Dear Daughter (6 page)

Then, one day, his visit began a little differently, with a question he’d shied away from the entire time we’d known each other.

“How are you?” he asked, fiddling with one of the shitty ballpoint pens he preferred.

I didn’t know how to answer, so I consulted my Magic 8 Ball of Social Interaction. It settled, as usual, on Act the Stone-Cold Bitch.

I slouched in my seat and lit a cigarette. “Peachy.”

“Good.”

“Is this when I’m supposed to ask how you are?”

He tapped his pen against his legal pad. “If you’d like.”

“No offense, Noah, but I’ve had better conversations in solitary.”

“We can’t all be Dorothy Parker.”

“I’ll settle for Dorothy Gale.”

He tossed the pen on the table. “I’m not here to entertain you.”

I yanked on my chains. “And yet it’s the only thing you’ve managed to do for me so far.”

He wet his lips; my concentration flickered. Then he nodded, clearly coming to some sort of decision. “There’s something I have to tell you,” he said. “About Adeline.”

My head jolted up so abruptly my neck cracked. “Yeah?” I said. “What?”

His hands moved toward mine. When the guard in the corner opened his mouth to object, I drew back reflexively, but Noah kept reaching out anyway, until he was cradling my wrists like they were newborn kittens. The guard took a step forward; Noah stopped him.

“Please,” he said.

That’s when I knew he’d come to tell me that he’d come up empty, that he was giving up on Adeline.

There was a screech of a sound that I supposed came from my throat.

Noah’s hands tightened on mine. “Jane—”

My eyes rolled back; just before they closed, I saw the guard looming over my shoulder. What did he think was going to happen, I wondered, almost dreamily. I was five foot two. I weighed about seven pounds. I was
shackled
. There was nothing I could do, absolutely nothing.

No, wait—there was one thing. I opened my eyes. A mean, mulish expression settled on my face.

I looked at Noah’s stupid soft go-wherever-they-wanted hands and pressed my sawtooth nails into the tender underside of his arms, digging slow and steady and hard like I was trying to get purchase on an orange peel. I felt the skin split; warmth welled up. I squeezed and squeezed and squeezed until, finally, I felt him start to fight back.

Over in the corner the guard was muttering things like
crazy
and
bitch
while calling for backup on his radio, and as soon as I heard the door open I released Noah and schooled my features into a more acceptably blank stare—less like a mule, I told myself, more like a cow. But who was I trying to fool, really? Seconds later the guards had me up by my elbows, and before I could think
in for a penny
I was kicking and screaming and spitting because why not, I was fucked regardless.

I’ll never forget the expression on Noah’s face as he watched them drag me away. Like Mother Teresa ministering to the poor. Like
he
had been the one to let me down.

That’s why I never told him when I found the other Adeline. He never would have forgiven himself for not finding it first.

I folded a towel under my head and turned on my side, trying to ignore the way my bones pestled into the bottom of the tub.

It was late and it was Sunday, but I knew Noah would still be working by not nearly enough light, mapping out a strategy for whatever sad-sack case had been dropped on his desk. I could imagine what his office looked like: cluttered and crumpled and smelling of Chinese food—although I’d never actually seen him eat, had I, so what did I know? What did I know about him at all, really? It doesn’t mean much to say a person’s your whole world when your whole world consists of an hour every other week.

As I fell into what counted for sleep, I wondered if he still had my marks on his arms.

Kayla
@kaylaplayah

Good morning Nebraska!!!

11:12 AM—3 Nov 2013

Kayla
@kaylaplayah

“If you believe in yourself anything is possible” <3 <3 <3

4:19 PM—3 Nov 2013

Kayla
@kaylaplayah

Graveyard shift at work tonight ugggh

10:34 PM—3 Nov 2013

Kayla
@kaylaplayah

RT @MileyCyrus Space balllllllllz

10:35 PM—3 Nov 2013

Kayla
@kaylaplayah

You guys the weirdest chick just came in I think she was a bag lady lol

12:42 AM—4 Nov 2013

Kayla
@kaylaplayah

Who wants pancakes

5:03 AM—4 Nov 2013

Kayla
@kaylaplayah

SOMEONE STOLE MY CAR FML

9:38 AM—4 Nov 2013

CHAPTER SIX

Sunrise is such a sudden thing out on the prairie, a razor’s edge of cold light that slices all at once from the horizon, across the empty land, and straight into my freaking eyes. Its radiance hurt like a hangover.

Strange, but I actually wished I
was
hungover. Because when you’re so busy thinking about how awful you feel you forget for a moment how awful you are. Because pain can be its own relief. Because throwing up is a super-effective way to stay a size 0. If I’d been hungover, maybe I wouldn’t have had to cling instead to my unease, buttressing back one kind of anxiety with another.

It was just past eight on Monday morning. Hours and hours to go, even though as the crow flies, my destination was just three hundred or so miles north of McCook, but once I’d seen the size of the truck’s gas tanks, I’d decided to stick to state highways and county roads as much as possible, and each one, from 83 to 80 to 61 to 4A, would be a little shittier, a little slower than the last. Plus, I’d lost time when I stopped at an all-night laundromat outside North Platte so I could swap Kayla’s license plates with those from a similar-looking truck in the parking lot.

(Thank god for my Swiss Army Knife. Multi-tools are like insults, girls—you should always have one on hand.)

The grasses swayed in the breeze. My hands tightened on the steering wheel. I felt like I was heading out into a great green ocean in the run-up to a summer storm, and the water was getting deeper and the currents were pressing me places I didn’t necessarily want to go and at any moment the swells might break into—

Jesus Christ. I swear, sometimes I open my mouth and a high school lit mag falls out. The point is, I was scared.

Eight hours later, about twenty miles north of Chadron—just across the South Dakota border and approaching the Black Hills, on an unnamed road that didn’t appear to have been repaved since the Eisenhower administration—the check engine light came on.

I glanced out the window, then at the map on the passenger seat.
Shit.
I was literally in the middle of nowhere, and not even the banality of prison life had been able to convince me to take auto repair. If the engine died now, I was fucked.

I pushed my greasy bangs to the side and tried to get ahold of myself. I knew from experience that if I wasn’t careful my panic would melt me down until I wasn’t even myself anymore, until I was just a barely sentient bag of churned-up guts. The moment I found my mother’s body, my wires got rerouted; these days, cascade failure is perpetually imminent.

Hollow reed
, I told myself.
I am a hollow reed, and trouble blows through me like the wind
.

Nope. Nothing.

My vision started to go dark around the edges.

Okay, let’s try some of that Tibetan breathing shit
.

Nada.

My vision started to go dark in the middle.

“Oh fuck—”

I slammed on my brakes just as my front right wheel spun off the shoulder of the road, kicking up a flurry of dust and gravel, but I knew that it wasn’t going to be enough. I dimly recalled something from the one day of driver’s ed I hadn’t skipped—

I threw the wheel to the left.

The truck fishtailed. I couldn’t turn into the skid, so I clenched the wheel, squeezed shut my eyes, and steeled my stomach. The truck whipped around in a circle; I gagged once, twice, and then the back wheels caught on some gravel on the far side of the road.

The truck gasped and shuddered to a stop.

I sat there for a minute, perfectly still. I restarted the car. The engine
sounded
fine.

I removed the key, pulled the hood release, and climbed out of the truck, holding on to the open door to support my gelatinized legs. Once I’d steadied myself I went around front to peer at the truck’s—I don’t know, guts? Whatever you call the stuff under the hood. The engine smelled like burnt coffee and looked . . . enginey.

I leaned against the truck’s bumper and pulled out my phone. There was no service. I took reluctant stock of my surroundings, finding nothing but barbed wire and utility poles. I looked toward Chadron, toward Hot Springs. A half hour in either direction—provided the engine held out.

A crackle of gravel, the grumble of an engine.

Something sour erupted in the back of my throat, as if I’d just had a sip of milk when I’d expected orange juice.

I peeked around the raised hood. A car was pulling up behind me.

No, strike that—a
police car
was pulling up behind me. It might’ve been unmarked, but I knew what it was: Ten years in prison had given me a near-infallible nose for authoritarian stink.

I straightened my glasses and put on my best these-aren’t-the-droids-you’re-looking-for face.

There were two men in the car, and even through the windshield I could see they were engaged in the kind of forcefully gesticulated discussion that characterizes serious business. I lowered the hood and edged around to the driver’s side door. I pulled it open.

The men climbed out, and I didn’t know whether to be relieved by or wary of the fact that neither was in uniform. Either they were off duty or detectives—if they even had detectives in South Dakota.

My eyes went first to the driver. He was a long, lazy kind of lean, dark enough that Hollywood could happily have cast him as eighty different ethnicities. Messy-haired, dressed in faded jeans and a Jethro Tull T-shirt. Mirrored aviator sunglasses, which meant he either watched too much TV or no TV at all. What I could see beneath those glasses might’ve been pretty apart from the upkeep: chapped lips and a scarred nose, the sort of patchy beard beloved by seventeen-year-old guitar players.

The other man was heavy and white-blond, his Cro-Magnon brow paired disconcertingly with a long, patrician nose. His eyes were more socket than ball, dark hollows shadowed by a massive forehead that cast so much shade the man had probably never needed sunglasses in his life. After a moment I realized he was pointing in my direction.

I eased into the driver’s seat and slipped the key into the ignition. I couldn’t run, but maybe I could talk them into leaving. And as soon as they did, I’d drive the other way.

I checked the rearview mirror. Slim was muttering something I couldn’t make out. Shady threw up his hands before stalking off and propping himself against a fence post. He pulled a cigarette from his shirt pocket and stared off into the distance. I didn’t notice Slim’s approach until he was right next to me.

I smiled, cheerful dismissal at the ready.

“She dead?” he asked.

This is when each and every nerve ending in my body went completely numb.

Just numb.

•   •   •

Everyone always asks what my first thought was, when I found her. But it wasn’t like that. I didn’t have any thoughts at all until much later. I was mixed up before I even opened my eyes, still reeling from the previous night’s dire combination of blended whiskey, prescription painkillers, and agonizingly fatuous conversation. And anyway, thought was beside the point—when I walked into my mother’s room part of me already knew. Whether that was because I sensed that something was wrong or because I myself had already done that wrong something, well: that’s the 16.5-million-dollar question.

Then, before I realized what I was doing, I was down on the floor with my face next to what was left of hers, shouting in one bloodied ear while scooping up tissue and viscera and bone, trying to spackle her over like she was a bucket and I was Dear Liza. Of course, by that point it wasn’t of any use.

This was the last time I saw her. If only they’d let me come to the morgue—the neat stitches of a pathologist would have been a welcome relief—but I wasn’t allowed the privilege, such as it was. So instead my retinas are forever burned with the image of a stranger, a woman whose curated beauty had been splattered across a room. It was hardly even a body; it was a spill.

I wish I’d been able to look away, but just then sight was the kindest of my senses, a hug and a hot toddy compared to the stench, the swamp, the silence. I found myself mesmerized by all the parts of her she’d tried never to let anyone see: a beige blotch of sun damage on her décolletage, a purple-veined calf. I hadn’t known that her lip liner was tattooed on or that she had a bald patch in the middle of her left eyebrow. One of her implants had collapsed, punctured by a bullet. For a second I could see what she had looked like before, when I was little, before the surgeries and injectables and miracle creams made from monkey come.