“Damn,” he says, “you look just like her.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I don’t know much about the Cantrells. Logan was three years older than Mama, Brandon one year. They were raised by their grandparents, though by the time Mama went to live with them, their grandma was dead and their grandpa was in a nursing home with his mind gone. They were bad kids. Everybody says so.
Everybody has always said that Brandon left after Logan went to jail. They say he ran off in the night, abandoned their old trailer on the ridge. Left it for the pastor and his friends to burn to the ground. This is certainly no double-wide trailer. It’s barely even a full camper.
But this is him. It must be. Why else would my sister bring me here?
Brandon watches me for a moment, silhouetted in the doorway of the camper. If he takes a step toward me, I decide, I will stagger away as fast as I can. Try to find Lee. But he doesn’t. He simply turns around and goes back inside without another word, taking the light with him.
People say Brandon was quiet. They say he was strange. They say, We never trusted that boy, always knew there was something off about him. I should be scared of him, this strange man in the woods, but my sister wouldn’t have brought me here if he was dangerous, right?
A small black cat appears in the open doorway. It regards me warily for a moment, before hopping down and slinking toward the trees. There’s no sign of Lee. I don’t know if she’s coming back.
I take a deep breath and walk across the clearing, step up onto the cinder block that serves as a front step. Inside the camper, the walls are paneled with dark wood, the floor covered with a threadbare Oriental rug in fallen-leaf colors. There’s a brown couch slumped against the back wall, and beside it, on a heavy wooden cabinet, an aquarium.
I lean in. To the left there’s a closed door. To the right, kitchen cabinets and glass mason jars with canned food stacked on top of them. In the center of the room there’s a small old-fashioned-looking black stove with squat legs. I can feel the heat of it, even from the doorway. Against the front wall is a small table. Brandon is sitting at it, eating his dinner.
“Are you Brandon Cantrell?” I ask.
He looks up, briefly, nods once, looks back down at his food, keeps eating.
I step up into the camper. A little gray cat unfolds itself from the corner of the couch, jumps down, and pads over to rub against my legs. The warmth of the woodstove wraps around me.
“I thought you moved away,” I say.
Brandon shifts one shoulder so slightly that I’m not sure if it’s a shrug or just a coincidence. I’d never really thought of him as a real person. More like a character out of some ancient story, a myth. But here he is. He’s wearing jeans, a long-sleeved gray Henley. He’s thin. The lantern, as old-fashioned as the stove, with a curved glass bulb and a burning wick, sits on the table beside him, though there’s also faint light coming from the aquarium, which seems entirely out of place here.
“You hungry?” Brandon asks. His voice is low, gravelly. He’s not looking at me, and so at first I think he’s talking to the cat, but then he says it again. “You hungry?”
“I…I don’t know.”
Brandon gets up and opens a cabinet along the far wall, pulls out a plate. He bends over the woodstove, dishes food out from the cast iron pot on top of it.
Maybe he’ll take me to town. He did it once before, didn’t he? When I was only a baby. I cross the small room, barely more than six feet across, and sit on the couch. The aquarium beside me glows with a gentle greenish light. There’s a cord snaking down from the lid. It ends not in a plug, but in two split ends, scraped of their plastic coating and attached to the contacts of a large battery. The plants inside the tank are growing like crazy, an underwater jungle. I feel like I’m dreaming.
Brandon approaches carrying a plate piled with a stew made of green beans and something that might be sausage. He sets the plate on the floor in front of me. I stare at it, baffled. He takes a seat back at the little table and stares out the window, though it’s full dark out there. Nothing to see.
He’s treating me like a cat, I realize. Or like my sister. Trying not to startle me. I grab the plate from the floor, moments before the gray cat pounces on it. I nibble at a green bean, take a tentative bite of sausage. It tastes good, salty and hot, but I’m worried I’ll puke again, so I don’t take more than a few bites.
I know I shouldn’t, but I feel oddly safe. Maybe it’s the cats. Or the otherworldly glow of the fish tank. Tiny multicolored fish dart this way and that, fins flashing in the light. One looks like a sunset; another is an electric iridescent blue.
“They’re so pretty,” I say. “They look like candy.”
Brandon snorts. “She ate them,” he says.
“What?”
“Jolene. She ate them.” He doesn’t look at me when he speaks. It makes me feel like a ghost.
“I…What?”
“Fished them out with a net and ate them,” he says. He smiles down at his hands. “At the old trailer.”
Jolene. Mama. My stomach knots up, the room seeming to draw to a point suddenly. Brandon’s hands twist against each other.
“She ate your fish?”
“Ate a lot of weird stuff,” he says. “She had cravings.”
I’m struck again with the reality of who is sitting a mere three feet from me. He knew Mama at the very end. He probably knows what happened to her. What his brother did. My stomach knots up. Mama ate his fish. She had cravings.
Pregnancy cravings.
“Do I really look like her?” I ask.
Brandon turns to me finally, gives me a long look. “A little.”
“I thought you said I looked just like her.”
“I meant the other one.”
“The what?” I ask, but even as the words leave my mouth, I realize who he means. My sister. The other one.
I start laughing. It’s all just too much. I’m laughing and it’s coming out strange, too high, too much. Here’s someone for the first time in my life who knows everything. He knows all of it.
The look on his face is confused, wary. He reminds me of my sister in that moment and that only makes me laugh harder. I mean hell, the two of them are probably related, after all. He’s probably our uncle.
I run out of breath from laughing. There’s a stitch in my side. I gasp a few times, try to calm down.
“The other one,” I say. I stick out my wrist, pull the sleeve up. “She bit me,” I say. “It’s infected, I think.”
He leans forward to study the wound on my wrist.
I study him back. He’s got a thin crooked nose. Dark eyes, with dark circles underneath. It looks like he probably cuts his hair himself. Hunks of it are radically different lengths. It’s longer in the back, not quite a mullet, but close.
His beard is mostly brown, though there’s a streak of gray on one side, hints of red throughout. It’s thick around his chin, thins out to a scraggly point at the middle of his chest. The beard makes him look older, but I know he must be roughly the same age as the pastor. About thirty. Twice my age.
He certainly doesn’t look anything like I thought he would. I tracked down a mug shot of Logan online in the school computer lab once. He was smirking, eyes bloodshot, head shaved, tattoos climbing up his neck. He had a defiant look to him, like he’d happily do it all again. I guess I figured his brother would be the same. Tough, brash, looking like the kind of trash Margaret is always complaining about. But instead he’s this strange, quiet, sleepy-eyed mountain man who speaks and moves as softly as my sister when she doesn’t want to be seen.
Brandon drifts through the door to the left, returns a moment later with a bottle of rubbing alcohol and a fishing tackle box.
He kneels in front of me, uncaps the alcohol.
“To disinfect,” he says.
> I hold out my wrist. He tilts the bottle.
It burns like a thousand fucking suns, hissing against my wrist. I yowl and yank my hand away.
“Fuck,” I say, shaking my wrist, though that doesn’t help any.
Brandon opens the tackle box. Instead of bait and hooks, it’s full of little plastic bottles. Translucent. Orange. White labels, white lids.
Medicine.
My sister must have known about this. It must be why she brought me here. She’s been lying to me. For years. Every time I asked her about the Cantrells. Every time she said nothing.
Brandon digs through the box, pulling out bottles, setting them on the carpet. The gray cat bats one of them over by my feet and I pick it up. Percocet. Prescribed for someone named Tammy Reed.
“Here,” says Brandon, holding out a thin cardboard box, about the size of a wallet. “Antibiotics.”
I take the box. Zithromax. Prescribed to Meredith Gross. There’re five pills nestled in plastic punch-outs. The foil on the back is unpunctured, smooth and shiny. So they’re safe, right?
“Water?” asks Brandon. He talks like my sister. Never two words if one will do.
Or maybe she talks like him. I was right, that the Cantrells raised her. I just never dreamed that one of them was still around.
“Who is Meredith Gross?” I ask instead.
“An old friend,” he says.
“What about Tammy Reed?”
Brandon’s mouth quirks up on one side and he tilts his head, bemused.
“Where did you get all these?” I ask.
“I guess you know about Logan,” he says. “You want to know if I’m like him.”
I want to know if he’s dangerous. If I should trust him.
I mean, I shouldn’t trust him. Obviously, I shouldn’t.
“I just want to know whose medicine I’m taking,” I say.
“Well,” he says, “all right. Maybe you know some of this. Logan was part of a big thing. Pipeline down from Columbus. Had ties all the way out to Detroit. Police broke that up pretty good when they got him. But he had some backups, too. Just regular people. In other towns. With clean records. They’d get prescriptions the normal way. Sell to him. Not directly to him, though. He managed to hide that side of it pretty well. Cops didn’t crack it, and anyway they were more interested in the big fish. After he got locked up I kept some of the backups going. Just a small thing. A little money here and there.”
I blink at him. He’s a drug dealer. A drug-dealing possible murderer hiding in the woods.
“Meredith actually was a friend, though,” he says, with a slight smile.
“Was?” I ask.
“She’s dead.”
My heart thuds. I drop the pills.
He picks them up, holds them out to me.
“Died of a heart attack,” he clarifies. “About a year ago. At the age of ninety-four. She’d been a friend of my grandmother’s.”
“So you took her stuff?” I point accusingly at the pills.
“Believe me or not, but I helped her out. Brought her groceries twice a month. Did her yardwork. She lived alone. Her son was Logan’s friend. He’s in jail now. Never cared for him, personally.” He scowls. “Anyway, I’m the one who found her. I called the police, and before they came I took a few things. She didn’t need them anymore. I’ve got her blood pressure pills in here somewhere.” He digs around in the tackle box with his free hand. The pill bottles rattle.
“Why?”
He shrugs. “You never know.” He gives up looking for the pills, pushes the pack of antibiotics toward me. I take it.
“Water?” he asks again.
“Okay,” I say. He crosses to the kitchen, rummages through the cabinets, fills a speckled red camping mug from a tall silver cistern with a spigot sitting on one of the counters.
When he hands me the mug, I take a cautious sip. Tastes like water. Slightly tinny water.
I poke two of the Zithromax out of the foil, swallow them. The second pill sticks in my throat and I have to chug the rest of the water.
Brandon picks up the Percocet bottle. He opens it, shakes a little white pill out onto his palm. He holds it out.
“For the pain,” he says.
I stare at the pill. Brandon’s palm looks rough beneath it, cracked with lines. His fingers are long and thin, his nails dirty. You aren’t supposed to take drugs from strangers. You aren’t supposed to do any of the things I’m doing. But he’s not exactly a stranger. We’ve met once before, though I don’t remember it. He’s held me in his arms.
After a moment, Brandon shrugs, tilts his head back, pops the pill in his mouth, swallows. He closes the bottle and sets it on the cabinet next to the fish tank.
“I’ll leave it here,” he says.
He gathers the other bottles, replaces them in the tackle box. He hasn’t asked me why I’m here. Hasn’t asked any of the things a normal person would.
“My sister,” I start, but I can hardly think of where to begin. “You know her?”
It’s a dumb question. I know he does.
In reply, he rolls up his own sleeve, points to a spot about halfway up his right forearm. There’s a scar there. Two shiny pink semicircles, like parentheses.
Well, shit. “What happened?”
“Snowstorm. Tried to get her to come inside.”
“That big one two years ago?”
“Yeah.”
It was January. The snow came up to my knees in drifts. My sister put on her tights, her puffy coat, her knit cap, and we heaved snowballs at each other, built a lopsided igloo in a clearing at the top of a ridge. I had tried to get her to come inside, too. Said I could hide her at Myron’s house, bring her hot cocoa. She refused, predictably.
She was lying to me, back then.
“How long have you lived out here?” I ask.
He considers. “Just over ten years, I guess. Doesn’t feel that long.”
“Everybody always said you left town.”
He nods, grave. “I keep away from Lester. Don’t associate with anybody I can’t trust to keep their mouth shut about me.”
“Does my sister ever stay here?”
He shakes his head. “She never comes inside. Just stops by for food.”
I’m oddly relieved by that. It would be unfair if she went inside for him, but not for me. “How often?”
He shrugs. “Every couple of days.”
She’s been lying to me for as long as I’ve known her.
While I was hiding her from everyone else in the world, she was hiding him from me. Why would she do that? Why would she protect him?
Unless she thought she was protecting me?
What I want to ask, what I need to ask, is what happened to Mama. Would he tell me? Logan killed her, he’d say. I had nothing to do with it. There was nothing I could do to stop him. Such a tragedy. Such a crying shame.
But I don’t ask. I don’t even know how I would form the question. Why are you hiding out here? Did you kill her? Are you the monster everyone thinks you are?
I’m starting to feel sick again, starting to feel scared.
Brandon picks up the box and the rubbing alcohol, walks to the door on the left. He’s about to step through, but he stops, turns back to me, says, “I’m glad you’re here. I’ve been waiting a long time.”
And then he’s gone and my heart is racing again. He’s been waiting? What the hell does that mean? I push myself up from the couch. I feel dizzy.
I should go. There’s no way this is safe.
I shouldn’t have taken the pills. I shouldn’t have drunk the water. He’s probably going to wait until I’m unconscious and then do what men do and then kill me.
I get up and stumble toward the front door. I let myself be lulled, somehow, by how still he was,
how quiet. But this man is, at absolute best, an accessory to murder. He wouldn’t be hiding out here if he wasn’t guilty of something.
My sister brought me here. She told me to stay here. But my sister has been lying for so long. Not just forgetting. Not blocking things out. Straight-out lying. How many times have I asked her if she remembered Logan and Brandon? If she knew anything about them? My sister brought me here because Brandon had medicine, but that doesn’t mean she trusts him. Lee doesn’t trust anyone. She just wasn’t willing to take me to town, to give up her victory.
I’m standing by the front door, hand on the knob, when Brandon comes back in with a pillow and a folded blanket.
“Where are you going?” he asks, frowning. He sets the pillow and blanket on the couch.
“I—I thought I heard my sister.”
He moves toward me. I shrink against the wall. He reaches past me, though, pushes the door open, steps out. He stands there, perfectly still, blocking the doorway, for what feels like a long time. He is listening, squinting out at the trees.
“No,” he says finally. He comes back in, shuts the door. Latches it. “It’s cold. You can sleep on the couch.”
He picks up the lantern from the table, puts it out. The room gets darker, but the aquarium light is still on. He crosses to that next, switches it off. I gasp a little, involuntarily, at the darkness.
“I guess I can leave it on for you,” he says, switches it back on. He leans over the woodstove, adjusts something on the side. Then he walks past me, wordlessly, goes through the door on the left, into the darkness, out of sight.
I’m shivering again. I don’t know if it’s the rush of cold air from outside or the fever or something else. I feel very alone all of a sudden, and I pull Savannah’s phone from my pocket.
I could call Aggie.
But what would I say? Come pick up me please. Where, you ask? Oh, at Brandon Cantrell’s secret camper in the middle of the woods. Yeah, you can’t miss it.
The way things are going these days, Aggie would probably send the pastor to come get me. I can’t act like a little kid who needs rescuing. Can’t admit defeat. That’s exactly what the pastor wants. To save me, whether I want him to or not.
Some Kind of Animal Page 15