CHAPTER 16
LILA
I was too alarmed by what Ransome had said to feel relieved when Carl scooped me out of bed and carried me to his truck. I grasped that I wasn’t supposed to tell Carl what his brother had done to me, and Ransome had made it easier by lying to him herself.
Back at Carl’s, I was placed in an upstairs bedroom with whitewashed walls and an old iron bed. Light filtered through the trees outside the window and played across the wood floor. I was grateful to be out of the darkness, to know night from day and sense the passing of time. Once I was feeling more alert, I realized the room was too feminine for Carl; it must have been his mother’s. There was a dressing table with a large round mirror across from the bed, and I could see myself propped on a pile of feather pillows. I looked like a storybook witch, my eyes ringed with shadows and my dark hair bushy and tangled.
I spent a whole week in bed, Birdie Snow feeding me pills and spreading sticky concoctions on my skin while Carl watched anxiously. I expected to be pressed for details about what had happened, but there were few questions. I got the feeling Carl didn’t want to upset me by talking about it, and I was terrified that Crete would come after me if I didn’t keep his secret. Though there was no hiding the bruises or the bite, Carl thought Sump was to blame. I didn’t know how much he’d told Birdie. She rarely spoke as she tended to me, aside from occasional orders for me to swallow something, lift my nightgown, or hold still.
By the end of that first week at Carl’s, my bruises had faded. I was able to get up and move around, though I felt nervous leaving the bedroom by myself, even to use the bathroom across the hall. Carl kept me company as much as he could, but there was someone else I wanted to see. I asked him for Gabby’s phone number.
Gabby sounded surprised and happy to hear from me, and it was good to know that I’d been missed. She asked if things had let up on the farm. Crete had told her I was too busy in the fields to work any shifts at the restaurant. I didn’t contradict what Crete had said, only added to it with the story Carl and I had agreed on—that I’d come down with something and gotten really sick. She wanted to know how I’d ended up at Carl’s, and all I could think to tell her was that he’d been worried about me. She had no problem believing it.
The next morning, Gabby stopped by, and Carl brought her upstairs to see me. She forced a smile and hugged me and didn’t say anything about how awful I looked. We sat on the bed, and she filled me in on all the gossip I’d missed. Everybody was talking about Joe Bill Sump running off to spite his ex-wife, who depended on him for child support. He was a snake-eyed son of a bitch, Gabby said, and she wouldn’t miss him at all. He’d never left her a tip in his life. I wondered if people were talking about me, too, but if anyone besides Gabby noticed or cared that I hadn’t been around the restaurant, she didn’t mention it.
Gabby insisted on coming over every day on her way to work. She would sit on Carl’s mother’s bed with me and style my hair or paint my nails or insist that I put on some blush. There was a man in the house, after all, and she didn’t want me letting myself go. Gabby had been through two new boyfriends since I’d seen her last. She asked me lots of questions about Carl, like how serious were we, and wasn’t it romantic that he’d brought me to his house to recuperate.
“Not that romantic,” I said. “I’m wearing his mom’s ugly-ass nightgown.” Gabby laughed, and I laughed, too. For the first time since leaving the garage, I let myself stop worrying that Crete would barge into the house and drag me back. I didn’t feel safe—memories of the attack hung over me like storm clouds—but somehow, in the bright bedroom, I felt a little less afraid.
Carl stayed in the house most days, though he left me alone much of the time so I could rest. I heard him downstairs rattling pans in the kitchen and watching TV. I’d asked him why he came back from Arkansas early, and he said there’d been an accident on the job site, and the project was on hold for a day or two. He’d been glad for the unexpected time off, because there was something he wanted to talk to me about. All he’d tell me now, though, was that it could wait. Everything could wait until I was better. I didn’t know how long he could put his life on hold for me. He’d been home from work for almost two weeks, and I fretted about what would happen when he had to go back.
Sunday evening, Carl brought two bowls of vegetable soup up to the bedroom so we could eat together, him in the chair and me with a tray on the bed. “Mmm,” I said, savoring my first spoonful. “I can tell it’s homemade. Is it Birdie’s?”
“Now, why do you always assume Birdie made it if it’s good? I can cook.”
“Sorry,” I said.
“I’m just joking.” He smiled and patted my leg. “Of course she made it. There’s buckets of it in the deep freeze; it’ll last us through winter.”
I looked down into my bowl, wondering if that was true. Would we be here together in this house, eating Birdie’s soup, come winter? I didn’t know what was going on with Crete. I didn’t know if it was safe to stay, if I even wanted to stay.
“And if you’re worried about your job, don’t be,” he said. “Crete’s hired a kid to help Ransome out, and he’s gonna get somebody on part-time at the restaurant. It’ll all sort itself out.” A grim look crossed his face, but I might have imagined it, because then he was smiling again and teasing me about how much I’d eaten and did I want seconds. It was a good sign, he said, my appetite improving.
I felt woozy the next morning when Birdie came to check the bite. I closed my eyes every time she removed the bandage, because it nauseated me to think about Crete’s mouth on my body, but this time she didn’t put a new bandage on. My visible wounds had healed. I talked to her about how I felt weak and dizzy sometimes when I got up for my shower, and she said it was from spending so much time lying around. The more I got up and about, the better I’d feel, and there was no reason for me to be in bed.
When Gabby arrived, Carl left to run a few errands. I was feeling better by then. It was her day off, so I knew she had extra time, and I asked if we could go outside.
“Does Carl approve?” she asked, only partly teasing.
“Birdie does,” I said. “She says I need the fresh air, need to get used to using my muscles again.”
She helped me up and we started across the room. “Wait,” she said. “You can’t wear that awful nightgown outdoors. No offense to Mama Dane.”
“Are my clothes here?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said, “but Carl got you a few things.” She opened the closet and pulled out a simple dress. “It’s secondhand, but that’s all we’ve got in town. If he’d been willing to leave you alone long enough, he would’ve driven down to Mountain Home and bought you some new stuff.”
Gabby and I sat on the porch swing for a while, just watching clouds inch by. “Can we walk down the road a little?” I asked.
“Sure, if you’re up to it.”
We walked slowly, stopping frequently to shake out my secondhand sandals when rocks slipped in between the straps. We hadn’t made it far when I noticed something draped over the barbed-wire fence. As we got closer, I could make out the body of a snake, maybe four feet long, its brown skin patterned with diamonds. I pointed it out to Gabby.
“Oh,” she said. “That’s to make it rain. Old superstition. We had a drought a couple years back, and there was snake jerky hanging all over the place.”
The smell reached me, and my head swam. I doubled over and threw up in the road.
“Uh-oh,” Gabby said. “We best get you back to the house.” She took my arm and led me back, making me lie down in bed even though I no longer felt sick.
“I’m fine,” I said. “I think it was just the smell.”
“Smell wasn’t that bad,” she said. “You should tell Birdie. Could be something’s still not right.”
“I told her I’ve been feeling weak and dizzy, and she said that’s normal. It’s usually just in the morning, though.”
Gabby stared at me the way people do when you have a spider on you but they haven’t figured out a good way to tell you.
“You’re sick in the morning.”
I nodded. “It doesn’t last. I’m starving by lunch.”
“Uh-huh. And when was your last period?”
“My period?” I didn’t know. It had never been regular.
“Are you pregnant?”
It was a ridiculous thing for her to say. “No.”
“But it is possible. And how do you know you’re not?”
Time stopped as all the different pieces came together. I’d been lulled into a kind of blissful ignorance during my time at Carl’s, had forgotten the pattern my life was following, where it grew shittier at every turn. I’d dreamed of having a new family, but not now, not like this. I could not imagine anything worse at that moment than something growing inside me. I felt too hollow even to summon tears.
We sat there, and after a while I noticed that Gabby was holding my hand. Carl would be back soon, and I would have one more horrible thing I couldn’t tell him.
“It’ll be okay,” she said. “Carl’s not like some guys. He won’t be mad. He won’t think you did it on purpose.”
I didn’t want to tell her it might not be his. I couldn’t bear the thought myself.