The Weight of Blood (9 page)

He leaned against the counter and chatted while I worked. When the dumplings were ready, we ate them at the dining room table, Carl complimenting my cooking repeatedly and finishing off the portion I'd planned to save for lunch the next day. After dinner, we moved to the porch swing with sweating glasses of iced tea.

“I've been meaning to ask, how'd it go with Ray?” Carl asked.

“Fine,” I said.

“I don't want to pry,” he said. “I know whatever happened with your family must be painful. I can see it on your face when I bring it up. So I'll try my best not to.”

I looked around the peaceful yard and out to the hills. There was no indication in the unbroken expanse of green that other people existed. A pair of birds cried in the trees, and it sounded like they were arguing. “We lived on a farm,” I said finally. “Me, my mom and stepdad, and my grandma. My stepdad was great, always treated me like his own kid. I never met my real dad, and my mom didn't talk about him. My grandma told me once that he was a visiting professor from some other country—she wasn't sure which one. My mom met him in grad school at the University of Northern Iowa, and they split up before I was born. My mom taught English at the high school in Waverly, and my stepdad ran the farm. They were driving into town to get a carryout pizza for dinner—we did that on the weekends sometimes. There was a combine in the road, and they didn't see it in time. They smashed into it and flipped over. Not too long after that, my grandma passed away, and I got stuck in foster care. I was twelve.”

I'd told the condensed version of my life story so many times over the years that I could recite it without emotion. When I said the words out loud, they felt like they belonged to someone else.
Thank God you weren't with them
, the neighbors had said.
You're so lucky nothing happened to you.
As if I could go on like before.

“I'm so sorry,” Carl said. He took my hand and I let him. I sipped the tea he'd made. It didn't compare to Ransome's.

“What about your family?” I asked. “Is there anyone besides your brother?”

“I've got cousins all over the county,” he said. “My dad was quite a bit older than my mother, and he passed on. My mom's still living, but we had to put her in a home.”

“What kind of home?” I asked, sliding my hand out of his.

Carl looked uncomfortable. “Well, she … she gets confused. She jumped out of the upstairs window once, broke her leg. At the time my dad told me she fell. He planted those bushes all around the house in case she tried again. She'd get real depressed, lay in bed, wouldn't talk to anyone but Dad. She wasn't doing good without him here keeping an eye on her.”

“So you sent her away?”

“If there'd been any other way, I'd have kept her here with me. But I'm just not home enough to take care of her.”

We rocked in the swing, the porch floor warm under my bare feet.

“Your brother,” I said. “You guys are pretty close?”

“Yeah,” Carl said. “Always have been, ever since we were kids. He was ten when I was born, and he sort of took care of me. I really look up to him, you know? The way he runs the business and all that. I mean, we've fought here and there, had our differences, but you could hardly ask for a better brother.”

“Would you mind not telling him about the lawyer?” I asked. “I just … Like you said, my parents … I don't like to talk about it. It's better not to bring it up.”

There was more to the story, things I didn't want to tell Carl. When my parents died, I'd expected to stay in Waverly with my stepdad's extended family, but one by one they'd bowed out: not enough room, not enough money, not willing to take responsibility for a soon-to-be teenager. I'd grown up around these people, eaten Sunday dinners with them. They looked genuinely sorry when they turned me away, but I could also sense their relief, because I had never been blood to them. As much as my stepdad made me feel like I belonged, his family thought of me as my mother's child, not one of their own, and it was a hurtful thing to realize.

Finally, a second or third cousin of my mother's, a guy I barely knew, was tracked down in Decorah and pressured into taking me. He sat me down at his tiny kitchen table and explained the burden I'd put on him. My parents' farm would be sold to pay debts, and when everything was sorted out, there would be very little left to take care of me. I would need to earn my keep. That first night as I slept on the foldout couch, he slid his hand under the blanket and over the planes of my body. The second night he peeled back the bedding, and I slashed him with a kitchen knife. Part of me was terrified by what I'd done—his high-pitched scream, the blood soaking through my nightgown, the increasingly dark detours my life was taking. Another part of me couldn't help thinking that the scar would be impressive. I never got a chance to see it. The third night I slept in a temporary shelter in the care of family services.

Lucy

Dad was home when I got back from work Saturday evening. He'd spent the day fishing out at Rockbridge and surprised me by frying up a dinner of trout and hush puppies without my help. Bess stopped by while I was washing the dishes and sweet-talked me into forgiving her. I made her recite back to me all the things she was now forbidden to do: fix my hair, pick out my clothes, take me anywhere near the Petrees. We made a batch of molasses cookies and sat on the porch talking until Dad came out to enforce curfew and drive Bess home. Bess was almost as disappointed as I was when I told her nothing romantic had happened between me and Daniel on Friday night. She didn't say anything about her night with Gage, and I didn't ask.

The next time I saw Daniel at Dane's, he offered to go with me to visit Cheri's mom. There was no mention of our spin-the-bottle conversation, but it felt good to no longer be hiding anything. Exposing our shared secret seemed to have dissipated the tension between us, and talking to him felt normal now, like talking to a friend.

He picked me up after work so we could drive to see Mrs. Stoddard together. I'd brought along the last of the molasses cookies in an attempt to give my visit legitimacy. I figured once Mrs. Stoddard invited us in and we were eating, I'd casually start asking questions.

There was a conversion van parked in front of the trailer when we pulled up, and a scrawny boy, four or five years old, stood in the dirt yard throwing rocks at a pile of animal droppings. He watched as we approached, blond hair hanging down in his eyes.

“You better not go in,” the boy said. “He'll kick your ass. He said stay-right-here-don't-move.”

“Oh,” I said, wondering who
he
was. “Okay. Can we wait out here with you, then?”

He shrugged and resumed throwing rocks. We watched him in silence, shifting back and forth uncomfortably as we waited for whoever was inside to finish up whatever he was doing. Flies swarmed around the droppings and then buzzed away briefly when a rock came near.

“Yeah!” the boy cried. “Got you, little fucker.”

Daniel and I exchanged looks. “You got a fly?” he said to the little boy. “Way to go. They're fast.”

“Hey,” I said, opening the bag. “You want a cookie?” The kid eyed me warily and then eyed the cookie. He snatched it out of my hand and wolfed it down. I handed him another one.

A scraggle-haired man in a flannel shirt and Dickies stumbled out of the trailer, snorted, and spat on the ground. He looked up and saw us all watching him, and his eyes locked on mine before turning to the boy. “What's that?” he growled. “Where'd you get that?”

The boy stood frozen, the cookie inches from his lips, as the man walked up and slapped it to the ground. “Don't take shit from strangers,” he said, grabbing the boy's arm and dragging him toward the van.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “It was just a cookie, I didn't think—” Daniel put his hand on my shoulder, and I stopped talking. “Who was that?” I asked as the van tore out of the yard.

“I don't know. Haven't seen him around Henbane.”

We waited a minute and then knocked at the door. Doris Stoddard appeared in a ratty housecoat. “I don't go to church, and I ain't buying no Avon,” she said.

“Hi, Mrs. Stoddard,” I said. “It's Lucy Dane, Cheri's friend? From down the road?”

She narrowed her eyes, appearing to have some recognition. “Why're you here?”

“I baked these for you,” I said, holding up the bag. She took it, pulled out a cookie, and made a sour face. Not a fan of molasses, apparently. A Rottweiler sauntered up next to her, and she tossed him first the cookie, then the entire bag, which he proceeded to tear apart. So much for my plan.

“I thought maybe we could talk a minute,” I said. “About Cheri.”

She grunted. “That girl was nothing but trouble when she was here, and now she's dead, I got her goddamn ghost hanging on. I ain't got nothing else to say.”

“Please,” I said. “I think I might have some information about where she was staying when she was gone, and I just wanted to ask you a couple questions. See if Cheri'd been hanging around anyone new before she disappeared.”

Mrs. Stoddard's face blanched. “How would you know anything about where she was?”

I hesitated, not knowing how much to say. She looked at once angry and afraid. “I found something of hers.”

She gazed at me for a long moment, then moved to shut the door. “I got appointments coming.”

“You said her ghost is here,” Daniel said loudly, stepping in front of me. “That true?”

I didn't know what he was doing, but he'd succeeded in getting Mrs. Stoddard's attention. She paused, pressed her lips together, and nodded.

“You want to get rid of it?” Daniel said. “I can help. I can get you something.”

Mrs. Stoddard angled forward to better examine Daniel's face. “I know you,” she said, her voice hushed. “Your mama's the medicine woman, up Crenshaw Ridge. I thought she'd quit after all that trouble with the Walker girl.”

Daniel's stance was commanding and assured, his expression calm. He wasn't bluffing. “She does a little work here and there,” he said. “You'd have to keep quiet about it.”

She nodded vigorously. “'Course.” I could see in her eyes how badly she wanted this, believed it.

“Surely you know this sort of thing's expensive. But she'll do it for free if you talk to Lucy. Tell her everything you know.”

“Fine,” she said. “I'll talk once the ghost is gone.”

“So,” I said. Daniel and I were meandering along the riverbank, cooling our feet in the shallows. “Your mom gets rid of spirits. She sounds like more of a witch than my mom.”

He smiled wryly. “Not exactly. She's into herbs and that sort of thing.”

A cottonmouth slid into the water and rode the current away from us. “What was Mrs. Stoddard talking about, the trouble with the Walker girl? Did she mean Janessa?”

“Yeah, do you know her?” he asked, rolling a stone in his palm.

“I know
of
her. She went to school with my dad, and he's friends with her uncle Ray. She's one of the few people I know of who left Henbane and didn't come back. How did she get your mom in trouble?”

“Back when it happened, her dad was the mayor and Ray was a lawyer—not yet a judge, like he is now, but they had a lot of influence. Janessa was home from college for summer break, and she came to see my mom.” Daniel looked away from me, across to the far bank of the river, where a tree leaned low enough to wet its leaves. “Janessa couldn't sleep. At least that's what she said at first. She'd heard that my mom could help with things like that. So Mom gave her some valerian root to make tea. Janessa left, but she came back a few days later. She said the tea wasn't working, and she started bawling, and Mom knew something else was wrong. My mom's pretty good at getting people to open up—you'll see when you meet her—and after a while, she got Janessa calmed down and asked her what was really going on, why it was she couldn't sleep in the first place.”

“What was it?”

“Promise you won't repeat any of this, even to Bess?”

“I won't,” I said.

Daniel threw the stone he'd been holding, and it flitted across the surface of the water one, two, three beats before sinking. “Her parents had found out that she'd dropped out of school in the middle of the semester, and they were furious. They'd always expected her to go to law school after college and then come back home and work with her uncle Ray. Her dad was making all kinds of threats about cutting her off if she didn't go back to school, and her mom was so disappointed that she wouldn't even speak to her. They didn't want anybody to find out, because it would be an embarrassment to the whole Walker family. But Janessa didn't want to go back to school, and she didn't want to stay in Henbane, either.”

“Why did she drop out in the first place?” I asked.

“That's the crazy part. She was going out a lot, meeting guys her parents would have hated. They'd blamed her for screwing things up with Carl—your dad—and she was getting him out of her system, dating guys who were nothing like him. Nothing serious; she was just having fun.

“Then one night a guy gave her a drink that made her feel all sick and dizzy. When she asked him to take her home, he carried her out to the alley and laid her down in the back of a van. She was confused and barely conscious by that point, but she said she caught sight of a guy with a ball cap pulled low over his eyes and a bushy beard covering half his face. The guy started arguing with her date, and she swore to my mom that the guy was holding a pair of handcuffs. She heard the bearded guy say something like ‘I ain't messing with no mayor's daughter.' The next thing she remembered was waking up in some bushes behind a liquor store. She got back to her apartment and locked herself in, and after that, she was so scared to leave that she stopped going to class. When school got out, she came back home. But she didn't feel any safer in Henbane, because whoever that guy was, the one who knew she was the mayor's daughter—she was scared she might run into him. She was suspicious of everybody.”

“Wow,” I said. “That does sound crazy. Like something from a TV show.”

“Yeah. Mom believed her, though. There wasn't any reason to make up a story like that, and she could tell Janessa was really scared. The poor girl was so worked up about it that she was having trouble eating and sleeping. She asked Mom for something stronger than the tea to help settle her nerves, but Mom didn't have anything more to give her. She tried to convince Janessa to talk to her parents or go see a doctor. But Janessa must have found something stronger somewhere else, because whatever she took that day nearly killed her. I don't know what she told her parents, but the Walkers came after my mom. They threatened to prosecute her and run her out of town, even though they couldn't prove anything.”

“So that's why your mom practices under the radar now.”

“Pretty much.”

“And that's why Janessa never moved back here?”

“I guess. Her parents whisked her away somewhere, and she's barely been back since.”

I'd seen pictures of Janessa in my dad's old yearbook, with her poufy eighties hair and wide smile—student council, volleyball captain, fall harvest queen. It was hard to believe a girl like that could get herself into such a mess. But there was always so much we didn't know about people, lurking right below the surface where we couldn't see it. I'd pored over old photo albums, trying to locate despair in the corners of my mother's smile, depression in the set of her shoulders as she held me gleefully suspended in the air. Anything to indicate she was about to kill herself. Abandon me. But there was nothing so obvious as to be visible. In the pictures, she was madly in love with me and my dad. If the pictures said anything, it was that she was happier and more beautiful than anyone in Henbane had a right to be.

Cheri's pictures were more telling. In her ninth-grade photo, you could see the shadow of a bruise on her cheek. A wariness in her eyes. A tentative smile coaxed by the photographer, a stranger who had no idea that the portrait would later end up on the front page of hundreds of newspapers. And in the hollow of Cheri's throat, for the world to see, the blue butterfly, the symbol of our friendship.

I thought about what Mrs. Stoddard had said about being haunted by Cheri's ghost. If I didn't find out what had happened to her, she would always be drifting somewhere in the ether, a life that never quite materialized. She would haunt me in a quiet, ghostless way, the knowledge that in life I had neglected to save her, and in death failed to bring her peace. I would have preferred to see her ghost, in the way that I'd always hoped to be visited by my mother's. But ghosts never came when you wanted them to, and I didn't know how to stop wanting.

The next weekend Dad was meeting some friends at Bell's, so he gave me a ride to Bess's. She and her mom usually cooked a big meal on Saturday nights, and then Bess and I would watch a movie while Gabby went out to play bingo. It was one of the few vices she had left, and she clung to it like a religion.

Bess and I sat on the porch with a tick-covered hound dog, tending barbecued chicken on the grill while Gabby made potato salad in the kitchen. Clouds darkened the sky, and a cool breeze picked up ahead of the storm, rattling wind chimes in the trees around the trailer.

“Gage still hasn't called me back,” Bess said, parting the dog's fur to remove a swollen tick.

“Sorry,” I said. I could tell she wasn't surprised. Lightning threaded through the clouds, and I counted to ten before I heard the muted grumble of thunder.

“So what's going on with you and Daniel?” Bess asked, pinching my arm.

“We're friends.”

Bess groaned. “You're not trying hard enough.”

“I'm not trying at all.”

Gabby hollered at us to bring in the chicken, and we got inside before the first drops of rain tapped the trailer. Throughout dinner, I'd look up and catch Gabby staring at me with a troubled expression. When I asked her if the possums were doing okay, she nodded absently. After we finished eating, we put our dinner plates on the floor for the various cats to fight over, and Gabby excused herself while Bess and I dug in to the blackberry pie. We were sprawled on the couch trying to decide what movie to watch when Gabby reappeared, lugging a cardboard box. She set it at my feet.

“This is for you,” she said, her face puckered like she might start crying. “Some of your mom's things, just some clothes and such. I was thinking they might fit you now. Your dad had me take it all way back when. I think it hurt him too much to have it around. I saved it for you, though, most of it.”

“Thanks,” I said. I hadn't known there was anything left besides the photo albums. My mom hadn't had much to begin with.