Morning is a lie in Pine Deep.
It explodes with light and color, laughing the clouds away and shouting among the many-colored leaves. The lingering raindrops on the grass sparkled like jewels and birds sang happy songs in the trees.
The morning was sneaky like that. Manipulative. It insisted you accept the fiction that all was right with the world and each new day was, indeed, filled with the promise of good things and happiness. Those people who moved through life with little awareness, barely noticed, because they had not really taken note of the intensity of the darkness the previous night, nor the harshness of the storms. They sleepwalked through their days and got lost in TV or computer screens at night and were somehow armored against the world as it was.
For the others, though, the ones who counted more than five personal senses and who were wired into the nervous system of the town, the lie was obvious. Some took the reprieve from shadows and storms, accepting it with the gratitude of the beaten, who bless the moment when the bully takes a breath. For some the morning offered at least a chance to shuffle the cards and maybe deal a better hand. And for those special ones who could not unsee the things that moved behind the curtains of either day or night, the bright sunshine was a joke, a deception, a crocodile smile.
Dianna Agbala got out of bed and stood by the windows, shivering despite the heat turned high last night. Even the bedroom carpet felt like ice beneath the soles of her feet. She stood rubbing the place on her arm where the tattoo had been fading, where the roses had withered. She was not aware she did that.
She thought about Gayle. About the things they talked about, the things they shared. The sex was the least of it. Gayle had been sweet and earnest, but too uncertain and self-conscious to be a good lover. Maybe she was in her hetero life, but she did not yet understand how to make love as a woman with a woman. Dianna wondered if there would be a second time for her, or if last night had gotten it out of her system. Her instincts said that a door had been opened, though, and maybe couldn’t be closed.
A mockingbird drew her attention for a moment and when she returned to thoughts of last night they were oddly vague. As if it were something that happened months ago rather than hours.
“Christ,” she said aloud, “how drunk was I?”
It annoyed her because she had to fight to reconstruct the face of the woman she’d slept with. Grace? Or Greta? Something like that.
She waved a fly away from her face and the action broke her concentration. She did not return to thoughts of last night. Not even for a moment.
The streets were still wet and the morning sunlight painted impressionistic landscapes with colors borrowed from the trees. It was easy to behold such rampant beauty and forget that there were shadows in the world. In moments like that Dianna even forgot about the tattoo on her arm. When she shivered, she smiled and dismissed it as the last of the storm breezes.
Andrew Duncan sat on the bed of the motel room where he had slept badly. He wore boxers and a tank top and stared for hours at the scarred spot on his arm. His wife had called her sister and gone to her place in Easton. There was no invitation for him to follow. She’d even blocked his number.
He stared at the faded scar on his arm and wondered if the local bars were open yet.
Down a crooked farm road, Alexa Clare sat cross-legged on her bed, all the lights out, rubbing at the spot between her breasts where a circle once connected her to the world, to her first love, to her sanity. She used the pads of forefinger-and-index fingers and made circles with such consistent force and pressure that the skin was abraded, raw. Tiny droplets of blood tickled down her stomach, but she didn’t notice.
She tried to remember what she did last night, but could not. There was a room somewhere in her mind where certain thoughts were hung. Alexa was aware of its existence, and knew without doubt that there were times when she went in there and put on those thoughts like a second skin. In her dreams there were some vaguely erotic images, seen as indistinctly as shadows on the other side of a drawn shade. No real details. And a lot of lost time.
She rubbed the spot on her chest and wondered why it hurt. And wondered what it was.
She was not aware that she had a new tattoo in the center of her back, at the angle where the eye does not usually fall. There, in her skin, the blowfly trembled and waited.
Gayle Kosinski lay alone in bed. Scott was gone—up and out to play golf with his friends. The kids were still, mercifully, asleep. She lingered at the edge of wakefulness, recalling bittersweet fragments of a dream in which she had gone prowling in bars along the Fringe and found a beautiful woman. They had talked, and laughed, and kissed, and made love in a big bed. It had been so good, and Gayle came over and over again. But then the dream changed as she tried to bring this new lover to orgasm. She tried and tried, but nothing worked. Not fingers or tongue. After a while the effort fatigued her own muscles. Her jaw ached and she started getting a headache from the position, lying facedown between the woman’s thighs. It was also uncomfortable for her breasts because there was a fold of the top-sheet beneath them and Gayle didn’t dare stop what she was doing to move it. Then the woman reached down and pushed her fingers against Gayle’s forehead, breaking the contact, pushing her back, and in a cold voice laced with disapproval, said, “You’re useless.”
That’s when Gaye looked up, past stomach and breasts, to the woman’s pinched and shrewish face … and saw her own. Saw that this woman was her. That the only woman she could ever meet, ever seduce, was herself, and even in that she had failed.
She lay in bed, her hands clenched to fists, pulling the blanket over her body so that even she didn’t have to look at it.
It took her hours to remember what actually happened last night, and when it all came back she sat up sharply, gasping, confused. The strangest thought popped into her head—that it was not her own memory that was faulty, but that she was somehow being forgotten. Which made no sense at all.
Miles away, Malcolm Crow sat on the edge of his bed. Val, sweet and smart and strong, slept next to him, twitching as if something in a dream stabbed her. Memories, Crow knew. Like the ones that had pulled him awake. The birds singing outside were hateful and noisy. He leaned his forearms on his thighs, hung his head, and felt lost.
Val slept on her back and wore a thin white camisole. It was not sheer, but just translucent enough so that he could see the faint outlines of the ladybug and the lightning bug on her sternum. He wondered if she was aware of how many times a day she touched that spot.
Seeing those tattoos shoved his mind in the direction of their meaning and of Patty Trang. Forgetting a child, even if that was the result of stress, head trauma, or some other cause, was truly appalling. Crow was in no way a religious man, but it felt like a sin.
He got carefully out of the bed and walked over to the window that looked out at the oak tree and the two headstones.
“We’ll never forget,” he promised his children. His babies. The lost ones.
There were dozens of nightbirds hidden among the leaves of that ancient tree. They all cawed in a soft, plaintive chorus. Closer to the house, blowflies buzzed as they looked for a way inside.
In a hospital bed at Pinelands Regional, Joey Raynor lay staring up at the ceiling. He wanted a drink so badly that tears ran from the corners of his eyes and soaked his thin pillow.
As he lay there he ran his hand over his chest and stomach. Over the smooth artless skin. He had his eyes closed and was barely aware that his fingers stopped here and there and there … each time lingering where a tattoo had been. It was not memory exactly, not on the surface anyway. It was deeper than that. A habit of awareness. His deepest mind, his truest heart, was aware of the absence.
But an absence of what?
He wept alone in the darkness of his hospital bedroom.
Monk Addison lay on the floor of his living room. Sprawled where he’d fallen when the alcohol in his system flooded the control room and short-circuited all awareness. The loss of that tattoo on his chest was awful for him. He wasn’t scared of much in the world, but the few square inches of bare skin terrified him.
Truly, deeply terrified him.
He was already drunk when he walked in the door and grabbed the rest of the whiskey bottle he’d started that morning. He’d been mad at Patty for poisoning herself with too much alcohol, but he outdid her by a mile. Good bourbon was a velvet cudgel and he let it smash all his lights.
It was not the morning light or the chorus of songbirds that woke him. It was the ringing of his cell phone. It took him so long to make sense of the sound. Longer still to climb up that dark, steep hill to awareness. His punctured hand spider-crawled to where the cell lay, found it, grabbed it, scuttled back to press it against his face.
“What?” he croaked in an old man’s voice.
“Monk?” said Patty Cakes. “They’re letting me go. Can you come get me?”