Page 7

The principal awaits us behind a massive mahogany desk. She looks more like an aging Hollywood starlet than an education professional, bedecked with ornate jewelry on her fingers, wrists, and ears. Her silver hair is wrapped into a chignon, her mouth a slash of peachy lipstick. Disgust flickers across her face as she assesses my appearance. As she recites a school board-approved spiel about violence on school grounds, she crunches her nose every time our eyes meet.

Four chairs sit before the desk, two to the left and two to the right. Judge, prosecution, defense. Grace’s victim, bloody tissues hanging out of both nostrils, and a middle-aged woman I assume to be her mother, occupy one set of chairs, while Grace sits on the other side with the empty chair reserved for me. Connor slips into the background, shoulders against the wall, far from the fray.

Grace mouths I’m sorry as I take my seat. She wears a red Rosie the Riveter style scarf around her head, fastened at the top with a bow. It used to be mine. In a box deep in the attic, where the few Byrd family photos are preserved, there is a picture of me, then a reedy thirteen-year-old, with my hair wrapped in the same scarf as I rock baby Grace in my arms. You cannot tell I’m holding a baby. Grace was only hours out of the NICU in Scottsbluff and still impossibly tiny, despite the exhaustive medical intervention which made her existence possible. I’m not smiling at her. Instead, I’m scowling into the setting sun, cursing the heavens for forcing me to open my life to another sister who, once my mother’s tenuous sobriety buckled, would become my responsibility.

“For Christ’s sake,” my mother said as she tinkered with the camera, “at least pretend like you’re happy to meet your new sister.”

“Let’s take her back to the hospital. Please, Mom. I’ll never ask you for anything again if you take her back.”

The principal’s monologue has yet to stop. “… and frankly, I think it’s shameful that this incident occurred at all, much less in a classroom, much less in front of your teacher and your peers. When we look at our code of conduct, we—”

“What does the code of conduct say about punching innocent people in the face?” cries the girl with the tissues.

“You grabbed me from behind!” Grace counters.

“Oh my God, I touched your shoulder! Like—like—” The girl taps her mother’s shoulder for effect. “Just like that, like a normal fucking person!”

The girl’s mother swats her on the knee. “Katy, watch your mouth.”

“I have to watch my mouth, but she gets to punch me in the fucking face ?”

“I’m sure Grace is sorry,” I pipe to Katy and her mother. It’s a useless thing to say, but saying nothing at all seems unforgivably spineless. “We all know how hard it is to be a teenage girl.”

“Sorry isn’t going to fix my daughter’s nose.”

“Well, I don’t—”

“And to be quite frank with you, I shouldn’t have expected anything different from one of Tom Byrd’s girls. You’re all barnyard animals.”

I put a knuckle between my teeth and clamp down. I want to bite straight through my finger like a baby carrot. I know Grace wants me to retaliate. She perches on the edge of her chair as she waits for me to lob the first salvo of a verbal firefight. All I have is the nuclear option. I can tell this woman what she already knows: that my father is a beast in human skin, that he beat his daughters, neglected us, did things to us we cannot even reveal in the privacy of our psychiatrist’s office. And for what? For the fleeting satisfaction of humiliating this woman and accepting her insincere condolences? To become the object of yet another person’s pity? There’s nothing worse than pity. Grace isn’t old enough to realize it yet.

I meet the woman’s contempt with a smile. When I look at Grace, she turns her entire body away from me to stare at the wall.

“She should be expelled,” the woman says without a trace of irony. She’s the type to condemn petty thieves to the electric chair.

“We can all agree that punishment is necessary,” the principal says, “but I hardly think depriving Grace of a high school diploma is necessary.”

At this, Connor chimes in. I’d almost forgotten he was here. “Grace is a smart girl. She shows a lot of promise.”

“So does Katy,” the woman retorts. Her daughter nods in agreement, which dislodges her tissues. Crusted blood rims both her nostrils.

“She absolutely does, ma’am. Both these girls have bright futures ahead of them. That’s why, whatever punishment we agree on, I don’t want it to affect Grace’s education. In-school suspension, maybe. She could transfer into Mr. Garcia’s class so Katy can have the distance she needs.”

Connor, always the diplomat, smooth as silk. He had the principal nodding along before he even finished talking. He’s good at playing the hero too: an in-school suspension means Grace doesn’t have to be home alone with our father. The same way Gil looked out for me, Connor is looking out for Grace. This seems like the natural order of the universe: the Crawford men protecting the Byrd sisters. I hope no one catches the grateful look I give him.

Once they’ve negotiated the particulars of Grace’s punishment, Katy and her mother start to leave. They’re halfway to the door when Katy turns to us again. “I’m sorry, Grace. About your mom. I really hope she comes home soon.”

Silence. Grace folds her arms across her chest and remains fixated on the wall. “Thank you, Katy,” I say before her mother can insult us again. She accepts my olive branch with a clipped nod before cupping her daughter’s shoulders and steering her out of the office.

The principal says goodbye to Grace and Connor, but not to me. She doesn’t even glance up from her computer when I offer to shake her hand. It dawns on me then that it’s not the tattoos or the plastic surgery or the stench of cigarette smoke that makes me repugnant to her: it’s who I am. Providence Byrd, would-be murderer. Who wants to shake hands with a woman who tried to spill her own mother’s blood?

As the three of us cross the empty locker hall, I chase the rejection away with my affirmations. People love me. I am lovable. But the sentiment rings hollow when my own sister won’t even glance at me. I have failed her somehow, on a level I can’t understand.

“Can you take me home now?” she asks, staring dead ahead.

“I need to talk to Con—I mean, Mr. Crawford alone for a minute, okay?”

She rolls her eyes. “I’m not a child. You can talk in front of me.”

“Grace, just head outside for a minute. I won’t be long. It’s—”

She unleashes a guttural wretch and tosses her hands in the air. She revels in the opportunity to inflict her histrionics on someone without authority to punish her. “You’re useless, Providence!”

She tears off down the hall, throwing the double doors open with enough force to fling them off the hinges. Alone with Connor, my first instinct is to apologize—for Grace’s behavior, for my own incompetence, and for the cosmic forces conspiring to embrangle us in this awkward encounter.

I rest my head against the cool metal of a locker. “I’m so sorry, Connor. I don’t—”

“You have nothing to apologize for.”

“Why did you call me? I barely know Grace. I’m not … well, Grace said it best. I’m useless.”

“It was you or your dad,” he says. “The less he knows, the better, right? That’s what you always said when we were kids—keep him the dark.” He presses his hands against the side of his head, a telltale sign that he’s losing his battle against a migraine. “I broke protocol to call you. He’s the primary emergency contact.”

“And I’m guessing my mother’s the secondary contact, and that left you with no one to call but me.”

“No. You’re the secondary contact.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.” I feel the color drain from my face, as if escaping through a tiny hole punctured in my jaw. I slump down to the floor and Connor follows, and only for a moment, it’s like we’re teenagers again. He’s quizzing me on the constitutional amendments while I’m inhaling the extra bologna sandwich he brought me for lunch. He’s keeping an extra flannel shirt in his locker for me to borrow when I have bruises to conceal. “I mean it, Connor. There’s no universe where I should be my estranged sister’s emergency contact.”

He lifts a palm. “Scout’s honor.”

“Who made me her contact? When?”

“That’s above my pay grade,” he says.

“Then whose pay grade is it and where can I find them?”

“Providence, what’s going on?”

“Before my mother disappeared, she gave Grace my phone number,” I tell him. “If she made me her emergency contact … shit. She had to know something was going to happen to her.”

“Making arrangements.”

“She didn’t have brothers or sisters, or friends, or anyone she could turn to if she was in trouble. I’m it.”

“What about Harmony?” he asks.

“She’s always been a wild card.” I can’t imagine Harmony upending her day for Grace the way I just did. Pure fiction.

“Right,” he says, skepticism elongating his syllable, “but just from a practical perspective, it would make more sense for her to pick Harmony as Grace’s emergency contact. You live two states away.”

I consider this and shake the thought from my head. “My mother must have known I’d come looking for her. A chance to right all my wrongs.”

Connor massages his knuckles against the side of his skull. There is a desperation to the tiny circular motion, a frantic attempt to stimulate blood flow and revitalize his peaked expression. “That’s a good thing though, isn’t it? If she left of her own volition, then it’s more likely she’s not in danger.”

“But the thing I can’t wrap my head around is—why now? Why leave now, after thirty years and three children?”

“God willing,” he says, “she’ll be able to tell you why herself.”

We drive past the pool hall. My father’s car is gone. He’ll be home, waiting for us.

Grace surprises me by insisting on pumpkin ice cream. We claim the last available picnic table outside the ice cream parlor to bask in the sunshine and watch the storm clouds drift eastward.

“You let Katy’s mom walk all over you.” Grace nibbles the corner of her chocolate-dipped waffle cone like a rabbit. I encouraged her to create the most extravagant ice cream imaginable so she would like me more. I envisioned sprinkles and whipped cream; instead, Grace has constructed the Mount Everest of ice cream, topped with cookie crumbles, fudge, peanut butter cups, gummy bears, and more decadent toppings I suspect she added not because she liked the taste, but to make the treat more expensive. Just looking at it would put a diabetic in a coma. “Like … you let her call us animals. That’s so fucked up.”

“Don’t say fuck .”

“Oh, now you care about what I do?”

The ice cream tastes like autumn. It’s sweet enough to make my molars ache. “What did you want me to say to her, Grace?”

“I don’t know! Literally anything at all would have been better than sitting there and taking it like you did, stupid smile on your face.” She corrals a chocolate chip into her mouth with the tip of her tongue, guiding it through the gap between her front teeth.

“Nothing I said was going to make her think any different of us. Some people are only ever going to think of us as Tom Byrd’s daughters. They’re going to think we’re trash, no matter what we say. You don’t reason with people like her. You let them be wrong.”

“But they’re not wrong,” she mumbles.

“Is that what you think of yourself? That you’re trash?”

“Is there a better word for us?” She engrosses herself in scooping her monstrosity into the extra bowl the cashier provided us. You’ll be needing this , he said upon witnessing Grace’s creation. She breaks the cone into fragments with her plastic spoon. “We’re a poor, dumb, backwater family full of drunks and addicts.”

“It doesn’t define you . You’re not the sum of your family.”

She points her spoon at me. “But you’re contradicting what you just said. It doesn’t matter who we are individually. All roads lead to him.”

“That’s not true,” I say. “Not everywhere. I made my own life.”

Grace appraises the tattoos on the tops of my hands, the dueling sun and moon. I wait for her to compliment them, but her face is slack with disinterest. “Is it a good life?”

“Good enough. I finally made enough money last year to move into an apartment all by myself.”

“Was it, like … hard to find roommates? Because of what you did?”

It takes otherworldly strength to keep from wincing. Her vagueness stings. “All the girls I work with are troubled. Lots of us have been roommates with each other.”

Her eyebrows shoot up. “Troubled how?”

“Prison. We all took up tattooing while we were inside. My boss, Kiera—she did ten years. She couldn’t get a quote-unquote ‘real’ job when she came out, but she was a brilliant artist. When she started her own shop, she made it a point to hire other people who’d done time. That’s how I started.”

“There wasn’t another skill you could learn?” She points with her spoon to my hand tattoos. “It’s so permanent. Like, what happens when you’re fifty?”

“Then I’m fifty with beautiful artwork on my body.”

“I don’t really like it.”

“You sound like Mom.” The word tastes wrong, Mom instead of mother . She would hate what I’ve done with my body. “Do you want to talk about her?”

“Why?”

“Maybe you need someone to talk about her with.”

Her eyes narrow. “Got to be honest, you’re not high on my list of people to talk about Mom with.”

“I can probably tell you stories you haven’t heard before.”

“Like what?”

She watches me fumble for a happy recollection that does not exist, her smirk growing wider the longer I flail. “She came to one of my softball games. Just one. But it was the one where I broke the school record for stolen bases. Coach Romanoff dumped Gatorade on me and everything. I was soaked and sticky and gross, but she still hugged me and told me she was proud of me.”

“And what about Dad?” she asks.

“We’re not talking about him.”

“But I’m asking you.”

“He was there, sure,” I say.

“And did he say he was proud of you?”

“Of course he did.”

I leave out the part about him berating me on the drive home. “You could have stolen third in the seventh,” he said. “You weren’t paying attention. I was embarrassed for you.”

I also omit what happened after our mother fell asleep in the back seat, how my father made me atone for my incompetence—at least, I thought she had fallen asleep. She was awake the whole time and she knew. She was just grateful it was me in the passenger seat for once, not her.

I want to tell Grace about the suspicion that brought me back to Annesville, about the throbbing pain in my chest telling me that my father is a murderer, but I keep it inside for now. She’ll know soon enough. It’s only a matter of time before my mother’s body is found, and then she will reach the same conclusion I have: our father must die.

The screen door to the house is open. Each gust of wind beats it against the clapboard exterior like a twenty-one gun salute. There’s no use trying to rush Grace out of the car. He heard us pull up. We have enough time to exchange a solemn look, apologizing to one another for things we lack the vocabulary to verbalize. I wonder if it’s a shared personality trait, innate to both of us, or if it’s a consequence of our upbringing. Nature or nurture. The lines have always been hopelessly blurred to me.

Our father lumbers onto the front porch, armed with a beer and a book, careful to avoid the pitfall of rotting wood beyond the welcome mat. I’ve forgotten reading is one of his hobbies. As often as baseball games provide entertainment in his drunken stupors, so too do books, usually chronicles about ancient Rome or Greece thick enough to double as doorstops. It’s an intellectual pursuit I cannot associate with such a brutish man. I’ve also forgotten he wears reading glasses, and it satisfies me, petty as it is, that my vision is impeccable. Anything to one-up him. Anything to affirm I have become better than him, even in the most insignificant of ways. His face softens as his eyes rove over me. I don’t fall for it.

Grace slingshots out of the car but stops short of approaching him. Her hastily removed lipstick has left a faint pink stain around her lips. “I’m so sorry I’m late, Dad. I—I missed the bus, and …” She lowers her head in contrition.

“Why did she miss the bus, butterfly?”

“Math tutoring.” The lie rolls from my tongue with ease. It’s a defensive instinct, natural as the hiss of a rattlesnake or a gazelle stotting into the air.

“Bullshit. It’s Gracie’s best subject.”

While the nickname makes Grace wince, I burn with jealousy. Grace was Gracie, Harmony was Harmonica, and I was butterfly, most infantilized of all. “Precalculus is hard,” my sister whines.

He doesn’t acknowledge Grace. “Are you telling me the truth, Providence?”

“Yes.”

My father slides a bookmark into his paperback and runs his tongue over the front of his crooked teeth. I worry I’ve only made things worse for Grace by lying and forcing her to participate in the charade. I consider, briefly, pulling her back into the car and speeding away, and then, even more briefly, speeding away without her.

The porch rasps with relief as he descends the steps. “You call me if you need to get a ride home,” he says to Grace. “Don’t call her. Not now, not ever. You understand me?”

“I understand.”

“Good girl. Get in the house.”

She glides into the house without a glance back at me, and I can’t help but feel betrayed to have been left alone with this man. He takes the final swig from his beer and casts the bottle into the street. When he leans in through the car window, his beer-soaked breath nearly makes me retch. “Fancy seeing you twice in one day, butterfly.”

“I was hoping you’d be passed out on the floor of the pool hall.”

“And I’m hoping this thing’s in park,” he says, drumming his palm against the roof of my car. “You’re not great with cars.”

“You’re a barrel of laughs.”

“Where are you running off to?”

“None of your business.”

“Couple folks saw someone with Missouri plates headed up to the reservation yesterday,” he says. “Indians got an extra teepee for you?”

“It wouldn’t kill you to read less about ancient Rome and more about Wounded Knee.” Rather than striking me for back talk, he manages a tepid laugh, and I relish having the upper hand once again. He can’t hit me anymore. I have the power, and naturally, I let it go straight to my head.

“Am I free to go now, officer?”

“Depends. Am I going to see you at the search tomorrow morning?”

Tomorrow’s search will chip away at the swath of prairie between Annesville and Chadron. Nothing out there but cemeteries, abandoned nineteenth-century military outposts, and enough open sky to make you nauseous.

“I’ll be there with bells on.”

“As long those bells are loud enough to get your mother out of whatever foxhole she’s hiding in.”

“You can’t tell me you think she’s just hiding somewhere for fun.”

My father rakes his fingers through his salt-and-pepper hair. Whether it’s anxiety or agitation, I can’t quite tell. “Your mother’s always had a flair for the dramatic, just like you.”

He reaches into the car. Reaches for the sleeves of my shirt. Before I can yank my arm away, he hooks his index finger around my sleeve and tugs down. In the midafternoon light, my scars are milky white. Grotesque. Once you see them, you don’t see the tattoos anymore. He may as well cleave open my chest and expose my insides to the world.

“Make sure you keep those covered up. They’ll scare people—and I don’t mean the tattoos.”