SEPTEMBER 13, 2011
Vale borrows Deb’s pickup truck and drives to town. The state highway is being worked on by crews from Virginia, Delaware, and Tennessee. A national disaster—that’s what this one qualified as. FEMA funds to repair bridges, rebuild roads, compensate families for the houses that were washed away. Vale imagines those FEMA workers making their way downstream. Pictures some young kid, come north for the first time to repair roads, stumbling across Bonnie’s body.
Vale gets her news updates from Deb at dinner. Each night Deb makes a thick stew out of dried beans and vegetables from her garden, brings it to Hazel’s house, ladles it into bowls. Fresh warm bread and wine, too. Deb, wearing, as always, her blue jeans and flannel shirts. Vale thinking, a face grown into this place. Altered by it. Silver fox. Who is she? Vale never says much at dinner. Nods thank-you. Slips out the door.
This morning she drives slow around backstreets, eyeing the faces on porches, the faces in doorways. A girl, six or seven, sits on a porch in a puffy pink jacket, a cat rubbing up against her knees. There’s a woman talking on the phone in an open doorway, her bare foot resting on her inner thigh. Vale thinks of Bonnie cleaning Motel 6 rooms. Bonnie working at the Sunoco. Bonnie cleaning up shit and vomit from toilets and shower stalls. No sick leave and late nights. When Vale was thirteen Bonnie tripped down the last third of the apartment stairs, broke her arm, was sent home with a never-ending prescription of little white pills for the pain.
VALE GOES TO THE COPY STORE AND SLIPS THE PHOTO OF Bonnie at the river into the photocopier. She blocks her own face from the image, blows Bonnie’s up to triple size. Writes: MISSING. PLEASE CALL IF SEEN, in thick letters, makes forty copies and posts them everywhere: grocery stores, gas stations, laundromats. Bonnie’s face at the women’s crisis center. Bonnie’s face at the drop-in center. Bonnie’s face tacked on the doors of various churches in town. Which one was Bonnie’s?
Most of the churches are locked, but the door of the Evangelical Baptist—a one-story concrete building at the edge of town—opens. Vale enters, sits in the back pew, and looks around. She can see why Bonnie might have come here: this large quiet room with so little inside. The church is mostly barren: blue carpet, wooden pews, a simple wooden cross affixed to the wall. The emptiness itself merciful. The heat must come from the people who show up here, Vale thinks.
She rises and steps closer to the nave. “Hello?” she calls out, her voice echoing.
“Welcome,” a voice comes from a side room.
A tall man in his sixties approaches her. Kind eyes. Blue jeans.
“Do you know her?” Vale asks, handing him the photograph of Bonnie.
This man steps closer. He looks at the photo for a long moment. “Yeah,” he says slowly. “I recognize her. She would come in occasionally.”
Bonnie’s church. This is the one. Vale feels a tingle at the back of her neck.
“Have you seen her lately?”
He looks Vale up and down slowly. “I don’t think so,” he says softly. “No. Not since the storm.”
“Come back anytime,” he calls out, as Vale turns. “You are welcome here! Jesus welcomes all through this door!” His voice rising.
VALE DRIVES HERSELF TO A TATTOO PARLOR, THE ONE next to the 7-Eleven. It doesn’t matter what kind of tattoo parlor; she isn’t particular. She knows what she wants: to feel the burn of the needle, the slow release of red ink into skin.
It’s an image of poppies, strewing, that she’s had in her mind for years.
Poppies—that glorious flower. Wild in the deserts of Arizona and California. Cultivated in the gardens of New England. Propagated in Afghanistan, Turkey, Pakistan, and Colombia in farmers’ dry and arid fields, so that those farmers can make a living, feed their children, send their sons to school. The opium sap cultivated, refined into morphine, further refined into heroin, shipped, on the black market, to New York, then driven upriver, through Springfield and north, under the seats of cars, and sold, in Nelson, for five or ten dollars a bag.
Cheap enough for Bonnie, addicted to her OxyContin. Cheap enough for half of Vale’s old high-school friends.
Vale pulls up a photo on her phone and shows it to the woman inking: two red poppy flowers, the petals unloosing in the wind, on the arm opposite Vale’s owl. One stalk. One set of roots. Two heads: Bonnie and Vale.
“Cool,” the woman says, ink threading up and down both of her arms: snakes, vines, a pistol, a bear.
She smacks her gum loudly. Has a bright smile.
“What’s it signify?”
“Nothing,” Vale says, closing her eyes. Ten years of Bonnie injecting that poppy’s serum, relief in ultrarefined form, into any vein she can find.
Vale picks up her phone and glances at the news headlines: a photo of a Somali refugee, a woman, carrying jerry cans of water from a tap at the Dagahaley camp in Dadaab.
The woman is beautiful: a gray headscarf and dark, resilient eyes. In the background—dead trees, a cow on its side, eddies of trash swirling around its gutted body.
THE TATTOO TAKES THREE HOURS AND MOST OF THE cash Vale has left. The parking lot is dark by the time it’s done. Vale drives through the streets of Nelson one last time before going home—past the Indian grocery, up and down backstreets, past the lit windows of apartments and houses where couples watch TV, babies sleep, kids do homework.
She drives slow, stares into every window.
How easy it would be to head back to that apartment in New Orleans where the magnolias and camellias bloom. To that city, braided in beautiful ways. Jack: slipping her shirt up over her head, taking a pen and drawing birds and vines across her breast, neck, shoulders.
But she can’t, yet.
Dean: She comes back. She always does.
Bonnie, neck tipped back, laughing. Bonnie in a field of corn stubble, walking this way.