Page 17

CHAPTER 16

August 18 th

2:46 PM

I CAN’T STOP seeing it. The inside of the closet.

The memory gathers dust in the far-flung recesses of my mind. Some memories I return to frequently because the triggers are impossible to avoid. A crying dog, a police cruiser, footsteps outside of my apartment door. Nothing ever forces me to return to the linen closet. It comes to me now in jolts like flashbang grenades. The single spiral lightbulb flickering overhead. The cold vinyl floor sticking to my skin. The smell of my sisters’ breath, stale from two, six, ten hours without water. Baby Grace cocooned in my arms, unleashing deafening cries more beast than child.

Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the rock.

By the time I get back to the sheriff’s office, my hands are destroyed. I look like I lost a fight with a barbed wire fence, the skin at my knuckles completely torn away, dried blood smeared down the lengths of my fingers. I’ve never attacked my hands so viciously before.

The deputy who confiscates Harmony’s medication crinkles his pug nose at my hands. “Miss, do you need a bandage?”

“Can I see my sister?”

“Wait here. Sheriff Eastman wants to talk to you.”

I start suckling the dried blood from my fingers to clean myself up, but it only adds to my humiliation. The frizzy-haired receptionist gawks at me from across the room. She hovers one hand over her desk phone.

“I’m having a bad day,” I say to her before I can stop myself.

“Sure.”

“My sister was arrested.”

“Okay.”

I wait for her to pull her hand away from the phone, to give an indication she sees me as a person and not a nuclear reactor on the brink of a meltdown. “You know—you know, most people would say ‘I’m sorry’ when someone tells them something like that.”

Nothing. She returns to whatever mind-numbing work her computer and her file cabinets have in store, and I focus on the rage frying a hole in my guts, the envy I feel for this ugly woman, her meaningless job, the microscopically small diamond on her wedding band. What has she done to earn this perfectly ordinary existence? The only thing separating me from her are shades of circumstance.

“Miss Byrd?” Josiah pokes his head out of his office. “Back here, whenever you’re ready.”

I am steps away from his door when the frizzy-haired woman speaks, her eyes glued to her computer screen. “I don’t feel sorry for you.”

“Excuse me?”

“I’ve heard about you and your family. I think it’s horrible, the things that happened to you. But you could have made something of yourself. You didn’t have to end up this way.”

“End up what way?”

“Like trash.”

My mind churns out a string of insults to kneecap this woman. You’re supposed to take the high road, but sometimes you cannot resist the temptation to counter cruelty with more cruelty, like scratching an itch you’ve been ignoring for hours. If everyone takes the high road, no one gets their comeuppance. Maybe that’s what Grace was trying to tell me when she asked why I didn’t reprimand the loathsome woman in the principal’s office.

I smile at her. “When you die, I hope your husband brings a date to your funeral.”

If Josiah overheard our exchange, he doesn’t let on. He stands behind his cluttered desk with his arms clasped behind his head. He is without his signature cowboy hat. “Just one question for you. Do you know where your sister’s car is?”

“I assumed she would have driven it here.”

“No. It’s not at her apartment either.”

“I have no idea where the car is.” It sounds like a lie even though it isn’t. More than anything, I wish I had Sara at my side to keep me from putting my foot in my mouth and inadvertently confessing to a crime before the conversation ends.

“It seems like she doesn’t either,” he says, “which, quite frankly, we’re not willing to believe. Riddle me this. You confess to a murder, say you ran the woman over with your car, but you won’t tell the police where the car is.”

“Sorry, what am I riddling?”

“Does that make sense to you?”

“No. No, it doesn’t. But if she isn’t taking her medication, she—”

He interrupts me. “If Harmony tells us where the car is, between that and the confession, she could cop a decent plea deal. I’m buddies with the DA. I’d pull some strings.”

“Is she not telling you or is she saying she doesn’t remember?”

“Doesn’t remember. The Indians have been looking all over the reservation. Hell, I’ve got sheriffs two counties away looking for the car.”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I talked to her fianc é and Grace, and …” The nuances of mental health are not going to work on Josiah, a man from a generation that still sees mental illness as a sign of weakness. I need to sell it. “… without her meds, she was absolutely insane. She wouldn’t have been in her right mind. She hasn’t been taking them regularly, Josiah.”

“We need to know where the car is. Bottom line.”

Swing and a miss. “She never said anything about it to me.”

“Then I need you to see what Harmony will tell you. She won’t say anything to us, but she might to you.”

“I think you’re misremembering how close she and I are,” I say.

“Then bring in Grace. Bring in your father. Bring in the fianc é . Hell, bring in twelve drummers drumming and eleven pipers piping for all I care. There’s someone out there who can make her talk—and if she won’t talk, I might have reason to believe she’s lying. Maybe trying to take the heat off someone else.”

“Why is this up to me?”

Josiah slides a plug of tobacco behind his lip. “It’s not, but if someone can talk some sense into Harmony and spare her life in prison, I think it’s a no-brainer. I’d bring Grace down here if I were you.”

“I am not dragging Grace into this.”

He furrows his brows, trying to make sense of my resistance. “It might just save Harmony’s neck.”

“She can decide for herself if she wants to be involved. She has a choice.”

“Is this your way of trying to protect her?”

“You are the last person in the world who gets to give me advice on how to protect my sisters.”

“I always tried to—”

Now it’s my turn to cut him off. “To do right by me and my sisters? You’ll have to forgive me if I find that hard to believe.”

“Providence—”

But I’m already gone. I flip the bird at the frizzy-haired woman on my way out, bloody knuckles bared to the ceiling.

The conversation hangs over our heads like the guillotine’s blade as we eat pumpkin ice cream. Grace and I exhaust mundane conversations to stay our execution—things like Bucket the cat, which of my tattoos are yard tattoos, whether Grace should try out for the cheerleading squad. She fills every pause. She knows something terrible is coming, and the moment she allows more than a beat of silence to elapse, her world will be rocked once again. I see the desperate plea each time our eyes meet. If you love me, please don’t do this. Please don’t say anything.

“Do you want a cigarette, Grace?”

She only accepts the offer once she sees we are alone. Since I last gave her a cigarette, she is more polished, crossing the boundary between casual and compulsive smoking. I can tell because she has a style now. She splays her fingers like the legs of a spider, inhales long but exhales short.

“Are you stealing Dad’s cigarettes?”

“Ew, no. Why would you ask me that?”

I motion to her cigarette with my own. “Last time you coughed like a cancer patient. You’ve been practicing.”

“Karishma bought me a vape. I lost my last one.”

“Don’t vape, Grace. They’re terrible for you.”

“Harmony said the same thing. She made me listen to her rant and rave about how much worse vapes are. Whatever. It’s going to destroy my lungs all the same.” She rolls her eyes. The cigarette fits perfectly between her gapped front teeth. “When did you start?”

“After prison.”

“What was prison like?”

The same way you don’t ask someone what they went away for, you don’t ask them what it’s like inside. I can’t hide how much the question offends me. “I don’t like to talk about it.”

Grace shrinks into herself the way the dog would after my father kicked her. “Sorry.”

“No, it’s not … you don’t have to be sorry.”

Her eyes twinkle with ghoulish hope that I can be cajoled into divulging the details she seeks. I have those stories, of course. I can tell her about Sara teaching me how to fashion a toothbrush into a shiv my first week inside. I can tell her about being groped by the guards, male and female alike. I can even tell her about the week I spent in solitary for biting another inmate . But those horrors I have left behind. Their aftershocks have faded. It’s the little things I can’t free myself from.

“The worst part is it’s never quiet,” I say at last, ignoring how Grace’s face falls when she realizes this is all I will give her. She doesn’t understand how something so mundane can be so nightmarish. “You never have a second of silence, and then you get out, and you realize the real world is always quiet, but you can’t live without the noise anymore.”

Grace turns away to hide her disappointment. She still sees me more as a fascination than a sister—a bizarro exhibit in a museum rather than a human being—and when I fail to live up to those expectations, she doesn’t know what to respond. I cannot indulge her with prison horror stories right before I tell her about Harmony. It would be unimaginably cruel, crueler than telling her the news itself. I could let her find out another way and relieve myself of this burden, but no one else will talk to her like an adult. They will sugarcoat it or lie about it, and she deserves more. What she decides to do with the information is her choice.

“We have to talk about something, Grace.”

She meets my eyes reluctantly. She brings a spoonful of ice cream to her lips but cannot open her mouth. “I could tell.”

“I don’t … I’m going to say it all wrong, and I’m so sorry for that. I’m sorry for a lot of things, but mostly I’m sorry I don’t know you and I don’t know how to talk to you.”

Grace releases a tiny exhale. “Okay?”

“I talked to Harmony a little while ago, and she’s …” I stop myself from softening the blow with a euphemism. “She’s in jail right now.”

“Jail? For what?”

“She went to the police this morning and she told them she killed Mom.”

“No.”

“Grace—”

“No!” She springs to her feet. “No!”

“I’m just telling you what I was told, okay?”

“Don’t tell me! Tell them!” She points in no particular direction, punching at the air again and again. “Tell Josiah Eastman that Harmony didn’t do anything.”

“I—”

The tears come hard and fast like a burst pipe, and she wipes them away with her wrist. When she thinks the valve has shut off, another torrent gushes forth. “What is wrong with you? Why didn’t you stand up for her?”

“Because I don’t know the truth,” I stammer.

“She didn’t do it!”

“I think she stopped taking her meds and—”

She cuts me off. “Why won’t you listen to me?”

“What do you know that I don’t?”

“Harmony would never hurt Mom,” she says. “I know it in my bones, Providence. And she wouldn’t have—she wouldn’t have gone to the searches and faked it. She isn’t like that. She can’t bullshit anyone, and—and she has mental health problems, okay? She isn’t well, but she’s not a sociopath.”

“Who did it then?”

The question takes her aback. “What?”

“If you don’t think she did it, then who did?”

“I don’t know.”

“Doesn’t it make sense if it’s Dad?”

The question is a miscalculation. My visceral hatred toward him is something I share only with Harmony. The pain is different when you are no longer consumed by it. It becomes sharper as the years wear on, like a knife dragged across a whetstone a hundred times. I see it as proof of hindsight being twenty-twenty. I know now that my father is a villain, that I was horribly mistreated, that I did not deserve one single night without food or palm to the cheek or hand on my breast, but in the moment, I could always find a way to blame myself. It didn’t matter why my imperfections were punished so sadistically: they were still imperfections, and all imperfections were worthy of punishment.

She immobilizes me with a scornful stare. The muscles in her face twitch as she clenches her jaw. “I don’t even want to think about that.”

“I’m only saying it’s the easiest answer.”

“The easiest answer is my dad killing my mom?”

I stop myself from saying yes. “Isn’t it easier than Harmony doing it?”

Grace stubs out the cigarette in her melting mound of ice cream. Each time she opens her mouth to speak, she snaps it shut again.

“This can all be over,” I say, “if we could find a way to show people he did it.”

“What happens to me if he goes to prison? I’m a minor. Everyone’s dead. We don’t have any aunts or uncles or grandparents. Do I end up in foster care?”

“Someone would … Harmony would take care of you.”

“She can’t take care of herself,” she whispers.

“I would take care of you then.”

She has less confidence in those words than I do. She knows I would be a piss-poor substitute for a family. A feeble nod is her only acknowledgement of the offer before gazing into the distance, watching a young couple unload a horde of children from a minivan. Their triple-wide stroller barrels across the gravel parking lot like a tank. “How did Harmony say she did it?”

“With the car. She won’t tell the cops where it is though.”

“Because she didn’t do it.”

“I don’t think she can take back a confession, Grace.”

“You said she stopped taking her meds, right? She—she’s not in her right mind.” Her pitch grows higher, her tone more frenetic as she assembles an alibi for Harmony. “You have to tell them that. The last time she stopped taking them, she tried to kill herself. She was talking to herself all the time, and she—I bet they can call her psychiatrist and read all their notes. You have to tell them how much she needs the meds.”

“Maybe you should tell them.”

“How?”

“We can go to the sheriff’s office. Maybe you can talk to Harmony and—”

She shakes her head. “Please don’t make me go there.”

“I won’t make you do anything you don’t want to.”

“I can’t see her. It will break me, Providence.”

I reach across the table for her hand, but she ignores me. Another little rejection. I can’t take them anymore, and so I suggest the unthinkable to prove my loyalty: “If you ever … if you ever wanted Dad to die, you could tell me.”

“Then you’re no better than him.”

“It isn’t the same,” I insist.

“Violence is still violence.”

But he deserves it. But the universe must be a just one. But the universe must mete out punishments to those most deserving. “I know the cops don’t help. The neighbors are useless. I’m saying if you needed him to stop forever, I would do it.”

I ache for her to say yes, not only because I want to play the hero, but because I need someone else to agree this is the only way our story can end. What is the alternative? For me to return to my meager existence, for my sisters to cobble together what pieces of a normal life they can still salvage, for the old man to die warm in his bed twenty years from now? Don’t violent deeds deserve violent consequences?

“By next summer,” she says, “I’ll be gone. Karishma and I are going to the community college in Scottsbluff together. I can move on.”

“You don’t move on, Grace. You wake up at three in the morning and suddenly you can’t breathe because you remember he’s still alive.”

She sets her jaw. “I’m not you.”

“I—”

“I want to go home. I want to be alone.”

I don’t want to go home. I don’t want to be alone. The cereal boxes I haul into Sara’s trailer look like they have survived a tour in Afghanistan, crushed at the corners and bloated with air at the middle, the top of one torn open so I could shovel fistfuls of cornflakes in my mouth as I careened up the road to the reservation. Sara looks up from the couch where she toils away at a shapeless crochet project. “Jesus Christ, you look like you just walked through a minefield.”

“I got you more cornflakes.”

“I see that,” she says slowly, discarding the yarn ball beside her. The shift disturbs Julius, who protests by grumbling and slinking to the tile in front of the back door.

“I didn’t want you to think you had to cook for me every morning, and I knew we were out of cereal, so I wanted to buy you cornflakes.”

“Why don’t you set them on the table and then sit here with me?”

“Did you want cornflakes?” My voice cracks.

“You’re freaking me out.”

“My sister might have killed my mother.”

Sara transfers the boxes into her arms and drops them on the table. Cornflakes sprinkle onto the shag carpet, but neither of us (nor the dogs) move to clean them up. “Tell me what happened.”

“Harmony confessed, and it—it can’t be her, Sara. I don’t think it’s her, and I can’t let it be her either. It has to be my father.”

“Daniel says his alibi checked out.”

I spike the open box against the table. More cornflakes come flying out, confetti celebrating my suffering, and it is the final push I need to unravel. A piece of delicate, white flesh peeks out from beneath the shirtsleeve. The tantalizing vein throbs. “Fuck the alibi! I need it to be him.”

“It’s not him.”

“If it’s not him, he’s never going to be punished. Not for this. Not for anything. He’s going to live the rest of his life drunk and happy, and he’ll never suffer one single consequence.”

“He’ll burn in hell,” she says.

“I don’t believe in hell.”

“You have to. It’s the only way some people ever get what they deserve.”

I lower myself to the floor beside Zenobia. I wrap my arms around her and bury my nose in her dusty fur, the way I did with Annie when I was young. “I want him to die.”

“I know.”

“No, Sara, I mean—”

“I know exactly what you mean, and that’s why I won’t let you finish your sentence.”

“Grace said it would make me just like him.”

Sara shakes her head. “It’s not the same thing. It’s that if you go back to prison, he wins.”

“He can’t win if he’s dead.”

“Providence Byrd, don’t.”

“I got myself a gun.”

“How?”

“Don’t ask.”

Her eyes simmer white-hot with fury. “If you brought a gun into my house, I swear to God I’ll strangle you right now.”

“It’s not here.”

“Where is it?”

“I’m not telling you.” I send up a silent prayer that the gun is still safe in its half-assed hiding place. What the hell is nursing home protocol for finding a weapon in someone’s room? “If someone comes asking, I don’t want you to know.”

The answer cools her rage to morbid curiosity. She lights a citronella candle on the windowsill. The mosquitoes will swarm soon. “You came here to kill him. That’s why the sheriff wanted to look in your car.”

I nod.

“So what stopped you? Why didn’t you do it?”

I take too long to respond. Sara flits from window to window lighting the citronella candles. “You didn’t really want to, did you? You knew deep down it wouldn’t change anything.”

“It’s not about changing things. If he dies tomorrow, it doesn’t undo every horrible thing he’s done. But if I kill him, I hold him accountable. He answers for his sins.”

“Destroying your life doesn’t hold him accountable.”

But I am scared my life was already destroyed at age seventeen, and I am scared I’m destined to feel like I’m suffocating until my father finally dies. I can’t live like this. It is the sensation I get when I need to bite myself amplified a hundred times over, hot as the glowing coals of a fire, bitter as vinegar.

“I need this feeling to go away,” I say quietly.

“Focus on something else. Focus on helping Harmony.”

“How?”

Sara stoops down beside Augustus, ruffling the fur between his powerful shoulders. It doesn’t rouse him from his deep sleep. His legs twitch like he is dreaming of chasing rabbits through a field. “Finding her a good lawyer, for a start.”