Still Mine (5 page)

“You tell him if I see him over here, I’ll shoot him.”

“Who?” Clare asks. “If you mean Charlie Merritt, I only met him this morning.”

“You aren’t welcome here.”

“Your wife was lost. It was clear she was . . . disoriented. I was only trying to help.”

Wilfred jolts to attention, his sights turned on something out the kitchen window. With a start he’s out the back door, snatching up his shotgun as he passes through the cold room, the door swinging behind him. Chasing a rabbit. Clare goes to get her shoes. In the living room, Dr. Meyer presses his stethoscope to Louise’s chest. Clare watches the doctor frown in concentration, his eyes fixed on nothing as he listens to Louise’s breathing. Derek Meyer wears glasses but no wedding ring. Clare knows well enough that this says nothing of whether he’s married. Done with his examination, the doctor writes some notes in a small leather-bound book.

“It was nice to meet you, Mrs. Cunningham,” Clare says. “You too, Dr. Meyer. I should be going.”

For the first time the doctor makes direct eye contact with Clare. “Can I have a quick word?” he says.

“I really should go. Mr. Cunningham will be back in soon.”

“Won’t even take a minute,” the doctor says.

Clare is self-conscious of her clothes, her jeans and T-shirt grubby from her efforts to clean the trailer. They leave Louise in the living room and move to the kitchen.

“You’re staying in Charlie’s trailer?” the doctor asks.

“Yes.”

He waits for her to continue.

“Louise wandered up there. She seemed disoriented.”

“So you don’t know the Cunninghams.”

“No. I was just walking her home. She invited me in for tea.”

“I see,” he says.

“Can I ask you something?” Clare says. “Does Louise know her daughter is missing?”

Clare detects only a twitch in the doctor.

“Do you know Shayna?” he asks.

“No. I saw the Missing Woman poster at Ray’s. The waitress there filled me in.”

“There’s no reason for Louise to register her daughter’s absence,” Dr. Meyer says. “As you’ve probably figured out, her grasp on reality comes and goes.”

“And I guess no good comes from reminding her?”

“Reminding me of what?” Louise enters from the dining room and hands another frame to Clare.

“Look! I found this one of you in the pile on the mantel. Remember this?”

The photograph shows five friends clustered in a group hug, a pristine mountain backdrop behind them. At its center Derek Meyer stands with his chest puffed, his face younger and tanned, sunglasses on. The girl next to him is Shayna. He holds her by the arm, tugging her toward him, her head tossed back in laughter. Beside them, a beardless Charlie Merritt sticks out his tongue, and next to him are his brothers, the gold hair and bulky build, standing side by side, serious.

“How old are you there?” Louise says.

“We were nineteen,” says the doctor.

“Such good friends you were.”

“Not really. You don’t always get to choose your friends.”

“Don’t say that.” Louise elbows him. “You love Shayna.” She turns to Clare. “Don’t let him tell you otherwise.”

The doctor shakes his head, flustered. He leads Louise back to the living room, leaving Clare holding the photograph. In it Shayna’s laughter is so carefree, all the bad things yet to come. How kindred we are, Clare thinks as she dissects this photograph, Shayna and me, two lives veering so far off the course we expected they’d follow. On the sill of her kitchen window at home Clare kept two photographs, one of her mother before she got sick, and another from the summer Clare turned seventeen, taken on a camping trip with her best friend, Grace Fawcett. Like her brother, Grace remains perfectly intact to Clare, not just the adult but also the Grace from that trip, her bouncing hair and wild smile, the Grace who inhabited the short era in Clare’s life that felt both hopeful and grown-up.

Clare sets the frame down on the kitchen table and walks back to the living room.

“I really should get going.”

“We haven’t finished our tea,” Louise says.

“I don’t want to be in Dr. Meyer’s way.”

“Call me Derek, please.”

“He’s out there with his gun,” Louise says. “If you leave now he might shoot you.”

“Louise,” Derek says. “Let’s not overstate.”

“You know he’s done it before!”

“You’re the one who’s in danger, Louise,” Derek says. “You need to stay close to home. No more walks on your own.”

“Or what? You’ll commit me?”

“It’s not safe, Mrs. Cunningham. You could slip. Break a hip.”

“Or I could get shot.”

“That’s not funny,” Derek says. “You could get lost. Really lost. Who would find you?”

“You would, Doctor. That’s your job.”

The three of them stand shoulder to shoulder at the front window, Clare in the middle. Out in the garden another rabbit is at work on the lettuce, or perhaps the same one from earlier. Small breaks have formed in the clouds, patching the mountains with sunlight. At the far side of the garden Wilfred skulks and grips his gun.

“Run.” Louise’s voice is a hoarse whisper.

The rabbit stands on its hind legs, its paws holding a leaf to its face. Louise goes to bang on the window, but Clare catches her arm.

“Leave it.”

“But he’ll shoot.”

“Then let him,” Clare says.

Wilfred darts along the rows of vegetables, taking aim. When he fires, the rabbit bounds away in frantic escape, gaining ground, the shotgun blast loud and echoed. The rabbit pops in and out of the grass. If the gun were in her hands, Clare would rely on physics, aiming ahead of the animal, accounting for its speed.

“Your father’s crazy,” Louise says.

“Wilfred’s not my father, Louise.”

“He thinks I don’t know,” Louise says.

“He thinks you don’t know what?” Clare asks.

Derek looks to Clare, widening his eyes as if to shush her.

“About what he did. About Russell. He thinks I’m stupid!”

With a strangled wail Louise lifts her mug and hurls it at the window, spraying Clare and Derek with the lukewarm tea. The mug shatters but the window doesn’t, and then the doctor has Louise in a hug, restraining her as she writhes against him. He calls to Clare to grab his kit. Clare finds it and takes hold of Louise in his place, squeezing her from behind.

“It’s okay,” Clare says. “No one will hurt you.”

“It wasn’t his fault!” Louise says.

Derek plunges a syringe into a bare patch of skin. Louise jolts.

“Ketamine,” he says. “Should work right away.”

They scramble to hold Louise until her eyes flutter and she slackens against them, then they set her down on the couch. Out the window Wilfred shoots again, oblivious to his wife’s outburst. He’ll never leave it alone, Louise said. Clare watches Wilfred as he stops to reload. You can never be too vigilant, Clare’s father used to say, whether he spoke of neighbors, enemies, or pests in his garden. If you leave it, her father would say, that rabbit will come back with his friends and your whole garden will be gone. And you’ll think back to this moment, the first sign of trouble, and wish you’d killed it when you had the chance.

I
n her dream, it is dusk. The window is clouded by dust. Clare blasts through the cellar door, dashing through the kitchen until she is outside, racing across the yard, barefoot. Though she will not turn around, though his words are muddled, his voice high and pleading, she knows he is on the back porch. She must make it only to the grove behind the barn so that the trees swallow her up before he can fumble the bullets into the chamber and raise the gun to her back.

Clare is running.

Out the door and down the hill from the trailer and past her own car, past the Merritt house, Charlie’s truck still gone, and into the field, sprinting. The fence that marks the back end of the Merritt field has already been pried open. From there the earth drops steeply, a makeshift path zigzagging down. Clare’s momentum tumbles her forward, arms in windmills, nothing to grab. She tips over the edge of the switchback, breaking through the brush. Falling. She used to dream of falling all the time. She lands hard, flat on her back, gasping for breath.

Clare blinks. This is not a dream. The highest branches flutter far above her, the canopy so dense that little light pokes through. She blinks again. This is not the yard behind her house. This is not the grove. Jason is not here. He is not chasing her. This is Blackmore.

The pain oozes, hot up her neck. A trail of blood curls down her arm. A gash on her left shoulder.

Did she fall asleep in the trailer after returning from the Cunningham house? For months she’s slept so soundly, sinking into motel beds along the way, waking sweaty and disoriented, the sleep blank and deep. She must have bolted from the trailer in a trance, in that panic that overtakes her between dreaming and being fully awake. Clare sits up. The hill she tumbled down hovers over her like a wall of rock. She pinches the gash and balls up her sweater to press into it.

Somewhere among her things is the map of Blackmore Malcolm gave her, the gorge behind the town. This must be it. It slopes in every direction, a creek gurgling not far from where Clare sits, a rusted pipe running along its far bank. If Clare can orient herself at all, this is where she must be: this gorge behind the Cunningham and Merritt houses, upward to the mine, downward to the town. The last place anyone saw Shayna alive.

When the bleeding subsides, Clare stands and gingerly removes her sweater, the T-shirt underneath torn and soaked with blood. She ties her sweater to a tree to mark the path back to the Merritt house, then crouches at the creek and cups the icy water. It tastes clean. She sits on a rock and yanks her shirt off-shoulder, splashing the gash, the pain finally sharp, her skin fanned open in a perfect line, a three-inch cut from her bicep to her collarbone. It’s been years since she felt pain this clear and piercing. The first pill Clare ever took came from her mother’s cancer supply, an orange bottle behind the dandruff shampoo in the medicine cabinet. It dissolved on her tongue like a snowflake and dulled all aches, damming the constant current of thoughts that had always plagued her. Calm. Clare blows on the gash, relieved by how much it hurts.

Her cell phone is not with her. There might be an hour of daylight left. Clare stands and follows the creek down. Every few steps her heel slides in the mud and she must jut her arms out for balance. Once she is awake, Clare can never remember the specifics of the dream. It is only the sensation of running that lingers, the need to get away. The thin mountain air has Clare drawing long breaths. The forest around her creaks and sways, her pulse fast and hard.

“He’s not here,” Clare says aloud. “You’re not here.”

Up ahead is a small clearing, charred logs piled high in the fire pit at its center. A tent is pitched but buckling. Sleeping bags hang from the lowest branches. The clearing is littered end to end with beer cans, crumpled chip bags, cigarette butts. In the tent a sleeping bag is gathered into a ball as though someone might still be hunched inside, passed out after a bender. It is easy to envision this place at night, the light of the bonfire, how darkness would envelop all but those closest to the fire. Shayna. A person could walk away, be led away, be carried away without anyone taking notice.

That’s where they go to party, the waitress at Ray’s said.

It was at a summer party around a bonfire like this one where Clare’s brother first introduced her to Jason, his coworker at the plant. After the fire was doused, Jason let Clare and her friends ride in the back of his truck, and Clare remembers how he eyed her in his rearview mirror, the way her friend Grace laughed and squeezed her hand. Clare had thought him so chivalrous and mature. She wanted him to find her worthy. And so in the back of his truck she’d raised her arms overhead and screeched with abandon, giving in, the wind whipping her hair as the farmland sped by. When they started dating, her brother turned wary.

There’s a side to him you haven’t seen, he told Clare.

Water has pooled on the tent’s canvas. Clare presses it to release the gush. On the other side of the creek the land disappears over a ledge. Clare crosses right through the water so that it soaks her shoes. Over the edge she can see trees growing upward from the gorge wall, clinging to the rock with tentacles of exposed roots. Clare takes hold of a tree to steady herself, then picks up a rock and pitches it, her shoulder pulsing with pain. The rock arcs out, then vanishes into the depths, and she waits, one beat, then two, then three, then four before she hears the rock crack against the earth. Something in that lapse, in the counting in between, has finally set Clare to tears. She tries to muffle the cries, but they come anyway, sobs bursting forth.

Sometimes Clare pictures word of her disappearance spreading through her hometown in the days after she left, what it might have stirred in those who loved her once. Though it took willpower at first, Clare made a point of never searching for news of herself online, of leaving her e-mail untouched until it would have been shut down from disuse. The tips of her wet shoes hang over the ledge. She wiggles her toes.

Perhaps it would be just like flying.

Clare lets go of the tree and holds her arms out in front of her, superhero. She bends her knees.

Don’t jump.

The gray light plays tricks on her, the tent and sleeping bag too bright beyond the creek. Clare spins around. “Hello?”

Nothing moves. There is a light rain against Clare’s skin. She crosses the creek again, never certain she’s alone. Shayna must have felt the same way. Watched. Clare swallows against the lump in her throat. There was a version of her worth saving once, the Clare with a brother and a best friend, a father and husband she remembers loving once, a nephew and a decent job. That woman vanished long before Clare actually left. Surely such a version of Shayna existed too, a woman loved by her people. Clare will return to the trailer before it gets too dark. If she is to solve this riddle, she will have to seek out Shayna’s friends and family one by one, an outsider looking for a way in.