Gabby ignored her. “Lucy, I’ve got a nursing mama cat out in the woodpile. I’ll see if she’ll take ’em on. We’ll start with one, ’case she eats it. That happens, we bottle-feed.”
“You think a cat’ll nurse a possum?” Bess said, examining the roach to see if there was anything worth salvaging. “You’re nuts. That’s a crime against nature.”
“I’ve seen stranger things,” Gabby said.
“C’mon, Luce.” Bess slid her feet into a pair of flip-flops. “Let’s go to Bell’s. I’m out of cigarettes.”
“Forget it,” Gabby said. “Gonna get dark here right quick. I don’t wanna be picking pieces of you out of the river.”
“We could just as easily get chopped up in daylight.” Bess ran a finger under the edge of her shorts and tugged them down.
“I said no.” Gabby took the baby possums out of the bag one by one and draped them on her chest, where they clung to the terry cloth with tiny paws.
“You weren’t so worried about our safety when you used to lock us in the station wagon and whore yourself out at the Red Fox,” Bess said.
“If I wasn’t worried, I wouldn’t have locked the doors.” They glared at each other until Gabby stalked off, cradling the possums.
“Why do you have to bring up stuff like that?” I asked.
“It just pisses me off,” Bess said. “You know how she had that come-to-Jesus moment after the whole Cheri thing, went back to A.A., started asking where I’m going all the time.” She twisted her hair into a bun and then shook it loose. “It’s annoying. She thinks she’s mother of the year now. I just like to remind her.”
“She’s still smoking,” I said. “How’s that work with A.A.?”
Bess laughed. “Pot’s not a drug, it’s her medicine—she says it’s for her anxiety. Like Xanax or something. It’s the only thing that keeps her sane. I’m actually looking forward to working at Wash-n-Tan so I don’t have to spend all summer stuck in the trailer with her.”
“I wish you were working with me at Dane’s.”
“Your dad hasn’t even said he’ll let you.”
“I know, but he will. He doesn’t have any good reason to say no.” For the past two years, he’d told me I was too young for the job, but he could hardly argue now that I was seventeen.
Bess smirked. “Maybe he’s worried that if you hang around your uncle too much, you’ll wind up like Becky Castle.”
“Holly’s mom? I don’t even know if Crete’s still seeing her. And she was a wreck before they started dating.” Holly was a few years younger than us, a tiny girl so pale and white-blond that Bess used to call her an albino. The three of us had been in 4-H club back in grade school and had done a team project together, raising rabbits to show at the fair. Holly’s mom, Becky, was always forgetting to come pick her up after club meetings.
Bess nodded. “Yeah, but have you seen her lately? She looks like a wrung-out dishrag. She was over at Bell’s one night, dancing by herself in front of the jukebox. Had jizz crusted all down the back of her hair.”
“How do you know it was jizz?” I asked, laughing.
Bess shrugged. “Just saying, if your dad thinks I’m a bad influence, I can see where he wouldn’t want you around somebody like her.”
Crete never bothered to introduce any of his girlfriends to me or Dad, probably because Dad was always telling him that he had terrible taste in women. None of the relationships lasted long enough to get serious anyway.
“All right, I need to get home,” I said, wadding up the burlap sack that had held the possums. “Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“You know she’ll wanna drive you back.”
“Tell her you tried to stop me.” I smiled and blew Bess a kiss.
She pretended to catch the kiss in her palm, then pressed it to her lips, something dumb we’d done since we were babies. “Try not to get dismembered,” she said. Dismembered. The word came easily, like she’d said it a hundred times. It was a newspaper word, one that grew too comfortable with repetition, from countless articles in dozens of papers and broadcasts on the Springfield nightly news. It was easy to think of Cheri as dismembered. It was harder to think of someone leaning on a blade to saw through her joints, to cut muscle, windpipe, bone. It didn’t seem fair to condense what had happened to her into one clean word.
I took the long way home, crossing onto conservation land to stare into the mouth of Old Scratch Cavern, where dogs had tracked my mother’s scent when she went missing. Old Scratch, of course, was a nickname for the devil. I didn’t go in; narrow tunnels and false floors gave way to an underground river that never saw light. Things lost to the cave stayed lost, and if my mother’s bones rode blind currents in the earth, I’d never find them.
When I was old enough to hear the story, I thought the worst part of my mother’s disappearance was the uncertainty, not knowing what really became of her. The sheriff was convinced she’d killed herself, but no one could prove she was dead. The search parties Dad pulled together yielded nothing definitive. Bloodhounds followed her scent toward the cave but didn’t find her. The most worrisome part was that my dad’s pistol had disappeared with her, and she’d left with nothing else, but even that didn’t prove anything. I wasn’t the only one who didn’t take the official explanation as gospel; as with anything concerning my mother, there were rumors and stories and whispers of magic. That she haunted Old Scratch and roamed the hills at night. That she’d traded spirits with a crow and flown away, or slipped off with traveling Gypsies. Without evidence of her death, I could continue to believe she was alive somewhere, that for some reason she’d had to leave but would someday come back for me. I begged Gabby and Birdie (and my dad, before he stopped talking about her) for stories, details, any scrap of who she was and what she did. I pieced her together over time, a mosaic of others’ words: witch and ghost, woman and girl, magic and real. I wanted more, but that was all I had.
When Cheri turned up in the tree, I knew uncertainty wasn’t the worst part. It was a luxury, a gift. The worst part was knowing for sure that your loved one was dead, and I was grateful then that my mother’s body had never been found. The mystery eats away at you, but it leaves a thin rind of hope.
It was dark already among the trees, fireflies flaring and burning out like flashbulbs, but the path was familiar, and I was more cautious than scared. I’d avoided the woods after Cheri’s murder, just like everyone else, but after a while the fear dulled. I knew the land better than any stranger who might wander through. If I paid attention to my surroundings and kept up my guard, I’d be fine. I wasn’t like Cheri, who’d been vulnerable as a wounded fawn, the easiest kind of prey. No one looking out for her. Not even me.
When I got home, I fixed myself a peanut butter sandwich and a glass of tea to take up to my room. I snapped on the bedside lamp, sending shadows scurrying up the lavender walls, and turned on the fan in the window next to my bed. Fresh air flowed into the room and slowly flipped the pages of the notebook I’d left on my pillow. It was a journal of sorts, mostly lists. “Things I Know About My Mother” (almost a full page, including a strand of hair I’d found on an old nightgown of hers and taped in the margin). “Boys I’ve Kissed” (five: four from a spin-the-bottle game at a river party where I got drunk on apple wine, and one a visiting pastor’s son Dad caught leading me—willingly—toward sin on the front porch). “What Happened to Cheri?” Her death hadn’t answered that question, hadn’t narrowed the list of possibilities. She’d run away or she’d been taken, and the last year of her life was a question mark.
When I wasn’t scrutinizing Cheri’s list, I jotted down notes about places where I wanted to travel. Iowa, of course, to see where my mother had lived, but I wouldn’t stay there long. It wasn’t far enough away. Sometimes I wanted to put so much space between myself and Henbane that it would take days to cover the distance. Dad had never taken me farther than Branson, and he had no interest in going anywhere else, even if we could afford it. He had my life plotted out in three bullet points: get good grades, stay out of trouble, go to college. He hadn’t accomplished any of them himself, but he insisted it was what my mother wanted for me. He’d added a fourth bullet after the incident with the pastor’s son: Don’t let a boy get in the way of numbers one through three.
Dad couldn’t complain about my grades, which came easily. He said I must have gotten that from Mom’s side of the family. And I hadn’t been in much trouble except the occasional scuffle with Craven Sump, nephew of Joe Bill, who—if you believed the story—had slithered off into the brush, never to be seen again after my mother turned him into a snake. Dad said Joe Bill ran off to avoid paying child support, but Craven and his kin believed in black magic. He called me “witch” or “devil’s spawn” every chance he could, and sometimes I got tired of it and called him a dumbass or gave him a little shove and he’d report me to the office. The principal would sigh and tell me I had more potential than anyone else in my class, but I needed to work on my charms and graces if I wanted to get somewhere in life. Sometimes I’d glare at Craven, focusing all my energy on a mental picture of snakes clotted in a den, but he remained in his annoying human form. If my mother truly had transformative powers, she hadn’t passed them on to me.
I sprawled across the bed to eat my sandwich and pulled my paperback copy of Beloved out of the crack between the mattress and footboard, thumbing it open to a photocopied bookmark from Nancy’s Trade-A-Book. Henbane’s tiny library (“library” being an exaggeration—it was just a room in the basement of the courthouse) never had anything good, so I’d made a list for Dad, and whenever he passed through Mountain Home, he’d stop at Nancy’s and see what he could find.
When I couldn’t keep my eyes open to read any more, I got ready for bed in the pink bathroom across the hall and turned off all the lights. I padded over to the double window opposite my bed, the one that looked out across the backyard and into the hills. We’d learned in science class that stars looked brighter here than in most places because there were no competing lights. Henbane was a dark spot on the globe seen from space.
Black flakes like falling ash scattered across the moon as bats swirled through the sky. They spilled out of Old Scratch on summer nights and swooped through the valley to feed, their presence as familiar and comforting as the bugs and frogs that sang me to sleep. Dad once spent a month working a construction job in Little Rock, sleeping in a hotel, and when he came home, the nighttime sounds were deafening to his unaccustomed ears. The hotel room had been too quiet at first for him to sleep, but in time he’d gotten used to the absence of night music. I wondered if it would be the same for me when I left Henbane, if all the little pieces of home would so quickly be forgotten.
I had deer steaks and gravy in the skillet when Dad walked in Friday night with a book under his arm. Even though it wasn’t quite summertime, his skin was already dark from working outdoors every day.
“That deer smells like heaven after a week of McDonald’s,” he said, grinning and pulling me into a hug. He let go and handed me the book. “I know you been wanting this one.”
Song of Solomon, its pages brown and swollen as if it had been dropped in a bathtub. “Thanks, Dad.”
“So you’re all done with school, right? How was the last day?” he asked, flipping through a week’s worth of junk mail on the counter.
“Fine. Nothing new.” I laid the food out on the table and poured glasses of tea while Dad pulled his boots off and set them by the back door.
We sliced our steaks in silence. The venison was tough. Birdie had taught me how to make it several years back, though her recipe involved soaking it in milk for twenty-four hours, and I never managed to start a meal that far in advance.
“Have you talked to Uncle Crete?” I asked.
“Yep. He seems to think you’re coming to work for him.”
“So? What do you think? Maybe I could finally get my own phone. And I could save some money for college.” I thought surely I’d hook him on that one.
“You don’t need a cellphone. And you’ll get scholarships.”
“Dad.”
“I didn’t say no.” He pulled a piece of gristle out of his mouth and set it on the edge of his plate while I waited for him to continue. “But there’s gonna be some rules.”
I smiled. This was going better than I’d hoped. I was already following the long list of rules he’d created for when I stayed home alone. A few more couldn’t be that bad. And with him gone, he’d never know when I bent the more ridiculous ones. “Go on,” I said in my most dramatic voice.
“I’m being serious here,” he said. “No working after dark. No walking home alone through the woods after dark. No socializing with your uncle’s pals over there.” I thought of Becky Castle with her crusty hair. No temptation to break that rule. “And you’re gonna save most of your paycheck.”
“Sure,” I said. “Is that it?”
His knife and fork stopped moving and he was quiet for a moment, a strange look crossing his face. He stumbled around whatever he was trying to say. “Crete’ll be looking out for you … but you need to use your best judgment. You don’t know what kind of folks you might run into up there, and … you just need to mind your business and do your work and stay out of anything that don’t concern you. And if anything makes you uncomfortable, let me know. I can give him some reason you gotta quit.”
“What’re you talking about?” I asked. I could tell he wasn’t joking around, but I couldn’t imagine what had him worried. “I’ll be renting canoes and selling worms. It’s not exactly dangerous.”
His left eyebrow curled down like it did when he was about to lose his patience. “I want you to take in what I said, and I want you to agree to it.”
“Sure,” I said. “But you don’t have to worry about me. I’m really good at taking care of myself.”
“I know,” he said softly, looking down at his plate. As though he regretted that fact.