Along the Indigo

by Elsie Chapman

  Unable to just walk away now that she was here, she circled around until she was at the rear of the house.

  The backyard was a wide swath of wheat-like grass, and Brom’s half here needed a cut, too. The other side was strewn with water guns and overturned flip-flops and the occasional patch of grass burned even lighter by dog pee. An empty wading pool sat deflated and dejected near the center, a rawhide dog bone alongside it.

  She went to Brom’s back door and knocked. Silence from this end, too. Wherever he was, it wasn’t here.

  She turned to go and saw a little boy watching her from the side of the house. His thumb was in his mouth, and he had a bad sunburn.

  “Hi,” she said. “I guess you live here?”

  He didn’t move, and then a woman appeared around the corner. She was holding a baby in one arm, a bag of groceries in the other, and looked about done in for the day. A dog bounded onto the lawn, panting and running in circles, the tag on his collar jangling.

  “Oh, hello,” she said. “Who are you?”

  “Um. I was looking for Brom. He lives here.”

  Her eyes got wide. “Oh, you must be his daughter! Funny, I always thought you’d be younger. Are you here for a visit?”

  Marsden felt herself nodding along, even as her head spun. Brom had a daughter? Did her mother even know that?

  “Yes,” she said. “A surprise visit.” Her own words shocked her. What was she thinking? What was she getting herself into?

  “I thought he was out of town again, the place has been so quiet,” the woman said.

  “No, I’m here to see him. But, uh, I forgot my key.”

  The woman slung the baby over her shoulder, set her bag of groceries on the ground, and began to fish around in her purse. “Here—your dad asked me to hold on to one just in case. You can just give it back to him when he gets home.”

  “Thanks.” Marsden took the proffered key. Well, now she’d done it, she thought as the woman watched her unlock the back door. She had no choice but to go inside.

  Blinds all pulled—the walls glowed like a sunset, all ochres and oranges. The air smelled musty, unused and staid. So Brom wasn’t even coming home during the days. The boardinghouse—and Shine—had become his life. Until his next week off from his bank job, anyhow, a couple of months from now.

  She stood there for a moment, guilt leaving her unable to move. What was she doing? Could she slip away yet without the neighbor noticing?

  Her curiosity grew as she debated, and soon she was walking around, inspecting, gathering. She didn’t know what she was looking for, specifically, or that she was even really looking for anything. Just being there was the closest she’d come to dissecting this man, who now wanted in on her mother’s life, without being protectively filtered through Shine’s desperation.

  The place was small, but tidy; not dull but not interesting, either—basic kitchen, front room, short hall leading to bedrooms and bathroom. Perfectly fine, just like Brom.

  Would her mother be living here soon with Wynn? While Marsden stayed with Nina, paying down a debt passed on to her as much as the covert would be one day?

  She went to the main bedroom—people slept close to what they most wanted to stay hidden. She would know. And if Brom had secrets going back eight years, he wouldn’t let them stray.

  The space was sparse and spare: a bed, a chest of drawers, a nightstand—nothing strange, nothing incriminating.

  In the drawer of the nightstand, she found blank envelopes, some late bills, receipts. A Michener paperback, the kind sold on racks by the checkouts in grocery stores, reminding her of Jude and his admittance of struggling through Gibson, the mix of pride and sheepishness on his face. Her hand touched a box of condoms, which reminded her of Jude again, but this time of his mouth and fingers. With her pulse uneven and a slight flush climbing up her neck, she slid the box out of the way.

  Tucked in the very back was a small pile of notebooks. All identical, the covers faux brown leather, the kind people carried around to jot down lists. She pulled one out and opened it.

  Names and numbers, in neat columns down the page:

  02/12/87–02/25/87

  Rm3 0938174 Citi

  Rm4 1370322 WM

  Rm11 038611 Union

  Rm13 275891 BoA

  Confused, she took out another book from deeper in the pile. Flipped it open.

  06/03/85–06/13/85

  Rm4 127890 BoA

  Rm5 788994 GWB

  Rm6 241417 HSBC

  Rm12 080411 WM

  Marsden had no clue what any of it meant. She thought Rm might mean “room” and that some of the shorthand at the end of each row might have been banks—Brom was in banking, after all—but she wasn’t sure.

  She placed the notebooks back into the drawer, changed her mind a second later, and tucked one into her pocket. There were so many of them—one being misplaced wasn’t impossible. And she felt better having it—as proof, or insurance, she supposed, in case she ever needed it.

  There was one last thing inside the drawer. A small stack of photos, held together by a rubber band.

  She slipped the band off with fingers suddenly gone shaky and began to flip through the stack.

  And felt her heart go small and withered at what she saw. She recalled with a kind of dull, pathetic insistence that she’d always known Wynn had inherited Shine’s jawline, cheekbones, nose, hair. How she would have gotten the shape of her eyes, her slightly clefted chin, her paler coloring from her father.

  She’d been right.

  But Wynn’s father wasn’t Grant Eldridge, as she’d assumed.

  Because he was Brom Innes.

  forty.

  Marsden biked along the highway so fast, her tears dried on her cheeks before they could fall. She tasted the mud of the river in her mouth with each gasp for air. Rocks flew from beneath the wheels of her bike, bouncing back off the shoulder of the road like loosed scattershot.

  But she couldn’t move fast enough. She could never outrace the truth of Wynn and who her father was, what he might have done. It shamed her, too, that so much of her wanted her father’s death to be on Brom’s hands instead of hers, whatever that might mean for Wynn. Shamed her to the core. Her mind stewed over the idea of bonds drawn by blood, the supposed sanctity of those links. She and Shine, Jude and his father, Lucy and her family—no wonder she questioned. Even her connection with Wynn now felt strained and odd.

  A honk from an approaching vehicle startled her, and she slowed down a fraction. A truck passed her and pulled over to park crookedly on the shoulder of the road. Evergreen emblazoned on the side, forest-green paint on black, all of it sheened over with a fine layer of dirt. Behind it, the river coursed brown and the sky blazed blue.

  Her pulse leaped.

  Jude.

  They’d just been with each other, fingers driven into each other’s hair, the crushed perfume of too many flowers adding to their light-headedness. His skin had been searing, his mouth and tongue the hottest.

  Marsden should have been scared to let him get that close. She knew he saw things in her that she’d always been so careful to hide before. She didn’t have to ask to see the truth of that on his face, the way his eyes couldn’t hide a single thing when he looked at her.

  Forest fires.

  Maybe, even, kismet.

  And she wanted him.

  Now, as she listened to him cut the motor of the truck, the need to tell him everything came in a flood. Her future at the boardinghouse, being a skimmer, that she’d taken a part of his brother from him—all of it. The relief of finally wanting to admit everything she was eased some of the tension in her gut, told her how wrong she’d been to not do it earlier.

  Jude stepped out from the truck and headed toward her. She heard the sound of tiny river rocks crunching beneath his shoes, the dried-out weeds that had blown over from the riverbanks snapping and screaming.

  There was an envelope in his hands, white and creased, as though it’d been
worked over by disbelieving hands.

  Marsden recognized it instantly. It must have fallen from her back pocket. She instantly felt sick. The expression on Jude’s face was pure, miserable fury.

  She recognized that look, too.

  It was the Jude from before the covert. The one still reeling from damage, made raw from the people he needed, the same ones who kept falling short.

  And she’d been the one to do that now.

  “Adam Lytton,” he said as soon as he reached her, staying an arm’s length away. His voice was steel, pounded flat and sharp. “I recognized the name from the covert column in the paper. Why would you send a dead man money?”

  “Where did you find that envelope?” Her own voice was dull. Delaying the burn.

  “I found it on the floor at Evergreen. After you left. Why do you have this?”

  “Why did you open it? It wasn’t for you.”

  “I couldn’t help it. Seeing his name on an envelope you were just holding made no sense at all, so I needed to—Marsden, why do you have this?”

  “I was going to tell you.” There was a ringing in her ears.

  “I guess I beat you to it.” Jude’s gaze was unmoving from her face. “So tell me.”

  “I got the money from Adam Lytton’s body when I found it in the covert.” Each word was supposed to have come easily. She thought she’d been prepared, hadn’t she? But she’d never been more wrong as each one slowly scraped itself to life, proving her horrible. She paused, her longing for time to stop so acute it nearly hurt. The quiet around them blistered; her next words crawled from her slowly and painfully. “I’m a skimmer. I’ve been one since I was nine.”

  He sucked in a breath. “For money?” His cold revulsion hung in the air, as thick as the tan silt that made up the river, the mud that birthed it. “Doing all of that just for money?”

  “It was our way out of Glory—Wynn’s and mine. I had to get us out of the boardinghouse. Watching her get older there, seeing what people did—I had to.”

  “I’d be the first to tell you that money only goes so far.”

  “I was running out of time. I still am.” I’m already out of time.

  “Why were you sending away money if you need it so badly?”

  “It was my way of saying . . . sorry, I guess. Asking for forgiveness, in a way.”

  His face seemed to break. The wind came off the water and tossed the waves of his hair, dashing grit all around them. The warm breeze was cold against her skin.

  “You lied right to my face,” he said. “Back at the covert, when I asked you outright if you thought a skimmer could have gotten to Rig before you did. When all along it’d been you.”

  She said nothing. What could she say that would change that truth?

  “Did you take something from Rig? When you found his body?”

  “Money.”

  “That’s all?”

  Marsden closed her eyes. “A note. It was in his pocket. Four lines, handwritten.” She opened them to see Jude’s completely torn apart. The colors in them were wild, chaotic, dangerous.

  “This whole time, you didn’t tell me.” His voice was molten. “You made me trust you and want you, and you kept that from me. You knew how badly I’d needed more from my brother. I would have taken anything.”

  “Not this,” she whispered. “You wouldn’t have wanted this.”

  “Bullshit. That was never your decision to make. You were just trying to hide how you had it in the first place, because then I would have known about you being a skimmer. You chose that over what you knew I was looking for.”

  “I didn’t want you hurt, having to read it, seeing it for yourself. Doesn’t that matter to you? That I cared?”

  His expression darkened, became cutting and cruel. “Not nearly enough. You don’t matter nearly enough. You barely matter at all.”

  A series of cars slung themselves along the highway, and Marsden heard a catcall from one driver’s-side window. It meant nothing and the sun was useless and something in her chest felt splintered.

  “Tell me what he wrote,” he demanded bitingly. “The note.”

  She knew he would hate her, would never forget the sound of her voice saying Rigby’s last words. “Jude—”

  “Goddamn it, Marsden. Please.”

  “Your brother . . . he wrote, ‘I’m sorry, Jude, I never wanted you to know. I told myself it was Dad. I didn’t want to stop. But I didn’t mean to do it.’”

  She watched his eyes absorb his brother’s words, try madly to untangle the puzzle that they were and make sense of them. “What was he talking about? Do what?”

  She remembered how she’d thought of violence, reading those words, and how she hadn’t been sure what that meant. “Killing himself, what else could—”

  “No, because he did mean to do that—he walked into your covert all on his own.” Jude shook his head. “So he told himself who was Dad? He never wanted me to know what? It doesn’t make sense.”

  Suddenly, his fury died away, and his expression turned uncertain, and Marsden felt it in her own bones—the other ways Rigby’s words could be read, if you dared to. And the image that bloomed in her mind wasn’t how he’d looked as she’d stood over his dead body in the covert, but how he might have looked standing over someone else’s.

  She watched that same image cross Jude’s face like a shadow, linger there like a bruise. One dealt not by his father, but by his beloved brother.

  “What else did he write?” His eyes, emptier than she’d ever seen them, utterly desperate. “Those were not my brother’s last words.”

  She shook her head slowly, unable to say a thing.

  Marsden watched him be devastated, be buried beneath the depths of her and his brother’s betrayals, and was absolutely numb as he got back in the truck and sped away.

  forty-one.

  She waited there for a few moments—heart in her mouth, pulse thick and painful in her veins—and heard nothing but her own shallow breathing. The summer sun was a ball of flames, but she was so frozen, she wondered if she’d ever thaw out. Alongside her, the river gurgled and giggled and made her shiver.

  When she’d read all the old fairy tales as a kid, she’d sometimes imagined herself as one of their princesses in trouble. Just waiting, sure she would be rescued by her special prince, whether it be from a dragon-guarded castle or moat-encircled tower or forest thick with poisonous trees. All she had to do was wait, and he’d come.

  But no tale had ever covered being rescued from the shore of a river that was the color of mud. Or a covert stained with old blood. Or a town that was pitted with greed, made into a trap by its own people.

  And Marsden especially couldn’t think of a single story about someone being rescued when they were the ones who messed things up in the first place.

  She was the dragon, the moat, the poison.

  Jude wasn’t coming back. His fury had been alive, absolute, his certainty of her guilt without a single doubt. He wasn’t suddenly going to understand what she’d done, turn around on the road, and say Marsden, you’ve been lying to me ever since I came to you for help, have just destroyed what I have left of my big brother, and made me think you were someone you weren’t just so I wouldn’t hate you, but I’m actually okay with all that. So you want to keep digging in the covert together?

  She got on her bike, swung it out onto the shoulder of the highway, and headed toward the center of Glory, moving as fast as she could.

  To find him.

  • • •

  By the time she got downtown, road dust in her mouth and on her skin like a coating of ash, the sun had dropped past the midway point, shining down on the back of her neck instead of the top of her head.

  Late afternoon. She should have been at the covert with Jude, dragging Rigby’s old metal detector over the ground. Her chest pounded, was spiked with nerves as she biked along the streets and down the blocks, her eyes looking for him. She passed Evergreen, passed Seconds, and nearly rode
right past the café, where his work truck was parked.

  Theola.

  Resentment for her grandmother’s old friend rose in her, black and tidal. Wasn’t it bad enough that Marsden had been born into a family with an ancestor so infamous that simply saying his name aloud gave people the chills, sure they’d just invited the devil into their homes? That her grandmother also had to be friends with a person who gazed at palms and read their secret lines? Someone who glanced at mushed-up dregs in the bottoms of cups and then claimed they spoke of the future?

  She leaned her bike against the outer wall of the café and strode inside.

  It was the business lull between lunch and the late-afternoon snack rush, and she was the only customer in the place. No sign of Jude at all.

  Theola sat in her booth in the back, her ever-watchful eyes fixed on Marsden. As though she’d been waiting for her, had known she would return to hear what had been left unsaid in the presence of Jude. The thought came bitterly, her wondering how Theola kept it all straight, the desperation of the people who came to talk to her, how to best price their ghosts and guilts and tragedies.

  The psychic beckoned to her—her hat was especially flashy today, gold and wide-brimmed, and the smoky black feathers on it bobbed deeply with the gesture—and Marsden, sure she was making a mistake, walked over.

  “Phoenix feathers,” Theola said, pointing at her hat as soon as Marsden sat down. “The man who made this hat for me—Lewis, who owns the costumer’s shop a few blocks away? He still has such a crush on me, the old sweetie—said he did it after dreaming of the sun being set on fire, before it let itself be burned up so that it could glow even brighter. How coming from ashes only made it stronger.”

  “I’m not here to talk about the sun.” Why was she there when she should be looking for Jude? He wasn’t there—she should have turned right around and left already. Had she really wanted a reading but couldn’t admit it to herself? Did she need to find out what was in store for her now? “Or about phoenix feathers.” Or the ashes of her past.

  In her smoker’s rasp, Theola called to the order counter for banana smoothies. An old man emerged from the kitchen, cursing someone named Darby for calling in sick and griping about how the hell was he going to get any of the paperwork done if he was out there cutting up damn bananas.