Page 20

CHAPTER 19

August 20 th

1:14 PM

G RACE WAITS FOR me beneath the chokecherry tree on the lot with the burnt-down house. The branches sag with bunches of glossy purple fruit, bruises against the brilliant blue sky. My favorite thing about chokecherries is that there is no universal rule as to when they are ripe. It varies tree to tree and bush to bush. Some are ready to be picked as soon as they deepen from green to red, but others must blacken before they are ready to be eaten. It’s a prosaic mystery, but one I always found delight in.

My mother knew every chokecherry tree in Annesville, which ones could be harvested at red, purple, and black. It’s why her pie always tasted so heavenly. When she shared the recipe with Grace, she must have imparted her knowledge of the fruit too, and as I look at my sister, my stomach cramps with envy for the secret my mother entrusted her with.

Perhaps that’s what my mother thought about as she was dying. At least someone else knows about the chokecherry trees. It was her pearl of wisdom, the only thing she could pass down to her daughters.

“Is it ripe?”

Grace looks up from her phone and into the crown of the tree. Sunlight falls to her face in jagged golden pieces. “These ones are,” she says, taking a quick pull from her vape. “Big and purple, like they should be.”

I pluck a tangle of chokecherries from the tree. The bunch is round and thick like a Christmas ornament. When I bring the first berry to my lips, Grace shrieks and scrambles to her feet. “What are you doing?”

“I’ve only eaten a slice of toast today.”

She bats the chokecherries to the ground. Her face is stark white. “They have cyanide in them! They’ll kill you if you eat them raw!”

I can’t contain my laughter. “It’s just the pits, Grace. You can spit them out.”

“But …”

“That’s why Mom always made us pit them when she baked a pie.”

She shakes her head. “She told me you can’t eat them raw at all. If you did, they’d poison you and you would choke. That’s why they’re called chokecherries.”

I was sixteen. My mother was sober. Juice squirted into my eye while I was pitting the chokecherries, and as I flushed my eye in the kitchen sink, I started crying because I was sure I would go blind. “If the raw ones can kill me,” I said between sobs, “then I’m sure the juice will make me go blind.” She cupped her hands around my face and asked me to open my eyes. She said, “They won’t really kill you, Providence. I told you that when you were little so you wouldn’t choke on the pits.”

“So they’re not dangerous?”

“No.”

“But they’re called chokecherries.”

“That’s my favorite thing about them,” she said. “They sound like they’ll kill you, but they’re harmless.”

So, to dispel the myth for Grace now, I say the same thing: “They sound like they’ll kill you, but they’re harmless, Grace.” I try to channel my mother’s cadence—the fanciful rhythm to her words, her voice airy as if she had been relieved of a grave burden—but it falls flat.

Grace rolls her eyes. “What a stupid thing to lie about,” she says.

“She didn’t want us to choke on the pits.”

“The pits are, like, the size of a pea.”

Now the recollection has been soured for both of us, an eye for an eye, another happy memory of our mother ground to dust. Grace’s dress pools around her as she lowers herself to the earth again. She holds the chokecherry bunch in her hand like Snow White with her apple, the stems and berries lacing between her fingers. “What did you need to talk about?” She utters the question in a single breath. I pretend like she isn’t eager to get away from me. “Dad’ll be home for lunch soon.”

I think about my mother showing Grace which trees have ripe fruit. I think about them harvesting bunches of chokecherries with wicker picnic baskets. I think about them painstakingly extracting the pits, holding their breath because they are nervous about wasting too much good fruit.

“Why did you wait to report her missing?”

Exactly as I feared, I see the wheels in her head spinning, plotting out her next move. “I’m sorry, what?”

“You waited a whole day. Why?”

“Sometimes she just didn’t come home. I didn’t think anything of it.”

“She always came home. She wasn’t even allowed to leave overnight for funerals.”

Grace does her best to meet my stare, but the confidence rings hollow, no more real than a little girl trying on her mother’s high heels for the first time and thinking she’s finally a grown-up. “Well, things have changed,” she manages.

“Grace, please. If you know something, tell me.”

“What are you accusing me of?”

“Lying,” I fire back.

“I didn’t do anything! I talked to the cops. I talked to them a hundred times.”

“She always came home. He wouldn’t give an inch on that.” Every time I try to say Dad , my tongue loses its way.

She pulps the chokecherries in her hand. The juices trickle down her forearm in rivulets. She squeezes, squeezes, squeezes until the berries are no longer berries, only purple paste oozing between her fingers. “I didn’t do anything.”

“Then tell me why you waited.”

Flies are drawn to the sweet fruit remnants. Two of them buzz around her in erratic circles, their flight noiseless and weak as if they will die without this meal. “Because she was running away.”

“She never would have run away.”

“You didn’t know her as well as you think, Providence.”

I am a believer in the classic truism that people do not change. They might evolve around the edges, but who they are at their core will always remain the same, constant as the sun rising in the east. My mother was never one to upset the status quo. Decades married to our father instilled in her that the only way to survive was to be seen and not heard, shrinking yourself as small as you can possibly be. After all these years forcing herself to be small, what finally made her drum up the courage to leave my father?

Courage . The word has teeth I don’t expect. Whatever courage my mother mustered, it was only enough for her, not her and Grace both. Grace is the girl forever left behind, drawing love from wells that have long ago run dry. We were born in the wrong order. It should have been Grace first, so the sister who deserved the most love would have been given the most love.

“How do you know she ran away?”

“She told me,” Grace says, voice cracking, “not when or where, but that she was going to. She made boxes for Harmony and I to remember her by, just little trinkets and birthday cards, nothing special. Harmony didn’t even care. She thought Mom was getting rid of old keepsakes from the attic. When she didn’t come home, I figured she finally decided to do it. I didn’t worry.” She pulls her knees to her chest. “She told me she would call when she got to Rapid City. There’s a women’s shelter there. So I waited. And then she didn’t call. A whole day went by, and I knew something was wrong.”

She snivels and begins to tremble, and although my duty here is to comfort her, my mind snags on the wrong thing. Grace and Harmony got boxes. Grace and Harmony got goodbyes. I didn’t even get a voicemail. My mother opened her mouth to speak to me and died before she could say a single word.

“Was there a box for me?”

“I—I don’t know. She didn’t show one to me.” The answer is no and she is too kind to say it. No will cleave me in two.

“Is that really everything, Grace?”

“It’s everything.”

“Because if—”

She cuts me off. “I swear on Mom’s ashes. There’s nothing else.”

“Did you tell the cops she ran away?”

“No, but it’s because I’ve heard on all the podcasts—literally every single one I listen to, I swear—they don’t look for runaways,” she says. “It’s not illegal to run away, so the cops care less. I thought if I told them, they wouldn’t look hard enough. They would think, well, there goes another local drunk , and close the case.”

As I join her on the ground, her head heavy against my shoulder, her hand clammy in my own, I speculate about Harmony. If she found out our mother was running away, maybe she felt betrayed, and maybe the natural response to such an inconceivable blow to the psyche is an equally inconceivable crime. We forget what a mortal wound it is to be forsaken by someone whose blood you share, a person whose existence is inseparable from your own, bound to you by cosmic divination rather than choice. You exist within them and they within you. They echo through your marrow eternally.

In my mind’s eye, I answer my mother’s phone call. She says, Stop haunting me, Providence , and then she hangs up. I call her back again and again, but the number has been disconnected. Instead of my mother’s voice, there is only a dial tone.

Grace turns to me with a drawn mouth. It’s the first time I have been close enough to see the faint freckles spattered across her nose and cheeks. I see so much of myself in her that I want to apologize. I hope her resemblance to me does not condemn her to a similarly doomed life. We come from the same parents, from the same home, share the same appearance—and can a rosebush ever grow any flower but a rose?

“I need to go home.” Grace uses the tree trunk to pull herself to her feet. She dusts the dirt and twigs from her dress, but nothing can be done about the chokecherry stains. “If I’m not there when Dad gets back …”

“You don’t have to explain.”

“I know.”

As she takes her first steps back to the house, my heart catches in my throat. “Grace, wait.”

“What is it?”

“Can I give you a hug?”

The smallest of smiles warms her face. “Of course. I love hugs.”

It is the first time in years a hug has brought me joy. She hugs me tighter than I expect, and once I steady my breathing, I surrender wholly to the embrace. I never want to let go.

She speaks into my shoulder, her voice a half whisper. Maybe she doesn’t want me to hear it, but I do. “I wish it was you here instead of Harmony.”

At the sheriff’s office, I anticipate resistance when I ask to see Harmony, but the deputy smiles, nods, and guides me to the shoebox-like visitation room without a word. I’m relieved not to be in the interrogation room again. I never spent time in the visitation room because no one came to visit before my sentencing, except the overworked public defender in such a rush to see me before the day ended she forgot her purse at the jail in Alliance and couldn’t go more than two minutes without mentioning it. “It was Louis Vuitton,” she said, “brand new, leather.” She wanted me to thank her for the valiant sacrifice. I never did.

Harmony’s jumpsuit is candy apple red. The way she shuffles into the room makes me think she is cuffed at the ankles too, but no, only the wrists. “I’m touched,” she says as she takes her seat across the metal table. “I thought you’d have run back home and long forgotten me by now.” She walks her index and middle fingers across the table.

“Sorry to disappoint.”

“Bite me,” she says. “I was being genuine.”

“Even when you’re sincere, you sound like you hate me.”

Her hands are cuffed just far enough apart for her to crack her neck, a motion she makes with enough speed and force to sever her spinal cord. She allows her head to loll forward and rotates in a semicircle from shoulder to shoulder. Her vertebrae never stop crackling. “You want something,” she says. “What is it?”

From here on out, I have to tread with caution. I’m certain our conversation is being monitored somehow, and I can’t let it slip that Grace withheld information from the police, even if those details have ceased to be relevant. Odds are, no one is going to bring down the hammer and charge her with obstruction, but I need to keep her as far from the fray as possible.

“Have you been up to the attic lately?”

“Oh, all the time. Weekly seances and everything. Summoning our dead grandma from the urn on the mantle. She says hi, by the way.”

It’s not a question of Harmony being smart enough to realize I’m speaking in code, but whether she is shrewd enough to understand why I need her to play along. “I was thinking about it the other day,” I say. “I’m sure all of our old keepsakes are up there.”

“Yeah, like the old man’s favorite belt to hit us with.”

“His favorite Bible to preach fire and brimstone from.”

Her laugh singes the air. “King James Version.”

“Do you think Mom would ever give us any of the old shit?”

“She cleaned out the attic a few weeks ago. Spring cleaning in the summer. You know how she was. She gave me a box.”

“Something to remember her by?”

“No. Just old school projects, birthday cards, so on. I guess it was nice she cared enough to keep it. I always thought she threw it away.” She pauses and stares at me, an actress waiting for her scene partner to remember their lines. “I had a feeling she was cleaning things out. She had a box for Grace too.”

So she knew our mother was making a break for it. No one told her, but she put two and two together. “Was there a box for me?”

“I don’t think so, but honestly, what did you expect? You tried to kill her. If she had nothing to give you, nothing to say to you, that’s her right.”

I push a knuckle into my mouth, my teeth grazing a healing scab. A crust of flesh falls beneath my tongue. “She called me five times the day she died. She had something to say.”

“It doesn’t matter now. She’s dead.”

I return to my mind’s eye. When I answer the phone this time, my mother says, I’m going to die, Providence. Are you happy? You always wanted a dead mother. Then the dial tone.

“Easy for you to say. You got closure.”

“You’re barking up the wrong tree for sympathy.” Harmony releases the loose bun atop her head. Her hair is so greasy it looks damp. “I have my own shit to worry about. My arraignment is tomorrow.”

“Are you pleading guilty?”

“Depends what my lawyer says. Depends if the DA offers me a good deal.”

“Don’t plead guilty until they’ve given you a deal. They’ll work with you if you tell them where the car is.”

She curls her fingers without quite making a fist, like a witch preparing to cast a spell. “Oh, my God, stop asking me about the car!”

“You either don’t know where it is, which means you confessed for kicks, or you really don’t remember, which means you weren’t in your right mind and that’s your defense.”

“Where’d you go to law school, again?”

“Harmony—”

“You want to talk about doing things for kicks? How about meddling in my life? Pretending like you give one single fuck about what happens to me?”

The door swings open, and the affable deputy who escorted me to the visitation room peers in. We straighten up immediately, like we used to when our father caught us digging into dinner without saying grace first. “Yelling usually means trouble. We good in here?”

“Peachy keen,” Harmony retorts, oblivious to the deputy’s concern being for my safety, not hers. He only leaves the room once I nod.

Alone again, I try a new approach. “I don’t think you grasp what is going to happen to you.”

“I did a stint in the county jail. I’m not Mary Poppins.”

“The county jail is not in the same dimension as the prison in York.”

“How na ? ve do you think I am?”

“Did you know there are no mirrors in prison? There’s polished metal you can just about see yourself in if you squint. I forgot what I looked like by the time I got out. And as much as you change, the world changes without you. It took me months to figure out how to work the new cell phones. There was a new president. All my favorite TV shows were over. And you forget you have choices in your life. The first time I had a real cheeseburger when I got out, I cried. I literally sat there in a crappy diner in Grand Island, and I cried into this overcooked hockey puck of a burger. I could put whatever I wanted on it. I had such little control over anything for five years that putting mustard on a cheeseburger brought me to tears. And I’m telling you the little things, Harmony. That’s not being sucker-punched in the yard, or being groped in the shower, or having pages torn out of a book you’re reading during a search just because a guard thought it would be funny to torment you, or spending a week in solitary and having people slide food through a slot on the floor like you’re an animal.”

I can’t tell if my soliloquy is cruel or merciful, if I am giving it for her benefit or mine. It’s the most I’ve ever talked about prison outside of therapy. Harmony chews on her fingernails until the skin around her nailbeds turns red. Eventually, she peels her eyes away from me to stare vacantly at the floor, perhaps immersing herself in the nightmare I have thrust upon her.

“If you have any sense at all, tell them where the car is.”

“What if I really don’t remember, Providence? Have you considered that possibility?”

Her face is inscrutable. I cannot distinguish sincerity from vitriol. Every word she says is laced with venom. She could make the classifieds drip with sourness. “Then tell them what they need to hear. Tell them about the meds. Tell them you lied about your fianc é . Tell—”

“Did you call Cal?”

“Jesus Christ, Harmony, you are so far from the point.”

“No, this is exactly the point: you meddling again, galloping in with your stupid, misguided savior complex.” She rips the engagement ring from her finger and stows it in her bra. “And if Cal fed you some sob story about the ring being his mother’s, it’s a lie. He bought it at a Kay Jewelers in Omaha. I was there.”

“I don’t give a fuck about the ring,” I snap. “Where is the car?”

“Don’t worry your Botoxed little head about it.”

“Harmony, please.”

She yells for the deputy. He whisks her out of the room, down the short hallway to the cells. I shout at her one last time before she makes the turn.

“Where is the goddamn car?”