Chapter 48

Chapter 48 of 56 · 8-minute read

I’m shaking all over as I walk into the house, but I’ve promised Virgil the truth, the full truth I didn’t have before. Before he can walk through the door behind me, I’m shaking instead with rage.

“Oh, Laurie!” He grabs my hand to steady me.

All I can do is stare. My mom’s always been a bit of a hoarder—her psychological defense against not having what she needed—but everything she hoards is now strewn the width and length of the house. The contents of her closets, old chests, every drawer, under the beds. Everything has been pulled out and picked through in a search for evidence that was never here. Cushions ripped open. Whatever itchy no-seeums Everett and Emmett found—or found them—are probably all over the house by now.

But the deer rifle hangs in an unused bedroom, in easy view of the back door when there’s not a glamour camouflaging it. Two boxes of ammo on the headboard. The single lightbulb shining bright above the string pull that dangles from the ceiling. Everything else in the room has been turned upside down and littered across the shag carpet originally installed in the 1970s.

Everything will have to be fumigated, cleaned, picked up, much of it discarded. I don’t need this right now. One more straw on my back, and I’ll break.

Slowly, the two of us back out. My mom’s house won’t be habitable for a while. And I can’t bear to look at this mess, anyway. I grab my phone and keys from the table near the back door.

With all of Everett’s attempts to overturn every stone to find evidence in the house and the property around it, they didn’t get as far as checking either my mom’s car—where they would have found a pistol under her seat—or my own car, still packed to the gills with all my earthly belongings not stashed in a storage unit in Atlanta and waiting for me to decide where to live in the future.

While Virgil douses the bonfire with a water hose from the corner of the hay barn, I unlock my car and dig around my Tetris-packed cargo hold for a packing cube of spare clothes. I tug on a pair of jeans, roomier than I recall, under my nightshirt and pull on a purple sweater over it. I leave my thermal blanket on the front seat and take nothing else but the black ballet flats that provide no arch support but are a suitable alternative to being barefoot among people who think there’s something wrong with being barefoot.

When Virgil returns, I take a deep breath and settle into the passenger seat of his car to share with him something I’ve never told a soul. I snap my fingers, and the sphere of purple energy sinks into the ground.

“I remember every detail,” I begin as he slowly backs the car away from the fire pit. “Just as if it happened last night. I’ve tried to forget, but I’ve never been able to bury my memories. They resurrect themselves out of nowhere, but in the last few decades, only when I visit here. It was a hot summer night, hotter than usual. The magnolias were blooming, and the smell of them was everywhere. I’d picked a few blossoms in the morning before we left for Sunday School, and there were wasps inside the blooms because inside is warmer than outside, and as the blooms opened and fell in their vase on the kitchen table, I accidentally set two wasps free in the house, and when we got home from church, Mama was mad about it. I suggested she punish me by not letting me go camping with Uncle Bobby. I’d come up with dozens of reasons not to go, and I’d put him off for weeks, but my parents had agreed I could go this time. I never requested the camping trip. Only Bobby. The last two times he’d driven over to take me camping, I’d stuck my finger down my throat to make myself throw up so I could create an excuse not to go, but the third time, my dad caught me and threatened to beat me with his belt.”

Virgil openly winces as I speak, but says nothing. I motion for him to take the driveway to the dirt road leading away from the house, and he nods.

“Uncle Bobby hung around for a few hours, talking to Daddy about various relatives and old times. I stayed out of the way and kept trying to get Mama to let me go visit a friend in town or take Shelby to ride his toy tricycle outside, but then Bobby went out to his car—same color as yours—and brought in a present for me. Pearl earrings and a dainty necklace of pearl beads.”

This time, I’m the one who winces. I’ve always hated pearl jewelry.

Or have I? I’m not sure I ever noticed it before Bobby made a habit of bringing his twelve-year-old niece such things on a weekly basis—jewelry, clothes he’d picked out with the help of a department store clerk who must have wondered what the hell this relationship was about, bracelets with my misspelled name engraved on them, candies, my first bra. Even if my own parents had seemed oblivious at the time or even grateful for his “generosity,” those gifts had always stuck with me, along with the immense discomfort I felt every time he handed me a gift-wrapped box to open. Most of all, I’d learned that when a child doesn’t feel comfortable around an adult, the child’s feelings should trump those of every adult in the room who worries about disrespect, manners, or brattiness. If a child doesn’t feel comfortable, there may well be reasons that child doesn’t know how to express yet.

I sigh and remember to speak my memories aloud for Virgil’s sake and to give them voice I’ve never given them before, at least not in this way. I tried to tell my mom, my aunts, my teachers, every adult around me, but they all either blinked at me as if they didn’t hear me or they chided me for “making trouble,” which I didn’t understand.

“Bobby stayed and had dinner with us that night. My mom was kinda nervous but wouldn’t speak up. I was quiet. It was well into summer by then, and it didn’t get dark until late. Bobby had said we’d make something for supper over a campfire after we set up the tent, but Mama insisted on making supper. It took her forever. And then she insisted we all have some pecan pie she’d made. Maybe she was delaying him after all in her usual passive way, but I didn’t notice then. Finally, he got tired of being served more food and demanded we head to our camping spot in the woods, where the timber is planted now, so we could set up our two tents before dark.”

“Two?” Virgil interrupts. “Someone who works in Truett’s office told me they recovered only one tent from the car.”

“Yeah, Bobby lied. A lot. He didn’t have two tents. And his tent wasn’t meant for more than one person. He didn’t figure anyone would come looking, either.”

As we reach the dirt road, I gesture for Virgil to turn left. I can almost see the path Bobby and I took that night as the sun hung low in the sky. I still remember sitting in the passenger seat of his car and staring past his profile at my house growing smaller in the distance. When we reach the main road, I motion to Virgil for another left turn.

Virgil waits for a deputy sheriff’s car to pass. Everett. Its brake lights flash on, then the deputy keeps going. Why is Everett still checking on me? But if Virgil notices, he doesn’t mention it.

“Laurie, you don’t have to go into such detail. Not for me.”

“No. Not for you. But for me. I need to exorcise this demon.”

I don’t say anything else—just like on that night—until after we pass Virgil’s house and a long parcel of land. I point to another dirt road that leads into the woods on the far side of my mom’s farm. Normally, the path down the road would be indistinguishable from every other wall of weeds along the property line, but this road has been too well-traveled lately: the crew who’d cut out the diseased timber, the backhoes and equipment, the crew who’d removed the old scrap iron from the swamp after Mama had dumped the contents of her storage buildings to hide any sign of Bobby’s resting place, the sheriff and deputies and all the workers they’d brought in the help and all the local-yokel lookie-loos who were there only for entertainment.

“There was a full moon that night,” I remember aloud. “I’d been praying all the night before and all day that something would keep Bobby from visiting or me from going on his so-called camping trip, but God didn’t send a guardian angel to stop Bobby, nor earthquakes nor a bunch of plagues and locusts. Your mom had once told me that if no one else answered my cries for help, I should call on the Old Gods. I wasn’t ready yet. I still thought someone somewhere would save me. When we turned down this road, I knew no one would. I was on my own. No heavenly host was coming to save me. No human cavalry either. I was alone with a man who demanded on every visit that I walk him to his car and give him a goodbye hug as a thank-you for the expensive gifts. Right there with my parents in sight, he would keep the open car door between my parents and the two of us so they couldn’t see him with his hands down my pants. If they turned away, he’d stick his tongue in my mouth, so I was terrified of what he might do if I were truly alone with him. Not that I knew at twelve what that might be. Not until he took me off-property that one time for ice cream. My parents had kept me sheltered to the point where I knew almost nothing about sex except what I heard from kids at school—but I knew how awful and shameful I felt every time he touched me. I wasn’t sure if it was my fault, but no one would talk to me about it or either they would act like I was bad for mentioning it. But at that moment⁠—”

I break off and stare across the field, now covered in planted timber. I clear my throat.

“At that moment, watching the sun setting in the west and the full moon rising in the east, I knew everything in my life was about to change. I knew I was about to lose what was left of my innocence, even if I didn’t understand yet what my innocence was. And I did, just not in the way that Bobby intended.”

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