The Contradiction of Solitude(19)

I walked into my kitchen and stopped at the dry erase board I had hung on the refrigerator.

I uncapped the marker and jotted down a line: Sealed lips, closed eyes, dead ears. Easy heart.

I laid the newspaper out on the table and turned on my computer. While I waited for it to boot up, I skimmed the local stories. I made a point to familiarize myself with the goings on in the tiny towns I chose to live in.

Brecken Forest was typical in all the usual ways. The front page was dominated by the minutes from last night’s school board meeting. Pictures of the recent garden show took up most of the second and third page. I looked at the faces of local celebrities. Women and men whose names meant something in this quiet hamlet. Families who had been there for generations.

This was about blending. About claiming. I wanted to slip inside the blood and bones of the town to find belonging. For however long I could have it.

I could pretend that I had grown up in the small town with the state championship winning football team. That I skinned my knees on the streets of a make believe childhood filled with parents who had normal jobs and friends I had known since infancy.

I could dip my toes in an imaginary past and live a few moments in content delusions.

I read about Mrs. Gardner’s upcoming yard sale to benefit the homeless shelter. I went over the obituaries, pretending that I was sad for the loss of Mr. Davis Cooper, who had been a volunteer firefighter for forty years and was survived by his three children and ten grandchildren.

For a brief period of time, these people, these citizens of Brecken Forest, Virginia, were my home. My family. Strangers that were more important to me than the people I knew.

“Family is the most important thing in your life, Lay. Wherever you go in this world, no matter what you do, family is in your blood. You can’t ever forget about the people that made you.”

My mother hadn’t meant for her words to tighten like a noose around my neck. She hadn’t meant for her love-filled sentiment to drag me into purgatory and keep me there.

Without conscious movement, I tucked my hand into the waistband of my panties, touching the once tender skin that had been altered forever only days before. The bandages were gone, and it was healing nicely.

Family made me. It shaped me.

Family owned me.

I folded up the newspaper and set it aside, turning to the computer. My compulsion taking over once again.

I clicked open the bookmarked site on my browser. Another newspaper from another town popped up and the tendrils of ease disappeared. The Norton Hill Gazette was filled with stories so much like the ones I had just read in Brecken Forest’s local paper.

Filled with people from another life. A thread that I could never sever.

My chest started to feel tight and my hands started to tingle. My face flushed hot as I clicked through the pages, reading…reading.

When I couldn’t bear it any longer, I opened another tab, closing that door for another day. Turning to a different fixation. A different driving need.

I searched.

I spent the next hour flitting from one newspaper to the next. Making notes on scraps of paper and then balling them up and throwing them away when they didn’t seem to fit. I couldn’t find them.

I knew they were out there.

He had left me a trail…somewhere. Secrets safe for me to find. Between us. Only us.

Stars that needed their stories.

And I wanted to tell them.

I had been collecting them for him since I left home. Since my mother died and Matthew was taken away.

I had been lost and adrift, nothing tying me to the life I once had.

But the stories my father had told me once upon a time kept me company during the loneliest days.

It was hard to hate the man when he had given me something to hold me together.

His stars.

His stories.

They weren’t all told.

I became obsessed with finishing them. For him. For my father.

For the man that had ruined me.

And there it was. A small article at the bottom of the front page of the Vanleer Observer, the source of news for a tiny town in the middle of Texas. A story from their archives, nineteen years earlier.

I didn’t recognize the name on the headline but I felt the flutter in my belly. Vicious birds taking flight. My fingers tingled as I scrolled down, reading. Reading.

Maybe…

Janurary 16th, 1998 Grisly Murder Unsolved

Police are still looking for leads in the murder of a young Abilene girl who was found just outside of Vanleer on June 10th, 1997. The victim whose body was discovered by two local schoolboys on their way home, had been stabbed multiple times. Her throat was slashed and her hands were removed. Officials searching the area were never able to recover the missing limbs.

Sheriff Carter confirmed shortly after the discovery that the victim was sixteen-year-old Tawny Reaves of Abilene, Texas and a junior at Middlebeck High School. Tawny had been missing for seventy-two hours before her body was found in a ravine off Back Road sometime between ten and eleven p.m. on June 9th.

It is unclear how Tawny, who resided thirty miles away, came to be in Vanleer. Mr. and Mrs. Reaves contacted their local police department when Tawny failed to come home after school on June 7th.

The Reaves family admits that Tawny had been going through a “rough” period after the death of a close friend. An autopsy confirmed that Tawny had both THC and opiates in her system at the time of death.