The Wildlands

by Abby Geni

  She punched him. She didn’t plan to; the action seemed to happen without her volition. Her hand clenched and she struck her brother. A glancing blow on his chest. A shocked exhalation. A quick exchange of stunned eye contact.

  Then he punched her back.

  She saw a blur in her peripheral vision, and his fist connected with her eye socket. There was an explosion of red. The floor seemed to tip beneath her feet, sending her stumbling backward. For a moment, she could not see.

  She heard motion, muttering. Gradually she realized she was now sitting on the couch. One eye was functioning, but the other saw only shadows tinged with pink. Tucker was darting around the room, picking things up and shoving them into a backpack. Darlene blinked, which was painful. Gingerly, she touched her face, caressing the spot where his fist had landed. The flesh was already swollen. Her fingers came away stained.

  The door slammed behind him.

  She had not seen Tucker since. Two and a half years gone. He survived the tornado, but, in the end, it took him too.

  13

  Through the window, Darlene watched the squad car glide away, its taillights shimmering in the gloom. She pulled the curtains closed and took a moment to relish the quiet. Then she began to move, walking widdershins around the couch. She murmured to herself, a comforting habit in times of turmoil. Speaking her thoughts aloud gave her clarity.

  She picked up the phone to call Jane, then decided against it. Her sister would be asleep now, and the truth was that Darlene had nothing to report. The police were looking for Tucker, but she did not know why, and Jane wouldn’t either. Darlene knocked on the door to Cora’s room and peered inside. In the darkness, there was a lump in the bed. She resisted the urge to peel back the covers. It would be better if both her sisters slept until morning. She needed time to think.

  It was strange to have a clue, at last, to what had happened to her brother. Over the years, there had been little to go on. Tucker simply disappeared. He tumbled into the blue like a pebble dropped into a pond—out of sight, the ripples stilling, the surface of the water growing opaque.

  The week after he ran away had been the worst of Darlene’s life—even worse than losing her mother or the tornado itself. She had curled up in her brother’s sleeping bag every night, inhaling the smell of him. She sobbed until her chest was sore. She tried to cover her black eye with makeup, but the bruise darkened and spread, her cheekbone purple, the white of her eye blotched with crimson. There was no hiding it. She woke at odd hours, going to the window and staring out at the moonlit expanse of Shady Acres, waiting. The days were dimmed by a pervasive sense of failure. She had been the head of the family for only a few months, and already she had failed in every possible way. She and her sisters were now the poster children of the tragedy. Tucker was gone.

  She had never been struck by a man before. The force of it had been remarkable and horrific—the jolt in her vertebrae, a supernova bursting in her optic nerve. She spent a lot of time looking in the mirror. Her black eye continued to flower, a ring of green blooming around her orbital crest. Even her upper lip swelled. She did not know how to categorize this new iteration of her brother’s capacity for violence.

  The days ran together, filled with her sisters’ anxious faces, their hands on her body, so many questions. Jane seemed to understand on some level what had transpired between her older siblings; she fetched Darlene packages of frozen peas to bring down the swelling in her cheek, and she did not ask when Tucker would be home. Cora, however, was only six. She asked about Tucker constantly.

  Darlene did not know how to answer. At first, she still hoped he might come back. Surely he would not desert his family in this way. She called and called, but his phone went straight to voicemail, and then his mailbox was full, and then his number had been disconnected. Darlene filed a missing persons report with the police. They offered her little, however, in the way of reassurance. Tucker was just a few months shy of his eighteenth birthday. Runaways that age often weren’t found—unless they wanted to be.

  So she waited. Eventually her brother would cool down and come to his senses. After he spent a little while off the grid, maybe panhandling for his supper, maybe working odd jobs, maybe sleeping in homeless shelters or fields, he would appreciate the modest comforts of No. 43. He would remember that his sisters needed him.

  During that time, Darlene kept busy, which was not difficult. There was always something to be done: a toilet cleaned, a meal cooked, her phone ringing. She needed to go to work and feign something like normalcy. She needed to move the laundry from the washer to the dryer so her sisters’ clothes would not grow mildew. She needed to brush out Cora’s curls so they wouldn’t knot. Her face healed until she looked like her old self again. She kept the TV on constantly—a kind of medicinal noise, blunting the sharp edges of the day, keeping her sisters distracted, their worried eyes fixed on something else for once. Darlene wondered if a person could die from heartbreak.

  Finally she understood that this was their new reality. Tucker wasn’t coming back. The knowledge settled over her like cold rain in autumn, gradual but inexorable, darkening the landscape. She threw away all of his things—his clothes, his shoes, everything he had not been able to take in his backpack the night he left. She gathered up all the photos of him and shoved them in the garbage. Everything went in the trash, nothing donated or sold. Darlene did not want her brother’s belongings out in the world being used by strangers.

  She had not cried since. As the months slipped by, she underwent a transformation, a hardening of the spirit. She felt it happening but could do nothing to stop it. Over time, her voice grew softer and more precise. Her eyes in the mirror were sadder.

  Occasionally her phone would ring, Caller Unknown, and no one would speak, the line clouded by static. Darlene wondered if this was Tucker checking in. Sometimes she would see a man in the distance with her brother’s gait, and she would find herself recalling the details about Tucker that she still possessed—the jut of his wrists, the slimness of his waist, his pigeon-toed stance. It was both pleasant and awful to think about him, each recollection from childhood followed by the sting of his desertion, each moment of joy infused with the essence of its opposite. She was used to the sensation by now.

  I’ll never forgive you, Tucker once told her. But Darlene knew now that nothing she had done was unforgivable. It was her brother who broke the bonds of their family. His cruel words, the punch—she could have accepted all of that, given time. Only his abandonment was unjustifiable. I’ll never forgive you, she would throw back at him one day. If she ever saw him again.

  NEAR MIDNIGHT, DARLENE STOOD ON the front stoop of No. 43, inhaling the musk of the recent rain. The storm had traveled west toward the mountains. The sky was a cloudless, tinny expanse, pocked by stars like dents in metal.

  At last, she went to Cora’s room and hesitated outside the door. Darlene knew she should go in and check on her sister, but she could not do it. She was exhausted, overwhelmed, and frightened. She laid her forehead against the wood of the door. She turned away.

  That night, Darlene tossed and turned, pummeling her pillow and adjusting her hips to avoid an errant spring in the couch cushions. The light in her mind would not switch off. She felt that she ought to be vigilant for some reason. Jane was not there to fill the air with her usual raspy snores. On the other side of the wall, Cora was silent; she seemed to have slipped into the profound state of rest specific to young childhood.

  Darlene gave up on sleep when the birds began to sing. The sun had not yet risen, but the robins caroled louder than any alarm clock. As the coffee percolated, the sky outside altered by degrees, blueing and glimmering. The high clouds caught the light first, outlined in copper.

  She prepared Cora’s favorite breakfast, plain toast with butter and jam. It was her hope that her sister had slept away the worst of her illness. If she was well enough to go to school today, that would be a weight off Darlene’s mind—on
e weight among many.

  At seven o’clock, she opened the bedroom door.

  “Rise and shine,” she said.

  The heap of blankets in the middle of the mattress didn’t answer. On closer inspection, there was something odd about its appearance—a little too immobile, no suggestion of breath. Darlene came closer. She lifted the edge of the coverlet. Then she snatched up the whole mess of bedclothes and shook each layer loose, the billowing sail of the sheet, the lumpy quilt, a pillow falling with a thud, nothing but a lone feather twirling in the sunlight.

  14

  The police station was quiet, every surface bathed in a harsh, fluorescent glare. Roy sat behind a desk cluttered with knickknacks. Occasionally a phone rang somewhere, a strident shout. The Mercy police station was small, as befitted a small town—one story, an open workspace with three desks, and a single lavatory that smelled strongly of bleach.

  “Let’s go over it again,” Roy said. “Did you see your sister yesterday?”

  Darlene recalled herself to the moment.

  “Yes,” she said. “Only in the morning, though.”

  “Cora was too sick to go to school?”

  She felt a lump in her throat. “That’s what she told me.”

  “And when you got home—”

  “The bedroom door was shut, and I thought she was asleep. Then y’all came by to talk about Tucker. Then I poked my head in and saw the sheets in a pile—I thought it was Cora—I should have—I never—”

  She broke off, her mouth opening and closing. Roy leaned across the desk and patted her forearm. She noticed that he had dirt under his fingernails.

  “Do you have a recent picture of Cora?” he said gently.

  Darlene fumbled in her jeans pocket and retrieved her cell phone. She flicked through the images stored there—a sunset, a flower she had noticed growing between the cracks in the sidewalk, a snapshot of Jane giving the camera the finger. There was a photo of Darlene’s bare feet with a new nail polish. There was a selfie that Jane had taken without Darlene’s knowledge, a close-up of her sunburned visage, the eyes and mouth comically wide.

  She settled on a picture of Cora at Christmas. The light was natural, no filter. Her sister knelt beneath the family’s artificial tree, a blow-up replica as slick and green as algae. She wore a sweater with a reindeer on it. She was holding a wrapped present in her hands. Something about the photograph captured her entirely—little face, delicate bones, a cascade of dark curls.

  As Darlene passed her phone across the desk, she realized that her fingers were trembling. Roy examined the picture and smiled.

  “She’s a doll,” he said. “I’ll email this to myself, okay? That’ll get the ball rolling.”

  “Fine.”

  “Can I get you some coffee?”

  Darlene blinked at him.

  “Something to drink?” he said. “Did you have breakfast?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  The past few hours had swirled away from her like water down a drain. It took her a while to figure out that Cora was actually missing—not in the bathroom, not outside, not anywhere. Darlene had upended the contents of every closet in the trailer and shouted into the crawlspace. She knocked on her neighbors’ doors, receiving ire, then confusion, then sympathy. She walked the edge of the ravine, peering into the brambly gloom, a gully formed by the action of water decades ago, now parched and filled with wiry bushes.

  Without warning, Roy loomed over her and pushed a paper plate into her hands. A Danish, a bruised apple, and a mug of black coffee.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “Eat. It’ll help.”

  She obeyed. The frosting crumbled into the crevices between her teeth, the dough as spongy as cardboard. The coffee cup was ceramic, with World’s Greatest Mom written on the side in bubble letters.

  “I’ll be right back,” Roy said.

  He hurried down the hall, striding with an eager bounce. Darlene took a bite of her apple and spat it out, unable to tolerate its mealiness. In a corner of the room, a TV blared the morning news.

  Sometime soon, the screen would change. Maybe in an hour, maybe this evening, a picture of Cora would appear. A laughing child. A reindeer sweater. A missing minor. Another tragedy to befall the saddest family in Mercy. Darlene was trying to prepare herself. She was failing to prepare herself.

  There was a clatter in the street outside, and she gazed hopefully at the front door. Kendra had headed off in a squad car to pick Jane up from school. It was strange to see people on the sidewalk, going about their ordinary lives, untouched by the possibility of tragedy. Darlene watched the town librarian walk by with her spaniel. The florist was cleaning her shop window with a bucket and squeegee. The cup of coffee tilted in Darlene’s fingers, splashing down her thigh. She groped for a napkin and dabbed at her jeans.

  The bell over the front door jangled, and Jane was there, moving fast with her arms outstretched. She careened into Darlene at full speed, enveloping her in an embrace.

  “Good lord in heaven,” Jane said. “What is happening to us?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where is she?”

  “I don’t know,” Darlene repeated.

  They stood that way for a while, intertwined like a pair of trees planted too close together, their trunks overlapping into a single broad base. Jane pulled away first. She wore a hot-pink T-shirt with Sassy written on it. Her hair was sleek beneath a polka-dot headband. Her entire outfit, upbeat and colorful, clashed with the shipwrecked expression on her face.

  Kendra hovered off to one side, arms folded. Roy reappeared, hurrying toward them down the hallway. Darlene watched as the two officers put their heads together, murmuring in low voices. They glanced in her direction. Roy shook his head, a rosy blush of emotion blooming beneath the umber of his cheeks. Kendra poked his chest with her forefinger.

  “What’s going on?” Darlene said.

  “Y’all should sit,” Kendra said, with something like kindness in her voice.

  “Is there news?”

  “Yes and no. Please sit.”

  Darlene reached for Jane’s hand, and they each took a chair. Kendra settled on the edge of the desk, fidgeting with her cuffs. Darlene realized that the woman was nervous. Her own anxiety spiked in kind.

  “We have reason to believe that your brother’s in town,” Roy said. He was still standing, towering over them all, his tone formal.

  “Excuse me?” Darlene said.

  He cleared his throat. “We have evidence to suggest that Tucker has been in Mercy.”

  “I don’t understand,” Darlene said. “What kind of evidence?”

  “We don’t think Cora ran away,” Roy said. “We think your brother took her.”

  Jane let out a moan. Kendra fiddled more urgently with her cuffs. Darlene sat frozen for a moment, gripping her sister’s hand like a lifeline.

  Then her cell phone buzzed. She tugged it from her pocket, an automatic reflex.

  A new text message. It was marked by a triangle with an exclamation point inside; it seemed to be similar in kind to the emergency warnings she sometimes received before a bad storm. With some dim, distant part of her mind, Darlene realized that she had last seen that little symbol on the day of the tornado. She read:

  AMBER ALERT. Mercy, OK. CHILD: Cora McCloud 9YO W/F Hair: BLK. SUSPECT: Tucker McCloud 20YO W/M Hair: BR.

  15

  The interrogation room was not as intimidating as Darlene expected. On a TV show, it would have been a steel box with a one-way mirror on the wall. Instead, there was a turquoise sofa, a painting of horses in a field, and a row of file cabinets. Roy bustled around the room, tucking a manila folder under his arm and turning on the box fan in the window. Darlene was on her fourth cup of coffee now. She and Jane sat together on the couch, the cushions slippery and thin.

  Roy took a seat on the other side of the table: an oaken expanse, maybe an antique. He was explain
ing what would happen next. His voice was ripe and mellifluous, which had the unfortunate byproduct of lulling Darlene into a daydream, listening to the sound of his words rather than the sense of them. She had not slept much, and her worry about Cora seemed to be manifesting as a kind of sensory overload—every lamp too bright, every smell an assault. It was difficult to focus on any one thing. At her side, Jane was in her usual process of devolution. She began most days looking fairly put together, but the entropy of her nature could not be denied. Already she had twirled her blond mane into tangles and smudged her cheek with ink. Her shoes were untied.

  “Normally my sergeant would be the one talking to y’all,” Roy said. “But Charlie had a heart attack a few weeks ago. Maybe y’all heard?”

  “Oh no,” Darlene said. “Please tell him we’re thinking of him.”

  “He’ll appreciate that.”

  “He was a family friend when I was little. Daddy used to talk about him.”

  “Yeah,” Jane added.

  Roy nodded. A small pause blossomed in the room—the usual beat of respectful silence to honor someone who had died in the tornado. Both girls knew it well.

  Then Roy pushed a few forms across the table and handed Darlene a pen. She signed them all without reading a word. He was saying something about wiretaps. Something about searching for bodily fluids. She was distracted by the feel of the pen in her hands—unusually heavy, made of fancy metal, not plastic.

  Roy explained that the FBI would be involved soon; the Mercy police simply weren’t equipped to handle a case like this. He said these things without resentment. The FBI had a crime lab, he said. Their equipment was state of the art.

  “Y’all will still liaise with me though,” he said. “I’d like to stay involved. Do y’all have any idea where Tucker might go? A familiar place. Somewhere he would feel safe.”

  For a moment, an image of their old house shone in Darlene’s mind. She saw Tucker jumping down the stairs two at a time, slipping through the back door with a grin, and strolling away through the long grass toward the farm. Then she shook herself. That place—their entire street—had been reduced to rubble and tainted by toxins.