The four of them decided to head to Zach’s house. It wasn’t like Bennie and Motheater had anything pressing at her apartment, and they needed to regroup. Motheater was pale and shaking in the car, and Jasper kept falling asleep. Bennie and Zach shared looks in the mirror, commiserating and deeply worried. Bennie drove slowly, avoiding the downed wires, the broken branches, the new rocks made out of asphalt that made the road nearly impassable. Kire was a slow hurricane destroying Kiron.
Her knuckles were ashen as she made her way through her old neighborhood. She had been out of Zach’s home a month, and she hadn’t realized until right now how much she missed it.
This was the whitest, most suburban part of Kiron, and it was still hard to find two houses close enough to see your neighbor. Lawns were mowed around the small orchards, hedges by the road, fences whitewashed. It was cute, comfortable, and the fact that Bennie didn’t hate it made her mad.
Bennie pulled into the small brick rancher and parked the car, immediately putting her hands back on the wheel. In the back seat, Zach slid out and then offered his hand to Jasper, helping him out of the truck. They walked in together, Zach’s hand hovering protectively over Jasper’s shoulder.
“You don’t look well,” Motheater said, turning toward Bennie.
“I never wanted to come back,” Bennie muttered. “While I was here, so much of myself slipped away.”
Motheater looked over the house, and Bennie couldn’t tell what she was thinking. How did it look to her, someone who had grown up with dirt floors and soft walls? Bennie refused to feel bad about her decision, refused to back down. She steeled herself, but Motheater just reached for her hand. Bennie, like a fool, let her take it.
“Sometimes the places that keep us safe keep us small.”
Bennie just stared at the house.
“I need to see to Jasper,” Motheater whispered. “If you need to leave, I ain’t going to fault you, but . . .” Motheater hesitated, her finger sliding along Bennie’s palm, intimate, tender, needy. “I don’t want to do this without you.”
“You can do anything,” Bennie said quickly, ignoring the way her heart lurched.
“Not alone.”
Motheater’s words hung between them like sparks thrown up from a disturbed fire. Bennie turned to look at her, the strangeness of her, crooked nose and blurred cheekbones and brown eyes. Motheater caught a chill and shivered. She squeezed Bennie’s hand, and then dropped her fingers to graze Bennie’s knee before stepping out of the truck, heading into the home.
She disappeared into the rancher, and Bennie was by herself.
Inside the truck, without anyone watching her, Bennie let herself tear up. She was frustrated and angry; the sirens had been going on and off all day, and even as they drove into the suburb, she had seen a veritable caravan of respectable folk with places and means to go evacuating Kiron. She knew that if she went over to the Hallside neighborhood, the Black and brown residents there wouldn’t be so privileged. Some of them could leave, piling two families into the one working van they shared, but many others would have to wait here, under Kire’s shadow, doomed to be crushed under rockslides and power failures. God, it was the same story breaking her heart every time.
Bennie had hoped they would find Jasper’s grave, do a séance, get some backstory, and then go home. She thought they had time. They didn’t. They only had right now.
Bennie sat in the car for another half hour or so, wasting gas, fighting with herself as lights turned on inside the house, as silhouettes began moving around. Zach would be putting a frozen meal into the oven, Motheater would be collecting moths from the basement that they had been hoping to renovate and never got around to, Jasper might be nursing a strong drink with his thousand-yard stare.
And where would Bennie fit in?
The engine hummed. She could leave.
Would she be on the couch, reading a book she had left behind? Organizing Zach’s clothes so that the coal dust didn’t spread beyond his side of the closet? Doing her hair in the large antique vanity mirror she and Kelly-Anne had thrifted from a Yardville swap and shop?
Everything was tied up in that house. Inadequacy, grief, the loss of her best friend. If she went in, she wouldn't be just doing it for Motheater, or for Kelly-Anne . . . she had to do it for herself, too. They were going to stop what had killed her best friend, what killed nearly thirty men and women in the dark.
She could handle one night. They needed to plan how to put the mountain to rest. Bennie finally turned off the engine and got out of the truck, pushing her hands into her jacket. Motheater had asked her to stay. She would stay.
When she went in, she headed down the hall to the guest bathroom, not looking at the group crowded around the kitchen counter. Nobody stopped her.
In the bathroom, she washed her face and dug through the drawers, finding a pair of scissors and a set of clippers that she had gotten for Zach years ago. Normally, she wouldn’t be so aggressive, but she wanted to get her burned hair out and get it over with. She snipped the braids and unwound the synthetic hair as much as she could. God, this would take forever.
She stared at her half-undone hair and sighed, the ache of the past week weighing on her. This was useless. The clippers were next to her right hand. Why shouldn’t she just get rid of all this?
Looking in the mirror, Bennie turned her head left and right. She had kept her hair just long enough to put hair extensions in, but she didn’t need long hair to fit in, or look pretty, or be passable. She didn’t need to make the Greshams like her, or pretend to be a part of the church, or any of that. It was just her in the mirror. Maybe it was time to make some things easier.
Her mama would hate it. Bennie smirked as she turned on the clippers, remembering her mother twisting her hair back into an intricate braid, ironing it straight before church, flattening it down to keep her from being bullied in school.
But Bennie was a grown-ass woman and she wasn’t afraid of bullies anymore.
Her dark hair fell to the ground, still half in braids as she began to carefully clip away at the remaining ones. Bennie knew she should have gotten someone to help, but she didn’t care. She wanted her hair gone, now. After the braids were gone she took a few minutes to look at the horrorshow on her head. Embarrassing. But she had been taught how to clip a fade back in college and managed to get her hair looking presentable. She’d get it done after and see what the salon could do for her, if she wasn’t laughed out of the door.
It took nearly two hours, and she heard a few people walk by, but nobody knocked. After her cut was finished, she realized that she had never seen her hair so short. She felt exposed and resolved, that this was her, this was real. More real than how she felt with braids or rows or flattened hair. Bennie put all the hair on the floor in the trash and then took off her clothes, stepping into the shower.