Authors: Robin Wasserman
Eventually, though it never seemed possible, Eisenhower High School emptied its hallways for the summer and a lucky few, with a fanfare of halfhearted speeches and tossed caps, got to leave it for good. Jeremiah West was not among them, but – small consolation – at least got to join the rest of the team’s rising seniors in the ritual streaking across the stage.
Summer was, traditionally, too hot for traditions. Summer was for sitting on porches sipping lemonade – or talking wistfully of a time when summer meant sitting on porches sipping lemonade, when there were fewer bills to pay and no DVDs to watch, and of how in this mythical past, this rustic paradise of outhouses and unlocked doors, life had been good. Summer was when the gossip that had been fermenting all year was finally ready to pour. Tempers rose with the heat; grudges defrosted; things got interesting. This summer was no different, except that as August approached and blanched the town with its white heat and its memories of the killing day, the rumors took on a new intensity. It was as if the murders themselves had become Oleander tradition. Any argument, any lovers’ quarrel, any innocent encounter in the new drugstore, catty-corner to the old, carried the seeds of potential violence. Surely it was only a matter of time before one would bloom. People waited; people watched. People whispered: about the source of Mayor Mouse’s campaign funding, about the Tucks’ failing marriage and the way that girl of theirs wandered with no apparent supervision, turning up in the strangest places at all hours of day and night. They noted, with their communal eye, the way
that
man
looked at his stepdaughter Jule, who seemed always to be by his side. They knew the King girl had turned into a bigger Jesus nut than ever, as they knew about the restraining order Milo Ghent’s mother had taken out against his father and half brother – and about the way Daniel had taken to lurking in bushes, just to catch a forbidden glimpse.
They never stopped talking about the murders, but by the time summer had fully settled itself over the town, they’d learned to once again talk of other things, the pettier the better. Somehow, the town talked itself back to life.
They never talked of Cassandra Porter.
There had been no trial for the sole surviving Oleander killer. Cassandra Porter, who could not remember her crime, pleaded not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect. The DA offered a deal: conviction with a sentence of twenty years to life, to be served not in a maximum-security prison but the slightly cushier state mental hospital.
She supposed she should have wanted to fight. Her lawyer had explained: If it was true she’d lapsed into some kind of fugue state, an insanity with the life span of a fruit fly, then she was innocent. At least in the eyes of the law. (If, on the other hand, she’d purposefully squeezed the air out of Owen Tuck’s lungs… if she, Cassandra Porter, being of sound mind and body, had held the boy in her hands and ended him, with malice aforethought, for reasons her brain now contrived not to remember? She was, as they say, guilty as sin.) These were the issues her lawyer walked her through as she lay in a hospital bed recovering from the leap she couldn’t remember taking. Floating on a morphine cloud, dizzy with the pain of twelve broken bones, she nodded along, pretended to listen, and let her parents decide for her.
They had, in short order, decided to deliver her up to the criminal justice system, then pack their belongings and skip town. The Porters had settled with relatives in a faraway coastal city where they could pretend to whoever asked that their smart, successful daughter was off at boarding school – or perhaps that she’d never existed at all. Cass knew this because of the emails they sent, in lieu of calling or visiting or sending the packages of cookies and clean underwear the lawyer had repeatedly told them they were allowed. She knew this, but not the city to which they’d moved, the relatives with whom they were staying, or the address where they could be found.
No one told her what had happened to the house. She preferred to imagine it intact, her belongings stored away in the bedroom she’d lived in since she was three years old, each scrapbook, homework assignment, stuffed animal, memory filed in its proper place. Gathering dust, maybe. But still, somehow,
hers.
Impossible to imagine the house given over to strangers, the kitchen where she’d been planning to bake cupcakes for the student-council election given over to someone else’s TV dinners. The dining room where she would have filled out her neat stack of college applications crowded with someone else’s awkward Thanksgivings. The living room couch where she’d spent more than a few nights waiting, in vain, for Jeremiah West to take off her clothes or in any way indicate he hoped she would do so – cushioning some other, happier daughter, one with a future rather than just a past.
She tried not to think about that. As she tried not to think about the baby.
What she did to the baby.
After, she jumped out the window. That’s what they told her, and when she refused to believe them, they showed her the video. The nanny cam captured life in a fuzzy black and white, but the sequence of events was clear. There she was, like the distressed damsel in a D-grade horror movie, creeping into the baby’s room as the audience shrieked at her to stop. She’d shrieked, too, when the lawyer first showed her the video, and she’d watched herself lift the baby from his crib. But the figure on-screen continued with silent determination no matter how loudly the real Cassandra screamed. She pushed Gracie Tuck out of the way, moved calmly to the window, and, with no visible hesitation on her dim face, flung herself into the night. Cass remembered none of it. Nothing but waking in the dirt, in pain, staring up at the police, the flashing lights, and Gracie Tuck’s empty eyes.
That was what she saw, every night, when she waited for sleep to rescue her. Gracie’s dead eyes.
The broken bones had eventually healed. It was the infection that followed that left her floating for months in blissful oblivion. In that timeless time of fever haze, she would close her eyes in one impersonal room and wake up in another, always surrounded by strangers. There was something wrong with her blood. That was what they told her, when they told her anything, which wasn’t often. She was a possession of the state now, like a sewage pipe or a garbage compactor. She was broken, and so they would fix her. But you didn’t tell a sewage pipe what was wrong with it, and you didn’t hold its hand when the pain kept it awake all night, writhing in sweaty sheets, begging for help. You didn’t explain to a garbage compactor why you were performing this test or that one, or which ones would hurt.
Later, when she was healthy again, and the questions came one after another after another, she would realize how good she’d had it. There was an ease and simplicity to being an object, to lying still and letting the world exert its will.
When she was healthy again, they’d locked her in the cell. It had no bars, just a bed, a desk, a sink, a toilet, and softly padded walls. They allowed her books, but no newspapers or magazines, nothing that would tether her to the outside world. Emails from her parents were printed out and delivered to her room, until the day the emails stopped. Cass had seen plenty of movies set in mental hospitals. All of them played variations on a theme: moon-eyed inmates drifting about a sterile hospital lounge, playing checkers and shouting at shadows; inmates forced to bare their souls in a group-therapy circle of trust; dazed and cooperative inmates lining up for meds; rebellious inmates flattened by linebacker orderlies. But there were no inmates here, as far as Cass could tell, and no orderlies, either. There were no lounges or corridors or electroshock laboratories. No checkers games. There was only Cass, and her room, and the doctor.
The doctor, old enough to be Cass’s mother but with an angular, birdlike, distinctly unmaternal edge to her, came every day. And every day, she took a sample of Cass’s blood. She brought food and watched Cass eat it. She pulled up a chair to Cass’s bed and asked her questions. It didn’t seem much like therapy. The questions never strayed from the past – and not the distant past, either, the Freudian depths of potty training and father-daughter dances. They dwelled only on, as the doctor put it, “the night in question.” She wanted every detail of how Cass had felt in the moments before and after the blackout, what she had been thinking, what she had been
wanting,
as if any of that could matter with Owen Tuck’s body moldering six feet underground. Cass had nothing to offer but a stream of
nothing
special, nothing much, nothing out of the ordinary.
And then, always, when her memories gave out and she ran smack into that featureless mental wall,
I
don’t know.
I
don’t know.
I
don’t know.
She didn’t know if she wanted to.
The doctor only asked questions, never answered them. In all those months of daily visits, Cass never succeeded in learning her name.
Then came the day the doctor didn’t show up.
Cass had thought nothing could be worse than reliving “the night in question,” over and over again. But then the doctor didn’t come, and didn’t come.
And never came back.
That was worse.
There were no windows in the cell; the lights never went out. She slept when she could; she woke when she was hungry, or when she needed to pee, or when nightmares tossed her from sleep. Sometimes a slot in the door would open, and food would appear: she ate. And then she would read, and then she would try to remember, and then try not to, and then, again, she would sleep, and this she called a day.
There was no mirror in the cell. The most reflective surface was the metal basin of the sink, which offered only the shadow of a reflection. She was forgetting what she looked like; she was imagining a monster.
She supposed she was going crazy. There was a part of her rooting for madness; there was a part of her, bigger every day, that wanted to fall into the black. It was her only remaining hope of escape.
She hoped she was already crazy, as the lawyer had suggested. Not guilty, not
responsible,
by reason of mental disease or defect.
She clung to that, until she couldn’t anymore.
She couldn’t.
Guilty.
It was the one thing she did know; it was the answer she couldn’t avoid. That was why she didn’t throw herself against the walls or slice herself open with one of the toilet tank’s rusty screws. This was hell – and where else did she belong?
This was home. So she tried to forget the girl she had been, the future that girl was meant to have. This was torture, and this was right.
And in this way, a year passed.
The door had a bell on it that jingled with every customer. Daniel heard that bell in his dreams. There’d been no bell on the door of Gathers Drugs – it would have offended the old man’s shop-owner pride to suggest he needed an alarm, no matter how festive, to signal that someone had walked through the door. “Customers aren’t cows,” Gathers liked to say. “No need to hang a bell around their neck.”
Of course, in the end, it hadn’t been Gathers who needed to watch out for his customers, but vice versa, and so there was a new store, with a new regime. The bell ensured that its employees – mostly shift-shirking teenagers and disgruntled ex-farmers – noted every person who entered the store. It was cheaper than a security camera – and just as useless at fending off crime.
There had been three robberies in Daniel’s tenure at Jacobs & Colton Drugs, two of them armed. The J&C had cash and cold medicine, irresistible temptations for a certain meth-addled demographic. Standing behind the counter, a stupid yellow apron tied around his waist, the cash register chirping and humming merrily along, the bell jingling, Daniel couldn’t shake the certainty that he was the new Gathers, destined for a bad end.
He’d taken the job anyway. It’s not like there were other options. The town’s farms and businesses were failing, and enough had already done so that half the town’s population was looking for work; it didn’t make for much of a job market. Daniel vaguely remembered a period of optimism a couple of years back, when a corporate tenant had finally picked up the lease on the old power plant and the town went breathless, waiting for the job offers to rain down upon them. But the new company shipped in its employees from out of town, employees who never crossed the barbed wire surrounding the property and certainly never contemplated hiring a native. Which meant no revenue for local businesses and no jobs for anyone. Daniel had been lucky to score this one when he did, and he was determined to make the luck hold out for another nine months. Nine months till he turned eighteen and could apply for custody of Milo. Nine months to acquire a high school diploma and a savings account, and with them some chance of getting his brother back. The thought of which kept him from fleeing the J&C, even on hot, humid summer afternoons that reminded him of all the wrong things. It was the hottest day of the summer so far, sticky and ominously still, the sky holding its breath and waiting for something to happen. Murderously hot, the old folks said to each other, with a glimmer of malicious humor. The kind of day that could drive a man insane. Not the kind of day you’d want to set foot in a drugstore, not if you knew your history.
But here he was, history repeating itself, because jobs were scarce and he was desperate. A coincidence, maybe. Behind that counter, it seemed like fate. And if living in Oleander had taught him anything, it was that there was no point in trying to weasel out of your fate. On the prairie, you could see a bad end coming from miles away. Knowing something’s coming didn’t mean you could outrun it.
So every time the bell jingled, Daniel waited for a gun.
The girl, dark and hollowed out, seemed unlikely to have one. But she was a Prevette, and with them, you never knew. He recognized this one from school. Jule skittered through the aisles, furtive as it was possible to be in combat boots. He watched her in the ceiling mirror as she clomped past the cleaning supplies and hesitated by the hair dyes – her hair, this week, had a rich purple sheen, and Daniel had a sudden weird urge to tell her she should stick with it a bit longer. She moved on without taking anything, turning into the feminine-products aisle. He looked away and began resolutely restocking the bagging area. So he didn’t see her approach.
“Can I pay, or what?”
She slammed a box of tampons down on the counter and thrust a few limp bills in his general direction. Her scowl was stained a purple-black that nearly matched her hair, and her eyelids wore a raccoon mask of smeared mascara. Her eyes themselves, such a deep, dark brown that the iris shaded into the pupil, had a glossy sheen. Daniel wondered if she was high.
The Sudafed was behind the register, along with all the other prized substances over which he was to stand guard.
He told himself, not for the first time, that he needed to quit this job.
“What?” she said. Her voice was husky, like she gargled with gravel just to ensure it matched the rest of her.
“What?”
“You’re
staring.
”
He shook his head, and shoved the rumpled bills into the register.
“Never seen tampons before?” she said.
He wondered again if she was high. She had a reckless look to her, and these were more words than he’d ever heard her say in a row. Daniel offered her a fistful of change, fumbling the handoff. Coins scattered everywhere.
She laughed. Not meanly, but not kindly, either. “We don’t have cooties, you know. Girls.”
“I know that.”
“But we do have girl parts.” She shook the box of tampons in his face. “It’s not like your little sister’s Barbie doll.”
The words came unbidden, and too angry: “I don’t have a little sister.”
She gave him a sharp look.
There were no secrets in this town. He knew that.
She shrugged. “Whatever.”
He scooped the last of her change off the counter and, this time, pressed it firmly into her warm palm.
“But you
were
staring,” she said.
“Look, I just…”
“Yeah? You just…?”
Better she think he was freaked out by her purchase – which, to be honest, wasn’t his favorite thing to be ringing up, especially when it was a customer whose girl parts he preferred not to be thinking about – than realize that he’d marked her as a potential threat.
“I’m sorry. For staring. Have a nice day.”
She snorted. “Unlikely.”
Maybe it was the defeat in her voice that made him say it. “I like the purple. Your hair, I mean. It’s pretty good.”
And so it was out there, sitting between them, too late to take back.
She seemed no happier about it than he was. But before she could respond, the door jingled and the two of them became instant allies with a glance at the threshold and a single, simultaneously muttered response to what appeared there: “Shit.”
The football thugs came in a couple of times a week, pawing at the merchandise and contriving clumsy distractions as if Daniel didn’t notice them shoving beef jerky into their pockets and Red Bull into their bags.
Jule groaned. “I’m out of here.”
Daniel envied her easy escape right up until the moment they formed a human blockade and barred her from the door. Baz Demming and Matt Crosby, the latter a foot taller than her and twice as wide, sandwiched Jule between their muscled bulk. Jeremiah West stood to their side, focusing hard on the greeting-card spinner, like a getaway man already figuring whether nonparticipation would cut down on his eventual jail time. He did nothing when the quarterback yanked the tampons from Jule’s hand and used his vaunted passing arm to toss them to Matt, saying, “I never got these things – maybe you wanna give us a little private demonstration on how they work?”
Of course, Daniel did nothing, either.
Jule grabbed for the box, fruitlessly. “If you’re looking to stick something up your ass, surely you’ve got a better option.” She looked pointedly between the quarterback and his linebacker.
“You got a big mouth all the sudden.” Baz flicked the collar of her pleather jacket, letting his hand stray all too close to her face. “Doesn’t she have a big mouth all the sudden?”
“Sounds like it,” Matt said.
“Seems like there’s plenty better things you could do with that mouth,” Baz said.
He was known for his fast hands. It was smooth as any of his moves on the field, the sudden, graceful quarterback cradle, Jule efficiently locked into place against his chest.
Say
something,
Daniel told himself.
Do something.
She wasn’t looking at him, but surely she was thinking it, too.
West cleared his throat. “Leave it, Baz. If Coach hears about this…”
“Coach can suck it,” Matt said, but Baz let go.
For a moment, Jule froze in place. Daniel could see the battle play out across her face: Fight or flight. Pride or cowardice. Vengeance or survival. The store itself seemed to hold its breath waiting to see which way she would fall. Daniel, who’d never been to an Eisenhower Bulldogs game, suspected the quarterback’s expression looked much like this when he hunched over the field, waiting for the snap – tense, watchful, dangerously still. Jule’s lip curled into a snarl, hinting at a pounce – but it was a fake. With a final, fierce hiss of
“Assholes,”
she abandoned the tampons and the door and fled to the opposite end of the empty store. She disappeared into the back storeroom, either not realizing it had no exit to the street or not caring.
No one followed her. The thugs returned to the business at hand, pawing through merchandise, arguing about which tabloid celebrity they’d rather screw, and presumably inventorying all the potential treasures to claim – at the low, low cost of $0.00.
Daniel cleared his throat. “We’re closing soon. And I have to clean up first, so…”
This was a disastrously wrong tack to take. He knew it even before he heard Baz’s nasty chuckle, before he caught the look tossed from quarterback to linebacker, and well before Matt took his cue and, with one wide sweep of his beefy arm, flung an entire shelf of sauce jars to the floor. Then, for good measure, opened the refrigerated cabinet, pulled out a carton of eggs, and, one by one, slammed them into the floor, atop the pooling sauce.
“It does look like you got a lot to clean,” Baz said, with a sorrowful shake of his head. “You’re right, you better get started.”
The bell jangled – once, twice, three times – and they were gone.
It could have been worse.
This Daniel reminded himself as he tried to summon the will to clean. The constellation of broken glass, the splashes of red on the counters and wall, the rising odor, fetid and sweet – it was more of a reminder than he needed.
It could have been worse.
“You got any mops?” Jule had successfully snuck up on him again. “Other than that pissy disposable crap in the cleaning section, I mean?”
And instead of calling him a coward, or abandoning him to his karmic reward, she took the mop he found her, neither disposable nor pissy, and together, silent, they cleaned. They kept their heads down; they didn’t look at each other. And neither of them looked up when the door opened yet again.
“Hey.”
It was West’s voice. Daniel forced himself to raise his head: at least he was alone. “Hey.”
“Sorry about… all this.” West nodded at the soapy pink smear. “Those other guys are sorry, too.”
Jule snorted.
“So. Yeah,” the Bulldog muttered. “I just thought I should…”
“Mops are in the closet on your right,” Jule said. West’s face lit, as if, in the prospect of manual labor, he’d glimpsed salvation.
Working together, they erased the spill in less than half an hour. None of them spoke, and when West deposited the mops back in the closet and Jule retrieved her box of tampons, neither of them said goodbye. Nor did they make it out the door. They froze on the threshold, side by side, Jule comically short beside West, who’d had to bend his head to avoid the dangling bell.
“Daniel,” West said, in a strange, choked voice. Daniel hadn’t even thought the football player knew his name. “Daniel, look.”
He joined them in the doorway. He looked.
All light had drained from the day. The flap of leftover Fourth of July flags beat a steady thunder in the gusting wind. And in the distance…
Daniel had to remind himself to breathe.
In the distance, something that looked very much like Mayor Mouse’s vintage Chevrolet was spiraling thirty feet above Main Street, silver fins glinting as it spun in the wind.
And in the distance, farther, but not far enough, not nearly, an ink-black funnel cloud swallowed the sky.
Drive.
West flattened the gas pedal to the floor. He cursed the battered engine, the useless wipers, the pickup itself, a rusted bruiser solid enough to barrel through snow and mud but now too solid, too big a target for the battering rams of wind and the gravel torpedoing across the road. The wheel jerked and bucked in his hands. The truck shuddered beneath him. The road ahead was nearly invisible beyond the curtain of driving rain. Somehow, West kept the tires on the concrete as he left the heart of Oleander behind and sped, as fast as he could yet still maddeningly slow, for home.
They’d thought him crazy for leaving the drugstore: maybe. And maybe a year ago, he’d have agreed to stay, and huddled under a table, pretending a fear he didn’t feel. Assuming, as the building shook in the storm and the funnel tore up the town, that all would be well, because it always was. He knew better now, and he knew crazy. He’d seen it on that road, in that car, mowing down Nick. He’d seen it in the mirror, the days and weeks after, in his own eyes.
He had muffled it – and tamed it – by driving. Everywhere. Nowhere in particular. The Wests were rooted in Oleander: four generations on the same homestead, tending the land, tending each other. Staying in one place ran in their blood. But after the killing day, West found himself in motion. Before, it had been place that held him upright –
his
town,
his
land,
his
home; after, it was only constant movement that kept him steady. He preferred the long, straight two-lane highways that cut through the prairie, nothing but grass in all directions and an unthinkably wide sky above. He liked the sameness of it, the ribbon of blacktop, the steady rhythm of rubber on concrete and gravel between, the radio turned up high as it would go, skipping from rap to gospel to rock to pop and back to rap again, surfing the static that hid in the gaps.