“Sweet Camille, a beautiful girl can get away with anything if she plays nice. You certainly must know that. Think of all the things boys have done for you over the years they never would have done if you hadn’t had that face. And if the boys are nice, the girls are nice. Adora played that pregnancy beautifully: proud but a little broken, and very secretive. Your daddy came for that fateful visit, and then they never saw each other again. Your momma never spoke about it. You were all hers from the beginning. That’s what killed Joya. Her daughter finally had something in her that Joya couldn’t get at.”
“Did my mother stop being sick once Joya was gone?”
“She did okay for a while,” Jackie said over her glass. “But wasn’t that long before Marian came along, and she didn’t really have time to be sick then.”
“Was my mother…” I could feel a sob welling up in my throat, so I swallowed it with my watered-down vodka. “Was my mother…a nice person?”
Jackie cackled again. Popped a chocolate, the nougat sticking to her teeth. “That’s what you’re after? Whether she was nice?” she paused. “What do you think?” she added, mocking me.
Jackie dug into her drawer again, unscrewed three pill bottles, took a tablet from each, and arranged them from largest to smallest on the back of her left hand.
“I don’t know. I’ve never been close with her.”
“But you’ve been close to her. Don’t play games with me, Camille. That exhausts me. If you thought your momma was a nice person, you wouldn’t be over here with her best friend asking whether she’s nice.”
Jackie took each pill, largest to smallest, smashed it into a chocolate, and swallowed it. Wrappers littered her chest, the smear of red still covered her lip, and a thick fudgy coating clung to her teeth. Her feet had begun to sweat in my hands.
“I’m sorry. You’re right,” I said. “Just, do you think she’s…sick?”
Jackie stopped her chewing, put her hand on mine, and took a sigh of a breath.
“Let me say it aloud, because I’ve been thinking it too long, and thoughts can be a little tricky for me—they zip away from you, you know. Like trying to catch fish with your hands.” She leaned up and squeezed my arm. “Adora devours you, and if you don’t let her, it’ll be even worse for you. Look it what’s happening to Amma. Look at what happened to Marian.”
Yes. Just below my left breast, bundle began tingling.
“So you think?” I prompted. Say it.
“I think she’s sick, and I think what she has is contagious,” Jackie whispered, her shaky hands making the ice in her glass chime. “And I think it’s time for you to go, Sweepea.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to overstay my welcome.”
“I mean leave Wind Gap. It’s not safe for you here.”
Less than a minute later I closed the door on Jackie as she stared at the photo of herself leering back from the mantelpiece.
Chapter Fourteen
I nearly tumbled down Jackie’s steps, my legs were so wobbly. Behind my back I could hear her boys chanting the Calhoon football rally. I drove around the corner, parked under a copse of mulberry treees, and rested my head against the wheel.
Had my mother truly been sick? And Marian? Amma and me? Sometimes I think illness sits inside every woman, waiting for the right moment to bloom. I have known so many sick women all my life. Women with chronic pain, with ever-gestating diseases. Women with conditions. Men, sure, they have bone snaps, they have backaches, they have a surgery or two, yank out a tonsil, insert a shiny plastic hip. Women get consumed. Not surprising, considering the sheer amount of traffic a woman’s body experiences. Tampons and speculums. Cocks, fingers, vibrators and more, between the legs, from behind, in the mouth. Men love to put things inside women, don’t they? Cucumbers and bananas and bottles, a string of pearls, a Magic Marker, a fist. Once a guy wanted to wedge a Walkie-Talkie inside of me. I declined.
Sick and sicker and sickest. What was real and what was fake? Was Amma really sick and needing my mother’s medicine, or was the medicine what was making Amma sick? Did her blue pill make me vomit, or did it keep me from getting more ill than I’d have been without it?
Would Marian be dead if she hadn’t had Adora for a mother?
I knew I should call Richard but couldn’t think of anything to tell him. I’m scared. I’m vindicated. I want to die. I drove back past my mother’s house, then east out toward the hog farm, and pulled up to Heelah’s, that comforting, windowless block of a bar where anyone who recognized the boss’s daughter would wisely leave her to her thoughts.
The place stank of pig blood and urine; even the popcorn in bowls along the bar smelled of flesh. A couple of men in baseball caps and leather jackets, handlebar mustaches and scowls, looked up, then back down into their beers. The bartender poured me my bourbon without a word. A Carole King song droned from the speakers. On my second round, the bartender motioned behind me and asked, “You lookin’ for him?”
John Keene sat slumped over a drink in the bar’s only booth, picking at the splintered edge of the table. His white skin was mottled pink with liquor, and from his wet lips and the way he smacked his tongue, I guessed he’d vomited once already. I grabbed my drink and sat across from him, said nothing. He smiled at me, reached his hand to mine across the table.
“Hi Camille. How’re you doing? You look so nice and clean.” He looked around. “It’s…it’s so dirty here.”
“I’m doing okay, I guess, John. You okay?”
“Oh sure, I’m great. My sister’s murdered, I’m about to be arrested, and my girlfriend who’s stuck to me like glue since I moved to this rotten town is starting to realize I’m not the prize anymore. Not that I care that much. She’s nice but not…”
“Not surprising,” I offered.
“Yeah. Yeah. I was about to break up with her before Natalie. Now I can’t.”
Such a move would be dissected by the whole town—Richard, too. What does it mean? How does it prove his guilt?
“I will not go back to my parents’ house,” he muttered. “I will go to the fucking woods and kill myself before I go back to all of Natalie’s things staring at me.”
“I don’t blame you.”
He picked up the salt shaker, began twirling it around the table.
“You’re the only person who understands, I think,” he said. “What it’s like to lose a sister and be expected to just deal. Just move on. Have you gotten over it?” He said the words so bitterly I expected his tongue to turn yellow.
“You’ll never get over it,” I said. “It infects you. It ruined me.” It felt good to say it out loud.
“Why does everyone think it’s so strange that I should mourn Natalie?” John toppled the shaker and it clattered to the floor. The bartender sent over a disgruntled look. I picked it up, set it on my side of the table, threw a pinch of salt over my shoulder for both of us.
“I guess when you’re young, people expect you to accept things more easily,” I said. “And you’re a guy. Guys don’t have soft feelings.”
He snorted. “My parents got me this book on dealing with death: Male in Mourning. It said that sometimes you need to drop out, to just deny. That denial can be good for men. So I tried to take an hour and pretend like I didn’t care. And for a little bit, I really didn’t. I sat in my room at Meredith’s and I thought about…bullshit. I just stared out the window at this little square of blue sky and kept saying, It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay. Like I was a kid again. And when I was done, I knew for sure nothing would ever be okay again. Even if they caught who did it, it wouldn’t be okay. I don’t know why everyone keeps saying we’ll feel better once someone’s arrested. Now it looks like the someone who’s going to be arrested is me.” He laughed in a grunt and shook his head. “It’s just fucking insane.” And then, abruptly: “You want another drink? Will you have another drink with me?”
He was smashed, swaying heavily, but I would never steer a fellow sufferer from the relief of a blackout. Sometimes that’s the most logical route. I’ve always believed clear-eyed sobriety was for the harder hearted. I had a shot at the bar to catch up, then came back with two bourbons. Mine a double.
“It’s like they picked the two girls in Wind Gap who had minds of their own and killed them off,” John said. He took a sip of bourbon. “Do you think your sister and my sister would have been friends?”
In that imaginary place where they were both alive, where Marian had never aged.
“No,” I said, and laughed suddenly. He laughed, too.
“So your dead sister is too good for my dead sister?” he blurted. We both laughed again, and then quickly soured and turned back to our drinks. I was already feeling dazed.
“I didn’t kill Natalie,” he whispered.
“I know.”
He picked up my hand, wrapped it around his.
“Her fingernails were painted. When they found her. Someone painted her fingernails,” he mumbled.
“Maybe she did.”
“Natalie hated that kind of thing. Barely even allowed a brush through her hair.”
Silence for several minutes. Carole King had given way to Carly Simon. Feminine folksy voices in a bar for slaughterers.
“You’re so beautiful,” John said.
“So are you.”