When Quinn reached the top of the stairs she heard the cry clearly coming from the bathroom. A whimper echoed off the tiled walls but there was no baby anywhere. She ripped the shower curtain off the rod and there the baby was—no, there she must be—the whimper came clearly from within towels and dirty laundry Quinn hadn’t gotten around to yet. She parted the towels and cotton sheets and saw the baby lying there. Safe and sound, her arms flailing and her tiny face contorted.
Quinn had looked in the tub earlier; the baby must have been asleep. Tain must have forgotten she put her in the tub, maybe went to the bathroom, maybe not, who knew what Tain’s reasoning was, but Quinn knew one thing for sure: the baby wasn’t safe with Tain. The baby wasn’t even safe with Tain and her. As long as Tain was around, things like this would happen. Until one day, she’d leave the baby in a stroller somewhere, she’d give her the wrong medicine or too much or none at all, Tain would turn in her sleep and the baby would roll off the bed, or fall down the stairs, or be left in a hot car or outside in the cold. So many possibilities, any of them bound to happen. And one would be fatal. The baby was safe with Quinn, no one else.
—
Three days passed, and Quinn kept an eye on the shed through the kitchen window. Eventually she would have to go out there and deal with it but she wasn’t ready quite yet. She was still mad at Nolan—so many things she hadn’t said to him, so much she still wanted him to know. She’d never get that chance now.
After five days had passed, Tain began to ask about Nolan.
“Did he leave?” she kept asking, her eyes wide and glossy.
“I’m not sure. I don’t know more than you do. Maybe he had business in town?”
“I heard you argue in the shed.”
“Maybe he’s still out there. Maybe he spent a few nights in the truck or the barn.”
“Are we going to look for him?”
“Should we?” Quinn asked, and a tinge of guilt crept into her heart for being so deceiving. Nolan was, after all, the baby’s father. By then Quinn had made up her mind, had come to the conclusion that it must all look like an accident, and surely Tain wasn’t going to understand or question the circumstances, yet she still had to keep up the facade.
On the seventh day, Quinn told Tain they were going to look for Nolan. In front of the barn she instructed Tain how to safely hold the baby—she kept forgetting to support the head—and put her in the crook of Tain’s elbow, the other arm underneath her body, making sure the blanket never restricted nose or mouth.
“Let’s go inside,” Quinn said and they entered, calling out Nolan’s name into the dark and dank interior. Nothing stirred but for the air swirling with dust. Quinn stood by the ladder leading into the hayloft, looking up. She narrated and explained things along the way—wanted Tain to later recall some sort of story if it ever came down to it—and she described how there was no way Nolan was in the barn, he had not stood on rungs so brittle only a fool would attempt to climb them, that short of a being a small child the treads would break, or if he had made it up there, the flimsy loft would fail to bear a grown-up’s weight. Then they strolled from the barn to the shed as if this was just an afternoon walk, and Tain followed Quinn like a duckling its mother.
“Let me just take a look inside,” Quinn said in front of the shed. “All those chemicals are bad for the baby. Just wait outside.” The moment she placed her left hand on the lever and pulled with her right hand, she smelled it. Not only were there chemical odors of glue and solvent and alcohol—no, there was something additional lingering in the background, a different kind of scent. Sweet, the way rotten fruits reek. Like overripe pineapple, like the pears in the yard when she was a kid, after they’d fallen off the tree and plopped on the ground underneath, slowly turning brown and soft and then she’d step on one and the sweet stench would hit her right between her eyes, like an arrow. Only this was deeper. More concentrated. Focused. “Remember, wait here,” she repeated, “the smell of the chemicals isn’t good for the baby.”
Quinn stepped over the threshold and found herself standing over Nolan’s body. One more step and she would have touched him. The jars and bottles lay shattered, and fragments of glass, clear and brown and green, were strewn about. The hammer, the one Quinn had bashed him with, was on the table. Its claw head was stuck in a puddle of white. And so was Nolan where he lay on the ground.
Nolan’s fingers pointed upward, stiff, deformed and warped as if frozen in the middle of a convulsion, and everything about his body was ugly and forbidding in its putrid decay. Quinn felt a sense of triumph. Just like his crickets and beetles, Nolan had died like the bugs in the jars, in this shed. Avoiding his broken eyes staring into space, Quinn stepped closer and grabbed the papers from the table.
The deed seemed to be the only object in the entire shed that was neither plaster-speckled nor doused in chemicals. Quinn took that as a sign. She wanted to chuckle. She long had chased away thoughts of guilt, and all that was left inside her was the notion of the fates having intervened. And just as she had thought he had it coming, it indeed had come to pass. Nolan, trapped like a bug in his very own killing jar, had gotten what he deserved.
Thirty-seven
DAHLIA
QUINN, Nolan, Tain, Aella, they swirl and take form, they lose their ethereal bodies and become more and more tangible. They visit me at odd hours, at work, on the drive home. At the farm, I hear their footsteps in the foyer. They open drapes, slam the back door, but I am convinced there is more to this.
It was a physical shift when we arrived at the farm, as if the property had had a plan all along to do us both in, claiming me and my mother. But how does one verify the stories of an old eccentric woman who, over the years, has had a track record of being vague and irrational at best? Assuming her stories are real and factual, still decades have passed, the town of Aurora is no longer this tight-knit community in which one knows everybody’s business, neighbors like Seymour are no longer around. There is a canning factory that brought an influx of people years ago; there is the apple orchard sprawling over a hundred acres or more a few miles from here bringing visitors and tourism; the Barrington and its conventions and meetings; the farmworkers harvesting Texas grapefruits at a farm south from here, season after season. The prison complex thirty miles west. Ramón de la Vega, Bobby’s father, would know, but according to Bobby he’s senile, and even if he did remember, it might just stir up unwelcome memories—and Bobby would never allow me to question him, he’d made that clear.
Later that night, I tell Bobby how my mother didn’t deny the truth of the deed. I tell him the entire story again, beginning with the storm that started everything. I need to lay it all out for him.
“Hurricane, all the way in Aurora. Imagine that,” I say to Bobby.
“There’ve been hurricanes coming from the coast,” he says, “and if they carry storms with them, they can dump large amounts of rain hundreds of miles inland. Did she say what year?”
“Before I was born, late seventies. So this girl, Tain, came to the farm and Quinn found her and she gave birth in the foyer. The baby died and Quinn had an argument with Nolan about allowing her to stay. Nolan is the name on the deed, the one who put the farm in Quinn’s name. Nolan, in her story, dies in the end, in the shed. Quinn hit him with a hammer and then left him in the shed with the chemicals.”
I catch the impression on Bobby’s face—eyes wide, eyebrows raised, head slightly cocked to the side—and I have a small inkling of how I must sound, talking about these characters as if they are family members or people I know. I’ve even caught myself lately, upon waking up in the mornings, wondering what they’re up to—is Nolan in the shed, is Quinn fiddling around in the kitchen, is Tain simplemindedly roaming the farm, picking flowers, visiting the grave of her stillborn child?
“Quinn Creel,” Bobby says and allows it to sit on his tongue. “Doesn’t sound familiar.”
&nb
sp; “Creel Hollow Farm, makes sense.” Something inside of me jerks, telling me to open my eyes. “I should be able to look that up, right? A storm, dumping rain all the way up in Aurora. A birth on Creel Hollow Farm. There should be records.”
“Dahlia.” He pauses as if he’s thinking hard how to say something he can no longer hold in. “The deed and all those stories your mother is telling you, I don’t want you to go overboard.”
“Overboard?”
“What I’m trying to say is that I worry about you. Everything you’ve been telling me about your childhood, it sounds overwhelming. It gets to me, just listening to you. But I want you to know that I understand why you won’t quit. Not only with your mother, but Jane Doe. I get it. But I still worry.”
“I know you do,” I say but I’m not so sure about the first part. Bobby was born here, grew up here. The trees he climbed, the house he grew up in, it’s all there. His life is an open book, while mine is a vault with my mother holding the key.
I want to bring up the bracelets, and the photograph of the one on Jane’s hand, yet I hesitate to tell Bobby about the briefcase. Maybe now isn’t the time. To me he still is the teenager looking out for me, stubborn in his attempts to protect me, to make sure I’m okay.
“I don’t know what your mother’s stories are all about, and short of hiring a private detective you may never know. What we do know is that this farm was signed over to a Quinn Creel and she put the farm in your mother’s name, Memphis Waller. There could be a relation, or maybe she bought it from her, I don’t know.”
“She never had any kind of money.”
“What do you expect to find? Why are we doing this now?” he asks.
“Because I’m tired of all the lies, for one. And because finally there’s something tangible that we can look into.”
As we walk outside, I stop in the foyer.
“Right here?” he asks and lifts the edge of the rug with his boot tip.
“Right here.”
“If it’s blood,” he says as if he’s telling me a spooky story on Halloween, “blood evidence is very hard to get rid of, especially if the surface can’t be scrubbed or bleached.”
“I mopped but the stain is still there.”
“If it soaked into the grain of the wood, nothing will get rid of it. Short of ripping out the floors. Wait here,” Bobby says and disappears through the front door. Seconds later, I hear a trunk open and close.
I roll up the dusty rug and push it against the wall. I get down on my knees and examine the spot, which is by all accounts rather large with well-defined edges. It looks different than I remember it; maybe it’s the fact that I’m mere inches away from it now. I run my finger across the porous floor and the slats that have warped around the stain. It looks refinished, as if another layer of stain was applied at some point— not a particularly thick coat—and that layer has also worn down.
Bobby appears behind me, in his hand a flashlight and a box that says Luminol Demonstration Kit.
“You remember you asked me about a blood detection kit?” He hands me the flashlight and I search for the tiny nail holes that used to hold the rug down.
I remember my mother telling me that Quinn nailed the rug down. I also want to believe that there are a dozen or so holes in an almost perfect circle, the exact shape of the wool rug. But I could be mistaken.
“Step back,” Bobby says and I do.
He opens the kit and takes out a small spray bottle, coating the entire floor from the front door to kitchen on the right and the living room on the left. There’s nothing, not a trace, no glow, not even one the size of a firefly.
“Don’t you have to use a blue light?” I ask and Bobby studies the back of the bottle.
“No blue light required. Says here that the area must be completely dark in order to see chemical reaction,” he reads off the box.
Bobby shuts off the foyer light and motions me to turn off the kitchen light. The house goes dark.
I look down and freeze.
On the floor a blue orb floats in front of me, but then I recognize it for what it is: a large oval stain, blue and luminescent, with multiple smaller droplets around it. My mind is searching for shapes and forms and figures and there is a realization that I refuse to accept: one shape looks like one of those newborn kits in which you make an imprint of a little foot. Only this one is much smaller, so small it might as well belong to a baby doll.
“Bobby,” I say and I sound like a little girl. The flashlight slips out of my hand and lands with a clatter on floor. With only a second of hesitation, Bobby steps around the oval stain, careful not to tread on it with his heavy boots.
I feel like I’m being shaken, like a tree by an ax, not taken down, not quite, but a few more hits and I will drop to the ground. A light comes on—not the dusty pendant in the foyer, but an overall light bathing the entire hallway in a stark and harsh glow.
Out of the corner of my eye I see a silhouette at the top of the stairs, dressed in a white nightgown, staring down on us like a ghostly onlooker. The silhouette isn’t moving, isn’t talking, just hovering, and I wonder if all the commotion has caused my mother to wake from her sleep.
It can’t be my mother, the silhouette is shorter, younger, with long, dark hair, like mine. Judging by her fuzzy outline, she isn’t a person after all, more an apparition of a woman in a white nightshirt, a woman who looks nothing like my mother, but everything like me. She holds something rather bulky in her two outstretched arms. I can’t help but ask myself if I’m dying, or if I have already passed, and a specter of myself is ascending the stairs. I can’t be dead. My limbs are heavy, I can feel my weight, its momentum taking me to the ground. By then I’ve tumbled, giving Bobby barely enough time to catch me.
My head is buzzing but I can still form thoughts, even though I know I’m about to black out. Who are these people? How does my mother know these stories and why, for the love of God, why does the woman atop the stairs look like the composite that is taped to my wall? I understand with every fiber of my being that this is a hallucination, this is not reality. There’s no woman on the landing looking down on me, yet she is real.
I feel as if someone is holding me, carrying me down the stairs and across the foyer. I am being held like a child. Just as Bobby lifts me off the floor, carrying me into the living room and dropping me on the chintzy couch, arms carry me through the foyer and down the front steps. Outside, I’m engulfed by tiny specks of ice. The blizzard. I’m surrounded by it, I’m in its very eye.
The vision, for once, doesn’t scatter like the others have done before; it continues on. There’s an open car door, and the woman whose face I cannot see—not the same woman who stood on the stairs—puts the child—me?—in the backseat, on top of a feathery mountain of pillows and blankets. And then the blizzard swallows everything around me and there’s nothing left but the humming of a car engine.
—
Dr. Wagner is right, it takes me longer and longer to recover. My muscles remain stiff, my mind can’t quite get back to where it was before the seizure, and the first steps I take are unsteady at best. I push the implications aside—now is not the time to worry about that. I still have to tell Bobby about the briefcase and the bracelets; it might change everything.
I wake to the sound of kitchen drawers slamming and the smell of coffee drifting into my room. I find my mother in the kitchen dressed and showered, fixing eggs and toast. I follow her command as she points to the kitchen table, motioning me to sit. She wears the yellow dress. It’s too big, but it’s a lovely color on her.
“Sit,” she says. She’s resolute, rigid, as if I’m a child who needs to be taught manners.
“What’s going on?” I ask.
Before me on the table lies my book. My childhood salvation, the book that had answers to everything I didn’t dare ask my mother. My Columbia Encyclopedia.
“You’ve had this all along?” I ask. I want to reach for it, but I don’t.
“I’ve kept a lot of things that weren’t mine to keep,” she says. “After Quinn killed Nolan . . .” She pauses. Then, “There’s something else you need to know.”
The wheels are turning. I don’t know what I’m expecting—a tale of Quinn running and getting caught, maybe confessing, I’m not sure—Quinn is so real to me, all alone in her dark and twisted world, and I wonder if karma does exist in the story I’m about to hear.
“Tell me she’s getting away,” I say, almost as a joke.
“No one ever gets away,” she says. “That’s not how things work.”
Thirty-eight
MEMPHIS
THE scent of the closet hasn’t changed at all; it is sharp and spicy like cedar, yet sweet like the sprigs of lavender I used to put everywhere around the house. There is one thing I’m after: the yellow dress.
I slide it off the hanger and lay it out on the bed. It has moth holes, and the formerly bright yellow fabric has faded. I remember it well—the deep back has a tied bow to make the waist fit the body, and a flared skirt has pleats sewn in.
I slip the dress over my head and it rests on my shoulders. My arms find the holes and I reach behind me and tie the bow as tight as it will go. Nothing about it is right. It hovers around my body like an ill-fitting garment made for someone else. It fit Quinn’s body perfectly, it was never meant for me, so what do I expect anyway? I won’t look in a mirror—a visual would just disappoint me further.
Today, I am going to tell Dahlia the rest of the story. I can only imagine how it must sound and I won’t go as far as to admit that my mind is twisted—I’m not pleased with what I’ve done, that much I will say—but I had no choice. Backed into a corner, there was only one way out, but I’ll allow her to be the judge.
The Good Daughter Page 32
