Page 4

CHAPTER 4

August 10 th

11:11 PM

I T’S THE FIRST Sunday in recent memory I haven’t been tattooing. I should do something novel with my freedom, but there’s no entertainment to be found in this slice of the country. Everything closes by sundown. All I can do is putter on my laptop and wait to feel drowsy, which probably won’t be for several hours. I scroll through Zoe’s campaign website. Zoe Markham—Fighting for the True Nebraska. The home page showcases a photo of her standing in front of a green pasture, her cornsilk hair radiant in the sunlight. She wears a pink button-up and a pair of jeans so tight they look painted on. The blurb beneath the photo extols her roots in the Nebraska sandhills and her devout Christian upbringing, a clever spin on being raised Jehovah’s Witness and hating every moment of it. Her photos are all absent of a husband, her left hand absent of a ring.

I feign interest in her policy positions. They’re ludicrously libertarian. She supports marijuana legalization and opposes driver’s licenses, which, considering she knows someone who used a car as a weapon, puzzles me. There’s no mention of her position on same-sex marriage. I can’t tell if it’s by design or by accident.

As I read an op-ed detailing Zoe’s vociferous opposition to routing the Keystone XL pipeline through the sandhills, my phone buzzes. I let the unknown number go to voicemail, but it rings again. It’s probably one of the new artists at work who can’t find the barrier gel. No one else calls at midnight.

“Hello?”

“Providence?” The voice is too young to be one of the girls at the shop. She sounds nervous, almost apologetic.

“Who’s this?”

“It’s Grace.”

“Grace.”

“I’m sorry—I know this is, like, really weird, and out of the blue, but …” She trails off.

I clutch the phone so tightly it might snap in two, like the slightest movement might cause my sister to hang up. “No, no, it’s fine. How did you get my number?”

“Can you help me? I’m—well, I’m in a bit of a pickle, one might say.”

“What kind of pickle?”

“Dill,” she snorts. “No, sorry, I’m being stupid. I promise I can explain when you get here. I’m at the sheriff’s office.”

“Give me an hour.”

“Oh, thank you, thank you! I’ll explain everything, I promise.” Grace appeals to me like I’m her mother, not her older sister. Part of me expects it. I’m thirty and she’s only seventeen. To her, I’m a senior citizen. “I’ll tell him you’ll be here soon. Thank you, Providence.”

Adrenaline courses through my body and pools hot in my stomach like a shot of whiskey. I’m counting on it to get me through my encounter with the sheriff. I slip on my shoes, scribble a note to Sara, and run out to the car.

The sheriff’s office in Carey Gap shares a parking lot with a church, an accidental expression of its views on the separation of church and state. The two brick buildings are indistinguishable from one another but for their flags. Both hoist American flags into the sky, but the sheriff’s station pairs theirs with the rich blue Nebraska state flag, the church with a Christian flag.

Inside, the office is deserted, only a few empty desks and filing cabinets to fill the cavernous room. This isn’t because it’s midnight. Tillman County operates a shoestring police force, forever vacillating between six and seven officers—six if one of the fossils retired, seven if some poor kid from Tyre just graduated from the training program. The floorboards in the entryway announce my steps. Even though the sheriff is expecting me, it seems like trespassing to be here so late. I’m halfway across the room when he emerges from the back office, drawing the door to a close behind him.

“Miss Byrd.” His voice is hoarse and dry like he swallows razorblades.

“Sheriff Eastman.”

Josiah Eastman is a bear of a man in his late fifties, tall and broad with a lumberjack beard. He carries himself with a John Wayne swagger, though he is for once without his trademark cowboy hat to cover his shock of graying hair. His teeth are brown from chewing dip. “I’m glad you came to look for your mother.” He coats mother in venom. We are both remembering the morning he hauled me into this office in handcuffs. “It’s never too late to do the right thing.”

I resent his fatherly tone. “Doing the right thing? Pretty rich coming from you.”

“I always tried to do right by you and your sisters,” he says. “I wasn’t perfect, Lord knows. I’ve got a lot of regrets, but I always did the best I could.”

My hand comes to my cheekbone, reconstructed with plates and screws. All the times Josiah responded to a 911 call at our house and never once did he offer me anything more useful than a bandage or a prayer. Old Tom Byrd put the fear of God into everyone, including the sheriff. They knew each other from boyhood. My father is the reason Josiah has a crooked nose, a dead dog, and, depending on who you believe, at least one child of dubious parentage. “I want to see Grace.”

“You’ll have to wait,” he says. “Still got some paperwork to finish up.”

“What did she do? Run someone over with a car?”

My joke lands with the grace of a fish flailing on dry land. To prove his “paperwork” is not an invented excuse, he seats himself at a nearby desk and opens a manila folder. “Joyriding.”

“That’s it?”

“It’s a class-three misdemeanor. Hardly a case of that’s it .”

If he’s trying to rile me up, it’s working. I glance at the closed office door. Is it a crime to rush in and spirit her away? Is she technically being held? Charged with a crime? My stomach churns at the thought of Grace being burdened with a criminal record at seventeen. She’s too young to realize how damning it will be. “What exactly happened?”

“She and a friend borrowed her father’s car without permission. Mitesh Jadhav’s daughter.”

“Is Karishma here too?”

He nods, continues thumbing through the manila folder. When he rolls up the sleeves of his flannel shirt, he reveals a Bible verse tattooed across his forearm, the lettering too faded for me to decipher. Something from Philippians. Evidently he skipped Leviticus.

“They’re kids, sheriff,” I say. “They’re bored kids who live in a shitty town with shitty people.”

“I know all about what bored kids in that shitty town get up to.”

“Have you called my father?”

“No. Haven’t called Mitesh neither.” He spits into a nearby trash can.

“Let me take them home,” I say. “We can pretend this never happened.”

“It don’t work that way.”

I feel like an enraged cartoon character with steam pouring out of my ears. “ ‘Whosever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn him to the other also.’ Just let them leave, please. Nothing good can come of calling my father down here. For them or for you.”

Josiah looks at the door, then back at me. “Grace is a human hurricane,” he says, “and a bad influence on Karishma to boot. I’ve dealt with shoplifting from Grace, truancy too, but now she’s fooling with folks’ cars and dragging her friend into it. Karishma’s a good kid.”

“Grace is a human hurricane who’s lost her mother.”

“Karishma lost her mother last year. Don’t remember her stealing a car to cope with it.”

“Grief is a funny thing,” I say. “Some people are good with it and the rest of us go mad trying to put our lives back together.”

“So the law doesn’t apply to folks who are going through a tough time?”

“Normal people don’t break laws without a good reason.”

“What does that make you?”

“Sheriff, I’m not a normal person, but it’s no reflection on my sister. She’s a troubled girl. That in itself isn’t a sin.” I can’t tell if I’m getting through to him. It feels like throwing stones into a pond but never seeing a splash. “If I remember right, Josiah means God heals . Neither of those girls will heal or have a normal life if you slap them with a criminal record while they’re still in high school. They don’t deserve to wind up like me.”

He bows his head. “Fine. You can take them home. But if Grace ends up in here again, it’s done. I’m out of second chances to give.”

Josiah vanishes into the back room and returns a minute later with Grace and Karishma in tow. Karishma looks sheepish. Grace raises her chin in defiance as Josiah looms over them, hands on his hips, reveling in his petty display of power.

“Next time you’re in here, Grace, you’re not leaving until you post bail.”

“Of course, sheriff.” As soon as Josiah turns his back, she gives him a mock salute.

It unsettles me to see how alike we look, brown hair so dark it looks black and big Barbra Streisand noses and tawny eyes. My poor mother. She disowned her oldest daughter only to watch her youngest turn into her spitting image. Grace does not notice our similarities, but Karishma does. Her eyes dart between us.

With Josiah’s permission, I escort the girls back to the car. We’re halfway to Annesville when someone finally speaks. “My dad is going to kill me,” says Karishma to neither of us in particular.

“So don’t tell him,” Grace says.

“He has to come pick up the car at the sheriff’s office.”

“Oh. You won’t …?”

Karishma draws her knees to her chest. Every time she blinks, she disturbs the overgrown fringe of bangs covering her forehead. I can’t tell where her hair ends and her eyelashes begin. “I won’t tell him you were there.”

“It’s just—like, you know I don’t want you to take all the blame. But your dad is more reasonable than mine.”

“No, really?” Karishma rolls her eyes. “You mean the sociopath who shot my dad in the neck isn’t a reasonable man?”

I wish I could say the revelation shocks me. My father makes a habit of threatening people with his Springfield; it’s more surprising it’s taken him this long to pull the trigger on one of them. “He shot your dad in the neck?” I ask Karishma.

“Yeah. Last year.”

“What the f—what happened?”

“Something about the liquor stores,” Karishma says.

“Jesus, I’m so sorry.”

“I wish sorry paid his medical bills.”

Karishma does not speak again until I pull up to the Jadhavs’ house on Willow Street. The yellow bungalow is dark but for a flickering porch light. They too have a ZOE MARKHAM FOR CONGRESS sign in the window. “Thanks for … everything,” Karishma says, her face brightening but falling short of a smile.

Grace squeezes Karishma’s wrist as she steps out of the car. They share a doleful look. “What she means to say is, Harmony would have let us sit there all night long, listening to Sheriff Eastman chew on his tobacco like a horse chewing its bit. So thank you for having a soul.”

Karishma climbs into the bungalow through an open window. Her clumsiness tells me it’s her first time sneaking out after curfew. I fiddle with the air conditioning for a few moments, hoping Grace will take the passenger seat without me having to ask. Our relationship is so fragile that something as simple as declining an offer to sit next to me will send me spiraling. I drive toward my father’s house at a snail’s pace.

“The car smells like an ashtray,” Grace says.

“Sorry. I usually don’t have other people in here.”

She tosses her head back when she laughs, baring a gap-toothed smile. Imperfect teeth run in the family. We never had enough money for dental work as kids. It’s only because of the thousands I shelled out on aligners that my bottom teeth no longer look like tilting tombstones. “I’m trying to tell you I want a cigarette,” Grace says.

“It’s bad for you.”

“Yeah, well, oxy is bad for Mom, but it doesn’t stop her from eating it like candy.”

She started taking Percocet to ease the pain of her broken bones and dislocated joints after I hit her with the car, but that was a lifetime ago. “She’s still taking it?”

“Give me a cigarette and I’ll give you the gory details,” she says.

“I don’t want you to start smoking.”

Grace rolls her eyes. “Oh, my God, spare me. I already have a vape. The only difference is cigarettes look cooler. I think it’s very Marilyn Monroe.”

I park beneath a chokecherry tree at the edge of what I think is a vacant lot, but if I squint hard enough, I can see a charred, collapsing house in the darkness. Someone has graffitied 666 in hot pink paint across the siding. Grace finally gets into the passenger seat. When she takes the first drag of her cigarette, I see myself in her again, how she closes her eyes and surrenders to the swell of dopamine.

“She’s been taking the oxy as long as I can remember.” Grace coughs into the crook of her elbow. It’s the only indication she isn’t as seasoned a smoker as she pretends to be. “She gets clean for a few months here and there, but she always falls off the wagon. Always finds some doctor to write her a new prescription.”

I draw from my cigarette to distract myself from the guilt, sharp like an icepick. I did this to her. I did this to her. I did this to her. “She’s always been that way, Grace. She’s an addict. Before you were born, it was gin. Now it’s oxy. It’s a—”

“A disease? You sound like Harmony. Don’t tell me you believe it too.” Grace scoffs. “She’s only addicted to oxy because of what you did to her.”

“I did a bad thing, Grace. I already know that.”

“Harmony hates you for what you did to Mom.”

Her cold nonchalance strikes me as an attempt to poison the well against Harmony rather than true statement of fact. I let the question hang in the air for a few moments. “Don’t you hate me too?” I ask.

“I don’t know.”

“I think you do.”

“Like, I know I should hate you,” she says, “but in a way, it’s like I can’t because I’ve never known Mom any other way. It doesn’t feel like you took anything from me. She’s always been too skinny and she’s always slept a lot. I don’t even remember what happened that day. I was too young. By the time I was old enough to ask, no one wanted to talk about it. Well, no one but Harmony, and she’s …”

“Difficult?”

“A bitch. Always trying to win points with Dad, even if it means throwing me under the bus. Like, I had a boyfriend for a little while, and she ratted me out to Dad just so she could look like the good daughter and I could look like a little slut.”

She wants me to chime in with my own anti-Harmony slander, but I can’t bring myself to do it. I still think of Harmony as a headstrong preteen desperate to discover who she is and carve out her place in the world. I shift in my seat to keep the leather from adhering to my bare legs. “Do you want to ask me about what I did?”

“Why Mom and not Dad?”

Mom. Dad. The warm names sicken me. “It was supposed to be Dad. Just didn’t happen that way.”

I wait for Grace to press for details, but she stares out the window, past the chokecherry tree and the burnt house. Her curtailed curiosity feels like a rebuff, punishment for a wrong answer I had no choice but to give. The end of her cigarette glows orange as she inhales.

“I miss her,” Grace says.

“Do you think she’ll come home?”

She scolds my na ? vete with an eye roll. “I listen to true crime podcasts all the time, and they say if someone goes missing and isn’t found within three days, they’re dead.” She mimes dragging a blade across her throat, lolling out her tongue like a dehydrated animal, but even the comic charade cannot mask the sadness in her eyes. “Today is day three.”

“The turnout was good at both searches. Maybe that’s a reason to be hopeful.”

“They don’t really want to find her. Everyone thinks of it as a fun little story they get to be part of—ooh, a local mystery, how exciting!” She bleeds sarcasm. “No one really cares what happened to her except me and Harmony.”

“I care.”

Grace takes another drag. “I don’t think you’re very different from anyone else who showed up.”

“She’s my mother too.”

“Yeah, but you tried to kill her. I mean, you wanted her to die. What difference does it make to you if she’s gone forever?”

Every response I come up with is robed in hypocrisy. I’ve changed. I don’t know if I have. I regret it. I don’t know if I do. It does make a difference. I don’t know if it does. “I didn’t have to disrupt my entire life to come out here, Grace. She hasn’t talked to me in almost ten years. Last time she saw me, she told me she wouldn’t care if I dropped dead. I never loved her, and I don’t think she ever loved me, but I don’t want her story to end this way. It matters to me that we find out what happened to her.”

I can’t tell her my suspicion about our father. That motive makes me a reptile. I will live up to every diabolical assumption she has about me and I will never come back from it. She will write me off as a would-be killer, exactly the evil creature she was warned about.

“Closure is a lie,” she says.

Spoken like a teenager. “One day you’ll need it too.”

She rests her head against the window and gazes at the chokecherry tree. Its branches dip from the weight of their fruit. Our mother would be harvesting them for her famous pie if she was here.

Cigarette still in her mouth, Grace smiles at me. I choose to see it as an assurance she still does not hate me. “Will you take me home now? I’m tired.”

We stub out our cigarettes and I take her back to Cedar Street. Every light is out, a lucky peculiarity given my father’s erratic sleep schedule. The stillness of the house relieves Grace, who cannot help but sigh at the stroke of good fortune. I want to ask if he still prowls around the house in the middle of the night, if our bedrooms still have no doors, if the floorboard outside my old room is still silent beneath his step, but I’m afraid she’ll say yes.

Her hand is on the door. “Before you go, Grace—how did you get my number?”

“Mom gave it to me a few weeks ago,” she says. “In case of emergency.”