“Oh, my dear,” said Mabel Ridge, taking the picture back. “I don’t hate you. I’ve never hated you. I hate your father.”
She said it without emotion, like she was reciting a fact of the universe. And that was enough. Loo didn’t want to hear any more. She pulled off her mother’s gloves and tossed them on the table. She stood up.
“I need a ride home.”
The old woman wiped her blue hands on the rubber apron. She adjusted her goggles. “I haven’t driven for years. But you can take the Firebird.” She slid the picture back inside the box and closed the lid, then turned to bring it to the closet, and as she did Loo snatched the gloves up again and stuffed them into her pocket.
Mabel Ridge did not ask if Loo could drive. She just handed over the keys to the rusted-out Pontiac as if they were nothing, walked Loo out to the driveway, said goodbye and shut the car door. Then she knocked on the window. When Loo rolled it down, she passed her a small photo album with a black leather cover.
“You can have this,” she said. “But I want you to bring the Firebird back. Not right away, but sometime soon. And then we’ll talk some more.”
“Okay,” said Loo. She watched the old woman shuffle up the steps of the porch and move inside. The lights still shone in all of the windows.
The Firebird looked like it had spent its life on cement blocks, but to Loo’s surprise it turned over quickly. She backed out of the driveway and the pedal lurched under her foot. The bucket seat nearly touched the ground, the engine rattled and the brakes were weak—she had to press to the floor before they caught. Loo gripped the wheel and took a breath. You can do this, she thought, and then she shifted to drive and started down the empty street, barely moving twenty miles per hour, her heart thumping like she was on a raceway.
The only time she’d ever driven was with Hawley in an empty parking lot. He’d promised to give her more lessons but she didn’t have a permit yet. Luckily, the streets were deserted, and the few cars she passed seemed to be driving just as slowly as she was—drunks hoping not to get pulled over. A few blocks from their house, Loo slid the car to a stop next to the sidewalk and turned off the ignition. Her hands were trembling.
She flipped open the album Mabel Ridge had given her, hoping to see her mother’s face again, but instead of pictures there was only Lily’s obituary and a few newspaper articles, yellowed with age. One of the articles said that it had taken days to find her mother’s body. That the lake had been dragged with a net. At the memorial service, they had played “Bye Bye Blackbird.” Apparently it was her mother’s favorite song.
When Loo had finished reading she closed the book and slid it underneath the driver’s seat. She got out and locked the door. As she walked home she thought of the photo she’d held between her fingers of her mother covered in muck, looking like a monster from an old black-and-white B movie. In the tiny mirror above the sink in Mabel Ridge’s kitchen, shaking bugs from her hair, mud on her face, Loo had not looked very different.
When she reached the corner she saw her father’s truck parked outside the house. She paused for a moment, considering her chances of sneaking in. Then she climbed the front steps. She slid the key into the lock. Instead of flipping the light switch, she kept her flashlight on and maneuvered past shadowy chairs and tables, then up the stairs. When she passed Hawley’s bedroom, she felt him there behind the closed door, waiting.
He was awake. She was sure of it. Hawley never slept much, and when he did Loo could always sense the difference in the house—a thickening quiet. Now the floorboards in his room shifted, which meant he was standing and that he had his boots on. He had been out looking for her. For hours, maybe.
The doorknob turned and a flood of brightness came over the hallway. Loo shaded her eyes against her father’s haggard face. It was as if a drain had been opened and all the life had been sucked from his features. He looked worse than he did on the nights when he did not sleep and only sat and stared at her mother’s things.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes,” Loo answered.
Hawley was shaking, the same way he had that day she went missing at the county fair, throwing off the security guards, unrecognizable in the moment before he saw her waiting at the carousel. Loo turned off her flashlight. She braced for the shouting to begin. But instead all she heard was the familiar clink of a gun being opened, and the sigh of bullets sliding from their chambers and jingling into her father’s palm.
“Then good night,” he said.
“Good night.” Her voice came out in a whisper. She waited for something else to happen, but he only stepped back into his room and closed the door, taking the light with him. Outside there were birds singing and inside it was as dark as Dogtown. Loo traced her fingertips along the wall. And then she was in her own room with her own bed and her own door to close.
She threw herself down on the mattress. Slowly she unlaced her boots, peeled off her wet socks. Her clothes smelled like sweat and smoke and the sharp air of the woods. From her pocket she took out her mother’s gloves. She slid them onto both of her hands and pressed her fingers against her eyes. The black lace clouded her vision, as if she’d opened her eyes underwater.
She was nearly asleep when she heard her father come out into the hall again. He paced up and down the rug a few times, and then he stopped outside her door. He talked to the wood, his voice winding through the keyhole.
“You’re all right,” he said again.
“Yes,” Loo said.
“Then I don’t care where you’ve been.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Don’t start saying you’re sorry,” her father said, “or you’ll be saying it for the rest of your life.”
“I’m still sorry,” she said.
“Don’t,” he said.
For a few minutes there was nothing but his breath at the door and Loo began to wonder if he’d been drinking. Then she heard him strike a match, and the scent of his cigarette filtered through the cracks. She listened as Hawley made his way downstairs. The door to the bathroom creaked open and shut. He would be in there for the rest of the night. Loo knew this like she knew her own body. And now she knew something else, something more than his old photographs and scraps of paper and haunted words. She knew that her mother dove off of breakwaters. That she was strong enough to swim through a shipping channel. That she wore gloves and rolled around in seaweed and had a father of her own. That she had grown up in a house full of color. And that she had lived a whole life before she’d met Sam Hawley.
Bullet Number Three