The Roanoke Girls

by Amy Engel

  I never had any plans to return to Osage Flats, but if I did, I always expected to find Tommy settled. It was no surprise to learn of Sarah. But somehow I never thought Cooper would have a place to call his own. I thought he’d end up more like me, a drifter even if he never set foot outside of Osage Flats, someone content to float from bed to bed, day to day. Seeing this house Cooper has turned into a home makes me feel even more like an impostor in a grown-up’s body. My life could be an eighteen-year-old’s. And Allegra, still living at home, still sleeping in the same bedroom she’s had since birth. All the Roanoke girls somehow unable to grow up, stuck in a suspended childhood their entire lives.

  I follow the gurgle of brewing coffee into the pale yellow kitchen. The room is small and needs updating, but it feels cozy, the window above the sink giving a view of wheat fields that melt into the horizon. I pull out a chair and sit down at the table, rest my forehead in my hand.

  “You might want to invest in curtains,” I tell Cooper. “All this sunshine is a killer.”

  He snorts. “I think the real problem is the forty drinks you had.”

  “It wasn’t forty,” I grumble. Cooper puts a mug of coffee down in front of me, and I cradle it between my hands, breathe in the bitter smell. “Your dog almost made me break my neck, by the way.”

  “That’s Punk. He’s good people.”

  I attempt to roll my eyes before thinking better of it, wary of the pounding in my head. Cooper takes his own mug and hops up onto the counter, long legs dangling. “You want something to eat?” he asks. “I can scramble some eggs. Or make some toast.”

  I shake my head carefully, but even that’s a mistake. “No, coffee’s good.”

  “So,” he says, after we’ve both had a few fortifying swallows, “what set you off last night? You came into Ronnie Joe’s in pretty bad shape.”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Can we not do this right now?” I ask with a sigh.

  “What? You mean talk, like normal people?”

  “We’ve never been normal people, Cooper,” I say, which doesn’t even net me a hint of a smile.

  Cooper sets his mug down on the counter next to his hip. “We’re not kids anymore, Lane. It’s time to grow the fuck up.” He’s not quite angry, but he’s somewhere in the neighborhood.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means I’ve tried to make a life for myself, a decent one. It means that I’ve worked really hard not to turn into my father. To not use the way I grew up as an excuse. I’m not willing to go backward.”

  I glance over at him. “Yeah? Don’t you still work at his garage?”

  Cooper’s face hardens. His hand clenches on his leg. “Low blow,” he says, voice tight.

  I shrug, remembering all the nasty, unfair things I said to Jeff near the end. “What did you expect? People don’t change, Cooper, not really.”

  “Yes, they do. If they really want to. And no matter what you think, I’m different than I was at eighteen. I’m not interested in a repeat performance. And last night felt like that’s where we were headed.” He runs a hand through his hair. “I can’t do it again. It hurt too much the first time around.”

  This is a Cooper I’ve never met, one I didn’t know existed. Part of me didn’t truly believe he was capable of being hurt, at least not by someone like me. But age has made him braver, more willing to put all his past grievances on the line. For me, the passing years have had the opposite effect. I’m more scared than I’ve ever been.

  He hops down from the counter and leans over me, his hands on the chair back behind me. “But we could start over,” he says. “Couldn’t we? I think we had something, Lane, even way back then. Something good hidden underneath all the crap we threw at each other.”

  I force myself to look up at him, keep my breathing steady. I feel trapped in a way that has nothing to do with his arms bracketing me, holding me in place. “What are you even talking about?” The annoyance in my voice is a relief to me. I wasn’t sure what I would give away when I opened my mouth.

  “We could start over,” he repeats as he traces one finger down my cheek, slides it gently across my bottom lip. I open my mouth, let him slip his finger inside, lick the tip with my tongue. I wait until his eyes go soft and hazy and then bite down. Hard.

  “Jesus!” Cooper hisses, yanking his hand free. “What the hell was that for?”

  “Don’t do that again.” My heart hammers so violently I imagine it’s about to barrel right out of my chest.

  “Don’t do what again?”

  “Don’t try and pretend we’re something we’re not.” My breath is coming fast and sharp, stinging in my throat. “It’s bullshit and it makes me want to puke.”

  Cooper backs away, his face a careful blank, eyes empty. It’s a look I remember well. “Maybe you’re right,” he says. “Maybe people don’t change. Because God knows, you’re still the same heartless bitch you’ve always been.”

  Sometimes it’s a revelation, even to me, how much more comfortable I am with cruelty than with kindness.

  —

  I spend the day sleeping off my hangover in my humid, stuffy bedroom, sheets slick with sweat. Around six Granddad knocks on the door to see if I want to drive into town with them for dinner, but I ignore him until I hear his footsteps retreating down the hall. After Granddad’s truck rattles down the drive, I get up and shower, find myself some leftover macaroni in the fridge, and eat it cold while standing against the counter.

  Twilight is settling in, lighting up the sky with the reddish glow that means a storm is on the way, when I decide to go into town. Charlie is out in the barn feeding the cats and gives me a wave as I drive past.

  “Still here?” he calls, and I stop, lean over to talk to him out my open passenger window.

  “So far,” I say, trying for a smile. He doesn’t smile back.

  “Thought maybe you’d be gone by now.”

  “Me too. But I need to know what happened to Allegra.”

  Charlie nods, spits into the dirt. “Like I said before, might be we never know, Lane. Not a good enough reason for you to stay.” His eyes are phlegmy. Old man’s eyes, but their gaze is keen. He picks up one of the kittens, rubs his big, scarred fingers under its tiny chin.

  “I’m doing okay,” I tell him, but my trembling hands, my whiskey-sour stomach and aching head make a liar out of me.

  “You sure?” Charlie asks.

  I nod, take my foot off the brake, and coast away. There are things I can’t talk about, even with Charlie, who holds all the same secrets I do.

  I don’t really have a particular destination in mind. The Eat is out, unless I want to share a meal with my grandparents. And Ronnie Joe’s is off-limits, the risk Cooper might be there too great. I stop at the grocery for some beer and then drive around town aimlessly, find myself at the park without making any conscious decision to stop. It’s almost full dark now, and the park is deserted. As I get out, a car passes, momentarily blinding me with its headlights.

  The air is even thicker than usual, making it difficult to inhale a full breath. My lungs turn to sponges and my hair takes on weight, sweat bubbling to the surface of my skin only five steps into the park. Heat lightning streaks across the sky. I head for the carousel, slide in through the gap in the chain link, snagging the back of my shirt on the ragged end of the fence. The only sounds are the rustling of leaves in the huge trees surrounding the carousel, the ever-present cicadas, and a lone rumble of thunder in the distance. I clamber up onto the wooden deck of the carousel and give thanks to the full moon, otherwise I’d be slamming my shins into horses as I move around the circle searching for my favorite, the black one with the aqua mane and the eyes rolling back in her head.

  “I knew you’d go for that one.” Tommy’s voice slides out of the darkness behind me, and I whirl around, smacking the horse on the head with the six-pack of beer in my hand.

  “Scared the shit out of me,” I
inform him as I swing a leg up, settle myself onto the horse’s back. “And I always pick this one. I like her.”

  “Her?” Tommy’s next to me now, pulling himself up onto the palomino on my left. It’s missing its tail, and someone has keyed a long streak down the paint on its side, leaving a glinting silver scar in the moonlight.

  “I don’t know. She always seemed like a girl horse to me.” I give her a friendly pat on the head and pull two beers from the six-pack, hang the remaining four from the horse’s ear. “Want one?”

  “Sure.” Tommy takes his beer and pops the tab, holding it out from his body as foam spews.

  “What are you doing here?” I ask, opening my own can. I haven’t seen Tommy since the silo, have no idea if Sarah’s told him about my visit. He’s acting like the same old Tommy, but I know better now, know he has secrets he’s hiding like everyone else. Maybe I should be nervous, alone in the dark with him, but I can’t make myself take seriously the idea that he might hurt me. Which is probably what Allegra thought, too. I hope he isn’t playing both of us for fools.

  “I was headed home after a late shift. Saw you getting out. You always did love this place. Figured I’d stop and say hello.”

  “Won’t Sarah be wondering where you are?”

  “I won’t stay long. Things are pretty tense at home right now anyway.” He hoists his beer in my direction. “A little liquid fortification before my arrival won’t hurt.”

  “I’m guessing you and Sarah had a talk?”

  Tommy nods. “I finally came clean, couldn’t hold it inside anymore after I told you. And you were right. She knew about Allegra the whole time.”

  “Think you’re going to be able to work it out?” I ask.

  “I don’t know.” Tommy sighs, belly-deep and heavy. “She wants to. And, really, I do, too. I love my wife.” He sucks in air, and I want to shout Stop! Don’t say it! because I know what’s coming. And I don’t want to be the keeper of those words, the bearer of his unrequited flame, but he gets them out before I can find a way to deflect them. “But she’s not Allegra.”

  “Oh, Jesus.” I sigh. “After everything, Tommy, why would you want her to be?” I lean forward and rest my forehead against the golden pole running through my horse’s body. The metal is warm and slightly tacky against my skin. “Allegra’s never going to be what you need. Trust me. You want babies and a wife and the whole American Dream. She’s never going to be soccer mom material, and I think deep down you’ve always known it.”

  “You’re probably right,” Tommy says after a pause. He lobs his crushed beer can toward the trash barrel near the fence. It makes a loud bang on contact, but in the dark I can’t tell if it was a hit or a miss. I pull another beer from the six-pack and hand it to him.

  “I never quite understood it,” I tell him. “Allegra and you. What the fascination was. She never seemed like your type, like the kind of girl a guy like you would fall for.”

  “Could say the same about Cooper and you.”

  “No, you couldn’t. Cooper and I were a matched set. So fucked up no one else would want us. We’re like the poster children for dysfunction.”

  “Cooper’s dad did a number on him, that’s for sure,” Tommy says. “But Cooper’s come a long way.” Exactly what Cooper told me in his kitchen and I didn’t want to hear. Maybe I’m jealous that I’m still as messed up as ever while he’s evolved into something more than he used to be. Tommy continues, “He’s not perfect, don’t get me wrong. But he’s turned into a good man. A better man than his dad ever was.” Tommy reaches over with his foot and snags my horse’s stirrup, rattles it to make sure he has my attention. “And I never thought you were that screwed up, for what it’s worth. Just young. We were all so damn young.”

  I laugh, but it’s not a happy sound. “We were young. But that doesn’t excuse anything. The way I treated Cooper…” This is more than I’ve ever admitted out loud, and I can’t even bring myself to finish my sentence, don’t want to think too hard about the way I left things with Cooper this morning.

  “If there’s anyone who understands lashing out, it’s Cooper,” Tommy says. “I think he’d forgive you, Lane, for all of it. But you have to be willing to let him.”

  I drop my empty beer can at my feet, open another one even though the ghost of last night’s alcohol still lingers on my tongue. “No offense, Tommy, but you’re not exactly in a position to be giving relationship advice.”

  Tommy laughs, the one I recognize, not the sharp-edged version from the silo. “Touché.”

  “Besides, I thought we were talking about Allegra and you.”

  “I used to watch her all the time, even in grade school.” Tommy shakes his head, a soft smile passing across his face. “She always seemed so fragile, underneath all her crazy bravado.”

  “She was fragile,” I say. “She is fragile.” Which is the simplest explanation for how Tommy fell in love with her. He was always the boy who wanted to make things better, fix anything broken. And in a world filled with damaged goods, Allegra is the most broken thing of all.

  Tommy nods. “When she agreed to go out with me, I thought I was the luckiest son of a bitch in the world. Took me a while to figure out she didn’t choose me, she just allowed herself to be chosen. Which isn’t the same thing at all. She was never really mine.”

  “No,” I say. “She wasn’t.” I grip my horse’s mane as though I’m about to be bucked off. “What do you think happened to her, Tommy? Not the cop version. The honest version. The guy-who-loves-her version.”

  Tommy exhales, his breath uneven. “She’s dead, Lane. That’s what I think. She’s gone. It all got to be too much for her and she…drifted away.”

  I close my eyes. It’s what I think, too. One way or the other, Allegra is gone. But I can’t say it out loud. I’ve never been superstitious, never believed you can change fate through the power of a wish or a curse. But I’m not willing to risk it on Allegra’s life, not willing to voice dark words that might forever seal her fate.

  “If I knew anything concrete about what happened to her, I’d tell you,” Tommy says, voice quiet in the darkness.

  I don’t open my eyes. “Even if it made you look bad?”

  “Yes.”

  A strong breeze blows through the trees, cooling my skin and bringing with it the loamy scent of rain. “Even if Sarah had something to do with it?” I ask.

  The slightest of pauses. “Even then.”

  I wish I could believe him.

  Even when Allegra sat still she never stopped moving. Some part of her was always in motion, a finger twisting a long wave of hair, a foot tapping a rhythm against her chair, her tongue passing back and forth across her lower lip. But her fidgeting didn’t have the same unfocused, sluggish energy I usually associated with people who couldn’t hold still. Hers felt frenzied, uncontrollable almost, like something lived beneath her skin and was playing her body like a fiddle. Sometimes being in the same room with her exhausted me.

  “How do you spell abortion?” Allegra asked.

  My head jerked up. Allegra tapped Granddad’s pocketknife against her leg, her free hand tracing the wooden arm of the chair where she sat. “Seriously?”

  Allegra laughed. “No, not seriously.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Why are you always carving up stuff?” I asked, my gaze falling to the pocketknife.

  Allegra’s hand tightened protectively around the knife. “I don’t know. I like doing it. Sometimes a word or a feeling is so strong, I have to get it out. It helps me.”

  “Helps you with what?”

  Allegra shrugged with tight shoulders. “Feel normal, I guess. Calm.” She flicked open the pocketknife, ran the blade along the wood.

  “So it’s kind of like a diary?”

  “Yeah.” Allegra snorted. “The diary of a person with a supershort attention span.”

  “And you don’t mind people reading what you write?”

  Allegra shook her head. “No, sometimes that’s the poi
nt.”

  “Like when you left cunt on Sharon’s cutting board?”

  “Exactly,” Allegra said, a smile on her face. “You should try it sometime. You could write about how much you and Cooper looooove each other.” She mimed writing in the air with the knife. “Lane Sullivan. Mrs. Lane Sullivan.” She stuck a finger down her throat so I’d know exactly how she felt about that idea.

  “Cooper and I aren’t in love.” And we weren’t. Or at least not the kind Allegra meant. The night of the party and the fight with Nick hadn’t ended things between Cooper and me, only reduced us to our lowest common denominator—angry sex that left me hollowed out in the aftermath. We were horrible to each other now, and it felt familiar, safe. Safer by far than whatever it was I’d felt that day in Cooper’s bed. Our barbed-wire affection was the type of love I understood.

  “Whatever,” Allegra huffed. “You two still fuck all over the place.”

  Now it was my turn to shrug. “Your point?”

  “I don’t want to talk about Cooper,” Allegra said, eyes flashing.

  “You brought him up,” I reminded her. “And what about you and Tommy? I bet you’ve got a few Allegra Kennings scrawled around here somewhere.”

  Allegra looked away from me, her gaze lingering on the view from the library window, endless green prairie rolling into the distance. “I’m not going to marry Tommy,” she said.

  “He would, though,” I said. “In a heartbeat.”

  “Even if I wanted to someday, Tommy’s too nice for me,” Allegra said. “Besides, I’ll never leave Roanoke.”

  That stopped me. I shifted from where I’d been lying on the floor, flicking my way through a fashion magazine. “Why not? What are you going to do here your whole life?”

  Allegra’s eyes snapped back to mine. “You’re not staying?”

  “Forever?” I laughed. “I seriously doubt it.”

  “But…where would you go?” Allegra’s knuckles were white where they gripped the arm of the chair. I forgot sometimes she had been born here, had never seen anyplace but Roanoke and Osage Flats. When I told her stories about New York, I might as well have been describing life on an alien planet.