Her mother took her to the local clinic, who said it must be a cold, and then to the hospital, who said it must be heatstroke. They both ordered bed rest, and Misty spent the next week on the living room couch with the fan sputtering cool air onto her calves. Her mother hovered nearby and even Penny let Misty choose what they would watch on television every night for a week. They were always so kind when she was hurting. It almost made her wish she was hurt more often.
Misty didn’t speak to anything for almost a month after that. Every time she tried, the pain of the fawn seared through her and she let go, retreating to the silence in her head. Eventually, the pain of the memory faded, and Misty went to the creek, to the crawdads. The fawn was still part of her name, its bloody hip ingrained on Misty like a scar.
“Are you coming or not?” Penny leaned through Earl’s barn doors and squinted against the sunlight.
Misty shivered. She tore her eyes away from the garden and hurried past Earl’s trailer. No matter how much she’d like to help the garden, she couldn’t risk that kind of pain. Not again.
Four
Inside the barn, William climbed onto a rusted camper shell and squinted at the hayloft overhead as Penny squatted in the nearest corner, all of them looking for the same thing.
“What do we need a bottle for anyway?” Misty asked.
“For the game,” William said.
“But everything in here is broke,” Penny said.
“Including you,” William said.
“You know, I got plenty of other things I could be doing other than digging around some flea-bitten barn on a Saturday with the likes of you.” Penny rose from the corner and planted her hands on her hips again.
“There’s got to be one bottle in this whole damn place,” William said. “Mom says that Earl drinks like a fish.”
“That’s another thing,” Penny said. “I don’t like being in here when Earl could come creeping back to his trailer any minute. He might chop us up into little pieces like he did his wife.”
“Quit, Penny,” Misty whispered, but Penny just rolled her eyes.
“That’s just a story,” William said.
“A true story,” Penny said. “Aunt Jem says that he never got convicted because he’s a Dixon. His uncle’s a preacher at our church, and he vouched for Earl when it happened and made everything go away with all that money his family’s got.”
“They wouldn’t vouch for him if he really did it,” William said. “Besides, people said his wife was right quare. She was all the time talking to animals.”
“So?” Penny said. “Misty’s all the time playing with crawdads. It don’t mean anybody has a right to hurt her.”
“What’s wrong with liking crawdads?” Misty asked.
“Well,” Penny said, “Aunt Jem said that after Earl’s wife went missing, her sister lost it. She wanders through the woods now with a lantern in her hand looking for her. She don’t even eat anymore.”
William pointed a finger at Penny. “It’s fire, not a lantern. She conjures it in her hand like this.” He held out his palm and wiggled his fingers so they might have been writhing and orange instead of short and pale.
“What was her name?” Misty asked.
“What?” William said.
“The lady,” Misty said. “Earl’s wife.”
“I don’t know,” William said.
“It was something with a C. Carol. No, Caroline, I think.”
“Oh,” Misty said. “That’s a pretty name. Caroline.”
There was something in saying her name that made the barn feel heavier. Something about her name that charged the air between them. That she was a real woman with a real name made it harder to share the stories because it made the stories easier to believe. The conversation fractured, and the three went back to their separate corners searching for a bottle.
Misty found one first, nestled in a pile of broken glass. Her bottle was a deep, true green with a white smudge on the front where the label used to be and a crack that snaked from base to mouth. The crack rose up a little, just enough to tear her skin if she wasn’t careful. The bottle’s name was hiding there, trembling along the thin crack that Misty felt all through her chest like a spine bent and creaking. If the bottle broke, its old name would still be there, changed only a little by the breaking.
Names were shaped through addition. The bottle’s name grew when it went from something small and dark in an endless sky to something spinning and joined, to something solid and deep in the earth, to something outside of it, to something heated and shaped, to something green and slick, to something labeled and sold, to something here in the palm of her hand. It was all of those things, always. It carried its own shadow in its sounds, little imprints of the life it had lived, and the bottle’s life had been long. Misty ran her fingers gently along the length of the bottle before she stood.
“Here,” she said.
William let go of the board he was hanging from and dropped to the floor. He took the bottle and twisted it between his hands, searching for defects. The bottle cast a faint green shadow over William’s nose and mouth, turning him momentarily into something far away and sinking, a drowned boy with his face pointed toward the sun.
“This here’s the one,” he said.
“We have to hurry though,” Misty said. “Mom’ll be home soon.”
Penny crossed her arms over her chest. “She’s right. Mom’ll skin us alive if she finds us in here. Or Earl will. We must be a bunch of idiots.”
“That’s what makes it fun,” William said.
Penny took the bottle from William and held it upside down, letting a few drops of brown water drip out. “Yeah, but your mom won’t take a switch to your bare legs if she catches you. She’d have to be home first to even notice you was gone. She’s probably out with that new feller of hers. The one that drives that blue truck.”
Something dark flashed across William’s face as he jerked the bottle from Penny’s hand. “That ain’t her feller. And if you’d quit talking for half a second, we could get started and then nobody has to get in trouble, how about that?”
They sat so their bodies formed a triangle, there in the corner of the barn among puddles of rainwater grown scummy in the June heat, where the air smelled of stale hay and staler beer. That way, William said, no one could see them from the road if they drove by.
“Ain’t we supposed to have more people?” Penny asked.
“What, you want me to go find Earl?” William said.
Penny frowned. “I’m just saying. There ain’t that many of us playing, so what happens if my bottle lands on Misty, huh? What then?”
“You ain’t never kissed your sister on the cheek before? We’ll figure it out, all right. The game ain’t even started and you’re picking it apart. Here.” William held the neck of the bottle between two fingers. “You just spin it like this. Not no little spin, neither. It’s got to go all the way around at least twice.”
“What if it don’t?” Penny said.
“Then you lose your spin.”
“You’re making this up,” Penny said. “Spin the bottle ain’t got that many rules.”
“Have you ever played this game before?” William asked.
Penny lifted her chin. “I’ve seen—”
“Seeing ain’t the same,” William said. “My cousin taught me how to play with her and her friend, and they’re both sixteen. And I reckon they know a lot more than you do about kissing games. They showed me—well, they showed me how to do this, for one. So until you know more than me, I reckon I’m the one to listen to.”
William took the first spin without hesitating, and they kissed what the bottle gave them. Wooden beams. Metal pipes. Once, for William, a grasshopper. The bottle seemed to find only the gaps between them, the space that separated their knees from other knees. It didn’t land on a body,
not even after William moved them three times, convinced that it was the ground or the moisture from the puddles that was warping the bottle’s path. Nothing changed when they moved, except for the light falling through the spaces between the barn’s wooden sides. The light soured, turned to a kind of dirty yellow that no flower had ever grown.
Misty’s lips grew chapped from kissing so little skin and so much else. Her tongue tasted first of dirt and then of iron and then of nothing at all, but they kept spinning, because even one kiss would change something between them. Misty could feel it in the way that they all leaned forward as the bottle spun, that something was about to happen. She opened her chest for the bottle, let it fill her with its memories, with the feeling of its glass against the cold earth, the tremor of every spin jarring through her spine, like they were spinning together, and she could have asked the bottle to land on William if she wanted. She could kiss him there, in the dank barn while her sister watched, but she didn’t want to. Her nerves coiled around the bottle’s name until they both pulsed together under her skin and she hoped it might never land, that it would spin and spin until someone’s mother came home and called them from the barn.
It was Misty’s turn, and she told the bottle to land where it would, to choose for itself where it wanted to be, and the words coursed through her like a lightning strike, all spark and light, all warmth. She pressed her fingertips along the crack in the bottle’s glass and felt the bottle call back, a distant, glimmering sound, but then William grabbed the bottle’s neck and twisted. The bottle seesawed back and forth against the damp ground, the glass clinking louder every time it touched the earth. Misty leaned back in case the glass shattered. She pulled away from the bottle until she heard nothing but her own thoughts, felt nothing but her own skin, solid and sheened with sweat.
A car drove past the barn, a cloud of dust yawning in its wake. A door slammed and Misty’s mother called their names. Penny jumped to her feet and ran outside before their mother could notice what direction she was coming from. Misty leaned back, about to follow, but William darted forward at the last second. His lips were warm and dry against Misty’s cheek as he kissed her. He didn’t look at her as she stood to leave, but his own cheeks were stained a deep, deep pink. Misty’s skin tingled in the breeze as she walked out of the barn, leaving William behind with the green bottle, still spinning.
Five
That night, Misty and Penny and their mother watched their mother’s favorite show, the one about the missing people, who almost always turned out to be missing women. Missing women usually turned out to be dead women, murdered by their husbands or boyfriends or coworkers. Dead women whose bodies were often found in parts, scattered along empty highways, shoved into boxes or freezers, or left in shallow pits in unfamiliar woods. The lives of women seemed to be thin strings held taut in someone else’s hands, and at any moment someone, some man, might come along and cut that string in half.
Misty sat beside their mother on the couch while Penny lay on her belly on the living room floor. Penny scribbled furiously in her notebook, though she refused to share what she was writing. Their mother had a plastic tray of cookies in her lap. Misty had eaten the entire middle row that week, the one where the cookies were half vanilla and half chocolate, leaving only the vanilla and chocolate cookies on either side. So their mother took one of each kind, wiggled them apart and then stuck the odd pieces back together. She handed one of these cookies to Misty and kept one for herself. Every now and then Penny looked up at the television to mutter “What an idiot” or “What a jerk,” and their mother just shook her head.
It was Misty’s favorite night of the week. Her mother had just gone grocery shopping so there was plenty of food in the cabinets—more, it seemed, than their family might ever eat. Misty had already showered, and her long, damp hair dripped cool water onto her neck, which made her shiver and scoot closer to her mother, and her mother smelled just the same as always, like dried flowers and sweat.
Misty had tried to talk to her mother the way she talked to the rest of the world, but it had never worked. When she tried, her chest felt tight with a mixture of loneliness and tenderness that she associated with her mother, but she heard no other sound, no grumblings or roarings or quickenings, no memories, no stories. It was that way for everyone she knew. She had never learned her family’s other names and she wasn’t sure where to find them, or if she could. She wasn’t sure why it was that way, either, though she wondered if maybe it was because people lied so much and so often. Names were honest. They had to be in order to work, and sometimes it felt like there wasn’t a day that passed that her family didn’t hold something back. But if she could find her own name, then maybe she could help her mother find her name. And things would be different between them. They could talk to each other all the time and share everything that they had to share, and Misty would never have to wonder if her mother was lonely or sad or scared, because she would know. And she could help. She might even be able to help her mom and dad stop fighting so much. She could become the bridge between them.
Everything would be better if she could just talk to them the way she talked to the crawdads. All she had to do was figure out how.
Headlights arced across the living room window as a car pulled into the bottom. The light skittered across their mother’s eyes, and she walked to the window to peek outside.
“Is it Dad?” Misty asked. The night would be better if he were home, too, sitting in his recliner with his face stained dark by coal dust.
Penny snorted. “Not likely.”
Their mother glared at Penny, but she said to Misty, softer, “No, Little Bit. Your dad will be home tomorrow. That’s just Miss Shannon coming home from work.”
“Is that blue truck behind her again?” Penny asked.
“How’d you know?”
“That same truck was here last weekend,” Penny said. “I told William that she had a new boyfriend. You’d think he’d be happy that she’s finally seeing just one feller instead of three or—”
“Penny Lee. It ain’t your place to comment on who Miss Shannon spends her time with.” Their mother closed the blinds and sat back down beside Misty.
William’s mother, Shannon, worked at a gas station a few miles away. She was a cook in the kitchen that served hamburgers and pizza and fries. She always came back smelling of grease and charred meat, and sometimes she brought Misty free onion rings. But her hours were long and always changing, and William was never sure when she’d be back. Misty had seen William waiting for his mother a thousand times, and every time it was the same. First he lingered in the driveway with the cordless phone in his hand. Every now and then he’d put it to his ear, wait for a moment, and then drop the phone back down. Then he waited on the porch steps. His knees drawn up under his chin, a bag of potato chips or cookies sitting by his side, or sometimes clutching a pillow he’d brought from his bed. Eventually, when the sun started to set and the gnats worried at his skin, he went inside the trailer and closed the door. The only light that flickered in his living room window came from the television show he watched alone. Misty always wondered if he watched the same show that she did with her mother and sister, if he saw the same women die, if he called his mother again, and if, that time, she answered.
* * *
Misty checked the locks on the doors twice. It was part of her bedtime routine. She checked the back door, tapping it once with her finger when her father was home and twice when he was gone. The doorknob spoke to her with a gentle voice, its name a string of hands twisted together at the wrist, a rope that stretched through decades—the warmth of Misty’s small palm and the rough calluses of her father’s hand and the quick, tight twist of Penny’s hand as she flung the door open and stomped outside, and Misty’s mother’s touch, tentative, soft. There were other people, too, who Misty had never met. People who had lived in the trailer before with cold hands and hands dripping hot water a
nd hands stained with grease, hands bleeding and frightened and grasping, hands tired and glad to be home. All of those hands reached back to her through the doorknob’s memory as Misty tapped the lock twice, asking it to keep her family safe, and the doorknob promised it would try.
Misty and Penny’s room was on one side of the single-wide trailer and their parents’ room was all the way on the other end. If Misty stood in her doorway, she could see her mother’s doorway, which was never closed but always cracked a little. She checked for the crack—a little beam of golden light, her mother’s shadow sweeping across the floor as she changed clothes.
Misty’s room was small, and felt even smaller because of the dark wood paneling on the walls. There was a single window above Penny’s bed that looked out onto William’s trailer and Earl’s garden. Their mother had tacked a blanket around the window frame at the beginning of summer to keep the sunlight from heating the room. A box fan leaned against the door, blowing cool air against Misty’s bare calf. They had inherited their beds from their cousins Jerry and Jamie, two sturdy metal frames nicked from years of use. Misty’s bed had belonged to Jamie and had a curse word carved into the bottom of the headboard where no one could see. Penny’s had belonged to Jerry and had vines etched along the bottom post, their leaves the color of static. The beds were meant to be bunked, but the ceilings in the trailer were too low so their father had pushed each mattress to opposite walls instead, leaving a wide-open space in the middle, which was usually strewn with cast-off toys and clothes.
Misty’s bed was on the left side of the room, the one without a window. The side of her bed next to the wall was lined with stuffed animals. She checked on each of them before bed, kissing their foreheads or booping her nose against theirs or shaking their tiny stuffed paws. Penny groaned Misty’s name from the other side of the room. She hated Misty’s bedtime routine, but Misty just ignored her.
Every Bone a Prayer Page 3
