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  “Under the couch.”

  “Well,” she said, “I guess he’ll come out when he’s ready.” We looked at each other one more time. Her eyes was shiny. Then she went about getting Larry’s coffee. I could tell by her humming that she was happy. The next day when my hand swelled up she let me stay out of school. She took me to the doctor. After that we had milkshakes and she bought me a purse. From then on, it was easier to live at the Moffetts’ house.

  JOHNNY

  After what I did to Steven, I was sent to the Briar Mountain Children’s Home. It was a red-brick building with a bell tower behind iron gates, nestled in a grove of pine woods. On the highway there, past fields and gas stations and through dark tunnels, I felt home receding. Our empty house, my mama in the asylum, my father’s finger bone, and most of all Laura. It was like I didn’t fully exist without her. I drifted among the other boys and girls, around the main building where we slept in a dorm, the chapel where we sat through the sermons of the pastor who ran the home, the fellowship hall where we ate tasteless meals, the room with folding chairs where the pastor’s son counseled us in groups. I spent the whole hour looking out the window at the mountains wreathed in fog. They were not the same mountains I had grown up with. I was almost certain somewhere among those hazy blue ridges was Chickweed Holler, where my great-granny had come from. I pictured shady thickets and cool ledges of rock, tree bark wriggling with bugs. Soon I began skipping the counseling sessions and disappearing into the woods outside the iron fence for hours at a time. Whenever I came wandering back, the pastor’s son always took me by the arm and asked if I wanted to be living there forever, if I never wanted to have a real home. I didn’t say what I was thinking, that there’s no such thing.

  Some of the boys whispered that the grounds were haunted, telling ghost stories after the lights went out. They said it was once a Civil War hospital where many soldiers had died, but I never saw or felt the presence of anything there. The main building was the oldest, its corroded pipes spitting brown water when we washed our hands. All night in the dorms we heard the drip-drip of the leaky showers down the hall. In the summer opening windows gave no relief from the heat and in winter the boiler always went out, leaving our teeth to chatter on frozen mornings, making the other children sick so that I couldn’t sleep for their coughing. But I never caught their croups and colds and bouts of bronchitis. I was an outsider among them, made of something different than they were.

  In the five years I lived at the children’s home, I saw my sister twice. Nora Graham said visits were hard to arrange because we lived in separate counties. On our twelfth birthday, she drove Laura an hour from Millertown to see me. She left us alone on the playground behind the main building, a patch of worn grass with swings hanging limp at the ends of their chains. Laura was taller and her face was longer. She had grown up behind my back. Sitting on the swings together, I was reminded of things I’d tried hard to forget. I heard my mama’s screams, saw Laura’s handprint on Steven’s cheek. When she gave me the present she had made, a drawing of our house on the mountain, I crumpled it in my fist. She studied me with sad eyes. Then she reached out and guided a lock of my hair back into place. For a long time I could still feel the brush of her fingers on my brow.

  When Laura was gone I climbed the iron fence and got lost between the pines. I ran through the woods half blind with unshed tears, clambering across gullies and over rises, tripping and falling again and again. It was almost dusk when I came to a bluff of stacked rock shelves with more pines perched high on top. Near the ground I saw a crack under an overhang. When I ducked inside, the cave smelled of algae and minerals and wet stone. Within the sun’s reach the limestone walls were mottled with moss, shaggy near the top with russet-colored roots like the pelt of some mythical forest animal. Farther in, I found what looked at first like three old trash barrels leaning on uneven piles of rock. On closer inspection I realized it was an abandoned moonshine still. There was a tin tub with a pipe running down from its rust-eaten lid into a weathered barrel made of rotten gray boards, and from it a length of tubing coiled into another metal barrel, brittle and fiery orange with rust. Not far from the still, I noticed something glinting on the ground. I bent down, startling a lizard up the stone wall, and found a silver cigarette lighter. I held it in the sun falling through the cave’s opening and saw initials engraved on one side. I stopped breathing. The initials were J.O., like mine. But I didn’t think of my own name. I thought of my father’s. It was like somebody had left the lighter there for me to find.

  A few months after I discovered the cave, a girl named Libby came to live at the children’s home. Boys and girls ate together in the fellowship hall and one morning at breakfast I caught her staring at me. She had brown hair and green eyes and a chicken pox scar on her forehead. I learned later that she was fourteen but she was built like a woman, breasts straining at the buttons of her blouse. When I saw her later at the middle school, I almost didn’t know her. There was a dumpster out back where I went to smoke. She was standing with a group of boys wearing blue eye shadow and blowing smoke rings through the shiny oval of her lips. She asked how old I was. When I told her, she smiled and said, “You don’t look no thirteen.” On the bus back to the children’s home she was the same plain girl from breakfast again, no trace of teased bangs or lip gloss.

  That afternoon she followed me into the woods. I heard her footfalls on the pine needles behind me but I didn’t turn around. I let her trail me all the way to the cave. When we reached the opening I turned and she almost bumped into me, face flushed and pulse fluttering in her throat. I took her by the arm and we ducked into the crack in the rocky bluff. For what seemed a long time, we knelt facing each other in the murky gloom. Then her hand slid up my thigh. My muscles tensed under her touch. The black holes of her pupils widened to draw me in, opening to show me what was inside of her, heaps of cinder and mud and things left out in the rain, wells where living things fell inside and drowned. I pulled her close by the nape of the neck, kissing her so hard I tasted blood. I twisted my hands up in her hair, bit her shoulders, sank my fingers into her flesh. She didn’t pull away. She was drawn to me in spite of or maybe because of my darkness. She was only there for a month, but after her there were others that I lay tangled with on the cool dirt floor of the cave, pinning them down with my body, pulling their hair until they cried out. Like Libby, they always wanted more, as if they craved my meanness.

  Not long before I left the Briar Mountain Children’s Home, when we were fourteen, the state arranged another visit with Laura. It was an overcast day in March so we sat at a table in the fellowship hall, where the windows faced the mountains. I wasn’t prepared for how much she looked like our mama. She was wearing a skirt down to her ankles and had hair to her waist because her foster parents were Church of God people.

  “You look skinny,” she said.

  “So do you,” I said.

  She smiled. “I learnt how to make biscuits. I wish I could fix you some.”

  I turned my head. “I don’t like biscuits.”

  There was an awkward silence. We sat listening to the clanking radiator, smelling the dampness of the long, drafty room. She pulled her cardigan tighter around her. When she spoke again it startled me. “What’s it like in here, with all these other kids?”

  I thought about it. “Like being by myself.”

  She fidgeted in her folding chair. “Are you lonesome?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t mind it.”

  She got quiet again. I felt her studying me and looked down at the floor tiles, the same dingy color as the weather outside. “I guess there’s something I ought to tell you,” she said. “I meant to keep it to myself, but I can’t do you that way.”

  I waited for her to go on, not sure if I wanted to hear.

  “There’s a store in Millertown with our name on it.”

  My eyes moved to her face. “What?”

  “There’s a building on Main Street that says Od
om’s Hardware on the side. I seen it when I was downtown with Pauline. The woman I stay with.”

  I leaned closer to her. “Did you go inside?”

  Laura shook her head. “Pauline don’t trade there. But she knows who owns it. She said his name’s Frankie Odom.” She bit her lip. “I reckon he’s our granddaddy.”

  I blinked at her. “How do you know that?”

  “Pauline said so.”

  “Then how does she know?”

  Laura looked down at her scuffed shoes. “Everybody knows it.”

  “You didn’t go in the store and ask any questions?”

  She shook her head again. “Pauline said Frankie Odom ain’t in his right mind anyway. She said he’s got old and senile. His boy runs the store now.”

  My stomach dropped. “His boy?”

  “Not our daddy,” Laura said quickly. “Our uncle. Pauline called him Hollis.”

  “Hollis,” I repeated, so I wouldn’t forget.

  Laura twisted her hands in her lap. “Pauline said the Odoms are bad people and I believe her, Johnny. I don’t want any part of them. For Mama to do something like what she might have done to our daddy, he must have been mean.”

  My eyes began to sting. “We have people who knew our dad and you don’t care?”

  “Can’t we talk about something else?” she asked. “I been missing you so bad.”

  “You want to find our mama, though. You’d talk to her, after the way she did us.”

  “I don’t know about that, either,” she said. “I used to want us to run away and go find her but I’ve give up on that. I’ve quit believing we’ll all be together again.”

  “Don’t lie,” I said. “I know how it is. You’d go to her right now if you could.”

  “What do you mean, how it is?”

  “I mean you’re just like her.”

  “How’s that true? I don’t even know her anymore.”

  I clenched my teeth trying to keep in the words, but in the end I couldn’t stop them from tumbling out. “You walked off and left me, just like she did.”

  Laura’s eyes widened. “Johnny, you know I never wanted to be away from you.”

  I looked down at the floor again. “I don’t know anything.”

  Laura spent a long moment thinking. Then she said, “I guess I can’t help being something like Mama, on account of having her blood. But so do you.”

  I grabbed her arm. “Don’t say that. I’m not like her.”

  Laura looked into my eyes. “Okay, Johnny,” she said. “I wish you’d let me go.”

  I took my hand away from her arm and stared down at it. Laura turned her face to the window and the distant blue chain of the mountains, where Chickweed Holler was hidden from us. She rubbed at my fingerprints fading on her skin. I was sorry but I couldn’t take it back. Then Nora Graham cracked the door of the fellowship hall and my time with Laura was over. I didn’t know it would be five years until I saw her again.

  LAURA

  For a long time I looked forward to Johnny getting out of the children’s home. Nora Graham said she’d place him with a foster family as close to me as she could. I thought even though I was still in middle school and he was starting high school, we might at least get to ride the same bus. When he finally did get out, he lived for a while at a foster home in Millertown and went to the ninth grade. He was on the other side of town so we didn’t ride the same bus, but Nora Graham arranged a visit. Then, before I even got to see him, she said he done something bad and got sent off again. My heart was broke in two. No matter what Johnny thought of me, I loved him better than anything.

  When I started high school myself, the girls there was still talking about Johnny. They said he done them wrong in the short time he was there. He’d go with one until he got tired of her and then move on to the next. It wasn’t just the girls Johnny left his mark on, either. This boy named Marshall Lunsford asked if I was Johnny’s sister. He claimed Johnny was his best friend and had been to his house. He said Johnny had lived with his mama’s cousin so they was like family. I couldn’t see Johnny being friends with anybody. He said when Johnny got out of jail they was going hunting together. I figured that boy would be better off to never see Johnny again. It was a sad thing to think about my own brother, but I knowed something was broke in Johnny, the same as it was in me.

  I didn’t like high school. The only good thing about it was Clint Blevins. A bunch of us used to stand around and wait for the bus to take us home. One day I felt a finger winding up in my hair. I whipped around and Clint said, “Sorry about that. I couldn’t help it.” Clint was in some classes with me and he was always getting called to the office. Seemed like every week Clint Blevins was in a fight. One time I walked up right after the gym teacher pulled him off of a boy. There was blood all over the hall. It made my belly hurt. I thought Clint was just another mean boy. But when I turned around, I knowed he wasn’t. He had eyes like Mama’s and his hair had fat yellow curls like rings of sunshine. Then I seen something peeking out of his shirt collar, flashing in the sun. He had a chain around his neck, a silver rope. I didn’t know I was fixing to talk until I opened my mouth.

  “Your name is Clint,” I said.

  “Yeah, but I can’t remember yourn.”

  “Laura Odom.”

  “You’re a pretty girl, Laura.”

  “I favor my mama some. But she has blue eyes like you got. Not black like mine.”

  “I like black eyes the best,” Clint said, and followed me up on the bus.

  He sat down with me. He said he’d moved back in with his mama, that’s why he rode my bus now. He said, “Me and Daddy was living in a little green trailer beside of the lake. I don’t get along too good with Mama, but Daddy finally drunk hisself to death. She thinks I ortn’t to live out yonder by myself and me still in school.” Clint looked out the window. I felt sorry for him. I could tell how sad he was. “You should’ve seen poor old Daddy there on the last. He was shrunk down to nothing and yeller as a punkin where his liver was bad.” Clint looked up at the bus ceiling. I moved my hand closer to his on the seat between us. I think that made him feel better.

  “Where’d you get that silver necklace?” I asked to change the subject.

  “From Louise,” he said. I got jealous. Later I found out she was just the gray-headed cashier down at the grocery store where he worked.

  Clint got off the bus at a house behind the laundrymat. After that, we set together every day. He told me all about his life. I seen the stories in my mind. Clint couldn’t remember things being any different. His daddy held down a janitor job before he started drinking, and his mama worked in the school lunchroom before she went on welfare. When he was a baby they rented a farmhouse beside of a pond. But the first thing Clint remembered was living in that house behind the laundrymat. When he talked about it, I could smell warm clean clothes drifting across the yard. He said when he was real little it was like being wrapped in a blanket. But later on the smell of laundry got to where it gagged him. Too many times Clint had set in the weeds out behind the house, with the cinder blocks and busted glass, smelling that laundrymat and listening to his mama holler and carry on. Then after while he would see his daddy plod off down the street holding a whiskey bottle with a cut place over his eye where she throwed something at him.

  Clint said sometimes he used to slip in the laundrymat and watch the clothes float in them glass portholes. He’d listen to the blue jean buttons and loose change clinking around. He’d watch that round and round motion and get sad, thinking about a circle that kept going and didn’t end up anywhere. Sometimes his daddy found him and bought him a Coke in a glass bottle and a pack of peanuts to pour in it. Then Clint said that old laundrymat life was finally over, at least for a while. His daddy got a job driving the garbage truck long enough to put back some money. One day he came out of the house with a paper sack in his arms. Clint’s mama was screaming and throwing his things out behind him. Clint followed his daddy in the street and asked, �
��Where are we going?” His daddy said, “I got us a little spot by the lake.” Clint said when they got down to the water, it was the prettiest place he ever seen. Him and his daddy was happy there from the start.

  Clint spent every day he could in the lake until it got cold, trying to be a fish. He’d sink as far as he could and stay down for as long as he could hold his breath, because he knowed it was all going to end. He said it was like time stopped when he was under the water and he wanted to stretch it out. He could see his daddy getting sicker and sicker. He remembered what his mama said when his daddy left. “That’s all right. You’re just slinking off to die, like a dog does. Mark my words. It won’t be long.” Clint hated his mama having the last laugh, about as bad as he hated that his daddy was fixing to die.