Echo Lake: A Novel (4 page)

It says here take a turn at the flower place, Emily said.

The woman sniffed. That place ain’t been there for years, she said. They sell flowers over at the little store by the Baptist church now.

Emily nodded.

The road starts out paved then,
boom
, it’s dirt, not but a half-mile down it, the woman said, moving shards of ice from her soda cup around in her mouth. That’s how you’ll know it’s the right one—most roads go right to dirt off of the main one.

Thanks, Emily said. I’m new around here.

Huh, the woman said, cracking ice between her teeth. You got family around?

Not anymore, she said. Not that I know of.

Emily imagined there had to be someone around, though. She planned to find them, if there were any left. She’d take a thin Claymore County telephone book and call all of the last names she could remember from her mother’s stories and ask them if they knew of any Collins and where they’d gone.

Best forget the whole rotten bunch,
her mother had said.
It’s not like they can do anything for you that I can’t.
Emily had stopped asking about the absent family by the time she was a teenager. She convinced herself that she liked being alone, she liked having no family photographs. It made her mysterious and different, even if nobody noticed but her.

I don’t know anyone who moves here without family or an oil or logging job or something, the woman said. She leaned on the counter, her forearms flat, hands folded together.

It’s a nice place, she said. Good for kids. They get outside and everything, or at least they used to, before this summer. She shook her head and sighed. No gangs, at least. You have any kids?

Emily shook her head. She thought
I’m too young for kids,
but of course, she wasn’t really, not anymore.

I’ve got three, the woman said, each of them a handful. She leaned forward across the counter, her elbows rustling in a pile of Heartshorne Stars. It’s even harder now that we can’t let them play outside. She pointed to the newspaper headline, the two children missing.

She shook her head. Her dark hair rioted with the platinum. It looked as though her scalp bled ink.

The world is different than it used to be when we were kids, you know? She said. Can’t even protect your children.

True, Emily said, that’s true. She wondered, though, how true that was. She remembered the faces on the back of milk cartons, stories about cults on Geraldo, and learning about good touches and bad touches in school. Everybody had been afraid then, she remembered. But maybe it was worse now. Maybe parents hovered by the window, hoping that their children would make it home every afternoon after school.

Thank you for your help.

The woman nodded and stood up straight, patting the
newspapers back into a neat stack.

Good luck, she said. Holler if you need help.

Emily nodded, but she didn’t think she’d want help. She was free. She had the key to her own house in her pocket. She had five boxes and a loose pile of clothes already on hangers balled in the trunk. She could do it on her own.

•

The house was set far back from the road, beyond a wide, deep lawn, left un-mown for several rains and infested with dandelion and dark patches of clover. It was obscured by trees and heavily shaded. She parked her car in the driveway and walked up to the door, watching the cicadas jump away from the dirt path as she stepped. The grass rattled dryly under her shoes and she imagined it would be hard and cutting under her bare feet. Before the door were three concrete steps and a stoop. On it, a stained Welcome mat and one newspaper rotting in its bright orange plastic bag greeted her.

The house was nothing spectacular: one-story, the roof sloping upward slightly and meeting itself at a dull peak. It was covered in a standard white aluminum siding, grimy from rain, and the windows were small and infrequent, but she wasn’t disappointed. She had expected so little that an intact house, only cosmetically ugly, was a relief. The lawyer had told her little about the house but that it needed few repairs, was small, and that she could move in as soon as she got there. He seemed eager to be done with it.

She’d learned her low expectations from her mother, who had always had a glimmer of hope at every new place, though she had been disappointed over and over again. Emily had learned that hope was exhausting.

She held the key in her hand. It looked like any other key, a generic copy from a hardware store key machine, the edges serrated. She clutched the key and stood on the first step, occasionally looking behind her out into the driveway when something rustled or a car threatened to come closer from the distance.

What if she were wrong about the house, if the lawyer had been wrong and this very minute was on his way to take the key away and turn her back, to tell her that somebody else, a closer family member more in need of a home, had been found?

But she didn’t have anywhere else to go. She saw herself getting down on her knees in the dried weeds to beg the lawyer not to make her leave. She imagined the feel of the grass beneath her knees, how even the crickets would jump away from her.

He’d look down at her without understanding.

You can’t be alone, he’d say, looking at her with the contempt that the loved try to hide from the unloved. That’s impossible. You are thirty years old. Go to your family. Go to your friends.

The front door opened into a dark, empty room. She almost tripped on piles of letters and pamphlets piled before the front door—a mail slot was placed knee-level in the door. Emily stuck her fingers into the slot, making the hinge squeak.

She gathered the mail and shut the door behind her. The small living room had one large window which revealed a square of the backyard and the woods that surrounded it. The light dappled sparsely through onto her dry backyard, which was grown up and completely empty of anything but a coil of old water hose, disconnected from a spigot and cracked where the plastic had been curled.

She hadn’t lived somewhere so secluded since she’d been eight, when they had lived in a trailer in rural Virginia and Connie had tried to make a living as a reiki healer. She’d set up shop in the trailer, in what should have been Emily’s room, after a weekend reiki training and retreat which had cost them an entire month’s worth of utilities money.

In those days, they’d eaten their dinners of canned beans and wheat bread out on the porch, it being more comfortable outside than in the trailer, which caught and held heat like the inside of a car in summer. Emily remembered tossing and turning at night, the sheets sticking to her body and her sweat waking her with its tickly slide down her face.

The only people they’d seen on the roads then were the mailman and teenagers looking for the backroad way to the lake and sometimes a police officer trailing a swerving pickup. Connie’s few clients would arrive and immediately be whisked away to her office. It smelled of incense and little bottles of essential oils that pooled and stained the wooden countertops. Connie had placed soothing things in the room, like Aloe Vera plants, crystals, and photographs of various spiritual teachers. Emily had hated the room. All of the smells made her eyes water.

As a child, living so far away from everything had made her feel isolated. She had hated it. Now, she felt safe tucked away from the road and other houses. She could dissapear if she wanted to.

Emily flipped the light switch in the kitchen and set the mail down on the kitchen counter: Three Wal-Mart circulars, a printed advertisement for a high school Indian Taco dinner, and a pamphlet from Heartshorne Free Will Baptist Church:

Welcome to Heartshorne!

We hope that you will join our church family

in worshipping hte Lord and serving our community.

Sundays: 9:00 to 11:00 AM and 5:00 to 6:30 PM

Wednedsays: 6:00 TO 7:30 PM

Fridays: Community prayer and remembrance, 7:00 to 8:30 PM

This was the only message that was meant for her—
Welcome to Heartshorne!
How had they known so quickly? The typos were charming. She imagined the church secretary, ancient and unfamiliar with computers, hunting and pecking her way through the announcement, probably counting spaces to center the document. She placed the mail neatly in a pile on the kitchen counter.

She walked from room to room, turning on every light, touching each doorknob, examining the walls for marks of the previous inhabitant, great-aunt Fran (a name that made Emily think of spunky older women in cozy mysteries, though she knew nothing about the real woman). The walls, though, were clean and white and she could smell the faint poison of new paint. The two bedrooms were small, and one windowless, but this was still far more room than she was used to having. Being here wouldn’t be like living with Eric, who took up all of the space with his instruments and his sheet music and his piles of Buddhist philosophy books, the first chapters filled with earnest highlighting and dog-eared pages, the rest clean and unread.

Downstairs, she’d been left with a refrigerator, range, plastic counters, and a rickety kitchen table with a gouged plastic tabletop. She slid her fingers along the deep grooves. Probably from knives cutting through apples or tomatoes.

The kitchen’s enormous, deep steel basin could hold every pot and dish she’d brought with her, and the water came out strong and hot, though a small stream flew ninety degrees from the faucet, spraying her shirt with water when she turned the water all the way up. Lighting came from an uncovered, low-watt bulb above her, a metal-beaded string hanging down.

The living room was clean, with only faint, whiter spaces on the freshly painted walls where pictures had been removed and a plate-sized stain darkening the maroon carpet just below the window. The lawyer said there had been few things of value in the home, and they had either destroyed or sold some pieces, according to her will. She had donated any money from the sales to the local Baptist church. Fran had left Emily a few basics; a refrigerator, range, couch, and a bed.

She sat cross-legged on the carpet and looked up at the still ceiling fan, its dust collected in strings, the strings moving slightly.

This is my house. I own it. She said it aloud to the house, which absorbed the words without an echo.

Her great-aunt Fran had been dead and buried for four months before the Claymore county courthouse had tracked Emily down. Frannie had left the house to Connie or her survivors. The lawyer had asked Emily if Fran and Connie had been close. Emily had not known how to respond, the idea of Connie being “close” to anyone so foreign to her.

When Emily had heard her mother’s name spoken by the man on the telephone, she’d had a strange moment of fear: what if he knew that Connie had died a difficult, lonely death and that Emily had been grateful when she finally stopped breathing completely? Of course, he knew nothing about it—nobody did. Connie had been, as she usually was, completely alone when it had happened. The man on the telephone had merely given his condolences and moved on to business.

Emily got up from the floor and started to move boxes from the car to the living room. She set her teakettle and dishes in the cabinets, folded her clothes in a neat pile in the back bedroom, and put away the little bit of food that she’d had left over from the trip and her infrequent stops at convenience stores.

After two hours, she’d all but finished, and it was still morning.

I should nap, she thought, but she wasn’t sleepy, despite getting only five hours of sleep the night before. She felt a humming inside her body, the same kind of excitement she’d felt in those first years with Eric, when she’d see him mount the stage and think
he is mine. That’s my boyfriend.

She examined each room in the house carefully, kneeling to into the gaps underneath and behind the refrigerator and stove for anything Frannie might have left behind—a loose shopping list, a leftover piece of junk mail indicating what charities she gave to, if she gave to any at all—to indicate who she’d been. What kind of woman would choose such a red carpet? Why hadn’t she planted flowers? And the white boxes on the walls—what pictures had they held? What did a woman without much family have on her walls? Did she collect art?

Emily was on her knees, trying to peel back the carpet in the living room to see what kind of floor had been covered up underneath it, when the door rattled with a knock—it was loose in its frame and a slice of light came through the edges.

She had the thought, again, that this must be the wrong house, not hers at all. What if the real owner wanted to come in?

She stood up, smoothing her clothes. It’s fine. Just somebody knocking, someone who wants to say hello. The house was hers.

But there was still that nagging feeling that she did not belong.

Emily touched the key in her pocket, that proof of her belonging, and opened the door.

The man at the door wore a neatly ironed blue-checked shirt, the colors of sky and snow. His face was round and abundant without being fat—boyish cheeks below crow’s feet that indicated he was older than he looked. He smiled and held out his hand. Emily was distracted by his metal watch, the enormous face which was sparsely populated with slim roman numerals, the kind of watch you could barely read, it was so minimal.