The Familiar Dark(3)
“Hey, Cal,” Louise said, her voice pitched high and girlish. “You want—”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my brother hold up one hand, stopping Louise’s voice in its tracks. “Eve,” he said quietly, walking toward me. His cop shoes were loud on the ancient linoleum floor.
I didn’t look up, kept scrubbing. Whatever he was here for, whatever had been nipping at me all day, it wouldn’t be true, it wouldn’t have happened, if I could keep him from saying it.
“Eve,” he said again. I could see his belt buckle pressed up against the edge of the counter now, and he reached over, laid his hand on mine. “Evie . . .”
I jerked my hand away, took a step backward. “Don’t,” I said. I meant it to come out fierce and commanding enough to stop him from speaking, but my voice wobbled and broke, the single word dribbling away into nothing.
“Look at me,” Cal said, gentle but firm. His big-brother voice. I raised my eyes slowly, not wanting to see, not wanting to know. Cal’s eyes were red-rimmed and swollen. He’d been crying, I realized with a little electric jolt. I couldn’t remember ever seeing Caleb cry, not once in our shitty shared childhood. I stared into his bright blue eyes, and he stared back. As always, it was like looking into a mirror, but one that threw my reflection back crisper and clearer. Same hair, same eyes, same smattering of freckles, but all of it overlaid with a sheen I simply didn’t have. As if nature had blown its entire genetic wad on my brother, and when I came along eleven months later there was only enough left over for a faded, second-rate replica.
“What?” I said. Ready now, suddenly, for whatever hell was waiting for me behind his lips. When he didn’t answer, I threw the rag at him, watching it slap into his chest and leave a wet stain against his shirt. “What?” I practically screamed. Louise moved up next to me and laid one hand on my forearm. Her touch, usually the closest thing I had to a mother’s comfort, burrowed under my skin, and I jerked away, my whole body buzzing like a downed power line.
“It’s Junie, Eve,” Cal said. “It’s Junie.” His voice broke and he glanced away, his throat working. “You need to come with me.”
I felt rooted to the spot, my feet sinking into the floor, my body heavy and leaden. “Is she dead?” Next to me Louise sucked in a sharp breath. That one sound letting me know that I’d gone a step too far, made a leap that Louise never would have. But Louise hadn’t grown up the same way I had. No money, yeah. Food stamps and government cheese, yeah. But not violence. Not raised in a double-wide that stunk of random men and meth burners. Not strange faces and too much laughter, most of it jagged and mean. All of it nestled in the armpit of the Ozarks, a place only fifteen miles down the road, but so backwater, so hidden from the wider world, that it felt like its own dark pocket of time.
But Cal knew. He looked back at me, held my gaze. My brother never lied, not to me. Whatever came next would be the truth, whether I could stand it or not. “Yeah,” he said finally. “She’s gone. I’m sorry, Evie.”
“How?” I heard myself say, voice far away like a helium balloon drifting above my head.
Cal’s jaw tightened, and he sucked in a breath through his nose. “It looks like she was murdered.” It wouldn’t be until later, when I knew all the awful details, that I would remember this moment and realize how, even then, my brother was trying to spare me from something.
In my mind, I fell to the floor, mouth twisted and howling. Screamed my throat raw. Ripped out my own hair. Slammed face-first into the linoleum until my nose burst and dark blood flowed. But in reality, I simply turned and grabbed my coat and purse off the hook behind me, catching a single glimpse of Thomas’s shocked face, his mouth open and eyes wide. Walked past Louise’s outstretched hand and around my brother’s reaching arm. Pushed out into the cold, snow-scented air, squinted against the weak sunlight tearing through the clouds. It had happened now, finally. The disaster I’d been anticipating from the second Junie was born. And I had never even seen it coming.
TWO
It’s never the thing you’re expecting that wallops you. It’s always something sneaky, sliding up behind you when your attention’s fixed on something else. How many times had my mama told us that growing up? One tiny tidbit of valuable insight in her otherwise alcohol-and drug-fueled existence. The lesson learned from her own father, who suffered from a bum ticker, his every hiccup or wheeze a sure sign of impending death. Until the day stomach cancer crept up out of nowhere and snuffed him out before his heart knew what was happening. When I was a kid, my mama doled out wisdom so rarely that I clutched onto this nugget like a lifeline. Spent my time trying to foresee every single disaster that might befall us in hopes that nothing could catch us unawares. And when my daughter was born, I had anticipated a million ways my clawing, desperate love for her could go sideways: SIDS or choking on a piece of hot dog when Junie was little; a car accident or childhood leukemia as she grew; some dangerous older boy or her grandmother’s taste for drugs reaching down through the generations now that she was approaching her teenage years. But her throat slit in the park where she’d played as a little girl? No, that was never a horror story I had entertained. Not in this small, middle-of-nowhere town, where if you didn’t know someone you at least knew their kin, who they belonged to, where they came from. All of this was my fault, really. Because if I’d had a little more imagination, stolen the idea before the universe had grabbed on to it, maybe my girl would still be alive.