“Does your son ever swim in the reservoir?” I ask her, and she nearly hacks up a lung.
“He don’t know how.” She pounds her chest, loosening whatever’s rattling around there. “Sorry. I worked over at Optimal for fifteen years. That’s why the cough.” She lights a cigarette.
“Is that why you left?” I ask.
“Didn’t leave. I got fired.”
My heart sinks: any good defense lawyer will blow holes through her story, claim she’s looking for revenge and a payday. Still, I persist. I kind of like Carolina Dawes and her polka-dot stretch pants.
“You have well water, don’t you?” I ask her, and her expression folds up around her cigarette, like she’s trying to suck herself down it, not the other way around.
“We should,” she says. “But how things been going…this is the third year straight running with a drought…” She taps her ash angrily onto the porch. “So I figure why not take a little something free?”
Suddenly I understand. The PVC piping, the hoses rigged like laundry lines in the backyard: she’s been tapping the reservoir.
“But that’s when Coop started having all those problems, when we decided to try and give the well a rest…”
“Do you have pictures of his rash?” I ask her, and she grinds the cigarette out into the railing, exhaling a long plume of smoke.
“I can do you one better,” she says, and then turns her head to shout. “Coop. Coop! I know you hear me, so get your little butt down here. He’s a little shy,” she adds, as someone moves in the darkness behind the screen door. “And all that itching and nonsense ain’t helping none, let me tell you. Come on, Coop. It’s all right. This nice lady’s here to help.”
A little boy, maybe five or six, edges carefully into the light. He is unexpectedly beautiful: big blue eyes, blond hair, perfect features. Cherubic. Half his face is still in shadow; half his face glows in the sun.
He steps right up to the door and places a hand to the screen. Then he turns and leans his cheek against it, and the sun catches the scabrous raw sores on his cheek and jaw and neck, the desperate marks where he has scratched his way through the skin.
“It itches,” is all he says.
Chapter Seven
What do I remember?
—Kaycee Mitchell narrowing to a long dark shadow, moving down the road, whacking at the corn with a blunt stick, teasing out the rats, sending a blur of dark bodies across the road.
—Misha Dale, smile as wide as a fishbowl, standing by the bathroom sinks when I pushed out of a stall. How I almost crawled back into the toilet. How I wanted to flush myself away. You know there’s operations for ugly now, she said, cocking her head. I bet we could even raise donations. Kaycee was putting on lipstick, drawing the lines in real thick. Unexpectedly, she turned around. They’ve got operations for being dumb, too, she said to Misha. But once they can cure bitch I’ll let you know. A warning in her eyes when she looked at me, a subtle tic: Go.
—Kaycee leaning against a fence, smoking a cigarette, the dazzle of floodlights in the football stadium turning her to silhouette. The smoke, the way it curled, like it had questions to ask.
—God doesn’t exist, people made him up. It flew out of Kaycee’s mouth in the middle of senior year. History. Her fingernails were filed sharp, painted with Wite-Out. When I turned around to stare, I hardly recognized her.
—Kaycee alone in the art studio, after the final bell, working on an enormous canvas, slashing in broad strokes of red and black, painting like she was cutting, like the color was bleeding out.
—And finally: Kaycee, bent over a toilet in the fourth-floor bathroom. The stall door swinging open. A sour smell hanging heavy in the air. Go away, she said, when I reached for her. She turned; streaks of bright red blood ringed her mouth. Then I saw it: blood on her fingers, blood in the toilet. Vomit tangling her hair. Leave me alone, you freak! But instead I just stood there. She retched again, almost missing the toilet. This time when she looked at me, her eyes were wide and desperate, like open sores. What’s happening? she whispered. Please. What’s happening to me?
Chapter Eight
If there are chemical contaminants in the water now—blistering Cooper Dawes’s skin, leaching bad smells from the taps—there might have been chemical contaminants in the water ten years ago, when Kaycee Mitchell first started collapsing in class. I return to the idea that maybe Kaycee Mitchell really was sick. That there was truth buried deep inside the lies.
If so, I could use Kaycee’s testimony, especially now that the Davies and the Ioccos are backpedaling. A little thrill moves through me at the idea of finally having an excuse to reach out—but I have no idea where she is.
And for the first time in a decade, the full force of the question returns to me: Why did she run away? Misha didn’t. None of the other girls did. Was Kaycee simply looking for an excuse to disappear?
I’ve looked for her before. How could I not? I found hundreds of Kaycee Mitchells on Facebook but never the real one. Once, late at night, my then roommate banged through the door, drunk, and caught me combing through pictures of strange blond girls. Who’s the hottie you’re creeping? she asked. I slammed the computer shut so hard I nearly snapped her nails off. After that she never walked around in a towel in front of me again; she brought her clothes into the bathroom and changed right after leaving the shower.
How could I explain it to her? I couldn’t even explain it to myself. All I know is that Barrens broke something inside of me. It warped the needles on my compass and turned the south to north and lies to truth and vice versa. And what happened to Kaycee senior year—what happened to all her friends as they began falling, fainting, and forgetting—is the central magnet. If I have any hope of finding my way again, I have to figure out which way the truth was pointing all along.
Which way did you run, Kaycee Mitchell?
—
There are four porn stores and six strip clubs named Temptations in Indiana, three of them in Gary alone. Luckily, only one is in Barrens.
I count the rings by primes. One. Three. Five.
Kaycee’s mom ran off even before I became friends with her, back in first grade—that was a bad time for crank in Indiana, and her mom was a user. Her dad, a notorious drinker, owned the 99-cent store. I never liked being at Kaycee’s house when her dad was home, and I got the sense that she didn’t, either. That’s why we were so close when we were kids: we met in the woods, and we practically lived there, toeing the edge of the reservoir, pretending the water was a mirror that would slip us into a different world.
When we were in middle school, Frank Mitchell opened a porn shop—the same one I passed on my way into town. Everybody was sure he sold weed there, too, and six-packs from a cooler concealed behind a wall of old Playboy magazines.