Wes swallowed hard. Then bobbed his head in assent.
“I just want to be with my sons again. I can’t see any further ahead than that.” Marta sighed and rubbed her middle fingers along her sharp, high cheekbones. “I need to make sure you know that about me. My motives are selfish. Everything I do—it’s going to be a calculation. Whatever I think is likeliest to get me home to them. Whatever it takes.”
“I understand,” Wes said. “So what do we do? Do you have a plan?”
“Ha. Not as such.”
“What then?”
“I play it like I play chess,” Marta said. “June will come to me. She’ll want me to do something, or she’ll want to ask questions about David. Maybe she’ll kill me and send him my head. I don’t think so, though. Not yet. So right now, I wait and see. When I know her move, I’ll start thinking about mine.”
Seventeen
Violet has three distinct memories of the time before she escaped Flat Rock.
The first is of her mother’s death. She’d had a baby in her belly, she’d explained to Violet (though Violet wasn’t Violet then; Violet’s very young, very well-meaning mother had saddled her with the name Alexandria Magnificent—Alma, thankfully, for short), and the baby had hurt her bad coming out and then ended up dying after all the trouble it had put her through. Violet’s mother was laid up after the birth in their camper, thin under a thinner blanket, and a red bloom had suddenly appeared down where her tummy was, the size of a saucer and then, in seconds, the size of a dinner plate. “Alma,” she’d said, face white as bone and lips the faded blue-gray of a winter sky, “you got to run and get Big Mama right this instant.” And Violet (Alma) had. She had dragged Big Mama, muttering and cursing, to the camper by her index finger. But Violet’s mother was dead by the time they returned. “Mommy,” Violet had said, jabbing the body. “Mommy. Mommy, wake up.”
Big Mama had slapped her jabbing hand. “Quit that. Your mumma’s dead. Go lay in your bed and hush up before you give me a headache.”
The second memory of that time is from some summer night. Wall Day, maybe, and there were fireworks over the lake, and this man (his face was a blank to her now, but he’d had a mustache) had made her go with him, she had been very scared, this hadn’t happened before, and Big Mama had said to her, “Put your big girl britches on. It’ll be over before you know it.” So she had expected something very bad, but the man had only hoisted her to the top of his camper, held her hand while the black sky was fissured with gold and green and red, and she hadn’t liked his sweaty palm much, or his loud, stuttering respirations, but he was nice, he didn’t hurt her, and he’d even given her a soft brown sweet square that melted on her tongue. The most extraordinary thing she’d ever tasted.
This is a good memory. Violet is grateful that one of the three is.
It would be inaccurate, really, to say the third memory is “distinct.” It lacks form, it lacks narrative. But it makes up for these lacks in its intensity, a story told by sensation—a pain so large and long it nearly blots out every other sense. The pain is
ROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAR
a thing that keeps happening, that she participates in, it is outside of time, somehow, so that what Violet remembers of her agony might only be its first few shocking seconds, or minutes, or of all the weeks that followed them. There is the pain, the primal enduring roar of it, and a handful of other sensations that flare across the roar like—well—fireworks. Blinding light, then a dark blot moving across it. Screams. A brief dimming of the pain when something cool and thick touches her neck, and the odd sticky, crackling sound the cool stuff made. Like river mud when it sucks at your boots. This is a comparison Violet can only make now, because she didn’t have boots when she lived at Flat Rock, and she’d never seen a river. Only the lake, the lake so expansive from Violet’s brief glimpses of it that it might as well have been an ocean.
Violet can remember other things about her years at Flat Rock, but what she remembers are amalgams of many moments and many days. Her walk from home to Fat Daddy’s camper. Shaquoia—she was the one who took Violet (Alma) in after her mother died—frying fish patties on the camper’s little hot plate, and the accompanying smells of oily tinned fish and hot old grease.
A flicker here, at this memory. A very bad thing. But Violet doesn’t pursue the thought, has no desire to follow it where it goes.
There was a game she would sometimes play with the other squirrels, if no one needed them, and they kept very, very quiet. Duck, duck, goose. She remembers how it felt to whisper-giggle, needing to laugh but never sure what the laugh would cost you.
There were many hurts. Violet doesn’t remember breaking her arm or her leg, she doesn’t remember any one of the hundreds of hits or bruises—but she has a composite memory of Fat Daddy’s furious face, Big Mama’s long-suffering face, a composite memory of the hits and bruises, of the way a bruise starts deep purple and fades to yellow. She has a composite memory of being afraid. Constantly.