CHAPTER 24

August 22 nd

9:59 PM

A NNESVILLE HAS DEVOURED my mother. I settle on this as the cause of her death because it’s the only resolution to this saga that brings me any peace.

As I detour through Annesville’s darkened streets, I tell myself this town morphed into a monster—a real, sentient, bloodthirsty beast—in search of easy prey to feed on. Its five dirt roads became veins, its mailboxes became teeth, its condemned houses became eyes. And at the very center, its throbbing red heart, are the liquor stores. It intuited my mother’s plan to escape, and as soon as no one was looking, snapped her between its powerful jaws. It knew no one would come looking for her until it was too late.

When I turn onto Maple Street, the door of the Crawfords’ bungalow is wide open. My stomach freefalls at the sight, and my mind latches onto the image of a blood-soaked crime scene with my friend’s pallid corpse at its center.

I park across the street and run across the clover-covered yard. Constant motion is imperative: if I stop moving, I’ll think about the danger I may be walking into. But when I enter the house, nothing is amiss. No blood, no signs of a struggle, no dead bodies. There’s even a fresh zigzag pattern in the carpet from the vacuum cleaner. What made Connor leave in such a hurry that he—?

No.

No, no, no.

Gil.

It takes four calls for Connor to pick up. We’re both breathless when he finally does. “I can’t talk right now, Providence.”

“I was driving through town and saw your front door wide open. I thought you’d been murdered.”

“I—fuck, no. I’m fine. I was in a rush. It’s my dad. He slipped in the shower and hit his head. It’s bad. I’m walking into the hospital right now. Penny says it’s a concussion, but I wouldn’t trust that nursing home to diagnose someone with a head injury if their brain was halfway out their ears.”

Gil’s brain, already shriveled like flowers in a waterless vase, swells and bruises as we speak. Does he know where he is? Does he understand why his head hurts? I pace from the piano to the kitchen and back again. “Is he at least conscious?”

“Providence, I don’t know anything.”

“I’m sorry. I—I’m—” In my mind, Gil’s brain swells obscenely, pressing against his skull until its blood vessels pop. “I’m just worried about him.”

“I know you are,” he says. “Stay at the house for a few minutes and catch your breath, okay? I’ll call you in the morning.”

He hangs up before I can ask another question. Gil Crawford may have been a surrogate father to me, but he is not my real father, and the only person with the right to rush to his bedside in the dead of night is Connor. I convince myself it isn’t personal. There may be medical decisions to make, tearful goodbyes (God forbid) to exchange. Those moments are not for me; I can only wish they were.

But there is a sense of impending doom I cannot quell—thoughts of Gil in the morgue, thoughts of him in a vegetative state, a machine drawing breath instead of his lungs. I’ve already lost my mother. I can’t lose Gil too. Part of me thinks the universe can’t be so evil that it would make me suffer another paralyzing blow, but another part remembers I am a lightning rod for tragedy.

I won’t leave until Connor returns. I don’t care that it’s unforgivably selfish to claim this pain as my own. If I wake to a voicemail telling me that Gil died in the night, I fear I will never recover.

I turn on the TV and crank the volume on the home shopping network. Perfectly banal, like an anesthetic straight to the brain. The host extols the wonders of a plumping lip gloss as if her lips have not been enhanced with filler. I rot on the couch, fingers between my teeth, and allow my mind to drift until my thoughts converge on the need for a cigarette.

As soon as I step outside, creatures scutter through the grass, the bushes, along the branches of the mighty oak tree buckling the earth with its roots. I use the rusty birdbath as an ashtray. Not my finest moment, but better than setting Connor’s backyard ablaze. I gaze at Gil’s old woodshop in the corner of the yard. I can hear the shrill whine of his circular saw and smell the powdery traces of sawdust, a scent I always found more delightful than I should have.

The door grates as I open it. Everything is in its right place, exactly as I remember it. I imagine Connor standing here, surveying Gil’s favorite hideout, unwilling to part with his father’s favorite things even if he has no use for them. Perhaps he stands here and considers taking up carpentry himself. There is an unfinished chair felled on the ground, missing its fourth leg. I lean it against the wall, beneath his array of carpentry tools.

My cigarette has burned nearly to the filter. I extinguish it beneath my slipper, hoping I remember to dispose of the remains later, and walk to the shelf where Gil keeps the trinkets he used to whittle, hunks of wood carved into the vague outline of animals. By his own admission, he was more adept at the bigger projects. These hands are ham hocks , he would say, the less detail, the better. They face east toward the rising sun, paired off in predator-prey couplings: the bear eats the deer, the bird eats the snake, the alligator eats the turtle. The only predator without an assigned meal is a wolf at the far end of the shelf. I wonder if Connor would notice if I pocketed it.

As I approach the workbench for better lighting, I trip over something. The wolf skids across the concrete floor and disappears beneath the workbench.

I stop. I look down. I have tripped over a pair of shoes. Women’s shoes. White heels with plastic ribbons on the toes.

My mother’s shoes.

I wait on the couch, the shoes on the cushion beside me, my spine rigid like I’ve run a steel rod through it. When I glance at the shoes, I can’t think of anything but my mother’s mutilated foot, the fraying cords of muscle straining to keep it attached to the rest of her leg. I try to remember how she looked in these shoes, and when I fail to do that, I just try to remember her alive, walking, breathing. But now, in every memory, her foot is bloody and falling off, and she is dead.

Connor sees the shoes as soon as he comes in the house, almost midnight, but he isn’t alarmed. He reacts with little more than a long sigh.

“Why do you have my mother’s shoes in the workshop?”

He reaches behind him. He takes out my pistol.

“Why did you hide a gun in my dad’s room?”

“You killed my mother! If I want to hide a nuclear bomb in your dad’s room, you can’t say shit to me about it.” I sound like I’m on the verge of tears, but it is fury—thirty years of it coming to a hilt—that runs my voice ragged. “You killed my mother and then you had the temerity to act like my friend. You stood there and you comforted me when they found her body!”

“I did not hurt your mother, Providence.”

“You’re a liar.”

“My dad did, and it was a fucking accident, I swear to God. Let me explain, please.”

“You don’t run people over on accident!”

“You do when you have Alzheimer’s and you don’t know how to use a car anymore. You do when you forget that the old service road out to the water tower isn’t the highway to Scottsbluff. He called me in tears, Providence. He knew he’d done something awful.”

The service road. My mother’s favorite shortcut to church, the only snatches of time she was a free woman. I stand, which he sees as an invitation to approach me. “I’ll break your nose if you take another step toward me.” I draw my arm back so he knows I mean it.

“I would never hurt you.”

“Just like you’d never hurt my mother, right?”

“How do you think he got to the church the first day you got here? He didn’t walk twenty miles! He’s done it before: takes some nurse’s keys, gets in her car, and comes back to Annesville. He can’t leave Annesville behind. Sometimes it’s the church, sometimes it’s the house, once it was—”

“But you hid her body.”

“Yes. Yes, I did.”

“You threw her away like trash!” I cry. “You dumped her in the woods, and you let the vultures eat her eyes and the coyotes mangle her feet, and then you held me when I saw her body.”

“I was protecting my dad.”

“He killed her!”

“It was an accident. A freak accident—a one-in-a-billion accident. You think I would have done that if I knew he did it on purpose? He called me, and he cried, and he begged me for help, so I did what I had to do to keep him safe. He’s still a person. He’s still my dad.”

“And what was my mom?”

“Your mom was a person too, but not my person.”

“I’m going to the police.”

Connor lifts the gun. The safety is engaged. “You do that and I’ll tell them about the gun.”

“How did you find it?”

“I went to the nursing home for his meds. I found it next to his goddamn Namenda bottles.”

“Who says it’s mine?”

“No one else comes to see him,” he says.

“Your fingerprints are on it too, dumbass.”

“And who are they going to believe? Me or the felon?”

“I’ll take my chances.”

I am bluffing when I head for the door, but he falls for it. He blocks my way like a linebacker. “Don’t do this to him, please.”

“And I should let Harmony go to prison for something she didn’t do? I should sacrifice my family for yours? How noble that would be.”

“It’s noble to save someone you love. Someone who loves you. Don’t kid yourself about the relationship you and Harmony have. She’s never going to want you around, but my dad loves you like a daughter. He doesn’t even know how to move a bishop half the time, but he knows who he loves.”

To choose one sister over another is a decision of blood, but to choose Gil over Harmony can only be a betrayal—and yet, at some level, even though I hate him for it, Connor is right. It boils down to love. Gil loves me and Harmony does not.

People love me. I am lovable.

“He’s an old man.” Connor is close to tears. “He’s not well. He never would have hurt your mom on purpose, God as my witness. I was only—damn it! Damn it!”

The sobs strangle his breath, but I will not comfort him. I watch him weep, watch him collapse to the floor, watch him bury his head in his hands, watch him crumble into pieces. It boils my blood. He hauled my mother’s body to the woods. He left her body beneath the leaves for the little boy to find. He comforted me when I saw her body.

Body. Body. The word snags in my brain. He is the reason she is a body and not a person anymore.

“It never had to go this far. You could have called the cops.”

“He doesn’t deserve to die in prison.”

“He has Alzheimer’s. They’d send him to a care facility.”

“Half their dads and granddads were in the KKK. You think those good ol’ boys wouldn’t jump at the first chance to throw another Black man in prison? They don’t give a shit about the Alzheimer’s. They’d still lynch him if they could.” He runs his teeth over his bottom lip, his chest trembling from the force of his exhale. “What if it was Grace? You’d have done the same thing. I saw it when you came to the school that day, how you would have taken a bullet if it meant she’d be safe.”

And he is right, about all of it, but I can’t give him the satisfaction. “Give me my gun.”

“No.”

“It’s my gun.”

He thumbs the tears from his cheeks. “I’m keeping it. You go to the cops and I will too. You don’t and we have no problems.”

“Maybe I’ll go to them anyway.”

“They won’t believe you.”

“I have her shoes,” I say.

“They’re just shoes. Maybe they were my mom’s. Only so many places to buy shoes around here.” He does not intend to be snide, but it still sounds that way. He is three moves ahead of me.

“The car. If he hit her with a stolen car, then—”

“I tore the engine apart. The nurse had to scrap it for parts. It’s gone.”

“My God, if you had put half the effort into getting my mother medical attention as you did covering your tracks and hiding her body, she would still be alive. Did you hear her breathing, Connor? Was she still gasping for air when you left her to die? Did she beg you for help?”

“I thought she was dead, I swear to God. If I’d known—”

“Fuck you, Connor.”

I storm out of the house. One more word and I will be sick. One more word and my universe, already splitting at the seams, will collapse completely. I stop in the driveway and look back at the house.

I take the deepest breath I can manage, one two three , and then I throw my mother’s shoes through the window.