Page 1

CHAPTER 1

August 10 th

1:36 PM

T H ERE IS NO sign welcoming you to Annesville. Blink and you miss it. The town begs you to forget it before you arrive.

Other tiny towns scattered across the Midwest comfort travelers with vestiges of a livelier past, like hollowed-out car factories, grain silos rusted from disuse, tracts of houses foreclosed upon during the recession. Annesville offers no such fragments of nostalgia. There are no restaurants, no parks, no schools, no doctors. Instead, there are three liquor stores lined up along the main road like unfelled dominoes, undistinguishable from one another but for the sun-faded signs in their windows, along with an abandoned gas station, a barber shop, and a mechanic’s garage. The post office closed unceremoniously when I was fourteen. An errand as simple as a gallon of milk requires a fifteen-mile drive north to the Long Grass reservation, just over the South Dakota border, or south to the town of Tyre. On every side, Annesville is flanked by endless beige prairie. We are in the Nebraska sandhills. No crops can grow here. God himself has salted this earth.

Five unpaved side streets branch from the main road like tributaries from their mother river. In a town of ninety-some people, there are no city services to plow the snow or collect the leaves or clean up the odd gutty mess of roadkill, which is often left to suppurate in the sun for weeks before someone is finally repulsed enough by the stench to scrape the decaying creature from the dirt. The lots are large, no fences between neighbors, the excess spaces filled with trucks, trailers, RVs, and even a handful of tiny fishing boats for catching walleye down at the Twin Lakes. Houses range from rundown to dilapidated. Rusted swing sets and knee-high grass decorate the front yards, along with a few signs urging voters to reelect the local congresswoman. Everyone has an American flag. Most people have a Gadsden flag.

In Annesville, no one moves away. People die and pass along their house to children who will also die there, a cycle spanning generations. My family is no different. We are the fourth generation of Byrds to live in the saltbox house on Cedar Street—or I suppose I should say they are the fourth generation of Byrds to live there. It hasn’t been my home in thirteen years.

In the paper on my dashboard, beneath a bold red title that reads MISSING , is the reason I have returned: my mother. The bullet points beneath her picture—shoulder-length brown hair, brown eyes, five-feet-four, one hundred and ten pounds, birthmark above left eyebrow—suggest a softer, prettier woman than the one pictured. She is all sharp angles and unforgiving edges, her features carved from marble, her nose thin and severe like a blade. The hollows beneath her eyes are deep enough to catch rainwater. She looks older her forty-seven years. She was last seen leaving the women’s Bible study on Thursday night, three days ago. The bottom of the page implores anyone with information about the whereabouts of Elissa Byrd to call the Tillman County Sheriff’s Department.

The saltbox house is frozen in time. I drive by with my head ducked, in case my Missouri plates attract undue attention. I once peeled swaths of blue paint from the same siding, reclined on the same lopsided porch swing, fled from snakes in the same overgrown grass. We always had a problem with eastern racers. They’re as fast as their name suggests, long enough to rear up and peek their slender black heads above the grass. Fuel for nightmares. One even slithered into my bed once.

I drive to the southern edge of town, where the church cowers from the liquor stores to apologize for their indecency. The church is the closest thing Annesville has to entertainment, though it can only scrape together services on Wednesday nights and Sunday mornings. While every other building languishes in disrepair, the church is pristine. The empty bell tower reaches for the sky above stained glass windows. Behind the church, across a manicured lawn, are small portable classrooms for Sunday school and weekly Bible reading groups segregated by gender.

My sisters and I never missed a service growing up, not because we were devout, but because our father would berate us to the point of tears if we objected. Once or twice, when I was old enough to be properly punished for my insolence, he cracked me across the face. Spare the rod, spoil the child. The services imparted me with little spiritual guidance, only an encyclopedic recall of Bible verses I carry with me to this day. Most of them are from Leviticus.

If anyone curses his mother or father, he must be put to death.

When I pass the church, I notice an older man in a bathrobe milling around the parking lot. I dismiss it as a local drunk until I recognize the gleam of a prosthetic leg.

“Mr. Crawford?” I call from the car. He doesn’t look at me, and the cold shoulder takes me aback. Gil Crawford is the only person who ever visited me in prison. He made the six-hour drive to York twice a year, once for my birthday in May and then the day after Christmas, always with a small stack of books as a gift. He sent me twenty dollars every month too. It was the difference between washing my hair with bar soap or with shampoo.

To everyone else in Annesville, I am persona non grata. But not to Gil Crawford—or, at least, I shouldn’t be. Our contact since my release has been fleeting. I’ve been too busy surviving from one day to the next to maintain a close relationship. Perhaps I’ve spurned him without intending to.

I step out of the car and say his name again. The midafternoon sun blazes white above the prairie. Gil’s hands cup into a visor over his eyes as he gazes into the distance. When I tap him on the shoulder, he jumps. His hair has turned white and his face sags with age like a bloodhound, but his enormous bell pepper nose remains comfortingly familiar.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Crawford, I—”

“Connor isn’t here,” he says. “He has baseball practice.”

My mouth gapes, unable to form words, as if I’ve been lobotomized. All I can manage is, “What?”

“Coach Romanoff is pushing them hard. They need it. That team from Scottsbluff is a real juggernaut.”

It dawns on me then. The bathrobe alone should have tipped me off. Is it Alzheimer’s? Dementia? Was it not enough for him to lose a leg in Iraq and a wife to cancer? Life does not dole out suffering in equal rations, but knowing that makes the capriciousness of the universe no less painful. Gil pulls on the loops of his robe belt and tucks his hands into his pockets, his face angled toward the sun again with a serene smile, like a cat sunning itself in a patch of grass.

“Coach Romanoff canceled practice today.” I stand close to Gil and weave my arm through his. He accepts the gesture, sighing deeply. He must remember me. He must know it’s me. He’s telling me about his son, my dearest childhood friend. He must know who I am. I want to tug on his hand and beg for reassurance. Remember me? Remember me? Like when I was a little girl, starved for affection. Please remember me.

“He never cancels.”

“His appendix burst.” That the lie is necessary does not ease my discomfort in telling it.

“I asked him to work on barehand throws with you. You have a hell of an arm, Providence, but you lose too much time collecting the ball on the throw to first.” Gil makes my name sound lighter and airier than it has any right to be, its three syllables beautiful instead of cumbersome.

“My father says off-balance throws are amateur hour.” If I threw without my feet set when we practiced together, an affair often stretching deep into the night, my father would pelt me with a softball right between the shoulders. The welts would sometimes be bigger than the ball itself. Don’t play like a fucking girl.

Gil laughs. “There’s a reason your father never got a scholarship to play ball.”

“Why don’t we go find Connor? Maybe he can practice with us too.”

He blinks hard, skimming the surface of lucidity. His hands relax. “I think I should see him. Connor had something important to tell me.”

Gil starts to walk toward the prairie, but I steer him toward the passenger seat. I’m about to head to his house on Maple Street when I notice the wristbands. Yellow: FALL RISK . Blue: ALLERGY, AUGMENTIN. White: CREEKSIDE NURSING HOME .

The drive to Tyre lasts twenty excruciating minutes. Gil monologues about a cherrywood table he’s building for my father, which he really built years ago. (My father never paid him for his work. Instead, he agreed to stop hurling racial abuse at him every time their paths crossed at the Tyre poolhall. The Crawfords were the only Black family in Annesville. If my father had it his way, the town would be lily white.) Cherrywood, but strong as an oak, ha ha, little carpenter’s joke. Gil thinks I’m a teenager. He asks how school is going this year, if that old fossil Mr. Keaton is still teaching American history. I smile and nod at all the right beats, ignoring the knot my stomach has contorted itself into.

A sheriff’s cruiser is parked in front of the nursing facility. I don’t recognize the deputy chatting with the nurses, half a dozen women lined up in a gradient of scrubs from navy to robin’s egg blue, but I thank my lucky stars it’s not the sheriff. Two nurses rush to my side and guide Gil into a wheelchair. They whisk him into the building before I can say goodbye.

“Where’d you find him?” asks the deputy. His lower lip juts with chewing tobacco. When the scent wafts toward me, my craving for a cigarette intensifies, an ache in the back of my mouth like a rotten tooth ready to be pulled.

“The church in Annesville.”

“He took someone’s car,” offers a nurse with a matronly bob. The words are directed at the deputy, not me, but her defensiveness sets my teeth on edge. “It’s not the first time he’s made his way up to Annesville. Most of us,” she says, glaring at a young, curly-haired nurse, “know better than to leave our keys where Mr. Crawford can find them.”

“I’ve never had a patient steal my car before!” the other nurse protests.

The deputy lowers himself into the cruiser. “We’ll have your car back shortly, miss. And as for the rest of you—eleven silver alerts in the county this year and they’ve all been from Creekside. Don’t make me come out here again.”

The remaining nurses nod their heads before ducking inside the building. The deputy’s threat is a feeble one. Like most of the healthcare facilities in Tillman County, Creekside has a skeleton staff with dubious qualifications. You can’t be picky out in the boondocks. Better to have an undertrained nurse than no nurse at all.

At the very least, my small act of heroism has earned me a visit with Gil. The nurse at the front desk cradles a phone against her ear with one shoulder, her fingers dancing across the keyboard in front of her. When I show her my ID, she takes a cursory glance before waving me down the hall. Her inattentiveness is welcome. I hate showing people my ID. I live in constant fear of an eagle-eyed store clerk or bartender recognizing my name. Around here, the name Providence Byrd only means trouble.

As I walk down the hallway, one of the nurses from outside recognizes me. She’s petite, brunette, cute. There’s something familiar about her—perhaps the younger sibling of a friend from school. She chews on a wad of cinnamon gum. “Did you want to check in on Gil, honey?”

I bristle at a girl younger than I am calling me honey. “He was kind of a surrogate father to me growing up.”

“Of course, honey. Let me pop in and ask his son if it’s all right.”

“His son?”

But the nurse hurries out of earshot, peeking into a room at the end of the hall. She leans through the doorway on one foot, the other extended behind her like a figure skater who has landed a perfect jump. She turns back to say something to me, but Connor comes out before her words can.

He has finally grown into his long, lean body, a far cry from the lanky teenager who invited me to his house every day after school because he knew I wasn’t safe at home. His hair is styled into cornrows and gathered into a small bun, leaving nowhere for the acne scars pocked along his cheeks and chin to hide. Last I remember, he wanted to be a teacher. With a button-up shirt and horn-rimmed glasses, he certainly looks the part now. My heart swells with pride. My childhood dreams have long slipped away, but it comforts me to know Connor didn’t suffer similar misfortune.

He offers me the greeting I least expect: a hug. I am not a hugger. Hugs are chokeholds masquerading as gestures of affection. But I power through my unease and reciprocate, allowing a fragment of my resentment to melt away. While his father showed me extraordinary kindness during my stint in prison, Connor sent me just two letters before heading to Indiana for college, at which point frat parties and football games took precedence over an incarcerated childhood friend. I understand it and, at the same time, selfishly, I don’t. I’ve never been able to cope with the pain of being forgotten.

“It’s the third time this summer he’s gotten up to Annesville,” says Connor when we separate, like we’re picking up a conversation from five minutes ago. He takes off his glasses and scrubs his hands over his eyes. “Like he always used to say, the lunatics are running the asylum here.”

The nurse who fetched Connor glares at him from behind a cart of medical supplies. She brushes past him a little too close, just near enough to bump his shoulder.

“What is it?” I ask.

“Alzheimer’s.”

“But’s he’s only …”

“Sixty-seven,” he supplies. “It’s early onset.”

“God, I’m so sorry, Connor.”

We peer into the room at the same time. Without the handful of photos arrayed across the dresser, you could never tell who lived there. The room is all but devoid of personal touches. My heart breaks to think Gil will die in this husk, his only child the last family left to help him cross over to the other side. Gil sits upright in his bed with a plate of ketchup-soaked meatloaf before him, carving the meat with a spoon instead of the plastic knife they’ve provided. Something inside of me breaks, real as a snapped rib. My resolve to visit him breaks with it.

Connor leans against the wall. “I came to visit at Christmas. I knew something wasn’t right. It got worse so fast. Damn near cut his hand off with his old carpentry saw while I was getting groceries one day. I had to move him in here, then I moved back so I can …”

“I’m sorry,” I say again.

“I’m sorry too.”

“For what?”

“Your mom.”

My cheeks burn. “Yeah, of course. It’s … well, I’m sure you know more than I do.”

The warmth of our reunion is gone. Our relationship has been reduced to a spiritless exchange of condolences. The gap in the conversation stretches into a chasm, both of us unwilling to reach our hand toward the other. “I’ll be at the search later.” He registers my blank expression. “Sungila Lake, up on the reservation.”

“I’m surprised the sheriff’s department and the tribal police kept their teeth away from each other’s necks long enough to organize a search party.”

“Makes two of us,” he says. “If my dad knew what was going on, he’d come look for her too. He’s always had a soft spot for your mom.”

“More like he always had a soft spot for her chokecherry pie.”

Connor smiles. He flashes both rows of teeth, and he’s charming enough to look like a movie star rather than a hyena. “It’s good to see you, Providence. The circumstances are shitty with your mom, but I didn’t think we’d get to see each other again.”

Get to , as if our paths intersecting today is a miracle. What about all the years that passed without a letter or a phone call? I’m not sure if he’s oblivious or insensitive. The bitterness rots inside me like a cavity, but I merely nod. I have the sense one slip of the tongue will sour the moment.

But the next question is one I can’t resist asking. “Do you think my sisters will be at the search?”

“I’m sure they will. They’ve been at all the others.”

“How are they? Do they look okay?”

“Grace is in my civics class this semester. She’s bright. A bit of a know-it-all, but bright. I think she’s planning to go to college next year, long as she stays out of trouble.” He’s pleased to provide me with these details, and I lap them up, a thirteen-year hunger for information about my sisters finally quelled with this scrap. It’s like the first hit of nicotine. It leaves me pining for more, more, more. “And Harmony, I don’t know much about her. She’s living in the old apartment building in Carey Gap. Remember those ugly blue ones? Engaged to some firefighter over in Box Butte County last I heard.”

The other questions I burn to ask are ones he cannot answer. Do they remember me? What I did? Have they forgiven me? Do they want to see me? What lies have my parents slandered me with? I have learned to live without my sisters the way an amputee learns to live without a limb, a once unfathomable absence turned normal. But I miss them. Harmony is now twenty-five, Grace seventeen. They have lived entire lives without me.

“And Zoe? Has she been there?” The name of my childhood sweetheart flies tactlessly off my tongue.

“Saw her at the first one, but not yesterday’s. You should go see her. Her office is in Carey Gap.”

“No, I don’t—”

“You’re not going to come all the way out here without seeing her.”

“We haven’t exactly kept in touch either.” My tone is too sour. The veiled insult makes him wince.

There is nothing left to say. Thirteen years and this is all we can manage? We exchange another hug, this one mercifully brief, before parting ways, only to realize we are both walking the same direction. I pretend to tie my shoe so we don’t have to walk together and strain to fill the empty space with small talk. I thank the receptionist at the front desk, who is still pecking away at her keyboard as she reassures someone on the phone. I understand your concern … Yes, ma’am, but … I understand, but …

There is a piece of paper wedged beneath my windshield wipers. Another ticket—just what I need. I cringe at the notion of a deputy running my plates and cataloging the tickets I’d racked up in Kansas City over the last few years. Then I burn hot with fury, remembering the countless 911 calls placed by me, my mother, even once by Harmony. The sheriff or one of his drudges strode in with the verve of superheroes to admonish my father and urge him to cut back on his drinking. The drink has a mean hold on your old man , one of them said to me as he bandaged a laceration on my arm, deep and jagged from a broken bottle. He needs your help to sober up.

But I unfold the sheet of paper to discover it’s not a ticket. It’s my mother’s missing poster. I didn’t realize when I looked at it before, but she is smiling in the picture. She looks beautiful. She almost looks happy.

I open my glovebox. I wrap the paper around the barrel of my gun.