Done Dirt Cheap

by Sarah Nicole Lemon

  Tourmaline blinked, searching his face for anything to trigger her memory. It wasn’t there, but countless memories she’d wanted to put away forever waited in its place. “Are you here about Wayne?”

  He dropped his hand and tilted his head. “Who?”

  “Wayne Thompson. The guy whose heroin my mom got busted for? Just released? Any of this ringing any bells?”

  “I’m not familiar with your mom’s case beyond the basics. That’s not really why I’m here.”

  Of course not. She tightened her jaw and looked away. Even though she’d known better, disappointment pitched deep in her stomach. As if she’d expected something different after everything that had happened.

  “I’m sure you’re aware this area has been going through some difficulties with heroin. Your mom.” He dipped his head in acknowledgment of the ribbon of sticky black highway that had claimed her mom. “With the interstates right here, it’s becoming more and more of a problem. I’m here—” He paused, and then corrected. “The FBI is here, as part of a special task force combating the trafficking and distribution of heroin.”

  “What does that have to do with me?”

  He paused again, as if weighing his answer. “It doesn’t. Per se.”

  She gave him a cold look, putting her hand on the screen door to threaten going back inside.

  “Maybe it does. Does it?” he asked.

  That her mother was an addict did not mean she’d know all about heroin use in southwestern Virginia. “What are you saying?” But it clicked as the words left her mouth.

  He was here for the Wardens. For Dad. Because he thought they were doing something with heroin.

  Hayes’s warning bell tripped again. You have to start paying attention to the things around you.

  He looked past her, as if scanning the house and barn and committing it all to memory. “Maybe your dad’s club needed a way to make money, and your mom got caught up in a wave a lot of folks are finding themselves in? A casualty of war. I spent eight years with the Pagans. Similar kind of thing.”

  She swallowed. “The Wardens aren’t that kind of club. You think my dad would have anything to do with that after watching my mother?”

  He looked into her eyes then, a sad smile pulling on his mouth, as if he were watching something he’d seen before and he knew how it would go. “I’ve seen a lot of girls like you. Saying that same thing. Wives. Girlfriends. Daughters. It’s not even that you’re lying, either . . .” He shrugged, a terrible kind of sadness still creased on his face.

  Heat bloomed in her cheeks—anger and embarrassment mixing as the thought occurred to her that maybe, maybe, she was a fool here as well. That she didn’t really know. That the warnings she should have been listening to were these. But the thought was so sickening and terrible she immediately shook her head.

  She wasn’t. She knew. This was all just a game to make her do what they wanted. She wasn’t about to fall for it again. “Outsider’s misconception,” she said coldly, jumping back inside. “Have a good day, now.”

  The man shoved his boot into the door before she could close it.

  Her heart quickened, but she glared at him as if he didn’t outweigh her by a hundred pounds and a shiny brass badge.

  “I can help you,” he said. “We can talk about your mom. Talk about her sentence.”

  “That’s what they always say,” she snapped, struggling to smash his foot in the door. “Until you’re sitting in a courtroom finding out they lied. I’ve had help before. I’m good for a lifetime.”

  “I’m not accusing your dad of anything. I’m just trying to sort out what’s true and what’s not. Let me just . . .” He dug in his pocket and produced a business card. “Here. In case there’s anything you think might help. Or even if you need something. Anything.”

  She clenched her jaw and ignored the card, pressing the door harder on his wedged foot.

  He grimaced. “Just in case.” Picking up her wrist, he shoved the card into her limp hand, and with a quick tug, pulled out of the door.

  Tourmaline flipped the dead bolt and watched him leave from the window, only turning away when his black Suburban disappeared down the driveway.

  The card was still in her hand. Thick paper with his name and number on it. A tiny FBI seal in raised ink. She thumbed over the seal, the edges on her skin turning to pain inside her head. The truth was not what he wanted. No one wanted the truth.

  Maybe not even her.

  You can’t claim you didn’t know.

  No. She couldn’t think like this.

  In her room, she shoved the card deep in her nightstand and burrowed back under the covers. The ceiling stared back at her.

  That guy—the agent—he was wrong. The CO was wrong. Virginia was wrong.

  She’d know.

  Tourmaline kept repeating it to herself, staring at the ceiling, head throbbing. But the more she repeated it, the less she believed. It slipped out from her fingers like a flower-painted porcelain teacup she’d taken from her granny’s hutch, something she wanted so desperately to return untouched to its shelf; but she felt it slip through her fingers as she stumbled on the way back. Belief. Shattering.

  Maybe she didn’t know.

  Tourmaline closed her eyes, falling into the depths of the pain in her head, and somewhere inside her circling thoughts she landed, half dreaming and half remembering her sixteenth birthday.

  Mom had called from prison, Dad had gotten her a cake, and they ate it alone. No Wardens. No Mom.

  That afternoon, Dad had been outside with a few Wardens, and she went out the way she normally would—seeking out warmth like a stray kitten, content to curl up in some cozy corner of the garage and be around people she knew when the rest of her life was foreign.

  Dad had turned when they saw her coming.

  She’d given a tiny wave-shrug and ducked her head.

  He’d not smiled as deeply. But she only saw that now.

  Turning his shoulder, he’d stepped in front of her and not acknowledged her.

  She had been in her own world, not his, so it wasn’t something to take much note of, and she’d pulled her hands out of her jacket pockets to sit on his bike.

  It was the same thing she’d done since he first put her there as a baby. Propping her up in his lap for Mom to take a picture. Lifting her up on her own when she was older, and telling her not to get fingerprints on the gas tank. Taking her for rides as she clutched the middle of the handlebars and laughed at the wind in her face. She sat quietly. Pretending to ride. Pulling the bike off the kickstand to test the heavy weight while Dad wasn’t watching. The conversation had been boring—just the soothing backing track to a life she remembered having before her mother had left. The sun was setting. The dogwood was losing its blooms.

  The wind had gusted. She remembered because it took her hair and pulled it out behind her in the spring sunshine, and she’d opened her mouth to taste the hints of melting ice and mountain snow still left as the wind poured off the ridge.

  And she remembered because that was when Dad’s hand had fallen gently on her shoulder.

  She blinked and looked up. They all stood there quiet. Serious. No one really looking at her.

  “Go inside, Tourmaline,” Dad had said softly. “And stay there.”

  Her face had burned with the kind of embarrassment that she could still feel now, half asleep in an empty house with a summer rain on the roof. It was the kind of embarrassment everyone seemed to understand except her, which made it all the more embarrassing. She’d wanted to cry, right there, right then, but she’d gotten good at holding back tears.

  Biting the inside of her cheek hard enough to draw blood, she’d stood off the bike, lifted her chin, and walked inside. Searching: trying and failing to see what she’d done. She’d never been sent away like that . . . not by her father. And the thought consumed her, choking her, that she’d done something horribly wrong and hadn’t known, while everyone else did.

  Inside the h
ouse, she’d slammed her bedroom door and screamed. A scream she half hoped they’d all hear, standing out in the driveway in a place she couldn’t be.

  But if they heard, Dad never mentioned it.

  She’d caught sight of herself then, in the dark. In the single beam of pale spring sunshine that clung to her room when the sun had dipped beyond the window. In that pale silver light, her eyes were angry and heavy with unshed tears, and her cheeks flushed. Her body had gathered a woman’s sway to meet the road in front of it. And she’d looked . . .

  Like her mother. Her mother, the Queen. Not her mother, the fallen. Like the wild woman who had both laughed and kissed with abandon. The one who had danced on the borders of everything. Where Dad and the rest of the Wardens were lesser gods, crawling on their knees to pay tribute to her hold on the fates. But that woman didn’t exist anymore, just the space she’d once occupied. That Queen had faded away to sit in United States Penitentiary, Hazelton, while Tourmaline screamed because she was alone and cut off from all she’d ever known of love and family, trying to hold the echoing space her mother had once inhabited without having any understanding of what that role entailed.

  Tourmaline could see now what had happened.

  She began to see it soon after that day—laid bare in the strange men she passed. But then, slowly, she saw it even in the Wardens—even the ones who understood, without Dad to remind them, that she was still a child. It was in their eyes. It was in the way they smiled—finding some joy she didn’t understand when they looked at her. A joy sometimes complex. Sometimes simple enough to make her sick.

  And she knew that they knew.

  Thou shalt not . . . That was when she discovered that law: when it applied to her. That was when she discovered it wasn’t her world; she just lived in it.

  The rain drummed harder. Tourmaline blinked at the ceiling, reaching for sleep but fighting it all the same. She should text Dad and tell him about Wayne. Her hand pushed out, groping for the phone, but the movement sent a heavy wave of drumming pain behind her eyes. She tried to lift her head, but the white walls seemed so bright and searing that she quickly gave up.

  What if she was wrong?

  About everything.

  Virginia would know. Virginia was the kind of girl who would know the answer to these questions.

  Finding the phone, she forced her eyes open, texting Virginia to ask whether she was busy. But the pain in her head twisted and sharpened, as if there really stood a creature on her chest, gleefully poking its razored fingers in and out of her skull. And the only way to get out from under the creature was to give in to the darkness.

  “You okay, honey?” A soft voice reached down into the pain.

  Mom?

  Tourmaline pushed away the covers and forced her eyes open. The dull light from the windows sent a sickening wave of nausea over her, and a hot knife continuously impaled her temple.

  “You look like hell.” It wasn’t Tourmaline’s mother sitting on the edge of the bed, but Virginia. Long wavy dark hair. One eyebrow ever arched over suspicious blue eyes.

  Not Mom.

  The disappointment hurt more than the migraine. How could she still be expecting her mother to be there, after all that had happened?

  “Migraine,” Tourmaline muttered, throwing her arm over her eyes. Hot tears collected underneath her eyes. Spilling over. Down her cheeks.

  “Did you take medicine?”

  “No.” Tourmaline moaned. If Virginia Campbell was here, the horrible things inside her head were probably all real as well. “I don’t want them. I just need to sleep,” she croaked through a dry mouth. It wasn’t until the bed sagged, rolling her into a body, that she realized Virginia had left and come back.

  “Come on. Let’s get you fixed.” Virginia shoved tablets into Tourmaline’s palm and pulled her upright at the same time.

  She didn’t want to sit up. Or take medicine. The emptiness of sleep beckoned her, and she let her body fall back.

  Virginia hooked an arm around her ribs and pulled her forward. “Come on. Just sit on the floor.”

  There was no fix for this hurt. But Tourmaline closed her eyes and slid off the bed, slumping to a heap on the floor. Carpet under her thighs. The humidity heavy on her arms and legs despite the air-conditioning. The smell of food cooking. With Mom.

  Mom cooking. Mom rubbing her back. Mom sitting on the floor of her bedroom, playing cards. Mom everywhere.

  Tourmaline rarely cried about it anymore, but the loneliness exploded in her chest, leaving her aching and raw on her bedroom floor. She sobbed as if everything in her head that hurt was simply built up of tears that needed to be let out.

  “Here.” An ice pack pressed to the back of Tourmaline’s neck. Cool hands lowered Tourmaline’s feet into scalding water. “Tell me if this is too hot,” Virginia said.

  Tourmaline gingerly dropped her wet face into her knees, pressing the tender eye sockets against her kneecaps to relieve the pressure. “What are you doing here?” she mumbled.

  “Came to collect on that money you owe me.”

  Tourmaline’s mouth watered, but she swallowed it down. She would not be sick. “What time is it?” she asked, trying to orient herself a little.

  “Nearly supper.”

  Dad had to be home by now. She needed to tell him.

  Slowly, more things came into focus, pulling her out of the past. Eventually, she lifted her head off her knees. Her cheeks were tight from dried tears. Her knees were still wet. The ice pack slid down her back. The water had cooled.

  She looked through her window: They were out in the driveway. As they had once been. As they always would be. Jason. Dad. The conscript. Standing around a bike and talking.

  She sniffed and met Virginia’s calm gaze. “Let’s sit outside.”

  Tourmaline flicked water off the lawn chair and sat, tilting her head to the clearing skies and the thick beams of light filtering through the wet trees.

  “Real pretty back here,” Virginia said, plopping into a chair next to her. “I might almost believe your dad knows something about gardens.”

  The garden was a hodgepodge of experiments intended to screen the back garages from view of the driveway, but like most things, Dad had managed to pull it together.

  Staggered cedars, magnolias, and festuca grass broke down to an unfinished flagstone path winding through the rosebushes, zinnias, and pink coneflowers. There were three waterfalls, all different—products of Dad trying out new techniques. A well-worn path cut between two lilac bushes to the garage.

  Virginia pulled her leg up and lit a smoke.

  Tourmaline erased a voicemail from Anna May and slouched in her chair, staring into the garage. The doors were open, the lights on. Inside, Jason, Dad, and the conscript picked their way to the back.

  Part of her had hoped the migraine had intensified everything, even reality. But now it was clear: Her faith was faltering. She could feel doubt there, a growing shadow over everything. And inside that doubt, Wayne became more and more her responsibility. She took a deep breath of the smoke from Virginia’s cigarette.

  If there was ever a guide for those shadowed and twisting paths, Virginia Campbell would be it. “All right, let’s try this again. What do you want with the Wardens? No bullshit.”

  “No bullshit?”

  “Not even a little.”

  Virginia sighed and slumped in her chair, playing with the lid of the cigarette box. After a minute, she answered, “I’m not sure. I want to know.”

  “You mentioned. What about?”

  “About men who are more than men. About why you say they aren’t criminals, and yet everyone around them acts as though they are. I want to know whether they’re good men who do bad things, or bad men who do . . .” She shrugged. “Bad things.”

  “This seems like pretty cheap shit, if you’re asking me.”

  “It’s always valuable to know what kind of men your world is made of.”

  Tourmaline rolled her eyes. “Th
ey aren’t your world.”

  “The same kind of men are everywhere.”

  Tourmaline’s eyes followed the conscript as he helped her father roll out the bike. What kind of man was he? A younger Jason? Something else? “Is everything they say about you true?”

  “Oh, absolutely.”

  Tourmaline tore her gaze away from the conscript. “So, the drug dealing?”

  “I’m actually a member of a cartel,” Virginia said primly.

  “Oh, the Full of Bullshit one?”

  “Oh, this is fun,” Virginia said. “Try some more.”

  “You slept with the assistant principal to graduate with honors?”

  “Much easier than working, don’t you agree?”

  “You had four abortions?”

  “Fourteen,” Virginia said coolly over a rush of smoke.

  Tourmaline clenched her jaw. “You were born nine months after your mother slept with the devil, and that’s why your eyes are so blue and your hair is so dark?”

  “Absolutely.” Virginia winked.

  “Is there anything about you that isn’t bullshit?”

  “Nope. That’s how come I know it when I see it.” Virginia stabbed the cigarette in Tourmaline’s direction and grinned.

  “What’s the worst thing you’ve done?” Tourmaline challenged.

  Virginia didn’t answer right away, eyes narrowing as she took a long drag. She exhaled and looked down. “Being young and naive was the worst thing I’ve ever done.”

  They were the same age. They’d been in the same grade in school their whole lives. But in that moment, Virginia seemed a much older type of eighteen, with a much different level of thinking.

  Tourmaline picked at the edge of the lawn chair. Through the dripping lilacs, the conscript adjusted something on the engine. The sun hit his neck, finding some thin layer of bronze to light in his dark skin.

  Was she being naive? What if there was more truth in that courtroom than Dad had let on? There had been times he’d lied. Softly. Gently. To protect her from things she didn’t want to know. He’d told her the starlings on Jason’s cut were for different accidents. And she’d thought, Boy, he sure is terrible at riding a motorcycle.