Better Left Buried (25 page)

“Tom stabbed Charity because he was jealous of Dad?”

Joan shrugged. “Jealous of Dad, angry with Charity—who knows? The fact of the matter was Tom had gone after Charity before. This was just an escalation. We went home and all your father kept saying was how he’d never forgive himself if something happened to Harmony. You girls have always been close and he saw a lot of you in her. Charity could defend herself to a point, but a three-year-old didn’t stand a chance. Your father went back to their house that night. I begged him to stay out of it, to call your Uncle Jim, but he didn’t want to get the police involved. He tucked you in and left. Charity had already taken off with Harmony in the back seat of Tom’s car. Your father didn’t know it at the time, but she was in a ditch not far from Reston Memorial by the time he got to their house. Your uncle called me to let me know what happened. Your father and Tom had a run-in. They got into a fist fight, not your father’s doing, by the way. He’d have never started something like that. The police found blood and the neighbors reported seeing our car there. Your father being a suspect was a formality. He just happened to be the last person to see Tom before he left.”

“What about the car? If Charity put Tom’s car in the ditch, how’d he leave?” Brea
didn’t mention that his car was still in the garage of the house at 6 Maple.

“
He hitchhiked, most likely. That was a popular way of getting around back then. Someone mentioned seeing a man matching Tom’s description hitching that night. It’s in your uncle’s report, but no one said they picked him up. He could’ve taken the bus to the Greyhound station for all I know. No one’s seen or heard from him since.”

No one that she knew of, at least.

“And that was it?”

“More or less.
We did what we could for Charity afterward, but there was no helping her. Call it the beginning of the end. She started drinking more, partying, and going out to bars. She was with a different guy every night and then started in with the drugs. Harmony went to foster care for a while and Charity and I grew apart. I mean, what kind of mother shuns her own daughter?”

Brea shook her head.
“The kind that’s been beaten and stabbed, maybe? How come none of this was in the papers?”

“Uncle Jim kept as much of what happened out of the news as he could, in part t
o keep our family out of things, but also to see if he could flush Tom out. He knew if the stabbing was made public, Tom would stay gone.”

“He stayed gone anyway.” Brea unfastened her seat belt. “And Dad left, too.”

“The pressure was too much for him. A town as small as Reston, even the stuff that doesn’t make the news is news, you know? Your father lost his job and no one else would hire him. He said he had to leave, to get a fresh start. For what it’s worth, he wanted us to go with him. I just couldn’t leave my family. Grandma and Grandpa weren’t doing well and if we left, Uncle Jim would be alone. He wasn’t equipped to take care of them.”

“So rather than Uncle Jim
being by himself, totally his choice, by the way, you let me grow up without my father? Is that why you’ve been trying to keep Harmony and I apart all these years? You didn’t want me to find out about all this?”

“No.” Her mother turned to her. “I don’t want you around Harmony because I didn’t want you caught up in her mess. I didn’t want you in trouble like the kind that you’re in right now. This car business, it’s the tip of the iceberg. Don’t think because we had this talk, because of what happened, that you’re anywhere near off the hook. I meant what I said, Brea. This is the last straw.
I’ll get you a full-time police escort if I have to. I swear. Harmony’s dangerous and I can’t believe you still don’t see that. I don’t blame her, not entirely. Her mother is like a natural disaster. If it were up to me, Harmony would’ve been sent to Midtown years ago. At least there, I know she’ll be away from you. That family has been sliding down the gullet of a sink hole for years, Brea, and I’m not about to let them take us down with them.”

It was sunrise by the time Harmony arrived at 6 Maple Avenue, the only place she could think to go. The dilapidated house looked as depressed as she felt and it leaned at an awkward pitch as if a strong wind might blow it down.

There were boards on some of the windows and
doors, but nothing solid enough to keep anyone out. They looked more meant to support things structurally until the house was knocked down. The swing she’d seen in so many photographs creaked back and forth in the breeze. She limped toward it. For somewhere she’d supposedly never been, no place had ever felt more like home. She sat on the edge of the front porch with her legs hanging over the side. Her shoes had rubbed her feet raw from running and then walking through the woods to avoid being seen as she made the miles-long trek across town. She pulled off her sneakers and peeled her right sock away from the ruptured blister that held the cotton with its sticky fluid and blood. There was no way she could put her shoes back on, so she took off the other sock and went inside barefoot.

A fine layer of dust and mold coated everything in the exposed living room and there were footprints on the floor.
Someone had recently been there, maybe her mother or one of Winslow’s workers. Maybe someone worse. Harmony set her purse on the kitchen table and sifted through the dozen or so pill bottles she had confiscated from her mother, looking for her pocket knife at the bottom of her bag. If squatters had been staying there, she’d be ready when they came back.

Several damp
boxes sat on the table, their lids open and their contents spread out. There were old papers, mail, and photos that stuck together. The happier shots confirmed what she suspected, that she had repressed her childhood memories and not all of them were bad. Looking them over, it could have been anyone’s family smiling and playing. The fact that she was in most of them meant nothing. She couldn’t recall a single one of those days.

The
dirty linoleum radiated cold through her feet and she shivered, setting down a picture of her father and deciding to see what else had been left behind. She wandered down the hallway and glanced into her old bedroom before heading into the master.

The closet door
s were open and there were both men’s and women’s clothes inside. The wide void in the center told of things that either her parents had taken with them or had been stolen since they left. Harmony lifted a red plaid shirt to her nose and breathed in stale air and dust. She had wanted, despite everything, to remember her father’s smell. She took the shirt off the hanger, put it on, and rolled up the sleeves before going to one of the dressers to look for socks.

The
top drawers were empty, except for one. She grabbed a pair of women’s dress socks, put them on, and looked through the complicated knot of tangled hosiery to see if there was anything else inside. One of the pantyhose was stuck on something and she couldn’t yank it free. She set the drawer on the bed and followed the snag to the drawer’s false bottom. She pushed as hard as she could on the corner, forcing the bottom to tilt, and dumped out what had been hidden beneath it. Her eyes filled with tears as she saw more Polaroids of her mother, beaten and broken. With them was a journal.

She
dusted off the teal leather cover, terrified to open it. For all of the times she’d wanted answers, being faced with them was another matter. She turned to the first page, dated 1992, the year before she was born.

The handwriting was a cleaner, loopier version of her mother’s now almost illegible scratch. Most of the entries were dated
and the book was nearly full, the well-worn pages frayed at the edges, smelling like cigarette smoke. She slid between the queen size bed’s dusty covers to stay warm while reading her mother’s life story.

I never thought dropping Joan’s car off at the garage would have landed me a date. She thinks I’m crazy for going out, alone, with someone I just met, but everyone has to start somewhere. Even her and Kurt. Tom took me to the drive-ins to see Jurassic Park and some other movie, though I couldn’t tell you a thing about either of them. We parked behind the snack stand. There’s not a whole lot of movie watching going on from back there.

A chain of connected hearts was drawn across the page, the kind a girl might sketch, daydreaming about some bright future.

Harmony remembered when she felt the same
way about Adam, who, conveniently, also worked at a garage. She hadn’t known that when she met him, though she guessed it from the grease stains under his fingernails. No matter how much she denied it, she was following in her mother’s footsteps—more so since Adam had hit her.

The fact that her mother was friends with Joan wasn’t a secret, at least not to her. She
never told Brea that the two had been friends because it seemed that whatever had happened ended with bad blood between them, the kind of thing Brea would’ve gotten in trouble asking about. Her mother had more than a few things to say about Joan when she was mind-erasingly wasted.

Harmony had felt bad,
keeping the secret, but over time it just became a thing she and Brea didn’t talk about. She convinced herself years ago that not talking about something wasn’t the same as lying.

Her life depended on that.

She skimmed the next several pages, reading every other sentence in an attempt at getting to the meat of her mother’s mundane confessions. There were more dates, more hearts, a drawing of a daisy plucked of half its petals that said, “He loves me. He loves me not.” Two months went by before the lovesick girl sentiment faded, revealing a fear-stricken version of her mother in an entry that started with the words “I’m pregnant”.

It had been easy for Brea to blame Harmony for all that had happened because it’s what her mother wanted to hear—that she was, in fact, again, blameless. Climbing into the passenger’s side of Jaxon’s Jeep, she couldn’t help rehashing the inventory of lies that had Harmony on trial in her mind. She tried to focus on their years of friendship, but circled back to the fact that if her uncle wasn’t a cop, she’d have been arrested more than once.

The fact that Harmony had gone so far as to drug Lance to take his car said as much about her
worsening condition as the knife had. She was, as everyone had been trying to tell her, out of control.

Brea flipped down the visor and shook her head at her ref
lection. Her reddish brown hair was still wet from the shower and the dark circles hollowed her eyes. She pulled her hair back and sighed.

Jaxon looked perfect. He could’ve been a model in his hooded s
weatshirt and dark washed jeans. He smelled even better.

She felt awkward by comparison.

He put on his seatbelt, restraining a wide grin and the obvious urge to say something.

“What?”
Brea slammed the visor back into place.

“Did you really steal a car?”

Damn small towns.

“No, Jaxon. I did
not
steal a car.”

“You borrowed it, right?” The ends of his ear-to-ear smile curled up even farther as he backed
out of the driveway. “You know if you’re
that
desperate to get your license, I’ll teach you how to drive the Jeep.” It was a kind offer wrapped in an insult. She gave him a playful punch in the arm. “Harmony again?”

She nodded. Some things went without saying and th
e fact that she’d been cast as a sheepish follower had only ever worked in her favor. Even Jaxon displaced the blame. “How did you hear?”

“My father.
Ken Phillips moonlights as a freelance roofer. He’s working on the new development.”

Phillips
was the name of the wiry cop who had restrained Adam.

“And how did my name come up?”

“Remember the blue F150?” He was talking about the man he waved to when they’d been parked in front of Charity’s old house.

“Yeah.”

“This guy named Rick owns it. He mentioned us being at the house to Ken, the cop, and Harmony’s name came up. Ken put two and two together and figured he better tell my father what’s going on. He called this morning.”

“Are you in trouble?”

“Trouble? No, but I can tell you we’re not going anywhere near that house again.”

“What did he say, exactly?”

“I don’t know, for sure. Apparently they were looking for Harmony.”

“
Were?
” Brea clued in on the word that indicated they might have found her.

“I guess the guy whose car
she borrowed,” he made air quotes with his fingers, “dropped the charges. She’s off the hook, but Ken still wanted to let my father know to be on the lookout.”

“For what?”

“For Harmony being at the house, or something. I don’t know.”

“What would it matter? He doesn’t own the place.”

“He will. Charity called him yesterday to negotiate the purchase price.”

First she sold Harmony up the river to Midtown,
and then she sells her house.