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CHAPTER 17

August 19 th

9:02 AM

A S I HURTLE past the state line into Annesville, I spot one news van. There is one more in the Burger King parking lot in Carey Gap. That’s it. My dead mother is only worth two news vans. It would hurt less if there were none here at all.

I stare at myself in the rearview mirror, quizzing myself on every question I think an enterprising reporter might ask, from Annie the dog to why I am dressed for the cold in the dead of summer. Eventually, I have been looking into my eyes so long that my pupils morph into tiny oval slits, like a snake, my irises shifting from tawny to pure yellow.

My car rattles as I drift over the center line. A minivan swerves to avoid me, the bleat of its horn echoing between my ears long after it’s gone. When I look into my eyes again, I see two round pupils shrinking to pinpricks in the sunshine, the way they should.

I need to escape. I need to be someone other than a woman with a murdered mother, and so I take refuge in the quiet of the nursing home. It is removed from time and space, its own galaxy strung together by the distorted realities of the residents. The worlds they inhabit exist only inside their heads, and like the unsung extras in a Broadway show, the nurses quietly uphold the verisimilitude. The televisions are tuned to game shows and black-and-white movies, the reading material divided between word searches and outdated magazines whose covers promise to divulge the secret to keeping the lushest garden on the block. In the common area, teenaged volunteers lead a game of bingo. Two girls at the front of the room alternate announcing numbers at breakneck speed while a handful more whisk from resident to resident, racing to help them scratch off one number before the next can be called.

Gil has graduated from puzzles to chess. Captured pieces stand at attention alongside the board. I watch from the doorway for a moment as he contemplates his next attack, tapping his fingers against an empty can of 7-Up. When he remembers how to correctly move the knight, my heart skips a beat, and I indulge myself in the na ? ve hope that the Gil I love is not gone forever—just lost in a fog, ready to emerge at any second.

He dashes that hope when he says my mother’s name. “Elissa! You look well. Summer suits you.”

He always said that to my mother when they crossed paths. No matter what time of year, no matter how haggard she looked, he would smile and say the season suited her. “You look well too, Gil,” I say, and I wonder if anyone has tried to tell him that my mother is dead. Is it crueler to let the illusion continue or to shatter it?

“I’m glad you happened by.”

“Do you need a chess partner?”

Gil looks down at the board, his face lax with confusion. He plucks the rook from the queenside corner and closes it in his fist. “I have something to give you.”

“My birthday is in May.”

“Bah. It’s important.”

“Gil—”

But now he is on a mission, rummaging through his nightstand drawers like a raccoon through an open dumpster. He tosses items onto the bed and the floor when he realizes they’re not what he’s looking for. I reach for his elbow and then he yells. “No! No!”

I flinch.

He isn’t going to hit me. But I flinch because my body remembers what happened the last time someone yelled at me like that, and the time before, and the time before. I jump backward, out of his reach, and try to catch my breath. He continues narrating his search like nothing happened. He even cracks a joke when he finds his dentures case. I wait for a nurse or a nosy resident to peek into the room, but no one comes. Like always, no one comes.

Finally, Gil finds what he’s looking for. He presses a bundle of cash into my hand.

“What is this?”

“It’s for Providence,” he says.

I leaf through the bills, all hundreds with a few fifties and twenties mixed in. Ten grand, easy, probably a little more. It is an unfathomable amount of money to be holding in my hand. Even after my best days tattooing, I’ve never had a bundle of cash this thick. “No,” I say, shaking my head. “No. No. I can’t.”

“Even when she gets the softball scholarship, Truman State will still make her pay for the dorms and the food. She shouldn’t have to worry about the debt, Elissa. Not for the first year or two anyway. She’s still a kid. Let her play softball and have fun.”

“You can’t give me this much money. What—what about Connor?”

“Connor’s taken care of.”

I thrust the money toward him, but he slides his hands into his pajama pockets with a sly smile. “Tom would kill me. He’d kill you too,” I say. “He won’t accept charity.”

“Then it’s a good thing he doesn’t need to know.”

“Where did you even get all this cash?”

Gil laughs as he returns to the chessboard. The rook he nabbed is nowhere to be seen. “Nothing untoward, if that’s what you’re implying.” He pauses. “Marjorie had a nest egg. I paid off the house, Connor’s got something … I wanted to give a little of what’s left to Providence.”

“I can’t take this.”

“Please, Elissa. I insist.”

I try one more time to give the money back, but he shakes his head and advances the white bishop across the board. I promise Gil I’ll be right back and duck out into the parking lot. My hands tremble so intensely I can barely handle my phone. Connor picks up on the first ring.

“Your dad just gave me ten thousand dollars.”

“He what?”

“He thinks I’m my mother.” I wait for the nurse on her smoke break to go back inside before I continue. “He said it’s for me when I go to college. I—I can’t take it, Connor.”

His exhale crackles on the line. Water runs in the background, followed by the clinking of plates and silverware. “If he wanted you to have it, take it.”

“Not under false pretenses. I’m not too proud to turn down money, believe me, but it’s a lie. He thinks I’m going to play softball at Truman State. He thinks I’m going to be an astronaut. If he was lucid enough to remember what happened, he’d never give me thousands of dollars.”

“The man visited you in prison. He’d still give it to you. He loves you.”

“I’m practically robbing him.”

“Then think of it as a gift from me,” Connor says. “Think of it as my way for saying sorry—for the past, for being a shitty friend, everything.”

“You’re a teacher in Nebraska. Don’t act like you couldn’t use ten grand.”

“Don’t worry about me. Use it for Harmony. Get her a decent lawyer.” The water stops. “Are you going to watch the press conference?”

My heart stutters. “What press conference?”

“The sheriff,” he says. “You didn’t know?”

“Of course not. Why would anyone tell me anything?”

“Shit, I’m sorry. It’s about your mom and Harmony. I figured …”

“It’s fine,” I say, even though it isn’t. Another cold reminder that while I am a Byrd by blood, I am not a Byrd in spirit. An impenetrable pane of glass separates me from the rest of my family—usually for better, but today for worse. “Could I come to your house to watch it? I don’t think I should be alone right now.”

“Anything I can do to help,” he says quietly.

I refuse to sit on the couch when the press conference finally comes on. The camera is trained on an empty folding table. It boils my blood to think of people settling into their living rooms to consume my mother’s tragedy. They think of themselves as bystanders, but they’re fiends, nourishing themselves with someone else’s suffering. There is nothing Americans love more than butchered women. Nothing captures our imagination so completely.

The Crawfords’ house remains remarkably intact, as if my childhood memories have been gouged from my mind and brought to life. The furniture is lumpy and musty, the shag carpet so blue it gives me a headache. His parents’ favorite wedding picture, a candid shot of them laughing during a dance, still occupies the place of honor on the mantle. As the story went, Gil’s prosthetic started squeaking to the rhythm of the song (“You Make My Dreams,” Hall and Oates) as they danced, and after the first chorus, Marjorie dissolved into a fit of giggles. She snorted when she laughed, which in turn made Gil laugh. They were laughing too hard to finish. It was a story they loved to tell together, like comedians rehearsing their favorite skit. At the end, they would share a conspiratorial smile, the two of them the only ones in on the joke, and Gil would kiss Marjorie’s cheek.

I see ghosts like this in every corner. I see the alcove where the Christmas tree stood, teeming with so many presents they spilled out beneath Gil’s desk and atop Marjorie’s piano. I see that same piano too, and if I hold my breath, I hear “Lorena” carrying down the hallway, reverberating from the floors. I smell stargazer lilies in bloom. I feel the notch in the top of my bishop as I slide it across the chessboard, the crenellations atop my rook. The little memories are the ones that eat me alive.

On the TV, a man clears his throat. Josiah and company take their seats. He sits at the center, a deputy on either side, with Daniel relegated to the furthest chair, only half of his face in frame. His all-black uniform makes him stand out from the Nebraska deputies, all outfitted in tan. I feel sorry for him the way you do for someone who arrives at a masquerade party without knowing they needed a mask.

“He does that a lot.” I point to the screen as Josiah busies his hands with paperwork. To my disappointment, his hands are steady. No sign of nerves. “He always shuffles his paperwork, like he can’t keep still.”

The camera pans out to reveal dozens of empty chairs and only four reporters. One of them even looks asleep. Connor told me the conference was closed to the public to prepare me for the possibility of low turnout, but this is worse than I could have imagined. The universe is sending me an unmistakable message: your mother is not worth anyone’s time or resources. Had my mother been prettier, had she been richer, had she been younger, had she never used drugs, the room would be full of people demanding justice for her murder. Josiah’s face falls when he sees the low turnout. He reminds the reporters how personal my mother’s tragedy is not just to the community, but to him as well. “I’ve known the Byrd family for going on forty years now,” he says. “Our daughters went to school together.”

There is all of one high school in a thirty-mile radius, but never mind that.

“On Sunday, our pastor in Annesville shared a verse from Psalms I think we all needed to hear. ‘The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.’ ”

“Always with the Bible verses,” I mutter. “He recited one of the beatitudes to me when he was done questioning me.”

“Man of faith,” Connor says.

“Only when it suits him.”

As Josiah reconstructs the timeline of my mother’s murder and disappearance, I notice the tobacco in his lower gums, protruding like a tumor. The microphone picks up the viscid sound of him swallowing. Again and again, his mouth clots with saliva and he has nowhere to spit. He pretends to sneeze into a handkerchief as the floor opens to questions.

Connor turns to me, a question he hesitates to ask on the tip of his tongue. “Do you think she did it?”

“I don’t like stories when they’re too perfect.”

“Parallel, maybe. Not perfect.”

The piano bench, weakened by years of disuse, creaks as I sit down on it. I bump the keys with my elbow and drown Josiah out with the strident melody. “You don’t think it’s too perfect? One sister tries and fails to kill her mother, and then thirteen years later, the other one tries and succeeds?” My sigh does nothing to relieve tension. My body is a screw tightened one twist too far. “I think she’s not in her right mind. Even if she did, it was an accident. I don’t think she’s a murderer.”

“Is it just a feeling?”

“I did time with a couple murderers. You can tell. There’s a void in their eyes.”

One reporter asks how thin the search for my mother has stretched the department and if a budget raise should be considered in the next election. When I look at Connor, his face is tight with disappointment. Clearly I have given him the wrong answer. He never liked Harmony, always suspected something was wrong with her.

“Do I have a void in my eyes?” I ask, long after the moment passes. I angle my face toward him so he can examine my soul, appraise it like a jeweler does a precious gem.

“No.”

“You didn’t even look.”

He dismisses my question as a childish distraction. “I know what your eyes look like, Providence.”

Cold, flat, dark. Like a snake. I imagine them transforming again.

Another reporter speaks. “How closely did your department look into the oldest daughter, given her history of violence?”

“We are confident Providence was not involved in her mother’s death.” When the reporter starts to talk again, Josiah cuts him off. “No, no, let me be more clear. We definitively ruled her out very early in the investigation. I’d like to remind everyone that regardless of the past, now she’s a young woman grieving the loss of her mother. I hope you all keep her in your prayers, same way you do with the rest of the Byrd family.”

The exoneration borders on theatrical. It is his good deed for the day, announcing my innocence to the world and reminding them of my humanity.

I want to be grateful, but I’m not that big of a person.