by Laura McHugh
* * *
—
It was dark when I left work. Spending all day in a windowless office at the health department left me starved for daylight, and it would only get worse as November wore on and the morning commute turned dark, too. I loved my job, or at least the idea of it—social work was highly rewarding, though it was depressing at times, the terrible things you’d see, the knowledge that no matter how hard you tried, you couldn’t fix everything. The fallout from the drug epidemic had introduced new problems and compounded existing ones. Older people who would normally turn to their families for help now had children or grandchildren stealing their money and pills, and when those kids overdosed or went to rehab or prison, they left behind babies the grandparents were ill-equipped to raise.
On the way home, I called Lily to ask about her day. She spoke in run-on sentences, her voice squeaking with anxiety as she detailed a difficult social studies assignment and recounted, word for word, an incident in the school cafeteria where someone she thought was a friend had made fun of her lunchbox. I smashed down the maternal desire to turn my car toward the city and go get her and wondered for the thousandth time whether it had been the right decision to let her switch schools.
I heard Greg in the background, cajoling the baby to swallow her rice cereal instead of spitting it back at him. He was much more patient and indulgent with his new daughter than he’d been with Lily when she was little, and I hoped Lil was oblivious to that fact, that it didn’t cut into her the way it did me. I had insisted that Greg include her in the new family portrait he had taken with Heidi and baby Caroline, though it selfishly pained me to think of Lily in some other family without me.
“Mom? Dad wants to talk to you for a sec.”
“I love you, sweetie,” I said, but she had already handed the phone to Greg.
“Hey, Sadie. I hope you mailed that check for your part of Lily’s school trip. The deposit’s due Monday.”
He might have developed a more easygoing attitude with his second family, but it didn’t extend to me. I had sent the check on time—I always did, not that it would cause Greg any hardship if it came late. He had made partner at his firm and lived in a McMansion in a neighborhood of blandly reimagined French châteaus and marble fountains. We had planned to go through law school together but couldn’t swing it without one of us working, so I’d supported him with the understanding that I would start when he finished. Everything changed when I unexpectedly got pregnant with Lily. Greg had assumed that I’d want to stay home with our baby, and I didn’t know why he would assume that. It wasn’t something I’d mentioned or even considered, but he insisted it would be impossible to care for an infant with him working and me in school, that I was being selfish. We’d moved to Shade Tree as a concession, so I could be close to my family.
Greg met his new wife, Heidi, at work—she was a lawyer who taught yoga on the side—and I wondered if he would pressure her to stay home when her leave was up, or if he’d softened his attitude on that, too, and would simply hire a nanny. Heidi wasn’t the type to let Greg push her into anything, or make decisions for her, as I’d so often let him do for me.
I was grateful now for the time I’d had with Lily, regardless of how everything else had turned out. Greg had wanted to have more children right away and I’d wanted to wait, and as time went by, our marriage became as frustrating as the baby sweater I’d tried to knit for Lil—a few dropped stitches, a pulled thread, and it was suddenly completely unrecognizable from the pattern I’d attempted to follow.
* * *
—
Becca had Gravy ready to go when I stopped to pick him up.
“I’m worried about him,” she said. “He barely ate anything, but he threw up twice. I don’t think that special senior food you got agrees with him. I gave him some of the Gravy Train we got from Shane’s.”
“Okay. Sorry he was sick.”
“I almost called you earlier,” she said. “It was awful—I thought he was dead. I dropped a biscuit pan on the floor right next to his head, and he didn’t even flinch. And he’s been peeing in his sleep, too,” Becca murmured. “On the carpet or wherever he is. He peed on the new couch.”
Gravy looked like an awkward cross between a Saint Bernard and a dachshund. He had shaggy brown and white fur, a flat snout, and drooping jowls. His legs were maybe four inches long and he could barely manage to balance his fat-laden body on top of them at times, yet he could somehow leap up onto the one piece of furniture Becca cared about. It seemed downright miraculous, and possibly spiteful.
“His vet appointment’s next week,” I said. “Maybe he’s supposed to be on some kind of medication and Crystle didn’t bother to tell us.”
Becca was silent for a moment, picking hairs off Gravy’s leash. I chewed on a hangnail, wishing the conversation wouldn’t go where it was about to go.
“What did Kendrick say? Anything we didn’t already know?”
“Yeah, actually. She said the coroner assumed it was a heart attack based on some prescriptions they found.”
“So…is that our answer, then? But he never said he was having trouble. Why didn’t he tell us? How long had he been having problems?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “We’d have to get Crystle’s permission to see his records. Maybe he didn’t say anything because he didn’t want us to worry. Because of Dad.” Our father had suffered a fatal heart attack at the grain elevator, time card in hand to clock out, still several years from retirement. It was fitting that he’d put in a full day’s work before collapsing, and his death wasn’t much of a shock given his refusal to quit smoking after bypass surgery. In many ways it was a relief. We no longer had to worry about Mom, the sole target of his volatile temper after Shane and Becca and I had graduated and moved out. Even after he was gone, a pit of dread would sometimes open up inside me when I entered my parents’ house, and I’d have to remind myself that there was nothing to be afraid of.
The volume on the kitchen TV spiked abruptly and Jerry hollered from somewhere in the house for the boys to turn it down. Becca lowered her voice, even though no one could hear us. “Did you talk to her about Crystle?”
“Not really,” I said. “She shut that down pretty well last time, on the phone.”
I’d told Kendrick about Crystle’s behavior at the funeral, about her not calling us when Shane died—how she’d accidentally dialed Becca hours later, a clamor of voices in the background, his body already gone. She’d dismissed my concerns with annoyance. Fake tears aren’t a crime, Kendrick had said. Not everybody cries. People grieve differently. Real life isn’t like cop shows on TV.
* * *
—
I’d left the furnace on all day to keep the pipes from freezing, but once I got home I turned it back down and made a fire. We’d never used the woodstove when Greg was here, but after he left, I figured it would help save on heating bills. I remembered the unpleasant childhood tasks of hauling wood and dumping ash, my clothes smelling like smoke after hanging laundry by the stove to dry, but I’d forgotten the good parts, the pleasure of basking in the intense wall of heat, of listening to the fire.
I got Gravy settled on Lily’s old sleeping bag in the living room and moved an assortment of potted plants from the coffee table so I could eat a Lean Cuisine in front of the TV. The plants had come from Shane’s funeral, two glossy peace lilies and one shriveled African violet. They were supposed to go to Mom, but she couldn’t stand to look at them because they reminded her that Shane was gone. I’d saved the cards so we could write thank-you notes, which I still hadn’t gotten around to doing.
The larger lily was from the power plant in Kansas City where Shane had worked for the past ten years as a welder. The other one was from Dave and Carla Gorecki. Dave had been one of his coworkers, the only one I’d met at the funeral. The lone violet, in a small woven basket, was from a Leola Bur
dett. The name was familiar, though I couldn’t quite place it.
The smell of my dinner roused Gravy and he wriggled to his feet, sniffing my tray and then lumbering over to the door.
“You want to go out?” I asked. I clipped on his leash and opened the door, but he backed up and wouldn’t budge. He stared out into the darkness, the chill wind lifting his ears, nose twitching.
I looked toward the woods but couldn’t make out anything beyond the reach of the porch light. There was a far-off screech of a ghost-faced barn owl swooping through the trees, the hushed scurrying of unseen things, the plaintive howl of a dog or coyote. When I was little, Dad had convinced me that a coyote he shot dead in the field was actually a young wolf making its way toward the house. He claimed that wolves in the woods could tear a little girl like me limb from limb. Shane had stood behind him, shaking his head. It’s a lie, he’d whispered later, squeezing my hand in the darkness when I couldn’t sleep. He’s just trying to scare you. Wolves only eat bad people.
I thought of the skull, of whomever it belonged to lying alone in the woods night after night as the moon came and went, scavengers going about their solemn work, and hoped that Hannah Calhoun would never have to think of Macey in the past tense the way I still had trouble doing with Shane.
FOUR MONTHS EARLIER
Most people in Cutler County could recount the highlights of the Sullivan family’s tragic history off the top of their heads. They knew that Harlan Sullivan had stabbed his ten-year-old daughter, Emily, to death with a pitchfork, accidentally, when she hid in the haymow to surprise him. They knew that Harlan’s son, Earl, had given up college to help run the family business when Harlan fell ill, and that Earl’s wife, Daphne, had died of cancer when their son, Jason, was six years old. And whether or not people knew Jason personally, they knew he was arrogant and spoiled, a gifted but lazy athlete, and a disappointment to his father.
Folks in Blackwater had grown up under the gaze of Emily Sullivan’s statue in Sullivan Park and made their living working at Sullivan Grain or in its shadow. They relied on Earl Sullivan to sponsor the local Little League and to bid ridiculous amounts for homemade pies at the annual Fourth of July auction that paid for the fireworks display. Every spring, Earl sponsored the Emily Sullivan Memorial Essay Contest at Blackwater Elementary, inspired by the virtues his older sister had modeled in her short life. She had been a champion barrel racer in her age division, the only girl, and had survived a brutal fall, returning to competition as soon as the doctor would allow. After hearing a sermon about helping the less fortunate, she had boxed up all but a few of her dresses and shoes and hauled them to church in her wagon—a distance of several miles—to donate to orphans.
When Henley was younger, she had been fascinated by Emily’s legend. She’d stood in the park face-to-face with Emily’s statue and imagined what it would be like to have this fierce girl as her friend. When the river swelled and spilled over the floodplain, she thought of Emily in the park, alone and unafraid, water creeping over her bare feet, up to her knees, covering her dress and her resolute lips, unwavering as she kept watch over the town. And then Henley grew older and thought how unfair it was that Emily, who was dust in the grave, who had never been to Sullivan Park, which hadn’t existed when she was alive, had her likeness rooted in one spot for eternity, to be defiled by birds and humped by drunk high school boys and drowned at the whim of the river. The poor girl hadn’t lived long enough to disappoint anyone, and that had sealed her fate. Decades later, townspeople were still leaving flowers at her feet on Memorial Day, writing essays about her in school, and, in the case of Hannah Calhoun, standing before her statue on the news as she pleaded for her husband to return their nine-year-old daughter—tearfully invoking Emily, as if she were the patron saint of Amber Alerts.
In fifth grade, Henley had won the essay contest, imagining that Emily, had she lived, would have grown up to be mayor. She’d found the idea boldly optimistic at the time and now sadly pathetic—because she hadn’t given Emily higher aspirations, and because, still, no woman in Blackwater had ever run for mayor. The essay prize was a hundred-dollar savings bond and a trip to the state capitol, which she had missed because her mother, Missy, had gotten the days mixed up.
Missy had a connection to the Sullivan family, like everyone else, though hers was more personal. She’d started keeping house for Earl as a teen after working in a summer jobs program he’d sponsored and had kept it up ever since, Earl generously welcoming her back every time she relapsed, disappeared, and then got clean again. Harlan had built the stately red-brick Colonial before he’d fallen ill, though he insisted on keeping the original Sullivan homestead—a shack, more or less—on the property as a reminder of their humble beginnings. Earl had had the big house completely renovated when he got married, rather late in life by Blackwater standards, after years of tomcatting around. That was in the eighties, and it was still a shrine to the style of that era, like the set of a John Hughes movie, a monument to his wife, Daphne, a one-time runner-up for Miss Kansas who had come to town to teach preschool and captured his wayward heart. Henley had grown up hearing stories about Jason, who was four years older than she was, from her mother. Missy viewed him by turns with exasperation, pity, and affection, likening him to a feral kitten that would spit and scratch, scared to let you see that it wanted to get close to you.
Henley’s family, the Pettits, were well known in Blackwater, too, though for different reasons. Henley’s grandpa was a drinker and ended up losing most of the family farm. His three sons, Henley’s uncles, were delinquents from the start, graduating from schoolyard fights to petty theft to shady business ventures, or at least accusations of such, and his three daughters didn’t fare much better, the two oldest girls marrying farmhands and birthing an ever-expanding crop of mischievous boys. His youngest, Missy—who’d surprised them by showing up when the other kids were nearly grown—had gotten pregnant with Henley at seventeen, father unknown. Each year on the first day of school, Henley’s teachers had groaned when they called roll and saw her last name. Everyone in Blackwater knew a Pettit when they saw one, the honey-blond hair and wide hazel eyes, the freckles and sturdy frames, their genes refusing to be watered down over generations.
Earl Sullivan was no doubt seen as saintly for employing Missy. She owned her reputation by then, wearing rumors like illicit Girl Scout badges, and was glad for the opportunity he gave her, not just to earn a living, but to spend her days surrounded by fancy things—monogrammed silverware made of actual silver, an espresso machine that steamed your milk, central air conditioning—that she herself would never have.
Recently, Missy had hit a milestone, a two-year stretch of sobriety, which she and Henley had celebrated with cream horns from Why Not Donuts. Missy had started attending the Free Will Church again and mused optimistically about becoming a massage therapist or enrolling in a vocational program to get certified in medical billing. Earl had offered to help her if she wanted to go back to school. Certain that better things were right around the corner, she decided to train Henley to take over the housekeeping for the Sullivans. Henley, who had just finished high school, had other plans, but they required money, which she didn’t have, so she humored Missy and tagged along.
Her first day on the job was memorable, if nothing else. She was mortified when she pushed the vacuum into Jason Sullivan’s bedroom, thinking the house was empty, and saw Jason stretched across the bed on his stomach, fast asleep, his lanky body bare as the day God made him. Her startled squeak woke him and he rolled onto his side, rubbing sleep from his eyes as she tried to fumble backward with the vacuum.
“What the hell?” he said, blinking at her.
“Sorry-sorry-sorry,” she chanted, trying not to look at him, running the vacuum over her toe as she yanked it into the hall and wrenched the door shut. She heard him laughing.
“Well, good morning to you, too!” he called out. She f
lipped him off from behind the door.
It was hard to believe that had only been a week ago, one day before Missy relapsed, snorting crushed oxy off the coffee table and lighting out before dawn—or maybe Missy had been on the way down well before that, and Henley hadn’t been paying close enough attention. They’d grown complacent in the airy farmhouse with the porch swing at the edge of what used to be Pawpaw’s cornfield. The farm hadn’t belonged to the Pettits in years, and the three boys had long since taken up residence near the salvage yard, but the small notch of land with the house, not worth much on its own, still belonged to the family, and Henley and her mother lived there for free—sometimes without electricity and running water if Missy forgot to pay—because Missy was the baby of the family, sweet and helpless as a knob-kneed foal, never quite strong enough to stand on her own.
Henley didn’t know where Missy was now. When her mother was gone, the farmhouse was quiet, no Fleetwood Mac blaring in the kitchen while Missy burned popcorn on the stove and sang along in her clear, haunting voice, belting out the refrain like she was Stevie Nicks.
Henley opened the wide windows and listened as the corn whispered all around. She felt safe here, surrounded by the fields, the vast expanse of shuffling leaves the closest thing she’d seen to an ocean. The house still had some of Memaw’s old furniture—the pieces Missy hadn’t sold off—and her dainty crocheted doilies, yellowed with age, were still draped on the backs of the armchairs. The bathroom upstairs, with the baby blue toilet and tub, still held the lingering scent of Brylcreem and powder, though Memaw and Pawpaw had been gone for years, moving first to a state-run nursing home and then to the Blackwater cemetery.
