Break the Skin

Also by

LEE MARTIN

River of Heaven

The Bright Forever

Turning Bones

Quakertown

From Our House

The Least You Need to Know

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2011 by Lee Martin

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com

CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Martin, Lee, 1955-
Break the skin : a novel / Lee Martin. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
I. Title.
PS3563.A724927B74 2011
813’.54—dc22
2011003329

eISBN: 978-0-307-71677-4

Jacket design by Jennifer O’Connor
Jacket photograph by Lyn Hughes/Corbis

v3.1

For Baby, who spoke to me from her heart

My steel toes start kickin’

My new tattoo just ain’t stickin’

You’ve got to break the skin

Take the needle just stick it in

—
WATERSHED
, “Black Concert T-Shirt”

Contents

Cover

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Laney

Miss Baby

Laney

Miss Baby

Laney

Miss Baby

Laney

Miss Baby

Laney

Miss Baby

Laney

Miss Baby

Acknowledgments

About the Author

LANEY

December 2009
MT. GILEAD, ILLINOIS

T
he police came for me in the middle of the night. Two officers: one tall and slope-shouldered, the other big-bellied. They walked into the Walmart where I worked, and after speaking to the shift supervisor, they came to my register and the tall one said, “You’re Elaine Volk, aren’t you? We asked you a few questions once before. Remember?”

Of course I remembered. Questions about where I was on a certain morning in May.
Home, asleep
, I’d told them, and
No, I didn’t hear any shots
.

Now a few customers who had been about to push their carts to my checkout line were hesitating. I gave them a grin in hopes that they’d think everything was all right, but I knew it wasn’t. I said to the officers, “I’m Laney.”

My voice sounded strange to me, too loud for my soft-spoken nature. I was the sort most folks didn’t give a second look—a scrawny thing with short curly hair, a nothing kind of girl with no hips to speak of and arms and legs as thin as ropes. I looked like I might turn to dust, which is what I wished I could have done just then. I was nineteen, and as I stood there waiting to see what was going to happen next, I felt how far I was from the girl I’d always been—Little Laney Volk, as ordinary as bread from the wrapper, nothing to take note of at all unless, that is, you could get her to sing. Then, my mother said, the angels would fall from the sky, struck dumb with envy. As a favor to her, I sometimes sang at the
New Hope Free Methodist Church, and my senior year in high school, I played Marian Paroo in
The Music Man
. I didn’t know what to say when after performances people told me I’d put a lump in their throats and tears in their eyes with my renditions of “Goodnight, My Someone” and “Till There Was You.” My director said I should go on to college and study voice and musical theatre.
There were prettier girls I could have cast
, she told me,
but none of them could sing like you
. Much to my mother’s disappointment, I was too shy, too afraid to leave New Hope, too worried that in a bigger place I’d find out I was what I’d suspected all along—no one, no one at all.
Oh, Laney
, my mother said.
That just breaks my heart
.

Sometimes, like that night when the police came, I felt that girl—that Laney I’d been, scared and shy—watching me, hoping beyond hope that I might find my way back to her. That night, though, I knew I was leaving her behind. I knew she couldn’t save me.

The police officers wanted me to come with them. They said they had more questions. “Let’s go back to wherever it is you keep your coat and purse,” the big-bellied officer said. “Then we’ll drive uptown to the station.”

It was snowing outside, a hard, wet snow slanting down through the sodium lights in the parking lot, but I could still make out the flash of the red lights on the police car. I felt a shiver go up my spine.

“All right,” I said, because there was nothing else I could say, at least not to the police officers who were waiting for me to come with them. I wouldn’t say,
I know why you’re here
. I wouldn’t tell them that my boyfriend, Lester, after a summer of fretting, had taken off. He was somewhere I didn’t know—him and that silly derby hat he always wore; him and his gap-toothed smile that could melt my heart. His house on Route 130 was locked up tight. He’d left everything behind in September, and I hadn’t heard from him, not a word. I wouldn’t tell the police officers that. I wouldn’t say,
Go talk to Delilah Dade
. They’d already done that once. They’d come to her and said they’d heard she had a pistol and people had seen her wave it about once in a public place. Did she still have that gun?
“No,” she told them. “That gun belonged to my old boyfriend, Bobby May. He took it with him when he left me high and dry.” Would she mind if they searched her trailer? “Look all you want,” she told them, “but you won’t find any gun.” And, indeed, their search didn’t turn up a thing.

That was back in the summer. Now it was almost Christmas, and here they were again. This time I was afraid they wouldn’t stop asking questions until they had what they needed to know.

I did what they said. I let them follow me to the break room at the back of the store, and I picked up my coat and my purse. Then I had to walk back through the store, all the way down that long aisle, my head bowed, a police officer on either side of me, the wet soles of their shoes squeaking on the floor. I knew everyone was watching—the other Walmart associates and the shoppers—but I didn’t raise my face to look at them or make any attempt to say this was all a mistake. I just kept walking.

Then, at the front of the store, I glanced up and saw Delilah, who had taken over at my register. We’d sworn we’d never say a word, and now she was giving me a hard look—a look to kill.

She was the pretty one, the one with the curve to her hips and that ash-blond hair that fell to her shoulders in soft waves. She was nearly twice my age, the big sister I’d never had. Since Daddy died when I was twelve, it’d just been Mother and me, and as I got older and it became clear that I had this gift for singing but was afraid to do anything with it, we’d lived with the tension of her wishing I’d be more forward and have more confidence in my talent, until finally I couldn’t take it anymore, the little ways she had of making it plain that I was disappointing her.

When I went to work at Walmart and fell in with Delilah, I didn’t think twice when she asked me to move in with her at the Shady Acres Trailer Park in Mt. Gilead. It was only eight miles up Route 50 from New Hope, but it was far enough from my mother to convince me I could make a life of my own and not have to spend my time feeling all
down in the mouth because I couldn’t live up to what she wanted for me.
All right, then
, she said when I told her I was moving out.
You just go
.

I wanted to be like Delilah—independent and tough as nails—but that was no excuse for what I’d done to make the police have an interest in me. The time had come when I’d have to give them answers.

The police car was parked at the curb, its lights still swirling. I hunched my shoulders and stepped out into the snowy night. I let the officers lead me to the car. The slope-shouldered one opened the door to the backseat, and I got in. The snow was coming so hard I could barely make out the shapes of people moving inside the store. Just a few minutes before, I’d been one of them, but now there wasn’t a sign, no sign at all, that I’d ever set foot in the place.

I closed my eyes, and I let myself be scared. Scared to death.

AT THE POLICE STATION
, I sat across a table from the big-bellied officer in a room with no windows. From time to time, I could hear footsteps in the hall outside the closed door. The fluorescent lights hurt my eyes. Not long ago, someone had eaten fried food in this room, and the hot-grease smell turned my stomach.

The tall, slope-shouldered officer paced back and forth behind me, calling me “honey.” “Honey,” he said, “why don’t you tell us what you know?” He reminded me of my daddy and how, when he was still alive, he’d say something in a way that suggested he loved me and yet was disappointed at the same time. “We’ll call your mama,” the slope-shouldered officer said. “Maybe that’ll make it easier for you.”

It pained me to think of Mother, rousted from bed in the middle of the night to come to the police station. I knew how she’d look at me, her face all caved in and sad, and I could hear her say,
Oh, Laney
. I shut my eyes and saw the bright lines sizzling at the edge of my vision, a migraine coming on. I thought I’d put them behind me for good, but now they’d come back.

“No, don’t call anyone,” I said. “Can I have some Tylenol? My head hurts.”

Sometime later, Mother would raise a stink because the police had no right to question me like that, not without a lawyer being there, but at the time I didn’t think of that. I was thinking instead about something else Daddy had told me when I was a little girl: Eventually everybody had to answer for the things they’d done.

I knew it was true, but I couldn’t bring myself to start at the beginning with the story of how Mother and I had a falling-out last year in January because after
The Music Man
, when she was all excited because my director said I was so talented and I should go to college, I dropped out of high school. Just stopped going and wouldn’t go back no matter how much Mother yelled and cried and told me I was throwing away everything God gave me. Just couldn’t take the pressure of having to meet all those expectations, which seemed beyond my reach.

Working at Walmart seemed like something I could handle while I figured out what else I wanted to do—and then Delilah said, “Why don’t you come and live with me?”

There we were, two women who’d never found a happy place to be until we had each other. When I was with her, I felt like anything could happen and it’d be all right. She even let me shoot that pistol she had—yes, it was hers, and not Bobby May’s like she’d told the police—just target shooting out in the country, and I thought, Okay, then. I never thought I’d do something like that, but just look at me. I had no idea who I was becoming, but I was willing to find out.

Delilah was on the other side of Bobby May and trying to figure out whether he’d been her last chance at love, or whether he’d been someone she had to get past so she could better know the kind of man she was looking for, a man who would treat her fine forever, a man who would make sure she had a good life.

Sometimes at night we sat out on the deck in front of the trailer and looked up at the stars, and before too long, she started in with the story
of how her daddy left when she was just a little girl, and then a year later, her mother’s car got stalled one night on the B&O Railroad tracks on Whittle Avenue in Mt. Gilead, and the train that was coming couldn’t stop. An eyewitness came forward, the owner of the B&L Liquor Store at the corner of Whittle and Cherry. He was looking out the plate-glass window about the time that freight train was coming into town from the east, curling past the International Shoe Factory, cutting its speed but still coming at a pretty decent clip. “I saw a Chevy Impala,” the man said when he testified at the coroner’s inquest. “Yes, that one,” he said when the coroner showed him a picture of a mangled white Chevy Impala. “I saw that woman drive it down Whittle, and she got up on the crossing, wedged in between the guard arms, and she just stopped. Then she cut the engine. I saw that plain as day. She shut off the engine, and she let go of the wheel. She didn’t look one way or the other. She just stared straight ahead. The engineer blasted his whistle again and again. I heard the wheels screeching on the rails as he tried to shut that train down, but it was too late.”