Gun Shy(88)

Sometimes I think of what Damon did to her. How being in that accident and going to prison was nothing compared to what she had to endure, on her own, for all those empty years. I’m not a murderer. But I am a killer. I’d kill for my girls. I’d do anything to keep them safe.

Most often, though, I think of the way she sobbed when we buried Damon in the yard, under the chestnut tree. I told her I’d do it myself, that Pike and I would be able to dig the hole down faster while she stayed inside, but she insisted that she be a part of it. Of all of it. In the end, my brother was the one watching from the warmth of the living room window, little Grace in his arms, while Cassie and I lowered Damon King into his final resting place; the hollow in the earth where, as I’d found out only days earlier, Jennifer’s body rests.





CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT





CASSIE





There’s an old chestnut tree outside our kitchen window.

When I was a girl, I’d sit in that tree and survey my kingdom, the fields that stretch out in every direction.

We’ve made love against it, Leo’s hands pressing my hips into the weathered bark until it cut the skin on my back.

Jennifer is there, bones now, wrapped in plastic and laid to rest without fanfare, without a headstone, without a priest to give her any last rites.

The ground was hollowed after we buried her, no matter how much dirt I piled on top of her final resting place. No matter how many hours I knelt in that dirt and prayed for her soul. No matter how many nightmares she visited me in, her big eyes imploring me to save her.

The ground never let me forget that she was there. Their baby rests there too, in a heart-shaped box that used to hold my mother’s wedding dress, a soul too small to have ever survived the violent way it entered this world.



* * *



It’s cold tonight. This winter was just as harsh as the last one, but spring is here, now. Soon it will warm up. Luckily we have the insurance money from mom’s life insurance policy, something that keeps the heat going twenty-four hours a day and lets us pay for firewood instead of stealing it.

Leo’s stretched out on the couch, his big hands looking huge as he pats our baby girl on the back.

She’s only a month old, something we hadn’t planned for, but something that is so beautiful, so perfect, it’s made me happier than I could have ever imagined on those lonely nights when it was just Damon and I between these four walls.

I could stare at these two my whole life, the way her ear rests on his chest, the slow breath that they’ve somehow managed to synchronize, the way she looks every bit his and nothing of mine. I might have carried our daughter in my belly for nine months, but she belongs to her father.

We’ve talked about moving, but we both agree that it’s better to stay here. To keep an eye on things. We wouldn’t want anybody else digging around the property and finding things that are best left buried.

Leo moved the old piano away from the window, but I made him put it back. He thought I wouldn’t want to stare at that spot below the chestnut tree as I played, but he’s wrong. Apart from my baby girl and my Leo, that spot fills all the empty spaces inside me. It comforts me on those cold nights when they’re asleep and the memories come flooding back. We spend most of our nights like this; Leo holding little Grace while I play for them. He told me once how it wasn’t the noise he feared in prison, but the quiet. He doesn’t like the numbing silence, so I try to fill it for him. Between my fleeting music skills and the way Grace cries for food every few hours, we have him covered.

Sometimes I lie on top of the spot where they’re buried, in the night, in the weak yellow light the porch lamp casts off. Now that it’s spring, the snow has melted, and the grass on top of them is thick and healthy. The ground does not hollow anymore with the weight of Jennifer. Now it is smooth and flat, and Damon is with her.

All I ever wanted was somebody to love. To love me.

Leo thought I was crazy when I insisted on digging right down until I hit bone. What did a year in the ground do to somebody’s body? Would the flesh be gone? Would they just be shiny white bones?

Please don’t leave me here, Cassie.

There was nothing shiny about Jennifer Thomas and her year-buried body. It was just dirt and bones and flesh and the outfit she’d been wearing when we put her in the earth. Leo wanted to shove Damon’s body into the hollow and be done with it, but I couldn’t bear the thought of the three of them spending eternity separated by dirt and rocks and a thin sheet of plastic. So I unwrapped her, and we put her next to him, the tiny heart-shaped box on top, and when Leo saw Jennifer’s decomposed corpse he cried.

All I ever wanted was somebody to love. To love me.

You’re probably wondering why I went to any effort to bury them together. Why I cried. Why I loved him in my own strange way. I didn’t love the man who killed my mother and sent Leo to prison, no. It was the man he could have been; the man he would have been if he hadn’t stepped into that van. If he hadn’t been a boy on a milk carton. I think I would have loved that boy very much if things had been different.

More than anything — even in death — I didn’t want him to be alone. He should be with his child, with the girl he loved in the only way he knew how. With violence, and with a finality that was as brutal as it was unwavering.