No One Will Miss Her(8)

But everyone else does. They see what’s happening to your body. They see it even before you do.

Imagine.

They caught up to me while I was riding my bike home on the last day of school, five dusty miles, my backpack so heavy that I had to get off and walk every time I hit a hill. There were a half dozen of them. Some of them were older, and all of them were bigger. I left the bike in the road, front wheel spinning. I ran into the forest ahead of them and tried to disappear between the trees, but they caught me. Of course they caught me. I counted myself lucky afterward that pulling my shirt over my head was all they did.

I’d had that mole forever. You couldn’t miss it, raised up like it was and so dark against my skin. I knew it was ugly—even then, I was careful not to let the other girls see it during those quick-change moments in the locker room after gym class—but there was nothing I could do to hide it that day, backed up against that falling-down shack a hundred yards into the woods with my arms raised out in a T and a boy leaning hard against each of my shoulders. I couldn’t even see past the hem of my T-shirt, stretched tight over my face, damp with sweat and spit. I wasn’t wearing anything underneath, and one of them jabbed a finger against the dark blemish below my breast, hard enough to make a bruise, making a disgusted noise while he did it.

They all saw it. And the ones that didn’t see it, like Adam Rines, all heard about it. It was its own local legend, my mole, growing in the retelling like the giant prehistoric carp that was supposed to live down in the deepest part of Copperbrook Lake. I still remember that first time with Dwayne, when I stepped out of my dress and stood there uncovered like he wanted, letting him look at me, he gazed at that dark spot and said, “I thought it would be bigger.” I said, “That’s what she said,” which I thought was a pretty solid comeback, but Dwayne didn’t laugh.

Dwayne never laughed at my jokes. Some people thought I was funny, but not Dwayne Cleaves. My husband was like a lot of men. Always making noise about how he loved comedy, but no sense of humor to speak of. All but the dumbest jokes would go over his head, and the ones he liked best were always at someone else’s expense. He loved, I mean loved, those prank-call radio shows, where the hosts would get someone all riled up with a fake story, dragging it out while they got more and more upset, and only come clean after the poor bastard totally fucking lost it. God, I felt sorry for those folks. Not that I have any business giving out marriage advice under the circumstances, but if this sounds like your man? Don’t marry him. Because he’s an idiot, and probably mean to boot.

Of course I wasn’t smart enough to take my own advice. Not that I had options, either. The boys weren’t exactly banging down the door of Pop’s trailer to take me on dates or give me a diamond ring. Dwayne would never have admitted we were even together if not for what happened that summer after graduation, and you could feel the shame coming off him in waves—that crawling, squirming humiliation that’s so potent, everyone else gets embarrassed for you. It was thick in the air the day we got married. People looked at their feet and grimaced when he said “I do,” like he’d just shit his pants in public. That’s the thing about being an Ouellette in Copper Falls: just being next to you is embarrassing. Like those sad maids in India. Untouchable.

Of course, untouchable is not the same thing as unfuckable, which is why this whole messed-up story ends the way it does.

The police won’t hear any of this, either. The men who come around, collecting evidence and asking questions, will get only half the truth—or outright lies, from people like Adam Rines—and I didn’t leave behind a diary to set the record straight. Maybe I should have. Maybe people would actually listen to me now, the way they never did when I was alive. Maybe they’d even understand.

I wouldn’t start at the beginning. I don’t even remember the beginning. Some people say they have memories from way back, clear ones, distinct little glimpses of their lives at age two or three or five. It’s all just a blur to me. Partly, it’s that nothing ever changed: the trailer, the junkyard, the woods beyond. Pop asleep in that shitty recliner in front of the old TV with the rabbit ears on it. The sour smell of last night’s spilled beer. Day after week after year, the same. The only way to tell if a memory is from before or after is that sometimes my mom is there, hovering in the background. I can’t remember her face anymore, but there’s the shape of her. Reddish hair that had started to fade to brown. And her voice, harsh and dusky like the cigarettes she was always smoking—although I don’t remember ever seeing her do that, either. Maybe she never smoked in front of me. Or maybe I’ve just forgotten. I do remember that my father punched a hole in the wall of the trailer the night that Mom skidded out on the county road between Copper Falls and Greenville, going so fast that she flipped over the guardrail and took a long plunge down into the brush. She died on impact. She’d been driving too fast. Stoned, too. Pop never told me that part, but the kids at school all knew, and they were at just the right age to make it hurt. It was an exciting day there at Falls Central when someone in Miss Lightbody’s fifth-grade class realized that my given name, “Elizabeth,” rhymes with “crystal meth.”

I remember the two state policemen standing on the drop-down step outside, one behind the other, holding their hats against their chests. They probably teach them that at the academy, to never give someone bad news with your hat on. I wonder if Sheriff Ryan will take his off when he tells Pop I’m gone.