Is it a coincidence? Or did something happen to explain how fast and how far they fell?
I have to know.
Dropping my keys in my bag, I cross the weedy lawn.
The house shows all its age and neglect: peeling paint, even a cracked window kept from shattering by two-by-fours. I might think it was abandoned if it weren’t for the truck pulled up beneath a plastic carport.
Before I can even make it to the door, it opens, and there she is. Cora Allen. Or rather, some rotted version of her, scabby and grayscale. Only her eyes are the same: big and brown and thoughtful.
“Abby Williams,” she says, before I can even lift a hand. “I heard you were back.” She scratches at her stomach beneath her T-shirt. “Been expecting you to find me.”
“Hi, Cora.”
She turns around and disappears inside again, and for a second I stand there, confused about whether she means for me to follow. But then she leans out the door to gesture me after her. “Well, come on in. Let’s get this over with.”
I follow her inside, which is hazy with old cigarette smoke. The kitchen counter is cluttered with empty beer bottles and before she sits, she grabs a new one from the fridge. This isn’t fun day drinking. This is something much darker. I have a quick look at the inside of her refrigerator: water, beer, orange juice, and a shriveled round of cheddar.
We take a seat in the main room, and she switches off the TV. She pops the beer against the coffee table edge, which is scored from hundreds of previous beers. She won’t stop scratching, either. Misha wasn’t lying. She’s a drug addict. It’s painfully obvious.
“So? What is it you want to know?”
I’m more and more puzzled by the minute. “It seems like you’re the one with something to tell me?”
“You’ve been asking around about Kaycee Mitchell, huh?” She takes a swig of her beer. “What did all the others tell you?”
“Nothing. And all the same exact thing. That they haven’t heard from her in years. That she was a liar. That they were glad to see her go.” Cora flinches, just for a second. “How about you?”
For a second, Cora says nothing. We stare at each other until I have to look away.
“No. She scared me sometimes. But no.” She takes a long sip of her beer. “We let her down, all of us. She was sick, you know,” she goes on. Then, in response to my look of surprise, “Sick in the head. Her dad used to be too fond of her, if you know what I mean.”
Suddenly my stomach drops. I remember Kaycee in fourth grade, proudly showing off tubes of mascara and lipstick, tucked at the bottom of her backpack. My daddy gave them to me, she told me. He says I’m a big girl now so why not?
I think of Kaycee, heating up a silver Zippo lighter, shocking my skin with the burn of steel. You know it’s love because it starts to hurt. I was too young to understand.
The air is stifling—the smell of stale beer coats everything. I feel as if I can hardly draw a breath.
“She tried to tell us, too. What do you do about something like that? Misha accused her of wanting attention. Misha was always accusing everybody of wanting attention.”
I clear my throat. “That’s called projection,” I say, and she laughs, throaty and surprisingly rich.
“I’d say.” Suddenly she leans forward, putting her elbows on her knees, her eyes fighting their way to sharp focus. “I think that when she got sick, it was because of that. You ever heard about that? How the mind can make you feel bad even when you’re not?”
“Sure,” I say carefully. “But I thought she was only pretending?”
She leans back. All at once, she seems totally exhausted. “No,” she says quietly. “It wasn’t pretend. She was sick all right. We all were. It was no one’s fault but our own.” She directs the words toward her beer, as if it’s proof of this.
Misha always said that what happened senior year was a prank that quickly spiraled out of control: as more and more girls began to get sick, no one knew what was real and what was pretend anymore. Cora’s idea is that the sickness was a kind of punishment.
But for what?
She avoids my eyes and watches her beer drain toward empty with every sip, as if trying to figure out what’s happening to it. No point in holding back now. “Was it because of the Game?”
Bingo. She jerks her head up to stare at me. “That was some sick shit. I remember when they found Becky Sarinelli hanging. I thought I was going to puke.”
“Me too.”
“It was Kaycee’s idea, you know.” She stabs a smoke ring with her pointer finger to dissipate it. “Not the Game itself. The senior boys had been competing for nudies for years. But the money part.”
The cigarette smoke is making me nauseous.
“That was typical Kaycee,” she says. “Always running some scheme.” And I know she’s right. Kaycee was always scheming for money, even when we were little. Her family was worse off than mine, or even Cora’s. “She used to steal stuff whenever she could. We all did—beer and rolling papers and gum and shit like that. But with her it was like she couldn’t help it.” She shook her head. “So then Kaycee had this idea, right, that we could ransom back the pictures they took. Make the girls pay, or else. I didn’t want to. But you know how Kaycee was…” She trails off, shrugging.
She doesn’t need to finish, anyway. I know what she would have said: It was impossible to say no to Kaycee. She could talk you into anything.
Dogs like that should be put down.
“What did she do with the photos after people paid up?” I ask. “Did she actually return them?”
Cora frowns. “What do you think?” She leans forward to stub out a cigarette. “She kept them.”
Chapter Thirty-One
On the way to Monty’s house that afternoon, I get two calls from the same Indiana area code—Shariah, I assume, has found my note. Joe’s face pops up cartoonish in my head, saying focus, saying this is about what’s happening now, but I send the calls to voicemail instead.
The water results have bought us all the time in the world. We have nothing but time now: years of litigation, of grunt work, of remediation and blame-casting and bureaucratic red tape.
But I let Kaycee disappear once before. I can’t let her disappear again—not when I’m closer than ever to finding the truth.
Cora’s words play again and again in my head.
Her daddy used to be too fond of her, if you know what I mean.
Always running some scheme.
She’s right about some of it. Even as a kid, Kaycee stole things—little things, trinkets from other people’s houses, stuff from the cubbies at school. She was never sorry about it afterward. I remember when Morgan Crawley cried until her nose bubbled with snot over a pair of mittens her grandmother had knitted her—mittens Kaycee had showed me, gloating, at the bottom of her bag the day before.
“Then she shouldn’t have been so careless with them,” she said, when I confronted her about it. “If you love something, you have to take care of it and keep it safe.” She was so angry at me that she took the mittens and threw them in a storm drain, and I’ll never forget how she looked then, standing in the street while a rush of rainwater roared the mittens down into the sewer. “Look. Now they’re not stolen anymore. Now no one has them.” As if it had been my fault all along.
Nothing was ever her fault. She was immune to guilt, and her memory worked like one of those old gold sifting pans, shaking away all the dirt, all the bad stuff, leaving intact only the things she really wanted to remember, the things that made her look good.
That’s why the thing with Chestnut’s collar has always puzzled me, too. What made her keep the collar and then, so many years later, give it back? Why was that so important to her? It was as if Chestnut’s death wasn’t proof of something terrible she’d done, but proof of something terrible done to her.
But what? It didn’t make any sense.
Your problem, Abby, isn’t that you can’t draw. It’s that you can’t see.
—
I follow the school bus right to Monty’s doorstep, expecting to see him pour out through the open door, all six feet of him. But only a girl disembarks, bent nearly double beneath the weight of an enormous backpack, and trudges across a browning yard to a neighboring house.
Maybe Monty caught a ride home with his mom: she works in the cafeteria at the high school and part-time in one of the tollbooths on Interstate 70, which runs between Columbus and St. Louis. She told me once she liked to wear her hairnet there, too, tried to dress herself down and look as plain as possible, so the late-night drivers coming through would be less tempted to stroke her palm when she was giving change or whisper dirty things to her.
Monty lives in a funny patchwork house that looks like two ranch homes got into a collision and never got unstuck. An American flag hangs over the door.
The house is dark inside. But his mom, May, comes to the door as soon as I knock, still wearing her hairnet.
“Abigail,” she says, and gives me a huge hug. She smells like cinnamon airspray. I’ve always thought May was like a favorite quilt, colorful and comforting, soft to touch. The kind of mother who makes you feel, right away, like you’re at home. My mother was exactly like that.
“It’s good to see your face.” She holds my cheeks briefly between her hands. “I came around the other day to visit your daddy but he said you had your own place…?”
I nod. “Yeah, I rented a place behind the hair salon,” I say. Feeling suddenly judged, I add, “I just didn’t want to put my dad out. And I’ve gotten used to my privacy now, living in Chicago.”
“Seems lonely to me,” she replies, and I’m not sure whether she means it as a criticism. But a second later, she smiles.
“Come in, come in.” She steers me into a cramped seating area wobbly with teetering sports trophies and framed family photographs: she must have tripled her collection since I was last here years and years ago. “Sit down. Make yourself at home. Can I get you anything? Water? Soda? I got some of my special tea!”
“Sure, tea is great,” I say, as she bumps off into the kitchen. I sit down next to a shrine to Monty’s incremental growth from grinning, gap-toothed child to enormous muscle man.
She returns a moment later with a tall glass of tea clinking with ice. “Monty told me he saw you last night at the game.” She puts a coaster on the table and takes a seat across from me, sighing as she eases off her feet. “You know half the kids showed up today still smelling like beer. Alcohol-free zone, my you-know-what. Last week of school, too. Some of them don’t even bother bringing books to class anymore.”
“You didn’t go?”
She shakes her head. “Football and more football. Seems like that’s the only thing anyone can agree on.”
“Is he at home?” I ask. But before she can respond, I get my answer: from deeper in the house, the crash of something heavy to the ground.
“Gimme a second,” she says, stiffly, and pushes up from the sofa. She disappears and I hear a muffled dialogue, the rapid back-and-forth of teenage stubbornness. She returns looking not angry, just exhausted.
“Hun, he’s not up for talking,” she says in a low tone. “I had to take him out of school early today. He turned over his desk, got into a shouting match with the principal.” For a second, she looks like she might lose it. “I’m just at my wit’s end with him. But what do they expect, dropping that kind of news at assembly?”
“What news?” I ask, and she stares at me.
“Lord, I thought that’s why you came by.” She scooches forward on the couch and lowers her voice, casting a nervous glance in the direction of Monty’s room, as if he might overhear. “Terrible, terrible thing. She’ll pull through okay, though. Still, a girl so young…a good student, too…”
“What girl? What happened?”
“Tatum Klauss,” she says, and my heart stops. The girl who accused Monty of stalking her, according to Sheriff Kahn. “Monty’s had a thing for her for ages—since they were freshmen and they used to ride the same bus, before her parents divorced. Sweet as anything, and always so polite when she sees me in the line. Not like most kids. Look at you like you’re trash. A bright student, too.”
Talking to May has always been like trying to separate strands of spaghetti left to cool in a colander. Every idea leads to ten others. “What happened to Tatum?”
“Got ahold of a bunch of her brother’s attention medicine and took them all at once—last night, when everyone was at the game.” May makes the sign of the cross. “Thank God her momma wasn’t feeling well and came home early. Found her puking her guts out and barely conscious. She rushed her right to the emergency clinic in Dougsville.” The same clinic where I rushed my father, after his fall. “They say she’ll be just fine. Can you imagine? And she’s a straight-A student, too. Got one of them Optimal Scholarships. Supposed to be heading out to college in the fall…” May says “college” the way someone might say “heaven.” In some ways, it isn’t surprising. Around these parts, both are just as hard to get into.
I take a long swallow of tea, hoping it will wash down the sudden bitter taste in my mouth. “Do they know why?”
May shakes her head. “Sheriff Kahn was there for assembly, and that’s all he said.”
An image blinks in my mind, hundreds of hands passing photographs through the risers. And Becky Sarinelli, hurtling herself down from the bleachers, trying to escape—but not quickly enough.
Not nearly quickly enough.
Some things are inexplicable, Sheriff Kahn said that day. It seems there are a lot of things he hasn’t been able to explain.
May adds, with sudden ferocity: “Well, he ain’t gonna pin the pills on Monty, is he? Doesn’t mean he won’t try. I swear, if the sun turned green tomorrow he’d say it was Monty’s fault.”
“Has Sheriff Kahn told you whether Gallagher is going to press charges?”
“It isn’t Gallagher,” she says. “Even that old kook has more sense than that. Sheriff Kahn keeps saying they need to make him an example!”
“I’ll talk to Sheriff Kahn again.” I say the words automatically, though I know the promise in them is empty. If Gallagher isn’t pressing charges, there’s no reason to go after Monty. Unless Kahn’s trying to cover for someone else.
“He won’t eat,” May is saying. “The school’s saying they might keep him from walking at graduation. If he graduates.” May’s eyes well up and she swipes at them with the back of her hand. “Look at me, crying over spilled milk. I keep thinking of Tatum’s mother…”
“Will you tell Monty I came by?” Suddenly I just need to get out of here. A hundred Montys grin at me from a hundred different pasts: a hundred idiot smiles, blissfully unaware of what comes next. “Have him call me, if he feels like it. Here.”
She lifts my card by its edges, as if she’s afraid to smudge it. When she glances up, I see a look of uncertainty travel all the way from forehead to chin. “Why did you come by, then, if not about what happened to Tatum?”
“No reason.” I stand up, alarmed by a cloud of black that temporarily darkens my vision. I steady myself against the wall. “To say hi, that’s all.”
She nods. But I can tell she isn’t convinced.
I’m already in the car when she pokes her head out again to shout, “You say hi to your daddy for me, okay?”
It looks like she says something else, too, but the engine swallows whatever it is.
Girls, games, poisons—the past is repeating itself, rippling outward like the surface of the reservoir.
—
I’ve missed another call—not a local number, this time. I pull over onto one of the nameless dirt roads, so narrow that the fields slap my side mirrors. I cut the engine and listen to a faint wind sift the leaves. From here the road does nothing but disappear into cornstalks, and I imagine if I keep driving, I’ll disappear too, just blink out of the world. Like Kaycee did.
The first voicemail is from Shariah, sounding uncertain. In the bac
kground, a baby cries.
Hello, Ms. Williams. I got your note. I…well, I’m calling you back, like you told me to. You can give me a call anytime at this number. Or if I don’t pick up, I’m probably putting Grayson down. Okay. Bye.
The next message is a man I don’t recognize: he explains he’s calling for Abby Williams in a creepy-calm voice.
This is Dr. Chun, calling from Lincoln Memorial in Indianapolis.
Unconsciously, I straighten up a bit, check my rearview mirror, as if something might be coming from behind.
Dr. Aster sent me the results of a recent MRI for your father, and indicated you were the point of contact. Please call me back at your earliest convenience.
It’s funny how quickly the whole world shrivels up to the inside of a car, to the space between ringtones. I watch birds streak across a washed-blue sky. Six of them. Then a seventh one, late.
I squeeze my phone until it turns warm beneath my fingers.
One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy, five for silver, six for gold, seven for a secret, never to be told.
I reach a receptionist. Possibly, it’s the same receptionist at every doctor’s office, rental car agency, and health insurance claim office I’ve ever called. Possibly, there is only one in the whole world, and she rotates her bored inflection from desk to desk, like a Santa Claus who brings nothing but not giving a shit. She informs me Dr. Chun will call me back when he can, in a way that suggests I will be very lucky if this occurs before Christmas.
But he does call me back, almost immediately.
“Abby? It’s Dr. Chun, from the neurology wing of Lincoln Memorial. Thank you for returning my call. Dr. Aster sent over some scans for me to look at,” he says.
Finally I find my voice. “I’m sorry. What kind of specialist are you?”
“Neurology,” he says, and I almost, almost relax. Neurologists look at brain scans. Normal. But then he goes on: “Actually, my specialty is neurological pathologies. And oncology,” he adds, almost apologetically.
I close my eyes and remember all the times I wished for my father to die. I open my eyes. The world is still there. A pickup truck rolls by, the truck bed packed with sunburned teenagers.
Bonfire: A Novel Page 17
