Where the Truth Lies Read online

  She knows—she knows—it is worse if Abigail is dead. But people at school say she ran away and who could blame her, and that feels like a buck knife in Emma’s stomach, tearing a big hole through her guts. Abi wouldn’t just leave without saying anything. She wouldn’t have caught a bus to Denver and not said a single word about it. You don’t run out on a friendship of ten years like that; you just don’t. But then, would it be better if Abigail were dead?

  In the morning, after her mother leaves for the clinic where she is the local GP, Emma doesn’t go to school. She goes to Mr. Wen’s liquor store, stuffs a bottle of Jack Daniel’s inside her coat. She’s almost out of the door with it when she sees the young man with the leather jacket grinning at her from the parking lot, all brilliant teeth like he eats knives for breakfast. Something about him looks familiar, and this familiarity seems to take her by the scruff of the neck and tell her to sit up straight, so much so that she loses her grip on the bottle.

  Mr. Wen has a kind face, crinkled like a paper lantern, and he tells her he isn’t going to press charges this time, although he does make her pay for the broken bottle. He takes it all in: her smudged mascara, her puffy eyes, her bitten-down nails, and says he hopes she’ll feel better soon. She knows, without him needing to say, that he understands what it’s like to be different in this country. That thought alone—that sense of fragile solidarity—makes her want to burst into tears all over again, and in the parking lot she braces herself against her car to steady her gasping breaths.

  “Hey, you okay?”

  When she looks up, the guy with the leather jacket is watching her. With his head cocked to one side, his hair lifting in the wind like feathers, he looks like a big crow. Emma swallows, and tries not to screw up her eyes too much when she nods.

  “No ID.” She hates how small her voice sounds, carried away by the rumble of traffic on the main drag.

  “I’ll buy it for you,” he says, with an accent that sounds faintly Eastern European. “You can drink with me.”

  Emma runs a hand through her hair, and the greasy residue it leaves on her fingers makes her feel queasy. In a few years’ time, college friends will tell her not to accept free drinks from men she doesn’t know. Even now, her head rings with folkloric warnings: nothing is ever free, everything has its price. But right now there is nothing lovelier, she thinks, than light filtered through whiskey-brown glass, and if she puts a bottle in her hand, she can forget about the feeling of last night’s bad dream.

  She sniffs loudly. “Okay. Sure.” Everything has its price, but she cannot yet imagine the real cost of this one bottle of whiskey. Neither of them can.

  3

  THEN

  The month before Abigail disappears, Noah and his sister go down to the river. He does not remember having asked Abigail to come with him, but she grabs her big movie-star sunglasses and follows him out of the house without a word.

  They drive through acres of muggy August. Tourists sag under the trees, stopping to catch their breath, while kids roll in grass the color of old men’s teeth. Noah’s AC is broken, which makes their lungs feel as if they’re full of damp wool, but they don’t dare roll down the windows in case the insects get in and they end up scratching themselves ragged. Abigail sits in silence, her face half obscured by her big glasses. Noah can’t tell if she’s looking at him or not.

  He chooses a stretch of river outside of town on the south side, which is usually free of tourists because of the steep rock faces obscuring the picturesque views. Brother and sister scramble down the bank, pine needles poking into their bare feet, low branches whipping at their cheeks, and still they do not speak to one another. The heat feels arrogant, as if it’s been here so long it can’t imagine being pushed away by fall. In the shallows, they lie on their backs fully clothed, like they used to when they were kids, letting the water, still blissfully cold from the mountain springs, slip over their bodies. Hummingbirds, fat with nectar, zip back and forth overhead. From somewhere among the trees comes the creaky call of a blue jay. At last, Abigail says, “You would have graduated college this year.”

  Noah knows she’s looking at him, but he keeps staring at the sky through the branches.

  “Are you ever going to forgive us, Noah?”

  You’ve grown too used to forgiveness, he wants to say. He is not God. He is not obliged to forgive her just because she’s asked.

  Instead he tells her, “You’ll be off to college yourself next year. Then you won’t care what I think. You’ll make new friends, see new places, forget I was ever mad at you at all.”

  She is quiet for a moment, but he can guess what she’s thinking. I won’t make new friends. We don’t make new friends.

  When she speaks again, it sounds as if she’s on the brink of laughing. “Another year? I think I’ll go crazy if I have to wait another year.” It’s not a good sort of laughter. Noah shivers, and he knows it isn’t just the chill of the river.

  “No,” she says, “of course you’re still mad. I’d lose it if you cost me my one chance of getting out of here. I’d bash your head in.”

  Noah sighs. “What do you want from me, Abi?”

  “I just want you to do something. You haven’t even mentioned it in four years, and I can’t stand it anymore. If you’re not going to forgive me, then maybe you should just bash my head in.”

  “Abi…”

  She stands up. Her summer dress is heavy with water and clings to the outline of her body. Noah has avoided her for so long, he hasn’t noticed that his little sister has become a woman. He looks away quickly, and she laughs.

  “I’m the only woman you’ve ever really seen, aren’t I? Poor Noah.”

  He sits up too fast and the water slides off his chest, like something solid. It reminds him of his baptism, when Pastor Lewis dunked him in the tank.

  Abigail sneers. “Poor, poor Noah. Couldn’t get Chrissy Dukes to go to first base with you, couldn’t get Sabrina McArthur to put out, couldn’t even get Erin Broadstreet to hold your hand in the nativity play.”

  “Shut up.”

  She kicks water in his face. “That’s right, let it out.” Several birds take off from the trees, startled by her voice, their wings beating like fleeing footsteps. “There’s something wrong with you, isn’t there?”

  Noah’s hair drips over his eyes and he can’t see her, but he itches to cut that sneer out of her voice.

  “You’d never have gone to college anyway, because you know there’s something wrong with you. I remember, Noah. That’s why you don’t have any friends. That’s why you can’t keep a girlfriend. That’s why Mom and Dad don’t love you.”

  “Shut up!”

  He lunges at her blindly, knocking his cheekbone against her elbow, but the sudden pain feels good. They fall back into the water with a crash, and she struggles against him, but he’s taller than her, stronger than her, and he holds her down. The seconds pass. The river bubbles over Abigail as though she were just another stone on its bed. It’s the soothing noise that helps him steady his breathing again, helps him realize what he has done. He’s holding her down by the shoulders, holding her head under the water. She is staring straight up at him, and her mouth is curled in the barest trace of a smile, but she doesn’t move or blink.

  For the briefest moment, Noah thinks she might be dead, and his mind races away to a future in which his shoes take up all the space in the hallway, and his college degree hangs on the wall instead of her dried-macaroni art. Their mom says goodnight to him first, and their father has no choice but to hold his hand when they pray before dinner. It’s his day they ask about, his Steinbeck and Vonnegut strewn across the couch instead of Abi’s magazines, his hair in the plughole. Of course, Noah knows deep down that her absence will change none of those things, that the space their parents have made for her and do not have for their sons would quickly be filled with their grief, and he would fade into the background once again. He knows this and lets go, his hands poised in the air, as if in
surrender, as if he is expecting to be caught.

  But then she sits up, and paws the water from her eyes, taking huge breaths that make her whole body shudder, and relief floods through him. She looks at him, and he looks at her, and he understands: she is the only thing holding them all together.

  On the way home they do not speak. They do not speak of that day ever again. Just sit making little puddles on the floor of Noah’s truck as their bodies drip with baptismal waters.

  NOW

  The First Baptist Church of Whistling Ridge looks like a recreational center with a white fiberglass steeple tacked on the top. Noah knows this is how most churches around here look. But he also knows that on the East Coast there are huge Gothic-style churches built from heavy stones, as grand as God Himself. God should be made of stone, if He’s made of anything, Noah thinks. In this country He is made of Styrofoam, smells like tarmac, and tastes like fries. God is a truck stop or a billboard. There would be no point in making Him out of stone, because stone is made to last. God is always being reshaped to fit.

  As the Blakes pull into the church parking lot, they pass the big LED board out front where the schedule of worship is written up, like a special deal at a drive-through. Noah leans against the car and stares at the wonky black letters, while behind him his mother helps Jude out of the back seat, and his father spits in the grass. Casual worship 9:11 a.m. every Sunday. Has anyone else died for your sins?

  Noah wonders.

  There are more cars now, and the people emptying out of them take their time pouring long gazes over the Blake family. There is Samuel, a scarecrow GI Joe, with shadows of the Vietnam jungle in his gray eyes and hunched shoulders. There is Dolly, with her split ends and nicotine-stained fingers, the heels on her best shoes worn down unevenly so she seems to lean like a tree that’s been pulled by the wind. There is Noah, all denim and corduroy, who could be Marlon Brando handsome if not for his chapped lips and crooked nose, the same haunted look as his father. There’s little Jude, with his old man’s walk, his long hand-me-down flannel sleeves that hide so many secrets. But where is Abigail? That’s what everyone wants to know, and they stare harder at the Blakes as they file past, hoping perhaps to bore right through them to the truth.

  Noah knows that’s why most of them have lingered out here. They buzz around the parking lot, shaking each other’s hands or embracing, sticking to the concrete like so many flies. They exist in this strange purgatory where the Depression feels not so long ago, yet the present seems oddly far away. His sister’s disappearance is just fresh roadkill to them.

  The sudden howl of a motorcycle shreds the idleness of the crowd. Noah tenses and shoves his hands inside his pockets. Across the street in the Dairy Queen parking lot, Rat Lăcustă takes off his helmet and shakes out his wild black hair. He moves like a hooker whose rent is due, and he doesn’t seem to care about the way his jacket rides up as he leans over his bike. There is something primal in the reaction to that strip of exposed skin. Teenage girls in their Sunday best bite their lips and glance at their mothers, who dare to watch the boy because they know it will get their husbands all riled up.

  Even Dolly can’t help cocking her head to one side and saying, molasses slow, “Isn’t that the young man from the trailer park? The gypsy?”

  “He’s Romanian, not Romani.” Noah busies himself scraping dry mud off the edge of his best shoes against the curb. “He just happens to live in an RV.”

  “And you shouldn’t say ‘gypsy,’ ” Jude pipes up. “It’s a slur.”

  Samuel snorts. “Give me strength, boy.” He elbows Jude, who wobbles slightly under the contact. “This generation, eh? Honestly.”

  Dolly narrows her eyes at her husband, as if to say: Not in public. Samuel just smiles and delivers a short, sharp kick to the back of her ankles. Noah sees his mother stumble, watches the pink shame rising in her cheeks as she scans the church parking lot, afraid that someone will have noticed. But the truth is that, just for a moment, everyone has forgotten about the Blake family. At least the Blakes are of the town, of the church, of the faith. Rat—with his tight jeans and the smooth, dark laterals of his unfamiliar accent—is a stranger. He is a bullet that has entered the town and not yet left an exit wound. People have still to decide where he fits, or how they will shape themselves around him, or if they will do so at all.

  Noah is vaguely aware of his father saying, “Come on, we’re going in,” but he’s still staring across the street. He feels like he’s been doused in gasoline and he’s shivering from it, the kind of shivers that make your spine arch and your toes curl. Rat props a cigarette between his lips and grins right at him, like they both know some private thing that nobody else knows.

  4

  Hunter Maddox slows the car, squinting through the rain on the windshield as they pull into the trailer park owned by his father. It used to be a burial ground, centuries ago when the Maddox family first came to Colorado. Now there are rows of squat trailer homes with dusty drapes and peeling tarp roofs. They seem to shrink against the grass, as if the fierce mountain winds have beaten them into the soft earth. On days like today, when the rain comes down in sheets and swells the mountain springs, the ground still gives up bones and arrowheads. On those days the trailer-park people stay indoors.

  It surprises Hunter, then, to see a familiar figure picking her way through the mud. He shakes his head, muttering, “There she goes again.”

  Beside him, his father, Jerry, does not look up from his phone. “Where who goes?”

  “Emma Alvarez. She’s going to the gypsy’s RV again.”

  Emma’s jeans are spattered with dirt and she keeps stumbling. It could just be the ground, slick with rainwater, but Hunter’s seen her with that same glassy-eyed look at school too. He’s spent enough afternoons baked under the bleachers to recognize intoxication when he sees it. He feels a twinge of guilt and has to look away.

  “Well,” says his father, “however Melissa Alvarez-Jones-whatever wants to raise her half-breed kid is no business of ours.” Jerry is a broad-shouldered man with a square jaw and a military-grade haircut, who takes up space without apology and always wears his top two buttons undone. Hunter knows there is plenty of his father in his own face, and he is of an age where he isn’t sure if he likes that anymore.

  Jerry glances up at him at last. “You had a look at those latest brochures your mom ordered?”

  Hunter pouts at the wiper blades sweeping across the windshield. “Yeah,” he lies.

  “College is just around the corner, you know. Plenty of good places for basketball. Have you looked at North Carolina?”

  “Sure. Whatever.”

  “No, not whatever, young man. If you don’t get your act together soon, you’re going to end up wasting your life like that Romanian boy, moping around some dump like this.” Jerry frowns. “Most kids would be a little more grateful, you know, with me and your mom still helping you out, after what you’ve done.”

  Hunter grips the steering wheel tight, until he can see his knucklebones white under his skin. He watches Emma knock as she reaches the RV, watches the way she pushes her rain-soaked hair back from her face.

  After what I’ve done.

  He bites his lip. “Yeah, Dad, I’m real grateful.”

  You have no idea what I’ve done.

  * * *

  Rat sits on a mound of Byzantine-colored quilts, strumming his grandmother’s guitar. The gray headache light coming through the RV window winks off the wolf fang he wears through his left earlobe. Emma hesitates in the doorway, rain dripping down her sleeves and onto the chipped plastic flooring. Incense burning on the kitchen counter lends a hazy kind of quality to the air.

  “You’re back.”

  Emma fiddles with the hem of her jacket. “You don’t mind?”

  He places his grandmother’s guitar reverently to one side. “Well, don’t just stand there, drăgută. You’re getting water on my floor.”

  “Oh.” Emma takes another step insid
e. “Sorry.”

  She takes off her jacket, the denim heavy with damp, but she doesn’t know where to put it, or where to put herself, so she just stands there, water trickling down her neck.

  Rat shakes his head and gives her his idle Cupid’s bow grin. “Bad morning?” He gets to his feet and heads to the kitchenette, already reaching for the cupboard where Emma knows he keeps the liquor. She watches his T-shirt rise up as he roots around, revealing a few inked petals of a tattoo that disappears below his waistline.

  “Someday I’ll get my hands on some decent pălinca for you,” he says, “but for now we’ll have to settle for good old No. 7.”

  She doesn’t even see the bottle, just feels him press the weight of it into her hand. Tilting her head back to let the whiskey run over her tongue, the cool rim of the glass pressed to her lips, it’s the best kiss she’s had all her life.

  “You want to talk about it?”

  No. It was nothing.

  She takes another swig of Jack Daniel’s.

  Just something stupid that happened this morning—a joke she’d remembered, and without thinking, she had reached for her phone to text Abigail. When she’d realized what she was doing, it took her a while to tune out the sound of her own breathing again.

  She misses the wispy hairs at the back of Abi’s neck that never stayed up in her ponytail, the particular way the rubber peeled on the bottom of her sneakers, her strawberry smell—but she wonders when these little details will fade into some larger sense of absence. Just missing Abigail altogether. Already this lack of her feels too familiar, but perhaps that’s because Emma started missing her before she was even gone. Lately, Abigail had been speaking in the future tense—a place that, even now, Emma does not know how to get to.