The Wildlands

by Abby Geni

  Darlene grew increasingly thankful for Roy’s presence. With him, at least, there was no pretense. He knew what she had suffered—what she was continuing to suffer—and she did not have to feign normalcy or change the subject to something less upsetting. He never told her to smile, to trust in God, that he was praying for her.

  She missed Cora more than she thought possible. She had always loved the feel of her baby sister climbing into her lap. Wishbone torso and knobby knees. Sometimes Cora would nap there, her brow nestled against Darlene’s throat. These moments were rare. Her sister was never one for embraces or kisses, and Darlene was wired the same way. Nowadays, as much as she tried, she could not remember the last time they had touched. It seemed important somehow. That was the thing about hindsight; only in retrospect did the significance and prescience of little moments spring into being. The last hug. The last goodbye.

  Over time, Darlene became more and more aware of the irrepressible systems of human life. Both great and small, both interior and exterior, these unstoppable mechanisms maintained and supported her existence. Without her will or consent, her body continued to function, her heart pumping blood, neurons firing in her brain. Without her will or consent, the town of Mercy continued to function too. Electricity flowed through the wires overhead. The supermarket opened every day at 8 a.m. sharp. Garbage trucks collected the refuse and carted it away to the dump. The hardware store held a summer sale.

  Down the highway, beyond the horizon, on the other side of the TV screen, the indomitable infrastructure of civilization prevailed. Cell towers operated. Airplanes took flight. The internet continued its mysterious existence. There was news from Chicago, something about a riot after a baseball game. There was news from Europe, something about a controversial statement from the pope. There was news from outer space, something about a meteorite that might be heading toward the earth in a thousand years.

  The deeper, older rhythms of the world flourished too. Days grew longer, nights shorter. The moon waxed and waned. The summer constellations rose higher and burned with greater intensity. Watermelons overran the supermarket, and tiny biting ladybugs overran the parking lot. There was a rainstorm that flooded the streets for a few hours, the ground too parched to absorb the overspill. There was a tornado warning in Dover that turned out to be nothing. One morning, there was a double rainbow.

  WHEN SCHOOL LET OUT FOR the summer, Jane took over the trailer. She was constantly underfoot, sprawled across the couch, her cleats on the welcome mat, her shin guards in the living room, clumps of dirt and grass everywhere.

  Darlene tried to make allowances. Jane was under strain too, though she could not express it directly. She never talked about Cora. She did her best to pretend that everything was fine, though she always seemed to be on the verge of tears.

  Darlene often found herself thinking of Tucker—remembering him the way he used to be. Her best memories of her brother were her earliest ones. Tucker laughing at her with a toothless mouth through the bars of his crib. Tucker in diapers, his bare belly taut and golden. She remembered teaching him how to braid Mama’s hair. She remembered pushing him in the stroller at her mother’s side. She and Tucker were less than two years apart, and for a long time they had been the only children in the house. Babies together. Toddlers together. They shared their toys, their books, the sandbox in the backyard, their evening bath, their mother’s lullabies, and their father’s lap.

  As a boy, Tucker was fearless. He once slid into third base so ferociously that he broke his arm in two places. He was a child composed of scrapes and bruises. Riding his bike with no hands. Clambering onto the roof on a dare. Hammering nails into the back fence just for the noise of it. Starting fights with his favorite challenge: “Your ass is grass and I’m a lawnmower!” Darlene would often find her brother at the very top of a tree, higher than anybody else dared to go, swaying with the movement of the trunk, his gaze on the horizon as though he half expected to take flight. For a while, he believed that the phrase tuckered out was about him personally. At the end of a long day, he would nuzzle close to Darlene and whisper, “I tuckered you out.”

  He loved animals, even then. He became a vegetarian at an early age, announcing that meat was murder and reminding everyone over dinner exactly what their meal would have looked like when it was still alive. This was not really acceptable for a young boy in a small Oklahoma town, but Tucker pulled it off with a combination of humor and charisma. He laughed away the backhanded comments, and soon enough, people stopped commenting.

  The family farm had been his home and heart. He and Mama were both designed like that. At any hour of the day, Tucker could be found in the cow paddock, Mama sitting by the henhouse. Darlene liked the animals too, but they did not draw her the way they drew her mother and brother, who treated the shabby shed and mildewed barn as portals to wonder. Mama was never so quick to smile as she was with Mojo. She spent hours with the stallion, not riding him, not feeding him, just communing with him in his own language of touch and gesture. Tucker had a similar bond with the cows, more profound than the inherent divide between species. The herd would look for him every afternoon, their heavy heads turned toward the house, swishing their tails. They would wait for him to come home from school, and when they saw him strolling toward the paddock, they would call to him, long necks extended, mouths wide, the same cry they gave to greet their own kind.

  After Mama died, Tucker redoubled his devotion to the animals. Sometimes Darlene thought there was no other outlet for the love he had lavished on their mother—a rushing river with no path—so he redirected it all toward the farm. He brought treats to the shy goat, despite its disdain for humanity. He took over Mama’s relationship with Mojo. When the stallion fell ill, Tucker tended him with affection and grace. He intuited that Mojo was grieving for Mama too and organized the purchase of a mare and pony. He spent weeks helping them acclimate to their new home.

  He did not neglect the cows, either. Darlene remembered a rainy week one August, perhaps a year after their mother’s death: the sky papered over, the trees fat and dark, the air in the house so humid she could almost swim in it. Glancing out her bedroom window, she noticed the cattle lying down, as they always did in wet weather. There was a lean shape among them. Looking closer, she saw Tucker lounging between two females in the grass, letting the rain soak him to the bone.

  After the tornado, none of the farm animals were ever found. The horses, the cows, the goat, the brood of hens—they were erased as completely as the house, the barn, and, of course, Daddy. All of it blown away. Darlene knew better than to hope that any of their animals had fled to safety. There were a thousand ways to die in a tornado. She only hoped it had been quick.

  A week after the storm, she and Tucker snuck back to the old house to pick through the wreckage for anything they could salvage. They crept between fallen trees and chunks of drywall, looking for clothes, pots, or toys. They wriggled under pieces of plumbing and climbed over splintered boards. Most of what they uncovered was useless: a single shoe, a picture book torn into fragments, a pillow in a puddle of mud and sewage, half a guitar.

  Darlene saw the object first, though she did not recognize it. A silvery shape. Soft and furred. Bedewed with red droplets. It took her a moment to register that it was the severed foot of a horse.

  The leg had been sliced clean through, leaving just a hoof, a boxy joint, and a gleam of sleek gray coat. The wound was surprisingly clean, as though it had been cauterized. Darlene reached for the dreadful thing, hoping that her senses were deceiving her, hoping to touch plastic or wood.

  The flesh was cold. The hoof and hair felt exactly the same in death as they had in life. The blood had dried into paste. She could smell the onset of decomposition now—rotten, curdled, and earthy.

  Then a shadow fell over her, and she glanced up to find Tucker standing there. His expression was one she had not seen before or since. So much pain that she had to look away. He took a handkerchief from
his pocket, spat into it, and knelt down to wipe the patina of dried blood from her fingers.

  18

  On a dry, balmy afternoon, Darlene was sweeping the sidewalk in front of the supermarket when she heard a screech of tires. She turned to see a squad car braking wildly. Roy climbed out of the driver’s seat, waving to her. Darlene shaded her eyes with a hand, taking in his determined expression, his movements brisk with purpose.

  “They found a girl,” he shouted. “At the Texas border.”

  Darlene let go of the broom, which landed with a clatter.

  “Is it Cora?” she cried.

  Roy hurried around the hood of the car. “No identification yet. I just got the call ten minutes ago. A couple fishermen saw something floating in the Red River. They dragged her out and took her straight to the ER.”

  He handed his phone to Darlene. There was an image on the screen, slightly out of focus, as though the photographer had been in motion. She saw a gleam of ruddy water. She had never been to the Red River, but she knew that its banks formed the rumpled border between Oklahoma and Texas. The snapshot was framed by trees and a thicket of wet grasses. She looked closer.

  A child lay in the mud. Two adult figures were bending over her. Her posture suggested that she was unconscious. Her clothes were soaked, her skin dappled with patterns of rust-colored silt, hair plastered across her cheek. Darlene used her fingers to enlarge the image, but the girl only dissolved into pixels.

  “I can’t tell,” she said. “Do you think it’s Cora?”

  “She’ll be in the ER for a few hours at least. With a little luck, we can be there when she wakes up.”

  Darlene squinted at the picture again. An anonymous child. No distinguishing features. In the background, the river was the color of blood.

  THEY TOOK ROUTE 81 SOUTH across Oklahoma. The sun hung unmoving in Darlene’s window, cooking her skin. The squad car was clean but shabby. Roy drove well above the speed limit—the policeman’s prerogative—while Darlene read an article on her phone about the Red River. She had never thought much about it before, its biblical hue. According to the internet, the river was usually a nondescript mud brown, but during flood periods it became saturated with crimson soil.

  Darlene could not seem to find a comfortable position in the passenger’s seat. An air freshener in the shape of a sunflower hung from the rearview mirror, filling the small space with an artificial approximation of perfume. Roy did not attempt small talk. He turned on the radio, but they were far enough into the countryside now that each station was awash with static.

  Outside the town of Chickasha, Roy stopped to refill the gas tank, grab some bottled water, and smoke three cigarettes in a row, pacing around a barren field of dirt behind the parking lot, far from the pumps and fumes. Darlene considered texting Jane about what was happening, but restrained herself. Her sister was spending the day with friends, probably flirting with boys at the dollar store or trying to sneak into the R-rated movie at the cinema. Darlene would wait until she had actual news to share.

  Out in the field, Roy took a call on his phone. She was too far away to hear what he was saying, though she watched him avidly as he gestured with his cigarette. She gnawed her thumbnail until it bled.

  “Anything?” Darlene asked as he approached.

  “Not yet,” he said.

  They drove on. Roy’s clothes were now drenched with the smell of smoke, which mingled discordantly with the stench of his air freshener. The sun was lower in the sky, boiling the clouds into vapor.

  Darlene suddenly found the silence untenable.

  “You weren’t here, were you?” she blurted out.

  “Beg pardon?”

  “When the tornado hit. You weren’t living in Mercy then.”

  “That’s right.”

  She nodded. “I thought I remembered that. You were away for a while.”

  “College,” he said. “Police academy.”

  “Where?”

  “Oklahoma City.” He thumped his chest with a fist. “Sooner born, sooner bred.”

  Darlene debated whether she ought to tell him that she had once planned to go to OU, to be the first member of her family to get a degree. A thousand years ago.

  “What brought you back to Mercy?” she asked.

  Roy rubbed his chin. “Well, my mother got sick.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Thanks. Cancer took her quick. Just a couple of months.” He sighed. “After she passed, I realized I wanted to stay. No place like home, right?”

  Darlene did not answer. She laid a hand over her heart.

  “There,” Roy said. He pointed at a road sign, but it was gone before she could read it.

  “Are we close?” she asked.

  “Half an hour.”

  It occurred to Darlene that there was a lightness about Roy—a quality she herself did not possess. His default state seemed to be optimism. She wondered what had made him this way, armored against sorrow. Perhaps his temperament was an inherent trait, woven into his DNA, present from birth.

  Roy had never treated her the way other people in Mercy did. He was not formal or distant. Maybe it was because he had been away when the tornado struck. He either missed the subsequent media coverage entirely or was kindhearted enough to leave it in the past, where it belonged.

  THE VAST WASTELAND OF TEXAS glimmered along the horizon. The hospital stood at the edge of a small town, overlooking a steep slope studded with bushes and boulders. As Roy pulled into the parking lot, Darlene could see the faraway gleam of the Red River. From this angle, touched by the sunset, the water shone like neon.

  She wished she believed in God. She wished she could pray.

  Before the car reached a complete stop, Darlene was out on the pavement, pelting toward the hospital doors. Roy yelled something behind her, but she did not look back. As she skidded into the lobby, the man at the front desk glanced up in alarm.

  “Where’s the girl?” Darlene cried.

  “What?”

  “The Red River. The girl!”

  The man scooted his chair back, wide-eyed, then reached toward the phone on his desk.

  “Let me just call security,” he said.

  “That won’t be necessary,” Roy said, appearing at Darlene’s shoulder, a little breathless. He held out his badge.

  A nurse in pink scrubs led them down the hallway. She moved with a languid Southern slowness, and Darlene had to resist the urge to shove her out of the way. The hospital was tiny, the walls a distractingly bright blue.

  “Here we are,” the nurse said, gesturing to a door. “She’s sedated. You won’t be able to talk to her.”

  There was a small figure in a white bed, tucked beneath a blanket. The girl was hooked up to an IV and a monitor that displayed her pulse and respiration. The beeping of the machinery was both reassuring and irksome.

  Darlene moved closer. She touched the rough weave of the hospital blanket. Then, without warning, her knees buckled. Roy leapt forward and caught her. He pulled her back up to her feet.

  The girl in the bed was unlike Cora in every way. She was not the right size, the right age, the right ethnicity. A plump little thing. Maybe five years old. Her hair was sleek and straight, without the slightest wave, let alone tumbling ringlets. Her skin was russet-colored, as warm as sunrise against the white coverlet.

  Someone else’s child. Someone else’s sister.

  Darlene staggered backward, her body colliding with Roy’s. He stayed close, supporting her, his hands tight on her shoulders.

  The heart monitor beeped. The IV bag glowed. The girl in the bed breathed, her arms folded limply over her belly.

  “Take me home,” Darlene whispered, turning away.

  THE HIGHWAY WAS DESERTED. NIGHT had fallen, absent of moon. Roy drove as Darlene leaned her temple against the window, rocking with the movement of the car. A few lonely stars glinted above the horizon. A truck lumbered past in the opposite
direction, nothing but headlights and wind. Darlene texted Jane, explaining that there had been a false alarm and she would be home late. She did not feel sad; she did not feel anything. She seemed to have moved into a quiet state beyond human emotion.

  Cora was not the only missing child in the Southwest. Of course she wasn’t.

  Roy fumbled in his pocket, then passed Darlene a handkerchief. She turned it over in her hands. The fabric was crumpled, smelling strongly of nicotine.

  “I’m not crying,” she said.

  “Just in case.”

  Then his phone rang. He answered without taking his eyes off the road. The conversation was short. “Uh-huh,” he said. “Yep. Got it.”

  Roy hung up and cleared his throat.

  “The girl,” he said. “Her parents just turned up at the hospital.”

  Darlene closed her eyes, balling the handkerchief up in her palm.

  19

  Darlene woke to the sound of her phone. It took her a while to wrestle out of the tangle of covers. She groped across the coffee table, attempting to unplug her phone from its charger.

  “Hello?”

  There was a crackle of static on the other end. Darlene sat up, pushing her hair out of her face. She squinted at the clock on the microwave.

  “Jesus Christ, it’s four in the morning,” she said. “Who is this?”

  A laugh floated down the line. It was high-pitched, as sugary as cotton candy. A child’s giggle.

  All at once, Darlene was completely awake, as alert as she had ever been. She rose to her feet, clutching the phone with both hands.