The Familiar Dark(27)

I wasn’t sure what he wanted from me. We shared a loss, but I didn’t know Zach Logan, not really. We weren’t friends. We were barely acquaintances. And unlike him, I understood, down to the marrow of my bones, that my daughter was gone. Now I had one more thing to envy.



* * *



? ? ?

I’d avoided the park since Junie’s death, made sure I went the long way to the grocery store or gas station. But after I left Zach in the frozen food aisle and got back in my car without buying anything, I found myself taking a left on Elm and gliding to a stop at the park. It was empty, yellow crime scene tape tied around a tree at the edge of the playground, the other end loose and flapping in the breeze. I got out of the car, made my way across the scrubby grass to the mouth of the cement tunnel where my daughter had died. There was a dark patch in the dirt, a stain that might have been blood soaked into the earth. I put out a hand, steadied myself on the rough surface of the tunnel.

“I had the same reaction,” a voice said, and I whipped my head up, saw Jenny Logan sitting on a picnic table to my right, feet resting on the bench. “But then I told myself it wasn’t blood.”

“Did that help?” I managed.

She shrugged. “Does anything?” She patted the table next to her hip. “You may want to come sit down. You’re looking a little green around the gills.”

If I didn’t know better, I’d think the Logans were following me around, inserting their lives, their grief, into mine. But I wasn’t that convinced of my own importance. This was just a small place, everyone bumping up against each other. I crossed to the picnic table and hoisted myself up, the spring chill of the wood worming its way through my jeans into my skin. “I saw your husband at the Piggly Wiggly a few minutes ago.”

Jenny gave a wan half smile. “Always dangerous, sending Zach to the store. Even when I give him a list, he always ends up with a random assortment of crap. I was going to go with him, to get out of the house. But at the last second I couldn’t do it.”

“Too many people asking how you’re doing?”

“Yeah.” Jenny nodded. “But some days it’s not even that. It’s Zach. He keeps reading things online, about how to deal with grief. It’s like he thinks if he follows the steps, he can instantly make it better. And when it doesn’t work, he freaks out, has no idea what to do when I’m crying and losing my mind. It gets exhausting, you know? Acting like things aren’t as bad as they are so he doesn’t fall apart. I needed a break.”

I didn’t know. I guessed that was one benefit of being alone in the aftermath. I didn’t have to keep my chin up for someone else, could let myself sink as dark and deep as I pleased.

Jenny leaned back, using her hands behind her for balance, and tipped her face up, eyes closed. She was more disheveled than I was used to seeing her, hair tangled and a little greasy at the roots, dark smudges under her eyes, her shirt wrinkled. Even her speech was looser, words flowing easier off her tongue. Was I seeing her differently since my talk with Cal, aware, suddenly, of the chip on my shoulder? Or maybe Jenny had always been more human than I’d given her credit for and I hadn’t had any good reason to notice it before now.

“I wasn’t going to come back here, to Barren Springs, after college, did you know that?” she asked without opening her eyes.

Pondering Jenny Logan’s life choices wasn’t a topic I’d ever spent much time on, but she didn’t need me to answer, kept right on talking.

“It wasn’t even something I really thought about, never said to myself, ‘You’re getting out of Barren Springs and never looking back.’” She gave a watery laugh and opened her eyes, leaned forward again. “But it was a given. I thought I’d go to Mizzou, get a degree, then move to Kansas City or St. Louis, someday maybe Chicago.”

I didn’t really care about this story, about Jenny Logan’s life, but I liked focusing on someone else for a change. It felt like a vacation from my own buzzing brain. “What happened?”

“Have you ever left here?” she asked instead of answering my question.

I shook my head. I’d been to Branson once, years ago, for a day. That was the extent of my travels. All I really remembered of it was the bumper-to-bumper traffic, the sea of tourists crowding the sidewalks. How foreign and far away it felt from the quiet green of home. I’d been thinking about moving with Junie, trying to claw our way up in the world. I could have made a little more money there, working at a chain restaurant instead of the diner. But everything else would have cost more, too. At the end of the day, I would’ve still been poor, still been scraping by. Only I would have been poor in a place without Cal, without Louise and Thomas, without the safety net of Barren Springs—where every square inch was familiar. Branson was a life I couldn’t picture for myself, no matter how hard I tried.

“I thought I would love it. All those new people, new experiences.” Jenny picked at a thread on her jeans. “But it turns out the world is big. Even a place as small as Columbia felt overwhelming. I didn’t know who to talk to or how to act. I spent almost every day of those two years desperate to get back here. I remember one night I got a flat tire and no one on the highway stopped to help me. I was standing out there in the rain, trying to change my tire, sobbing like a baby and thinking that if I were in Barren Springs, if I were home, I would’ve had ten people stopping to help me.” She cocked her eyebrows at me. “Can you believe that shit? What a goddamn wimp.”