One of Us (8 page)

“Congratulations,” Brenna says.

“Big deal,” Moira scoffs.

I turn and glare at her.

“I finished sixth my senior year.”

“Double big deal. Who cares if you won it? How many runners get to shake hands with the president, or get a sandwich named after them, or get to bang one of the Kardashians?”

“What is she talking about?” I ask anyone.

“That was ages ago,” Brenna says to me, “but I’ve heard of you recently. Why would that be?”

I’m about to suggest one of my many television appearances or the publicity surrounding one of my books, when all the warmth drains out of her honeyed eyes.

“I read an interview where you said your hometown is full of ignorant yokels.”

“I’d never say anything like that.”

“Those were your exact words.”

“I’m sure the quote was taken out of context.”

“How do you take that out of context? You meant the good kind of ignorant yokels?”

I start to defend myself. I open my mouth, but the festering childish words stay inside me where I’ve learned it’s best to keep them.
People were mean to me first!
I want to shout.

I don’t get a chance to say anything. She and Moira walk away.

Living well is supposed to be the best revenge, but it hasn’t proven true in my case. I should take some satisfaction in my success. I should own up to my comment because I said it and yes, I meant it and yes, it’s true. And all of that aside, no one around here thinks twice about making fun of the way I dress, the way I talk, where I live, what I eat; why shouldn’t I make fun of them?

When I left for college, I thought I was going to fit in just fine in the Ivy League, but once I arrived there I was instantly branded . . . an ignorant yokel.

It didn’t matter how smart I was or how ambitious, how many books I had read or obstacles I had overcome. I could earn my way into those hallowed halls with my brains and my fleet feet, but I was woefully unsophisticated and painfully poor and could never be a true part of the world that had formed the majority of the student body. I did be
friend some of the rich and spoiled, but it was implicitly understood I was invited to their parties and onto their yachts and into their opulent homes as an observer, a foreign exchange student of sorts from an inscrutable barbaric land of past-due utility bills, faded hand-me-downs, and Tater Tot dinners.

The truth is I’ve never belonged anywhere, and as much as I hate to admit it to myself, I wouldn’t mind belonging somewhere.

I can feel Rafe looking at me by not looking at me. I don’t know what he’s thinking and it doesn’t matter because he would never express it out loud.

During all the years I knew him while growing up there was only one time when I got into trouble and he was called upon to intervene. He gave me a talk that probably didn’t last more than a minute, but when it was over it was understood by both of us that this was the only life lesson he was ever going to put into words for me and that I should find a way to make it applicable to every crisis of conscience I would ever have in the future.

In third grade, in a gallant effort to engage boys in art class, our teacher asked us to draw pictures of the deadliest monsters we could imagine. Then we had a contest where we were randomly paired up and the class voted on which monster would win a fight between the two until we came down to the ultimate victor.

The other kids drew hideous creatures with blood dripping from their dagger claws and gnashing teeth. Some were fire-breathing; others acid spewing. One had machine guns for arms. Another shot lasers from his eyes.

I drew a dome-shaped shell covered in armored plates and a poisonous slime. Inside, my monster could be seen curled up sleeping. He had no means of attack. He won by surviving.

It was the only time I ever flunked a school assignment.

The other kids teased me mercilessly and even my teacher sniggered. By the end of the school day I had moved past my usual response to this kind of treatment. I didn’t want to take flight; I wanted to fight. I was mad. The hottest part of my anger didn’t stem from the abuse, but
came from the fact that I loved my picture. It was a great work of art, a hundred times better than the caveman drawings the other kids had done, and no one appreciated it.

I wasn’t in any mood to negotiate the vagaries of school bus bullies. Lost Creek Elementary was a couple of miles from my house. Some of the route was along isolated country roads, but I had walked it before and I didn’t care.

I started out and soon I came upon another boy. He was a first-grader. I didn’t know his name. I assumed he lived in one of the nearby houses behind the school or he wouldn’t be walking alone at his age.

His age. I thought about it for a moment. Six. I was six the first time I went to visit my mom in prison. My great-grandfather Jack McNab was six when he watched his father hang. It was a milestone age, an age when a boy should already be a man, but this kid was obviously still a baby and more than that, he was fat, the one physical attribute on the list of reasons why other kids could call you names and destroy your self-esteem that I didn’t possess. Never mind the irony that I got made fun of for being too skinny.

It would be so easy. I wouldn’t have to strain my brain at all. And it would make me feel good. It must make them feel good or they wouldn’t do it all the time.

I jogged up beside him. He turned his big round face toward me in fear but then a brief flicker of hope shone in his eyes as he recognized the too-tall, too-skinny, too-quiet, nerdy, pale, weirdo, smart kid with the mom in jail and thought he was safe.

“Hey, Fatso,” I said and waited for the rush of joy that was supposed to accompany hurting someone.

It didn’t come. Watching his demoralized gaze drop to the ground, his shoulders bunch up, and his lower lip begin to quiver actually made me feel worse.

“Hippo,” I tried again and gave him a shove.

“Don’t,” he said to his feet.

“What’d you say to me?” I responded automatically, not realizing I was quoting my father.

“Don’t, please,” he sniffed.

I shoved him harder.

“What’s the matter with you? Aren’t you going to fight back? Are you chicken?”

My next push knocked him on all fours. He scraped his hands on the roadside gravel and banged his knees and burst into tears.

I still wasn’t feeling good. I was feeling worse. Before he could get up, I pushed him again and he fell over onto his side. I let loose and began flailing at him. It wasn’t punching or even slapping. I didn’t know how to do either.

“I hate you!” I yelled at him, but I was lying. I didn’t hate him. I didn’t even know him.

I hated that my mom was in jail. I hated that my sister was dead. I hated that my dad didn’t like me. I hated that no one liked me. I had a lot of hate in me but it wasn’t directed at individual people; it was directed at circumstances. How do you beat up a situation?

He covered his face with his pudgy hands and I instantly recognized him as the monster in my picture hiding in his armored shell.

By this point, I was crying as much as he was. I ran off into the trees.

I didn’t venture back onto the road until it was starting to get dark. A few people slowed their cars and asked me if I wanted a ride, but I gave them my name and told them where I lived and promised I could get there on my own and they went on their way.

Finally, I heard the sound of a slowing engine behind me and one solitary whoop from a police car’s siren. I turned and saw red and blue lights sparkling in the gloom of the fading day.

It was Rafe. The same man standing beside me now, only then it was Young Rafe with his sulky good looks in his uniform with a gun strapped to his side. A law enforcer. A protector and server. The only person who ever took the time to explain to me what was happening to my mother.
A man I admired but didn’t envy. A man I wanted to mimic but didn’t want to be.

I trudged over to his open window.

“Did you beat up that little kid?” he asked me.

“I didn’t beat him up,” I replied.

If only he’d have been there, he’d know this was appallingly true.

He waited with his engine idling.

“Yes,” I finally admitted.

“Why?”

I shrugged.

“I don’t know,” I said honestly.

“Get in, Danno.”

I climbed into the car and I wanted to stay forever in the warmth and safety and the silent camaraderie. The only thing that could’ve made it better would’ve been a pizza.

My own house would be empty and without food. My dad had been on disability for over a year now and was rarely home, spending most of his time at the union hall or drinking at the Rabbit. This was okay by me for the most part, but sometimes it was okay to have him around. I got lonely and he and his feet weren’t always mad at me.

Dad would probably never find out about the incident, but Tommy certainly would. He’d be disappointed in me. If I had beat up a true bully he’d be thrilled, but picking on a little kid was never okay.

Rafe looked at me then looked away.

“Before I was a policeman, I was a soldier fighting in a place called Vietnam. You ever heard of it?”

“I think so.”

“I’m not going to dwell on the subject. All I’m going to say is it was the worst place in the world. I suppose the Vietnamese like it, but for people from Pennsylvania it was like being in hell. Hot as an oven. Red earth.”

He stopped himself from going on. I could see the effort on his face.

“We had to fight in the jungle with forty pounds of weapons and equipment on our backs, but the heaviest thing I carried around was my hate.”

I thought about this revelation the same way I’d contemplated the little fat kid’s age. I could see Hate hunkered on top of Rafe’s soldier backpack, a bristly black monkeylike beast with yellow eyes and long sharp twisted claws weighing him down.

“Who did you hate?” I asked.

“At the time, the enemy. The North Vietnamese.”

“Why were they the enemy?”

“We didn’t really know, but it didn’t matter. We were soldiers. It was our job to defend the country, not our job to decide when it needed defending.”

“Why’d you want a job like that?”

“I didn’t. It was given to me, and even though I didn’t want to do it, I couldn’t say no.”

“Like when my dad makes me scrub the toilets?”

“Exactly like that.”

He put the car in gear and began driving.

“I was a soldier and we were in a war so I had to shoot people sometimes. They were always far away or hidden in the jungle. I never had to see anyone up close. Then one time I did. I had to fight an enemy soldier with my hands. The way you did with that boy today.”

The comparison was ridiculous, but I knew he wasn’t making fun of me and that made it even worse.

“We had both lost our rifles, but I was finally able to get my handgun free and I pointed it at him. I should’ve shot right away. That’s what I was supposed to do but I didn’t. I looked at him and he looked at me. He was just like me. Probably the same age. Had a mom and dad somewhere who loved him. A family. A house where he grew up. Maybe a girl he liked.

“I understood in that moment that I’d been lied to my whole life. There’s no us and there’s no them. There’s just everyone. And as soon as I realized that, all my hate went away.

“He was just like me,” he repeated.

“What did you do?”

“I killed him.”

In the silence that followed I struggled to find the lesson I was supposed to take away.

Tommy was a talker; Rafe wasn’t, but they both only opened their mouths when they had something meaningful to say. Most people did the opposite.

“You got rid of the hate, but wouldn’t it have been easier to kill someone you hate?” I eventually asked.

I knew I had asked the right question because the answer explained everything.

“Yes,” he said.

“Let’s go, boys,” I hear Rafe say beside me.

He and Billy and Troy start walking toward the gallows.

Rafe’s sixty-one now. The years have put their stamp on him but somehow haven’t aged him. Maybe that’s because he was never young to begin with. He’s always just been.

Parker’s eyes dart in all directions, searching for his best avenue of escape, but he thinks better of it and falls backward onto the time-blackened wood in surrender, where he lies motionless, trapped by his snowsuit as surely as any toppled baby.

eight

SCARLET

T
HE FIRST TIME I
saw a dead person I was nine years old. Actually, I didn’t see an entire person; I saw parts.

Twenty-eight men were killed in an explosion in one of my dad’s mines. I was playing in his study when he got the call. He stood beside his desk, a slim figure in silhouette against the daylight outside the window. I couldn’t see his face, but I knew he wouldn’t look sad or even upset. Nothing ever bothered my dad unless he wanted it to.

“Twenty-eight,” he said into the phone.

His fingers began to tap on the lovingly polished surface of the mahogany desk that once belonged to his great-grandfather, the original Walker Dawes.

He noticed a mark on it, frowned briefly, and rubbed it away with his fingertip.

“Well, double digits are never good, but it could’ve been worse. Let me change and I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

He turned around, intending to head out the door, but spotted me on the floor with my collection of Strawberry Shortcake dolls spread out before me. He bent down and gave me one of his best boardroom smiles.

“Hey, there, Button.”

“Is something wrong, Daddy? Where are you going?”

“There’s been an accident,” he replied, tousling my hair. “It’s nothing that concerns you.”

My mom agreed with him. Not only did the mine explosion not concern me, it
really
didn’t concern her. She departed the next day to go stay with her parents in New York and avoid the “unpleasantness,” as she called it. My little brother and I were left in the care of Anna, our nanny, which wasn’t anything new.

Anna strongly disagreed with my parents. She thought the accident did concern me very much and to prove it, she packed me up in her pea-green Pontiac two days after Mom fled and the bodies had been recovered and drove me to Lost Creek. She left Wes at home with the kitchen staff.

The nearest hospital and morgue were dozens of miles away from the mine and there were too many bodies to fit in the funeral home, so they laid out the pieces of men in the elementary school gym.

When we arrived, the building was surrounded with vehicles: cars, pickup trucks, ambulances, fire trucks, police cars. People stood around in murmuring knots or stared numbly into white Styrofoam cups. Some cried quietly while others held them. Men were crying as much as the women. Big men. Tough men. Men who looked like they could break my dad’s arm as easily as they snapped kindling across their knees.

I had expected hysteria. I had heard my dad tell my mom that “all hell was breaking loose” in Lost Creek. I expected women collapsing on the ground sobbing and tearing their hair out. I expected angry men shaking fists and brandishing shotguns while claiming someone was going to pay for this. I expected other men in uniform rushing around authoritatively calming everyone; instead it turned out the men in uniform cried just as much as everyone else.

I had believed in Hollywood’s version of tragedy, but this was real life, and in real life hell wasn’t something that broke loose; hell was something people kept quietly hidden in the shadows of their everyday lives, but every now and then they couldn’t stop it from stepping out into the light.

Anna grabbed my hand and maneuvered me through the cars and trucks and people.

Everyone stared at us, but I didn’t mind. I was used to people knowing who I was, but this was a different kind of acknowledgment. There
was no awe or respect in their glances. No humility in their silence. They stared at me frightened and full of animal distrust, as if they were a pack of woodland creatures watching me walk through the smoldering ashes of a forest I had just burned down.

We walked into the gym. It also served as the cafeteria and auditorium. School had been canceled for three days, but the smell of pizza burgers still lingered. There was a stage at one end with old snagged blue curtains and a counter at the other end where the kids lined up to get their school lunches slopped onto their orange plastic trays. Both ends had scuffed backboards hanging from the ceiling with basketball hoops and torn nets mounted on them. There weren’t nearly as many people in the gym as outside, and the ones who were there didn’t notice us at all.

The bodies and pieces of bodies were covered in sheets and spread across the gym floor. The sheets must have been torn off beds and donated by townspeople because they weren’t a uniform institutional color. I noticed a pink one and a lavender one. One was yellow with tiny orange flowers, one striped in shades of blue and green, and one decorated with cowboy hats and boots. It was smaller than the others and obviously belonged on a child’s bed. The lump beneath it was smaller, too, and for a moment I wondered if a dog had died in the explosion.

A policeman stood beside a table near the other doors talking to a doctor with a clipboard under his arm. The table was covered with a white sheet and had a couple of small lumps. Two tear-stained women—one older than the other with her arm around her shoulders—stood together over one of the sheets while a priest talked quietly to them. A pastor in a polyester suit holding a Bible and wearing a white tie with a large gold cross pinned in the middle of it talked quietly to an elderly couple standing away from the sheets.

I looked up at Anna and thought she was about to say something to me when a young woman came through the doors behind us, walked past us, and headed toward the policeman, her high heels click-clacking over the polished wood floorboards.

She was attractive in a skittish sort of way and had the most amazing shade of hair I’d ever seen. It was almost the color of a yellow marsh
mallow Peep. But it wasn’t her hair or youth or slavish use of blue eye shadow that made her stand out compared to the others. It was what she wore: a slinky black party dress and a pair of strappy red stiletto heels.

I didn’t understand. I was enthralled. I couldn’t take my eyes off her.

She talked to the policeman and the doctor and from out of nowhere, two other men appeared. I could tell they were miners by their steel-toed work boots, their dirty hands, and the exhaustion carved into their faces. They had been digging for bodies for two days and nights.

They greeted her and it was obvious they all knew each other. The four men talked earnestly to her. I couldn’t tell if they were trying to talk her into something or out of something. Finally the two miners stepped away and she lifted her chin and squared her shoulders, and I suddenly understood everything about her.

She had dressed up for the occasion the same way people dressed up for church and funerals. Out of respect for the worst thing she would ever have to do in her life she had put on the prettiest thing she owned. Her husband had probably bought her those shoes and that dress with the money he earned at the job that had killed him. He probably loved to see her in them so she had put them on to come down to the school gym and identify what was left of him.

The doctor pulled back a section of the sheet on the table. The policeman looked away.

I stared at her shoes. I wanted those shoes.

She suddenly lunged for whatever was under that sheet. It turned out to be part of an arm, from the elbow down, charred black, with a hand attached to it.

The doctor tried to intervene but she pushed him away. She began fiddling with the dead fingers. She was trying to pull off a ring. She yanked and the finger came off instead.

A strange noise came gurgling out of her mouth. I thought she was finally going to cry, but it was laughter: high-pitched, screeching, hysterical laughter. She laughed and laughed and laughed.

Everyone in the gym watched, but no one made a move to stop her.

I suppose I should’ve been scared or grossed out or sad, but I wasn’t any of those things. As I looked around at all the bewildered pain on all
the helpless faces, I wondered if life and death was different for poor people. Maybe being alive was the bad part for them. Surely it was better to be ribbons of flesh seared into a coal seam than to be that crazy, ruined girl.

The doctor was able to get the finger away from her and put it back under the sheet. She kept laughing. The priest went over to talk to her, and she laughed harder.

“This is your father’s fault,” Anna whispered icily to me. “He’s a murderer. All of the Dawes men are murderers.”

“I’m going to tell my dad you said that.”

“Go ahead. It wouldn’t be the first time he heard it. Besides, he doesn’t care what anyone thinks about him.”

“He cares what I think.”

She squeezed my hand tighter and shook it.

“Look closer,” she urged me. “Doesn’t it bother you? What do you see?”

What I saw bothered me but I didn’t feel bad. It was their own faults, after all. Everyone knew coal mining was a dangerous job. I didn’t feel regret. I didn’t feel in any way responsible for what I was seeing or that my father was responsible either. I sensed something wasn’t fair, but injustice without a defined villain is only bad luck. I sensed waste, but I wasn’t sure what was being wasted unless it was the red shoes because they might not ever be worn again.

“Parts,” I told her.

She glared down at me and I dug my fingernails into her palm. She stood it for as long as she could before whipping her hand away, hissing at me. It was a game we played: which one of us could inflict more pain.

She wasn’t allowed to inflict physical pain on me, because I was a child, so she settled for the emotional and psychological kind that didn’t leave marks on the outside. I, on the other hand, could do whatever I wanted, and even though I enjoy a good mind fuck just as much as the next gal, I preferred real, honest hurt.

I like red shoes to this day. I have at least a dozen pairs of them. I like red in general but not because of my name.

People always think I must be named after the color or the plucky
heroine from
Gone With the Wind,
but I’m not. My father’s great-grandfather died of scarlet fever, and my father idolized him to the point of obsession. The Dawes men never sire daughters and always name their firstborn sons after themselves, so when I was born, my parents were completely caught off guard and had no idea what to call me. My dad insisted that despite my gender deficiency, they still had to find a way to pay tribute to his revered ancestor. And that’s what they did. They named me after the disease that killed him.

I haven’t been back here for almost twenty years, and when I say here I mean the mansion the Original Walker built back in the 1800s. It sits on an expanse of private land about five times the size of Lost Creek. We have our own zip code.

My father loves attention but he also tires of it quickly and needs to retreat into isolation, while my mother must be constantly admired by people who mean nothing to her. They resolved the problem by buying four other homes in more exciting locales where my mother spends most of her time. Dad joins her now and then when he wants to be reminded why he spends most of his time alone.

He’s a man of extremes in everything. He once told me that it’s okay to be very poor or very rich because the lack or excess of money frees your mind to dwell on loftier subjects, while the people in between spend their lives obsessed with the pathetic mundane trappings of mediocrity. It’s why we have a country infested with shopping malls, tractor mowers, aluminum siding, and sweatpants.

The people in between would all be better off dead, according to Dad. At least he practices what he preaches. He works tirelessly to keep himself very rich and his workers very poor. He’ll have none of that middle-class blandness associated with his name.

I’ve never spent any time in the town except for my visit to the school with Anna. I’ve never even seen the infamous gallows, although I’ve heard enough about them and seen enough pictures, including the painting in my father’s study. Last night while relaxing in my hotel room after my flight from Paris to Philadelphia, I watched a repeat of a reality TV show where a group of paranormal investigators skulked around the gallows and jail looking for the ghosts of Prosperity McNab
and his fellow Nellies. They didn’t find them, although they insisted they felt them. I wasn’t convinced.

I’m on my way to Barclay, the only town around here large enough to have a motel. I have no idea how this meeting with Anna’s cousin is going to unfold, but even if it turns out to be nothing, I want the option of not sleeping under the same roof as Walker and Gwen Dawes.

Maybe I’m a little crazy for doing this, but my curiosity has been piqued to the point where I can’t think about anything else. Anna’s been dead for a long time now, and I didn’t even know she had a cousin in Lost Creek who described herself in her letter to me as Anna’s best friend. I was immediately pissed off. I was Anna’s best friend. She also said she was the only person Anna would trust to keep this kind of secret and I’m a huge sucker for secrets.

The rest of the letter was vague in content, a bizarre conflicting mix of angry half-formed threats against me and desperate pleas to let her help me while hinting that there was some horrible skeleton in the Dawes family closet Anna had told her about and only I could stop her from revealing it to the world.