She hadn’t seen Mama since Christmas, when she’d barely managed to get the tree up, a spindly teetering thing, propped up in the corner, strung with big colorful outdoor lights and only a handful of ornaments. When Bridget had asked her about it, Mama only muttered and waved her hand around in a circle, it’s good enough, bebe. Mama wasn’t Cajun French, but she claimed she spent a summer on the bayou as a teenager. With Mama it was hard to tell what was real and what only existed in her mind.
Mama’s crazy seemed to keep getting a little crazier and Nadine had gotten a little more watchful, but Mama took her pills and Nadine set limits on her wine and it all seemed to be working. Nadine, the spinster, took care of Mama, the widow. Sometimes Bridget couldn’t believe she’d followed in her Mama’s footsteps, a widow at thirty-seven. Sometimes she wondered when Mama’s crazy would get her, too.
Bridget left as tired as she’d come, but for drastically different reasons.
She’d gotten so lost in her own brain, thinking that it had been too long since she’d been down there, that she needed to make more time, more often. Thinking about how Nadine would cope when Mama went first, which she surely would, lifelong bipolar medication eating away at her liver like a Georgia swamp parasite.
“Mrs. Peterson?” Taylor Lawson stood in Bridget’s doorway, her messenger bag slung across her body, her shoulders hunched forward with the weight of it.
“Hi, Taylor,” Bridget said with a smile, but she was tired. She wanted to go home to her sandwich and her tea and Sunny the cat.
“Um, can I talk to you?”
“Sure.” A dark green plastic and metal chair was pushed against the whiteboard and she pulled it to her desk with her foot. Bridget motioned for her to sit. “What’s up?”
“I’m worried about Lucia.” She pushed her bangs away from her face with her hand. “I know you don’t like her.”
“That’s not true, Taylor. I don’t dislike her. I think . . .” Bridget paused, because her feelings seemed irrelevant, but then also because Taylor was Lucia’s unlikely best friend, inasmuch as Lucia could have a friend. Taylor, dark and petite, friendly but a bit of a follower, trailed by Lucia like a pet. She gave Lucia what little social credibility she had, got the duo invited to parties and events. People mostly liked Taylor and tolerated Lucia’s strangeness. Or were at least fascinated by it, until she became some kind of oddball fetish: where’s the weirdo? Then later: where’s the witch?
Bridget thought it odd, these mixing of classes. When she was in school, the juniors and seniors stuck to their own like cattle in a chute. These days, everyone was all mixed up in some kind of bubblegum soup.
But Lucia and Taylor had been added to the right table in the cafeteria, between Andrew Evans—King Evans—and Porter Max, vying for the attention of Riana Yardley. Josh Tempest, with his arms thrown around Kelsey Minnow, protective and needful, his face in her hair while she chewed iceberg lettuce from between two fingers. Lucia perched on the end, her legs thrown to the side, as though ready to bolt at any time. She rarely saw them talk to her. If Bridget had to guess, she’d wager most kids were afraid of her.
“I think Lucia needs attention. Everyone is looking for the same thing, to feel loved. Lucia’s no different,” Bridget finally said.
“I just don’t know who else to talk to. It’s weird, because she’s eighteen.”
“What’s weird?”
“Lucia said she ran away. She said she’s been living at the old paper mill.” Taylor ran her fingernail along a ridge in the wood top of the desk. Bridget felt her heart speed up. Oanoke Paper stood on the edge of town right before a thick impenetrable woods, part of the twenty-two thousand square acres of preserved game lands in northern Pennsylvania. While some well-traveled areas contained winding but clear trails, most of the forest was left untamed, dense and disorienting.
“Taylor, that’s not possible. The nights are still pretty cold. In the thirties sometimes.”
“She says she has a fire. And some kind of oil heater? I don’t know where she’d get that.”
Every other person in this county was a hunter. Schools were closed for opening day of buck season. Camping equipment wasn’t hard to come by.
“Plus, I think she skipped work. She never does that.” Taylor kicked the leg of the desk, a quiet, steady thump vibrating up Bridget’s arms.
“She works?”
“At the Goodwill. A few nights a week,” Taylor said, but with an air of confusion like a girl who’d never had a job might say.
“What do you know about her family?” Bridget asked, her tongue thick. Taylor shifted the binder in her hand and stared at the wall behind Bridget’s head.
“Enough. I don’t go there much. Her dad left, but I don’t know when. He’s a drunk. Her brother is Lenny Hamm. He was supposed to graduate like three years ago but he dropped out.” She shrugged like this was no big deal. “Heroin.”
“Heroin?” Bridget blanched.
“A lot of kids use,” Taylor said.
Bridget sighed. She thought of her tea. Her cat. She stood, grabbed her purse. “Come on, Taylor. You’re in it now.”
Taylor stood but hung back. “I should get home, Mrs. Peterson . . .”
“I’ll take you home,” Bridget said. “After.”
?????
Bridget had never been to a student’s home. That was more Nate’s thing; he’d been invited for dinners with the baseball players, steaming plates of homemade meat loaf and mashed potatoes. Comfort food as thanks. Bridget kept a nice air of distance and she’d wanted it to stay that way.
Lucia’s house sat outside of town, away from the developments and square streets that formed “downtown” Mt. Oanoke. It stood alone, beyond the trailer park on the outskirts, over the railroad tracks, literally the wrong side. It was asphalt sided, broken in places, and the shingles were hanging. The house was grayish-brown, a noncolor, and the porch was sunken as though supporting the weight of some invisible giant. The upstairs window was broken, splintered out like a spiderweb.
Bridget stared at that window, halted at the end of a broken sidewalk, one arm outstretched protectively in front of Taylor.
“What’s wrong?” Taylor asked.
“That curtain,” Bridget pointed to the broken window. “I think it moved?”
“I’ve been here before, it’s no big deal.” Taylor shrugged. “It’s just a mess. Her family is a fucking mess.” Her hand went to her mouth and she let out a little whoop. “Sorry.”
“Should we have called first? Lucia, I mean,” Bridget asked.
“She doesn’t answer her phone much anymore, anyway. Just text, and only sometimes.”
Bridget navigated the upended concrete. The porch groaned under their combined weight. She knocked. Waited. Knocked again.
Finally, the interior door slid open, wide enough for a face, a pair of gray eyes.
“Yeah?” The boy looked like Lucia, skinny with that same shock of white hair. Lenny, Bridget guessed.
“Is Lucia here?” Bridget asked, and Lenny looked past her to Taylor, regarding her with a nod.
“No.” He started to close the door.
“Lenny, wait.” Taylor reached out, her hand on the screen door handle. “When did you see her last?”