

  I turn the phone off, hide it under the mattress, next to my envelope of money, and crawl into bed. I cry for real now, pulling the blanket over my head to muffle my sobs.

  My wrist hurts, my cheek hurts, and no one is on my side.

  Not Aggie. Not Savannah. Not Henry.

  Not even my sister.

  She ruined everything. My first kiss. My best friend. She doesn’t even realize how badly she ruined everything. She was mad that I couldn’t run every night, but now I probably can’t run ever again. Now everyone thinks I’m a monster.

  But it’s her. Not me. I’m just a girl. I’m normal. I’m nothing.

  * * *

  —

  I’m woken by a bang. I sit bolt upright in bed. It’s dark and my mind is still stuck in the mud of sleep. Light pushes through a crack between the boards over the window, but it doesn’t feel like morning. I check the clock: 4:00 a.m. A moment later, I hear scraping on the other side of the door and then it swings open. The pastor is silhouetted. He fumbles along the wall, flips the light switch on. I shield my eyes.

  “Is she trying to get out?” Aggie’s voice comes from behind him.

  “No,” he says. “She’s still in bed.”

  Aggie pushes past him. Her eyes go from me to the window, where the boards are firmly in place. She crosses the room, tries to peer through the cracks between the boards.

  “What the hell was that?” she demands.

  “I don’t know.” I rub my eyes. My mouth feels stale and dry.

  “Must have been something outside,” says the pastor, who is still standing in the doorway. He’s wearing boxers and that’s it. There’s a big tattoo of a cross on his bicep. His chest is surprisingly hairless. He’s much doughier-looking than Jack. Kind of has the start of a beer belly going. Just a little swell, like he’s a few months pregnant or something.

  “Do you live here now?” I ask him.

  “No,” he says.

  “Mind your own damn business,” snaps Aggie. “Go back to sleep.”

  As if on cue, the motion sensor light outside the window clicks off and the boards go dark.

  CHAPTER NINE

  When I wake up again a few hours later, I feel sick. Really sick. Worse than I did yesterday morning. And my wrist aches terribly.

  My room is dark. Just one thin sliver of sun forcing itself through the boards. I pad over to the door. It doesn’t open. I jiggle the handle, jiggle it harder. What the hell? My door doesn’t even have a lock. I bang on the door with my good hand.

  A moment later, there’s a scraping noise and the pastor opens the door. He’s wearing his proper black pastoring clothes, complete with the stiff white collar. No goofy jacket. By his feet, I see the fifteen-gallon keg that had been blocking me in.

  “This is bullshit,” I tell him.

  “It wasn’t my idea,” he whispers as I push past him.

  In the bathroom, I study my wrist. It’s still red and the swelling hasn’t gone down even a little. The skin is glistening, wet, but not with blood. I poke around in the cupboard under the sink, find some self-sticking stretchy wrap left over from my track days. I wash my wrist, rub soap into the wound even though touching it makes the pain blaze. Then I wrap it as tight as I can stand with the stretchy wrap.

  Aggie’s in the kitchen when I come out, but she’s not cooking anything. Just sitting at the card table in her robe, hunched over a bit, drinking her coffee mechanically. I pour myself some Cheerios, trace the little maze on the back of the box, find all the dead ends.

  “You’d better get dressed,” Aggie says, “you’ve got church.”

  I’d forgotten all about that. Sheila’s baptism. The deal I made with the pastor. I start to say something about how I’m feeling sick, but Aggie turns and shoots me a look so cold that it shuts me right up.

  “The police called,” she says. “You’re going to have to go down to the station later today to give another statement.”

  My appetite is gone. I drop my Cheerios bowl back down on the counter so hard it rings.

  I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Henry’s parents must be angry. I bet they think I’m the one who attacked him, just like everyone else does.

  Even Aggie.

  Will they press charges? Will I be arrested? Locked up for my sister’s crimes? She has no idea what she’s done. No idea how she’s ruined everything.

  Defeated, I slink away and get dressed for church. Choose my rattiest hoodie and jeans as a small rebellion. Before I leave my bedroom, I pull Savannah’s phone from under the mattress and slip it into my pocket.

  I follow the pastor outside. His car is parked in the alley behind the building. Before we reach it, though, he stops and stares up at my bedroom window.

  It’s smashed. There’s a jagged hole in the middle and cracks shooting out in all directions. Slivers of broken glass glitter along the rungs of the fire escape. I remember the noise that woke me last night. I feel cold. Hot at the same time. Burning from the inside out. What if the boards hadn’t been there?

  “Who the hell did that?” asks the pastor.

  “No idea,” I say, honestly.

  I think of Jack first. Maybe he was trying to scare me. Send me a message. Maybe he was coming to beat me up, to kill me.

  “Aggie won’t be happy,” the pastor says.

  Could it have been Savannah? She’s mad as hell, for sure (bitcch). Maybe she’d come over to take her phone back. Or maybe it was just someone who’d heard what I did and thought I deserved to be punished.

  I nudge a sliver of broken glass with the toe of my sneaker. It flashes in the sun. A warning.

  “Might as well file a report,” says the pastor. “We’ll b
e going to the station when we get back anyway.”

  Of course, there is someone else I know who’s also angry at me. Who might communicate that anger by throwing rocks. But it couldn’t have been her. She would never come this far into town. Not for all the chocolate in the world.

  * * *

  —

  A few blocks away, the pastor pulls up in front of a raggedy shotgun house. Sheila’s sister’s place. He honks once. I pick at some peeling plastic on the dashboard.

  “She never mentioned twins,” the pastor says into the silence. “Nobody did.”

  It takes me a moment to understand. Twins. I said it last night. Mama had twins.

  I don’t know why he’s bringing that up now, out of nowhere. Does he want to lecture me more about lying? Recite the commandments at me?

  Or is he giving me the benefit of the doubt?

  “Maybe nobody knew,” I say softly.

  He hmms, stares out the window. Doesn’t tell me I’m wrong. Doesn’t tell me not to lie.

  I shouldn’t take the bait. I know I shouldn’t. He’s a wolf, picking on the weakest lamb in the flock. I’m broken, alone. No one is on my side.

  “Did she ever get one of those ultrasound things?” I ask, trying to use the opening to my advantage, dig for information. Did Mama know she was having twins? I’ve often wondered this, but Aggie refuses to talk about Mama and I don’t dare ask Margaret.

  When Savannah’s sister Dakota was pregnant, they had a picture from the scan taped up on the fridge. It was the freakiest-looking thing, the baby just a vague white outline, like a chalked body at a crime scene.

  “I don’t know,” the pastor says. “I know she didn’t give birth in a hospital, though.”

  He glances over at me. I look away, disappointed.

  “Yeah, everybody knows that.”

  “If she had twins,” says the pastor, “what happened to the other baby?”

  I turn back, look him in the eye. No grin, no glint, no smirk. He looks serious. He looks like he really wants to know.

  There’s no way he believes me. Savannah didn’t even believe me and she’s my best friend. There’s no way the goddamn pastor is the only one who believes me. This must be some kind of trick.

  Right?

  “Well,” I say slowly, watching his face, trying to gauge his sincerity by his reaction, “I always figured the Cantrells must have kept her.”

  “Wouldn’t the police have found out?”

  “Why would they?” I scoff. “They never even found Mama’s body.”

  He frowns at me. I know what’s coming next. Don’t lie, Jolene. Don’t make up stories.

  “She did look pretty huge toward the end,” he says instead, tilting his head, considering.

  A picture pops into my mind of Mama as a giant, towering over the tiny town of Lester, stomping houses with her bare feet, uprooting trees and munching on the leaves.

  But he means her belly of course. Full of the two of us.

  “How did you find out about her?” he asks, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. “Your sister.”

  This isn’t how I expected this conversation to go. I gape at him for a moment. Your sister. Did I hear him right? He didn’t say, Your sister who doesn’t exist?

  “She just showed up one day,” I say. “When I was younger. She came out of the woods.”

  Again, I expect him to protest, same as everyone else. Girls don’t just come out of the woods. Stop being stupid, Jo.

  “How old were you?” he asks instead.

  I let out a breath. “About five.”

  “Five,” he repeats. “Logan and Brandon were both gone by then. Did she tell you she’d been living with them?”

  “Well, no, but it makes sense.” Someone obviously cared for Lee through infancy. Brandon Cantrell is the one who dropped me off at Grandma Margaret’s house, so he must have been involved somehow.

  I often wonder why he did it. Maybe Logan wanted to kill us, too, and Brandon saved me, and then Logan changed his mind and raised Lee. Maybe they tried to keep us both, but two babies were too much to handle, so they tossed a coin and only kept one. “How did she survive?” the pastor asks. “After they left?”

  I know that Logan went to jail when Lee and I were four. From what I can gather, Brandon skipped town a few months after. So, yeah, there’s a little bit of missing time there, before Lee showed up in my backyard. Maybe that’s when she went feral. She certainly didn’t look well cared for when we met.

  But that’s not the important thing right now.

  How did she survive? the pastor said. Not, How could anyone have possibly survived? But how did she. There’s no denying it now.

  The goddamn pastor believes me.

  “She wasn’t like other kids,” I say. “She’s not—”

  And then Sheila’s rapping on the back window. I jump at the sound. The pastor pops the lock for her, shoots me a quick smile.

  “Look what my cousin did for me last night,” Sheila says as she slides into the backseat.

  She fans out her fingers. There are tiny crosses painted on each nail. For a second I think they are silver like Mama’s necklace, but then she tilts them so they catch the light and I see that they are gold.

  * * *

  —

  Sheila keeps up a running commentary the rest of the way to church, so I don’t get to ask the pastor why he believes me. I don’t know if I’m relieved about that or angry that he’s the only one who does. I don’t know how to feel, other than sick. I hunch my shoulders, hold my breath as the car dips and swerves along the wooded ridges.

  The church, when we reach it, isn’t much to look at. Just a squat brick building at the end of a long dirt road. If it weren’t for the sign you’d never even know. It’s a lot less impressive than the church Grandma Margaret took me to when I was younger, but that one has since shut down because the building was too expensive to keep up. Margaret drives to a church in Delphi now.

  The pastor leads us inside. The room is carpeted. High-ceilinged, but plain. Instead of pews, there are rows of folding chairs. The stained-glass windows are just regular windows, painted. One shows a faceless Jesus with blobby hands. Another, a misshapen snowball in flight. Or maybe it’s meant to be a dove.

  The pastor carries a deflated plastic kiddie pool out from a room in the back and sets it up in the front corner. It’s decorated with cartoon fish. Not the baptismal font I was expecting. Sheila and I take turns blowing it up while the pastor drags a hose through the entrance and fills the pool with about a foot of lukewarm water. We finish just as the first parishioner arrives, a thin old woman with a walker who I think I’ve seen at Minnie’s before.

  I pick a chair in the back of the room and sit, feeling dizzy from inflating the pool, and too hot. I want to roll up my sleeves, but I can’t because someone might notice my wrist.

  The pastor stands by the entrance, greeting everyone who comes in. Apart from Sheila and two families with kids, there’s hardly anyone who looks younger than sixty. Most of the folding chairs are still empty when it’s time for the service to begin. I understand why Grandma Margaret looks down on this, though in a way there’s less artifice here than there was at her church. No hiding behind fancy architecture. No cold and echoey stone, no statues staring you down, judging you through the centuries.

  Not that I’m about to convert or anything. But the pastor is the only person in my entire life who believes me, so I guess I’m feeling charitable.

  At the front of the little room, the pastor calls on the Lord to bring this country not only to its feet again but to its knees. I wish Savannah weren’t mad at me so I could tell her that and we could both laugh.

  The pastor pops a cassette tape into the little stereo on the chair beside him, presses Play. It’s a recording of voices singing the hymns. A
t Margaret’s old church there was an organ, a choir. I move my mouth without actually singing. The tune sounds vaguely familiar, but I don’t remember the words. Two rows up from me an old lady warbles along a whole octave higher.

  “Let us now exchange the sign of peace,” says the pastor, when the song is done.

  Everybody stands up. A tiny old woman with watery eyes behind thick peach-rimmed glasses staggers over to me and clutches at my arm as if she were falling.

  “Bless you for coming, honey,” she says. “So many kids these days have lost their way.”

  A cloud of perfume thick as a swarm of gnats envelops me, clogs up my nose and catches in my throat. It takes every ounce of willpower I have not to retch. As soon as the woman moves on, another takes her place. There’s a whole procession of them, each one older than the next. And the older they are, the stronger their perfume. One of them grabs both my hands, sandwiches them between hers.

  “Peace be with you,” she says.

  “Uh, thanks,” I say.

  There’s a crash from behind us. Everyone freezes. I whip around. One of the painted windows is smashed, glass strewn across the carpet. A rock rolls to a stop inches from the inflatable pool in the corner. The little old lady next to me gasps, tightens her bony grip on my hands.

  Another window shatters, this one closer to where we’re standing. Shards of painted glass clang against the metal legs of the folding chairs. Several people scream. The pastor is telling everyone to stay calm, to get away from the windows.

  I jerk my hands free and run for the door.

  Glass crunches under my shoes. More shards glitter in the water in the inflatable baptism pool. One must have pierced the plastic because the pool is sagging to the side, the cartoon fishes slumping into one another, a wet spot darkening the carpet.

  I push through the door, skid to a stop as it bangs shut behind me. There’s a low mound of earth to the left of the building. And there, at the top, with a rock clutched in one fist: her.