“So,” I said. Daniel and I were meandering along the riverbank, cooling our feet in the shallows. “Your mom gets rid of spirits. She sounds like more of a witch than my mom.”
He smiled wryly. “Not exactly. She’s into herbs and that sort of thing.”
A cottonmouth slid into the water and rode the current away from us. “What was Mrs. Stoddard talking about, the trouble with the Walker girl? Did she mean Janessa?”
“Yeah, do you know her?” he asked, rolling a stone in his palm.
“I know of her. She went to school with my dad, and he’s friends with her uncle Ray. She’s one of the few people I know of who left Henbane and didn’t come back. How did she get your mom in trouble?”
“Back when it happened, her dad was the mayor and Ray was a lawyer—not yet a judge, like he is now, but they had a lot of influence. Janessa was home from college for summer break, and she came to see my mom.” Daniel looked away from me, across to the far bank of the river, where a tree leaned low enough to wet its leaves. “Janessa couldn’t sleep. At least that’s what she said at first. She’d heard that my mom could help with things like that. So Mom gave her some valerian root to make tea. Janessa left, but she came back a few days later. She said the tea wasn’t working, and she started bawling, and Mom knew something else was wrong. My mom’s pretty good at getting people to open up—you’ll see when you meet her—and after a while, she got Janessa calmed down and asked her what was really going on, why it was she couldn’t sleep in the first place.”
“What was it?”
“Promise you won’t repeat any of this, even to Bess?”
“I won’t,” I said.
Daniel threw the stone he’d been holding, and it flitted across the surface of the water one, two, three beats before sinking. “Her parents had found out that she’d dropped out of school in the middle of the semester, and they were furious. They’d always expected her to go to law school after college and then come back home and work with her uncle Ray. Her dad was making all kinds of threats about cutting her off if she didn’t go back to school, and her mom was so disappointed that she wouldn’t even speak to her. They didn’t want anybody to find out, because it would be an embarrassment to the whole Walker family. But Janessa didn’t want to go back to school, and she didn’t want to stay in Henbane, either.”
“Why did she drop out in the first place?” I asked.
“That’s the crazy part. She was going out a lot, meeting guys her parents would have hated. They’d blamed her for screwing things up with Carl—your dad—and she was getting him out of her system, dating guys who were nothing like him. Nothing serious; she was just having fun.
“Then one night a guy gave her a drink that made her feel all sick and dizzy. When she asked him to take her home, he carried her out to the alley and laid her down in the back of a van. She was confused and barely conscious by that point, but she said she caught sight of a guy with a ball cap pulled low over his eyes and a bushy beard covering half his face. The guy started arguing with her date, and she swore to my mom that the guy was holding a pair of handcuffs. She heard the bearded guy say something like ‘I ain’t messing with no mayor’s daughter.’ The next thing she remembered was waking up in some bushes behind a liquor store. She got back to her apartment and locked herself in, and after that, she was so scared to leave that she stopped going to class. When school got out, she came back home. But she didn’t feel any safer in Henbane, because whoever that guy was, the one who knew she was the mayor’s daughter—she was scared she might run into him. She was suspicious of everybody.”
“Wow,” I said. “That does sound crazy. Like something from a TV show.”
“Yeah. Mom believed her, though. There wasn’t any reason to make up a story like that, and she could tell Janessa was really scared. The poor girl was so worked up about it that she was having trouble eating and sleeping. She asked Mom for something stronger than the tea to help settle her nerves, but Mom didn’t have anything more to give her. She tried to convince Janessa to talk to her parents or go see a doctor. But Janessa must have found something stronger somewhere else, because whatever she took that day nearly killed her. I don’t know what she told her parents, but the Walkers came after my mom. They threatened to prosecute her and run her out of town, even though they couldn’t prove anything.”
“So that’s why your mom practices under the radar now.”
“Pretty much.”
“And that’s why Janessa never moved back here?”
“I guess. Her parents whisked her away somewhere, and she’s barely been back since.”
I’d seen pictures of Janessa in my dad’s old yearbook, with her poufy eighties hair and wide smile—student council, volleyball captain, fall harvest queen. It was hard to believe a girl like that could get herself into such a mess. But there was always so much we didn’t know about people, lurking right below the surface where we couldn’t see it. I’d pored over old photo albums, trying to locate despair in the corners of my mother’s smile, depression in the set of her shoulders as she held me gleefully suspended in the air. Anything to indicate she was about to kill herself. Abandon me. But there was nothing so obvious as to be visible. In the pictures, she was madly in love with me and my dad. If the pictures said anything, it was that she was happier and more beautiful than anyone in Henbane had a right to be.
Cheri’s pictures were more telling. In her ninth-grade photo, you could see the shadow of a bruise on her cheek. A wariness in her eyes. A tentative smile coaxed by the photographer, a stranger who had no idea that the portrait would later end up on the front page of hundreds of newspapers. And in the hollow of Cheri’s throat, for the world to see, the blue butterfly, the symbol of our friendship.
I thought about what Mrs. Stoddard had said about being haunted by Cheri’s ghost. If I didn’t find out what had happened to her, she would always be drifting somewhere in the ether, a life that never quite materialized. She would haunt me in a quiet, ghostless way, the knowledge that in life I had neglected to save her, and in death failed to bring her peace. I would have preferred to see her ghost, in the way that I’d always hoped to be visited by my mother’s. But ghosts never came when you wanted them to, and I didn’t know how to stop wanting.
The next weekend Dad was meeting some friends at Bell’s, so he gave me a ride to Bess’s. She and her mom usually cooked a big meal on Saturday nights, and then Bess and I would watch a movie while Gabby went out to play bingo. It was one of the few vices she had left, and she clung to it like a religion.
Bess and I sat on the porch with a tick-covered hound dog, tending barbecued chicken on the grill while Gabby made potato salad in the kitchen. Clouds darkened the sky, and a cool breeze picked up ahead of the storm, rattling wind chimes in the trees around the trailer.
“Gage still hasn’t called me back,” Bess said, parting the dog’s fur to remove a swollen tick.
“Sorry,” I said. I could tell she wasn’t surprised. Lightning threaded through the clouds, and I counted to ten before I heard the muted grumble of thunder.
“So what’s going on with you and Daniel?” Bess asked, pinching my arm.
“We’re friends.”
Bess groaned. “You’re not trying hard enough.”
“I’m not trying at all.”
Gabby hollered at us to bring in the chicken, and we got inside before the first drops of rain tapped the trailer. Throughout dinner, I’d look up and catch Gabby staring at me with a troubled expression. When I asked her if the possums were doing okay, she nodded absently. After we finished eating, we put our dinner plates on the floor for the various cats to fight over, and Gabby excused herself while Bess and I dug in to the blackberry pie. We were sprawled on the couch trying to decide what movie to watch when Gabby reappeared, lugging a cardboard box. She set it at my feet.
“This is for you,” she said, her face puckered like she might start crying. “Some of your mom’s things, just some clothes and such. I was thinking they might fit you now. Your dad had me take it all way back when. I think it hurt him too much to have it around. I saved it for you, though, most of it.”
“Thanks,” I said. I hadn’t known there was anything left besides the photo albums. My mom hadn’t had much to begin with.
“I just— I look at you now, and it’s eerie, almost, like I’m seeing her.” A few tears broke through.
“God, are you going through menopause?” Bess said. She turned to me. “I swear, if she’s not high, she’s crying.”
“I gotta get to bingo,” Gabby said, wiping her nose and heading for the door.
“Good luck,” I said. We heard the car start up and drive off in the rain.
“I really think she’s losing it,” Bess said. “You know what she told me? She said that box had been sitting in the same spot on her closet shelf for years, and then the other day, for no reason, it fell off and spilled all over the floor.” She nudged the box with her foot. “You gonna open it?”
I shook my head. “Just pick a movie. I don’t care which one.” I didn’t want to open the box in front of her, in front of anyone.
“What’s that?” Dad asked when he came to pick me up. He smelled like beer and smoke, but he wasn’t drunk.
“Just some clothes,” I said, climbing into the truck with the box on my lap.
“We’re gonna have a problem if you start dressing like Bess,” he warned. A deer stepped into the beam of our headlights then, and he swerved around it, tires crunching gravel in the ditch and diverting his attention away from me and the contents of the box.