“Come here,” I say, drawing her into a hug. Her baby belly between us. My baby sister with a fucking baby of her own. “I’m here now. I’m not leaving again.”
I start to think up ways to kill our mother for letting this happen.
It’s this town. There’s something in the water, even after the dead girl blood’s been washed away. It’s some poison, some toxin that leeches into everyone.
This town will suck the life out of you.
I GET Hannah dressed in some of my warmer clothes, give her my thick snow jacket and some sweat pants that have a drawstring she can tie up under her protruding stomach. I’ll have to go to the thrift store in Tonopah and buy her some new things so she doesn’t have to go around holding her pants up to stop them from falling down. I mean, she’s already pregnant, so she can’t get knocked up again, but still. I can’t even think about the rest. She’s going to have a baby. I’m not even sure what that means. Will the state let her keep it? I mean, she’s got a file as thick as my fist. We all do. I wonder if Mom’s avoided taking her to the doctor because she’s afraid they’ll take Hannah — and the baby — away.
Probably she’s just a lazy bitch, knowing my mom.
The heat isn’t working that well in my room, so I take Hannah back up to Mom’s trailer. I hold her hand as we walk through the snow, bitter wind biting at my cheeks. As I walk, I glimpse at Cassie’s house. I’ve been purposely avoiding looking that way, but Hannah has distracted me, and before I know it I’m stopped in my tracks, staring. If I had a pair of binoculars, I’d be able to see straight into Cassie’s kitchen. Into her bedroom. She used to write me messages and stick them in her window back in the day.
“I miss Cassie,” Hannah says, tugging on my hand. “Can we please go visit her now that you’re home?”
I grind my teeth as I try to think of a suitable response.
“Leo?”
“No,” I say, resuming my brisk pace, half-dragging Hannah behind me. “Cassie and I aren’t friends anymore.”
* * *
THE TRAILER’S exactly as I remember, only smaller. It feels tiny, no doubt because my family has grown bigger in my absence. My mom sits on the torn leather couch like some kind of royalty on her throne, smoking a cigarette as she watches the television intently, and two brand new baby brothers somebody forgot to tell me about play with Legos at her feet. They’re two and three years old at best, and the quietest kids I’ve ever seen. Pike’s already told me that the triplets—Matty, Richie and Beau, who were barely in grade school when I went to prison—are living with their paternal grandmother in Reno after my mother failed to send them to school for almost a year. I glance at these new little boys again and wonder if she’s given them NyQuil to calm them down. That’s what our batshit mother used to do when Pike and I were going stir-crazy inside in winter. Give us each a dose of medicine to calm us down before she got her own ‘medicine” sorted.
“Mom.”
“Oh, hey,” she says, glancing away from the TV for a second. “Welcome home. They give you gate money?”
I chuckle, shaking my head. That’s a record, even for her. Normally she’d try to sweet talk me before asking for money.
“Hey, Mom,” I reply. “Missed you, too.”
She rolls her eyes. “Don’t be like that. I need to buy food for the boys.”
“What happened to Hannah?” I ask her, ignoring her question. She shrugs, blowing cigarette smoke over my brothers’ heads as they play quietly. She’s older than I remember. Her mouth is smaller, the corners of her eyes more lined. She’s barely forty and she looks sixty.
“Mom,” I say, more forcefully this time. “Hannah’s pregnant.”
She looks at me like I’m dumb as shit. “You’re kidding.”
Sarcastic bitch. “She’s fourteen.”
“I know that.”
Hannah breaks away from me, going for the Lego on the ground. “Hey,” I say, pulling her back gently. “Go shower first.”
For once, she doesn’t argue. A few moments later I hear the water turn on and Hannah starts singing the theme song from Frozen.
I don’t move from my spot next to the TV. I stare at my mom, imagining laser beams shooting out of my eyes and burning holes in her face. Anger in my veins. I always think of the pasta sauce I used to make with Grandma when I’m angry. It had to simmer for hours before it was done. That’s how my rage works. It simmers for hours, and then I’m fucking done.
I’ll wait. As long as it takes, I’ll wait for my mom to bite.
“What?” she says, lighting a new cigarette, the old one burned down to the filter and abandoned in the overflowing coffee mug she’s using as a makeshift ashtray.
“Did you know what she was doing down in my room?”
She coughs. “I’m sorry, did she mess your room up some time in the last ten years, baby?”
Sarcastic bitch.
“Eight years,” I correct her.
Bitch doesn’t respond.
“I don’t care about the mess, Ma,” I say through gritted teeth. “I care about walking in on my fourteen-year-old sister being used as a plaything by some guy you used to date.”
“She’s almost fifteen,” Ma says, flicking a bit of tobacco from her lip. “I was sixteen when I had you.”
“Mom!” I yell. “She’s not almost fifteen! She’s intellectually fucking disabled.” The ‘thanks to you’ part is silent, but strongly inferred.
She stands up, furious. “How dare you!” she cries. “Coming in here after all these years and yelling at me! I’m trying to watch my show!”
I respond by yanking the TV’s power cord out of the wall socket. “Leo…” my mother growls.
“Mother,” I reply. I really didn’t mean to come back and upset her. But then Hannah happened.
“Have you got food? A turkey for Thanksgiving?”
“That depends,” she says. “You got gate money for me? Turkey ain’t cheap.”
I snort-laugh. “How much money you think they give you at the gate? Not enough to spring for a fucking turkey to feed six people. Six and a half, if we’re being accurate.”
Her eyes narrow to slits, and I know she doesn’t believe me. “Derek got two hundred dollars and a bus ticket to anywhere in the country after he got out,” she says.
I shrug. “Yeah, well, Derek was in prison in California, Mom. In Nevada, they don’t give you two hundred dollars.”
She taps ash on the floor, digesting that. “Well, how much?” she asks.
I shake my head. “I’m not giving you money so you can go and shoot it up your arm.”
She’s about to launch a tirade against me when a horn beeps outside. I know that noise. Short and sharp, two beeps. Mayor Carter is here. Hannah’s biological father, though he’d never admit it, and he definitely won’t come in and see the daughter who has no idea her daddy is the town mayor. Fucking prick. Probably getting one in before he has to spend Thanksgiving with his poor, unsuspecting wife and their six teacup poodles.
“What the fuck’s he doing here?” I ask.
My mom looks me up and down. “Dropping off some money, since my own son can’t spot me twenty dollars.”
“Whatever.”
She glares at me as she brushes past, the boys following. They’re stir-crazy, no doubt. “Stay here!” she snaps at them. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
The boys go back to their Legos. I wonder if she’s just drugged them or if she’s started beating them, as well. At this point, nothing would surprise me.
Mom shrugs into her own winter coat and slams the door behind her. A few seconds pass and then I hear a car door slam, followed by the sound of an engine tearing off at high speed.
I stand there for a moment, staring at the closed door, waiting for her to come back inside. I count to five inside my head, just like I’ve been taught. I do that five times over and she’s still not back inside, so I open the front door and step out onto the stoop, scanning the yard.
She’s gone. I can s
ee the rear end of the smart black town car she’s gotten into as it crests the ridge at the top of the hill and disappears.
“Fuck,” I mutter under my breath, turning to go back inside. Less than five minutes and she’s taken off. That IS a record.
“Derek says you shouldn’t say fuck,” Hannah says. She’s been standing right behind me, and I almost knocked her over when I turned.
“Shit, Hannah,” I say, one hand on my chest. “You scared the hell out of me.”
“You shouldn’t say shit or hell, either,” she says, her face serious. Her hair is soaking wet from the shower and I’m afraid if I don’t get her inside soon, it’ll start to form icicles.
“Let’s forget about Derek,” I say, putting my hand in the small of Hannah’s back and guiding her into the trailer. “Let’s pretend we never met him.”
Hannah wrinkles up her nose at me, but she doesn’t argue.
“Pike!” I yell. I don’t need to go looking for my brother; his piece of shit car is out front, so he’s in this trailer somewhere.
He appears a moment later, eyes red, smelling like dirty bong water. “Hey. You’re back.”
He’s gotten weirder while I’ve been away. He’s got a giant tongue piercing that looks like a ball of metal rolling around his mouth, and he’s dyed his blonde hair jet black.
“You auditioning for My Chemical Romance?” I ask, punching him lightly on the shoulder. I’m not sure whether to laugh or be fucking disturbed that my younger brother looks like an emo.
He frowns, a lip piercing glinting in the harsh light.
“Hannah’s pregnant,” I say.
“No shit,” Pike replies, looking bored.
I fight the urge to throw him up against the wall and throttle him; I’d break the wall before I did any damage to him, and now we don’t have Derek to fix it.
“I told you to watch her while I was gone,” I say to my brother. He looks at the floor, with embarrassment or anger, I can’t tell.
Maybe both.
“I’ve been in Reno,” he mutters. “Selling a little. Mom’s checks stopped coming.”
I raise my eyebrows so high they almost hit the fucking roof. Not that that’d take much; I can barely stand straight without hitting the ceiling in this tiny shithole.
“They stopped coming, or she spent them?” I ask.
Pike shrugs. “It’s all the same, right? Either way, I had to pay the bills since you were gone. Keep the heat on. Feed these kids.”
I take a step back and decide that maybe Pike doesn’t need the living shit beaten out of him, after all. I take a twenty-dollar bill out of my jeans pocket, the twenty Jennifer insisted I keep and hand it to Pike.
“What’s this for?” he asks, holding the money like it’s diseased.
“Thanksgiving dinner.”
“Thanksgiving dinner,” Pike repeats, sounding unimpressed.
“Yeah. I missed it last year. And the seven years before that. I need you to go to the store and get some things.”
He looks dubious. “We don’t celebrate shit like Thanksgiving.”
“We do now!” I snap. “Go.”
“And get what?”
I let out a long breath. My head hurts already and it’s barely noon. “Get some chicken pieces. Look for the ones with the sticker. They’re always fine a few days past the date. Some yams. Cauliflower or broccoli, whatever’s cheaper. Milk. Cheese – a small package, that shit isn’t cheap. Cranberry sauce if you can afford it. Make sure it adds up right before you take it all to the register.”
I take out a second twenty as another thought strikes me. “Prenatal vitamins. Get the biggest bottle you can afford. Where’s the dog?”
Pike looks uneasy, and for a moment my heart sinks. “Please don’t tell me she’s dead,” I say.
He shakes his head quickly. “No. We didn’t have money for dog food, and Cassie kept feeding her. She stays up there most of the time at the Carlino place.”
The mention of Cassie stabs me like an icepick to my heart; it takes every ounce of willpower not to physically grab at my chest to stop it from hurting. I’m glad Rox is with her. A dog is good protection, among other things, since I haven’t been there for her.
“How is she?” I ask, hungering for something. Some crumb of news, of intel on the girl I still love so much, it’s killing me inside.
Pike shrugs. “She’s different,” he says. “We’re all different since you went away.”
Well, I don’t know what to say to that.
Pike goes off to the store; I think he’s relieved more than anything to have someone else take charge. I pile my little brothers into the bath — Hannah used the seven minutes of hot water our system heats at a time, so I have to boil three saucepans full of water to get them a reasonably warm bath. After, I find them each a change of clothes without holes. I use Mom’s hairdryer to dry Hannah’s long hair, and when Pike finally gets back with the ingredients and a quarter to spare, I make her take three of the big oval-shaped vitamins with a glass of the milk. Even though it’s technically a week early, I cook Thanksgiving dinner for my siblings, trailer style, and Mom doesn’t come back for days.
* * *
ONCE EVERYONE IS FINALLY TAKEN care of — clean, dressed, warm, fed — I leave them in the trailer and trudge through dirty snow down to my room. The place is trashed. I spend hours getting everything back in order. Even though it’s freezing outside I open up the door and the little makeshift window to air the place out, get new sheets and turn the mattress over. I sit in the middle of the bed in my warmest jacket and smoke half a pack of cigarettes to try and paint over the other smells in here, the ones that don’t belong to me, and finally, it starts to feel like my room again. My house. This is my place in the world and I’ve reclaimed it. Nobody else can have it. Tomorrow I’ll get a new padlock for the door and hide the key.
* * *
BEFORE I TURN in for the night I go down to the well. I can still taste Karen if I close my eyes, and now I don’t even have alcohol to dull the edges. In prison, I had four walls and three cellmates to keep me company. Now, here, in the frozen dark, it’s just me and the ghost of the girl I found dead all those years ago.
The well has a new cover. It looks sturdy, and it’s locked. I pull at the shiny padlock to test its strength. It’s not opening without some serious bolt cutters, and that brings me some relief. I smoke a bunch of cigarettes and stare at Karen’s final resting place, hopeful that her ghost stays trapped in the well and unable to come visit me like it used to every night when I closed my eyes.
When I can’t feel my toes anymore, and my cigarette packet is empty, I go back to my room.
At first, I think I’m seeing things. That I was wrong. That Karen’s ghost is still here, sitting on my newly made bed waiting to pick up where we left off in my nightmares.
But the girl on my bed is not a ghost. She is real. Alive. Made from flesh and bone and shiny strawberry lip gloss.
“Jennifer,” I say, leaning against the doorframe and waiting for her to speak, to offer some explanation as to why she’s here.
“Leo,” she replies.
CHAPTER NINE
LEO
Nobody says anything for a beat.
“It’s cold,” Jennifer says. “You should shut the door.”
I step inside and I shut the door. I don’t think about Karen. I don’t think about Cassie. All I can think about is what I’d like to do to the sixteen-year-old girl sitting on the edge of my bed.
“What do you want?” I ask her. She smiles. Shrugs her narrow shoulders. Parts her knees ever-so-slightly. I notice everything, every movement, every facial expression. I’ve been starved for eight years. I am hungry. She needs to leave, now.
“Do I have to want something?” she asks. “Can’t a girl just drop in?”
I scrub my hand across my chin. It’s sharp with new growth; I need to shave. “Does your father know you’re here?”
She laughs, sliding off the bed and ste
pping toward me. The sound of her laughter fills up the room until it feels like it might explode. She’s too bright, too shiny.
“My father’s on a business trip,” she whispers. She’s so close, I could reach out and wrap my hands around her throat.
She reaches out and traces my bottom lip with her index finger, and I almost come in my jeans just at her flesh touching mine. Bad, bad Leo. I’m twenty-five. This girl is sixteen. I used to babysit her.
She’s touching me, so I figure it’s only fair if I touch her back. I place my hand at the base of her throat, just above the spot where her tits press together inside her shirt, my thumb against the hollow in her neck. “What do you want?” I repeat slowly.
She motions for me to come closer. I bend down so she can whisper into my ear. Her breath tickles as she tells me all the things she can’t look me in the eye and say aloud.
I VISIT Jennifer every evening at the diner; she seems to like the attention, and I could use the distraction. I make sure to turn up just before her shift ends, and she gives me a ride home every night. The first night she came over we ended up talking for hours. My mouth hurt by the end, every sense on high alert. I was a gentleman. I didn’t lay a hand on her again, not after she started to talk. She’s in trouble. A lot of trouble. I think it eased her mind to be able to confess to somebody who pretty much wrote the book on trouble in this town.
I mean, there’s not a thing I can do to help the girl. Not unless she tells me who got her into this mess in the first place. “That’s the problem with men,” she said to me when I urged her to give me the name of the guy blackmailing her. “They always jump straight to problem-solving. Men always want to fix everybody.”
“You don’t want to be fixed?” I’d asked her.
“I can fix myself,” she’d replied. “I just need somebody to understand.”
I don’t understand. Her predicament is something I’ve never experienced. But I can listen. I listen to her talk as she drives me home in her shiny new car every night, and it makes me feel less of a fuck-up. I mean, she hasn’t killed anyone. But she’s planning to. And that’s why we’ve found each other. I am a killer and she is ready to spill blood. She is a welcome distraction from my sins, and I am a makeshift altar for her to lay her own sins upon. Because when I’m with Jennifer, I don’t think about Cassie Carlino. I don’t think of Karen Brainard. And, most especially, I don’t think of Teresa King and the way she burned beside me in that car.