The Weight of Blood (11 page)

Lucy

It was a long ride to Daniel's, east along Ridge Road, which curved and dipped like a roller coaster. The handful of houses in Crenshaw Ridge were spliced into the hillside with sloping shale yards. The bare planks of his mother's house blended into the surrounding trees. A narrow porch spanned the width of the house, with firewood stacked to the eaves on either side. Near the front door sat two rocking chairs, each occupied by dozing cats.

Daniel's mother was waiting for us in the kitchen, a crooked room that had been tacked on to the back of the house. The wall behind the kitchen table was lined with shelves, and on the shelves sat a hundred or so old canning jars filled with seeds, dried herbs, wild mushrooms, feathers, moss, roots, tree bark, and plenty of things I couldn't distinguish through the glass. Mrs. Cole came forward and took my hand in hers, a soft smile on her face. Her dark hair was streaked with gray, and her bangs were uneven, as if she'd cut them herself.

“Glad to meet you,” she said. “I'm Sarah. Go on and sit. I made sassafras tea.” I could smell the roots boiling in a kettle on the stove, a sweet, earthy smell like root beer. Sarah smacked an ice tray on the counter to loosen the cubes and parceled them into three mugs, then spooned in sugar and poured the tea. She sat down across from me and Daniel.

“I've got everything ready for Mrs. Stoddard,” Sarah said, stirring her tea with a tarnished spoon. “I wrote the directions down, just be sure and follow 'em right close.”

“Okay,” I said.

She nodded and sipped her tea. “Daniel, fetch a box, would you, from the shed? Get this all packed up for Lucy?” She waited until he left the room and we were alone. “I was right about you,” she said, her gaze moving over my hair, my eyes, my hands. “I told your mama, and lucky for you, she listened.”

“You knew her?”

“Yep. That's why I made Daniel bring you here today, wanted to see you in the flesh. Make sure. But I knew then, when you were a speck in the womb, and I knew when my boy started talking about you. I can sense things.”

I wasn't following. “Were you and Lila friends? I'm sorry, I just never heard my dad mention you.”

“No. She came to me, looking for help, like people do. Friend of hers brought her. She was pregnant and thinking it over.”

Thinking it over? My dad had always told me how much my mother wanted a baby, wanted
me
. But then, what else could he have said?

Sarah's hands gripped mine. “Don't be pained, child,” she said. “She had a bad feeling, wasn't sure who the daddy was. I told her you were good, I could feel it through the skin.”

“She's not talking you to death, is she?” Daniel grinned at me, striding into the room and setting down the box. “Mom, I told you not to scare her off.”

Sarah released my hands, laughing softly, and I sank back into my chair, stunned. “Just girl talk,” she said. “I didn't get much of that, raising boys.”

Different scenarios ticked through my mind on the way home. I knew my mom and dad were married when they had me, but I didn't know the actual date—it had never seemed strange to me that there was no mention of their anniversary, no marking of the day. An anniversary was hardly something to celebrate alone. I'd spent my life believing the fairy tale that had been woven for me: love at first sight, whirlwind romance, elopement, me. I wasn't bothered to learn it might have happened in a different order, that she might have been pregnant when they got married. But I'd never entertained the notions that my mother had been with someone else—or that Carl wasn't my father. If she'd been with another man in the narrow margin between arriving in Henbane and meeting my dad, I'd never heard about it. Even in the ridiculous stories of her enthralling various men, no one ever claimed she'd cared for anyone but Carl Dane.

Maybe Sarah had made the whole thing up. That was the problem with secondhand accounts. You could believe them or not, but you could never be sure they were true. It didn't seem possible that I could belong to someone else. I looked like my mother, but I had Dane features, too. My height. The slight dent in my chin. The second toe a little longer than the first. Things I had to admit might not stand up to questioning.

When Daniel dropped me off, I asked if his mother had ever mentioned mine. “Not until I told her I was working with you. She said Lila Dane was the most beautiful woman to ever set foot in Ozark County. That beauty could be a curse.” He smiled apologetically. “She didn't say anything to upset you, did she? She just kind of rambles sometimes. Doesn't mean anything by it.”

If she hadn't told my mother's story to Daniel, she might not have told anyone. But she had mentioned a friend bringing Lila to the house. Aside from my father and Birdie, Gabby was my mother's only friend.

When I got home, I pulled out the box Gabby had given me. I'd been saving it for the last few days, but I couldn't wait any longer. I opened it. At the top of the box was a dress with an empire waist and a pleated skirt. A maternity dress. I had worn it with her. I recognized the next dress, the green sheath she wore in the photograph that sat atop our TV. In the picture, she stood with my father's arm around her, a lily in her hair. Ray Walker had taken the picture with Dad's camera. It was their wedding day. I wondered if I'd been with her that day, too, and whether she knew it. She was happy in that picture, it radiated out from the frame. I pulled off my T-shirt and slipped the dress over my head, the soft, musty fabric floating over my body. Then I let down my hair and draped it over my shoulder the way Mom's hair fell in the picture. The image in the mirror was uncanny, and for a moment I tried to imagine myself as her. A young bride with a child on the way, her mind filled with paint colors and garden plots and nursery furniture.

Beneath the clothing were some papers. I found a little notebook with sketches of plants and their descriptions. On the back cover were pencil outlines of two hands, one inside the other. I touched the larger one.
My mother's
, I thought. The small one had to be mine. I pressed my hand to the notebook, trying to make it fit, but it eclipsed the other hands entirely, my fingers long enough to curl around the edges.

A door slammed downstairs and Dad called my name. I walked to the top of the stairs and looked down to where he stood gripping the banister. He stared with bewilderment that prickled into anger. “Where'd you get that?”

The dress. I held the fabric away from my body to distance myself, feeling guilty, sick to my stomach, as though I'd done something unforgivable. “Gabby,” I said softly.

He turned wordlessly and left me there on the stairs. Back in my room, I lay on the bed, surrounded by my mother's things, and let tears seep down into my hair. Dad rarely spoke of her anymore, keeping all his memories to himself. It wasn't fair to me. My image of her was warped and incomplete, relying on what others told me. Especially Gabby. She'd always kept up the fairy tale, indulging me, her guilt at being here in my mother's absence still raw beneath the surface. I knew her stories well, but I was ready for her to tell me more. I wanted everything, good and bad. I needed all of Gabby's pieces of my mother to make her whole and real.

Gabby was asleep in the lawn chair with her feet up and her head tilted back. She twitched as a fly buzzed around her face. “Gabby,” I said, shaking her foot, “I need to talk to you.” She moved her head from side to side as though disagreeing with something in her dream. “Gabby,” I said, louder, and she opened her eyes and lurched backward in her chair.

“Jesus!” she said, sucking in breath.

“Sorry,” I said, brushing lint off the dress. Lila's dress. “Didn't mean to scare you. It fits, sort of. Maybe a little short. She was shorter than me, though, right? My mother?”

Gabby nodded and pulled a cigarette out of the pack on her lap. Her hands trembled as she lit it. “Yeah, few inches, maybe.” She cleared her throat and took a deep drag.

I leaned against the railing. The wind chimes clinked halfheartedly. “I was out in Crenshaw Ridge today, and Sarah Cole told me she knew my mother. That a friend brought her in for an abortion.”

Gabby's face flushed. We were quiet, smoke dulling the air between us.

“It wasn't like that,” Gabby murmured finally, flicking ash.

I squatted down next to her. “I need to know what happened, Gabby. I'm not a kid anymore. I'm almost as old as she was when she had me.”

Gabby snorted. “Hardly. What she went through, growing up, it ages you. She was nineteen going on a hundred.”

“Then tell me,” I begged. “Tell me everything. All I have of her is what I'm told. You don't think that's hard?”

“She didn't want an abortion,” Gabby said. “Not really. She was worried something was wrong with the baby … with you. Had a bad feeling. I took her to Sarah because she sees things, knows things. I knew she'd tell your mom everything was fine. And if she didn't, well, Sarah's known to be right about those things. She's the one who told Ray Walker's wife their baby wouldn't make it.”

“Sarah told me Mom wasn't sure of the father. My father.”

Gabby paused. “It's plain as day who your father is.”

“Why'd she think it was somebody else?”

Gabby rubbed her eyes with her palms. “Maybe Sarah heard wrong, because your mom never said anything of the sort to me. Though I guess that's not the kind of thing you go around telling people. In the time I knew her, she only ever talked about your daddy.”

“Do you think it could've happened before she came here?”

She tapped another cigarette out of the pack but didn't light it. “Timing-wise, I guess it's possible. But I don't know. And it doesn't matter, so you might as well leave it be.”

“She kept a secret that big from Dad.”

“Oh, no. Don't you go getting high and mighty. We all got secrets. I bet you got some yourself. Some you keep from your dad, for his own good.” She eyed me sharply. “She had her secrets, all right, but they were part of her past. Once she married your dad, it was like her life started over. Things were good for a while there, just think on that.”

Neither of us spoke, ruminating on the fact that the good hadn't lasted, that something had changed at the end. I'd asked Gabby a thousand times why she thought my mother left; I believed now that she hadn't been lying when she claimed not to know the real reason. She and my mother had been friends, but they hadn't shared everything. Gabby was right that we all had secrets, secrets that would hurt other people or expose us in ways we didn't want to be exposed. I couldn't fault my mother for that.

Lila

The hammering ceased, and I ran back across the room to try the door again. I heard the rattle of a key in a lock, and the door swung open. Crete stood in the doorway, his expression cold and blank.

“I don't get you,” he said quietly.

I cringed away from him, confused, my mind quickly shaking off the veil of sleep to make sense of what was happening.

“After all I done for you, you can barely look in my direction. Can't bother yourself to be grateful for the opportunities I give you. Then I let my brother drive you around, and you can't keep yourself from fucking him. He thinks he's in love, ain't that something? Maybe you are some kinda witch, making fools outta men.”

My heart was a caged bird bent on escape. He couldn't have known what happened between me and Carl at the homestead. Surely Carl wouldn't have told him. I backed away and he stepped inside, closing the door. His anger vibrated like a taut wire, intensifying with each step he took toward me. My back touched the sink in the makeshift kitchen, and I couldn't go any farther.

Crete's hand pressed against my throat, the weight of his body driving my spine into the sharp edge of the counter, and tears blurred my vision. He ran his grizzled face along my cheek, stubble grating my skin. “Did you like fucking my brother, you little cunt? Huh?” Though I knew the countertop was bare, my hands scrabbled blindly on either side, seeking a weapon. I thought of Carl and Gabby and Ransome, the only ones who would notice if I disappeared. What would he tell them? That I had run off? Carl would be hurt, maybe, but in time he'd forget. It would be like I'd never existed.

“Let's see who you like better,” he said, pushing up my nightshirt. I clawed at him and he wrenched my hands away viciously. I felt the heat of his mouth on my breasts, my nipples, the awful wet probing of his tongue on my breast, and then he bit down, hard, breaking the skin. I screamed and he clamped down on my windpipe. My hands were now free and pushing against him to no effect. He brought his mouth to mine, forcing a kiss, and I tasted blood. I tried to twist myself away from him, but he was too strong. His free hand worked between my thighs, snagged my underwear. There was a soft thud as his pants fell to the floor. He squeezed my throat with both hands as he entered me, and pain radiated through my body. The anger and fear began to dissolve along with my consciousness, and I drifted away from the weight of him, dissipating, like smoke into darkness.

I lay cocooned in my bed for unknown hours, my head buzzing, nerves jangling with the fear that Crete would burst in at any moment. I had no plan, no idea what I would do when he returned, and the harder I tried to organize my thoughts, the more they jumped around like live wires. My throat was swollen and bruised, my back raw where it had scraped against the counter. The bite on my breast pulsed, tender to the touch. Thirst finally drove me to the bathroom, where I guzzled water from the tap and used the toilet, wincing at the sting of scraped flesh. Dots of dried blood stained one side of my shirt. I dabbed at my wounds with a damp washcloth, my eye on the door the whole time, waiting.

I didn't know how long I sat watching the door, tensed for any sound or movement. Finally, the constant stress of being on alert wore me down enough that I could think beyond the moment. I showered, changed into clean clothes, and assessed the security of my prison. The window glass smashed easily with my suitcase, but the board beyond it must have been reinforced, because it wouldn't budge. The door was locked from the outside, and I couldn't get through the concrete-block walls. I was trapped.

Packets of crackers and raisins and beef jerky sat on the kitchen counter, and a bottle of aspirin that I knew Crete wouldn't have left for me. It must have been Ransome. She was in on this, partly if not completely. It hurt to know she was involved, but it gave me a flicker of hope. There was a tiny possibility I could convince her to help me—and in time, Carl would return. Crete couldn't keep me hidden from him forever. Carl wouldn't accept the explanations Crete would come up with. I told myself he'd come looking for me.

Two days passed. I had nothing to do but think about what Crete had done to me, my pain and soreness a constant reminder. I alternated between anger and tears, burning the lamp at all times, even while I slept, because the room was too dark without it. It was nighttime when I heard a rattle, keys turning, locks releasing, and my body tensed. My instinct was to hide, but there was nowhere to go. The door opened and closed, and Ransome stood just inside, ready to dart back out if necessary.

“No point trying nothing,” she said, resigned, apologetic. “You won't get far.”

“I know,” I said, my voice hoarse.

She moved toward me, a bag in one arm, and I wondered if I could knock her down, make it out the door. If I could get across the field, slip away into the woods … I'd spent hours dissecting what to do when this moment came, yet somehow I couldn't will my body off the bed. I felt weak, exhausted, not in charge of my own limbs. And I didn't know what waited outside.

Ransome stopped a few feet in front of me and set down the bag. “You okay?”

I laughed, a dry laugh that sounded more like a sob. Her eye twitched, and she knelt down to my level, keeping her distance—wary, perhaps, that I was faking my helplessness. She pulled a square green tin from the bag. “I brought some ointment. Works on udders, thought it might work … you know.” My breast. She'd been in the room that first night as I slept. Had she noticed the blood on my shirt? Lifted it to see the wound? Maybe Crete had told her.

“Thank you.” I closed my eyes and lay my head back down.

“You know why he brung you here, don't you?” She waited for me to open my eyes before continuing. Her lips were pressed together in a flat line, and her gaze flitted away when I looked at her. “It weren't to pull weeds and wait tables. He had men lining up for you right away, but he wanted to ease you into it, take it slow. I saw how he took a shine to you, thought maybe he'd change his mind and let you be. But that's all gone to hell now, and you'll be doing what you came here for. He's gonna start bringing customers for you. Next week.”

“Customers?” Nausea spread through me. Surely I was misunderstanding her.

“He says they'll pay top dollar for a girl like you. I told him you needed time to heal up, but he ain't giving you long.”

“I won't do it.”

She looked down. “He has ways to make you.”

“You could help me,” I said. “Ransome, please, you could get me out.”

“I'm sorry, I am.” She shook her head. “I just … There ain't much I can do. I need this job and this place, and I ain't got nothing else.”

No wonder she hadn't made much effort to get to know me. She'd shared her meals but kept her distance, doing her best not to get involved. Because she'd known what was coming. An exodus of built-up tears wet my face, and she pressed a handkerchief into my palm. She sat stiffly while I cried and blew my nose.

“There was another girl,” she said. “Before you. Younger, not much English. Wild as a barn cat. Couldn't let her be seen in the restaurant, so he just kept her out here on the farm. She weren't here long. She wouldn't cooperate, and a man come to get her.” Ransome wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “You gotta do what he wants, show him you can behave, do what you're told. You don't want him to have to move you, and that's what he'll do. He's already talking about it, says he's gotta get you outta here before Carl comes back. You gotta change his mind, get him to let you stay. There's worse places, see? The man that took her, that other girl … just, there's worse places. This ain't the worst.”

I tried to process everything she'd said. As she stood up to leave, her voice lowered to a whisper. “Running ain't wise now, anyhow. He's ready for it. You best bide your time.” I pictured traps in the woods, armed men with dogs. Who knew what he had in store for me.

I opened the bag after Ransome left. Canned SpaghettiOs. Apples. And a jar of her tea. I unscrewed the lid and drank it all. Another week trapped in this room, and then … Crete would get what he wanted from me. Ransome had hinted that I might have a better chance to run when I'd proved myself trustworthy and cooperative. Who knew how long that would take. Maybe Ransome was right, and there were worse things. But I thought of Crete's attack, and I tried to imagine reliving that shame and fear and disgust and rage every day with other men. How much worse could it get?

I was partly in shock, understanding what was going to happen but not fully believing it. Days passed, and my bruises and scrapes were healing. Everything except the bite. I'd been slathering it with the sticky yellow balm Ransome had brought, but it was still painful and swollen and had begun to ooze pus. The garage was hot, suffocating, and I was so tired. The lightbulb had been flickering, and I couldn't bear to watch it burn out, so I curled up on the quilts and slept.