The Scamp (21 page)

'Cause someone else can help you with that.

I don't need that kind of help, I say. My voice is dry, gone in the red dust.

She swings her hair before she goes inside with the black case. You don't need her kind of help at all, she says to me.

Any idea, Couper says, of where I might find Ashley Dunn?

That's not her name, Crystal says. Even Ashland's not her name, she says, and fake smiles at him. Then, Why don't you start at the river? she says, pointing to the trees beyond the trailer. And follow the trail of blood?

I expect Crystal to slam the door, but she closes it snug, and I hear the dead bolt slide into place. The windows are covered tight with blinds, not a movement again from inside, even though the whole thing is only about twelve feet wide, maybe thirty feet long.

I follow Couper back to number seventeen. Well, he says, and picks his shirt up, covering his nose with it. Here goes, he says.

He pushes on the door of number seventeen, and it opens until it can't. Until the angle makes the corner jut into the floor, dragging, ripping the carpet.

Inside, it's littered deep with dirty dishes that have sat so long they're fuzzed over with thick black, hardened
to a shell. There's the low hum of flies and slow bees pinging against the windowpane. You can see everything from the doorway, the way you always can in a single- wide: the table, with its dishes and yellowed newspapers, a long green striped couch that's empty except for misshapen cushions, placed haphazardly so they don't fit together the way they should anymore. There's a counter across from the table with some small appliances, a toaster with a drawing of wheat on the side, a white coffeemaker stained brown around the edges. The pot has an inch of hardened sludge in it.

But the carpet is the worst. It's crusted flat with a dark rust-colored stain in the shape of a bean up the middle of the trailer.

I watch while Couper pushes aside a flowered curtain on a tension rod, revealing the back bedroom. He sticks his head in, but doesn't enter. There probably isn't room, just space for a bed, and some shelves, maybe, on the walls. It's hard to tell if there's anything worth the effort. There are no people here anymore, not even their important things. Just the shit left behind. It smells rotten. The kind of decay that grows.

I need to get out. I hop over the steps and stand in the tall grass to the side. There's a field behind that goes for miles, no farmland or crops, not even trees except for way back. Just wild. The houses going up off to the right of here, where another line of trees makes a sorry attempt at masking the development, the constant sound of tamping. That side of the trailer, solid, with
no windows. Dingy white, dented in some places, with holes in others, like a variety of rocks had been sprayed at it. I run my finger over it, reading the pattern.

The moldy, closed-up smell in the trailer made me woozy, and outside, the air isn't much better. It's hot and stagnant, heavy with roofing tar and exhaust.

Honey, Couper says. He leans out the door and lets his shirt down.

Honey yourself, I say.

Rayelle, he says.

I look up at him leaning, and think if he comes out any farther, he's going to tip the whole garbage can on top of himself.

What? The sun burns the top of my head.

Can you come look at this? he says.

Is it a fucking body? I ask.

No, he says. He holds out his hand to me.

I try doing what he did, and pull the top of my dress up to cover my mouth and nose, but there's too much boob and not enough fabric. Pulling on it hurts my neck. So I let it drop, and try to breathe slowly, through my mouth.

He leads me to the bedroom, which is, like I expected, all bed with about a foot's width of floor to step around. There's a smushed-flat king-size mattress on top of a platform with drawers underneath, and moth-eaten red-velvet curtains over the window. A wire hangs on the side wall, with a string of postcards clipped to it. The pictures face out, mountains, a river, the ocean,
daisies, and Couper picks them off one by one, handing them to me.

Tennessee. South Dakota. Nevada. Georgia. Virginia. Carolina.

Each one with the address carefully razored off so that side of the card is blank and worn soft like fabric.

The messages largely the same.
Miss you. Love you. Wish you were here with me.

xoxo Rainy
.

I feel my knees give, like, actually give underneath me so that Couper grabs my elbow and holds me up, walks me back out of the trailer with the cards in my hand. My cards.

Rainy? he asks outside, looking over my shoulder at the signature on each card.

It was a phase, I say.

For?

For me, I shout at him. It comes out as a roar, my throat dry and rattling. These are mine, I say.

I think he hasn't been listening to a damn thing I've said.

I hold them loose in my lap in the car. The names like a chant in my head. Montana, Nevada, Tennessee, Virginia. Caitlin, Jessa, Alyssa. Florida.

Think for a minute, he says to me, but I just look at my kid handwriting, curlicued and cute.

When did your cousin leave South Lake? he says.

June, I say. Right after her dad died.

How old was she?

Sixteen. Actually, not even, I say. She wasn't sixteen till August. But she left in June.

Right after, Couper says.

I know, I say. Yes. I don't know what he wants me to admit, what he's pointing at, or if I'm afraid of what he's suggesting. After Holly Jasper disappeared, I say. But Khaki didn't disappear, I say. I watched her leave.

With who?

I get a chill in that hot car, just like I did when I saw the kiddie pool in the sun, my arms go goose-bumpy and my head sweats along the hairline.

With her boyfriend. My voice is small, dry. He waits, and I say the name. Jeff Henderson.

Are you sure? he says.

I think. We only ever called him Henderson, I say, but yeah, I'm sure that was his name. I watch Couper grip his hands on the wheel, open, closed, knuckles pink and then white, until he's ready to turn the key and start the car.

I shuffle the cards in my hands. They're dusty, and they smell weird, like mildew, damp and rotten. Why? I say to Couper. I'm too dry for any kind of crying, but wind and red dust are rumbling around inside me. I'm too stunned, too filled up tight with fear to do anything but turn to him and ask him why, why we would find these here. Now.

I don't know, he says. He's unwilling to tell me what he's thinking. I hold the cards in my hands till the
edges are soft from my sweat, deteriorating under my fingertips.

Sixteen

KHAKI

The secrets under my skin have changed the shape of my face, which shifted from town to town, from girl to girl. I took on the shape of each place, the sound of their voices, the length of their hair, the color of their eyes. In Georgia, light ash-brown. In South Carolina, deep brunette. By the time I got to Tennessee, I was back to blond, going lighter all the time.

I cut my own hair. I shaved my head. I bought wigs. When the hair grew in, it was the color of pure light.

My eyes, like a cat's in the sun.

My mother told me about Rayelle after Aubrey. When she died, my mother went silent for a long time. She lay in bed alone, a habit I would know more and more as
she got sick and died. But after Aubrey, I would sometimes creep up beside her, slip my hand in hers.

The bassinette in which Aubrey died, still there in the room, sour smelling, the blankets with their sweet, oily, baby-milk scent, tucked into the sides, but with no baby to swaddle.

I had wanted a sister bad.

I was six years old, alone in the house except for a brother who was much older, a brother with hard hands and sharp breath.

I held Aubrey's soft squirmy body only once. Her face, smushed and red. Her eyes, squinted shut. Her nose like a candy button. And her lips, like a tiny flower, barely open.

They buried her in a casket the size of a shoe box.

Closed.

I was angry that the baby I had wanted so bad came and left so quickly.

I want a sister, I said to her. The sun came in the back bedroom windows, warm on the floor, lighting up the bedside table. It was midafternoon, the TV on the dresser on a soap opera I knew my mother didn't watch. She lay on her side with her back to me, but when I came in and said that, she rolled over.

You have a sister.

Not anymore, I said. I was disgusted. With everyone. I thought a sister could at least keep me company. Could sleep in my room, in my bed even, our fat kid legs mixed up together. I thought if I had a sister in my bed, no one else would come in at night. If my sister was there, I
wouldn't wake up burning like I was being split in half, my legs wet and aching.

I watched my mother rub her eyebrows. When they weren't drawn in, they were just ash brown, just a shadow above her green eyes. Her hair, with its color washed out, was returning to its medium brown. She'd kept it darker for years.

I thought she was the most beautiful woman ever.

Rayelle is your sister, she said.

I slapped her hand, the way my aunt Carleen had slapped my face when I told her the baby was dead. The sound sharp like paper snapping.

She snatched her hand back from me.

Don't you say that, I said to her. It's not the same. It's not the same as having my own baby sister, I said. By then I was shouting.

Kathleen Suzanne, she said to me. Rayelle is your baby sister. She sat up before I could tell her to shut her damn mouth. Shhhhhht, she said, holding up her finger. Her face was thin, and sallow, yellow-looking to me. And don't you tell a goddamn soul I told you, she said.

Who knows that? I said.

The people who need to know, she said. Me, and you.

Does Dad know? I asked. I thought of the way he called me his girl. The way his breath smelled.

It's none of his goddamn business, she said to me, and then she dropped back. She told me to hand her a pill bottle that was on the dresser, and then get out of there. And shut the door, she said.

I thought she had every fucking thing in the world, an only child with her own room, with parents who were maybe better for her because none of them belonged to each other, not Carleen to Chuck, not Rayelle to Carleen. Three separate people. No one laid a hand on Rayelle except to smack her bottom when she needed it. Her trashy trailer that we could run through and kick our shoes against the wall without the booming voice of my dad. Her hand-me-down pink bike, rusted from her just leaving it on the lawn after riding. A stray cat bundled in her arms, and riddled with fleas. And summer after summer a road trip to some state I'd never even imagined, sitting up front in Chuck's car while Carleen slept in the back. Mountains, the ocean, fields where there was nothing but sunflowers as far as you could see. The desert. Every time she left in that car for the sweetest weeks of summer I felt part of me go along, like a long string stretched between us. I imagined her sleeping in a motel bed by herself, with the AC icy cold and her non-parents in the bed next to hers, ordering her hamburgers and Cherry Cokes. Watching cable TV. With no one's hands on her head, nothing in her mouth, or between her legs.

I hated her.

And loved her more than anything. Flesh of my flesh. My own girl.

Before my mother died she told me she didn't want to go to hell.

I had never heard her say such a thing. Didn't know either heaven or hell was any concern to her. I never imagined she would burn. For anything.

Mom, I said. I stroked her papery arm. Don't worry about that. There's nothing to worry about, I told her.

I didn't do enough, she said.

But I couldn't think of anyone who'd had more happen to her than my mother. When Nudie died, I thought I'd lose them both. He lingered for two long gray-lit days while my parents stayed at the hospital and I stayed with Rayelle.

They were two of the best days I had.

Mom, you did everything, I said.

I didn't do enough for you, she said. To protect you.

She closed her eyes then, the way she did in the last months, her hair sweaty and her lips dry. The Vicodin working hard in her blood. She slept like she was dead already.

I loved them all that way. The way I hated, hard in my gut, the things that had been thrust upon me, the things that cut hard and scarred.

I loved them so hard I crushed them.

Until I found Dakota. Dakota, who lay in the bushes like a dead deer, her body the same copper as the soil, her hair shining black like a vein of coal. She'd lost an eye. Her pants were wet with her own urine.

I crouched beside her like a fairy who'd found a giant. And when I put my hands on her head, I felt the throb of
survival. Her skin spoke to me, singing like a vessel deep in the earth, alive.

I could never crush that.

seventeen

RAYELLE

Here's where I'm comfortable: at a bar, with strangers, drinking myself happy again. In a car, with a stranger, fucking someone who makes me feel, for an instant, like I'm happy again.

Right now I'm neither.

I'm not at a bar, and I'm in a camper smaller than the car that tows it. And Couper is less of a stranger all the time.

Was I happy with Summer? No. And people knew that, my mother, my friends, I just didn't think anyone would say it after she died. But that's when the people you thought were friends and neighbors, the people who lined up and said they were there for you, who brought you casseroles and said they were praying for you, that's when they say the shittiest things.

My very last friend from high school was a girl we all just called Sissy, but whose real name was Paula. It's no wonder she went by Sissy. Before Summer, we'd been going-out friends. Bars, parties. Her brother was a fireman. We went to the field days, played on a softball league. She had a boyfriend before I met Eli. And then I had Summer.

After, when by then we hadn't partied in months, Sissy said to me, Look Rayelle, I know you don't want to hear this, but all you ever said was that you felt trapped. Maybe now's your chance, she said. Maybe it's a sign. Get out and run, she said.