Echo Lake: A Novel (12 page)

She woke in the morning early, having forgotten to undress or brush her teeth before bed. Her mouth felt thick and dirty. Emily had expected a phone call, a knock on the door, something. She had not called the police. Wasn’t it illegal not to call? Emily found the thin yellow phone book that had materialized in her mailbox the week before, a faded picture of a stream on the cover. The county sheriff’s office phone rang three times before anyone picked up.

I saw the accident yesterday, she told the operator, the one with the young girl and older man, over on Wells Road, around Echo Lake.

The woman on the other end of the line seemed distracted. Emily thought she could hear chewing.

Yes, operator finally said. So you saw the incident happen?

No, I was there after, after everything happened.

We’ll take your name and number, the woman said. If we need you, we’ll call.

So I shouldn’t come down?

Don’t bother, the woman said. Just come if you’re called. Emily nodded and gave her address and phone number.

I don’t get my cell phone calls out here, she said, so it might be hard to get ahold of me that—

It’s fine, the woman said. We’ll get you if we need you. And then she hung up.

She spent the weekend after the accident cleaning, disinfectng every surface. When she was done, the house smelled as chemical as a hospital and bore no traces of tobacco and cabbage, which she had smelled faintly in the drapes and other porous surfaces of the house before. She had scrubbed the past away, and now all that was left of the past were the measurements in the doorframe, which would not come away without taking the paint with them.

She dreamed about the girl in the accident. In her dreams, the girl turned her head. She wasn’t dead, but damaged beyond repair, her face bloodied and misshapen. I’m alive, she said to Emily, her broken arm flapping against the ground, held down by the snapped bone. Don’t just walk away.

•

Emily sometimes bought the weekly necessities that she inevitably ran out of—toilet paper, toothpaste, coffee, milk—from Jimmy’s store, where one roll of toilet paper cost three dollars and the coffee was dusty on the shelf, an off-brand vacuum-packed for freshness probably years ago. But it was better than driving all the way to Keno, and sometimes she’d drink too much wine to even contemplate the ride. Other people, too, shuffled in to buy things they’d forgotten in qualities and quantities less than what they otherwise would stand for: paper towels stained yellow with age, cans of beans with torn labels and bent sides for full price. She was in Jimmy’s when she saw Colleen.

Colleen was reading the Heartshorne Gazette at the counter, holding the front page close to her face. On it was a photograph of the girl from the accident. Emily had seen it as soon as she came in. She hadn’t seen the girl’s face that day, but she knew it must be her: the black hair, narrow shoulders. It must have been the girl’s senior picture, since she wore her cheerleading outfit and smiled before a fake background of autumn leaves. She stood with her hands on her waist, one knee bent, her sneaker balanced on a basketball. Colleen turned, the paper in her hand, and saw Emily. Emily smiled and nodded.

Hello, she said. How are you doing, Colleen? The woman’s eyes didn’t change, though her mouth crept slightly up at the edges.

I’m Emily Collins, she said. Related to Fran, you remember? I live in her house now.

The old woman continued to stare, clutching her paper tighter.

We met at the church dinner? Emily said, smiling wider.

Colleen finally nodded, closing her eyes. I know you, she said. I remember you from church. Did you see this? She pointed at the front page of the newspaper. Did you see what happened to this little girl? She held the newspaper so tightly that it wrinkled beneath her hands. She held the page up, inches from Emily’s face. The girl’s teeth were white and unbroken, her hair one black mass. Emily remembered how difficult it had been to tell her hair from the ground, both were so darkened with blood.

Yes, she said. I heard about it.

Colleen lowered the newspaper. It’s a shame what can happen to young girls, she said. She looked up at Emily. Did your mother ever tell you about why she left here, about what happened? Emily shook her head.

She didn’t tell me much about living here, Emily said. I was hoping to learn more from anyone who knew her.

Colleen pursed her lips and shook her head, disagreeing with whatever Emily might have said, not listening to the actual  words.

Whatever she told you, Colleen said, she didn’t tell you everything. Emily opened her mouth to speak, but Colleen interrupted her. She didn’t tell the whole thing, Colleen repeated. Girls don’t usually tell everything. They keep secrets. Not like boys, all out in the open.

Emily’s stomach lurched. She tried to speak quietly and calmly, as she would to a skittish animal.

So you knew my mother? She asked. And why she left? Colleen had to be in her seventies. She would have been a young woman when Connie was a teenager. How old had Connie been when she’d left? Emily couldn’t remember exactly. Her mother never told the stories straight. She’d gone to high school in the Midwest, though, Emily remembered that much, those stories of flat planes and farms and trucks parked in cornfields as a backdrop to her exploits smoking pot and failing geometry. So she’d left with her family during or before high school.

I knew her a little bit, Colleen said. Everyone did. All the Collinses were wild. Colleen looked down at the floor and clutched the paper to her chest. Shame they all left, though, she said. It’s a shame when anyone has to leave.

But why did they have to leave? Emily asked.

Colleen looked at Emily, her eyes wet and unsteady. We like to keep our people close, she said.

Col! The young woman behind the counter called, standing on tiptoe. Your burger’s ready.

Colleen walked away without saying goodbye. Emily stood with her roll of toilet paper and half-gallon of milk in her hand, not sure what to do. She could follow Colleen and demand answers—finally, somebody who had known her family, who might know what had happened—but the old woman had seemed agitated, and now she hurried from the door, not looking back at Emily as she got into the backseat of an already-running car. One of the young men from the church was in the driver’s seat.

Emily tried to imagine her mother as wild. She had been paranoid, secretive, but never wild as an adult. She told high school stories about driving cars through cornfields and smoking weed, but she seemed to have been genuinely uninterested in true wildness. Despite her problems, Connie hadn’t been an alcoholic—she didn’t like to be out of control, to be made stupid, and so she limited her drinking to her rare nights out at bars with a boyfriend or a glass or two from a bottle with a screw cap, which she’d keep in the refrigerator for months. Her only major vice was smoking, which she did alone in the living room while watching television or reading horror novels, which she liked because they helped her to understand human behavior.

Everybody is secretly like the people in these books, she’d tell Emily. She’d point to the lurid cover, a figure in black against the red backdrop of a sunset or a hatchet in relief against the paperback page, the title of the novel in letters formed from splatterings of blood.

Wild. She’d never been wild.

Jonathan had said that Emily’s family history in Heartshorne had started with the Tower, with some event like lightning that had sent her family flying from their place of security, an event that had dashed them to the ground and left them below, praying for it all to be over. Emily picked up a copy of the local newspaper and placed it on the counter with her milk and toilet paper.

And I’ll take a pack of Marlboro’s, too, Emily said, imagining all of the possible towers that her mother might have lived through to make her the woman she had become.

10

The quiet around her house was a quiet she had never heard before. No human sounds cut through the dark, but the night was filled with as much noise as any city street during rush hour. The cicadas made their usual steady hum with a spikier cricket accompaniment. Sometimes birds erupted from the trees, roused by a sound or movement she couldn’t hear or see. Small animals rooted in the dry leaves. They crunched away when she clapped or threw a rock into the tangle of bushes. She was spooked by their noise, though she knew she shouldn’t be afraid. The only dangerous animals were cougars or mountain lions, and those walked heavily through the woods and screamed like a woman. She’d listened to a recording of a mountain lion scream on YouTube, a keening, enormous sound that announced itself immediately. She had grown used to the sounds and kept a flashlight and pile of rocks on the porch to throw at the woods or road if she was afraid. She knew that the rocks probably didn’t help, but they relieved her fear for a moment, and that was all that she really wanted. She smoked her Marlboros on the porch, one per night, just to be safe from the perils of addiction, and imagined the ways her life might turn out now.

Maybe she could go back to church, make it a habit; it wasn’t so bad to have something to organize your life around, even if you couldn’t believe in it completely. She’d meet a young man. She’d let him move in—after they married, of course—and they’d have a baby. The baby would cry in the small kitchen as she fed it mush from a tiny spoon. He would be tired and would smell of sweat and come home wanting nothing but quiet and the sounds of beer moving in his mouth. She would cry in the bathroom as he strenuously avoided seeing her tears. She knew this pattern from her mother’s life—the tears and the boredom, if not the marriage, which Connie had been smart enough to avoid. Or maybe she’d be like Frannie, alone until she died by herself in her living room, nobody with her in her last moments but the cats licking her blood until somebody found her body. Or she could be like Jonathan and his sister, running an occult shop, living at the edges of completely acceptable society. But there were other options. She could become an artist, an eccentric. She could make art out of deserted cars and trash she found in the ditches between the pavement and the woods.Or she could devote herself to some cause: orphans or pit bulls or recycling.

It occured to her that by now, she should know better the kind of person she really was.

She finished her cigarette and sat in the dark, listening to the bugs and the animals. I won’t be afraid, she thought. This is where I live. I belong here. Whatever I choose to do, I belong here.

She threw a rock into the dark. It bounced dustily into the underbrush, scaring away something small and light, a bird, maybe. She went inside, taking her pack of cigarettes and flashlight with her.

She decided to call Jonathan.

Jonathan didn’t ask her why, which she appreciated. It was the kind of thing best to explain in real life, preferably over something involving alcohol.

Of course, he said. Of course I’ll help.

•

Emily sat in Jonathan’s car, stiff by his side. Now that she had actually called and they were together in his car, she wanted to sink into the sticky plastic fabric of the car seat. She had been forward. She had asked him to do something silly and he probably regretted giving her his phone number.

I’m sorry, she said, to ask you to do this. I know you don’t know me very well, and this isn’t—

It’s fine, he said. It sounds fun, even. He wrapped both of his hands around the steering wheel. He was a careful driver, good at navigating the roads. I wouldn’t have given you my card if I didn’t want you to call, he said. She looked away when he turned to look at her.

Thank you, she said. When you showed me that Tower, during the reading, I wanted to know more, but I figure I need help.

I met a woman when I was at that church thing in Heartshorne, she told him. She knew my family. She hinted that something had happend, something that had made them leave. It made me think of what you said, that whatever it was had probably shown up in the papers.

He nodded. We’ll see what we can’t find. If it’s something as big as the cards say, then we should be able to find it.

So the cards might be wrong? It might not be that big?

He shrugged. Please don’t take me too seriously, he said. Really, they’re only cards. They’ve helped me before, but they’re just paper.

The library was one of the oldest buildings in town, flanked by the courthouse and an old hotel, all made of the same white stone. Inside, the woman at the periodicals table motioned them toward the back, where the enormous encyclopedias and reference books sat on sharp metal shelves, rust eating away at the corners, a lightswitch on each shelf that turned on a row of ancient flourescents above the books. As they walked past rows of books, dust-covered and untouched for years, the woman at the periodical desk switched on the lights just above them. They kicked on gradually, growing into their full light only after Jonathan and Emily had passed on to the next row. Each light made a small humming sound: together, they reminded Emily of the sounds throbbing around her house every night.

Back here, the woman said. She pointed to a door, unlabeled, windowless. That’s where we keep the microfilm machines, she said. Hardly anyone uses them, so we got them off of the floor to make room for computer stations.