Before
MADDY BOYLE WAS told by the doctors to ease back into things.
With someone in her situation there was no distinct timetable. She’d been out for nearly eight days; the fact that she was speaking and able to move all her limbs was a miracle in itself.
Focus on eating, Maddy. On keeping food down, building back your strength.
“It’s not a race, Madeline,” her father had said on her second day home from the hospital, when he’d caught her in bed trying to do a sit-up but failing. Him patting her head like she was a puppy, and not the slut he’d called her in the weeks before her attack. Yeah, Dad, I remember. Little did he know he’d walked in on sit-up number ten, which had been her goal from the beginning, and not what he’d assumed was her first and unsuccessful attempt. She not only did ten the next day but managed to push out fifteen before collapsing back down to her pillow, exhausted, panting and sweating, but feeling good about her future.
And now, three weeks after her release, three and a half weeks from suddenly awakening from her coma—and now with two new fake teeth to replace the two her attacker had knocked out—she was up to walking three miles a morning, and able to rip through fifty pushups and fifty crunches without effort. And the more she became her old self, which was to say, driven, smart, self-assured, strong, and, according to her parents, hard-headed to a fault, the more her parents—especially her father—began to drift away. Drift back away, as she’d never been the favorite child; she had, in fact, been an accident. She didn’t have time for second chances, which was what she assumed they’d been going for since they’d nearly lost her, acting the way they had that first week. Smiling and chatty and so constantly there. So physically present it had taken her only a day or two to snap at them to give her some space.
Before the attack it had been all about their southern, low-country social calendars and high-paying jobs—he CEO of a popular hardware store chain, she a lawyer who sued doctors for malpractice. Maddy’s two older siblings, Mark and Theresa, were married to gorgeous people living cookie-cutter lives: they’d married within their own country club, spouses Mom and Dad had joking-not-jokingly set up with other families years in advance, so that they could promptly produce more little cookie-cutter kids.
Maddy was an aunt five times over. Her brother and sister married their high school sweethearts and they’d all attended the University of Alabama, where their parents had met, popular in their Greek fraternity and sorority back in the day. Not Madeline, five and six years younger than Mark and Tammy, respectively, and perpetually unattached. Or another way to put it, as her father had so often done, attached to too many, and none of their choosing. With her sandy-colored curls and pretty green eyes, she was considered beautiful, like her siblings—a real catch, as her father liked to say.
Any boy would be lucky to have you, Madeline.
But she didn’t just want any boy. She wanted a man. Someone she could trust and talk to and maybe one day marry. And have her? What the fuck did that even mean? Like she even needed someone. She didn’t, and that was the glory of it all to her. She didn’t.
She’d been asked out numerous times by boys since middle school, and maybe a quarter of the time she’d say yes. Sometimes one date would lead to two or three, and once, in high school, with Jeffrey Lombard—who her parents had actually liked; he came from good stock—they’d gone out for three months, but even that had ended abruptly, when he’d slid his hand into her pants in the car after he’d bought her a fancy steak dinner, with the attitude that he deserved some kind of sexual repayment.
She’d slapped him, and that relationship ended on the spot.
Her fault, according to her parents, because Jeffrey was such a clean-cut young man. She’d had over a dozen boyfriends in her twenty-two years on earth, starting with holding Kenny Hockenslatta’s hand in seventh grade to the asshole with the tattooed arm-sleeve she’d dated briefly, breaking up with him two days before her recent attack, only to have him—she remembered his name was Adrian when she saw him on the porch—unexpectedly ring their doorbell three days ago, with a bouquet of roses for her, in hopes of a speedy recovery.
She’d thanked him, gladly accepted the roses, and wished him a good day, not even asking him in for a drink, which was what her mother immediately told her she should have done, implying somehow that that was exactly why she was still single, still unmarried, still the perpetually unattached Madeline Boyle. Adrian would not have been someone her mother would have chosen out of a lineup for her—she abhorred tattoos—but Maddy could tell that over the years her mother had lowered her standards. Maddy knew her mother was tired of telling her friends, while drinking tea or gin or whatever the fuck they drank out around the pool in the evenings, that her youngest was still out there trying to find herself. Her mother’s biggest fear, Maddy knew, was that after a time, most would start wondering what was possibly wrong with her. Madeline Boyle, the same girl who liked to run through the country club in shorts and a T-shirt and tennis shoes instead of dresses and blouses and cute little flats with bows, who cut up during cotillion, who quit tennis lessons and golf lessons in favor of reading books and writing poetry, who had even started writing a novel of her own until the Horseshoe Rapist had almost killed her out next to Charleston Harbor.
But seeing Adrian was what had begun her father’s retreat away from her. Seeing Adrian and his tattoo sleeve had been an instant reminder of who, in his mind, she’d begun to pick up ever since she’d begun dancing.
Stripping. In his perfect mind, trash.
He’d found out about her secret profession through one of his country club friends who frequented the local strip joints, who said he could have sworn the tall glass of water he’d seen on stage that night, Trixie or Dixie, was Madeline. Her father confronted her the next morning and she’d admitted it, with the belligerent attitude they’d come to expect from her. Him saying how she’d always been a disappointment. Him getting even more pissed off when she said she’d been dancing for nearly two years. And it wasn’t Trixie or Dixie, it was Candy. Her blaming him. Blaming Mom. Him bringing up the full ride to Alabama she’d turned down. Him refusing to pay for the three-quarters tuition the College of Charleston had offered.
Him ultimately getting so worked up he called her a whore. Or was it a slut? Yes, it was a slut—spittle had spewed from his lips with how hard he’d said the T.
And it was that word that had fueled her recovery, because yes, Daddy, it is a race.
Not only to get out of the house, perhaps for good, but to do what she’d come back from Lalaland to do. Maddy zipped up her flowery Vera Bradley bag, slung it over her shoulder, and walked down to the kitchen, where her mother was fixing toast and her father was sipping coffee, both probably heading to work within the half hour.
Her father saw the packed bag over her shoulder. “Where you going?”
“I’m moving in with Adrian.”
Her mother stopped buttering her toast. Her father sipped his coffee, stared out the window toward the pool and hot tub and pergola, but otherwise, other than a grunt, said nothing.
“I’m joking.”
Truthfully, she didn’t know exactly where she was going. She had a destination, yes, Harrod’s Reach, Nebraska, an old railway town that, according to the maps she’d pulled up on her phone, appeared to be right in the area where the northwesternmost tip of Kansas met both Nebraska and Colorado, what some called the Tristate Point, or the Three Corners, like Harrod’s Reach was some kind of forested central hub connecting them all. Or she’d thought last night while studying the location, it could also be the absolute middle of the United States, if she was eyeballing it correctly. Like if the country had a navel, Harrod’s Reach might be it.
When neither parent responded, she said, “If you want to know the truth, I’m leaving.”
This got their attention.
Mom, toast in hand, waited for an explanation.
Dad placed his coffee mug down, leaned back in his chair, and folded his golf-tanned arms. He wore a smirk that said, This ought to be good.
In her mind it was. Not only good, but important in ways she couldn’t yet explain. She remembered very little of what she’d seen in Lalaland while in her coma, but she assumed that was par for the course. Dreams were fleeting. She hoped it would come back to her, just as memories from her real life had come back to her over the past two weeks. But she told them where and explained it the best she could, and still they looked at her completely flabbergasted, speechless until her mother said, “Where again?”
“Harrod’s Reach.”
“Never heard of it,” said her father.
“Doesn’t make it less real.”
Mom again, too shocked to be worried: “And who is … what?”
“Sully,” Maddy said. “His name is Sully Dupree. First name is really Solomon. He’s in a coma, like I was, but for three years now.”
“And you’re what?” said her father. “You’re gonna save him or something?”
“I don’t know exactly.”
All I know is I have a message for him, she thought, although it was still cloudy what it meant. One brain. Unify … Maybe that wasn’t it exactly, but give it time, Maddy, give it time.
“How old is he?” asked her father.
Maddy refocused. Back to Sully Dupree. “Six … Seven. Maybe eight.”
Her father scoffed, then mumbled, “Little young, even for you, don’t you think?”
Without pause, Maddy gave him the finger.
Her father stood from the table. “Get out.”
“I’m going,” said Maddy.
He stormed out of the kitchen.
Her mother was on the verge of tears. “Maddy, this is so out of the blue. It’s nonsensical. Can you at least tell us why?”
“No, I can’t.” She touched her brow; Lalaland had come through as a shooting star trail of memories, and there were oceans over there that flowed backwards. Forests of mare trees. An island of bones. Every creature and beast under the sun. The days were short and the nights were long. Everything is backwards. Everything is wrong. She opened her eyes, cleared her head. “But it’s something I have to do.”
Her mother nodded, beckoned Maddy closer, and then hugged her hard and true.
Maddy returned it, awkwardly at first, before allowing herself to melt within her mother’s arms, smelling her mother’s perfume, the fresh shampoo scent in her hair, letting go before the sudden affection could begin to change her mind. For the moment it held her frozen, hammered home the fact that, yeah, she was scared too.
Maddy wiped her eyes, just like her mother was doing.
“You’ll text?”
“Yes, I’ll text.”
Her mother rooted inside her purse, pulled out a torn piece of paper, and handed it to Maddy. “Read it.”
Maddy forced herself to look at the two words written in black ink on it, in what appeared to be her mother’s handwriting.
Sully Dupree.
Maddy looked up at her mother, who said, “That’s why I’m not trying stop you. When you were coming out of your coma, you kept saying that name over and over. I felt I needed to write it down. And now I know why.”
Maddy nodded. “Thank you. And I’ll be fine.”
“I’m sure you will. Only girl to survive the Charleston—”
“Don’t,” Maddy said. “I don’t ever want to hear that name again. Not until he’s caught.” She started toward the door but stopped. “Tell Dad …”
“What, dear?”
“That … that I’m still a virgin.”
“Oh, Maddy …”
“Tell him I was stripping to pay for a college he wouldn’t pay for. And that I did it to spite him. And that I’ve broken up with so many boys over the years because I’m saving myself for the right one.” She opened the door. “Tell him I’m not a slut.”
Her mother chuckle-cried. “It’s really none of his business either way.”
Maddy shared a smile with her mother, their first in years, and then went on her way.