Page 31 of We Are All Guilty Here

“What is it?” Myrna sounded impatient. Her hands were on her hips. Classic teacher stance. The pose was a mirror image to Hannah’s.

Emmy lost her nerve. “I think the girls are dead.”

“I think you’re right.” Myrna glanced at the doorway to the living room before she punched on the coffee maker. Faded lines on the doorjamb marked the growth of her four children. Emmy Lou and Tommy. Martha and Henry. The woman was intimately familiar with the devastation of losing not one, but two teenagers on the precipice of their adulthood to two tragic accidents.

She said, “Hannah will need to lean on you more than ever now.”

“I don’t know, Mom. Last night …” Emmy wanted to tell her about the fight, but she couldn’t find the words. Everything was still painfully raw. There was no going back from it. The wound would fester for the rest of her life. “That Poe quote you said to me in the park—something like, if you don’t suffer, you won’t be blessed.”

Myrna sat at the table with a heavy groan. She clasped together her hands on the place mat. She looked at Emmy, quoting, “‘Never to suffer would never to have been blessed.’”

“Were you talking about suffering Jonah to be blessed by Cole?”

“Poe disdained didacticism and allegory, though like all writers, he seldom followed his own rules.”

“I take from your deflection that you were making a point about my marriage.”

“Your take would be accurate.”

Emmy’s throat went tight again. Hannah had said that she and Paul had laughed at Emmy for believing Jonah’s bullshit. What had her parents said to each other? Were Tommy and Celia making fun of her, too? Were the cousins gossiping about her behind her back like they gossiped about everybody else? She felt nauseated by the thought of all the text chains she’d been left off of. What an absolute fool she’d been.

“Well?” Myrna asked.

Emmy was saved further humiliation by the sound of car wheels crunching against the gravel driveway. She stood to lookout the door, recognizing the silver Mercedes ML 400 by the red UGA LAW SCHOOL ALUMNI plate on the front.

Taybee was strangling the steering wheel with both hands as she pulled down the driveway. Her daughter Kaitlynn was in the car beside her. She grabbed onto the dash as Taybee came to an abrupt stop. The emergency brake raked up. The driver’s door popped open. Taybee got out wearing white cowboy boots with a long white linen skirt and blouse. Her jewelry was understated, yet somehow managed to convey the full power of the Cliftonfuck you moneythat had propelled her side of the family to success after success.

Emmy reflexively clenched as Taybee shut the car door, then opened it and closed it again. Then she tapped the hood with her knuckles and pointed at Kaitlynn before walking toward the house. Her make-up was perfect. Her skin was like a china doll’s. There had always been something terrifying about her cousin. She was breathtakingly beautiful, thin as a rail, and shockingly bossy.

“Hey.” Emmy pushed open the screen door, asking, “What’s up?”

“I volunteered to wrangle all the kids. Considering what’s going on, it’s best to drop ’em off at the farm where they can all be together and play in the dirt. I’m due in court in an hour, so you need to tell Cole to shake a leg. Never mind. I’ll get him. I brought Kaitlynn with me so y’all can talk. Move it, baby. Your aunt Emmy doesn’t have all day.”

Taybee breezed into the house, shouting a needlessly loud “Good morning!” to Myrna on her way up the stairs, ostensibly to fetch Cole. Her fingers tapped along the railing to a beat only Taybee could hear. There was no question who was going to win the Xbox war this morning.

Emmy slipped on a pair of flip-flops before walking down the porch stairs. The heat was already brutal. She held up her hand to block the intense sunlight. Emmy could feel it burning her skin. Her sleeveless shirt and shorts turned into sandpaper against her body. It said a lot about the state of her marriage that she lived a ten-minute walk away but still kept extra clothes at her parents’ house.

Kaitlynn took her time getting out of the car, her thumbssliding furiously across her phone. She was the reverse image of her mother, dark hair and olive skin where Taybee was blonde and almost translucent. She got her coloring from her father, Terrell, who was also a Clifton, but not the same branch as Taybee, which had inexplicably compelled Taybee to hyphenate her last name to Clifton-Clifton. Hannah called her the Extra C, though not for that reason.

Emmy said, “Mornin’ sweetheart.”

“Mornin’ Aunt Emmy.” Kaitlynn’s smile had a quiver as she tucked her phone into her dress pocket. She was seventeen, two years ahead of Madison and Cheyenne, but her beauty and money had given her advantages the other girls would never have. There was a reason Jack Whitlock had listed Kaitlynn first among the popular girls. She could be as terrifyingly confident as Taybee, but being smart and pretty had its disadvantages, too.

Emmy asked, “Did you want to talk to me?”

Kaitlynn nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Let’s find some shade.” Emmy led her across the driveway. She smoothed her thumb into the palm of her hand as she walked. She couldn’t let go of the sense memory of holding Madison’s hand under the oak tree. It seemed fitting to stand with Kaitlynn under the magnolia that draped across half the front yard—the second time in as many days that Emmy had stood under a tree with an anxious-looking teenage girl. Kaitlynn was clearly troubled, too. Emmy gently tucked the girl’s hair behind her ear. She could be a pill sometimes, but she was only ever mean to her mother.

Emmy promised, “Whatever you have to say is between us.”

“You can tell Mama,” Kaitlynn said. “We already talked. That’s why she dragged me here. She said you needed to know what they were up to.”

“Cheyenne and Madison?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Kaitlynn grabbed onto Emmy’s hand like she needed the physical reassurance. Her palm was still cool from the car’s air conditioning. “I don’t know much, but I know that Cheyenne was seeing an older man. I heard her talking about it with Madison the last week of school. We were waiting for Mr. Loudermilk to let us into the auditorium for chorus practice.”

Emmy’s brain flashed up the image of Madison wearing alight blue North Falls Choral Club T-shirt the day before. “Can you remember what she said specifically?”

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