Amelia Anne Is Dead and Gone (20 page)

CHAPTER
25

T
he rain blew in biting cascades, sheeting furiously against my body. My clothes had grown heavy, clinging in places and sagging in others, waterlogged and losing their shape. My hair hung in a limp rope, plastered between my shoulder blades. There was water everywhere, pooled in growing puddles under my feet, running in rivulets down my arms, gathering one drop at a time in the soft depression above my upper lip.

James, his face a broken wall of grief and guilt, wrapped his bony arms around his trembling body and simply stared at me.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I cried. My voice disappeared in the thudding, pattering, driving noise of the rain.

He shook his head. His lips parted—ready to explain, ready to answer the questions that bloomed in my mind with every passing second. I held my breath.

There was a flash of lightning, a deafening thunderclap, and a tree at the far end of the field exploded at its top in a shower of pink, electric sparks.

“We can’t stay here!” he shouted, moving toward the car. His feet lifted away from the muck-turning ground, the twin depressions where he’d been standing beginning to fill with water, drowning grasses twining themselves around the legs of his pants.

I didn’t move.

“Becca,” he cried, turning back and extending his hands in supplication. Rain fell on his open palms.

“Becca, please! I’m not going to hurt you!”

Looking into his face—the long nose, the thin-skinned temples, the eyes I had stared into so many times—I knew it was the truth.

The field was a sodden mess now, nothing like it had been on the night when we parked here and I had slid, ready and willing, through the back window to lie in the flatbed. Nothing like it had been when James returned, less than an hour later, with the taste of my sweat in his mouth and my broken heart in his hands, and sat, smoking. Sucking on cigarettes, and scared of what might come next.

Nothing like it had been when he padded softly along its perimeter, drawn by the sound of raised voices by the roadside, and saw Amelia Anne Richardson there in the road, standing tall, lit by the headlights of a white sedan.

Furious, and proud, and alive.

The door slammed, we stared into the blackness, and for a long time, we didn’t speak. The rain drummed on the roof and the seat turned damp beneath my soaking body, and the dark, shiny glass of the windows became opaque with hot fog. James wordlessly reached across the seat, taking care not to touch me, finding the glove-box cigarettes where they had fallen at my feet and lighting one with a sigh. The air inside the truck turned cloudy.

I felt a hard edge cutting into the palm of my hand and looked down, looked into her eyes again, pressed my fingertips against the matte surface of her frozen face, and traced the name with my fingernail.

“Amelia Anne Richardson,” I said. The words settled into the space between us. I thought, as my eyes began to water from the smoke, of how many times he must have said that name this summer, whispering it like an incantation over the rattle and hum of the motor, into the wind that whipped through the open window, into the quiet corners of empty rooms.

James looked out through the windshield, where the headlights blazed against a wall of moving water and disappeared dimly into the storm.

“Ashtabula, Ohio,” he said. I looked down again, reading the unfamiliar address.

“I don’t know where that is.”

“It’s nine hours from here,” he said. He looked at me now, and his lips curled in a smile that was full of sick, sad pain. “Nine hours, exactly.”

I searched his face, not understanding, then realizing as my gaze drifted over the dull illumination of the dashboard just how many miles had appeared on the odometer in two short months.

His eyes followed mine.

“Your mom’s things,” I said, almost to myself. “You said you were helping—”

“I know,” he said.

“How many times did you go?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

* * *

He had left early in the morning, always as the sun came up, always claiming excuses that would be met without question. Me, he fed the story about his mother’s things, knowing that I would never doubt him, disappearing down the interstate in pursuit of answers while I sat alone and pitied his loss. He would arrive late in the day, winding through the downtown of a small city that wasn’t so different than this, where people looked curiously at his out-of-state license plates and wondered who he was, this haunted-looking young man who crawled the streets in a beater pickup and stared mournfully from the window at each turn. This sad-eyed, skinny boy who drove slowly, so slowly, peering uncertainly into the waning light in search of an address. The one who parked each time, across from the same house, and watched the man who lived there as he left for work, came home, spent the evening watching sports or mowing his lawn. The one whose face grew pinched with each passing hour, until he would roar away amid the rattle of old steel and the scent of exhaust.

Disappointed.

Devastated.

Wondering how, after so many weeks, this man had not begun to wonder where his daughter was.

“That rag in your glove compartement—” I began.

He nodded, sharply.

“But . . . I thought . . . they said—” I began, then stopped. I couldn’t think about Craig, couldn’t let my mind open to the horror of his bloodied face, his broken nose and teeth, the sound of boots as they punched against his skin.

“No,” he said, and for a moment he clenched his teeth so tightly—with so much anguish—that tremors ran the long length of his neck. “After it happened . . . I wasn’t thinking. I was so scared, I was so scared that someone would come down the road and see me there, with her.”

“You could have called the police—”

“And told them what?” he cried. “That she was like that when I got there? That I was just trying to do the right thing? Who would have ever believed that? Christ, Becca, not even you would have believed it.”

He stopped, shaking his head. I swallowed hard but kept quiet.

He was right.

The rain was beginning to drum more lightly now, tapping its impatient fingers against the truck, as though it wanted answers too. I waited.

“I killed her,” he said, finally. “That was all I could think about, that I killed her. I panicked, and I had blood on my hands, and I just grabbed everything that I’d touched—I grabbed that”—he pointed to the cigarette case—“and I bolted.”

He looked into the dark.

“This is my fault,” he whispered. “I did this. And now Craig . . .”

“Please don’t talk about it,” I said.

“How bad was he?”

I couldn’t meet his eyes. When I spoke, it was to my own knees.

“Bad.”

I stared again into the eyes of the dead girl. She had a pretty face, open and matter-of-fact, more friendly than the cold gray lines of the police sketch had made it out to be. She looked out at the world from the tiny square photo of her driver’s license, smiling slightly, her expression full of amused resignation at having the picture taken.

Get it over with,
she seemed to be saying,
and let’s go.

Wherever she was going, she had never arrived. She had been derailed, delayed, detained forever at the side of the road in a town surrounded by nothingness. The summer people would pack their things, shutter their houses, disappear for the winter and forget this place until the snow melted; the graduating classes would kiss their parents good-bye and only come home for holidays; workers at the steel plant would change shifts and crawl home in the dull twilight, only to wake up still exhausted in the cold, gray dawn. But she, Amelia Anne Richardson, would always be here.

Let’s go,
I thought again, and remembered the boxes that lay untouched in my bedroom, their cardboard mouths yawning with annoyance at so many weeks of emptiness. I had almost believed that they would stay that way. That I would stay this way. That there was something here for me and that this was where I belonged.

I tried again to see my future, any future. I closed my eyes. I took a breath, and the air in the car was suddenly so thick and dense that I thought I would choke.

* * *

One girl lost forever to this stagnant place was enough.

* * *

“Becca,” James said. I looked up, saw him looking at me with eyes full of hope, looking at me as though he wanted to take my hand. I saw his fingers twitch, then lie still again. I stared at him in disbelief.

“I should have told you,” he sighed.

“Why didn’t you? All this time . . .”

He shook his head. “I thought they’d figure it out on their own, with DNA, or fingerprints, or . . . or anything. I thought someone would report her missing. I thought they’d come looking for her. And then . . . and then nobody did. And I didn’t even know where to start, how to tell you, when you were just starting to trust me again.”

The drumming of rain on the roof faded to a light hum. Overhead and to the west, I could see patches of star-
glittering sky between the low, oppressive hang of the clouds.

James looked at me, and this time, he did reach for me. I let him cover my hands with his, let him twine his fingers into the curl of my palm. I was still holding the cigarette case.

“I thought they would put me in prison,” he said. “For . . . for what I did. Or for hiding this.” He swallowed; his Adam’s apple bobbed awkwardly on his neck. “And I couldn’t—not then, not after the way things were between us. Not when things were so fucked up. I needed time, just enough to make things right.”

I remembered his face, his voice, whispering to me in the hot, heavy air.

We can still have this summer.

“Yes,” he said, and I realized that I had said it out loud.

I cracked my window, opening a sliver of night in the fogged glass. Cool air kissed my forehead. Outside, the night was thick with the smell of wet earth.

James let go of my hand, and I didn’t reach for it again. I folded my fingers over the cigarette case, over the dead girl’s easy smile, and clasped them tight. He looked at me, longingly, with tears beginning to rise at the rims of his exhausted eyes.

I sighed, and breathed again, and the sweet chill of rain slipped into my throat and into my belly. I opened the window wider, and the air in the car began to move, and I felt more cold on the bare, brown curve of my shoulders and along the bony length of my spine. It felt like September.

My eyes were dry as I turned to him, seeing his face lit by the glow of the dashboard light, hearing the heavy chafe of wet upholstery as I moved closer. My hand moved lightly over his shoulder, the hard curve of his collarbone, and came to rest on the flat, damp cotton that lay over his heart.

“James,” I said. “Summer is over now.”

* * *

There were halos around the lights that lined the parking lot as we rolled in, fuzzy spheres that hung mutedly in the damp air, glowing above empty pavement that smelled like ozone and hot tar. Beyond the window made of plate glass and steel, there was a room—green tiled, paper piled high on desks, chairs pushed askew as though people had left in a hurry. At one desk sat a young man with blond hair and tired eyes. He looked up at the sound of the car door.

“I can come with you,” I said, not for the first time.

James looked at me across the hood. Steam rose between us. He sighed and shook his head,
no
, as I’d known he would. It was decided. I would take the truck; I would go home, face my parents.

He would stay.

He would go inside, and face whatever came next.

Let’s go
.

I stepped into the headlights. The heat from the grille was hot breath on my bare calves. His arms wrapped me like wire, all taut sinew and hard bone. I pressed my face against his shirt and inhaled, expecting the familiar, expecting to taste sweat and shaving cream and the bitter must of old smoke, but the rain had washed it all away.

I smelled only earth, dark and rich and damp.

“I’ll call you,” he said. He looked over his shoulder, at the curious face of Jack Francis, at the fluorescent-lit walls and chipped tile of the station. “If I can.”

“I hear they give you one phone call,” I said, and he smiled, and so did I.

The wind blew through the open windows as I slipped into the driver’s seat, pulling it forward, throwing the truck into gear. He stepped back, lighting a cigarette, and lifted his hand as I pulled away and into the road. Ahead of me, the asphalt stretched away, shining wetly in the glow of the headlights. Behind me, the police station was a pocket of light in the yawning dark.

I looked back, then, and saw him.

James was still in the parking lot. Watching. Waiting. A silhouette beneath the lights, smoking and tapping his knuckles against the concrete rough of the station wall. The cherry glowed, illuminating his mouth. His teeth were slick pearls behind the filter.

Watching.