The Scamp (16 page)

What? Couper says.

Denis opens his eyes toward me. Could I talk with you? he says. Alone?

No, I say. The hairs on my arms tingle, all of them, like quills on a porcupine. I don't want to be read, I say. I stand up, ready to go out. I need a cigarette.

Just walk with me for a minute, Denis says. I'll show you the garden.

It's like the highway isn't even there. There's a tall fence, hiding it, but it's not even that. There are huge hollyhocks looming over your head and, looking down, roses, big bushes of something scrubby and purple, and paths of cut green grass that curve around with low flowers,
pansies, snapdragons and marigolds and regular stuff and then all these other plants, tall and bright and waving in the breeze. There are bees and butterflies, the bees so big and heavy they barely take flight when they move from flower to flower. There's a pond and a little stone bench. Big goldfish circling in the water.

I can't smoke out here. It would be worse than smoking inside. All that fragrance and color. All that light. I stand still, and awkward, fidgeting.

Honey, Denis says, and when he touches my arm, it shocks me, not surprises, but like when you drag your feet on the carpet and then touch a doorknob. A crackle between us. In the dark, you would see the spark.

When he stands before me, he has to look up just a bit. I slouch out of habit, even with Couper. I've been compensating for everyone else's shortness my whole life.

Honey, he says again, gently, like he's afraid to startle me.

I remember, then, being in the front yard with Khaki when we were both little, maybe one of the first things I remember at all, at her house, not mine. Everything else blurs into one shitty kitchen.

Teddy and Doe lived out on Route 8 then, in an ugly little trailer that sat close to the road, and we played there in the grass, our hands and knees damp and stained, and Khaki wandered out, too close to the busy road. Teddy came up behind her, with that same gentle calling, not wanting to scare her, or startle her into running into traffic. She got down on her hands and knees
too, crawling in the grass, creeping closer to Khaki, calling real soft, almost like she was trying to wake her up. She held a cookie out, crouched down beside the road while a truck went past, lifting up Khaki's hair like a fan blew under her chin. She was seconds, inches away from being dead, crushed by a tractor trailer.

Denis lays his fingers on my wrist bone. Beside him, a line of roses that are doubled, white and red, their heads so big and full of petals they don't even look like roses. I feel like I'm splitting open, like the shock he gave me is my skin breaking apart, that light is coming out of me, or bees, flying out of my mouth. He holds my hand.

You have, he says, slowly, closing his eyes. Quite a shadow. A sadness, he says, clinging to you.

No shit
, I think.

I need you to work hard at moving away from that darkness, he says.

That's hard to do, I say.
Plus
, I think,
I'm here, I am moving. Moving is all I've been doing
.

He takes both my hands, and from far away, we probably look like we're getting married, standing in the garden, facing each other, saying our vows.

I'm worried, Denis says.

Don't be, I say. It's like I'm talking to Chuck. Like I'm being scolded for my lifestyle, my late-drinking, fucking-around lifestyle.

He seems to listen, his head cocked slightly, his eyes closing again. I'm afraid you're in danger, he says to me.

With Couper? I ask.

Oh, God no, Denis says. I've known Couper for years, he says. Couper Gale wouldn't hurt a fly. He might break your heart, he says, and laughs, but not before he tries to marry you. The way he laughs, warm and open, makes me wonder what else he knows about Couper.
Not before he tries to marry you.

Then, It could be you, Denis says. In there, with those girls.

I shrug. I guess. What am I, but another woman running away, another woman taking up with someone who looks like he cares for her, looking for something else to hold on to, to move her away from what hurt her. I try to imagine the older ones, Jessa, Caitlin, hoping for something better than a baby and a man who hits you, and turning up in pieces on the bank of a river.

Summer, he says. Is Summer your sister?

Shut up, I say.

He smirks a little. Is she?

No. I yank my hands away.

Honey, he says, Rayelle, and reaches my arms before I back away from him to run.

Who is Summer?

That's it, I say. We stand there like a V, me pulling away from him, and him desperate to hold on. That's the dark cloud over my head, I tell him. The dangerous black hole I could fall into.

No, he says. No. Not at all. He lets go then and moves his hands round the side of my head, past my shoulders and down to my hips, like he's pulling something off,
like you would pull someone out of netting, someone who has gotten caught in a web.

She's okay, he says to me.

Please stop talking.

Honey, no, he says. You're not hearing me.

She's not the darkness, I repeat, barely able to contain what wants to wail out of me. I'm ready to crumple onto the ground, next to the pond, to put my face underwater, and breathe.

Summer? No, he says. She's the light in your heart.

He leaves me out there, and goes back in to confer with Couper again. I stay in the garden. There are short Japanese maples along the fence, their leaves fanned out like hands, soft and feathery. I sit on the bench by the pond with the goldfish. There are mounds of gravel pebbles around the pool, banking it. Tiny gray balls, perfectly round, like what you would put at the bottom of your fish tank, but gray instead of electric blue or hot pink. I pick one up in my hand and let it roll around like a pea. Then I get down on my knees, heavy, all at once, sinking to the earth, and I pick up the stones, by the handful, sifting. I let them drop through my fingers, cold and smooth, and I dump them, as many as I can pick up, as many as I can sift from my hands into the water, filling up the pool, giving the goldfish nowhere to go, no water left to swim in.

Inside, Couper is scribbling from one page to another in his flip-top notepad and Denis is in a galley kitchen off
the living room, making tea. The photos are put away, and when Couper finishes, pausing to look up at the ceiling, and adding a few more lines, he closes the notebook with a flap and slides it into the file he'd brought in.

Denis brings out teacups on a tray, each one old and delicate, the tea in a ball that opens into a spiky flower as the water darkens. Mine tastes like clover, grassy and sweet. Denis sits on the couch next to Couper and runs his hand over his shoulder. He traces his fingers in a circle.

What's this? Denis says.

Couper shrugs. Cotton? he says. He wears a military-style shirt, faded brown, soft.

No, Denis says, laughing. What happened here? I watch the movement of his wrist tendons, his fingertips circling. I picture his middle finger in a divot in Couper's back, but can't think of one, can't remember noticing anything there.

Couper's eyes go wide with wonder. He answers Denis like he can't believe the words are leaving his mouth.

That's where I got shot, he says.

What's left of the scar is just a wink. A tiny closed eyelid, or a dent from a fingernail, curved into the flesh of his shoulder blade. It's less of a divot than I'd imagined when I watched the way Denis probed it. I sit with my legs around Couper, his shirt off, my fingers, my lips, tracing his skin.

It's old, Couper says. Like the rest of me.

Does it hurt?

No. I forget about it most of the time.

I comb my fingers over the back of his head, by his ear. All the hairs at the edge gray, and the gray creeping into the darker hair on top. From the edges in, the way paper burns.

How'd you get yourself shot? I say, and lean, my lips meeting the smiling scar.

I was young and stupid, Couper says. And in over my head.

I hear his phone, its familiar burble of notes, and he turns it over, looks, and turns it back without answering.

A girl? I say.

Nope. He shakes his head and I feel the movement all the way down his big torso. The same way I always get myself into trouble, he says. Writing a story.

We park that night in a Walmart parking lot outside of Greenville. The lights stay on all night. The store is open all night, and the sound of cars, carts banging together, the downshift of tractor trailers pulling in, is constant. I want to ask him why he included Khaki, if he really thinks that she's connected, that she could be missing, in pieces in the woods or sunk into a lake, the ocean somewhere.

But it's late. Past midnight. Couper says, No more work tonight. Instead, he asks me about Summer.

You can say the unspeakable into the dark, even when that dark is interrupted by a streetlight, by headlights circling the parking lot. In a daylit garden filled with sunshine and flowers, the truth is too bright.

He runs his fingers up and down the grooves in my belly, the lines, vertical, but connected at the tops and bottoms. He goes from one to the next without having to jump, a whole highway of scar tissue, all the places where my skin tried to bust open but didn't; it never broke at all, it only stretched.

It took days, I say. It wasn't, like, all at once and she was gone. They thought she would be okay, I say. But they couldn't get all the water out.

Like having pneumonia, he says.

I guess. They called it delayed, I say. Delayed drowning.

No one ever said it then. The doctor said it once, and then all the other people you have to talk to, the cops, a social worker, a funeral home director, neighbors, it's all just
sorry sorry sorry
until it means nothing. It's just people talking at you, words bouncing off you while you move like a robot and wish it were you, yourself, filled up with water and dying. Not a baby. Not your daughter.

The little metal fan rattles on the counter inside the Scamp. I wonder how long the batteries will last.

When? Couper says.

Last year, I say. Summer. I say it in my head. Last summer. The summer before. This is the summer after. There's next summer, and all the summers before that one.

It's pretty, he says. Summer.

I named her that because I loved it, I say. And she was born in a cold snap, in January.

Dead trees in the yard and gray frosted grass, and I was trying like hell to convince myself that the cold
wouldn't last, trying to project myself forward, one summer at a time.

Couper dips his finger from one line to the next, this one a long one that hooks up around my belly button. It's deeper, and wider, than the rest. My knees shake.

Where were you? he says.

I was right there, I say. In the backyard.

I can feel the edge of the lawn chair in the backs of my knees. Smell the hose water and the cut grass. The azaleas along the back fence, hot, burning pink against white pickets.

Let's go, Couper says.

Right now? What time is it?

He looks at the phone. There are two missed calls. Almost four, he says. When he opens the curtains, the sky is still dark, still heavy, but lit by all the surrounding homes, the glow from the Walmart sign, the McDonald's, the tall, bright, boxed lights of the parking lot. I don't know how long I can keep this up, staying up all night, driving during the day, sleeping in the passenger seat beside him, interviewing, searching.

Couper says, There's a great barbecue joint about six hours from here, closer to where we're going. They open early.

You've driven this route before? I say.

Many times, he says.

twelve

KHAKI

I've seen reporters. Investigators. Cops. Some are better than others. In Sunbright, in the fall, I let a special investigator into my kitchen. I lived way out on a back road, a house that was mostly kitchen and porch with upstairs bedrooms and a cellar you could reach only from the outside. I was one of the few people short enough to stand upright in it. I'd grown my hair to my chin, dyed it a shining chestnut brown, and had gotten a dog. A big female German shepherd who had a purebred litter before I got her fixed. I sold them all for $1,500 apiece. Eight of them. The mother, mostly black, smaller than the big-footed tan male I mated her to. I named her Juneau.

The investigator said they'd found human remains. Most of a foot, he said, the long bones dug into the dirt, the round ball of an ankle.

A dog found them, he said, like this one, holding his hand out to Juneau, who rumbled a low growl at him. Near the riverbank, he said.

I kept Juneau tight at my side. She was smart and well trained, would sit still and wait, alert, until I told her to do otherwise. She didn't like men in or near the house, especially if they touched the property in any way. A mailman. A meter reader. An electrician. She could stare a man down.

I lived near enough the river. I had a reputation, if you asked the right people, for kindness.

You sometimes let strangers into your home, Miss . . . White? he asked me. He was a type. A balding, older guy who was tall and thin and had a bass voice. He wore regular clothes, plain-front tan pants and a button-down shirt with a vest, not a cop's uniform. But he carried a badge. And a gun, close on his hip. He probably had a wife he'd been married to a long time. A high school sweetheart even. Might have had a daughter he doted on. That guy.

When I didn't answer him quickly, Juneau growled louder. I stroked her soft head. Did someone tell you that? I asked him.

I heard you would not turn away someone in need, he said.

I let women in, I said. A woman who needs a place to stay, who's in trouble. Who needs shelter, I said. Sure.

Not men, he said.

I turned my body to face him, my hands out at my sides, emphasizing my stature. Me? I said. Alone? No.

I went to the stove and poured him coffee that I'd made in a percolator, which he drank with honey. A Southern thing I never caught on to. I liked my coffee strong, and black.