The Good Daughter

by Alexandra Burt

  She might have to settle, Quinn thought, not in a condescending way, but factually, with clarity, and maybe caring for someone who needed her was what the world was willing to give her—not a newborn nestling into her arms—vulnerability came in many forms and maybe this was it and there was no use in waiting around for something that was never going to happen.

  Twenty-eight

  DAHLIA

  THE vet calls and there are complications. Tallulah has been running a fever for the past four days. “It’s not uncommon after surgery, not for the first twenty-four or forty-eight hours. But now she seems to be fighting off another infection. We are giving her antibiotics. It’ll be a waiting game but I’m optimistic. She’s been sleeping most of the time and that’s what we want. You are welcome to see her but if you can hold off on visiting her, that might be best. We don’t want her to get excited. Our techs take excellent care of her and spend time with her when she’s awake.”

  “Whatever is best for her,” I say and fight back the tears. I don’t want my mother to see me cry. She’s offered to pay for the vet but for as long as I can remember, she has been opposed to dogs. I don’t want to show any emotional weakness, knowing how harshly she has judged me in the past, never extended empathy toward me during such moments.

  It’s not until Bobby stops by and I join him on the porch that I begin to cry. He pulls me closer, folding his arms around me. His embrace is warm and protective as he wraps himself around my body. His arms offer more comfort than my mother will ever be capable of.

  Later, Bobby and I sit on the porch, lazily draped across old lawn chairs that squeak every time we move. He has forgotten to buy beer and the only drinks in the fridge are a couple of bottles of sangria, the cheap stuff you buy at gas stations. We have a few glasses of the wine, and after we get used to the sweetness, we sit and talk, the sangria making my knees weak and my stomach tingle.

  The sun is about to go down, the light is just right, the colors seem to get stripped from the world and everything turns into shades of gray and out of those grim hues the land and the farm with its buildings float like boats in still water. The crickets start chirping and soon twilight will fall, the sharp shadows will fade into the background, and only the faintest light will come from the moon above.

  We remember funny stories from high school—I actually get up at some point and mock the dancing skills of a girl who now works at the Family Dollar, the way she used to bounce her upper body, sidestepping wide and awkward—and we spray my mother’s homemade bug repellent all over us, a spray bottle filled with a cloudy liquid and engorged lemon rinds. By the time the sediments collect on the bottom, I shake it up again. I refuse to allow anything to settle tonight. I feel a need for the world around me to remain in motion.

  As Bobby relays some sadder stories—the coach who fell off a ladder and remains paralyzed, the pretty cheerleader who now sits in her trailer in a mobile home park we used to refer to as the worst place to live in Aurora, with three kids and no husband. How most of the people never made it out of town and never made it in it either, still selling farm equipment or stocking feed store shelves with their tired bodies twice the size they used to be, struggling to make child support payments—the sun sinks lower and lower in the sky. We no longer care to keep the mosquitoes at bay and go inside. Bobby has never seen the interior of the farmhouse but for the stolen glance into the foyer the day we broke down the door. We get fresh glasses from the cupboard and another bottle of sangria from the fridge. The last remnant of the day has drained away and, as if the conjuring of our past has given way to a road we’ve always refused to travel on, we both know we are taking us into consideration.

  “This place is something else,” Bobby says as he follows me across the foyer into the living room.

  The couch in the middle of the room is a chintzy saggy affair that has seen better days. Its velvet-like fabric and large floral pattern is past the point of distress and there are numerous tears and holes. The sun has bleached the once-bright colors, the browns have bled into the pinks, and the fabric puckers around the corners of the cushions. When we sit, we fall in with a thump.

  At some point, I don’t remember when, after the second bottle of the sangria’s sweetness has taken over my body, I feel the strong urge to start my life over, right here, right now, have it going forward from this moment on, everything else, the past and everything with it, fading into the background.

  We hold hands. It has an initial tinge of awkwardness, and then we kiss. He tastes of citrus with a hint of apple, and at first the kiss has less appeal than that of a complete stranger, but then it turns into something else. Bobby is known yet unexplored; he’s not a dangerous alley but an undiscovered room in my very own house. There’s some reluctance in the back of my head, even through the alcohol daze—the fact that we won’t be able to take this back, that our friendship will change to some sort of relationship that we can’t be sure of, but all the while I know my resistance began to dissolve quite some ago.

  I crumble the moment he puts his lips on my neck, and when his hands touch my body, something else does the bidding for us. His hand runs through my hair, as the kisses become harder and more urgent. Another hand slides around my waist and pulls me close to his lemon-scented body. Maybe the room itself does the commanding for us—after all, time has stood still here, and we too are going back to some point in time when we came of age, but simultaneously we are being born right here and right now.

  And then I want—I just want more of him, more of life and happiness and being in the moment and I want to see him fall apart and at the same time I want to come undone myself. I feel his breath on my neck, then the burning brush of his lips as they make contact with my skin. Our clothes come off slowly, and then his naked body is on top of mine. The sensation of having him inside me, the emotions on his face, in his eyes, the way our bodies seem to hum and vibrate, an overlay of something I can’t put my finger on, this descending into each other, is never-ending. Without breaking eye contact, he begins to move slowly, maddeningly almost, and I slide my hands down his back, feeling him beneath my touch. My head is spinning and we are moving, moving, and we still don’t look away. We are no longer in this farmhouse, we are not on an old dusty couch with my mother sleeping upstairs, we are who we used to be and who we are going to be, all at the same time.

  Later, as my eyes drift to the glass of sangria on the table, I tell him of all those stories my mother has been telling me. He listens as he holds my hand, and I feel like I have my whole life to tell him stories about bloody floors and sheds and chirping crickets. As I relay them, they seem to be nothing but a figment of my mother’s imagination, nothing more than the strange outbursts of her slow descent into madness.

  After Bobby leaves, I make my way up the stairs and down the hall to my room. I turn the knob slowly and step inside. I switch on the light and my room comes to life: a four-poster bed, a cross-stitch quilt with a pink wreath, a round table as a nightstand. Eerily similar to my mother’s story of a woman and a girl who may or may not have lived here before us. I haven’t changed the room at all, haven’t so much as moved a table, and the only personal things are some cardboard boxes lined up neatly by the wall across the bed. One box is ripped open, with four flaps hanging lifeless.

  My eyes are heavy. I lie down and as I switch off the lamp, right before I drift off to sleep, out of the corner of my eye I see the composite of the missing woman tacked to the wall. I jerk from my lulled state. I have yet to open any of the boxes; I haven’t taken out the papers, haven’t assembled the missing wall, hadn’t thought about it in days. Did I, in a moment of stupor, tack up the missing wall like I had in my mother’s house? I don’t remember doing any of this. I switch on the light on the nightstand but the room remains stubbornly shadowy.

  The past materializes and cloaks the present in a layer of dust, as if it is stronger than anything happening in the present. My
mother’s stories of people who have lived here, stillborn babies, husbands who disappear into sheds, seem all too real.

  In the distance, I hear the creaking and moaning of a door slamming shut. Or open, I can’t be sure. But this I know: this farm, this house, they have a life of their own.

  Twenty-nine

  MEMPHIS

  WHEN Memphis enters the living room, she knows that Bobby and Dahlia were together on the couch the night before. She heard them talking on the porch at some point, stirring up the past, and one thing must have led to another, that’s what disturbing the past does. It’s like kicking up the dust that coats everything in this house, putting a distorted layer on a life left untouched for decades.

  She remembers the scent in Sigrid’s bedroom lingering after Cadillac Man left. She recalls the initial pleasant hint of tobacco and vanilla mutating into a raunchy scent of sweat and bodily fluids. The blanket and Benito in the woods, those scents were different, they smelled sweet and honeyed, fragrant with tenderness. The hunters in the woods had reeked of bruised pine and deer urine, salty and stingy like skin abrasions, intermixed with blood and semen and spoors of pain, raw and aching.

  Bobby might cloud Dahlia’s mind for a bit, Memphis worries about that, but she doesn’t dwell on it. Last night, as she heard their voices and laughter drift up to her bedroom window, she had entered Dahlia’s room and opened all the boxes that were neatly arranged against the wall. She finally found the one with the pictures and articles about the missing people Dahlia has been so obsessed with lately. Memphis isn’t sure what’s happened to the girl Dahlia found in the woods, but the composite, that’s the one Dahlia should keep in mind.

  And Memphis puts up the wall as she sees fit; the composite in the very middle, and all the other articles around her, as if she’s the one on whom everything hinges. She is proud of herself; the story is coming together but Dahlia is suspicious and Memphis knows she has to be careful and spoon-feed her small tidbits at a time, like sipping water after being stranded in the desert as to not overwhelm the body.

  Dahlia won’t survive if she turns fragile now. And that job, at that motel, scrubbing sinks and changing filthy sheets, polishing faucets and distributing miniature soaps. Memphis knows this all too well, has spent all her life working menial jobs, but the last thing Memphis wants is for Dahlia to be at the mercy of that boss giving her double shifts in that horrid place, at the mercy of men in general.

  Memphis doesn’t know what to make of Bobby either.

  From Texas to New Mexico, across the state border to Nevada and farther west to California, she had always kept Dahlia safe. Yes, they had to pack up and leave often, mostly in the middle of the night, cloak-and-dagger operations that required every dollar Memphis had so painstakingly put away in months of working double shifts herself. Men were the problem, had always been the problem, and when Dahlia turned twelve she could no longer protect her. She became headstrong and independent, just wouldn’t stop asking questions, rebelling against their lives, and eventually she’d blow their cover altogether.

  Memphis returned to Aurora without knowing if anyone was looking for her or had become suspicious, if someone had found the graves. All the while, all these years, she had shuddered at the thought of a flash flood coming through, exposing the bodies, washing up bones, making them float to the surface.

  Henry Cobb, the man who owned a mechanic shop, had started off as if he was a catch but then she’d seen him look at Pet, just a bit crooked in the beginning, but there were moments when Pet’s face told a story that Memphis tried to ignore. Inevitably, she had to face it: he made Pet uncomfortable, his hand placed ever so slightly on her shoulder or the back of her neck was an intrusion, but more than that it was a plan in the making. Memphis loved Pet fiercely, she had loved her from the moment she was born, pink and healthy and perfect. Such a happy child, curious, always having to get to the bottom of everything. That never changed. As Dahlia she was just the same, always searching for the truth. Like the other day, when they cleaned out the closets, they had found the quilt Tain had used so many years ago. Out of all the blankets and quilts, this one was the only one not eaten up by moths and bugs, and it had remained in an almost pristine condition. When Memphis tugged at the quilt, a white boucle jacket with a green embroidered rabbit and a zipper that no longer worked fell from its folds. Stuck within the quilt, it hadn’t yellowed, and it smelled of the cedar lining Nolan had put in the closets. Memphis hid the jacket among other linen and blankets, but then Dahlia discovered it, handed it to her, probing, digging, asking questions.

  “Whose was this?” Dahlia asked, and Memphis took Dahlia’s hand in hers.

  “Remember the woman I told you about?”

  Dahlia seemed like a deer caught in the headlights, not understanding how encountering the past can make you unravel—Dahlia doesn’t have enough of a past yet—and make you let go of secrets, as if loosening the laces of a corset. “I thought the woman’s baby was stillborn?”

  Now might be the time to tell Dahlia what women were capable of, she thought, but only for a second. One spoon at a time, one at a time.

  The woman. Memphis wonders if Dahlia ever questions why every single conversation begins with the woman. Memphis feels compelled to tell particular parts of the story. She doesn’t know why. In due time, Memphis thinks. In due time all shall be revealed.

  And Memphis grabbed the baby jacket and continued with the story. There was still so much to be told, and it was getting harder every day.

  But what’s done in the dark must come into the light, that’s the way of ancient and secret things. Into the light.

  —

  “She’s a feral cat,” Nolan used to say when Tain wasn’t around. “She’ll never trust us, never trust anyone. You can feed her, pet her, she’ll always be wild. You must know that.” Nolan gently squeezed Quinn’s shoulder but she shrugged his hand off.

  “She’s a child, barely grown. Don’t talk about her like that. She needs a family.”

  “I agree with you, for once. She needs a family. But we are not her family. Someone is probably looking for her.”

  “We would have heard by now if someone was.”

  “Remember the cat that used to come to the back door, wanting to be fed?” Nolan asked, not caring if Tain could hear him in the next room. “The food made her stick around, but then she got spooked when you tried to pet her and we never saw her again. That girl is going to leave one way or another—it’s just a matter of time. Let it be on your accord, otherwise it’s a heartbreak waiting to happen.”

  It’s my heart to break, Quinn wanted to say, but knew she was on thin ice and so remained silent.

  “Do what you want, but her days are numbered. She has to go.”

  “She’s become so independent. She does all the chores and gives me time to rest.” Quinn realized that the statement sounded selfish. “I like spending time with her. She’s like the sister I never had.”

  “After Christmas. That’s my last word. Come the New Year, she will leave.”

  “Put her out in the cold?”

  “It’s then or now. What is it going to be?”

  Quinn wanted to cry, knowing that she could defy Nolan only for so long. He was right in so many ways—what if someone was indeed looking for her?—but Quinn was selfish, wanted to keep Tain around, loved spending time with her. She had a plan, to take a picture of Tain, maybe show it around, see if anyone knew her. She had bought a camera and had begun taking pictures and eventually she asked Tain to be in the picture, pose for her.

  “This is the barn,” Quinn would say and take a picture. “And this is Tain by the barn. Smile, Tain, smile for the camera,” Quinn called out with all the cheer she could muster, but Tain would protest, not wanting to smile for too long, or hold a pose. She’d remain still for a second, but never long enough to take a clear picture. Tain always seemed to remain e
lusive, as if she didn’t want to be observed, wanted to remain fleeting and temporary, a mere passing presence in their lives. Quinn took photos of her anyway, hoping a few would come out clear, and it took her months to get a mere dozen or so pictures and still there were many left on the film roll, and most of them were fuzzy at best.

  Tain had long picked up on Nolan’s hostility and avoided him at all cost. Quinn didn’t blame her. There was this feeling Quinn couldn’t shake, a hunch really, that Tain was limited in many ways. She had given her books to read—first she’d picked random ones off the shelves, then she’d selected more childlike stories, with large letters, but not a single one of the books engaged her. Tain did wait for Nolan every morning to read the daily paper he bought at the gas station and after Nolan left, she’d pick up the paper and turn the thin pages, one by one, looking at the pictures, and Quinn couldn’t help but think of a child pretending to read.

  One day, as they were folding laundry, Quinn watched Tain bite on her lower lip and then saw her eyes turn glossy. First she blinked them away, but it was no good, and she just stood there, staring at the ground, crying, and then turning away as if she was embarrassed.

  It pained Quinn that Tain wanted to hide her tears with everything that had happened to her, but there was this limited range of emotions, this obvious simplemindedness that seemed to govern Tain, as if she really was a child and her outbursts were guided more by frustration than actual understanding.

  “What’s the matter?” Quinn asked and forced a cheerful smile on her face, when all she wanted to do was to break into tears herself. Quinn embraced Tain and held her, allowed the shaking to subside, then wiped the tears off her face. Every time she hugged Tain, she was surprised how tiny she felt in her arms, how bony and fragile, with the tiniest hands she had ever seen on an adult. After Tain stopped crying she told Quinn that she didn’t like it that Nolan wanted to get rid of her and that she was afraid.