Leaving

I went back to Jim’s trailer to make sure I had everything I needed for the trip to Gulfy, the prospect of which seemed less frightening now that I would be traveling with Gigi. There would be time enough for everything once we were on the road. Maybe she and I could talk on the drive about what had happened to Hinkle. I wondered if she knew or if I could somehow explain to her the relative advantage of not having to bear alone the knowledge of what had happened. We could reassure each other that we weren’t irredeemable. Gigi wasn’t, at least.

I was about to walk over to Gigi’s when I heard the sound of an approaching car. It must have been Mickey, showing up with the promised vehicle. Though I appreciated how quick and able he had been, the prospect of another delay, of having to tell Mickey that we no longer needed his assistance but thanks anyway, was daunting. He would probably want to chat for a bit and speak to Jim as well, and there was no time for any of that.

I stepped outside, trying to think of the fastest and easiest way to get rid of him. I decided I would just tell him we had a situation right then, which was true enough, and that I had to leave.

The car pulled up so close that it sprayed gravel on my ankles. The passenger door opened, and out stepped Missy.

“Oh shit,” I said under my breath.

In the distance, a police cruiser drove toward us. It had occurred to me, of course, that Missy would bring the police here, but I hadn’t expected her to be able to accomplish that task with such speed.

“Good morning, Sarah. And this is my fiancé, Steve,” Missy said, gesturing to the man exiting the driver’s side.

He was tall with thick black hair that he wore a bit long, almost touching his collar. Missy seemed to have had little trouble replacing her first fiancé with another good-looking one. Remembering my view of the audience last night, I wondered if he might be the only handsome man in Patawaunee.

“Steve? Is that right?” I asked. “I’m terrible with names. Last night I thought you told me your fiancé was named Jared. I remember you talking a lot about how much you loved him. My mistake, I suppose.”

“No, I never said that.” Missy reached into the car to try to grab Steve’s hand and hold it, but he slipped away from her grasp. “Steve, that’s not how I put it,” she insisted.

Steve didn’t answer and slammed the car door with more force than necessary when he got out to stand next to Missy. He didn’t want to be there with Missy. That much was obvious.

“Anyway,” Missy continued, turning all her attention back on me. “Guess where Steve’s best friend works? For the Patawaunee Police Department.” She gestured at the police vehicle now parked alongside Steve’s car. “How’s that for a piece of luck?”

“Well, good. Maybe that will help you listen to reason, then.” I noticed Steve’s slight nod of assent, which only reinforced my belief that this was Missy’s project, and affable Steve was only along for the ride.

Gigi came around the side of the trailer. “Hey there, Lola. I came to see what was holding you up. I didn’t know you had company.” She glanced from Steve and Missy to the police officer getting out of his car.

“It was a bit unexpected. Maybe you could get Jim here to help us out.” I swiped at the line of perspiration that had formed along my lip.

“Yeah, sure thing.” Gigi turned and walked back the way she had come.

I knew that as soon as she was out of sight, she would start running as fast as she could to get to Jim. Then he would have to take a break from dealing with one extraordinary crisis to face another. Thinking of it that way only convinced me further that all of us needed to abandon this crazy way of living.

“Good morning, Officer.” My voice was light and cheery as I extended my hand toward the cop.

“Well, good morning.” He looked taken aback by my good nature and manners as he shook my hand. “I’d like to have a word with you, if you don’t mind.”

“Why certainly, Officer,” I said in the cute, sugary voice I used onstage sometimes. “I’m happy to offer whatever assistance I can.” I glanced up at the cop’s face—a fail-safe posture of feminine deference I’d seen Gigi use to great effect.

The cop took off his cap and grinned down me, intrigued, I could tell, by the size of me. He couldn’t stop himself from gazing back and forth at my upper arms and looking down at my thighs and knees.

Missy jumped in front of me. “You’ll pay now, you fat bitch.” She was only inches from my face and stabbed my chest with her accusatory finger. The sad, vulnerable woman who had pleaded with me under my trailer window seemed like a product of my imagination now.

The cop pushed Missy away from me. “Now, now,” he said in a stern police voice, “there’s no need for that kind of language from a lady.”

“Yeah, come on, Missy,” Steve said. “Just let him do his job already.”

Missy and I locked eyes. She wanted some kind of sign from me, some flicker of recognition, but I kept my face impassive, steely in my determination not to concede any ground to her accusations. She was the first to look away.

“Officer, I want you to arrest this woman for killing my fiancé—I mean my former fiancé, her very own brother!” She spoke those words loud and clear, like someone who had rehearsed them many times in her loneliness.

For a split instant, the unvarnished truth of her statement and the recent events surrounding Hinkle’s death made me wonder if, indeed, I had the right to defend myself. I had earned my punishment. A part of me craved it, even. The baby inside me, though, deserved what I had been denied in childhood—a free, happy life alongside her mother.

“Ma’am, like I said before, you have me mistaken for someone else. I don’t even have a brother.” I turned back to the cop, my face soft and bewildered. “I’m an only child.” I shook my head sadly. “In fact, my mother always said having just one child was the greatest tragedy of her life.”

Missy pulled on the cop’s arm. “She’s lying to you. That’s what she does! The police in our town are looking for her because she used to live with her brother. And then one day, she’s gone, and her brother, my former fiancé, is lying on the floor with the side of his skull smashed in, and no one can say how it happened.” Missy paused and drew a deep breath then continued with forced slowness. “She killed her brother and then ran away with the carnival to hide her crime. She is getting away with murder!”

There it was again—the horrible truth of what I had done. The precision and heat of Missy’s accusation silenced us and stamped out my thought-making machinery, nearly derailing my performance. Then I saw Jim and Gigi from the corner of my eye, walking toward us, both of them looking unhurried and unworried.

“Hi there,” Jim said, reaching over to shake hands with the cop. “Officer, I’m in charge of the sideshow. Is there some way I can be of assistance?”

“Jim, honey, there’s a case of mistaken identity here—”

The police officer silenced me by holding the palm of his hand up to my face. I tasted a drop of blood from biting my tongue.

“I wonder, then, if you could tell me,” the cop said, “how many siblings this... person here has.”

“My name is Lola—” But the cop snapped his hand in front of my face again to keep me from talking. Missy watched back and forth between Jim and the cop, clearly impatient with the cop’s delaying, while Steve stood with his arms folded, staring down at the ground.

Jim scratched under his chin, making a show of thinking. “Well,” he said in the calm voice of a simple, bemused man, “you know, now that you mention it, I don’t think it ever came up in conversation. I guess I don’t really know.”

The cop dropped his hands to his sides. “Ma’am, do you have some form of identification to verify your actual name? You said your first name was Lola.”

Missy stamped her foot on the ground. “Why is this taking so long? I’m telling you it’s her. I’m an eyewitness. I’ve known this person or have known about her my whole life.” Missy swiped tears from the sides of her face. “My God, you could parade her through the streets of our town, and anyone could tell you who she was. You’re not going to get away with it, you fat fucking slob.”

The cop inhaled audibly. “I hope she doesn’t swear like that all the time,” he said to Steve.

“Be cool, Missy,” Steve said, his voice low and mumbling, like a reluctant, forced apology.

Missy couldn’t see or didn’t care that Steve’s friend, the cop, didn’t like her or that Steve hated the bad impression she was making on his friend. Neither did she pay any particular heed when Steve walked away to lean against the trunk of the car, his back to them all. She just didn’t know her audience.

“Oh,” I exclaimed, pressing my hand against my heart, as if Missy’s profanity might stop it from beating. “Officer, sir, could I speak to you privately? Really, it might be the best way... I don’t want this lady... this person here to get any more upset than she already is.”

Missy inserted herself between me and the cop, standing so close to him that their posture had a weirdly romantic feel, as if they were about to kiss. “No. Anything she has to say, I get to hear that too. Otherwise, she’s just going to tell you more lies.”

“You need to move away from me.” He gave Missy a firm, businesslike shove to the side. “Why don’t we step over here?” the cop said to me.

The cop and I walked several paces away, far enough for me to be certain that we were out of Missy’s earshot. She looked lost and confused, wondering no doubt how the scene had managed to slip away from her.

“Now, Officer, what we have here is a case of mistaken identity. I’m happy to supply you with whatever information you need to clear up this matter. Yes, my name is Lola, but it’s short for Dolores.”

The cop pulled out a small notebook to write down that bit of information. “And what is your last name?”

“It’s Barnes.” In my mind’s eye, I stared out the back window at the old house, the Schendel dairy barn visible on the far hilltop. “Dolores Barnes.”

The cop wrote again on his pad—possibly the word Barnes. He slid the notebook and pencil back into the inside pocket of his uniform jacket. “All right, then. If you could just show me some form of identification attesting to that fact, we can get this matter resolved.”

“Jim,” I called over my shoulder.

Jim walked over as fast as he could without it seeming like running. He put his hand on my back, and the warmth of his palm across my bare skin was the richest, most soothing experience in the world at that moment.

“Would you mind bringing out my birth certificate to show this officer? I’m sure he has more important things to do than wait for me to go in and get it.”

Jim smiled at the police officer, his face open and friendly, eager to please. He was used to dealing with the fuzz, and I let that idea comfort me. I allowed myself to feel a small squirm of pleasure, near to gloating that I had had the foresight and good money for Scratchy to do up a birth certificate for me.

“I’ll be back in a jiffy,” Jim said with a slight bow to the police officer.

Missy flapped her arms at him, like an ineffectual, confused bird. “Wait, wait. What’s he doing? Where’s he going?” She started toward me, but the police officer held out his hand.

“Please stay where you are, miss,” he said in crisp tone.

It occurred to me that the cop might like nothing more than to be able to tell Missy she was wrong about this whole matter. Maybe all he needed was a helpful explanation of Missy’s delusions. Then perhaps, on some future date, he and his friend Steve might drink beer together and laugh about Missy and how certain she had been of possessing some special information.

“Officer, a case of mistaken identity really isn’t so hard to explain in this instance. I bet I’m the fattest woman you’ve ever seen. Isn’t that right?”

The cop’s face turned an immediate purple. With no one else around now and having been given a reason, permission, to look, he inventoried me from head to toe. I told myself that it was no different from being on stage, except I never had to stand this close to an audience member.

“Please don’t be embarrassed, sir. I know I look very different from other women. So I bet the person this woman is looking for was also really large like me. And then what happens is, you know, people just see the size, and they tend to ignore the face and hair and other things. See, she has this idea in her head that no one else could be as fat as this person she’s looking for, so when she does find someone who is that fat, she automatically assumes that someone must be the same person.”

“Well, miss, I’ll admit you might have a point there. But then again, this is a very serious accusation being made against you.”

“Yes, yes, I can understand that.” I was performing, telling this cop what he wanted to hear, but the desolation in my voice sounded and felt real, nonetheless.

Jim came out of the trailer with a manila folder in his hand, which he gave to me and I passed to the cop. “Here you go”—I squinted to read his name tag—“Officer Pettiman. Here’s my birth certificate, and you can see right there that my name is Dolores Barnes, like I said.”

Pettiman removed the document with one hand while the fingers on his other hand rifled through the stack of ten- and twenty-dollar bills Jim had tucked into the bottom of the folder. His lips moved slightly while he counted. The sight of his spit-shiny mouth nearly made me gag, but Jim was right about cops—they always expected a little something extra.

“Well, Miss Barnes, it certainly appears like everything is in order.” Pettiman pocketed the cash and snapped the folder closed, apparently satisfied with the money he had earned. “And it looks like you’ve got yourself a nice tidy little career too.”

“Yes. I don’t know what I’d do if I didn’t have this job. I mean, could you imagine me as someone’s secretary or a nurse or a teacher?” I drew a deep breath, letting a whistling, authentic sadness fill my voice. “Can you imagine me as a housewife with children and a nice husband to take care of me?”

Pettiman smiled down at me, looking for a moment as if he might chuck me under my chin or call me a good girl. “You’ll do just fine yourself, I’m sure.”

“So, we’re all set then?” Jim asked.

Our small huddle began to break up. Pettiman placed his hat on his head and tugged the brim in my direction. He handed the birth certificate and folder back to Jim while I smiled the entire time. If Missy and Steve hadn’t been there, Pettiman would probably have driven away, leaving Jim, Gigi, and me to deal with the fallout from Hinkle’s death in peace.

“Wait! What’s happening? Nobody can go anywhere.” Missy ran over toward us. “You have to arrest her. That’s what we’re here for. Steve, come here and tell him to arrest her.”

Steve walked over to the group with obvious reluctance. Gigi moved closer as well, as if sensing something was happening.

“Man, are you going to arrest this lady or what?” Steve asked.

“This is a case of mistaken identity,” I said in a clear, firm voice. “Officer Pettiman, I just showed you my legal birth certificate.” And paid you more money than you’re worth, I thought.

“That’s true what she says about the birth certificate,” Pettiman explained to Steve. “So probably not, I guess.”

“You can’t let her get away with this. I don’t care what piece of paper she has. I see her with my own eyes. I’m telling you it’s her!” Missy yelled.

“Really?” I asked. “Are you sure of that? What if there were a whole lineup of carnival fat ladies? Are you saying you could identify this particular person out of that group with no problem?”

“Yes,” she said.

Pettiman crossed his arms. “You don’t actually sound one hundred percent convinced, so I think—”

“Well, then, it doesn’t have to be just me. There are dozens of people from our town who can tell you who she really is. We can get them to identify her. She can’t just get away with murder.”

“Actually, I’m from Oregon,” I said.

“Yeah,” Gigi agreed. “We’ve talked a lot about that. I’m from Kansas myself.”

“Who gives a shit where you’re from?” Missy shouted.

“Officer, do you have an actual warrant for Lola’s arrest?” Jim asked.

“Her name isn’t Lola!”

Pettiman ignored Missy. The more erratic and irrational she seemed, the easier it was to dismiss her. That was the way most people viewed things, especially when it came to women. I understood that, but Missy did not.

“Well, no, not actually,” Pettiman admitted.

“Because I could really use your help with a much bigger matter. The carnival owner died in his bed last night, and I’ve already called for the ambulance, but I sure could use some real police presence to help keep the scene clear. And then later, this afternoon even, if there’s something else you’d like to talk about or some other questions you have for Lola, I’ll drive her down to the station house myself. Fair enough?” Despite Jim’s easygoing exterior, a sort of electric tension radiated from him.

“Sure, that would work, and I’d be happy to help,” Pettiman said. He smiled and drew a visible deep breath that puffed out his chest.

“No! You have to take her with you now. She’s just going to leave otherwise. She’ll get away!” Missy’s voice splintered on those last words.

She pressed her hands to her face and began to cry, her narrow back hitching with her sobs. She was a loud crier and not a particularly pretty one, but Steve wrapped his arms around her nonetheless. He rested the side of his face on top of her lowered head.

“Oh, honey, come on. It’ll be okay.”

Pettiman looked panicked and contrite as well. “Yeah,” he agreed. “Everything’s under control here.”

Whether she intended to or not, Missy was stealing the scene. Whereas Steve and Pettiman might have been annoyed or offended by her angry outbursts and thoughtless profanity, they appeared powerless against her tears.

An old white Buick Skylark came barreling toward us, moving so fast that a cloud of dust surrounded it. We all watched as it pulled to a stop, and a very skinny man wearing navy shorts with white piping and no shirt got out. He had short, curly red hair and looked to be somewhere in his thirties.

“Hi there, Mickey,” Jim said.

“You’re driving mighty fast there, sir,” Pettiman said.

“Well, sorry about that, Officer. I had to gun it to make sure I could get this old girl over the ruts,” Mickey said as he pointed back at the car.

“Mickey, it’s good to see you,” I said. “If you could hang on for just a moment, I’m going to step into the trailer a minute to freshen up. Then I’ll just get my purse and list, if you’d be kind enough to drive me to the grocery store.”

“It’s awful nice of you, Mick,” Jim said.

“No problem, man,” Mickey said.

Missy lifted her head. “She can’t go to the store.”

This conversation with her and Steve and Pettiman, who appeared not to understand how bribes worked, had lasted far too long. So unless Pettiman tried to restrain my body, I was going to get moving and keep going. I glanced back to ask Gigi to join me, but she was already on my heels.

I rolled shut the windows as soon as we were in the trailer so that no one would hear us and also so we wouldn’t be distracted by the conversation outside. “Gigi, in a minute you need to pull out of here with your trailer and then drive until that truck stop right there before the junction with 12. You know the one I mean?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“I’ll meet you there with Mickey and get right in the trailer, and then we’ll just keep going. No one will know where or who I’m traveling with. Take Jim off to the side and let him know what’s happening. This is the end of Midstate, so if we get out of here, the whole trail goes cold. It’s the end of our troubles.”

Gigi nodded. “I suppose. That girl isn’t going to keep that man of hers too long if she keeps up with this. That’s obvious, at least.”

“We’re going to make it.” I hugged Gigi close to me, and she squeezed me back with an almost painful degree of force.

After Gigi left, I sat in the bedroom and looked out the back window until I saw her drive away, pulling her trailer. I filled an old purse with some last-minute items I hadn’t had time to pack and waited until I felt certain Gigi had had enough lead time to get to the meeting spot.

Outside, the configuration of people had shifted. Jim and Pettiman were gone, and Missy and Steve were sitting in their car. Missy waved at me when I glanced in their direction. Mickey was lounging against the hood of the Skylark.

“What’s going on here?” I asked him.

“Well, let’s see, first that girl that was in the trailer with you comes out and talks to Jim for a minute. Then the ambulance shows up, and Jim has to go take care of that. First, though, he tells those two clowns to get out of here, and the cop backs him up. So sugar britches here and the boyfriend drive away, and then Jim and the cop go to meet the ambulance. Except now, the charming couple is back. And I went over to tell them they were supposed to be gone, and she said no carnie with gross, messed-up skin was going to tell her what to do. I’m waiting here, though, to drive you wherever you need to go.”

Mickey’s freckles were so numerous it was hard to tell where one ended and the next one began. His face and body had flushed even more red when he recounted what Missy had said about him. I wanted to find some words that would offset Missy’s collateral meanness, but since Mickey’s skin was in fact terrible from any objective view, I couldn’t think of any.

Instead, I leaned in close to him. “Man, can you put the pedal to the metal and get us out of here when I say so?”

“Nothing would give me greater pleasure.” He got into the driver’s seat and gripped the steering wheel, ready to go.

I motioned to Missy, waving her over to talk to me. “Look,” I told her when she was standing next to me, “you’ve got the wrong person, and I think part of you knows that. You don’t have to keep track of me, okay? I’m not this Sarah you’re looking for. This will all get cleared up. To tell you the truth, I’ve had it with carnival life, and now with the owner passing, I’ll probably go back to Oregon and look after my parents. They’re older, you know.”

Many times during my recent interactions with her, though I might have wanted to reveal my identity and correct her various misrepresentations of herself and of me and Jared, too, I had stayed silent because I recognized that desire to be visible as the same compulsion that had killed my mother. That wasn’t going to happen to me. I opened the passenger door and got into the car. Mickey turned the key in the ignition. Missy didn’t say anything, not even when I took her hand in mine through the open window.

“You know, lady,” I said, “you’ve caused me a lot of worry and stress with everything you’ve been saying. Despite that, I’m sorry for your trouble. You must be very sad and lonely to carry on like this, and I wish you well. I really do.”

I would always feel remorse for what I had done to Jared. There was no way I could see of being a decent person without carrying that burden. My conversation with Missy was calculated in some ways. I knew my compassion would confuse her, and calling her over to me meant she would lose time traversing that same ground to get back in the car with Steve if they decided to follow me. There was also truth in my words as well, however. Even though Missy had a new fiancé and appeared to have moved on to the next act of her life, she was still the one who had loved Jared most. She had grieved him and maybe still missed him. I let go of her hand.

“Hit it,” I said to Mickey.

Then we drove off. The car bounded over the bumps and ruts, rattling my teeth. I rolled up my window, despite the heat, to keep the dust from getting into the car.

“Yep. It looks like they’re following us,” Mickey said as he glanced in the rearview mirror. “We can shake ’em, though. Especially since we’re going to get to the road before them.”

I told Mickey where we were headed, and he opened the engine. It felt like we were flying. As I saw it, the endlessly flat landscape was our biggest problem. Despite the growing distance between the two vehicles, I knew we were still visible to Missy and Steve.

Mickey’s only focus seemed to be on the road in front of him. We needed some sort of plan besides driving faster and faster. Missy and Steve couldn’t see me get into Gigi’s trailer.

“We’ve got to get out of their line of sight,” I said. “We’re coming up on Mary’s Point here. Once we get over the town line, you think you could find a place to pull off where they wouldn’t see us? Or maybe we could lose them if we took enough turns through the side streets.”

“Well, yeah, sure. The only problem is that Mary’s Point is past where you wanted me to drop you.”

“I know. We can double back, and they’ll keep right on traveling in the same direction.”

“We better get as far ahead as we can now,” Mickey said. “We’ll do just fine. That guy driving hasn’t got the nerve for any real speed.”

That was not the case with Mickey as he pushed the car to go even faster. When we crossed the town line into Mary’s Point, he slowed so abruptly that I had brace myself to keep from being slammed into the dashboard. He pulled into a gas station with an attached car wash and drove around the back of the cinder block building so we could watch for Missy and Steve.

About ten minutes later, they flew past our spot without stopping. Mickey and I waited. I heard a siren. My first reaction was to panic, but the police went right by us in hot pursuit of someone else.

“I think that cop is after Missy and Steve because he wants to pull them over for speeding,” I told Mickey. The hilarity of Missy’s reversal of fortune when she had tried so hard to get me arrested made me laugh until it was hard to catch my breath.

Mickey joined in. “Well, I guess them’s the breaks, sugar britches,” he said.

We went back the way we had come, with Mickey driving at a more judicious speed this time because only sheer luck had kept us from meeting the same fate as Missy and Steve. Gigi’s car and trailer were in the exact location just like planned, but Gigi herself seemed jumpy and nervous as she asked a stream of questions.

I stepped into her trailer and held the door open a crack. “Everything’s fine, Geeg, but we don’t have time to waste. Mickey, I really do thank you from the bottom of my heart.” I placed a hand on my chest to emphasize my words.

“Yeah, no problem. Any friend of Jim’s, you know? I’ll make sure to tell him you two got off okay.”

After Mickey left, and I was closed up in the trailer, it seemed like a long wait until Gigi started the engine. It could have been that only a short while had passed and that my anxiety to keep moving and get away had distorted my sense of time. I was worried about Gigi, though. Her center seemed to be failing her in some fundamental way.

When at last we started moving, I hugged my midsection. Despite not knowing what the future held for me, I experienced a profound sensation of relief. Soon we would be down in Gulfy, beyond Missy’s reach and knowledge, and we could stay there for as long as we liked.

I patted my stomach. “It’s okay, baby. We’re going home.”

***

A few hours later, Gigi pulled the car and trailer over to the side of the road. Her hands were shaking so much, her overall movements so disjointed and spastic, that there was no question of her taking us any farther. Once I adjusted the seat and got behind the wheel to drive, she began having some sort of delayed reaction, moaning with her head hanging out the window, a soft, painful howl repeating on an endless loop. The monotony of the sound became like a strange lullaby, causing my eyes to close for a few moments longer than they should have. The crunching of gravel on the road’s shoulder jolted me back awake and quieted Gigi for a while, at least.

We had to pull over at least four times for Gigi to vomit, until she was gagging and heaving but had nothing left to expel. On the last such occasion, after getting down on all fours to retch into a cornfield, she sat down with her back to me, apparently mesmerized by the clatter of the cornstalks knocking into each other in the late-evening breeze. A person could get lost in that endless green.

“You go on without me,” she said. The moving field nearly swallowed her words.

“Gigi!” I yelled through the passenger door, which she had left hanging open. “You get your ass in this car right now.”

She stood up like she wanted to walk into that swaying green ocean. I knew that if she went in too far, I would lose her forever. Normally, I rode in the trailer on these long trips to Florida because sitting stuffed up in the car for long periods was a type of agony for me. As it was, my feet and calves were swollen, and the entire lower half of my body pulsated with warm pain. If I had to get out of the car to grab Gigi, I would never be able to fold myself back into the vehicle.

“Do not crack up on me, and get back here.”

When Gigi ignored me still, I grabbed the water jug Jim had filled earlier in the day. I opened the top and tossed it out the passenger door to Gigi. It landed just behind her. The water spilled out, lapping onto the tops of her feet.

“What the hell?” Gigi said. She turned and looked at me, her eyes like blank mirrors, shining with tears.

“Get back in the car,” I said. “And bring the jug too.”

The spell, it appeared, had been broken.

Gigi was better after that, like herself even, albeit more silent and restless, shifting in her seat and twiddling her fingers in strange manic gestures. We kept driving past sunset and into the dark of night, determined to get across as many state lines as possible. When we stopped at a campground sometime after midnight, Gigi gave me her bed in the trailer. “I’ll never sleep anyway,” she claimed.

In my dreams, Hinkle, who was really Jared, pressed the length of his body down my back, reaching around to clamp his hand on my throat and squeeze. I jolted awake. Over my thudding heart, I could hear the moist, snuffling sound of Gigi crying on the other side of the divider.

“Are you okay out there?” I asked.

The speed at which Gigi came in and sat on the bed made me realize how lonely she must have felt in the waking world. She pulled a pillow from the mountain I had built as a prop to keep myself from choking while I slept. Gigi smothered her own face into the pillow to sob as I stroked the back of her head.

Outside, some people from another trailer were still awake and drinking around their fire. A woman’s disembodied voice carried through the open window. “No, fuck you. You fuck you. You don’t get to tell me what to do.”

“Lo,” Gigi whispered. “I killed a man. I’m going to burn in hell for all eternity because of that.”

Her words reminded me of when Jared had come to haunt me. His presence in Jim’s trailer that night, impossible though it had been, had seemed so real, as certain as Gigi’s conviction that a painful, retaliatory afterlife awaited her.

“It’s time for you to go to bed,” a man’s voice said in response to the outside woman’s laughter. There was a sizzling like the sound of water on fire.

In all the time I’d known Gigi, she had never invoked the name of God except to curse someone or something. “There’s no hell. You know that,” I said, trying to shake the creepy feeling brought on by Gigi’s terror and crying. “And even if you did go to hell, you’d sure as shit run into Hinkle there.”

“Jesus, Lo, that don’t make it right.”

Gigi squeezed the pillow closer to her chest and curled her body into a tight ball so we could sleep next to each other. I kissed her cheek, neither of us caring or commenting about how my tears fell on her face, mixing with her own. Gigi might have mixed the poison drink that killed Hinkle, but she only did it to try to help me. I had killed him just as much as she had.

“I know,” I whispered. “I know.”

***

Gigi spent the next two days of our trip talking, talking, talking about what had happened that morning with Hinkle. As we headed south down into Illinois, through the western corner of Kentucky and across the middle of Tennessee, she discussed the nuances of every alternative she could envision, any reality that allowed Hinkle to still be alive and me to still be free. We bought food from grocery stores, making endless sandwiches in the car, not wanting to stop long enough even to eat a full meal in a restaurant. At night, we slept at campgrounds.

When we crossed the state line into Georgia, it felt as if we had passed an important marker, a divider after which our destination was closer in front of us than our point of origin was behind us. Light rain fell from the sky. Some water dripped in through the gap where we had left the windows open to keep the car from becoming too stifling in the heat, the windshield too clouded with our breath. Having told me about halfway through Illinois that she would never drink tequila again, not for as long as she lived, Gigi had switched to gin.

“I been thinking, Lo,” she said after a long silence broken only by the repetitive thumping of the windshield wipers. “When we get to Gulfy, the first thing we gotta do is find you a real doctor, a good one. Not like that old perv, Arnold.” Gigi pulled a small, flat bottle of Beefeaters from her macramé purse on the floor and took a good, long drink.

Not counting the visit with Arnold, I hadn’t been to a doctor’s office since childhood, back even before being forced to leave school. Even so many years later, the sensation of the doctor poking his long index finger into the fat roll at my waist, maybe to see how far in he could make it go, filled me with a sick dread, made me grip the steering wheel harder.

Gigi must have sensed my discomfort because she touched the top of my hand resting on the gearshift. “Look, we both know he’s going to give you a ton of shit about being so fat, but you’re going to have to do it anyway. I’ll go with you to all the appointments and tell them I’m your sister. We’ll make friends with them.”

***

Gulfy felt safe and familiar when we finally arrived. The smell of the salty, fishy air and the sound of the warm, lapping water soothed me, made me feel as if I could finally release the breath I had been holding for days. We went straight to the Showstop to call about the house that Jim and I usually rented.

“We’re home,” I said as I pulled the car and trailer into the parking lot.

“Thank Jesus,” Gigi replied.

“Listen to me,” I said in a sharp voice, clutching Gigi’s arm as she went to open the car door. “As far as the two of us know, Hinkle died in his bed. That’s why we ended our season early. You can’t tell anybody what happened. Not even Lonny.”

“I’m not stupid, you know,” she said, getting out of the car.

“I know that.” I also understood, though, the deep allure of confession, the relief of placing the straining weight of the unspoken on the ground, rather than carrying it with you all your life.

***

Gigi and I settled into the little house. She kept her trailer parked on the lawn with the vague assumption that she would make some other arrangement when Jim showed up and the rest of the winter crowd began arriving. In the meanwhile, we lived together, spending a lot of time at the Showstop.

One afternoon, about a week after we had arrived, when we were there having lunch, Gigi said she wanted to go in the back to talk to Lonny. When I had finished eating and she still hadn’t reappeared, I went through the kitchen to see where she had gone. I stopped just outside the storeroom, where I saw Gigi sitting on a section of the low counter and Lonny facing her with his hands planted on either side of her. Lonny leaned in close, like a man taking great care in listening to what was being said. The intimate intensity of their postures made me wonder if Gigi was recounting to Lonny the story about how Hinkle had really died. Lonny never was and never had been any kind of a snitch, though. I knew that much.

Later that night at the house, I waited for Gigi to tell me what she and Lonny had talked about, but when she didn’t volunteer any information, I went back to studying the calendar I had taken down from the wall and placed in front of me on the kitchen table.

“What’s that you got there, Lola?” Gigi popped open a can of Tab and sat down at the kitchen table next to me. Her hair was mashed up with thick brown dye on top of her head and covered in swirls of plastic wrap.

“Just trying to figure out when to expect Jim.” I sounded cheerful to show I wasn’t concerned. A small dot was visible each place where I had touched the tip of my pencil as I tried to count how much longer I had to wait until Jim could wrap up business with Midstate and then travel down to Florida.

“Well, I wouldn’t expect him anytime too soon,” Gigi said. She lit a cigarette and drank her Tab, as if there was nothing more to say about the matter.

“What do you mean? Do you know something I don’t?” I asked, unable to believe that Gigi would withhold information like that from me, that she might possess it when I knew nothing.

“Jesus H., calm down, calm down. Oh, oops.” Gigi clamped her hand over her mouth. “I been trying to not take the Lord’s name in vain, but sometimes it slips out on me.” She tapped her fingers on her closed lips. “Come on, you know I would have told you if I’d heard something from Jim. Besides which, my father used to say, ‘Bad news always finds you.’ So we’d know it if he was dead or something.”

“If you don’t know anything, then why did you say I shouldn’t expect Jim anytime soon?” I slapped my hand on the table to get Gigi’s attention. Her comments about Jim were the closest thing I had to any insight about when he would arrive.

“Oh well,” she said. “I only meant that Jim’s got that wandering bone, and he’s in a good spot now. He used to worry himself sick working for Midstate, always running around fixing problems that probably could have been avoided in the first place. Now, he’s got him a little time on his hands. He probably figures you’re all set up down here, so why not try out some things, maybe see about getting a gig for next season. He’ll turn up before you know it, and we’re doing okay here, right?” Gigi squeezed my hand.

There were so many things I wanted to talk about with Jim, like what had happened in the immediate days after we left, how much money he had had to pay to the police and had there been any speculation that maybe Hinkle’s death wasn’t just a pill-popper accident.

More than anything, though, if Jim stayed away until after the baby was born or, worse yet, if he left me to experience alone whatever tragedy might be in the offing, it would be impossible for me to tolerate his presence after that or to hold him in any kind of esteem in the future.

“No. It’s not all right,” I answered.

***

Gigi was as good as her word, though, about helping me with the pregnancy, finding the best doctor she could. She went with me to all the appointments, just like she had promised. Everyone at the doctor’s office came to love Gigi and, by extension, to tolerate me. She brought them bowls of candy and sometimes homemade treats, cooked by me of course, always asked to see photographs of children, and in short, gave such a good show of being interested in the lives and welfare of the entire staff that ridiculing me would have seemed plain bad manners.

I was sure it helped, too, that Gigi no longer looked like Gigi anymore. After she had dyed her hair back to a nice plain dark brown, she had gone out and bought herself a bunch of Sunday dresses because she said she needed to get to church and, in her words, “make peace with the Lord.”

Gigi played the part well, looking decorous, a little shy maybe, prone to easy shock and adopting something of a southern drawl of indeterminate geographic origin. She drove all over the place, trying out the Presbyterians, the Episcopalians, the Lutherans, the Methodists, and even the Catholics but steering clear of the Mormons and the Jehovah’s Witnesses as being too batty and restrictive of alcohol, before settling on the Episcopalians. After weeks of continual church attendance, Gigi truly did take on a sort of holy look, and Gigi being Gigi, regardless of how hard she might pray, she got herself a boyfriend through the church before too long. A sharp immigration lawyer named Doug who drove a green Mercedes. Gigi insisted on referring to Doug as her “suitor” with an irritating degree of adamancy.

“What’s a ‘suitor’ anyway?” I asked her one night when we were sitting at the kitchen table as usual. “Is that to make it sound like you’re not sleeping with him?” I laughed, thinking that Gigi would also find it funny.

“Well, we are not, in fact, sleeping together, for your information,” she said and sniffed.

Then I did burst out laughing in earnest, certain as I was that her pious tone and words had to be a joke. “Oh shit, you’re serious,” I said when I saw the hurt look on her face.

Around that same time in October, when we’d been gone from Midstate for about three months, Thelma and Scratchy came by to visit for the night. They showed up unannounced, an uncovered mattress and box spring tied to the top of their car and the trunk so jam-packed it had to be held closed with a section of old baling twine.

While I fried hamburgers and sausages for the two of them and for Gigi and myself, Scratchy talked at length about his brother, who lived outside of Macon, Georgia, and grew peaches, and about how he, Scratchy, had begun to realize the importance of getting back to the land. Thelma sat by his side, not saying anything until Scratchy got up to use the bathroom.

“Those people that hated us so much,” she said in a soft voice to Gigi and me, “some of them killed Useless. They gutted him and left him where they were sure we’d find him.” Tears rolled down Thelma’s cheeks.

Gigi moved over to the chair Scratchy had vacated next to Thelma, and I pulled up closer to her.

“Oh, Thelma, no,” I whispered. Unable to think of anything to say, I held her hand while Gigi clasped the other, shaking her head in disbelief.

“Don’t say anything about it to Scratchy,” Thelma said. “He loved that stupid goddamn dog so much he’ll just start crying all over again.”

When Scratchy came back from the bathroom, we continued on with the party as if nothing had happened, even though Scratchy must have known what we had talked about when he was out of the room. We maintained a casual and pleasant aspect anyway, determined to enjoy our last night together. Though he didn’t mention it, I knew Scratchy was disappointed that he hadn’t been able to say goodbye to Jim.

I hated Jim then for his blithe assumption that everything would be fine in his absence even as I feared that something awful had befallen him because, as Thelma’s story showed, the world was a terrible place.

***

November 4, 1979

Dear Sarah,

I’ll bet you’re surprised to get a letter from St. Petersburg, Florida! I’m pretty shocked myself. To tell you the truth, most days, I can’t believe I’m really here. I tried to keep the farm going after Luther died because I worried maybe Edna was right and that I would be a fool to squander all of Luther’s hard work to sell everything and move away. But we had that hard winter last year. I tired myself out hooking up the plow to the truck and clearing the driveway and the path up to the barn—all those things that Luther used to do.

Then I had some trouble with the pair of morons I hired to help out. I guess they didn’t like working for a woman. I came up on the two of them one day when they thought I was still at the house. One of them was holding the front of his shirt pinched between his thumbs and forefingers, making like it was my boobs, skipping around like he was me, saying how I was old and skinny and needed to get my plumbing cleaned out. With all the work they had to do, they still found time to make fun of me.

Right then, I think I stopped caring what Edna or Harold would say and decided I was going to live someplace warm, where I wouldn’t have to work every hour of the day like it was some God-sent mission.

Edna reminded me that I needed to be surrounded by family, but honestly, I think she was just worried that if I moved away, I’d spend all my money and come back looking for a handout from her and Harold—as if that would ever happen.

I’m living at this type of residential hotel called the Beachway. It’s nothing too fancy, and there are lots of other people my age, all retired. I’m not ready for retirement, of course, even if I could afford it. So I do some shifts as a short-order cook, and I get a fair amount of business as a seamstress.

Here’s some other news you’ll never believe. I have a boyfriend. I’m sixty years old, and suddenly, I’m going on dates to restaurants and walking on the beach when I’ve never done anything like that before in my life. His name is Saul. He’s a Jew, but so are about half the people I meet down here.

We go everywhere together, and I’ve told him things about me and my life that I thought I would never mention again out of respect for Luther’s memory. We even talked about your father and how I lied to myself that no one knew what was going on, and Saul just shook his head at that, at the sadness of it all.

Maybe you could meet him. Your letters might have a New York City postmark, but since I’m writing to you at a post office box here in Florida, I imagine you’re closer by than that. I’ve been thinking maybe you could visit me here, where no one knows you or even me really. You would love Saul, and I can’t tell you how happy I would be to see you again.

I try to keep up with what’s going on at home through Edna and Harold. I’m sorry to say that the bank finally sold off your old house for the back taxes. Neil Smoot’s daughter and her new husband bought it. They said it was too much work to repair the house, so they tore it down and started from scratch. They dug a good foundation so that the house has a proper basement now. Edna says the new place is nice, but she hasn’t seen the inside of it.

Write to me again soon, and tell me your news. I just don’t know enough about what’s going on with you.

Love,

Ursula