Chapter 6
Then
The Rust Bucket bounced down the country lane past the service station where Ruth worked part-time.
I honked at the old men who sat on the bench in front of the ramshackle store with its ancient gas pumps and a sign that hadn’t been updated since I’d been old enough to notice.
Most of them waved without looking up from their conversations, identical in their trucker hats and overalls and paunches.
The corkboard full of faded photographs that hung over the old men’s bench had been the first place I’d laid eyes on Aunt Ruth, though at the time, I hadn’t known it.
The social worker who delivered us to our new lives had stopped for gas, and from the back seat of her sedan, I’d studied the images.
Men holding fish as if presenting an award.
A dead hog that had made me sad. Deer and turkeys and men in camo with crossbows and shotguns.
Some of the photos were faded to nothing.
Ruth had stood out as one of the only women on the board.
She’d clutched the antlers of a deer, its black eyes blank and tongue lolling from a mouth that trickled blood, while she grimaced into the camera as if daring someone to tell her to smile.
I’d never seen anything like it and couldn’t decide if the woman terrified me or if I wanted to be just like her.
Honestly, that was still a pretty accurate description of my feelings for Aunt Ruth.
I punched the gas, Frances doggedly silent beside me, as we sailed over the short bridge near our place before sliding into our driveway.
The fence posts marking our property were adorned with bones, appearing like giant tusks sprouting from the ground.
Ruth changed them out regularly, and if there was a rhyme or reason, I didn’t understand it.
Rib cages that once belonged to small animals were now split open and tethered to the femur of something larger, all held in place by fishing line.
Sometimes a spine. Always a skull. Never antlers, because people would actually pay money for them.
Maybe the bone-laden posts should’ve given me the creeps, but it’s funny what can feel like home given enough time.
Once, when I was little and still frightened of the posts, teased relentlessly at school about how creepy they were, Ruth had told me the bones were there for protection. Wards against the uninvited. And the way she said it made me feel a little better, even if I didn’t fully believe her.
I pestered her, asking what she meant by protection.
How could some old bones keep bad people out?
Aunt Ruth never had patience for our questioning her methods.
It didn’t matter how those methods affected me.
As a little girl, a favorite playground taunt had been Witchy Milly, all alone, living in a house of bone!
Never mind I’d never been alone in my life or that there were no bones on the actual house. It was catchy, it rhymed, and it hurt.
“I don’t understand. What do you mean?” I’d whined one too many times.
When Ruth threatened, “If you don’t leave me alone about those goddang bones I’ll make you come with me to change them out each month!” I’d finally snapped my mouth shut and moved on to Hattie-May for answers.
“Well. I’ll tell it to you plainly, honey. We have no control over the people who are hell-bent on hating us. But if they’re determined to hate us, then by God, let them fear us too.”
I’d understood, then. Why the aunts never fought back against the rumors. Why they never tried to ingratiate themselves to the small town, instead leaning into what everyone had already determined they were, despite the good deeds they performed.
Why Ruth hung the bones.
Those bones had no magic for us, but in their own way, they kept us safe. Because only witches would dare decorate their property like that, and no one messed with witches.
I pulled the truck into the front yard just as Bunny was getting out of her prized powder blue Camaro, a bucket of chicken tucked under her arm.
“Oh look.” I smiled at my sister, dumbly trying to break the tension. “Bunny brought your favorite.”
Frances shot me a scathing look before swinging open the passenger door and storming across the yard and around the corner of the house.
Probably to the woods. To our place by the creek, I imagined.
I sighed before sliding out of the vehicle, Bunny’s eyes trained on me.
Her hot-pink lips curled into a grin. “I thought that was you behind me. Frances still pissed?” she asked.
I nodded. “Yep.”
“Eh. Don’t worry. She’ll come around. Always does.
” Bunny tottered toward the porch, the spiked heels of her fuchsia peep-toes sinking into the ground with each step.
She held up the bucket of chicken and joked, “Anyway, thought I’d cook for everybody.
Why don’t you help me set the table? Your aunts will both be home soon enough. ”
“Sure.” I smiled. I’d met Bunny the same day social services had dropped us off, and often turned to her for advice when I thought gruff Aunt Ruth or old-fashioned Aunt Hattie couldn’t understand.
In that moment, faced with Bunny’s lighthearted smile and the sense of ease that seemed to roll off her in waves, I wanted nothing more than to blurt out all my problems: Casey, the kiss, homecoming, even how my attempt at the chin-length bob had been a horrible mushroom-shaped mistake. She must’ve sensed it.
Her brows arched. “You got something you need to get off your chest?”
“Uh, well,” I stammered. “I just…”
Bunny and Ruth were opposites. Aunt Ruth was all sharp angles and lived in Wrangler jeans and flannel shirts.
She kept her dark hair cut short, which suited her cheekbones and wide-set brown eyes.
Meanwhile, Bunny was infamous around Puddle Creek for her curve-hugging, electric-hued outfits and talon-length nails.
Aunt Ruth had a temper, sure, but was also quiet, reserved.
The only thing bigger than Bunny’s hair was her personality.
And possibly her boobs. The women made no sense on paper, but they were the best example I’d ever had of a healthy relationship.
Which is why the words died in my mouth.
Bunny and Ruth didn’t keep secrets from each other, and the very idea of Bunny later talking over my personal problems with Aunt Ruth—specifically Ruth hearing I’d kissed Casey—made my cheeks burn with embarrassment.
“No,” I said finally. “I’m good.”
“You got that thinking look on your face.”
I scratched a bugbite on my arm, glancing away. “It’s nothing.”
“If you say so.” Bunny shrugged, and I followed her into the house, the screen door banging shut behind me.
That thinking look. It’s what she said when she caught me daydreaming.
I hadn’t been daydreaming this time, but it wasn’t a rare occurrence.
My mind often drifted away to scenes of what life could’ve been, if everything had turned out differently.
Me and Frances in our own bedrooms, in our old home in Lundinville.
Family portraits hanging on the walls, scented candles burning on the counters.
Instead of this drafty snake-of-a-house, with its hidden nooks and creaky floors and walls covered in sketches of flowers and bloodthirsty trees.
I pictured Frances, Mama, and me sitting down around the table to eat dinner, Wheel of Fortune playing in the background, talking about something boring.
I pictured never knowing about the Sight and what that might all mean. It was all so…normal.
But would I trade the Sight for that dream?
If it meant having Mama back, would I give up being able to recognize that gaping thing inside me without being afraid?
For opening that door, seeing seeing seeing, and not feeling so alone?
The answer always pained me, because it wasn’t so clear cut, and depended on when the question wormed its way through my mind.
Because I missed my mama every single day.
God, I missed her. I’d never been angry at her over Daddy’s death.
She must’ve felt so desperate, so alone, to go so far as to take his gun and end his life.
It hurt me deeply, the way she refused to allow us to visit or write, and I told myself it was because she wanted to spare us the knowledge of what her life had become.
But on the darkest nights, when I lay in bed thinking of her and us and how our life could’ve been, her refusal to see us stung like a fresh abandonment.
And other times, when I was especially low, I remembered that flash of intuition, the fireworks, the metal in my palm, and I worried that maybe the whole thing was my fault. If I’d refused to go to school, if I’d made Mama understand, then everything would be different.
And on those nights? Yes. I’d make that trade. I’d give everything back, I’d take the heartache and worry and fear and never knowing myself, just to have Mama and the life that should’ve been ours.
But other times? Well. I felt guilty even admitting it, but the thing is, the Sight is…
invigorating. What once felt like trying to claw my way out of a deep pit now was like a phantom ache in my molars when I thought of something sweet.
It was the scent of rain days before a storm blew in.
It was plunging beneath waves, knowing that because of my aunts, I had the strength to kick my way back to the surface.
It was feeling myself whole and complete.
I didn’t have Mama, but I had family. My aunts and Bunny loved me and Frances, and I’d been raised to be strong, with none of the delusions of the world being a kind place, at least not for us. And it wasn’t like a normal life was forever out of reach.
If we followed our plan, Frances and I would both go on to bigger and better things, to the life in my daydreams, outside of Puddle Creek, and maybe one day Mama would be free and could join us.
But not if Frances doesn’t follow the damn plan. Not if she messes around and gets us both stuck here forever. It was complicated both being proud of my family and wanting so much more for myself.
I pulled a stack of mismatched plates from a kitchen cabinet and sat them on the table, next to where Bunny had deposited the containers of fried chicken and mashed potatoes.
“Can I get you to read for me when you have a chance?” Bunny walked to the kitchen sink to wash her hands.
“Sure,” I said. An open newspaper sat on the kitchen counter. I mindlessly flipped the page. “Everything okay?”
“Oh, everything’s fine. Just got to do some hiring at the Lickety Split, that’s all. I’m thinking that…”
My eyes caught on one of the newspaper articles, and Bunny’s voice faded away.
Archie Baker, beloved husband, grandfather, and great-grandfather, passed away in his sleep in his South Puddle Creek home. He is survived by his wife, Earline Baker…
The words hit me like a freight train. Front and center, in a black-and-white picture twice as large as the rest, was an old man with a bald head and wire glasses. Next to him the wife I knew well.
“Shit,” I whispered, scanning the rest of the obituary.
She’d done it, then. Earline Baker had seen Hattie-May about her pest problem.
“Milly?” Bunny appeared next to me and bumped my hip with her own. She glanced at the paper in my hands and rolled her eyes. “Oh lord. Hattie-May is reading the obits again. She’s the only person I know that buys a paper just to see who died.”
I stuffed the newspaper in the trash and thought about what it meant.
There must be truth to at least some of the rumors.
I thought of Mama pulling the trigger and the light fading from Daddy’s cruel eyes.
I thought of Aunt Ruth and her bones on the fence, pulled from inside animal carcasses and hung like ornaments on a Christmas tree.
So many deaths at her hands. And now Hattie-May.
Maybe she was helping those women. Maybe the men who meet their end truly were pests—vermin.
I loved my family. Nothing could change that. But the reality of who they were slid over me. Because I’d been raised knowing I’d inherited a legacy. But maybe that legacy was more than the Sight.
My mouth went dry, and I grew lightheaded. Because this—this legacy of death—was not one I wanted any part of. Whatever was going on with my sister, she had to get it together, because we had to stick to the plan and get out. We could not become our aunts.