Page 21

CHAPTER 20

August 21 st

7:46 AM

T HERE IS A lottery for spectators to get into the courtroom. The line weaves around the courthouse and into the parking lot it shares with the local drugstore, each person clutching their ticket like they’re hoping to tour Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, not watch an arraignment that will last all of five minutes. I can tell they’re all locals. The press may not be interested in my mother’s death, but the people of Tillman County are.

The courthouse is a blocky brick building. Local folklore credits God himself with its construction in the late nineteenth century. The bricklayers ran out of bricks before they could finish the walls, and to complicate matters further, all the fuel stockpiled for the kiln had washed away in a thunderstorm. Dejected, defeated, staring down the black throat of winter, the bricklayers went to sleep in their tents beside the unfinished building—but when they woke the next morning, conveniently Easter Sunday, they saw threefold the bricks they needed to finish the courthouse. The miracle inspired them to build the second story. (God may have rested on the seventh day when he created the earth, but on the seventh day in Tillman County, he produced bricks out of thin air.) While everyone agrees on this facet of the story, there are no records as to when the marble statue of Lady Justice—blindfolded, armed with her scales and sword—was placed in front of the courthouse doors.

“Did I ever tell you the roof started leaking during my arraignment?”

Sara and I are waiting at the crosswalk. We parked almost half a mile away, and the kitten heels she let me borrow pinch my toes with every step. I’ve borrowed yet another dress from her, this one tea length, long-sleeved, and the same shade of rich blue you see on the rooftops of houses in Greece. This morning, I’d been paralyzed thinking of how precisely to make myself presentable not just for the courtroom, but for onlookers who would recognize me and the reporters who might take my picture. Sara took charge and styled me, and though I now look like the wife of a youth pastor, I am grateful to have one less distraction to contend with.

“You never mentioned it,” I say.

“Water started dripping onto the stand. It was a few drops at first, but by the end, it was coming down so hard it splashed the judge in the face.” Sara smiles up at the overcast sky, as if to thank the clouds for their cooperation. “Maybe the same thing’ll happen for Harmony.”

“God willing.”

“Are you okay? You look pale.”

I shake my head as we cross the street. “I’m going to puke.”

“Let’s sit for a second,” she says.

“I don’t want to be late.”

“We’ve got time. You don’t want to vomit while she’s making her plea.” Sara steers me toward a bus stop bench, occupied at one end by a woman reading a romance book with a shirtless, chiseled man on the front. She wedges a plastic bag of groceries between herself and Sara. “Talk me through it. What are you thinking?”

“You’ve heard the phrase ‘crossing the Rubicon’?”

“My dog is named Julius.”

I want to chuckle, but the most I can muster is a sharp exhale through my nose. “My father used to say it. We’re going to go in there and she’s going to cross the Rubicon. She can’t come back from whatever she does here.”

“Did she say how she’d plead?”

The woman leans closer, still pretending to flip through her book.

“No,” I say.

“She likes to keep people guessing, doesn’t she?”

“She’s always had a flair for the dramatic.”

A leathery hand gropes my shoulder. I jump like I’ve received an electric shock. My father has never looked this sophisticated, not even in the pictures I’ve seen of my parents’ wedding. His salt-and-pepper hair is slicked back, heavy with pomade, and his oxford button-up is free of wrinkles and creases. To anyone who doesn’t know him, Tom Byrd looks like an average man, and his averageness will be captured in photos, disseminated to people who cannot fathom the evil beating inside. They will sympathize with him as an ordinary person caught in the crossfire of larger-than-life tragedies, trapped in a waking nightmare. First his daughter , they will say, mouths agape, then his wife, and now his other daughter?

“Fancy seeing you here, butterfly.”

Grace peeks out from behind my father’s shadow like a mouse snared in a trap. The sleeves of her plum-colored shirt flutter in the wind. One hand grips the hem, pulling the fabric down to keep it from riding up and exposing her midriff. A familiar crucifix necklace adorns her neck. I recognize Jesus’s tarnished body lashed to a rose gold cross, the crown of thorns upon his bowed head. Our mother’s necklace.

“But Mom,” I say, ten years old, as we walk out of church, “ what about the two thieves crucified next to Jesus? Why don’t we make jewelry for them too?”

My father notices me staring at the necklace. He caresses our savior with his thumb, his other fingers relaxing on Grace’s collarbone. Her skin revolts against his touch by turning crimson beneath his calloused fingertips. “Your sister looks beautiful in rose gold, doesn’t she? I think it brings out her eyes.”

“That was Harmony’s favorite necklace.”

“Harmony has enough jewelry. You’ve seen the rock on her finger.” He focuses on Sara, who has not yet faced him. She busies herself with a cigarette. The smell, somehow, does not drive the eavesdropper away. “And who is your friend here?”

“I’m Sara Walking Elk. You don’t know me, but I know you.”

“And how’s that?”

She angles her head enough for him to see her profile. She refuses to do the courtesy of meeting him in the eyes or shaking his outreached hand. “You make your blood money selling liquor to my tribe.”

“As long as their money’s green, I don’t turn ’em away. Just trying to make an honest buck.”

“You should come to Long Grass sometime, Tom. You can see what your honest buck looks like from our side.”

He rubs the back of his neck and smirks. “All due respect, I can see you’ve got an axe to grind. Your quarrel isn’t with me.”

“You’re exactly who my quarrel is with.”

“How is it you know my daughter?”

“I shared a cell with her.”

This is the last straw for the woman with the romance novel. She drops her book in her purse and hurries down the street, grocery bags swinging from her arms like wrecking balls. In the distance, the clouds swell and darken with rain.

“Then you’ll forgive me if I’m a little hesitant to take morality lessons from a criminal.”

“From what I hear, you’re no paragon of virtue yourself.”

I trifle with the hem of my dress so no one can see me cringe. Sara is using ammunition that is not her own, my pain dimmed so hers can shine brighter. When I’m in my father’s presence, I like to pretend none of it ever happened. I don’t want him to have the satisfaction of knowing he still haunts me.

My father’s hand returns to my shoulder. “I want us to go in there together, butterfly, all three of us. Harmony needs us to be a united front.”

“I’m sitting with Sara.”

“She’s not your family.”

Sara starts to say something, but I drive my elbow between her ribs before she can toss another match into the fray. “I’m not sitting with you,” I say.

“Gracie and I insist, butterfly.”

They will pack us into the courtroom seats like cattle into the slaughterhouse chute, not an inch of space between us. An entire side of my body will press against my father’s, and I will leave the courtroom smelling like his aftershave. I will scrub my shoulder raw where he touched me. I want to slough off every inch of my skin at the thought.

“You should go,” I say at last. “I’ll see you when I get in there.”

“Stubborn as an ox, like your mother used to say.”

“She said you should go.” Sara tries to take my hand, but I recoil.

Grace starts toward the courthouse, but my father won’t leave until he launches his Parthian shot. “She’d be disappointed in you. You never gave her one goddamn thing to be proud of.”

“She’s dead. She doesn’t give a shit anymore.”

“Don’t speak to me that way about your mother.”

A lightning bolt streaks through me. I leap to my feet. “She’s dead! She can’t be disappointed in me anymore because she’s dead. I never loved her and she never loved me, and I will talk about her whatever fucking way I want because I have the right. I have the right to hate her and I have the right to grieve her. You can’t take any of that away from me.”

I picture every word as a physical blow, hooks and jabs and uppercuts, because the high I get from losing my temper in front of him is almost as gratifying as a real punch. He says nothing, only smirks. He takes Grace by the arm and pulls her down the sidewalk. Just as the crowd absorbs them, Grace’s shirt lifts to reveal a bruise unfurling across her hip, dark like necrosis.

“Good for you.” Sara stands close to me, her hands opened awkwardly like she suspects I’m going to chase after them and she’ll need to pinion me. “Good for you. He deserved that, and you deserved the catharsis.” The encounter with my father has given her a taste of what she has craved for so long, like a parched desert traveler offered a tiny sip of water. She bounces on her toes in hopes of seeing them in the crowd. “Are you ready to go?” she asks.

“I’m not. But I can pretend to be.”

I tell security that Sara is my wife. I even hold her hand and kiss her cheek to sell it. I can’t tell if he knows I’m lying, or if the repulsion plain on his face is from the idea of two women “tainting” the definition of holy matrimony. Regardless, he allows us in.

The courtroom is too full. The bailiff escorts a dozen people out before the proceedings begin because they’ve exceeded the fire marshal’s maximum capacity. The unnatural crowdedness reminds me of the way church pews fill up at Easter and Christmas but never for a regular Sunday service in March.

I scour the room for familiar faces. My father and Grace are two rows in front of us. I can see him talking to nearby neighbors, accepting condolences, yucking it up for the few local reporters on the other side of the aisle. Smile and smile and be a villain—isn’t that Shakespeare? His arm rests behind Grace’s head. He smooths her hair and pretends he does not know about her gruesome bruise. By an inexplicable divine error, Coach Romanoff won one of the lottery seats. He at least has the decency not to grin about it. There is no Zoe, no Connor, no Gil, the latter of whom I didn’t remotely expect to see, but whose presence would have put me at ease.

Sara waggles a stick of gum beneath my nose. The peppermint stings my nostrils. “Peppermint is good for nausea. Take it.”

“I’m fine.”

“You keep gagging.”

“All rise. The Tillman County District Court is now in session.”

It’s not the same judge who sentenced me. This is a heavyset, middle-aged woman whose glasses hang from a bejeweled retainer around her neck and bounce against her chest with every step. The box-dyed blonde hair suggests a mother, but the gray roots sprouting from her part suggest a grandmother. Though she pretends not to see the small press gaggle at the back of the room, she strikes her gavel for their attention. Her role in their stories, however significant, is small. She is part of the supporting cast. If she gives them a bit of spice, hams it up, offers them something to remember her by, she might even see her name printed on the front page.

Her voice sounds artificially deepened, like she has lowered it an octave for dramatic effect. “This is the case of People of the State of Nebraska v. Harmony Byrd …”

I fade in and out as the judge talks. There isn’t a flicker of emotion from Harmony. She looks as pretty as one can while incarcerated, where makeup is scarce and restful sleep a distant memory. Clean hair transforms her into a different person. To me though, the engagement ring, somehow polished to a sheen, is what attracts the most attention. She props her hands on the table and tilts the left until her marquise diamond catches the light, as if to ask how bad can she really be if someone wanted to marry her.

I can’t picture her sauntering down the aisle in white, a man awaiting her at the altar. She would find the flowers wasteful, the dress gaudy, and the vows cheesy. Even as a young girl, she never saw the beauty and romance in playing dress-up.

The judge races through a prescribed list of questions: name, date of birth, ability to understand the English language, when she was arrested.

“Are you currently under the influence of drugs or alcohol?”

“Seroquel and Depakote.”

Some of the crowd recognize the medication names and titter. The rest exchange appalled glances, certain they have just been introduced to a new strain of marijuana.

The public defender (the same woman who defended me—the gaudy Louis Vuitton purse gives her away) brings her manicured fingers to her temples. “She misunderstood the question, Your Honor. Those are prescription medications.”

Harmony can’t help but be pleased with herself, getting a joke off right beneath the judge’s nose, upstaging her on her own turf. She purses her lips to hide a smile.

“Are you under the influence of any illegal drugs or alcohol?”

“No, ma’am. Sorry—Your Honor, I mean.”

The judge glares at Harmony over the rim of her glasses. “The grand jury has charged that on or about August sixth of the current year, you—Harmony Byrd, the defendant—used a deadly weapon—that is, a vehicle—to incapacitate and ultimately end the life of Elissa Valerie Byrd, and later used said vehicle to transport Elissa Byrd’s body to a remote location on the Long Grass Indian Reservation for disposal. The charges against you are murder in the second degree and unlawful disposal of human remains. If tried and convicted of these charges, you may be sentenced to life in prison.”

When my mother was murdered, she was a person. When she was disposed of, she was human remains. There is a purgatory between those two acts, the desolate drive through the reservation, when she was both.

“Do you understand the charges as I have read them to you?”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“How do you plead?”

Harmony soaks up her last moment in the limelight. She draws her shoulders up when she inhales, down when she exhales, a runner on the track waiting for the starting gun to fire. “Not guilty, Your Honor.”

All the air escapes my lungs, another layer to the susurrus filling the courtroom. My father locks his hands behind his head. I want to see his face, if he is angry or relieved. Regardless of what he feels, he doesn’t share it with Grace. Instead, he claps a hand on the shoulder of the anonymous man beside him, a decidedly masculine gesture of affection. Probably a drinking buddy who will commiserate with him over stouts at the pool hall.

The plea blindsides the everyone, but no one more than Harmony’s lawyer. They exchange words shielded by hands around their mouths. I glean a sliver of satisfaction from having known Harmony might plead not guilty before her own lawyer did—more than a sliver when I consider that I was the one who persuaded her. For the first time in my adult life, I’ve done something a big sister is supposed to do. We’re supposed to be the guiding lights for our little sisters, their shoulders to cry on, their older and wiser confidants, and I don’t have to remind anyone how spectacularly I have failed to live up to those expectations. I steered Harmony away from suffering and protected her from danger. Finally, finally , I’ve gotten it right, and even if I get it wrong for the rest of my life, I have at least tasted redemption today.

The judge sets Harmony’s bail at half a million dollars. She ends the session with another righteous rap of the gavel. Grace shoots me a pointed look as she hurries out of the courtroom, and I know to follow her. We have minutes, maybe even seconds, before my father whisks her away.

In the bathroom, she blots her tears with paper towels, running the sink behind her to drown out her sniffles and snorts. “I’m crying because I’m relieved,” she says before I can speak. “Now there’s a chance. I—oh God, I can finally breathe.”

“I saw the bruise on your hip.”

“This isn’t about me. I’m fine.”

I crank the knob of another sink and check over my shoulder to make sure we’re still alone. “I meant what I said, Grace. He deserves to die.”

“You don’t get it! You’re just like him if you do that. You think your motive makes it just, or pure, or right, but it’s violence all the same. We’ve had enough violence for one lifetime.”

“The motive is exactly what makes it different. It’s why we can fry serial killers in the electric chair and then have a good night’s sleep afterward. Deep down we know it’s right. Some people don’t deserve to walk the earth.”

Grace clenches her eyes shut. “Maybe you could sleep at night, but we’re not all you.”

“You don’t sleep at night as it is. You lie awake for hours and you hold your breath and you pray you don’t hear him walking down the hall.” I pause. “Don’t you wish he was dead?”

“Of course I do! I wish it every day! I want to walk into the living room and see him slumped over on his recliner, clutching his chest.”

“It’s no different than what I want to do.”

She grips the counter, rocking back and forth on the balls of her feet. A pregnant woman comes through the door, but, sensing the gravity of our conversation, immediately turns to leave.

“It’s not on your conscience, Grace. It’s on mine. It would finally be over—for you, for me, for Harmony, even for Mom. It’s not over until he’s dead.”

“You don’t need to kill him,” she whispers.

“Then I’ll take you back to Missouri with me.”

“I wish I could, but I can’t—I can’t—” She rips another fistful of paper towels from the dispenser and buries her face in them. Makeup streaks across her face like the erratic brushstrokes of an abstract painting. “I’m not your responsibility. I can’t ask you to rearrange your whole life for me. It’s not fair to you.”

“You can’t stay here, Grace. I know I’m late, okay? I should have tried to connect with you years ago, and I’m so sorry I never did. I thought it was better if I stayed far away from you. I was always trouble. Nothing good ever came from being around me.”

“Providence …”

“It’s late, but it’s not too late,” I plead. “Grace, please. Come to Missouri.”

“He’ll never let me leave.”

“Maybe he’s finally tired of it all. Maybe he just wants to have the house to himself so he can get drunk in peace. Maybe everything with Mom, with Harmony—maybe I could make him see reason.”

“Reason with him? You can’t reason with the devil.”

Women stream through the door before I can reply. One recognizes us and offers condolences, rubbing her hands between our shoulders like we are colicky babies to be soothed.

Grace flees the bathroom before I can say goodbye.

The rain is steady like a drumbeat all the way to the reservation. The roads are slick. We nearly fishtail at the state line, one brake pump away from belting off the highway and through the grainy picture of Mount Rushmore on the Welcome to South Dakota! roadside sign, Teddy Roosevelt’s woolly mustache the last earthly thing we see.

Sara preens in the visor mirror, wiping away mascara flakes and smoothing flyaways made frizzy from the rain. Her septum piercing is crooked, but she leaves that imperfection as is. “I can’t tell if you’re not talking because you’re sad,” she says, gripping the handle above the window as we come to a stop, “or you’re concentrating on the road.”

“I’m not a good driver.”

“Tell me how you’re feeling.”

Instead of ruminating on my encounter with Grace, I’ve been replaying Sara’s conversation with my father in my head, the recollection growing hazier and more distorted with each recitation, like a tongue twister you’ve attempted too many times. I want to tell her she hurt me, but I also don’t want to explain why such an insignificant remark, one I’m sure she doesn’t remember, meant so much. The longer I’m here, the more I crave a return to my regular life, where I pretend to be a fatherless daughter everywhere except the four walls of my therapist’s office. I wanted him to know I pretended like he was dead. I had hoped it inflicted a psychic wound upon him, an agony he could not escape but could also never place. Now, he can pinpoint exactly where the pain comes from, and he knows it isn’t real.

A homeless woman pushes a shopping cart across the intersection. The seconds click by with only the pattering of rain to keep us from silence. I want to hurt Sara the same way she hurt me.

“Your brother is drinking.”

The noise Sara makes is a cross between a laugh and a gasp. “What do you mean?”

“Bourbon in his coffee.”

“I don’t think you know what you’re talking about.”

The homeless woman muscles the shopping cart over the curb and onto the sidewalk. I drive above the limit so we can get back to the trailer and I can hide from the fallout of this conversation. I can’t help but be relieved to finally throw this secret from my back. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner.”

Sara’s face is taut. Her breath strains through her lips in tense, controlled breaths. The emotional relief delivered by my spiteful remark is eclipsed almost immediately by shame, like when you make yourself vomit after a night of drinking to stave off a hangover, only to still feel like death warmed over the morning after.

I pull into the driveway and leave the wipers on high. They squeal against the windshield as the rain lightens. “How long have you known?” Sara stares straight ahead.

“Not long,” I say.

“How long?”

“A few days.”

She flips her visor up. My clip-on air freshener falls to the floor from the disturbance. She pins the plastic, daisy-shaped holder beneath the toe of her shoe and takes it hostage. “So why didn’t you tell me?”

“He was willing to tell me about my mother’s case if I didn’t say anything.”

“So your pain matters more than my pain.”

“It wasn’t like that.”

She brings the full force of her shoe down on the air freshener. The holder cracks like an eggshell. “I don’t see what else it was like.”

“It was about protecting you too. I didn’t want you to hate him, Sara. I know how you feel about alcohol, and when you told me about him going to rehab, how you stopped speaking to him, I thought it’d ruin your relationship if you found out he was doing it again. I thought about you ending up like me, estranged from my sisters, and I just … I didn’t want that to happen to you. It’s horrible.”

“You know what would really ruin my relationship with Daniel? Him dying.”

I try to meet her eyes, but she refuses. “I’m so sorry, Sara.”

“Did you know you’re like a sister to me, Providence? I will never have the same relationship with anyone else that I have with you—and I love you, you dumb, selfish bitch. You’ve been through horrible things, okay? I have too. We’ve both experienced enough trauma for a dozen lifetimes. So we look out for number one, right? It’s how we survive. But the difference is, I know sometimes I need to put other people first, and you are so used to looking out for yourself that you can’t put anyone else first.”

The words are etched into my bones, branded into my skin, with one bigger and bolder than all the rest. Selfish. My first instinct is to refute the epithet, tell her what I said to Grace in the courthouse bathroom, but then my mother’s voice knells through my head. Most people call a spade a spade, Providence , she says as she pours a splash of gin into her water bottle, and even if they’re just being mean, there’s usually a grain of truth in it.

I don’t know if it’s a memory or a figment, but I cling to it all the same. It is already washing away like kelp pulled back into the ocean by the tide, the same as all my recollections of my mother, doomed to fade with time.

“I’m not kicking you out, because I know you don’t have anywhere else to go, but I need space.” She looks at me from the corner of her eye. “ I love you . But I can’t even look at you right now.”

“I love you too, Sara.”

“I wish you’d learn a better way to show it.”

Her phone lights up. Her dark eyes tick-tock back and forth as she reads.

“Is everything okay?” I ask.

“Speak of the devil.” She shows me the text, Daniel’s name on the screen. “Harmony gave up the ghost on the car. It’s on the reservation.”

I idle outside the trailer for hours, waiting for a text, a phone call, a news alert, a carrier pigeon, some kind of update . I watch the sun burn off the clouds and then I watch it dip below the horizon and then I watch the sky turn deep blue, speckled with stars like crushed velvet. The mosquitoes feast on my bare legs. I smack one as it attacks the skin around my moth tattoo, so ferociously that when I examine my palm, there is no longer any trace of its existence beyond a smear of blood.

Citronella candles appear on the windowsills. Sara came outside to bring me an ashtray a few hours ago, which I mistook for a peace offering, but has otherwise left me to frantically pace in silence. The dogs have taken her side in the fight and ignored me all day.

My hands are raw from so much wringing, my face warm from a sunburn, my bare feet blackened from dirt. One more lap around the trailer, I tell myself, just to burn off more anxious energy, then I’ll go inside and pack my things. I’ll find a motel to stay at for a night or two, and maybe once—

I shriek when my phone buzzes. I nearly fumble it out of my hands twice. “Hello?”

Josiah needs no introduction. The wet mouthful of tobacco is enough. “Providence? Sheriff Eastman here. I, ah … well, I can’t tell you too much, but I wanted you to know we found Harmony’s car up on the reservation.”

He tells me about the unmarked dirt road, the copse of dead trees (charred by a brushfire, he adds) in which the car had been concealed. It was almost forty miles away from where my mother’s body had been found.

“Was there anything in the car? My mother’s shoes?”

“Just Harmony’s personal effects. Mints, a vape, a scone covered in mold. The front of the car was mangled like she hit something.”

“A vape?”

Karishma gave me a vape. I lost my last one.

My stomach lurches into my ribs, my heart into my throat. Suddenly, I can feel every part of my body. I feel my bones straining against my skin. I feel my teeth rooted in my gums. I feel every blood vessel and every nerve ending catching fire.

“Providence? You still there?”

I am grateful beyond words that the sheriff cannot see my face right now. “Yes. Yes, I’m here. It’s—I’m—sorry, I wish I could stop stuttering.”

“I know it’s a lot to take in.”

“Did she take the plea deal?”

“Fifteen years, possibility for parole after ten. Plead down to manslaughter.”

“She’s going to prison.”

“She’s going to prison,” he echoes.

“Maybe I should be relieved.”

“I would be.”

What sweet relief it would be for all of it to be over. For Josiah, it is. Case closed. Car recovered. Plea deal signed. Confession affirmed. Sentence handed down.

But it’s all a lie. A giant fucking lie.

I run inside for my purse and my keys. Sara is in the bedroom with her door shut, sparing me the further pain of telling her what’s happened. I will combust if I have to explain myself to anyone. I beg myself to wait until I’m in the car before I really put the pieces together and draw the terrible conclusion I am careening toward.

I only have one sister who vapes.

It’s not Harmony.