Still Mine (6 page)

I live with two ghosts.

Last night we found her naked in the garden on her hands and knees, clawing at the earth like an animal. Planting seedlings, she said, even though there was snow on the ground. Her skin was blue. At the kitchen table I hugged a blanket to her while she talked about the beauty of the moon out the window.

This is your fault, Dad said to me. My fault she’s losing her mind? We yelled at each other across the kitchen and she sat there shivering and smiling. She’s gone and he can’t bring her back. Sad things never make him sad; they make him angry. I’m the same. So are you.

Sometimes I wonder if you have it in you to hurt me. Why does it have to be hard even with you? None of this makes me cry. What should be filling me with sadness is filling me with rage instead.

T
his street has no sidewalk, each bungalow a cookie-cutter version of the one beside it, the dead end marked by a faded yellow guardrail. A few of the homes have been boarded up, “For Sale” signs tilting in neglect on the overgrown lawns. Clare parks her car and walks up the center of the road, backpack on. A young boy rides his bicycle on his lawn. He pedals in circles, his training wheels off the grass as he leans into the turns. A woman rounds the house, carrying a garden hose in one hand and holding a cigarette in the other.

“Not on the lawn,” the woman says to the boy. “Driveway only.”

“There’s no room in the driveway. Can I ride on the street?”

“And get killed?”

“There aren’t any cars.”

“What’s that?”

The woman points to a truck parked in a driveway across the street, its tire wells rusted out. The decal on its side reads F
OWLES
L
ANDSCAPING AND
T
REE
R
EMOVAL
. The mother widens her eyes when she catches sight of Clare. She is younger than Clare, thin, her brown hair unwashed and pulled into a ponytail. She flicks her cigarette onto the road and tugs the hose down the length of her driveway.

“Can I help you?” the woman asks.

“I was looking for a grocery store. The one on the main road is closed.”

The little boy dumps his bicycle and sidles up to his mother.

“The mart’s closed,” the woman says. “Merged with the hardware store around the corner. Go looking for a hubcap and you’ll find a bag of apples for ten dollars instead.”

“Wow. Okay.”

“You’re the one up at Charlie’s.”

“That’s right. Clare.”

“Sara Gorman.” The woman lets go of the hose to extend her hand. “This is Daniel.”

“Hi there,” Clare says to the boy.

“A photographer. Gracing us with your presence.”

Clare chooses not to respond.

“Did you know that, Danny? This lady takes pictures.”

The boy peers up at Clare. “Where’s your camera?” he asks.

Clare slides her bag around to her chest and zips it open.

“Do you want to see it?”

“No thanks,” Sara says.

“Maybe I can show it to you another time,” Clare says to the boy, zipping the bag closed.

Sara squeezes her son’s shoulders, then wipes at her nose with her bare forearm. The skin around the bend in Sara’s arm is dotted with punctures, bruised. Clare knows precisely how long it takes for such marks to fade. Even now, if Clare runs her palm up and down her own inner arm, she can feel them, the tiny holes closed over with pearls of scar tissue. Above these, the gash from yesterday aches, her whole body stiff from the fall in the gorge.

“My babysitter’s gone,” the boy says. “A police car came because of her.”

“Never mind about that,” Sara says.

“She disappeared,” the boy says.

“Shut up!” Sara crouches and gives him a shake. Daniel’s lips quiver as he absorbs his mother’s wrath.

“It’s okay,” Clare says. “I know the story.”

“No one cares what you know,” Sara says.

“Okay.” Clare raises her hands. “I’m sorry to bother you.”

“You want to meet Jared? Is that why you’re here?”

“Sorry?”

“You making casseroles?”

“I’m not catching your meaning,” Clare says.

“We’ve had a whole lot of groupies show up here from God knows where. Bringing casseroles and knocking on Jared’s door. They saw his mug in the paper and figured he was a catch. Swoop in while he’s too troubled to know any better. Death bunnies, my father-in-law called them.”

“That’s not . . . That’s unbelievable. I’m not—”

“You saw his picture in the paper?”

“No . . .” Clare trails off, unable to come up with a truthful defense. She knows these things happen. In the first months after she left, Clare would often lie in her motel rooms, imagining the women who most certainly zeroed in on her husband, the ones who for years had glared at Clare at parties. Even though stories of his drunken rages wove their way through town, there was never a shortage of women beguiled by Jason’s truck or his good looks, by the way he could liven a room. And though Clare had ached for years to be free of him, in those motel rooms the prospect of a woman sitting at her kitchen table wearing her housecoat inflamed her.

The boy pries himself away from his mother and mounts his bicycle. This time Sara doesn’t stop him when he swoops onto the road. He brakes at the foot of Jared’s driveway and bends to pick up a stick.

“Don’t you dare,” Sara says.

But Daniel doesn’t turn around. He tosses the stick with all his might and it hits the front door of the Fowles house.

“Jesus!” Sara yells. “Get back here!”

Sara chases him down, yanking him off his bicycle and dragging him back to the lawn. Clare rests her hand over the cell phone in the pocket of her jeans, as if cueing Malcolm. The front door of the Fowles house opens and Jared steps out. He seems much older than in the wedding photo, more filled out and better looking. He wears a baseball cap on backwards and a faded T-shirt.

“Say sorry to Jared, Daniel,” Sara says, heavy with sarcasm. “Tell him you didn’t mean to throw the stick.”

Jared collects the stick and bends it into an arch until it cracks. Then he tosses the pieces into the sickly looking bush that makes up his front garden.

“Asshole,” Sara says under her breath.

Though he stands a hundred feet away, Clare can feel Jared’s eyes bore through her.

“Just ignore him,” Sara says. “He’ll go away.”

And Jared does, stepping back through the screen door into the darkness of his house. Clare feels a stab in her gut. Always the husband, her mother said.

“He was probably hoping for a casserole,” Sara says. “He’s as heartless as they come.”

“Did his wife still live there?” Clare asks. “Before she disappeared?”

“No. She left him around Christmas. She was living up at her folks’ place.”

“Strange,” Clare says.

The word seems to jar Sara. “It is strange,” she says. “The whole thing is strange.”

By now the boy is back on his bike and over at the very end of the road. He weaves fearlessly close to the yellow guardrail, yanking his front wheel to draw tight circles. There appears to be a path marked next to the guardrail, another way down to the gorge. Clare lifts her hands and mimics the clicking of a camera. Did Jared know Shayna was leaving? Did he see it coming? It might have been Sara who piled Shayna’s suitcases into her car and drove her up the mountain road to the Cunningham house, playing the helpful friend in the face of a broken marriage. Was there screaming, words exchanged in the driveway? Or was it silence between them, an icy disregard?

Every marriage suffers in its own way, Clare’s mother once said after witnessing a hostile moment between Clare and Jason. Some quietly, others not. But her mother knew nothing of the truth. Clare bears few scars from Jason on the pale of her skin. He had a way of inflicting injuries that faded before anyone could catch on, of using his charm to override any rage that seeped out in public. Surely Shayna had her reasons for leaving. For Clare it was the certainty that death was circling her, that death was the only other way out. It was a fleeing under the cloak of a winter evening, her husband none the wiser, a panicked flight behind the wheel of her junker car, the snow coming down hard out the window.

T
he section of the hardware store reserved for groceries takes up half an aisle. At the back Clare finds a display table scattered with fruits and vegetables, and then a refrigerator and a freezer with groaning motors. With only the cash in her pocket to pay, Clare must keep tabs on what she buys. It takes all her willpower not to tear open a box of crackers and start on them right away.

Clare wanders the aisles in search of a few other supplies, duct tape and matches, ointment for her gash, a can of lighter fluid for the fire pit. She finds a plastic poncho for a raincoat and some wool socks. Though it is July, the mountains do not seem to adhere to the seasons, moving through heat and rain and fog and sun and even a sharp snap of cold in the two days since she arrived. She lands at the cash register with a full basket.

The young cashier stares dead ahead as she pulls Clare’s items along the beeping conveyor. This girl with the nose ring is the same one in the crop top from the other night at Ray’s, though now she wears a uniform, her eyes smudged with coal liner and her lips a blinding red. She can’t be older than eighteen, an age Clare best remembers because it was on her eighteenth birthday that her mother announced at the dinner table that a marble-sized tumor had been found on her esophagus. Announced it, with flair, a swilling glass of wine in one hand and a forkful of birthday cake in the other. Her father sat still and silent in his way, almost smiling. Clare remembers feeling injured by her mother’s showmanship. She’d felt ready for the world until that moment. But there was an instant loss of hope, her birthday bested by a proclamation of terminal cancer. Perhaps Clare knew what was coming, the stash of medications introduced to the house, her parents too preoccupied with their own troubles to take note of her transgressions, the hole dug in Clare’s heart by her mother’s cancer the perfect opening for Jason.

The high sun nearly blinds Clare as she clears the sliding doors of the hardware store, so that the sight of Jared Fowles leaning against his truck, staring at her, stops her in her tracks. He half smiles, his elbow propped against the rearview mirror.

“Clare,” he says.

“Yes?”

He takes off his baseball cap, the dark of his hair falling across his forehead.

“I thought you might want to introduce yourself.”

“You seem to know who I am.”

“Do you know who I am?”

The plastic bags cut into Clare’s hand so the tips of her fingers feel numb, her shoulder smarting. Jared’s scrutiny lays her bare. A bead of sweat rolls down the curl of her back. The articles about Shayna’s disappearance describe Jared as a landscaper, a former miner, a man twice arrested for drunk driving. He was at the gorge the night Shayna disappeared, but left early. Had the police interviewed him? Was he even bothered that his wife was gone?

“I know who you are,” Clare says. “Sara told me.”

“We don’t get a lot of visitors in Blackmore. Did she mention that?”

“That’s what I’ve been told.”

“You’ve come to take pictures,” Jared says, his tone chiding.

“I have.”

“Or maybe you’re a fancy private detective. A fancy PI. Here to snoop.”

“I’m not a private eye.”

“A cop?”

“Is this small talk in Blackmore? That’s all anyone asks me.”

Jared laughs. “You a runaway, then?”

One of the bag loops slips from Clare’s grip. What does Jared see when he looks at her? Clare adjusts her stance.

“I’m not sure grown-ups can be runaways.”

“Sure they can,” Jared says.

“Then maybe that’s what I am.”

The words surprise Clare as soon as she utters them, the frankness of what she’s just said. There was a time, before she was married, that Clare knew how to talk to a man like Jared, how to measure just the right amount of push-back, that mix of assertion and flirtation, a show of strength.

“Hiding from someone?” Jared asks.

“Not hiding. Moving. I don’t like to stay still.”

Jared smiles fully now. Perhaps he sees the resemblance to Shayna, Clare same-aged and vaguely similar to his estranged wife, this arrogance a way to mask his true response. Clare nearly jumps when she feels the vibration of her phone in her pocket. It takes a concerted effort not to drop the grocery bags.