Echo Lake: A Novel (17 page)

Her arm was a collection of thinning black lines. She held it up, trying not to smudge. She took the triangle of glass in her free hand (it shook now—she’d have to lie down soon, to sleep it off) and slid it from her inner thigh all the way down to the knee. That swipe bled too quickly to be worth much, at least aesthetically. It made a sheet of blood, no intricate design.

She could barely hold her head up. She’d have to work quickly. She stood up and tilted her head back. The sky was lit, the moon huge and suspended directly above her, big as a clean Christmas plate. The glass slid smoothly across her skin and she felt a tingle and sting when her skin broke. It hurt at the endges of the cut and she let her chin snap back down so she could watch the lines collect and run down her chest, skirt around her breasts, and drip down her stomach.

She was tired. She pitched the shard of glass into the water and lowered herself down to her knees and lay face down on the ground. Her legs and arms ached now where she had cut them. She was almost asleep when she heard the shrill song coming from her tangle of shoes and underwear. It was her phone. She had forgotten all about the children for a while, but she remembered them now.

Lillian tried to push herself up by her arms, her palms dipping deep into the dirt, but her whole body was leaden, so tired, and it would not move.

She couldn’t remember how she had gotten here. She was wet—had she gone swimming in the lake? She hoped not. It was notoriously dirty and children cut their feet on the bottom, which was filled with beer bottles and car parts.

She tried to open her mouth, but no sound came out. Her throat felt hot and throbbing and she wanted to touch it but her hands wouldn’t listen.

She closed her eyes and hoped that before the children woke, somebody would find her and help her to her own bed. She hoped that her absence wouldn’t make them afraid as she had been, curled at the bottom of her parent’s bed, holding herself tight and certain that she was the only one left, that she was alone and that their stories and songs soothing her to sleep had meant nothing at all.

14

Emily slept through the night without visits from her mother or dreams of travel. Jonathan didn’t pull away the covers or crowd her. He slept in a self-contained ball, warm and complete and turned away from her. Not unfriendly, but enough for himself, needing no heat from her. When they woke, almost at the same time, he touched her hair and said he was hungry and that he was sorry that he had to leave so soon.

I have to open the shop on time, he said. Most of our customers are early-morning people. They ate cereal in her kitchen. It was the first time that somebody else had eaten with her in the new house, the first time somebody had spent the night.

She asked him if she had snored, if the house had kept him awake (as if the house itself were particularly loud or difficult to sleep in).

Emily watched his face for signs of lying as he said no, that he’d slept well. She felt panic, which tasted like tin and felt like buzzing in her teeth, as he prepared to leave. He found his clothes and kissed her goodbye. I had a very, very, good time, he said, pressing his forehead against hers. I’ll give you a call tonight, okay? He said. She nodded and waved on the front step as he left, feeling silly for doing something so cliche, something that probably made him laugh as he viewed her in his rearview mirror.

When she stepped back inside the house, she got on her knees, pushed aside two days of mail collected from the mail slot, and lowered herself to floor. She began to cry in ugly waves.

Her body surprised her. She was afraid—her stomach hurt, her eyes ached from behind, as they did when she was particularly tired. But what was she afraid of? That he wouldn’t come back and she’d be left in this house like Frannie until she died of old age, or was killed? That somebody would find her dead after a week, maybe, her throat cut and one bowl of instant soup cooling and thickening on the kitchen table, and that nobody would really care?

He was kind. He said he’d had a good time. Why do I expect it to fail?

She hardly knew him. He knew so much about her. It made her nervous to be at a disadvantage. And she was letting him too close, too quickly. It was a bad idea, all of it.

When she was done crying, she rose and wiped her face clean. At least she knew exactly why she was upset. So often, in the past, she hadn’t. She would cry for hours and Eric would come to her asking if he could help, asking if it was his fault, and she honestly could not answer. But knowing helped: she knew what to do. She put on a pot of tea. She went to the bedroom as it warmed and made her bed, smoothing away the imprint of Jonathan. It was only the trace of his body that made her act like this, the inevitable feeling of connection and fear of that connection being severed that came from sharing certain parts of one’s body with others. She’d learned this in college, in biology class, and so the knowledge had stuck with her as fact, as yet another sad example of how little humans really could control who they loved, for how long, or why.

If he didn’t come back, she would be fine. She ran downstairs when the kettle screamed and made herself a cup of tea.

Emily fished the folder full of photocopied articles about her mother’s disappearance from her bag. She decided that she wouldn’t think of him, that if he didn’t decide to come back or call again, she would go back to her work of finding out about her family. Maybe it would even be easier without him. She wouldn’t be so distracted. She wouldn’t have to clean or hide the wine bottles. She’d have time to put herself together properly before she met somebody, a real somebody who would not sleep over and then leave quickly, as if to get away before anyone was awake to see him. She wouldn’t be suprised if he didn’t call or if he called with one of those messages full of throat clearing and apology, something about her neediness and her Tower and how he just wasn’t ready. Though, he probably wouldn’t have to resort to that kind of behavior. There was something cool in his self-possession. He would be able to say, simply, that it just wasn’t going to work out. She had been such a burden to him already, all of the microfilm spools and the photocopying in a dusty room, and she had cried last night at dinner—actually cried so much her face turned red, her eyes swelled, and her stomach felt empty thought it was full of cheap wine.

She shook her head and spread out the newspaper clippings before her. They were scant, but they at least gave her an area of investigation, a particular place to look. It was nearby, where Connie had been finally found, within sight of Rod’s Swap Shop, not far from where Echo Lake ended. She’d gone missing outside of the school. It was down a road that Emily hadn’t visited yet that led to one of the few scenic outlooks in Oklahoma, one of the only places where you could stand above anyplace else and see swaths of green below. She hadn’t seen the mountains yet, though they mounded gently on the horizon when she drove from Keno. The articles mentioned the people who had seen Connie last (she imagined her mother as
Connie
now, even in her thoughts, she was so far from being her mother yet at this age): Mrs. Hanson, the English teacher, and a few names of people who were surely so old that they were dead by now. No Colleens. Still, she’d have to ask Colleen. She’d have to figure out why her family had been wild.

She washed the used cups and cleaned the kitchen until there was nothing left to clean. Even the dirt that collected between the metal sink and the countertop had been bleached away. She’d have to start now. Not with Colleen, Emily wasn’t ready for somebody so unfriendly yet, but somebody she knew. She’d talk to Levi. He had to know more, have some memory of this event that, if the papers told any truth, had been an enormous shock to the community. But first, she had to go to the high school.

•

Heartshorne High School was made of stone and mortar, the rocks varying between black, brown, and the orange clay of the dirt roads Emily had crossed to reach it. A wide, stone staircase led up to the glass doors at the entrance. It was a Sunday, no school, though there were a few cars in the school’s gravel driveway.

Her mother had walked here almost every morning, had run down these steps to get home. Emily touched the metal plaque at the entrance of the school. It had been built in 1910, just five years after the town was established. She walked up the steps and when she reached the top, turned and leaned her back against the glass. Her mother had stood in this spot the day she had disappeared. She had come down the steps. Emily stepped down each deliberately, imagining herself as her mother forty years before. She tried to imagine herself in white stockings, a skirt made of heavy polyester, a blouse buttoned up to her chin, a bra full of wires and cones and fasteners. Her mother had worn her hair curled, though her hair, like Emily’s, was aggressively straight and flat. Connie had talked about sleeping in curlers and how sick hairspray made her, how she woke each morning with a headache and hair that smelled clean and poisonous and moved like a collection of soft springs. Emily imaged her hair bouncing, the smell of hairspray faint, her clothes buttoned and tucked and made of heavy fabrics. Even in her later years, her mother hated how women
let themselves go
, how they wore sweatpants outdoors and couldn’t even be bothered to put on lipstick even when they
looked like death
. Emily imagined herself in her mother’s body, a small, constricted body, hot under her clothes but used to being so. She imagined that peculiar smell of sweat on polyester, reminiscent of burning rubber.

She walked down the steps, one-by-one, imagining her mother’s tight shoes (she bought size seven shoes as an adult, though they pinched her feet, a strange and painful sort of vanity) on her own feet. Her mother had been thirteen. She imagined Connie’s face, the slightly receded chin, the fuller mouth than her own, the broader but straighter nose, the blonder hair. She imagined Connie’s face like a mask over her own face. She was going home from school on that afternoon, but how did she get off course? Maybe she never intended to go home. Maybe she had a secret boyfriend, somebody she was going to meet. Maybe she was going with a girlfriend to do something forbidden: drink, smoke weed. Colleen had said that
those Collins kids were wild
.

Emily opened her eyes. The day had turned hot. She peeled off her long-sleeved shirt. The sun was almost directly overhead. By the road, the school’s electronic sign played the same message in neon dots over and over again:
We will miss you, Jenny
. Jenny, the girl in the accident. Like Connie, Jenny had been somewhere she shouldn’t have been, but she hadn’t returned. In the last few days, the newspaper had reported that Mr. Rodriguez, Jenny’s high school history teacher, had been having an
illicit sexual relationship
with the girl for several months. In questioning, he claimed that he could remember nothing about the accident.

The sign flashed her name again and Emily wondered if this same sign, with black letters that the janitor had to change every morning instead of a digital screen, had once said her mother’s name.

1

Heartshorne, 1965

Connie waved the cigarette smoke away from her face and toward the screened windows in the girl’s bathroom—everyone else was gone, pretty much, and so she could have a smoke in peace without being caught outside by the elementary school teachers who beat chalk from their erasers and gossiped together like teenagers in the hour after school had ended.

She had stayed behind to finish her homework, which she hadn’t completed for three days in a row. She’d finished it in five minutes and spent the last twenty minutes of detention writing her name next to Billy Sisco’s name on a full sheet of notebook paper.

When Mr. Colchester let her out, his bow-tie as bright and his comb-over as stiff as it had been that morning, despite the heat. Connie went to the girl’s restroom again to smoke another cigarette. She wiped the dampness from her throat and underarms with the rough, brown paper towels in the girl’s room. She smelled of bathroom soap now, sweet and cheap, but it was better than sweat.

Billy hadn’t known that she existed before this year. He ran in different circles. She’d known vaguely that he was a church kid, that his family worked in oil and that he lived in a beautiful, two-story ranch house just before the lake, but all that was from rumor. He was popular—he went to parties, smoked cigarettes behind the bus barn, and did things that normal kids did, but he did them in a way that made him seem slightly outside of them, as though he was only passing through. She’d never heard a story about Billy getting in trouble for smoking or Billy getting so drunk he passed out in the woods. He was there, but he wasn’t quite there.