I was standing on the inside of a glass door, one of those sliding glass doors folks use to separate kitchens from patios for easy access to grilled hot dogs when the house is full for summer barbecues. It was nighttime, pitch-black inside, and only a dimly lit blue shining on dewed grass before the darkness continued at the woods line. I don’t know why I stood there, no recollection of a sound that may have woken me up and brought me to scan the yard. It wasn’t my house, but that didn’t seem strange, and I didn’t question it. It all seemed natural. I knew I was at a house I’d gone to with Maggie and her family when I was little, her uncle’s house in Ellijay.
All of a sudden, one of those motion-sensor lights, the kind I always thought Daddy should buy, lit up the yard with a jaundice yellow and out of the woods came this bloody, naked body walking like a string puppet. As it got into the light I could see the skin bubbled up in the few places it still held around the jaw, the rest of the face just indistinguishable meat. When I saw where the knife had stuck him, I knew it was Robbie Douglas, but not until then. The place that skinning knife had hooked into him was lapped over and seeping with a yellow almost the color of black-eyed Susan petals, even yellower in the light. He was moaning something heavy, but no words, and he just kept walking closer and walking closer and nothing I could do could move me from that glass door. As he climbed onto the patio, I could feel that snub nose tucked down the back of my britches, cold steel riding right beneath the waistline, but my arms couldn’t move to grab it. My brain said go and my arms never moved. Wasn’t a goddamn thing in the world that could bring those arms to life, and before I knew it he’d slid that door open and was on me.
That was the part that kept shaking me from dream. At that same place I woke up out of breath, heaving for air as if I’d just had the wind knocked out of me. My arms were crammed under my body and dead as nails, and I had to roll my whole torso toward the edge of the bed to get those arms dangling so the feeling would run back into them. I hadn’t slept more than a few hours. When I closed my eyes that drippy face was taped up to the insides of my eyelids like a poster, and when that faded long enough to sink a bit deeper, that dream started playing again and before I knew it I was choking for air. With my fingers still prickly, I grabbed my cell phone and checked the time: 4:42 a.m. Scared of closing my eyes, truly scared of what would happen next if that dream played out any further, I just decided to get up.
There was a pretty blonde on the television trying her damnedest to sell some type of chopping gadget to housewives still awake after their husbands had pushed them past the point of sleep. The blonde cycled through a round of salsa just about as fast as she could pull onions, jalapeños, and tomatoes from the bag, and not long after she was hammering away at whole bulbs of garlic. That chopping gadget pulsed tomatoes way too thin for any sort of sandwich and I’d lost hope in it being of much use, but that pretty blonde kept my finger from surfing channels.
She had long curls tucked up behind her head and blue eyes. Light freckles dotted her cheeks just enough to be cute, and her teeth were set straight like someone had filed away at them and balanced bubbles in a level till it all lined up perfectly. It was that smile and how her hair wanted to just burst out and drape across her shoulders that made me realize how much she looked like Maggie.
I grabbed a cigarette from Daddy’s pack on the coffee table and lit my first. My eyes were melting into the glow of the television, but I couldn’t see what came next to the chopping block. My mind was someplace else, shooting back and forth between the way Maggie’d looked at my hands that night when Avery quit moving, and the way her lips had pursed just a little when she sat right beside where I was sitting now. I wondered if she’d wanted to kiss me, if somehow or another she had the feelings in her that were eating me alive, if maybe she’d forgiven me, if anything in the world could make a woman like that fall for something like me not once, but twice? There wasn’t but one way to answer any of it, and so I made up my mind right then and there that just as soon as dawn broke over the jack pines I would settle it, put an end to the wondering.
—
THE TRAIL TURNED steep just a hundred yards from a kidney-shaped gravel parking lot. The Little Green lookout wasn’t far, but from there, the trail cut switchbacks down angled grade and didn’t flatten for a second until the valley. When I was younger and Daddy still took me to the woods to get away, he used to bring me down that trail to chase speckled trout with red wrigglers where the headwaters of the Tuckasegee was nothing more than a creek. He’d poach those specks by the dozen, sliding the six-to-eight-inch trout into the top of a milk jug until it was full and those fish were flapping against one another. He’d never cared much for game wardens, and considered all those newfangled laws an attack on a family that settled here before the first land grants were cut loose. We’d head home and Daddy would fry the trout whole, eat those specks, bones and all. I ate them too, but the memory that stuck out most was the way those fish smelled on my hands, that mossy kind of smell that was clean and dripping wet with something older than any of us, and the smile on my father’s face. Those were the times when Daddy was most like a father, the times when he shared fragments of what truly made him happy. That was what stuck out in my mind as I sat down on the rock that morning and stared out at Little Green.
Maggie had started running during the middle school years after her family left The Creek. The Creek was a beautiful place, but it was lawless and always had been. The land was of little use for farming, so the folks who settled way back when were mostly drunkards and thieves. I was generations away from those earliest outlaws, but things like that have a way of staying in the blood. Maggie’s father didn’t carry those ties, but he fit right in. When Maggie and I were kids and her father tied on weeklong drunks, he’d wander the road, stumbling tranquilized, speaking gibberish, wake up covered in dew when the booze wore off. Even the crankers took him for a joke and searched his pockets for any dollar left while he lay sprawled like a cadaver. It was when he found Jesus that he moved the family onto Breedlove Road. I guess he figured he could leave it behind.
With their house on Breedlove just up the gravel from Panthertown, Maggie took a liking to the trails that wove through that wilderness. For years now, she’d been coming here every morning when the sun rose, and would run from the parking lot to Schoolhouse Falls and back, no matter if it was drowning frogs or snowing over tire chains. I’d never cared much for running. I wasn’t about to run unless something gave chase, more specifically something with teeth, something with a gun, or something with blue lights and a badge looking for someone to take down to Sylva mid-shift. Maggie ran from things all her own. She ran from circumstance. She ran from things that would never catch her. And somewhere down in that valley, Maggie was running right toward me without even knowing.
I’d stolen a soft pack of Winston straights from a carton Daddy kept in the freezer, and by the time I heard someone coming out of the valley, I’d already smoked that pack half flat. I heard her long before I saw her, tennis shoes crunching gravel, then her breathing as she blurred behind a laurel thicket. She saw me standing as she passed and threw on the brakes, her soles sliding to stop on loose gravel.
“Jacob,” she said, huffing for breath and searching for words. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail and a tight lilac-purple top stretched at her breasts while she panted. Black sweats followed the curves of her legs to just past the knees. “You scared the hell out of me.”
I made my way through a thin line of brush and stood beside her on the path. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“No, not like that, Jacob. You just surprised me, that’s all.”
“I had to see you.”
“I wish it weren’t like this.” Maggie looked herself over, eyed the places where she sweated as if she were embarrassed. She took a long swig of water from a sports bottle. She was still out of breath.
“You look beautiful.”
“That’s sweet. Maybe a little bit of a lie, but sweet.”
“I’ve never lied to you.”
Maggie’s eyes were fixed on me. We didn’t speak, and she didn’t come any closer, but there was something brewing in that space between us. It was me who broke the silence.
“I have to ask you something.”
“What is it?”
“I want to know if you’ve forgiven me.”
“Forgiven you?”
“Yeah, Mags. That shit has haunted me since the minute we broke up, and I thought I was over it, and then you were graduating, and the thought of you leaving without me ever knowing for sure is fucked. It’s just fucked.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I know it doesn’t make sense. I know it doesn’t. I left you. I did it. I’m the one who fucked it all up. But the thing is it never felt right, and then you came to the house, and the way you were looking at me—”
“How was I looking at you?”
“Fuck, I don’t know, Maggie. You were looking at me like you used to.”
“I’m not trying to be difficult, Jacob. I just want to hear it.”
“You looked like there were feelings still there.”
Maggie stared at the ground as if looking at me any longer just might destroy her. She didn’t say anything for a while, and I didn’t know how to fill that silence. There was nothing I could say to fill that space. Then her head came up and her eyes were filled with a sadness and anger that I hadn’t seen since the day I left her. When I walked out of high school, my life was decided, and with my life decided, keeping her any longer would have bound her just the same. I broke her heart in the parking lot and drove away with her crying her eyes out, left that school and her and any shot I’d ever had of making it off this mountain in one clean cut. That sadness and anger is what I’d spent the last two years trying my damnedest to forget. But there was something different about it this time. There was strength with it. There was something solid about her now, a confidence that seemed to guarantee that what I broke would never be broken again.
“I loved you, Jacob. I always loved you. From the time we were tiny. But you broke my heart. You left me and you broke my heart and I’ve done everything I can to get over it.”
“I know I did. I know I did, and I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Maggie.”
“I needed an apology a long time ago, Jacob. I needed you to be there. I needed you to be there until it quit hurting, and the fact that you weren’t is what hurt most of all. The fact that you just upped and left. But if there’s one thing you can do for me, it’s tell me why you thought you had to do it? I’ve never been able to understand why you left.”
“Because I loved you.”
“I don’t think you and I have the same meaning of that word.”
“I loved you then and I love you now. I can’t imagine ever not loving you.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
I’d always known why I left her, but I’d never had to put it into words. I knew the words would be too hard to come by. I knew the words would have to be perfect. She deserved those kinds of words, but I didn’t know if I’d ever had them inside of me. The only thing I could offer Maggie was honesty, brutal honesty. That was the one thing I’d always given her.
“I couldn’t stand the thought of keeping you here. I couldn’t stand the thought of it then and I can’t stand the thought of it now. You’re better than this place. You always have been. You’ve had your eyes set on someplace else since we were kids, but where you’re different is that you’ve actually got something that can get you there. You’re smart enough to do any fucking thing you ever wanted to do, and you’re stubborn enough to make it happen. But I’m not, Maggie. I’m not getting out of here and I know that. I came to terms with what I was born into a long fucking time ago. I can’t get out of that. So how in the fuck would that work? One way or another you were going to get hurt. I loved you too fucking much to drag it out.”
“There’s nothing keeping you here, Jacob.”
“Bullshit.”
“There’s never been anything keeping you here but you.”
“Bullshit, Mags.”
“I mean that.” Maggie moved closer and that closeness cut my words. She stood directly under me now, her head almost pressed into my chest, gorgeous blond curls wadded up close enough to nuzzle. “I wouldn’t have fallen in love with you if it weren’t true.”
I wasn’t quite sure what to say and so I said nothing. I just stood there staring into her eyes. And in that moment that passed between us, there was this energy in the air that seemed to cup the two of us like lightning bugs in closed hands. I felt numb. I felt weightless and numb, and it was the closest thing to perfection that I’d ever felt. And out of that feeling came words. And maybe they were the perfect words, or maybe just the closest thing to perfect words that I’d ever had, and so I spoke them.
That same look I’d seen appeared again. Those silver blues dilated like she was on some fine drug. She pushed up onto tiptoes, her head cocking sideways as she came, and before I knew it I could feel her lips pressed into mine and I struggled to catch up. I hooked hair that had fallen along her cheeks back behind her ears, and continued with my right hand down her arm till my fingers found their place along her ribs. I ran my left hand down her cheekbone and feathered my fingers under her chin to hold her there a second longer if I could. The numbness stayed with me. It was an old feeling that I had all but forgotten, a feeling that I never knew I’d missed until right then. She pulled back and smiled, and I was left there wide-eyed as a child when she ran away.