Page 24 of Every Sweet Thing Is Bitter

MIDNIGHT. IDRIVEthrough the reservation, careening down remote, lightless roads with no destination in mind. I acquired the habit on parole when I was tethered to my halfway house by an invisible fifty-mile leash. Aimlessly driving country roads became my preferred hobby. The streets of Kansas City offer a less bucolic diversion, but occasionally I still find myself navigating the rural stretches east of the city, hugging the banks of the Missouri River and dreaming about following the water all the way to St. Louis.

Missouri. Miserable place. It’s my punishment for near-matricide: living out the rest of my days in Missouri.

My mother’s body is probably on a road just like this, but there is no earthly trace of her to be found. She has disappeared. She has wandered into one of the world’s dark corners, fallen into one of its holes, and she disintegrates more with each passing day, not quite dead but not quite alive. A ghost who cannotbe properly mourned. What sweet sorrow it must be to slip into the next life without even a sound.

It can’t end like this. What I did to my mother has defined my entire life to this point, and, perhaps as it should, it will define the rest of my life too. It shapes me into who I am, for better and mostly for worse, entwining me with my mother like conjoined twins who share organs and spines and brains. It’s a twisted form of codependency. Without my mother, I don’t know who I am. If I never ran her over, who would I be? Would that person be even vaguely recognizable to the woman I am now?

As my mother yawped beneath the car, her bones crushed, her tendons torn, not even the intended target of my wrath, I did not feel remorse. I could recognize the other emotions. Disgust. Shock. Horror. Even guilt. But guilt is not the same as remorse. Guilt touches you on the surface, but remorse echoes through your marrow. I always fall just short of it, eluding me like the end of a rainbow. I am always chasing it, desperate to prove I can feel the one emotion that would absolve me of my greatest fear. Remorse separates humans from animals. We are not the only species that kills for sport, but we are the only one that feels remorse when we do—and if I cannot feel remorse for what I have done, then am I even human at all?

An oncoming truck blinds me with its brights. Before my retinas can be further scorched, I peel off onto another side road, which runs out after half a mile. When I come to a stop, it takes me several moments to realize the vast, treeless expanse unfolding before me is not the prairie, but a lake.

The water is black and sedate like an oil spill. A single light on the opposite shore illuminates a boatless dock. I take the gun from my glove compartment before approaching the water. I’m less worried about a serial killer snatching me from the bushes than I am about becoming the midnight snack of perturbed wildlife. A murderer I can handle; a bear or a cougar would,frankly, make me shit myself. There’s a reason I explore the countryside in a car instead of on foot.

I leave my sandals on the craggy strip of sand separating the water from the grass and wade into the lake. The water kisses my knees. I wish I could swim or at least that I was brave enough to throw caution to the wind and plunge beneath the water. But I’m scared. Of drowning. Of the quiet. People muse about the silence underwater, like it’s something sacrosanct and beautiful, stealing precious moments away from the noise of the universe. I think the universe isn’t noisy enough. Even now, with the chirring crickets and sighing wind to remind me I am not alone, the quiet closes in on me like the jaws of an invisible beast.

I’m anxious. Short of breath. The gun is foreign and unwieldy in my hand. I have no more business handling it than a toddler who has broken into their parents’ gun box. I chuckle as I unlatch the safety.

I fire at the dock light and imagine it as my father’s face. It’s a series of sensory throttles: the muzzle flash, the gun recoiling into my shoulder, the acrid smell of gunpowder, the ear-splitting crack like the peals of a thousand church bells. My breaths are deafening in the ensuing silence. I wait for something to happen. I wait for police sirens to come screaming down the dirt road, or for an irascible creature to pounce at me from the shadows, or for something, anything other than this noiseless purgatory. It feels like I’ve detonated a nuclear bomb, only for there to be no mushroom cloud, no blinding pulse of light.

I raise the gun to fire it again, but my arm is trembling. My cheeks are wet, my breathing ragged.

CHAPTER

8

August 12th

8:22AM

THE NEXT MORNING,I have just enough time to visit Gil before the search begins. The longer I loiter without visiting him, the more cowardly I am. It’s not until I’m following the nurse down the hallway that I realize I’m dressed completely in black, come to pay my respects to the enervated remnants of the man I once loved like a father.

“You picked the perfect time to come in.” The nurse has a peculiar smile, one side of her mouth lifting as the other droops ever so slightly, like a stroke patient. It’s the same cute, pocket-sized girl who brought me to Gil’s room the other day. She still looks familiar. She smells familiar too, like freshly baked pastries, sugary and buttery. “He’s just finished his morning coffee.”

“He’s like me,” I say. “Neither of us are human until we have our coffee.”

She walks one pace in front of me. Her cocoa-brown ponytail is fastened impossibly high on her head and swishes withevery step she takes. “He talks about you sometimes. He likes to tell us about how he taught you to drive.”

“How do you—?”

The nurse flattens herself against the wall so a wheelchair can pass. “Softball. You were shortstop; I was first base.”

“Jesus Christ, Penny Eastman?”

Now the other side of her mouth lifts too, imbued with enough joy to complete her smile. She is happier to see me than she should be: her father, after all, is the sheriff. I was never able to disassociate the softhearted, bubbly girl I knew Penny to be from the man I hated almost as much as I did my father.

“I wasn’t sure if it was my place to gohey, remember me?when you brought Gil in a couple days ago,” she says. “But … it’s so good you’re here, looking for your mom. I know you were … troubled, growing up. It seems like you’re in a better place.”

“I live in Missouri and my apartment has mice. I think you’re being generous.”

Despite her deer in the headlights look, Penny musters up a laugh. She waits for me to remedy her discomfort by brushing off the remark as a joke—ha-ha, no, I’m happily married with two kids and working at a Fortune 500 company—but I can’t bring myself to do it. It’s unfair of me to punish her for Josiah’s misdeeds, but I cannot unlink them in my mind. Any act of kindness I show to her becomes an act of kindness toward him, and that requires a level of magnanimity of which I am incapable. I nurture that ancient grudge like the precious first spark of a fire.

“While you’re in town, I’d love to have a drink together.” We arrive at Gil’s room. He is hunched over a small table, laboring over a puzzle designed for children. The pieces are comically large. “It’s been too long since we’ve talked,” Penny says. “I’d really love to chat while you’re here.”

“Sure,” I say. I don’t mean it, and I’m puzzled as to why she’s keen on catching up with me like a long-lost best friend. I chalkit up to a morbid fascination—with me, with my family. People used to say we were cursed. One of our forebearers was a graverobber.

Penny insists on exchanging phone numbers, then scuttles down the hallway with her ponytail bobbing along behind her, back and forth like a hypnotist’s pocket watch. I knock for Gil’s attention even though the door is open. “Hi, Mr. Crawford. Is it okay if I come in?”

He grins at me. “Sure, Elissa. Come on in.”

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