“How far back do you want to go?” Wave said. “When would you hit the reset button?”
“I don’t know,” Kate said. “I mean, last year? Remember driving around in Tiny and all the parties and everything? Like, how we would always have great talks? We were best friends.”
“No, we weren’t,” Wave said, and she leaned back, crossing her arms over her chest. Downstairs, the closing music of Bewitched began to play.
“Last year was terrible for me,” Wave said. “And you didn’t even notice. It’s probably not even your fault. You’re not able to see outside of your own self, I guess. But I was miserable. I just don’t like the person that I have to be when I’m around you. And I think about what a better person I’d be if I’d never had you for a sister. Like, all the life I wasted trying to mold myself for you.”
“You’re lying,” Kate said, but she felt like she was being shot or stabbed. “I know that you loved me. You know you did. You’re just being stupid.”
But Wave only closed her eyes. She ran her palms down her face.
“You know what I thought when I found them?” Wave said at last. “When I found their bodies?” And she chuckled, or whimpered—Kate couldn’t tell which. “The first thing I thought was that you killed them. I mean, I definitely thought you were capable of it.” She shook her head. “I still sort of wonder, actually. Maybe it was you. I sure as fuck don’t think it was Rusty.”
Kate was now at the ugliest shade of red that she could possibly be. She could feel her face glowing; even her eyes hurt.
“You’re in love with him, aren’t you?” she heard a nasty voice say from out of her mouth. “You’d choose that piece of shit child molester over your own sister.”
It sounded hollow and melodramatic, even as she spoke. They were both silent, and the stuffed octopus eyed Kate ironically from under the bed.
“I don’t think I’ve been able to love anybody,” Wave said. “You’re always blocking me whenever I try to feel anything for myself. And I just—I don’t want to be around you anymore. You know when you and Rusty prayed to Satan because you didn’t want to go to Yellowstone? You know what I prayed? I prayed that I wouldn’t have to be your sister anymore. O Guland! Please let me not have a twin sister!”
She’d sat up and was leaning on her palm on their dead mother’s bed, and she seemed almost sort of sorry. She was lying, Kate thought. Kate was sure she was lying, but even as the words came into the air she could feel them hardening into the truth.
“You sacrificed them, Kate,” Wave said. “And this is your reward.”
—
By late October, Wave wasn’t coming back to Grandma Brody’s house at all anymore, and by November she was gone altogether. Vanished.
She’d run away from home: That’s what Kate told Dolin Culver when he summoned her to his office. She spoke dully, though there were all kinds of fires burning in various parts of her brain. She felt wronged and tricked and heartbroken and dizzy and so incredibly angry, all of it smearing together like paint on a palette.
“Do you have any idea where she is?” Dolin Culver said. She hated his stupid yellow-tinted glasses so much that they felt like a personal affront. “You haven’t heard from her at all?”
Kate kept her head down so that she didn’t have to look at him. “No,” she said.
“Okay,” Dolin Culver said.
His mouth twitched like a rabbit’s, and she could feel his distaste for her. She imagined that he thought she was a certain kind of stupid, slutty teenage girl. He knew her type. She was wearing an open-necked, Flashdance-style sweatshirt that revealed her bare shoulder, and she pulled it up self-consciously.
He was silent for a moment. “So,” he said heavily. “What makes you think she ran away? Did she…express to you any kind of unhappiness about her situation? Did she discuss any sort of…plan or so forth?”
Kate shrugged. “I don’t know. Not really,” she said. She looked out the plate-glass window of his office, which was in a mall, and there was the blinking neon light of a cheap-jewelry store nearby. “We weren’t really talking that much,” Kate said. “She was hanging out with a different crowd.”
“But you’re sure that she ran away?” Dolin Culver said. “If she’s missing, any number of things could have happened. And I, personally, am concerned about that.”
She shrugged again. She didn’t know why but it made her sort of happy, how much Dolin Culver loathed her. It was satisfying. “I don’t think anybody kidnapped her,” she said.
“Honey,” he said. “We may be needing to go out to the sheriff, to fill out a report. And I’m going to have to tell them that a young woman—who was previously involved in a murder crime—has disappeared. And the sister doesn’t seem upset about it. So you will definitely be coming down to the sheriff’s office with me. I know you don’t want to go through that again.”
Kate glanced up at the reflective surface of his glasses and then looked off to the side. There was a postcard taped to the wall that said: Greetings from Yellowstone National Park!
Which she guessed was a coincidence.
“I know she ran away, because she took her clothes,” Kate said. “All of her clothes. And her jewelry, and toiletries, and whatever mementos she saved from home. And her suitcase. So that’s why I think she ran away.”
He looked at her, and she looked at the postcard on the wall. She was aware that there were terrible storms moving through her body, lightning and blizzards and torrential rain, but she also felt as if she were looking at them from a distance. Dolin Culver shrugged and turned away from her.
“What about you, Dusty?” he said. “Did your cousin Waverna confide in you at all?”
Kate shook her head silently. If Dolin Culver had been a decent human being or even a competent social worker, he would have noticed that Dustin was not mentally normal. If Culver was the kind of person who cared about his job—which was to be a liaison for orphans and foster kids—he would have looked into Dustin’s eyes and felt as alarmed as Kate did.
But Culver’s expression didn’t shift. He tapped his pencil lead lightly against his desk, while Dustin sat there like a ventriloquist’s doll, his eyes fluttering weirdly, as if he’d just woken up.
“Dustin?” Dolin Culver said.
“Huh?” Dustin said.
Culver sighed, and then he repeated himself slowly. “Did Waverna tell you that she was thinking about running away from home?” he said. Kate realized that he must have thought that Dustin was retarded.
“Uh?” Dustin said. “No?”
She watched as Dustin put his fingers to his mouth, as if he’d just snuck a bite.
This had become a sort of “tic” of Dustin’s; it seemed like he did it unconsciously, and then his eyes grew dull, and he slid down into himself.
If she were a social worker, Kate thought, she would be seriously concerned.
There was something kind of frightening about him. Didn’t other people notice? Was Kate the only one who saw? Since they had come to Gillette, he had almost completely stopped talking, as far as Kate could tell. Sometimes she would hear him whispering to himself under his breath as he did his homework, printing the right answers on worksheets in his careful, ugly, boyish handwriting, but mostly he was silent. Sometimes she would catch him doing little weird gestures, like a wizard casting a spell.
Maybe Dustin should go to a hospital, she thought.
But Dolin Culver’s main interest was in the disappearance of Wave. It was probably something that would cause him trouble—losing one of his wards, or clients, or whatever they were to him. He’d probably have to fill out lots of paperwork. She watched as he picked up a can of Orange Crush soda and positioned it under his mouth. A little stream of brown tobacco spit trickled from his pursed lips.
“I hope for your sake that you kids are telling me the truth,” he said.
—
And so Wave had escaped somehow. Kate tried to imagine how it had happened.
Did someone drive her somewhere, did she have money, somehow, to buy a bus ticket? Or hitchhiked maybe? Kate understood that it was possible, but it didn’t make her feel any less trapped.
For her own self, she couldn’t quite imagine a way out. Sometimes, she would go out to the shed and look at her grandfather’s old Studebaker. It was clear it would never be drivable again. She thought of their old Ford Mustang, Tiny. Where was he now?
In any case, she probably couldn’t leave Dustin. Somehow, it felt like he was her responsibility.
Meanwhile, it was too far to try to walk to town in the cold, and she had made no friends that could give them a ride. Most of the time they couldn’t even watch TV unless they were willing to watch the same thing Grandma Brody wanted to watch. Hee Haw; 60 Minutes.
Upstairs, she and Dustin played the old board games they’d found in their mothers’ closet. They lay on the bed, side by side, and read paperbacks that they’d brought home from the school library. They did chores that Grandma Brody came up with.
Sometimes she wondered if Dustin had lost his mind—if some part of his brain had wandered away and couldn’t find its way back. He seemed calm enough, though. He would sometimes talk about books he liked—The Lord of the Rings, Dune, the sort of thing Kate found impossibly boring, but she listened because it was better than silence. They never spoke of Wave. They never spoke of what had happened. They never spoke of Rusty.
The truth was, Kate sometimes thought, even though Rusty had been convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison, he may have gotten the better deal. Her family was dead. She had lost all her friends. She had lost her sister. She had lost her home and everything that she had once believed that she “owned.”
And then it was full-on winter, in Gillette, Wyoming.
—
The day of Christmas was very bad. There was something haunted about it. When she went outside to smoke, the sky was a kind of dead color. Some grackles perched in the bare apple tree, watching her, and she opened her pack and saw that she had only three cigarettes left.
She walked along the edge of the highway, and the wind blew into her face whichever direction she turned. She had to crouch down on her haunches with one hand cupped across her face just to get her lighter to work. She’d woken that morning and found herself thinking about their family photograph albums. What had happened to them? she wondered. Neither she nor Wave nor Dustin had thought to bring them. There was a whole drawer full of Kodak Instamatic pictures she and Wave had taken and that she once really enjoyed looking at.
She could remember the pictures they took last year on Christmas. There was the formal one of all of them in front of the Christmas tree: Kate and Wave on either side of their parents, Dustin in front of his. Rusty off to the side, grinning. All the presents splayed out in their garish wrappings. There was the one of Wave putting sardines onto a condiment plate and making a hilarious grossed-out face. There was the one of Dustin solemnly wearing a Santa hat. Uncle Dave holding up a bottle of Johnnie Walker and grinning. Rusty showing off his new .22 hunting rifle, holding it out in both his palms and making a mad-scientist grimace of goofy joy. “It’s alive,” he was screaming, she remembered. He was imitating the scene from Frankenstein, which he loved. She didn’t really get it, but she thought he was cute.
There was a photograph of Vicki and Colleen having an argument in the kitchen, both of them with their mouths open, pointing their fingers at one another, and Kate remembered the exhilaration she felt when Vicki had turned to her and screamed: “Get the hell out of here with that goddamned camera! I’m going to smash that thing!”
There was a photograph of her dad sitting beside Dustin, with his arm casually draped over Dustin’s shoulder, and Dustin was hunched over, putting batteries into the electronic game—Atari—he’d been given.
There was a photograph of Kate and Rusty sitting next to each other on the couch, and Kate was flipping the bird with both hands.
It made her wince, thinking of this picture.
She turned and looked over her shoulder, looked back at Grandma Brody’s place in the distance. There were no cars on the road, and the wide prairie and the sky stretched out emptily in all directions, but there was still the distinct feeling of being watched. It gave her a superstitious feeling, and she dropped her half-smoked cigarette and began to walk quickly toward the house.
She could hear the TV going in the living room.
There was a weird moment when she was certain that she heard Dustin say the word Rusty. But when she walked in, he was sitting on the floor by Grandma Brody’s easy chair, and they were watching It’s a Wonderful Life. Grandma Brody was dabbing her eye with a tissue.
There was a weird moment when Grandma Brody had raised her hand and gestured: Come join us! And Dustin had looked at her with the blankest eyes.
There was a weird moment where she thought, You sacrificed him. And this is your reward.
—
When she went back to their room, she saw that the Ouiji board game was open on the bed. The box was open, and she could see the contents.
There was the game board, with the alphabet on it and the moon and sun, and there were dozens of rocks that had been polished, and stamps, and coins. There was also a revolver.
She thought it was her father’s pistol, the one he’d kept in the kitchen drawer for “protection.”
Fuck, she thought. She didn’t touch it.
She backed out of the room and she could hear the actor from It’s a Wonderful Life screaming ecstatically. “I want to live again! Please, God, I want to live again!”
—
Even after Wave left, they’d continued sharing the same bed. She didn’t know why—except that neither of them had suggested doing anything different. Even a simple change in their arrangements would have felt huge.
But when Dustin got into bed with her that night, she stirred uncomfortably. She sat up in bed and looked at him, and she felt herself flinching from his touch when he climbed under the covers.
“What?” he said.
She shuddered. “I had a bad dream,” she said. “I’m scared.”
He sighed sleepily. “What are you scared of?” he said.
“Just that—” she said. “What if we made a mistake?”
“Mmm,” Dustin said. He yawned. “Don’t be scared,” he said. He pressed up against her and began to sleepily stroke her hair. “There’s nothing to be scared about,” he murmured.
—
If there had been any lingering doubts about Rusty’s guilt, the trial put them to rest.
The first astonishing thing that happened was that Trent testified against Rusty. They questioned him and questioned him, and finally he broke down. He said that he and Rusty were high on PCP and that Rusty told him that he planned to kill everyone and burn the house down. Rusty told him that he was going to move to Los Angeles, Trent said, and start a metal band.
Then there was Dustin’s testimony. He told them about the baby rabbits and his voice broke, and then he talked about being forced down into the open grave and he actually started crying. The courtroom was silent, and he gasped in a couple of hoarse, sobbing breaths.
Rusty took out a comb and ran it through his long hair, as if he were distracted.
Kate decided to tone things down a little, to be very soft-spoken and to only describe things very vaguely. She kept her head down a lot; she was a traumatized girl. But she didn’t cry.
She only glanced up once. The prosecutor was looking through some papers, and it seemed like he had lost his place. “One moment, your honor,” he said, and Kate lifted her head.
She looked at Rusty, and their eyes met before she could stop. He stared at her with a softly bemused look. Then he lifted his hand, his pinkie and forefinger raised: the bull sign, the rock ’n’ roll forevah sign. He raised his eyebrows at her: I toast you.
She never understood why he didn’t testify himself. If you say you’re not gui
lty, shouldn’t you at least try to defend yourself? But maybe he had given up. Maybe he saw it was hopeless.
—
When classes started again in January, she rode the bus to school, but she didn’t go inside. When she got off the bus that first day, she stood on the sidewalk, staring at the kids milling around in the courtyard.
Then she turned away from them, putting the school to her back, and began to walk in the direction of downtown. She was wearing a blue down parka, and she put the hood up. A circle of fawn-colored synthetic fur framed her face, and she lit a cigarette as she walked.
Her makeup was modeled on Joan Jett. Heavy black eyeliner, almost to the point of raccoon eyes. Bright-red lipstick.
But now she regretted it. It was the kind of look that construction-worker guys would hoot at, and Gillette was full of those kind of men. A boomtown, so people said.
So she kept her head low and she tried to walk in a way that expressed quiet hostility and gloom, so that the worst that she might expect from the men outside the bars were a few catcalls. Hey, don’t be depressed, what are you sad about? Lift your head up, honey. Let the world see that pretty face.
Knowing that making eye contact would be an invitation to pursue her.
—
For a while she stood outside a pharmacy and thought about shoplifting. She was low on makeup, but she wondered if she could get away with it, and eventually an old man came out to shoo her away.
Literally. He waved his arms at her the way you would at chickens. “You go on, now,” he said. He was a thin, white-haired man in a white lab coat, wearing a name tag that said AMOS. He actually stomped his foot at her on the sidewalk. “Git!” he said. “No loitering!”
And so she moved grimly down the block and settled against the wall of a storefront Chinese restaurant called Oriental House, and no one bothered her there. She leaned against the wall, smoking, and finally at around ten o’clock some short, skinny Chinese guys came to the door. They were talking—maybe arguing?—in their native language, and when they saw her standing there shivering, they stopped.