by Laura McHugh
Raymond decided he didn’t like the looks of her spare tire, so he brought a better one out to put in her trunk, and she rolled the old one into the shop. She stopped in the kitchen to wash her hands before she left. The Walmart bag was gone. As she pumped soap into her palm, she noticed a red ring pooled around the drain, dark as congealed blood. Like the cough syrup had spilled. Even after the water rushed over it, it left a faint stain.
“Oh, my god,” Hannah cried, lurching backward, hands clasped over her mouth. “What is that?”
I peered into the kitchen drawer she’d opened. There were chunks of what looked like human hair, coarse and blond, arranged in a nest. I reached in and extracted the long handle of a basting brush, the kind used for grilling, all the bristles chewed off.
“Disgusting,” she said, slamming the drawer with her foot. “Damn mice. Gone for a little while, and they take over.”
It had gotten too overwhelming for Hannah out at the farm with her aunt and Chad and his girlfriend, their kids, the vaping, the dismembered dolls. The news vans had moved on. She’d wanted to go back home, to grieve in peace.
“You could get a cat,” I said. “A good mouser.”
“I don’t know,” Hannah said, looking around the narrow kitchen. “I don’t think I can take care of anything right now. Even a cat that feeds itself.”
Her gaze caught on a rustic sign above the sink, white lettering on a barn-wood board: HAPPINESS IS HOMEMADE. Hannah had painted it. She’d done a lot of crafting back when the girls were small. She had made a sign for me and Greg that said THE LOWELL FAMILY, but I’d gone back to my maiden name after the divorce and had thrown the sign away.
“I’ll clean up the drawer,” I said. “And wash whatever’s in there.”
She sighed. “Probably need to wash everything.”
“Has there been any news?” I asked, checking around for paper towels to pick up the mouse nest.
She leaned against the stove, scraping at a fleck of grit with her thumbnail. “They’re interviewing Roger’s friends, coworkers. They’ve already talked to most of them before, so I don’t know if they’ll find anything they didn’t already know. And they questioned me, of course. Asked if I meant it when I said I wished Roger was dead.”
“Was it Kendrick?” I asked.
“No. One of the guys. Kendrick’s all right. She’s about the only one who doesn’t look at me like I’m guilty of something. Probably because she and Chad are old friends.” She tucked her hair back behind her ears. “I need some air.”
I followed her out to the little deck tacked onto the back of the trailer, the wood gray and splintered. Dry prairie grass swayed in the sprawling field beyond the deck, and I thought of the mice creeping through it, seeking warmth and shelter as winter closed in, finding their way through the lattice beneath the trailer.
Hannah looked out over the field, her pale skin nearly translucent, bluish hollows around her eyes and at her temples, the shape of her skull showing through, the natural strawberry tint bleached out of her blond hair so that it no longer matched Macey’s. A painted flowerpot balanced on the railing between us. Lily had made one just like it in kindergarten, a Mother’s Day gift with thumbprint butterflies. The withered stalk of a long-dead plant poked out of it, cigarette butts stubbed out in the soil.
“How much do you know,” I asked, “about that last weekend? When they disappeared?”
She scraped her chapped lips with her fingernail, her face to the wind. “I know he was going to take her fishing. Something she loved and I hated. He wanted to make it fun for her, so she’d want to go. She didn’t like his place, out in the sticks, trees all around so it never got light inside. Said it smelled like Granny’s old root cellar, dark and damp, wood paneling everywhere, little toadstools growing in the shower. Told me the sheets on her bed were bumpy. She hated that.” Hannah cleared her throat, her nose running in the cold. “The carpet was orange, and she’d pretend it was lava, and she’d sleep in her clothes so she didn’t have to feel the bumpy sheets. But she liked fishing. The spring peepers were out, and she told me they’d be real loud by the water. She liked to listen to them sing.”
Lily loved the peepers, too, the chorus of tiny frogs at the creek announcing that winter was over, that spring had arrived, however brutal and unpredictable it might be.
“She called me Saturday night because there was a bad storm, and the wind was banging all those trees together up against the house so she couldn’t sleep. She said it sounded like somebody was pounding on the door. She wanted me to come get her, and I…” Hannah squeezed her eyes shut. “I said I couldn’t. She called again the next morning, Sunday. Said her dad had bought her a new fishing pole, all her own. The Walmart greeter confirmed it, that old lady who’s always there. Said they looked happy when they left the store. They were gonna go out on the river, have a picnic, roast hotdogs. The whole deal. I was glad he was making an effort, though I figured he was doing it as much to spite me as anything. Playing the long game to win her over. Maybe I was wrong. I don’t know.”
“Was that the last you heard?”
She nodded, her mouth set in a grim line. “He filled up at a gas station near the river later that morning. Some guy thought he saw them fishing later, a man and a little girl with a bright blue pole. He was supposed to take her to school the next day—that was part of the new visitation schedule he’d fought for, so he could get an extra night—and when she didn’t show up, the school called him instead of me, and I didn’t find out till later, when I went to pick her up and she wasn’t there.”
A fissure in her cracked lips filled with blood and she reached up to touch it, staring at the red smear on her fingertip. “When they went to check his house, her overnight bag was still in her room. They said he probably left it behind so she wouldn’t be recognized—so nobody’d see her wearing the clothes I’d packed for her, or rolling that red ladybug suitcase into some hotel. But now…maybe something happened to them at the river. Or when they got back home. Sometime before they would have left for school the next day, but most likely at night.” Her mouth twisted bitterly. “Kendrick said disposing of bodies is something best done in the dark.”
“Have they found his truck?”
“They’re looking for it,” she said. “It’s about the most common pickup you could have—a white Ford. They’re everywhere. They sent a diver into the river back in the spring, in case they ran off the road or something, but Kendrick wants to try again.”
“Can I ask you something personal, about Roger?”
She turned to face me. “Yeah.”
“Did he ever go out with Crystle?”
“Crystle? I don’t know. I didn’t exactly keep up with his love life after we split. I didn’t care what he did, who he saw, as long as he kept Macey out of it.”
“Okay.”
“Okay? You asking for a reason?”
“Somebody told me Shane thought Crystle might have been cheating on him. I don’t know with who.”
“So you think she had an affair with my ex?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know what to think. She showed up at my house the other night and told me Shane overdosed, and she didn’t know whether or not it was an accident. She implied that he was upset over some things.”
“You believe her?” Hannah asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Nothing surprises me anymore,” she said. “I could believe almost anything about anybody. We don’t know what we’re capable of ourselves, let alone what somebody else might do under certain circumstances. I wouldn’t take her at her word, though. From what I know of her, she’s all drama. Might’ve come over to stir shit up just for attention because she was bored.”
“Yeah. Maybe.”
“I wonder if Kendrick’s talked to her, if she and Roger hung out. She’s always saying, you never know w
here a lead’ll come from. Somebody somewhere knows something.”
* * *
—
I headed straight to Mom’s house from Hannah’s, not bothering to call first. It was rare these days for her not to be home, though I wouldn’t have minded if she was gone.
“Oh,” she said, her hand going up to touch her uncombed hair. “I wasn’t expecting anybody.” She wore an old-fashioned housecoat with snaps down the front, the wide pockets bulging with tissues. Judge Judy was on TV and the volume was blaring.
“Sorry to pop in on you,” I said. “I was wondering if you still have my old prom dress in a box somewhere. I wanted to show it to Lily.” A look of tired resignation crossed her face, and I felt a twinge of guilt. I knew she kept the formal dresses she’d sewn, the costumes, Shane’s first communion jacket, all of it, and she knew it, too—but she didn’t know where she’d put them, which closet, which unmarked box. I was counting on her having to dig.
“Let me check,” she said.
She disappeared down the hall and I scanned the room. Shane’s drawing wasn’t by her recliner or on the table just inside the door where she stacked the mail. I turned down the hall and nearly bumped into her.
“Gimme a minute,” she said, opening the door to the basement. “I think I might have put it downstairs.”
She shut the door behind her, probably not wanting me to see the mess she was cultivating down there, lest I threaten an intervention like on Hoarders. I slipped into her bedroom. The walls were sallow with nicotine stains, the duvet pocked with burn holes from years of Dad smoking in bed every night while reading Louis L’Amour novels. Mom had talked about painting the walls, sewing a new duvet, driving out to Walmart to look for a good price on sheets, though years had passed since Dad died, and the room still looked exactly the same. A pile of paint chips gathered dust on the dresser, all various shades of blue, and I could hear her declaring the colors too bright, too dark, too similar, the thought of making a decision about such a small change enough to paralyze her.
I checked the dresser drawer where she kept a cache of old birthday cards from her mother beneath a tangle of shriveled nylons and flesh-colored underwear, and then the jewelry box where she stored her antique cameo, her agate worry stone, and a scattering of our baby teeth. No luck. The nightstand was crowded with wadded-up tissues, a forty-year-old clock radio that no longer told time, and a precarious stack of Dad’s paperback Westerns, as though she still worried, even after he was dead, that she’d get smacked for moving them. The piece of paper with Shane’s drawing wasn’t there, or in the nightstand drawer, or tucked into the Bible that lay inside. I hurried back to the living room as I heard Mom’s footfalls on the stairs.
The shimmering taffeta dress hung over her arm like a lifeless mermaid. Teal, Becca’s favorite color. Becca’s dress. “This one?” She held it up, the fabric intricately wrinkled from being stuffed in a box, the musty scent it had acquired over the years unlikely ever to come out.
“Yes,” I said, forcing a smile. “Perfect.” It was a small thing, to not remember the color of a dress, which daughter preferred coral to teal all those years ago, though it wasn’t like her to forget. I watched her face for any sign that she knew what I was up to, that she’d brought the wrong dress up to see what I would say, but there was no deceit in her eyes. She looked tired, as tired as I’d ever seen her.
I couldn’t bring myself to ask her where she’d put the paper, to tell her why I needed to see it. I wanted to be wrong and maybe I was, the shapes uncertain depending on the angle and shadow and the way the lead had smudged into the grooves, but for a moment, when I had tilted the paper toward the light, the letters appeared to form a word: Calhouns. Plural, as in Roger and Macey. I hadn’t thought much of it at the time, before I’d talked to Crystle and Hannah, but now I couldn’t help wondering what else he had written on the page with such a firm hand, and who he had written it to.
The Cutler County Jail was a plain limestone building next to the courthouse, surrounded by white-limbed sycamores with broad canopies, each yellowing leaf larger than Henley’s hand. Missy wore black-and-white stripes like an old-fashioned jailbird, her dark blond hair limp and oily, skin blotched and flaking. She seemed to have aged at an accelerated rate during the weeks she’d been gone, undergoing a perverse metamorphosis from diaphanous butterfly to faded moth.
They sat across from each other at a wobbly table with one gimpy leg.
“Hey, baby, I missed you so much,” she said. She was gaunt, a skeleton shrink-wrapped with skin.
“Me, too, Mama.” She smiled at Missy, wanting to cry. She hated seeing her mother like this, unwell, not yet herself, but sober enough to be aware of what she’d done. She wondered how Ellie was faring, if her outlook would change at all while she sat in jail, her tan fading and her fractured skull knitting itself back together.
“So glad you came to see me. What’re you up to?”
“I’m gonna be leaving,” she said. “I think it’s time. You don’t need me when you’re in here, and I can’t stick around doing nothing. There’s no reason not to go.”
Missy winced, but she made herself nod and to her credit didn’t spill any tears.
“I just wanted to let you know.”
Missy cracked a fake smile. “Tell me where you’re going,” she said. “I want to hear all about it. I want to be able to picture you there when you’re gone.”
Henley knew, despite everything, that her mother loved her. She conjured a storybook image for her of a place they’d never been. Mile-high mountains thick with snow like fine sparkling dust, the sky painfully blue. The sun cresting a ridge, igniting the valleys in diamond glints, rich people swooshing down the slopes, throwing out money with abandon, drunkenly overtipping people like Henley who cleaned up after them and served them pricey drinks. And after that, on to Alaska for the summer, spying whales, climbing glaciers, the sea lit by the midnight sun.
“You’ll come back and see me,” Missy said. “Right? When I’m outta here?”
“Sure,” she said. “Hey, Mama, I want to talk to you about something. About you and Earl.”
“Earl?” Her lip twitched when she said his name.
“I found the picture in the music box.”
Missy looked stricken. She tugged at her greasy hair.
“That baby was Earl’s, wasn’t it?”
Missy dug her thumb into a gash on the tabletop. Her nails were gnawed to the quick and rimmed with dried blood.
“Tell me.”
She nodded, finally, her dry lips pressing together.
“Did you ever tell him?”
“Of course.”
“Where’s the baby now?”
“Out behind the tractor shed,” Missy said, “with all of Memaw’s roses looking out over the fields.” Her gaze drifted from ceiling to floor like she was watching a spider descend from a thread. “Lost it not long after they took that picture. Worst day of my life. They knew something was wrong. Wasn’t meant to be. Never was able to have another one after that.”
She didn’t know whether all of that was true, but “tractor shed” had rolled out of Missy’s mouth so easily that Henley had to consider it might be. “Did you want to keep it?”
“More than anything,” Missy whispered.
“Did Earl?”
She shrugged. “It was a hard time for him,” Missy said. “Daphne’d been gone a couple years. Jason was struggling, both of them were. Earl promised to take care of me, whatever I decided. And he did. From then on. I always had a job, always had a paycheck, even when I wasn’t really working.” She looked up at Henley, one eye missing its lashes, as though she’d pinched them all out.
“Were you working for Earl when you got pregnant with me?”
“Yeah.” It came out as a breath, the ghost of a word, her head nodding like she had a palsy.
“Mama.” Henley’s mind ricocheted from one horror to the next like a pinball smacking targets in a machine. Earl. Jason. Saliva pooled in her mouth, sweat beading her scalp and neck and tracing down between her breasts.
Her mother’s eyes lost their faraway haze and snapped into focus. “He’s not your daddy. Is that what you came here to ask me?” She let out a sharp barking laugh. “I was just a stupid kid, screwing around. Not unlike yourself. Hell, I was seventeen. I had a lot of boyfriends back then.”
“I know, Mama, everybody knows.”
“Earl was faithful to his wife,” she said, sucking at a fresh well of blood along her ragged thumbnail. “Didn’t so much as look at me till I was of age and she was bones in her grave.”
Henley studied her face, unconvinced.
“They have those spit tests, now, if you don’t believe me,” Missy said. “You can get one from the goddamn Walmart. Not that it matters. Just garbage for a bunch of old biddies to gossip about. Earl’s a good man.”
Henley was done listening to her mother defend him. “Do you know what happened when I was at the Sullivans’ the other day?”
Missy’s head swiveled back and forth.
“Earl and I had a talk in his bedroom,” she said, her voice going low. “And then he tried to kiss me. He fell over and landed on top of me on his bed.”
Missy’s mouth opened, but no sounds came out.
“He was drunk, and he seemed to think I wanted it. Why would he think that? He said you were just fine with the idea of me taking over for you. Did you mean more than cleaning, Mama? Were you gonna tell me?” Henley leaned forward, gripping the edge of the table. “Did you worry what was gonna happen to me in that house after you left?”
“No! Earl and me—” She gestured wildly with her hands, trying to form the thought she couldn’t articulate. “He wouldn’t do that. He’s not like that. It must’ve been a mistake.”
