The Roanoke Girls

by Amy Engel

  —

  I barged into Charlie’s apartment without knocking. He was sitting on the couch watching a soap opera, which might have been funny on a different day. “Lane?” He pushed himself up from the saggy cushion, his brow furrowed.

  “Can you drive me to Wichita?” I asked.

  Charlie’s eyes ran over my face, down my body to my leg. “You’re bleeding.”

  I glanced down. I’d tripped in my haste to get up the stairs to his apartment, smashed my shinbone against the wooden steps. The cut was deep, but I couldn’t even feel it. “It’s nothing. Please, Charlie, can you drive me?”

  “Why’re you crying, Lane?” he asked.

  I gulped in air. “Please,” I said again, scrubbed at my wet cheeks with both hands.

  He pulled a handkerchief from his back pocket and handed it to me, waited until I’d wiped my face and handed it back before he spoke. “You running?” That’s all he had to say, those two words enough to make the depth of his knowledge clear between us.

  I nodded, and Charlie’s eyes dropped to the floor. I knew right then he wouldn’t help me. But I wanted to make him say the words. “I can’t,” he said finally. “Your granddad finds out I helped you leave, I’d be out on my ass. And I don’t have anywhere else to go.”

  “How can you sit up here and let it go on?” I asked. “How can you not do anything?”

  Charlie’s gaze returned to mine. His face was etched with lines, his eyes dim. He shook his head, and I backed away from him. “Wait,” Charlie said. “Wait a minute.” He raised one finger and crossed the room to a small desk against the wall. He pulled an envelope from the top drawer and held it out to me. “It’s all I’ve got. Five hundred dollars. Won’t get you far. But it’ll get you somewhere.”

  “Is that what you gave my mother, too?” I asked. “An envelope of money?”

  Charlie didn’t answer, thrust the envelope toward me. I thought about not taking it, showing him what I thought of his attempt at help. I could turn my back and make it obvious that what he was offering wasn’t near enough after a lifetime of watching what went on at Roanoke and never speaking up. But I needed to get away more than I needed to make a point. I took the money.

  —

  Back in my room, I packed my suitcase, stuffed the money down in the bottom of my backpack, and waited. My fingers drummed on the floor where I sat. I felt like Allegra, unable to hold still, my whole body sizzling with nervous energy. When I heard Granddad’s heavy tread on the stairs heading down and Allegra’s quick steps going up to her room, I went after her. She had her back to me as she dug around in her dresser. I stopped in the doorway for a second, watching her.

  “Allegra,” I said finally, and she whirled around, a shirt bunched in her hand.

  “Oh my God,” she breathed. “Don’t sneak up on me!” She cocked her head. “You look like hell. What’s wrong?”

  She most definitely did not look like hell. Her hair was mussed, her cheeks flushed pink, her eyes sparkling. I thought I could see the slightest hint of stubble burn on the tender skin of her neck. My stomach heaved. “I saw you,” I said, voice low.

  “Saw me what?”

  I didn’t answer, and the shirt floated out of Allegra’s hand, settled on the floor at her feet. “Oh.”

  “Allegra,” I whispered.

  She ran to me, grasped my hands in hers, and pulled me to the bed, forcing me down to sit beside her. “It’s not a big deal, Lane,” she said, looking at my face and laughing a little. “Okay, I mean, it’s a big deal, but it’s not bad. I promise, it’s not.”

  I squeezed her hands, trying to force her to focus on my words. “I’m leaving. Right now. Come with me.”

  Allegra’s mouth opened, then closed. Her hands went limp in mine. “Leaving? You can’t!”

  “I can’t stay here. Not when…Allegra, it’s wrong. It’s sick!”

  Her smile was sweet, patient, as if I simply didn’t understand. “Oh, Lane, it’s not like that at all. He loves us so much. And I love him. More than anything. Granddad—”

  “He’s our father, Allegra!” I practically screamed. Pinpricks of heat bloomed along my neck and chest as my breathing sped up.

  “So? That doesn’t change anything,” Allegra said, a little more agitated now, the pink in her cheeks flaring to red. “And he loves us. We’re everything to him.” She raised one of my hands and laid it against her hot cheek. “We really are sisters, you know.”

  “How long has it been going on?” I asked. “Your whole life? Since you were little?”

  “Oh my God, no!” Allegra said, eyes wide. “He’s not a pervert! Nothing happened until I was fourteen. Old enough to decide for myself.” Her words were bad enough, but the worst part was seeing how much she believed them, how easily he put it all back on her.

  I shook my head. “I can’t stay. I’m leaving.” Allegra had never seen the damage years of this life did, but I had. I’d lived it with my mother. I couldn’t do it again. I couldn’t let it be me. I tried to pull my hands away, but Allegra held on tight, her fingers digging in so that I hissed through my teeth. The calmness in her eyes faded, replaced with a wild desperation.

  “Please don’t go,” she begged. “Please, Lane. Please don’t leave me. Please don’t leave me.” She was crying now, fat, pregnant tears rolling down her flushed cheeks. “We can all stay here and be happy. I won’t be jealous anymore. It’ll be perfect. I promise.”

  I didn’t know what to say to her. What string of words to put together to make her change her mind and come with me. Maybe no combination would ever work, a lifetime of our granddad’s whispered lies stronger than any truth I could ever come up with.

  I pulled my hands away from hers as gently as I could, my own tears falling. When I stood, she wrapped her arms around my waist, buried her face in my stomach. I looked down, ran my fingers over her dark hair. My hair. My mother’s hair. Our father’s hair.

  “Please,” she whispered. “Don’t tell anyone, Lane. If you have to go, then go. But let me stay here. This is where I want to be. I love him. Don’t tell anyone. Promise?”

  I could hardly speak, breathing a kind of torture under the heavy weight of pain. And God help me, I promised. But not for Allegra. And not for my granddad. For myself, so no one would ever know where I came from. So I could keep on pretending I didn’t know, either.

  —

  I went back to my room and grabbed my suitcase, slung my backpack over my shoulder. I took the stairs as quietly as I could, slunk down the front hall and let myself out the screen door with hardly a sound.

  “Lane?”

  I whirled and found my granddad standing in the doorway, his eyes traveling from my suitcase back to my face. He pushed open the screen and joined me on the porch. “Why don’t you come back in, honey,” he said. “So we can talk.”

  I shook my head, tightened my hand on my backpack strap in the hope he wouldn’t see it shaking. “Nothing to talk about.”

  He took a careful step toward me. “Sure there is. We’re family. We can work this out. I know we can.”

  “You’re fucking her!” I yelled, flinging my backpack toward him. My granddad didn’t even flinch. “How do we work that out? And my mother? All of them? All of them?”

  “We love each other. I’ve loved every one of them.” His voice was soft, reasonable. If I didn’t concentrate hard, it would be easy to slip over into believing him.

  “And what about Gran? She sits back and what? Tells herself it isn’t happening? Or does she not care?”

  “Your gran understands,” Granddad said.

  My laughter was wild and familiar. I sounded like my mother on those days she locked herself in her room, tearing at her own hair. “Understands what?”

  “That you girls are special. So damn special. And what we have together is special, too. It’s worth protecting. It means something, Lane, the way we all feel about each other. Other people might not understand, but your gran does. She doesn’t interfere
.”

  “You’re crazy,” I whispered. “I always thought my mother was the crazy one. But really, it was you.” I felt the weight of my mother’s love for me for the first time, there on Roanoke’s porch with my whole world crumbling around me. She might not have been able to love me the way a mother should, with kisses, and kind words, and hopes for my future. But she’d done the very best thing for me—she’d taken me away from here and tried her hardest to keep me from ever coming back. It wasn’t her fault she’d failed. I understood now that she’d held on as long as she was able. I tried to wait. I’m sorry. Discovering the secrets of Roanoke had given my mother back to me, long after the understanding of her pain could do either of us any good.

  “Where are you going to go?” my granddad asked. “What will you do? You’re only sixteen.”

  “I don’t know. Get a job. I’ll figure it out.” I couldn’t allow myself to think beyond the end of the driveway. Not yet. It was too scary, the world too enormous, and I knew fear would lead me right back into the house if I let it.

  My granddad took a step closer. “You know what happens to girls who run away? They end up living on street corners, prostituting themselves for food and—”

  “How’s that any different than what I’d be doing here?” I demanded. “At least out there I wouldn’t be screwing my own father!”

  “Please don’t,” my granddad said like I was stabbing him right in the heart. “Don’t make it into something ugly. It’s not ugly.”

  “How can you say that? How can you even think that? I thought this place could finally be my home,” I said on a cracked whisper. “But my mother was right, it’s a nightmare.” A nightmare made worse because even with my mother’s warning, I fell into it so easily, caught up in the awful Roanoke spell almost from the start.

  “Oh, Laney-girl,” my granddad said, his own eyes tearing up. “Of course this is your home. You’re a Roanoke girl, through and through.” He was right in front of me now, and he reached out, put a tentative hand on my elbow. His fingers burned into my skin, and I didn’t pull away.

  “But you and Allegra…”

  My granddad’s hand glided up my bare arm. “I love Allegra,” he said. “But I love you just the same.” That hadn’t been what I meant when I spoke, but somehow he read the intent below the surface of my words, the shameful truth I didn’t want to acknowledge. Why hadn’t he picked me?

  “I was waiting until you were ready, is all,” he said. His fingers stroked the back of my neck, under my ponytail. “I wanted you to be sure.”

  I saw his face moving closer, and still I didn’t stop him. He kissed my cheek, the corner of my mouth. He paused, and the world slowed down. I could hear my own harsh breathing, feel the pressure of his fingertips on my neck pulling me closer. His lips against mine were soft, familiar. His kiss tasted of my mother’s tears, Allegra’s neediness, my own worst impulses. We were all there, all the doomed Roanoke girls, in the touch of his mouth. Something inside me expanded, took flight with dark and twisted wings. It wasn’t desire. Nothing that simple. It was more like a recognition. Like he was already swimming through my blood, already inside of me. He was a destiny it was possible to run from, but one I would never escape.

  I lurched backward, covered my mouth with one hand. “No,” I said. I rubbed hard at my lips, trying to dislodge the feel of him, the slide of his tongue against mine.

  “Don’t go,” he said, voice rough and pleading, the edges of his mouth white with strain. “I love you.”

  I dropped my hand. “No,” I said again, my voice louder. I could tell from the look on his face that it wasn’t a word he was used to hearing. He didn’t look angry, just confused. I was probably the first one of us to ever say it to him. But it didn’t make me feel strong or brave. I only felt abandoned.

  I grabbed my backpack, lifted my suitcase, and walked down the porch steps onto the gravel drive. Hot wind howled off the prairie, whistled under the eaves of the house. I walked away, and he didn’t try to stop me. He let me go, and I told myself that was how I wanted it.

  —

  Tommy was waiting for me at the end of the drive, leaning against the side of his car. “Hey,” he said when he saw me. “Why do you have a suitcase?”

  “I need a ride to Wichita.” When I’d called him, the only person I could think of to ask, I’d just said I needed a ride, left all the details for later.

  “Wichita?” Tommy said slowly, like he’d never heard the word before.

  “Yeah.” I opened the back door and heaved my suitcase inside. “To the bus station.”

  “Lane.” Tommy put his hand on my arm, but I flinched away. I couldn’t stand for anyone to touch me, not yet. Not now. “What’s going on?”

  “Just…can you do it or not, Tommy?” I asked, squinting against the brutal sun. “If you can’t, I’ll hitch a ride.”

  Tommy stared at me for a second, then nodded. I slid into the passenger seat and waited for him to get in. I took one last look at Roanoke in the distance. For a second, it looked like Allegra was standing on the front porch, as she had on my arrival, but it might have been a trick of the light.

  Tommy waited until we were ten miles down the road before he spoke, which was longer than I thought he’d be able to make it. “Does Cooper know about this?”

  “No. And you’re not going to tell him, either.”

  Tommy laughed. “How am I supposed to keep this a secret? It’s going to be pretty obvious you’re gone.”

  “You can tell him I’m gone. But don’t tell him you drove me to Wichita.” I took a deep breath. “And don’t tell him I’m pregnant.”

  The car swerved a little, the driver’s side tires skating the edge of the double yellow line before Tommy pulled it back. “You can’t tell me something like that!” he protested. “You can’t tell me you’re pregnant and say it’s a secret.”

  Before I’d ever set foot in his car, I’d known Tommy would need an answer, a reason why I was leaving. And I’d promised Allegra I wouldn’t say anything about our granddad. Even without that promise, I don’t think I could have made my mouth form the words. Not to Tommy, who even if presented with the evidence right in front of his face would probably have tried to find a way to make it into something less horrible, something he could live with. So I told him about the baby instead. And I trusted he wouldn’t break my confidence. Tommy might have loved Cooper like a brother, but even he wasn’t naïve enough to believe Cooper and I had any business being parents.

  “What are you going to do?” Tommy continued. “Are you going to have the baby? Do you have any money?” He fired the questions at me, glancing from the road to me and back again, each word amping up my anxiety. I hadn’t given much thought to what came next, my only goal to get away from Roanoke. But if Tommy kept talking, I would panic, beg him to turn the car around and take me back to where at least I knew exactly what the future held.

  “Shut up, Tommy!” I said. “I don’t know, okay? I don’t know.” I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and let the sun seep through my eyelids. “All I know for sure is you can’t tell Cooper.”

  “It’s not fair,” Tommy said, “to ask that of me.”

  “Tommy, if you think anything in life is fucking fair, you’re an idiot.”

  He stopped talking to me after that, his mouth set in a thin line, his hands clamped on the wheel. The parking lot of the bus station was deserted when we drove up, only a few cars parked on the outer edges. It could have been the same day I arrived, nothing different except for me. I’d thought I was stepping into a whole new world that day, one that might make up for all the years that had come before. I felt the hot sting of tears and rubbed my temples, willing them away.

  Tommy pulled up to the entrance, and I put a hand on his when he started to set the emergency brake. “No. It’s okay. Just drop me off.”

  “I can’t leave you here.”

  I tried to smile. “Sure you can.”

  “This is going to kill
him,” Tommy said. “I’ve known Cooper my whole life, Lane. I know him better than anyone does. And I know how he feels about you, even if you want to pretend like you don’t.”

  I opened the passenger door, sucking in a breath as the heat radiating off the pavement smacked me in the face. “It was one summer, Tommy. Give me a break.”

  “What does that matter? One summer is enough. Hell, sometimes one day is all it takes to change your life.”

  He was right. One summer was more than long enough, for a lot of things. Already I knew these one hundred days would be the rotted foundation the whole rest of my life was built upon. “He’ll get over it,” I said with a nonchalance I didn’t feel. “As long as you don’t tell him about the baby. That will only make it worse.”

  “What about Allegra?” Tommy asked. The words rushed out of him as if he was using everything he could think of to try to change my mind.

  I couldn’t look at him, kept my gaze focused on the tinted doors of the bus station. “She’ll be fine, too. She has you.” My throat ached as I swallowed. “And Roanoke.” I got out of the car and pulled my suitcase from the backseat. “She’ll be fine.”

  Tommy leaned over, braced his hand on the passenger seat, and looked out at me. “Are you sure about this?”

  I nodded. “Yeah.” I slammed the back door. “Thanks for the ride.”

  Tommy shook his head, blew out a defeated breath. “Good luck, Lane.” I stood on the uneven pavement and watched him drive away. Stayed there until his silver car turned into a tiny glimmering speck in the distance.