“I told you —”
Nick held up a hand to stop him. “I meant what I said. I don’t want you to do anything. I’m just… sorry it’s ending.”
“You mean summer.”
“Yeah. Summer.”
They had reached the fork in the road where they habitually parted, one path leading to Nick’s house at the heart of town, the other to West’s family farm on its outskirts. The narrow highway was lined with cottonwood trees, one of them thick enough to provide cover. West took a deep breath, then took Nick’s hand. They secreted themselves behind the tree. West leaned into the trunk, savoring the roughness of the bark on the back of his neck. It came to him that these were the kinds of details he would want to remember.
When it ended.
“We shouldn’t risk it,” Nick said, but he didn’t mean it.
“I want to,” West said, and he did.
Nick had never asked anything of him. Not even at the beginning, when they were near strangers to each other, just polite acquaintances sharing an exile from phys ed. Nick had his limp; West had a football injury he’d exacerbated at the start of baseball season, enough so that his season soon ended for good. Nick never pressed, never hurried. It was West who had to suggest they continue their long talks over warm beers in Nick’s backyard, their shirts in a heap beside them, the sun blazing down, the sweat pooling between their shoulder blades. For endless afternoons, they rehashed old Super Bowl plays and debated whether their math teacher’s chin mole was grosser than their Spanish teacher’s werewolf knuckles and circled around the thing neither of them was willing to name. Eventually the conversation ran out, and then there was only the two of them, and an empty house, and a soft bed of grass, and sweaty skin, and want.
When it happened, it was West who moved first.
The guys had understood West keeping to himself as long as he was sidelined by an injury. But his arm had healed, and in the fall, the team would be waiting. Watching. Nick believed it was the team he was worried about – and the girls who worshipped him, the almost-ran guys who wanted to be him, the teachers who turned a blind eye and passed him, the full cast of characters who’d long accepted the myth of Jeremiah West. Nick believed that West cared, and it was easier to let him.
“You’re insatiable,” Nick said, offering his first real smile since they’d left the cornfield.
“Perks of dating a jock,” West said, aware of the word that had slipped out, the one they’d both been conscious never to use. “Plenty of stamina.”
“Let’s not forget conditioning.” Nick ran an appraising hand across West’s defined torso. “Also much appreciated.”
West kissed him.
They clung to each other, bodies mashed together, and Nick’s hands found West’s waist, his shoulders, his neck, then cradled his head, pulling him closer, and closer still. Before Nick, there had been girls, and that had been pleasant enough. But with them, West had never felt this kind of hunger, this need that consumed him now for pale, freckled skin, for wiry muscles, for hands and lips and tongue.
It was the hunger that had, finally, been impossible to ignore.
It was safer to emerge separately from their flimsy hiding spot, and so Nick set out first, reluctantly. “I’ll miss you,” he said, with excessive melodrama, so West wouldn’t mistake it for what it obviously was: true.
West laughed. “You’ll see me tomorrow.”
“Excellent point. I take it back – I’m sick of you.”
“Not as sick as I am of you.” West wanted to grab him again, to drag him back behind the tree, to kiss him, to swallow him whole. But he didn’t.
He let Nick go.
Down the road, limping, slowly, oblivious to the black Chevrolet that suddenly roared up behind him – oblivious until West shouted, and then too slow, too awkward, to get out of the way. Spinning around to face the oncoming car, Nick shuffled backward and then, as he hadn’t in years, pitched into one of his awkward falls. The car kept coming. The chrome bumper caught him at the waist and lifted him off his feet and carried him like a hood ornament and West ran and ran and no feet had ever been so slow. He ran, and the car slammed Nick into a tree, another cottonwood, sturdy and unyielding. The car backed up and rammed him again, and again, and again, until the bark was bloody and Nick was a broken rag hanging from the dented bumper. With a final gunning of the engine, the driver shot through the windshield and landed on top of him, and only then did the car finally rest. Only then did West reach the bodies, an eternity past too late.
Nick was in the grass, his limbs jutting at all the wrong angles, metal and glass and gravel embedded in his fair, perfect skin. The driver lay across him, the blood that gushed from his chest splashing on Nick’s face and pooling in the hollow of his neck. It was Paul Caster, West’s assistant coach, a man who’d once led West’s Pee Wee football team to a league championship.
Neither of the bloody heaps was moving.
West knelt. He wiped the blood from Nick’s forehead and pressed his lips to the ruined skin. It was still warm, and, in some dim, calm place miles beneath his panic, West supposed it took some time before a person turned into a corpse. He dug into Nick’s pocket and found his phone, mysteriously intact, and used it to call 911. An accident, he reported, though it had not been that. Come quickly, he begged, though there was now no hurry.
He kissed Nick’s lips, hungry, even now, now more than ever, for more.
And now the hunger, he realized, would never go away.
Now there would be only want and need. There would be no Nick.
West was the one who felt cold.
He folded the phone into Nick’s limp fingers. And then, because there was nothing left he could do, because Nick was gone, and because he was a coward, he ran away.
No one knew how much Cassandra Porter hated children. Except perhaps the children, who seemed to sense the hostility that leaked from her pores. The timid ones smiled politely and stayed close to their mothers. The bold ones kicked her shins or shouted things like “Not the ugly lady!” – which failed to help their cause.
It wasn’t an abnormally strong aversion; it wasn’t even hate, precisely, so much as disinterest verging on mild distaste. She could admit that giggling babies and dimpled kindergarteners were cute; she just wanted nothing to do with them. It wasn’t her fault that in the eyes of the child-adoring world, that translated as hate. So she kept it to herself, and no one was the wiser, except the children, who could always tell.
It made babysitting a bit of a chore.
Gracie Tuck stood up from the table, her untouched pizza cooling on her plate. “I’m going to my room,” she said.
“Okay.”
“No big plans for the night.”
“I wouldn’t expect so.”
“Probably I’ll just smoke and drink a little and maybe play with some matches if I get bored.”
“Don’t burn the house down.”
Gracie was twelve, a blond waif with an elfin smile, which she deployed now. She was, by far, Cass’s favorite babysitting charge, self-sufficient, jaded beyond her years, and clearly embittered by the fact that her parents still felt she needed a babysitter. Hence the polite fiction that Cass was only there to supervise the baby now miraculously asleep upstairs. As far as Cass could tell, Gracie hated children even more than she did, and seemed to reserve a particular animosity for her baby brother. Or, as Gracie liked to call him, the Accident.
She wasn’t the type of child most people found adorable, but Cass appreciated her peculiar charms. Usually. Tonight there was something unsettling about the appraising way she looked at her babysitter, as if weighing whether it would be safe to leave her downstairs, alone. There was something about her tonight… something that made Cass wonder whether she really did have big plans of some sort, whatever would constitute big plans for a twelve-year-old whose best friend was a pet chameleon. For a moment, she toyed with the idea of following Gracie up the spiral staircase, inviting herself into the
girl’s bedroom for a round of Monopoly, or Truth or Dare, or whatever it was normal twelve-year-olds spent their time doing. But then the baby cried, and in the subsequent flurry of rocking and feeding and diaper changing, Cass forgot her concerns. An hour later, settled in front of the TV, she closed her eyes and promptly fell asleep.
She dreamed that Jeremiah West was gnawing at her arm, his teeth tearing through flesh and muscle and sending a hot pain radiating through her shoulder. When she jerked awake, the pain was still present, sharp and real. She gasped and searched around wildly for the source of attack – until the dream faded. She remembered that the throbbing in her arm was courtesy of that afternoon’s flu shot; West would no sooner tear into her arm than he would tear off her clothing. She hated needles even more than she hated babysitting, which made it all the worse that the latter necessitated the former. The Tucks insisted on a flu shot for anyone who came within ten feet of their precious Accident. Since every dollar earned dragged the out-of-state-tuition dream a little closer to reality, Cass had consigned herself to a Saturday of needles and diapers and pain. Her arm only really hurt when she rubbed it, which she did now out of sheer spite.
The TV had somehow shut itself off; the house was dark and quiet. But Cass was suddenly convinced that something had woken her. Some noise, some instinct. Something wrong.
“Gracie?” she called, softly, not wanting to wake the baby.
There was no answer.
I don’t want to go up there. The thought came unbidden as she stood at the base of the stairs.
Don’t make me go up there.
She shouldn’t even be babysitting. She should be at Hayley Patchett’s party, toasting the dregs of summer or getting toasted by the Patchetts’ sorry excuse for a pool. But she hadn’t been invited. Not really, not until Hayley’s best friend, Emily, had accidentally-on-purpose asked Cass what she would be wearing to the big party that, oops, she wasn’t even invited to. Hayley had played it off like of course she’d just assumed Cass would hear about the party and realize she was wanted. She wasn’t. Not that she cared. Here was another secret that Cass had resolved never to reveal: She was better than them – and she knew it. Better than Hayley and Emily and Kaitlin (who had inanely dubbed herself Kaitly to fit in with the others). Better than the idiot jocks and the ignorant teachers and the drug cases and the head cases. Better even than her parents, who’d proved their inferiority by growing up in Oleander and then, against all reason, staying. She didn’t hold it against them, any of them. But she gave herself credit for an insight that few people seemed to grasp. The town was rotten; the town was dying. There were only two more years to endure, and then there would be college, somewhere so far away she could be excused for never coming back.
But that meant finding the money to make her escape, which meant, at least tonight, playing the dutiful babysitter. She mounted the stairs slowly, and crept down the dark hallway, telling herself she was only staying quiet so as not to disturb the children. Not because it felt like there was something lurking in the shadows, something around which it was best to make no sudden moves, lest it stir, lest it strike. The ceiling fan sighed overhead, stirring up a hot breeze. Just the fan, she told herself. Not someone’s warm breath, misting against her neck in the dark.
She was too old to be afraid of the dark.
She did not believe in gut instincts, in premonitions, in the body’s ability to sense danger and plead, as it did now, Turn back.
Get out.
Save yourself.
She thought she’d left the door to the baby’s room open, but it was closed now. Probably just Gracie, paying a visit to her baby brother. Except that Gracie hated her baby brother, and treated the room as if it carried the plague.
She was trembling.
Feeling abundantly foolish, she twisted the knob – slowly, silently – and eased open the door.
Cass laughed.
The room was intact, and empty, but for the baby in his crib. He lay there gurgling, with a small smile, and for a moment Cass felt a rush of what she realized other people must always feel when they see a baby. She lifted the tiny package of warm, wriggling flesh, breathing in the fresh, sweet smell and pressing her lips to his pale dusting of blond hair.
“Turns out you’re pretty cute after all, aren’t you?” she whispered.
Silly of her to suddenly panic because of a bad dream and a dark house and a noise it turned out she hadn’t even heard.
Nothing was wrong.
Everything was fine.
She smiled, and patted the baby’s head, and that was when the darkness claimed her.
Grace woke up from the dream and knew it had not been a dream.
Grace ran down the hall.
Grace blew through the door.
Grace tore the pillow out of the babysitter’s hands.
Grace lifted the baby, the blue baby, the cold baby, and pressed her lips to the baby’s lips and tried to make him breathe.
Grace screamed, and the babysitter gave her a blank look, then pushed her to the floor, then opened the window, then began to climb through.
Grace didn’t know whether to grab her leg and drag her back into the room or give her a push and watch her fall, but she delayed too long. And maybe it didn’t matter, because Grace was just a kid, that’s how everyone treated her and that’s what she suddenly realized she wanted to be, because a little kid couldn’t be expected to know what to do. A little kid could just lie on the floor, watch the baby turn blue and the babysitter climb out the window, and cry.
Grace cried.
Grace saw, through her tears, the babysitter’s face as she turned back one last time before launching herself into the air. She looked at Grace as if to say You always claimed you were old enough to take care of yourself, now see how you like it.
Grace ran to the window and looked down, just in time to see the babysitter land, and to watch her writhe on her back like an overturned hermit crab, and to hear her screaming in pain.
Grace picked up the baby, who she had not liked, but had no choice but to love. He was her brother.
Grace vowed: the babysitter would pay, the babysitter would be punished, the babysitter would die, because her brother was dead.
Grace would, if necessary, see to it herself.
The killing day.
The day the devil came to Oleander.
That day.
Whatever they called it, through the months to come – through the funerals and the potluck dinners and the sermons and the sidelong glances between formerly trusting neighbors – it was all anyone could talk about. It seemed safe to assume it was all anyone would ever talk about, as it was assumed that Oleander had been changed forever, and that, once buried, the bodies would stay in the ground.
But then the storm came.
2
TO EVERYTHING THERE IS A SEASON
One year in Oleander.
One typical year, as those were the only kind Oleander dealt in, even the year of the killing day. In blood as in drought or in poverty or in flame, Oleander was Oleander, and there were still crops to be sown and meth to be harvested, pies to be baked and pigs to be prized, bargains to be hunted and farms to be foreclosed, cherries to be popped and hearts to be broken, worship to be offered and sinners to be shamed. There was still the promise of a warm night on a covered porch or a sledding trip on a snowy afternoon; there was, flickering on the periphery, like the shy fireflies that danced around Potawamie Lake on late-summer nights, still a glimmer of hope. There was gossip and tradition, for these were the fumes on which Oleander ran, chugging steadily along with its needle wobbling on empty, and would until it faded to a dried-up husk, with only a broken and rusted WELCOME TO OLEANDER, HEART OF THE REAL AMERICA! sign to mark what had once been a town.
Tradition: In early October, once the funerals had been endured and the mourners’ houses purged of dying flowers, frozen lasagnas, and baskets of corn muffins long gone stale, the veil of solemnity lifted, and bu
siness – what little business the town had left – continued as usual. In the liminal days between summer and fall, this meant the annual Harvest Festival, capped off by the Main Street parade. The recently departed Sally Gunther, who, thanks to the flask of Jack Daniel’s stashed in her bra, could always be counted on to mount the D’Angelo’s float and strip with Mardi Gras–worthy aplomb, was sorely missed. Kathleen Hanrahan, who’d been favored to win that year’s Miss Oleander banner and wax-flower crown, was not. At least, not by Laura Tanner, third-grade teacher, two-time divorcée, and four-year reigning Miss Oleander, who was more than happy to continue her streak. The parade route was altered for the first time in memory, stopping three blocks short so as to avoid the empty drugstore, with its boarded-up windows, faded police tape, and, if you believed in such things, bad juju.