I try to run, but my left leg cramps up and I fall to my knees. The knife slips from my hands. I grab for it, scrabbling frantically at the leaves, heedless of the danger of the blade, until my fingers find cold, sharp metal.
I roll over. Brandon is standing in the doorway.
“I’m sorry,” he says again. The sun is coming up, but the camper blots it out. I can’t see his face.
I launch myself up and swing at him with the knife. He throws his hands out to stop me. We collide. One of his hands wraps around my wrist, the other pushes my shoulder, my head knocks against his chin, the knife drops out of my hand. I am crying.
It makes sense. I don’t want it to, but it does. Mama raising my sister. Mama teaching her to hide.
I pull away from Brandon, stumble backward, and collapse. I am sucking in strained, snotty breaths, trying to shove down sobs the same way I kept the waves of nausea down before. My fingers are bleeding. Brandon is clutching one of his palms. He’s bleeding too. I cut him. But he doesn’t look angry.
“I’m sorry,” he says again. He sounds like he means it, and I can’t help it, I believe him.
I believe that he’s sorry. I believe she was alive. I believe she raised my sister, hid her from all of us. I don’t know how she did it. I don’t know why.
But if it really is true, if Mama didn’t die fifteen years ago, then there’s another question.
What about me?
* * *
—
Brandon and I sit in the clearing. Me on the ground, legs splayed in the leaves, and him on the cinder block, pressing the hem of his shirt against the cut on his palm, staring off into the trees. The little black cat winds past him out the door. It sniffs the air, pads over to me. I wipe my nose on my sleeve. My lungs hurt. My fingers sting from where I grazed them on the knife blade. There are drops of blood scattered on the leaves around me, but the cuts aren’t deep and they’ve already stopped bleeding.
Cold morning light filters through the trees. The ground beneath me is wet with dew, the grass sparkling. The trees are ghostly, ringed with mist. It’s quiet, even the birdsong hushed, distant.
“Why do you have her necklace?” I ask, my voice still thick from crying. “Why was it in the fish tank?”
Brandon is silent for a moment. I pet the black cat, which has stretched itself out at my side. Its silken fur is a comfort, its rumbly purr.
“They were sitting on the couch,” Brandon says finally, “Jolene and the baby. The baby was playing with the necklace.”
The baby. “My sister?”
“Yes,” he says. “She dropped the necklace in the tank. I was going to fish it out, but Jolene laughed, said leave it there.”
“They lived with you here?”
“No, they didn’t live with me.”
He lapses back into silence. I’m trying to work it all out, what this means. Mama was here, at this very camper. She sat on the same couch where I slept. But after we were born. After everybody already thought she was dead. Was that before or after Logan went to jail? Before or after the double-wide trailer was burnt down? How old had my sister been? Was it before or after she met me? “She’s here,” Brandon says.
For one moment I think he means Mama, means she’s buried here, that her body is here, beneath us even now, but then I hear rustling and I twist around.
The print of the new dress blends in with the leaves, but the sun sparkles off the SASSY and gives her away. She takes one step into the clearing and stops.
I push myself to my feet.
All three of us stare. I find myself searching for a family resemblance. We ought to look a little like Brandon. If his brother is our father. I don’t think we do. But maybe that’s just because we don’t have beards. Nobody says a thing, except the wind.
Abruptly, Brandon stands up and goes inside the camper.
As soon as the door shuts behind him, I walk fast toward my sister. I stop just in front of her, pull the picture of Mama from my pocket, hold it out between us like I held the necklace out to Brandon. An accusation.
“You knew her,” I say. “You fucking knew her.”
My voice is too loud. It frightens a bird from a nearby tree. A sudden rush of wings and then silence. Lee reaches for the picture. I yank it away.
“You lied to me,” I say. “You’ve been lying to me my whole life.”
“No.” She lurches back, muscles locking up, shoulders hunching.
“Yes. It’s true, isn’t it? Mama was alive.” My voice falters, comes out hoarse. I think I’m going to cry again, but I choke it down. “Mama raised you.”
My sister doesn’t say anything, but she doesn’t have to. Her eyes flick quick from the picture to my face and then back again. Her eyes are wet. Shining. She is trying to shrink down into herself, trying to hide in plain sight.
It’s true. It’s absolutely true. Brandon was a big enough thing to omit, but how could my sister keep this from me? I used to tell her everything I knew about Mama. Whatever measly details I could glean from other people’s vague recollections. How could she have sat there and listened to me and said nothing?
I look into my sister’s face, so similar to mine, and I feel like I am looking at a stranger.
“I’m not going to chase you if you run,” I tell her.
Her shoulders are hunched, her rib cage heaving. She reaches out a branch-thin arm to touch my wrist. I jerk away from her touch.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I say.
Her eyes dart to something behind me. I twist just enough to see Brandon standing on the cinder block again. He’s holding one of the plastic-wrapped hunks of meat from the fridge, watching us.
I turn back to her. “Because of him?”
She shakes her head no. A twig falls loose from her matted hair.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I ask again, my voice hard.
My sister’s eyes are dark pools. She’s still, but I can see her struggling, twisting around herself. Her voice, when she speaks, comes out as a whisper.
“Don’t you ever tell a goddamn soul,” she says.
“What?”
She reaches for the picture again, looking about as close to crying as I’ve ever seen her. I hold the photo tight but don’t yank it away. She puts her palm flat against it, like she’s trying to block it out.
“Don’t you ever tell a goddamn soul,” she says again, slowly, pronouncing each word carefully. “Every last one of them is the devil.”
She looks up at me, face stricken, eyes wide, bulging, whites for days.
“You see someone,” she says, “you run.”
And she does.
She’s off like a fucking shot and I keep my promise, I don’t even try to follow her. I watch her go as long as I can, which isn’t long, the earth sloping down and taking her out of sight.
She doesn’t talk like that. She never talks like that, in complete sentences, unless she’s copying me. Echoing my words back at me. And the way she said it, like reciting. Those weren’t her words.
They must have been Mama’s.
Reaching me, through the years, through death, even. Mama talking right to me.
Brandon is sitting on the cinder block, tossing the hunk of meat from hand to hand. I stride over through the dead leaves, feeling tall, feeling held up by some power not my own. Feeling like someone else entirely.
Mama’s words.
Brandon looks up at me. “Guess she wasn’t hungry,” he says.
I am towering over him. I am blazing. My voice, when it comes out, is not a whisper, not a sob. It is hard and sure and carved from the bedrock of these hills, these almost-mountains.
“You,” I say, “are going to tell me everything.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Brandon and I walk through the woods. He’s telling me about
what Mama ate.
“Baking soda,” he says. “Toothpaste. My fish. Glass pebbles from the bottom of the tank. I had a nicer tank back then, in the old trailer. Coffee grounds. Strips of wallpaper. Dirt. That was her favorite.”
He stops for a second, studies a tree, adjusts our course. There is no path. We crackle through the undergrowth, snapping sticks, picking up whole families of burrs. It’s a gray morning, the flat disk of the sun barely visible through a veil of clouds.
“She said it was your fault,” Brandon says.
“Me?”
“Well, the two of you I guess.” He gives me a look that isn’t quite a smile, but almost. I mean, his mouth doesn’t actually move, but he’s smiling somehow anyway. “Giving her cravings. She ate so much dirt I thought she might give birth to an earthworm.”
At the crest of a hill ahead of us, there is something wrong with one of the trees. It bulges oddly in the middle, branches growing straight out to the sides, then curving up like a cage.
“Come to think of it,” Brandon says, “she ate earthworms, too.”
* * *
—
This is what Brandon tells me.
Mama came to live with them about five months into her pregnancy. That I already knew. She fought with Logan often. The fights got violent sometimes, both of them screaming and throwing things. Mama would call him the devil. He would call her a whore. Logan hit her, but she hit him back just as hard.
Logan and Brandon had dogs then. Hounds. Mama started taking them out with her for long walks along the ridges. Early in the morning. Late at night.
Sometimes the hounds would wander home without her. Sometimes she would be gone all day.
Logan thought she was off seeing other guys. That was one of the things they fought about. Logan, of course, was sometimes off seeing other girls. But Brandon always figured Mama just wanted to be alone. He felt the same way. Lots of people came by the trailer back then. Logan’s friends. Logan’s customers.
Once, Brandon followed her when she went out. Tracked her through the woods the way his grandfather had taught him to track deer. And she led him to this tree. She was big by then, lopsided, front-heavy, but that didn’t stop her from climbing. There was a deer platform halfway up the tree, and around that she’d made an odd sort of nest, weaving vines and sticks through the branches.
Maybe a bird instead of a baby, he had thought. Maybe a big speckled egg that she would keep warm with her body, until one morning: a thin branching crack in the shell.
* * *
—
We climb the tree. There are notches carved into the trunk, healed over now like old wounds, which act as a ladder. We have to squeeze between two thick horizontal branches to reach the wooden deer platform. It must have been here a long time, to have forced the branches to grow up around it the way they do.
I settle down cross-legged, run my hand along the wood. It’s worn smooth, like the stone in my sister’s cave. The branches arch up all around the platform, enclosing us, with patches of sky between them like windows.
The tree is at the crest of a hill and you can see other hills and valleys stretching far into the distance. A sea of leaves shifting in the wind.
“She did disappear,” Brandon says. He’s sitting with his bony knees scrunched up to his chest, his arms wrapped around them. He doesn’t look at me. “Logan and me weren’t lying about that when we told the police. They didn’t believe us, but it was true. Neither of us knew a thing when they first showed up. She went for one of those walks and she never came back.”
I stare down at the ground beside the tree. There are some little brown birds hopping around down there. As soon as they stop moving they disappear, indistinguishable from the fallen leaves.
“Logan thought she’d gone back home, but I knew she wouldn’t do that. She hated everybody from town, hated her mother especially. So I searched the woods. Took the hounds out. Checked this tree, of course, though she wasn’t here.
“It was a couple of days before I found her. When I did she’d already given birth. She did it in the woods. On the ground. Alone.”
As I watch, one of the little brown birds beneath the tree takes flight, like a dead leaf that has decided to fall in reverse. Decided to return, suddenly, to life.
I try to picture what Brandon has told me, but I don’t know how. I see Mama looking like the school photo, brown hair parted neatly in the middle, lips pink with gloss, blue shadow on her lids. I see her standing in a grove of trees, cradling a baby girl in each arm. I see her beatific, with a ray of light splitting the sky above her, bathing her in its soft warm glow.
Brandon says Mama made him promise. Made him swear he wouldn’t tell a soul where she was. Let them think I’m dead, she told him, then they’ll be fucking sorry.
Mama was fifteen. Brandon was sixteen. Couple of kids, he says. And that’s all there was to it. Everybody thought she was dead. Brandon kept his promise; didn’t tell them they were wrong.
“No,” I say. “Wait, hold on. You’re leaving everything out.”
He shrugs. “That’s what happened.”
“You took me into town, though. You took me to Grandma Margaret’s.”
“I did.”
“Why?”
“She told me to.”
I try to picture that, too: Mama holding me out, tiny, naked, fragile as a baby bird. Her hands shaking, saying—saying what? Take her, please. It’s too late for me, but save her. Let her have a normal life.
“What about my sister?” I ask.
“What about her?”
“Why didn’t you take her?”
“Jolene didn’t want me to.”
My heart drops. “Why not?”
Brandon shrugs.
“You must know,” I say.
“I just did what she told me to do. That’s all I ever did.”
“No,” I say. That’s not good enough. He must be leaving something out.
“She was stubborn,” he says. But I already knew that. We all are, the women in my family. “She had her own reasons for doing things. I didn’t always understand them. Sometimes I felt helpless.
“Hell, even I didn’t see her for weeks after that first time. I was scared she really was dead. But I brought her food and clothes. My grandma’s old things, because no one would miss them. I left them in trash bags, hidden up here or under piles of leaves. I had to be careful. The police were watching. When I came back to check, days later, the bags were gone.” I picture Mama climbing down from a tree, my baby sister lashed to her back with strips of torn black plastic. See her wearing a dead woman’s cardigans, a dead woman’s pearls, ripping open a trash bag, ravenous. In my mind her face becomes my sister’s face. Her hair my sister’s hair. She is my sister. And Brandon is me, keeping her a secret, sneaking out at night to meet her.
“It was a difficult time,” he says. “Everyone hated us.”
“They thought you were murderers,” I point out. “They had good reason.”
“Maybe. Maybe they didn’t need much reason at all.”
“You could have just told them she was alive.”
He shook his head. “I promised her I wouldn’t.”
I want to know this, need to know this, but it’s hard to take in. Hard to reconcile with the image of Mama I’ve built up over the years. So much of what I’d believed about her was wrong. She’s not the tragic figure I thought she was. Not a bright spark extinguished too soon. She was something stranger and more complicated. I don’t know what to think now. Was she a victim or a villain? Crazy or brave?
“They tried to kill us, you know,” says Brandon.
“Who?” I ask, not following.
“Group of men from town. Drunk, I’d say. A few months after she left.”
I think about what the pastor told me at the ba
r. How he could have killed Logan. How he went out once to try.
“They had guns,” Brandon says. “I saw the headlights coming through the trees, so I ran and hid in the forest behind the trailer. Logan wasn’t even home. They shot into the trees. Shot some of the hounds.”
I flinch involuntarily. It was fifteen years ago. And my sister kills animals all the time, so why should I be bothered by this? But they weren’t killing those dogs for food. It seems brutal, senseless.
The way Mama’s murder would have been, if it had happened.
The pastor was probably one of those men. I wonder if he had a gun. I know he helped burn the trailer down. When he’d told me that, I’d been firmly on his side. Seemed like the least he could do.
And now?
Now I don’t know.
“How did no one find them?” I ask Brandon. “Mama and Lee, I mean.”
Brandon gestures around us. “Miles and miles of trees,” he says, as if it’s as simple as that.
I glare at him. His mouth quirks up slightly on one side.
“That’s not a real answer,” I say. He relents.
It had been spring when Mama went missing. That worked in her favor, Brandon tells me. Rainstorms obscured her tracks. The foliage was dense. Besides, the searchers, whether they admitted it or not, were looking for a body, not a girl. And none of them were looking for a baby, either. Nobody knew she’d had twins.
Both Mama’s parents had been hunters, had taken her out with them when she was young. She knew how to stay hidden, how to stay still. She roved deep into the national forest, moved between caves and hollows, treetops, old deer blinds.
In summer, Brandon says, he found this old camper that someone had abandoned. It was overgrown, vines through the windows, no door, leaves and dirt coating the floor, half collapsed. He started fixing it up, cleaning it, rebuilding. He installed the woodstove. Mama and Lee spent their first winter living there.
Brandon would visit when he could, when he could get away without Logan noticing. He was always afraid Logan would follow him. He took long, circuitous routes to reach the camper, never the same way twice. Mama was more afraid than he was. She made trip wires by stringing fishing line between the trees, ankle-height, connecting it to empty cans that would alert her if anyone jostled the line (I remember the nearly invisible string Lee had shown me the other night). More than once, Brandon came and found the camper deserted, Mama and Lee scared off, in all likelihood, by a hapless deer. At Mama’s insistence, he dug underground hideouts for them.
Some Kind of Animal Page 17
