Strange in Skin (23 page)

There were a few pictures up on the walls. I glanced at them as I went by. None of them were of
Emry as a child as I had hoped to see. They were older pictures, mostly groups of people, and they
were in black and white, some of them faded from the sunlight draining them over the years.

“How is he doing?” Lainey asked, taking a seat on an old green recliner at the back of the L-shaped
living room.

I took a seat on the edge of a matching green couch directly across from her, a cat on either arm
rest. “He’s good,” I replied. She had no clue he was in jail I guessed. Emry had said she had
dementia.

My eyes shifted to the mess of papers on the floor. That’s when I really took notice of how bad this
place smelled. It was a combination of garbage and cat feces. I looked around to see if I could find
the exact source of the smell, but there were so many things on the floor that it made it too difficult to
pinpoint.

“And how is Candy doing?” she questioned me. “I was glad to see those two marry.”

I cringed at the name and also the memory that Lainey was rekindling. She had no idea they were
divorced. I decided I might as well just play along. It was amazing that this woman was able to stay
here on her own. I only imagined how inefficient she was at cooking and bathing herself as I could tell
by her housekeeping that she was mentally not equipped to be living here on her own anymore. Then
again, she probably was the type that wanted to stay in her home until she died. A nursing home was
probably out of the question for her. I doubted she even went to the doctor’s.

“Candace is good, too.” I realized I had said her full name. I just couldn’t bring myself to call her
Candy. It seemed like the kind of name that belonged to a stripper.
Lainey nodded her head approvingly at my brief answers and then looked up at me. “How did you
say you knew Emry again?”
“We work together,” I blurted out.

“I don’t remember what you said your name was.”
“Anna. Anna James.”

“Anna James,” she repeated, biting her lower lip and squinting up toward the ceiling as if in deep
concentration. “I believe I recall that name. You’re that preacher man’s kid, ain’t ya?”

Wow
, I thought. I couldn’t believe she would know something like that, let alone remember it.
“That’s right. I am.”
Lainey nodded and stared at me in silence.

I looked at the orange and black cat to my right. Its eyes were closed as it slept carelessly on the
arm of the hair covered piece of furniture. “You know, Emry has told me so much about you. He said
how you adopted him.”

“I did,” she said proudly. “My late husband and me never had any kids. I decided I didn’t want to
be alone no more. I went and found myself Emry. A perfect match.” She pressed her lips together and
smiled.

I flashed an uneasy smile back at her. “So was it hard to be a single parent?”
“What was that?”

I swallowed and took a deep breath so I could yell it out at her once more. “I said, was it hard
being a single parent?”

 

“Nah,” she replied. “Emry was a good boy. He never got into much trouble. He never said much.
Boys will be boys.”

We sat there in silence for a moment. I wasn’t sure what to say to her next.
“You do know what happened to my late husband, don’t you?” she said suddenly.
I raised my eyebrows. “No.”

Lainey changed her position in the chair as an odd smirk crossed her lips. “That nasty Earl Connor
was sneaking around here again.”

I tried very hard to make myself concentrate on what she was saying. I felt so distracted with the
way she looked, by knowing this was where Emry lived, by her strange smile directly after
mentioning her husband’s death, by the cats. It was exhausting to have to sit here and really focus.

“Who is …?”

“He was a looker, that boy,” she quickly interrupted me. “Handsome devil. Black slicked back hair
in beautiful waves and dark eyes. All the girls went crazy for him. But me, no, I knew better. That
Earl Connor wasn’t getting to me, no, sir. He always comes around, but I told him no, to get on out of
here. I would have nothing to do with him. But he wouldn’t have it. No one had told him no before.”

Lainey was speaking so fast now. I was glad she paused so my brain could try to catch up. “So
what happened?”

She smirked again. “Well, he knew I was a married woman. He knew Larry. They had graduated
together and all. But he still didn’t care. He comes around, and I straightened him out and put him in
his place good. Well, that must have done it. Earl Connor, he snapped. I came home one day and
found Larry hanging from one of those slaughtering hooks out there in that shed.” She lifted her arm to
point toward the door. I had already guessed she was referring to the one with the roof caving in that I
had noticed on my way in. “The tip of the hook right through his neck. It was awful.”

I cringed at the picture she was creating in my mind. “You think Earl Connor did this because you
… rejected him?”

 

She nodded. “Oh, I know he did it. He stabbed Larry first before hanging him up there. Awful, just
awful.”

“How do you know it was him?”
“Such a waste of life. Poor Larry,” she mumbled, ignoring my question.

I wondered then if what she had said was even a true statement. How could I take anything she said
as the truth? She had severe dementia, and her memory couldn’t be that good at the moment. Then
again, she knew who I was and remembered my father.

“A murderer in Seneca?” I had never heard of a so-called Earl Connor before, one who killed the
husbands of the women he wanted for himself. It sounded too made up to be true.

 

She nodded, her disheveled hair springing back and forth with the sudden movement. “He was a sly
one. Sometimes he still comes around here, but I always say the same thing. He’ll never get to me.”
I lowered my eyebrows. There was no way she knew what she was saying now, right?
“Earl Connor. You remember that name, and you remember to stay away from him and his good
looks, too.”

“I’ll do that,” I whispered.
“How is Candy doing, by the way?”

I sighed. The noise stirred up one of the cats on the armrests. It turned to stare at me and flicked its
tail in annoyance. “She’s fine.” The words came out just as annoyed as I had imagined the cat was
sitting next to me.

“Everyone thinks of a kid in a different way, you know?” Lainey continued. I realized it probably
had been some time since her last human interaction or conversation. “I didn’t give birth to him, but
he’s my son. You can put your nose up to me all you want. You think adopting a little boy who has no
one is still not right. It’s just not right to you people, but I don’t care what you say.”

“Lainey, I didn’t say anything …”
“You come in here with your snobby attitude and your good clothes.”

I looked down at myself. Good clothes? Anything would be considered good compared to living in
your own filth.
Lainey stood up just then. She shook her finger toward me. “At least I didn’t pretend like all of
you!”
I started to panic. She was getting upset. What could she be capable of? I wasn’t sure. Her mood
and affect were so unstable. I stood up too, not sure if I should make a run toward the front door or
not. My eyes shifted toward it, to the door knob, on how to maneuver it in a hurry if the need may
suddenly arise.
“No, all of you are fake!” she cried out. “When they adopted you, it was the same thing, but they
made
me
feel bad about it and they just pretended that you were theirs, but you ain’t never belonged to
them and you know it, don’t you?”

I gasped in horror. Now she was trying to accuse me of being
adopted
? She was truly crazy.

“I can see it in your eyes!” she went on shouting and still shaking and pointing her index finger at
me, taking a few steps closer. “You’ve always known! They’re convincing, I know. They tried to
convince me, too!” She stepped even closer still, too close for comfort.

Suddenly I ducked underneath her arm and sprinted toward the front door. My hand quickly twisted
the door knob and I swung it open and looked back at Lainey, a wild look in her eyes. She remained
positioned as before, still pointing to where I had just been standing. She turned her head then and our
eyes met once again.

“You’d better be careful. Earl Connor might be lurking in the shadows out there.” She grinned.

I stepped out onto the porch and slammed the front door behind me. I hesitantly looked around.
Nothing but the falling down shed and a ground full of snow. I carefully walked on the rotten
floorboards of the porch and was so glad when I was finally back in the safety of my own car again. I
started it up and sped away from Lainey Tritt as fast as I could.

She had genuinely freaked me out. I never wanted to step foot in that place again. It made me feel
stranger still to know that Emry had grown up there in that creepy place. Perhaps it wasn’t always so
creepy? Who knows. I kept getting flashes of imagines of Lainey’s husband hanging from a hook dead
in that shed. No wonder no one ever kept it up.
Stupid
, I told myself.
That story isn’t even true.
She’s
just a woman without a properly functioning mind anymore. I should be feeling more sorry for her
than I was. She was living there in that filthy house in her own delirious world. The thought of another
world sparked up the memory of Evadere. How I longed to be there right now where I had felt safe
and perfectly at ease for once.

The houses blurred past me as I sped down the road, barely even conscious of my driving. Why
would such a thing come from Lainey’s mouth about my being adopted? It couldn’t be true. I felt the
tears come on quickly, and I angrily wiped them away with the back of my hand. I couldn’t sit here
and allow myself to get upset over something I knew wasn’t true. My baby pictures were plastered all
over the house. There hadn’t ever been even the slightest mention of it to me before by anyone. Surely
someone
would’ve slipped it to me if it were true.
That’s because it’s not true
, I convinced myself
and slowed down my driving speed as I began to calm down a little, but a sick feeling in the pit of my
stomach lingered. It was that small portion of doubt that I knew nothing about everything, that I had
been blinded for most of my life and that nothing I knew was of any sort of truth, that everything
around me was only as my parents wanted me to see it. I had to find out for myself. I had to look my
mother straight in the eyes and find out what exactly the truth was. There was no way around it. If it
wasn’t true, she could tell me I was being ridiculous and that would be that. If it was true, then … I
shuddered at the mere thought of it. Everything around me would change even more drastically than it
already had.

The anxiety I had had before about being around my house and my family didn’t even occur to me
now. That ache that Lainey Tritt had put there was still in my stomach, eating away at me piece by
piece.

I pulled in front of the house and got out of my car. I didn’t even bother to put on a pair of gloves or
hat as the wind whipped around me. I didn’t even seem to notice it as I took long, steady strides up the
walk, then up the steps, opening the front door without any sort of hesitation. I shut the door behind me
and listened. The TV was on, and Matthew sat in front of it. He grinned and waved to me. I waved
back and stomped through the house, my boots still on leaving wet shoe prints behind me.

“Anna, is that you?” I heard my mother ask from the kitchen.

I took a few more long steps into the room and leaned against the kitchen table. My mother stood
over the counter as she peeled potatoes and tossed them into a pot beside her. “You slept in late this
morning, honey. Are you feeling okay?” Then she turned to look at me, and her eyebrows lowered in
hesitation. “Anna?” She put down the peeler and potato to spin the entire way around to face me.
“What’s the matter?”

“You tell me,” I spit out.
She gave me a questioning look. “What do you mean?”

So my father hadn’t told her about our wonderful adventures at the prison yesterday. Or, maybe he
had told her and she decided to act clueless about it. Sometimes she did things like that, ignored
circumstances as if they never existed and went about her merry way. No, I decided. He hadn’t told
her.

I swallowed down the lump forming in my throat.
“You look pale. Honey, please sit down,” she insisted in a soft voice, reaching out to touch my arm.
I jerked away. “I’m fine standing,” I snapped at her.

She gave me a look of uncertainty as if she didn’t recognize the person standing before her. Perhaps
she was unrecognizable to me, too. Perhaps this whole family thing was merely a charade. Maybe
Lainey Tritt was right. Maybe I didn’t have a
real
family.

“Am I yours?”
“What?”
I shut my eyes tightly and shook my head as the words escaped out. “Am I adopted?”

The look on her face just then was one of pure horror as it twisted up in a moment of grief as well
as deceit. I gasped, my hand extending over my gaping mouth. So Lainey Tritt had been right all along.
No wonder she remembered my family. They stuck out as the other ones who had adopted a child.

“I can’t believe it,” I whispered. It felt as if my legs were going to give out from under me. I caught
myself on the edge of the table. The tears were there but barely. It was as if the shock of this moment
was even more powerful than the overwhelming urge to cry.

“Anna, please!” My mother grabbed my arm and pulled me away from where Matthew could hear
us speak. She peeked in at him as he was still happily watching his show as she led me into my
father’s study just off the dining room and shut the door behind us. “Please look at me,” she begged.

My eyes fell to the floor. I couldn’t look at her. I just couldn’t.
“Say something,” she pleaded again.

I shook my head and leaned against the front of my father’s huge cherry desk. My head was still
lowered. “You’re unbelievable,” I snapped. “You want
me
to say something? It seems to me that I’m
the one owed an explanation here.”