“Better every day,” she said. “How are you?”
Caleb smiled, then, realizing something, he smacked the table.
“I almost forgot!” He reached in his back pocket and pulled out something red and plastic. When he laid it on the table she could see it was a biohazard bag.
“I know this might be a little sensitive,” he said. “But I thought you’d want it back. I pulled it from the . . . from where I found you. And, well, just to warn you, there’s some blood on it. Yours, I think.”
Kit took the bag. She tried ripping it open, but the plastic was thick and her hands were flimsy these days. Caleb tore it open for her, stretching the plastic, and shook out what was inside.
It was the sheet of school photos, folded into quarters, caked in blood. Brown, dry blood absorbed into the photo paper, smeared over the smiling Charlies. She pulled it by the corners and laid it on the table, smoothed out its rigid bends. Some of the dried blood flaked off. She brushed it aside. Bleary images returned to her, blood in her eyes, glass sticking out of her hip, Charlie appearing in the doorway before everything turned to black. She was heavy with the thought of what Charlie had seen. Too much ugliness, too much blood.
A waitress passed by.
“Hey, can you get me some scissors?” Kit said.
“Sure!” the cheerleader chirped. She found a pair in a catchall can by the register and brought it to Kit. There was one photo at the center that was nearly clean. She clipped away at the photos on the outside and singled out the good one. She wet her napkin in her water glass and dabbed a little rusty spot from the corner of the picture, then slid it in her back pocket. The rest of the photos she stuffed back in the red bag and pushed it to the side.
She noticed Caleb waiting patiently as always. “Thank you for getting this to me,” she said. “As soon as I get home I’m gonna put this up on the wall.”
They drank their coffee and ordered some pie to go with it. As they ate, they talked about the goings-on in town. About the trouble in Beulah’s marriage, how Sugar’s youngest son got a girl pregnant, Dirk’s latest DWI and how he might face jail time. Kit shared that Charlie’s test results had come in, and though they were just short of passing, the school had agreed to graduate her to the eighth grade, given the summer she had had.
Kit found herself relaxing and enjoying the pleasure of a little chitchat to pass the time—just like Aunt Eleanor would have. After an hour or so, Caleb took out a couple of fives from his wallet and lay them on the check. He smiled.
“Time for me to go back to work.”
Kit did not want to lose the warmth of being near him. She did not want him to go.
“Hang on,” she said. “I’ll walk there with you.” She hoisted herself out of the booth and took his slim and steady arm, leaning generously into his side for balance, loving the feel of him next to her.
Epilogue
Pecan Hollow, TX 1991
Kit kept thinking that, with Manny gone for good, she might finally feel safe, but she still faced each morning uneasy, ever looking into darkness. Perhaps it was the shock of killing him, the feel of it locked into her bones. She couldn’t swing an ax or clear brush without releasing that grisly sensation. Meat, bone, blood. A slammed door would throttle her back to the motel with its dirty pigeon smell, and she would remember not the relief of seeing Charlie safe, but always the terror that preceded it, when she hadn’t known which one of them would die first.
She knew she should be grateful they had made it out alive. And things were better than ever with Charlie. They now talked with an honesty Kit had never dreamed possible. Charlie came to her with her worries, however small, and Kit had learned to listen. Charlie told Kit about Dirk, how he had stopped talking to her and why. How she still liked him even though she knew she shouldn’t. Kit only said she understood, and that had been enough for Charlie. It had been painful to let her daughter in on the sins of her past, but she learned they were not quite so ugly as she had always thought. And there was freedom in letting Charlie know more about where she came from. Now, when Charlie asked her questions, even the hard ones, she answered. Still, she knew it was only a matter of time before Charlie moved on and started a life of her own. And when she did, Kit would be left to reckon with the darkness again.
When she realized Manny’s death would not end her worry, she felt freshly lost. He had loomed so large, for so long, that she could not see that the gaping sadness at her center was not caused by him. He had climbed into the hole and lived there, stretching and warping it, making her think it had been filled. But its source, the great sadness of her life, was never knowing her mother.
Caleb looked into it for her. It took him a few weeks, but he found Marie de Clair. There was a minor rap sheet—shoplifting, drug possession, public nudity—and a joint bank account she shared with an old boyfriend, a rich landman, whom Caleb was able to get on the phone. He said she had been living in a rest home in Corpus Christi since a heart attack left her feeble and shaken. He had loved her so much he paid for her convalescence. He said she wasn’t a kind woman, or even a good one, but that there was magic about her.
The day Kit found out, the news had sickened her, like a meal she had eaten too quickly. She had not expected to find her mother, just a trail of crumbs she could savor, just enough to move forward without the shock of meeting her in person. The woman she had dreamed of all her life, in beds cold and lonely, could always remain a watery figure, a myth.
After a month of stomachaches and sleepless nights, she dug a map out of her glove compartment. She carefully traced the route with a pencil, two hundred miles southwest, then she fueled the truck and filled up its tires.