Winter Loon(79)

Each time I lifted the lid—and I did, over and over for days—it was like a dirge would play, organ strikes, minor keys. Sometimes Jolene sat with me and we’d rehash what we knew of death. Her mother had left her with few belongings, nothing of worth, though she slept with a stuffed bear that had survived countless upheavals. “I’ve got this,” she said, touching the scar, a reminder, a warning. “And this.” She rested her hand on her chin, glanced around the dining room, into the kitchen. It was a gesture at the very ceiling and walls that sheltered her, but I knew she meant more than that. She had a family. She had a home. I had what Ruby left me.

Despite her coarseness, for the life of me I couldn’t imagine Ruby handling these items with anything but care, placing them gently, as if they were fragile crystal. She gave no explanation, leaving it to me to glean her intent. With the task complete, she would have had to get on all fours, using the box as leverage to push up, to get a foot under a knee, to press her bones to standing. Had she hoped I’d think of her kindly from time to time, that I would know she was a person fractured, that her sorrow was all over that box, that this was as much as she could do? What I knew was that when dying came for her, she wanted me at a safe distance, away from her thin spirit. That box was a kindness, the only true gift she ever gave me.

I’d gone over to the burned-down lot in the days after the fire, thinking I would pick through to look for any other clues—a piece of jewelry, a photograph with only the corner burned, a metal box full of answers. There was no police line, no signs warning me away. My boots sank into the wet ash like it was mossy loam. Heat-twisted metal frames slumped in the two bedrooms, coils of bedsprings all that remained of the mattress where Ruby had been found. Gip’s recliner—charred and singed but somehow spared—was the only furniture that was recognizable. I thought of the years they’d lived there, the three of them, the two of them, then me. What the walls had seen, what was swept under the rugs, painted, or patched over, was reduced to coal.



WE BURIED RUBY NEXT TO Gip, whose plot was still mounded soil. The funeral expenses, even a headstone for the both of them, were covered by an anonymous donation. At first I thought it was Mona and Troy, and I tried to pay them back with the money from the envelope. But they assured me they hadn’t done it. Then I realized. Burt Rook. The day of Ruby’s burial, a bank envelope arrived at the Hightowers’ addressed to me. In it was a check, made out to me, and a letter telling me the bank would receive an insurance settlement, that while the fire was suspicious, it had been deemed an accident caused by an old woman smoking in bed. The check was meant to cover my losses, it said, though the human toll could never be compensated, that losing a loved one comes at too high a price.



“I KEEP THINKING ABOUT THAT baby in the pictures,” I said. Jolene was sitting on the end of her bed, I was still on my back, staring at the ceiling.

“Hurry up,” Jolene said. “Get your pants on. They’ll be home soon.”

Mona and Troy thought it would be better if I stayed at their house until something more permanent could be worked out. Jolene and I had promised chastity but broke that promise every chance we got, sneaking up to her room whenever the house was empty. My intense want to be inside her, part of her, was more than a boy in heat or love. She was what I knew when everything else was in shadows. I could hold her in my arms, feel her with every part of me. She was whole when all else was lack. We screwed with abandon—quick, frantic, clumsy—as if each time was to be the last. No time was sacred. If Troy was in the shower and Mona was dropping off Mariah at school, I took the stairs two at a time to get to her before she dressed for school. She flopped on the bed, I stood next to it, not bothering to lie down, not bothering to step out of the jeans that shackled my ankles. She giggled and I worked up a selfish sweat. I left her mostly frustrated but tried to make it up to her, taking what time I could when a vacant house allowed.

“Seriously,” I said, grabbing her hand, pulling her down next to me. “You think my dad knew what happened to my mom or suspected at least? And their fight at Bright Lake. I told you it was about having another baby.”

“Wes, please.” She kissed me and pushed me off her bed. “We’ve been over this. I don’t know what you want me to say. Let it go. There’s no way of knowing. You keep going over this and it’s like living in the past. Now, get out before Mona gets home.”

“Okay, okay,” I said. I pulled on my jeans and T-shirt. “What do you think they’d do? It’s not like they don’t suspect.”

“Well, it’s one thing to think you know something and another to know it for sure.”

It was true. The photos, that letter, the box itself had me dizzy with speculation and suspicion. I couldn’t know everything but I could know more. To do that I’d have to find the person I’d given up on because he’d given up on me. I had tried to talk myself out of it, reasoning that if he cared at all, he knew where I was. But I kept going back to the letter and not so much to what was in it, but that Ruby had put it on top—and not to give me the money, of that I was sure. Those bills folded flat had not been touched. That had to be Ruby’s doing. She could have pocketed the money, destroyed the envelope. Instead she’d left it for me, a bread crumb. I did not want to be in the dark anymore, like Ruby said. That was no way to live.