The Roanoke Girls

by Amy Engel

  “We were talking about Allegra,” I remind him, voice sharp.

  The smile fades from my granddad’s face. “I love her,” he says. “If that’s what you meant.”

  “No,” I say. “That wasn’t what I meant at all.” I put the piece of muffin in my mouth. The sweet cake turns to sawdust on my tongue.

  —

  I doze away most of the day, naked and sweating under my thin cotton sheet. The sun through the curtains casts filmy yellow shadows against the walls. It gives the illusion of being trapped in a moist, warm cocoon, and I feel drugged and fuzzy, my limbs still heavy with sleep, when I finally drag myself out of bed and get dressed.

  I splash my face with cold water in the bathroom, and I’m wandering back to my room when the phone on the hall table rings. No one else picks up so I grab it, anxious for news of Allegra.

  “Roanoke residence.”

  “Hey, Lane. It’s me, Tommy.”

  I lean back against the wall, hit with sudden dizziness. “Allegra?” I ask.

  “Oh, no…no.” Tommy clears his throat. “Nothing new to report. Sorry.”

  “It’s okay.” I blow out a slow breath. “What’s up?”

  “Listen, Sarah and I are going to Ronnie Joe’s tonight for a drink. Want to join us? Sarah’s dying to see you again.”

  I wonder if the lie burns on his tongue. “I’m pretty beat still from the drive. Maybe another time.”

  “Come on, Lane. It’ll get you out of the house. Get your mind off things.” He pauses. “Some other old friends might show up, too.” We both know exactly who he’s talking about without either one of us having to say the name.

  “I don’t know, Tommy.”

  “Oh, come on. It’s just a couple of drinks.”

  I give in, only because I don’t have the energy to argue, and an alcohol stupor is exactly what I need. “Okay, fine. When?”

  “In a few hours. Around eight?”

  “Yeah, sounds good. I’ll see you then.”

  —

  The inside of Ronnie Joe’s is about what I expected, but I can’t suppress a flash of disappointment at the cheap plywood bar, the aging girlie calendar tacked to the wall, the slack faces poised over mugs of beer. When we were teenagers, we anticipated the day we’d be old enough to enter this tired brick building crouched at the end of Main Street like a stray dog waiting to be kicked. As with so many things in life, the reality isn’t worth the wait.

  The place doesn’t exactly fall silent when I walk in, but there’s a tightening of the air. My presence disturbs some delicate balance honed over years with no new faces making an appearance. The men sit higher on their barstools, watching me from the corners of their bloodshot eyes. The women bristle. If they were cats, the fur along their spines would be standing on end. Allegra would’ve loved the reactions. She always thrived on this type of attention, the breathless satisfaction of being the biggest fish in a very small pond.

  They’re sitting at a table near the back, under a glowing Bud Light sign, and Tommy motions me forward with his hand. The neon gives his skin a sickly green cast, highlighting the shadows beneath his eyes. The tall man across from Tommy keeps his back to me, doesn’t turn around even after Tommy waves.

  I thread my way between the close-packed tables, whispers following me as I move. “Hey, Cooper,” I say when I reach the table. My voice comes out desert-dry.

  Cooper looks up at me, not bothering to straighten from his relaxed slouch, his spine melting into the wooden chair. “Hey there, Lane,” he responds in his gravel-deep drawl. “Long time, no see.”

  His hair still falls into one eye, but it’s darkened to the color of winter wheat, just a few strands remain streaked with youthful gold. His body is as lean as ever, but the muscles in his arms are harder, veins standing out against his tan skin. A cigarette dangles negligently from the corner of his mouth, and when he plucks it out, I notice that he’s never had his chipped front tooth repaired—a souvenir from a drunken fight. His golden brown eyes study me with plenty of fire but very little warmth. He is still, after all these years, the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen.

  I gesture to the shot of whiskey in his hand. “Any more where that came from?”

  Cooper grins and the dimple in his right cheek flares to life. He used to call that dimple his insurance policy. If all else failed, flash the cheek dent. “There’s always more liquor around here. It’s the one thing we’ve got plenty of,” he reminds me.

  “Lane, glad you could make it,” Tommy cuts in, formal in his nervousness. “This is my wife, Sarah.”

  “Hi,” I say, holding out my hand. Sarah takes it limply in hers like I might be trying to pass her something unwanted in my palm. She is slight, overpowered by a mass of light brown curls she’s tried to tame with a white fabric headband. She lives in the vast, overpopulated territory somewhere between plain and cute, with the kind of face you can never fully recall afterward, every feature blurry around the edges. “I’m sorry about your cousin,” she says. “I’m sure everything will turn out fine.”

  “Well, that’s reassuring,” I say, pulling out a chair at the end of the table. Sarah’s eyes drop away, her cheeks burning. Tommy gives me a warning look that I ignore.

  “So”—Cooper takes a lazy swallow of his drink—“how’ve you been since you ran away from here?”

  “I didn’t run away.”

  “You didn’t?” Cooper raises his eyebrows. “Could’ve fooled me.”

  He doesn’t give me a chance to respond, scraping back his chair as he heads to the bar. Tommy, Sarah, and I sit in uncomfortable silence until Cooper returns moments later with a round of shots in his hands and an hourglass redhead by his side. When they sit, she positions herself under his arm, his hand dangling dangerously close to one plump breast. He doesn’t introduce us.

  “Are you the one who went to California?” the girl asks. She stinks of cheap perfume and bubble gum.

  “Yeah, that’s me,” I say, downing my shot with grim determination. The whiskey hits my empty stomach with a hard thump, and sweat blooms along my hairline. My cheeks flush with heat.

  “What’s it like?”

  I think of California, with its endless blue skies, sunny days, and perfect temperature, how the seasons bleed into one another with no way to mark their passing. The unearned bounty becomes a kind of narcotic so that you wake up one morning and realize ten years have come and gone and you have nothing to show for it. “It’s different.”

  “Cool. Different.” The girl gazes at me as if I’ve said something profound, and Cooper rolls his eyes.

  “I could have told you that much,” he says. I can’t tell if he’s more disgusted with her or me.

  “What do you do in California?” Sarah covers Tommy’s hand with hers as she speaks. I must make her nervous, looking so much like Allegra, the one Tommy really wanted.

  “Whatever I can. Kind of hard to find jobs with only a GED.” I shrug. “Waitress, cashier, receptionist.”

  “Aren’t those all code words for stripper?” Cooper asks. He gives me a sideways twist of his lips, a sly smirk full of bad intentions. This is the Cooper most people know. The one who hides behind snide comments and shit-eating grins. Once I knew a different side of him. But I’m not surprised it’s this version who’s shown up tonight.

  “Clever,” I say and give him my own tight smile in return. He blows smoke in my direction, and I wave it away. “No one smokes anymore,” I tell him.

  He glances down at the smoldering cigarette between his fingers as if it begs to differ.

  “No one smart,” I amend.

  “Well, you know us dumb hicks,” Cooper says, deepening his drawl. “Always behind the times. Thank God you’re back, so we can get caught up.”

  I open my mouth to respond, but the redhead cuts in, leaning across the table toward Tommy but looking at me. “Hey, I heard someone thought they saw Lane’s cousin hitchhiking out on Lone Tree Road.”

  The whole tab
le freezes, Tommy’s gaze flying to mine. “Just a bunch of stupid kids spreading rumors, Lane. Looking for attention. But we checked it out. It was nothing.”

  “She wouldn’t need to be hitchhiking,” Cooper says. “She had her own car.”

  “Allegra did lots of things she didn’t have to do,” I remind him. “Just for the hell of it.”

  Tommy shakes his head. “No, it wasn’t her. Remember Beth Van Horn?” He doesn’t wait for me to nod. “It was her oldest girl. Somebody saw the long dark hair, jumped to conclusions.”

  “The whole thing is totally tragic.” The redhead makes sad puppy-dog eyes to prove her sincerity. She pauses to light a cigarette, and I smirk at Cooper. “And like no offense or anything since we don’t know what happened to her yet…” She glances at me before continuing. “But what if we have a serial killer here?” She gives an exaggerated shudder. “It’s like a horror movie. I swear, I can hardly sleep at night.”

  Tommy’s eyes swing from Cooper to me and back again. He raises his eyebrows and Cooper shrugs. “Um…one missing woman doesn’t mean we have a serial killer at work,” Tommy says.

  “It sure could,” the girl argues. “Osage Flats’s very own serial killer.” She makes it sound like a potential tourist draw. Hell, for all I know, maybe it would be.

  “Actually, that’s the definition of serial,” Cooper informs her. “More than one.”

  The girl frowns, her head tilted to the side. “What?”

  “Never mind.” Cooper sighs, tapping ash from his cigarette into the already full ashtray.

  “This whole town is completely fucked up,” I mutter under my breath and catch the twitch of Cooper’s mouth out of the corner of my eye. He rakes a hand through his hair, pushing it off his face in a gesture so familiar it makes my throat ache. His hands are bigger than I remember and, unlike in our youth, his fingernails are clean now, no half-moons of black. But the deep lines of his palms are still permanently stained dark with grease. Once I went to church with that grease smeared across my breasts. My skin hummed all day under my thin cotton bra.

  “You still working at your dad’s garage?” I ask. It’s a stupid question, but it’s something to say that doesn’t feel dangerous.

  “My garage now.”

  “Did your dad retire?” I picture Mr. Sullivan, who always looked older than the other fathers, with his sloping shoulders and hard paunch of belly. I don’t think I ever saw him smile.

  “Nope. Died. Last year.”

  “How?”

  Cooper plucks a piece of errant tobacco from his tongue. “Heart attack,” he says, voice mild like he’s talking about the weather.

  “Oh. Sorry,” I say, because something seems required, even if it’s not heartfelt.

  Cooper nods, and for the first time all night he holds my gaze for longer than a moment. All the old, confused emotions tangle together in my gut, a heavy knot of pain.

  “How’s your sister? Is she still here in town?”

  Cooper looks amused as he taps a fresh cigarette from his pack on the table. This type of small talk was never our area of expertise. “No, Holly’s in Kansas City. She has been for years.”

  “I heard you were in K.C. for a while.”

  “For a while. Wasn’t for me.”

  The redhead leans into our conversation. “I’m getting us another round. Then maybe you can tell me more about California.” She holds out her palm, and Cooper fills it with cash, barely glancing in her direction.

  “Looks like your date is more interested in me than you,” I comment when she’s out of earshot.

  Cooper grunts, his arm grazing mine as he drains the last of his drink. “No big loss. I’ve already been around that block one too many times, checked out all the major landmarks.”

  Sarah leans over and swats Cooper’s free hand. “Don’t be nasty!”

  “Sorry,” he says, but I can tell he doesn’t mean it. I lower my eyes and run my thumb in absent circles on the tabletop. Slowly conversation starts up around me as the redhead returns with a bouquet of shot glasses. I drink mine with whiskey-numb lips, my gaze catching Cooper’s as I swallow. A small, secret smile tugs at the corner of his mouth, telling me he’s not fooled. He knows the truth—knows little Lane Roanoke likes his brand of nasty just fine.

  They were born on the same day, exactly one year apart. Him first, her after. Not twins, but they might as well have been. They were always treated like a set. Yates and Jane. Jane and Yates. Always a they, a we, never two separate people. Sophia came five years after Jane. She was an afterthought to more than their parents. All Jane really remembered of Sophia’s childhood was her high, pleading voice, “Wait for me!” They never did.

  Sometimes Jane tried to pinpoint when it started, but there wasn’t a single moment she could look at and say, There, right there was the beginning. By the time he kissed her it was already done. That kiss felt like the thousandth step, not the first. She thought maybe it started from the time they were born. The two of them and two thousand acres. All that childhood curiosity combined with all that isolation. There was no one else for them to play with, talk to, fixate on. And even if there had been, would it have mattered? Would any other boy have been as handsome as Yates? Would any other boy have looked at her like every word out of her mouth was gold, like every move she made hung the moon?

  She was fourteen the first time they had sex, in the hayloft in the barn, hot and sweaty and neither of them feeling any shame. It felt like a natural progression of all the things they’d done before: catching frogs and riding horses, laughing on the sleeping porch after dark, sharing ice cream on sticky summer days, whispering secret dreams for the future, kissing behind the barn, his warm hand under her blouse. Yates and Jane, always together.

  She wasn’t even sure if she loved him, as much as they were fused. Like he was an extra appendage, a part of her that could never be severed. A single heart beating between them. The two of them lived in a bubble of their own making. Other people might see the dark edges, but they saw only the gilded center. But then Jane got pregnant. And something inside her grew along with the baby. The idea that she wanted more than this farm, this endless blue sky and flat horizon. The idea that maybe there was something beyond this place. But she didn’t even have to ask to know he would never leave. He loved Roanoke. If Jane owned half of Yates’s heart, Roanoke held the other half, and it was never letting go. But the truth was, Jane didn’t think she owned her half outright anymore. Because Yates loved Sophia now, too. Not the same way he loved Jane. Not yet. But she could see it whenever Sophia walked into the room, the way Yates’s eyes sparked, a little flash of heat.

  Jane stayed until the baby was born, though. Suffered through their mother’s thin, pinched lips when her eyes fell on Jane’s growing belly. Endured their father’s nightly dinner table sermons about sin and hellfire. Yates held her hand during labor, cradled their daughter’s tiny body in his still teenage arms. Jane let him name her. Penelope. It wasn’t a name Jane would have chosen, but she wouldn’t be the baby’s mother for long, so it didn’t matter.

  She left in the night, without a note or a good-bye, her body still bleeding from Penelope’s birth. If given the chance, he probably could have convinced her to stay. So she made a clean break, ran down the driveway and hitchhiked her way south. No more Yates and Jane. Just Jane. And she was free.

  In the few days I’d been at Roanoke, my gran had been more of a passing presence than a permanent fixture. She swept past me in the hall, admonished me to put on sunscreen when I was out by the barn, snapped her fingers at Allegra and reminded her to clean up her mess in the kitchen (a directive Allegra ignored). But beyond those quick interactions and nightly dinner in the dining room, I’d seen her hardly at all.

  So it took me by surprise when I found her sitting on my bed, a pile of fresh laundry stacked next to her. “Come in, Lane,” she said with a clipped smile, when I hesitated in the doorway. “I want to talk to you.” She patted a spot on the be
d, and I sat, curling my feet up underneath me, the laundry between us.

  Once she had me where she wanted me, Gran straightened the seam of her pant leg, plucking away invisible lint. “Lord, it’s hot in here. We can get you a window unit. The fan isn’t much help.”

  “It’s okay. I kind of like having the windows open.” In New York when we’d opened the windows it had smelled of exhaust and stale Chinese food from the restaurant below us. Here the air was fresh and hot and green.

  “You and Allegra. I don’t know how you girls stand it.” She fanned her face briefly. “Anyway, I wanted to ask you about your mother.”

  “Oh.” I’d known at some point one of them would want more details about my mom and our life, but I’d figured it would be my granddad. It wasn’t that it was difficult for me to talk about my mother. More that I had nothing to say, nothing anyone in their right mind would want to hear.

  “I know it probably seems impossible to you because she was your mother, but she was my little girl once,” Gran said. Her voice remained steady, her eyes dry, for which I was thankful. “I was only twenty when she was born. Nineteen when I had my first one, Eleanor. Not as young as Camilla was when she had you, but still mostly a child myself.”

  “You and Granddad got married young.”

  Gran smiled. “Very young. I was eighteen. He was only a year older. Oh, my family threw a fit.” She slapped her leg with one hand in emphasis. “We were in St. Louis visiting my mother’s aunt and I saw your granddad across the lobby of our hotel. Knew right then and there I had to have him.” She laughed, leaned her head toward me. “I was a willful thing, at least when it came to Yates.”

  “Did you move here right after you got married?”

  Gran nodded. “It took some getting used to. After Boston. All this space. All this…nothing.” Her voice drifted off and her eyes followed. It took her a few seconds to find her way back to the story. “But I had Penelope to look after. Your granddad’s niece.”