Chapter 11
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Sophie
In a small town, everybody already knows your name, so there's nowhere to put your face down and disappear.
I tell myself I'm being paranoid, pushing my cart through the Piggly Wiggly with my chin up and a list I don't need, because I made myself come here on purpose.
Njal's still a while out. I could've waited in his house with the curtains drawn until he got back and handled the world for me.
I didn't want to.
I’m not going to hide in a dark room because somebody built a lie about me on a computer.
I didn't do what they say I did.
A woman who didn't do it doesn't act like a woman who did, and so here I am buying dog food I could've gotten tomorrow, head up, daring this town to look at me.
And it does.
That's the first thing I notice—not hostility, not yet, but the way the woman in the cereal aisle steers her cart a wide arc around mine and won't lift her eyes off the Cheerios.
The way two girls I taught in Sunday school four years back go silent when they see me and then start whispering before I'm even past them.
By the time I reach the dairy case, my hands aren't as steady as I'd like.
I reach for the eggs out of habit, the same case where Patricia cornered me a couple of weeks ago with the word sister hanging off her tongue like bait, and I think, with a flat dark humor I didn't know I had in me, that I should probably skip the eggs.
Eggs feel like tempting fate. I get them anyway.
I’m done letting these people decide what I'm allowed to pick up off a shelf.
The checkout girl is maybe nineteen, and she scans my groceries without one word, her mouth pressed white, and she sets my change on the counter instead of into my hand so she won't have to touch me.
Like it's catching. Like what they think I “am” could come off on her fingers.
I take my bags and walk out into the bright flat heat of the parking lot, and I almost make it away unscathed.
They're waiting by my truck.
Not all of them on purpose, maybe.
A parking lot is a public place, and people come and go, but enough of them, clustered loosely between me and my driver's door.
The back of my neck goes cold the second I understand what I'm looking at.
Beverly Daughtry is at the front.
She's got her church purse over her forearm and a look on her face I've never once seen there, because the Beverly I've known my whole life wears concern like a Sunday hat—the soft voice, the bless your heart, the hand on your back that feels like care until you understand it's a leash.
That Beverly is gone. The woman standing between me and my truck has let the mask all the way down, and what's underneath is colder than anything the lie ever was.
"Sophie." She says my name like a verdict. "I think you know you've got no business showing your face in this town."
"I'm buying groceries, Mrs. Daughtry." I keep my voice level even though my pulse is going. "Same as you."
"Don't." Her chin comes up. "Don't you stand there and play sweet with me. We've all seen it now. The whole congregation's seen what you are."
A few of the others edge closer. I know most of them.
A man who ushers on Sundays.
A woman whose twins I had in my class two years ago, who cried at the end-of-year program because I'd been so good with her shy one. She won't look at me now.
"What you've seen isn't real." I make myself say it slowly, reasonably, like reason is a thing that still works here. "Somebody made those pictures. There's technology now, you can build an image of anyone?—"
"Oh, here we go." Beverly's mouth curls. "Computers. A conspiracy. You hear that?" She says it half over her shoulder, performing for the cluster of them. "Same thing the sister used to say. It runs in the family, I suppose. The lying does."
The word sister hits where she means it to.
"Don't you talk about Hannah." My voice cracks down the middle and I hate it, hate that they can hear it. "You don't know one thing about my sister."
"I know your family's been a stain on that church for years, and we were too Christian to say so.
" She steps closer, and the church purse swings, and I smell her perfume, the same one she's worn to every potluck since I was a girl.
"Caleb Bradley's mother is a wreck. That poor baby.
And you've got the gall to stand in our grocery store with your chin in the air like you're the one who's been wronged. "
"I never touched that child." The horror of having to say the sentence out loud, in a parking lot, to people who watched me grow up—it comes up my throat like something rotten. "I never—Mrs. Daughtry, I love those kids, I would never in my life?—"
"Then explain the pictures."
"I can't explain them, they're fake?—"
"Then you've got nothing." She says it softly, almost gently, the old fake-tender voice slipping back in for one terrible second. "And you should go. Pack up whatever you're renting and go somewhere they don't know you, and let this town heal."
Something wet hits the side of my face.
It takes me a second to understand it—the cold slide of it down my cheek, the crack of the shell on the asphalt by my shoe, the yellow of the yolk going splat across the toe of my sneaker.
Somebody at the back of the cluster has thrown an egg.
My egg, maybe, knocked out of the bag I dropped without noticing I'd dropped it, my groceries scattered around my feet on the hot ground.
A second one hits my shoulder.
Nobody laughs.
It's worse than if they laughed.
They watch, their faces gone hard and righteous, while a grown woman stands in a parking lot getting pelted with her own groceries, and not one of them moves to stop it—not the usher, not the mother of the twins.
Not Patricia.
Patricia.
She's there, at the edge of it, in her good cardigan with her purse held in both hands.
The woman who taught me the books of the Bible with felt cutouts when I was nine.
Who let me cry in her kitchen the summer my dog died.
She's not throwing anything. She's not saying anything.
She's just standing there, watching them do it to me, and the not-helping is its own kind of egg, the one that hits hardest and leaves no mark anybody else can see.
"Patricia," I say. Just her name. A question I don't have the words for.
She looks at the ground.
That's the moment it breaks me, more than the yolk drying on my face or Beverly's perfume or the predator word still hanging in the air.
The oldest, gentlest face in my whole childhood, looking at the asphalt so she won't have to look at me.
I get down on the hot ground and pick up my groceries with shaking hands because I will not leave them there, because some animal part of me refuses to let them have the dog food I drove here to buy.
I get the bag back together and stand up.
I make myself walk through the gap they leave me—they do leave me a gap, they part for me like I'm something they don't want to brush against—and I get in my truck and lock the door.
I don’t cry until I'm three streets away and there's no one left to see it.
* * *
I don't remember the drive back.
I come back into my body in Njal's gravel driveway with the engine ticking and my face stiff with dried egg and salt.
His bike isn't here yet, and I sit there a minute, not sure I have the legs to make it inside.
Then headlights swing in behind me.
He's off the bike before it's fully stopped, helmet shoved back, and he's at my door, pulling it open. His face does a thing I've never seen it do—goes from worried to murderous to something wrenched all in the space of a breath, taking in the egg in my hair and the wreck of me behind the wheel.
"Who?" It comes out of him low and flat and terrible. "Sophie. Who did this?"
"It doesn't matter."
"It matters to me."
"It was the whole town, Njal." I get the words out, and they come apart at the edges. "It was everybody. It was Beverly, the usher, and the mom of the twins and—and Patricia just stood there?—"
I don't get any further, because I'm out of the truck and into him, my face in his chest, egg and all.
His arms come around me so hard it's almost more than air, almost the only thing I need.
He doesn't tell me it's okay. He doesn't say one useless thing.
He just holds me up in his gravel driveway in the falling dark, one big hand cradling the back of my head, and lets me come apart against him until there's nothing left coming.
"I've got you," he says into my hair, the only words he gives me, again and again, like a nail he's driving to be sure it holds. "I've got you. I've got you."
He runs me a bath I don't ask for.
He gets the egg out of my hair himself, kneeling by the tub with a cup, pouring warm water slowly over the back of my head while I sit with my knees pulled up.
His hands in my hair are so careful, I could weep all over again from the simple animalistic relief of being touched like I'm worth being careful with.
Neither of us talk for a while. The water gets the cold out of me by degrees.
"I keep thinking I should be angrier," I say finally, watching the water. "I keep waiting to be furious. And mostly I'm just so tired, Njal. I'm so tired of having to prove I'm not a monster to people who decided I was before they ever looked."
"You don't have to prove anything to them." His hand moves slowly down the back of my neck. "Not one of them. They stopped being people whose opinion you owe the second they stood in a parking lot and watched a woman get eggs thrown at her and called it righteous."
"They've known me my whole life."
"Then they should've known better." His jaw is tight, but his hands stay gentle. "That's on them, Soph. Every bit of it. Not you."
When the water's gone cool, he wraps me in a towel and leaves me to dress, and by the time I come out, he's already got his phone in his hand, ordering a pizza, because neither of us has eaten and because the world keeps turning even when it's ending.
While we wait, he opens the refrigerator and pulls out a bottle of red.
"You don't drink," I say, watching him pull the cork.