His beat-up car isn’t out front. She pulls up and parks. The engine and radio give way to chirping birds and humming insects, and as she approaches, excited barks from Otis inside the house. She tries the door. Locked.
Shuttered. Shattered.
Otis barks and then whimpers for a while as she waits on the porch, but then quiets. She pictures him on the other side of the door, nose on his paws.
“It’s okay, boy. I’m not going anywhere. I’m here.”
She settles into the rocking chair with the bloody hem of her nightie draped over the gash in her knee.
She remembers a gray-haired woman with bloodstained white pumps.
December, up Macon way.
The pastor who’d answered her knock that day wasn’t at all what she’d been expecting. He reminded her of her grandfather, with a pot belly and a mostly bald head.
“You need a referral, ma’am?”
“I . . . I, um . . .”
“It’s all right. You come right around back to my living quarters and I’ll get you started and on your way.”
He sat her down in a parlor filled with comfortable antiques and books. She tried to eavesdrop on the phone call he placed from the next room, but his voice was muffled.
After a couple of minutes, he reappeared with a glass of sweet tea. “Someone is on the way. I have to be at choir practice in ten minutes, but you can wait right here for her.”
His eyes were kind. No judgment. He’d wished her well. “I have a spare room upstairs,” he’d added. “In case you need a place to spend the night when . . .”
When it’s over.
Oh, how she longed for it to be over.
What-ifs jabbed her as she sat stiffly on the nubby green davenport. She sipped the tea but there was too much sugar for her liking, so she set the glass on a coaster and clasped her hands in her lap.
On the bookshelves, modern novels were sprinkled among dog-eared classics. Sue Kaufman’s Diary of a Mad Housewife alongside Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
She thought of Charlene, married to Gary. Gary, burning his draft card. Travis, burning crosses.
Was this the courageous choice, or the cowardly one?
A middle-aged woman showed up to drive her to another town. She had a towering blond beehive and a deeply tanned face, and had called Melody “hun.” She’d brought along her knitting, pink yarn poking out of a bag on the front seat between them. They’d made small talk, sharing no personal details—not even names. Unnecessary, the pastor had said. Easier that way. Safer.
They arrived at a little house tucked at the end of a magnolia-bordered lane. Melody thought of the Brothers Grimm, and how the cannibalistic crone had lured Hansel and Gretel, disguising her lair with sweet confections.
Two vehicles were parked out front. One was a pickup truck with Georgia plates. The other had North Carolina plates and was occupied. A redhead, who appeared to be in her early thirties, sat in the driver’s seat, smoking a cigarette and reading a movie magazine. Melody sat huddled on the front seat as the two women exchanged longtime acquaintance pleasantries.
“How’s that little grandbaby of yours doing?” the redhead asked Beehive.
“Gettin’ bigger every day. Already outgrew the sweater I made her, so I’m knittin’ a new one for Christmas.”
Melody had stared down at the pink yarn and thought about the baby inside her and wondered how far along might be too far along for . . . this.
There were no rules regulating the procedure itself, only laws making it illegal. And she knew nothing about obstetrics, beyond basic birds and bees information.
After some time—twenty minutes, an hour, maybe several—the screen door creaked open. Redhead closed her magazine, propped her cigarette in the dashboard ashtray, and got out of the car.
The woman in the doorway appeared to be in her late forties, maybe early fifties, with a weathered face and an unkempt, lopsided salt-and-pepper bun. She wore a wedding band, a house dress, and white pumps. Her arms were wrapped around her midsection as if she were cold, or in pain, or . . .
Bereft.
“All right, there, Dottie?”
“Always am, ain’t I?” the older woman told her escort, as her eyes met Melody’s. No tears. No shame. Nothing at all.
Chilled, Melody cast her own gaze downward, and saw that the woman’s leather shoes were spattered in blood.
The redhead had helped her into the passenger seat and driven her away.
Melody’s driver had turned to her. “You ready to go on in, hun?”
“Does it . . . hurt?”
“There’s a lot of things in this old world that hurt a whole lot worse.”
“I didn’t mean me, I meant . . . does it hurt the baby?”
She saw the woman wince behind her reassuring smile. “It’s all over real quick, that’s what I know.”
Melody closed her eyes, bowed her head and whispered, “I can’t.”
Inside Cyril’s house, Otis whines and scratches the door. Inside Melody’s belly, tiny feet and fists hammer as if to break free.
“Come on out,” she whispers. “Come now, and when your daddy gets back, he’ll take care of us. It’s going to be just the three of us, forever.”
She rocks the chair, cradling her unborn child and staring at the wisteria blooms dripping over the porch rail, until the sun rides high in a clear sky hung with puffy white clouds. Haint blue, Cyril calls it, like his front door and her parents’ porch ceiling and Travis’s eyes, too.
You couldn’t see the shade in the newspaper photo she’d found in his drawer, but their expression was vivid. Those eyes beamed with hatred, and were unashamed for it.
How could she never have seen him for what he truly was? Had she been blinded by . . .
Not love.
She’d never loved him, though she’d assumed she had, before she ever grasped what love was.
Travis had slipped so easily into her life that it would never have occurred to her that he didn’t belong there. Because women like Melody grow up and date suitable men from good families, with nice looks and perfect manners and enough money to buy a house and support a wife and children. Women like Melody hope that one of those will pick her to be his bride, and when he does, they say yes, just as their mothers and grandmothers had. Generations of women, saying yes . . .
“I want all your dreams to come true, Melody . . . a husband and children . . . a family, a home of your own . . .”
If she hadn’t come across the evidence in Travis’s drawer, would she have gone years, decades, without sensing it? Would they have raised a family and grown old together? Or would she have looked into those eyes of his one day and seen the truth?
Haint blue doesn’t always ward off evil. Sometimes, it harbors it.
Greg Martinez stops Gypsy in the hallway before her first class.
“Hey, there. You got away from me yesterday,” he says in his slightly Spanish-accented English, smiling down at her.
“The bell rang. Everyone got away. That’s what happens when school is over, you know?”
“Yeah, but most people don’t rush out like the devil is chasing them.”
“Maybe he was.” He crooks a dark brow, and she shrugs. “I just had some stuff to take care of at home.”
“What kind of stuff?”