CHAPTER 2

The phone in our house rang seven times between the hours of ten and eleven o’clock that morning. The calls began as soon as Grant’s story had made its way around town, starting with the gas station attendant at the corner of Main Street and Route 7, passing lightning-fast over country roads and quiet streets, tumbling from one mouth to another so quickly that, for fifteen minutes, every phone in the village of Bridgeton rang busy. People buzzed and hummed and speculated. It seemed impossible that the dead girl, the rag doll on the road-shoulder, could remain anonymous for long. Not with everybody talking about her, her, her.

The first six calls were spreading the news. It flooded in from neighbors, fellow gardeners, supermarket shoppers whose elbows would brush against my mother’s when they stood side by side and reached for the shrink-wrapped, violet-veined chicken cutlets in our grocery’s meat section. Ladies who frosted their hair and cropped it short in sensible, stylish bobs. They sipped lemonade in their shabby chic kitchens, pressed fingers to the dial pad, spilled the sensationalism of our mysterious tragedy into the receiver. Jaws wagged all over town.

My mother sat, listening—interested at first, then simply patient. She hung up with a sigh, turned toward me with a hand in her thick hair.

“A girl was killed last night,” she told me. “Just outside of town.”

The words were out of place in our relentlessly cheerful kitchen. Rays of sunlight originated somewhere within the neatly poured glasses of orange juice and flooded over, drenched the tablecloth, poured onto the sweet, printed wallpaper and around the shelves decorated with retro-red mixing bowls and vintage-inspired placards that read MAKE IT WITH JELL-O!, gently draped the gingham tablecloth and white-painted wood chairs.

I was smothering a biscuit with jelly, drowning it in purple before taking a bite. My stomach clenched, painfully, my throat constricted, I choked and then forced it down, putting the uneaten remainder back on my plate where it would remain untouched. The previous night’s events were in my mouth—there it was, my little story, bitter and bad tasting. It was unpalatable, too sour to swallow and too ugly to spit out.

He fucked me, and then he left me.

I couldn’t say it—not here, with the juice and sunshine and china.

“What?” I said.

“A girl,” she said, again. “Or young woman—they found her body early this morning. That was Lena on the phone, she heard it from. . . . well, who knows, but the police are out there now. They don’t know who she is.”

“Where?”

“Out by One Twenty-eight, where it crosses Nine. But I wouldn’t go out there right now, even if there was something to see I wouldn’t want you to—”

“No, Mom, no, that’s not what I meant. Morbid curiosity. I don’t want to see.” I put a hand to my temple, pushed my plate away. The tablecloth bunched and rose in folds underneath it. The orange juice glowed brighter. It was radioactive. It was hurting my eyes.

“Are you sick, honey?” my mom asked. She put a hand on the crown of my head, put her upper lip to my forehead, checking for a temperature. The gesture was achingly familiar. For as long as I could remember, my mother’s soft upper lip had been the litmus test for ailments of all kinds. It foretold the future, discerned cold from flu, measured fever within a tenth of a degree. I wanted to cry.

“I think I’m okay,” I said.

“You got in pretty late last night,” she said. “Aren’t you tired? Maybe you’d like to take a nap on the sunporch.”

“Okay,” I said, and all at once, I did. I would lie on the creaky white wicker sofa, wrapped up in a blanket that was soft knit and covered in yarn pills, feeling the tickle of stray hairs on my forehead as a backyard breeze swished by. I thought about the dappled light that bathed the afternoon, and the rustling, shhh, shhh sound of the trees. I thought of the drowning moment when sleep overtook, when sight, sound, and touch vanished behind closed eyes, and of how good it would feel to leave behind last night and its gritty, pained aftermath. Just for now. Just for a little while.

I thought, too, of the dead girl, somewhere at the base of the Appalachians, waiting anonymously in the dirty heat for someone to make sense of whatever was left of her.

My eyes closed over the summer afternoon. I sighed toward unconsciousness.

My last thought, slipping by like one of the brief shadows cast by the rustling trees, was that my field—the one where, twelve hours before, I had sat in silent shock while the boy I loved tore our carefully made plans to shreds—was only steps down the road from where the body lay.

Shhh, the trees said.

I hushed.

Drifted.

Slept.

Until call number seven, his voice on the line.

It was James who’d heard the story first, James who came up on Grant Willard’s Ford, waiting to pull away from the police barracks on Institution Road. He had slowed, chin-bobbed at the other driver to Go ahead, man, before he spotted Grant. Not in his grit-streaked truck, but on the side of the road, emptying his guts into an appalled patch of black-eyed Susans.

Grant turned, wiping beer bile from his whiskers.

“Rough night, Grant?”

“Shit, man, I just came from the cops. There’s a dead body out on One Twenty-eight. Damn near ran her over.”

Even in the mess he’d made, James still turned to me first when he had something to say. The ringing phone cut through the soft wash of sleep, and then my mother was shaking my foot and saying, “Honey, honey?”

“Yeah,” I said sleepily, lifting my head.

“It’s James on the phone.”

Something must have registered on my face, because she pressed her hand to the receiver and mouthed, Should I say you’re not here? I shook my head, reached for the phone. She handed it to me, gave my foot another reassuring pat, and retreated back into the kitchen. I had started to sweat inside the blanket. I kicked it off.

“Hello,” I said, holding the phone to my mouth. My words felt hollow, guarded.

“Hey.”

“Hey.”

There was silence for a minute, the two of us measuring each other to the sound of breath echoing in the receiver. Me, willing myself not to cry and wondering whether I’d somehow imagined the whole thing. Wondering whether he’d even meant to call. I could picture him—finger on the keypad, dialing on groggy autopilot, remembering too late that things had changed.

I wasn’t his girl anymore.

James finally spoke again.

“So, there’s a dead girl in the road up by One Twenty-eight.”

“I heard.”

“From who?”

“Mom’s friends have been calling all morning.”

“Gossiping old biddies,” he said.

“Of which you are one,” I said automatically, and when James laughed I surprised myself by joining in with a weak chuckle. My laughter was brittle, but it was a shared moment, and the aftermath hit me with painful force. This shouldn’t be happening.

Our shared moments were over.

We’re done.

I wanted to scream into the receiver, but knew that if I opened my mouth, all that would come out was raw, sobbing hurt. The trees were sighing. Leaves flipped over in the wind, exposing their pallid, veined undersides. The breeze rushed in the receiver and mixed with my own shallow breath.

“Where are you?” James asked.

“On the porch.”

“I can hear the wind.”

I swallowed and prayed that my voice would stay even.

“James?”

The line was silent, but I could feel him. Waiting.

“James,” I said, again.

“Yes.”

“I don’t understand why you’re calling me.”

“Rebecca, I—”

He stopped. I waited. I could hear him now, grinding his teeth. I knew the sound. He did it when he wanted to say something but couldn’t put it together properly.

I waited.

In the seconds that passed, I began to wonder if I’d lost my mind. If it hadn’t happened—or at least, hadn’t happened the way I remembered. In the bright light of day it seemed too brutal to be real, my recollection too inexact. The opaque blanket of that blue-black dark obscured it the way it had blurred James’s features as he looked down on me. I struggled, but couldn’t make the memory brighter than the faint glow of the dashboard and the burning flare at the end of his cigarette.

Only my swollen eyelids and churning gut told me that something had happened last night.

“I don’t know what to say to you,” I said. “Last night—I mean, you . . .”

“I want to see you,” he said.

“Why do you want to see me?” I bit the words off as my voice cracked, felt the last tenuous threads of self-control slipping away. “Why would I want to see you?”

“I don’t know. I guess, last night . . .” he trailed off. “You’re angry at me?”

I sat in silence, fighting the urge to snap back. No shit, I wanted to say.

“Rebecca?”

Had I imagined it?

He cleared his throat. “Please . . . don’t be mad.”

Impossible.

“James,” I said. My voice was a dead thing, flat and toneless. “Did you or did you not break up with me last night?”

At first, he didn’t answer. I heard the skritch of flint, the short sucking inhale as he lit a cigarette.

“I don’t know.”

I don’t know.

* * *

I tried to make that fit—to reimagine last night as something less final, something other than an execution, something nebulous and misunderstandable that left us neither together nor apart. Not done, not undone.

It seemed impossible that something which had felt so brutal and decisive to me could feel to him like limbo.

But I wanted to believe him. I had trusted James, and in return, he had loved me, protected me, kept my secrets. In his eyes, even more than in mine, we were always solid.

“Rebecca, let’s talk. I want to see you.”

“Don’t do me any favors,” I said bitterly. “If this is just going to be a rerun of last night—”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“What is it you want to say?” I pushed.

“Will you listen?”

“I don’t know. Is what you’re going to say worth listening to?”

“I don’t know,” he said, urgency creeping into his voice. “But I’m coming.”