The Far Empty (8 page)

MELISSA

S
he’d made spaghetti. True, it was with store-bought sauce and frozen Pepperidge Farm Texas Toast from a box to soak it up with, but it was something.

Chris just moved it around on his plate, though, and she guessed he’d already grabbed a burger or two. He probably hid out in his truck down the street eating it all before coming home. Kind of how she’d hid her day’s spent cigarettes in the empty spaghetti sauce jar. She felt her anger spark, ready to catch fire, but tried damn hard to stop it before it burned far and fast. He put his fork down, looked up, as if just noticing she was there.

“Did you talk to Will Donner over at Earlys?”

She shook her head, though she didn’t have to. He
knew
she hadn’t, just like she hadn’t talked to Constance Merrill over at the Hamilton or Felipa at the Dollar General or whoever the hell it was
who managed the Hi n Lo or the Napa Auto Parts. He’d been pushing her to find something, anything, to bring in a bit of money so they could keep fixing up the house, even suggesting she work weekends at the Comanche, the cattle auction. She didn’t know what she was going to do with herself, but it didn’t involve selling beers or burgers or windshield wipers or goddamn cows.

“I just know that he’s going to be shorthanded over there. May Doyle needs to get to Abilene. Her sister’s sick . . . or something.” Chris saw her face, let it go. He picked up the fork again, and she knew he was going to make peace by changing the topic and eating her shitty spaghetti. “The body’s going out to Austin. We’ll know something soon, I expect.”

“I’m sure you will,” she said, taking his plate from beneath his raised fork, giving up on dinner for the both of them.

“I wasn’t done with that,” he tried. But she was.

•   •   •

Tonight there was a football game over at the stadium; next week, or the week after that, a carnival, too. She wouldn’t have minded getting out a bit, sitting in the bleachers, sipping a spiked Coke . . . drinking and people-watching and letting the cold wind move her hair to hide her face. There was no way Chris would go or even suggest going. He’d barely glanced at the stadium since returning to Murfee.

She could go without Chris and he probably wouldn’t say a damn thing one way or another, but she couldn’t remember the last time she’d been anywhere, done anything, on her own. Since Chris, she couldn’t remember the last time she’d wanted to.

•   •   •

He helped bring the last dishes into the kitchen, taking the ones out of her hands to scrub them in the sink.

“Look, babe, all that stuff about Earlys? It’s no big deal. No pressure.”

“I got it, Chris. I do, loud and clear. I’ll check it out next week.”

He looked at her, shrugged, worked on the dishes.

She thought of him sitting in his truck down the street, waiting to come into the house, then later tonight, wasting their hours by flipping through some old dental film all spread out on the floor—ugly, warped pictures he’d dug out of storage, his dad’s things; something to do with the body he’d found. Holding them up to the light, then piling and repiling them because he’d already admitted to her he was afraid they wouldn’t be much use, and he didn’t really know what he was looking for anyway. Faded pictures spotted with rust—blood-colored, as if the film itself had bled. A thousand people she didn’t know, would never know.

Slowly, deliberately, she picked her purse off the counter, rummaged around the bottom of it, and found a cigarette, lighting it in front of him. Letting the cat out of the bag, so to speak. He didn’t say anything, didn’t have to. He’d known all along. He turned back to the sink.

She blew smoke. “I thought you said no one else was big on going to too much trouble for that thing.”

That thing.
The body that had once been a living, breathing person.

His hands paused. “No, not so much . . . not really. The sheriff, everyone else, thinks it’s just another drug runner or alien smuggler.”

“It probably is.”

He made a face, unreadable, careful while stacking the still-wet dishes, not drying them. “Yeah, I know. But do you know how many people go missing in this country a year?” She flicked ash, pretended to be uninterested, as he blinked through her smoke. He kept going. “Okay, about a million, give or take. Half of those are never found.”

At least she knew what he’d been looking up on the Internet . . . all his investigating. “Sure, Chris, and probably half of those didn’t
want
to be found. Maybe they got sick of their lives, got up and left and never came back. How many people go missing around here, Chris, in Murfee? Really?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know, babe, but that body I found was
someone
. They once had a name, maybe a family that’s still waiting to know what happened to them. I think that’s worth a bit of trouble.”

“You didn’t find
anyone
, Chris. You and Matty Bulger, you found a
thing
, broken pieces. You’re just scraping it up.” It was too much and she knew it the minute she said it. All of her needling, pushing, about the body—because it was the only thing that mattered to him now, after months of nothing mattering at all. She raised her hands, surrendering. “I’m not telling you not to do this or that, but don’t be disappointed if nothing comes of it. Maybe these people in Austin won’t be able to tell you a goddamn thing. It’ll stay a mystery. I don’t want you moping around about it.”

He turned to her, his hands red and wet. “Really? That’s what this is all about? I’m doing my job, Mel, at least as I understand it. That’s all.”

That spark she’d blown out earlier flickered, alive. “Don’t talk to me about
your fucking job
, Chris. You drag your ass around here for months, show no interest in this house, me, anything. Other than telling me what I need to do, all you do is come home and sit in front
of the computer or bury yourself in those damn books. I don’t understand what’s going on, but it’s got nothing to do with your job.”

He stepped back. “Mel, I . . .”

She cut him off. “Think very fucking hard on what you’re about to say right now, Deputy Cherry, because you’ve said very fucking little for weeks.” She paused, breathed, searched his face. “Please make this count, Chris.”

She hadn’t planned on any of this—not here, not now—but here it was all the same. He’d seen her angry plenty of times before. They both knew it could get a lot worse before it got better.

He settled against the counter. “Okay, I know, I know. I haven’t been easy. Coming back here, all of this”—he took in the house, her, with a tired glance—“it’s just different than I thought it would be. Harder. You’re not happy here.”

She inhaled, buying a moment, before nodding. “I’m not
comfortable
here, Chris. All of this stuff is yours. This house, everything in it. This fucking town. It’s all your old history. I don’t belong.”

“How do we fix that?”

“I don’t know, but it’s more than that.
You’re
different, too. Nothing about this place has been good for you.” She wanted to say
Nothing has been good since Lonnie Ray Holliday
, but stopped short. “Maybe you don’t belong here either, anymore.” Adding, “And if that’s the case, maybe there’s nothing either of us can do to fix it. Not here.”

He looked around the kitchen, past her, down the hall where boxes still stood stacked.

“You’re right, babe, I know you are.”

In their other fights, he’d step forward now and put his arms around her, wrap her up for a heartbeat or two, and she’d be fine with that. Instead, he stood, arms crossed.

“Look, give me another couple of weeks. Let me hear back from the DPS lab and make a stab at closing this thing . . . do some good here.”

She hesitated. “Okay, then what?”

“Then we’ll leave, if that’s what you want. We’ll leave.”

If that’s what you want.

But that wasn’t what she wanted, not exactly. She wanted
him
to say it, to admit that he was done here and needed to get the hell out of Murfee for both of their sakes. They didn’t have to go back to Waco, just somewhere, anywhere, else. Instead, he was putting it off on her, as if his stake in it—his own unhappiness—carried no goddamn weight at all.

It was bullshit, unfair, but for now that was all he was willing to give, watching her through the smoke.

There were other things she could say, a hundred things she knew would hurt him bad—as bad as putting bullets in him. Killing, really, whatever they still had. But she’d given herself to him and wasn’t ready to take it back.

“Okay, Chris. If that’s what you want. If that’s the way it has to be.” She flipped her cigarette into the sink where he’d been washing dishes, not waiting to see where it landed.

CALEB

N
othing much interesting happens in Murfee.

Nothing much anyone knows about, anyway. Time here is like a bug trapped in amber,
fossilization
—we learned all about that in biology. Come back a year from now, ten years from now, and Murfee would seem exactly the same. You would be wrong. Our town does a pretty good job of holding her secrets close.

•   •   •

Two interesting things have happened in the past couple of weeks.

First, our new teacher, Anne Hart, has come here from Austin to replace to Ms. Garner, who died in her kitchen. I have her for English, and she’s picking right up where Ms. Garner left off, with Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness
.

I’ve already read the book several times and know most of the passages by heart.

Ms. Hart is a small woman, delicate, much younger than Ms. Garner—who’d long ago fossilized. She keeps her blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, kind of like Mom; a look I also like on Amé, although she doesn’t wear it often—or simply won’t—because she knows I like it. Ms. Hart doesn’t use nail polish and her glasses seem a little too large for her face, unnecessary, when she could as easily wear contacts, but there’s a point to them. Sitting at the edge of her desk, talking, trying not to smile or make much eye contact, she doesn’t seem much older than us, but she could be prettier—much prettier, I think—than she’s willing to show.

Her clothes and glasses and the carefully maintained distance from us are props—all part of a charade, a mask she wears. I recognize it because I wear a mask every morning I wake up here in Murfee. I guess Ms. Hart has her secrets, too.

Amé already doesn’t like her, but I think it’s a girl thing. Where Ms. Hart is light, Amé is dark—dark hair and eyes and skin—and she’s a hundred percent Murfee. At least one end of Murfee, out past the stadium and beyond Mancha’s, where all the little houses and trailers begin. She speaks Spanish there but never at school and won’t practice it with me, even though I’ve been taking it since the fourth grade.

My mom tried hard to pick it up as well, always listening to her Rosetta Stone in her little Ford Ranger—the one I drive now, since my father kept it, just like that Kohler tub. We used to have days when we were allowed to talk to each other only in Spanish, at least outside my father’s earshot. If I wanted something, I had to start each sentence with
quiero
and go from there, and I used to write down all sorts of phrases and questions that Amé would sometimes translate for me. I memorized the lines and stumped my mom all day with
them, making her look up the words in the small Berlitz she carried for the occasion. She would laugh, flipping madly through her dictionary, trying to repeat and remember what I said.

Te quiero y te extraño y nunca te olvidaré.

I love you and I miss you and I’ll never forget you.

•   •   •

I’ve known Amé for over three years now. We’re more than friends but a lot less than something else. She’s forever keeping me at arm’s length, but never quite letting me go. She’s got problems with her family and there’s that mess with her brother. We both carry holes in our lives, and maybe that’s all that draws us to each other, even if I want to believe it’s more than that.

I think I love her, despite all the parts of her I never really see, but I’m no different. There’s so much we don’t show or tell each other, so much I guess we don’t dare say out loud.

Amé, Ms. Hart, me—just like this goddamn town, we all do a pretty good job of holding our secrets close.

•   •   •

After Ms. Hart’s first day, Amé and I were sharing one of her cigarettes and I mentioned our new teacher, thinking out loud. I suspect my father knows Ms. Hart a little, met her once, but I’m not sure. As I talked, Amé turned her head sideways, her big silver hoops defying gravity, and blew smoke in my face. That was the end of the conversation. But then there’s the second thing that happened—the most important thing. The body Deputy Cherry discovered at Indian Bluffs.

•   •   •

My father came home the night after Deputy Cherry found the body, and didn’t say anything to me. I was in my room doing homework and he walked past my open door without a word. I am never allowed to close my door. He walked down the hall to his room but didn’t turn on any lights or wash his face or brush his teeth. There was no movement at all. It was like he walked in there and disappeared. I waited an hour, let the house grow dark, and then I did what I’ve long practiced: I crept down the hallway to spy on him.

In my house it’s important at all times to know exactly where my father is and what he’s doing. As always, his door was cracked open as well. Not because he follows his own rules or cares less about his own privacy, but because he wants to hear clearly what I’m up to. Besides, he has nothing to hide. Not in his own home and not from his own flesh and blood.

There’s a spot I stand in, as silent and still as him, where the hallway forms a T. From that point I can see right through the door to the headboard and the top third of his bed; clearly visible is the cherrywood nightstand my mom bought in El Paso, with a cream-colored lamp on it. The same King James Bible is always there and the same empty quartz glass, dry and dusty as the desert around Murfee. The books and glass are props—things a real, living, breathing person might have if they slept in that room.

I can also see the old Rowan Cheval antique bronze mirror in the corner. It’s a full-size standing mirror, one of the few things my mom brought with her to Murfee, and I still remember her in front of it, brushing the desert dust out of her long hair or just pulling it up, all while seeing me over her shoulder, trapped in the glass.

Sometimes when I’m spying and the moon is right, when the entire room is pale and pearl, I see my father
twice
, one real and another, darker one, both reflected in the mirror my mother loved. It’s like he’s not alone, like there’s another person in there with him, and when I’ve thought I’ve caught him whispering to himself in there, he must have been talking to that other man in the mirror. But when the moon isn’t quite up or it’s hidden by clouds, I can see nothing in the glass. It remains empty, black like pond water, as if he casts no reflection at all.

That’s how it was the other night, after the body was found at Indian Bluffs. He was alone on the bed, the mirror empty, his arms rigid along his sides. He was staring straight up at the ceiling, and I looked close to see whether his chest was rising and falling, praying as always that it wasn’t. Praying, hoping, that he’d been struck down by a mysterious illness or that his heart had just given out.

That he was
done
.

Instead, the index finger of his left hand was tapping against his creased pants leg. Tapping, tapping . . . just above the knee. Like a clock ticking, like when he used to read my homework. Slow and practiced and deliberate—the way the big garden orb weavers out by the creek pluck at the strands of their webs. Spiders eat their own webs at the end of the day. It helps them regather the energy they’ve lost by spinning them.

I always thought that finger tap just meant he was thinking or pretending to, but it might mean something else as well. Worry—
real
worry, that Murfee might have finally given up one of her secrets.

At dawn, when the sun’s up over the mountains and it hits the far edges of town at the right angle, the pink caliche on the bluffs burns
crimson and everything runs red. Murfee always wakes up bloody.
The dead are her secrets . . . The missing are her ghosts.

I know who Deputy Cherry found out at Indian Bluffs, and so does my father.

My mother . . . his missing wife.