Bones & All (25 page)

The truth wouldn't set me free. I'd only end up like my father.

I wandered through the cabin in search of a distraction. There was a row of ancient paperbacks on a shelf in the dining area, but they were mostly spy thrillers or romance novels, nothing I was interested in. I went into the kitchen in search of hot chocolate and grilled cheese fixings—not the right time of year for either, but I guess I needed to feel like this cabin was home, or at least another version of it. There wasn't any bread or cheese or cocoa powder, so I settled for a stick of beef jerky.

Then I opened a cupboard by the back door, expecting to find citronella candles or a stack of board games. Instead it was crammed with an assortment of objects, clothing, and little golden tangles of women's jewelry, Walkmans and collectible coins in clear plastic cases, clunky pewter tableware, and random knickknacks. I thrust a curious hand into the jumble, and a minute later my fingers settled upon an object with contours that felt awfully familiar.

I drew the object out of the cupboard. It was Mr. Harmon's sphinx. I tried to tell myself it was only a memento, but I knew that wasn't true. Sully took things he could sell, not things to remember his victims by.

After that I went into his bedroom, though I didn't dare turn on the light. The bed was made, but all around the room was a mess of things that wouldn't fit into the cupboard: lamps and clocks and porcelain dolls with rolling glass eyes.

I sat on the bed and poked through the stuff on the bedside table. More jewelry. A tarnished silver flask—not the one he kept in his pocket, someone else's. Credit cards with different names on them. Among those credit cards was an ID card labeled
NATIONAL PARK STAFF, FRANCIS YEARLY
. In the corner of the card was a small black-and-white photo of him—it was blurry, but I could still make out his smile.

Dad, Dad, Dad.
A word with no meaning. What was Sully doing with my father's ID card? This didn't make sense. How had he met my father? What did he want with him?

The sound of a truck engine and headlights passing across the wall drew me out of a daze. I ran into the spare bedroom and hid the trophy and the ID card in the nightstand. I heard Sully's footsteps on the rickety porch steps, followed by the slam of the screen door. “Missy? You here?”

I took a second to gather myself before I came out into the sitting room. “Hi, Sully.”
Who are you?

He stood under the stag's head with a paper bag of groceries. “Well, well. Didn't think you'd be back so soon.”

“Is it all right that I'm here?”

“All right? 'Course it's all right!” He set the grocery bag on the kitchen table and put the milk in the fridge. “You hungry?”

“Not really, thanks.” I hoped my stomach wouldn't rumble and betray me.

“Where's your boyfriend?”

“He went back to Virginia.”

“He leave you off here?”

I nodded, only because I didn't want to explain everything.

“Sorry he's gone?”

I shrugged, and Sully gave me a sly look. “You like to think you ain't.” He pried the cap off a bottle of beer, sat down at the table, and tipped it back. I watched his Adam's apple bob up and down as he gulped. He sighed and wiped his mouth. “Give up on finding your daddy?”

“No,” I said. “I found him.”

His bushy gray eyebrows shot up. “That was some mighty quick detective work.”

I shoved my hands in my pockets and toed the edge of the braided rug on the floor. “Yeah, well.”

“Well? Don't keep me hangin', girl!”

“He's in a home,” I said slowly. “A mental home.”

“Aw, Missy. I sure am sorry to hear that.” As he said it I wondered how many other lies he'd told me. Sully wasn't sorry, not one bit. He'd known all along who my father was.

“You were right,” I said. “I should have forgotten about him and gone with you from the beginning.” I didn't know what made me say it. Sully was the last person I wanted to travel with now.
His daddy's pickled tongue, his mama's heart in a stew …

He took another gulp of beer and gave me an odd look. In that moment I felt that there was no more sense of
us against the world
, no mention of that fishing lesson he'd promised me
—
as if he knew I'd been through his cabinets. “Got any idea what you're gonna do next?” he asked.

I shook my head. I wished I hadn't told Travis to leave. Or Lee. If I hadn't picked a fight with Lee, this horrible night never would've happened.

Sully finished his beer and tossed the bottle in the trash. “Well, you got time to figure it out in the mornin'.”

“Will you be here when I wake up this time?”

He nodded. “Sleep tight, Missy.”

 

10

I went into the bedroom and turned the key in the lock as softly as I could manage. I pulled out the sphinx and set it on the night table, and tucked my father's ID card in my rucksack. Then I switched off the light and, without taking off my jeans, climbed into the bed Lee had slept in, burrowing beneath the red and blue patchwork quilt. I could smell him on the sheets, and it comforted me. He was probably halfway to Tingley by now.

When I fell asleep I dreamed of Mrs. Harmon. We were sitting at her kitchen table, and the light streaming through her suncatchers made glimmering pools of green and blue on the linoleum. She was cutting the slice of cake she'd promised me. “It's carrot, with cream cheese frosting,” she said proudly as she laid the moist auburn slab on a dish and handed it to me. “This is the last cake I'll ever bake, so I'm glad it turned out well.”

Mrs. Harmon poured us each a cup of tea from a china pot as I devoured the slice. She watched me eat, sipping pensively from her teacup. “He's not a very nice man, is he, dear?”

“Who? Sully?”

She nodded.

I raised my hand to my neck to hide her locket. “Because he took your husband's trophy?”

“That's one reason.”

“He's given me a lot of good advice.”

“You feel grateful to him?”

“Yeah. I guess I do.”

“Maren,” she began, setting down her cup and resting her hands palms-down on the table, “sometimes it's the worst things in life that have the most to teach us. You take what you can, and as for the ugly parts, well—you ‘leave it go and get on with the business of living,' as my Dougie used to say. Do you see what I mean?”

“I think so.”

She nodded. “Don't worry about the locket, dear. It makes me glad to know you'll think of me whenever you wear it.” She sighed. “I'm just sorry I won't be able to teach you how to knit.”

“Mrs. Harmon, there's something I have to tell you.”

She smiled at me expectantly. I put down my fork and dropped my hands in my lap. I'd only had one sip of my tea but the cup was empty, and she picked up the pot and refilled it to the brim. I looked at her hands as she poured, and they were the hands of a much younger woman. I thought it would be easier if I said what I had to say while she was still pouring. After all the kindness she'd shown me it would be too hard to look her in the eye. “I'm like him,” I whispered.

With a deliberate air she laid down the teapot. “No, dear,” she said as she laid her hand on mine. “No, you're not.”

The kitchen melted into nothing, and so did Mrs. Harmon. She had her hand on my hand, and I watched it vanish. Then I was back under the pile of coats in Jamie Gash's spare room, a fur collar tickling my cheek, and I heard my mother calling for me.
Get up, Maren. Wake up.

In my dreamy confusion I was convinced, just for a second, that after all I'd been through she'd finally changed her mind, and she had come and found me using some maternal homing instinct. A second later I was fully awake, my heart in my throat. There was someone in the room, but it wasn't my mother. I should've known there wasn't any point locking the door.

Sully was sitting in a chair in the corner of the bedroom. I couldn't make out his face. “See you found the ID card.”

“It was my father's.” I inched back on my elbows, pressing myself against the headboard as if I could get away from him. “How did you get it?”

“He left it here.” Sully scratched his chin, and it sounded like sandpaper. “He's my son.”

“Your
son
?” I cried.

For the second time that night, I felt like I'd been set adrift somewhere outside myself. It couldn't be. It couldn't.
Aside from my granddad I never did it in the house.

“Damned woman got in the car and took him away from me,” Sully was saying. “By the time I caught up to her, she'd lost him. Man stole my boy right out from under her nose.” He let out a snort of contempt. “She wasn't the sharpest knife, I can tell ya that.”

“My … my grandmother?”

“Yeah.” He cocked his head, as if this were the first time he'd considered the connection. “Reckon she was.”

“What happened to her?”

Sully laughed, a cold, terrifying laugh. That was my answer.

“Did you know where my dad was? When he was living with the Yearlys?”

“Couldn't get to him. Not without makin' a scene, and that was just about the last thing I needed. But I waited too long. He's hidin', and he knows I'll never get him now. But then, I guess I don't have to, do I?”

“What do you mean?”

“I knew you was out there. And if I couldn't get to him, at least I could get to
you
. I was waitin' for ya, Missy. All that time,” he said slowly, “I was waitin' for you to come back.”

A cold sick feeling came flooding out of my gut. “Why didn't you tell me who you were?”

He chuckled. “Why'd it take
you
so long to figure it out?”

Neither of us spoke for a long minute. Finally I asked, “Is that what you were waiting for?”

Sully shifted his weight in the chair, and I heard his bones creak. “Every kid's a mistake,” he said. “Every kid who ever was. You see that, don't ya, Missy?”

“I don't know,” I said slowly. “What else would you eat?”

Sully laughed. “Now you're usin' your noggin.”

His son's pickled tongue, his granddaughter's heart in a stew.
He exhaled then, and I smelled it, and it was like a day-old battlefield and a backed-up sewer and a hundred landfills all rolled into a single breath. You can imagine it, can't you? The man feasted on corpses and never brushed his teeth.

I couldn't see the knife, but I knew it was there. He was going to kill me with the blade he'd used to peel his apple.

Get out,
Mama said.
Get out, or he'll trap you under the bedclothes.

I've often wished I were dead, but I didn't want to die like
this
. I kicked off the quilt as he lunged toward the bed. He got on top of me, but not completely—he had my arms, but my legs were still free—and I felt the cold blade of the knife flush against my left forearm.

“You lied to me!” I screamed. “You lied!”

“I never lied,” he hissed, and his breath on my face nearly knocked me out. “I only eat 'em once they're dead. I don't always let 'em die on their own time.”

Why spend all that time telling me stories? Asking me questions?
Teaching
me things? What did any of it matter if he was only going to eat me?

Entertainment. Or maybe just fattening me up.

Now get your left hand free—make him fumble for the knife—reach back for the trophy.

I drew up my knee and began to kick at his legs with my heel, and while it was a pretty sad effort, it distracted him from his grip on my hands. I pulled my left hand free, batting his knife away by the handle, and I kept kicking as I reached back for the trophy on the nightstand. He fumbled for the knife as I fumbled for the trophy. My heart leapt as my fingers settled on the cold metal contours of the sphinx, and I gripped the trophy by the wing and brought it in an arc over my head. The blow landed on the back of his skull, and he lost his hold on the knife. “Bitch!” he shouted. “You little bitch!” He reared up and lifted his hand to his head, and that's when I clocked him good. He fell on top of me, and I felt the blood, hot and sticky on my fingers. I dropped the trophy on the floor, pushed him over, and rolled out of the bed, groping for my sneakers.

Looking back on it, I know I could have gathered my things into my rucksack. But I had no idea how quickly he would rouse himself, so there wasn't a second to spare. I tore down the creaky wooden steps into the forest with nothing but my journal in my hand and my birth certificate in the back pocket of my jeans.

I didn't have a chance, of course. Even if I could run the two or three miles through the woods back to the main road, I could hardly expect to hitch a ride in the middle of the night. Sully would come after me in his truck. Maybe he would run me over, and I would get what I'd wanted on that Iowa highway after all.

The track was muddy and I slipped more than once, but I got up and kept going, taking great lungfuls of air to push the panic aside. Muddy knees and bloody hands. Even if there
was
someone on the road this late, no one in their right mind would stop for me.

I was almost at the end of the dirt track when I saw a light up ahead. I slowed down as I came closer, and the light resolved itself into a car. An empty car, with the driver's-side door wide open.

I stopped beside the open door, gasping for air, and turned to check behind me before I bent to look inside. It was Travis's car. His Donald Duck keychain was still dangling from the ignition.

I popped my head up and scanned the moonlit forest. I didn't dare call his name, but I had a feeling there was no point. He wasn't out there.