Echo Lake: A Novel (24 page)

Just go back. Show him.

Another voice, smaller and more basic, a sound that seemed to come from the base of her skull, said
go back and show him and tear him apart.

She began to run. It felt good to run. It calmed the sickness in her stomach and gave the heat direction. She was close to the small clearing, where she could just see the edge of his trailer-house through the trees. She moved through the woods now as an animal did, through any impediments instead of around them, jumping over fallen logs and running straight through branches, the sharp sticks and thorns tearing at her face and chest and bare arms and legs. But her body did not have the animal agility it needed to keep going like this through a dense forest littered with fallen trees and branches. Her foot caught in a bundle of exposed roots and she toppled over. She had enough time to turn her face away from the rock she knew she would hit and shielded her temples with her hands.

The rock glanced the back of her head, hard enough to make an egg-sized bruise. She didn’t feel in pain in that moment, but instead a great desire to sleep. Her stomach settled and her skin cooled. She closed her eyes. The anger dissolved away.

16

Colleen sipped her tea and made a face at the bitterness.

I don’t much like this stuff, she said, but I read it’s good for you. Fights cancer and all that.

Colleen set the mug down on the end table, a bare, chipped thing decorated only with a bone-colored cordless telephone, fingerprints smudged around the receiver, and a photograph of a young girl, maybe eight or nine, in a cheap frame, the layer of fake gold covering the frame peeling away.

Here is everything I know, Colleen said. Frannie told me after your mother had been back for a few days, after she’d kept her mouth shut for so long everyone figured it was just a case of girl being afraid to make a fool of herself, Frannie told me she knew what had happened. She was the only one who Connie had told.

Emily leaned foward. What? What was it?

The old woman smiled. She probably didn’t have much opportunity to tell stories, to leave somebody in suspense like this. Emily wanted to shake her. It wasn’t just a story, was it? A real woman had disappeared and come back. A real person had died shortly after. A real woman had lived the majority of her life afraid, moving from trailer to trailer, from job to job, never believing she was wanted or worthy of whatever she had managed to get.

But Emily only nodded, encouraging her. Colleen didn’t know everything that had passed, all of the sad, lonely rest of it. Her hands shook as she held the cup. Her eyes had the opaque glaze of cataracts. Her joy in this was small and sharp and ugly, and Emily was too tired and sad to feel much beyond pity.

It was a man, Colleen said. But it wasn’t like everybody thought.Your mother hadn’t run away with one. A man had forced himself on her. Had left her so scared she hadn’t dared to tell anyone. Beat on her a little bit, too, that’s what Frannie told me. Or so she told Frannie, eventually, after Frannie wouldn’t take no for an answer.

The man who did it was James Blackshaw. The young man who was found shot, thrown in the lake, soon after. You probably saw things in the newspaper about him when you were doing your searching.

Emily set down her tea. She had a quick image of her mother, the first time Emily went out on a date, telling her to be careful, pressing a long cylinder of pepper spray into her hands. Connie had been shaking, then. Emily had taken it as more proof of her paranoia, her inability to trust that kept her away from any semblance of a normal life, but it had been something more. Emily wished then that she could go back and respond with more empathy then she had when she was sixteen. Then, she’d only rolled her eyes and walked away.

But what does this mean? Emily asked. What’s the connection? Are you saying my mother killed somebody?

Colleen shook her head. That girl was hardly in a state to go to school for weeks, let alone kill somebody. She didn’t have to do it herself, of course. She had family looking after her. Colleen leaned into the sofa’s back. It was a too-soft, enveloping kind of sofa that made Emily feel as though she were sinking down into the fabric when she leaned back.

Back then, people took care of each other, Colleen said. We didn’t need to get the police involved, bring them in just to the let the son-of-a-bitch who done it go free because of no evidence or because he’s kin or a good friend of the sheriff. Nowadays, you aren’t allowed to take care of your own business anymore.

So you’re saying my family did this—Fran, my grandparents, somebody in the family?

Colleen shrugged. Honey, there’s no telling who did it exactly. It didn’t work like that, just one person walking up to someone and putting a bullet in their useless head. Families had their friends in town. Families stuck with their own kin, people who understood what needed to be done and how to do it. All I know’s that once Frannie knew the man and the story, it was only a matter of time before that boy either disappeared or turned up dead.

In her day, Frannie was a force, Colleen said, her eyes glittering. You couldn’t just push Frannie around. She got things done. Colleen nodded, smiling. You couldn’t get anything past Frannie.

17

Connie woke with her left cheek pressed into the ground. Her ankle burned and felt swollen. Her arms and throat stung from scratches.

She remained on the ground for a few moments, unsure exactly where she was. She didn’t want to rise while that fever still had her, made her run back to a place she didn’t want to go and do—what?—something that would splatter her with blood. The word
blood
echoed in her head and she felt the last prickles of the fever flare and die. It had wanted her to kill James, to take out her anger on his body.

It
had wanted her. What was
it
? Her head felt swollen and slow. She gritted her teeth and tried to determine where she was and how she had gotten there.

But the feeling, that burning violence, was gone now. Her stomach felt bruised, as it did after hours of vomiting. She placed her palms on the ground and lifted herself up to her knees, then stood upright.

She heard, in the distance, the sound of men talking, their boots crashing.

They’re looking for me, she thought, but she didn’t want to be found yet. She was still in a fog. The thought occured to her, as though whispered by somebody else;
you aren’t ready to see people yet.

She made her way back toward the lake, though she remained in the woods, skirting the sound of sloshing water. She followed it until she reached the road.

A rare police officer out on the highway picked her up by the general store as she tried to stumble home, the hunger and thirst slowing her, her cuts stinging, her head throbbing from pain and heat. It didn’t occur to her to stop at anyone’s house, to say where she had been and what had happened. She only wanted to go home, a place that she usually wanted to be as far away from as possible.

The police officer recognized her from the flyers in the post office and urged her into the car, where she lay in the backseat, her knees pressed against her stomach.

When her parents held her, hugged her hard, her mother crying (had she seen her crying before? The woman’s face was usually as immobile and dissatisfied as a frown cut into rock), her father, even, choking on the sounds of her name, the first thing they asked was
where have you been? What happened?
Should couldn’t answer. She opened her mouth, but the words wouldn’t come, so she simply shut her mouth and shook her head until they stopped asking.

The more she tried to remember anything that happened after she had left James’, the foggier and more fragmented it became. Had she drunk from the lake or just splashed the water on her face? Had she stripped down and swum in it? This didn’t seem likely, but she had an image of herself in just her underpants, wading into the water. Why had she fallen? She had a lump at the base of her skull. She remembered the fiery feeling in her face and hands, the desire to
go
and
do
without knowing exactly why or what she’d do when she got there, but why had she woken up on the ground?

She only knew that something had taken over her body, like how the old people in the church sometimes spoke about the devil entering somebody’s body if they suddenly had seizures or acted in a way that didn’t become them, such as the music minister running away with an eighteen-year-old girl from the choir. It was like a devil had been in her body, emanating its heat and anger through her, replacing her own thoughts and intentions with his.

But she couldn’t say that, and the words didn’t seem quite right. It wasn’t a devil so much as the desire of a devil, something pure and bodiless without any real direction. James had seemed almost incidental to the anger, a handy thing to hang it on, but her desire to go to him and make him bleed had been irresistible. If she hadn’t fallen, she would have done it, too. So she had no words to explain what had happened and she couldn’t mention James. She had nothing to tell them.

When she finally spoke, she told everyone that she had woken up in the woods, covered in scratches, and remembered nothing from school that afternoon until the moment she woke up. She pointed to the purple and green bruise, egg-like and throbbing. She didn’t remember getting the bruise, she said, and she didn’t remember where she’d been.

•

She stayed in bed for days. Her family insisted she lie down until the bruise on her head had faded and the cuts on her arms had healed. It was the first time she’d been encouraged to rest since a childhood bout with the chicken pox. It had the opposite effect it should have—she had nothing to do but the think of the night she’d spent with James (it had only been one night! It seemed like much more and loomed so large) and the morning after, and everthing after that, which was considerably less clear.

She sometimes caught herself thinking of what she might say if she went back to him. She might tell him what had happened to her, the anger that had boiled up and how she’d almost run back to his house to do something crazy—break a beer bottle on the porch and cut his throat, for example—and how her falling had saved them both. Would he see then how unkind he’d been then? Would he ask her to come back?

She’d replay scenes in her mind, scenes of him aplogizing, getting down on his hands and knees after wiping his hands on his jeans, asking her to marry him. He’d push the hair away from his face as he knelt down and try to tuck it back behind his ear where it would escape the moment he looked up to see her face and hear her say—

But this was stupid, Connie thought, unable to entertain such desires that she knew to be idle. He’d been fooling her. It was stupid to expect anything different and stupid to want him to want her. Did she want to live in a trailer in the woods with a guy who stole cash registers and ate straight from cans without even bothering to heat the food inside them? Whose greasy hair hung in his eyes? Who probably hadn’t even graduated from high school? Why would she even bother with such a boy sober?

As she rested, she grew angrier. Instead of scenes of apologies, she imagined herself older, in possession of a husband and a job and a house away from Heartshorne, visiting the trailer by the lake where he still lived, growing older and balder as she grew more beautiful.

Look what you gave up, she’d say, making a show of wiping the bottom of her shoes on the tattered mat before his door.

Frannie was the most curious of all of her family members. She had time to visit and keep Connie company by bringing magazines and cigarettes to the cramped bedroom. She worked at a convenience store during the day and was a waitress in Keno on Saturday nights. When she came, her frizzy hair piled up in a tight bun, her cats-eye glasses flaring away from her face like wings, she’d throw open the windows.

Shit, I’m going to suffocate in here, she said, and carried her stacks of movie magazines to the bed, where they would both spend hours smoking and paging through them.

Frannie wanted to know what had happened, and she didn’t believe that Connie couldn’t remember. Connie’s parents had been strangely silent around her, as if she were now damaged and they must be very careful not to break her completely. Connie imagined that they thought something so terrible had happened to her that she couldn’t bear to tell or honestly couldn’t remember. They thought she’d been raped, probably, and she had only barely missed the sheriff insisting that she be checked for rape. She insisted she had been alone. She was surprised that her mother had agreed; nobody would “poke around down there.”

It was just a fainting spell, she told them. This was the new story. The doctors checked her blood, she was cleared as healthy, and they released her. She had started bleeding a couple of days later, to her relief. Maybe it could all be over if she just kept quiet and waited.

Frannie, though, wanted to know everything. What was the last thing Connie could remember? Could she really remember nothing? At first her questions had been innocent, the simple questions that everyone asked that Connie could easily avoid or evade or flat-out lie about.