Brandon says Mama made him promise over and over that he wouldn’t tell a soul about her. She told him she was never going back, that they couldn’t make her. He wasn’t always sure who she meant by they. Her family. The police. The whole town. The whole world.
Brandon wanted to get away for good. He made plans to fake his own death. Pin it on Logan, maybe, a neat trick.
Then Logan got arrested. They questioned Brandon, too, but they didn’t have any evidence. Logan had never trusted him with more than minor errands. As soon as Logan was charged, Brandon took his chance. He packed up everything he could from the double-wide. Sold his fish tank. Dropped a casual mention here and there around town that he was headed to Columbus.
Instead, he came to the camper. Cut himself off from all society, all contact. Men from town burnt down the trailer less than a week after he left, he says, though he didn’t hear about it himself for months.
“So the two of them did live with you there,” I say. “You lied to me about that.”
“No.” He shakes his head sadly. “They didn’t live with me.”
“They didn’t? Why not?”
“She got worse.” He’s looking out at the trees, not at me.
“Worse?”
“More afraid,” he says, pauses. “Paranoid, I guess. She didn’t even trust me, sometimes.”
He might as well be describing Lee, not Mama.
“She would make me prove,” he says, “every time I came, that I was who I said I was. Prove I hadn’t been switched or something. She stopped living in the camper. She wouldn’t tell me where she went. I think she moved around. Sometimes caves, sometimes places like this.” He puts a hand on the platform, traces the burnished head of a nail with one finger. “She’d stop by, but always at different times of day. I still gave her food and other things.”
“A Bible,” I say, thinking of the book Lee had in the cave. “She had a Bible?”
Brandon tilts his head at me, bemused. “Of course.”
“Grandma Margaret always said she’d turned her back on God.”
He snorts. “That woman would know about turning her back. No, Jolene talked about God all the time. She said the forest was the best church there is. Said out here you could actually be quiet for once and listen. Hear what he was really saying.”
The wind rustles the sea of leaves, a wave passing down the valley with a shushing sound. Brandon and I are both silent for a while, watching. Listening.
Mama was right about that, I think. I mean, despite all Margaret’s best attempts, Aggie raised me skeptical, so I might not have the same words for it. But there’s something truly magical out here. Something holy.
“But she died,” I say quietly. “How?”
Brandon stares out across the sea of leaves, doesn’t answer. He’s hunched over now, hugging his knees even tighter. I think of last night, the confession I was going to pull from him. I don’t have a gun, so I just kind of nudge him in the back with my shoe. He shoots me a quick glance.
“She liked to float,” he says, reluctantly.
“Float?”
“Yeah,” he says. “Benzos. Xanax. That kind of thing. They calmed her down when nothing else would. She needed them.”
“Oh.”
I knew that Mama drank and smoked, did all the things she wasn’t supposed to, but this still surprises me. This doesn’t sound like partying or rebellion. It sounds like she was an addict.
I’ve always figured addicts were weak. That they just let themselves slide. But Mama wasn’t weak. She can’t have been weak.
“I found her here.” Brandon says it quietly. Won’t look at me.
“Right here?”
“Yes.”
I run my hand over the smooth wood of the platform again. There’s a lump in my throat, which is stupid. I’ve always known Mama was gone.
I wonder if she felt the same way I do sometimes. Like I’m burning up from the inside out. Like I will explode. The only thing that helps me is running. Being with my sister. Mama didn’t have that. Aggie loved her, I know, but she couldn’t understand her. And Grandma Margaret didn’t even try.
“You found her?” I ask, trying to keep my voice even.
“Yes.”
“And she was dead?”
“Yes.”
“Because of the pills.”
Brandon shoots me another glance. “She got them from me,” he says. “I know you’re thinking that. And you’re right. I gave them to her. I would have given her anything she asked for.”
* * *
—
Brandon says there was nothing he could do. He says it was too late. It must have been a day or two already because the flies—he doesn’t finish that thought.
He says he buried Mama’s body. Under this tree. Where the brown birds are. He says my sister watched him. Says she didn’t cry.
She was five. Brandon thought he would take care of her. Thought it was the least he could do. When he talked to her, she didn’t answer, though she’d always talked before. She’d been a skittish child, sure, but she’d babbled on about nonsense like any kid. When he tried to put a hand on her shoulder to comfort her, she ran.
“It felt like history over again,” he says. “I searched for her. Left food in all the likely places. I thought she must be dead.”
“Why didn’t you call the police?” I ask, honestly shocked. I mean, okay, sure, neither had I, but I was only five myself when I first learned about my sister. He would have been twenty-one, then. A grown-up, more or less. “Or child protective services or something.”
He frowns at me, looking almost as baffled as I feel. “I gave my word.”
People in town are right. Brandon is strange. Maybe he always was. Maybe he’s gotten stranger after all these years of living alone.
Though maybe he had a good reason not to trust anyone. I remember suddenly what the pastor said to me about Logan. How he put his own little brother in the hospital more than once. Nobody called CPS then. Or if they did, nothing happened. No one helped Brandon.
“But,” says Brandon, “when I finally did see her again, I told her about you. I told her you were sisters, twins, two sides of the same coin. I led her to the edge of Margaret’s yard. Told her that was where you lived.”
That night comes flooding back. The window glass against my palm. My sister’s pale face. Fireflies in the dark. My life turned upside down. I didn’t know, didn’t think to look for another figure farther back in the woods. Brandon, from the beginning, shaping the course of my life from the shadows.
“I’m not heartless,” he says. “Jolene made me swear a thousand times I wouldn’t tell a soul about her or her child. I wouldn’t break that promise. I couldn’t.” He gives me a look, like he wants me to understand, wants me to say it’s okay. I give a small nod, uncertain. He goes on. “But I thought if she saw you, she might choose to go live with you. Margaret might be a monster, but this was only a kid and I was worried she wouldn’t survive in the woods.”
He shrugs. “I was wrong.”
I know now where my sister got her winter coat. I know how she survived all these years. I know how much she’s been lying to me, how much she’s been hiding.
“She talked to me again eventually,” he says. “Came to me for food. She was like a wild animal. I had to earn her trust. Maybe I did the wrong thing. I don’t know.”
Neither do I.
“I grew this beard,” he says. “Started going back to Needle, some other towns now and then, making the rounds of Logan’s old backups. Never Lester. Never stores or anywhere public. I’d get the same people I bought the pills off to pick up groceries and things. Things I needed and things she needed. I helped her as much she would let me. I did the best I could.”
This last he says with an air of finality, as if that settles
it. The tale is told.
Everything.
But I feel unsatisfied. Feel like he’s leaving things out, still. Even after all of that. Why did Mama do the things she did? He tried to explain, I guess. Sort of. Maybe there are things only my sister can tell me. “My sister,” I say as a bizarre thought hits me. “Did Mama give her a name?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“We always just called her ‘the baby.’ ”
I intend to laugh but it comes out weird.
“I know you call her Lee,” he says. He smiles over at me. “She told me.”
In the distance, above the trees, a firework goes off. It flashes, still rising, sparks red, stubs itself out against the sky.
We both stare at it. The ghost of it. A faint trace of smoke.
“What the hell was that?” I ask.
“A flare,” says Brandon. “Must be for you.”
“Me?”
“They must be searching for you.”
The thought gives me a chill. It shouldn’t, really. Of course Aggie would wonder where I’ve gone, want to find me. But it feels sinister, somehow. To be pursued. “I haven’t been gone that long,” I protest.
Savannah’s older brother ran off once when he was still in high school and they just waited a few days and he came back. I think he went to go stay with his girlfriend in Needle or something. They’re married now, three kids in.
“We’d better go dark for a while,” says Brandon.
“What?”
“Hide, I mean.”
“Isn’t that what you’re doing already?”
He laughs. Which startles me, actually. I think it’s the first time I’ve heard him laugh. It starts quietly and then builds before cutting off abruptly, the sound bright and quick as the flare.
“I’m not taking any chances,” says Brandon. “They’ll kill me if they find me.”
I wonder if that’s true. It’s been a long time. But people still talk about what happened to Mama. They haven’t forgotten.
Brandon doesn’t ask me if I want to go back. Doesn’t ask me why I ran in the first place. Maybe he doesn’t care. Or maybe he just understands without needing to ask.
I pull Savannah’s phone out of my pocket, power it on.
“What are you doing?” Brandon says. The force of his voice startles me. His whole body has gone tense.
“I was just checking it,” I say. “I thought my friend might text if people were out looking for me.”
“Does she know where you are?” He speaks quickly, urgently.
“No.”
“Does she know about me?”
“No. I haven’t told her anything.”
Brandon frowns, but he relaxes ever so slightly. There are four texts from Savannah.
jo come on pick up
jo im sorry
just talk 2 me
im sorry
“She didn’t say anything about a search,” I tell Brandon. “Maybe it’s just hunters.”
He shakes his head. “We should go.”
He scoots to the edge of the platform, grabs a branch, swings himself down, drops to the ground. Before I put Savannah’s phone away I send her a quick text.
Call me
I linger a few moments longer before climbing down. I stare up through the branches of the tree. Watch a tiny ant weave through the maze of the bark. Watch the leaves shimmer like sequins in the breeze.
Maybe this is what Mama saw before she died.
* * *
—
Savannah calls me back just as we’re reaching the camper. I stop in the middle of the clearing, answer the phone.
“Hello.”
“Jo?”
“Yeah, it’s me.”
Brandon has stopped with one foot on the cinder block. He’s watching me the way my sister watches, wary, waiting.
“Oh my God, I’ve been so worried,” Savannah says. She’s whispering.
“Where are you?” I ask.
“Weird bathroom,” she says. I know the one. Tucked down a dark hallway in the basement of the high school, filled with a perpetual cloud of pot smoke. I’d forgotten that it was Monday, a school day. School feels like another century ago.
“Where are you?” she asks.
“I’m fine,” I say. I talk loudly, clearly, so Brandon can hear. He’s still just standing there, watching me so hard it makes my skin crawl.
“Where did you go? Everyone is talking about you. Half the town is out looking for you.”
“Looking for me?” So Brandon was right, about the flare. I’m officially a fugitive. I catch myself glancing nervously at the trees.
“They think the pastor hurt you,” Savannah says.
“What?” I wasn’t expecting that.
“He chased you into the woods and then came back alone with his hand all bloody. He was saying you attacked him or something.”
I should be relieved, that he didn’t send the police after Lee. But instead I feel rage, flaring quick. I’m not going to be blamed again for my sister’s crimes. “That’s not what happened at all.”
Brandon steps down from the cinder block. I move backward, hold up my hand to mean wait, please, just give me a second.
“Well, he didn’t say it was you, exactly.” Savannah pauses for a long moment. “He said it was a girl who looked just like you.”
I breathe out loudly. Relief. “I fucking told you.”
“Jo,” says Brandon. “Hang up.”
“Look,” says Savannah. “Nobody believes the pastor either. They don’t believe him that there are two of you. They think he’s crazy or covering for you or that he killed you or something. Everybody at school thinks you attacked Henry, though. They think you’ve gone insane.”
I can feel the eyes on me already, hear the whispers. If I came back now. If they caught me. It would be worse than before.
I ran, didn’t I? That will make me look guilty in their eyes. Judge jury executioner in a glance.
“I’m hanging up,” I say loudly.
“Wait, Jo, don’t!” Savannah has stopped whispering. “I believe you, okay? I believe you.” I’m glad to hear her say it even if it is too little, too late.
“Hang up,” Brandon says again. I turn away from him, cup my hand over the phone.
“Who was that?” asks Savannah. “Are you with someone?”
“Is Aggie out looking for me?” I ask instead of answering. I hope she’s sorry that she hit me, sorry that she yelled. I wonder if she believes me, too.
“I don’t know.”
“Have you seen Henry?”
“No, he’s still out of school, but I hear he’s okay.” I’m glad to hear that, though I haven’t thought much about Henry. He’s just some boy, it turns out. Not like my daydreams at all. He’s real.
“What about Jack?” I ask.
“What about him?”
“Are you—”
Before I can finish the sentence, Brandon yanks the phone roughly out of my hand. He fumbles with it for a moment before stabbing the End Call button.
“You shouldn’t talk to anyone,” he says, quiet but angry.
“I didn’t tell her anything.”
He shakes the phone at me, lecturing like the pastor, though he has even less right. “They could track you.”
“Who could?”
“Them,” he says. “All of them. You need to get rid of this.”
“I can’t.” I grab for the phone, but he pulls it away, and I feel a surge of anger. Who does he think he is? “Give it back.”
“This is dangerous,” he says, holding it far away from himself as if it will burn him. There’s a flash of something in his eyes. Just for a second and then it’s gone. Real
fear.
I think of what he told me, about the men coming with guns, shooting the hounds. Brandon’s been hiding out here for a long time. He’s just like my sister. She’s just like him.
A few hours ago, I’d still been thinking about going home. Now that it’s day, maybe I could find my way. And then what? Pack a bag and run away for real? Go back to the way things used to be?
I can never go back to the life I had before. The pastor knows about my sister. So does Savannah. And I know about Mama. I know that everyone was wrong.
She wasn’t murdered, wasn’t abducted. She left. It was her choice. She chose to run.
“It’s my friend’s phone, okay?” I say. I’m not ready to go back, but I’m not willing to give up my only connection to the other world. “Nobody knows I have it except her and she won’t tell anybody. I swear. I’ll keep it turned off.”
I hold my hand out, do my best to look plaintive and harmless. Brandon looks uncertain.
“You can trust me,” I say.
“Just keep it off,” he says.
I snatch it quickly when he holds it out. I put it on silent and power it off, show him the black screen, shove it into my pocket. When he turns to go back inside, I slip my hand into my pocket, turn the phone back on.
* * *
—
Inside, Brandon prepares to go dark. He drapes a blue tarp over the fish tank, positions a ragged two-by-four gently across the tank as if it had fallen there. He grabs a handful of leaves from outside, scatters them across the sofa, the floor.
“So it looks abandoned,” he says.
I help him carry armfuls of mason jars out from the kitchen. A few feet from the camper, hidden beneath the leaves, is a wooden trapdoor. It opens into a hole, about four feet deep, the sides and bottom lined with soggy-looking boards.
Some Kind of Animal Page 18
