Probably dead.
Now word had gotten around: Ellie King, handpicked by the Lord to watch over His house. Ellie King, unscathed by the storm. Ellie King, who had stared unafraid into the eye of the tornado, and been spared. They really believed it – she could feel that in the weight of their stares – and so it must be true.
There were pleasantries exchanged and nothing of substance discussed and, after the mayor thanked her for her service to the town, the deacon maneuvered him out the door with a final, meaningful look whose meaning Ellie couldn’t penetrate. Then they were alone. They sat together on the couch. They always did. He said it made things less business-like between them, and after all, their business wasn’t business, but the work of the Lord. She knew it was vain, but she couldn’t help it: she liked feeling special.
You’re no one special, said the voice that was partly in her head but partly not.
You’re no one.
No one but a filthy whore.
In the days since the storm, she had given up hoping that anyone else would hear the voice, but she still watched the deacon carefully, silently begging him to react. Because the voice wasn’t just in her head, it was in her ears. Which meant either it was a hallucination, of the kind no sane person should have, or it was real. A voice that spoke only to her, the way she had always dreamed that His voice would speak only to her, but the things it said…
The voice was not, could not be, of the Lord.
He can smell it on you, the voice said as the deacon rested his hand on hers and told her he was proud of her.
You can’t clean a filthy soul, the voice said as the deacon told her how, together, they would clean up the town; how they would seize this moment to bring not just God’s word but God’s law to at least one small corner of a lawless world; how desperate people needed a leader to tell them what to do, and she would be that leader “with me by your side, of course – we’re in this together now.”
You want him to shove it in you, the voice said as the deacon suggested that perhaps they should order in a pizza to discuss their plans in more detail, or perhaps, if she liked, they should pray on their future, and the future of the town.
You want to get on your knees.
And show him what you’re good for.
Because that’s all you’re good for.
“I’m sorry,” Ellie managed as the bile rose up her throat. “I have to —” She flew off the couch and somehow made it to the small sink by the custodian’s closet before the gush of hot vomit forced itself out of her. She bent over the sink, gasping, the rich, sour stench making her sick all over again, and then someone was pulling her hair away from her face and rubbing her back and the deacon was saying that he would take care of her and it would be all right.
You want to ruin him with your garbage soul like you ruin everything you touch.
Because you’re a disease.
And there is no cure.
She heaved again, but there was nothing left to come out.
“Remember, men, you’re the future of this town. All those little kids who look up to you? All those fans who cheer you every Friday night? All those girls who drop their panties after the game? You think that’s because they care about football? You think football matters?” The coach paused to give the team space to hoot and stomp. They didn’t disappoint. “Damn right, football matters,” he continued as the noise died down. “But it’s not all that matters. Your families matter. Your town matters. And at a time like this, they’re looking to you to show them the way. So go get ’em!”
The speech was out of character for Coach Hart, who favored monosyllabic grunting over soaring rhetoric. West supposed it was possible that communal crisis had awakened the man’s poetic side. But it seemed more likely that, as often happened around homecoming time, he’d overdosed on a marathon of inspirational sports movies and decided to fulfill his cinematically ordained duty as a molder of men. As the team charged out of the gymnasium and into the dark, broken streets of Oleander, flashlights deployed and testosterone surging, West couldn’t help wondering what the coach believed they would find as they entered the breach. What challenge it was they – the future of midwestern civilization – were so uniquely qualified to face. He’d spent the previous night’s patrol picking up litter and helping a woman nearly his mother’s age and obviously stoned out of her head search for her dead sister’s cat. (Which, the woman remembered about an hour into the search, was dead, too.) That night, he’d been on his own. Tonight he was paired up with Baz and one of his linebacker lackeys, and it was clear from their swagger that they had a different kind of evening in mind.
The improvised neighborhood watch had been Baz’s idea. His father was a cop, and the tiny department had eagerly embraced the opportunity to spread the crap work around. So the Bulldogs became the Watchdogs, equipped with heavy flashlights they swung like police batons, deputized to scout the streets and keep the peace. Baz had even tacked one of the department’s spare badges to his jersey.
He’d claimed prime territory for their night’s beat: the north end of Main. It had been left nearly untouched by the storms, and so instead of ferrying stray branches out of the road, they would have little to do but protect the scatter of stores from looters who seemed unlikely to appear. West had to admit, it was a relief to stroll down the intact street, past Hot Buns (the coffee shop/gym), past the junk shop and the health clinic, the old-fashioned barbershop and the vintage-everything store Rags to Riches, and pretend Oleander was exactly like it used to be. To escape, for at least a few hours, the heaps of rubble, the flattened fields, the overturned trucks, the uprooted stumps, the still-gaping wounds of the homes and landmarks that used to be. Worse than the ruins were the people who wandered among them, even at night, dazed and confused and, in some invisible and incurable way, wounded. They said they were searching – but had no answer when you asked them Searching for what? Two nights before, West had found a man he dimly recognized from his dentist’s office slumped against a crushed Honda on the side of Third Street. West had tried to help him up and walk him home – and gotten a punch in the jaw for his trouble. For all he knew, the guy was still there.
It was inescapable, even at home, where the Thomases had taken up permanent residence in their neighbors’ guest room. The storm had skirted the West property and flattened the Thomas farm that lay a couple of acres due east. Their house was rubble, their crops uprooted, their cattle lifted by the wind and scattered across Route 72. And so they haunted their borrowed home, drifting from room to room with the expression of people so lost they couldn’t even muster the desire to be found.
Pointless patrolling or not, West was in no hurry to get home.
Hayley Patchett and Emily Dunster were leaning against the darkened window of Hot Buns, clearly waiting for the players to arrive. Baz slipped an arm around Hayley. Her slightly less blond and significantly less pretty friend nestled into Matt’s bulk.
“You should have told me West was coming,” Hayley said, with a giggle. She said everything with a giggle. “We wouldn’t have blown off Kaitly.”
“Probably we would have anyway,” Emily said.
“Okay, yeah, probably. But we could have found someone for him.”
Baz elbowed West. “Our boy’s not into the ladies, is he?”
Smile, West told himself. Grit teeth, laugh, go along, get along. It was his formula for survival, and it had always worked.
Nick had thought him a coward, though he’d been too kind to say so. West let him think it. That was easier than explaining something he still couldn’t explain to himself. Someday, I’ll tell Nick the real story. So he’d promised himself. Someday, in this infinite future they’d pretended they would have together, he would explain that Nick wasn’t the first.
First had come Miles Stoddard, fullback on West’s Pee Wee football team. West, who’d still gone by Jeremiah back then, had been thirteen, a halfback, and just old enough to know better. That hadn’t stopped him,
as it hadn’t stopped Miles. They were, after all, thirteen, well practiced at the fine art of getting themselves off but less skilled at suppressing the flagpole when it deemed the most inopportune moments – bus rides, gym class, Sunday dinner with Grandma – a good time to rise. They could, perhaps, be forgiven for experimenting. It was only a few feverish fumbles in the Stoddards’ rec room or behind Jeremiah’s locked bedroom door: harmless. Miles had been a freckled redhead, fond of farting the alphabet and telling jokes about dead cats. He hadn’t yet discovered deodorant. West suspected that the whole thing would have petered out on its own after a few weeks, and then maybe everything would have been different. But instead, Mrs. Stoddard came home “sick” so she could catch a pivotal wedding on her soap – only to discover her half-dressed son with his hands down another boy’s pants.
West had been sent home, and that night, Miles downed the full supply of his mother’s antidepressants. He lived, and was promptly shipped off to his grandfather’s farm in Kentucky. Within a few weeks, the rest of the Stoddard family followed, never to be seen in Oleander again.
Things hadn’t been so stark at the West household. Everyone knew what happened; no one spoke of it. There’d been a private conference with their minister, who’d preached tolerance and understanding and so been informed by the Wests, in no uncertain terms, that he should stick to the Lord’s business and stay out of theirs.
There’d been weekly doctor’s appointments, ostensibly to treat West for the “shock” of his sort of best friend’s sort of suicide attempt. The doctor spoke at first in veiled terms of hormones and control, and then in horrifyingly less veiled terms of masturbatory reconditioning. These were accompanied by supervised viewings of healthily heterosexual porn.
His parents never asked about the appointments. They didn’t speak to West at all, unless it was absolutely necessary. When he dared speak to them, they generally made an excuse and left the room.
More than once, he came home to find his mother weeping.
And then, just when it seemed the cold war would last forever: a thaw.
A Sunday hunting trip, father and son, just like they’d done in the time he had come to think of as a gone-forever Before. Everything had been normal as they trekked into the woods, set up camp in their favorite clearing, and waited for unlucky deer. It was only once they rested their faces against the sights of their rifles, and there was no chance their eyes would meet, that his father spoke.
“Do you like being a member of this family, Jeremiah? Do you value being a West?”
“Of course, sir.”
There was a silence as his father took that in. Then, “When your mother was pregnant with you, she always told people she didn’t care if you were a boy or a girl, as long as you were healthy. But I cared. I wanted a son. You know why?”
“No, sir.”
“I wanted someone who would grow up just like me. To play football for the Bulldogs. To take my place as head of the household. To run the business when I’m gone. To uphold the West name in Oleander for another generation.” He laughed. “Selfish dreams of a selfish man.”
West thought it might be the longest speech of his father’s life.
“I was mistaken,” he added.
“No, Dad, I —”
“You’re a man yourself now, Jeremiah, or at least you’re getting there. And a man gets to choose who he wants to be.” His father paused, and even now, five years later, West could still remember how that moment had felt, the sliver of hope between one sentence and the next. He’d lived an entire life in that pause for breath, a different life of possibilities he’d never let himself imagine. It was an impossibly short time to possess something; even now, five years later, he still felt the loss.
“So you need to choose,” his father continued. “Do you want to be a member of this family? Do you want to be the kind of man who follows in his father’s footsteps? Do you want to be a West?”
After that day, he’d stopped going by Jeremiah. The new nickname was a persistent reminder of his choice, and the reasons behind it. He’d vowed not to let himself forget – and then he had, and there had been consequences.
It didn’t seem fair that Nick was the one who’d had to bear them.
“Admit it, West,” Hayley said now, with a pointed wink. “If the right girl came along…”
Baz gave her shoulder a warning squeeze. That was territory he’d already marked, which made it definitionally the wrong girl for anyone else.
“Not my man West. He’s holding out for a conjugal visit, am I right?” Baz said. “After a year behind bars, even Cass Porter might get desperate enough to let someone in her pants.”
Hayley’s giggle took on a tinge of faux shock. “You’re terrible!”
“The only thing getting into Cass’s pants is that perma-stick up her ass,” Emily said. Then, as if realizing she might have overstepped the Hayley-laid lines of propriety, not to mention committed the worse crime of being surpassingly clever, she giggled herself. “I mean, not that it matters. You wouldn’t really… with a murderer. Would you, West?”
“We don’t know what really happened,” West said. The baby killer’s boyfriend, that’s who he’d been after the killing day. If he seemed to be acting strangely, a little distant, a little not there, it was easy enough to ascribe it to the shock of discovering that the girl he’d dated on and off for the last two years, hypothetically scrabbling at her virginal defenses, was a cold-blooded killer.
“It could have been an accident,” the girls chorused with him.
“Well, it could have,” he said, but it was halfhearted. Everyone knew she’d done it. He supposed it indicated some defect of personality that he couldn’t bring himself to hate her for it. They’d never been close, even in those early months when he’d done all he could to push things forward, proving something to them both. It wasn’t until she was gone – or, maybe more to the point, Nick was gone – that he realized the shallow relationship was more honest than anything he had left.
“If she’s so innocent, why did she run?” Hayley said. “Innocent people don’t try to escape prison.”
“Or nuthouses,” Emily added.
“Who cares where she was?” Hayley said. “What matters is she’s back. Jamie Meriden’s mom saw her crossing Fourth Street during the storm.”
Baz snorted. “Jamie Meriden’s mom snarfs so much Percodan she probably sees elephants crossing Fourth Street on a regular basis.”
“Chris Tapper saw her, too, when he was trying to get off the road,” Emily said. “He saw her heading into the woods.”
“I heard that old lady who lives by the cemetery saw her heading out of the woods,” Matt said. “And since when do you talk to Chris Tapper?”
Emily cleared her throat. “I’m just saying, she’s back. Everyone knows it.”
“So what?” West said, hoping it wasn’t true, that Cass wouldn’t be that bold or that stupid.
Emily gave a dramatic shudder. “So it freaks me out, thinking about her lurking around somewhere. I mean, she killed a baby. All those times we hung out with her, like she was totally normal or something. A week before it happened, she slept over! What if she’d…?”
Matt gave her a hug. “I’ll protect you, babe.”
Emily kissed him on the cheek. “Thanks, babe.”
Hayley rolled her eyes.
“What?” Emily said. “It’s creepy, okay? And why would she even come back? Do you think she has, like, some kind of plan?”
“If she did come back, we’ll make her regret it,” Baz said. “Don’t you worry about that.”
“Can we get back to business?” West said.
“Aw, Jeremiah wants us to shut up about his killer girlfriend,” Baz said. West tried not to wince. At some point in the spring, Baz had started calling him by his first name – always with a twisted smile suggesting he knew exactly how uncomfortable it made West and would keep poking until he could figure out why. “Don’t worry, buddy, for your
sake, we’ll go easy on her.”
Hayley laughed. “Not too easy, I hope.”
“No. Not too easy.” Baz wasn’t laughing.
They “patrolled.” This meant they meandered up and down the street, flashlight beams dancing on the concrete, girls whining that they’d been promised a more engaging evening, boys exchanging boasts about beer consumption and who would do what with whose mother. West trailed them by a distance that widened with every lap of the block, lost not in his own thoughts, but in the effort to avoid them. The wind had picked up, and thrummed in his ears.
It sounded like West’s name – his real one.
It sounded like Nick’s voice.
It had been happening a lot lately. Ever since the storm.
Jeremiah. Just a whisper, easily imagined, if you were the kind of loser who imagined the wind whispering your name in the voice of your dead lover. It was a kind of loser West resolutely willed himself not to be.