The Girl I Used to Be

  “It’s not like she would be haunting it.” Although, could some part of her spirit still linger? I would love to be able to talk to my mother, even her ghost. To have her answer, even in my dreams. “Besides, you said that house has lots of good memories.”

  “Oh, it does. It does.” Her forehead is still furrowed. “Still, I’m sorry I exposed you to the evil in this world, Olivia. You should stay ignorant of that as long as you can.”

  “I’m not a little kid. I already know about evil.” Nineteen stab wounds, a jawbone, blood drying on a knife. I know a lot about evil.

  Nora gives me a long look. “Yes, I suppose you do.” She bows her head, and I realize that she’s saying a prayer. “Lord, help Olivia to have a restful sleep tonight.”

  She’s on her feet before I can decide whether to say “amen.”

  But I can’t go back to sleep. Not when my mind might finally be beginning to shake loose what really happened. Maybe there are other clues from my dream besides the knife. Like the carpet it was lying on. What color was it? That might be important. Tan? Blue? But each possibility seems as real as any other.

  What about the person I heard muttering? Was it a man or a woman?

  I don’t know. All I remember is they sounded crazy.

  This is the second snippet of memory I’ve had since I got here. First the snowy woods and now this. I guess if they’re real, they’re flashbacks. But they haven’t shown me anything I could go to the police about. For that, I need facts.

  And maybe I’m just making the whole thing up. Filling in the blanks. My subconscious telling me what I’ve already been thinking: that to kill two people, you have to be some sort of crazy. That stabbing someone so many times does not go hand in hand with sanity.

  I don’t know whether to trust this memory or my overactive imagination or whatever it is. I’m still thinking this when I fall into a deep and, thankfully, dreamless sleep.

  * * *

  Is there anything better than the smell of bacon? I wake with a damp spot on the pillow. I’ve been drooling in my sleep.

  I straighten the bed, put on clean clothes, and then find Nora in the kitchen. She turns when I walk in. “Good morning, sweat heart.” She grins at her own joke. Her hair is pinned back, and she’s wearing a navy polyester tunic and pants. Around her throat is a necklace made of what at first I think are beads. When I take a closer look, I see they are buttons in all different shades of blue, from sea to midnight.

  “Oh, that’s beautiful!”

  She touches the necklace with one of her age-spotted hands. “You like it?”

  “It’s gorgeous.”

  Before I realize what she’s doing, she’s pulled it over her head and is holding it out to me. “Then it’s yours.”

  I take a step back. “That’s okay.”

  Nora keeps holding out the necklace. “It didn’t really cost me anything. I buy old buttons at garage sales and string them while I’m watching the news.” She presses the necklace into my hand.

  “I can’t take it,” I say, but I don’t let go. The buttons are cool and smooth, knotted onto what looks like dental floss. “You’ve already done too much for me.”

  “Nonsense. If you weren’t here, I would be talking to myself. It’s not easy living alone.”

  “Do you have kids or anything?” I slip on the necklace.

  “A boy and a girl. But they both grew up and moved away a long time ago. My daughter lives in Bozeman, Montana, with her husband and my twelve-year-old granddaughter. My son lives in Seattle with his boyfriend. They both call a lot, but it’s not like having someone in the house. And my husband died almost ten years ago. Which is why I talk to myself.” A rueful smile flits across her face. “It’s when you start answering back that you know you’re in trouble.” She changes the subject. “Would you like to go to church with me this morning? And it’s okay to say no.”

  I haven’t been to church in years, not since I was living with foster parents who made us all go twice on Sundays and on Wednesday nights as well. “Maybe not today?” My voice rises at the end, making it a question.

  Nora smiles. “Then I guess it’s time for bacon and coffee.”

  My cheeks feel hot. “That sounds good.”

  She pulls a red jar from the fridge, then dumps some brown crystals into a coffee cup. From the old brass kettle on the stove, she adds hot water. Instant coffee. I resolve to drink it down fast. Meanwhile, Nora takes a plate from the microwave and peels back a layer of paper towels to reveal strips of bacon. She puts six crisp strips on a plate and hands it to me, then takes a carton of eggs from the fridge. “Scrambled okay?”

  “That would be great. Can I help?”

  “Could you read me the headlines instead?” She points at a rolled-up newspaper sitting on the counter. “And then I’ll tell you which stories to read all the way through.”

  It turns out Nora’s interested in everything except sports. I read her stories in between bites of bacon. The six strips, which seemed like far too much, are gone in a few bites.

  A fifty-five-year-old woman was found dead at her house, and the police want to talk to her ex-husband. Fire danger is extremely high, and hikers are being warned not to light campfires. A burglar hit a half dozen businesses on East Main Street. A couple has started a business making casseroles to go.

  Between the woman’s murder and the burglaries, it sounds like the police chief has his hands full. With no new clues, how hard will he work to figure out who killed my parents?

  Nora mounds eggs on my plate. It’s a weird feeling, being waited on. In most of the foster homes I was in, we either poured our own cereal or ate the free breakfast at school. If my family had lived, would I be used to this? After I finish eating, Nora allows me to wash the dishes.

  “If I go on a walk while you’re at church, how should I lock the door?” I ask as I put the last dish in the drainer.

  Nora shrugs. “Don’t worry about it. There’s nothing here worth stealing. I never lock up during the day.”

  Medford’s small, but it’s not that small. She’s living in some olden time that doesn’t exist, and hasn’t for decades. But then again, she’s right. Her huge old TV, her heaps of afghans, her dining room chairs that aren’t quite steady on their legs—who would want them?

  To me, Nora’s house is full of things I long for. But none of them are tangible.

  CHAPTER 12

  STANDING ON YOUR BONES

  I push open the cemetery’s metal gate. The three vertical bars are decorated with two oversize oak leaves made of copper. A sign says it’s a designated historic site.

  This cemetery is more hilly than the other one. The roads are unpaved, just two tracks of gravel. Instead of well-manicured grass, there are only weeds and wildflowers.

  Ahead, the road splits in two. The section on the right holds only a few graves and slopes gently to a wooden fence.

  Us kids used to ride our sleds down that hill. This is a real memory from when I was six or seven, not a dream or my imagination. My grandma leaning over to give me a push. Me laughing and gasping, joy and fear mixed together, my fingers curled tight around the wooden edge of the sled, the snow only inches from my face. Running back to her, shouting, “Again! Again!”

  Now the same ground is being mowed by an old man wearing sunglasses and a battered straw cowboy hat. He raises a leather-gloved hand from the tractor’s steering wheel. I return the gesture.

  No wonder my grandmother chose this place for my mom instead of the sterile flat grass where my father is buried. This jumble of weathered stones of all shapes and sizes makes the other one look as appealing as a filing cabinet.

  I don’t remember where my mom’s grave is, so I let my feet choose which way to walk, which turns out to be up the hill toward a big stucco building with stained-glass windows. Along the way, I pause to read gravestones. Now that I’m here, I’m in no hurry to be confronted with the chiseled words that will permanently underline the truth.

&n
bsp; One small white marble marker says just the word Baby and the dates of its birth and death, which are the same: May 7, 1904. At one point, a lamb must have decorated the top, but the head’s been broken off.

  The air is filled with the trills and chirps of birds, punctuated with the occasional caw of a blue jay. And then I hear the sad, distinctive call of a mourning dove rise and fall: ooooh, ooh, ooh, ooh. When I was a kid, I thought it was morning, not mourning, but then Grandma set me straight, explaining what the word meant.

  Mourning. It’s such an old-fashioned word, but so is grief. Both as heavy and solid as tombstones.

  Each of these stones marks a person who was loved and missed. How many tears has this ground soaked up? Four children from the same family all died in July 1899. In 1936, a young woman died the same day as her newborn son. Here’s Silas Hawk, who was twenty-one—the same age as my dad—when he died in 1919. Did he have a sweetheart? A child?

  A few plots are surrounded by black wrought-iron fences complete with little gates. Small, plain gravestones stand next to those with elaborately carved birds and flowers, crowns and candles, doves and angels. One concrete monument is shaped like a tree shading a bench, and I maneuver closer to see the inscription. The weeds are as high as my ankle, and my foot slips into a small, crumbling hole. With a muffled cry, I yank it out. I know it’s some animal’s burrow, that no bony hand is going to come reaching out. That I can’t thrust my arm down to touch moldering flesh. I know that.

  This part of the cemetery hasn’t yet been visited by the man with the tractor. Scattered among the graves are blue bachelor’s buttons, orange poppies, white clumps of yarrow, yellow buttercups. In my head, I hear Grandma’s voice as she names the wildflowers. Others are just plain weeds, full of thorns and stickers, not worthy of being remembered by name.

  My eye is drawn by a flash of orange. It’s not a spectacular wildflower but an unopened bag of Cheetos. I know even before I get close enough to see that the marker belongs to my mom. Memories flood me, of how I would visit with already-drooping flowers picked from Grandma’s yard. Sometimes my mother’s friends had been there before us, and we would find a full bottle of beer or another offering. Once it was a rhinestone tiara, which Grandma allowed me to wear home.

  Who brought the Cheetos? Who still remembers she liked them? I’ve read that Chinese people sometimes burn play paper money, food, and clothing at the graves of their loved ones, believing the essence of the needed thing wafts to the afterlife.

  I stand in front of the tombstones for my mother and my grandmother. They are nearly identical, even though they died four years apart.

  Mommy, I am standing on your bones. Under my feet, she lies in a slowly rotting casket, with all the weight of the earth on her.

  A cry is torn from my throat. Mommy, mommy, mommy, and then I’m on the dry, stony ground, pricker bushes scratching my face, but I don’t care, tears hot on my cheeks. My words are jumbled, some in my head and some torn from my mouth. Why did you have to leave me, why did they take you from me, why did they take everything, I miss you, I wish you were here, I love you, I’m so sorry I couldn’t save you.

  I cry for a long time, at first so hard I can’t catch my breath, and then slower and softer. Until finally I’m cried out, silent, stretched flat on her grave. My arms spread as if they might tunnel through the earth and pull her to me, reclaim her bones and put flesh on them.

  And then I’m rewarded. No, I don’t hear her voice in my ear. I don’t feel her soft touch on my back. What I’m given is a memory. Of sitting on her lap and turning the pages of a book. “‘Brown bear, brown bear what do you see?’” Her cheek against mine and her soft breath in my ear and her smell, a certain sweet smell, in my nose.

  And for a moment I know without question I was loved.

  But that doesn’t make it any better. Because I was loved and someone took that from me. I cry again, more softly, the anger and rage bleeding away, leaving behind only a grief like a stone. I sleep then, without meaning to.

  And wake to a rough hand on my shoulder.

  CHAPTER 13

  WHO’S GOING TO FIGURE OUT THE TRUTH?

  “Honey,” a man’s voice says hesitantly. “Are you okay?”

  It’s the second time today I’ve been awakened by an old person. This time, it’s the guy in the battered straw cowboy hat. His riding mower, now silent, stands in the road behind him.

  “I’m fine.” I sit up, blinking in the bright sunshine. The dream I was having slips away. A man’s voice, urging me forward. A hand on the back of my head.

  “I could have mowed you down.” He offers me a hand. “Here, get up. It can’t be comfortable down there.” Although he must be close to eighty, he has the strong grip of a workingman. His jeans sit high on his waist and end a couple of inches above his Velcro-closed tennis shoes.

  I know him. It’s Frank. Nora’s friend. He was at my dad’s—

  “You were at the funeral,” I say after he pulls me to my feet. Will he put two and two together? Can he tell I’ve been crying? Maybe he’ll just think I’m a weird teenager.

  “That’s right. I knew Terry. I also knew his girlfriend, Naomi.” He looks down at the graves. “Naomi and her mom, Sharon.”

  “I’m thinking of renting their old house.” I lean down to brush prickers off my pants, giving me an excuse not to look him in the face. “Nora told me they were buried here, so I thought I’d come visit the graves. But it’s just so hot. I started feeling sleepy. I must have dozed off.”

  His face expressionless, Frank says, “Around this place, when we say someone’s taking a dirt nap, it means they’re dead and buried.”

  I stare at him for a second before I realize he’s making a joke.

  “Well, I’m not dead. Not yet.”

  He looks at the two graves again, and his mouth turns down at the corners. “Naomi—she wasn’t much older than you.” He shakes his head. “Sometimes it’s hard to understand why someone so young dies but an old codger like me keeps going.”

  “What was she like?” I ask. “Naomi, I mean?”

  “Young. She and Terry were too young to have a baby, but they did. Sharon wasn’t happy about that.”

  I look down at my flat stomach, try to imagine a baby curled up under my skin. How did my mom feel? Scared? Happy? Both?

  “She was a high-spirited gal,” Frank continues. “Beautiful, like her mother.”

  I realize he means Grandma. I do the math. Grandma was only fifty-six when she died. If she were alive, she’d still be younger than him. “Were you working here when Naomi was murdered?” All those people who left things on her grave—could her killer have been one of them?

  “I’d just started volunteering. For the first year after she died, people came here all the time. Sometimes they’d leave bottles of beer. Candy, snacks, Christmas ornaments.”

  “I found those Cheetos.” I point at the bag.

  He nods. “Every now and then I’ll find just one red rose. I used to think it might be Terry sneaking back into town, but obviously not.”

  I’d always thought my mom belonged to my dad and vice versa, even if they weren’t married. But now there’s this Sam person who loved my dad, and some mystery man who still thinks about my mom. Could the rose be from her killer?

  “So people still come?”

  “I’ve seen a few. Naomi’s best friend, this redheaded gal named Heather, she still comes around. There’s a homeless guy who likes to sleep here. Sometimes I’ve seen him talking to Naomi’s gravestone. And the police chief—he comes by sometimes, too. He was here last week, right after they figured out it was Terry’s jawbone.” Frank sighs. “Before she died, Sharon used to come here with her granddaughter. Naomi’s kid, Ariel. Sometimes they had picnics right on top of the grave.”

  I will my expression not to change. “What do you think happened to Naomi and Terry?”

  His lips fold in on themselves. His face is a mass of wrinkles, like a piece of paper that’s be
en balled up and smoothed out a hundred times. “Maybe they took someone with them that day.”

  I hadn’t thought of that. That would mean it had to be a friend. Who’s going to figure out the truth of what happened all these years later? I think of the police chief, his voice choked with tears. Apologizing for not finding my dad fourteen years ago. But it’s clear from the articles in the paper that he has his hands full.

  Frank leans down and picks up the Cheetos.

  “What are you going to do with them?”

  “Throw them away. They’ll just attract varmints.”

  “Wait a second.” I grab the bag and check the date. The Cheetos won’t expire for three more weeks.

  Frank cocks his head. “What are you looking at?”

  “I’m just trying to figure out how long this has been here. Before or after people knew the truth about that Terry guy.”

  “Oh, it was after. I pick up stuff like this as soon as I notice it. Leaving food out here is just a bad idea. But people do it all the time.”

  Only now do I wonder if there were fingerprints on the bag, fingerprints we must have just destroyed. Although who’s to say who put the bag here? It could just be one of my mom’s friends. It probably wasn’t the killer.

  “I guess I’d better be getting back.” I act as if there’s somewhere I have to be. “It was nice talking to you.”

  He nods. “Same here.”

  Before I go, Frank reaches into his pocket and scatters a handful of yellow birdseed on my mother’s and grandmother’s gravestones. A blue jay lights on a branch above us, and then another and another. They bob lightly in the breeze, too scared—or maybe too smart—to take the chance of eating while we’re so close. They watch and wait for us to go away.

  Just waiting until our backs are turned, our attention diverted.

  CHAPTER 14

  DOUBT A GIRL

  When I step inside Fred Meyer on Monday, the store is both familiar and not. It’s like when I look at Nora and see the old Nora just underneath. This Fred Meyer has the same typeface on the signs as the store where I work, the same store-brand groceries sitting next to the name brand, but the pharmacy is in a different corner, the electronics section is bigger, and there are two more aisles of toys. It’s like when you dream about a familiar place, but the dream version isn’t the same.