Even before she begins to scream, I know I’ve lost her.
“Help!” Tatum throws her voice as high as it can go. “Help! Help!”
“Tatum…” I try, one last time, to reach her. But even as I start for the bed, Sophie steps in front of me. For a long moment, her eyes hold me there. And it’s in that moment that I know who this girl is—what she is. She’s their Kaycee.
She smiles. She draws a breath. For a second, she looks as if she might apologize. “Help! Help!” She’s only inches from my face. I can smell coffee on her breath.
Like dolls animated by the sound of her voice, the other girls begin to echo her. “Help! Help! Help!”
I burst through the door. I trip, running down the hall. I push through a swarm of descending nurses, careen off the reception desk and hurtle toward escape.
—
Help.
The word keeps echoing in my head, even when the clinic is far behind me.
The sun is huge, red, terrible: like a mouth opening to swallow the horizon.
A long-haul trucker blowing toward me leans on his horn before I realize I’ve drifted into his lane. I jerk the wheel and slam on the brakes as his horn blast rolls into silence.
I pull over for a bit, just to let my heartbeat catch up.
Help, help, help.
From the bottom of my bag, my phone lets out a few insistent beeps. I’ve missed another call. I thumb over to voicemail with shaking fingers.
Ms. Williams, this is Sheriff Kahn. I was hoping you could stop down at the station today, or give me a ring back. I got a complaint from the night manager over at the U-Pack, says there was some kind of scuffle and you disobeyed his order to stop your vehicle. The pictures of the fence look pretty bad, and he’s got security video, too. I’d like to hear your side of the story.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Condor comes to the door even before I’ve knocked.
“Jesus Christ! Come in, before you beat my door down.”
Maybe I did knock. My knuckles are raw-red and sore. My throat swollen as if I’ve been screaming. My mouth tastes medicinal. Vodka. Or whiskey.
I remember a bar, dimly, but I can’t haul the image into focus.
Hours are dropping away, siphoned into darkness.
I remember seeing two calls from TJ, my dad’s friend. I remember letting my phone ring and ring, letting the sound of it drown beneath the noise of the bar.
“What happened to you?” Condor says.
What’s happening to me?
“You lied to me,” I tell him. I count the drinks I must have had by the slur of my speech. Four maybe five maybe six.
“Sit down. You need some water. Sit.” He pilots me into an armchair, and the room slows its turning, like a merry-go-round reaching the end of its cycle. The living room, warm and comfortable, its cheapness buffed and brushed up by details everywhere—pictures of Hannah, framed photographs cluttering the walls, old books stacked high on the shelves—fills me with a sudden shyness. Condor’s living room is like a weather-beaten dock, and I am washed-up wreckage.
A glass cabinet filled with ornate feathers catches my eye and holds it there; silver, gold, purple, blue. As he returns with a glass of water and watches me finish it, he catches me staring.
“Fishing lures. Always have better luck if you make your own.”
The water has cleared my head, just a little. “Thank you. Where’s Hannah?”
“With her grandparents for the week.” He gestures for the glass. “I’ll get you some more.”
I can remember, now, leaving Dougsville, and finding a bar on my way home. I can remember the first drink but not the others. My stomach drops. I think of Misha’s pink shoes and how they ended up on the floor next to my bed after the bonfire in the woods. A sick feeling moves through me, like the world is tilting. “Something stronger,” I say. “Anything you got.”
“I don’t think you need it.”
“I’m telling you I do.” I make an effort to sharpen my words. “Come on, Condor. I’m fine. I can spit and hit my front porch.”
He makes me drink another water first, then opens a bottle of wine and pours me some into an old jam jar. He takes a seat across from me. He moves as if his body hurts.
“Well, what are we toasting?”
I can’t think of a single thing. “To Optimal,” I say, meaning it as a joke. But my voice breaks. “Those fuckers.”
“Those fuckers,” Condor repeats, solemnly, and touches my glass before drinking.
For a while we sit in silence, as the night passes through the room, and the occasional sweep of headlights on the main road cuts through his windows.
“My father’s dying,” I blurt out after a while. I didn’t even mean to say it. I didn’t come here to confess. Then again, I’m not sure why I came at all.
Condor’s hand tightens momentarily on his cup. “Fuck, Abby. I’m…” He trails off, and when he looks away I can see a muscle working in his jaw. “You’ve had some couple of days.”
I look down because looking at him only makes me want to cry, and wanting to cry makes me want to disappear. “I should be with my dad,” I say. “But I can’t. I couldn’t.”
Maybe I did come here to confess, because suddenly the urge to be understood is overwhelming. “I hated my father. I wished him dead all the time. I used to pray for it. He would send me to my room for hours to pray. Sometimes he’d lock me in a closet, because he knew I hated the dark, and he told me that sinners lived in darkness forever. And instead I would pray that he would drop dead of a heart attack or fall off a roof.”
“It’s not your fault, Abby,” Condor says.
“How do you know?” I take a sip to keep from choking. “Maybe there is a God. Maybe my prayers worked.”
“God doesn’t answer prayers like that. That isn’t what he hears,” Condor says quietly.
“What does he hear, then?”
He hesitates with his glass at his lips, watching me over the rim. “The little girl, alone, and frightened of the dark.”
He’s nice enough to look away, pretending he doesn’t notice that I’m on the verge of tears. He just sits there studying his glass, the walls and the ceiling, while I breathe through the urge to cry like the little girl I was then.
When I get it together I don’t risk looking at him. I focus instead on the square of rug between my feet. “Optimal’s been fattening the bottom line by dumping waste in the water supply,” I say. “Probably for years now. The tests came back and proved it.”
Condor stares at me. “They all said the water was safe.”
“They all lied.” I remember Kaycee and I once found a bees’ nest, abandoned, lying in the woods. She poked it with a stick until it caved in. Kaycee said the queen leaves her hive after laying her eggs and the children kill one another. This time nobody won. “It’s a nest. It’s all corrupt. Optimal, the local agencies, and some of the federal agents, too. They’re all in on it.”
“Money?” Condor asks.
“What else?” I say. But I can’t shake the thought of Lilian McMann, and her daughter posing naked in those ugly socks.
Those girls shouting in unison, Help, help, help. The word oozing from the corners of their pretty mouths.