CHAPTER 2
T
he phone in our house rang seven times between the hours of ten and eleven o’clock that morning. The calls began as soon as Grant’s story had made its way around town, starting with the gas station attendant at the corner of Main Street and Route 7, passing lightning-fast over country roads and quiet streets, tumbling from one mouth to another so quickly that, for fifteen minutes, every phone in the village of Bridgeton rang busy. People buzzed and hummed and speculated. It seemed impossible that the dead girl, the rag doll on the road-shoulder, could remain anonymous for long. Not with everybody talking about her, her, her.
The first six calls were spreading the news. It flooded in from neighbors, fellow gardeners, supermarket shoppers whose elbows would brush against my mother’s when they stood side by side and reached for the shrink-wrapped, violet-veined chicken cutlets in our grocery’s meat section. Ladies who frosted their hair and cropped it short in sensible, stylish bobs. They sipped lemonade in their shabby chic kitchens, pressed fingers to the dial pad, spilled the sensationalism of our mysterious tragedy into the receiver. Jaws wagged all over town.
My mother sat, listening—interested at first, then simply patient. She hung up with a sigh, turned toward me with a hand in her thick hair.
“A girl was killed last night,” she told me. “Just outside of town.”
The words were out of place in our relentlessly cheerful kitchen. Rays of sunlight originated somewhere within the neatly poured glasses of orange juice and flooded over, drenched the tablecloth, poured onto the sweet, printed wallpaper and around the shelves decorated with retro-red mixing bowls and vintage-inspired placards that read M
AKE IT WITH
J
ELL-
O
!
, gently draped the gingham tablecloth and white-painted wood chairs.
I was smothering a biscuit with jelly, drowning it in purple before taking a bite. My stomach clenched, painfully, my throat constricted, I choked and then forced it down, putting the uneaten remainder back on my plate where it would remain untouched. The previous night’s events were in my mouth—there it was, my little story, bitter and bad tasting. It was unpalatable, too sour to swallow and too ugly to spit out.
He fucked me, and then he left me.
I couldn’t say it—not here, with the juice and sunshine and china.
“What?” I said.
“A girl,” she said, again. “Or young woman—they found her body early this morning. That was Lena on the phone, she heard it from. . . . well, who knows, but the police are out there now. They don’t know who she is.”
“Where?”
“Out by One Twenty-eight, where it crosses Nine. But I wouldn’t go out there right now, even if there was something to see I wouldn’t want you to—”
“No, Mom, no, that’s not what I meant. Morbid curiosity. I don’t want to see.” I put a hand to my temple, pushed my plate away. The tablecloth bunched and rose in folds underneath it. The orange juice glowed brighter. It was radioactive. It was hurting my eyes.
“Are you sick, honey?” my mom asked. She put a hand on the crown of my head, put her upper lip to my forehead, checking for a temperature. The gesture was achingly familiar. For as long as I could remember, my mother’s soft upper lip had been the litmus test for ailments of all kinds. It foretold the future, discerned cold from flu, measured fever within a tenth of a degree. I wanted to cry.
“I think I’m okay,” I said.
“You got in pretty late last night,” she said. “Aren’t you tired? Maybe you’d like to take a nap on the sunporch.”
“Okay,” I said, and all at once, I did. I would lie on the creaky white wicker sofa, wrapped up in a blanket that was soft knit and covered in yarn pills, feeling the tickle of stray hairs on my forehead as a backyard breeze swished by. I thought about the dappled light that bathed the afternoon, and the rustling,
shhh, shhh
sound of the trees. I thought of the drowning moment when sleep overtook, when sight, sound, and touch vanished behind closed eyes, and of how good it would feel to leave behind last night and its gritty, pained aftermath. Just for now. Just for a little while.
I thought, too, of the dead girl, somewhere at the base of the Appalachians, waiting anonymously in the dirty heat for someone to make sense of whatever was left of her.
My eyes closed over the summer afternoon. I sighed toward unconsciousness.
My last thought, slipping by like one of the brief shadows cast by the rustling trees, was that my field—the one where, twelve hours before, I had sat in silent shock while the boy I loved tore our carefully made plans to shreds—was only steps down the road from where the body lay.
Shhh,
the trees said.
I hushed.
Drifted.
Slept.
Until call number seven, his voice on the line.
It was James who’d heard the story first, James who came up on Grant Willard’s Ford, waiting to pull away from the police barracks on Institution Road. He had slowed, chin-bobbed at the other driver to
Go ahead, man
, before he spotted Grant. Not in his grit-streaked truck, but on the side of the road, emptying his guts into an appalled patch of black-eyed Susans.
Grant turned, wiping beer bile from his whiskers.
“Rough night, Grant?”
“Shit, man, I just came from the cops. There’s a dead body out on One Twenty-eight. Damn near ran her over.”
Even in the mess he’d made, James still turned to me first when he had something to say. The ringing phone cut through the soft wash of sleep, and then my mother was shaking my foot and saying, “Honey, honey?”
“Yeah,” I said sleepily, lifting my head.
“It’s James on the phone.”
Something must have registered on my face, because she pressed her hand to the receiver and mouthed,
Should I say you’re not here?
I shook my head, reached for the phone. She handed it to me, gave my foot another reassuring pat, and retreated back into the kitchen. I had started to sweat inside the blanket. I kicked it off.
“Hello,” I said, holding the phone to my mouth. My words felt hollow, guarded.
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
There was silence for a minute, the two of us measuring each other to the sound of breath echoing in the receiver. Me, willing myself not to cry and wondering whether I’d somehow imagined the whole thing. Wondering whether he’d even meant to call. I could picture him—finger on the keypad, dialing on groggy autopilot, remembering too late that things had changed.
I wasn’t his girl anymore.
James finally spoke again.
“So, there’s a dead girl in the road up by One Twenty-eight.”
“I heard.”
“From who?”
“Mom’s friends have been calling all morning.”
“Gossiping old biddies,” he said.
“Of which you are one,” I said automatically, and when James laughed I surprised myself by joining in with a weak chuckle. My laughter was brittle, but it was a shared moment, and the aftermath hit me with painful force. This shouldn’t be happening.
Our shared moments were over.
We’re done.
I wanted to scream into the receiver, but knew that if I opened my mouth, all that would come out was raw, sobbing hurt. The trees were sighing. Leaves flipped over in the wind, exposing their pallid, veined undersides. The breeze rushed in the receiver and mixed with my own shallow breath.
“Where are you?” James asked.
“On the porch.”
“I can hear the wind.”
I swallowed and prayed that my voice would stay even.
“James?”
The line was silent, but I could feel him. Waiting.
“James,” I said, again.
“Yes.”
“I don’t understand why you’re calling me.”
“Rebecca, I—”
He stopped. I waited. I could hear him now, grinding his teeth. I knew the sound. He did it when he wanted to say something but couldn’t put it together properly.
I waited.
In the seconds that passed, I began to wonder if I’d lost my mind. If it hadn’t happened—or at least, hadn’t happened the way I remembered. In the bright light of day it seemed too brutal to be real, my recollection too inexact. The opaque blanket of that blue-black dark obscured it the way it had blurred James’s features as he looked down on me. I struggled, but couldn’t make the memory brighter than the faint glow of the dashboard and the burning flare at the end of his cigarette.
Only my swollen eyelids and churning gut told me that something had happened last night.
“I don’t know what to say to you,” I said. “Last night—I mean, you . . .”
“I want to see you,” he said.
“Why do you want to see me?” I bit the words off as my voice cracked, felt the last tenuous threads of self-control slipping away. “Why would I want to see you?”
“I don’t know. I guess, last night . . .” he trailed off. “You’re angry at me?”
I sat in silence, fighting the urge to snap back.
No shit,
I wanted to say.
“Rebecca?”
Had I imagined it
?
He cleared his throat. “Please . . . don’t be mad.”
Impossible
.
“James,” I said. My voice was a dead thing, flat and toneless. “Did you or did you not break up with me last night?”
At first, he didn’t answer. I heard the
skritch
of flint, the short sucking inhale as he lit a cigarette.
“I don’t know.”
I don’t know.
* * *
I tried to make that fit—to reimagine last night as something less final, something other than an execution, something nebulous and misunderstandable that left us neither together nor apart. Not done, not undone.
It seemed impossible that something which had felt so brutal and decisive to me could feel to him like limbo.
But I wanted to believe him. I had trusted James, and in return, he had loved me, protected me, kept my secrets. In his eyes, even more than in mine, we were always solid.
“Rebecca, let’s talk. I want to see you.”
“Don’t do me any favors,” I said bitterly. “If this is just going to be a rerun of last night—”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“What is it you want to say?” I pushed.
“Will you listen?”
“I don’t know. Is what you’re going to say worth listening to?”
“I don’t know,” he said, urgency creeping into his voice. “But I’m coming.”
CHAPTER
3
I
t had started the year before, in August, with only two short weeks left before the weather turned cool and the town’s youth returned, plodding and en masse, to school. Our first meeting was romantic. High school legend-like, it made me yearn to stay with him just for the chance to tell our someday-kids about how their father had swept me off my feet at the tender age of sixteen. About the bonfire at Hunter’s Point and the coltish-skinny, cigarette-smoking boy with shaggy hair, sitting apart from his friends, who looked across the flames at me with such intensity that he himself seemed to be on fire. Saturday nights since God knows when had been spent this way: Bridgeton’s kids piled into beater cars with beer-laden backseats and drove like a steel caravan out to the lake’s lonely northern point. It was a homogenous group—nobody under sixteen, nobody over twenty, nobody who didn’t still call our quiet town home. The unspoken rule: When you moved on, when you moved away, you didn’t come here anymore.
And if, when your twenty-first birthday came around, you were still here, then they were waiting for you at the East Bank Tavern—ready to offer you a seat at the bar that would be yours for as long as it took, for as long as you needed it. Forever, if that’s what you wanted.
* * *
James and I had stared at each other for what seemed like hours, cheeks glowing with the heat, while other people flitted in and out on the periphery, like light-drawn moths, sucking on the necks of bottles that held watery beer. He was wearing jeans with the knees ripped out, threadbare and fringed where the fabric had torn. I stared at the loose threads, white-hot in the firelight. I was sure they would incinerate, and sure that my eyelashes were smoldering, melting, painting black track marks of soot against my skin. I stared back at him, feeling my skin grow tighter against the onslaught of heat. It took too much time, took ages, for him to come around to where I knelt in the dirt, my beer untouched beside me and sand clinging to my knees.
“Come for a walk with me,” he’d said.
“What, you mean
alone
?” I’d replied, teasing, my cheeks flushing with relief as I turned away from the fire. His face had stayed the same, impenetrable, neutral and firm.
I would see that expression, or lack thereof, over and over in the future, every time I made light of things he found serious. He was fixated, intent, and beyond amusement.
“Come with me,” he’d repeated.
And I, body humming like a live wire, not a bit afraid, had gone.
We had walked through the tangled vines, tall creek-side trees, weaving through the swamp with its wet holes that sucked at our ankles and threatened to steal our shoes at the slightest misstep. We didn’t speak. The fire behind us, the light growing fainter, punctuated the night with pops and crackles as the wood burned, releasing showers of sparks into the air. We could hear them behind us, the other kids, shrieking with glee as smoke rose into the night.
James took a long drag on his cigarette, his cheeks sinking inward, pulling the smoke deep into his chest. He turned toward me, looked at me through the curtain of hair that fell over his dark eyes. For the first time since we’d left the fire, I felt unsure of myself.
I cocked a hand on my hip with fake nonchalance.
“Are you going to offer me a cigarette, or what?” I said.
“What?”
“I said—”
“Come on, you don’t smoke,” he said, waving his hand at me and settling on the horizontal trunk of a fallen tree. It was enormous, cushioned with deep, pungent moss.
“How do you know?” I said, positioning myself with one leg tucked under me, turned toward him. “You don’t know me; I could be at two packs a day. Running for the cancer train at a hundred miles an hour.”
“The cancer train, I like that.”
“Do you?”
“It’s got a ring to it. But it doesn’t matter. You still don’t smoke.” He looked at me, his lips curling in the beginning of a smile.
“Maybe not. But,” I said, leaning toward him, “I’m feeling reckless.”
The tree creaked underneath us. He shook his head and then slid a cigarette out of the pack, lit it with the burning tip of his own, presented it to me with a flourish. I took it and inhaled, praying that I wouldn’t embarrass myself by coughing. He was right, of course—I didn’t smoke. I exhaled, blowing the thin stream upward, toward the overhead crochet of treetops.
“So, it’s James?” I said.
“Right,” he said.
“James, like James Dean.”
“Right again.”
“What are you, a rebel? High school dropout, smoker for life?”
He eyed me.
“Who says I’m a high school dropout.”
“You’re not?”
He shook his head.
“I thought you quit last year,” I said. “We had a history class together, didn’t we? I saw you there three times, tops, then you stopped coming.”
“I’d already fucked it up by October,” he said. “They wanted me to repeat. ‘Failure due to absences.’ I didn’t see the point in staying when it’d be the same exact thing next year. Memorizing it all, all over again, dates and names and whatever . . . I couldn’t.”
“Makes sense, I guess. You didn’t need to leave in a huff, though.”
“They didn’t need to fail me,” he said, looking straight ahead. “They could have understood, figured something out.”
“Why would they?”
“My mom was sick. She was . . .” He paused and swallowed, hard. “She was dying. She died.”
I started to touch him, then thought better of it.
“And they still failed you?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you tell them your mom was sick?”
“They knew.”
“They knew?” I said. “They just knew; you didn’t tell them?”
“It’s a small town. They knew, all right,” he said, jamming the half-smoked cigarette savagely against the tree trunk. He moved an inch, about to stand, then changed his mind. He pulled another cigarette from the pack and lit it.
“Okay, so they knew,” I prompted.
He looked right at me, squared off, jaw set.
“I don’t want to talk about this right now,” he said. “Let’s just say that things have been hard this year.”
Things were hard for James. Harder for him than for anyone else I’d known, before or since. He did it to himself, in a way—refusing anyone’s help, nearly incapacitated at times by his anger at the hand fate had dealt him.
He was a victim of circumstance. His family, what was left of it, still lived in a whitewashed, falling-down house out in the woods, which stood as though unsure of itself in between two big pines. It was a skeleton of a house, bleached bone outside, rickety railings wrapping a splintering porch, a crumbling foundation under years of dead leaves. His mom dead, his dad turned cold and quiet by grief; the money gone into hospital bills and hours of treatments and endless vials of pills to take the edge off of her pain.
His room was high up, under the eaves. I went there only once, where I walked through haunted hallways and climbed the stairs to the third floor while he vanished into another part of the house. One visit was enough. I’d trailed my fingers over the undusted banister, the surfaces of photographs. I had lain down across his bed—still flannel-covered in the late spring, no sensible mother there to make the seasonal switch—and imagined him grasping for sleep there while a dying woman’s screams echoed up the stairwell and sank into the walls. Cancer had eaten her alive.
I pictured him in bed, face turned to the window with dawn breaking outside, succumbing to exhaustion and drifting for hours, while his alarm rang on and on and on. Waking up at noon, another day of school missed, another morning wasted. His mother in the kitchen, James beside her. The two of them, together, his grief, her clawlike hands. She would stroke his hair. He would cry.
I had still been lying there, breathing in deep to catch the musky scent of James’s hair that clung to the hunters’ plaid pillow, nearly asleep, when he came upstairs to find me. I heard him come in. I didn’t open my eyes. I listened to him grinding his teeth in the doorway. I wanted to rise up, away from my body, to sit on the beams overhead and look down to watch him watching me. I wanted him to move forward, touch my cheek, wake me from the sleep that I was faking and tell me it was time to go.
Eventually, I opened my eyes. He hadn’t moved from the doorway. He wasn’t looking at me. His eyes were fixated on a point above me, out the grimy window, past the leaves that littered its sill, unblinking.
But before all that, before our relationship would evolve and deepen and become the defining one of our young, high-strung lives, James and I had left the glow of a bonfire to sit on the damp trunk of a recently dead tree and test each other with words.
“Tell me about your mom,” I said.
“She was . . . stable,” he said.
“Before she died?”
“No, stable as in . . . level. Really chilled out.” He dragged deep on his cigarette, and words came tumbling out along with the curling smoke. “She wanted everyone to be comfortable and settled down and going about their business. She didn’t like rocking the boat, not even when she got sick. It was like, they diagnosed it, and nothing changed except that there were all these pills in the bathroom cabinet all of a sudden. She wanted everything to be normal; she kept saying that things would be the same as always. She even got this wig, when she started losing her hair—it was exactly like her old hair. I mean, the same color and style and everything, and she’d have it on in the mornings and be standing there making coffee, like nothing was wrong.”
“That’s admirable,” I said, not knowing what else to say.
“It just made it harder when things got bad,” he said quietly. “And they did.”
“Did what?”
“Get bad.”
I waited to see if he’d say more. He started speaking again, still not looking at me. “My dad and I, we wanted to stop pretending and just deal with it. You know? Just talk about it. She kept saying no, nothing was wrong, except
everything was wrong
,
and you could
see
it. Everything was completely off about her, she was so pale and skinny. She started walking in this weird way. Like it hurt her just to put one foot in front of the other. She used to go running all over the house, cleaning everything at once, trucking the vacuum cleaner up and down the stairs, and then all of a sudden she’s shuffling around the kitchen like some old woman, and we’re supposed to act like everything’s fine.” He sucked on his cigarette again. I kept silent.
“And that fucking wig,” he continued, growing bitter. “I mean, she wasn’t fooling anyone. It never even looked
close
to real. And she wouldn’t let us talk about it. And then, at the end . . .”
He stopped.
I waited until I was sure that he was finished.
“But she was trying to make things easier on you, right?”
“I don’t know,” he said, and refused to look at me. “If that’s what it was, it didn’t work.”
I leaned into him, trying to comfort him with the solid weight of my body against his. I felt warm with his confidence. Nobody had shared a tragedy with me before. His hand moved over and covered mine. We sat, not talking.
I was brushing my hair from my eyes, leaning against his shoulder while we shared yet another cigarette, thinking that maybe he’d kiss me soon, when I felt him stiffen.
“What?” I asked, drawing up.
“Ah, shit,” he said, gesturing toward the fire, the damp reeds somebody had thrown on the blaze creating plumes of billowing smoke that climbed skyward and out over the treetops, over our heads. “What a bunch of assholes. You know how many summer people are going to see that from their back decks, freak out about forest fires, call the police?”
“How many?”
“One is all it takes.”
“And then what?”
“And then we’ll all be in deep shit.”
“Should we go back?” I said, fidgeting.
“I guess
you
should,” he said flatly, looking at me with something like contempt. “You wouldn’t want to get caught out with someone like me if the police showed up, right? Honor student that you are, and all.”
I hopped off the tree trunk, brushed moss from my behind, and zipped my sweatshirt. The good feeling that something shared and heavy was settling around us was gone. I felt flared-up and annoyed.
“Touchy,” he said, smirking a little.
“Like you’re not,” I said. “I’ve been sitting here with you, having a perfectly nice time”—I winced at how snobbish I sounded, but continued—“but if you’re going to act like an ass, forget it.” I turned to go.
“Hey—”
“Forget it, James. Thanks for the cigarettes. I’m sorry about your mom.”
I was halfway back to the fire when he caught up to me.
“Sorry,” he said.
I shrugged.
“All right,” I replied, still walking. I stepped quickly over a gaping maw in the ground, a marshy puddle so deep that it looked like a black hole. James hopped over it a moment after me.
“No, really,” he said. “I didn’t mean it that way.”