He doesn’t say anything for a beat. Then, apparently done, Damon drops his grip and I hurry upstairs.
In my room, I drag jeans and a clean long-sleeved work shirt on, scraping my long blond waves up in a messy ponytail. Function takes place over form in winter, at least for me. I don’t have the energy for all that bullshit preening and careful wardrobe selection that some other girls do. Girls like Karen Brainard. They put so much effort in and look where it gets them. Taken. Raped. Murdered.
* * *
IN THE BATHROOM, I don’t bother with makeup. Makeup draws attention, and the last thing I want is for anybody to look at me too closely.
Some days I feel like I’m made of glass, my clothes and my hair and my downturned eyes the only things that stop the light from getting in, from showing the world what’s happening within me. Who’s touched me. Who’s been inside me.
Nobody can ever know the things I’ve done.
Besides, I’m barely making it through the days without the added burdens of mascara and blush.
I brush my teeth listlessly, my brain smashing relentlessly inside my skull – I wish I could remember what pills I took last night.
I really don’t need to add liver failure to my list of this year’s achievements, but I think if I have to go to work with this noise inside my head, I might pass out before the lunch rush even begins.
I spit toothpaste out, grateful that at least the cereal taste has been burned away by mint-flavored chemicals, and find a bottle of aspirin in my top drawer. I shake a pile of the tiny white pills into my palm and toss them into my mouth, swallowing them dry. I catch sight of myself in the mirror, all hard angles and sour expression, the light smattering of freckles across the bridge of my nose the only thing that colors my lily-white skin. We don’t exactly get an abundance of sun up here in winter.
“Let’s wrap it up!” Damon yells from downstairs.
My head throbs on cue. I take my iPhone from the charger beside my bed and see missed calls from the diner, a worried text. Whatever. I’ll be there soon enough.
Steeling myself, I give one last glance to the face in the mirror, slap a knitted cap over my hair, and take the stairs two at a time, flying past Damon and to the front door. I grab my bag from the coat hook and sling it over my shoulder, eager to get out of this house and away from this for a few hours.
I try the door. Locked.
My stomach sinks.
“Cassie,” Damon says behind me. “Aren’t you forgetting something? Sleeping in doesn’t excuse you from chores.”
I’m tired. I’m so, so tired. I’m twenty-five years old and I’m just as hollow as the woman down the hall, the one whose body carried me for nine months, the one whose body no longer carries anything - not even her own soul.
Still facing the door, I swallow back an argument.
I drop my backpack off my shoulder and turn to face him.
“Sometimes I think you’d let her starve if it weren’t for me reminding you.” Damon hands me the liquid nutrition mix prescription and I take a deep breath, holding it between my palms as I approach the breathing corpse down the hall. Maybe he’s right. Maybe I would let her starve. Anything’s got to be more humane than keeping her alive all these years when she really should have died in that creek.
CHAPTER FIVE
CASSIE
Damon finally lets me leave the house fifteen minutes later, once I’ve injected the liquid nutrition mix into Mom’s feed bag and finished everything up just the way he likes.
He took my house keys off me right after Mom’s accident, and I spend my days either locked in or locked out. Him controlling the keys means I can’t punch out early and walk home in the middle of the day before he’s finished his shift. I did that a couple times before he caught on, and now he’s got that place locked down like Fort Knox. And before you do a double take and start counting on your fingers, yes, you read that right: I’m a twenty-five-year-old woman with less power over her life than most teenagers.
No wonder I spend my afternoons daydreaming about how long it would take to murder my family and take off.
“Can you take me to the store later?” I ask Damon as we drive over the bridge, bumpbump, bumpbump, past the shiny section of guardrail that was replaced after the crash, and pull up in front of Dana’s Grill. It’s beyond ironic that I work at the same place where the accident happened. That I get to relive it every time I happen to look out the window and let my eyes fall upon the highway.
He rolls his eyes. “We’ll see.”
My heart sinks until it’s a lead weight in the bottom of my stomach. ‘We’ll see’ means ‘no’ most of the time.
“I need to get the turkey,” I say flatly.
He throws the car into park and turns to me, his sheriff’s badge glinting in my peripheral vision. How he keeps that fucking thing so shiny, I’ll never know. He certainly doesn’t get me to polish it, surprisingly. It’s gleaming like a goddamned Academy Award. A vestibule of power. I own this town. And he damn well does.
“Thought you got the turkey last night.”
I shake my head. “I forgot.”
He takes a deep breath and exhales. He’s pissed. I see his fingers curl around the black steering wheel and squeeze. His knuckles turn pinkish-red in the cold, not white like I expect. “You forgot last night because you started drinking at midday.”
“My shift finished early yesterday. What was I meant to do?”
I immediately regret lying about the turkey. It won’t end well.
“What were you supposed to do?” he repeats. “Hmm, let’s see. Maybe get some food for Thanksgiving so we don’t starve? We have guests coming.”
I snort. “We have your asshole brother coming.”
Damon frowns. “You know he’s your only family aside from me.”
Damon’s brother is a fucking creep. “He’s not my family,” I almost add, Neither are you.
He looks at me for a long moment. “Sometimes I don’t know what to do with you,” he says finally.
“You get the fucking food if you want it so bad,” I reply, staring at the diner’s front doors.
“You really want to do this, Cassandra?”
“No,” I say. He called me Cassandra. Fuck. Should’ve just gone to the store yesterday.
“I’m sorry, what?” He cocks his head and puts a hand up to his ear. “I didn’t catch that.”
“No,” I say, more forcefully this time.
“You’re an ungrateful little bitch,” he says angrily.
“Go fuck yourself,” I snap. Before Damon can lock me in the car, I quickly open my door and slide out.
“I’m not finished with you,” Damon says, waving his finger at me as I get out of the car.
“Go rescue a kitten from a tree or whatever it is you country cops do,” I reply, slamming the door as hard as I can. I lug my backpack over one shoulder and stand at the gate, watching Damon’s car drive away, growing smaller and smaller until I can’t see it at all. I glance at the police station, on the same row of buildings as the diner, and wonder where he’s gone if not there.
What did she ever see in him? Oh, yeah. The face. The eyes. Guy’s a catch. Until you catch him and realize you’re stuck with the sorry bastard. Thanks, Mom.
I take a deep breath of winter air, the cold burning my lungs. It feels good. I start to walk into the diner when I see a familiar face staring at me from a piece-of-shit Honda three slots down from where Damon pulled in.
I don’t know whether to smile or run, so I do neither. Instead, I head toward the car before nerves can send me scurrying in the opposite direction.
The eyes that were staring at me don’t look away, but they change. Withdraw. Guess he wasn’t expecting me to come over to his car, after all.
“Pike,” I say. “You still live here?”
It’s Pike, Leo’s oldest little brother. Irish twins, their mom called them because of how close their birthdays are - ten and a half months, to be exact. Leo?
??s mom didn’t mess around back in the day. She was born in Gun Creek, had half a dozen more kids after Leo was born on her sixteenth birthday, and she’ll probably die in her double-wide one day when she smokes too much meth and blows a crater in the middle of her trailer. Most of her older children have scattered, buckshot as far and wide from Gun Creek as possible. The little ones are still with her, as far as I know. The woman might have started having kids almost thirty years ago when she birthed Leo, but she certainly hasn’t stopped.
Pike flicks his long fringe out of his eyes. He’s a pale, goth version of Leo, night and day but unmistakably brothers.
“Nah. I moved to Reno a while back. I’m just working a job.”
Oh. He’s dealing. I spy a battered Nike backpack on the passenger seat. There’s an excellent chance it’s full of drugs. I don’t judge him. His mom, sure. She’s fucking deplorable. All these kids and she never could take care of them. But Pike? He’s just doing what he has to do to get by. When you start life in this place, your options are limited.
“Have you heard from Leo?” My throat constricts as I push the words out into existence; it almost aches to mention his name. Leo. It’s a name your mouth really has to work for. It’s not easy, like Pike or Cassie. With Leo, you have to use your tongue, your teeth, your lips, your cheeks.
Pike shifts in his seat; I notice he’s not dressed properly for the cold. Like, at all. He’s wearing jeans slung loosely over his skinny hips, a t-shirt (in this weather?), a thin cotton zip-up hoodie you’d wear on a cool summer night.
“Aren’t you cold, Pike? Jesus. It’s barely freezing out.”
Pike looks me up and down from behind his black fringe, tossing it out of his view again. Just cut the damn thing, I want to tell him. But I don’t. He wants to be the seventh member of Panic! at the Disco, I’m hardly going to stop him.
“Sheriff told me not to talk to you about Leo,” Pike mutters at my midsection. Something sharp pierces my chest and burrows its way in. I feel like I’ve had the air sucked out of my lungs. “What? What do you mean?”
Pike’s face looks stricken. “Whatever, Cassie, I gotta go. Mom’s waiting for me.”
“Oh, well, you wouldn’t want to keep your momma waiting, would you?”
He goes to roll his window up and I catch his sleeve. He stares at my hand like it’s a cockroach before he shrugs me off angrily. “You think you’re the only one affected by what happened?” he hisses. “Leo’s the one person in our family who had a fucking job, Cassie. The only one who had his shit together. So yeah, Mom’s waiting for me to bring her fucking groceries for her fucking kids because she spent all her money on dope. Nice seeing you.”
I feel the color drain from my face. “I’m sorry-” I start, but he cuts me off.
“They’re gonna cut her power off next week if I don’t find some money. So unless you want to pay me to call Leo and ask how he’s been, don’t interrupt me.”
I would pay him if I had any money. I would.
He rolls the window up and starts the car, looking anywhere but at me.
I curl my hands up by my sides, the violence simmering at my fingertips something I can barely keep a lid on, wanting nothing more than to slam my fists into the hood of his car until he relents and tells me something about Leo. Anything. Does he ask for me? Does he think about me? Does he still love me, even though I’m unlovable, even though I’ve become the worst human being I could possibly be?
I don’t ask him anything, though. I don’t scream or use my fists or beg. Because there’s nobody in the world that could answer the questions in my head. Will I ever see him again?
The judge gave him nineteen years, so - I doubt it.
I turn and trudge across grey sludge snow to the front doors of the diner. Everything I do is on autopilot these days.
I go into the staff bathrooms and make myself throw up stale coffee and cereal before I pull my hair into a more respectable topknot, my skin pallid under the bare bulb overhead, the whites of my eyes tinged yellow. And the veins. Jesus, I look stoned. A map of tiny burst blood vessels that traces the map of my terrible diet and my affection for alcohol.
I linger in the bathroom longer than I normally would, chewing mints to mask my vomit breath because today is going to be a shit show. I already know it, and positive thinking isn’t going to help me out of this bind.
The holidays are not kind to people like me who never made it out of town. They’re ripe for unwelcome reminders of what could have been, of the pack rats crawling back into the sewer, back to the nest they’ve long since fled. They bring with them husbands and wives and fat babies that smell of sweet milk and diaper cream.
They pull into the parking lot of the Grill in gleaming rental cars because they’ve flown in because they had to move that far away to forget how desolate this place is. What they’ve since tinged with nostalgia and rose-tinted memory — I grew up in the cutest little place! — is the empty present for the rest of us.
Visit the past briefly and go back to your shiny new life, but this is my life, and when the others who were planted here, the ones I grew up beside, the ones I was better than, look at me with an edge of discomfort in their eyes, it takes every bit of willpower I possess to not scratch their eyes out with my chipped fingernails.
Grow where you’re planted, the saying goes, but everything withers and dies here in winter. Even in summer, it’s winter for me. It’s been winter for eight years. I have long since shed my petals and burrowed beneath the layer of snow that smothers this place.
My mom was big into the law of attraction. She had all those The Secret books, the DVDs, the notebooks. She was a self-proclaimed self-help junkie before that shit was mainstream. She always told me that focusing on something makes it come true. But I’ve been focusing on getting out of Gun Creek for probably ten years now, and I’m still here. My manifesting game is strong, though, because it seems I’ve attracted the very thing I didn’t want to deal with today.
Motherfucker.
Shelly Rutherford and Chase Thomas. They’re in a booth in my section, in the back, away from the front windows. It’s quieter back here and the tables turn over less, so I earn less, but at least I don’t have to look at the highway every time I serve somebody.
Shelly was head cheerleader in our graduating class; Chase was the linebacker, second in skill only to Leo. Shelly’s still beautiful, tanned and slim without being painfully thin, the only sign of weight on her body a gigantic baby belly that looks like it’s about to pop right here in the diner. Chase chats to her and rubs her belly affectionately as their three daughters, all less than five years old, jump on the booth seats and throw sugar packets everywhere.
I have to see them every time they come back into town, but usually, I’m better at hiding. Usually, there is more staff on to take their table, every time they come home with a brand new baby and a great big rental car and the diamond rock on her hand so big, it’s obscene. I see his hand on her stomach and I can’t look anymore. Which is hard because it’s at that moment that Shelly sees me.
Her eyes go wide with shock before the pity settles into them. Fuck you, bitch. “Cassie,” she says, pushing Chase’s hand away and arranging her pretty face into a smile just for me. “It’s so good to see you. How are you?”
My best friend. She’s a stranger, now.
I smile, hoping the mint is doing its job and my vomit breath isn’t noticeable. “I’m good,” I lie, glancing at Chase, who offers his own plastic smile and a wave. “I’m really good.”
We make small talk before I take their orders; Shelly is a natural at being able to speak to anybody. She always was. She was my best friend from kindergarten all through school; apart from her annual visits back to her family, we haven’t spoken since the day she moved out of town six years ago to follow Chase to the college Leo and I had picked.
“How’s your mom?” Shelly asks.
“She’s doing much better,” I lie. “Her doctors say she could wake up
any day now.”
Shelly glances at Chase; they might think I don’t notice the invisible words that flow between them, but I’m all about invisible words. They think I’m lying.
The ding from the kitchen saves me. “I’ll be right back,” I say, smoothing my apron as I walk back to the pass and grab a bunch of plates.
While I’m waiting for Eddy, the cook, to finish plating up a Dana’s Big Breakfast, Amanda, the owner’s daughter, joins me at the pass. Amanda is a registered nurse, a few years younger than my mom, and she only covers shifts at the diner when her parents, Dana and Bill, are traveling or unwell. She’s pretty, with red hair that falls in loose curls down her back, a smattering of freckles across her pale face, and big, pale-blue eyes that like to linger on my stepfather when he comes to pick me up from my shift. Or when she comes to our house. She does a couple shifts a week as Mom’s home-care nurse, bathing her, moving her to avoid bedsores, and making sure her meds are all adjusted correctly to keep her out of pain. I’ve seen how little Damon pays her — all he can afford, according to him — and I’m pretty sure she only does it because she and my mother used to be close. Plus, she likes my stepfather. She always manages to be getting off shift as he’s arriving to pick me up, or dropping things around at the house close to dinner time.
The police station is a few hundred yards away from the diner, which makes it convenient for Damon. He’s here a lot, more than he needs to be. With the meth problem in this town, he and Deputy McCallister have to be everywhere. I know where Nurse Amanda wants him. In her bed. She’s also a woman of morals, even at the ripe age of thirty-nine, and I know she doesn’t want to move onto my mother’s turf until she’s in the ground. She’s been patient. My mother’s been on the verge of dying for eight years now.
Nobody wants to be the whore that sleeps with a woman’s husband while she’s comatose and having a machine breathe for her, but also, nobody else would wait so long. She’s kind of lovely, and kind of pathetic.