by Jane Bradley
There’s often much comfort in useless things like the choice of pinto beans in a pale blue bowl and not the white. And I was thinking maybe Roy was right that I think too much. My momma, she said the same thing, said Darly worked too much and I thought too much, and why couldn’t we just sit still, be happy, just be?
I was thinking about whether we’d ever find Katy Connor, and those thoughts just led me to Darly, her car on the side of the road, her bones scattered in the North Georgia mountains, how I made that detective show me the sight, how I made him give me answers: her head was here, her body there. And then my mind started spinning with what had happened to Darly between that phone booth by the side of the road and those North Georgia mountains, and I made myself sick just from thinking.
Roy calls it my hyperbolic imagination. And you probably wonder where some small-time county sheriff learned to talk like that. He reads. He reads anything you put in front of him. The fine print on a can of beans, Popular Mechanics, Psychology Today, manuals on small-engine repair. “Hyperbolic imagination,” he says when I see things like bones and build the awful all around them. I’m only looking for the answers to the hows and whys of things. Darly’s bones. Her head was here. Her body there. The words looped in my brain like a stuck record. I was thinking if I could follow those words long enough, somehow they’d lead me to Katy, thinking that in a flash I’d know exactly where she was with the ease of remembering where I’d misplaced my keys. But I wasn’t seeing keys in my mind. I was seeing some girl’s broken body in a field. Someone would find her in time. They find so many bodies these days. Let’s just say I was in a bad place that night even with the breeze and the honeysuckle filling the air.
I call it the black turn my mind takes. Most days I can keep my mind steady, and most nights I can make myself bigger than all the pain out there, and I can stand everything that passes in this world the way the mountains back home can look down on so much sorrow and say nothing. Most times I can make my mind big and steady and solid as a mountain, but that night my heart was small and my mind just sick of things, tangled up in Billy’s words, This is fucked. I saw what Billy did to that girl in the bar. Might as have well have punched her in the face when he spoke those words. Corn. Who would think a simple word like corn could turn into something mean. But I suppose anything can hurt depending on how you hold it, how you throw it, what you do.
So there I was, sick of the world and breathing that night breeze, wishing it would calm my thinking into something peaceful, as if the sweetness in the air could turn that bitter feeling to something else. What I wanted was a cold beer, but I knew one beer led to five more with the way I was feeling, and I needed to be clear the next morning when I took Livy to meet Roy. It was when I turned my house into the REV center that I promised myself to never drink alone. Not in that house. Not with all those faces of the missing tacked on the bulletin boards in the front room, not with what should be a living room a shrine to the missing and the all-too-often dead. I couldn’t shake the awful feeling coiled inside.
And it was just when I decided what the hell and stood to go risk the one beer that my cell phone rang that “Ode to Joy” tune it rings. It was Bitsy made me pick that ring tone. I looked and saw the caller. Roy.
All I had to do was say, “Hey, Roy,” and he knew where my mind was.
“You brooding?” he said. I told him I was planning on knocking off a six-pack.
He said it the way he always says it, like a light thing, but there was a heaviness in his voice: “Friends don’t let friends drink alone.” I told him to come on over, and I headed for the bathroom to splash cold water on my face and make my hair look like something. Not that he would care. He’s seen me at my worst, covered in sweat and dirt and more sorrow than most could stand. Even then, he’ll step back and look at me like I’m Venus on the half shell and say, “You’re something else, Shelby Waters.” And I always pretend not to notice where he’s going on like that because I don’t have time for all that. I was looking at my face in the mirror and wondering when I started looking old when my phone rang again. I pulled it from my pocket. Roy again. I said, “You can’t wait to get here to talk to me.” I was trying to sound playful but knew he heard the weariness. He said, “You still wanting those remains?” And my head went swimmy, and I was thinking of Darly’s remains. But we claimed Darly years ago. I heard him saying, “Shelby, Shelby,” and then I heard him saying, “Patricia England.” And I said, “Damn, Roy, you scared me. I was thinking something else.”
“I knew you were brooding,” he said. I wanted to tell him I was sick of all the dying, and why was it so many women we found? Pretty women. Like it was open season on pretty women, and men could set their sights on them the way a hunter went for deer. “I’m in your driveway,” he said. “I was downtown and thought I’d stop by before I headed out to the lake. I saw your truck in the drive but no lights on in the house. I figured you were on the back porch. It’s one of those black-turn kind of nights, right?” I heard the weariness in him then. Something I’d never heard. So I headed for the front door, I asked was he all right, but he’d hung up. I opened the door to see him holding a grocery bag with one hand while the other hand slipped his phone into his pocket. He walked in, raised the bag, and I could see the shape of the cardboard box inside. “You said you wanted her remains if nobody claimed her.” He looked around the front room. All those faces of the missing staring out. Kids. Old people, teenaged boys. And women, all ages, lots of women lost somewhere out there. He shook his head, went for the kitchen. “I don’t know how you live with this.”
I followed him. He hadn’t met my eyes yet. I knew there was something more on his mind than the unclaimed remains of a woman who’d wanted to be Patricia England. “Why didn’t you come on around back if you knew I was home? Why sit in my driveway?”
He put the bag on the counter, went for the fridge. “I didn’t know if you’d want company. And I’m not in the best place myself, Shelby. I figured we could use the beers.” He opened our beers, gave me mine, took a long pull on his, and went to the bag on the counter. We usually clink our beers, even on the bad days. He focused on taking the cardboard box from the Bi-Lo bag like it was something fragile. But I saw that there was something in him fragile. That was why he was being so careful. “I know you have a way of wanting to keep things.” He gestured toward the front room. “Like those pictures in there. The ones you’ve found, the ones you want to find, the ones you never will. But why want the unclaimed remains of a stranger?”
“She wasn’t a stranger by the end of the day,” I said. But I didn’t want to go near the box. I looked at the label, knew without reading that it would say “Jane Doe” and some number marking her place in a long list of unclaimed remains.
He put the box back in the bag as if I might want him to take it away after all. He carefully wrapped the plastic around it, tied the handles into a little bow as if it were a present. There was a little trembling to his fingers as he pushed the box away. “I don’t get why you want to cling to so much sadness.”
“She helped me find those kids,” I said. “She gave me a day with a happy ending. I couldn’t let her be stacked with all those others in some dark storage room.”
He nodded, his eyes still focused on the floor. I knew he hadn’t come and sat in my driveway just for me. I wasn’t the only one brooding.
“Out back?” I said and led the way to the back porch.
“What you gonna do with Jane Doe?” he asked.
“Patricia England.”
“That’s not Patricia England.”
“She’s not Jane Doe either,” I said, sitting on the wicker couch, hoping he’d sit beside me. “I’m calling her by the name she wanted to be.” He sat but leaned forward, looked out at the dark. There was a wincing kind of tension in his face as if he hurt somewhere. “I’ll just keep her here with me. Maybe one day someone will want to claim her. Maybe I’ll put her in a pretty vase. She seemed the kind of woman who
appreciated nice things.”
“Yeah, put her in that front room with all those other unclaimed souls in there.” I heard the edge in his voice, let it go, knowing that whatever was stinging at his insides would come out. He shook his head. “As if it’s not enough to surround yourself with those missing people, you gonna start a collection of the remains of the dead ones too?”
I wouldn’t answer that. It would lead to the old fight. About my need to fill my life with other people’s sorrows so I wouldn’t have to face my own. But I knew my own all right. There was no running from it. If I spoke, I knew I’d say, What’s wrong with a life of serving the world? What’s the harm in helping others? And he’d say, What’s the harm in living your own life too? What’s wrong with going out and listening to music now and then, seeing a movie, letting somebody who’s not dead or who might could be dead into your life? He thinks I live for Darly, and I know he just wants me to make room for him. I’ve told him at least a dozen times that it does no good to argue with the living about the dead they carry around. People talk about this thing called the death grip like it’s the dead ones trying to hang on to living. But it’s the living can’t let go. So maybe I do have to hang on to Darly, her sweetness, her trusting of the world, to keep living in this world something I can stand.
He still wasn’t looking at me. “We should go somewhere,” he said.
He’d tried that before. Tried to get me to go to Tybee Island, Pauley Island. Even Savannah. Told me I might be interested in the graveyards there. He’d said that with a smile. Roy has a way of smiling. Even when he was giving you shit. He was always trying to get me out of town, as if leaving could get me out of me and into a new me who doesn’t look back, a new me who could look ahead only to the next round of fun the way Roy did. I never was one of those happy, giggling girls—that was Darly. Momma used to try to get me outside playing and tell me, “The good Lord didn’t mean for you to be such a deep child.” She called my way of thinking about things questioning the good Lord’s mysteries. In her mind we were supposed to embrace mysteries—her word for the bad shit that happens to good people. We were supposed to have faith in the Lord’s will. Like Job. She was always talking about Job. But I’m guessing Job never walked into a crack house. My guess is Job’s daughter never had half her face chewed off by a Rottweiler when she tried to blow the dog for a dealer who said if she did it, he’d give her a rock of crack to smoke.
I realized that Roy was still talking about the idea of going somewhere, and his words were hanging in the air like some kind of smoke signal that was rising, fading away. I hadn’t answered, and he just stared out at the dark like there was nothing but darkness between us. I noticed he wasn’t drinking his beer. And he wasn’t teasing at me the way he usually did when I needed steering away from the black turn and onto a brighter road. I was wondering if he didn’t want to meet Livy Baines, didn’t want to face another mother who’d lost a daughter somewhere. Maybe he was tired of all those dark roads I kept pulling him down. It’s not like there was much crime in the small town of Lake Waccamaw. That was why he liked his job there. He liked being happy, and I guess that was why I liked having him around. But I couldn’t let him out of meeting Livy. She was aching to meet the man who’d found Katy’s truck. She was convinced that Roy had the secret that could lead us to Katy.
I kept watching his face, waiting for him to feel my watching, to look at me, but it seemed the longer he stared out at the darkness, the more he could see. And whatever it was he was looking at, it was bad.
Sometimes the hardest part of my job is listening. Sometimes I have the urge, like we all do, to fill and empty space with words, as if words are like little cushions to take the nervous edge off. But silence is a big space, and if you sit still and open your ears to it, you can hear all kinds of things that go missed most times. I was hearing his hurting inside. And I knew to sit quiet until he could find the words to tell me why.
He finally moved, sipped his beer. “You believe in evil, Shelby?”
I looked out at the darkness and thought about those black turns my mind takes. If you look at darkness long enough, you can start to believe evil things are hiding in the shadows. And I was thinking, was it a man or evil that did things such as snatching a woman off the side of a road? Then a gusty breeze blew up, filling the air with that honeysuckle smell that wraps around your skin, softening everything and filling your head with nothing but the sweetness of things. I couldn’t declare a belief in evil. Not with that sweet air all around me and the goodness of Roy beside me. “On bad days,” I said. “Not always. And today was feeling like a bad day until you came along.”
Without seeing his face, I knew he was smiling. I can always feel him smiling, even when he’s on the phone. He turned to me and shook his head. “There was a girl in Land Fall.” He looked back at the dark, and his words played again in my head like the beginning of a story. This was the bad thing hiding behind the hurting in his face. Land Fall. I knew where Land Fall was. I didn’t know anybody there, but I had this feeling that what he had to say would have something to do with me. So I asked him what had happened to the girl in Land Fall.
He went to the screen door. “It’s hard to believe a man could do the things he did to this girl.” I thought of Darly. I thought of all the girls who had been and still would be damaged by some man turned monster. You know, we all know it happens every day. He didn’t tell me what this man had done to the girl in Land Fall. Just said it in three clipped words: rape and assault. He said it was a rape and assault like he’d never seen. And I sat thinking about those words rape, assault, like Band-Aids, little plastic sticky things we paste over some wounds to hide the damage done. The words can never speak the truth.
He finished his beer and put the bottle on the table, and I could see the hard trembling in his hand. I reached, took his hand, and pulled him back to sit with me. I thought of lighting a candle to bring some softness to the porch, but I didn’t want to move away from him. It seemed he’d fly apart into pieces if I stopped stroking the back of his hand.
Finally he sighed, eased up enough to talk. “It’s a miracle,” he said. “Somehow the girl got away. Ran to the neighbors’ house. They said she looked like a bloody angel, a naked, bloody angel falling in their door, said they’d never dreamed of such horrors in the world. The girl’s mom, they’ve got her so sedated she can hardly move.”
“What about the girl?” I said.
He shook his head. “Unconscious. They don’t know if she’ll come out of it.” He let himself lean into me then. I’d never seen him broken like that, and we’ve seen a lot of things. I wrapped my arm around him, pulled him close. I’d always seen the cheerful, we-can-solve-it Roy, a man who could wade into any kind of mess, fix what was broken, find what was lost. That was why every county, township, city around here kept him in their loops. Cops, they get mighty territorial, but everybody welcomed the eyes and instincts of Roy.
I thought of the words people like to say at time like this: It will be all right; we’ll have to wait and see; we’ll get through this; everything happens for a reason. I hate such words. Let them go to a preacher if they want some patched-up hope based on nothing but a need. I knew he wasn’t telling me everything. He knew I didn’t need to hear about another girl torn apart. There’s a wisdom in not telling all you know. I held Roy close, rubbed a light circle on his shoulder to soothe him the way my momma used to do. “We’re gonna get out of all this mess one day,” I said. He nodded, just barely. He didn’t need to say what he was thinking. He was always wanting to go somewhere. I know in his mind he likes to see himself throwing a fishing line into the surf, standing in the sand barefoot, not really giving a shit if he catches something, just happy to be standing in the sun with cool water foaming and swirling around his legs. I know he sees the two of us biking on a beach. He’s told me you haven’t lived until you’ve biked on a beach with that sea air blowing all around in your hair.
He sees going to these
happy places as a solution to most all things, but I know they are only distractions. They give a way of stepping out of the mess of this world until it’s all over and we cross that line to the other side of living. And even then, I wonder, do we really ever get set free from this world, or does it keep calling? I’ll have to live with not knowing. And like you, like all of us, I have to work to make some kind of peace with not knowing a damn thing about this world we like to think makes sense according to some grand design. I thought of Billy’s words: This is fucked up. Then realized I’d said it out loud. Roy nodded and sank deeper into my arms. We stayed on the porch that night, dozing in and out on the wicker sofa, waiting to see if a phone would ring. But there were no calls. It seemed the whole world was worn out from the day.
A Simple Plan
Jesse woke to the sound of Luke’s dog collar clanging. He sat up, saw Luke looking at him, then back to the door. “Sorry, Luke. Guess I slept too hard to hear you.” He got up, opened his door, watched the dog head down the stairs for the kitchen, where he’d push through the doggie door and go outside. Jessie listened for any sounds in the house. His mom would be on a plane by now, but his dad … he heard his dad downstairs talking to Luke as if Luke were his favorite child. Jesse turned toward his bathroom, remembered his pants on the floor there.
