“She was your best friend,” I point out, struggling to keep up with the conversation, to haul myself out of the muck of memory.
“She was yours, too, for a little while,” she says. “You remember how it was. She scared me to death.”
Could it be true? Whenever I remember that time, it’s usually Misha’s face I picture, her crowded teeth and those big blue eyes, the look of pleasure whenever she saw me cry. Misha was the vicious one, the pit bull, the one who made the decisions. Cora and Annie, the followers: they trailed after Misha and Kaycee like worshipful little sisters.
Kaycee was the prettiest one, the one everyone adored. No one could ever say no to Kaycee. Kaycee was the sun: there was no choice but to swing into orbit around her.
Now, ten years older and ten years free of her best friend, Misha seems to be at ease. “Brent will be so happy you’re back, even if you’re on opposite sides now. Well,” she adds, seeing my face, “it’s true, isn’t it? You’re here to shut Optimal down?”
“We’re here to make sure the water is safe,” I say. “No more, no less. We’re not against Optimal.” But to the people of Barrens, the distinction will make little difference.
“But you are with that agency group, right?”
“The Center for Environmental Advocacy Work, yeah,” I say. “News travels fast.”
Misha leans a little closer. “Gallagher said they’re going to shut off the water to our taps.”
I shake my head. “Gallagher has his signals crossed. Anything like that would be way down the line. We’re just here to check out the waste disposal systems.” Law school teaches you one thing above all: how to speak while saying absolutely nothing.
She laughs. “And here I was, thinking you were a fancy lawyer. Turns out you’re a plumber instead!” She shakes her head. “I’m glad to hear it, though. Optimal’s been such a blessing, you have no idea. For a while we thought this town was turning to dust.”
“I remember,” I say. “Believe me.”
A look of sudden pain tightens her forehead and pinches her mouth together. And for a long second she appears to be working something out of the back of her throat.
Then she grabs my hand again. I’m surprised when she steps closer to me, so close I can see the constellations of her pores.
“You know we were only kidding, right? All those things we did. All those things we said.”
I guess she takes my silence for assent. She gives my hand a short, quick pulse. “I used to worry sometimes about you coming home. I used to fear it. I thought you might come back looking for—” She breaks off suddenly, and I feel a cold touch on the back of my neck, as if someone has leaned forward to whisper to me.
Kaycee. I’m sure she was about to say Kaycee.
“For what?” I ask her, deliberately trying to sound casual, spinning a rack full of cheap sunglasses and watching the sun get sucked into their polarized lenses.
Now her smile is narrow and tight. “For revenge,” she says simply. This time, she holds the door open and allows me to pass through it first.
—
Misha’s baby is fussing in the car seat. As soon as she spots Misha, she begins to wail. I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding when Misha reaches in to unbuckle her.
“This is Kayla,” she says, as Kayla begins to cry.
“She’s cute,” I say, which is true. She has Misha’s eyes, but her hair, surprisingly thick, is so blond it’s nearly white.
“She is, isn’t she? Thank God she didn’t get Peter’s coloring. The Ginger Ninja, they call him at work.” Misha jogs Kayla in her arms to quiet her. I somehow can’t square an image of Peter Jennings—blunt-jawed and stupid-looking—with this child. But that’s always true of babies, I guess: it’s not until later that they inherit their parents’ ugliness. “You’re helping put us on the map, you know, living all the way out in Chicago with your big job.” It’s half-compliment, half-command. Subtext: Don’t fuck with us.
“You’ll have to come by the house for supper. Please. You at your dad’s? I still have the number.” She turns and fastens Kayla into the back seat again. “And let me know if you need anything while you get settled in. Anything at all.”
She slips into the car before I can say don’t bother, and there’s no way in hell I’d be staying at the old house anyway. As soon as she’s gone, it’s like a hand has released my vocal cords.
I will never need a thing from you.
I will never ask you for anything.
I’ve always hated you.
But it’s too late. She’s gone, leaving only a veil of exhaust that hangs in the thick summer air, distorting everything before it, too, vanishes.
Chapter Two
Senior year, Misha and Kaycee started getting sick. Their hands shook—that was one of the first symptoms. Cora Allen and Annie Baum came next. They would lose their balance even when they were standing still. They forgot where their classrooms were, or how to get to the gym. And it was like the whole town got sick, too, like Barrens spiraled down into the darkness with them.
And all of it? A joke. A prank. All just because they felt like it. Because they wanted attention. Because they could.
For a few months, they were famous, at least in Southern Indiana. Poor, neglected small-town girls. Misha’s and Cora’s moms went on local TV, and just before Kaycee ran away, there was even talk of interviews with big-time media. Someone from the Chicago Tribune was trying to link the sickness to other examples of corporate pollution. When the girls came out as liars, though, the story fizzled quickly, and no one seemed to blame them, at least not for long. They just wanted a little attention. That’s how the newspapers spun it.
But I believed them. And there’s a part of me that never stopped believing the sickness was real—that found myself again and again tugged to questions of environment and conservation, that brought the initial complaint to the agency’s attention, cleaving to it with the small but painful, nagging intensity of a hangnail.
When I moved to Chicago, I tossed all my old clothes as soon as I could afford to replace them. I traded in my style, such as it was, for whatever was draped on the mannequins on Magnificent Mile. I ran my accent over a blade, sharpening out the long Midwest vowels, and told people I came from a suburb of New York. I slept off my hangover on Sundays, and never prayed unless it was to clear the traffic. And I stopped calling home.
I did my best to shake Barrens off.
But the more I tried, the more I felt the subtle tug of some half-dead memory, the insistence of something I’d failed to do or see. A message I’d failed to decipher.
Sometimes, coming home after one glass too many—or maybe too few—I’d return to old memories of Kaycee, back to afternoons spent target-shooting rocks at the huge mushrooms in the woods, back to my dog, Chestnut, and back to the convulsions of a town felled by sickness.
Maybe I wanted to believe there was some answer, some reason, for why she did what she did.
Maybe I just wanted to believe her, because after all this time I couldn’t understand how she had suckered me so badly.
No matter how many times I swore I would stop, I found myself coming back to the same questions. Why? I could shake free of almost everything, but I couldn’t shake free of that question. Why? Kaycee, Misha, the hoax. Why? Sometimes a month or two would go by. Other times, it was every few weeks. I’d lose hours searching Optimal, combing through the pitiful threads of what in Barrens counted for news. Mostly Optimal PR—new housing, a new community center, a new scholarship fund. All that searching over the years, and it never turned up anything of use.