Page 2

CHAPTER 2

August 10 th

3:04 PM

I NSTEAD OF F ORGING further south to Carey Gap and reacquainting myself with its ghosts, I head north to the Long Grass reservation. Exhaustion seeps into my bones as I cross the South Dakota state line. I cut west through the town of Long Grass, the largest settlement on the eponymous reservation, until I reach a double-wide mobile home with the Oglala Lakota flag hoisted above it, brilliant red beating against the cloudless sky.

The dogs tell me I have the right trailer. I’m halfway across the street when they charge up to the chain-link fence, ears pinned back, teeth bared. I read once that dogs can tell if you’re untrustworthy. These dogs could do with a bath and new collars, but look otherwise well cared for. No protruding ribcages. No matted fur. No sad eyes. Yet my throat still thickens with tears. I don’t do well around dogs.

A car honks. I’ve stopped in the middle of the street. I lift a hand to apologize, but the driver swerves around me and blazes through the stop sign.

“You can come through the gate. They don’t bite unless I tell ’em to.”

Sara Walking Elk calls to me from beneath the trailer’s awning. Her dark hair sways in the wind in a single limp sheet. Silver barbell piercings embellish her septum and the bridge of her nose. She pierces the air with a whistle. The dogs finally hide their fangs, though they still hold me hostage with their stares. I fixate my eyes on the clothesline in a neighbor’s yard. Never look an angry dog in the eyes . It’s the only meaningful piece of advice my father ever gave me.

“So the ‘beware of dog’ sign is just for show?” I ask.

Sara carries herself with a peculiar lightness, like she’s tethered to the earth by the faintest force, a balloon ready to sail toward the stratosphere. She wrangles two dogs by the collar and holds the third between her knees in a game of canine Twister. “Never said they were friendly,” she says.

“I can’t go back to Kansas City without legs.”

“Seriously, get in here.” She lowers her head toward the dog beneath her, planting a kiss atop its head. “Are you going to behave, girl? You going to be good when I let you go?”

Against my better judgment, I haul my suitcase and duffel bag through the gate. She releases the dogs, and, thank Christ, none of them lunges for me. Swats on the rear send all but the biggest dog trotting toward the awning. She plants herself beside Sara with a grumble.

“The bluetick is Julius, the Rottweiler is Augustus, and this girl here is Zenobia. She’s a wolfdog.”

“You own a wolf ?”

“Wolf dog .”

I throw my hands up. “You lost me at wolf.”

“Oh, she’s a sweetheart.” Sara kisses Zenobia’s head again to prove her point, as if the dog (wolf?) not biting off her nose is praiseworthy. “She’s a Czechoslovakian wolfdog. They were the national dog of Czechoslovakia, for God’s sake. Besides, if I’d mentioned I had a wolfdog, I don’t think you’d have stayed here.”

“I wouldn’t call it a selling point.”

Sara starts for a hug, but stops short and settles for an awkward pat on the arm. I’m touched she remembers my distaste for hugging. “It’s good to see you, Providence Byrd. Prison khaki wasn’t your color.”

“Wasn’t yours either.”

“Bullshit. I look great in khaki.”

I chuckle and follow her into the trailer. The stifling heat reminds me of my father’s liquor store. He refused to run the air conditioner, even when temperatures soared into triple digits. The windows are open and the box fans are on high, but the trailer is still unbearably hot. I fight the temptation to roll up my sleeves. We dodge landmines of dog toys on our way to the dining room table, which is littered with bills both opened and unopened. Just before Sara sweeps them into her arms to deposit them on the couch, I notice at least one is stamped PAST DUE .

“My AC’s busted, so get ready to drown in sweat until sundown.” Sara wrestles with a water jug in the kitchen. The plastic warbles as she moves her hands, loosening and tightening her grip. The kitchen is ripped straight from the 1970s, all harvest yellow countertops and laminate cabinets with a pastel blue refrigerator to boot. “I know we did the whole ‘Hey, let’s catch up once we’re both off parole’ thing while we were inside, but I never thought we’d follow through.”

“We sent birthday cards, at least,” I say. “Better than anyone back home ever did for me.”

“Well, I’m sorry our reunion isn’t under better circumstances. And I’m …”

“What?”

“I don’t know if I should say I’m sorry about your mother.”

The water jug finally opens with a thin crackling noise, like a popped spine. I don’t know what she should say either. I haven’t made heads or tails of my own feelings yet. I first yielded to the animal instinct all daughters feel toward their mothers. As natural as it is for them to protect us, it is natural for us to protect them too. It’s the least we can do to thank them for bringing us into this world. Anyone who would dare harm our mothers deserves our wrath. We would delight to watch the vultures scrape the flesh from their bones. Anything to protect our mothers. But for me, this instinct comes steeped in hypocrisy.

I have also harmed the woman who gave birth to me.

I’m miles away. I jolt into the present when Sara snaps her fingers and hands me a glass of tepid water. I only realize how thirsty I am when it touches my lips. “You should give your condolences,” I say after a greedy gulp. “Even just for my sisters’ sakes.”

“Condolences makes it sound like she died.”

“She’s been missing three days and she’s got the Tillman County Sheriff’s Department heading the search. It’s not a winning combination.”

Sara leans back in her chair toward a cluttered desk and produces an ashtray shaped like California. The mere sight of it sends a jolt through me, and my fingers, stained yellow with nicotine, twitch in anticipation. I didn’t smoke before prison, but after years of listening to Sara extol the wonders of the cigarette, I started craving them as if I’d had a pack a day my whole life. (I also started craving the adrenaline rush Sara described when she stole her first car, but grand theft auto was an easier temptation to resist.) My body goes lax at the first inhale. Pure bliss.

“Did you stop in Annesville on your way here? See your sisters at all?”

“I’ll probably see them later at the search,” I say.

“Nervous?”

“Horrifically.”

“Maybe it won’t be as bad as you think.” Sara exhales smoke through her nose like a dragon. “Tragedy brings people together, so they say.”

I’ve spent years thinking I was ready to reunite with my sisters, but now, with the moment only hours away, every nerve undulates with brittle energy, a million live wires without a socket. There may be tearful embraces. They may run me out of town. Other than the morsels of information Connor provided me, my sisters are strangers. Even the simplest pieces of their personality are mysteries to me.

“Blood is thicker than water,” she adds.

“This is like talking to a fortune cookie.”

Sara snorts as she ashes her cigarette. “I can dispense familial wisdom or I can comment on your fake tits.”

“Are they that obvious?”

“They’d have kept you afloat for hours after the Titanic sank.”

I laugh with Sara. “I’ve paid them off already.”

“You really make that much money tattooing?” she asks.

“It’s shockingly lucrative.”

She releases a puff of smoke when she scoffs. “I work two days a week as a library aide, and that’s a small miracle. If I didn’t have my aunt and uncle helping me pay the bills, I’d probably be homeless.”

We are both intimately familiar with the hand-to-mouth existence of a former felon, especially a female felon. We wash dishes in chain restaurants, weasel our ways into seedy strip clubs, or get lucky. All things considered, I’m one of the lucky ones.

Julius and Augustus lumber into the trailer and curl up on opposite ends of the couch, their tails just touching as if to remind the other of their presence. Zenobia does not move from her watch beside Sara. As terrifying as I find her bayonet-sharp teeth, I also admire her loyalty. I get the impression she’d run headlong into a burning building if Sara needed rescuing.

Ash accumulates on the end of my cigarette in a gray appendage, like a limb deprived of blood flow. I want to see how long it can grow before disintegrating. “Is your brother going to be at the search later?”

She crinkles her nose and nods. “He’s none too pleased you’re here.”

“Did you tell him I’m on the straight and narrow?”

“Nothing is straight or narrow enough for Daniel. Ever since he made tribal police chief, he’s insufferable. I swear to God, I drive one mile above the speed limit and the vein in his head starts throbbing like the Hulk.”

I hope my laughter masks my envy. Sara had an endless stream of family who visited her in prison, from ne’er-do- well second cousins to her cop brother to her mother dying from a cirrhotic liver. There was a parade of loved ones waiting for her on the other side, and, as I gathered from our spotty correspondence over the years, the ones who haven’t died have all stuck around. She has people who love her. She has family. A pang of loneliness slides between my ribs like a splinter.

Observant as ever, mindful of the landmine we are near, Sara guides our conversation back to the matter at hand. “Search doesn’t start until five. It’s too hot to go out before then. You can unpack, maybe take a nap.”

I nod, extinguish my cigarette, and follow her to the room off the kitchen. It’s clearly a storage room with an air mattress thrown onto the floor, but after five years of sleeping on a metal prison bunk, I can sleep anywhere. Unmarked cardboard boxes flank the bed like two nightstands. She’s laid out a toothbrush, shampoo, and conditioner for me atop the scuffed bookshelf. As I unzip my suitcase, my muscles slackening at the imminent relief of a nap, Sara gasps like she’s taken a bullet to the chest. “What the hell, Providence?”

“What?”

She seizes the bottle of vodka from the depths of my suitcase. “You knew better.”

“I wasn’t thinking. I won’t drink it here.”

It’s not enough. She storms into the kitchen with the bottle lifted high, the gentleness of her gait replaced by a single-minded ire. Before I can muster an apology, she dumps the vodka down the kitchen sink. “Long Grass is a dry reservation,” she says. “You don’t get to flout the rules just because you don’t live here.”

“Sara, I—”

“You bring another bottle into my house and I’ll throw your ass out on the street before you can Sara me again.” Her eyes are flinty, cold, appalled at my carelessness but not surprised by it. She taps the bottleneck against the drain to coax out the last drops.

“It won’t happen again. I’m sorry.”

“We don’t need another Byrd ruining Long Grass with liquor.”

Another Byrd. Now I’m the one who has been shot in the chest. It is bone-chilling to be compared to my father, my existence a colorless echo of his own. His liquor store, just miles away from the reservation, poisoning her people. For Sara, this is her eye for an eye. I violate her cardinal rule and ignore her tribal law, and in turn, she presses on my oldest, deepest bruise.

We don’t say anything more. I retreat to the bedroom and Sara to the backyard with a crateful of dog toys, her menagerie trailing close behind her. I crave a drink, a stiff shot of my vodka, but even more, I crave biting myself.

I peel off my shirt and study the mosaic of scars on my arms. They spangle my skin from the base of my wrists to just beneath my shoulders. Counting them is like counting stars, an endeavor equal parts infinite and foolish. Dozens of them. Maybe hundreds. I lost track years ago. Some are perfect crescent moons, each individual tooth distinguishable from the next, and others are ragged and violent, more animal than human. A thousand tiny screams carved forever into my flesh.

The tattoos, just like the fake breasts and the Botox and the lip plumper, give me the power to direct people’s eyes away from my scars. I’ve peppered my arms with dozens of girlish, sticker-sized tattoos—things like my Taurus zodiac sign, a set of vampire fangs, a fig sliced open at the center to reveal its sensually shaped innards, an evil eye, a set of angel numbers—and adorned the rest of my body with larger, more intricate pieces of artwork. There is the snake slithering up between my breasts, the moth on my thigh, the mandala on my neck, the sun on my left hand and the moon on my right. If I tuck my hair behind my ear, there is even one on my face, a delicate orchid flowering along my hairline.

I trace the length of my forearm until I find the bitemark I’m looking for. The gruesomeness of a fresh wound is gone, replaced by an ar ê te of white scar tissue. Except where my incisors cut too deeply, it’s perfectly round and smooth.

It’s the first scar. It’s the one from the day I ran over my mother.

From the moment I considered it to the moment I stopped the car, the act lasted ten seconds. Sunday morning, early March, unseasonably warm without a trace of snow on the ground. I was seventeen and finally had my license. My mother agreed to let me drive our family to church that morning, a whole quarter mile down the road, probably because she and my father were already several beers deep. I was the first one in the car. It was the only time I had ever been eager to attend church.

My mother came out of the house next. She fetched the newspaper from the end of the driveway and stood there to read the front page. I still remember it. BUCKSKIN DINER, LONGTIME STAPLE IN CAREY GAP, BURNT TO THE GROUND. (This would be blas é compared to the following day’s headline: ANNESVILLE TEEN ATTEMPTS MATRICIDE .)

My father lurched down the driveway with a bottle in his hand. He always drank beer from bottles, never cans, because canned beer was for trailer trash and the Byrds were a good, respectable family, and anything said about us to the contrary was a vicious lie. When he lifted the bottle, I thought it was to take one last swig before church. But he raised it high, swung his shoulder back, and cracked the bottle over my mother’s head. She drove an elbow into his chest without missing a beat. It was hardly the first time I’d seen them hit each other.

An agonizing heat permeated my body, like someone had poured boiling water into the space between my bones and my skin. A series of ugly images clicked through my brain: my mother’s dark hair tangled with blood and glass, my father’s yellowing teeth fuzzy from beer, my sisters’ gaunt, tear-streaked faces pressed against the living room window. But the thought I snagged on was that of my father dead beneath the wheel of his car, his viscera unspooling from his belly in bloody knots.

I was no stranger to violent thoughts. I had fantasized about repaying my parents’ neglect and cruelty untold times before, but never acted on it beyond kicking their shins beneath the dining room table or leaving a steak knife wrong side up in the dishwasher to cut their hands. But this was different. This feeling could not live inside of me. If I didn’t discharge this evil, I would explode.

And so I threw the car in reverse.

It was my father in the rearview mirror. It was my father I wanted to kill. But it was my mother who pushed him out of the way at the last moment, my mother who howled when the car struck her, and it was that otherworldly sound which first make me seek comfort in the taste of my own blood.

I was arrested within the hour. No one corroborated my story. Not even my mother. She chose him over me. She swore there was no beer bottle, no altercation, no violence from which I was trying to protect her. Her oldest daughter had always been a troubled girl, she told the police, and, really, she couldn’t say she was surprised that I’d made her the target of my wrath. The initial charge was attempted murder.

In exchange for a guilty plea, the prosecution reduced the charge to assault with a deadly weapon. The judge took pity on me, white, baby-faced, and seventeen years old, and handed down a seven-year sentence, possibility for parole after five. My mother came to my first parole hearing and voiced no objection to my release. Considering that, a satisfactory display of contrition, and my relatively clean inmate record, the board granted my release. My parole officer agreed to let me move to a halfway house in Grand Island, a town five hours south where I wasn’t a local villain. I lucked into a job cleaning offices at night until my parole ended, and then I was free to get the hell out of Nebraska.

Most days I can forget it happened. Sometimes weeks, even months pass without sparing a thought for my crime, until the tiniest trigger brings it to the forefront of my mind. A mother holding her daughter’s hand. A car reversing in a crowded parking lot. No matter how many years separate me from that day, there is no new beginning. Nothing changes. Absolution is a myth. Some sins you must pay for again and again and again, as long as you live.

I don’t nap. I stare at the ceiling and map the constellations of water stains. It distracts me from the ticking clock in my chest.

One more minute that my mother is missing.

Another. Another.

Tick. Tick. Tick.