Misty closed her hand into a fist and felt the bones slide together beneath her skin. Her hand went numb slowly, and then altogether, until she couldn’t feel the place where her arm ended. Her hand was empty, blank, and endless.
“Misty?” Caroline said just as Aunt Jem called her name again.
Misty turned and walked further into the woods.
Thirty-Seven
Misty hid her skin in the hollow belly of a maple tree.
She rested her chin on her chest, tucked her arms around her knees, curled her toes so they might fit inside the tree instead of sprouting like mushrooms from its bark. Her eyes refused to stay closed so they stared, bewildered, at her own palms as if wondering what had happened to bring them to such a place.
Already, Misty felt lighter.
Already, the heavy weight of her mother’s dancing and of her family crowded tight into her house and of William’s hand at the collar of her shirt and William’s hand on her neck and William’s hand—already the weight was lifted. Even as she ripped some brush from the ground and arranged it around the trunk to hide her body, she had forgotten half of what had sent her running out of her skin. It didn’t seem like such a terrible thing anymore. Nothing did.
Misty turned to walk further into the woods, thinking of the way her bones would rattle if she walked upstream through the creek, of the silver flash of minnows between her toes, and the kudzu she might wrap around her shoulders like a cape, the kudzu peeling from the mountain to trail behind her feet, the mountain sliding away, the whole world unraveling in her wake.
Penny stood a few trees away, her hands cupped around her mouth. She was calling Misty’s name.
Misty froze. She’d been so focused on hiding herself that she hadn’t heard Penny coming through the woods. Now all Penny had to do was turn around and she would see Misty there, standing alone in her soft glowing bones. Misty waited.
Penny turned. She looked to the other side instead where Jem and Dolly struggled through the dark. They carried heavy flashlights, and their denim skirts were hiked to their knees so they could fight against the underbrush. Misty cowered behind the tree where her skin waited, her name echoing faintly around her.
William crashed through the woods with his own pocket flashlight sputtering a narrow beam onto his feet. He stopped just shy of Dolly, his narrow chest heaving as he looked up at her the way an ant might look at a mountain.
“What did you do?” Penny yelled.
She whipped around and stormed toward William. When she reached him, she planted both hands on his shoulders and shoved. His foot caught something in the grass, and he hit the ground hard.
“Penny!” Dolly yelled.
“What did you do to her? What did you do?” Penny punched at William’s chest and belly. He tried to scoot away, but he was caught, helpless until Dolly wrenched Penny to the side, her fists still swinging. “He did something! He came to talk to her and now she’s gone!”
“Have you seen her?” Jem asked. She shone her flashlight in William’s eyes until he squinted, then lowered the beam to his chin.
“No,” William said. “She—she said she was going back home. And I went back home. And that was it. I thought she was with you.”
“He’s lying!”
“Penny,” Dolly hissed. She wrapped her arms around Penny’s elbows as Penny squirmed and kicked the ground.
Jem loomed above William. Her dark hair had come loose from her bun, and little hairs were plastered to her cheeks and forehead. Her skin looked pale blue beneath the faint moonlight, the dips, the peaks, the wrinkles of her face lost to Misty’s eyes and she seemed to swim in space above William, an extension of the trees themselves. She seemed, for a moment, much bigger than herself as she leaned down and took William’s hand in her own and helped him up.
“Son,” she said. “This is very serious, what’s happening. I need to know you’re telling us the truth.”
“I ain’t lying,” William said.
Jem looked back at Dolly. Dolly shook her head.
“He’s lying, Jem.” Penny dropped her chin to her chest and slumped in Dolly’s arms.
“Go on home.” Jem pointed the flashlight through the woods. “If you hear or see her at all, you tell one of us, all right? Go.” When William was far enough away, Jem turned back to Penny and Dolly. “I don’t trust that little thing as far as I could throw him, but what can we do? Take Penny back to the house. Get her something to drink and calm her down. We’re going to find your sister, Penny. I promise you that. And I’m awful proud of that right hook of yours, but we can’t do a thing if we lose our heads. So go on.”
“Should I call the hospital?” Dolly asked.
“Not yet. Give us some time before we scare everybody half to death. I’m going to walk through the woods and meet you back in the yard. Get everybody lined up and ready to search.”
When her family turned away, Misty climbed the maple tree as quick and quiet as she could. She’d never been able to climb trees in her skinned body. She’d always been too afraid of falling. There’d always been so much of her to hurt, so much skin to cut, so much softness to lose, but her bones didn’t mind at all. It never occurred to them that they could break, so they didn’t hesitate as she swung her legs onto a heavy bough. She rested her ankles in an empty bird’s nest, the bottom littered with bright white shards of egg.
Below her on the ground, Jem walked slowly between the trees. She swung her flashlight back and forth, calling Misty’s name.
By morning, everyone in the family had searched the woods, the bottom, the road, the creek. Jamie and Jerry walked side by side, shouting. Sam stood in the middle of the woods and closed his eyes like he was searching inside himself for Misty. Charlene carried a plate of biscuits that she refused to put down, thinking Misty hungry, thinking food enough to bring her back when nothing else could.
Even Earl came. He never once opened his mouth to call her name, but he stood not far from her tree and tipped back his head and closed his eyes. He stood there in the deepest black of night, and Misty knew that he was praying for her. She could almost feel the words lift up between the trees like fog rising from the mountains.
Every hour that passed, her family’s voices grew fainter until Misty couldn’t hear them at all even as she watched Penny standing in the distance, the muscles of her throat straining as she yelled until Jem wrapped an arm around Penny’s waist, picked her up, and carried her home. There was a moment near dawn that Misty saw something shimmering in the distance—the dark shape of a woman with her hand outstretched and a bright flame flickering at the end. Whether the flame came from a lantern or from her hand, it was impossible to tell. But Misty could have sworn that the woman looked right at her before she turned and walked away.
Eventually, the woods emptied and the sun returned. Misty’s bones didn’t ache from sitting so long in the same position, unmoved. Her bones didn’t feel, didn’t need, didn’t care. The longer she sat on the branches, the harder it was to remember why she’d come there in the first place. It was better this way. This body better than her own had ever been, kinder than her skin, gentler than her own heart.
She shimmied down the trunk once she was sure that no one was coming back. The sun was already creeping toward afternoon, and almost a day had passed since she ran from William and took shelter in the woods. She scooped her skin from the hollow of the tree, meaning to find a final place for it to rest, somewhere that it would never be found. Just to be sure, she slipped her arm inside her mouth and tried to fit herself back into place. Her hand barely made it past her shoulder before the skin tightened, slowed, stopped. She wiggled her fingers in her upper arm, trying to press forward, but there was no use.
Even if she wanted to go back, she couldn’t.
Too much time had passed. Too many things had happened. She’d outgrown herself at last, and her body wasn
’t hers anymore. Her body hadn’t been hers for a long, long time.
Thirty-Eight
Misty’s head lolled back and her eyes stared at the grass as she carried her body through the woods. She stopped by a hickory tree whose branches yawned toward the sky. There were holes in the ground from the squirrels digging up the nuts as they fell. The earth was soft, a little damp. She couldn’t smell it anymore—the rich, dark dankness of the ground—but she had loved that smell. She’d scooped a handful of dirt into her mouth once because of that smell, because she wanted to know if it would melt in her mouth or turn to silt between her teeth, because just the smell hadn’t been close enough. She’d needed to know it better, to feel it as part of herself.
Misty laid her body beside the hickory tree. She was a tangle of limbs, her knees stacked atop each other like firewood, her fingers splayed, her jaw slack. She wore one of her father’s shirts, OSHA written in bold, white letters across black fabric that had faded near gray after years in the wash. The sleeves reached Misty’s elbows and the hem swung almost to her knees, past the frayed end of her favorite blue-jean shorts with a plaid patch sewn into one of the back pockets. She’d taken the shirt from her mother’s dresser after their father took her away to the hospital. Misty thought Penny would say something cruel to her, but when she saw the shirt, Penny had walked into her parents’ bedroom and came back wearing one just like it.
Misty slotted her finger bones into the holes that the squirrels dug into the soft earth. Her arms didn’t grow tired the way they did when they were skinned. She didn’t sweat or lose her breath. She dug slow and even, pulling back the dark earth growing darker the deeper she went. She wrenched stones loose and tossed them over her shoulder. She broke roots as thin and creeping as spider’s legs. Her body piled in a heap beside her, her feet bare and her forehead resting on the fallen leaves.
As she dug her grave, Misty considered that it might be easier if she left her body somewhere it might be found instead of hiding it. If she tossed herself from the bank of the creek so she was half-submerged, one shoe kicked off, her dark hair floating in the slow current. Like she’d tripped and fallen, like she’d hit her head just a little too hard. She might coax the copperhead from its hiding place and hold it up to her skin, let it have its pick of which tender places it would bite. It wasn’t like she would feel the venom anyway. Nothing could burn a skin that wasn’t hers; nothing could pierce her or cut her, not anymore. She could prop herself against a sycamore, her body curled tight around the wounds that killed her, like she’d been walking home when she was overcome and her life ended beneath the watchful trees.
Then her family would know, at least, that she was gone.
But even her bones felt wrong about that. Even then, unskinned, she didn’t want anyone to find one part of her without the rest. If she left, then her skin left, too, her skin as gone as her bones would be. It made sense to her.
Of course, her family would miss her. Their faces blurred in her mind, overlapping, joining, until they seemed to be a single person who looked a lot like her. They might never stop searching for her, but they would never find her, and eventually, they would move on. They would build the house their mother dreamed of, and Penny would never have to share her room again. She’d carry Misty’s backpack all through high school, and anytime someone mentioned how childish it looked—bright purple with little stickers fading along the front pocket—Penny would whip her eyes at them and say something so cruel and quick that eventually people stopped asking. Penny would learn how to cast cards not for herself, but for Misty, and every year she would draw the same spread—the three at the beginning and the end. Penny would keep the sheet she tacked across their room tucked under her bed as a reminder. She’d take it out every now and then and stare at the stitches, half-expecting to see Misty’s shadow dart across it just like it had on all those nights that summer.
Her father would come home. No one would say that it should happen. There wouldn’t be a discussion or an agreement, but he would be there again one morning, at the table drinking a cup of black coffee, and they would go on as if it had always been that way. He would kiss Penny on the forehead every night and read her stories before bed the way he’d always meant to when she was small. Penny would indulge him for a while, though she could never fall asleep to the sound of his voice, always waiting for him to get up and leave so she could relax into the familiar space of his absence.
One summer night a few years after Misty left, her father would drink too much at his brother’s house and demand to be driven into town. He would wake up the only tattoo artist he knew and beg to have Misty’s name inked on his chest, right across the rib he had broken when he was ten years old, falling from the back of his father’s truck. The man would oblige, but the minute the needle hit his skin, her father would say he wanted a crawdad instead. He wouldn’t know why, but it would feel right, and he would carry it with him for the rest of his life, catching sight of it from the corner of his eye some mornings as he got ready for work, his skin working the crawdad into motion like it was burrowing into his chest.
Her mother and all the other women would wake up. It might take a while, but Misty was sure that Caroline would give up once she knew that Misty was gone, when she realized that she was alone again, alone for good. The statues would stay or they would crumble. The crawdads would be released back to themselves and find their way home to the creek. They would remember Misty in their stories, an image of her passed between them through generations. Caroline would recede deeper and deeper into the earth until she forgot herself completely. Any sadness or doubts Misty had about her plan were left buzzing in her skin, and Misty’s bones were sure that the world would return to normal in her absence.
When her mother got back home, it would break her heart to know Misty was gone, but after some time, she would recover. She might even go back to school. Get her GED and take some poetry classes at the community college, writing long elegies in a little leather journal that she bought just for herself. Every summer she would come back to the woods and read them to the trees. From sunup to sundown, she’d stand beneath their shade, the hot air heavy on her neck, her voice cracking to barely a whisper as she recited all the things she thought Misty might have been that year.
“You would be taller than me by now,” her mother would say and she would look up, her chin tilted just a fraction of an inch, and she would see Misty in front of her, Misty made of light and sundust, Misty’s eyes dark and smiling, and she would cry the way she did every year, every month, every week.
Her mother and father and sister would draw closer, the three of them closing up like a pine cone before a storm, shielding the soft core that had been exposed by Misty’s leaving. All she’d wanted for so long was for her family to be together, and now she realized that all they needed to make that happen was for her to disappear. She would be the wound they couldn’t recover from, the one thing that would bind them together forever.
As for herself, she wasn’t sure.
Her bones were quickly losing their ability to hear or see, so she would take to the woods. There were miles and miles of forest within the mountains. She would follow the nearest trail for as long as she could, and then she’d lie down somewhere soft and wait until she forgot every moment of her life, every happiness and every hurt. The grass would sprout through her ribs. Wildflowers would bloom in her eye sockets. Chipmunks and ground squirrels would gnaw on her finger bones, their little teeth etching runnels into the bone until they plucked them away and carried them off to their nests, to their children, to the far ends of the woods that Misty had never seen before.
Snow would fill all her empty spaces. It would melt and freeze and thaw again, cracking her skull and splitting her vertebrae, sinking her deeper into the ground.
It would peaceful, at least.
It would be over, at least.
By the time Misty had dug a hole deep
enough for her body, night had come and the stars blinked sleepy eyes at her between the trees. It was almost impossible to see in the dark, her senses lost so that only her own brightest bones were visible, and the smooth, pale circle of her face as she rolled herself into her grave.
Her skin made a soft, thumping sound as it hit the earth.
Misty climbed down and arranged her limbs. She tilted her chin back and pulled her hair onto her shoulders. She ran her finger bones through the dark strands, her knuckles snagging on tangles and knots, and she did her best to break them free. She was careful of her tender scalp even when she wasn’t in it. She could still feel the thin skin pulling from the time they had been running late for church and their mother told Penny to brush Misty’s hair. It had felt like Penny took out every wrong that Misty had ever done, every pinch, every ounce of trouble she’d ever caused on Misty’s scalp that day.
Misty pulled the hem of her T-shirt over her belly. A scar etched its way along the bottom of her rib cage, glinting like water beneath moonlight. She’d seen a little gray kitten walking along the mouth of her granny’s well and climbed up to catch it before it fell, but fell herself. Her leg got tangled in the rope and she tumbled to the side. A nail tore a small wound on her side that bled through three handfuls of paper towels before it slowed. Her granny called it her spear wound and said she bled more than Jesus on the cross.
Every Bone a Prayer Page 26
