Everything would be better if she could just talk to them the way she talked to the crawdads. All she had to do was figure out how.
Headlights arced across the living room window as a car pulled into the bottom. The light skittered across their mother’s eyes, and she walked to the window to peek outside.
“Is it Dad?” Misty asked. The night would be better if he were home, too, sitting in his recliner with his face stained dark by coal dust.
Penny snorted. “Not likely.”
Their mother glared at Penny, but she said to Misty, softer, “No, Little Bit. Your dad will be home tomorrow. That’s just Miss Shannon coming home from work.”
“Is that blue truck behind her again?” Penny asked.
“How’d you know?”
“That same truck was here last weekend,” Penny said. “I told William that she had a new boyfriend. You’d think he’d be happy that she’s finally seeing just one feller instead of three or—”
“Penny Lee. It ain’t your place to comment on who Miss Shannon spends her time with.” Their mother closed the blinds and sat back down beside Misty.
William’s mother, Shannon, worked at a gas station a few miles away. She was a cook in the kitchen that served hamburgers and pizza and fries. She always came back smelling of grease and charred meat, and sometimes she brought Misty free onion rings. But her hours were long and always changing, and William was never sure when she’d be back. Misty had seen William waiting for his mother a thousand times, and every time it was the same. First he lingered in the driveway with the cordless phone in his hand. Every now and then he’d put it to his ear, wait for a moment, and then drop the phone back down. Then he waited on the porch steps. His knees drawn up under his chin, a bag of potato chips or cookies sitting by his side, or sometimes clutching a pillow he’d brought from his bed. Eventually, when the sun started to set and the gnats worried at his skin, he went inside the trailer and closed the door. The only light that flickered in his living room window came from the television show he watched alone. Misty always wondered if he watched the same show that she did with her mother and sister, if he saw the same women die, if he called his mother again, and if, that time, she answered.
* * *
Misty checked the locks on the doors twice. It was part of her bedtime routine. She checked the back door, tapping it once with her finger when her father was home and twice when he was gone. The doorknob spoke to her with a gentle voice, its name a string of hands twisted together at the wrist, a rope that stretched through decades—the warmth of Misty’s small palm and the rough calluses of her father’s hand and the quick, tight twist of Penny’s hand as she flung the door open and stomped outside, and Misty’s mother’s touch, tentative, soft. There were other people, too, who Misty had never met. People who had lived in the trailer before with cold hands and hands dripping hot water and hands stained with grease, hands bleeding and frightened and grasping, hands tired and glad to be home. All of those hands reached back to her through the doorknob’s memory as Misty tapped the lock twice, asking it to keep her family safe, and the doorknob promised it would try.
Misty and Penny’s room was on one side of the single-wide trailer and their parents’ room was all the way on the other end. If Misty stood in her doorway, she could see her mother’s doorway, which was never closed but always cracked a little. She checked for the crack—a little beam of golden light, her mother’s shadow sweeping across the floor as she changed clothes.
Misty’s room was small, and felt even smaller because of the dark wood paneling on the walls. There was a single window above Penny’s bed that looked out onto William’s trailer and Earl’s garden. Their mother had tacked a blanket around the window frame at the beginning of summer to keep the sunlight from heating the room. A box fan leaned against the door, blowing cool air against Misty’s bare calf. They had inherited their beds from their cousins Jerry and Jamie, two sturdy metal frames nicked from years of use. Misty’s bed had belonged to Jamie and had a curse word carved into the bottom of the headboard where no one could see. Penny’s had belonged to Jerry and had vines etched along the bottom post, their leaves the color of static. The beds were meant to be bunked, but the ceilings in the trailer were too low so their father had pushed each mattress to opposite walls instead, leaving a wide-open space in the middle, which was usually strewn with cast-off toys and clothes.
Misty’s bed was on the left side of the room, the one without a window. The side of her bed next to the wall was lined with stuffed animals. She checked on each of them before bed, kissing their foreheads or booping her nose against theirs or shaking their tiny stuffed paws. Penny groaned Misty’s name from the other side of the room. She hated Misty’s bedtime routine, but Misty just ignored her.
Her stuffed animal lineup rotated every night so that each animal got a chance to be at the head of the bed, which meant they were closest to Misty. She rearranged them as she said good night, moving Carol the Octopus from the head of her bed to the foot and shifting the line along until Culver Penguin was just beside her cheek. She scratched at a stain on his belly until something pale yellow flaked away.
“You know them animals don’t care who sleeps beside you, right?” Penny said. “They got fuzz for brains.”
“So do you,” Misty said and smiled when Penny scoffed.
“Isn’t it time to give those animals away?” Penny asked. “I gave all my stuffed animals to the church when I was ten. Mom and Dad got me a bike for giving them all up. Don’t you want a bike?”
Misty rolled her eyes. Ever since Penny turned twelve, she liked to pretend that she was grown. “I have what I want.”
“Well, if some of them animals start disappearing, don’t blame me. It was probably a wolf that ate them.”
Misty walked to the center of the room and drew a line down the middle with her finger. “The force field is up.”
“Oh no,” Penny mumbled.
Misty climbed into bed, and a pillow flew across the room. Penny giggled. “That’s some force field you got there. Can’t even keep a pillow out.”
Misty closed her eyes.
“Hey, will you get my pillow for me?” Penny asked.
“Get it yourself.”
“Please?”
Misty held out as long as she could, but the minute she refused her sister, she had begun to feel guilty about it. If she didn’t pick up the pillow, Penny might never speak to her again. She would pretend that she couldn’t hear Misty talking like she sometimes did, until Misty panicked, convinced that she’d slipped through the cracks in their home at last, become a ghost at last, and she got so afraid that she would yell at Penny until Penny yelled back at her. Sometimes the only way that Misty knew she was real was if someone else told her it was true. Misty kicked the covers away, picked up Penny’s pillow, and tossed it at her head.