I stared into the fire until blinds spots appeared in my vision and tried to remember why. I thought back to the stay in the hospital, tubes hanging out of my body like clear-coated strings on a puppet. Nurses coming and going through the night with clipboards, cups and pills, the distant smiles of strange faces hovering over me. “I was going to. I really was, believe me, but—”
“You kept it from me, then?” Amy’s mouth hung open in surprise. “In the hospital you told me you didn’t remember everything that happened.”
“I was on morphine, what was I supposed to tell you? Every time I woke up the room was spinning.”
“How ‘bout what really happened? I’m a big girl.”
The blood in my ears surged like a cloud. I couldn’t think clearly enough to focus on the details. “Don’t tell me you never saw the tapes.”
“It’s not the same.”
“Our brother stabbed me, for God’s sake—with a ground down spoon handle! Trust me, we weren’t hugging goodbye. I almost died that morning.”
“And I was there that afternoon.”
“Then understand—it took a little while to heal from that, okay? I’m sorry! The press was right outside my door the entire time, waiting for a story. They didn’t care if I lived or I died, so long as it came with a headline. And I wasn’t telling them that. Could you imagine what it would’ve been like having that hit the newsstand? It was bad enough the first time. Not that you were around to deal with it.”
She smacked my arm. “I didn’t live there, smart ass. I can’t help that you stayed. There was a reason I left and it was a damn good one. And it’s not like I was giving press conferences when you were laid up in the hospital. I wasn’t looking for some headline either, as you put it.”
“I didn’t say you.”
“I’m your sister. We’re talking about our family.” She punched herself so hard in the chest it made me hurt. “Yours and mine, big shot. Whatever excuse you thought you needed to hide behind from them is fine, but I deserved to be told.”
I tempered my voice and tried to bring it down a notch. “Sharing that story with you would’ve been a mistake, Amy, a really bad one.” I shifted around. “And you’re not being honest with yourself if you think I’m wrong. I grew up with you. Hell, it was barely enough for me to handle. It wasn’t like you needed something else to take into therapy.”
“Oh, my God, please! Don’t you even start with that shit. Just because you think you can talk to horses doesn’t make you my doctor. I’m not some copy of All Creatures Great and Small, and the last time I looked, your medical license covers animals named Gidget. Does it look like I need paper training? Do yourself a favor and don’t presume to think you can figure out what it is I need and don’t need to discuss. I’ll manage that myself, thanks.”
Jacks, as if hearing he needed to come to my defense, stood up, shook his coat out beside the fire, and meandered over to where I was sitting and laid down, stretching his big head across my leg and rolling over with a deflated groan.
“I promise, I left my mind control collar at home,” I said, amused by the timing, but grateful nonetheless. Jacks gurgled loud and clear with pleasure, right leg kicking plumes of sand over onto Nicole as I scratched hard under his neck.
“Please,” Amy said over the giggles coming from Charlie. “You and your cheap parlor tricks don’t impress me.”
“Do you mind?” Nicole shook the sand from her shirt.
I answered by scratching Jacks’ leg into an informal shoveling machine.
Amy’s hand came up and brought my premature burial of Nicole to a screeching halt. “Stop it. We’re not done yet.”
“You can’t be serious? Our fucking brother’s idea of going out in style was a knife and some bullshit story. You can’t hold that against me. I thought he was lying.”
Amy shifted around in the sand and stretched her legs out. “But that’s just it—he wasn’t.”
“No,” I said reluctantly, “he wasn’t lying…not about all of it. I found that out the hard way.”
“I could have helped you.”
I thought of her own story and I knew that she was wrong. Having her involved would have made it an emotional nightmare. Not to mention the phone would have been ringing off the hook at all hours, with her self-medicating the situation into a dense rolling fog. Rehashing each and every lead again until my ear hurt with the details. Instead, I had accepted the undertaking without much hope of finding an answer.
“With what, falling apart?” I bit my lip hard and immediately regretted opening my mouth. The shock on her face was a freshly opened flower of pain.
“I’m going to pretend you didn’t just say that.” She glared at me with an expression I knew threatened blows to my head.
“Then I’ll pretend you’re right.”
Her curt laughter should have rained down stars. “Oh, I’m right, big brother, because your nothing ended up being national news, didn’t it? That’s why you flew to New Mexico. And considering you’re white as a ghost, I don’t think it was to work on your savage tan.”
“Did I say that?”
“Well, it’s kinda hard to tell. What with you talking out of both sides of your mouth. And another thing, I don’t think you need to be deciding what I can handle and what I can’t. That’s not your job.”
“Which is why things need to stay buried sometimes.”
“Oh, that’s right. Your answer for everything. Bury it.” Amy lifted her arms into the night. “How did I forget?”
“Easy kids,” Charlie said. “It’s not a pissing contest.”
I took a deep breath, knowing she was right. “That’s what I’m doing. I’m telling you right now.”
“No, you’re not. You’re giving me hell over something that you should have told me years ago. So let me help you with your little charade.”
I gave her a nasty grin, knowing she was reaching in the dark. “What?”
Her eyes drifted away. “I knew Darla was pregnant.”
You’re gonna have to do better than that. “Yeah, because I told you.”
“Sorry. But before that.”
“Wait…how did you know?”
“Because she told me, Lee. I knew it two months before she disappeared.”
Now the shoe sat on the other foot. And wearing it brought a sort of sadness with it, one that, at the middle, felt like it was ripping me a part. Of course it made perfect sense she would have known. How could she have not? And I was scared of asking the next question. But it circled around in my head as if some strange bird, with wings spread wide, sounding its deafening caws and I couldn’t keep it back.
“Did you know whose it was?”
“She told me she’d been with Marcus. I assumed it was his, and Warren couldn’t get up the stairs anymore—one of his feet had been cut off by then. He spent most of his time watching his fingers disappear. Besides I would have known if he’d managed the top landing. He smelled like rot.”
“Do you really think Paul was sleeping with Darla?” Charlie asked, seeming distressed by her own question.
I pondered that for a second. “God I hope not. Knowing everything he was capable of, I still think he said it to piss me off.” Although, with the direction things were taking, I had to wonder if I believed anything anymore. More than a few creeping suspicions lurked around in the history of our wounded family.
“I don’t think he did either. Something inside of Paul began walling itself off that year.” Amy’s voice breaking as the memory erupted out of her. “It was like watching someone curl up in a grave until he died inside and there was nothing left but hate. And I still feel guilty for that.”
“You can’t blame yourself,” I said, needing to console her.
“Why not? I learned it from you.”
It wasn’t said with spite, and I didn’t take offense to it. But neither did I respond. How could I? She was right as rain.
“Part of surviving, comes with facing your childhood,
not in demonstrating its perfect destruction. My God, he was a little boy, Lee. He was all alone,” Amy cried.
“We all were,” I whispered.
Her soul poured out onto mine and I felt the strain of her sadness spilling over the edges of me. I took her hand and held it tightly. Kissed the soft skin of her knuckles. Her eyes glistened with moisture and she wiped them away with the sleeve of her shirt. I understood it then. She still grieved for him, even though I could not. For the last few years the mention of my brother left an emptiness seated in the back of my mind. Darkness crowded around it, but I was beginning to see the little boy in it again.
I put my arm around her shoulder. When she finally stopped, I asked if she wanted to go on and she simply nodded her head.
Nicole crossed her legs. “How did you find Darla?”
God how the truth hurt sometimes. I stared into the flames until my eyes burned dry, hardly aware of the words coming out of my mouth. “Same way you find anything you aren’t looking for. Bad luck.”
“And Marcus?”
“He was there. Been there all along, I suppose. Only he was a national story by then, wadn’t he?” I said to know one in particular.
“But you knew it was him?” Amy eyes glossed over, as if I were recounting a meeting with death. In some ways it was.
“CNN played back some old footage of him preaching in a crowd. He was standing on top of concrete blocks.” I pinched off the memory. “Looked just like his daddy.”
Amy shook her head back and forth.
Nicole said, “So you decided to fly out there?”
“I had to know for sure. Nothing’s a hundred percent,” I said, suddenly looking away, knowing I had lied to everyone just then. After all, I had known almost instantly, hadn’t I? Yes, you had.
“Daddy, what really happened in Chimayo?” Charlie asked softly.
I’m not sure if I answered right away. I don’t think I did. The sound of Chimayo caused an immediate shudder in me, like the uncontrolled reaction of a cheap horror trick, someone jumping out of the dark or a black cat springing from the woods. Around my neck, the skin prickled cold. It brought to mind pictures of the dead. And I thought back to the image on the cover of Time Magazine and the quiver of fear residing there. I still had dark dreams of the girl in the water.
17
2009 - There are certain things about the past that I have come to understand, but most importantly they reside in the shape of a lie so much better than the truth. Like scars the past becomes easier to hide, those in deliberate marks carefully pressed in the shadows of skin. But like most mental scars, over time, they’re remembered almost as much for the superficial way they were inflicted than for the reasons we concealed them in the first place.
My brother Paul, I found out, knew a thing or two about that. He perpetrated a grave of deceit for our sister out of hate for our family, one that he never fully closed after her disappearance. Like a festering wound, only a scab of granite was left to shoulder the memory of her passing. For many years following Paul’s revelation, I spent time and money in the form of exhaustive searches and useless private investigators, both revealing little of the truth about our baby sister or the night we believed she was abducted. Little remained of the evidence bag gathered by police back then, reports lost or shuffled from one retired detective’s charge into another’s, a cold case file long forgotten in a unmarked storage room.
It’s typically in the dead of night the greatest clues to our own understanding are most often revealed, when it’s found out that the truth is not always the easiest to keep on our stomachs. When I looked back on that night, in the middle of one of the coldest Februarys I can remember, it was Caleb Daniels who was so involuntarily instrumental to finding Darla.
“Oh, what the hell is it now.” I thumbed the clock face back against the pile of unread books stretching across my night stand. 12:47 in the morning. The doorbell chimed again. A copy of Richard Russo’s book, Straight Man, fell on the ground with a thump when I pushed on the light.
I dragged my legs out from under the sheets and jostled though the living room, up to the beveled glass door in the foyer. My boxers, the ones with the receding hole in the crotch, felt airy, if not exposed in the porch light when I opened the door. Cold air whipped over my legs and plugged the hole in my worn shorts like an ice pick slamming into my balls.
Caleb Daniels, the town’s incumbent mayor, stood erect in the glow of the halogen bulb, wearing a brown, ragged longshoreman’s coat. Ducked behind him was his wife of three years, Evil Mary as I sometimes called her, or Mary Jo Haywood-Daniels, half obscured by Caleb’s brooding shoulders, and the only woman in town who kept her ascribed maiden name attached. And I might add, spent close to a year sleeping in my bed until I kicked her out. Obviously, I was not right in the head dating her. Looking back, it had been a strange point in my life and she was a good drinker, which made it easier to forgive. That and she knew her way around the inside of a bed. Good times all around.
“Evening, Lee,” Caleb offered rather sheepishly. “Hate to bother you this late, but…”
Mary Jo offered up a short-handed wave as if it someone was twisting her arm.
“Don’t hurt yourself,” I said, glancing back at the Mayor. “Caleb, first of all, you hate animals, so unless you’ve got a raccoon buried head-first up your ass, searching for shiny things, nothing’s going to bother me.” The impact of my joke was lost on Mary Jo as I made a backhanded referral to poker night from a week ago. Caleb had amassed his own wealth as a day trader for years and was notoriously tight with his funds, although he loved gambling and routinely took a beating.
“I’ve…I don’t know how to say this.” He turned back to Mary Jo with a frozen stare on his face. “We’ve got a problem. And because of this problem, which is a very delicate thing—”
She shoved him in the back. “Oh, spit it out, Caleb!”
“We couldn’t go in to town to see George.” His mouth circled up matter-of-factly. And I took it he meant George Funt our doctor. “It would cause a stir if it got out.”
“That’s understating it.” Mary Jo’s words pounded Caleb’s neck into his shoulders.
I raised my brow with that remark, if only to entertain the possible severity of her statement. Outside of her face, which was shockingly cold, her eyes expressed the pure language of embarrassment, the kind that certain dignified women were prone to get themselves into, like writing checks out of accounts they had no business in. A smile crept up around the edges of my heart. This time it wasn’t me.
A full moon hovered in the sky, its rather large complexion caked and bloated behind a mask of clouds. “Well, I guess you should come in, then.” I backed up, headed for the fireplace, my skin aching from the cold.
“Really, Lee, I hope this isn’t too much of an imposition.” Caleb closed the door shut behind us.
“Nah, it’s only one in the morning, you know me, I love being drug to the door in my underwear.”
“Can’t you be nice?” Mary Jo tripped up behind Caleb, standing in the wake of his feet. “I told you we shouldn’t have come here.”
“I’m sorry, Evil Mary, did you leave $27,000 and some change under the door mat?” I reached into the cabinet and pulled out the coffee, dumping grounds into the maker, adding water and a little unsettled tension.
“What’d you just call me?”
“That would be a no, I’m assuming?” I brought down three cups and set them on the counter. “So, pardon me while I fetch you up a cup of boo fucking who. And by the way, I moved the check book.”
“You’re an absolute joke and I explained myself.”
“Mary Jo,” I snorted, “you couldn’t explain your way out of a box with a good pair of scissors. That would take a little more sophistication than your average hyphen.”
“Screw you.”
“What? There’s a part you haven’t?”
“All right, stop it!” Caleb rubbed his eyes. “The both of you, en
ough already.”
I sighed, latching onto the counter and calming down. Silence stood in the room as if it had legs. Only the surge of the coffee maker dented the quiet.
After a few minutes I turned and began pouring coffee off the pot before the final hiss registered. “I’m sorry, Caleb.” I walked to the refrigerator, found the half and half and poured some into my cup before setting it up on the counter. When I looked back I realized that Mary Jo had not moved from behind Caleb. She still huddled against him. “What seems to be the problem?”
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