No One Will Miss Her(16)

I looked up, and said, “It’s okay, I didn’t bring him inside, because you said—you said—” and then I was sobbing, and my father was scooping me up in his arms, me and poor, dead Rags together, and carrying me inside, where I eventually stopped crying and told him what had happened. I remember the look on his face as he listened and then stood up, grabbed his keys, and set out down the road in the direction of the Carters’ house: it was the same look I’d seen on DJ’s face an hour before, the determined expression of a man with an unpleasant but necessary job to do. He told me he would be back in ten minutes, but it was much longer, closer to an hour, and whatever he said, Billy and Brianne never set foot on our property again that summer—and come September, they were gone entirely, the whole family moved downstate never to be heard from again.

DJ was another matter, a more delicate one. His daddy was the preacher at the hilltop church in the village, and his family name was among the oldest in town, even engraved on the founders’ monument that stood on the green. My own father, who’d grown up far from Copper Falls and shared blood with nobody in town but me, had to tread carefully—this was what he told me as we dug a grave for poor, sweet Rags in the clearing behind the yard, and I laid a bouquet of clover blossoms and dame’s rocket on the freshly turned earth. He made me tell the story again, and then a third time, listening carefully as I repeated the sequence of events. The appearance of the kids at the edge of the yard. The way Rags was in my arms, and then wasn’t. The way DJ flipped him, head to tail. The terrible resonant clang as bone covered by fur collided with the fender of a crushed Camaro. The feeling of the rain soaking my shirt, my hair, as I sat in the mud with my eyes closed—and then the sight that greeted me when I opened them. He asked me, gently but with great seriousness: Was I sure about what DJ had done? That it was, indeed, him? Even with my eyes closed? And just as seriously, I nodded. Yes, I was sure.

The next morning, Pop shaved his stubble, combed his hair, put on a clean shirt, and drove into town. He was gone a long time; the sun was midday high when he finally came back. He wasn’t alone. As I stood watching from the folding stairs, a second car, newer and nicer and cleaner than Pop’s old pickup, pulled in behind. The preacher was at the wheel. There was a smaller figure in the passenger seat.

“I’ll be inside,” Pop said, then cast a look back over his shoulder at DJ, who stepped out of his father’s car and stood with his hands stuffed deep in his pockets. “This boy got something to say to you. Isn’t that right?”

“Yes, sir,” DJ said.

I watched as he approached, my arms folded carefully across my chest. I thought I’d be sick at the sight of him, at the memory of what he’d done, but I wasn’t; instead, I felt curious. The boy walking toward me seemed like a different person from the one who’d taken Rags from my arms. That grown-up look was gone from his face. He looked young, unsure, unhappy. He stopped a few feet away, shifting from one foot to the other.

“My dad says I owe you an apology,” he said finally. He kept his eyes down. “He says that even if it’s right on principles to put a cat like that out of its misery, I shouldn’t have done it. Because, um, because”—he cast a quick look back at the figure behind the wheel of the car—“because it wasn’t my place, Dad says. So he drove me over here to tell you.”

“To tell her what, boy?” said my father’s voice, and DJ and I both startled; he was standing just inside the trailer door, a shadow beyond the screen, and I felt a flush of gratitude that he had stayed to see this through.

“I’m sorry,” DJ said.

I didn’t know I was going to speak until the words were already out.

“Are you?” I said, and for the first time, the boy lifted his eyes and met my gaze.

“Yeah,” he said, and then, so quietly that only I could hear him: “I wish I hadn’t done it. I wished it right away.”



Of course, there was no undoing it. Sorry or not, Rags was dead, and so was the part of me that believed in fairy tales, in magic spells, in saving broken things from a world that wanted to hurt them. I stopped playing in the heaps after that. I never fed the junkyard cats again. I didn’t tell myself pretty stories about our place in the world. When I stepped out the door, I knew who and what I was: a girl who lived at the center of a mountain of trash.

And now it’s all gone, and so am I. I bet you can see the smoke from that burning yard for miles. If you squint, maybe you can see my soul floating skyward along with it, lifted on a column of putrid, billowing black. I wonder where my father is, if he’ll finally leave. He should. Business torched, daughter dead; there’s nothing to keep him in Copper Falls.



But wait: this story isn’t over. I almost left out the best part.

Because after the forced apology and sudden expression of regret, DJ nodded and turned away, and walked with hunched shoulders back to where the preacher’s car sat with the engine still running. The man in the driver’s seat rolled down the window, and a cloud of cigarette smoke curled out through the opening and into the hazy air.

The preacher said, “All done now, Dwayne Jeffrey?”

The boy said, “Yes, sir.”



Because that boy, the one who killed my cat—reader, I married him.