The Familiar Dark(62)

“I’m guessing whatever reason he gave wasn’t good enough.” She barked out a laugh that held not even a single drop of humor. “I don’t even want to know. It’ll only make me angrier.” She handed me the shovel clutched in her left hand. “We need to bury him,” she said, matter-of-factly.

“Okay,” I said, slow and slurry. I felt the shovel sliding through my numb fingers and tightened my grip on the handle. I’d been calm earlier, focused, but now I couldn’t make any of the pieces fit together. “What . . . what are you doing here?”

Jenny bent down, set the flashlight on the ground. She grabbed Cal’s feet and looked at me until I got the hint and laid down the shovel, grabbed his hands. “I heard you and Zach talking. When you left, I followed you. Not all the way to your mom’s. You would have seen me for sure. I almost lost you when you got back on the highway and headed here. Took me a while to find where you’d parked.” She was still matter-of-fact, grunting slightly as we dragged Cal’s body deeper into the woods. “And then I waited until your mom showed up and dropped him off. It was a lot harder following his trail back here than I thought it would be. I got turned around a couple of times. But then I heard the gunshot. That helped. Wait a second,” she said, dropped Cal’s feet and ran back to grab the flashlight. She put it between her teeth and then took Cal’s legs again. We were quiet after that, other than the sound of breathing, dragging Cal through the trees.

“Here,” I said, dropping his hands. “This is far enough.”

Jenny took the flashlight from her mouth, peered around. “You think?”

“Yeah.” I couldn’t stand to touch him anymore, listen to his body scrape along the ground. And the fact was, they were either going to find him or they weren’t.

Jenny went back for the shovel, and we took turns digging, the other holding the flashlight. We worked without speaking, intent on our task. When the hole was deep enough, we paused, the scent of turned earth, dark, secret things thick in the air. We dragged him to the edge and rolled him in. I flinched when he hit, but Jenny didn’t. He was just the guy who’d killed her daughter. He’d never been the one who held that same daughter and rocked her to sleep, or gave her a bath and blew bubbles until she squealed. Jenny had never loved him.

Filling in the grave should have gone faster, been easier, but it seemed to progress in slow motion, both of us exhausted and ready to be done. When Jenny had scooped the final bit of earth, we spread moss and twigs over the site, walked and kicked until it looked the same as the rest of the ground. Or at least same enough.

Jenny palmed dirt off her cheek with the back of her hand. “That’s it.” She looked at me. “Anything you want to say?” She gestured toward the grave with a dirt-stained hand.

What was there to say? He’d been my brother. My first love. The only person I’d ever trusted not to hurt me. “Yeah,” I said, grabbing the shovel off the ground. “He had it coming.”

I had to hand it to my mama, those words I’d sworn I’d never say were strangely satisfying on my tongue.



* * *



? ? ?

    Jenny had done a good job hiding her car, although the chances of anyone happening along here were slim. I put the shovel in her trunk, and she tossed the flashlight in as well. “I’ll wash the shovel as soon as I get home,” she said. “Put it right back in the garage.” She glanced down at her dirt-streaked clothes with a wince. “And get rid of these.”

I looked at her. “Are you going to hold it together? Once daylight hits and all this is real?”

She stared back at me. “It’s already real. And yeah, I’ll hold it together fine.”

“What about Zach?” I asked. “He knew it was Cal.”

Jenny leaned back against her car. I could barely make out her features in the moonlight. “Don’t worry about Zach. The second I came out of the kitchen and told him I’d heard you two, the only thing he could focus on was the fact that now I knew he was Junie’s father. ‘What she said was true about that night, it was only one time. You and I weren’t even engaged yet. It never happened again.’” She snorted out a laugh. “Like I give a shit about that, at this point. It was years ago. They’re gone. Who cares? But Zach is Zach. He’ll carry his guilt around like a hair shirt for the foreseeable future.” She turned and opened the driver’s door. “I can use that, if I have to. But I don’t think I will.”

“For what it’s worth, he never really wanted to keep Junie a secret from you. That was my idea. I didn’t see what good it would do for anyone to know.”

Jenny gave me a little smile. “They found each other anyway, didn’t they? Zach and Junie. Junie and Izzy. Looking back, I feel like an idiot for not seeing it. The way he was always hovering around them when Junie was at our house, hanging on every word she said. I finally know why he never wanted to leave Barren Springs. It was written all over his face.”

“What was?” I asked.

“Love,” Jenny said. “He loved her.”

It should have eased something in me, the knowledge that Junie’d had a father who loved her after all. Junie, who’d never once voiced a complaint about being fatherless, but whose eyes always followed men carrying babies, men with kids balanced on their shoulders. But all I felt was sorrow. My heart ached for my daughter, for Zach, for all of us. For the secrets we’d kept from each other, for the chances we’d never had. I’d thought I was doing the right thing for Junie all those years ago, but maybe I had robbed her without meaning to.