Last Girl Ghosted(70)

The frown he wears deepens, he rubs at his temples with a thumb and forefinger.

“I don’t.” He sounds weary with the admission.

A photograph falls out of the book I’m holding. When I bend to pick it up, I see that it’s a portrait—a man who looks like an older, thicker version of Bailey, a woman with dark hair and kind face, a younger girl who looks like her but slimmer. All of them wind whipped and smiling, a beach behind them. I’m guessing it’s his family—parents, a sister. Something about that makes me like him a little more. I remember that he mentioned a brother and wonder why he’s not shown. It seems rude to ask. So, I slip the picture back in the book, and say nothing.

I walk back over to the desk, put down the book. From the stack of Bailey’s files, I take the one labeled Greenwood. He nods to acknowledge that it belongs to me. Then I walk out the door, and climb into my car. He comes out after me right away, climbs into his own truck.

As I pull out of the lot, Bob waves to me from the office window. And Bailey Kirk follows me back to town.



thirty-three


Then


My mother took me to town the next day, a rare thing. She had a bruise on the side of her face; she’d done an artful job of covering it with makeup and styling her hair in a way that it was barely noticeable, nothing more than the faintest shadow. If you didn’t know it was there, maybe you wouldn’t see it all.

In the cab of the old pickup truck, we bounced down the rural road. We were headed out to find the ingredients for Guinness stew, my father’s favorite. A way to appease him maybe, to make him happy. She was always looking for ways to make him less angry.

I know a lot of people grow to hate their abused mothers for never standing up, for never fighting back, for not leaving. I never felt that. I know she was in love with a ghost. She was haunted, waiting for that man to come home to her and rescue her from the one he had become. I was waiting, too. She had so much faith, it was contagious.

“He’s going to kill her,” my brother told me the night before.

I was lying beside her in the bed, and he sat on the floor of her room, his back against the door. He’d held my father off until he’d stormed from the house. We were waiting for him to come back, but he didn’t.

My mother was sleeping, fitful, sighing.

“Don’t say that,” I whispered, panic constricting my throat.

“We have to leave this place,” he said. He was just a shadow by the door; his baseball bat lay beside him, his hand resting on it.

“She won’t leave,” I told him.

“Then I’m going to wind up killing him.”

“Stop,” I said, a sob rushing up my throat. “Stop it.”

“That’s how these things go, you know. The violence—it just escalates. Until.”

“He’s getting better,” I said, not believing it myself. There would be days, even a week of peace, where my father worked hard during the day, slept well at night. Where he was happy. There was laughter, and home-cooked meals, music from my father’s guitar in the evening. Prior to that night’s explosion, things had almost been good.

“You sound like her,” said Jay, voice heavy with disdain. “I told you not to love him.”

His words rang in my head, knocking around in my frightened child’s brain. My father would kill my mother, or my brother would kill my father. This was what I carried into town with me. It burned in my center, burned like acid up my throat.

In the big grocery store, I wandered the colorful aisles. It had been a while since I’d been off the property. And I’d forgotten, maybe never even noticed before that day, the wild, Technicolor plenty of an American supermarket. The rows and rows of snacks in glossy, crinkly bags, the bubbling bottles of soda, the fat, waxy produce, and the bloodless meat in neat packages. I grabbed the royal blue package of Oreos. My mother took them from me indulgently and put them in the cart.

“Go get the beef,” she told me, and I obeyed her, walking off. The other shoppers glanced at us askance. Why? Maybe we were a little raggedy, hair too long, clothes past worn. I think they called us hill people, those of us that lived off the grid out of town. Energetically, there was something different about us now.

We were just like you, I wanted to tell them. Not long ago, I never dreamed of killing a living thing, or growing my own vegetables.

My father said that they—the worldly ones, the people still dwelling in the modern dream—were all sleepwalkers. So it seemed, all of them lost in their own thoughts, maybe casting a glance in our direction but nothing more. They didn’t care, that’s what Dad said. They didn’t care about anything except their own desires, fears, and cravings. They didn’t even know there was anything else besides the movie playing in their minds.

Was he right?

There was what seemed like a mile of chicken, turkey, hams, different cuts of beef, all tightly wrapped in plastic, neatly on yellow foam trays. Not a drop of blood, no odor, clean and prepped.

After I’d killed the deer, my father and I had hauled it back to the waiting truck. Later he hung it from a tree to bleed it. The blood ran from the doe like a viscous river, collecting in a bucket. I threw up twice.

People should know what it means to eat meat, my father said. Someone has to do the slaughtering, the cleaning, the butchering. There’s always pain and fear and blood. That’s life. That’s death.