Chapter 9
BIRDIE
On any other day, the drive to Sunrise Beach and the trailer a few miles south of that would take about three hours, but the rain was an awful thing, solid almost, pounding on the top of my tired, dented car like it wanted to crumple the metal like it was a can of pop.
Several times I had to pull to the side of the road to wait for the smallest abatement in the rain just so I could see farther than three feet in front of my hood.
Night came—just a deepening of the rainy dark—but at least it meant I could count on the other cars having their headlights on. It was the only way I could see them.
I heard screams, Mel Charboneau had said, but when I went down there to check, she was alone.
She screamed at me to leave when I knocked.
I have your number from when your sister first started trying to sell the place.
She said you might be closer to the property if something came up and she was traveling, and well…
I thought I should call you before the police.
Give you a chance to see what’s going on.
I’d thanked Mel and gotten in the car. I should have asked Paxico to borrow his truck again.
My car was barely up to the task of driving to Evelyn, much less three hours to the lake, and even less up to navigating the steep hills around it, but I also didn’t think I could afford to gas up the truck.
As it was, driving down to the lake would take about all I had left in my checking account after paying for the forklift tomorrow.
I finally made it to the narrow road and whispered a prayer through clenched teeth as I navigated my car onto the half-mud, half-gravel lane that led to a thicket of houses and trailers where our family trailer was.
The cabin, we’d called it growing up, or the lake house.
It took me a long time to hear the gentle self-deprecation in my father’s tone when he said it, because to my child’s eyes, it was just as perfect a place as any new mansion in Shawnee Bend, so I couldn’t have understood that it was a joke.
On one side of the road, the hill scrabbled up into darkness broken only by the blur of two or three sodium vapor lamps on utility poles.
On the other side was a sheer drop into a hole.
A hole was the only way it could be described—a deep hollow filled with dead trees, brackish water, and a plague of frogs every summer.
The gravel lane was not maintained by any government entity, and it wasn’t shored up on the hollow side, and I could feel it ooze and sigh under my tires as the car slid and went crooked for a terrifying moment.
I tried not to think about the crumbling edge on that side…
or how I was going to get the car back up the hill.
Every light was on in the trailer when I got there and trudged up to the front door, but I didn’t hear anything like screaming.
I’d tried calling and texting Busy, but I’d gotten no response, and I didn’t even know if she was still using the same number she’d been using a month ago.
I let myself in with the key stashed under a plastic rock and then stepped inside, shivering wetly on the ancient brown carpet.
“Busy?”
The trailer was small, with a sliding glass door leading out to a homemade sunroom my grandfather had added to the side.
The living room, kitchen, and sunroom were empty, which left only the trailer’s single bedroom.
I called Busy’s name again as I walked down the short hallway, and my stomach twisted into a knot as I opened the door.
I didn’t know what I’d find, and all the fears I’d tried to drown out with prayer now whispered loudly.
Overdose or suicide or some other kind of violence I couldn’t conceive of—
The hollow-core door swung open to reveal the bed with its vintage floral bedspread, a broken lamp on the carpet, and then my sister sitting on the floor with her back against the faux-wood paneling and her legs straight out in front of her.
She was barefoot, wearing nothing but a T-shirt, a big one of Dad’s that must have still been in the closet somehow.
Smudges of mascara blended into sleepless bruises of purple under her eyes.
A few actual bruises were splotched on her legs.
There was another on the top of her forearm.
She stared at me like I was a stranger.
I rushed over and dropped to my knees in front of her feet. It was too narrow between the bed and the closet to be next to her, to take her into my arms and hold her.
“Busy, what’s going on? I thought you were still in Odessa!”
She flinched, then rolled her head against the wall so she was looking away from me. At the tall dressing mirror tacked to the paneling instead. “I got here yesterday.”
“Your legs look—”
“I’m clumsy.”
“And your arm?”
She closed her eyes. “Really clumsy.” And then she laughed and laughed, a peculiar laugh that was loud but low, like someone else was laughing with her voice. It raised the hair on my arms.
“Mel Charboneau called,” I said. I paused before adding, “She said she heard screaming.”
“Interfering bitch,” muttered Busy without opening her eyes. “It’s none of her goddamn business what I do. It’s my own goddamn property.”
“She was just worried, I think. I’m worried. Maybe you should come home.”
Her eyes opened at that, and they flashed me a scathing look. “I’d rather go back to Odessa than stay a single night under Kaitlyn Masterson’s roof.”
“I’m not… She told me—” The wave of the last twenty-four hours suddenly reared up to suck me under, and I had no idea how I managed to suck in a breath and try again. “She kicked me out yesterday. I’m back at the hill house.”
Busy stared at me. “She kicked you out.”
“I’m getting fired from Evelyn.” The words came out steadier than I could have hoped, but they were so brittle they were practically flaking off at the edges. “They found me with a student yesterday, and it looked like—it—”
Both of her eyebrows lifted.
I pressed my lips together and looked down at her feet. Her toenail polish was chipped. The bruise just above her ankle was long and a queasy purple. The rain drummed so hard on the old metal roof of the trailer that it felt like noise was all the world had ever been.
I found that after twenty-nine years of sharing everything with Busy, I suddenly couldn’t share what had happened yesterday. If my own twin looked at me the way Kaitlyn had looked at me…
There was something else too, something underneath the fear of not being believed.
The fear of not being believed was logical, but the whispering, slithering thing under the fear, the thing that would always smell like incense and taste like pomegranates in my memory…
that thing was the furthest thing from logical.
I worried it meant there was something worse than sinfulness inside me. I worried it meant that I was very, very, very fucked up.
I couldn’t let myself think about it, which meant not talking about it, even to the other half of myself—who was no longer really the other half of myself anyway and hadn’t been for a long time.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said, still looking at Busy’s bruised ankle. “I violated my contract and the student safety policy, and Kaitlyn thinks I’ll hurt her chances of getting hired on at the diocese. So I’m evicted.”
When I looked up, my sister’s lip was curled. “I always knew she was a cunt.”
I’d defended Kaitlyn to Busy and Busy to Kaitlyn for what felt like my entire life, and there was too much muscle memory built in to stop me from shaking my head. “She’s just doing her best. I was the one who didn’t stop things with him.”
Busy’s eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”
“Nothing,” I answered quickly.
I couldn’t talk about this with Busy because I would cry, and even if I managed to speak clearly through the tears, the clarity would only be voice deep.
I wouldn’t know how to explain everything without explaining that what Bell did to me felt like assault and also that heat flickered through my body at the memory of it.
That I wished we hadn’t been interrupted.
I looked back down at Busy’s ankles. Nothing had changed about the light or either of our positions, and all the information coming to my brain via my optical nerves was the same, but my mind was now making different sense of it all.
The long bruise just above her ankle wasn’t a single bruise—it was four in a row, with a fifth a little farther out.
Four fingers and a thumb. Someone had grabbed Busy by the ankle, hard enough to drag her.
When I met her eyes again, they were defiant. She had a face on like she was daring me to say something about it, to utter the wrong thing, to give her a reason to fight.
“Come home,” I said. “I won’t… You don’t have to tell me anything. But please come home. Don’t be alone.”
“You’re always trying to get me to come home,” she said bitterly. “Did you ever think that maybe home is the reason I’m so fucked up?”
“I don’t think you’re fucked up,” I said quietly. It was barely audible over the rain on the roof, but she heard me.
“Yes, you do.” Her voice was a sudden hiss. “You’re fucked up too, you know. A dead father and then whatever was wrong with Mom, living with it for two years before she decided to follow Dad. It crawled into both of us, but it only made one of us pathetic.”
It was so unnecessarily cruel that I simply stared at her.
“You want to drag me home and make me as small as you are as a punishment for daring to leave and trying to have my own life,” she went on.
There was something unfamiliar in her voice, something beyond a normal outburst. It was vicious and oddly earnest—she believed this.
Completely. “You want to punish me for having friends, for seeing places. You want me to be trapped just like you, a nobody in a tiny, shithole town, trapped in the house we grew up in like a dead bug on a giant sticky trap. Fuck that.”