What Remains of Her

by Eric Rickstad

  She peeked in the bag. He pulled it tight to him.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Go. Colld. I’ll come to the store, charge a bluue streeak. Freeezing.”

  “I’ll see you?”

  “Yess.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “We’re aall sorrry.”

  She left him and he watched her enter the store.

  He lumbered toward the truck, swallowing down puke. Sally peeked out now, just the top of her head and eyes showing.

  At the truck, he looked back at the store.

  Lucinda stood inside, looking out the window at him.

  He opened the truck door. “Dowwn.”

  Sally covered herself with the blanket as he dumped the bag inside.

  As he pulled the truck out, Lucinda watched him go.

  He drove toward the mountains, in the opposite direction of the doctor, of everyone. There would be no escape from town tonight.

  He’d be lucky if he made it back to the cabin alive.

  Light

  Lucinda pulled out the metallic tongue of the tape measure and walked it back from Ed to the wire rack of postcards that customers looked at but never bought. “Fifteen feet two, two and a half, inches,” she said and yawned.

  She’d lain awake in bed all night thinking about the missing girl and her encounter with Jonah.

  “Back up to the chicken wire rolls,” Ed said.

  Lucinda let the tape go. It whipsawed and crackled, snapped into its case like a tin tongue into the serpent’s mouth.

  “Ouch.” Ed sucked at his thumb where the tape caught him. “When’s the wrecking ball, anyway?”

  Lucinda felt a tug of regret for her duplicity, for not coming clean with Ed about her possible absence for ten months and what that meant for the future of the place, if the place had a future at all for her, or anyone.

  “We going to stay open while they renovate?” Ed said.

  “If I even do it. I don’t know. If I even stay open at all.”

  “That’s a bolt from the blue. I thought you were excited about the renovations. What is all this? What else are you going to do if not run this place?”

  “I’m capable of more than this.”

  “I meant, do you have something in mind or—”

  “I got accepted, to a thing. A dig. In Newfoundland. But it’s a ten-month commitment. I’d need someone to manage the store, take over my role, while I’m away. You’ve been here a dozen years, I know that you’ve wanted more. I was thinking—”

  “I’ve been thinking, too,” Ed said.

  “That’s beyond your pay scale.”

  “I might get my grandfather’s old workshop in working order.”

  “Now that’s a bolt out of the blue,” Lucinda said.

  “In my spare time,” Ed said, as if sensing her concern that she’d be left high and dry. “Just to see if I take to it.”

  She knew this wasn’t true, even if Ed didn’t. He would leave the store and never look back when he found he was good at his grandfather’s craft of building custom Finnish hot tubs. “You’ll take to it,” Lucinda said.

  “I’d still be able to try to help you out even if—”

  “It’s not your responsibility.”

  Ed grabbed a bottle of Moxie from the cooler, cracked it open. “He was famous for his hot tubs, my granddad,” Ed said. Lucinda was familiar with the story, but she did not interrupt. Ed was trying to redirect the conversation, and pride rang in his voice; good pride. Pride for someone else’s accomplishments. “He went to Finland. By ship. He was in Yankee magazine. LIFE. The Grocery still has the faded magazine spreads on a bulletin board.”

  “I saw Jonah at the Grocery last night,” Lucinda said.

  “Since when is he in town at night? And at the Grocery?”

  “He looked horrible. A mess.”

  “That’s breaking news.”

  “I mean. Really sick,” Lucinda said. “His hand looked grotesque. So swollen it didn’t even look like a hand. Purple, blistered, and seeping a yellow fluid. A recluse spider bit him.”

  “Jesus. That’s serious.”

  “I told him to go see Vern and he swore he would; but I checked with Vern this morning and he hadn’t seen Jonah. I should have forced him.”

  “You can’t force Jonah to do anything.”

  The cowbell above the door clanked. Marnie from the Gas-n-Go strode in clapping her hands and blowing into them and knocking her boots together to clop off the snow, her face florid from the cold. She wiped at her runny nose.

  “Greetings,” she said.

  Ed took the tape measure from his pocket and played with the tape, pulling out a length and letting it snap back.

  “I hoped to see you here,” Marnie said to Lucinda.

  “Our haul of wood pellets is due in tomorrow if—”

  “No, no. As deputy,” Marnie said. “I saw something strange last night. I was driving by that old abandoned place, by One Dollar Bridge, and I saw a light on inside.”

  “Couldn’t be,” Ed said. “Place hasn’t had power since—”

  “A flashlight,” Marnie said.

  A light? In Jonah’s old place, Lucinda thought.

  “Did you see anyone, the person using it?” Lucinda said.

  “I wanted to stick around. But I was looking for my dog, Jelly Belly; she got loose and I was walking around looking for her. I saw it for certain. I came back to the house after I found Jelly Belly. She was over behind the Covered Bridge Diner, eating slop around the Dumpster, she likes all that fried food, like I don’t feed her enough already, but Jelly Belly she—”

  “What was at the house when you got back?” Lucinda said.

  “Nothing. The house was dark. But with this girl missing, and me not ever seeing a light on in that house in all these years. And just seeing that old guy in the Gas-n-Go recently.”

  “Jonah was at the Gas-n-Go?” Lucinda said.

  “I didn’t even know that’s who he was, until the boob tube at work aired an old piece about him, about his wife and daughter. I can’t believe anyone believes that about him. He’s always been respectful the few rare times he’s come in. Quiet. If nervous. Bought his tobacco and rolling papers, and crayons this time and—”

  “Crayons?” Lucinda said.

  “For something he’s building. He said crayons are cheaper than carpenter pencils.”

  Outside, the town plow charged past on Main Street to heave a wave of snow onto the sidewalk.

  “I just thought it was odd,” Marnie said, “and you might want to look into trespassers or whatever. I’d rather tell you than the sheriff. He kind of . . . I don’t know . . . creeps me out.”

  Lucinda took her barn jacket from a wood peg by the door, pulled on a wool cap, and shoved off into the morning snow and cold.

  Falling

  Jonah lay on the couch, head propped on a pillow he’d not recalled placing there himself. Slack, immobile, body poached in sweat. Vision swampy. Tracers of pain flared through each vein, each capillary. He opened his eyes. Slits. Saw a semblance of her face through the quavering air as she came and went, yet he felt her always present. He shut his eyes again and fought the nausea.

  A cloth, cold and damp, pressed to his forehead.

  His putrid hand soaked in a bucket of warm salt water.

  How did she know what to do?

  He drifted.

  Dreamed.

  Home, the sun pouring through the breakfast nook in the kitchen, the smell of bacon and eggs and coffee, daughter on his lap giving him a peck on the cheek, her arms wrapped about his neck loosely and a round pink face so full of love and innocence gazing up at him it was all he could do to leave her and set out into the world for a day of work. She was there, too, Rebecca, standing in the doorway to the hall taking them in, her husband, their daughter. Her face, too, shining. Glowing. The kitchen saturated with sunlight, growing warmer, brighter, until it blinded, caught afire and burned them all to ash.
>
  He started awake, weeping.

  A hand touched his cheek.

  He took it in his and held it there.

  “Sally,” he said. “Sally.”

  And he was gone again.

  Falling.

  Endlessly.

  Discovery

  Lucinda stalked down the snowed sidewalk, face flushed, bare hands jammed in her jacket pockets. She stopped fast at the sight of a face staring at her. For a second, Lucinda had thought the photo on the Missing Person tacked to the telephone pole was of Sally. Those dark eyes, the paper wet from snow, cried black ink down the image of the girl’s face. It was not Sally. It was Gretel. But, the resemblance. That odd, sweet face. It betrayed none of the abuse inflicted upon the girl, as if she knew that to betray it would bring more upon her. And those eyes. So dark. We’ll never find her, Lucinda thought. Not alive. Not now. “Whoever did this to you, whoever has taken you,” Lucinda whispered. “I’ll make sure they pay for it.”

  She hurried onward. Snow drifted down silent from dark, smoky clouds as if it were the ashen fallout of a forest fire. The morning light was sleepy. A gaggle of boys stalked the sidewalk, launched snowballs at a stop sign, making a competition of it. You’d never see girls do that, Lucinda thought. A girl’s inclination toward competition was more subtle but perhaps more vicious too. For the first time in years, Lucinda thought of Betty Lansing, the meanest of the Eye Shadow Girls who had taunted and frightened Lucinda and Sally. What had become of her? Not long after Sally’s disappearance, the girl and her family disappeared, too, not like Sally and her mom had, but moved out of state somewhere, and Lucinda had never seen Betty again.

  A truck from High Meadow’s dairy backed up into the side street to the loading dock of Ivers Grocery. Lucinda remembered milk and eggs left in the milk box on the porch. Gone now. That personal touch. Vehicles eased up and down the street, slush shooshing. Wipers thwacking. Pickup trucks. Tradesmen.

  As she passed Rosie’s Hardware, Edsel, the owner, nearly knocked her over as he trundled a dolly loaded down with sacks of ice salt.

  “Sorry there, Luce,” he said. Jowls rubbery as a St. Bernard’s. “Gotta get the salt out for the customers. Town oughtta salt the walks better. But I can’t complain. Selling this stuff like water in the desert.”

  Lucinda passed the Lucky Spot, the place mobbed, vehicles parked out front, idling, wisps of exhaust trickling from shivering tailpipes.

  She crossed Railroad Street and kept going until the sidewalk ended.

  At One Dollar Bridge, she stared across the street at the old house. In the covered bridge’s rafters pigeons purred. Their droppings spattered the old boards. She looked down at the stream running under the bridge. Clear. Cold.

  She looked for trout finning, as she’d done with her father as a girl, but her eyes were unpracticed and she could not see any trout. In the summer, kids jumped from the bridge roof into the deep water. She’d done it. It had always been done and seemed it would always be done. She looked for a moment longer for a trout and crossed the street, stood in front of the old house.

  She’d not been in there since she’d sat on the swing with Jonah the day she’d run off to the pit, so long ago.

  Stunted maple tree seedlings sprouted from the moss she knew carpeted the roof beneath the snow. The chimney was cratered where bricks and chinking had loosened and fallen out over the years. A tree lay dead on the lawn. How much effort went into the upkeep of life. The work it took just to maintain. She walked up the driveway, the asphalt in rutted upheaval from decades of freeze and frost and thaw, freeze and frost and thaw.

  She stopped and stared at tire tracks, nearly erased by new snow. The tracks led from the driveway around to the back of the shed.

  She followed the tracks to where a vehicle had parked.

  A wide vehicle. A truck? SUV? Someone had been here.

  Lucinda circled the area where the truck had parked. Boot tracks, reduced to indistinct depressions under the fresh snow, led from where the vehicle had parked to the house.

  Lucinda followed the drifted tracks to the front steps. One track was definitely that of a child. Another track an adult’s. Squatters? she wondered, with the cold coming? No. The house, as far as she knew, had not been disturbed all these years. She only knew one squatter. And he was up in the hills. She tried the knob, surprised to find it unlocked. She let herself in, as she had so often, so many years ago as a girl, when she was yet untainted by the world’s wickedness.

  My God.

  Her breath left her at the ammoniac stench of animal urine.

  Every toy, every glass and magazine sat right where it had been that last night, the place in decrepitude now from time’s passing, slow and steady and unstoppable.

  Animals had laid waste to the place; feces soiled the carpet and wood floors.

  Decades of sunlight washing through the windows had leached color from the wallpaper and furniture, now gone a ghostly pale.

  Lucinda tried to breathe, coughed in the dry dust of the place. She’d have sat down in the couch to gather herself as the crush of memories stampeded her, but the couch was befouled with clots of animal hair and scat, and it reeked of piss and musk.

  In the kitchen, three place settings sat on the Formica tabletop, each plate still waiting to be used.

  Lucinda could almost hear Sally squealing with glee from her room: Is that Lucinda at the door, Mommy! Let her in! Let her in!

  Lucinda trailed down a hall littered with peeled wallpaper and animal scat and came to stand at a closed door. The faded sign: sally’s room.

  Lucinda opened the door. The room lay as quiet and still as a held breath. She shuddered and felt nearly overcome with an urge to flee. Her presence seemed a violation of a place sacrosanct. Unease settled in her bones.

  A pile of stuffed animals lay heaped in the corner, the creatures reduced to scraps of fur and puffs of stuffing, real animals having cannibalized their faux kin.

  She knelt by the animals, overcome with sorrow. Sally would be distraught to see her animals in such a pitiful, unloved state. Lucinda picked up a doll, one of its button eyes missing. “Baby Beverly?” she whispered. It reminded her of her own Baby Beverly. Except her Beverly had both eyes. How she’d cherished Beverly. She’d taken her everywhere so she would not be alone and afraid. Where was she now? Packed away. In a box, likely. In a dark lonely attic or basement. Lucinda could not even say where her doll was, if she even existed anymore; yet she had a desire to see her again, as strong a desire to find her old, childhood doll as she had to find this missing girl.

  She looked at a photo on the desk, the doll dangling by its pigtails from her fingers. The photo was of Sally. A school photo. Lucinda blew dust off it, an archaeologist piecing together past civilizations. Those eyes. So dark yet bright, it seemed a sacrilege they could ever be extinguished from the world. Life in them. Not just Sally’s. Life itself. Wanting out. Filling you with itself.

  Lucinda set the picture down and looked at a cork bulletin board, coloring book pages pinned to it, as pale now as Lucinda’s father’s sickly skin.

  She pulled a thumbtack out of the board to free a page. A giraffe, its purple body and yellow mane faded.

  Stopped.

  She stared at the bulletin board, the coloring-book page falling from her hand.

  “What the fuck,” she whispered.

  No

  Lucinda reached for what her eyes saw but her mind did not believe.

  Her fingertips touched it, pulled away.

  A child’s drawing on a piece of lined yellow paper, long hidden behind the giraffe picture.

  Stick figures. Two of them. On their sides, hand in hand. One larger than the other, with long dark brown hair. Like Sally’s mother’s.

  One smaller, with pigtails. A girl.

  Eyes X’d out.

  Red slashes across the necks.

  All around them, scribbled red crayon. Dark, ragged. Furious. The paper torn from pressing. Blood. Pools of
angry blood, so deep and waxy it seemed to be wet. Hovering above the figures, in a black scrawled sky, an evening star. The arms. The legs.

  “Christ,” Lucinda said.

  She looked at the bulletin board.

  At all the other coloring book pictures.

  She lifted up one of a bumblebee.

  No.

  One of a rainbow.

  No.

  Of a cat.

  A puppy.

  Horses.

  She tore them down. Behind each page hid another drawing, each more gruesome, more graphic and angry than the last, of things no child could know unless they’d lived it, or glimpsed its potential within another person.

  She stared at the drawings, heart racing so hard it was as though the valves were stuck wide open, her blood a wild, hot torrent.

  She was too hot. She reached to clutch the desk edge for balance, but her fingers would not obey. The rag doll slipped from her weakening grip to hit the floor with a dead thud and a mechanical cry: Help me. I’m hurt.

  Darkness descended.

  Book IV

  Darkness Coming

  Cold. Stiff. The light peculiar. An orange glow pulsed and strobed.

  Where was she?

  Lucinda gained her knees with a groan. Her jaw and her left eye pulsed with pain.

  A bedroom.

  She was in a bedroom.

  Sally’s bedroom.

  She looked out a window. The setting sun’s orange light glowed on the bedroom walls.

  Lucinda looked at the stick figure drawings on the bulletin board.

  A chill rippled through her. How had Lucinda not known about Sally’s drawings? She felt a stab of petty girlhood resentment. How could Sally have kept these drawings secret; she and Sally were best friends. They told each other their secrets and kept them.

  Lucinda tucked the drawings in her coat pocket. She did not know what they meant, but they disturbed her. The tracks in the snow and someone having been in this house upset her too. She considered telling Kirk but decided to sit on the development, for now. The house appeared undisturbed, and the snowed-in tire and boot tracks were useless as evidence.