Echo Lake

by Letitia Trent

  He had made her the responsible one, the boring one. Or she had let him do this. Or, more likely, she thought, she’d done it to herself. She couldn’t blame him, really. They had created a system, and she had not stopped it. She had even taken comfort in it for a while, in the lulling rhythms of everyday life and her clear role in it.

  But all of that was over now. She’d received the letter from Oklahoma, where her mother had grown up, where her mother’s side of the family had lived for decades. And her mother had come to her in her dreams and said she was going back home, finally, and Connie hadn’t been angry or sick or thin in those dreams—she was the woman Emily had loved in the few times when she’d loved her mother purely without the complication of fear and dislike that was so familiar in their relationship.

  The Connie in her dreams was the mother she had wanted and had seen only sometimes, like when Connie was dancing in the kitchen, or putting up Christmas lights, or when she’d pull Emily into her arms and unpin her hair and brush it straight around her shoulders before bed.

  Emily knew now that she’d had a great aunt in Heartshorne the entire time. Connie had said that nobody was left there, that everyone had scattered, and good riddance to them, too, but she’d been wrong: Frannie Collins had remained. And if a great aunt had been there all of this time, there might be others. Maybe she would meet her family.

  She’d wanted to meet them so badly and had asked until her mother shouted and told her to give up.

  I don’t know where they are, Connie had said, and they don’t know where I am, and that’s how I like it.

  Emily would finally see the place she might have grown up, if her mother hadn’t left. She had a house waiting for her, paid in full, her inheritance for being Connie’s only living relative.

  •

  After two weeks of anger at Eric and the realization of the years she’d wasted, Emily finally felt nothing but a muffled annoyance and tenderness toward the remnants of her old life.

  Her lack of anger surprised her. She felt not only calm, but triumphant, as though she’d done something to be proud of, though she’d done nothing but be the last surviving member of a broken family and a woman who had the courage to leave a philandering man who had never committed himself to her to begin with. Still, it was something—she had somewhere to go. She’d never been the one going, the one with a direction out. Eric would be in the same city, under the same rain and clouds, walking past the same gutters clogged with leaves and potato chip bags and ripped posters of bands who would never get anywhere beyond Columbus, and she’d be somewhere else, starting afresh.

  She helped Eric pack the last of his books and his half-dozen identical black boots and drove him to John’s house, which was shared by four other men in their late twenties or early thirties, all musicians, all broke. She remembered the young woman in his arms as she looked at that bay window but felt nothing but sadness. So much wasted time for both of them.

  She kissed him on the forehead like a mother leaving her child on his first day of school. He seemed confused by the kiss and nodded goodbye. She’d told him she was leaving for good, but he didn’t seem to believe it.

  See you around, he said.

  Sure, she answered.

  At work, she gave her two weeks’ notice.

  But why? Her supervisor, a middle-aged man who wore an enormous jade ring on his pinky finger like a gangster, though he was otherwise pale and bespectacled, gave her a pained look. He was probably imagining all of the paperwork he’d have to do to find a new employee, the weeks of training, the professional development required. Are you pregnant? He asked.

  Emily realized she was smiling, probably blushing, probably glowing.

  Oh God, no, she said. She hadn’t told anybody from work that she had left Eric or that she’d received the note from Oklahoma. They didn’t know that she was going to leave everything behind. She wouldn’t know how to begin to tell them. She didn’t have work friends, really, just people that she spoke to in passing. They knew her exteriors—her heels, her boyfriend in the parking lot waiting to pick her up, how she never ate cake during noon birthday parties because the icing made her sick. But they didn’t know anything else about her. If she told them where she was going, she’d have to tell the whole story of how and why.

  Just looking for a change, she said.

  She bagged up her work clothes and gave them all to Goodwill, those thick knits and stockings with runs down to mid-thigh where she’d stopped them with clear nail polish. She gave away every pair of slacks, rows and rows of pleated, folded blues and greens and blacks. And winter boots, too, were unnecessary where she was going, like chains on tires or antifreeze or snowsuits. No more dirty snow after months and months of it piled up like modern art made of cold and mud.

  •

  The trip to Oklahoma took two days, most of which she spent driving. When she absolutely had to, she’d eat at the counter at cafes and truck stops. She didn’t sleep for more than six hours at a time, too excited in the mornings to stay in bed and try to sleep when her body told her to get up. No, excited wasn’t exactly right. Excitable. Nervous in her stomach. She drank coffee with cream at restaurants, not black like she took at it home. She didn’t take photographs along the way, though her camera lay in the glove box, the batteries charged, the memory card empty after she’d deleted the last photos of Eric.

  She drove across the Midwest through a series of thunderstorms that filled the wide expanse of sky with clouds that churned black in the middle and moved in mottled colors, though the sky remained cloudily unbroken as a pot lid above her. She had never imagined there could be as much sky as there was from horizon to horizon in the middle of Nebraska, the corn whipping heavy heads together. She stopped at one-story motels, each little room a box within an L-shaped arrangement of identical boxes, the televisions and lamps bolted to the tables, each bed covered by the nubby white blankets that let the cold in through the visible webbing of weave. These rooms always smelled the same, like carpet-cleaning fluid and pine. She watched cable television and laughed when the people laughed on screen. Usually, she couldn’t stand sitcoms and canned laughter. What a good idea, she thought for the first time, to have laugh tracks. She now understood how it worked: It was uncomfortable to laugh when you weren’t sure you were supposed to laugh, particularly in a room you didn’t know that smelled of pine and was always too warm or too cold.

  Outside, cars went past all night. Even when she woke up at two in the morning, cars still passed.

  They were all going somewhere, just like her. She imagined herself driving away like those cars and somebody else watching her from a window, wishing they had such direction.

  •

  Oklahoma is OK! Each license plate gave the same lukewarm recommendation.

  I’m going home, she thought, though the landscape continued to look like Kansas for miles—flat and green, the sky neverending.

  Emily stopped at Tote-A-Poke convenience store on the outskirts of Tulsa, mostly because of the name. She couldn’t understand it as a command, as a pun, or as a description of a place. It sounded vaguely sexual, like a country euphemism, but inside, the Tote-A-Poke it was like any other convenience store: pumps in the front and rows of junk food flanked by magazines and overpriced T-shirts for tourists inside. She bought a Vogue, a map of Oklahoma, and a Tulsa World newspaper.

  What road should I take to get to Heartshorne? Emily asked.

  The man at the cash register looked upward, past the bill of his cap. He might have been Emily’s age or much older. He looked as though he’d spent much of his time outside, his cheeks and nose reddened and slightly chapped. He wore a t-shirt with the name of a football team on the front and jeans. He took so long to answer that she wondered if he had heard her or if she’d have to speak again, more slowly.

  Hmm, he said. Heartshorne. Near what?

  I don’t know, Emily said. Just Heartshorne. Had her mother ever mentioned the big town, the place they went to g
et groceries? What was it called?

  We went to Keno once a month to stock up on frozen French fries, ham, big tubes of bologna, and enough toilet paper to keep us from having to buy it for a dollar-fifty a roll at Jimmy’s.

  Keno, she said. It’s somewhere near Keno.

  He nodded. Let me see the map. I went to church camp at Keno. Beautiful place. He looked up at her and nodded. Beautiful country.

  She smiled. So it would be beautiful. She hadn’t known that it was beautiful. Connie had never said so.

  Lots of forests, lakes, even mountains, he said. Not much country like that around here. You’re in for a treat. Some people call it God’s country, he said, but I think everyone calls a place they love God’s country, so that probably doesn’t mean much. Still, it’s a pretty place to visit.

  He spread her map out on the counter and highlighted one long stretch of road. She watched his hand move down the map.

  Take this road, he said, pointing to the thickest blue line. It went straight through the middle of the state until it veered a sharp right and disappeared into Texas. You just take it all the way until you see Keno. Get off there and ask for the easiest way to Heartshorne. I can’t help you from there, he said, shoving his cap back on his head in a gesture that Emily recognized from young men in movies, though he wasn’t a young man. But I bet the signs will help.

  She took the map to the car and highlighted that road all the way down to Keno, a small dot on the map, but not the smallest dot, meaning it was a big town or a small city. Heartshorne didn’t show on the map at all, like Chester, Harrisburg, or any of the other places her mother had mentioned when talking about her childhood. Whole clusters of little towns filled those empty expanses between dots, towns that had their own Elementary and High Schools and rival basketball teams, their own churches and houses in rows, all conducting the business of life. She was, momentarily, shocked by the map, the great white gaps of it, and how many people lived in those gaps.

  The Chester kids all came to Heartshorne when they failed. Connie had said. Harrisburg always beat Heartshorne in Basketball, but we beat them in Quiz Bowl.

  Her mother had spoken about her childhood and early adolescence more than any other time in her life, mostly of things that had seemed insignificant to Emily at the time. Connie retold the same stories over and over as though they meant something more than she was saying, something that Emily could have figured out if she’d only listened hard enough. She liked to tell about the time that Reggie brought firecrackers to school and set them off in the bus barn, which resulted in an enormous fire. The fire truck had to come all the way from Keno, Connie had said, smoking furiously, her eyes wide. And the black smoke filled the school, but we couldn’t go outside, it was even worse, and so we lay on the floor under our desks and covered our mouths with wet brown paper towels from the bathroom.

  Emily remembered this story more vividly than the others. She’d had nightmares about it as a child, as though it were her own memory of a fire and not her mother’s. In the dream, she was trapped under a desk, black smoke stinging her eyes. Her mother was under the teacher’s desk opposite Emily’s, though its bulk of wood kept anything but her eyes and red fingernails from showing.

  •

  If you blink you’ll miss it, the old man behind the counter at the gas station just outside of Keno had said, and he was right. There, Emily had bought a Heartshorne Star. Heartshorne had its own paper, though it served all of the little towns between it and Keno, or “The City,” as people called either Tulsa or Oklahoma City, depending on which direction they were going to or coming from.

  HARRIS TWINS STILL MISSING

  The headline dominated the front page, and under it, there was a photograph of a boy and girl, dark-haired, smiling in bathing suits at the rocky edge of a lake.

  The closer she got to Heartshorne, the wilder and emptier the landscape became. The highway narrowed to only two lanes with a wide, pebbly shoulder. Dead animals and pieces of metal and rubber littered it. She passed her first armadillo, its armored back on the ground, the pink pads of its feet turned up to the air.

  She passed through Chester (a bait shop, a Pentecostal church, the sign reading A ORTION STOPS A BEATING HEART, and a gas station with picnic tables outside and a microwave to cook frozen burritos and pizza pockets) and soon entered Heartshorne. It almost didn’t seem worth it to separate the two towns, but somebody had.

  Here, the trees grew closer together, dense and tall. Emily couldn’t see through the stands of trees that lined the highway, the blocks of pines that stood out in dark, wet green against the otherwise sun-faded leaves and grass. Sometimes a mailbox leaned into the road at a small opening in the trees. That opening meant that a house was at the end of a path, but Emily couldn’t see it. The trees ate the path and only the mailbox stood as the only sign that there was something human beyond.

  Mountains rose up before her and as her small car climbed them with difficulty. Some of the only mountains in Oklahoma, the man at the gas station had told her. The only scenic view in the state. Her mother had mentioned the mountains, too.

  They surrounded Heartshorne like a wall. It was hard to get in or out past them.

  Emily liked the mountains. It reminded her of living in Virginia, in the hollows between mountains, in little towns tucked away from immediate view. She liked how overwhelmingly green it was, how it was almost a shock to the eye. It was a comfort to be rolled up in so much darkness.

  Her cell phone stopped working soon after she entered the town.

  Heartshorne proper began with Echo Lake, a man-made lake still new enough that the dead trees, their branches blackened, broke through the surface of the water. Emily’s mother had hated the lake. Slimy bottom, dirty, filled with snakes, branches so sharp they could rip a hole in the bottom of your boat. She’d told stories of teenagers jumping from the reservoir tower on dares and impaling themselves on trees still standing deep underwater and how in the summer, the lake released a yellow fog like condensed poison.

  We weren’t allowed to swim when it fogged up like that.

  An ugly place. Cemeteries and trailer houses and animals all down there at the bottom.

  But the sky was blue as Emily drove, almost completely clear, and the lake reflected back that light. A man and a woman wearing battered, brown cowboy hats, sitting in bright red lawn chairs, threw their fishing lines over the bridge’s wide shoulder. The signs said to slow to thirty miles per hour, and then twenty. She was the one car on the road at six AM, besides the occasional log truck or semi.

  Emily spent an hour and a half meandering down back roads, past whole spools of wire fence, which seemed a flimsy and slim barrier between the road and the cows that stared dully out at her when she passed. She’d been given directions on the phone, but she realized now they were meant for somebody who knew their way around; a right at the fork, a left at the creek. Some of the roads lacked signs, and all had been changed to a numbering system, though the lawyer had given her roads with names. She couldn’t get any cell service to call the lawyer back for clarification.

  Emily drove slowly, looking for road signs or even mailboxes with names she remembered from her mother’s stories—Gilbraiths, Nix, Coulter, Harrington. She ended up back on the main road, stopping at Tony’s Swap Shop, which sold rebel flag t-shirts, plastic lighters decorated with American flags, and other Southern kitsch, though Emily didn’t think of Oklahoma as the South. The young woman at the counter, who must have been her age or younger—though her dark eye-makeup and bleached hair made her seem older—said that Wells Road was back the way she’d come from, just barely past the lake, between the bait store and the Cut and Tan, which had been shut down because the owner didn’t actually have a beauty school license.

  It says here take a turn at the flower place, Emily said.

  The woman sniffed. That place ain’t been there for years, she said. They sell flowers over at the little store by the Baptist church now.

  Emi
ly nodded.

  The road starts out paved then, boom, it’s dirt, not but a half-mile down it, the woman said, moving shards of ice from her soda cup around in her mouth. That’s how you’ll know it’s the right one—most roads go right to dirt off of the main one.

  Thanks, Emily said. I’m new around here.

  Huh, the woman said, cracking ice between her teeth. You got family around?

  Not anymore, she said. Not that I know of.

  Emily imagined there had to be someone around, though. She planned to find them, if there were any left. She’d take a thin Claymore County telephone book and call all of the last names she could remember from her mother’s stories and ask them if they knew of any Collins and where they’d gone.

  Best forget the whole rotten bunch, her mother had said. It’s not like they can do anything for you that I can’t. Emily had stopped asking about the absent family by the time she was a teenager. She convinced herself that she liked being alone, she liked having no family photographs. It made her mysterious and different, even if nobody noticed but her.

  I don’t know anyone who moves here without family or an oil or logging job or something, the woman said. She leaned on the counter, her forearms flat, hands folded together.

  It’s a nice place, she said. Good for kids. They get outside and everything, or at least they used to, before this summer. She shook her head and sighed. No gangs, at least. You have any kids?

  Emily shook her head. She thought I’m too young for kids, but of course, she wasn’t really, not anymore.

  I’ve got three, the woman said, each of them a handful. She leaned forward across the counter, her elbows rustling in a pile of Heartshorne Stars. It’s even harder now that we can’t let them play outside. She pointed to the newspaper headline, the two children missing.