Hey, hey, wait. James stood, letting the cash register fall to the ground and the coins inside clatter.
She stopped before him. He pushed his black hair out of his face. He was gaunt and leaned to the left, his posture unsteady. He was tall and seemed to slouch to make up for it. He had the posture of an animal that ran quickly, its belly against the ground.
It felt wrong, everything about him.
I don’t think you can go, he told her.
I won’t tell, she said, stepping backward. I just want to get to the—
Won’t tell what? James hooked his fingers in his pockets and slouched backward, rocking on his heels. You think we done something wrong?
Connie looked to the other men, looking for one who would meet her eye, that would step forward and say cool it James, she’s just a kid, like something from a movie, like how the boy on a motorcycle in a movie could break windows and smoke cigarettes but still wouldn’t hurt a girl; those boys were always good underneath their leather and their slang and their hair oil. But nobody looked at her. They looked at the ground or at James as he rocked and smiled slightly and waited for her to respond.
I don’t know what’s going on, but I’m not gonna tell and I want to go, she said. Her anger was rising. She wondered if she could run faster than them. If she threw her books and ran back she might run into somebody at the school. There were a few scattered houses just past the school, too. She calculated in her head how long it would take: not long. She could scream the whole way.
We can let her go, Jimmy. She won’t say nothing. A man with the scars of old acne under each cheekbone and blonde, greasy hair spoke up.
She wished he hadn’t. He wasn’t in charge and hung towards the back, smoking nervously.
James shook his head. I can’t risk it.
Then what are we supposed to do with her? Another asked.
She didn’t hear the response because she had thrown down her books and started to run back toward the school.
4
Levi invited Emily inside his manufactured home. It had the appearance of stability, the same beiges and whites of any middle-class home, but when she leaned against a wall, she could feel it give beneath her shoulder.
Would you like some tea?
Emily took the tea, not sweet, as she’d expected, but acidic and bitter with lemon.
I’d hoped to see you at church. Levi sat across the kitchen table from her. In the middle of the table, a napkin holder burst with square paper napkins, each with the same autumn print she’d seen at the church dinner. His kitchen was immaculate. A list of groceries was pinned to the refrigerator with a magnet that said Heartshorne Free Will Baptist: Welcome to the Family!
Do you need the church bus to come out there to pick you up on Sundays? He asked. He looked up from his glass, excited. Sometimes people don’t go because of transportation issues, he said, but the church family can always help.
He seemed so hopeful that she would say yes, that her lack of attendence had just been a matter of the church van not going quite far enough down the road.
No, she said, that’s fine. I’m not really—I’m not really a Christian, I suppose. He sat up straight and nodded, interested now, animated with purpose. She could feel where the conversation would go next if she didn’t take control of it.
But I am not, not anti-Christian, she said, and I understand why you would want to be. Want to be a Christian, I mean. She paused, not sure what to say next. He readied to speak, but she cut him off.
I’m sorry, Levi, I know this is important to you, but I actually came here to ask something specific, not about religion. She breathed in deeply. I need to ask you about my family.
When not in church, he seemed smaller, older, his skin thinner and more delicate. He seemed vulnerable in this gleaming, plastic house. He sipped his tea and nodded. He sank back in his seat, the energy leaving his face.
Okay, he said. Shoot.
My mother grew up here, Frannie’s neice. Her name was Connie, Connie Collins. Levi nodded.
I recently learned that she disappeared for two days in the mid-sixties, right after school one day, and was found again stumbling along highway two, near where Rod’s Swap Shop is right now. She wouldn’t say where she’d been—she couldn’t remember. But I never knew about it. She never told me anything. Which makes me think this has something to do with our whole family leaving town soon after.
Except Frannie, he said. Frannie stayed.
Yes.
He nodded. I was small when it happened, five, six. It wasn’t something I knew about personally, but I do remember. I assumed you already knew.
Emily shook her head. I was told nothing. So, the general store was called Richardsons, the place where she was found by. Was that your family’s business?
He nodded. Cousins, though. We didn’t have much to do with them. They were Pentecostals, he told her, as way of explanation.
Your mother really never told you anything about this? He asked. He looked at her, his eyes assuming a look his parishioners must have known well—a moist, focused concern.
She shook her head. I only know that my family left sometime in the sixties. I know they scattered, but we didn’t keep in touch. My mother didn’t keep up with her sisters and brothers, her parents, anyone. Emily laughed. Honestly, don’t take this personally, but the only things she had to say about Heartshorne was that it was a pit—a place you get sucked down into and can never escape. She hated it.
I can understand that, he said. Some people find life here too quiet—they want bigger things. Maybe she was one of those people.
Emily looked down into her tea. Her mother had always wanted something bigger, but she had never gotten it. Probably because she was never sure what she wanted, only what she did not want.
I don’t feel the same way she does, Emily said. I like it here, even if I don’t quite know how to live here yet.
Levi nodded. I bet it’s hard, not knowing anyone. Not having any family.
Emily nodded. That’s what I’m here to talk about, she said. I just want somebody to tell me the truth, she said. What happened with my mother, as far as you know? What did you hear? Anything is more than what I have right now.
He sighed and leaned away from the table. I was so young, he said, that nothing I knew came firsthand. I’d hear my mother on the telephone with her sister, or the things my father said after going out on his visits to parishioners. It was big news then, the biggest we’d had in a while. Your mother was a regular, decent girl—that’s why everyone was surprised when she didn’t come home. There wasn’t a boy, not as far as anyone knew. She was just gone.
I think that’s what scared everyone most, he said. And when she came back, she wouldn’t say a thing. Levi stood up abruptly, interrupting himself. He walked over to the kitchen and and brought out a dishtowel. He wiped the rings of condensation from their glasses and then wiped the sweat from the bottoms of sides.
I’m sorry, he said, folding the towel on the table by his glass. I like to keep things neat. He smiled. I don’t really believe that cleanliness is next to Godliness, but I do try to keep my spaces in order. He shrugged.
Emily got the feeling that people didn’t always react well to his neatness.
So, anyway, he said, taking his seat again, your mother, she was a good girl. And when she came back, everyone was happy, it seemed to me, though nobody knew what had happened. I don’t remember much until a week or two later, when the boy went missing. Then talk started again.
Emily sat up straight. Missing? Like my mother? She hadn’t read about anyone else missing. Levi shook his head. He wasn’t a boy, really—more like a young man. In his twenties. I remember my Mother on the phone, saying that it had something to do with that Collins girl, that it was payback. My Father wouldn’t talk about it. He called it gossip and said it’s a tragedy, whatever happened, when young people go astray. I remember that specifically.
I remember the day we heard about your m
other, he said. My father had come home from visiting a widow, a woman with her teeth missing and a foot swollen from diabetes, too sick to make it to church. Back in those days, older women without family needed somebody to take care of them or they’d end up with twenty cats and nothing to eat. That’s what the church did. He came back from the visit full of gossip that he’d heard from her, not to dispense, mind you, but to teach us something. He wouldn’t tell us the details, but he said that the Collins girl was missing and there were rumors of her running off with some boy. He said that nobody but God knew what had really happened to the Collins girl, that gossip was malicious. My mother nodded along with him and then went and told her friends the very next day.
And then, soon after, after your mother came back safe, the Collinses left, soon after the man went missing. I know it got bad enough around town—apparently they had a falling out with somebody, or people just didn’t like the fact that Connie wouldn’t tell— that my father visited them to see if he could mend the rift. They wouldn’t speak to him. They were packing their things to leave when he visited. Connie, your mother, she wouldn’t speak. She didn’t talk at all to strangers for a while, that’s what my father told us.
So they left then, after a man disappeared?
Levi nodded. The boy died—it was probably in the paper, if you want to look it up. They left soon after that. All but Frannie, who had a job at the diner and was engaged to a man here in town, though nothing ever came of it. She never married.
The kitchen clock, a red cat, the plastic tail hanging down and ticking the seconds, suddenly sounded the hour.
I’m sorry to keep you for so long, Emily said.
It’s nothing. Levi shrugged. I’m not that busy today. I don’t have quite so many widows as my father did. Everybody lives much longer, now, and fewer people want the church to visit them at home. They think I’m there to sell them something.
If you don’t mind, I have one more question, Emily said. I don’t understand about the man who died, or disappeared. What did it have to do with my mother?
Levi leaned forward again, fixing her with those practiced, pastor eyes. I’m going to be honest with you, Emily. People believed then that your family killed that man. And that he deserved it, for some reason, and that it had something to do with your mother’s disappearance. There were never any official charges against anyone regarding your mother, but it didn’t matter what happened officially—everybody seemed to know something I didn’t. My parents were quiet and hushed when the subject came up, afraid to give us bad dreams or fuel for telling tales, I guess. And that’s why your family had to leave. They were driven out, I guess you could say. Not literally, but by all of the rumors, the whispering, the way people looked at them. It was probably impossible for them to go back to normal life after that, despite their guilt or lack of it. Things like this happen, and they’re kept quiet, but for some reason, your family couldn’t keep it quiet.
Emily wrapped her hand around the glass of iced tea and took a sip to occupy her mouth and hands as she tried to understand what Levi was telling her. He offered her another glass and she shook her head.
I have to leave soon, thank you. She downed the rest of the glass despite the bitterness. I appreciate your help, she said. She looked at Pastor Levi, his kind eyes, his tired face, his spotless home.
Could I ask one more favor?
Anything.
Could tell me how to get to Colleen’s house?
5
James chased the girl through the woods, toward the high school. Running toward that school made his stomach recoil and he fell back a step at the thought of it. The girl was young, and long-legged, and she’d outrun him if he didn’t go faster.
He had hated it at Heartshorne High School—fucking spinster teachers and bastards with their paddles they hit you with and offered you right after to write your name on, like it was really a prize to let them hit you. He’d written his name large across the width of the paddle and dug his name in deeper each time he was sent to the principal’s office, where he was offered a paddling or detention. He always chose the paddle instead of detention, and each time he had to bend over the desk and let that fat fuck Principal Knight hit him square in the ass he thought they will all pay. All he could remember of those punishments was the anger it created in him, the feeling that he had to go out and punch something, hard, until his knuckles split and the person or thing he was beating broke, too. But they didn’t pay—soon after he dropped out in eleventh grade, he was arrested and spent for his 4-year jail stint for burglary. James didn’t know what had happened to Knight after he’d left school. He probably had a cushy retirement to Keno. Probably thought that he had touched the lives of many children in a positive way and woke up proud of himself every morning for what he’d accomplished.
School and jail, the two places he’d hated the most and spent more time in than anywhere else so far in his adult life. They were both pretty much the same, and he wasn’t going back to either of them. But he needed the girl to be sure of that. He pushed harder and reached her, snagging her hair as it flew behind her, a hunk of it escaped from her stiff hairdo. She screamed and he pulled her close, covering her mouth with his hand. She didn’t bite, as he feared she would, and she seemed to go limp. She knew when she was caught, at least.
Shhh, he said, shut up. I’m not going to hurt you. Not if you do what I say and shut the fuck up.
6
Emily came home from her visit with Levi and almost immediately fell asleep. Too tired to make it even to her bedroom, she pressed her body into the seam of the couch, her knees drawn up against her stomach, her arms over her eyes to keep out the sunlight the miniblinds.
Before that first dream of driving with her mother, she hadn’t remembered much of her dreams. She had become too used to sleep uninteruppted by anxiety, sleep that was just sleep—a complete shut-down of the body with pleasant or puzzling or harmless images flitting through only to be forgotten upon waking. She had attributed it to peace of mind, but she wondered now if it were simply another symptom of her growing boredom; even her unconscious had been too numb to make up something interesting.
Now, she could feel herself entering the dream and could also feel her bare knee pressed against a hard plank of wood that made the couch backing. She tried to wake herself, but it didn’t work. She could feel both the low sun slanting on her shoulder and the cool air on her face; she was in the car again with her mother.
She was herself, not a child, but an adult, all of the small scars and wrinkles in her hands, the subtle feeling of bra straps sinking into her skin.
Thank god I’m old enough to fight her, she thought, and felt upset with herself for being so petty. Here her mother was, alive again, and she was already gathering her weapons.
Emily said nothing. She didn’t even look over at the passenger seat where she knew that her mother was seated (she knew as you know things in dreams—with absolute certainty and the ability to hold impossibilities in your head).
Look at her, her mind said, the mind that was curled on the couch asleep, vaguely feeling the world outside that pressed against her body. The mind in her dream, though, looked out at the road before them, a wide, featureless highways, the same boxy gas stations and convenience stores passing by over and over again. They could be anywhere.
You shouldn’t be mad at me, Connie said.
Emily turned to look at her mother, who was now the age she’d been at her death: fifties, her hair in patches from the chemotherapy, cheeks sunken, her mouth cracked and dry. She held a cigarette in one hand and had the other on the steering wheel.
What?
You shouldn’t be mad at me. It’s your pickle.
Emily imagined an actual pickle, a sour, green thing suspended in vinegar.
It is your fault, the way you feel right now, Connie said. You’re not taking responsibility.
You always say things like that, Emily said. You always put it back on me.
&n
bsp; Her mother took her hand from the wheel and wagged it at Emily. Avoid words like never, like always. Don’t you remember all those books you read about communication? You tried to get me to read them. Maybe I did read them. It’s not liked you’d know the difference anyway. You thought the worst of me. She turned back to the road, which was so straight that she scarcely had to steer.
You assume so much about me, Connie says, about why I did what I did. She threw the cigarette out the window and closed it, making the air still and filling the car with the smell of mint, a smell that Emily associated with her hospital room and the candies that filled a bowl by her bed, god only knows why: a gift from somebody, probably, since Connie couldn’t eat through her mouth by then, just through a tube. The candies had staled and filled the room with their aggressive perfume.
I can only assume, Emily said. You don’t tell me anything.
Connie shrugged.
It’s strange how like our real conversations these dreams are, the waking Emily thought as her sleeping self started to feel that familiar irritation rise up from her stomach, one she hadn’t felt since her mother died.
Her mother took her hands from the wheel, turned, and took the dream Emily’s shoulders and shook her, hard, until the waking Emily was gone and couldn’t comment anymore.
Listen, she said, her teeth yellow, her breath sickly, her hands bony and dry, catching the fabric of Emily’s shirt. If you want to know, just ask.
Ask who?
Ask everyone who might know. Just ask. Stir the pot. Make the graves come up. Drag the bones out of the trash. Do what you need to. Stop blaming me and do something.
The car continued to travel down the straight road, though Connie no longer had her hands on the wheel. She started another cigarette and leaned the seat back, napping. Emily turned on the radio, looking for a classic country station. She wanted to hear Patsy Cline’s Crazy Arms, but all she could find was Willie Nelson singing about the things he should have said and done and Hank Williams crying that he hadn’t had any kissing or loving or hugging for a long, long time.
Echo Lake Page 14
