Barbed Wire Heart

by Tess Sharpe

  Cooper doesn’t question me again.

  I’ve made my point. I’m nobody’s baby girl now.

  Thirty-Six

  June 7, 2:49 p.m.

  Copper. Bright. Bursting on my tongue.

  Troy’s blood is in my mouth.

  Thick. Wet. Sliding in chunky drips down my cheek.

  Troy’s blood is all over me.

  Weight. Suffocating. Pressing down on my chest.

  Troy’s body is on top of me.

  Voices. Yelling. Coming into focus in a rush.

  Cooper and Buck are shouting—“Son of a bitch, you fucker, what the fuck were you thinking, shooting so close to her?” “Fuck you, he was skimming off the top!”—their guns drawn and on each other. Wayne’s got his hand on his hip at Cooper’s side, seconds away from drawing that machete.

  They’re all gonna kill each other.

  I push, gasping as the back of Troy’s head drags against my cheek, and I twist under the weight until I’ve rolled out from under his body. Dazed, I struggle to my feet, my ears still ringing from the gunshots.

  “Hey!” I call out, blinking hard, trying to focus. There’s so much blood. I wipe at my face, and my hand’s just red, so much red. Busy’s barking like crazy in my truck, her paws scraping frantically at the glass. “Hey!” I yell this time, loud and clear.

  They don’t even look at me; just keep yelling while Troy’s blood puddles at my feet.

  I look down at his body.

  What are Sarah and the boys going to do?

  Fuck.

  This is my fault.

  This isn’t how it was supposed to go.

  My focus narrows.

  Think, then react, Harley-girl.

  I grab the Glock from my waistband. The second it’s in my hand, I stop shaking.

  The second I aim, I’m calm.

  No one.

  Bang, right between Buck’s legs.

  Was supposed to.

  Bang, right over Wayne’s shoulder.

  Get hurt.

  Bang, right above Cooper’s head.

  “Guns down!” I shout.

  They’re frozen, their full attention on me now, and it’d almost be funny except I’m spattered in Troy’s blood and bits of his brain and skull, and I’m fully willing to add to the mess if I have to.

  I shoot in the air and then point the barrel down to aim at them. “Now!”

  One.

  Two.

  Three guns tossed on the ground in front of me.

  I scrub at my forehead with my shirtsleeve. It just smears more blood on me. My stomach turns. I’ve never wanted to get clean so bad in my life.

  I take a deep breath. I want to tremble. Break. Sink so deep into the ground I’ll come out changed, with new growth. I want to be the kind of woman who can’t handle this. Who doesn’t know how.

  But this is what I was raised for.

  A remote location, bleach, and tarp, Harley-girl, and you’re golden.

  “Wayne, there’s a tarp and rope in the bed of my truck. Put on the gloves that are in the toolbox before you handle them,” I tell him. “Cooper, back your truck up so we can put him in the bed. Buck.” I look at him long and hard, until the sweat springs up on his forehead. “Get out of here before I change my mind about shooting you.”

  He huffs out an indignant breath, opening his mouth to protest.

  In a few strides, I close the space between them and me, and I level my Glock at Buck. “I have three bullets left,” I tell him. “I’ll put the first one in your foot. The second in your dick. And the third right here.” I press the barrel against his forehead. “Go home. Don’t leave.”

  “I—” Buck starts.

  “You heard her, Buck,” says a voice behind me. “Go.”

  It’s not Cooper, though. It’s Wayne.

  His hand’s on the machete he keeps strapped to his leg. I’ve seen him gut a deer with that thing, cut through tendons and joints like they’re butter. And I know Buck has, too.

  Cooper wears his threats tattooed on his face. Wayne keeps his voice and his violence to himself, because when he lets go, when he does what he does best, there are no survivors. Just rumors.

  Buck’s face pales as he looks back and forth at the three of us.

  There’s a beat, a moment where I’m afraid the ego that made him pull the gun on me earlier will get the better of him. But this time I’m not alone. Cooper and Wayne flank me like guards, and I feel safe, like it’s the way it should be. Like it’s what Duke always imagined for me. The queen and her knights.

  “Fuck this,” Buck snarls. “Call me when you’re ready to fucking do something about Springfield.”

  I don’t say anything. I don’t even move. I just keep my gun on him as he backs up, gets in his truck, and drives off, spraying dirt and pine needles everywhere.

  As soon as it’s safe, I crumple to my knees. As soon as he’s out of sight. The gun falls from my hands, and I stare at them as they start to shake again.

  “Harley, honey.” Cooper crouches down next to me.

  But I can’t. My hands are speckled in Troy’s blood. All of me’s spattered in Troy’s blood. I need to get it off. I rub my hands together frantically, trying to get it off, but all that does is make the blood that’s starting to dry peel up all over my skin.

  There’s this whimpering sound, and I realize it’s me, and then Cooper’s grabbing both my hands in his and going, “Okay, calm down, honey. Calm down.”

  I look up at him. His pale blue eyes—they’re usually icy, but now they’re kind.

  I want to tell him. Duke’s his best friend. If I don’t tell, Cooper won’t get to say goodbye. But if I do, he’ll stop me. I can’t let that happen.

  Everything’s already gone wrong. I promised myself no one would get hurt.

  I lied to myself. I knew the cost. I was just pretending it wouldn’t happen.

  Now two little boys don’t have a father and Sarah is a widow and she doesn’t even know it yet. She won’t even get a body to bury. Cooper will get rid of him. Put him somewhere no one can find him. Because that’s what Cooper does.

  Because that’s what we do.

  Because that’s what my plan has wrought.

  I have two choices. Crumble or rise.

  My legs wobble as I get to my feet. The front of my shirt sticks wetly to my stomach. I stare down at myself. I look like I’ve butchered a deer and botched the job.

  “I need a jacket,” I say, pulling off my flannel shirt and handing it to Cooper. The tank top underneath it is black, so it’s not as bad, but my arms are streaked with blood.

  Wayne thrusts a jug of water and some napkins at me, and I use them to wash off my arms and hands and face.

  “Is everything in my truck?”

  Cooper nods.

  I look over at Troy. He’s half on his side, his face in the dirt. I can’t leave him like that. I go over, crouching down, and roll him over on his back.

  A good chunk of his skull’s missing. I grit my teeth against the swell of sick that ripples inside me.

  I reach out, hesitating, and then I press my hand to his chest. “I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I’m so sorry. I’ll take care of Sarah and the boys. I promise. They’ll never need anything. They’ll have a good life.”

  They’d have a better life if he was still alive.

  I get to my feet and look at Cooper. “We need to get rid of him.”

  “I know,” Cooper says. “Wayne and I will take care of it. You go lock up the product. Don’t stop for anything.”

  “Sarah…”

  “We can’t tell her yet,” Wayne says. His voice is always gravelly. I’m not sure if it’s just that way or if it’s because he barely uses it.

  I know this, but it’s still like a knife against my skin. “She’ll get worried when he doesn’t come home.”

  “I’ll call her,” Cooper says. “I want you to go home. Lock the gates and doors.”

  “Do you think he’ll come for me?” I
ask.

  “I think we need your father,” Cooper says. “We don’t have just a Springfield problem. We have a Buck problem. He doesn’t know his place. Never has.”

  “Tell me about it,” I say.

  “But we need to get this done first,” Cooper says. “So go.” He nudges my shoulder. “Be safe.”

  I get in my truck and make my way out of the clearing. Right before the final turn onto the road, I pause, turning back. Wayne’s already got a tarp spread out next to Troy. Cooper’s got an ax.

  He swings it high.

  I floor the gas pedal.

  Thirty-Seven

  I’m sixteen years old the first time I’m responsible for a man’s death. I don’t kill him with my own hands, but I’m the reason he’s dead, all the same.

  It all starts on a Sunday in February. Miss Lissa sends Will and me into town for groceries, and we stop at one of the gas stations on the south side of town before heading home.

  Will’s pumping the gas and I dash through the rain into the mini-mart because I want jerky.

  I don’t even look at the guy behind the counter beyond a quick glance as I do a 360 of the store, marking the exits in my mind like I’ve been taught to do.

  There’s no one else in sight, and I head over to the jerky rack, trying to decide between the jalapeño and the pepper when the bell on the door tinkles.

  I look up to see Will frozen in the doorway. But he’s not looking at me.

  He’s staring at the guy behind the counter, and the look in his eyes…

  It makes the hair on the back of my arms raise.

  It makes me reach for the knife in my jacket pocket.

  The wrongness of the moment, the fear in Will’s eyes, has me moving toward him swiftly. But I don’t reach out and touch him.

  There’s something inside me that tells me not to. That tells me if I do, he’ll flinch.

  I focus on the guy on the counter, one hand hidden in my jacket, holding my knife tight. He’s just a regular guy. Skinny. Tall. Dirty blond hair, light blue eyes, long nose.

  “Will?” There’s a hundred questions behind that one word, but I don’t even know if he can hear me. He’s so terribly still. It’s not like him.

  It’s not who Daddy taught us to be.

  Something changes in the guy’s face when I say Will’s name. There’s a slow dawning of recognition, then a smile.

  Something sick churns inside me at the widening of his mouth. The flash of his teeth. At the way Will stiffens next to me.

  And then Will’s grabbing my hand and yanking me out of the store. I stumble after him, letting him pull me. I look back at the man, who hasn’t taken his eyes off us.

  “Will—”

  “Not now.” He tosses me the keys, and I nearly miss them in my surprise. He never lets me drive.

  I climb into the driver’s seat, starting the engine up as he buckles himself in. The silence stretches as I pull out of the gas station and drive down the road, heading toward the highway.

  My mind races, sorting out the scenarios, the possibilities, at a rapid-fire pace that comes only from being drilled, over and over again.

  Think of all the angles, Harley-girl. Cover all the possibilities. Always know more than your target.

  But Will isn’t a target. Will is sitting next to me, horribly silent, his lips pressed together tight, and he looks like he’s about to be sick.

  “Do you want me to—” I start to say, and then I just pull over to the side of the road, right before the highway entrance. He jerks the truck door open, stumbling out. He throws up on the side of the road in the dark, and I don’t know what to do. I scramble from the truck, going to stand next to him as he braces himself on his knees, panting.

  “Fuck,” he says.

  Reaching out and touching him seems like a good and a bad idea all wrapped up together. But I do it anyway. I lay my hand on his shoulder, and his hand comes up, pressing over mine.

  We stand there like that, the sound of the semis heading up the mountain in the distance.

  “I need to get you home,” he says finally.

  “I need to get you home,” I say. For a second, I think he’s going to crack a smile, but then it’s gone.

  We drive home in silence. I don’t ask, and he doesn’t answer. Miss Lissa frowns at us when we get home, wondering why we’re so late.

  “They were training a new cashier at the store,” I tell her. “She kept messing up the produce codes.” The lie comes easy, and I walk into the kitchen with her to unload the groceries before she notices Will has slipped outside, heading toward the cabin across the meadow where he and Miss Lissa live.

  I don’t say a word to Miss Lissa or Uncle Jake, who ambles downstairs to help with the groceries. I wait until everyone heads off to bed, and then I grab one of the lanterns from the mudroom and hurry out into the night.

  Out here, there’s the pure kind of darkness that only comes from being far away from towns, from houses, from people. The sky’s so clear it never quite looks real, the stars shining there like gold flakes at the bottom of a pan.

  I am a lone prick of light as I move through the forest, my feet taking the path worn through the pines partly by instinct. The shadows stretch in front of me, forming shapes out of the corner of my eyes.

  But I’m not afraid of the woods.

  I’m afraid of what happens when I find him.

  There are dozens of places he could’ve gone. But I get it right on the first guess: the deer blind closest to the creek. It’s set high in an old oak, the trunk so thick it would take three men to circle it with their arms. I climb up the ladder, the handle of the lantern in my teeth.

  I set it down next to him and push my back against the far wall of the blind, drawing my knees up like his. He reaches out and turns off my lantern, leaving us in darkness.

  I wait, because pushing’s no use with him. It just makes it take longer.

  Will and I are good at silence. At being quiet. At things unsaid. At keeping a foot in the unknown.

  We are made up of secrets: some we share, some we don’t. And until I saw that look on his face in the mini-mart, it hadn’t ever worried me.

  I always told myself he’d tell me if it was important.

  But now…

  “You remember your momma, Harley?”

  He’s not looking at me, staring out the opening in the blind, out into the trees and shadows and rustles of the forest, instead.

  “Of course.”

  “I mean really remember her,” he says. “Not just stuff Jake or Gran filled in. Or Duke told you.”

  I frown, something twisting in me. I do remember. I do. But it’s hazy.

  “She smelled like lilies,” I say. “I remember her bracelets. The turquoise ones. I liked to play with them. She read to me from this big book of fairy tales every night. And she didn’t take shit from anyone.”

  His mouth twitched. “No, she didn’t.”

  “You knew her longer than me,” I say, and there’s some sort of accusation in my words that I can’t quite figure out or keep from leaching into my voice.

  “She was nice to me,” Will says. “Whenever Mom would call her, she always came. She always bailed her out of whatever shit-show Mom got in. I never understood why.”

  “They grew up together,” I say. “Like us.”

  “They were nothing like us,” he says, with a sudden ferocity that makes me sit up straighter. “Your Mom loved you. I love—” He stops, and it hangs there, the “you” he won’t say. “But my mom…”

  Will barely talks about Desi. The one or two times I asked Daddy about her, he got this disgusted look on his face and just shook his head, telling me to drop it.

  “She loved you,” I say, because it’s hard to imagine anyone not loving him.

  “She loved getting high more,” Will says and it’s one of those terrible, real truths that I can’t deny. Because the things I do know about Desi aren’t good. The longest time she stayed clean was when sh
e was pregnant with him. She let Carl build a fucking meth lab ten feet away from her kid’s bedroom. She was too beaten down by him to stop him when he burned those marks into Will’s skin.

  There’s a line a mother crosses where she loses the title. When it becomes just a word instead of a bond.

  “She kept a lid on it for a while,” Will says. “But after she had me, Gran started watching her closer. Gran figured it out, so she promised to clean up. Rinse. Repeat. She cut Gran off when I was six. I never saw her after that until.…” He picks at the hole in his jeans, twisting the fraying threads of denim around his fingers. “Things were bad when she didn’t have Gran giving her money. She kept getting fired. We lost the apartment. Moved in with one of her boyfriends for a while, but he kicked us out when I was seven because he said I ate too much. And then we were at the Capri, renting by the week, picking cans and bottles out of the trash to take to the recycling center for food money.”

  He goes quiet. It’s not a normal silence from him. Will likes to pick his words unless he’s riled, and I’m used to waiting, but this feels different.

  Heavy.

  It’s hard to find his hand in the dark without looking down; it takes me two tries to get palm to palm, our fingers threading through each other’s. I squeeze, once, it’s okay; twice, you can tell me; three times, I’ll stay no matter what.

  “She started turning tricks,” he says. “For the drugs. And then…”

  Something in the pit of my stomach turns dark and deadly as a horrible thought rises in me, urged on by his shuddering words and lost voice. My hand tightens around his.

  “There was one guy,” he says, hushed. I have to lean forward to hear, tilt my head into his shoulder. My ear brushes against the thin cotton of his T-shirt, worn soft from years of washing and drying on the line. “The guy from tonight. Dan. He always watched me, and I just…I knew. You know?”

  I nod against his neck, and he lets out a shuddery breath.

  “One night, I heard them talking. About how much.”

  I slip my hand that isn’t holding his around his waist, tilt my body until it’s a solid press of warmth against his side. I breathe against his neck, smelling green and fresh and Will, waiting for him to say more.