A Grant County Collection: Indelible, Faithless and Skin Privilege

  Main Street dead-ended at the entrance of the college, and Lena took a left into the children's clinic, turning around and heading back out of town. She rolled up the windows as the chill got to her and found herself fiddling with the dials on the radio, trying to find something soft to keep her company. She glanced up as she passed the Stop-N-Go, and recognized the black Dodge Dart parked beside one of the gas pumps.

  Without thinking, Lena did a U-turn, pulling parallel to the Dart. She got out of her car, looking into the market for Terri Stanley. She was inside, paying the guy behind the register, and even from this distance, Lena could almost smell the defeat on her. Shoulders slumped, eyes cast down. Lena suppressed the urge to thank God she'd happened to run into her.

  The Celica's gas tank was almost full, but Lena turned on the pump anyway, taking her time removing the gas cap and putting in the nozzle. By the first click of the pump, Terri had come out of the store. She was wearing a thin blue Member's Only jacket, and she pushed the sleeves up to her elbows as she walked across the brightly lit filling station. Terri was obviously preoccupied as she walked to her car, and Lena cleared her throat several times before the woman noticed her.

  'Oh,' Terri said, the same word she had uttered the first time she'd seen Lena at the police station.

  'Hey.' Lena's smile felt awkward on her face. 'I need to ask you –'

  'Are you following me?' Terri looked around as if she was scared someone would see them together.

  'I was just getting gas.' Lena took the nozzle out of the Celica, hoping Terri didn't notice she'd put in less than half a gallon. 'I need to talk to you.'

  'Dale's waiting for me,' she said, tugging down the sleeves of her jacket. Lena had seen something, though – something all too familiar. They both stood there for the longest minute of Lena's life, neither one knowing what to say.

  'Terri . . .'

  Her only answer was, 'I need to go.'

  Lena felt words sticking in her throat like molasses. She heard a high-pitched noise in her ear, almost like a siren warning her away. She asked, 'Does he hit you?'

  Terri looked down at the oil-stained concrete, ashamed. Lena knew that shame, but on Terri it brought out anger in Lena like she hadn't known in a while.

  'He hits you,' Lena said, narrowing the space between them as if she needed to be close to be heard. 'Come here,' she said, grabbing Terri's arm. The woman winced from pain as Lena yanked up the sleeve. A black bruise snaked up her arm.

  Terri didn't move away. 'It's not like that.'

  'What's it like?'

  'You don't understand.'

  'The hell I don't,' she said, tightening her grip. 'Is that why you did it?' she demanded, anger sparking like a brush fire. 'Is that why you were in Atlanta?'

  Terri tried to squirm away. 'Please let me go.'

  Lena felt her rage becoming uncontrollable. 'You're scared of him,' she said. 'That's why you did it, you coward.'

  'Please . . .'

  'Please what?' Lena asked. 'Please what?' Terri was crying in earnest now, trying so hard to pull away that she was almost on the ground. Lena let go, horrified when she saw a red mark on Terri's wrist working its way below the bruise Dale had made. 'Terri –'

  'Leave me alone.'

  'You don't have to do this.'

  She headed back to her car. 'I'm going.'

  'I'm sorry,' Lena said, following her.

  'You sound like Dale.'

  A knife in her stomach would have been easier. Still, Lena tried, 'Please. Let me help you.'

  'I don't need your help,' she spat, yanking open the car door.

  'Terri –'

  'Leave me alone!' she screamed, slamming the door with a loud bang. She locked the door as if she was afraid Lena might pull her out of the car.

  'Terri –' Lena tried again, but she had pulled away, tires burning rubber on the pavement, the hose from the gas pump stretching, then popping out of the Dart's gas tank. Lena stepped back quickly as gas splattered onto the ground.

  'Hey!' the attendant called. 'What's going on here?'

  'Nothing,' she told him, picking up the nozzle and replacing it on the pump. She dug into her pocket and tossed two dollars at the young man, saying, 'Here. Go back inside.' She climbed back into her car before he could yell anything else.

  The Celica's tires caught against the pavement, the car fishtailing as she pulled away. She didn't realize she was speeding until she blew past a broken-down station wagon that had been parked on the side of the road for the last week. She forced her foot to back off on the accelerator, her heart still pounding in her chest. Terri had been terrified of Lena, looking at her like she was scared she'd be hurt. Maybe Lena would have hurt her. Maybe she would have turned violent, taking her rage out on that poor helpless woman just because she could. What the hell was wrong with her? Standing at the gas station, yelling at Terri, she had felt like she was yelling at herself. She was the coward. She was the one who was scared of what might be done to her if anyone found out.

  The car had slowed to almost a crawl. She was on the outskirts of Heartsdale now, a good twenty minutes from home. The cemetery where Sibyl was buried was out this way, on a flat plain behind the Baptist church. After her sister had died, Lena had gone there at least once, sometimes twice a week, to visit her grave. Over time, she had cut down on her visits, then stopped going altogether. With a shock, Lena realized she hadn't visited Sibyl in at least three months. She had been too busy, too wrapped up in doing her job and dealing with Ethan. Now, at the height of her shame, she could think of nothing more appropriate than going to the graveyard.

  She parked at the front of the church, leaving her windows down and the doors unlocked as she walked toward the front gates of the memorial garden. The area was well lit, overhead lights illuminating the grounds. She knew she had driven here for a reason. She knew what she needed to do.

  Someone had planted a handful of pansies by the entrance to the cemetery, and they swayed in the breeze as Lena walked by. Sibyl's grave was to the side of the grounds that bordered the church, and Lena took her time walking through the grassy lawn, enjoying the solitude. She had spent almost twelve hours straight on her feet today, but something about being here, being close to Sibyl, made the walk less daunting. Sibyl would have approved of being buried here, Lena always thought. She had loved the outdoors.

  The cement block Lena had upended and used for a bench was still on the ground beside Sibyl's marker, and Lena sat down, wrapping her arms around her knees. In the daytime, a huge pecan tree gave shade to the spot, tendrils of sunlight slipping through the leaves. The marble slab marking Sibyl's final resting place had been cleaned to a shine, and a quick look around at the other gravesites proved that this had been done by a visitor rather than the staff.

  There weren't any flowers. Nan was allergic.

  Like a faucet being turned on, Lena felt tears pool into her eyes. She was such a horrible person. As bad as Dale was to Terri, Lena had been worse. She was a cop, she had a duty to protect people, not scare the shit out of them, not grab their wrist so hard that she left a bruise. She was certainly in no position to call Terri Stanley a coward. If anything, Lena was the coward. She was the one who had scurried off to Atlanta under the cover of lies, paying some stranger to slice out her mistakes, hiding from the repercussions like a frightened child.

  The altercation with Terri had brought back all the memories Lena had tried to suppress, and she found herself back in Atlanta, reliving the whole ordeal again. She was in the car with Hank, his silence cutting like a knife. She was in the clinic, sitting across from Terri, avoiding her eyes, praying it would be over. She was taken back to the freezing operating room, her feet resting in the icy cold stirrups, her legs splayed for the doctor who spoke so calmly, so quietly, that Lena had felt herself being lulled into a sort of hypnotic state. Everything was going to be fine. Everything will be okay. Just relax. Just breathe. Take it slow. Relax. It's all over. Sit up. Here are your clothes. Call
us if there are complications. You all right, darlin'? Do you have someone waiting for you? Just sit in the chair. We'll take you outside. Murderer. Baby killer. Butcher. Monster.

  The protesters had been waiting outside the clinic, sitting in their lawn chairs, sipping from their thermoses of hot coffee, for all intents and purposes looking like tailgaters waiting for the big game. Lena's appearance had caused them all to stand in unison, to scream at her, waving signs with all sorts of graphic, bloody pictures. Obscenely, one even held up a jar, the implied contents obvious to anyone standing within ten feet of it. Still, it didn't look real, and she wondered at the man – of course it was a man – sitting at home, maybe at his kitchen table where his kids sat and had breakfast every morning, preparing the mixture in the jar just to torment frightened women who were making what Lena knew was the most difficult decision of their lives.

  Now, sitting in the cemetery, staring at her sister's grave, Lena let herself wonder for the first time what the clinic did with the flesh and bone they had removed from her own body. Was it lying somewhere in an incinerator, waiting to ignite? Was it buried in the earth, an unmarked grave she would never see? She felt a clenching deep down in her gut, in her womb, as she thought of what she had done – what she had lost.

  In her mind, she told Sibyl what had happened, the choices she had made that brought her here. She talked about Ethan, how something inside of her had died when she started seeing him, how she had let everything good about herself ebb away like sand being taken with the tide. She told her about Terri, the fear in her eyes. If only she could take it all back. If only she had never met Ethan, never seen Terri at the clinic. Everything was going from bad to worse. She was telling lies to cover lies, burying herself in deceit. She couldn't see a way out of it.

  What Lena wanted most of all was to have her sister there, if only for a moment, to tell her that everything was going to be okay. That had been the nature of their relationship from the beginning of time: Lena fucked up and Sibyl smoothed things over, talking it through with her, making her see the other side. Without her guiding wisdom, it all seemed like such a lost cause. Lena was falling apart. There was no way she could have given birth to Ethan's child. She could barely take care of herself.

  'Lee?'

  She turned around, nearly falling off the narrow block. 'Greg?'

  He emerged from the darkness, the moon glowing behind him. He was limping toward her, his cane in one hand, a bouquet of flowers in the other.

  She stood quickly, wiping her eyes, trying to hide her shock. 'What are you doing here?' she asked, rubbing grit off the back of her pants.

  He dropped the bouquet to his side. 'I can come back when you're finished.'

  'No,' she told him, hoping the darkness hid the fact that she had been crying. 'I just . . . it's fine.' She glanced back at the grave so that she wouldn't have to look at him. She had a flash of Abigail Bennett, buried alive, and Lena felt an unreasonable panic fill her. For just a split second she thought of her sister alive, begging for help, trying to claw her way out of the casket.

  She wiped her eyes before looking back at him, thinking she must be losing her mind. She wanted to tell him everything that had happened – not just in Atlanta, but before then, back to that day she had returned to the police station after running some samples to Macon, only to have Jeffrey tell her that Sibyl was gone. She wanted to put her head on his shoulder and feel his comfort. More than anything, she wanted his absolution.

  'Lee?' Greg asked.

  She searched for a response. 'I was just wondering why you're here.'

  'I had to get Mama to bring me,' he explained. 'She's back in the car.'

  Lena looked over his shoulder as if she could see the parking lot in front of the church. 'It's kind of late.'

  'She tricked me,' he said. 'Made me go to her knitting circle with her.'

  Her tongue felt thick in her mouth, but she wanted nothing more than to keep hearing him talk. She had forgotten how soothing his voice could be, how gentle the sound. 'Did she make you hold the yarn?'

  He laughed. 'Yeah. You'd think I'd quit falling for that.'

  Lena felt herself smile, knowing he hadn't been tricked. Greg would deny it at gunpoint, but he had always been a mama's boy.

  'I brought these for Sibby,' he said, holding up the flowers again. 'I came yesterday and there weren't any, so I figured . . .' He smiled. In the moonlight, she saw he still hadn't managed to fix the tooth she had accidentally chipped during a game of Frisbee.

  He said, 'She loved daisies,' handing Lena the flowers. For just a second, their hands brushed, and she felt as if she had touched a live wire.

  For his part, Greg seemed unfazed. He started to leave, but Lena said, 'Wait.'

  Slowly, he turned back around.

  'Sit down,' she told him, indicating the block.

  'I don't want to take your seat.'

  'It's okay.' She stepped back to place the flowers in front of Sibyl's marker. When she looked back up, Greg was leaning on his cane, watching her.

  He asked, 'You okay?'

  Lena tried to think of something to say. She sniffed, wondering if her eyes were as red as they felt. 'Allergies,' she told him.

  'Yeah.'

  Lena crossed her hands behind her back so she wouldn't wring them again. 'How'd you hurt your leg, exactly?'

  'Car accident,' he told her, then smiled again. 'Totally my fault. I was trying to find a CD and I took my eyes off the road for just a second.'

  'That's all it takes.'

  'Yeah,' he said, then, 'Mister Jingles died last year.'

  His cat. She had hated the thing, but for some reason she was sad to hear that he was gone. 'I'm sorry.'

  The breeze picked up, the tree overhead shushing in the wind.

  Greg squinted at the moon, then looked back at Lena. 'When Mom told me about Sibyl . . .' His voice trailed off, and he dug his cane into the ground, pushing up some grass. She thought she saw tears in his eyes and made herself look away so that his sadness did not reignite her own.

  He said, 'I just couldn't believe it.'

  'I guess she told you about me, too.'

  He nodded, and he did something that not many people could do when they talked about rape: he looked her right in the eye. 'She was upset.'

  Lena didn't try to hide her sarcasm. 'I bet.'

  'No, really,' Greg assured her, still looking at her, his clear blue eyes void of any guile. 'My aunt Shelby – you remember her?' Lena nodded. 'She was raped when they were in high school. It was pretty bad.'

  'I didn't know,' Lena said. She had met Shelby a few times. As with Greg's mother, they hadn't exactly bonded. Lena would never have guessed the older woman had something like that in her life. She was very tightly wound, but most of the women in the Mitchell family were. The one thing Lena had been astounded by since her attack was that being raped had put her in what was not exactly an exclusive club.

  'If I had known . . .' Greg began, but didn't finish.

  'What?' she asked.

  'I don't know.' He reached down and picked up a pecan that had fallen off the tree. 'I was really upset to hear it.'

  'It was pretty upsetting,' Lena allowed, and surprise registered on his face. She asked, 'What?'

  'I don't know,' he repeated, tossing the pecan into the wood. 'You used to not say things like that.'

  'Like what?'

  'Like feelings.'

  She forced out a laugh. Her whole life was a struggle with feelings. 'What things did I used to say?'

  He mulled it over. '"That's life"?' he tried, mimicking her one-sided shrug. '"Tough shit"?'

  She knew he was right, but she couldn't begin to know how to explain it. 'People change.'

  'Nan says you're seeing somebody.'

  'Yeah, well,' was all she could say, but her heart had flipped in her chest at the thought of him bothering to ask. She was going to kill Nan for not telling her.

  He said, 'Nan looks good.'

  'She
's had a hard time.'

  'I couldn't believe y'all were living together.'

  'She's a good person. I didn't really see that before.' Hell, she didn't see a lot of things before. Lena had made an art out of fucking up anything remotely positive in her life. Greg was living proof of that.

  For lack of something to do, she looked up at the tree. The leaves were ready to fall. Greg made to leave again and she asked, 'What CD?'

  'Huh?'

  'Your accident,' she pointed to his leg. 'What CD were you looking for?'

  'Heart,' he said, a goofy grin breaking out on his face.

  'Bebe Le Strange?' she asked, feeling herself grin back. Saturday had always been chore day when they lived together, and they had listened to that particular Heart album so many times that to this day Lena couldn't scrub a toilet without hearing 'Even It Up' in her head.

  'It was the new one,' he told her.

  'New one?'

  'They came out with a new one about a year ago.'

  'That Lovemonger stuff?'

  'No,' he said, his excitement palpable. The only thing Greg loved more than listening to music was talking about it. 'Kick-ass stuff. Back to the seventies Heart stuff. I can't believe you don't know about it. I was knocking on the door the first day it was out.'

  She realized then how long it had been since she had listened to music she really enjoyed. Ethan preferred punk rock, the kind of disaffected crap spoiled white boys screeched to. Lena didn't even know where her old CDs were.

  'Lee?'

  She had missed something he'd said. 'Sorry, what?'

  'I need to go,' he told her. 'Mama's waiting.'

  Suddenly, she felt like crying again. She forced her feet to stay on the ground and not do something foolish, like run toward him. God, she was turning into a sniveling idiot. She was like one of those stupid women in romance novels.

  He said, 'Take care of yourself.'

  'Yeah,' she said, trying to think of something to keep him from going. 'You, too.'