Chapter Eight

Sunday, October 15, 12:06 p.m.

Where could Lydia have gone? Roy was going crazy just thinking about it. The first thing he had done was to drive to the supermarket. He asked the three checkers and the guy behind the meat counter and the kid who counted pop cans if they had seen Lydia come in that day, but they all said they hadn’t. Only none of them would meet his eyes. Were they afraid of him, were they disrespecting him - or did they know something he didn’t? But then the manager told Roy he had to leave.

Then he went to the neighbors who lived on either side. They hadn’t seen Lydia, or if they had, they wouldn’t admit to it. The woman who lived across the street just shut the door in his face without saying a word. Roy knew right then that she was the one who had called the cops on him before. She was the one who had messed in his business. What happened between family was private, didn’t she know that?

Roy spent the rest of the evening and most of the night driving up and down the streets of Pendleton, looking for Lydia. Any second he expected to see her wide dark eyes caught in the glare of his headlights, just like when you jacked deer out of season, pinning them in a beam of bright light. But he saw nothing.

By two in the morning, Roy was back in his own neighborhood, peeping in his neighbors’ windows to see if Lydia was there, maybe hiding in someone’s back bedroom. But all the houses were dark and still, although he had to run when a dog started to bark where the stupid biddy lived. That one time she had gotten so upset about, that one time in the car she had seen, he had only put his hand over Lydia’s mouth to shut her up for a goddamn second because she was screaming at him so loud he couldn’t think. And maybe some of Lydia’s hair had gotten pulled out, but that was only because Roy had had to grab her and stop her from jumping out of the car when it was moving.

Finally he had gone to sleep, after checking three times to make sure the phone was working okay. But when he woke up Lydia was still gone, and there was still a dial tone, and the message light on the answering machine still wasn’t blinking. Lydia had been gone for nineteen. Roy felt pissed off and worried, all at the same time. Lydia was naïve. She didn’t know what was out there. They’d had a little fight yesterday, and maybe she thought she could make things better by running away and putting a scare into him, but she was wrong.

He couldn’t think of where she had gone to. Her parents were dead, and he made sure she never talked to her old friends. And she didn’t have any money. So where could she go? How could she just disappear into thin air? Softly, he thumped his head on the door frame, the way he used to when he was a kid, but it didn’t help clear his mind. What Roy needed was some crystal. Lydia was always on him about it, but what was the difference between crystal and some yuppie drinking a triple mocha special? You used coke at a party to be social, you smoked some weed to be mellow, maybe you had a belt or two when you were angry, but when you wanted to concentrate, you used crystal. And that’s what he needed to do. Concentrate. Figure out what to do next.

If only things could be the way they used to. Roy remembered what Lydia had been like when he first met her. Big brown eyes, shy, ducking her head when she caught him looking at her, hiding behind her hair. So nervous that the first time he took her out, she trembled all the way through the movie in the seat next to him. When he went to kiss her, her teeth chattered. Roy had found all that innocence exciting. She was like a little girl in an eighteen-year-old’s body.

He met her just a few months after his grandmom had died. He had bought this place out on the edge of town, but it needed a woman’s touch. And Lydia was looking to get away from her parents who fought all the time. Drunks, both of them, with the house scarred from their fighting, holes in the wall from their fists, doors that had been kicked down so many times they didn’t close tight, not a dish in the cupboard that matched.

Three months after they met, they were married. Then slowly Roy found Lydia was not to be trusted. She lied about little things and big, and when he caught her she just pulled into herself. When she broke the little china ballet dancer that had belonged to Roy’s mom, she hid the pieces. He asked her and asked to keep the house clean, and he would come home and find dishes in the sink, crumbs on the counter. He hated dirt. He couldn’t stand disorder. And he had told her that. The first time he hit her, he expected her to cry, but she did nothing. Nothing! It drove him crazy.

Then he began to wonder if she was tricking him. Cheating on him. He set more and more rules, but even still, he figured she could find ways to wiggle out of them. And maybe she was. He followed her whenever he could, just to be sure. He had seen her with his own eyes, seen her smile at strangers, seen her laugh with other men.

Roy had hated then how he had let Lydia know one or two of his secrets. He had always been careful to keep his shirt on around her, but then one time she saw him after a shower and touched the knot on his collarbone. He had told her what had happened and his eyes had even gotten a little wet. For all he knew, maybe Lydia had been laughing at him, or telling his story to strangers while she rolled her eyes. About how his grandmom had shoved him down the cellar steps for a chore not done to her liking. When Pop-pop came home from work hours later, he fixed up a splint for Roy’s arm, but Roy’s collarbone never healed up right. Roy had been down there in the blackness for an eternity, cradling his arm to his chest, barely able to breathe because of the pain and his face swollen from crying and the dank smell of mold.

He had been too scared to move. In the dark, the spiders had worked their webs all around him. He was four. He knew better than to call out.