* * *
—
As Carter gathered up her things now to go, Everett imagined her moving through the big house in Blueheart and all its splendid rooms. Before she left, she pulled her coat on, glancing at him nervously.
“I need you,” she said as she did up the buttons. “Please know that.”
It was the most serious thing either of them had said and he didn’t respond directly.
Instead he walked over and put his hand at the base of her throat, as if he were examining it like a doctor. He placed his thumb in the divot lightly, barely a touch.
“This spot is my country. This one inch. When you’re away from me—it’s still mine, do you hear me? I’m planting my flag right here.” He tapped her skin lightly. Then he let his hand fall.
September 29, 2008
Assignment 1:
Write about your mother or another female figure in your life.
It’s hard for me to write about my mother because in all the novels I read the girls are orphans. When I look for her face in my mind, the face I find wears an expression of disappointment. The trial did that. It wasn’t always that way. When I think of her name—Laine—it’s like a loon’s call out on some mountain lake, forlorn and faraway.
* * *
—
My mother visited me for the final time during the last days of my girlhood. Can I call it that? Girlhood. It sounds so antiquated, like something out of one of the Penguin Classics that I’ve read in here. Almost eighteen, I was in segregated housing until a bed opened up at Heron Valley. In three months of isolation my skin and hair had turned the same color as the cold, humming lights. Laine looked no better when she came to see me. There were no visiting lounges in segregation, only the Plexi window and phone. My mother struggled to stay awake during the visit. She wore a wig to hide the chemo damage, but it was all wrong: it was piled high and artificial looking, like the hair a Dixie widow might have, the kind she made fun of after we moved to Blueheart.
“This is the last time I can come,” she said into the crackling phone. “They’re not going to let me travel again.”
I began sobbing, but my mother remained calm. She had accepted this and I had not. She put her hand up to the glass. I did the same.
“You have to wait for me,” I pleaded into the phone. I didn’t think about how long that wait would have been. It was the last childish request I ever made.
My mother shook her head slowly. “You’re going to get out one day. Don’t forget that. You’re going to have a life. And Carter. She’ll need you. You’re the stronger one—you always were.” Laine breathed deeply before going on. Her voice, like the rest of her, had weakened, but I heard every rasped word. “But don’t build that life around men. Just . . . be your own person.” Laine took her hand away from the glass, leaving a hand smudge, as if she were already a ghost marking its presence.
Even through the glass she saw I didn’t understand and spoke more directly.
“I’m not saying all men are shit. But some of them want to destroy you. God, if we went to trial things would have come out about Blueheart. I’ve never liked it there.”
My mother seldom swore, but I had heard this tone from her before. The same year my father’s friends and clients began staring at me as I walked through the living room or down the sidewalk with the other girls. They offered Carter and me rides home in postdivorce Porsche Carreras, with mentions that their pool water was a perfect temperature and we could use it anytime. We never went swimming in their pools or got into their cars, but Haley did. When my mother saw her getting a ride in Doug Macaulay’s new Lexus the spring I was sixteen, I got taken aside and was told that these were divorced men. It wasn’t right and Haley shouldn’t have been taking rides with them. Doug especially.
Haley lived her short life for men, and it may have been Berk who killed her. It could have been someone else she was seeing, a stranger, or some neighbor. Who knows? Maybe Doug Macaulay, whose face I don’t even remember. The fact that I don’t remember the night she was murdered also means I must always include myself as a suspect when contemplating the truth.
My mother died a week after the visit, and I wondered whether they buried her in the wig but couldn’t bring myself to ask.
—Kennedy Wynn
Heron Valley Correctional Facility
Chapter 4
Carter hadn’t meant to be so late. She thought of her sister alone out in the world and felt, for a second, short of breath, but she inhaled her way through the panic and managed to open her car door. The same asthmatic feeling had happened when Gerry had asked her to go with him to pick up Kennedy. The color had seemed to go out of the world around her.
She pressed the key fob and got into her car, stuck the key in the ignition. Music bounced through the small space of the Honda with the suddenness of firecrackers. It was the Breeders covering “Happiness Is a Warm Gun.” She quickly turned it down.
The dream she hadn’t told him about: She was Kennedy; she was dragging Haley’s body through grass, mud. Her blouse was transparent, yellowy. The hem was trailing and she had this urge to hoist it higher to stop it from getting dirty. The floral print on it almost matched the spots of blood. How did she know she was Kennedy? The way her hair hit her face (Kennedy had worn hers down, over one eye). Kennedy had always insisted she didn’t move the body—she touched it, she didn’t transport it, she said. There were other details that were wrong, yet it had felt so real.
Carter’s fingers rested on the place on her neck Everett had stroked. She flipped down the visor and assessed herself in the vanity mirror. In spite of the makeup she’d dabbed on, her eyes looked cracked around the periphery and hollow. She’d plucked her eyebrows thin over the years, a subtle attempt to look like someone other than who she was. As she put the car in gear and backed out, her phone rang. Rochester, the call display read, though it was only a nickname and one she’d never told him about. She pulled back into the parking spot and picked up.
“I just wanted to say—” Everett began.
She knew. She’d almost said it herself upstairs. Five months, ten days; it was too early. “Traffic’s really bad,” she said.
“No problem. Just: good luck.” He sounded relieved.
“You too,” she said.
* * *
—
Carter almost forgot to push the brakes as she spotted Alex’s Scion in the drive of the Wynn house in Blueheart Woods, bumping into it as she finally remembered to stop. She got out and inspected his vehicle, but there were many tiny nicks all over it already. The only damage to her car was a faint tear in the 100% Vegetarian sticker. When she’d moved out he’d asked her if there was someone, and she’d just said that they’d been good for each other, but it was time to move on and they both knew it. He hadn’t known it, he’d said, and so she’d said all the nicest things a person could say while still breaking a heart.