by Laura McHugh
Crystle blinked at the sudden brightness, her arms crossed over her chest.
We stared at each other. The last time I’d seen her, she’d told me to keep away from her, had nearly shoved me out of her house. Shane’s house. I didn’t unlock the door.
“We need to talk,” she said. “Come on, lemme in.”
She was by herself, and I couldn’t help being curious about why she had come to see me, what she wanted to talk about. I relented and flipped the latch, and she tromped inside, glancing around. She stood with her hands on her hips in the middle of the room, several inches taller than me, mostly because of her high-heeled boots.
“You know, this is my first time coming here?” she said, taking in the small living room, the green sofa, the woodstove, the funeral lilies. Her gaze caught momentarily on the pie safe, my grandmother’s, the one Crystle had found so ugly she’d made Shane keep it hidden in a back room. “I don’t think you’ve ever invited me over.”
It was true, but mostly because family get-togethers were always held at Mom’s. Crystle had only been to Becca’s house once, when Becca had agreed to host a party for Crystle to sell her leggings.
“Can I get you anything?” I asked.
She snorted. “What, you think we’re gonna hang out and drink sweet tea? Little late for that. I’m here to thank you for sending that cop over,” she said. “Just what I needed, my husband six feet deep, some bitch asking me a bunch of personal shit about my marriage.”
“Cop? Detective Kendrick?”
“Don’t act like you don’t know. She said his family had concerns. I figured that meant you.”
I was surprised to hear that Kendrick had gone to talk to Crystle after the message I’d left. She must not have gotten any useful information, because she hadn’t called me to follow up.
“I didn’t accuse you of anything,” I said. “We just had questions. Don’t tell me you wouldn’t do the same for your family.”
“You should have talked to me if you had concerns.”
“I tried, and you kicked me out.”
“Listen,” she said, her voice going soft. The gentle tone was disconcerting somehow. “My dad had an old hunting dog got caught up in barbed wire out in the woods. Drug himself home a week later, skin ribboned up, infection set in, trailing a fence post behind him. Go to touch him and he’d bite you, even though you’re trying to help. That’s about how I been feeling since Shane died. Like that dog dragging that fence, trying to survive. I was hurting and you were making it worse. None of this is easy for me. I was trying to stay true to what Shane would have wanted, and he always wanted to protect his family.”
She pulled her long hair away from her neck and draped it over her shoulder. It was different since the last time I’d seen her, ironed smooth, the ends bleached a colorless blond.
“I can’t do it anymore,” she said. “And I’m sorry for that. But it’s your own fault.”
She let the words hang between us, the house silent except for the hiss of the stove, and I wondered if I had made a mistake in letting her in.
“What are you talking about?”
“The truth. You kept complaining that I wouldn’t tell you what happened. I didn’t want to talk about it because I knew he wouldn’t want you to hear it. He never wanted his mom and sisters to worry about him, think poorly of him. He said when he was growing up, everybody saw him as the bad kid, always getting in trouble, doing stupid stuff. That’s how he saw himself, too. He spent his whole adult life trying to show that he was better than everybody thought he was back then. To prove it to himself. That there was good in him. He didn’t ever want you to think otherwise. So he hid everything he didn’t want you to see. Hid himself from his own family because he was worried about what you’d think. He wouldn’t have wanted you to know how he died, but you need to. If you look at his records, talk to his doctor, he’d tell you a heart attack was as likely as anything, and that might make you feel better somehow, but that’s not what killed him.”
“Then tell me what did.”
“What kills everybody around here? He took a little something now and then, when he needed to. He worked hard. On his feet all day long, sometimes double shifts. Flared up his back.”
Shane had an old football injury that bothered him from time to time, though he rarely mentioned it. He wasn’t one to complain.
“The pain had been bothering him for a while, and he was stressed out, couldn’t sleep. He wasn’t feeling well. He’d started taking pain pills nearly every night so he could get some rest. I was worried about him, but he didn’t want me to say anything. Knew it’d upset your mom. So I let it be. When I came home that night and found him…maybe he took one too many. I don’t know if he meant to. But that’s what happened, and it was too late to do anything.”
Her words jumbled in my head, my brain trying to process them and lagging.
“I knew he’d want to spare you and Becca and your mom, so I tossed the bottle and didn’t say anything. Figured it’d be easier for you, if you thought it was unavoidable. Spare you the guilt of thinking you could have done something. He was already gone. What did it matter?” She sniffed, shook out her hair. “But you couldn’t leave it like that, so you need to know everything.”
Everything? It was hard to believe that there was more, that it could get worse.
“There was something weighing on him, more than just bills that needed paying.” I remembered the ballooning credit card balances Becca and I had seen in his box of papers, the personal loan he’d taken out, his finances taking a bad turn after Crystle came into his life. “It’d been going on for a while,” Crystle continued, “and it didn’t occur to me before—not till Roger was found—that maybe what was weighing on him was guilt. That maybe he had something to do with the Calhouns. Because of what happened with Roger and me.”
“You were cheating on him,” I said. “With his friend.” Roger must have been the guy Gorecki was talking about.
She glared at me. “No I wasn’t. Roger came on to me when I was drunk; it was a one-time thing. A mistake. He wanted something I didn’t, and it pissed him off. He was harassing me and I had to tell Shane. I’d never seen him mad like that—it scared me. He said he’d deal with it, with Roger. Make sure he’d stay away.”
I watched her face as she talked, scanning for signs that she was working up fake tears, trying to manipulate me, but her expression was flat.
“I guess what I’m saying is, do you want that detective coming around asking about Shane? About him and Roger? Wouldn’t do a bit of good. Both of them dead. I don’t know if he had anything to do with it or not, but something was eating away at him that he didn’t tell you and didn’t even tell me.”
My instinct was pure denial. Even if it had been possible for Shane to kill Roger in a jealous rage, and I wasn’t sure that it was, I knew that he would never hurt a child. He couldn’t possibly have looked Macey in the eye—a little girl, just like Lily—and pulled the trigger. I was only beginning to uncover the things I didn’t know about my brother, but I knew his heart, and I didn’t believe that had changed.
“Feel better now that you know?” Crystle said. “I’m guessing you don’t. That’s on you. Maybe you should have paid more attention when he was alive. Loved him for who he was. I tried to do the right thing. Now leave me be, and let him rest in peace.”
Her eyes fixed on mine. I didn’t know how much of what she’d said was the truth, but what struck me as sincere was that Shane had felt he couldn’t be himself with us, that he couldn’t share what was going on in his life. It had hurt to discover how much he’d kept hidden, but it was far more painful to realize that the blame lay with us, that we’d made him feel like he couldn’t come to us for help.
I locked the door behind Crystle when she left, turned out the lights, and sat in the dark, stoking the fire. It took Becca severa
l rings to answer when I called, and I wondered if she was avoiding the phone, the possibility of unsettling news we now associated with late-night calls.
“We should have been there for him,” Becca said when I finished relaying the conversation with Crystle. I could tell she was crying but trying to do it quietly. Jerry and the boys were probably in bed. “Maybe things would have been different. Maybe none of this would have happened. He was always there for us.”
“Do you think there’s anything to what she said about Roger?” I asked.
Becca sniffled. “I wouldn’t blame him for being upset. I could see him beating the crap out of him—he used to get in fights all the time back in school. Remember when he got in a bar fight down in Alabama and broke some guy’s arm? But he couldn’t have killed anyone. Could he?” In the background, one of her boys began to wail. “I have to go,” Becca said. “We’ll talk tomorrow.”
I watched the fire burn. When I adjusted a half-green log with the poker, it let out a sound like a muffled scream. I remembered when I was maybe eleven and Shane fourteen, Dad had him pushing against a tree limb while he cut through it with the chain saw. When Dad’s blade got close enough to nip Shane’s glove, Shane let go and the limb kicked back and hit Dad, who threw down the saw and threatened to beat him bloody.
I didn’t mean to, Shane had pleaded. Dad had to have realized that Shane had let go out of instinct, not wanting to lose his fingers.
Spare the rod and spoil the child, Dad said.
That’s not how it goes, I said. It’s “Whoever spares the rod hates his son.” You already hate him, so what’s the point in whipping him?
Dad had slapped me across the face, an instant tooth-cracking whiplash headache, and Shane had shoved him, muttering for me to run back to the house. He never said what happened, though he walked stiffly for days, and two of his fingers were purple and swollen, surely broken. He didn’t go to the doctor. Mom taped the fingers together with a homemade splint and nothing more was said about it.
I hadn’t talked back much after that, knowing Shane would end up paying, something Dad had exploited as another means of control. Shane had been protective by nature; he had rushed to defend me without thinking of the consequences. If he truly thought Roger would hurt Crystle, he would have done everything he could to protect his wife. Like Becca, I didn’t want to think that he was capable of murder. No one wanted to believe that of someone they loved.
Henley knelt on her bedroom floor and leaned into the window well, inhaling the night air through the screen, the rich, earthy scent of cornfields and the sweetness of fresh-cut hay. She could see the lights on the silos at Sullivan Grain west of town, but she looked beyond that, imagining the world spooling out in the darkness, vast glaciers and snowfields, jagged mountains and frigid seas, places where the sun didn’t rise for weeks on end, where her name could be anything, her identity fluid, shaping itself into the open spaces. It was dizzying, all that awaited her outside the farmhouse, beyond Blackwater, but her eyes kept coming back to the lights at Sullivan Grain. Beneath a loose floorboard, tucked under her journal, lay the envelope of Earl’s money.
She turned on the radio and crappy nineties music blared through the speakers. Missy must have changed the station at some point to annoy her. She liked to do that sometimes, telling Henley that it was a mother’s duty to expose her child to decent music, which in Missy’s estimation included Aerosmith, Shania Twain, and her eternal favorite, Fleetwood Mac. Once, when Henley had really pissed her off, Missy had made her listen to Kenny Rogers’s Greatest Hits on repeat all day. It was ridiculous, and mild in terms of punishment, though it had certainly conveyed the message that she was displeased with Henley’s behavior. Missy was never one to ground her or take away privileges like Henley’s friends’ mothers did. She treated her more like a sister, like they were on the same side despite occasional squabbles. Henley knew she could talk to her mother without judgment, because whatever stupid thing she’d done, Missy had surely done worse. She wanted to talk to her mother now, about what had happened with Earl, but she was alone with her mother’s music, and Missy was sitting in the county jail.
She crossed the hall to Missy’s room. She’d poked around in there several times since her mother had left, checking to see if she had snuck back for clean clothes when Henley wasn’t home, embarrassed to face her daughter. But Missy hadn’t come back, and now she couldn’t. In her closet, her bright sundresses and halter tops still hung next to her denim jacket, a pile of dirty laundry on the floor. Henley started to shut the closet door, then changed her mind. She stepped on top of the laundry, reaching up to the closet shelf and feeling around for her mother’s stash. Missy usually kept some pot on hand, even when she was clean of everything else.
Henley slid the pink music box off the shelf and opened it, the tiny plastic ballerina resurrecting as she lifted the lid. The box had once been Henley’s, a birthday gift from Memaw and Pawpaw. Inside, there was a small glass pipe, a lighter, a baggie containing a scattering of stems and seeds, and an empty bottle of OxyContin prescribed three months ago in Ellie Embry’s name. Even as Missy had been attending church and chattering optimistically about going back to school, she’d been in touch with Ellie and had been using again. Henley wound up the metal key and the ballerina began to pirouette as the mechanism inside the box produced the tinny notes of “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.” She shut the lid and hurled the box against the plaster wall.
It would have been so much easier if she could give up on Missy completely, stop caring one way or the other. She’d certainly tried. But even though she was mad at her mother, she still wanted her home. As she knelt to pick up the music box, she saw that the satin insert had popped out. Tucked down in the bottom of the box was a folded square of paper. She took it out and opened it up, spreading it flat on her lap. It took her a moment to understand what she was looking at. A blurry black-and-white skull with a leering face, dark sockets for eyes. Like an X-ray. A sonogram.
The picture was nearly worn through at the folds, as though it had been taken out and put back many times, the soft curve of the skull traced by fingertips until the ink had rubbed off. According to the notations in the upper corner, the sonogram had taken place a few years after Henley was born, and the fetus was estimated to be nearly six months along. Her mother had been gone for various stretches of time, in rehab or jail. Could she have had a baby without Henley knowing? Why wouldn’t she have told her? She was already a single mother; it wasn’t like she could have suddenly become ashamed.
Her phone buzzed and for a moment she thought that Missy had somehow sensed her discovery and was calling to explain. It wasn’t her mother, though; it was Jason. When he’d called the day before, she had told him she’d been busy helping out at her uncles’ garage. She hadn’t felt like seeing him.
“I miss you,” he said. “I haven’t seen you in two days.”
“I’m really tired,” she said. “I think I’m just going to go to bed.”
“Are you kidding? It’s not that late.”
“Jason.”
“I could come by just for a little while. I don’t mind if you fall asleep.”
“No.”
He was silent for a moment. “Is something going on? You all right?”
“No. Yeah, I’m fine. I just…”
“You’re at home?”
“Yeah.”
“Stay put,” he said. “I’ll be right there.”
She groaned and got up off the floor. He was coming over whether she wanted him to or not, and she’d have to figure out what to say. That he was smothering her and she needed a break; that his father had kissed her and she had to leave town and it had nothing to do with him; that they should sneak away together tonight and never look back. She couldn’t make up her mind. Every time she half convinced herself to push Jason away, he’d show up and draw her back in. She stuffed the
sonogram in the pocket of her jeans, restored the music box to its hiding place, and went down to the kitchen to attempt to settle herself while she waited.
She dug around in the cupboard to find Missy’s half-full bottle of Captain Morgan and splashed a few inches into a jelly jar. She couldn’t find anything to make it go down easier except the unopened bottle of Mad Dog Banana Red that had been in the fridge for so long it was practically a family heirloom. She filled her glass to the rim, leaving a sticky red ring on the counter when she lifted the murky concoction to her lips and chugged. It tasted so bad she chased it with more rum.
Jason embraced her when he came in, rubbed the red stain away from the corners of her mouth with his thumb. “What’s going on?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she said. “I’m just sick of this place. I need to get out of here, out of this town.”
“Hey,” he said. “I thought you’d changed your mind about that. Did something happen?”
She shrugged. The alcohol was beginning to work its magic, warming her insides, loosening her tongue. “I’m not working for your dad anymore.”
“Why not?”
“I was in his room the other day when he came home,” she said. “He tried to kiss me. I pushed him off.”
Jason exhaled slowly, jaw twitching and nostrils flaring. “Fucking prick,” he muttered. “God, I’m so sorry. He’s gonna regret it.” He took her hands in his and squeezed them. “You remember how I told you about hitting my dad with a bat that time?”
“Yeah.”
“I’d walked in on him and Missy. Dad saw me and went off. I freaked out. I thought maybe he’d hurt her—I couldn’t imagine she’d wanted that. I hit him, and that night, after Missy talked to me about it, and told me she was okay, I went into his room and set his bed on fire. I guess part of me thought he should still be faithful to my mom, even though she was gone. Part of me was jealous in some stupid little-kid way, like I didn’t want him taking any of Missy’s attention away from me.”
