Page 5

CHAPTER 5

August 11 th

9:46 AM

T HE NEXT MORNING, I wake to the smell of coffee and bacon. Sara’s hospitality is not for me, however. It’s for Daniel, who sits at the dining room table in his policeman’s uniform, playing tug-of-war with Augustus. The gun on his hip reminds me of my own, which I now have stored in the glove compartment of my car instead of my purse. The last thing I want is for someone to find my gun in Sara’s trailer. If I get caught with it, I don’t want to take her down with me.

“Glad you finally decided to join us, Sleeping Beauty.” Sara stands an arm’s length away from the sizzling bacon. She flinches each time she flips a slice, as if she’s cutting wires to defuse a bomb. The other two dogs sit raptly beside her. “Daniel, my guest of honor has arrived.”

“We met yesterday.” Daniel gives me an appraising look, unable to hide his distaste for me still being in my pajamas. I think his antipathy is reserved for me, but when he glances to his sister, his churlish expression remains unchanged. He is a cut above us both.

He talks as I help myself to a scalding cup of coffee. It’s only ten and the trailer is already miserably hot, but I crave caffeine nearly as much as I do a cigarette. “I wanted to stop by on my way to the station,” he says. “The divers searched the lake, but it was too murky to see more than the hand in front of their faces.”

“Will they try again another day?”

He shakes his head. “Visibility won’t improve. Just how that lake is. You couldn’t see the Loch Ness Monster down there.”

“Maybe it’d be better to drag it.”

From the stove, Sara grunts. Her shoulders are tense, the crease between her eyebrows deepening. “It’s sacred to our people. No one’s dragging Sungila Lake.”

Daniel begins to respond but thinks better of it. “We have patrols at the main roads leading in and out of the reservation. If she’s still in her vehicle, we’ll find her.”

“But it’s unlikely,” I say.

“It’s unlikely.”

“I saw my sister last night. She—”

Sara heaps the bacon, crispy enough to shatter, onto a plate. “Whoa, whoa, whoa! Which sister?”

“Grace.”

“And Grace is the …?” asks Daniel.

“The younger one,” I say. “She got in some trouble and—well, she called me. She said our mother gave her my number a few weeks ago so she could call me in case of an emergency.”

For a few moments, no one speaks. Sara rations out the bacon across three plates and seats herself at the head of the table. She reaches for her ashtray, but a sharp look from her brother stops her.

“You’ll have to enlighten me on your family dynamics, Providence,” Daniel says.

“My mother wouldn’t have wanted them to contact me. When she came to my parole hearing, she asked me never to contact my sisters, told me she’d forbid them from speaking my name, cut me out of the family pictures … run of the mill stuff when you’re disowned.”

Sara breaks a piece into thirds and tosses one to each dog. It induces a piranha-like feeding frenzy. “Pretty reasonable response considering you ran the woman over with her own car.”

“It was my father’s car,” I correct. The two of them look at me perplexed, but the detail always felt important to me. She never owned a house or a car, never had her own credit card. Everything in my mother’s life belonged to her husband. “What I’m trying to say is, my mother wouldn’t have given Grace my phone number for the hell of it. She had to know something bad was going to happen.”

“That,” says Daniel, spreading his hands apart in a contemplative gesture, “or maybe she was planning to run away.”

“From what Grace told me, my mother probably wouldn’t go more than half an hour away from the doctors filling her oxy prescriptions for the last thirteen years.”

His eyebrows shoot up. “I’m sorry—your mother has been taking oxycodone for thirteen years ?”

I swallow the pebble of guilt in my throat. “Ever since I hit her with the car, apparently.”

“Would anyone outside your family know about it?”

“Everyone knows my parents are drunks. I don’t see why they wouldn’t know this either,” I say.

“We don’t have any medical records for Elissa.” Daniel leans back in his chair, his fingers interlocked behind his head. “Sheriff Eastman wouldn’t share them.”

“He’s protecting my father,” I say.

“What’s your dad got on him?”

“It’s never been a matter of what my father has on people. It’s always about what he’ll do to people. Kill your dog. Fire a bullet through your window. Shoot you in the neck. He beat the shit out of Sheriff Eastman once, before he was a cop. He thought Josiah hustled him at a pool game. Supposedly he fucked his wife too, years later. That one’s probably just an urban legend.”

“Okay, let’s try this,” he says, unamused by my tangent. “Any idea who your mother’s doctor was?”

“We’re estranged. What do you think?”

Daniel scrawls notes on a small pad, tears the sheet off, and crams it into his shirt pocket without folding it. He snaps a piece of bacon in two and puts both halves in his mouth. “I’ll work on this,” he says. “It might be a new angle.”

“Covering up an accidental overdose, maybe?” asks Sara. “Some shitbird who doesn’t want to lose his medical license?”

“At this point, I’d bring in a psychic if it got us a new lead.”

“You need to check out my father,” I add before Daniel leaves. I don’t want them to lose focus on the man who should be the prime suspect. “Josiah won’t. They say it’s always the husband.”

“All due respect, I can do my job without your interference.”

I take a sip of coffee so I don’t tell him to go fuck himself. “Forgive me if I don’t believe you. I’ve never met a competent cop before and I’m not expecting you to be the first.”

Sara edges her chair closer to me. She’s taking my side on this one. “My brother is a sour bastard, but he’s good at his job. He’ll look into your dad as much as he can.”

“I’m not going on a wild goose chase based on your hunch, but if you find something, something compelling , bring it to me and I’ll see what I can do.” It’s the closest he’ll come to an apology. He smirks at Sara as he heads for the door. “Good at my job, right?”

Augustus follows Daniel out of the trailer, and with her brother gone, Sara visibly relaxes. She heaps a spoonful of sugar into her coffee. “I’m sorry about him. He’s a walking ray of sunshine.”

“Does he despise my father as much as you do?”

“Other than you, no one despises Tom Byrd more than me,” she says, lighting a cigarette. “It’s not enough we’re impoverished and unemployed and sick and shit on by the government. We have that asshole pouring thousands of gallons of liquor onto our reservation—a dry reservation—every year. Everyone has an alcoholic in the family. It’s liquid genocide.”

“It’s bullshit,” I agree. It is not my place to add more.

“I wish you’d run over your dad instead of your mom.” She fidgets with her bridge piercing. “We’d all be better off for it.”

“I tried,” I say. Sara is not the only person who’s heard the true story of what happened that March morning, but she’s the only one who’s ever believed it.

Sara rattles her lips with a long breath, as if she hadn’t considered this. “If he—” She accidentally ashes her cigarette into her coffee, then pounds a fist against the table. Coffee spills over the brim of her mug. “Goddamn it!”

I leap at the opportunity to make myself useful and prove I’m nothing like the man she so viciously hates. I grab a wad of paper towels to sop up the mess, but as I wipe the table, I make the mistake of rolling up my sleeves. I don’t even bother to yank them down. There’s no point. Sara has already seen my bite marks.

“You’re still doing it?” Sara’s voice is heavy with disappointment.

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“You said you stopped years ago.”

“You’re surprised a criminal is a liar too?” I ask.

“I worry about you, you idiot. God, that time you did it after shakedown? I thought you were going to bleed out.”

I was nineteen. I hadn’t bitten myself since the day they transported me to the prison in York. I had a good sense for how deep I could bite without serious injury, but that shakedown was uniquely violating in ways I still can’t talk about. Sara had to use her own jumpsuit as a tourniquet to stop the bleeding. The next day, with my fresh bite mark on display, another inmate started calling me Teeth. She meant it as an insult, but eventually I turned it on its head and used it to scare new inmates. No one wanted to trifle with a girl whose nickname was Teeth.

I abandon the clot of wet paper towels and focus on fixing her a fresh cup of coffee. I can’t bear to face her. Throughout my life, I’ve disappointed countless people, but the only person I’ve ever felt bad about letting down is Sara. All she wants is for me to be healthy and happy, and I can’t even manage that.

“I take my meds. I’m in therapy. I’m doing my best.”

“I know.”

I pull down my sleeves.

Sara goes to work at the library in the afternoon, giving me a few precious hours of solitude. I settle into an uneasy truce with the dogs and sit at the dining room table with a pencil and a sheet of paper. Drawing tattoo designs by hand is an antiquated practice, but I like doing it from time to time. It feels like a love letter to the art.

I begin sketching the outline: a female hand, her nails long and elegant, a cigarette cradled between two curled fingers. Tendrils of smoke unwind from the cigarette even though it’s lit from the wrong end. I already know which scars I will place it between. As I fill in the woman’s nails, regret nips at my ribs. If I’d brought my tattooing supplies, I could have fresh ink by sundown.

My phone buzzes from beside me, the screen lighting up with a FaceTime from my boss, Kiera. I stand my phone up against the vase of faux roses at the center of the table just as her beaming face fills my screen. She has a Miss America smile that even the best veneers can’t buy.

“Hey, sweetheart. Just calling to check in.”

Kiera Geraghty is the only person on earth who can call me sweetheart without making me bristle. She did it the first time we met. She shook my hand in the middle of her tattoo shop and said, “Hi, sweetheart. I looked at your work. You’re one hell of an artist.”

“I won’t pass a background check,” I blurted. It was the fourth shop I’d interviewed at by then, the previous three balking at my aggravated assault charge. My scarlet letter. My mark of Cain. If she was going to turn me down, I wanted her to do it now, before I could get my hopes up.

“That’s okay,” she said with a wink. “Neither would I.”

I started working for her two days later.

“I’m surviving,” I say. “Barely. There’s no AC at my friend’s place.”

“But you made it okay?”

“Yeah, no issues. And I know I was vague about how long I’d be gone, but—”

Kiera waves her hand dismissively, her blonde topknot toppling to one side with the gesture. The cat trees in the background tell me she’s at home. She’s the proud mother to an army of cats, half a dozen of them, all named after healing crystals. She has a son too, a human one, but I’ve always been more fond of animals than kids. “It’s your mother, Providence. Don’t worry about anything else. Your job’s not going anywhere.”

“Thank you.”

“Have we ever had a conversation that didn’t include you uttering those words?”

But Kiera deserves those words every time they cross my lips. Without her, I’d be homeless at best, back in prison at worst. She seeks out people who learned to tattoo in prison and gives us the space we need to evolve into real artists—and best of all, she never pries into our pasts. Her philosophy is simple: as long as we didn’t harm an animal or a child, she has a place for us. I know Kiera did time, but I’ve never asked what for. I’ve never even Googled it. When the other artists gossip about it, I put in my earbuds and crank my music as loud as possible. All I know is whenever the news runs a story on gun violence, Kiera scurries out of the room. I don’t need any of the gory details.

I do need a cigarette. As I slide one between my lips, Kiera groans. “I thought you were trying to quit.”

“I said I was trying, not that I would succeed.”

“How are you going to pay your medical bills when you get lung cancer?”

“I don’t like to think that far ahead.”

She carries me into her kitchen and places her phone on the windowsill. She holds up a dirty pan to the camera as if to prove she’s doing something productive with her day off. “You seen your dad?” Her voice turns hard as anthracite.

“I saw Grace, my sister. I’ve told you about her a few times. She wasn’t even in kindergarten when I went away.”

“Is she a good kid?”

For a fraction of a second, I consider asking Kiera if we’ll need a new receptionist in a year’s time. Maybe I could arrange a job for Grace, give her a way to leave Annesville. I banish the thought before it can take root. There’s nothing I can give her that would atone for being an absentee sister all her life. “Better than either of us were at seventeen,” I say as I light the cigarette.

“Jesus, don’t put it like that. You couldn’t lower the bar more if you tried.”

I steer the conversation away from our pasts. “Can you make sure Margot is watering my plants? I don’t want my peace lilies to die. I gave her the key to my apartment before I left.”

“Sure.”

“And the guy I did the palm tattoo for before I left—will you call him to reschedule for a few weeks out?”

“Of course.”

“You’re an angel, Kiera.”

She rolls her eyes as she scrubs a greasy dinner plate. Her arms are turning red from an eczema flareup. “And you’re a flatterer. Anyway, I’ve got to run, Providence. You come back to us safe, sweetheart, you understand me?”

“Sir yes sir.”

“I mean it.”

“So do I.”

The call ends and the loneliness returns, but I tell myself it’s a good thing. I’m lonely because I have people I miss. I’m lonely because I’m away from the people who love me.

People love me. I am lovable. Positive self-talk. Affirmations of my worth. My therapist taught me to do it every time I feel undeserving of care or affection, which is more often than I care to admit. Empathy for myself is in short supply.

Aloud this time:

“People love me. I am lovable.”