The Overnight Guest(13)

Instead, she colored a picture of the flowers. The only problem was she had lost her orange crayon, so she couldn’t draw the spiky pieces poking up through the middle. “What are these called?” the girl asked.

“I don’t remember,” her mother said from the couch. She had been lying there for a long time and she fell asleep a lot on and off throughout the day. The girl was careful to be extra quiet and spent the time coloring and looking at the books from the small bookshelf that sat next to the bed.

At dinnertime, the girl rifled through the cupboards in search of something they could eat. She found a loaf of bread and pulled two slices from the bag and dropped them into the toaster.

“Oh, God,” her mother said, staggering from the bed to the bathroom.

Her father walked in to find the girl waiting for the bread in the toaster to pop up and to her mother retching in the bathroom.

“What’s the matter?” he asked, plucking the bread from the toaster and taking a bite. The girl wanted to snatch it back. It was for her mother. It helped her stomach feel better.

Her mother stumbled from the bathroom, pale faced and weak.

“Pregnant?” her father asked when her mother told him the news. “How is that even possible?” He was shocked but also a little angry. The girl moved closer to her mother.

Her mother rolled her eyes. “The same way I got pregnant the first three times,” she said crossing her arms in front of her midsection.

Her father had banged out of the house angrily. The girl put another piece of bread in the toaster.

“I had two little boys before you, did you know that?” Her mother asked with that faraway look in her eyes that she had been getting so often lately.

The first, a baby boy, was born too early. Her mother was home alone and all of a sudden, her stomach felt like someone was stabbing at it with sharp knives. “I didn’t know what to do,” her mother said. “I lay in bed for hours, not sure what was happening and then all of a sudden he was coming. It was like my body was being turned inside out. And then he was here. He was so small.”

Her mother held her hands about ten inches apart. “And blue. His skin was the strangest color of blue—like an old bruise. I was so weak and sore I couldn’t get out of bed. I fell asleep, and when I woke up, your father was back. He took the baby away.”

The girl had asked her mother what happened to the baby and she pursed her lips together and shook her head. “He died. He was too small. Your dad named him Robert. And then a year later, another boy, this one even smaller. His name was Stephen.”

“And then came me?” the girl asked.

“Yes, then came you,” her mother said. “And I told him that this time, the baby was going to live, and I was going to pick the name. And I gave you the most beautiful name in the world.”

The girl smiled. It was a beautiful name.



7


August 2000

Josie was mortified at the scene between her brother and father and once back at the house, to distract Becky from her family drama, Josie suggested that they search for the missing dog.

Josie and Becky walked slowly up the dusty lane. The farm rested in a dip at the bottom of a valley and when they reached the top of the lane, they could see for miles. Fields of alfalfa, soybean, and corn were yellow and green patches in a never-ending quilt that blanketed the earth. Narrow gravel roads were gray seams and Burden Creek was a ragged tear through the fabric.

They took turns calling for Roscoe. Their voices were harsh, momentarily silencing the chirp of crickets and the high-pitched buzz of the grasshopper sparrow hiding in the butterfly milkweed and partridge pea. Josie was getting nervous. Roscoe never stayed away for this long. She had visions of him lying by the side of the road, struck by an unaware farmer in his truck or on his tractor.

“I wonder where Ethan is?” Becky asked, looking up and down the gravel road. Josie wondered the same thing. He should have been home by now.

“Who cares,” Josie said, still miffed at him for nearly ruining the night. Becky shrugged.

Unhurriedly, they walked up and down dirt and gravel roads past the Cutters’ new hog confinement operation, past the old Rasmussen farm all the way to Henley farm. The sun, matching their pace, was still a few hours from setting.

Describing the Henley property as a farm was being generous. The cropland was sold off long ago, and all that remained in the Henley name was a wind-scrubbed two-story farmhouse that stood on a hardscrabble yard along with dozens of rusted-out vehicles. A half-collapsed barn and several outbuildings were bursting with broken-down washing machines, farm equipment, and lawn mowers.

The girls approached a woman holding an unlit cigarette in one hand and a bucket in the other as she crossed the weedy yard.

Sixty-one-year-old June Henley, all tendons and sinew, wearing a housedress, flip-flops, and a pink, rolled brim cloche to cover her bald head, was a curiosity to the girls. Though most neighbors knew one another, to date, Josie had never actually met June nor her adult son, Jackson, who lived with her. Josie shyly introduced herself and Becky and explained how they were looking for a lost dog.

June relayed that they had stray dogs hanging around the yard all the time and they could walk through the property and take a look. “My son is tinkering about, so just stay away from the outbuildings.”

The girls thanked her and began to explore the five-acre property. Filled with what looked like garbage to most, it was surprisingly organized. The mangled steel and rubber collections were sorted into long, weedy rows.