At the End of the Road (20 page)

Just get through tonight, Louise told herself. Just get through tonight, and tomorrow your life starts over. Tomorrow you’ll leave Eden Road in the dust. Just get through tonight.

that the kitchen was deserted. Her feet still planted squarely on the porch, Grace poked her head through the opening and listened. No sound came from any part of the house. She lifted her right foot over the threshold and planted it on the first square of soiled and foxed linoleum. There was a loud creak as the warped floorboards underneath announced her presence. With the utmost care, she brought her left foot forward to rest on the same square with her right. She stood there and listened—the coiled Lasso of Truth dangling from her left hand. No sounds. She advanced two more squares into the room; loud groans came from the floor both when she took her weight off the first spot and when she stepped onto the next. She stopped. Listened. Advanced. Wonder Woman lay isolated near the kitchen sink, just a yard-and-a-half away. Three more steps, six more squares to cross. The floor was less squeaky the farther she ventured into the kitchen, so she crossed quickly. Grace squatted down and snatched Diana Prince from the dirty floor. In her heightened state of perception, Grace noted immediately that Diana’s beautiful brown hair was knotted and tangled. This disturbed her, that in her absence, Diana Prince had been treated with such disregard. Grace took a second to pick at the tangles.

If Grace had simply scooped up her doll and run out the door, things might have turned out differently for her; but by the time she heard the hum of the electric motor, it was already too late. By the time she stood up, Kenny Ahearn was halfway across the kitchen. And before she could take her first step toward the door, the paralyzed man was there, his cumbersome metal wheelchair blocking her passage.

Grace stared up at him, her mouth slack, the pupils of her eyes dilated as though from drops of belladonna.

man said. “I wanted you to have that back.”

Grace took a step backward.

“You want something to drink? Co-cola? I’ve got some MoonPies in the pantry there.”

Grace shook her head.

“Why just look at you. Your eyes are big as dinner plates. You don’t have to be scared of me, sweet-girl. I’m just Kenny Ahearn from across the road.”

Grace wanted to believe him, but her mind returned to the day he had lured her up on his porch with this very same doll and grabbed her and wouldn’t let her go until Kyle hit him in the head with a dirt clod.

“You’re thinking about that time I held you in my lap, ain’t you?”

Grace nodded.

“Sweetie, I am so sorry for doing that. I can’t tell you. I didn’t mean a thing by it. I was just mad at your brother, that’s all that was. We’ve done got over that. We’re friends now. Friends. Why, he comes over to visit with me just about every day. You can come over too. Any old time you want.”

Grace took a step forward. “Can I go home now?”

“Why, I’m blocking your way, ain’t I? ’Course you can go home.” The wheelchair hummed and rolled forward just enough for Grace to pass. “Now you just remember that you’re welcome here anytime.” Grace slid past the paralyzed man like a climber traversing a vertical drop on Mt. Everest. She squeezed past him and emerged back out onto the porch. The paralyzed man followed.

“Oh yes, me and Kyle have us a good old time. Are you sure you don’t want to stay a while and play with us?”

Grace conveniently forgot how Kyle had turned into something-other-than-Kyle since he had become friends with the paralyzed man, and instead she latched on to the thought of spending time with her brother again—through a shared friendship with Mr. Ahearn. She looked at the paralyzed man and realized that maybe that day he had grabbed her wasn’t such a horrible thing. He’d let her go after a minute. And he wasn’t stopping her now. Plus, he called her sweet-girl the way her paw-paw did before he went to live in the sky with Jesus. In fact, he looked like he could be somebody’s paw-paw. Grace (not afraid, but pragmatic) decided that she should go on home for now, but also decided that she would come back. That she wanted to be a part of whatever was going on here.

“Bye-bye, sir.”

“Sir? Sir? Why you can just call me Kenny.”

Grace giggled. She had never called an adult by their first name. “Bye-bye, Kenny.”

“Bye-bye, sweet-girl.”

Grace took off down the steps and Kenny called out after her. “Sugar, what’s your name?”

Grace turned around on the bottom step. “Grace.”

“Grace, that rope you’re holding there, that wouldn’t happen to be a Golden Lasso, now would it? A Lasso of Truth?”

Grace beamed up at Kenny (for she had already forgotten her other name for him), her smile as wide open as her eyes had been earlier. She nodded with pride.

“You know what I bet? I bet you was gonna put that lasso around me and make me tell the truth. You were, weren’t you?”

Grace nodded with a shy smile.

“You can if you want. I don’t mind. Come on up here and I’ll let you do it. Let’s see if that lasso works.”

Excited, Grace bound up the steps and followed Kenny back into the kitchen.

ahead. Now don’t be shy. I’m not.”

Grace let Kenny hold one end of the clothesline in his hand while she walked around him, wrapping him.

“Alright, you just ask me anything.”

On the spot, Grace couldn’t think of anything to ask. She giggled and stared at the floor.

“It’s hard to think of something sometimes. I know how it is. Tell you what,” Kenny said, “why don’t we put the lasso around you and I’ll ask you some questions? How about that?”

That sounded like a fine idea to Grace. She unwrapped Kenny, and then wrapped herself in the rope.

“Now hold on a minute. I see you’re wearing metal bracelets. Is that Amazonium?”

Grace nodded, again smiling with pride.

“It don’t seem rightly fair that you should be wearing those. The lasso might not work against Amazonium. Maybe you better take them off.”

It took Grace a minute to work the duct tape off her wrists.

“That’s right. Just stick them right there on the Frigidaire. Now, what we’ll do, what we’ll do is this. Let’s see. I know. Tie one end of that rope to the doorknob there. Uh-huh. Good and tight. That’s it. That’s it. Now what can we do to make this more special? Let me think a minute. Just let me think. Oh, I know. I’ve got an idea.”

some Slim Jims from Mama’s pantry. The paralyzed man never gave her anything but peanut butter crackers and Coca-Cola. She was busy eating what Kyle had brought while he worked at the chain.

He could see right away that it wasn’t the right kind of saw. It was a hacksaw blade. Just the blade. About a foot long. He wasn’t able to find the frame it was supposed to attach to. It was hard to hold the thin metal tight enough to get it to bite into the metal chain. But it was all he had, so he set to work.

Melodie watched him working on it, and every once in a while she would reach out and run her fingers over his hair. Kyle knew she wished she could talk to him, and that was her way of telling him thank you.

After a while, his arm got tired. It was numb, and his sawing motion got real slow. Melodie put her hand on his shoulder and held her other hand out for the saw. Kyle gave it to her. They both looked at the chain to see how much progress Kyle had made, but it wasn’t much. The surface was scratched up some was all. Kyle wondered why Mr. Ahearn hadn’t called up to him yet. He’d been at it at least twenty minutes. Usually, if Kyle was up here more than a minute or two he started hollering up at him. Saying things like “Leave that dirty whore alone, boy.”

Melodie set to it. Her fingers were better now, with new fingernails budding from the beds. In fact, she was doing a better job with the saw blade than Kyle had. She pulled and pushed the saw in long, even strokes. It didn’t slide and skip around like it had when Kyle had been sawing. Slow and even. Kyle could tell that the blade had bit into the metal now. Probably just broke through the heavily oxidized chrome finish, but it was progress. She stopped one time to readjust the garbage bag she was wearing to cover her nakedness. Kyle looked away.

All he could think about was why hadn’t the paralyzed man called up after him yet. Maybe he was sneaking up here to catch them. Kyle decided to leave Melodie to it. He didn’t want them to get caught, so he went on back downstairs.

dead quiet down there. He looked into the living room and didn’t see anything. He looked to the little arch leading into the kitchen and couldn’t sense any kind of movement there. In the back of his mind Kyle was thinking maybe he had had another stroke. Or that maybe he couldn’t get to his medicine needles in time and the diabetes had killed him. Kyle walked into the kitchen, hoping like hell that he would find him in there, sprawled out in his chair, cold and dead. But that’s not what he found. Not at all.

Grace was tied up to the door. She was sitting down, and a length of rope pinned her hands up over her head to the doorknob. There were two pieces of duct tape over her mouth, crisscrossed like an
X
. She wasn’t crying, but Kyle could see where the tears had dried. Her Wonder Woman doll was lying on the floor next to her.

He untied her hands and pulled the tape off her mouth as gentle as he could. “Are you okay?” he asked her, but she didn’t answer him.

There was a little blue, thumb-shaped bruise just under her jaw.

“What did he do to you?”

She still didn’t say anything.

Kyle picked up her doll and put it in her hand. He walked her out onto the porch and down the ramp. They crossed over Eden Road and into the corn. Kyle took his sister to the green pond and they sat out there throwing rocks into the stagnant water the rest of the day. He tried talking to her, but she never would answer him. She would look at her doll sometimes and stroke its hair.

When they went home that evening, neither Mama nor Daddy neither one noticed that something was wrong with Grace. They were far away, not living in their own bodies. Daddy kept his face hidden behind the newspaper, and Mama kept her face poked over the pots simmering on the stove. In the steam and the bright kitchen light, Kyle could see that something was wrong with Mama’s eye. Something was off.

At dinner, they just stared down into their plates. Neither one of his parents talked to Grace or him except to give short little mechanical directions. Wash your hands. Sit down. Wipe your mouth. And with Jason and Wade at vacation Bible school, the house was quieter than Kyle had ever heard it.

Kyle didn’t know it yet, but his mother and father’s worlds had changed that day too. Like Kyle and Grace, they would never be the same. Nobody on Eden Road was ever going to be the same. They had all been cast out.

the paralyzed man had done to Grace that day. Ultimately, he came to thank God for sparing him that knowledge.

During the course of the next week, Grace didn’t say a single word, and when she did begin to talk again, she wouldn’t mention what had happened to her. But the arc of her life had been altered. She was never the same girl. She and Kyle never played much together after that. She kept to herself mostly. Mama took her to doctors, and they gave her pills to help ease her mind.

She began sneaking cigarettes by the time she was nine. She was caught smoking pot at school when she was twelve. When she started in junior high, Grace got boy crazy. She would sneak off in the middle of the night to be with them. Older boys. Men sometimes. She was expelled from high school for drinking. The police brought her home one night after the boy she was with was arrested for selling heroin. Finally, when she was seventeen, Grace ran away with a thirty-two-year-old man named Lucius Allen. Her mother, (who, frankly, had given up on Grace by then) reported her missing to the authorities, and the police treated it as an abduction. Lucius Allen had a criminal record that included two arrests for pimping. They never found Lucius Allen, and Grace never again contacted her family.

What became of her during the intervening years, no one will ever know, but ultimately, at the age of thirty-seven, Grace Edwards slid silently away from this world in a downtown Atlanta hotel room, a mixture of methamphetamine, Xanax, and vodka carrying her pragmatic, unafraid little girl’s soul back to Eden.

just as she was getting dressed for her shift. He knew that Dana had taken the case to heart and figured that she would want to be there when they pulled the vehicle out. She put on her uniform and headed for the reservoir. A hobby fisherman had spotted an oil slick not too far off from the shore. He was a retired butcher and he fished for carp three days a week—each time from his favorite spot: a giant slab of granite that jutted up and out over the water. He knew the reservoir, and in particular, he knew that spot on the reservoir like he knew tenderloin from short loin. The oil was bubbling up from the bottom, he had said. And there was a shadow down there that had never been there before. It was a car, he had said. See if I ain’t right, he’d said. Just see.

They saw. He’d been right. With Sweetwater Reservoir being Melodie Godwin’s final destination, the consensus was that they would be dragging out a powder blue 1972 Chevrolet Chevelle Super Sport with Ms. Godwin’s remains lodged inside. How Melodie Godwin had managed to drive her car off a rock cliff and into the reservoir in broad daylight without anyone witnessing it was a question for another day.

Dana saw the cluster of sheriff’s department vehicles just beyond the bait shop and parked her cruiser amongst them. To the left of the rock slab, the contracted diver was just coming out of the water after having attached the towing wench to the submerged car. No one was fishing today; a crowd of about forty people stretched in a half circle from the shoreline.