Burying the Honeysuckle Girls
Read Burying the Honeysuckle Girls Online
Authors: Emily Carpenter
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2016 Emily Carpenter
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle
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, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781503935013
ISBN-10: 1503935019
Cover design by Danielle Christopher
For my family of men—all great champions of women.
Contents
Chapter One
Saturday, September 15, 2012
Mobile, Alabama
For a solid year, I felt like I was living my life underground. Suffocated first by the weight of the pills and, after that, by the people who helped me beat them. But as I turned onto my father’s winding, crushed-shell driveway, I had the sensation that—after clawing my way through bones and fossils, roots and rocks—I’d finally broken free. Cracked the bright surface of earth.
And, holy shit, was it ever bright.
The Alabama sun blinded me as it glinted off a long line of cars snaking down both sides of the drive. I stomped on my worn brakes, and my ancient car shuddered to a stop. I shaded my eyes against the glare and peered toward the big house at the end. Maybe Molly Robb was hosting her garden club. Since I was gone and no longer a potential embarrassment, she’d probably started having it here rather than at the less-than-palatial brick ranch she shared with my brother, Wynn.
Or maybe they were holding a fund-raiser for Wynn’s campaign. I knew he’d been planning a run for governor next year, taking advantage of my dad’s political influence while he still could. But to have something like that at Dad’s house? Surely he was too sick for guests by now. According to his doctor, Alzheimer’s doesn’t plateau this late in the game; it just continues its relentless downward trajectory until every last identifiable piece of the person is gone.
And as far as this gathering being some kind of a homecoming celebration for me? Not a chance. There wasn’t going to be any party for me, not after this past year. Not to mention I was about a week and a half shy of my recommended release date, so no one was even expecting me.
I inched as far as I could up the drive and wedged my car into a half space between a Cadillac and a Range Rover. I could see the house clearly from my spot: white boards and black shutters, peeling in the afternoon haze. The low-country cottage, built in the early 1900s by my father’s people, was protected by acres of marsh and woods on the east bank of the muddy, wide Dog River. I could smell the dank, salty air through the vents in my car, and, as I sat there, a cloud blotted out the sun.
I’d grown up on this handful of acres. Lived here, on and off after graduation. On, when Dad and I were on good terms and I was clean. Off, all the other times. I’d always considered it home, and, standing in the drive, I felt my gut twist. Wynn and Molly Robb were letting the place fall into disrepair. It looked spooky now in the half-light, framed in weeds and overgrown azaleas.
I hoped they were keeping a closer eye on Dad.
I climbed out of the Jetta and slammed the door. The thick, coastal Mobile heat wrapped its arms around me, welcoming me back to the land of the living, to my childhood home. I filled my lungs with the scent of river.
I could do this. I might be shaky and fragile, but I wasn’t the same person who’d been trundled off to rehab almost a year ago. I blinked away the images of metal chairs circled on a coffee-stained rug in a sodium-lit room. The women filing in, broken, haggard. Numb from their inability to save themselves. I guess this time they had scared me. For some reason, I’d finally seen myself in their faces.
Walking on tiptoe so the heels of my new boots wouldn’t sink into the shells, I started up the drive. I’d bought the boots with a gift card from the women at the halfway house, and they’d given me a little surge of confidence when I’d tried them on in the outlet store an hour ago. Of course, I’d forgotten about the stupid shells.
I hadn’t taken twelve tiptoe steps up the drive—actual steps with my feet, not the proverbial AA kind—when I saw something that, in a split second, sent me hurtling back twenty-five years, to when I was just a little girl.
A red raven.
The huge bird perched on the newel post of the banister that flanked the wide front steps. Glossy, black tail feathers dipping low, curved beak bobbing up at the sky, the thing was twice as big as a crow. Closer to the size of a hawk. Every few seconds, it stretched out its wings, and on its feathers I thought I saw streaks of red flash in the sunlight.
I squeezed my hands into fists, shut my eyes, and took a deep breath—my head vibrating with the heat and humidity and smell of the river.
I am not my mother.
The honeysuckle girl isn’t real.
I do not have gold dust on my fingertips.
There’s no such thing as a red raven.
I spoke the words aloud into the hot air, just for good measure, the way I’d been doing for months back at the halfway house. Firm and clear. Like I believed them. When I opened my eyes, my breath whooshed out shakily. There was no trace of red on the raven, not anywhere that I could see. It was just a normal, everyday black bird, watching me with blank, black eyes.
I unclenched my fists, took another breath. Coming home might be stressful, but I could handle it without the old coping mechanisms. I didn’t need them anymore—the gold or the red raven or any of the other things I used to pretend to see. It hadn’t been easy to let them go—they’d morphed and taken on lives of their own—but now I had the affirmations. I didn’t have to play these old childhood games. I could be present and handle my life like a normal person.
The bird spread its wings again and lifted off the newel post, and I moved to the steps and touched the spot where it had been. I looked closer at the post for a trail of gold dust left under my fingers. There was nothing. No raven, no gold. Everything was going to be okay. I just needed to trust the affirmations and myself. Keep moving forward. Let the process carry me.
I climbed the steps and stopped, wondering whether I should knock on the door or just walk in. It’d been only a year since I’d been here, but still. It had been a long one. A long, grueling, hope-sucking year. Three months in a spectacular oxy-Percocet-anything-pill-shaped flameout. Three more in rehab, another six (almost) in the halfway house. A hell of a year.
It was a wonder I wasn’t seeing purple, polka-dotted elephants too.
I pushed open the door and blinked in the light. The crystal chandelier and every lamp and sconce within eyesight blazed. Weird. Bright lights set Dad off, making him irritable and confused. I stopped and let the heavy oak door thunk shut behind me, then clicked off the row of light switches, dousing the room in shadow. I dropped my purse on the antique needlepoint bench.
Low voices drifted in from the back of the house. If it was a party, it was a quiet one. No music. No laughter. I felt a spike of fear. Had he died and no one told me? I stepped into the long center hallway and noticed the spray of carefully arranged roses, lilies, and hydrangea on the round, marble-topped table. Funeral flowers. I couldn’t take my eyes off them.
My sister-in-law, Molly Robb, entered the far end of the hall from the living room, and I stiffened in surprise. She wore a beige, draped pantsuit—clothes a fiftysomething woman might wear, not a thirty-four-year-old. Certainly not her usual yoga pants and tank top. Her hair looked freshly cut and straightened. She moved toward me, arms outstretched.
“Althea, what are you doing here?” She clasped me to her bony frame. I nearly gagged at the smell of her unfamiliar perfume mingling with the flowers’ scent.
“I left a message . . .” My voice died. I had called my father, but he’d never called me back. It hadn’t surprised me at the time. Some days I knew he just couldn’t face talking to me. “Is he—did he die?” I could barely get the words out. Surely Molly Robb would have called if something had happened. I knew she’d been more than a little pissed at me when I left, but at the end of everything, we were still family.
Molly Robb pulled back, her mouth forming a perfect, lipsticked
O
. “Honey, no. No.” She hugged me again, tighter this time, and relief flooded me. I clung to her.
“God, you scared me,” I said.
She didn’t smile, just pushed me out of the hug, squinted into my eyes. The pupil check. I was used to it. Then she looked down, her gaze flicking over my faded black jeans and shapeless gray T-shirt, and frowned. “A lot has changed while you were gone, Althea.”
“What’s going on?”
She took my arm with both her birdlike hands. “He’s not doing well, Althea, so Wynn and I moved in. We thought we’d give everyone an opportunity—” She looked back into the house. “He doesn’t recognize a soul.”
“You should’ve called me.”
“We thought it was best to let you finish out—”
I didn’t wait to hear any more, just pulled out of her grasp and headed down the hall. When I stepped into the living room, I stopped dead, struck by the sheer number of bodies. People were everywhere. Some I recognized from my childhood days or from high school. There were friends of my father’s who hadn’t come around in ages. One elderly man, mottled and yellowed, leaning on a deer-antler walking stick, I knew—that would be my father’s friend Mr. Northcut.
He was older than Dad by a good twenty years, and he’d always been a kind of mentor to him. A rich mentor, who’d funded Dad’s run for attorney general. Personally, I’d never liked the guy. He gave off the unmistakable scent of old-South patriarchal entitlement and never had more than two words to say to me.
He nodded at me now, but I turned away to scan the room so I wouldn’t have to engage. In response, a thrum of panic vibrated through me. Names and faces that belonged to different places, different eras of my life, swirled together in a disconcerting mash-up. I wasn’t ready for this.
Then I spotted, with a painful jolt, somebody entirely unexpected. A face I knew well, even though I hadn’t seen him in . . . over a decade, probably. Gentle eyes, irresistibly warm smile. Perpetually sunburned nose, like most of the men around here who spent three-quarters of their lives on boats.
Jay.
He was talking to old Mrs. Kemper from next door, nodding and laughing, and I watched him, hypnotized. He looked exactly the same as he did ten—no, eleven—years ago. Maybe even better. I’d always been a sucker for his face—from the first time I saw him across Ms. Huffman’s crowded second-grade classroom—but not because it was the most handsome. It was more the way everything fit together, an evolutionary one-in-a-million that just did me in. It killed me when I was seven—although it took me ten years to admit it—and it was killing me right now.
Damn it. Seeing him again gave me the sensation of having my heart mauled by a pack of wild dogs, which was less than enjoyable, to say the least. I’d successfully steered clear of him once we’d graduated from high school, then heard he moved up North somewhere. He must be visiting his parents. Or had moved back. Fantastic. I looked away quickly, tried to melt into the room.
I finally found my father seated in a wing chair by the back wall of windows that looked out over the porch and the sloping bank of grass to the river beyond. Somebody, probably Molly Robb, had dressed him in a crisp, white shirt and blue blazer. But his freshly shaven face was slack, his blue eyes unfocused, and he looked so much older than his seventy-three years. Propped up by two chintz pillows wedged on either side of him, he balanced a small dog—it looked like a Pomeranian or a Chihuahua, maybe—on his knees.
The dog brought me up short. My dad was a Lab man. Ever since I could remember, we’d had a string of chocolates, all named Folly. I could still picture him, standing on the front porch almost exactly a year ago, watching me leave. He hadn’t hugged me, just kept his hand on the last Folly’s head, moving it in measured circles.
This new dog set off alarm bells in my brain.
I squatted by his chair, my face a little lower than his. He looked down at me, blank blue eyes and trembling lips, and I mustered a smile. The dog stared at me with its bulging eyes that for some reason reminded me of Molly Robb.
“Dad.”
His expression didn’t change.
I put a hand on his knee, and the little dog growled. “I’m home,” I said. He said nothing, but he didn’t look away, so I kept going. “I’m so glad to see you.”
I saw his pupils constrict and flash with recognition. “Althea.” He said my name fast, like it had produced a bad taste in his mouth and he was trying to spit it out.
“That’s right,” I said, trying to sound bright. I patted his knee and managed to keep my eyes on him, instead of checking to make sure I hadn’t left any gold dust behind on his pants.
“Get out,” he said.
My heart contracted, and I inhaled sharply. Looked into his eyes and smiled, tried to connect with him. To remind him who I was.
I’m your daughter. I’m Althea. I’m not Trix. I’m not my mother—
“Get out,” he repeated, so low I barely heard him.
I rocked back on my heels but kept my head down, reminding myself that I’d heard those words from him before. A couple of times, in fact, before he’d sent me packing for good. He was sick. He didn’t remember all our conversations—that I’d done everything I’d promised to do. That he’d said I could come back, stay here until I found a job and saved some money. I took a deep breath and reminded myself that the man before me wasn’t
my father
, exactly.
“Dad, I’m back.” I didn’t add
from rehab
. If he didn’t remember, I sure wasn’t going to remind him. I smiled again. “I’m doing good. Really good.”
“Is it your birthday?”
“No. This is a party for you.”
“You’re thirty.”
I shook my head, still trying to smile. It was getting harder. I could feel the tears I hadn’t let myself cry at the halfway house threatening to spill out. “In a few weeks. I’m thirty on September thirtieth. Remember? Thirty on thirty?”
As I said it, I felt a chill run down my spine. Even though every psychologist and therapist I’d ever seen had assured me my mother had been ill and had had no right to scare a five-year-old like that, I still remembered everything she’d said to me the night of her own thirtieth birthday, the last night I saw her alive.
“Wait for her. For the honeysuckle girl. She’ll find you, I think, but if she doesn’t, you find her.”
My father swiped my hand off his knee and shrank back into the chair.