Page 13

CHAPTER 12

August 13 th

7:42 AM

I HAVE A sixth sense for tragedy, finely honed by palms to my face and the squeak of my bedsprings at unholy hours of the night. I feel it deep in my bones, the way animals sense earthquakes and old women sense rain on the wind. My chest throbs when I wake up that morning. My heartbeat feels like a backhand strike against my ribcage. Something is coming. All I can do is brace for impact.

Focus on what is in front of you.

Sight: the water stains on the ceiling bleeding into one another.

Sound: my own breath, lungs emptying and filling, emptying and filling.

Smell: something inexplicably sour, like roadkill.

Taste: my tongue fuzzy and metallic from sleep.

Touch: numbness tingling between my joints, creeping around my bones like kudzu vines.

Tiny knocks at the door. Sara cracks it open, white sunlight slashing across the room. It should feel warm, but it doesn’t. It can’t cut through the numbness. My friend hesitates at the threshold. She chokes on her words. She crosses her arms over her chest, each hand reaching for its opposite shoulder, and looks down at the carpet.

And I know what’s wrong.

And I say it:

“She’s dead, isn’t she?”

And I’m right.

A little boy from the reservation found her. He was hiking with his father when they saw deer grazing, and the boy, no more than eight years old, tiptoed off the trail for a better view. Guided by an invisible hand or another supernatural force beyond comprehension, he noticed a human foot jutting out from a sparse blanket of leaves.

The boy and his father are still there when I arrive at the scene. The boy is crying. His strangled wail echoes through my bones. This is the thing I will always remember. Other details, such as the vulture-like mourners busily erecting a makeshift memorial in my mother’s memory and the blistering heat and the white sheet over my mother’s body, will be sanded away by time. But years from now, I will still hear this little boy’s cries in my dreams.

I am in a daze, numb except for an ache deep in my core. My lack of emotion is anticlimactic. I am being cheated of something. To be a motherless daughter is the most primal pain of all, yet I am not mad with grief. I am lost in labyrinthine recollections of my childhood, staring blankly ahead as if I’ve suffered a traumatic brain injury and been rendered a vegetable. Behind a strand of yellow caution tape strung around the trees, police comb the nearby woods for evidence. Crime scene marker number one denotes the pile of foliage my mother had been buried under, and a trail of leaves lead from her resting place to the stretcher she lies on now. Her bare feet stick out from beneath the sheet. The left dangles by a single bloody tendon.

Time has turned molten. Hours feel like days.

Two people bookend me and weave their arms through mine. Connor to my left, Zoe to my right. It touches me to see them band together and come to my aid. I rest my head in the curve between Zoe’s shoulder and neck.

“There are … there are things they need to do to her body,” Connor says without looking at me. He lets me keep my fragment of intimacy with Zoe private. “You don’t want to see that.”

“He should have buried her,” I say.

Zoe’s voice strains above a whisper as the wind whips her flaxen hair into a tangle. “What?”

“Whoever killed her,” I say. “He left her out here to be eaten by vultures and coyotes. He should have buried her. It’s the least he could have done.”

“Providence …” Connor begins. He stands with his back to the crime scene. He never had a stomach for gore. Just being near the carnage is making him turn green.

“She’ll never get buried. The women in my family only get cremated. She’ll gather dust on the mantle. He should have at least buried her.”

Connor and Zoe exchange a look, but I remain fixated on the crime scene. One of the tribal police officers places a yellow marker beside a gnarled tree. A tatter of fabric? A strand of hair? There must be dozens, maybe hundreds of invisible traces of my mother scattered in these woods, all screaming Elissa was here .

“And her shoes,” I say. “Where are her shoes?”

They steer me away from the crime scene and back up the trail. The onlookers wait for a police officer to provide an update, to emerge from the woods like Moses descending Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments. On a distant bench, the little boy continues crying. He clings to his father’s arm as Daniel kneels before them with a notepad, trying to draw information out of the shell-shocked boy. The boy sniffles, shakes his head, and asks for his mother. I want my mom. I want my mom.

While Connor and Zoe squabble about who should drive me back to the trailer, I approach the boy. I open my mouth to interrupt Daniel’s gentle questioning, but nothing comes out, and I stand there unnoticed with my mouth ajar like a baby bird waiting for its mother to deposit worms into its maw.

Daniel acknowledges me with a curt glance. “Now isn’t the best time.”

I point to the boy. “Can I talk to him? I feel like—I feel like we might need each other right now.”

“That okay, sir?”

The father nods. The boy shrinks further when I sit beside him on the bench. He’s so young, so innocent, the last person in the world who should be drawn into this sordid ordeal. It is the smallness and senselessness of the injustice which makes it so insidious. Why couldn’t it have been anyone else to find her body? Why not his father? Why not me? Why this poor child?

“Do you need a hug?” I ask the boy.

He crumples into my arms. I hold him as he cries.

“It was kind of you. Checking on the little boy.”

Zoe does not look at me when she speaks. Her eyes remain glued to the countryside sprawling before us, miles upon miles of flat earth without so much as a tree or bush to disrupt the visual monotony. She props her arm on the armrest between us. Her palm upturns, her fingers relaxed in invitation, and I can’t tell if I’m imagining it or if she truly pities me enough in this moment to indulge me with a chaste embrace of our hands.

“He wanted his mom,” I say.

“You were the next best thing.”

I place my hand beside hers, close enough for our pinkies to touch. Zoe senses this is all the courage I can muster and entwines her fingers with mine. A few hours ago, the gesture would have sent me soaring; now, it merely tempers the ache suffusing every inch of my body. I close my eyes and commit her touch to memory.

Zoe white-knuckles the steering wheel with her free hand. She drives at precisely the speed limit. Once a square, always a square. “It reminded me of something your mom would do.”

“Don’t.”

“What?”

“That’s not who she was. She was …”

“I don’t think you knew her anymore.”

“She was still an alcoholic. She was still letting my father abuse my sisters. She was still the same at her core,” I say. “Grace told me she was hooked on oxy too.”

“You always said addiction was a disease.”

I ball my free hand into a fist and look out the window. Trees populate the horizon as we near the town of Long Grass, our drive approaching its end. “It doesn’t mean I have to forgive her for it.”

“She knew about us,” she says.

“No, she didn’t.”

Zoe finally meets my eyes. The sidelong look distracts her from the road long enough for her truck to judder over the center rumble strip. “She came to my office a few months ago,” she says once the truck is squarely back on its side of the road. “I figured she was coming to ask about the VA office in Carey Gap they’ve been promising for years. People either complain to me about that or about their property taxes. Anyway, she said my mom called her that night. When we …”

“When we kissed.”

“When we kissed.” Hearing her call the act by its name, even if she’s only parroting me, is healing in itself. “So she knew. All these years, she knew, and she never threw the Bible at me, or made me feel guilty, or treated me any differently. She just came into my office that day and said, ‘I really don’t understand it, but I’m glad you made my daughter happy.’ ”

“I’m glad my mother could absolve you of your homosexual guilt.”

Zoe frowns. “Way to miss the point.”

“And what is the point, Zoe? That you got to have the heartfelt conversation with my mother I never did? That when she found out I’d been with another girl, she offered you her acceptance instead of me?” But I realize instantly that my mother used the only power she had to accept me: silence. The catastrophic kiss happened a month before I ran my mother over. If Zoe’s mom really called her the night it happened, if my mother really knew all along about our tryst (and if she knew about the kiss, then who can say she didn’t know about the things we did in Zoe’s back seat?), she had an entire month to ruin me. Send me to the church for counseling. Ship me off to conversion therapy. Out me to my father, God forbid.

My intestines coil like a snake eating its own tail. My mother guarded my secret, and I repaid her discretion by breaking her bones.

Zoe opens her mouth to speak, but only a bewildered sigh slips out. “I thought you’d want to hear a happy memory I have of your mom.”

“It’s a happy memory I should have. Not you.”

“Sweet Christmas, forget I said anything.”

“At least it would have meant something to me,” I fire back.

“Don’t start.”

But I have started, and now I can’t stop. “Now you get to keep my mother’s approval in your pocket, something to cheer you up when you feel guilty about still being in the closet.”

“I’m not in the closet,” Zoe insists.

“What else do you call a girl who’s ashamed that she has sex with other girls?”

“We were teenagers. I was confused and lonely and … repressed.”

“So it was just a science experiment for you?”

We stop at a red light. After almost an hour of constant motion, the stillness makes me queasy. I need more distance between me and my mother’s dead body, more distance between me and the weeping boy. “We shouldn’t do this right now,” Zoe sighs. “You’re tired. You’re grieving. Now is not the time.”

I am too exhausted to argue more.

The dogs tear into the front yard when we pull up to the trailer. Sara’s car is gone, probably a few minutes behind us. My grief is catching up with me. I want to be asleep when we finally collide.

I start to gather my things and get out of the truck, but Zoe does not let go of my hand. She wants to kiss me. Her lips are parted. Her head is tilted. I know exactly how it will feel: the softness of her mouth, the shyness of her tongue, her fingers wreathing into my hair and drawing me closer, closer, closer, until I drape over the center console. Zoe always kissed me in a frenzy, like the only air she could breathe was that which we had shared. I close my eyes and feel her drawing closer to me, like a planet pulling an asteroid into its orbit.

But at the last moment, I turn my head. The heat between us turns to ice as her lips brush my cheek.

“I thought you wanted me to kiss you,” she whispers.

“Not like this.”

“I’m trying to comfort you.”

My desire for Zoe is sharp, but my grief for my mother is sharper. “Don’t kiss me out of pity, Zoe. I don’t deserve that.”

The rumble of Sara’s car turning onto the driveway draws the moment to an unceremonious end. When I meet Sara on the front porch, she squeezes my shoulder affectionately. The dogs follow us inside, each carrying a toy in their mouth.

“Do you want food?” Sara is already opening the kitchen cabinets. “Maybe a cup of tea?”

“I just want to sleep.”

“Oh, Providence, I’m so sorry.”

“I’ll be okay.” My voice is fragile.

“It’s never easy, losing a parent,” she says. “Take it from someone who’s lost both. Even if you know it’s going to happen, it always feels too soon. It’s like watching a bridge collapse while you’re still standing on it.”

I shower and wash my face. Sara leaves a cup of tea on my nightstand. I draw the curtains, turn off my phone, and collapse onto the air mattress. The sheet I cast over myself is as white as the one covering my mother’s body. I think of her mangled leg when I close my eyes. Every few minutes, I reach for my ankles to make sure they have not spontaneously severed from my body. I palpate my legs and try to guess which tendon was keeping my mother’s ankle attached.

Sara knocks at the door. When she opens it, Zenobia trots in.

“She’s been scratching at your door,” Sara says. “She can tell you’re sad.”

I cannot even bring myself to sit upright. I ache all over. “I’m not sad. I’m …”

“She’ll be good company for you.”

Sara closes the door before I can protest or ask her to take away the tea. Zenobia noses through the pile of dirty clothes on my suitcase, then hops onto the air mattress. She curls up beside me and presses her back against mine.

Silence suffocates the trailer, heavy and dark like widow’s weeds. Sara has gone to bed. The dogs have purged themselves of their evening barks and howls. Now there’s only me and my white noise machine playing ocean waves on a loop. When I dial Grace’s number, it’s mostly because I’m desperate to hear another human voice.

She answers in a small, muffled tone. “Hi, Providence.” I picture her lost in a puddle of blankets, her hair mussed and her eyes rimmed with salt.

“Hi. I just—I thought I should call. See if you’re okay.”

“I feel like I’m underwater,” she says. “It’s like I can see the surface, but no matter how hard I swim, I can’t break through. She didn’t deserve this, to—to just be left like that. Like a piece of trash.”

“Carrion,” I say, rolling onto my back. My movement disturbs Zenobia, who makes her displeasure clear with a sidelong glare. She licks her chops sleepily before lowering her head back onto the corner of my pillow.

“What?”

“Dead flesh. It’s what vultures eat.”

She chastises me with a temporary silence. “You’re making things worse.”

I read between the lines: if you’d had your way, she would have been carrion thirteen years ago . My heartache will never be pure.

“Is Harmony with you?”

“She stopped by on her way to the bar.” She sounds sheepish, as if Harmony’s desertion is a reflection of her own character. The three of us echo through each other inescapably. “Mitesh and Karishma stayed longer when they dropped off their casserole. Everyone’s bringing casseroles, like I’ll forget my mom was murdered if I just shovel a few platefuls of tater tots and Velveeta into my mouth.”

“It’s what you do when people die,” I say.

“I wouldn’t care if they brought the casseroles and left, but they all try to tell me stories. Now that she’s dead, they all have something nice to say about her. Like, suddenly half the town is in tears, telling me ‘Oh, she was such a bright light at church’ and ‘I always loved her chokecherry pies.’ No one ever said anything nice while she was alive.”

“Do you …?”

She draws a sharp breath. “Do I what?”

“I could come see you. If you don’t want to be alone.”

“Dad wouldn’t …” She trails off.

“I know. I know.”

Wishful thinking, like always. I should abandon the thought, but I can’t. The fantasy unfurls in detail so crisp it feels like a memory instead of an invention: me and Grace on the couch together, our father nowhere to be found. She rests her head against my shoulder like a weary traveler finally offered respite, and I twine her hair into a lazy braid to busy my fingers. There’s a movie on in the background, something lighthearted and funny to distract us from the maelstroms churning within us. We drink hot chocolate even though it’s summertime, because—and I’m not sure how I know this, but I do, I do, I do—Grace loves hot chocolate. We don’t say anything, but we don’t have to. It’s enough to be near each other.

Anger lashes me like a whip. Here I am, pining for the sweetness of sisterhood, while Harmony has rejected it with casual carelessness, like a restaurant patron declining a second glass of wine. No more for me, thank you. While she numbs herself with shots and floats around the pool hall like a ghost, Grace is trapped at the house, maybe alone but maybe with our father. He skulks from room to room, beer bottleneck grasped between his fingers, waiting for her most vulnerable moment to strike.

A sob claws at my throat, but I force it down. “Will you please call me if you need anything?”

“I will.”

“Promise me.”

Her voice sounds as tortured as mine. Two animals scrambling to break free from the same cage. “I promise.”