The Next Time You See Me

by Holly Goddard Jones

  Emily backed away from the fence, embarrassed by her fear. The sun was going down, the goats silently assessing her, and her ankle yammered with increasing insistence. She needed to get home.

  She hobbled downhill parallel to the fence line, moving quickly, feeling chilled as the sweat from her climb started to evaporate. At the corner of the fence she turned, prepared to follow it to the road, but no, that wouldn’t work: the land sloped down steeply here into a small ravine, the barbwire in one spot grown around and even into the trunk of a maple tree. The tree itself was long dead, its roots exposed and dangling into the opening, leaving an ominous-looking hollow of darkness behind them. The gully was carved sharply into the hillside, narrowing as it ran down the grade, looking like the remnants of a streambed, though Emily couldn’t determine where a stream would have originated. Certainly it was a spot where things fetched up after hard rains: limestone, looking like bone in the low light; rotten logs; tangles of limbs and the soft down of dead leaves—a hundred dark crevices where a snake or a rat might sleep, a hundred dark crevices where a twisted ankle could turn into a broken one. Right now, the girls in her grade would be talking to one another on the phone about boys, and the boys themselves would be playing Super Mario Bros. or a game of HORSE out in the driveway. And Christopher—what would he be up to? He lived in one of the Civil War–era mansions up on North Main, his (it was rumored) three full stories tall with a ballroom, a library, and a separate servants’ quarters out back, now converted into a guesthouse where Christopher was sometimes allowed to host overnights with his friends. She could imagine him out in the little building she’d only seen from the road—it was gray stone, with a copper roof—bent over a pool table or playing foosball with his friends, a lock of dark hair trembling over his right eye as he twisted his wrist or thrust his hips to the left or right. She could—

  But that’s when she smelled it.

  She stopped, peering into the gulch. The smell didn’t hit her instantaneously—she’d been sensing it for a while now on some subconscious level and attributing it to the nearby goats—but her realization of it was instant, wrenching her from the safety of Christopher’s guesthouse and plunging her back into this twilight wood, where the shadows were starting to stretch and run into one another. When she inhaled again, more deeply this time, and tried to determine what it was, or identify its source, her stomach trembled. She knew this smell precisely because she did not know it, because it was too alien, too removed from her safe, familiar world to be anything but what it was. It was death. She was smelling death.

  Her breaths had gotten rapid and shallow. She put her hand on her chest and forced herself to exhale slowly.

  It was an animal, almost surely. A possum, a skunk. Maybe even a dog. She had seen such death before: shapeless bags of fur drawing flies to the shoulder of the road. She had once watched a dog get run over by a car, run home to tell her mother, and returned to find only an oblong streak of blood on the faded cement. The smell was new; the idea of it wasn’t.

  She hesitated, suppressing a tremor of unease, and then leaned back a little, palm behind her for balance, and started working her way down into the trench. She picked her footing as carefully as she could on her bad ankle but slid on a decomposing fall of leaves, and so finally she sat and simply pushed herself downhill, aware that getting back out, scaling the other side, would be harder.

  In the end she very nearly stepped on it. She was inching along the floor of the gully, wobbling from one loose-fitting stone to the next and clinging to the nimble trunks of trash trees for balance, when she slid, then overcorrected, planting her left foot against a stone and finally stopping her forward motion. She trembled with relief, her heart racing, and then she looked down at the stone she’d shifted and froze. The light was already dimmer than it had been when she first approached the crevasse—a light so low and gray that Emily could see better with her peripheral vision than she could straight on. What she thought she’d seen she didn’t quite believe; she focused her eyes to the left of it, squinting, and then, still uncertain, she crouched down, her left ankle squealing now—and yes, there it was, pale and threaded with fine lines, dimpled in the center with dark soil: a human palm.

  She jerked back. Then, slowly, she leaned in again. She grasped the neck of her shirt and pulled it up over her nose, but it did little good. The death smell was here, sitting atop that palm as though being held aloft, and she knew that she ought to turn away and go for help, but she also knew that she wouldn’t be able to stand it later on if she didn’t get a look while she had the chance. There was, along with the mounting horror within her, a curiosity, too, almost scientific: the same curiosity that drove her each day to flip the switch on that UV lamp, not because she didn’t think it would kill the tadpoles, but because she wanted to know how it would kill them. With her left hand still pinching her shirt tight over her nose, Emily used the right to grab a nearby stick. She poked the shifted rock; it wobbled, then fell back into place. She poked again. At last she had to hold her breath and use both hands, moving the stick like a golf club, dislodging the rock and revealing beneath it the underside of a puffed wrist, pale but bruised looking, the hollows between the prominent tendons purple as grape Kool-Aid.

  She felt her neck and face break out with heat, the sensation so shocking and instant that the roots of her hair tightened. There was, in this pocket of soil below her, a hand and a wrist—and the sight of both together, joined as they should be, discolored but still recognizable as human, set her off balance in a way that the palm alone could not. Before she knew what she was doing, she started knocking other stones and leaves away with the stick, and then she tossed it to the side and pulled the leaves and soil off barehanded, and when she finished half a minute later she’d unearthed the rest of the arm, the shoulders, and the head.

  The body rested loosely in the soil, as if it had been hastily covered before the rocks were set in place. There was a wrinkled elbow, grimed and whorled like a thumbprint, and a couple of inches of exposed upper arm, the flesh so bloated and tight that it strained against the sleeve of a thin white T-shirt. The shoulders and back were also swollen, the weave of the T-shirt puckered, and Emily thought of the Halloween dummies she and her mother used to construct each year, before the time some bullies from Billy’s school had set one on fire as a prank. They would close the sleeves of one of her father’s old flannel shirts with rubber bands and stuff so many leaves into the torso that you could see the points spilling out between buttons. This body, too, was overstuffed, the back humped, the neck bulging against the razored edge of short hair. A man, Emily thought at first—the body seemed both fat and muscular, the hair too short to be feminine—but there was some detail throwing off the image of maleness, a clue that she was grasping with the edges of her mind but not yet consciously. She crouched down and put out a trembling hand, a pointed finger, and touched one of the fingers of the exposed hand. The nails, she’d noticed from above, seemed longish—had she once heard that they continued to grow in death? When she pushed, something gave and came free, and Emily didn’t even jump this time; she just squinted in the low light, the vein in her neck pulsing with her excitement, and came as close to the object as she could stand to. It was a press-on nail, painted peach with an even white tip. It lay bright against the dark ground, like an opal.

  She stared silently at the perfect, whole press-on nail, imagining the woman who would have glued it to her finger, a woman with a man’s short hair and a man’s plain T-shirt but the vanity to want her hands to look nice. She sat back and lifted her head to inhale, like a diver surfacing for air: a crescent of moon was etched against the night sky, so bright that when she blinked she saw its afterglow.

  It was getting too dark to linger. She could make out between the trees the distant twinkle of lights from Sheila Friend’s house. Higher in the sky, and brighter, was a single security lamp, marking the roadway. She started moving in that direction. Her body throbbed with an elect
ric charge, energy that might have spilled into a sprint or a scream, but it was lodged in her, stuck, and she couldn’t run on her bad ankle anyway. When she emerged at the road, she paused, nonplussed by the orderly procession of telephone lines, the reasonable graveled shoulder. Sheila Friend’s mailbox was visible from here—it was tan, painted with bright cardinals and curling ivy. Emily stared at the birds, dazed. A full minute passed. Then, as if in a dream, she started hobbling downhill.

  If Mr. Powell had still been out in his front yard as she passed it, she might have gone to him, reassured by his authority as a neighbor, as an acquaintance of her father’s. But the car was pulled back into his driveway and the front door was shut tight. The light of a television flicked against the blinds of an otherwise dark corner room—probably a bedroom. Emily kept moving.

  In another few moments she was home, the night around her now absolute. Her house, the small pale rectangle of it, was illuminated: she could see the pulse and flash of their own television in the living room, her mother’s shadow in the kitchen window. Her father’s Ford pickup truck was parked in the gravel drive.

  She went in through the back door, and as soon as she entered the kitchen and its familiar smells—the low smoke of the wall heater; the stench of stewed cabbage, fleetingly reminiscent of the horror Emily had left back in the woods—her mother tossed her dishrag on the stovetop, took a shaky breath, and said, “Where on earth have you been?” She stopped, looking over Emily from head to toe, frowning. “You’re filthy. What happened?” Her hands were on Emily’s face now, warm against Emily’s cold skin. She put a palm to Emily’s forehead, considering, and then switched to the back of her hand, and then she was turning Emily in place as though she were trying to see if her shirt and pants fit right, the way she did when Emily tried on school clothes at Sears and Roebuck. “What happened?” Hands running up and down her legs, as though she were being checked by the police for a gun. “What happened?”

  Emily’s father appeared in the doorway, the lines around his mouth pinched in a way that didn’t yet commit to anger or concern. “Where’ve you been? Kelly, what’s wrong with her?”

  Emily said, “I tripped and twisted my ankle.” It was out of her mouth before she realized she was going to say it. She hadn’t decided on that walk home not to mention the body—it hadn’t occurred to her that she could opt not to—but now she was being led to a kitchen chair and her father was rolling up her pant leg to examine the ankle (“It’s a little swollen, but it don’t look broke to me,” he was saying, and her mother, breathlessly, “Are you sure?”), and her stomach was growling a little at the sight of a bag of Doritos, unopened, on the table to her left. She hadn’t screamed. She hadn’t sounded an alarm. She pulled the sack of chips closer and tweezed the top between her fingers, pulling, releasing the putrid-pleasant scent of corn and cheese into her face as her father quizzed her on where, and why, and how, and What the heck are you thinking, rambling around by yourself at night? Her mother brought her a Coca-Cola, opened, and Emily did what she loved: she put a chip into her mouth and crunched, and while the crumbs were still circling inside her mouth, getting milled by her teeth and tongue, she chased them with a long draft of the soda, the sweet and bubbles washing it all down the back of her throat. She wiped her right hand, the one she’d used to touch that press-on nail, absentmindedly on the thigh of her jeans, then reached into the bag for another chip.

  She didn’t know how to begin to say what she knew, to explain what she had seen. Already her memory of the body felt unreal, like something she could not trust, and she put another chip on her tongue, considering.

  “We should take her to the doctor tomorrow,” her mother was saying.

  “I’d have to use my sick leave. Or else get docked a point.”

  “I’m fine,” Emily said. “I don’t want to go to the doctor.”

  Billy came into the kitchen, arms crossed with paternal gruffness. “You were late,” he said. “Dinner is at five. Mom was going to make me eat my dinner late.”

  Emily glared at him. Billy was tall and pear-shaped, with a doughy stomach and broad, almost womanly hips. His eyes were large and moist, with thick, long lashes, and his full lips were raw with painful-looking cracks, because he had a nervous habit of chewing, then pulling, the chapped skin. His sweetness, his simple good nature, was held in check by a strong sense of entitlement, which their parents generally obliged, and so Emily had long ago fallen into a habit of feeling irritated by him, then guilty for the irritation. She did not realize how alike they were.

  “He was anxious for you,” her mother said apologetically. “He just wants things to be normal.”

  “Normal,” Emily echoed.

  “Yeah, normal,” Billy said with the bratty authority of a second grader.

  Her parents drifted back to their familiar places—her mother to the stove, her father to the living room, where he could watch TV—and Emily washed down another chip with a swallow of cola. Had she seen what she thought she saw? Maybe she should go back tomorrow, make sure. She was afraid—but there was also curiosity. Even possessiveness. If she told, she wouldn’t be able to have another look at the body, and she realized that she wanted to. Just once more. Just to make sure.

  Chapter Two

  1.

  Susanna Mitchell was late again picking up her daughter from the KiddieKare. There aren’t enough hours in the day; this is what she’d say to her sister whenever they both managed to carve out an hour of time for each other, on the phone or over thin, greasy cheeseburgers at the K-Grill. A cliché, but Susanna hadn’t happened upon a truer way of putting it.

  It was a quarter past five. Stuck at her third red light in a row, she slapped the steering wheel of her car a few times with the meaty heel of her palm, then backhanded tears from her eyes with a mascara-stained knuckle. “Damn it,” she whispered. Then, because there was no one around to hear her: “Fuck.”

  Hound’s Liquors was up ahead, just before the turn to the day care and her daughter, and Susanna popped her turn signal to the right. She was already late: in for a penny, in for a pound. It was Friday, and normally her husband, Dale, would give the marching band the night off from practice, or they’d be playing the halftime show at the football game, but tomorrow was state quarterfinals, and Susanna knew from experience that he’d be working them to exhaustion, letting them out no earlier than nine or ten o’clock tonight when the first parents started making threatening noises to pull their children off the field by force. She and Abby would be alone this evening, and Abby would probably be tired—it had been unusually warm for late October, in the midsixties, and she would have been out on the playground most of the day—so maybe Susanna could have some wine and a slow bath and a good cry without worrying about answering to anybody. Was that too much to ask?

  She passed her gaze over the bright bottles, the fancy fruit-infused liqueurs with French and Italian names, the whiskeys that glowed amber with backlighting. Finally she purchased her usual seven-dollar bottle of pinot grigio, which was already chilled in the front cooler. Dale barely tolerated her wine drinking and groused on the rare occasions she brought liquor into the house. Did she want to end up like her father? Like her no-account sister?

  “Are you ready for the weekend?” the clerk asked, smiling as he punched the price into the cash register. He was a man Susanna knew by reputation, an Indian who owned both Hound’s and the town’s two newest hotels, a Comfort Inn and a Best Western, and he was probably a millionaire, or close. But he was always here, always dressed in a polo shirt and loose-fitting khakis that had the ragged look of a Goodwill purchase. His one show of wealth was a bracelet of near-orange gold, dense and glittery against the brown skin of his forearm.

  “As I’ll ever be,” Susanna said tiredly. She always felt like a single mother during band season; she couldn’t remember the last time she’d been able to go for a long walk, or out shopping with a friend, or even to bed early with a good book. Abby wanted not just c
ompany but constant attention, and Susanna, who’d had an uneasy childhood, was loath to deny her.

  The clerk handed her the brown bag he’d packed. “Drive safely,” he told her.

  Back in the car she sat, engine idling, and looked at the bottle for a moment, thinking about her sister, Ronnie. They rarely drank together, she and Ronnie—Ronnie, like their father had, drank to get wasted and loud, and Susanna drank to get sedated. She wished that they could drink together tonight, though. She imagined it for a moment: Abby tucked in, out cold, and she and Ronnie downing vodka tonics and watching a movie that they both liked and having some laughs before falling asleep in their armchairs. Susanna could vent about work, and Ronnie could say something like, “Forget that little brat, and forget that rich bitch with the stick up her ass. She’s a bored housewife with nothing better to do than get in your face,” and Susanna would, temporarily at least, believe her. Susanna believed Ronnie about these things better than she did Dale. She knew that Ronnie wouldn’t bullshit her.

  Dale didn’t like Ronnie. He didn’t like her drinking or her swearing or the way she dressed—reasons enough, he said, to keep her away from Abby. Dale could always tell when Ronnie had come over to the house, because Ronnie couldn’t go an hour without a smoke and Susanna wasn’t going to make her sister sit outside every time she had one. He’d walk through the door, sniff, and frown. He’d check the trash can for ashes, the sink for a lipstick-stained glass, making a big show to prove a point, as though he were looking for the signs of a lover instead of his own sister-in-law.