Chapter 51
The scooter spat dirt up like a chemtrail behind her as Anna leaned forward, willing it to go faster.
She let herself believe that it was the dry air making her eyes water and not everything she was fleeing back in the house.
All the damage she’d caused. All the confrontation.
She rode until the house was far enough behind her and her mind had calmed enough to know she needed to save enough battery to get back, and she wished one more time that she had a car of her own and could drive all the way into that burnished shield of sun that hung so heavy over Harper’s Creek.
Out in the peace and quiet of endless fields she pulled over to the side of the road, panting as if she’d run the five or six miles.
She kicked at the earth, the sound loud in the tranquil peace.
After a moment, she slapped her own face—once, twice, three times—wishing Mom had done it, wishing she’d never woken up after the thing, wishing she were gone, never having existed, wishing her brain would eat itself like Grandma’s was doing and she could fall down the hole of not remembering until there was nothing left.
A bird screeched overhead, darting down to grab some unsuspecting mouse or worm, carrying it off into the baking sky.
Anna threw her head back and screamed, letting all her frustrations and self-loathing and anger and sadness and emptiness come out in a torrent of wild sound.
She stopped for breath and then screamed some more until her scream turned into a cough, her throat raw.
She bent over, panting, retching a little as her throat scratched with dust, her hair falling loose around her face as she coughed and spat.
Eventually she straightened up, her breath leveling out and her skin cooling despite the midday heat, and took long, deep breaths.
She looked out over the land, so peaceful around her.
Scream some more, she felt it was telling her.
If you think it will help, we can take it.
She closed her eyes, tilting her head up, listening to every quiet sound.
This wasn’t silence, not really. There were a million and more lives surrounding her.
Ants, mice, worms, birds, bugs. Even as the crops failed, something was there to make use of what was left.
A whole different world in which one field was a universe.
A city of tiny existences where she was unknown and would be forever unknown and nothing she did would ever matter.
She opened her eyes and looked at the land again afresh.
At some point over the past few weeks since they’d moved here, it had become less alien.
More compelling. More real. She crouched and touched the earth, cool under her fingertips.
Maybe this was what Melissa meant when she said it was in her blood.
Maybe the dust got into you and took hold.
There was a cruel beauty in the current barrenness of most of the fields, but maybe it was the bad years that made the good ones feel so bountiful.
A reminder that good times were precious.
Like life, she thought, hiccuping a small half sob. Everything was a balance.
Suddenly exhausted, and with nowhere else to go but home, she got back on the scooter.
She took it slowly, not only to delay facing Mom and Grandma but also to let the countryside hold her for a while longer.
She didn’t want to think about bloodstains that had been her own and then vanished.
Or Mom’s terrible sadness. Or Grandma’s quiet terror.
She wanted to stay out here with the myriad living things that would never know her.
She was a fair distance from the cemetery when she saw a few cars parked beside it, and she sped up, curious. Normally, the place was a literal graveyard with hardly any visitors, but today was different. Were they burying Jamie already?