Lies We Bury(48)



Without more to go on, I’m returning home and hoping for some big reveal in Arch. Following bread crumbs of details I’m remembering with Shia is the only thing I’ve done that resembles progress. Rosemary’s recollections of a time when so many of my own experiences were a blur may be the light bulb I need.

Downtown Arch is picturesque. Shadows from today’s overcast skies cut the painful glare of the river that runs through the town. Boutiques and some larger, corporate shops have replaced family-owned standbys, reminding me that life continues to roll forward even when I wish it would stop forever and Monday would never come. The ice-cream shop run by the Wilkinsons still pulses; a few early-bird customers enjoy a cone beneath the store’s awning, searching for relief from the region’s dusty, dry air.

I pass the elementary school where I attended grades three through six. After a year of adjusting and minimal homeschooling as she had done with us underground, Rosemary was told I had to transition to public school and a normal life. Wounding emotions limp to mind, recalling the way other kids avoided me for months—they had all heard I was demon spawn and born of incest. I was isolated that first year, until Lily joined me when she was admitted to kindergarten.

A new plastic jungle gym lies in place of the old metal one that used to stand in the sandbox. A phantom itch tickles my chin as the road veers left and I drive on by. It was there that Vera Hutchinson called me a dirty mutt while I was hanging upside down on a bar. Startled by the insult, I slipped from the metal and split my chin open on the ground.

The houses age as I make a right, becoming smaller in size. Chipped paint and dilapidated sideboards warped by the arid heat signal that I’m almost there. A lone dog trots beside the road, balancing to avoid the ditch. Uneven mange is visible from my driver’s seat as I pass, but the dog looks alert—on the hunt for something besides trashed leftovers. He pauses to pee on a discarded Christmas tree, brown and brittle in April. Despite all the updated fixtures and new businesses thriving in downtown Arch, not all of the town’s neighborhoods have changed for the better.

Outside a faded yellow house with a modest front porch, I put my car in park. Before I can consider turning around and grabbing some liquid courage at the local liquor store, the front door opens, followed by the screen door. Rosemary steps forward, her hands folded beneath her ample chest and wearing a smile that matches. Straight black hair that hasn’t faded with time is piled in a wild bun, and she wears sweatpants stained with something dark. Her solid red shirt reminds me of when I was twelve and she slept in that exact outfit for a week, unable to rouse herself to change or bathe.

“Hi, Rose—” I stop myself. “Hi, Mom.” I step from the driver’s seat and leave the door unlocked. No one followed me all the way out to Arch, and everyone already knows who I am here. They wouldn’t let me forget it.

Rosemary darts a look for any spying neighbors, then waves me forward. “Come, come. Let’s get inside.”

The urge to roll my eyes pulls upward like a magnet. I focus that energy into a tight-lipped smile. “Mom, when is the last time you were out of the house?”

She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear, as if genuinely worried someone might see her this way, then shrinks back into the shadows of the porch roof. Her thin skin is more papery in appearance than I remember it. She’s turning fifty this year, but dark circles beneath her dim brown eyes and those deep lines at the corners peg her as closer to sixty. “Hurry up—it’s going to rain.”

As if on cue, thick clouds clap overhead. Drops of water find my head, my shoulders, and then I’m walking quickly into the house I swore I would only return to when someone died. Internally, I note the irony: someone did.

Musty air enshrouds me like a veil the moment I pass over the threshold. The shag carpet from the 1970s that I always felt was akin to Mary Poppins’s bag—you never knew what you might find in its thick fringe—was old when Rosemary purchased the house back in the early 2000s. We bounced around from apartment to apartment in Portland, trying to find the right spot, before realizing we couldn’t remain where we’d been imprisoned. We moved to Arch when I started school, and Rosemary found this one-story. She used as little of the settlement money as possible, as she knew she might never work a real job again. And aside from the year she dished out ice cream on Main Street when Lily needed a new surgery, she hasn’t.

“Lemonade?” Rosemary calls over her shoulder. She walks past the front room that’s filled with cartons and has been since I turned sixteen. Labels across the cardboard tops identify the supplies she uses for her Etsy embroidery business: yarn, needles, a loom, and various colors of thread. When it was clear the money was running out, Rosemary turned to the skills she learned as a kid, and she tried to teach me, too, however terrible I was at it.

“Sure.” I move a box that reads SHIPPING SUPPLIES written in permanent marker.

“You talked to your sister lately?”

“Which one?” I murmur.

“What’s that?” Glasses clink from the kitchen, and I can picture her reaching up to the highest shelf in the cabinet to the left of the sink for what she deems the Good Cups—actual glass instead of the plastic kind we used growing up because we kept breaking everything.

“I said, which one? They’re both in Portland.”

Rustling in a drawer stops, and I know she’s paused in riffling through all the drink-mix packets she’s stored up over the years. She walks back into the front room where I sit wedged between cartons and a stack of coats she laid across the headrest of the couch. “Lily’s back? From Switzerland?”

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