The Roanoke Girls

by Amy Engel

  “Allegra told me about her. She said you and Granddad raised her.”

  “Yes, we did. Until her accident. She wasn’t even a year old when we got married. Our own started coming right after. Sophia, your granddad’s youngest sister, was here to help me, at least, until…”

  “Allegra said she drowned.”

  “Well, Allegra’s certainly been filling you in on the family history.” Gran smoothed a strand of hair off her face, tucked it into her tidy chignon. “I’m sure you know then, that your mother ran away before you were born. We never knew much about what happened to either of you after that. Your mother didn’t make it easy for us to keep in touch. And eventually, we gave up trying.” Gran sighed. “I always wondered about her, though, about how she turned out. Was she a good mother?” Gran touched the back of my hand with one manicured fingernail.

  “No,” I said. “Not really.”

  Gran nodded, like that was the answer she expected. “Were you close?”

  I had no idea how to answer her question. How could I be close to someone who barely spoke to me? Someone who I strongly suspected hated me more than she loved me? But at the same time, my mother was as much a part of me as my blood or my skin. Sometimes I swore I felt her vibrating through my bones. “I don’t know,” I said finally. “She was my mother.”

  “Tell me something about her,” Gran said, twisting toward me. It was the most interest she’d shown in me since my arrival. “Your strongest memory.”

  I scrolled back through images of my mother, almost all of them tearstained. “She was sad,” I said. “She cried a lot.”

  Gran closed her eyes for a moment, gave my hand a quick pat before opening them again. “Is there anything you want to ask me? About your mother?” She voiced the question reluctantly, like she owed me a debt she wasn’t sure she knew how to pay.

  I scooted closer on the bed. Gran put her hand on the laundry to keep it from toppling over, or maybe to keep a barrier between us. “Actually, I wondered about my father.”

  “What about him?”

  “She never talked about him. Do you know who he is? If he still lives in Osage Flats? Did she tell you his name?” I leaned toward Gran, my words spilling out of me.

  “Lane.” Gran sighed. “He could have been anyone. Anyone. Your mother wasn’t exactly…discerning.”

  “Oh.” My shoulders sagged even as I resisted the urge to pound my fists against the bed. My mother had dragged my father along with her to the grave. One more in a long line of answers she’d denied me.

  Gran stood. “Get this laundry put away, why don’t you, before Sharon takes exception.”

  Once she was gone, I flopped back on the bed, let my laundry unspool around me. I’d lied to Gran. Not about my mother crying all the time. That part was true. But my most vivid memory of my mother was one I would never share willingly. It wasn’t the type of recollection to be passed around, touched and fawned over. We’d been lying on her bed in our apartment, on our sides, facing each other. I was ten. She was tracing my face with her fingertips, and I remember being happy. Happy she was paying attention to me, focusing solely on me without tears or trepidation. “Right now,” she whispered, “you look exactly like your father. I loved him so much.” I thought maybe she was finally going to tell me some detail about him, but before I could ask a single question her hand trailed lower, around my neck. She squeezed. Gently at first, so that I didn’t wrench away as fast as I should have, then harder, her nails digging into my skin. “It makes me want to hurt you,” she said, voice calm and eyes wild. By the time I broke away, two of her fingernails had pierced my skin. Blood pearls set in a necklace of bruises. Later, when she locked herself in her room, weeping and pulling at her hair, I stood in front of the bathroom mirror and tried again and again to re-create the look on my face in the moment before she’d hurt me. Tried to find the expression that reminded her of my father. But no matter how I contorted my features, only my mother’s face stared back at me.

  —

  “Get your ass out of bed,” Allegra yelled, slapping at my legs with both hands. “What are you doing anyway?”

  I rolled over onto my back and covered my face with a pillow. “Taking a nap. Don’t people nap in Kansas?”

  “Not when there’s stuff to do,” Allegra said, yanking the pillow off me and tossing it to the floor. She peered into my face. “Are you like depressed or something? About your mom?”

  I shook my head. “No. Not really.” And it was true. I didn’t miss my mother the way I should have. Her death felt more like relief than sorrow. She had slipped away into oblivion, where she’d wanted to be all along. We were finally free of each other.

  “Then come on,” Allegra said. She pulled me up by one arm.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Into town.” Allegra frowned at me. “Is that what you’re wearing?”

  I glanced down at my cutoff shorts and plain T-shirt. “Yeah. Isn’t Osage Flats like ten miles away?” I looked out at the cut-glass sky, not a single cloud in sight. “We’re going to get heatstroke walking that far.”

  “We’re not walking,” Allegra said. “Hurry up!”

  I slipped my feet into a pair of flip-flops and stood still while Allegra tied my T-shirt into a knot at my waist, ran her hands through my sleep-tumbled hair. “Perfect,” she said. “You look freshly fucked. Here, put this on.” She handed me a tube of lip gloss. It left my lips tacky and tasting of strawberry.

  “We need to get you some better clothes,” she said as she skipped down the main staircase. “Everything you have is like bargain basement crap.”

  I wasn’t offended. My clothes were crap. “I don’t have any money,” I told her. “My mom wasn’t exactly rolling in it.”

  “You don’t need money.” She grabbed my hand and pulled me down the front hall and through a series of rooms I was still learning my way around. “Quick detour,” she said over her shoulder. She stopped in the office, in front of our granddad’s large cherrywood desk. She opened the top left-hand drawer and pointed at a black zippered envelope. “Credit cards. Get on the computer. Buy what you want. That’s what they’re for.”

  I hesitated. “But only for emergencies, right?”

  Allegra snorted. “Sure, if you consider an urgent need for a dozen crop tops an emergency.”

  “Is there a limit? I mean, I can’t order whatever I want, can I?”

  “I don’t see why not. I do.” Allegra bumped my hip with hers. “Seriously, Lane, that’s why Granddad leaves them there. For me. For us.” She glanced down at her phone. “Oh shit, come on, we’re late!”

  We racewalked down the drive, Allegra urging me to hurry up. “But don’t run. We don’t want to be all sweaty!”

  “What the hell are we doing?” I asked. Despite her warning, beads of sweat were already trickling down my back. There was no wind today, the air stagnant and wet against my skin.

  “Getting a ride!” Allegra said. She stopped where the driveway intersected with Route 24. “They’ll be here soon.” She gathered her hair into a messy knot on top of her head. Her giant gold hoop earrings flashed in the sun when she turned to me. “How do I look?”

  “Gorgeous,” I told her honestly, and she smiled. “Who are we getting a ride from?”

  “You’ll see.”

  I looked behind me at Roanoke. When strangers drove past and saw it in the distance, they probably thought it was an insane asylum. The idea made me smile. To me it looked like a ship, strong and unsinkable, afloat on a wild sea of wheat.

  Allegra pinched my forearm. “Here they come!”

  A small silver car crested the rise to the north. Allegra waved, and the driver gave a quick tap on the horn. The car pulled into the driveway and stopped beside us, kicking up a tornado of dust, which left me coughing.

  “Hey, handsome,” Allegra said, leaning into the driver’s side window.

  A teenage boy with dark hair smiled back at her. He looked out of place in the tiny car,
his broad shoulders spanning the width of the driver’s seat. “Hi, pretty girl. Need a ride?” he said. From the interior of the car someone muttered, “Oh, for God’s sake,” and I turned my face away to hide my smile.

  “Lane, get over here,” Allegra said. “This is Tommy Kenning.”

  “Hi,” I said, giving him a brief wave.

  His eyes sparkled as he grinned at me. “Hi. I’ve heard a lot about you.” He hooked a thumb toward the passenger seat. “And this is Cooper Sullivan.”

  I bent down a little to see into the car. The boy in the passenger seat glanced over at me, his blond hair blocking one eye. He raised a single finger off the open window frame in greeting.

  “Get in the back, Cooper,” Allegra demanded. “I want to sit up front.”

  “Fuck off,” Cooper said. “You wanted a ride, you get in the back.”

  I tried to pull open the passenger door on the driver’s side, but it wouldn’t budge. “Sorry,” Tommy said, craning his neck toward me. “That door doesn’t open. You have to go around.”

  “Are you and Tommy dating?” I whispered to Allegra as we skirted the back of the car.

  “Kind of.” Her grin was smug. “He’s totally in love with me!”

  “How old are they?” I asked, not worried, just curious.

  “Eighteen. They graduated a few weeks ago.” She opened the car door and mouthed, “An older man,” at me before collapsing into giggles in the backseat.

  I couldn’t help but laugh. “Scoot over, crazy girl,” I told her, prodding her with my knee.

  “So, you been into town yet?” Tommy called back to me once we were on the road.

  “No. This is my first trip.”

  “I hope you’re a fan of disappointment,” Cooper drawled. I caught his eye in the side-view mirror, and a fever blush spread across my cheeks. But I didn’t look away, made sure Cooper dropped his gaze first, a little smirk dancing on his face.

  We parked at the end of Main Street, Tommy’s car one of the only vehicles on the entire stretch of road. “Where is everybody?” I asked, as we all climbed out of the car.

  “Who knows?” Cooper said. “Probably in their trailers cooking up meth.”

  “This is the downtown?” I couldn’t believe a place so quiet and empty could be the center of town.

  “Uptown!” Allegra said. “We call it uptown. Like, get me some milk when you go uptown.”

  From what I could tell, “uptown” consisted solely of a collection of ragtag stores: a small grocery, a walk-up hamburger stand, a secondhand clothing store, and a five-and-dime with strips of faded flypaper hanging in the windows. The majority of the storefronts we sauntered past were empty, faded For Lease signs propped in dust-streaked windows.

  “Down there is Ronnie Joe’s,” Tommy said, pointing to the far end of Main, two blocks in the distance. “Local bar,” he said in response to my questioning look. “And across from it is The Eat.”

  “Our version of a fine dining establishment,” Cooper said. “Where you go when you really want to impress the ladies.” Somehow we’d ended up walking two by two, Tommy and Allegra holding hands in front, Cooper and I behind, a careful wedge of space between us. The sidewalk shimmered under the relentless prairie sun, and we all gravitated to the thin strips of shade the store awnings provided.

  “And that’s Cooper’s dad’s gas station,” Allegra said, “down past The Eat. Last thing you pass on your way out of town.” Allegra let go of Tommy’s hand and turned, walking backward. “Maybe someday, if you’re really, really lucky, it will all be yours, Cooper.”

  I glanced at Cooper, expecting anger, but he only continued to tap a cigarette from the pack he’d pulled from his back pocket. “Maybe,” he said, flipping the cigarette between his lips. “We can’t all be little rich girls.”

  “Oh, screw you!” Allegra said, whirling back around. She grabbed Tommy’s hand and pulled him forward, away from us. Cooper grinned around his cigarette and held out the pack to me. “Want one?”

  I used to smoke sometimes back in New York, huddled in alleyways with girls from school who were never my friends but pretended to be. “Sure,” I said. Cooper cupped his hand around the cigarette to light it while I held it to my mouth. His hand brushing against mine sent sparks cascading into my belly, and I sucked in too fast, choking on the smoke.

  “Easy,” he said, amused. “You inhale the smoke, not the whole cigarette.”

  I glared at him, and he laughed, a dimple appearing in his right cheek. I wondered what it would feel like to rest the tip of my finger inside it.

  “Come on, you slowpokes!” Allegra yelled from the corner. “I want to show you something, Lane!”

  When we rounded the corner and caught up with Allegra and Tommy, they were standing in front of a dilapidated old house with a familiar-looking turret on one side. “This is what Gran modeled the brick addition on,” Allegra said. She was hanging on to the chain-link fence surrounding the house, her fingers and toes hooked through the metal, sandals abandoned on the sidewalk. Signs were posted along the fence warning people to keep out. The house looked like a strong wind would topple it, send it crashing into a pile of matchsticks. “Isn’t it cool?” Allegra said.

  I looked at the boarded-up windows, the sagging front porch, the patches of rotted wood, not sure what to say. If Roanoke was an insane asylum, this place was a haunted house, vengeful ghosts lingering in all the shadows. “No one’s lived here for years,” Allegra continued. “Not since like 1960.”

  “Nineteen seventy,” Cooper corrected.

  “Whatever. Anyway, the lady who owned it was called Madame Wright. She was a loon.” Allegra kept her eyes on the house as she talked. “She gave illegal abortions in her basement.”

  “I don’t think that’s true,” Tommy said.

  “It’s true,” Allegra said. “Granddad told me they found tons of teeny tiny baby bones in her backyard well after she died.” Allegra glanced back at me, smiled. “Too bad she was before your mom’s time, Lane. We could have gone digging for the bones of your brothers and sisters.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Cooper said. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

  It took me a minute to understand what Allegra was saying, my brain sifting the words until they made sense. “She was only sixteen when I was born,” I said finally.

  “So?” Allegra said. “Just because you were her last, doesn’t mean you were her first. You were just the only one she didn’t have yanked out and thrown away.” Allegra turned and looked at me. Her face fell. “Oh, don’t be upset, Lane,” she pleaded, hopping down from the fence to fold both my hands between her own. “It’s not like my mom wasn’t knocked up a bunch of times, too. The Roanoke girls are fertile.” Her smile was all glee and excitement. “We get pregnant every time we spread our legs.”

  “Better be careful there, Tommy,” Cooper said.

  “Shut up,” Tommy muttered, his eyes downcast and his neck flushed red.

  I wake with a pounding headache, my tongue whiskey-thick and stuck to the roof of my mouth. I may be in a different state, but the outlines of my life are depressingly familiar. It’s only late morning, but the sun already roars in through the sheer curtains, making me realize how gentle the sunshine was in California. There, it bathes you. Here, it smacks you across the face. I heave myself upright with a muffled groan and swing my legs out of bed. The floor underneath my left foot feels uneven, and I glance down, find gouged into the wood. I rub the message with my big toe, remembering the morning Allegra carved it there, still in her nightgown, one of Sharon’s strawberry muffins clasped in her free hand. The memory gives me an idea, and I shift back onto the bed and grab my phone from the nightstand, look up the number of the police department. The receptionist puts me straight through to Tommy, who answers around a mouthful of food.

  “Oh, hey, Lane,” he says once I identify myself. “How’re you feeling this morning?”

  “I’ve been better.”

  He chuckles. “O
ne shot too many?”

  Or maybe three too many, but that’s not information I need to share with Tommy. “Listen,” I say, “do you remember how Allegra used to carve words into things? And sometimes little pictures?” Tommy doesn’t respond, and I forge ahead. “Like if she was into a band, she’d carve the name into the top of her dresser. Or if she was in a good mood, she’d leave a heart on my doorjamb. Did you look for anything like that in the house? Maybe she left a message before she disappeared?” Hearing it out loud sounds even crazier than it did inside my head. I’m about to say forget it and hang up, blame it on the leftover booze in my system, when Tommy steps into the silence.

  “She scratched dick on my dashboard once when she was pissed at me.” His voice is full of laughter and a dazed kind of wonder. “Shit, how could I have forgotten that?”

  “I’d pretty much forgotten it, too,” I tell him. “But I was thinking maybe she left some sort of clue behind.”

  Tommy sighs. “Sounds pretty far-fetched to me, Lane. It would be a lot easier to leave an actual note.”

  “You’re probably right, but can I look? Is it okay if I go through her room?”

  “Sure,” Tommy says. “We’re done in there. But if you find anything, it comes straight to me. Got it?”

  “Got it.”

  I roll out of bed and race up to Allegra’s room. The summer I lived at Roanoke, I found Allegra’s handiwork scattered throughout the house. The on the picture frame was only the first of many. carved in inch-high letters on the bottom of what had been her mother’s bedroom door; a tiny sun etched into my headboard; left on the ladder into the hayloft; gouged across the corner of our granddad’s desk. I asked her about it once, and she only shrugged, said sometimes she had thoughts she needed to get out of her head. I think she liked the mystery of it, the inherent drama of knife against wood, the image it left in all our minds of Allegra drifting through the house leaving a trail of word confetti behind her.

  I start with her bedside tables, move on to her bed, but find nothing other than the wear and tear of daily life. Her dresser yields only a tiny cluster of stars on the front of a drawer. I run my eyes and hands over her closet doorjamb, feeling more foolish by the second. Already my tank top is soaked with sweat, the air in the room barely moving even with the window fan on high. I sink onto the padded stool in front of Allegra’s vanity, eyes roaming over the knots of jewelry and piles of makeup. I slide it all carefully to one side, still searching. Maybe Allegra gave up her strange graffiti in the years I was gone. Or maybe she confined it to other parts of the house, places where it was more likely to be discovered.