I dragged on clothes over my aching skin and looked at myself in the mirror. You are thinking crazy thoughts. You are being un reasonable. But I’m not. My mother killed Marian. My mother killed those little girls.
I stumbled to the toilet and threw up a stream of salty, hot water, the backsplashes from the toilet freckling my cheeks as I kneeled. When my stomach unclenched, I realized I wasn’t alone. My mother was standing behind me.
“Poor sweetness,” she murmured. I started, scrambled away from her on all fours. Propped myself against the wall and looked up at her.
“Why are you dressed, darling?” she said. “You can’t go anywhere.”
“I need to go out. I need to do some work. Fresh air will be good.”
“Camille, get back in bed.” Her voice was urgent and shrill. She marched to my bed, pulled down the covers, and patted it. “Come on sweetness, you need to be smart about your health.”
I stumbled to my feet, grabbed my car keys from the table, and darted past her.
“Can’t, Momma; I won’t be gone long.”
I left Amma upstairs with her sick dolls and slammed down the driveway so quickly I dented my front bumper where the hill abruptly evened out at street level. A fat woman pushing a stroller shook her head at me.
I started driving nowhere, trying to assemble my thoughts, running through the faces of people I knew in Wind Gap. I needed someone to tell me plainly I was wrong about Adora, or else that I was right. Someone who knew Adora, who’d had a grown-up’s view of my childhood, who’d been here while I was away. I suddenly thought of Jackie O’Neele and her Juicy Fruit and booze and gossip. Her off-kilter maternal warmth toward me and the comment that now sounded like a warning: So much has gone wrong. I needed Jackie, rejected by Adora, completely without filter, a woman who’d known my mother her entire life. Who very clearly wanted to say something.
Jackie’s house was only a few minutes away, a modern mansion meant to look like an antebellum plantation home. A scrawny pale kid was hunched over a riding mower, smoking as he drove back and forth in tight lines. His back was spackled with bumpy, angry zits so big they looked like wounds. Another meth boy. Jackie should cut out the middle man and just give the twenty bucks straight to the dealer.
I knew the woman who answered the door. Geri Shilt, a Calhoon High girl just a year ahead of me. She wore a starchy nurse’s dress, same as Gayla, and still had the round, pink mole on her cheek that I’d always pitied her for. Seeing Geri, such a pedestrian face from the past, almost made me turn around, get in my car, and ignore all my worries. Someone this ordinary in my world made me question what I was thinking. But I didn’t leave.
“Hi Camille, what can I do for you?” She seemed utterly uninterested in why I was there, a distinct lack of curiosity that separated her from the other Wind Gap women. She probably didn’t have any girlfriends to gossip to.
“Hey, Geri, I didn’t know you worked for the O’Neeles.”
“No reason you would,” she said plainly.
Jackie’s three sons, born in a row, would all be in their early twenties: twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, maybe. I remembered they were beefy, thick-necked boys who always wore polyester coach shorts and big gold Calhoon High rings with flaming blue jewel centers. They had Jackie’s abnormally round eyes and bright white overbites. Jimmy, Jared, and Johnny. I could hear at least two of them now, home from school for the summer, throwing the football in the backyard. From Geri’s aggressively dull look, she must have decided the best way to deal with them was to stay out of their way.
“I’m back here…” I began.
“I know why you’re here,” she said, neither accusingly nor with any generosity. Just a statement. I was simply another obstacle in her day.
“My mom is friends with Jackie and I thought…”
“I know who Jackie’s friends are, believe me,” Geri said.
She didn’t seem inclined to let me in. Instead she looked me up and down, then out to the car behind me.
“Jackie is friends with a lot of your friends’ moms,” Geri added.
“Mmmm. I don’t really have many friends around here these days.” It was a fact I was proud of, but I said the words in a deliberately disappointed manner. The less she resented me, the quicker I’d get in there, and I felt an urgent need to speak with Jackie before I talked myself out of it. “In fact, even when I lived here, I don’t really think I had that many friends.”
“Katie Lacey. Her mom hangs out with all them.”
Good old Katie Lacey, who dragged me to the Pity Party and turned on me. I could picture her roaring around town in that SUV, her pretty little girls perched in back, perfectly dressed, ready to rule over the other kindergartners. They’d learn from Mom to be particularly cruel to the ugly girls, poor girls, girls who wanted to just be left alone. Too much to ask.
“Katie Lacey is a girl I’m ashamed of ever being friendly with.”
“Yeah, well, you were okay,” Geri said. Just then I remembered she’d had a horse named Butter. The joke was that of course even Geri’s pet was fattening.
“Not really.” I’d never participated in direct acts of cruelty, but I never stopped them, either. I always stood on the sidelines like a fretful shadow and pretended to laugh.
Geri continued to stand in the doorway, stretching at the cheap watch around her wrist, tight as a rubber band, clearly lost in her own memories. Bad ones.
So why, then, would she stay in Wind Gap? I’d run across so many of the same faces since I’d been back. Girls I grew up with, who never had the energy to leave. It was a town that bred complacency through cable TV and a convenience store. Those who remained here were still just as segregated as before. Petty, pretty girls like Katie Lacey who now lived, predictably, in a rehabbed Victorian a few blocks from us, played at the same Woodberry tennis club as Adora, made the same quarterly pilgrimage to St. Louis for shopping. And the ugly, victimized girls like Geri Shilt were still stuck cleaning up after the pretty ones, heads lowered glumly, waiting for more abuse. They were women not strong enough or smart enough to leave. Women without imagination. So they stayed in Wind Gap and played their teenage lives on an endless loop. And now I was stuck with them, unable to pull myself out.
“Let me tell Jackie you’re here.” Geri went the long way to the back stairs—around through the living room rather than the glass-paneled kitchen that would expose her to Jackie’s boys.
The room I was ushered into was obscenely white with glaring splashes of color, like a mischievous child had been finger painting. Red throw pillows, yellow-and-blue curtains, a glowing green vase packed with ceramic red flowers. A ludicrous leering black-and-white photo of Jackie, hair overblown, talons curled coyly beneath her chin, hung over the mantelpiece. She was like an over-groomed lapdog. Even in my sickened state I laughed.
“Darling Camille!” Jackie crossed the room with arms outstretched. She was wearing a satin house robe and diamond earrings like blocks. “You’ve come to visit. You look horrible, sweetheart. Geri, get us some Bloody Marys, stat!” She howled, literally, at me, then at Geri. I guess it was a laugh. Geri lingered in the doorway until Jackie clapped at her.
“I’m serious, Geri. Remember to salt the rim this time.” She turned back to me. “So hard to get good help these days,” she muttered earnestly, unaware no one really says that who’s not on TV. I’m sure Jackie watched TV nonstop, drink in one hand, remote control in the other, curtains pulled as morning talk shows yielded to soaps, glided into court TV, moved on to reruns, sitcoms, crime dramas, and late-night movies about women who were raped, stalked, betrayed, or killed.
Geri brought in the Bloodys on a tray, along with containers of celery, pickles, and olives, and, as instructed, closed the drapes and left. Jackie and I sat in the dim light, in the freezing air-conditioned white room, and stared at each other a few seconds. Then Jackie swooped down and pulled out the drawer of the coffee table. It held three bottles of nail polish, a ratty Bible, and more than half a dozen orange prescription bottles. I thought of Curry and his clipped rose thorns.
“Painkiller? I got some good ones.”
“I should probably keep some of my wits about me,” I said, not quite sure if she was serious. “Looks like you could almost start your own store there.”
“Oh sure. I’m terribly lucky.” I could smell her anger mixed with tomato juice. “OxyContin, Percocet, Percodan, whatever new pill my latest doctor has stock in. But I got to admit, they’re fun.” She poured a few round white tablets into her hand and shot them back, smiled at me.
“What do you have?” I asked, almost afraid of the answer.
“That’s the best part, sweetie. No one fucking knows. Lupus says one, arthritis says another, some sort of autoimmune syndrome says a third, it’s all in my head says the fourth and fifth.”
“What do you think?”
“What do I think?” she asked, and rolled her eyes. “I think as long as they keep the meds coming, I probably don’t care all that much.” She laughed again. “They’re really fun.”
Whether she was putting on a brave face or was really addicted, I couldn’t tell.
“I’m sort of surprised Adora hasn’t gotten herself on the sick track,” she leered. “Figured once I did, she’d have to up the stakes, right? She wouldn’t have silly old lupus, though. She’d find a way to get…I don’t know, brain cancer. Right?”
She took another sip of the Bloody Mary, got a slash of red and salt across her upper lip, which made her look swollen. That second swallow calmed her, and just as she had at Natalie’s funeral, she stared at me like she was trying to memorize my face.
“Good God, it’s so weird to see you grown up,” she said, patting my knee. “Why are you here, sweetheart? Is everything okay at home? Probably not. Is it…is it your momma?”
“No, nothing like that.” I hated being so obvious.
“Oh.” She looked dismayed, a hand fluttering to her robe like something out of a black-and-white movie. I’d played her wrong, forgot that down here it was encouraged to openly crave gossip.
“I mean, I’m sorry, I wasn’t being frank just now. I do want to talk about my mother.”
Jackie immediately cheered. “Can’t quite figure her out, huh? Angel or devil or both, right?” Jackie placed a green satin pillow under her tiny rump and aimed her feet onto my lap. “Sweepea, will you just rub a little? They’re clean.” From under the sofa she pulled a bag of mini–candy bars, the kind you give out at Halloween, and placed them on her belly. “Lord, I’m going to have to get rid of these later, but they’ll taste good going down.”
I took advantage of this happy moment. “Was my mother always…the way she is now?” I cringed at the awkwardness of the question, but Jackie cackled once, like a witch.
“What’s that, Sweepea—Beautiful? Charming? Beloved? Evil?” She wiggled her toes as she unwrapped a chocolate. “Rub.” I began kneading her cold feet, the soles rough like a turtle shell. “Adora. Well, damn. Adora was rich and beautiful and her crazy parents ran the town. They brought that damn hog farm to Wind Gap, gave us hundreds of jobs—there was a walnut plant then, too. They called the shots. Everyone bootlicked the Preakers.”
“What was life for her like…at home?”
“Adora was…overly mothered. Never saw your grandma Joya smile at her or touch her in a loving way, but she couldn’t keep her hands off her. Always fixing the hair, tugging at clothes, and…oh, she did this thing. Instead of licking her thumb and rubbing at a smudge, she’d lick Adora. Just grab her head and lick it. When Adora peeled from a sunburn—we all did back then, not as smart about SPF as your generation—Joya would sit next to your momma, strip off her shirt, and peel the skin off in long strips. Joya loved that.”
“Jackie…”
“I am not lying. Having to watch your friend stripped naked in front of you, and…groomed. Needless to say, your momma was sick all the time. She was always having tubes and needles and such stuck in her.”
“What was she sick with?”
“Little bit of everything. Lot of it just the stress of living with Joya. Those long unpainted fingernails, like a man’s. And long hair she let go silver, down her back.”
“Where was my grandfather in all this?”
“Don’t know. Don’t even remember his name. Herbert? Herman? He was never around, and when he was, he was just quiet and…away. You know the type. Like Alan.”
She popped another chocolate and wiggled her toes in my hands. “You know, having you should have ruined your mother.” Her tone was reproachful, as if I’d failed a simple chore. “Any other girl, got knocked up before marriage, here in Wind Gap way back when, it’d be all over for her,” Jackie continued. “But your mother always had a way of making people baby her. People—not just boys, but the girls, their mothers, the teachers.”
“Why is that?”