Page 6

August 11 th

12:57 PM

T HE A NNESVILLE C HURCH is quiet. Always is on Mondays. I am alone except for a pair of landscapers trimming the hedges.

The church makes me think of my mother. She is a splinter lodged in the grooves of my brain. I drive up to the dingy portable classrooms situated at the edge of the grounds and try to imagine her trudging home after Bible study. Church was the only place my mother was allowed to go alone. Unless there was a blizzard, she walked there. She liked to take the long way, even in heels. If you walk half a mile onto the prairie beyond our house, you’ll find a neglected service road for a long-defunct water tower. Follow it far enough and the road bends to the east, where it eventually runs parallel to the church. As the service road reaches its terminus, you’ll pass three white crosses fixed atop a manmade hill: Gestas, Dismas, Jesus.

As I approach the portables, I see my mother’s poster taped to the doors, surrounded by colorful notes reading COME HOME ELISSA! and WE MISS YOU MRS. BYRD! My first reaction is gratitude, to be floored by the outpouring of well wishes for my mother’s safety, just as it had been when I saw yesterday’s search party turnout. Now Daniel’s words poison the feeling.

I still have a child’s quixotic notion of what it means to run away. I cling to the fantasies that inspired me to run away time and time again as a teenager. Once I escaped Annesville, I could cast off my chains and begin my life anew. I kept a list of places I would decamp to, the usual suspects like Los Angeles and San Francisco and New York. At one point, I had diligently mapped out the trains I would need to reach my destination. I would pack clothes, books, and food into a duffel bag before sliding out the window and fleeing down the street, a phantom into the night. I never made it further than Tyre before a deputy or a well-meaning neighbor returned me to my parents, never pausing to question why I was so clearly undernourished or why I flinched whenever they touched me.

I entertain a fantasy of my mother doing what I once did, only she makes it beyond Tyre. She sails out of Tillman County, on to Scottsbluff, further west to Cheyenne, Salt Lake City, Reno, then finally reaching the promised land of California. Or perhaps she heads east in pursuit of anonymity in New York City, the way troubled women do in the movies. Maybe she even sneaks into Canada somehow, despite not having a passport. When she wasn’t neck deep in the bottle, my mother could bullshit with the best of them. It brings a smile to my lips to imagine her in a new city with a new name. The only hope my mother ever had at happiness was a clean break.

Just as easily, my mind gravitates toward darker alternatives, the countless grisly fates that can befall a missing woman. I find no thrill in imagining my mother suffering such an end, but the irony of this is not lost on me.

I am admiring the artwork in my mother’s honor when the door to the other portable classroom groans. Karishma chokes the drawstrings of a bulging trash bag, redness creeping up her neck to her cheeks when she recognizes me. “This is my punishment,” she says hurriedly. “Dad told the church ladies to put me to work, so I’m cleaning up the portables.”

How different my life would be if my father’s version of punishment had been taking out the trash at church instead of a palm to the face or denying me food for days on end. I wish I could say it relieved me to know at least one father in Annesville is decent, but it only stokes the jealousy living low in my belly. “They have janitors come every week,” I say, but the pause has already dragged on too long. Karishma meets my smile with one of her own, taut with nervousness. I peek over my shoulder to see if anyone is watching, maybe monitoring Karishma to make sure she isn’t slacking off, but it’s still only us and the landscapers, who are eating lunch on the bench overlooking the graveyard. When I smile at her again, I realize. She doesn’t want to be alone with me.

“I’m not a homicidal maniac.” The remark only intensifies Karishma’s horror, as if the mere reference to violence confirms my thirst for it. “Just like you and Grace aren’t car thieves. It’s a thing that happened. It’s not who you are.”

“It was joyriding, not grand theft auto.”

“You see the point I’m trying to make.”

Karishma sets the trash bag down. A clump of tissues rolls out. We both see it but don’t move to pick it up. “It’s, like … I like your mom. She’s so nice. She didn’t deserve what you did to her.”

She waits for me to agree, but I won’t give her the satisfaction. Who does she think she is? Who made her the arbiter of right and wrong? She didn’t live in my house. She didn’t see the things I saw. She didn’t live the horrors I lived. Yet here she is, in her infinite teenage wisdom, to chastise me.

“She used to give me rides home from school with Grace,” she continues, oblivious to my agitation. “She would bring pie.”

“Chokecherry pie.” The flaky crust glistening with butter, the tart bite of the chokecherries. My mother would pick me up before Harmony and allow me to sneak a slice without my sister’s knowledge. Our little secret , she would assure me with a wink. As I bask in the warmth of the memory, one of precious few pleasant moments I cherish from childhood, a twinge of sadness surfaces behind my ribs. If my mother was baking pies and picking me up from school, she was sober. It was as rare as it was blissful, more infrequent as the years wore on. Eventually she would stop bringing pies and stop picking me up from school, instead withdrawing to the darkened bedroom with her bottles.

The wind blows across the prairie and stirs up dust. It draws my attention to the shelf clouds looming at the edge of the sky. It’s August, for Christ’s sake. Tornado season should be over by now. “When’s the last time my mother drove you home?”

Karishma furrows her overplucked eyebrows. “You and Harmony both do that.”

“Do what? What are you talking about?”

“Say mother instead of mom . It’s weird.”

“When’s the last time, Karishma?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “Maybe a few weeks ago.”

So she’s been sober recently. She was sober, maybe even clean, and compelled to give my phone number to Grace at around the same time. The new information frustrates me. I am trying to put a puzzle together with all the corner pieces missing. My mother is a stranger to me. Karishma knows her better than I do.

Karishma hooks the trash bag on the crook of her arm. “I need to finish up before this storm comes in.”

“You’ll be swept up into a tornado like Dorothy if you stay in the portable.” The reference is lost on Karishma, who cocks her head and squints at me like I’m speaking Latin. I don’t bother to elaborate. “Hey, before you go—do you see Harmony much?”

She scoffs. “Sometimes, when she’s not off in the mental hospital.”

“The what now?”

“You were in jail,” she says. “Same difference.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Grace doesn’t like to talk about it much, okay? Harmony is … well, I think the exact phrase Grace once used was cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs .”

“Is—?”

Karishma is midway to the other portable, shrugging with her gloved hands. A gust of wind scatters her bangs and exposes two swollen pimples on her forehead, staring at me like a second pair of eyes. “She’s a nutcase. You’re probably better off leaving her alone.”

I thank her for the heads-up, but I don’t mean it and the wind drowns me out anyway. Karishma thinks I’m a nutcase too. Harmony and I can bond over that, share a few sisterly drinks at the pool hall and wax poetic about how the ghosts of our youth still haunt us all these years later, how we have become defined by the very epithets our father once hurled at us.

Somehow, I doubt it.

I decide to ride out the storm at the Tyre pool hall. The patrons inside are enraptured by a nail-biter Rockies game, unaware of Mother Nature’s approaching apoplexy. Billiard balls, abandoned midgame, are rainbowed across the green felt tables. The men at the tables swap baseball observations over beers in cans, beers in bottles, beers in glasses. I slink to the furthest corner of the bar and take the barstool beside the brick wall decorated with the tires of Tyre. Anyone who gets a flat tire in Tillman County is expected to donate the casualty to the pool hall. Your generosity is rewarded with a beer and a game of pool on the house.

I watch the game despite myself. Baseball makes me think of my father. I tagged along on a double date to a Royals game once, and the whole time I heard his voice in my head like gunfire, rebuking the commissioner who bastardized his favorite sport with the universal designated hitter. Pussies.

The bartender scarcely looks old enough to be serving me the stout in his hand. He can’t keep himself from peeking at my chest. “From the gentleman down there,” he says, pointing his thumb toward the only other person seated at the bar.

“Coach Romanoff? Are you—?” I stop myself from berating the bartender, instead dismissing him with a pinched smile. I refuse to look at Coach Romanoff again. Another look will be construed as an invitation. “Tell him I said thanks and I said piss off, in those exact words.”

“I don’t—”

“My old softball coach shouldn’t be buying me drinks.”

“No, I mean he—”

“I think Chuck and Jimmy could use another beer, kid.” Coach Romanoff claims the peeling vinyl stool beside me and shoos the bartender with a flick of his hand. “Miss Byrd, you looked a little lonely sitting here by yourself.”

The boys always got the first name treatment from Coach Romanoff. The girls were addressed by last name only, a habit he defended as chivalry, but I saw only as an affirmation that I belonged to my father. I wasn’t allowed to be Providence; I was only allowed to be Tom Byrd’s daughter. “I like being alone,” I say.

“That’s not how I remember it. You were always a social butterfly when you were on my team.” He drains the last sip from his beer and licks the foam along his upper lip. “You were a firecracker too. No one got thrown out of more games than you, least not until Harmony came along.”

“You coached her? Did you sit next to her in the dugout too?” I scoop a handful of almonds from a bowl on the counter and pop them into my mouth one at a time like Tic Tacs.

The bar erupts with cheers as the Rockies batter slices the ball under the first baseman’s glove. Bottom of the ninth, Rockies down two, one out, runners on the corners. “I put her at shortstop, just like you, but—well, but not as good, frankly. She didn’t move like you. If I had a quarter for every time she bobbled a routine grounder, I’d be on the Forbes List. And that swing? She reminded me of my four-year-old playing tee-ball.”

His knee brushes against mine, and the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I am sixteen again, alone with Coach Romanoff in his office, pretending not to notice he’s sitting a little too close to me. “Who do I remind you of?”

“Oh, you’re one of a kind, Miss Byrd.”

When his knee grazes mine again, this time longer and with intention, a bilious lump forms in my throat. “If you want to fuck me, you can say it. I’m sure you’ve been jacking off to the thought of me since I tried out for you in those tight softball pants.”

“Hey now, I—” He sputters.

“Or am I too old for you now? I am thirty, after all. I’m technically past my prime.”

He fails to disarm me with a blush and a smile. “I think we’ve misunderstood each other.”

“No, I don’t think we have.”

“I’m going to step outside for a moment to make a call,” he says, “and when I come back, maybe we can try this conversation again, hmm?”

Coach Romanoff stalls for a moment, waiting for my acknowledgement, but I glue my gaze to the Rockies game and continue popping almonds into my mouth. I swallow a couple without chewing. Just as I begin to relax, the bartender reappears with another stout in his hands, his shoulders slumped forward in apology, ready for me to explode.

“Tell that washed up asshole I don’t even like stout.”

“It’s not from him,” he says quickly. “It’s from the gentleman back there.”

He points toward a half dozen men congregated around the furthest pool table. They prop themselves up on their cues like exhausted hikers steadying themselves on trees along the trail. “You’ll have to be more specific.”

“In the Tulowitzki jersey.”

I see my father then, one foot lifted onto the chair, stretching forward to ease the strain of his bad right knee. His belly sags low. His ugly Richard Nixon nose is even bigger than I remember, stretched by the hands of Father Time himself. He is nearing sixty now, suffering the indignities time eventually visits upon us all: his once dark hair streaked with silver, his once athletic frame hidden beneath too many beers. His face is worn like a catcher’s mitt, dappled with sunspots and scored with crow’s feet, his fishlike lips curled into the cruel frown I still see in my nightmares. He lifts his own foamy glass of stout toward me in a mock salute. I’m so mortified by the gesture that I salute him right back.

I’ve attracted the attention of a hollow-cheeked brunette skulking around the restrooms. My first instinct is gratitude. She too recognizes the girl code women adhere to in bars and clubs. If another woman is in distress, even one you don’t know, you rescue her from the situation and whisk her to safety.

“Well, well, well,” the brunette says, grasping the bottleneck of her beer between two fingers, “it’s about time you showed your face here, you stupid bitch.”

Too late, I realize it’s Harmony. She approaches me deliberately, one gunslinger challenging another to a duel. Harmony is a diluted version of me and Grace—brown hair where ours is nearly black, brown eyes where ours are amber, a little paler, a lot thinner. She’s all veins and bones. Her sunflower yellow dress swallows up her frame and drags along the floor. She’s pretty in a sad, strange way, like Sally from The Nightmare Before Christmas .

She pokes the bottleneck into my chest. If her lumbering gait hadn’t already given away her drunkenness, her slurred words do now. Each syllable collides with the next like crashing cars. “I have waited thirteen years to call you that, you know? You’re a stupid bitch.”

“Say it again. Maybe it’ll make you feel better.”

“You don’t speak to me.” She digs the bottleneck deeper between my breasts. “You will never say a word to me. I am only—” She burps in my face. “I only talked to you so I could tell you to drop dead. I wish you were dead. Dead or rotting away in a prison cell, where you belong.”

The rest of the pool hall ceases to exist, the world melting away so we can share this pernicious moment. The symphony of cheers that ensues when the game-winning home run sails over the left field fence come from another dimension.

I ready myself for more of Harmony’s animosity. I promise to absorb every insult she has been saving for me. But she makes good on her promise to ignore me. No sooner than the words have left her lips, she has gone to our father. He pretends to be engaged in another conversation, but he’s been watching. His cruel frown has become a cruel smile as he delights in my wounded expression.

Harmony pecks his stubbled cheek to earn money for another drink. He makes a show of opening his wallet and placing the bill in her opened palm, a king bestowing a gift to a servant girl. Benevolent. Chivalrous. It is only because I remember the beats of this quid pro quo that it nauseates me. When we were kids, something as simple as asking him for lunch money required a lavish display of affection.

Harmony turns the money into two shots of whiskey. She downs them in rapid succession, her beer the chaser. There is no pleasure in her drinking. These shots are the means to an end.

The first shot glass whizzes by me and shatters against the wall. The second collides with my ribs like a shotgun slug before she heads out without another word.

My father’s posse roars with laughter, like Harmony and I are acting out an elaborate skit for their entertainment. One of them says, “She’s always been piss and vinegar, girl. Don’t take her so serious.”

“Providence has never been able to take a joke,” my father says. He labors over the three cumbersome syllables of my name the way people do when they first meet me. My parents’ first act of cruelty against me was my name. They burdened me with a name from which no nicknames could be wrung, then denied me a middle name to use as an alternative.

“I can when they’re funny,” I snap.

“I wasn’t talking to you, I’m talking about you. Mind your business.”

I throw a ten on the counter and storm out of the bar, determined to catch Harmony, but she has vanished into the ether. The rain lashes my face. My sister lives in Carey Gap. It’s not far. I can drive there and confront her, let her know I’m not going to let her abuse me for kicks. If she wants to read me the riot act, fine, I can take it, but I’ll make her use her words instead of throwing a drunken tantrum.

I’m barely in the car when my phone vibrates.

“What?” I shout into the receiver.

“Providence?”

I beat my head against the top of the steering wheel. I double-check the phone number, but I don’t recognize it, nor do I recognize the male voice on the other end of the line. “Who the hell is this?”

“It’s Connor.”

“Connor, I’m in the middle of something.”

“Can whatever you’re in the middle of be paused? It’s about your sister.”

“My sister is precisely what I’m in the middle of.” I start to turn the key in the ignition but stop quickly. It’s fruitless. My entire body is shaking. I can’t drive like this. “Harmony is so drunk she threw a shot glass at me.”

“Harmony? No, I’m talking about Grace.” He interprets my pause as permission to elaborate. “How fast can you be at the high school?”

“Ten minutes if I floor it.”

“If you floor it in this weather, you’ll be getting here in a body bag.”

“Well, I’m assuming she’s in trouble.”

“We can talk about it when you get here,” he says.

On the horizon, a sliver of white sunshine promises respite from the storm. I resent the position I’ve been thrust into. I am wearing a costume tailored for someone else, designed for a role which I am unqualified to play. In the last ten minutes, I have depleted what few reserves of sisterly love remained after so many dormant years.

I drive twenty over the limit until I’m in the parking lot, where the final students trickling out greet me with pinched smiles and wary glances. I can’t tell if it’s the tattoos making them nervous or my manic energy.

I expect Grace to be charged with a minor infraction. Dress code violation. Plagiarizing an essay. I can handle that. Anything more serious requires maternal skills I lack.

After crisscrossing the campus in search of Connor’s classroom (a group of boys dressed for football practice took pity on me and pointed me to Mr. Keaton’s old room), I am out of breath, agitated, and shivering in my wet clothes. I’ll get in and out, quick as possible. I’m less interested in Grace’s misbehavior than I am in the opportunity for us to talk on the car ride home, which she’ll certainly need with the bus long gone. We can stop for pumpkin ice cream at the fifties-themed parlor back in Tyre. We can talk. Really talk.

That modest fantasy is my carrot on a stick. I ease the classroom door open and feel my heart plummet into my stomach when Connor is the only person in the room. Am I too late? Is it worse than I imagined? What if they called the police? What if she had a weapon? What if—?

Connor writes furiously on the whiteboard. His words are so illegible, he may as well be writing in hieroglyphics. I glance around the room and try to get my bearings. The walls are decorated with framed copies of infamous American news headlines. OAHU BOMBED BY JAPANESE PLANES. DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN. FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD. A life-size cardboard cutout of Barack Obama waves at me from behind the rows of desks. George Bush peeks out from the storage closet.

Connor’s voice tears my attention away from the former presidents. “Remember when I asked you not to speed on the way here?”

“Where’s my sister? How bad is it?”

“Let me finish—”

“Damn it, Connor, just tell me what’s going on!”

He underlines a word that looks vaguely like justice before turning around. He winces at the mere sight of me. I must look more feral than I feel. “I don’t know how to sugarcoat this, so I’ll come straight out with it: she punched another girl in the face. Probably broke her nose, from the looks of it. They’re in the principal’s office now.”

“What’d the other girl do to deserve it?”

“Jesus, Providence.”

“She’s not a delinquent. She’s not going to punch someone in the face unprovoked,” I insist. My defense of my sister is as impassioned as it is disingenuous, because everything I’ve learned about Grace suggests that she is, in fact, a delinquent, a bad seed, damaged irreparably, stealing cars and throwing punches and God knows what else. Human hurricane. But I remember being denigrated with the same labels at her age, and I remember most clearly the pitiless sting of silence when no one came to my defense.

He riffles through a desk drawer for a pill bottle. He swallows the giant tablet with no water. “This whole ordeal is giving me a migraine,” he says by way of explanation. “Come on, let’s walk and talk. They’re waiting in the principal’s office.”

Our cross-campus trek winds around dingy portable classrooms and through the withered courtyard grass, where a troupe of theater students are woodenly reciting lines that sound vaguely Shakespearean. Connor fills me in on the details as we walk: his students were turning in an assignment at the front of the classroom when another student grabbed Grace’s shoulder from behind. Whether it was a deliberate provocation or a clumsy way to ask Grace to move is unclear and, frankly, ceased to be relevant the moment she introduced her fist to the girl’s nose. To anyone else, it’s a violent overreaction. To me and my sisters, it’s an act of self-defense. Nothing good ever happens when someone grabs us like that.

I reach for my face. My fingertips rest along my reconstructed cheekbone in a loose constellation. I had been making a grilled cheese, slathering both sides of the bread with mayonnaise like Gil taught me. My father seized my shoulders. I swung around and hit him. He cracked me across the face with his pistol.