Page 14

CHAPTER 13

August 16 th

11:20 AM

I THINK THIS is grief. I am not sure. It is one thing to think my mother is dead, but to know is another beast entirely. Now it’s really over. Our story ends here.

My brain is on fire with what if? What if she had been able to forgive me? What if I had been able to forgive her? What if she had protected me from my father? What if she had managed to stay sober? What if she had never taken the oxy? What if she had still been able to love me? I follow each strand of existential yearning to the same end, back to my parole hearing eight years ago. I don’t care if they let you go. I don’t care if you die tomorrow . It doesn’t matter to me anymore. After so much suffering and violence, at the end my mother only wanted to forget me—and now she is gone, and now I cannot forget her.

For two days, I scarcely leave the bedroom. Almost everyone I work with at the tattoo shop leaves a voicemail of condolence. Sara brings me food three times a day, like I’m back in prison doing another stint in solitary. This morning, she comes bearing bread and a purplish, pudding-like sauce. “It’s wojapi ,” she says as she sits beside me on the air mattress, Zenobia napping between us. “Think of it like a berry sauce. Dip the frybread in it.”

The wojapi is bittersweet like chokecherry pie. I submerge a piece of frybread. “I thought you hated cooking.”

“I’m out of cereal.”

I laugh for the first time in days. Zenobia is alarmed to hear me make a noise other than a sigh. I look to Sara, hoping my laughter will assure her I’m not dead from the neck up, but her eyes are stoic and glassy. My first thought is that she’s discovered Daniel’s drinking habit and, worse, discovered I didn’t tell her as soon as I found out. “What’s wrong? I’d ask if someone died, but I already know the answer.”

“Don’t shoot the messenger, all right?”

“What a vote of confidence.”

“Daniel called a few minutes ago,” she says, reaching up to pull back the curtains and blind me with daylight, “and said Sheriff Eastman is on his way here to talk to you.”

“The man can’t even let me grieve in peace.”

“He spoke to Grace earlier and he’s talking to Harmony tonight. Daniel says it’s due diligence.”

I push the bread into my mouth with tired fingers. I am acutely aware of how pathetic I am, spending days locked in this stuffy room, staring at the ceiling and torturing myself with recollections of my mother. Once the real memories ran dry, I created false ones. The chokecherry pie became my mother helping me pick my wedding dress.

“I think it’s heartless to ask us about it so soon after they found her body. It’s …” I trail off.

“Like I said, don’t shoot the messenger.”

We make the bed with fresh linens, but before I can retreat into my cocoon of grief, Sara leads me into the living room. I had forgotten how bright the rest of the trailer is. She seats me at the dining room table with the wojapi and frybread. “Eat, then get dressed. You’ll answer the sheriff’s questions, and then you can resume hibernation.”

“Do you have something black I can borrow? Something you’d wear for a funeral?”

“I have plenty of those. My family drops like flies.”

The dress is laughable. It covers every inch of my skin from the neck down, my cleavage tucked safely beneath the jewel neckline and my legs hidden in fabric puddling on the floor beneath me. I look more like the grim reaper than a daughter bereaving her mother. Despite how ridiculous it is, I am grateful my costume is such a shameless display of sorrow. I want the sheriff to see me as a woman in mourning and not as a former felon who is scared to death to be questioned by the police.

I meet Josiah at the front gate. Here I am, nothing to hide. His cruiser reads K-9 UNIT—STAY BACK, but the threat of canine intervention is an empty one with no police dog in sight. He tips his cowboy hat as he gets out of the car, pausing to survey the agglomeration of trailers surrounding us. “Jesus,” he says in the direction of adolescent boys clamoring around a basketball hoop. They are laughing and smiling, happy as children should be, nothing like the boy who found my mother. “We never did right by the Indians out here.”

“That’s an understatement.”

He gestures to the BEWARE OF DOG sign hanging from Sara’s front gate. “May I come in?”

“The dogs won’t be a problem. My friend is in another room keeping an eye on them.”

Josiah frowns. “She won’t be eavesdropping, I hope?”

I know better than to talk to cops alone. Without the time or money to recruit a lawyer, Sara eavesdropping from another room is the next best thing. “He has to stop when you say you want a lawyer,” she’d said as she herded the dogs into her bedroom. “It doesn’t matter if you’re not being Mirandized. I’ll come out there and tell him where he can stick it if you need me to.”

“She’s got pretty good ears, but that’s not a crime,” I tell him.

The dogs yowl as he crosses the threshold, sensing an unwelcome intruder in our midst. Josiah pays them no mind as he settles in at the head of the table. He spreads the contents of a manila folder before him, pictures and notes and typed documents I can’t decipher without asking questions or getting too close. Josiah’s every move is a trap until proven otherwise. As he licks his fingers and flicks through papers, I remember the first time he responded to a 911 call at our house. I was seven, too young to understand why the bedroom door was locked and why my mother was crying and saying stop , but old enough to know something was wrong. My father palmed my shoulders before he let the sheriff in. “The police aren’t your friends, Providence. They’ll punish you if you get something wrong. Think long and hard before you say anything to them.”

“Smells like an ashtray in here.” He thinks I don’t notice him turning on a recorder.

“Just me.”

Josiah’s mouth quirks into a smile, then flattens into a solemn line. “Before I ask you anything, I want to offer my condolences. I really thought she was still … I’m sorry any of this had to happen. Honest to God, I’m so sorry.”

“Me too.”

“Do you remember much from the book of Matthew?” he asks.

“‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.’”

My recitation impresses him. “The seventh beatitude. Do you remember the fifth?”

“Not off the top of my head,” I say.

“‘Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.’ I read it last night, and you came to mind.”

“Did I?”

“I know your relationship with your mom was difficult,” he says. “Hell, difficult ain’t even the half of it. But you’ve still lost your mother, and you’re allowed to mourn too. Your sisters don’t have a monopoly on grief.”

I want to dismiss the words, but the comfort I reap from them is too great. I turn to the window so he can’t see the tears welling in my eyes. Where was this fatherly warmth when I needed it all those years ago? I shake away the thought. He’s playing the good cop, buttering me up, coaxing me into letting my guard down. I won’t fall for it. “I appreciate that, sheriff,” I say.

“What I want to start with … it’s nothing nice, I’ll be frank. But I think you deserve to know exactly what happened to your mother.”

He slides a sheet of paper in front of me before I can ask him to spare me the gory details. The genderless human diagram is riddled with Xs to denote my mother’s injuries. The medical jargon is impossible for me to decipher—pulmonary laceration, diaphragmatic rupture?—but I don’t ask him to explain for fear of looking stupid.

“Your mother’s pattern of injury was consistent with being hit by a car. She suffered blunt force trauma to the head and torso.” He points a nicotine-stained finger at the head of the diagram. “Might have been manslaughter, but we’re learning toward homicide because her body was transported to the woods and disposed of.”

I stare at the coroner’s report. Josiah waits for me to speak, but my tongue has turned to stone. No matter what I say, he will manipulate my words and sand down their edges until they fit into the version of the story he has already decided on. I am more fearful now than I was at seventeen when I was handcuffed and Mirandized.

Who better to blame for hitting my mother with a car than me?

Josiah clears his throat. “How long have you been here, Miss Byrd?”

“Since last Sunday.”

“And what time did you arrive here, at your friend’s trailer?”

Two questions in and my stomach is already pretzeled into the Gordian knot. “Late afternoon.”

“Straight here from … Kansas City, isn’t it?”

“Right.”

“You didn’t stop anywhere else?” When I shake my head, he sighs. “All right. Let’s go back in time a bit, shall we? Let’s go back to when you tried to kill your mother.”

“I didn’t try to kill her .”

“The charge was reduced to assault with a deadly weapon in the end, sure, but you don’t run someone over with a car just to break a few bones.”

“I served my time,” I say. “What I did was horrible. Unforgivable.”

“You know what I always found interesting? After your arrest, you never once said you were sorry. Not a drop of remorse.”

“Why aren’t you asking me more important things? Like where I was?”

“We’ll get there.”

“I live ten hours away. I worked every single night that week. You can call my boss, Kiera Geraghty. She knows my shifts to the minute. She’ll tell you I was doing my first palm tattoo the night my mother disappeared.”

But these facts are of no use to him. His sharp turn from affable to hostile leaves me reeling. “When is the last time you spoke to your mother?”

“My parole hearing.”

“Are you sure?”

“I think I would remember otherwise.”

“That’s what I think too,” he says, offering me another piece of paper. “But your mother’s phone records show she placed five calls to you the day before she disappeared.”

The highlighted phone number is, indeed, my own. “I didn’t answer.”

“Why wouldn’t you answer a call from your long-estranged mother? What if she wanted to reconcile?”

The last question is the one tormenting me. I don’t remember the calls because I don’t remember my mother’s number. I decline calls from unknown numbers as a rule. The what if? questions rattle in my mind like dice in a cup. What if she needed me? What if she was in danger? What if she was scared? What if the last thing she wanted to hear was my voice? What if she hadn’t forgotten about me after all? With each beat of my heart comes a twinge in my chest, the muscle trying to rend itself in two.

“I didn’t know it was her,” I say quietly. “But she—Grace told me she gave her my phone number, in case of emergency. She made me Grace’s emergency contact at school.”

“How do you know this?”

I stop short of mentioning Connor’s name. I want to leave as many people out of this quagmire as possible, even if I doubt he would do the same for me. “I was called to her school about a disciplinary matter.”

“For an estranged sister, you seem awfully invested in getting Grace out of various, ah, disciplinary matters , as you put it.”

My eyes drift to the recorder, now completely visible. What I want to say next requires me to bare my soul. I need my sister to love me. The thought of my words living forever on tape, a confession of the loneliness I have endured for my entire adult life, will hollow me out, like I must scoop out my insides and display them in a museum for the world to examine. “I’m close by,” I manage. “The least I can do is help if she asks for it.”

He peppers me with mundane questions then, where I live and what I do for work and where was I on the night of my mother’s disappearance. My heartbeat is just beginning to slow when Josiah puts me on the back foot again. “What kind of car do you drive, Providence?”

His gravelly voice curdles my name. “I didn’t notice when I pulled in,” he elaborates.

“It’s the blue Honda out front. Nothing fancy.”

“Mind if I take a look at it on my way out?”

“Of course,” I say without thinking. Sara is in the other room fuming at my stupidity.

Josiah saunters outside. He shields his eyes from the sun, even though his hat shades his face. He peers through my windows and scrutinizes my front bumper. (Thank God I took care of the damage from an old fender-bender before driving out here.)

And then he raps on the passenger window. “Unlock it for me? Just want a quick look inside.”

The gun.

I’ve forgotten about it. He hasn’t.

The dogs charge into the front yard. Sara stands tall on the metal steps to the trailer. “I don’t think she will, sheriff.”

“I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure, Miss …?”

“Sara Walking Elk.”

“Sara then,” he says over the dogs’ rancor, his eyes drawn to my glove box like a magnet. “I don’t mean no harm. I only want a peek.”

“If you want a peek, you can come back with a search warrant,” she says.

“In my day, we called this making a mountain out of a molehill.” He waits for one of us to crack. A few moments ago, I would have, but Sara has given me enough backbone to hold firm. “All right then. No harm done. I’ll come back with a warrant if need be.”

“This isn’t your jurisdiction,” she says. “You’ll have to go through my brother if you want to search anything on Long Grass.”

“I wouldn’t dream of treading on your sovereignty.”

She huffs at his sincerity. “You could start by shutting down the Annesville liquor stores. We’re a dry reservation. They shouldn’t be allowed to sell to us.”

“Sara, not now. Please.”

My protestation comes too late. She has hijacked the conversation, and it’s no longer about me or my mother anymore. She fits her feet into the gaps of the chain-link fence and lifts herself higher than the sheriff. My five-feet-nothing friend turns into a giant. “When else am I going to have his ear?” She turns to Josiah. “It’s blood money, sheriff. They kill us to keep the lights on.”

“Your quarrel is with the state of Nebraska,” Josiah says. “That’s far above the authority of the local sheriff.”

“We have taken it up with the state of Nebraska. What did they say? Wait. Wait through years of bullshit court hearings and bullshit discovery and bullshit deposition. What happens while we wait? We die, and we watch people die.”

“I’m not unsympathetic to your plight.”

Sara unleashes a long breath. The fence rattles as she drops back to earth. “Hundreds of years of white men telling us what to do, telling us where we can live, where we can go to school, which deities we’re allowed to worship, and the first time we ask them for help, they shoo us away. Respectfully, sir? Fuck you.”

“She’d be twice the politician Zoe Markham is,” he muses once she hauls the dogs back into the trailer.

“Politicians have agendas,” I say. “Sara doesn’t. She wants people to stop dying.”

“We’ve all seen enough death and misery for one lifetime. It makes you tired.”

Josiah shakes my hand goodbye, but holds on to it for an extra beat. With his duties to his badge fulfilled, he eases back into the paternal role he has invented for himself. It is not his job to offer me comfort. I can’t understand why he does, and I chalk it up to another underhanded scheme. If he does make good on his promise to return with a warrant, he wants me to remember him as a good guy at heart, someone who showed me kindness in my hour of need. It will soften me up for an interrogation down the line.

“I really am sorry about your mother. I hope you remember the verse I shared with you.”

“‘Blessed are they that mourn.’”

“They shall be comforted. And so will you.”

It takes three drinks to rinse the memory of my mother’s maimed foot from my mind. By sundown, I’m too drunk to spell my own name. The Tyre pool hall thrums with life, the diehard Rockies fans replaced today by diehard Nuggets fans transfixed by the NBA draft. My universe has been pared down to noisily racked ivories and vodka sodas burning my throat when I swallow, the hot tang like vomiting in reverse. I whip my head toward the door every time the bell on the handle chimes. It’s only a matter of time before my father strides through the door. I’m just plastered enough to pick a fight with him.

As the bartender brings me my next vodka soda, my phone buzzes on the countertop. I keep it face down for a moment, my eyes closed, willing it to be Grace. Same as every time before, it isn’t. It’s a picture from Margot of my peace lilies, shriveling up and shredding their leaves. I shouldn’t laugh, but I do. First my mother, now my plants.

My phone vibrates again, but I see Kiera’s name on the screen before I can allow myself a morsel of hope.

“Oh, sweetheart,” she says when I answer. “I just heard about your mom. I’m so, so, so sorry.”

“Thank you.” I hide my drunkenness by using as few words as possible.

“If you need more time, if you need anything at all—”

“Margot killed my peace lilies.”

“What?”

I knock back the vodka soda, light on the vodka, in two gulps. I lift up my glass to tell the bartender I’m ready for another. “She sent me a picture. They’re dead.”

“You’re drunk.”

“And I’m sad about my plants. Will you buy me new ones?”

“You better not be driving home,” Kiera warns. In the background, her son laughs and shrieks. I can feel the jealousy oozing from my pores. For Kiera—for nearly everyone else I know—life marches on unchanged. This time tomorrow, she won’t be thinking of me or my mother. “Grief is no excuse to drive drunk,” she says.

“I’ll promise not to drive home if you promise to buy me new peace lilies.”

“Okay. I’ll buy you new peace lilies.”

The pause between us stretches too long. Even the sounds of the bar cannot make it comfortable. By the time I’m ready to speak again, I have a fresh vodka soda. I squeeze my lemon slice with one hand and watch the juice, pulp, and seeds drip into the glass. I don’t care how gross it is. At this point, I’d drink ethanol if it would numb me. “I don’t miss her, you know. My mom. My mother. She’s dead, and I know it’s sad and permanent, but lots of people have dead moms. Is your mom dead?”

“She drank herself to death when I was a kid.”

“What was her drink of choice?”

“Whiskey,” Kiera says.

“My mother liked gin. Beer too, if we were out of gin. She used to get so drunk she couldn’t walk to the bathroom to puke, so she had this blanket on the floor she’d vomit into. My dad always held his liquor better, but he had a blanket he’d piss on so he didn’t have to get out of his recliner. The living room always smelled like piss and vomit.”

Kiera is quiet for a moment. “My mom was never that bad.”

“I found out she was addicted to oxy too. The painkiller?”

“I know what oxy is.”

“It’s my fault. I broke so many bones when I hit her with the car. She was probably in agony all the time. Suffering. I didn’t want her to suffer. God, what a stupid thing to say. Fucking joke, right? Boo-hoo, I got my mother hooked on painkillers , okay, Providence, but you tried to kill her, so how bad can you really feel?”

“You’ve never grieved anyone before, have you?” Kiera asks.

It’s imperative that I redirect the conversation before Kiera can plumb the depths of my grief. “Do you miss your mom?” I swallow an ice cube whole. It hurts, but the pain grounds me. I am still here. It feels like I’m disintegrating, the way oceanside cliffs do after being centuries of being battered by waves, but somehow, I’m still here.

“I didn’t know her enough to miss her.”

“Well, I don’t miss my mother.”

“I think you do,” she says tenderly, “otherwise you wouldn’t be drowning your sorrows like this.”

“I need to go.”

“I mean it, Providence. Call someone. Don’t drive home.”

People love me. I am lovable.

“Maybe slow down after this one, if you don’t mind my saying so.” The bartender arranges canned beers like a bouquet in a bucket of ice. It’s the same bartender who brought me the stouts from Coach Romanoff and my father. Even while I’m dressed in funeral garb, he cannot help but steal glances at my chest.

“I mind, but only a little bit.” After trying and failing half a dozen times to stow my phone in my pocket, I give up and slide it into my bra.

“Did you know her?”

“What?”

He scrambles for the right words. “I mean you’re dressed like you’re in mourning. For Mrs. Byrd.”

I try to down half the vodka soda in one gulp, but my gag reflex betrays me mid-swallow. I manage only a tiny sip and expel the rest back into the glass, where it mixes with my spit to create a cloudy, viscous mixture. “My plants are dying.”

“They … well, they must have been dear to you?”

“More dear to me than my parents.”

He trundles out from behind the bar, beers in tow. The men at a nearby pool table whoop when he approaches them. Perfect timing, kid! They aren’t worried about dead plants or dead mothers. Their only concerns are what beer to drink and which freakish athlete their basketball team will draft. Again I check my phone and again there is nothing from my sisters.

“So, listen …” The bartender’s sheepish glance gives away his question before he can even ask. “I wanted to … well, I think you’re really pretty, and—”

“Where’s the bathroom? I’m about to piss myself.” My words barely sound like English. They’re muted by the thunderous booing as the Knicks announce their pick. I love the time-honored tradition of booing teams from New York. I join in with my own hoots of disapproval. Fuck the Knicks.

He directs me down a dank hallway. I keep my hand on the wall for balance until I’m locked inside the single-occupancy bathroom. The urinal overflows. The mirror above the sink is broken, honeycombed around the edges by missing shards of glass, cracks thin like cobwebs radiating out from the center. Someone has written profanities where the missing glass should be. SLUT. BITCH. MOTHERFUCKER. I grab a pen from my purse and write CUNT across them all.

I lower the toilet lid and sit. My knees are drawn to my chest in a self-embrace to keep me from toppling onto the grimy floor. A few minutes ago, I was comfortably drunk, rapturously drunk, delighted to be beyond the tentacles of reality, but the longer I sit, the faster the alcohol catches up with me. That’s the problem with drinking. It feels good until it doesn’t.

I hold the phone to my ear. I might be too drunk to spell my own name, but I still have enough presence of mind to know that getting behind the wheel right now would be suicide. I call Sara, Zoe, Connor, but no one picks up. I am left with one uneasy ally to call, and of course, he answers on the second ring.

“I wasn’t expecting to hear from you tonight.”

“Hi, Daniel.”

“You sound like you’re in a cave.”

“I am in a cave.” I talk slowly to make myself a fraction more intelligible. “I’m … spelunking deep into a cave of abject human misery.”

“Spelunking deep into the bottle sounds more like it.”

“I need a ride back to Sara’s.”

“Where are you?”

“Tyre,” I say. “The pool hall. I’ve been admiring the tires of Tyre.”

“The what?”

I rest my chin between my knees, but it does little to alleviate the sensation of rocking back and forth like I’m on a boat. “The … they collect tires. Tires, from your car. Because the town is called Tyre, get it? Like the city in … Lebanon, I think? Somewhere in the Middle East. The birthplace of Fido.”

“That was Dido, Providence.”

“If you’re not going to give me a ride, tell me now so I can go stand on the side of the road with my thumb out.”

He allows a few seconds of silence to pass, long enough for me to wallow in embarrassment before throwing me a lifeline. “It’ll take me half an hour to get there,” he says over jangling keys.

“I won’t move a muscle.”

To call myself three sheets to the wind is generous. The world is swimming. It barely registers when the pool hall erupts into cheers as the Nuggets announce their pick. The stranger beside me offers a high-five, mistaking my glassy-eyed stare at the television as rapt attention; I miss and nearly break his nose with the heel of my hand. I cheer loudly and yell nonsense at the screen. I bemoan the loss of my peace lilies to everyone within earshot. By the time Daniel escorts me out of the bar, even the bartender is relieved.

In his car, I miss twice before successfully buckling my seatbelt. My words tumble out half-formed, a potter’s clay not yet fired in the kiln. “You’re the only person who answered my call. Isn’t that pathetic?”

“It’s a weeknight,” he deadpans. “People work.”

“ People work , ooh, aren’t you just so down to earth? I have a job, you know. A real one. I pay taxes.”

“I never implied otherwise.”

“And I have people. I have friends. But most of them aren’t here. They’re in Kansas City, and I’m here with my dead mother, and … I feel very lonely right now. Like I’m on a deserted island.”

The road is empty. It isn’t quite nine o’clock, but the sidewalks in Tyre have already rolled up. The pool hall is the only building still lit, a lighthouse at the mouth of a blackened sea. Daniel grabs a plastic bag from the back seat in case I need to vomit, which, given the frequency and depth of the potholes we rumble over, seems inevitable.

“I wish I had more people who loved me,” I tell him.

“It won’t always be this way,” he says when we pull onto the highway. In the rearview mirror, Tyre is a ghost town. “You’re still young. You’ll get married. You’ll have kids. You’ll be part of a family.”

“No one marries felons and I got my tubes removed.”

“Sara said you were a lesbian.”

“Are you disappointed?”

“You’re not my type,” he says, like he’s rejecting me. As if there’s between us anything to reject. “I mention it because if you don’t sleep with men, why get your tubes removed?”

“So I don’t become the victim of the second immaculate conception.”

“Don’t be glib.”

I roll down my window to invite in the tepid summer night. The fresh air rolls through the car like the nausea through my body. “I got my tubes removed because I don’t want kids. Simple. Don’t overthink it. I’m sure I look like perfect mother material to you anyway.”

“Some people would say you did this to yourself.”

“ You would say I did this to myself.”

He shifts in his seat.

“I always thought at some point the world would stop punishing me for what I did to my mother, but every day it … I don’t know. I never get to move on. You think it ends when you get out of prison, and then you think it ends when you’re off parole, but then you realize you can’t have the job you want and you can’t live in a decent apartment, and forget going to college … and then your mom is dead.” I say it without thinking. Mom. “And then your peace lilies are dying too. What’s it all for? Why are we here and what’s the meaning of life? There. Now I’m being glib.”

“What did you want out of life when you were young?”

“I wanted to be an astronaut.”

He narrows his eyes at me, unsure if I’m being a smart-ass or if I’m being genuine.

“If you knew something about my mother …” I trail off and whisper the word to myself, committing the movements of my mouth to memory, the way my lips constrict on the m and part on the th , how the r judders in the back of my throat. Mother. Not mom. It tastes wrong. Mom is poison. Mom is acid. Mom is a chokecherry pit. Mother. Mother. “If you knew something about what happened to her that I didn’t, would you tell me?”

“Certain things I can’t talk about.”

I tense my jaw. “So you do know something.”

“Anything I tell you is only half the story. The other half you’ll have to get out of Sheriff Eastman.”

“I haven’t told Sara about the bourbon,” I say. “Give me a reason to keep it that way.”

He searches my face for any hint that this is my drunken idea of a joke. “Sheriff Eastman is looking into everyone who was at the church the day your mother went missing. There’s a couple of landscapers who aren’t too keen on talking to police.”

“Do you think they know something?”

“No. My guess is they’re undocumented and think they’ll get deported if they talk to the police.”

“And what about my father? Are they still doing a poly … the lie detector test?”

“Polygraph,” he supplies.

“Yeah, polygraph.”

“They are, but don’t put too much stock in it. They aren’t admissible in court.”

“Did you ever find her shoes?”

“Shoes? No. We’re not worried about the shoes. Probably dragged off by a coyote. The body is enough.”

I retch into the plastic bag, but nothing comes up. The alcohol has coalesced into a lump like a hairball. “Did you know my mother called me? Five times the day before she disappeared.”

“From your tone, I’m guessing you didn’t pick up.”

“Numbers I don’t recognize are usually creeps I tattoo. Some of them think you’re putting your hands on them for fun, not because they’re paying you.” I blink a few times, trying to hold on to the thread of conversation. “You have to make sure Josiah really looks into my father, Daniel. My mother—she wouldn’t have—the only reason I can think for her to reach out to me is if something was wrong. I mean, really wrong.”

“I haven’t forgotten what you said.”

“Did she feel it when the car hit her?”

“We shouldn’t talk about this.”

“Tell me,” I insist.

But when I see his eyes darken, I don’t want him to say the words. His forlorn expression tells me everything. “She didn’t die on impact, no.”

“What killed her then?”

“Respiratory injuries.”

“So she suffocated.”

“I would ask the medical examiner. She can—I’m probably getting some of the terminology wrong. The medical terms all get lost in translation.”

I wonder if she screamed. I wonder if her lungs allowed her to make any noise at all. I bite my knuckle, bearing down with just enough pressure to make it hurt. “I hope she was high,” I say after a long silence. “The oxy would have numbed the pain. Maybe—I know it’s a fucked-up way to look at it, but maybe I helped her in that way, you know? She only took the oxy because of what I did to her. Maybe that meant her last moments weren’t painful. I don’t like the thought of her dying scared.”

“One time, years and years ago, I went out on a call about a domestic disturbance. Asshole threatening his wife with a gun. He was quick on the draw, and he shot me in the chest.” Daniel brings his hand to the right side of his chest. “I finally understood what the phrase blinding pain meant. It was like someone ran a hot poker between my ribs. But when I was lying there on the ground, every time I tried to lift my head, I wanted to put it back down and close my eyes. The pain stopped eventually, and all I wanted to do was sleep.”

“But you lived.”

“In the end. They rushed me to the hospital, put a tube in my chest, and fished out the bullet. But for a while, lying there, I thought it was over. I would die in that asshole’s driveway. Most Lakota people don’t think of it as dying. Usually we call it walking on , beginning the next part of your journey, and when you think of it that way, it makes death a hell of a lot less scary for most people. It still scared me though. At least it did back then. So when I was lying there with a bullet in my chest, I thought I would die scared. I was at first. But by the time it was really the end—or at least, I thought it was the end, started drifting in and out of consciousness—I wasn’t scared at all. Time was slow and the world was quiet. I just wanted to sleep.”

“What were you thinking of?”

“My daughter Scarlett’s birthday was that weekend,” he says. “She was five, finally old enough to have a real birthday party. She had begged me for an ice cream cake. I was hoping her mom would remember to pick it up if I wasn’t there to remind her.”

“You didn’t have your life flash before your eyes, like in the movies?”

“No.”

“I hope my mother didn’t either,” I say quietly. “I hope she drifted away. She was born with nothing and she died with nothing. Her father hit her and her mother, and she grew up to marry a man who hit her and her daughters. The only things she ever liked to do were drink and take pills. I don’t think anything in her life ever brought her joy or made her proud.”

“You’d be surprised. It’s little memories parents cherish most. Everyone has those.”

The chokecherry pie. I can see her smiling in the front seat of the car as she passes me the saran-wrapped slice, red berries and filling oozing everywhere, and it is then I can finally feel the absence her death leaves with me. The word mother is meaningless to me. Mother is someone I hated. I cannot grieve for my mother, but I can grieve for the woman who brought me pie. That woman, so rarely and ephemerally part of my life, gone just as quickly as she appeared, loved me, and I loved her too.

I do not realize I have tears until they streak down my cheeks. I cry silently until my chest aches from suppressing my sobs. Then I begin to wail.