Evidence of Things Not Seen (16 page)

AUGUST 21 . THREE AND A HALF MONTHS MISSING

RITUAL

The minute she and her mother stop at the pull-out, Tara knows it’s mistake.

“I don’t know why you want to look at this place,” her mother says. She parks the car so it’s facing toward the highway as if she wants to make a quick getaway.

Tara doesn’t say anything as she opens the door and gets out. She isn’t sure why she wants to stop or what she’s going to see. Her dad’s murder happened two months ago. It wasn’t like blood would still be splattered everywhere or there’d be a taped outline of his body on the dirt like the
Law & Order
shows she’d watched.

It’s empty. The caliche is white hot under the August midday sun. It hurts her eyes it’s so bright. Even the cedar trees ringing the pull-out are dusted with caliche like a freak snowstorm had blown through this one spot.

Who knows? Maybe it had snowed. Maybe the whole universe had been altered and it snowed in August in Texas. Why else would she be standing in a pull-out looking for her dad’s blood? Why else would her dad be stuffed in a sack in the backseat? Why else was her mother bringing home endless burgers from the Whip In and not even eating them?

Yes, that has to be what’s happened. The whole world has been knocked slightly out of its orbit and everything’s been off course since Tommy disappeared. That’s how she felt the first time she came out of her chemistry class and Tommy wasn’t walking down the hall toward her. That’s where she always saw him, hurrying down the hallway. Sometimes he was writing something in his notebook. Sometimes he was reading a book. Always his backpack was unzipped. Always it seemed like he’d been interrupted. Tara looked for him every day until the end of school. Out of habit. Out of hope. Then her dad was murdered. Yes, the whole world went wobbly.

Tara looks over at the car. Her mom hasn’t moved. Her hands are still on the steering wheel like she’s still driving down the road, eyes forward. That’s how she looked the whole trip to the crematorium. Tara had forced her mom to go. The crematorium had called every week since the middle of June. Her mom had heard the messages even though she refused to answer the phone.

“Mom, they’re going to keep calling. We have to go.” Truth was, all Tara wanted to do was put her world back together before school started. Picking up the ashes seemed like a good first step.

“You go by yourself.”

“I don’t have my license yet.”

“Who cares? You know how to drive. It’ll be one more illegal thing this family has done.”

There it was again. Every conversation ended here: her dad’s betrayal. At first when the sheriff called, all she and her mom knew was that there had been an accident. Then he was dead. Then murdered. Bit by bit, the news of her dad’s secret life came out. Neither of them had known about the drug business her dad had going. At least Tara didn’t. She couldn’t tell if her mom knew or not because she was so mad. When the sheriff told them that the girl who killed him was a seventeen-year-old prostitute he’d had an affair with, her mom went over the edge. When the whole story came out in the paper, her mom gave up stopping at the Whip In. She went straight up to her room with a bottle of wine and drank until she passed out. Tara was pretty sure that her mom rarely showered. As for the washing machine, Tara knew for a fact that she was the only one using it.

Tara walks back to the car. This whole trip has been a disaster. What did Tara expect? That her mom would snap out of her funk and they would bond over the ashes? Or that they would laugh about their morbid experience at the crematorium?

It went south the minute the receptionist tried to sell them an urn.

Her mom asked, “How much?”

“We sell all kinds. They start at one hundred dollars and go up from there.”

“On top of what I’m paying you for the ashes?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Just put ’em in a cardboard box,” her mom said. “Or do I have to pay for that, too?”

“No, ma’am, I can find a box in the back.”

Tara looked at the urns on the wall. She didn’t really want an urn for her dad either. All of them looked like some version of the sports trophies outside the gym at Fred High. But when the woman came out with an old beat-up cardboard box and plopped the plastic bag of ashes in it, Tara thought it looked like someone had cleaned out a wood stove and the whole package was on its way to the dump. The way the lady was smiling, it looked like she knew who was in that box. It looked like she put all her meanness and judgment into choosing it and then capped it off with, “Have a nice day.”

Her mom didn’t seem to mind or notice. Maybe she liked that her drug dealing, cheating husband was in the crappiest cardboard box at the crematorium. The way her mom tossed it onto the backseat and slammed the door didn’t lift the moment above an everyday chore.

Tara looks around the pull-out one last time and walks back to the car.

As soon as she opens the car door, her mom says, “We could dump the ashes right here where he died. Be done with it.” Tara sits down. In the two minutes she had walked around the pull-out, the sun had heated up the vinyl seat. It seared the back of her legs. She focused all her thoughts on not flinching.

Tara looks over. Her mom’s hands are still on the steering wheel but her eyes are closed and her head is back on the headrest. Tara doesn’t move or say anything. She knows if she doesn’t get out and dump the ashes, her mom isn’t going to do it. Tara keeps her mouth shut. She’s figured out it’s best not to argue with her mom or try to reason with her. Pretty soon, she’ll be lying on her bed passed out.

“Goddamned son of a bitch.”

“Mom…”

“Shit.” Her mother shoves the gear in drive and accelerates hard out of the pull-out. She doesn’t look to see if a car is coming. Tara knows her mom wouldn’t have cared if a car smashed into them. She’s barely hanging on to life or her sanity. Tara wonders if there is much difference between her dead parent in the sack and the one driving the car. She keeps trying to give her mom a lot of slack but it’s hard. When is she going to snap out of it?

Like her mom, Tara avoids going into town as much as possible. She’s glad the murder happened after school got out and she didn’t have to face anyone’s stares or listen to their whispers in the hallways. It happens enough going to the grocery store. All Tara has to do is look around as she’s leaving and two or three customers are leaning together, whispering. The only person who is halfway normal to them is Sam at the Whip In. The first thing he said was, “Sorry for your loss, Mrs. Simmons. I’m real sorry, Tara.” It’s probably why her mom stopped there for food so often.

Tara hears the blinker clicking and looks down the highway. Her mother must have been speeding to get home as fast as they did. At the end of their driveway is a beautiful purple sign with her mom’s script. Lavender Valley.

“We should paint that sign over. Black. I don’t want people stopping to buy lavender and snoop around anymore.” She turns onto the driveway and speeds down it as fast as she can.

Again Tara doesn’t say anything. They had already skipped the lavender festival and not harvested any flowers to make soaps or oils. Her mom has tears rimming her eyes and her hands are gripping the steering wheel so tight it looks like she might break it. In a way, her mom looks like she might explode and get swallowed by her own negative energy. Tara takes a deep breath, trying to bring calm into the car.

“Goddamnit, Tara, why’d you make me leave the house and go get those damn ashes?” Her mom shoves the car into park under the pecan trees by the front of their house. She stops short of crashing into her dad’s Super Glide black custom Harley with the gold trim. It’s still parked in the same spot from when her dad got home that night in June. Tara is surprised her mom hasn’t hit it yet. Without a word, her mom goes into the house. Tara knows she is opening the refrigerator and taking the never-ending bottle of white wine up to her bedroom.

She reaches in the backseat and picks up the box with her dad’s ashes. Before they’d learned about his secret life, she and her mom had one normal conversation about what to do with the ashes. They both agreed to put a cross by the lavender fields and bury them there. But now it seems like his whole lavender farm was a lie and Tara isn’t so sure her mother won’t put the ashes in the trash. In fact, it worries her. That’s why she hides them up on the top shelf of the pantry.

That’s why she gets up in the middle of the night to check on them.

She creeps downstairs and snaps on the pantry light. The box is still there. She clicks off the light and turns to go back upstairs. Then she worries that maybe the bag isn’t inside. She reaches up and pulls down the box.

The bag is still inside, plump with ashes. She holds it in her hand. It feels like a sack of flour, only looser, more crumbly. She wants to open it but she hesitates. It feels wrong to touch her dad’s ashes, but then her fingers touch the twisty that closes the bag and it feels more wrong to have something as stupid and mundane as a twisty closing the bag that holds her dad. She untwists it and reaches inside.

This is him. This is his bones and flesh and hair all burned up and put in a sack. She didn’t think it would feel like wood ashes or sand. But it feels like both. Except for the big clumps. They feel like bits of pitted gravel from the highway.

Tara holds the bag to her nose. It doesn’t smell like anything. Not dirt or smoky ash. The plastic bag has more smell than her dad. She looks around the pantry. Maybe she should mix some cinnamon in with the ashes so he would smell like something. But she doesn’t.

Instead she stands there holding him. She doesn’t want to let go. She isn’t sure her mom will ever want to touch his ashes, never mind bury them or spread them. But Tara does. She wants to do something. Ever since Tommy disappeared, day-to-day life felt uncertain. After her dad died, it felt a million times more wobbly. If she can figure out something special to do with the ashes, maybe she won’t feel so out of balance.

Tara starts to put them back but the house creaks and she stops. Her mom is up. Tara can hear her up and down a lot during the night. She steps into the kitchen and listens. The toilet flushes. Then footsteps pad across the floor. Then silence. Her mom is back in bed. She isn’t coming downstairs for more wine. Tara stands there waiting for her mom to fall back to sleep. While she waits, she imagines filling another plastic bag with three scoops of ash from the wood stove. There’s plenty. They save it after the winter to mix in with the soil. Two scoops of white caliche dirt from the edge of the driveway. The ash and caliche would be easy. The big bits of bone would be harder to fake. They couldn’t look like pebbles. Maybe she could smash a big rock into different-sized pieces. Maybe.

Tara has no idea how long she’d stands in the doorway of the pantry. As long as it takes to make the plan to fake her dad’s ashes. She reaches into a canister of used plastic bags, pulls out two or three, and stuffs them in the pocket of her bathrobe. Silent as the night, she climbs the stairs to her bedroom.

In her bed, Tara curls around the sack of ashes. At first, the plastic feels cold. Then it warms. She imagines the flames that ate her dad’s flesh and bone. She imagines her father’s body on a metal plate and the flames beneath him, roaring, turning his body white, then gold, then orange, until it disappears and falls bit by bit onto the tray below, where it cools to white and gray and put into this sack.

The last time she touched him was when she kissed him goodnight in June. They’d had a late supper because he’d just come home from his business trip and school was out. He asked if she wanted to go for a swim at the sinkhole and she said no. So did her mom. He looked disappointed but he sat on the porch and smoked his second cigarette of the day. He smoked one in the morning and one in the evening. It was his ritual he told her. One cigarette to think about what you want to do. And one cigarette to forgive yourself for whatever you didn’t get done. Tara wondered what he was forgiving himself for that evening.

When it got late enough to go to bed, he came into her room and kissed her goodnight on her forehead. Tara never heard the phone ring in the night. She never heard him go downstairs or start his truck. She wondered if she would have heard him leave if he had started the Harley. In a way, he disappeared like Tommy. One day she saw him; the next she didn’t. She never saw his dead body. It was almost like she could still wake up tomorrow and he would be there. If she didn’t see his dead body, was he really dead? She touches the sack. Is this really him? One thing for sure is if she keeps lying next to that sack, that’s what her memory of him will become. That’s why she has to do something with the ashes. Tomorrow. She isn’t sure what it will be. Something. Something special.

The next night, she creeps down the hall cradling two filled plastic sacks. Her mom’s door is open. Tara looks in. She’s sprawled across the bed, clothes still on. It looks like she passed out again. Tara thinks about leaving her a note but what would she say? “I’ve gone for a walk with Dad.” No. Best just to go.

In the kitchen, she sets her father’s ashes on the table and steps into the pantry. She clicks on the light and looks at the sack of fake mixture in her hands. It has the same heft and grayish color as the real sack, although the fake stuff is a little bit darker. The jagged pieces of rock look pretty similar to the bone fragments. If her mom ever pulls down the box and looks at the sack, she might not know, but if she opens it up, she’d smell the burned wood ash. If she remembers where Tara put the ashes. Her mom might leave this box right here forever and never dump them out. Or maybe when Tara goes off to college, she’ll throw them in the trash. Maybe. Tara is pretty sure her mom isn’t going to look in the box for quite a while. She can probably keep track of her mom’s mental health by checking to see if the box is still in the pantry. It doesn’t matter. Tara’s decided what she is going to do.

She clicks off the pantry light and steps into the dark kitchen. First, she grabs her backpack hanging on the hook by the door. She unzips it and set ashes in the bottom. She hears paper crinkle and looks inside. At the bottom is a whole stack of flyers. Tommy’s face looks up at her.