“Things would be different if your father were still here,” her mother said. And Ruthie knew it was true, though she found it unsettling that whenever her mother spoke of him she made it sound as if he’d gone off on a trip, up and left them on purpose, not dropped dead from a heart attack two years ago. If her father were still alive, she’d be off at college. Her father understood her as no one else had, knew how much she’d wanted to get away. He would have found a way to make it happen.
“Is it so bad?” her mother had asked, smoothing Ruthie’s unruly dark hair. “Staying home one more year?”
Yes, Ruthie had wanted to say. Yes! Yes! Yes!
But then she thought of Buzz, who hadn’t even applied to college and was working for his uncle at the scrap-metal yard. It was shit work, but Buzz always had money and found lots of cool pieces for his sculptures—these amazing monsters, aliens, and robots made from welded-together car parts and broken farm machinery. His uncle’s front lot was full of Buzz’s creations. He’d even made a little money selling a couple to tourists.
She and Buzz had met senior year at a keg party over at Cranberry Meadow. It was early October, and going to the party had been Emily’s idea—she had a huge crush on a boy named Adam who’d graduated the year before, and Emily had heard he’d be there. It turned out Adam had come to the party with his cousin Buzz, and, somehow or other, the four of them ended up drifting away from the bonfire by the pond and going up to the cemetery. Adam and Emily were making out under a granite cross while Ruthie made awkward small talk with Buzz, annoyed at Emily for getting her into this. Buzz said his dad and uncle lived in West Hall, but he was living with his mom in Barre and going to school there. He was enrolled in the Barre Technical Center, in the automotive program.
“Cars are okay,” he’d told her with a shrug while they sipped cheap beer out of plastic cups. “I guess I’m pretty good at fixing stuff. I’m on the pit crew for my cousin Adam—he races out at Thunder Road. You ever go out to Thunder Road?”
Ruthie shook her head and started stepping away, thinking she’d leave Emily and go back down to the bonfire. She had no interest in a redneck gearhead, no matter how cute he might be.
“Nah,” Buzz said. “Didn’t think so. How about the Devil’s Hand? You ever been up there?”
This stopped her.
“I live right next to it,” she said.
“No shit? It’s a damn strange place. It’s almost like the rocks were put there by someone, right?” Buzz leaned against a lichen-covered headstone.
Ruthie shrugged. She’d never really thought about it that way before.
“You believe in aliens?” he asked.
“You mean, like, from outer space? Um … no.”
Buzz looked down into his cup of beer. “Well, personally, that’s my theory for how the rocks got there. I go up there all the time. I’m actually making a sculpture of it in my uncle’s shop. You should come check it out.”
“A sculpture?” she asked, stepping closer again. They spent the rest of the night talking about art, UFOs, the pros and cons of getting a business degree, movies they’d seen, how they both felt they were stuck in families where they were totally misunderstood. They wandered around the cemetery, checking out the names and dates on the stones, trying to imagine what kinds of lives these people might have had, how they’d died.
“Look at this one,” Buzz had said, running his fingers over letters on a plain granite marker. “Hester Jameson. She was only nine when she died. Just a kid. Pretty sad, huh?”
They’d been together ever since that night. Staying with him one more year sounded all right—more than all right, maybe, especially in moments like this, when they were side by side in the cab of his truck, stoned, cocooned and warm, careening through the darkness like nothing could stop them.
“You don’t think your mom’s up, do you?” Buzz asked.
“Hope not,” Ruthie said.
“Yeah, she’d have a bird.”
Ruthie laughed at the expression, but she knew it was true.
It wasn’t just her mother—the whole town was worried, uptight, keeping their kids locked in at night. Back in early December, a sixteen-year-old girl named Willa Luce had disappeared without a trace, walking the half-mile home from a friend’s house. Just before that, two sheep and a cow were found with their throats slit. And of course, before that, there had been the other disappearances: a boy who went missing in 1952 after his friends watched him crawl into a cave no one could find again, a hunter back in 1973 who’d been separated from his friends and never returned to camp, and the most famous, the college girl in 1982 who’d gone hiking with her boyfriend. The young man had come out of the woods alone, catatonic, and covered in blood. He was never able to say what had happened, and had been charged with her murder even though no body was ever found. In the end, he was deemed insane and sent to the state hospital.