There was a suitcase open on her bed, and inside the suitcase, many of her clothes had already been packed. And then the tears came, burned rivers down her face. She grabbed her things from the bathroom, a couple of her books. She tried to feel anger. She told herself he had no right. But the pain was there, in all of its shades, in her father’s eyes, in her mother’s voice. Maybe just for a night, or maybe a week or two. Things would settle down. Yet her heart trembled from the sheer force of what could not be undone. She closed the suitcase and carried it out to her truck. Her parents were no longer at the kitchen table. The chair she’d knocked over had been set upright. Her father was standing at the kitchen sink with his back to her. Maybe he was looking out the window at the small backyard. Maybe he was thinking the grass needed to be mowed. Perhaps he was looking at the swing set with the red, white, and blue striped poles that had rusted over the years, the one her parents had wanted to hold on to for the day when Amy Raye would have children.
The slow cooker had been unplugged and the smell of charred meat had grown stronger. She walked out the side door to the driveway, careful not to bang the door with her suitcase, and she wondered why she was being careful now. She set the suitcase in the bed of the truck. She climbed into the driver’s seat, and when she turned the key, a loud announcement for Auto Rama Used Auto Fair played over the speakers. Her mother stepped out of the house and walked up to the truck. The windows were rolled down. She handed Amy Raye some money. “It’s all I have.”
“Is this what you want?” Amy Raye asked.
“You have to go. I can’t change his mind.” Her mother was crying now. She pressed the money into her daughter’s hand.
“Mom, don’t do this.” But Amy Raye knew it was too late.
Her mother leaned in through the window and kissed Amy Raye on the cheek. “I’m sorry,” her mother said. Then she turned around and walked back into the house.
—
The night Amy Raye left home, she drove to the Free Rein Stables. She talked to the horse named Hemlock that she was told she’d one day ride. The horse came up to her and nibbled at her T-shirt. It hadn’t rained that night, and the stars were out. After she left the stables, she drove out of town a ways until she was halfway between Lynchburg and Tullahoma. She pulled her truck over on one of the dirt roads that led to Sam Burt Hill Summit. Then she climbed in the back of her truck and, using one of her sweatshirts as a pillow, lay down. She stayed awake most of the night deciding what she would do. Her mother had given her seventy dollars. Amy Raye had over seven hundred dollars in an account at the bank.
Once the sun was up she drove to the Quik Mart in Tullahoma, fueled her truck, and bought a package of donuts, an orange juice, and a United States atlas. Then she drove back to Lynchburg to the Moore County Bank. She sat in her truck in the parking lot, finished her donuts and orange juice, and studied the atlas. When the bank opened, she went in and withdrew all of her money.
On her way out of town, she stopped by her grandparents’ farm. Their truck wasn’t in the driveway, and she decided maybe it was better that way, because what would she tell them and how could she face them if they knew what she had done? She stepped into the barn. Van Gogh walked up to the edge of his stall like he always did when Amy Raye was around. She scooped up a handful of grain from the trough, opened his stall door, and fed him. She soaked in that warm feeling of his muzzle on her hand. “I’m going to miss you most of all,” she said. Though she knew it wasn’t Van Gogh she was going to miss the most.
When the pain behind her eyes and in her chest got to be too much, she kissed Van Gogh’s nose and rubbed his ears. She told him not to step on any barn cats. She told him he was her sky and that she would always love him. She closed the stall door behind her and wiped away her tears. She walked up the hill behind the barn, along the tractor road and into the woods. She sat in her blind for close to an hour, watched the birds and the dragonflies and the squirrels and the chipmunks. She wanted to tell everybody she was sorry. But she wanted them to be sorry also. She grabbed a fistful of dirt, held it to her nose. It smelled like mud and leaves and creek water. She shoved it in her pocket and stepped out of the blind.
Instead of heading back toward the barn and house, she walked a little farther through the woods until she came upon the small cemetery with the three markers, where Nan and Lionel and she used to play with their toy soldiers. They’d use the headstones, slabs of granite that stood about two feet out of the ground, as barricades. When they’d first discovered the site, there were only two headstones, but over the next couple of years, a third one had appeared. There was something peaceful about the smoothed-out clearing as they lay on their stomachs and manipulated the plastic figures, until the afternoon Amy Raye understood whose lives were buried there, and the person who had dug the small graves.
PRU
That next week, Colm brought six men in for questioning, including the husband and Aaron and Kenny, despite the men from the hunting party having already passed a polygraph test. Each night I called Colm.
“How did it go?” I’d ask him.