You Believers (42 page)

“You know what the guards think,” Fat Mack said.

“I know how people think. I spent my life watching the way people think.”

“So you know everything,” Fat Mack said.

Jesse paced. He could feel Fat Mack’s eyes moving over him. He wanted to yell,
Quit the fuck looking at me
, wanted to slam something into that fat face, but instead he grinned. “Think about it,” Jesse said. “If you run like they say you can, we can be out of here, sipping cold ones in some bar, watching some nice titties bouncing in some tight shirt. You’d like that.”

“Yeah, I’d like that,” Fat Mack said, but his face was still, eyes the same gray stone they always were. Not one flicker of interest in Jesse’s plan. Jesse shook his head and swung up into his bed to the sound of Fat Mack laughing. After a silence, Fat Mack punched at his bunk. “Hey, devil boy,” he said. “Every fucker I put down deserved it. Had it coming. There’s a reckoning always. And sometimes that reckoning is me.” Jesse said nothing. There was another punch. “Sounds to me like you just fuck somebody up for no good reason. That don’t sound like a plan to me.” And then there was more laughing. Jesse pulled the pillow over his head to try to muffle the sound of Fat Mack laughing.

There Will Always Be More Tears

In those months of searching for Katy, we followed dozens of leads. In the beginning Livy wanted to be right there beside me when we searched, but once we hit the fields she’d get faint, have to go back to the truck, so we decided to keep her back at the tables, running the volunteer list, handing out food and drinks.

One psychic—Livy insisted on a psychic—said Katy would be found near the sound of a chained and barking dog. So to satisfy Livy, we followed that lead. It wasn’t much work to call the Humane Society and get a list of every dog nuisance complaint in the city and surrounding counties. The searching, that was work. We got over a hundred volunteers for that search because everybody and their momma wants to rescue a suffering dog. We didn’t find Katy. But we did save some dogs. Busted up a big dog-fighting ring, and there’s some comfort in that. There’s a lot of comfort in that. No living creature should be used as bait to train a killing thing. Which leads me back to Katy. And I can’t tell Katy’s story without telling her mother’s story, a woman who refused to go back to her home on a mountaintop until she found her girl. She walked away
from everything. Her whole world collapsed, was reduced to one single purpose: to find Katy, bring her home.

The searching tore her down every day, weight dropping, lines deepening in her face, eyes going dull. Staying at Katy’s house, much as she felt the need to be there, it sucked the life out of her like a disease. She told me once it was like living where you feel a ghost in every corner, and you turn to look at it just when it’s left the room.

I didn’t tell Livy everything. I didn’t tell her I knew her daughter was dead. I let her cling to whatever sliver of hope she could summon up. But I’ve known for most my life that hope is little more than a pretty cloud we paint out there on the horizon. We decide it is pretty with the way it reflects light from the sun, and it shifts and changes and somehow remains there in brilliant color, promising something as the sun goes down. Then you’re left with darkness.

Livy was fighting that darkness even on the brightest days. So I fought to make her leave Katy’s house—I should say Billy’s house. It was his. Livy was living, breathing, searching, doing, but the Olivia Baines she used to be was dying every day. It took Lawrence coming down. It took both of us to pack up Livy, drive her out to that condo on the beach. And the minute she stepped out onto the balcony, took in the ocean, that steady, soothing rhythm of the ocean, something loosened in her, and for the first time in months she started to breathe.

Lawrence stayed for a week, just to help make things feel a little more normal, like they were on a vacation or some such thing. They had me over one evening for a cookout. We were hoping that for a few hours we could pretend we were all gathered for pleasure, not to survive the daily grind of pain. It promised to be a perfect evening, with Livy and me in the kitchen while Lawrence was downstairs grilling steaks on the patio near the pool. We could relax a
little with him out for a while. Both of us were grateful for the condo regulations that there could be no grilling on the balcony—too great a fire hazard. We were happy with that.

Losing a child tests any marriage, and losing a young child will most likely break it because so often, when the couple looks at one another, they see only reminders, the eyes, the mouth, the dimple, or a gesture maybe that makes them see not the living person who is in front of them but instead the physical, genetic reminder of the loved one lost. This wasn’t the case with Katy, being she was grown, a woman, and not Lawrence’s daughter. But still he resented that his wife had been yanked from their home to this beach condo, where the wind was turning cold at night and any conversation was punctuated with fear, dread of what the next phone call might bring. Livy was disappointed and resentful that Lawrence wasn’t grieving enough, even though he was there. And Lawrence still wanted to believe that Katy had just run away and would turn up back on the houseboat with Frank.

I knew they were both wrong. And even though both seemed to think the world wasn’t doing enough to bring back Katy, they liked having me around. It was if my presence were some kind of promise that an answer would come. So they invited me to visit them at the condo to have a night of something like normal: steaks off the grill and salad and cold beer and a wife chopping things in a kitchen.

I watched Livy from across the kitchen counter. She gave me nothing to do, said she’d missed the pleasure of having a guest in her house. She methodically opened a beer, poured it into a chilled glass, and pushed a dish of cashews toward me. There was a kind of sweet falsity to the whole thing, reminding me of the way Darly used to make me sit on the floor with her baby dolls and pretend to drink tea from her tiny cups and saucers, pretend the Little Debbie Swiss rolls sliced in little circles were her homemade secret-recipe cakes. “This
is so delicious,” I would always say. “I do hope one day you’ll give me the recipe.” She would only shake her head and smile.

So there I sat, letting Livy and Lawrence tend to me because they needed a domestic game to play. Even though I had a hundred things to do, I had chosen to put my phone on vibrate, promised myself I would answer only the most urgent calls. I would eat, drink, let myself be served, and say,
This is so delicious
, even though I would barely taste the food in my mouth for thinking of all the other places I needed to be.

Livy tore at the baby leaves of fresh spinach with the quick gestures of a woman tearing at weeds in her flowerbed. She was making the orzo dish she told me Lawrence loved and always wanted with his steaks. “The right food soothes him,” she said. But I could see that the process of making the right food was anything but soothing to her. She worked with precise jerking movements, mincing the garlic, chopping tomatoes, quickly measuring and dumping balsamic vinegar and olive oil. Occasionally she’d turn and stir the boiling orzo steaming on the stove.

I leaned over the counter, teased, “You look like you’re beating up dinner over there. Quit frowning. Take a breath and sip some wine.”

“I like cooking,” she said, frowning at the lemon before she mashed it against the grater to get the zest. As she tossed the vegetables, vinegar, and oil in a bowl, I wondered how a Suck Creek girl came to be easy with things like orzo, balsamic vinegar, and extra virgin olive oil. I knew she’d grown up on lard biscuits and fatback in her beans. She went back to stirring the pot. “I just wish he had a better attitude.” She used a spoon to test a bite of orzo, gave a nod, then dumped it all into a colander, stood back, and let the steam rise. She frowned again, came back to the counter, grabbed a chunk of feta cheese, and tore at it, crumbling with furious fingers. I wanted to tell her she was lucky to have a husband willing to fly down here. I wanted
to say all he really wanted was his life back to normal, his wife home, and her daughter never lost. I wanted to say he wanted what she wanted, just in a different way.

But I knew the better way was to stay on her side of any argument. Sometimes we all have to say little things we don’t mean to make it go little easier. So I nodded to Livy’s frowning gaze. “I understand,” I said. “I know it must be maddening when your husband doesn’t seem . . .” I wanted to say
terrified
but knew I should avoid any heart-pounding kind of words, so I said, “As concerned as you.”

She stopped tearing at the feta cheese and went to the sink to wash her hands. She sighed, dumped the orzo into a bowl, and stirred in the vegetables, oil and vinegar, and cheese. “I’m sure he is doing the best he can.”

“We all are,” I said.

“But sometimes that’s not good enough.” She looked at me as if I were the enemy now and took a sip of her wine.

I drank from my beer. “At least he’s down there grilling our steaks. I like a man who grills the steaks and brings the beer.”

She nodded, gently stirred the orzo, added lemon zest and ground pepper. “He likes to grill when he’s feeling useless. Back when the stock market was burning down, he was outside every night with his dirty martini and something searing on the grill.” She stirred the orzo, took a bite, seemed pleased. “Want a taste?” she asked, already reaching into the drawer for a clean spoon.

I took a bite, savored the blend of tart cheese, sweet tomatoes, the freshness of the spinach, lemon zest. “You’re quite the cook,” I said. “No wonder Lawrence wants you home.”

“Husbands always want their women home.” She gathered plates, flatware, napkins and was heading for the balcony, and I thought of Billy. She had to be thinking of Billy, who’d seemed indifferent when he’d shrugged, back when I’d asked if he could list
the places Katy liked to go. He said, “Shit, I don’t know. Katy always goes wherever she wants to go. I can’t keep up with Katy.” He was angry. He was scared.

Livy called to me, “You want to help me set the table?”

I got up. “I’m sorry I’m was just sitting there, letting you do all the work.”

“You do enough work,” she said. “But I know how you like to feel involved. Could you bring out the glasses and that pitcher of water on the counter?”

I gathered the glasses and pitcher and went out onto the balcony, where she’d set the table with place mats, cloth napkins, and fresh flowers. “Very nice.”

“I like things nice,” she said. She turned to look out at the ocean, more a slate blue than gray that day. The air still held some of the day’s heat, but a cooler breeze was blowing in.

“We couldn’t have a more beautiful day.” I said the words meaning them, but they came out false somehow.

“Yes, we could,” she said, her eyes on the horizon. I saw a tear slip down her face, heard the sound of her hard swallow. “He’ll be up with the steaks any minute.”

“I’ll get the salad and the orzo. And your wine.” She said nothing, and I turned to go inside, knowing she needed the quiet and not my bullshit courteous words. I stayed quiet, just placing the serving bowls and the wine while she faced the horizon that would soon fade to another night with Katy gone.

Sometimes we need the quiet. Sometimes sorrow is best kept to ourselves. If we keep digging it up and throwing it out for others to share, they step back. They go numb to so much sorrow, can’t help but turn away. Sometimes we all go numb. And I was standing in the living room, trying to think of what else I might need to bring from the kitchen but caught up thinking about the comfort of numbness,
when my cell phone buzzed. I thought to ignore it because Lawrence was just walking in the door with the platter of steaks, and he was smiling and saying, “Beautiful. Would you look at these? Prime Angus beef, the best.” I pulled out my phone, saw that the caller was Roy. I smiled at Lawrence as he went out to the balcony, offering the steaks as some kind of proof that the world was as it should be. He was a good man. Just a frustrated man. Probably a scared man, wondering would his wife ever again be the happy woman he’d married.

“Hey, Roy,” I said, and I heard Lawrence ask if I wanted another beer or to switch to wine. “I’m fine,” I said. “I’ll be right out.” I went back to my phone. “Tell me it’s good news.”

“We have a lead.” It was a flat, sad sound. “A shallow grave.” I stood there facing the balcony, saw Lawrence standing with his arm around Livy, both looking out at the ocean as if there were a ship out there that could bring them something. But there was nothing. Just water and sky.

Lawrence came to the sliding glass door, said, “You really ought to switch to wine with—” He stood still, stared at me while I listened to Roy’s words, trying to keep my face blank. But Lawrence was a smart man. He could see. Livy came to the door, stood half behind Lawrence, as if he could protect her from any awful thing I might have to say. I hung up the phone, went for my purse, said, “I have to go.”

“Shelby,” Lawrence called lightly, “can it wait until after dinner? We just set out the steaks.” He came closer, stood between me and the door as if he were thinking of arguing with me. I saw the hope seep from his face. He shook his head, sat down.

Livy rushed forward, squeezed my arms, and looked down on me like a mother pinning a child who won’t admit a truth. “It’s about Katy.”

“Maybe,” I said, seeing the old sight of a body half buried, dug up, the flies, the rot, the smell. She wouldn’t want to see this. “There’s a lead that might be something about Katy.” I looked to the floor. How do you tell a mother some kids playing in the woods had found a shallow grave that might be her girl’s? How can you lead her to the site, the flies, the smell?

Roy had told me it was in the woods near a construction site at a new development near Land Fall.

“You have to tell me,” Livy said. She was squeezing my arms so tightly, it burned. I looked up, saw the hysteria brimming in her eyes. Lawrence stood, put his hand on her back, as if his touch could hold her steady.