Dear Daughter (7 page)

She had never been more dear to me than she was in that moment.

Then I saw what she’d written on the floor:

This is when, finally, I had my first conscious thought:

I can’t let anyone else see this.

(And I didn’t.)

No matter what my clownishly optimistic therapists and social workers have tried to tell me, that morning isn’t something I’ll ever be able to “get over” or “process” or “come to terms with.” A person can’t stumble on their murdered mother and expect to be fine and dandy the day or the year or the decade after. Nope, lucky me, I get to hold on to this particular experience for the rest of my life. It’s like that houseguest who leaves his dirty underwear in your bathroom and open cans of tuna in the kitchen—or, worse, the other way around—and no matter how nicely you ask refuses to leave.

But I’m not lying when I say that it
is
better than it used to be, less a crippling terror than a sustained cognitive dissonance. Something I’m so used to that I can almost forget it’s there . . . unless I make the mistake of thinking about it. Then it’s impossible to think of anything else. Like: blinking, breathing, the feel of your tongue in your mouth. But instead of your tongue it’s your fingers, and instead of your mouth it’s your mother’s blood.

•   •   •

The cop was right the fuck up in my face. He was grabbing me by one shoulder and shaking me. “Hey, lady, you in there?”

I reared up like the snake I was, ready to strike, but my sense reasserted itself just in time. I retreated, nearly impaling myself on the gearshift in the process. An inconvenient memory surfaced of the last time I’d had sex.

I shifted self-consciously. “I’m sorry, I was thinking of something else.” My words were wooly, cumbersome, just like the rest of me. I ran my tongue over the sharpest points of my teeth to wake it up.

The cop took off his sunglasses and positioned himself in front of the open door. His eyes were the color of wet tar.

“Your truck,” he said. “I asked you if your truck is dead.”

“Just a false alarm. See?” I turned the key in the ignition and hoped the growl of the engine was convincing enough.

He leaned down and examined the dash, saw the warning light. “It’s a long way to a mechanic,” he said. “Pop the hood, I’ll take a look.”

“Oh, no, really, you don’t have to—”

He walked around to the front of the car. My foot tapped twice on the gas, consideringly. Then I turned off the car and went to join him. He was fiddling about with some sort of belt-type thing like he knew what he was doing. His hands were sure; his arms looked strong.

I became aware all at once of the bitter wind. I wrapped my coat around me.

He glanced up, caught my shiver. “You’re not from around here, are you?”

I jerked my chin at the desolate landscape. “No one’s from around here.”

Stop it, Jane. Now is not the time for personality.

He shook his head and returned to the engine. I indulged in a little fantasy: that the hood would crash down on the back of his skull.

“Is it busted?” I asked.

He lowered the hood. “Can’t tell—I need to check one more thing.”

He had just rounded the front of the car when the wind stirred again, carrying toward us a distinctive skunky smell. My gaze snapped to Shady: He was leaning against the fence, and he wasn’t smoking a cigarette—he was smoking a joint.

“What the hell kind of cops are you?” I asked Slim, unable to repress a throb of repulsion at the very word.

He took a step back at this, and one hand went to where his hip holster would have been.

My body moved itself into its own defensive position, nails at the ready.

“What makes you think we’re cops?” His words were as easy as his stance wasn’t.

“You’re
obviously
cops,” I said—but were they? No badges. No sirens. No guns that anyone could see. Just a white Crown Vic they could’ve picked up anywhere.

I glanced back at Shady. He was scratching lazily at his side, looking noticeably more relaxed. He had one of those skinny-legged bodies in which 95 percent of his body mass was concentrated in his stomach. It hung over his belt like a water balloon. I stared at it, wondering how it would feel to pop it open.

I’d read him wrong, I knew. He was no cop.

But Slim—he was a different story: He was leaning against the truck with the sort of studied indifference you learn to recognize once you’ve spent enough time in an interrogation room. I told myself to tread lightly, but my jaw still wanted to snap at the man.

“So where you headed?” he asked.

I adopted a breezy expression to hide my momentary inability to remember which meaningless states went where. “Montana.”

I realized this was the wrong thing to say a second too late.

“There’s an actual highway that can get you there, you know.”

“I like the scenic route.”

His expression was plainly skeptical. Why was he asking? Why did he care? What the fuck was wrong with him? What the fuck was wrong with
me
?

I came perilously close to sniff-checking my armpit.

“So what sort of business you have in Montana?” he asked.

“What sort of business you have
here
?”

Another wrong thing to say. He crossed his arms, watching me.

“Come on, man, we’re late!” Shady shouted, shattering what I realized then had been a prolonged silence. I broke eye contact with Slim. I had to resist the urge to draw a circle in the dirt with my toe.

“Leo! The time!”

“Jesus Christ, Walt, I’m coming.” With a grunt of annoyance, Slim stalked around to the side of the truck and flicked open the front fuel door. He looked back at me. “Figures,” he said.

“What?”

“Next time you fill up, maybe think about putting the gas cap back on.” He made an ostentatious show of tightening the cap and clicking the little fuel door shut.

I clenched my teeth to keep myself from blurting out that it wasn’t my fault, that I wasn’t that stupid.
Goddamn Kayla
.

“Thanks,” I managed. I didn’t smile or shake his hand, even though I knew that would have been the normal thing to do—but then again I noticed he didn’t exactly reach for my hand, either.

“Well,” he said, finally, “I suppose now’s the time I tell you to have a nice day.”

“It’s a bit late for that,” I said, louder than I would have liked.

Strike three.
The speculative glint in his eye crystallized into suspicion. As soon as he turned to walk away, I climbed back into the truck and locked the door behind me. I turned on the car; sure enough, the check engine light flicked off.

Moments later, the cop and his friend sped off, their car kicking up a cumulus cloud of dust. By the time it settled they had disappeared, leaving me with the impression that maybe I’d just fallen prey to some kind of deep prairie mirage.

Later, of course, I’d wish I had.

Jane Jenkins

Santa Bonita Women’s Center

April 24, 2004

Sweet Jane,

I almost didn’t write you this week. Part of me worries that these letters are gifts, glimpses of the outside world, maybe even a kind of companionship. And you deserve none of those things, of course.

Do they let you read letters in solitary? I heard that’s where you are. You just get into trouble wherever you go, don’t you?

I still think you should have gotten the death penalty, but I suppose solitary confinement is a reasonable compromise. I hear the hallucinations can start as early as 72 hours in. Is that true, Jane?

What do you see when you hallucinate? Do you see your mother? Does she talk to you? Does she tell you what she really thought of you?

Do you see me?

I see you, Jane. I see you on the ground, just as broken and bloody and debased as your mother was. I see your blood dripping through my fingers.

But that’s not a hallucination, that’s a dream.

Trace

CHAPTER SEVEN

Eighteen months ago, on a day I can’t describe for you because,
hello
, I was in a high-security prison where nothing ever changed, I finally found what I thought of as “my” Adeline—in the geology section, of all places. There, on the 527th page of a never-checked-out survey of twentieth-century metallurgical technology (donated by a well-meaning sedimentologist whose daughter got busted for intent to distribute), I came across this passage:

A number of mines in the southern Black Hills were abandoned in the late nineteenth century when more substantial deposits of gold were discovered to the north.
⁵
In the next decades, however, many of these early sites would prove to be tremendously lucrative sources of tin, and would be reclaimed by the same prospectors who had initially abandoned them.

And this footnote:

5  This kind of rash paranoia is characteristic of this time period, when prospectors regularly relocated at the first and slightest sign of better opportunities elsewhere. Nowhere was this phenomenon more manifest than in Ardelle and its long-forgotten sister city, Adeline, two settlements that were never fully populated simultaneously, their residents instead choosing to move back and forth depending on where the mineral wealth was thought to be that year. The towns’ population settled more or less permanently in Ardelle after 1901, when the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad built a spur line to Ardelle but was unable to traverse the mountain pass to Adeline.

Such a little thing! Hardly even a reference! It would have been so easy to miss were it not for my increasingly manic attention to detail. But, in my mind, the very unlikelihood of the discovery and of its relevance gave it credence—what is knowledge anyway but a series of wild improbabilities sigmaed up into inevitability?

On the days when I still let myself think that I might eventually get out, I began to plan my visit to Ardelle. First, I knew, I’d need a disguise. The physical part, as always, was easiest. I initially entertained a brief fantasy of transforming myself into a femme fatale: dark, finger-waved hair, stilettos, barbed innuendo delivered in a throaty European accent. But I knew that my compulsive need to look hot—and yes, I can admit that it’s a compulsion—was one of my greatest weaknesses, which meant that hotness was the first thing that had to go.

Hence the hair.

(By the way, don’t think I can’t hear you now: “Your hair! We get it! Jesus!” But honestly? If you’re really thinking that it’s only because you’ve never known what it’s like to have legitimately rad hair.)

My new persona, I knew, would be trickier. Not only would I need to throw off the press and anyone I met in Ardelle, but I would also need to be the kind of person who could ask questions without triggering questions in return, the kind of person in whom eccentricities and social awkwardness would be tolerated, even indulged. After long hours of consideration I came to a dispiriting conclusion: I’d have to make myself into a nerd.

Fortunately, I had some experience with this particular species. For the first fifteen years of my life I had been shuffled from tutor to tutor, learning all the things my mother thought ladies (or bastard children of petty nobility) should know—which as far as I can tell were gleaned directly from an Edith Wharton novel. I studied etiquette, music, antique furniture, napkin folding. I can spot a fake Picasso at a thousand paces; I dance the gavotte; I’m adept with a lemon fork, a butter pick, and a piccalilli spoon. My education was then rounded out with perfunctory attention to the more usual subjects, which were taught largely by mediocre or disgraced academics who were unwilling to cry uncle and find another field.

These are the seeds from which Rebecca Parker was born. It was a perfect disguise, really, something that no one but Noah would ever expect me to be: smart.

And smart in a way that served my particular purpose.

Rebecca Parker, I decided, received her B.A. in Old Stuff About America from the University of A State That Grows Corn. Her undergraduate thesis, “Something Something Gold Rush: Something Something Nineteenth Century,” won the departmental thesis prize. Her work has been published in impressive journals no layperson would have heard of, like
Tedious Details About the Dakotas
and
Undersexed Antisocial Nerds Discuss Cowboys
. She has frequently presented at major conventions hosted by associations with “history” in their names. Her current research interests include pioneer somethings and American Indian something elses. Ask her about any of this and you will be so crazy bored that you would rather self-lobotomize than ask a follow-up.