Page 58 of The Bright Lands
But nothing moved, of course. She was totally, hopelessly alone.
For the second time that day, Clark thought of her mother. Margo Clark, née Delbardo, remained the strangest woman Starsha had ever met in her life, even after three years in law enforcement. Margo had lived in Pettis County from the day she was born but never did she seem at home here. She had once—somehow—been a cheerleader as a girl but, as an adult, had grown into something of a hippy, or perhaps just a watered-down Texas mystic (though she’d have no doubt resented the description, much as she resented everything). She was prone to wearing beaded garnet shawls and turquoise headscarves and talking, whenever she was overcome by her drunk husband’s antics, about a spirit that had visited her in high school and revealed to her the exact date of her death.
Margo used to explain away all her mistakes with superstitions she had failed to heed or rituals she had failed to properly execute—the floors of Clark’s house had always been gritty with salt—and the woman could say something like, “Dreams are just our souls going for a swim at night,” with all the calm, bored confidence of a woman describing the laundry.
It had been Margo who’d instilled in Clark a lifelong aversion to the Flats outside the family’s house. Other children grew up with Bigfoot in the woods and the bogeyman under the bed, but not Clark. She’d been told stories since she was in diapers about a monster that slept in a trench under the Flats, coiled and lethal as a snake in a toilet’s U-bend. “The thing out there’s got long whiskers like a catfish,” Margo used to tell her daughter. “And nails as long as the school bus and two black iguana eyes that’re as big as your face.”
Looking back, Clark always thought that the monster had been a brilliant tool for a mother with a useless husband and two wild children to corral. The creature drank little girls’ tears, for one thing (“So quit your bawling unless you want him to come say hello”) and kept Clark well on her mother’s side of the property line. “Don’t you dare go over that fence, Starsha Marilynn Clark. Ain’t nobody goes out there in the Flats don’t get lost on the way back. And that’s how he gets you.”
The monster even had a name, though it was something so bizarre and alien it had always struck Clark as far too peculiar for her mother—a woman who was rather prosaic, under all the crazy—to have invented herself. Clark struggled now to remember that name, feeling suddenly as if it were a vital thing to know, though why on earth she suddenly cared after twenty years was beyond her. The name had sounded like something she’d find in the Old Testament, she remembered that much. “Botox,” Troy had called it once. “Bullshit.”
Margo hadn’t cared for that. “You just wait till you feel it moving in your sleep,” she’d told him. “Just you wait till he makes your nightmares go woolly—then you’ll know he’s took a shine to you.”
When Clark had discovered, much to her surprise, that none of the other children in her kindergarten had ever heard of a monster that slept under the Flats, her mother’s stories had quickly lost their power. But now that Clark, with more than a little fear, was approaching what she was certain would be a sixth night of troubled sleep, she couldn’t help but wish her mother were here with her tattered tarot deck and her prayer beads. Because Margo had been right about one thing: one afternoon, when her mother picked Clark up from the middle school, she’d greeted her by saying, “Next Tuesday’s the day.”
And sure enough, late on the morning of the following Tuesday—April 6, 2004—a pickup truck from Denton, Texas, had come roaring down the highway with Margo’s name all but written in blood on the front fender.
Clark turned away from the dark Flats outside her window with a shudder. She rinsed out the glasses in the sink and told herself she didn’t see a pair of brilliant black iguana eyes out there, staring back at her from just across her fence.
Her phone buzzed again on the counter. She ignored it. All her fear had knocked loose a thought. Browder had even mentioned it: rifling through her brother’s file, Clark saw that none of Troy’s old teammates had been interviewed after his disappearance.
Something else occurred to her. It was in her own interview with the police ten years ago—an interview conducted, she remembered, at this very table—during which she had told a much younger Detective Mayfield that she had no idea where Troy had gone but that her brother might have said something about his plans to Joel Whitley.
Yes,thatJoel Whitley, she had told the detectives. By the time of the interview it had be almost two months since Joel’s arrest but the sound of his name had still sent a tremor through the room. Joel and Troy had hung out on a few occasions over the summer, she’d explained to Detective Mayfield, usually on weekends when Troy was back in town.
And yet there was no mention of Joel in the notes of her interview. There was no mention of him anywhere in the report.
Was it a clerical error, she wondered, or another deliberate omission, just like the drug money?
“Mr. Boone asked that we keep that little detail out of the files.”
A heavy, painful memory fell unbidden into her mind and began unwrapping itself before she could stop it: late fall, midway through a chilly football season, a few weeks before everything started to come apart. Clark and Joel had never been better. Clark and her father had been a different story.
The old man had been out of work for weeks (again) living half in a bottle and pawning whatever he could carry out of the house. Clark had returned home from school one afternoon to find her father, chisel in hand, working to open the padlock she used to seal her bedroom shut against him. In a fury, Clark had wrenched her father away from the bedroom door and all but thrown him down the hall. She spotted the revolver he’d been using as a hammer a moment later.
She got out of the house before he could get his wits about him. At gossipy old Miss Lydia’s house a mile down the road she’d called Troy, had told him that he needed to comenow, and then spent the last hours of the day in Miss Lydia’s kitchen, eating stale Fig Newtons and suffering through recorded episodes ofThe Price Is Right. “If you play them back you can guess the answers,” the lady had explained. No shit.
She saw her brother’s truck pass Miss Lydia’s windows just after dark. She set off after him on foot, the first few stars appearing above her, and when the coast sounded clear she made her way into the house just in time to find Troy emerging from their father’s room bearing an armload of empty bottles, a box of ammunition and the old revolver, his finger roguishly hooked around the trigger guard.
“Is that all of it?” she said, nodding at the ammo.
Troy dropped the bottles in the sink with a clatter. He wiped sweat from his brow, eyes wide with adrenaline (or, she wondered now,with something harder?) and said, “The man’s room’s a rat’s nest.”
In those days, Clark had still been sore that Troy, the only person on the planet who could calm their father, had moved away. “Took you enough time to get here,” she had said. “The highway from Rockdale get longer this afternoon?”
At first she’d thought Troy hadn’t heard her. He seemed interested only in studying the sprawling Flats outside the window.
“I have to tread so careful around here, Star,” he said at last.
She had not taken that well. She had not taken that well at all.Hehad to tread careful?Hehad not been the one living alone with a drunken animal for a year.Hehad not been the one with the gun pointed in his face that fucking afternoon.
He was not the one who, despite every achievement, was perpetually known as “Troy Clark’s sister.”
No. She ran Troy from the house that evening and told him to tread his careful way home. She had spat on his truck. Hell, she shouted, if it were such a strain then maybe he should never come back at all.
It was the last time she ever saw him. She hadn’t expected him to take her seriously, but there you go.
But what did any of that matter now? Why did that memory come back to her, why those words specifically—“I have to tread so careful”?
