“No need lookin’,” I remember he called out from the front room, from the ratty old chair that’s the only thing settin’ upright in the mess, his heel resting across his other knee. “She ain’t here.”
“Where is she?” I pushed back through the swinging door that separates the two rooms from each other. “Huh?”
“Don’t you ‘huh’ me,” he said, uncurling his first finger from around the bottle he was holding so he could point at me with it.
“Tell me where Emma is.”
“What if I told you a little secret?” he asked, simple, like he’s ordering up a cheese steak for supper. Only his mouth was in a smile. “What if I told you something I’s sworn not to tell?”
“Emma!” I hollered up from the foot of the stairs. “Emma! Where you at?”
“I told you, she ain’t here.”
I remember looking back over at him.
“And here it is—she’s dead!”
There was a rushing sound against my eardrums and I reckon it was the blood flooding my head.
“In fact, I kilt her,” he said, swigging his beer, uncrossing his legs.
I remember taking the stairs two at a time and running into his room, then into mine. Nothing.
“No more Emma.” I can still hear his voice. And that laugh. That laugh is what told me he wasn’t lying.
* * *
“He laughed.” I open my eyes and tell the sheriff. “He laughed when he told me…” I can’t say the words.
“When he told you…” His voice melts into the air. “When he told you…” He tries again. I look at him and look away, remembering what Richard told me about my sister.
“He told me…” I gulp. “He told me…he told me he kilt her.” I look at him to make sure I said the words out loud instead of just plain thought them, ’cause sometimes I do that, think I say something when it’s really just something batting around inside my head.
He’s silent. I cain’t look at Momma. In case she doesn’t yet know Richard kilt her baby. I cain’t look at her.
“He told you he killed Emma?”
I nod, keeping the tears inside my eyes.
The man looks over his shoulder at Momma and moves his hand up from mine. I feel Momma move in close to me.
“Mrs. Parker, hold on,” he says, putting his hand into a stop sign in front of her. “Let her go on. What else do you remember, honey?”
I close my eyes and once again, scenes come back to me and I don’t know whether they’re real or in a dream.
Jumping over rocks. A path up from the blacktop. I remember it being dark, so dark I was relying on my feet to show me the way I’d gone so many times before. I remember seeing Mr. Wilson going in the front door. Waiting. Then…wait…I think I went around back. Did I? I think so.
I remember feeling my way along to the gun shack. Oh, Lord. I think I did. I remember waiting a spell and opening my eyes wider than they’ve ever been so they’d adjust to the pitch blackness of the inside of the shed.
You know what happens next, Emma said. I remember hearing her words ping-ponging from one side of my brain to the other. We’re gonna kill Richard.
* * *
“Where’s Emma?” I ask Momma and the sheriff.
“Keep going, honey,” he says. “Keep trying to remember what happened next.”
“Momma? Where’s Emma?” But she looks away from me when she fits the cigarette into her swollen mouth and pulls smoke from it.
So I close my eyes and take myself back there.
We got to kill him, Carrie, she said. I remember it like it was five minutes ago. We got to kill him.
I remember picking it up and popping open the chamber to see if I had to hunt for bullets. I felt along one, two, three, four, five open holes. On the sixth my finger runs right over and I knew there was one in there. One bullet. One man in need of killing.
* * *
“He killed her,” I say. Their faces look scary, unexpected. “He told me he killed her,” I cry. “Momma?”
But she won’t look at me. I think that’s another reason why it’s so easy to close my eyes. I hate seeing her turn away from me, looking the way she does.
“I got the gun,” I tell them in between gulps for air. Her head snaps back to me all the sudden. “I had to get the gun.” I cry harder.
“It’s okay, honey.” The sheriff’s saying all the things Momma would if she were good with tears. “You can tell us. We’ll make it all okay. Just tell us what happened next.”
When I squeeze my eyes back closed again, the lids wring out the tears like a wet dish towel after cleaning.
I remember the gun slowed me a bit but not much. The blacktop was easier to run along than the path leading down from Mr. Wilson’s, but scarier, too, ’cause at any minute a car or truck could’ve happened along. I remember going faster. And faster still. The path up to our house was steep, the sandy, rocky ground tripping me up but never catching me altogether. I remember seeing the light in the kitchen poking through the pine trees. Catching my breath, I felt the metal of the gun handle when I wiped my hand against my forehead.
I can still see the house getting closer. Closer still. At the foot of the front steps I grabbed hold of the gun with two hands, locking my elbows like I saw him teach Emma to do. I remember counting the steps up, knowing I couldn’t look down at them, my feet steadily carrying me inside on their own. I tried to breathe in and out slow through my nose like Mr. Wilson told me to before I take a shot. I think I did that for a second but then I think I panted through my mouth.
The front porch. With my elbows locked, the gun pointing down at the ground, I held the screen door open with my foot.
The porch door rested on my back and eased closed as I moved into the house. I remember the feel of it, lightening as I moved forward.
Looking at our things like it was the first time I’d seen them. I remember that. The table in the front room. The upright armchair he’d been setting in. The lamp overturned. Momma’s groans from the ground beside it. I held steady. Then I pointed toward the swinging door into the kitchen.
We’re gonna kill Richard, Emma said.
* * *
“I need to know where my baby sister is!” My mind’s come back into the room with Momma and the sheriff. “Momma? Did they find her…?” I cain’t finish the sentence. Wait. Breathe. Okay, now I can go on. “Did they find her body?”
The sheriff’s hands reach out for mine. Oh, Lord. They found her.
“Honey, what we need to do before we talk about Emma is hear the last part of what happened,” he says. “Understand? You need to tell us. Then we can talk about Emma, all right? I know. I know. Shh. Just breathe. That’s right. Breathe slow in and out. Calm down. Can you talk now? Just a little bit more. You were in the house, pointing to the kitchen door. What happened after that?”
They close again, my eyes.
I took two more steps to the swinging door. Then one more.
I can remember listening hard and finally hearing Richard’s “aaah” that comes only when he’s taken a bigger than usual gulp of beer. It was followed by the clear sound of the bottle setting back down on the tabletop.
I think I waited another second for it to occur to him that one gulp wasn’t gonna be enough, that he needed another.
That’s when I kicked the swinging door open and my purpose was revealed.
I am here to kill you, the gun said to him.
I can still see him absorbing it.
The memory of the shot firing, his face twisting from surprise to pain, shakes me in my seat in the sheriff’s office.
* * *
“So you shot Richard,” he says.
“He killed Emma,” I say, looking straight at him. Straight into his eyes. “And he was gonn
a kill my momma….”
The sheriff takes in a deep breath and it whistles against his teeth on its way back out of his mouth. He looks over at Momma, who inhales again off of her cigarette.
“Did you find Emma yet?”
“Caroline?” she says. Her voice sounds like it did when she tucked me into bed back when I was weensy. “Sleep tight. Don’t let the bed bugs bite,” she’d say. The outline of Daddy standing in the doorway, watching us.
“Caroline, look at me. I’m sick and tired of all this, you hear me? Sick and tired. It’s time for it to stop. Stop.”
I fix my eyes at her mouth, her eyes would be too much right now. “Emma…” I whisper out to her.
“That’s what I’m talking about,” she says, taking in a deep gulp of air and looking over to the sheriff, who’s nodding his head for her to continue.
“I saw that look,” I say, trying not to cry since Momma’s being so nice right now and tears would surely ruin it. “You found her body. Where is she?”
“Oh, for the love of God in heaven will you stop? There is no Emma! You hear me? There is no Emma!” Momma shouts but it came out louder than I bet even she had planned.
I think the quiet in the room makes her feel she needs to repeat it.
“There…is…no…Emma.”
Silence.
“There never was an Emma.” Momma’s hands were always stronger than mine so when she peels my hands off my ears, the words rush in, crowding my brain. “No, no—don’t turn away from me. Don’t you turn away from me. Emma never was, girl. Y’hear me?”
“Lemme go git a tissue,” the sheriff’s saying. “Calm her down and I’ll be right back.”
“You listen to me, now,” Momma’s going on. “Emma never was. You started talking about a sister right after your daddy died and I just let it go on. But I never meant for it to go too far. It ain’t right. It ain’t right to think something’s real when it ain’t. You kept talking about her and talking about her—I couldn’t stand it. On and on. Emma this and Emma that. Emma doesn’t like canned peas, Momma. Emma wants to ride up front with you, Momma. Emma wants to get into bed with you. On and on and on. It ain’t right, y’hear me?”
A door opens and closes.
“Here ya are.” A fistful of tissues appear in front of my face. “Now breathe, Caroline. Take a deep breath. Breathe. That’s it. Now blow into the tissues, honey. Good girl.”
It’s hard to find air enough to breathe through my tears.
“Now, now, there,” the man says. “Use them tissues like I showed you.”
“On and on with Emma this and Emma that.” Momma’s voice moves from one side of the room to the other, footsteps along with it. “And it only got worse. Worse and worse and worse and worse.”
“Mrs. Parker…”
“‘Emma doesn’t know why you don’t like her, Momma,’ she says to me one time…”
“Mrs. Parker…”
“Now you know why I don’t like her!” Momma’s bending down from standing so her face is right in front of mine, her words punching me. “I don’t like her ’cause she don’t exist! There! It’s out. No more stepping around you like you’s breakable, like them things they sell at White’s in them pretty glass bottles. I don’t like her ’cause she don’t exist!”
I choke on the words. “You didn’t like her ’cause she looked like Daddy! ’Cause she was the only one saw Daddy die and it reminded you of that!”
“You saw your daddy die!” she spits. “You saw it all! It was a Saturday. I was out back hanging the wash up. That man came into the house…”
“Stop it.” I hold my hands over my ears but it cain’t block out her voice. And it cain’t stop the picture in my head. A man carrying a shotgun. A sunny day. Momma pinning up the wet clothes.
“Mrs. Parker—”
“Your daddy fought ’im best he could…”
“Stop it!” I yell, squeezin’ my eyes closed so I cain’t watch her angry lips.
“…then he shot him dead….”
“Mrs. Parker!”
“He’d been warned to keep away from Selma Blake.”
“Stop it!” I scream at the top of my lungs. “Stop it stop it stop it!”
“Then I had everyone up in my business, telling me to do this, do that, go along with it, they said.” She’s pacing back and forth on the other side of the table. “It wore me out. Your teachers…”
“Stop!”
“…all them in town…”
“Mrs. Parker—”
“Everybody in that godforsaken town want to call you crazy….”
“Now, that’s enough, Mrs. Parker,” the man says from behind, I guess. “That’s enough. You come on with me and we’ll let Carrie be for a while and you and me’ll get a cup of coffee. We’ll be right back, little one. Right back, you hear?”
A door opens and closes.
But it doesn’t close all the way, I guess, ’cause their voices drift in to me in bits and pieces, like the tiny squares of carpet Daddy kept in his car.
“Her friends peeled off from her like skin on an onion, not playing with her, calling out ugly names. She thinks I didn’t know, but I did. Hell, I wasn’t that out of it I didn’t know my own daughter was crazy as a loon. Her best friend wasn’t allowed to come over to our house.” Momma’s voice snarls from outside the room. “Her momma called to tell me she could go over there where she’d be watched carefully, she said. Like it was my fault, this Emma craziness. Like if I watched my own daughter better… ’Course, that Phillips woman was always a little big for her britches, if you know what I mean….”
No!
“Then she got herself a job unpacking boxes at White’s Drugstore and I had the owner of the place calling me up telling me ’bout my own daughter, like I don’t know. ‘Say, Lib,’ he’d start in, ‘what you make of this Emma Caroline’s going on and on about. I don’t know if it’s so healthy for us to go along with it.’ Tell me somethin’ I don’t know! I never thought it was healthy but no, that uppity psychic or psychiatrist or whatever the hell she was tells us it is so healthy, that’s what we all got to do. Play along with it, she says….”
No. I remember Mr. White saying he’d be happy to have Emma help in the back room. And Miss Mary loved Emma. Played with her hair and all.
Emma was there. She was real. Emma was the one who pushed me out of the way when Richard called up from the bedroom. It was Emma he did things to.
No.
“Hey there, little one.” The man’s smile looks like it’s trying to make up for Momma’s frown coming into the room behind him. “How you doing?”
Pow! A cockroach nibbles at my brain: it’s my teacher, Miss Ueland, talking to me about the bruise on my arm, the same place Emma had hers that day.
“Now that you’ve had some time to think on it, how things look to ya?” he asks, scraping his chair closer to me.
Emma was there. I remember Emma being there. I remember having to help her with the lap belt when Momma’d drive too fast on the old country road out by Hamilton’s farm.
“She was real,” I whisper out to them.
Another nibble at my brain: the feel of knotted hair between my fingers…when my fingers would run through my own hair.
No.
Emma was there. Emma had rats’ nests in her hair. Not me.
“You got worse, not better like they said you would,” Momma says through a cloud of smoke that’s taking extra long to float up to the ceiling. “Town doctor came by to check on her after we got calls from school about her being beat up day in and day out, for talking to herself.” Momma’s back to talking to the sheriff. Not to me. “I didn’t care one way or the other, but the doctor said she’d get better. ‘Humor her,’ he says. Like I’m a circus clown meant to keep her entertain
ed, day in, day out. I tell you, it wore me out. Having to call both of them for dinner. Like I’m playing a fool, I was.”
Her voice cracks and brings my head back into the room. Momma’s gonna cry. I can tell.
“What’s gonna happen to us now? Huh?” she cries, pointing her shaking cigarette at me. “Didja think about that when you pulled the trigger? How we gonna get food on the table? Is Emma gonna take care of us now?”
“Mrs. Parker, please.”
A door opens. A door closes.
Chapter Fourteen
“How much for this bowl, ma’am?” the girl asks Momma.
“Two and a quarter,” Momma says, turning it upside down for some reason. “Came down from my own daddy in Rutherfordton.”
The girl counts out her change and hands it over. Momma puts it in the cigar box that I used to hold Daddy’s square of shag carpet that’s now carefully packed in my bag, safe from the tag sale Momma’s hoping will put some money in our pocket for the trip far away from here.
“This vase?” A man holds up the glass container.
“Dollar and a half,” Momma says, her hand already waiting for the money he’s reaching into his wallet for. “Thank you, sir.” She almost smiles when she says it.
But I’m not smiling. Not one bit. I don’t like the idea of our belongings ending up Lord knows where.
“Hey!” I call over to her from the table that has everything for sale spread out on it. “We cain’t sell this! It’s mine.”
Momma looks over to what I’m holding. “If I have to part with my stuff, you got to, too. Put it down.”
But I cain’t. That stamp book’s mine.
“Can I see it?” a little girl still holding her mother’s hand asks me.
“I s’pose,” I say to her. Then I lower my voice so Momma cain’t hear. “It’s not for sale, though.”
She lets go of her momma and takes the book in both her hands, real careful-like. Flipping through the pages, her eyes widen up. “Ooh,” she says. And then she holds it up. “Momma, look!”
Her mother looks over like she’s told to. “What’s that?”
“It’s a book of stamps from all over the world,” I tell her, with more than a hint of pride. “See? There’s Sweden.” I point to the page she’s opened it up to. “And here’s my favorite—Bermuda.” They’re both hovering over it.