A tremor runs through Gumshoe’s withers, and Meredith knows he is worried for her. He doesn’t like the going back. “Meredith, don’t let this harden your heart,” her mother says to her now on the edge of her squeaky bed somewhere, and we know this was the night after Meredith had gone to the quarry and seen Melissa Sutfin blowing Marcus Bell in the back of his Jeep Cherokee. The quarry, which isn’t a quarry at all but only a long gash in somebody’s stony field, someone’s plans gone south. Meredith feels her own humiliation rising up through the fissures in the rock. The bed squeaks but it sounds like a leather saddle. Her mother’s hand touches Meredith’s cheek and her wrist smells of Dolce & Gabbana Light Blue perfume. He’s just a boy, her mother says, though it’s not her mother’s face at all now but some young woman dressed as a hotel maid, with a face that’s lumpy and indistinct like a feather pillow. Then her mother’s face emerges beneath it. Her mother’s nails are neatly manicured and painted sea green. You’re bound for better things, she says. Her mother strokes her withers, grooms her. Meredith nuzzles her hand. Vows to forget him. To forget everything. “Oh, Meredith,” her mother says, tilting her head. “Not everything. Just some things.”
It strikes Meredith as strange that there could have been a time before she was, a time when she observed nothing and needed nothing, had no presence on the earth. The loud absence of herself suddenly surrounds Meredith, and it startles her.
Horsey girl, come back! we say. We miss you so.
She ignores us. Rides on.
Along the tree line, the cicadas start up their whine. Here and there she hears the call of a chuck-will’s-widow. Meredith can smell the water in the creek. Along its eroded bank, she’s found clamshell fossils, spiraled mollusk shells, a nautilus. All of this a shallow sea once, her dad had told her. So far back that it had to be imagined. Meredith’s mother told her on a camping trip that she had imagined Meredith before she even became pregnant. How she made a kind of emotional space where Meredith would fit, like rolling aside in the bed for someone you know is coming. But her mother worried, too, because she and her own mother were so close that she was afraid their relationship would never measure up. Such foolishness, Meredith’s mother would tell her. As if you could proportion how you love. Strangers commented on how alike they were. How even their posture was similar, their pigeon-toed walks. Meredith knows now. People she loves become strangers and strangers become achingly familiar, as if she’s somehow misplaced the memories of their time together. (We don’t have the heart to tell her our heads are soggy from walking on the bottom of this shallow sea.) When they’d ride down to the cabin ruins near the property line, Meredith’s dad would tell her stories about settler children captured by Comanche who were adopted by the tribe and gradually forgot their life before. They lived a life of constant movement and deprivation, he said. Later, when these captives were recaptured or ransomed and returned to their relatives, they often found they had no life at all back in the civilized world. They’d forgotten the language, hated to be settled in one place. They would run away, trying to rejoin their captors, the very ones who’d massacred their families. Her dad looked bewildered then as he often did now. His how and why never adding up. People need to belong somewhere, I guess, he’d said, his face pinching into silence and distance. And it’s not always in the places you’d think.
In her dad’s eyes, she can see a standing wave of fire poised over the land.
28
How can you make a story from what you don’t know? You just give us some ash and bits of drywall. A bridle. You say, well, there they are, see what you can do with them.
Shame on you. Shame.
Did my girls put you up to this?
III
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