Break the Skin (29 page)

LANEY

I
t was Poke who told the police what they needed to know in order for them to come for me at the Walmart that night in December, but really they’d been on my trail for a while—since summer when the two officers had come to talk to Mr. Mank, and they’d asked me a few questions. Wasn’t it true that I used to live with Delilah Dade and Rose MacAdow? “Yes,” I told them. “We were friends.” And wasn’t it true that Delilah had pulled a pistol out of her purse at the Boar’s Nest up in Dark Bend on Memorial Day? I lied and said I didn’t know anything about that.

Delilah was off sick from work the night the police asked me about her gun, but at break I called to warn her. She said not to worry. She’d already talked to the cops.

“But, Delilah,” I said, terrified of what they might eventually find out, “you got so mad at Rose that night at the Boar’s Nest, you threatened her with your .38. Someone’s told the police about that.”

“That .38?” Delilah was all la-di-dah. “Now, honey, I might have been a little ticked off with Rose, but point a gun at her? Why, I haven’t even had a gun in my house since Bobby May left. That was his pistol. Remember, Laney?” She kept quiet for a while, and when I didn’t answer, she said it again. “Remember?” And I knew she was telling me that if the police asked me about that gun again, this was the lie I was to tell them.

“Sure, I remember,” I finally said.

“That’s a good girl,” she said, and then she hung up on me.

Now, facing the police officers the second time, I’d told as much of the story as I could bring myself to say.

The big-bellied officer nodded at the slope-shouldered one, who went out into the hall. When he came back, he had Poke with him. Poke kept his head down, and I couldn’t bear to see him with the slope-shouldered officer’s hand on the back of his neck, guiding him to the table where I sat.

I could tell Poke was afraid. He sat down next to me. He took off his glasses and rubbed at his eyes. “I’m sorry, Laney,” he said, and my heart broke.

“The boy’s grandfather brought him in.” The slope-shouldered officer sat down at the end of the table and crossed one leg over the other at his knee. It was a relaxed gesture, and seeing it, I let myself believe everything would be all right. If I just told the truth, every bit of it—if I stated the facts calmly and plainly—everything would be fine. Then the officer said, “Seems like the boy was hiding something in his room. Grandpa didn’t like what he found, so he did the right thing. He came to us.”

“He’s not a stupid man.” For the first time, the big-bellied officer wasn’t snapping or threatening. He was just saying what he knew in a level voice. “He knew he was looking at trouble. Isn’t that right, son?”

Poke nodded. He put his glasses back on.

“And you’ve been doing everything you can to cooperate, haven’t you?” Poke nodded again, but that wasn’t enough for the officer. He tapped one of his chunky fingers on the table right under Poke’s bowed head. “Speak up, son.”

“Yes, sir. I’ve told you everything there is to tell.”

“Tell it to the lady.” The big-bellied officer had that edge back to his voice. “Tell her what Grandpa found.”

For a good while, Poke didn’t say anything. He chewed at his bottom lip and looked away from me. I heard the murmur of voices somewhere
in the hallway, and I wondered whether Mr. Hambrick was waiting out there. I wished I could reach over and take Poke’s hand, just to let him know that whatever he’d told the officers, it was all right.

“He doesn’t have to tell her.” The slope-shouldered officer uncrossed his legs and rested his arms on the table. “She already knows. Don’t you, Laney?”

It was a gun, he said—that’s what Mr. Hambrick found in Poke’s room. A .38 Taurus Special, a five-shot with a stainless-steel barrel and Pachmayr grips. The state crime lab in Springfield had lifted fingerprints from those grips, prints that belonged to Lester. There were other prints on that gun, the slope-shouldered officer told me. Besides Lester’s there were prints from Poke, and then sets that belonged to two other people. The officer felt certain, now that I’d told the story of the day that Lester and Delilah and I test-fired the .38, that some of those prints belonged to me. They’d suspected that ever since they got the crime lab report, and that’s why they’d come for me at the Walmart. Because I’d been Lester’s girlfriend. Because they didn’t know where he was, but they knew how to find me. And those other prints? Of course they were Delilah’s, and had the officers known that when they took me from the Walmart, they would have taken her, too.

“You matched a set with Lester?”

I was confused. Had they found him somewhere and taken his prints? Could he be right there at the station? What would I say if I saw him after all the time that’d passed?
Did you run because you forgot who you were, or were you trying to get away?
If he left deliberately, I’d still forgive him. I’d ask if he was all right. I’d ask if he remembered me. Maybe I’d kiss him on the lips and tell him we’d get through this and everything would be all right. I’d tell him I was sorry that I’d brought him into such a mess.

“Military records,” the slope-shouldered officer said, and I thought, Of course. “Laney, are you sure you don’t know where Lester is? Haven’t you heard from him since he left town?”

So they didn’t have him. He was still on the loose.

“Not a word.” I didn’t tell them how I’d worried over him, how I’d wondered if I’d ever see him again, how I felt all hollowed out on the inside without him. “Not one single word,” I said.

The slope-shouldered officer glanced at the big-bellied one, who raised his eyebrows in a way that told me he didn’t believe it. I kept talking. I told the officers that, all right, it was true for a while we had a plot, a plan for murder, but in the end we’d come to our senses. What happened after the day Lester and Delilah and I were down that oil lease road wasn’t my doing. That was the truth.

The big-bellied officer nodded toward the slope-shouldered one. “Get a warrant,” he said. “Let’s have a talk with Delilah Dade.”

DELILAH WOULDN’T TALK
. Poke and I waited, always with one of the officers at our side, for hours while they interrogated her. At last, the slope-shouldered officer came into the room and said she wouldn’t tell them anything other than what I already had. Yes, for a while there’d been a plot, first to scare Rose and then to kill her, but nothing had ever come of it, at least nothing that Delilah would claim to be a part of. Whether Lester Stipp put that .38 to work after that day down the oil lease road, she really couldn’t say.

“So there we are,” said the big-bellied officer. He drummed his hands on top of the table. The noise startled me, and I jerked up my head. Poke was looking at me, and I could see his lip quivering. The big-bellied officer narrowed his eyes and studied me. “Boy with a gun, not just any gun, but the .38 that killed those two people. Lots of explaining to do. I can tell you that. Maybe there’s something else you might remember?”

“Tell him, Laney,” Poke said. “Please. Tell him the truth.”

I BEGAN BY
telling the story of how Lester took me home the day we test-fired the .38. I took my time, the way I am now. I told the two police officers exactly how it was. We drove out of that oil lease road, and once we were back at Delilah’s, I got in the truck with Lester. He carried me to New Hope, and we swore we’d never speak of the fact that we’d gone as far as to fire that .38 in preparation for using it on Rose.

I told the officers how I finally went into Mother’s house and did my best to step back into the life I’d left, that unremarkable life, comfortable now with common sense and decent living. The days and weeks went on. The Inderal the doctor gave me was working, and by the middle of April my migraines had stopped, and I was glad to be Laney again.

Then one morning, Rose caught me in Mother’s driveway when I was coming home from work, and she said that she and Tweet had started to lock the house when they were gone and at night when they slept. She said she walked into the living room one day, and Poke was standing there. He’d just walked right into the house, pretty as you please. Said he was looking for Tweet.

“Laney, I know you’re fond of him,” she said, “but I’d be careful if I was you.”

The next night at Walmart, Delilah asked me if I’d do her one more favor. She wanted me to give Tweet a note. She handed me a folded-up sheet of notebook paper, and her fingers were trembling. “I wrote it out,” she said. “Everything I want to say. Everything that’s in my heart. You can read it if you want.”

“I’d never do that,” I said. “They’re your own personal words.”

“No, go on.” Delilah’s eyes were red-rimmed from crying, and I could tell she was scraped out, that it’d taken everything she had to write that note. “I want you to. I want to make sure I’m not making a fool out of myself.”

Her handwriting made me swallow hard: big, round letters and flowing tails and hearts for dots over the i’s as if she were thirteen again
and writing to her first crush. The words themselves, though, and what they added up to, were blunt and full of grown-up pain:

Tweet, I’ve done my best to put you behind me and imagine my life going on without you in it, but no dice. I just can’t swing it. Here’s the truest thing I know. We can make things right. You can come back and we can start again, no questions asked. We can pretend that Rose never came along. All I want in my life is you, Tweet, and if I can’t have you, I don’t know what I’ll do. I’m afraid to find out. When you live alone without the true love of your life in it, you get afraid of a lot of things. You get crazy thoughts, but the one thing you always know is what you need, and you keep hoping for a miricle to bring it your way
.

IT WAS THE MISSPELLING
in that last sentence, “miricle,” that made me embarrassed for Delilah. A word that couldn’t hold all that she wanted to fill it with, couldn’t hold everything that was in her heart. A word that broke down with the effort.

I folded the paper. I remembered how she helped me get through that time when Lester was gone. “It only hurts so long,” she told me. “Then it just aches when you touch it.” I didn’t realize then that what she was telling me was that it never went away, the pain in the heart when you lose someone you love. That’s how you knew it was real, that love. You knew it from the fact that you never stopped hurting, no matter what joy you found from there on.

“Why don’t you put it in the mail?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I don’t want
her
to get her hands on it. Please, Laney.”

“All right.”

“But don’t watch him read it. I couldn’t bear to hear that he laughed at me.”

The next evening, I had a night off from work, so I went to the South End. Helmets on the Short Bus were playing, and when they finished the first set and took a break, I saw my chance. I slipped Delilah’s note into Tweet’s guitar case for him to find.

He didn’t see me do it. He was off in a corner with Rose, and I could hear their voices getting louder. “You’d think you didn’t want this baby,” she said, and he shot back, “Maybe I don’t.”

I felt bad then about tucking that note into the guitar case. This wasn’t the time for Delilah’s words to find Tweet. I didn’t want to be any part of what might happen when they did. I wanted to open the case and get the note back into my pocket, but just then Tweet turned away from Rose and came back to the stage, and there was nothing I could do.

How could I know that Rose would find it? How could I imagine that she’d come to me a few days later and say, “You tell Delilah to leave Tweet alone.”

But I couldn’t tell Delilah that. I didn’t want her to know the rest of what Rose said. “Tell her Tweet isn’t coming back to her. Tell her there isn’t going to be any mir-i-cle.” She said the word the way Delilah had spelled it, and I couldn’t let Delilah know that Rose had read that note, had said, “Jesus, Laney,” with a smirk and a shake of her head as if to add,
How stupid can you all be?

That was as much as I could say to the police officers. I looked across the table at the big-bellied one. “I put Delilah’s note in Tweet’s guitar case.” I lifted my chin. “I did do that.”

The big-bellied officer said that was all fine and good, but the one thing he wanted to know was whether I’d ever been in that house—Rose and Tweet’s house—with that .38.

I glanced at Poke, who was rocking back and forth now, his hands all twisted up in his lap.

“Don’t look at him,” the officer said. “Look at me.” He snapped his fingers. “Tell me exactly what happened that morning.”

So there was this one more thing, and I knew I had to tell it. I
imagined that Poke already had—at least some version of it—and now the officers were just waiting for me to confirm his story.

That May morning, the one in question, I turned off the highway onto the New Hope Road, and as I passed their house, I saw the two of them on the porch. Rose had on the oversized tie-dyed dress she’d been favoring the last month of her pregnancy and a pair of flip-flops. She had a backpack in her hand and she was trying to tug it free from Tweet, who was shirtless and barefoot, wearing only his Tweety Bird boxer shorts with the yellow cartoon bird on them.