The Roanoke Girls

by Amy Engel

  I’m the first to arrive, and I stand in the doorway while Sharon brings in platters from the kitchen. Her back tenses at the sight of me, but she doesn’t make eye contact. I could offer my help to save her from making multiple trips, but I don’t. “It looks appetizing, as always,” I tell her, then hate myself for being childish.

  After she’s gone, I take a plate and scoop up some mayo-heavy potato salad and a piece of withered chicken. I skip the orange Jell-O salad studded with shredded carrots and pineapple. I told Jeff once about the endless variety of Jell-O salads served in the Midwest, but from the way he laughed it was clear he thought I was joking. Green Jell-O embedded with chunks of canned pear wasn’t part of Jeff’s worldview.

  Gran arrives as I’m sitting down in my old spot, and Granddad walks in last like always, making an entrance.

  “Laney-girl,” he says. “I sure do love seeing you at this table again.”

  I keep my eyes on my plate, cutting my chicken into tiny, manageable bites. “I don’t know how she can ruin chicken,” I say. “It’s like she’s doing it on purpose. Even I can cook chicken.”

  No one answers me. Allegra’s absence looms over the table, like she’s hovering above us, taking up more space than she ever did actually sitting here. Every time I raise my eyes, all I can see is her empty chair.

  “Tell us about California,” Gran says. “Allegra said that’s where you were living.” Obviously Granddad has thrown it to Gran to try to find out more about my time away from Roanoke. Gran looks as thrilled with the assignment as I suspect I do.

  “Not much to tell. It’s California. Ocean, sunshine, traffic. I wasn’t hanging out with the A-listers or anything.”

  Granddad and Gran exchange a look. “And you were married?” Gran asks, taking a dainty bite of potato salad.

  “Briefly.”

  “No children, I take it?”

  Something rolls over in my stomach. “Nope. Guess Allegra and I are the end of the line for Roanoke girls.”

  My granddad’s gaze falls away. Gran sips her water. The room is very quiet, so quiet I can hear the grandfather clock ticking from the front of the house. So quiet I can’t stand it.

  I drop my fork with a clatter. I’m never going to be able to eat anything anyway. “How did things work around here after I left? Did you three all share a bed? Or was there a schedule? Tuesdays and Thursdays with Gran? Monday, Wednesday, Friday with Allegra? Or was it random? Did you draw straws?”

  “Lane,” Granddad says.

  “What?” I turn to him with wide eyes, my voice falsely innocent. “It’s only us here. Can’t we talk about it?”

  “You’re ruining my dinner, Lane,” Gran says, calm as ever.

  “Oh, so it’s okay that it happens, right?” I say. “But talking about it, that’s crossing the line.”

  The only answer is the scrape of forks against china, that goddamn clock ticking in the hall. My hands are trembling in my lap, and I feel Allegra rising up in my throat, wanting to burst out. She deserves to have someone speak for her when she’s not here to speak for herself. “How about Allegra?” I ask. “Is she an appropriate topic? What does everyone think happened to her?”

  My granddad lifts his eyes to mine, fork filled with food halfway to his mouth. “I have no earthly idea.”

  I swing my gaze away from him, toward Gran. “What about you? Any theories?”

  Gran wipes the corner of her mouth with her napkin, sets it carefully beside her plate. “I think she ran away. Same as her mother, same as her aunt.” She pins me with her cool blue gaze. “Same as you.”

  I nod. “Well, for starters, I don’t think what I did can actually be called running away since you all knew I was leaving. Second, Allegra’s twenty-six years old. She’s kind of beyond the ‘running away’ stage.” I make overly dramatic air quotes to illustrate my point. “Third, that’s a lot of girls bolting for the door around here over the years.” I stare back at Gran. “That doesn’t give you any pause?”

  “You all make your own decisions,” Gran says. “It’s got nothing to do with me.”

  I laugh, the sound echoing wildly in the cave of a room. “Oh, wait, you’re being serious?” I ask, when my laughter fades away. “Sorry, I assumed that was your attempt at a bad joke.”

  “Stop it now, Lane,” Granddad says, the same stern voice he used on me when I sassed him as a teenager. “That’s enough.”

  Rage boils up from the pit of my stomach, mixing with outrage in my throat. “It’s not enough!” I say, my voice loud, just this side of yelling. I push back from the table, chair scraping against the floor. My knee hits the table leg and my glass falls over, water seeping across wood. “Allegra is gone. She’s gone! And both of you are sitting here like everything is normal! Like this whole place isn’t fucked!”

  My heart feels close to bursting, tears prickling the backs of my eyes. I brace myself for some kind of reaction, a slap maybe, or a get out of our house, but Gran simply places her napkin back into her lap, irons it flat with her hand. “There’s no need to be vulgar,” she says.

  Granddad puts his elbows on the table, lowers his head into his hands. “Nothing around here is right without her,” he says, voice muffled. “Without Allegra.”

  “News flash,” I tell him. “Nothing around here has ever been right.”

  —

  After dinner, I drive into town and pick up a six-pack of beer at the tiny grocery store. Most of the shelves are only half-filled, as if this is a third-world country instead of America’s heartland. I find the lack of choice somehow comforting. The flickering fluorescent lights snap and buzz overhead, competing with the static twang of a country song playing from a small radio up front.

  In the single checkout line the cashier stares at me with eyes as dull and worn as old pennies. Her bottle-black hair shows at least three inches of nondescript brown at the roots, the ends crunchy with cheap hairspray. “You a Roanoke?” she asks.

  “Yeah,” I say and wish it weren’t true.

  “Huh,” she grunts, apparently all she has to say on the subject, which is a relief.

  The interior of my car is already hot when I emerge, even though the sun is close to setting. I’ve been trying to ignore the red gas light glowing on my dash, but I’ll have to face it—him—sometime. There’s still only one place to go in Osage Flats if you need gas. A single filling station, situated at the end of Main, right before it becomes County Road 7. A metal sign, riddled with BB gun holes, hangs from a pole out front. SULLIVAN’S. The big garage bay door is open, and a couple of cars are parked inside, their guts spilled out onto the oily floor. I slide my car up next to the rusty pumps, probably the last two in America not yet replaced with a newer model. They both list slightly, like magnets repelling each other. The white-on-black numbers flip over with tiny clicks as I fill my tank.

  Once my tank is full, I pick my way across the torn and rumpled concrete, thick weeds poking through every crack. A large black Lab resting near the garage entrance watches me without moving, his tail beating a random greeting against the ground.

  I step past the dog into the garage bay. It takes my eyes a moment to adjust to the gloom. Other than the two mutilated cars, the garage is empty. I cross to the tiny, windowless office and poke my head inside. It’s like sticking my head into an oven; the heat makes my eyes water, stings the tender lining of my nose. A stack of worn tires leans drunkenly against the wall, and various car entrails are scattered across the grease-stained floor. The only sound comes from a small metal fan, each blade coated in dust, whirring in the corner. The remains of someone’s long-ago breakfast, a partially eaten doughnut and a Styrofoam cup of coffee, litter the surface of a card table with a folded-over newspaper wedged under one rickety leg.

  “Hey, Lane,” Cooper says from behind me. I turn, and he’s leaning against the front counter, wiping his hands on a stained rag. We stare at each other, and the years fall away. He could be eighteen again, in his jeans and dirty white T-shir
t, the boy I used to know.

  I clear my throat, hold up my crumpled bills. “I owe you for gas.”

  He nods, points at my face. “How’d you get the sunburn?”

  I touch my nose with my fingertips, wincing at the throb of tender skin. “Oh. I went out on the search for Allegra a couple of days ago.”

  Cooper clicks his tongue between his teeth. “Waste of time,” he says.

  “It can’t hurt.”

  “Can’t help, either.”

  “I don’t see why not,” I say, already feeling my blood pressure rise. I should have risked running out of gas. “It’s better than sitting around doing nothing.”

  “Doubtful. What are you now, some kind of half-assed Nancy Drew?”

  “For your information, I wasn’t the only one out there. Ran into your old friend Kate Levins.” I smirk at him. “She had some interesting things to say about you.”

  Cooper tucks the rag into his back pocket, blows out a dismissive breath. “I’m surprised she could talk around her meth pipe.”

  “Yeah? From what Kate said, there was a time you two were pretty close.”

  “We fucked once or twice, back when we were kids,” he says. “Is that what you’re getting at?”

  “I’m not getting at anything,” I say. “Poor Kate was another notch in your belt, huh?”

  Cooper smiles, but his jaw is tight. “I never was quite the man-whore you wanted me to be, Lane. Sorry to disappoint you.”

  My heart trips against my rib cage. “Are we engaging in revisionist history now?”

  Cooper glances away, rakes his hair off his forehead. “No. Just saying it was easier for you if I was a bastard, so you made me into one anyway.”

  “Oh, I think you did a pretty decent job being a bastard all on your own. You didn’t need any help from me.”

  “That’s how you want to play this?” Cooper shakes his head. “We both know I acted exactly the way you wanted me to, Lane. I was always dancing to your tune.”

  I toss my money down on the counter and walk out, pull away in a screech of tires. A few miles outside of town I jerk to a stop on the side of the road, slam my hands into the steering wheel, and scream, so loud and long my throat burns when I’m done, like something’s clawing for a way out. I soothe the ache with a beer and then a second and a third, choking a little in my haste. I wipe tears from my cheeks with the palm of my hand, trying to forget who I am and where I came from. Trying to forget what it means to be me.

  —

  Back at Roanoke, I plummet into sleep, my thoughts black and tangled. I dream of the Roanoke girls, lost and broken. Staring eyes and crumpled bodies. Jane. Sophia. Penelope. Eleanor. Camilla. Emmeline. Allegra. They are calling for me, begging me to help them. I search and search, but never find a single one.

  It took her an hour, all the hot water, and almost a whole bar of soap to scrub Charlie off. The worst part wasn’t the memory of his hands on her breasts, his breathy grunts, the stupid, scrunched-up face he made when he came across her belly. The worst part was how easily he gave in. She’d had such faith in him. In the Charlie who taught her how to shoe a horse and skip rocks in the pond. The Charlie who let her ride next to him on the tractor all afternoon and never asked a single question, somehow understood when she needed to get away. She’d been utterly confident when she’d told her dad it would never work. Charlie would never do it. But her dad had only grinned, quick and sharp, his fingers tracing lazy patterns on her bare back. “He’ll do it,” he’d said. “Because he’s not perfect, no matter what you think. He’s only a man. And you’re irresistible.” And then he’d proven it to her in the exact same way he’d been doing since she was fourteen.

  It turned out he was right. Of course he was. If there was one thing her father knew well, it was man’s baser appetites. At first, Charlie had looked at her like she was on fire, backed away, flush up against the wall of the barn when she yanked her top over her head, and Eleanor’s heart had soared. He was different, wasn’t going to let her down like everyone she’d counted on before him. But within seconds she could see the want slinking into his eyes, his protests not quite as strong as his reaching hands. Mouth saying, no, Eleanor, honey, no, but what was below his belt saying something else entirely. And her heart had broken. Flown right out of her chest in a thousand splintered pieces. Because, in the end, Charlie was the same as everyone else. Weak and dirty. A bitter, brutal disappointment.

  They’d ensured Charlie would never talk. Would never breathe a word about what went on out at Roanoke. Because she’d made him part of it, with naked skin and thrusting hips and ten minutes he could never take back. Charlie was ruined now. And so was she.

  For the most part, Allegra and I were able to avoid farm chores. I still woke up early and helped Granddad with the animals, but afterward I’d roll back into bed and sleep until Allegra stumbled in around ten with mugs of coffee, one of the few decent things Sharon could manage to make.

  But today Granddad told us we had to help stack hay in the barn. “Oh my God!” Allegra moaned. “That’s like pure torture!” She threw herself onto the couch.

  “Stop your drama, girl,” Granddad said, but he was smiling. He pointed at me. “You girls go put on something you don’t mind getting dirty and meet me outside.”

  “Dirty means covered in sweat and animal crap,” Allegra told me as we dragged ourselves upstairs. It was already well over ninety degrees, the day clear and sizzling with heat.

  Granddad opened both sides of the barn, but no cross breeze blew, the air still and soupy. Within minutes, I was soaked with sweat, bits of hay sticking to any exposed skin. We settled into a rhythm: Allegra heaved a bale of hay to Granddad, who tossed it up to me where I stood on the ladder, and I pushed it over the edge into the hayloft above. “Once we get ’em all up there, you girls need to stack ’em against the wall. Neat. Not just ass over teakettle like last time. You hear?” he said, looking at Allegra.

  “I hear.” She sighed. “At least I have Lane to help now.” She paused to wipe sweat off her face with her gloved hand. “Where the hell is Charlie anyhow? Isn’t this like his job?”

  “Day off,” Granddad said. He gave a grunt as he tossed me the hay bale. I caught it, but had to steady myself against the ladder with one hip when it threw me off-balance. “Whoa, Laney-girl,” Granddad said, his hand grasping me behind the knee. “You all right?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine.”

  “Seems like Charlie should be here, is all,” Allegra continued. “Pretty convenient day to go missing.”

  “He didn’t go missing. Man’s entitled to a day off once in a while.”

  “I don’t see why,” Allegra said. “We basically pay for his whole life.”

  “Mind your own business, girl,” Granddad said, in the tone that meant he was done with her bullshit. “Last I heard, you weren’t in charge around here.”

  Allegra huffed, but kept her mouth shut.

  “Why don’t you like Charlie?” I asked her.

  “ ’Cause he’s a creeper.” Allegra gave an exaggerated shudder. “And nosy as hell.”

  “I don’t even know what a creeper is,” Granddad said with a laugh. “But I’m pretty sure Charlie isn’t one.”

  I turned and pushed a hay bale into the loft. “You don’t act like you like him, either,” I told my granddad. When I turned, he was looking at Allegra, something swift and unreadable passing between them.

  “That’s not true,” my granddad said, easy, and it was almost enough to make me think I’d imagined the look.

  “Seems true,” I muttered, annoyed at being left out of something, some Roanoke past I wasn’t a part of.

  “Well, I’m his boss. He’s my employee. Hard to be friends, really. It’s enough he does what I say, works hard. Doesn’t need to be more than that.” Allegra had her head down, working on dragging a hay bale in Granddad’s direction. “Why don’t you girls cut on out of here?” Granddad said. “You’ve done enough for one day.”
<
br />   “I thought we had to stack them in the hayloft,” I reminded him.

  “Nah. You shown Lane the swimming hole yet?” he asked Allegra.

  “No.” She still wasn’t looking at either of us.

  “What are you waiting for, girl? Go on, you two, get out of here. Go have some fun.”

  —

  Turned out the swimming hole wasn’t in reasonable walking distance, tucked away on the back-side of what Granddad considered “Roanoke proper,” right before the fences ended and acres upon acres of fallow fields began. I drove Granddad’s truck, bouncing over ruts while Granddad’s warning that the truck better come back exactly as it’d left rolled around inside my head.

  “What do you think he’ll do if I wreck it?” I asked, jaw clacking after another hard bump.

  “Kill you,” Allegra said. “Jesus fucking Christ, do you have to hit every rut?”

  “I can’t see them! The grass is too high.”

  “There! Right there!” Allegra screeched. “Stop!”

  We climbed out of the truck, dragging towels and a small cooler from the bed. Sharon had offered to make us lunch, complete with a sour look on her face, but Allegra had rolled her eyes, said we’d handle it. “At least then we know it’ll be edible,” she’d said in a voice designed to carry.

  I expected the swimming hole to be something closer to its name. A small, muddy hole in the ground. But it was big and the water looked surprisingly clear. It was so quiet out on the prairie I imagined I could hear the grass baking in the sun.

  Back at Roanoke, I’d told Allegra I didn’t own a swimsuit. It wasn’t one of the many purchases I’d made since moving in. “We don’t wear swimsuits, stupid,” she’d said. “Why bother?” And now, out here with only the wind and sun and sky for miles, I saw her point.

  “Strip it,” Allegra said, pointing to my shorts and tank top. “We’re going in!”

  I pulled my tank top off over my head, unclasped my bra and threw it aside. “Is it cold?”

  “I fucking hope so!” Allegra kicked off her shorts and underwear and ran for the water.