And the fawn cried out still, filling Misty with its pain, with the scent of its mother. Misty tried to pull back, to shut the door in her chest long enough to breathe—all she wanted was a breath of air—but there was no way to do it. The fawn was so panicked, so afraid. It was in so much pain that it couldn’t stop itself. It just wanted not to hurt anymore, and it clung to Misty as long as it could.
And without the fawn’s name, it was harder to break the connection, harder to see beyond anything but its hurt, harder to know herself as something separate from the pain. Without something to anchor the fawn, all its feelings bled over into Misty, became Misty. She struggled to breathe, to speak.
Then the fawn’s mother came.
Misty wasn’t sure where she’d come from, but she was there and the world dimmed like the sun was setting in the middle of the afternoon. Misty had never passed out before, but she felt a kind of looseness behind her eyes, a sense of falling. A cold muzzle pressed to her throat once, briefly, and when Misty looked up again, she was alone. The grass rustled in the distance. The wind dried the sweat on her forehead and she shivered.
It took nearly half an hour for Misty to walk the quarter mile back to her trailer, and by the time she stumbled into the yard, her mother was looking for her. Misty had collapsed into her mother’s arms and smelled nothing but warm fur and milk.
Her mother took her to the local clinic, who said it must be a cold, and then to the hospital, who said it must be heatstroke. They both ordered bed rest, and Misty spent the next week on the living room couch with the fan sputtering cool air onto her calves. Her mother hovered nearby and even Penny let Misty choose what they would watch on television every night for a week. They were always so kind when she was hurting. It almost made her wish she was hurt more often.
Misty didn’t speak to anything for almost a month after that. Every time she tried, the pain of the fawn seared through her and she let go, retreating to the silence in her head. Eventually, the pain of the memory faded, and Misty went to the creek, to the crawdads. The fawn was still part of her name, its bloody hip ingrained on Misty like a scar.
“Are you coming or not?” Penny leaned through Earl’s barn doors and squinted against the sunlight.
Misty shivered. She tore her eyes away from the garden and hurried past Earl’s trailer. No matter how much she’d like to help the garden, she couldn’t risk that kind of pain. Not again.
Four
Inside the barn, William climbed onto a rusted camper shell and squinted at the hayloft overhead as Penny squatted in the nearest corner, all of them looking for the same thing.
“What do we need a bottle for anyway?” Misty asked.
“For the game,” William said.
“But everything in here is broke,” Penny said.
“Including you,” William said.
“You know, I got plenty of other things I could be doing other than digging around some flea-bitten barn on a Saturday with the likes of you.” Penny rose from the corner and planted her hands on her hips again.
“There’s got to be one bottle in this whole damn place,” William said. “Mom says that Earl drinks like a fish.”
“That’s another thing,” Penny said. “I don’t like being in here when Earl could come creeping back to his trailer any minute. He might chop us up into little pieces like he did his wife.”
“Quit, Penny,” Misty whispered, but Penny just rolled her eyes.
“That’s just a story,” William said.
“A true story,” Penny said. “Aunt Jem says that he never got convicted because he’s a Dixon. His uncle’s a preacher at our church, and he vouched for Earl when it happened and made everything go away with all that money his family’s got.”
“They wouldn’t vouch for him if he really did it,” William said. “Besides, people said his wife was right quare. She was all the time talking to animals.”
“So?” Penny said. “Misty’s all the time playing with crawdads. It don’t mean anybody has a right to hurt her.”
“What’s wrong with liking crawdads?” Misty asked.
“Well,” Penny said, “Aunt Jem said that after Earl’s wife went missing, her sister lost it. She wanders through the woods now with a lantern in her hand looking for her. She don’t even eat anymore.”
William pointed a finger at Penny. “It’s fire, not a lantern. She conjures it in her hand like this.” He held out his palm and wiggled his fingers so they might have been writhing and orange instead of short and pale.
“What was her name?” Misty asked.
“What?” William said.
“The lady,” Misty said. “Earl’s wife.”
“I don’t know,” William said.
“It was something with a C. Carol. No, Caroline, I think.”
“Oh,” Misty said. “That’s a pretty name. Caroline.”
There was something in saying her name that made the barn feel heavier. Something about her name that charged the air between them. That she was a real woman with a real name made it harder to share the stories because it made the stories easier to believe. The conversation fractured, and the three went back to their separate corners searching for a bottle.
Misty found one first, nestled in a pile of broken glass. Her bottle was a deep, true green with a white smudge on the front where the label used to be and a crack that snaked from base to mouth. The crack rose up a little, just enough to tear her skin if she wasn’t careful. The bottle’s name was hiding there, trembling along the thin crack that Misty felt all through her chest like a spine bent and creaking. If the bottle broke, its old name would still be there, changed only a little by the breaking.
Names were shaped through addition. The bottle’s name grew when it went from something small and dark in an endless sky to something spinning and joined, to something solid and deep in the earth, to something outside of it, to something heated and shaped, to something green and slick, to something labeled and sold, to something here in the palm of her hand. It was all of those things, always. It carried its own shadow in its sounds, little imprints of the life it had lived, and the bottle’s life had been long. Misty ran her fingers gently along the length of the bottle before she stood.
“Here,” she said.
William let go of the board he was hanging from and dropped to the floor. He took the bottle and twisted it between his hands, searching for defects. The bottle cast a faint green shadow over William’s nose and mouth, turning him momentarily into something far away and sinking, a drowned boy with his face pointed toward the sun.
“This here’s the one,” he said.