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Warren has been gone for three weeks. After two days of crawling into the bottle, I yank myself right back out on the third day. When I wake up, groggy, I go to the kitchen and down cup after cup of water to rehydrate myself. Then, I pour the last bit of vodka down the drain and tuck the bottle into the trash. Since I am under twenty-one, I can’t buy more. I go through all the rest of the cabinets to make sure there aren’t other bottles hidden elsewhere. The drinking hadn’t been all that wonderful: maybe at first, but ultimately I just feel ashamed and stupid for doing it. I’m queasy and a little weak, like I’ve come off the flu, but I get to work, and by noon the headache is gone. I’m beginning to feel like my old self.
The door dings open, and a young woman walks in, a load of clothes thrown over her arm. Lola is halfway into the dry-cleaner, pulling things out, so I make my way to the front of the store to tend to the customer. The scent of the perchloroethylene sets my stomach to rolling even on a normal day, so I try to be away whenever Lola opens it. But this time I don’t get gone quite fast enough and I start feeling a little more than queasy. I push away the feeling as best I can and smile at the woman, who drops her load of clothes onto the counter. The tags all say things like Banana Republic, Gap, Ralph Lauren.
“What ya got?” I ask, having picked up some of Lola’s speech patterns in the shop.
“Six—” ” She stops abruptly as she stares at me. “I know you.”
“No. Probably not,” I say. I get that every now and then. I have a familiar face, very normal and regular.
But then she says, “Alison.”
I correct her with, “Al,” and I stop gathering her clothes and look at her, really look at her, but I don’t know her, and I don’t really know anybody here except the regulars who come into Lola’s. I know a few people who Warren used to hang out with, but this woman is clearly not of that breed. Nobody knows me as Alison. I’m just Al here. “I don’t think I know you. Except from here, maybe.”
“No. It’s not from here.” Her brows are drawn. “Did you ever live in Charleston?”
Every instinct in my body tells me to say no. That was a different person. But my mouth doesn’t get the message and says, as quiet as a spoken word can be, “Yes.”
“You’re Alice’s daughter.”
My stomach plummets as I nod. “How do you know me?” I ask, trying to remember how would she know my mother, this clean girl with all her fancy clothes.
“I was your neighbor.” My stomach has just set up a whole gymnastics suite, and it is working through some hell of a routine.
“Oh. Well, that would be it then,” I say, hoping we can be done with this conversation. I know who she is now—the girl who let me use her phone to call 911. She was the girl who came outside and held my shoulders while we waited for the ambulance to come. It shouldn’t make me ashamed, but I feel my face flushing, and I can’t look her in the eyes. I haven’t coped with all of that yet.
“Are you okay?”
I nod. “Yeah, I’m okay.” Which sounds weird, I think. I know that I should not be okay, but mostly I am. I don’t miss my mom; I’m not lonely for her. Mostly I don’t even think of her—she’s just not here, not messing everything up. I’m doing a fine job of that without my mother's help at all. It’s been such a long time and so much has happened since then. I just moved on with life and never looked back. I know it is a wrong way to be, and I wonder what part of my soul was stretched thin from growing up in her shadow, what part of my soul fell out along the way. I would like to give this girl what she wants, a moment to console me, a moment to make herself feel that she has done a good deed. I would like to give her that, but I’m not a good enough liar to offer it up. I am broken. Just like mom was, broken in some very real way. “It’s been a shock,” I say, as close as I can come to offering an explanation for my dry eyes, for my nonchalance.
“What a small world, to run into you here.” She smiles, warm and kind. Not a stick of pity in that smile.
“I guess so.”
“I grew up here,” she says. “My parents live just on the other side of Carmichael Street.” This means something to her, the address on Carmichael Street. It should tell me something, but it doesn’t, so I just nod. Her fancy clothes tell me that it was the right place to grow up.
“I just wanted a change of scenery,” I say, explaining how I came from there to here.
“I’m sure.” She smiles again. In a different world, I would have liked this girl; we could have been friends. “I really liked your mom.”
My bullshit meter hits the red zone. “You knew her?” I’m scowling now, skeptical.
“Sure. She used to come to the bookstore every now and then.”
“You’re thinking of someone else.” I laugh. “My mom wasn’t a bookstore kind of person.”
“Oh yeah. Alice came in quite a bit that last week or so.”
“Really?” I still don’t quite buy it. Aren’t there people who want to be close to tragedy, who like the scene of the crime? Is she trying to get into my story, into my life? I feel a little creeper crawl down my spine. Has she stalked me here? Did she really not grow up here and has just been following me all this time? She doesn’t look like a creeper, but do creepers usually look like creepers? If they did they’d never get in because people would know what they were.
“Yeah. She’d sit and have coffee and read something off the used shelves.”
Maybe. Maybe that sounds like something she would do, especially that last week when she was trying to fill the hours between her AA meetings. “I didn’t know she did that. I never saw her read anything,” I say, wondering again who my mother really was.
“She liked romances.” Of course. I roll my eyes a bit and look away. She adds, “Not like the trashy ones, the ones with some mystery to them.”
I nod, as if I understand. My mother was always looking for love in one form or another. “Why am I never enough?” Her voice ricochets through my head, and I squeeze my eyes closed to push it out.
“Did they figure out what happened? I’ve been watching the papers, but . . . no updates.”
“Yeah, she killed herself,” I say as cold and hard as I can. “Sort of.” They actually did say that she’d overdosed, maybe accidentally. But the water-bottle thing still makes my head spin a bit. That damn water bottle still doesn’t make a lick of sense.
Her hand draws up to her mouth, her lips forming a small “o.” “It’s such a shame that he couldn’t stop her, or didn’t get her any help.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know his name. I’d seen him over there a couple of times before.” She says this casually, not realizing that this may be important.
“Cal?” My voice comes out, strained.
She purses her lips and shrugs. “I didn’t know his name. Tall guy. Black hair.”
“Tattoos all down his arms?” I ask, the hole in the pit of my stomach widening.
“Yeah. He had tattoos.” Her nose crinkles, and I can tell she thinks tattoos are gross.
“He was there that day?” My eyes narrow, because Warren said Cal was missing, had been for several days. Didn’t he tell me they had found his car out on 57 but no sign of him? I know for certain that’s what he said. I feel another frown coming on.
“He was there. He was there when I came home. I heard them talking through the door.”
“You heard them through the door? They must have been loud.” She nods. “What were they saying?”
“He was yelling, ‘What did you do?’ And he kept saying it. He sounded kinda panicky.”
Cal panicky? What could she have possibly done to make Cal panicky? Had she gone to the police with details about his business and suppliers? Is that why he killed her? “Did you hear her say anything?” I ask, my voice nearly a whisper. What were her last words? Chills run up my spine, and I feel like I'm suddenly going to understand something about that night.
“No. Not really. I could hear her talking, but she sounded okay, like she was just calming him down and then it would be okay.” There is a long pause, and her eyes focus far away. “I did hear her say something about doing what had to be done. I think that’s what she said. I should have stopped to check on her, I guess, but you know . . .”
“Did you tell the police this information?” I ask? “Did you tell them somebody else was there when you came home?”
“Sure I did. They didn’t seem to think much of it.”
“Hm,” I say, looking her in the eye for the first time. “Well, isn’t that odd?” I pause, thinking, trying to place things in perspective. I let the timeline run in my head. On Sunday Cal went missing and they found his truck. Somebody had picked him up, and he was lying low in somebody’s hunting cabin. On Thursday he came back into town and killed my mother. Then he went back into hiding. Then somebody shot him in the head and dumped him in the field. “You saw him or just heard him?”
“Well, I saw him leaving. He got in his car and drove off.”
“You mean his truck?” I ask. But, no, of course he wouldn't have his truck, because the police found that on Sunday. My head begins to spin a little faster.
“No. You know the gray one. Had all the decals on the back bumper.”
He had Warren’s car. Or Warren was waiting for him to finish and come down. Was Warren there waiting for him? Did Warren kill Cal? Warren didn’t let anybody drive his car. Even the one time I did, I thought he was going to freak out. Did Warren know Cal kill my mom? Did he help him?
All the light seems to suck out of the room and she wavers in my sight. Blind, in the darkness, I fall out.