The Roanoke Girls

by Amy Engel

  “She didn’t fight me, Lane.”

  I lower my hands slowly, gaze swinging back to Gran. “Are you seriously going to sit there and act like you did her a favor?”

  Gran gives an elegant little shrug of her shoulders. “I’m not acting like anything. I’m telling you Allegra wanted to die. I could see it all over her face. She was happy to be done with it.”

  I try to fight the vision, but I can picture it clearly. Allegra sprawled on the floor, dark hair spilling across the wood like wine. Gran crouched over her, thin fingers pulling the sash of Allegra’s bathrobe tight around her neck, twisting harder and harder. And Allegra not resisting, blue eyes slowly clouding over, a last breath sliding between purple-tinged lips. Finally able to let go, leave Roanoke behind, save her unborn baby from living her life all over again. It may have been what Allegra wanted, but only because she didn’t know any other way to be free.

  “You’re not going to get away with it,” I say. “I’m done keeping secrets about this place. I’m done pretending.” I pause, thinking of what words will hurt her the most. “You’re going to lose him anyway.”

  I barely have the words out when Gran pushes back from the table fast, lunges toward me, and catches me in the middle of the chest with her shoulder. My chair tips backward, and I go with it, head smacking against the floor, bright fireworks exploding across my field of vision. I can’t breathe, the wind knocked out of me. I roll sideways, telling myself not to panic. My breath will come back, the same as it did all the times I took a fall off the jungle gym in school, but the lack of air makes my hands spasm on the floor, my neck straining and mouth gasping.

  Through blurred vision, I see Gran reach down for a piece of her shattered wineglass. I throw my arm out, wrap it around her ankle, and yank. Gran cries out, hits the floor next to me with a thud. After several seconds that feel more like minutes, I’m able to breathe again, my lungs filling on a whooping gasp. Before I have a chance to even catch my breath completely, I’m flipped onto my back and Gran straddles my stomach. Her hands claw against my neck, banging my already tender head against the floor.

  There is a part of me, even after the revelation about Allegra’s death, that can’t believe this is happening. That wants to howl with disbelieving laughter. How can Gran, who is always in control, who has lived with this awful reality for all of her adult life and never lifted a finger to stop it, be trying to kill me now? But I look into her wild eyes, lips pulled back over bared teeth, and know this is deadly serious.

  “Get off me!” I manage to rasp. I grab hold of her right hand and bend her fingers back. The pop of bone triggers a wail from Gran. “Not so easy, is it?” I pant. “When you’re trying to hurt someone who isn’t drunk?”

  “Shut up!” Gran screams in my face, spit flecking my cheeks like rain. I try to wrench out from underneath her, but the grip of her legs around my torso doesn’t loosen. Gran isn’t big, but she’s wiry, surprisingly strong. And the blows to my head have left me weakened, my vision watery and limbs trembling. Gran leans down toward me, her forearm cutting into my windpipe. For a second I think she means to bite me as her face moves closer, and then I realize she is groping along the floor with her left hand. I manage to turn my head and see a long sliver of glass, barely beyond the reach of Gran’s searching fingers.

  I thrust my right hip up, hoping to dislodge her, but she doesn’t budge, hangs on like I’m a bucking bronco she’s trying to tame. Twisting my head to the side, I snap at her hand. My teeth make contact with her skin but don’t sink in. But it’s enough for her to bring her left hand back toward me, punching me on the side of the head.

  We are both breathing hard. Sweat runs down Gran’s neck, and moisture gathers near my ears. But whether it’s my own sweat or tears, I don’t know. What I do know is I have only a few seconds left, probably, to make some kind of move. Gran shifts slightly, and I grab her upper arm and yank as hard as I can, catching her off guard. When she tips forward, I slam my forehead into hers and shove her sideways with all the strength left in my shaking arms.

  The force of our skulls colliding brings the fireworks back to my vision, but because I anticipated the contact, I recover faster. I slither out from under Gran’s legs and roll over, belly-crawling toward the glass. She grabs my legs from behind me, climbing my body like a vine, and I scream out in frustration as she snags the ends of my hair and wrenches my head backward.

  Now we’re locked in the same battle as only a few moments ago, only this time I’m the one straining for the glass while Gran struggles to keep me contained. Over the sound of our breathing, I hear the door open behind us, but I can’t turn my head to see, my hair still tangled in Gran’s fist.

  “Yates!” Gran screams. “Help me! Get the glass!” She digs her fingers into my scalp. “Get the glass!”

  I fishtail along the floor, my fingers closing around the glass at the exact moment my granddad’s booted heel lands on top of it. Gran lets go of my hair, and I twist my face up to his.

  Granddad and I stare at each other. His face is unreadable. For an endless moment I don’t know what he will do. And even worse, I don’t know what I want him to do. If Allegra did long to die, I understand why. Sometimes even one more breath feels too hard. Granddad kicks the shard of glass away, sends it flying across the kitchen.

  “No!” Gran wails. She brings both fists down on my lower back, hard and fast. I convulse under her, trying to bring my knees up underneath me.

  “Stop it!” my granddad yells. “Jesus Christ!” He shoves Gran off me, and she cries out when her hip smacks against the floor. “What the hell’s gotten into you? Have you lost your mind?”

  I push myself to sitting, but that’s as far as I get. My head swims, and there’s a ringing in my ears that makes it hard for me to hear, words reaching my brain about a half second behind schedule. I scoot backward until I’m leaning against the wall.

  My granddad crouches next to me, his eyes roaming over my face from hairline to chin. I flinch when he reaches his hand out, but he only smooths my hair back, runs one finger along my cheekbone. “You okay, Laney-girl?”

  “I think so,” I say. “My head took a couple of good whacks.” I tilt my face away from his hand. “She killed Allegra.”

  My granddad goes completely still, his hand frozen in midair. Over his shoulder, Gran has heaved herself to her feet, one hand braced on the edge of the kitchen table. “Is it true?” he asks, eyes on me.

  “Yates,” Gran says.

  “Is it true?”

  “Yes,” Gran says on a whisper.

  My granddad sinks down to the floor, landing heavily next to me. He buries his face in his hands. His shoulders slump. I hate that my first instinct is to comfort him.

  “I’m sorry,” Gran says, moving closer. Tears trickle down her cheeks. “I couldn’t do it anymore, Yates. Not again. Please forgive me.” She kneels next to him, loops her arms around his neck, and leans her forehead against the side of his head. “Forgive me.”

  I push away from the wall, desperate to get some distance from both of them. I use one of the kitchen chairs to pull myself to standing. I hear the cicadas from outside, worked up into a frenzy, so loud it makes my ears ache. I look back at my grandparents, still tangled together on the floor. My granddad has uncovered his eyes, wrapped one arm around Gran’s back. His gaze finds mine, captures and locks.

  “I wanted it to be you,” I tell him. The cicadas scream. I rip my eyes away and limp out into the hallway to call Tommy.

  She played it over and over in her head like a movie on the nights he didn’t come to their bed, the nights he spent with one of them. In the movie version of her memory, she was as gorgeous as a movie star. A young Grace Kelly, perhaps. The truth wasn’t far off, really. She’d always been lovely, still was, even now that time had begun to do its worst to her. She remembered turning in the hotel lobby—it hadn’t happened in slow motion, naturally, but it played that way inside her head—and he was standing there, one el
bow perched on the marble check-in counter, his eyes trailing over her head to toe. He smiled, and her whole body flushed with prickly warmth, her stomach transformed into a seething coil of snakes and the lace between her legs soaked through.

  It was the first time in her life she could recall feeling something beyond polite interest, familial obligation. She’d grown used to her mother’s sharp elbow in her side, the hissed reminders to smile! when they ran into eligible bachelors at the country club. She lived always with the memory of the day she’d overheard her father and a cluster of his golf buddies on the veranda discussing what a pretty girl Lillian had grown into. Her father’s deep, dismissive laugh. Too bad a face like that is wasted on such a cold fish.

  It was true she’d never been a girl of strong emotion, but she didn’t know how to be any different. She watched other girls her own age with their flirting and bell-peal giggles and wondered what reservoir of feeling they possessed that she was unable to find within herself. Nothing made her heart race or her stomach flip. Nothing excited her. Until the stranger in the hotel lobby. He kindled something inside her with a single look, a flame that once discovered she was loath to extinguish, curious to see how hot it might burn.

  So she smiled back, let him take her to dinner over her mother’s protests and, a few days later, to the courthouse over her father’s. And after that first dinner she let him lead her up to his hotel room and peel off her clothes. She’d always assumed sex was something to be tolerated, counting down the minutes until it was over. Cold fish. But sex with Yates was all fire and mad, wild hunger. Every touch of his hands was like a magician’s scarf trick, pulling more and more feeling from her unresisting flesh. Anything he wanted she was willing to give him, just, please God, let it keep going, let it never end. Afterward, they sprawled across the bed, breathless and sweaty, and Lillian laughed and laughed, limbs so light she felt effervescent, only his big, warm hand on her belly keeping her tethered to earth.

  The next morning she told her parents that she loved him. He was the one she wanted. They tried to talk her out of it, first with reason and then with threats. She knew her happiness was only a secondary concern, what they really cared about was her ability to snag some stuffed-shirt Boston blue blood whose old family money and connections would help to prop up their own. Her father warned her she’d regret it. Her mother wept and said she couldn’t believe Lillian was throwing away her whole life. She couldn’t actually be willing to move to some farm in godforsaken Kansas for a man. I’d do anything for him, Lillian told her mother, felt the truth of the words in the tenderness at the juncture of her thighs, the hot rush of joy when she thought of him. Anything. Her mother looked up then, and Lillian turned, saw Yates watching them from the doorway, his eyes sparking with possessive pride. He proposed that very day.

  They married before the week was over. She became the wife of a man who adored her, lavished her with gifts, made her moan in bed and laugh outside of it. He was perfect, and she thought their life would be, too. But like everyone the world over, he had a flaw. Except his wasn’t a penchant for fights or a tendency to drink, nothing that easy. His flaw devastated her, tore open her chest, and scoured her heart raw.

  Oh, she thought about leaving him at first. When it was only Sophia and Penelope, and Eleanor still a bump under her dress. She told herself she stayed because she had no family to go back to. True to their word, they’d washed their hands of her before the ink dried on the marriage license. She could have left anyway, but she had no money and knew herself well enough to know she couldn’t survive without it. She’d put up with almost anything to avoid a low-paying job, some dirty apartment, thrift store clothes, and government assistance. But really, she stayed because she wanted to. Her words to her mother—I’d do anything for him—remained true. She stayed because she didn’t want to leave him. That was her flaw.

  So she took a page from her mother’s marriage playbook, the tactic used every time Lillian’s father had another in a never-ending string of dalliances. Lillian looked the other way. Made a meal of the crumbs of time Yates spent with her—never enough, always leaving her hungry for more. She consoled herself with the ring on her finger. She was his wife, the one who would never leave him, and that had to count for something. To his credit, Yates made it as easy on her as he could. He never flaunted what went on out of her eyesight, tried his best not to rub her face in it. And, as he always reminded her, he needed her. He loved her. But he didn’t love only her.

  She outlasted needy Sophia and stupid, careless Penelope. She gave birth to daughters and understood, from the second she held them, that she was never meant to be a mother. She looked into their scrunched faces, stroked their downy heads, and felt nothing beyond a pale kind of duty. Except for Emmeline. For some reason, the smell of her skin, perhaps, or the way her mouth twisted to the side before she cried, she managed to extract at least a hint of maternal instinct from Lillian. Enough that Lillian couldn’t stand to watch it happen. Couldn’t bear the thought of Emmeline breaking her own mother’s heart. Occasionally she wondered which came first: her lack of feeling for her girls or the knowledge she was destined to hate them. Her very own chicken-or-the-egg riddle.

  Sometimes, especially at the beginning, she clung to the idea that she could always leave later if it got to be too much. Gave herself an out in some distant future. But the more time passed, the more his secret became her secret, too. Her burden. Because if she told, if she exposed him, she also exposed herself. And she knew who people would blame. They might gossip under their breath about Yates Roanoke, the pervert. But Lillian would be the one they’d crucify. The mother who didn’t protect her children, who was too cold to love them. Never mind that the children didn’t want to be protected, were complicit in their own destruction. The unfairness of it rankled. The girls had made their own choices, the same way Lillian had made hers, but no one would care about that. The shame, the fault, would land at Lillian’s feet because she was the one who birthed them.

  But what it boiled down to, after the excuses and explanations, was the simple fact that she loved him. More than her daughters. More than her granddaughters. More than anything in the entire world. He made her come alive, still, with a smile or a tender touch. She would burn cities to the ground for him, if that’s what he wanted. His precious Roanoke girls always abandoned him, one way or another. But not her. She stayed. That’s what it meant to love. Never letting go. Never giving up. Never giving in. And when it was all over, she would be the last one standing.

  The only one left for him to love.

  I spend the night in the police station being questioned by Sheriff Mills, who can’t control his facial tics every time I mention my granddad and Allegra’s sexual relationship. I know they’ve brought my grandparents in, too, because Tommy tells me when he hands me a stale cup of coffee around three in the morning.

  “Is my granddad being charged with anything?” I ask. The ice pack Tommy gave me for my head has melted to lukewarm slush, and the over-the-counter painkillers aren’t touching the pounding heartbeat inside my skull.

  Tommy can barely look at me, his eyes bouncing around the small room like pinballs. “We don’t know yet. The incest stuff…” His voice breaks and he clears his throat, fist at his mouth. “With Allegra gone and no one underage still in the house, I’m not sure what they’ll do with that.”

  “Are they going to test the baby’s DNA?” I ask.

  Tommy shakes his head. “It’s a moot point now. Your gran confessed, and they don’t need to establish paternity to make a case against her. Everyone’s assuming the baby was your granddad’s, anyway.”

  “Lucky you,” I say, but my voice is gentle.

  “Yeah.” Tommy lets out a choked sound. “Lucky me.” His usually bright eyes are dim. The skin on his face hangs slack. Allegra’s death, the truth about her life, has taken something from him. The belief, maybe, that things can always be put right. Some things, it turns out, are beyond even Tommy’s abi
lity to fix. “Your granddad says he didn’t know anything about Allegra’s murder, and your gran says the same. But it’s kind of hard to believe she could move the body herself. Any thoughts on that?”

  “Talk to Sharon,” I say. “If there’s anyone who would’ve helped Gran, it would’ve been her.”

  “She knew?” he asks. “They all knew?”

  I nod, and Tommy’s shoulders slump. “I don’t understand why Allegra never said anything. Why she never left.”

  There’s no point trying to explain it to Tommy, a boy who grew up in a house where his parents loved him, where at the end of a shitty, no-good day, he could always look around the ring of faces at his dinner table and be sure of his family’s love for him. That’s a gift he took for granted and one Allegra never had. One I never had, either. And into that void stepped our granddad. Handsome and kind and doting. He created the perfect cycle of victims: motherless, unloved, and ripe for his sick devotion. We didn’t have any defense against him, especially not Allegra, who’d been with him since birth. He became the sun she revolved around, the only light in her whole world. And she couldn’t bear to live in darkness, even as the shadows of her life consumed her.

  Tommy shakes his head. “How did I not know? All these years and I never had a clue.”

  The one person I think might’ve had a clue picks me up at the police station at dawn, the sun just beginning its peach-colored ascent into the hazy morning sky.

  “Hey,” Cooper says as I sink into the passenger side of his truck. “Rough night.” It’s not a question, so I don’t bother answering.

  “Thanks for picking me up.”

  “Anytime.”

  I turn my head without lifting it from the headrest and smile at him through wobbly lips. His fingers glide through my hair, the backs of them feather down my cheek. “You did good, Lane.” He makes no move to put the truck in gear.