Echo Lake: A Novel (23 page)

Connie pressed her face into the pillow harder, until her nose hurt. Maybe she’d be run out of town like James’ other girl. Everybody would know. Billy wouldn’t want her. Nobody would.

She had only James now, this man she barely knew who she’d seen trying to rob a store, who’d been in prison.What would Momma think when she took him home?

She imagined, the whole time, that at least she’d have him. He would see the seriousness of the situation. And he must like her. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have sat up all night with her, he wouldn’t have treated her so kindly, would he?

If all he’d wanted was sex then he would have just taken it. He could’ve done it at any time.

She dressed and walked into the hallway. James stood at the stove making coffee. He was shirtless and barefoot, his hair disheveled. Connie had dressed neatly and smoothed down her hair, the appearance of respectability important to her now. It occurred to her in a small, funny flash that she finally understood the song
Will you still love me tomorrow?
It was a good question. She pulled her skirt down, buttoned her blouse up as well as she could with the missing button, but she could not stop feeling naked. She stood in the hallway for a few minutes, leaning against the wall, which buckled slightly under her weight. She didn’t know what to say. She hoped that he would say something first, invite her over for some coffee. He said nothing. He kept his back to her until she walked into the kitchen and stood by him.

He didn’t turn. She felt the room go hot, her palms sticky, her stomach tightened as if preparing for a physical blow. She opened and closed her fingers. He was ignoring her.

What am I going to do? She asked aloud. I mean, she said, feeling already how stupid her questions were, but unable to stop herself from asking them, what do you want me to do now? She spoke to his back, close to tears now. What did she even mean to say?

He turned, his face composed, not angry and not happy.

I imagine you should go now, he said. Your family is probably waiting for you.

Connie’s face crumpled like a child’s, and James had the urge to tell her that he was only joking, she could stay, she could live with him. But that was foolish. He let the urge go and instead busied himself by screwing the lid to the coffee back on the wide-mouthed jar, turning from her as her face contracted and reddened. It was easier not to see her upset.

She was young and she’d survive, he told himself.

I mean it, he said. You’ll be fine. Just forget what happened here. Forget everything you saw and everything that happened. You hear me? You can tell them whatever you want—make something up—but I’m not part of it. You never saw me. You never went here.

She looked at him. You want me to leave?

He nodded. I want you to leave. And you can’t come back. Not ever. Nobody can know you were here.

She felt it bubbling up, that old anger.

She remembered what he had said the night before, the tremor in his voice, how his face went hard when he talked about it.

I’ll tell what you did, she said. You’re a bastard. I’ll tell everyone what you did. And they’ll take you to prison like they did before.

His sympathy blinked out suddenly, an old bulb popping while still in the socket. The ride to prison flashed before him. He’d been arrested four summers ago, in August. They threw him in the back of a van with metal seats, oven-hot, the smell of sweat and booze ripe on his own skin and clothes. He was literally making himself sick with his own smell as he sat in the metal chair, his arms bent uncomfortably behind him. He remembered the flat, ugly building coming toward him through the bars in the window, a place that loomed gray against the blue, cloudless sky, the shrubs and grasses dead around it from the late-summer drought.

He wouldn’t go back there. And like that, he was himself again, hard and small and interested only in survival.

You tell, and I’ll tell, he said. And it’ll be worse for you than me, let me tell you that.

If I tell, everybody will know. It’ll be all over school, how you came over here, how you got drunk and came to bed with me, practically dragged me into bed. I’ll say you said you were eighteen. I’ll say you lied to me and then tried to get money out of me. Drank all of my whiskey while you were at it. I bet Billy wouldn’t like—

She turned away from him and threw open the front door, beating her fists against the sticky latch of the screen door until it popped and she left ran down the steps, twisting her ankle sllighty on the last step, but running anyway, despite the limp.

He didn’t have to bring up Billy. She didn’t even remember telling him about Billy. She’d probably said something last night, in that blur of slurry talk and kisses that she could hardly remember. The thought of Billy waiting for her by the General Store, worrying about where she was and thinking she’d abandoned him, made her flush with shame. She ran as hard as she could until the salt in her mouth and tears and mucus at the back of her throat choked her and she went down on her hands and knees and threw up.

14

Colleen smoked. Emily hadn’t smelled it on her clothes before, but this was probably because her clothes carried other dominant smells—Icy Hot, peppermint, and cheap polyester yarn. Colleen smoked Swisher sweets, those skinny, brown cigars, and their smell filled the house with cherries.

She held the cigar between her fingers and leaned forward.

Frannie loved your Mother, you should know that, Colleen said. She wished she could take Connie for herself, she told me so. Your mother’s parents were nothing to get excited about. They worked your mother, and all the kids, like dogs.

Emily knew those stories. Connie waking at dawn to make breakfast for her young brothers and sisters while her older brother went to work with her father, a job he’d gotten at sixteen, when Connie’s father had decided he’d had all the school he needed and that it was time to contribute. It wasn’t so much that Emily hadn’t believed the stories as that she hadn’t paid attention to them. The contours were so familiar, as were the rhythms of her mother’s voice when she told the stories, that their content had largely gone ignored. They were just another set of stories her mother had told to memorialize herself, to make her life seem more beleaguered than it had been. Emily had not thought of the stories as being related to real events. They were anecdotes pointing to Colleen’s victimization, a theme that Emily had already grown tired of by Middle School.

So, Colleen said, when Connie went missing, it was Frannie who made a stink about it. Your grandparents couldn’t be bothered. She went to the courthouse and insisted that Connie wasn’t just off partying, that she wouldn’t just up and leave like that, she was a responsible girl. Still, nothing much happened. They searched the woods around the school and found nothing. Still, even that wouldn’t have happened without Frannie.

When your mother came back, Frannie was the one who nursed her back to health.

I thought she was fine when she came back. Emily said. I thought she wasn’t hurt. That’s what the papers said.

Colleen laughed, a short, dry sound, and blotted out her cigar. She wasn’t physically hurt, but she was hurt in other ways. She couldn’t talk, for one thing. She just stared, her eyes big like this. Colleen opened her eyes wide and and thrust her head toward Emily.

I didn’t know your mother well—she was too young—but I went to school with Frannie and talked to her over at the store where she worked, a general store that burned down years ago over by the Free Will Baptist. She was sick when she told me about Connie. Your aunts and uncles all had their moments, and Frannie wasn’t any stranger to running away. She’d made off with the youth pastor was she was sixteen, but she came back after a week, saying he was a pervert, that he’d wanted her to do things in the bedroom that she’d never even heard of. Let him tie her up and all that.

When your mother came back, I thought at first she just keeping her mouth shut because she was afraid. Girls who disappeared for days and didn’t say where they were were probably in one place—out with some man, having more fun than they should. But Frannie said this was different: your momma seemed scared, as though she’d seen something she couldn’t even understand. She didn’t say she couldn’t remember, the papers had that wrong. She said she didn’t know.

Emily sipped her tea when Colleen paused, though it had grown cold and bitter. She imagined her mother as Colleen painted her, wide-eyed and too afraid to speak. It didn’t seem like the woman she had known.

15

Connie knew where she was: Near the lake, and from there, she could get back to the road. She could hear it close by, the vague sound of water against rock.

Her stomach felt empty, yet filled with something heavy in the place of food. She didn’t want to eat. She didn’t want to think. She didn’t want to go home yet. She was close to the part of the lake where the shore had washed up many tiny pebbles. The shore here hurt to walk on barefoot, so it was usually empty. She made her way toward it. She needed some cold water against her face.

She emerged from the trees and was exactly where she’d though she would—beyond the shore, on the pebbly beach where broken, black trees stood in the water, tipping and rotted but still upright and sharp enough to tear a hole in the bottom of a boat. To her left, Connie could see the bridge and the highway. She was close to home.

She crouched by the edge of the lake, cupping her hand into the surprisingly clear water. In the middle, it grew murky, a blue/brown mixture that you lost your hand in after just a few inches. Here, the water was clear like river water.

She splashed it on her face.

She didn’t understand what had happened with James. He had treated her well, he had fed her whiskey, he’d listened to her. And then, the day after, he’d told her to leave. Why? So she wouldn’t tell on him. So he wouldn’t have to go to prison for trying to steal some rolls of quarters and dollars from the general store. As if she would tell such a silly thing anyway.

He didn’t have to do it. That was what made her angry. He could have let her go. She would’ve been with Billy that afternoon, instead of him. She would’ve woken up in her own bed. She would’ve had something to look forward to. Now, she couldn’t think of her life beyond this moment in the woods, her hands and knees dirty, her underwear sticky.

She closed her eyes, feeling the water drip from her lashes and down her cheeks, though she was well past crying now, having gotten it all out back in the woods. She was not the kind of person who enjoyed indulging in a good cry.

She wanted to go back and shout at him, hurl something heavy at him and make him feel it, but she also wanted to be far away from him, at home in bed, listening to the sounds of her mother in the kitchen slamming and yelling.

She cupped lake water in her hands, splashed it on her face and poured a handful into her mouth, though she knew she shouldn’t: her mother had warned her against dirty lake, the insects and germs inside it, the worms that went into your mouth tiny and emerged in great ropes in your guts, turning you into a skeleton with a hungry worm inside. Her stomach, empty, rumbled.

As soon as she noticed the ache in her stomach, other symptoms followed. Her skin became hectic, hot and sticky. It wasn’t just the heat of having run through the woods—it was as though her skin had its own source of heat just below the surface.

Her head, too, began to fog. She forgot, for a minute, where she was, and panicked, her hands searching her empty pockets. But then she remembered, remembered everything intensely, her thoughts red-tinged and beating against her skull like physical objects. She could not control them. The memory of James pulsed in her head and she imagined her forehead bulging. She pressed her thumbs into her temples to relieve the pressure. She’d read in a history book about fossil remains of people with holes drilled in their skulls to let the devils out and wished in that moment that she had a small hand-drill to do the procedure to herself, the devils inside her were so insistent.

She did not know how long she sat there, the sickness running through her. She tasted salt in her mouth and wanted to tear off her skin, it felt so tight against her muscles and bones.

I’m sick, she thought, but the anger swept her up again in waves like fever. She bent over, her stomach rioting, and threw up a stream of amber liquid: she’d had nothing to eat for hours and nothing to drink but liquor and water. The water made me sick, she had time to think, before she felt a burst of energy in the form of heat prickling at her arms and face. She stood up, shaking her head, tearing at her arms with her fingernails to relieve the itching.

She had to go back to James. She had to show him what he had done to her. But what had he done? The question clattered in her head and dissolved. There wasn’t room to ask why she had to go back or why her head felt as though she had stuffed it with cotton or why her skin prickled and went from goosebumps to slick to itch or why it felt as though every hair on her body was standing on end. She felt the urge to move back toward James’ house as well as the urge to stand still and vomit as well as the urge to roll on the ground and put out the fire that seemed to pour from her skin.