Page 45 of They Say a Girl Died Here

“I know you think I’m a prude, and perhaps I am.” She poured her own tea. “I have my values and my religion and I try to live in God’s good grace. But I understand that you’re lonely, Claire. I understand you might want some male company, maybe even to fall in love again. But I can also understand why it upset Anna. Maybe it was too soon to have a man stay over.” She pulled out a chair and sat down carefully, feathery-light and birdlike in her careful movements. Face as prim as her blouse buttoned up to the top despite the heat. “Perhaps you should have stayed at his place if you’d wanted … well, that sort of thing.”

“Stayed at his place?” Mom’s voice dropped, as if the anger had been punched from her guts. She stared at her mother and then her daughter in disbelief before letting out a small laugh so full of despair it could make angels cry. There were fresh bags under her eyes. Dry patches on her cheeks. Anna and Grandma were pushing Mom into disrepair.

“And tell me how I could do that,” she said. “Go out for a whole night as if I don’t have a care in the world. Leave you both. You’re never here when you’re supposed to be, Anna, as if you’re still a selfish teenager coming and going as you please, and you know, that’s almost fine, apart from we have Mom to think about, and it’s not your fault, Mom, I know, but it’s hard worrying all the time that you’re going to have a moment and wander off or fall over or turn the stove on with a dish towel on it or a million other things that I know can happen.”

She barely breathed, the words coming out in one long sentence, from broken, tired heart straight to mouth. “I am the only adult in this house because you don’t help me, Anna, and you can’t, Mom. I work all the hours I can in a hospital I have to drive an hour there and back to get to, and while I’m working, I see everything bad that can happen to people, and that includes what happened to you, Anna, and what’s happening to you, Mom, and I’m sorry for you both, I really am, but Jesus Christ, I’m so tired of having to look after everyone.”

Anna and her grandmother stared silently in horror as Mom fought back tears and shook her head, staring at the floor as if she couldn’t believe she was having to explain any of this. “And now Caroline has gotten her period and so that’s my one ally in this house—and I am grateful for the house, Mom, I really am—about to turn into a teenage hormonal monster sure to blame every slight thing that goes wrong in her world on me.” She paused, whole body shaking. “I feel so old. I’ve felt so old for such a long time, and then there was suddenly something—someone—who liked me. Liked me for myself. And maybe it was too soon, and maybe I should have stayed at his place and let whatever calamity might happen here happen, but I just wanted to feel like a normal woman for once in my own home.” She took a breath, holding herself together. “I thought you would both allow me that.”

Time stopped in the silence that followed. Anna thought that if she looked at her iced tea, the condensation droplets on the side would have paused their slow roll down the glass, and the second hand on the hallway clock would be hovering between numbers. All of Mom’s frustration and pain and upset and how did my life come to this hung in that frozen moment.

“I’m sorry, Claire,” Grandma said at last. “We’ll do better.” She darted a look at Anna, stern and commanding, clearly requiring Anna to add her apology.

Anna scoured inside herself for something she could say to make it better. Her dry mouth, the iced tea untouched, worked for a moment or two, trying to find the right shape for the words.

“I’m sorry,” she mumbled eventually. And then, without warning, other words tumbled out, determined to be heard, defiant. “But I still don’t think Jamie’s death was an accident.”

And Mom exploded all over again.

51

The scooter spat dirt up like a chemtrail behind her as Anna leaned forward, willing it to go faster. She let herself believe that it was the dry air making her eyes water and not everything she was fleeing back in the house. All the damage she’d caused. All the confrontation. She rode until the house was far enough behind her and her mind had calmed enough to know she needed to save enough battery to get back, and she wished one more time that she had a car of her own and could drive all the way into that burnished shield of sun that hung so heavy over Harper’s Creek.

Out in the peace and quiet of endless fields she pulled over to the side of the road, panting as if she’d run the five or six miles. She kicked at the earth, the sound loud in the tranquil peace. After a moment, she slapped her own face—once, twice, three times—wishing Mom had done it, wishing she’d never woken up after the thing, wishing she were gone, never having existed, wishing her brain would eat itself like Grandma’s was doing and she could fall down the hole of not remembering until there was nothing left.

A bird screeched overhead, darting down to grab some unsuspecting mouse or worm, carrying it off into the baking sky. Anna threw her head back and screamed, letting all her frustrations and self-loathing and anger and sadness and emptiness come out in a torrent of wild sound. She stopped for breath and then screamed some more until her scream turned into a cough, her throat raw.

She bent over, panting, retching a little as her throat scratched with dust, her hair falling loose around her face as she coughed and spat. Eventually she straightened up, her breath leveling out and her skin cooling despite the midday heat, and took long, deep breaths. She looked out over the land, so peaceful around her. Scream some more, she felt it was telling her. If you think it will help, we can take it.

She closed her eyes, tilting her head up, listening to every quiet sound. This wasn’t silence, not really. There were a million and more lives surrounding her. Ants, mice, worms, birds, bugs. Even as the crops failed, something was there to make use of what was left. A whole different world in which one field was a universe. A city of tiny existences where she was unknown and would be forever unknown and nothing she did would ever matter.

She opened her eyes and looked at the land again afresh. At some point over the past few weeks since they’d moved here, it had become less alien. More compelling. More real. She crouched and touched the earth, cool under her fingertips. Maybe this was what Melissa meant when she said it was in her blood. Maybe the dust got into you and took hold. There was a cruel beauty in the current barrenness of most of the fields, but maybe it was the bad years that made the good ones feel so bountiful. A reminder that good times were precious. Like life, she thought, hiccuping a small half sob. Everything was a balance.

Suddenly exhausted, and with nowhere else to go but home, she got back on the scooter. She took it slowly, not only to delay facing Mom and Grandma but also to let the countryside hold her for a while longer. She didn’t want to think about bloodstains that had been her own and then vanished. Or Mom’s terrible sadness. Or Grandma’s quiet terror. She wanted to stay out here with the myriad living things that would never know her.

She was a fair distance from the cemetery when she saw a few cars parked beside it, and she sped up, curious. Normally, the place was a literal graveyard with hardly any visitors, but today was different. Were they burying Jamie already?

52

She felt awkward and out of place in her jeans and T-shirt, dusty from the road, but she kept her head high and made her way through the gravestones toward where the coffin, the gloss of the rich wood shining in the sunlight, sat above the open grave.

Pastor Keene was holding his Bible and standing away from the milling attendees, and in the solemn clusters she recognized a few faces from around town and some of the slightly older versions of the teenage football players she’d seen in the yearbooks and googled in the night.

As she picked her way toward Jamie’s parents, stern father stoic next to his veiled mother, she wondered where these friends had been when he was living alone in the motel out at the edge of town like an abandoned sick dog. How soon after his decline did they fall away? Tell themselves they’d check in on him when life settled down? When things were quieter? Well, things were pretty fucking quiet for Jamie now.

She drew closer, people moving out of her way, side-eyeing the interloper among them. Five minutes was all she needed. Maybe they’d ask her to stay for the service, wrong attire or not. Otherwise, she’d come back and say her goodbyes to Jamie another time.

“What are you doing here?”

If she’d been hoping for any form of warmth or basic politeness from the Carlsons, that was lost in the cold disdain of those words. Mr. Carlson had moved closer to his wife. His skin was tanned from golf and his hands were manicured and the cuff links on his shirt were gold with diamond inlays.

“I’m Anna. I am—I was a friend of Jamie’s.”

“We know who you are.”

Anna ignored him, speaking instead to his wife. “I just wanted to give you my condolences. Jamie was kind. And sweet. And—”

“You didn’t know James.” Eleanor Carlson lifted her veil, her red eyes stark, all her warmth, all her heart, trapped in that wooden box. “Don’t even pretend you knew my boy.” Her shrill voice was a pitch too loud in the quiet, ringing out across the barren fields, startling the other mourners into silence.