Penny smiled with her eyes closed and adjusted the pillow beneath her. “I won’t bother your dumb animals, okay?”
“Okay.”
Penny turned off the lamp beside her bed.
“Hey, Penny?” Misty said.
Penny sighed.
“Do you think Dad’ll come home tonight?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
Penny didn’t answer for so long that Misty thought her sister had fallen asleep, so she said a little louder, “Hey, can I ask you something else?”
Penny sighed.
“It’s important this time. Dad said something before he left. About how Mom had done something and she was supposed to tell us. What do you think he meant?”
“I don’t know,” Penny said. “I didn’t hear him.”
“But if you had to guess.”
“Then I’d guess it was something bad,” Penny said. “Or sad, probably.”
“Yeah,” Misty said. “I thought so, too.”
Penny’s mattress creaked as she turned over on her side, and the sheets rustled as she tucked them under her feet.
“Hey, Penny,” Misty said.
“What?”
“Can you do the thing?”
Penny’s hand was a silhouette in the darkness as she reached up and loosened the tack holding the quilt in place over their window. She wrenched it loose and tucked the quilt onto the frame so a thin sliver of light shone through from outside. The light came from the sodium lamp beside Earl’s barn. It was the pale orange of a dying fire, and it wasn’t much, but after a while it was enough to see the whole room by.
Misty leaned over and slid a shoebox from under her bed. Inside, the crawdad skins in her collection were thin and papery white. They rustled like dry leaves when Misty lifted them into her palm, and it was the sound she imagined ghosts made. Like someone’s pale lips pressed to a keyhole and whispering every secret they’d ever kept, fierce and quiet and gone. She counted the skins three times—seven in all—before Penny finally began to snore.
Misty counted to one hundred, listening to the rattle of Penny’s snore like there was a leaf caught in her chest that kept catching her breath and shaking and shaking. Only when she was sure that Penny was totally asleep did Misty stow her collection under her bed and slip from under the covers. She and Penny were never allowed to go outside after dark, never alone, and never, never anywhere near Earl’s trailer unless their mother was with them, but sometimes Misty liked to do all three. She’d taken to sneaking outside after everyone else had fallen asleep. She’d never gone much farther than the barn, once going so far as to stand on the one-lane blacktopped road that twisted along her holler, just to feel the heat of the day rising up from the pavement and into the soles of her feet. She liked being alone, and she liked doing something that even Penny wasn’t brave enough to do.
And no matter what their mother said, or their preacher, or the show about the missing women, or their teachers at school who told them never to trust strangers, it was hard to believe that anything bad could happen to her so close to home. Still, Misty held her breath as she crept through the living room, unlocked the back door, and slipped outside into the night.
Six
The bottom felt strange at night, like the darkness had swallowed the world Misty knew and left something else behind—a place filled with different animals, different sounds, different light. The withered maple tree at the end of the yard called out its name to Misty. Its trunk was full of beetles, and the beetles called out, too, roaming restless through the tree’s graying bark. They made Misty feel many-limbed and deeply rooted, her body stretched across a dozen smaller bodies and through more branches than she could count. The earthworms beneath her feet filled her arms with slick, wet earth, and an owl showed her what she looked like from above.
They were still hesitant with her, these night things, but they were growing more and more accustomed to her presence. Misty treated that trust like a piece of glass—something fragile, to be protected. Some people might look outside and never even wonder about the way that bats played games with one another or how owls sometimes told stories going forward and then in reverse and Misty could never really tell which way was the right way. They might seem dull, these animals. Just responding, never thinking, never dreaming, but it wasn’t true. Some people just didn’t look hard enough or didn’t understand that there were a lot of ways to pray, to hope, to feel. A lot of ways of being alive.
Misty stopped as she rounded the corner of the trailer. Miss Shannon walked onto her front porch with a man following close behind. Misty crouched in the grass, her knees sinking into the soft dirt.
The man was taller and broader than Misty’s father, and when the moonlight struck his face, it revealed a full, dark beard and small, dark eyes above it. As Shannon walked down the steps, he reached under the long T-shirt that she wore and lifted the hem, revealing her underwear. Shannon laughed as the man pressed her against the hood of his truck, his hands buried deep in her hair. Shannon’s back arched against the metal. Misty’s cheeks burned so she stared at the shadows on the grass instead, inspecting the quick, skittered movements of the bugs crawling through the yard.
When Misty looked back at the truck, the man had picked Shannon up, hoisted her onto his waist. Her legs were long and pale as they wrapped around his back, one foot swaying back and forth in its own little rhythm. It was easy to forget that William’s life was very different from Misty’s despite the many things they had in common. William talked about his mother often and the men that she brought home—her boyfriends, her flings, her test subjects, she called them, jokingly. Sometimes, William said, he listened to the noises that his mother and the men made together at night. Sometimes, she sounded like she was drowning.
Finally, the man set Shannon on the ground again and they parted ways. She watched his truck from the bottom step until even the dim red of its taillights had disappeared around the road, then walked back inside alone.
Misty slunk along the wall of her trailer, one hand gliding over the thin metal of the underpinning. Their front porch was squat and wooden. It had been painted white long ago, but the paint had chipped and faded until it was nearly gone. The bottom was covered on three sides by white latticework that someone had nailed into the boards but never secured to the ground, so over time the lattice got tossed by the wind until one side broke away completely and the other three sides were damaged, bloated with rain and age. A wasp’s nest hung from beneath the far corner of the porch, but its edges were dried and brittle, long abandoned. Spiderwebs stretched from one rail to the next, connecting the porch with thin, glistening threads, and a roach skittered out of her way as she crawled beneath the porch. A crawdad chimney that Misty had never seen before hid among the shadows. She knelt before it and strummed her fingers gently against the dirt until a crawdad broke through the chimney. Its claws were cool and slick and a little damp against her finger. The crawdad shared its name and Misty shared hers, building a bridge between them.