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CHAPTER 9

August 12 th

10:03 AM

T HE PRAIRIE OUT here is endless like the ocean, nothing but knee-high brown grass as far as the eye can see. Perfect place to dump a body.

I’d expected a lower turnout for this search, the locals’ interest in my mother flagging with each passing hour, but the people of Annesville have proven me wrong yet again. Half the town is here on this scalding summer morning, and they’ve brought an uncharacteristically neighborly spirit with them. The Nelson boys distribute water bottles from the coolers in their trucks while Eileen Capito hands out umbrellas (who has this many umbrellas?) to the women to shield us from the sun. Davy Hernandez, owner of the barbershop, leads us in prayer before the deputies unleash us on the desiccated prairie. I might not be the praying type, but I’m still moved by the gesture. When his voice cracks on my mother’s name, Elissa , a lump gathers in my throat.

And that lump turns to stone when familiar baritone belts across the prairie. “You’re a good man, Davy Hernandez. God bless you.”

“Your whole family is in our prayers, Tom.”

My father is a raincloud blotting out the sun, the ocean receding from the shore to portend a tsunami. Always a harbinger of doom. He is without my sisters, Grace presumably in school and Harmony presumably three sheets to the wind at the pool hall. In the sunlight, his crow’s feet run deeper and the wattle of his liver-spotted neck hangs looser. He parts the crowd like Moses at the Red Sea, gesturing for us to form a circle around him.

We do. He thanks us profusely for showing up to the search, then thanks God for giving him such generous, selfless neighbors. His eyes never once meet mine.

Credit where it’s due: he’s delivering the performance of a lifetime. To the unsuspecting observer, the tears in his eyes might seem genuine. You might be tricked into thinking that this man—flawed though he may be, despite all the nasty rumors that eddy around him like horseflies swarming roadkill— misses his wife and just wants her to come home to him safely. Deep down, Tom Byrd is a good man, or at least, he wants to be.

He’s trying, can’t you tell? And isn’t it the trying that matters?

Every time he says my mother’s name, the taste of gin blights my mouth, memories of the drunken good-night kisses she left on my forehead when she thought I was asleep.

Beside me, Zoe materializes from thin air. She stands close enough for our forearms to brush. Her blonde hair is coiled into milkmaid braids that should make her look matronly, but because she’s Zoe and even the sun seems to dim in her presence, she is undeniably radiant. The sleeves of her pink flannel shirt are cuffed at the elbows, exposing the tender white flesh of the forearms I once kissed.

The lustful memories stir to life unexpectedly, and the frothing sensation between my legs is as delicious as it is traitorous.

I am here for my mother . I play my chastisement on a loop in my mind. I am here for my mother. I will not be distracted by a pretty girl.

“… and I’m sure some of you have noticed that my eldest daughter is here with us today.” Finally, I become the focus of my father’s attention. He feigns a hitch in his voice when next he speaks. “And I’ll tell you something, it means the damn world to me to have Providence here. She’s put the past in the past. We all have. What really matters is all of us showing up for Elissa, right here, right now.”

The stares of old neighbors scourge my cheeks. A few of them gawk now that my father has pointed me out, having been unable to recognize me beneath the layers of plastic surgery and tattoos. I will doubtless be the subject of dinner table gossip this evening. Lips like a blowfish. Fakest tits I’ve ever seen. And, my God, was that a tattoo on her face ?

My father approaches me. Opens his arms. Hugs me. A play in three sinister acts. His stubble scrapes my reconstructed cheek as he clenches me against his chest, so tight that I cannot see the sky above me or smell anything but the vinegary odor of his body. His hand cups the back of my head tightly enough to puncture holes in my skull.

How long does it last? A second? A minute? A day? A lifetime?

When he finally releases me, the world spins like a record. As the deputy begins dividing us into groups, I stammer out an excuse about leaving something in my car, promise I’ll be right back, and then I hurry to the flattened brush where everyone has parked, even though it feels like the earth is crumbling beneath my feet with every step, feels like my skin has calcified into an exoskeleton too small for my body. I am unclean. No, worse—dirty. My father has held my body against his and left behind hideous stains only I can see.

I grab the hand sanitizer from my car and start rubbing it on my hands, my wrists, my neck, any strip of flesh that might have grazed his own. I’m dabbing it behind my ears like perfume when Zoe approaches. The silver necklace she’s worn since we were in middle school bounces against her collarbone with each step, the Z pendant sparkling iridescent in the sunlight.

“Are you okay, Providence?”

“Peachy keen.” I make a show of tossing the hand sanitizer back in my car.

“You’ve always been a bad liar,” she says.

“I like to think I’ve gotten better in the last thirteen years.”

I read different emotions in her mismatched eyes. Blue: caution, unease, pity. Green: warmth, softness, empathy. I can’t tell if she’s going to touch me or turn away. I don’t know which would hurt less.

Fifty yards away, the deputy divides searchers into groups of four or five. My father joins Davy Hernandez, two of the Nelson boys, and Desdemona Thompson, an old teacher of mine. When she caught any of us daydreaming, she struck our hands with rulers. I left class with purple, swollen fingers many days, but I didn’t mind much. It hurt less than what happened to me at home. The deputy catches me looking and beckons me over, hand curling into a come hither motion like I’m a yappy dog that needs to get inside.

I am here for my mother . I take the first step back toward the searchers, but Zoe blocks my path.

“Just wait.” Zoe’s voice is unexpectedly sweet, like biting into a hard candy only to find it soft and fudgy in the center. She brings her hand to my diaphragm. “Give them a head start. That way, when we go back, we can search together.”

She pauses. Then she says, “You shouldn’t have to be out there with him. Not even in a group.”

Our tardiness irritates the deputy, but Zoe’s plan works. He assigns the two of us a small search quadrant, hands us a walkie-talkie and two frozen water bottles, and tells us to be back at the rallying point no later than one o’clock, hell or high water. As soon as the deputy turns around, I tuck the water bottle between my breasts to stay cool. Into the high grass we go.

“Watch out for snakes!” the deputy hollers just before we’re out of earshot.

We walk an arm’s length apart, eyes trained on the ground. Every step I take with only the prairie grass beneath me gives me a jolt of relief. Even though I don’t expect to find my mother here, I can’t banish the thought of stepping on her decaying remains. Carrion. The heel of my boot accidentally tearing flesh from bone.

After half an hour of marching through the prairie, we stop for a water break. I tilt my head back to pour half-thawed ice water down my throat. The sky stretches infinitely overhead, not a whisper of a cloud to be seen. Just blue, blue, blue.

“I still think we’re going to find her alive,” Zoe says, running her hands lazily over the top of the grass. Her face is dewy with sweat. “I’m not just blowing smoke.”

“Hope springs eternal,” I deadpan.

“I can tell you mean that as an insult, but I’m choosing to interpret it as optimism.”

“If someone hasn’t killed her by now, I’m sure the withdrawals have.”

“Your mom is resourceful. She’ll keep herself alive,” she says.

“How would you know?”

She gazes across the horizon, where everyone’s cars are now just colorful specks in the distance. “I talked with her after church sometimes.” She says it sheepishly, turning what should be a source of reassurance for me—my mother had someone who cared about her, even just a little bit—into an admission of guilt.

My resentment is hypocritical. I understand this immediately. That’s why I swallow it down, rotten as it tastes, and try to smile instead. “I’m sure she’d be happy you’re here. Are your parents going to come out and help the searches?”

“They—” She clears her throat, stands up straighter. “They moved a long time ago. They’re all in New York now.”

“That sounds a little worldly for them.”

“They’re five miles down the road from World Headquarters. They love it.”

Zoe’s family are barely even silhouettes in my memory anymore. Her father was almost always at work, her mother was an unsmiling blonde who wore Mary Janes everywhere (even her own house when they had guests), and her brother was a freckled boy with a stutter that years of speech therapy could not treat.

I do, however, remember their head-scratching religious practices. No birthdays. No holidays. No dances. No extracurricular activities. No saying good luck , but saying if it is Jehovah’s will instead. No saying bless you . Muting TV commercials with demonic content. Burning objects with demonic spirits attached to them. Zoe could not call me her friend, only her acquaintance, because I was not a Witness. Under another set of circumstances, I don’t think I would have been invited into Zoe’s home at all, but they were the only Witnesses in Annesville, and since I was a regular churchgoer—still a Christian, albeit an astray one—they were willing to tolerate my presence.

Zoe gestures toward the sprawl of the prairie, the expanse of our quadrant we’ve yet to search. “We should probably keep moving. I don’t—”

“Was it me? Was that why you were disfellowshipped?”

Her pained laugh slices the air between us. “What else could it have been?”

We thought we were alone. We couldn’t hear those Mary Janes clip-clopping on the stairs over the rushing blood in our ears. Her mother screamed so loud you would have thought I was murdering her daughter instead of kissing her.

“Why didn’t you—?”

“Fight it? I was already going to college,” she says quietly. “They would have disfellowshipped me over that too. There was no point in subjecting myself to the elder board for … what we did, not if I was going to end up back there in a few months anyway.”

What we did. There it is again, the agonizing euphemism. “Do they—?”

She claps her hands together, squeezing tight enough to drain the color from her fingers. “Providence, please. I don’t want to talk about this. We’re here for your mom, okay? We shouldn’t lose focus on that.”

She takes off in long, loping strides that make it clear she isn’t going to wait for me if I fall behind. I have no choice but to follow.

Whatever compassion Zoe had for me earlier has long dried up by the time the search concludes. Like the first, this search unearths no trace of my mother’s whereabouts, and everyone is sunburned, exhausted, and grumpy when they disperse to their cars. She bids me a hasty goodbye before climbing into her truck. She’s the first one back on the road.

I’m aiming to be the second one out of the makeshift parking lot when my father knocks his knuckles against my window. I only roll down the window a few inches.

“What? Your windows don’t work?”

“The air’s on,” I lie. “I don’t want to let the cold out.”

My father spits onto the dirt, then wipes the viscous remnants from his lips. Beads of sweat roll down his giant nose, steady like the drip of a leaky faucet. He huffs and puffs for a moment before speaking. “What you got going on this evening?”

“Why?”

“I’m having your sisters over for dinner. I’d like you there too. Been too long since I’ve had all three of my girls under my roof, and … to tell you the truth, Providence, it’d make your mother happy to know you tried to be part of the family again.”

I open my mouth to reject this moronic, horrifying, insulting request, but stop myself. This is my chance to prove to Grace that I’m not useless. Suffering through one evening as a buffer between her and our father, her and Harmony, choking down the foul plateful of tuna noodle casserole our father will invariably serve—it’s the least I can do to atone for my many misdeeds.

It’ll just be a few hours. I can handle it.

He reads my mind. “See you at six, butterfly.”