I didn’t mind the idea of spilling Wind Gap’s stories to Richard. I felt no particular allegiance to the town. This was the place my sister died, the place I started cutting myself. A town so suffocating and small, you tripped over people you hated every day. People who knew things about you. It’s the kind of place that leaves a mark.
Although it’s true that on the surface, I couldn’t have been treated better when I lived here. My mother saw to that. The town loved her, she was like a cake topping: the most beautiful, sweet girl Wind Gap had ever raised. Her parents, my grandparents, had owned the pig farm and half the houses around it, and kept my mother under the same strict rules they applied to their workers: no drinking, no smoking, no cursing, church service mandatory. I can only imagine how they must have taken the news when my mother became pregnant at seventeen. Some boy from Kentucky who she met at church camp came for a Christmas visit and left me in her belly. My grandparents grew angry twin tumors to match my mother’s expanding tummy, and were dead of cancer within a year of my birth.
My mother’s parents had friends in Tennessee, and their son began wooing Adora before I was on solids, making visits nearly every weekend. I cannot picture this courtship as anything but awkward. Alan, pleated and pressed, elaborating on the weather. My mother, alone and untended for the first time in her life, in need of a good match, laughing at…jokes? I’m not sure Alan has ever made a joke in his life, but I’m sure my mother found some reason to giggle girlishly for him. And where was I in this picture? Probably in some far corner room, kept quiet by the maid, Adora slipping her an extra five bucks for the trouble. I can imagine Alan, proposing to my mother while pretending to look over her shoulder, or fiddling with a plant, anything to avoid eye contact. My mother accepting graciously and then pouring him more tea. A dry kiss was exchanged, perhaps.
No matter. By the time I could talk, they were married. I know almost nothing about my real father. The name on the birth certificate is fake: Newman Kennedy, for my mother’s favorite actor and president, respectively. She refused to tell me his true name, lest I hunt him down. No, I was to be considered Alan’s child. This was difficult, as she soon had Alan’s child, eight months after he married her. She was twenty, he was thirty-five, with family money that my mother didn’t need, having plenty of her own. Neither of them have ever worked. I’ve learned little else of Alan over the years. He’s a ribbon-winning equestrian who doesn’t ride anymore because it makes Adora nervous. He’s often ill, and even when he’s not, he’s mostly immobile. He reads countless books on the Civil War and seems content to let my mother do most of the talking. He’s as smooth and shallow as glass. Then again, Adora has never tried to forge a bond between us. I was considered Alan’s child but never really fathered by him, never encouraged to call him anything but his proper name. Alan never gave me his last name and I never asked for it. I remember trying out Dad once when I was little, and the shock on his face was enough to scotch any further attempts. Frankly, I think Adora prefers us to feel like strangers. She wants all relationships in the house to run through her.
Ah, but back to the baby. Marian was a sweet series of diseases. She had trouble breathing from the start, would wake in the night spluttering for air, splotchy and gray. I could hear her like a sick wind down the hall from me, in the bedroom next to my mother. Lights would click on and there would be cooing, or sometimes crying or shouting. Regular trips to the emergency room, twenty-five miles away in Woodberry. Later she had trouble digesting and sat murmuring to her dolls in a hospital bed set up in her room, while my mother poured sustenance into her through IVs and feeding tubes.
During those last years, my mother pulled out all her eyelashes. She couldn’t keep her fingers off them. She left little piles of them on tabletops. I told myself they were fairy nests. I remember finding two long blonde lashes stuck to the side of my foot, and I kept them for weeks next to my pillow. At night I tickled my cheeks and lips with them, until one day I woke to find them blown away.
By the time my sister finally died, I was grateful in a way. It seemed to me that she’d been expelled into this world not quite formed. She was not ready for its weight. People whispered comfort about Marian being called back to heaven, but my mother would not be distracted from her grief. To this day it remains a hobby.
My car, faded blue, covered with bird crap, its leather seats sure to be steaming, didn’t exactly beckon me, so I decided to take a turn around town. On Main Street, I passed the poultry shop, where chickens are dropped off fresh from the Arkansas killing fields. The smell flared my nostrils. A dozen or more stripped birds hung lasciviously in the window, a few white feathers papering the ledge beneath them.
Toward the end of the street, where a makeshift shrine to Natalie had sprung up, I could see Amma and her three friends. They were sifting through the balloons and drugstore gifts, three standing guard while my half sister snatched up two candles, a bouquet of flowers, and a teddy bear. All but the bear went into her oversized purse. The teddy she held as the girls locked arms and skipped mockingly toward me. Straight at me actually, not stopping until they were an inch from me, filling the air with the kind of heavy perfume dispensed on powdered strips in magazines.
“Did you see us do that? Are you going to put it in your newspaper story?” Amma shrieked. She’d definitely gotten over her dollhouse tantrum. Such childish things, clearly, were left at home. Now she’d traded in her sundress and was wearing a miniskirt, platform sandals, and a tube top. “If you are, get my name right: Amity Adora Crellin. Guys, this is…my sister. From Chicago. The bastard of the family.” Amma wiggled her eyebrows at me, and the girls giggled. “Camille, these are my loooovely friends, but you don’t need to write about them. I’m the leader.”
“She’s just the leader because she’s the loudest,” said a small honey-haired girl with a husky voice.
“And she has the biggest tits,” said a second girl, with hair the color of a brass bell.
The third girl, a strawberry blonde, grabbed Amma’s left breast, gave it a squeeze: “Part real, part padding.”
“Fuck off, Jodes,” Amma said, and as if disciplining a cat, smacked her on the jaw. The girl flushed splotchy red and muttered a sorry.
“Anyway, what’s your deal, sister?” Amma demanded, looking down at her teddy. “Why are you writing a story about two dead girls who no one noticed to begin with? Like getting killed makes you popular.” Two of the girls forced loud laughs; the third was still staring at the ground. A tear splashed on the sidewalk.
I recognized this provocative girl talk. It was the verbal equivalent of farming my yard. And while part of me appreciated the show, I was feeling protective of Natalie and Ann, and my sister’s aggressive disrespect raised my hackles. To be honest, I should add that I was also feeling jealous of Amma. (Her middle name was Adora?)
“I bet Adora wouldn’t be happy to read that her daughter stole items from a tribute to one of her schoolmates,” I said.
“Schoolmate isn’t the same as friend,” said the tall girl, glancing around for confirmation of my stupidity.
“Oh, Camille, we’re just kidding,” Amma said. “I feel horrible. They were nice girls. Just weird.”
“Definitely weird,” one of them echoed.
“Ohhh guys, what if he’s killing all the freaks?” Amma giggled. “Wouldn’t that be perfect?” The crying girl looked up at this and smiled. Amma pointedly ignored her.
“He?” I asked.
“Everyone knows who did it,” the husky blonde said.
“Natalie’s brother. Freaks run in families,” Amma proclaimed.
“He’s got a little-girl thing,” the girl called Jodes said sulkily.
“He’s always finding excuses to talk to me,” Amma said. “At least now I know he won’t kill me. Too cool.” She blew an air kiss and handed the teddy to Jodes, looped her arms around the other girls, and, with a cheeky “’Scuse,” bumped past me. Jodes trailed behind.
In Amma’s snideness, I caught a whiff of desperation and righteousness. Like she’d whined at breakfast: I wish I’d be murdered. Amma didn’t want anyone to get more attention than her. Certainly not girls who couldn’t compete when they were alive.