Friendswood (17 page)

Cully got out, opened the gas can, and poured the contents into his truck.

Hal got out after him, and walked over, put his hand on Cully's shoulder. “I'll wait to make sure it starts.”

He and Darlene had spoiled him. Cully didn't know what it was to have to get himself out of a situation. Hal wondered if maybe, for Cully's sake, he shouldn't have answered his phone.

Hal got into his car and sat there with his hands on the steering wheel, smelling the bitter, vaguely plastic air. The equipment they used out here so often looked like cartoon versions of spaceships. Down the road, and off to the right, a squat blue round tub seemed to spin in the heat over the gravel, but when he stared at it, it kept still.

W
ILLA HEARD THE PHONE
RING
, and then her mother talking hoarsely in the bedroom. “She wouldn't do that.”

Beneath Willa's feet, the red, yellow, blue, and green stripes moved, just barely, as if someone were tugging at the rug. She paused, halfway down the stairs, listened hard, imagined the voice on the other end of the line.

Ever since her mother had driven her home from school, planes cruised through the clouds overhead, cars had obediently followed patterns of traffic lights, and the world had been too quiet. Even her mother—though she'd smoked one cigarette after another in the car.

Willa heard the rustle of her pacing in the bedroom. She heard her say, “No, I didn't know.”

Willa plodded down the stairs, swiveled on the end of the banister to turn in the entryway, passed the living room, and went into the kitchen, where two carrots lay chopped on the cutting board, the long green leaves hanging over the side of the counter. She took a glass down from the cabinet and held it under the faucet in the sink until it overfilled with water.

There was a prayer and maybe a medical operation you could do to get virginity back. She was trying to remember where she'd heard that. Girls resurrected themselves that way, but how could it really work? Either you were or you weren't. She could have left when she'd been offered that
drink. She could have pulled her hand away from Cully's and told him to take her back to school.

When her mother came down, her face was flushed and shiny. “That was Ida Johnson,” she said. “You need to tell me what all happened over at that house.”

Willa closed her eyes and leaned her head back to drink down the glass of water. She remembered now another guy who'd been there, his blue sneakers, and a gravelly but high voice. And she didn't know if she remembered or had imagined someone leaning over her, asking if she was alright.

Willa turned on the faucet again, stared at the glass while she filled it. “I told you, Mom. I don't remember, I swear.” Without looking, she knew what was in her mother's face—lines and lines of disappointment, chaotic scribbling.

“You have to tell me,” she said, but her face said the opposite thing. She waved her arm as if to get rid of a circling fly. “Come on, get your shoes on. We have to take you to Dr. Davis.” She said it as if medicine might still be able to rearrange what had happened.

As they passed the open fields and the storage warehouse, on the radio in the car, there was a warning that Bush Intercontinental's air traffic control signal had gone off the grid. She looked out the window at the clouds, wishing for the hole in them to widen and pull her up into it. If she didn't remember, how could it possibly be her fault?

A
LITTLE WHILE AGO,
she'd read a book about the dispensation period, the ten years when people would be left behind, just before the Rapture. The book opened with an airplane ride, babies and children disappeared from their seats, sprung off to heaven; one pilot was gone too, and one (who was having an affair with the stewardess) was not taken. As they came in for the landing, other planes were crashing all around. “You
know what I'd do if I heard the world was ending tomorrow?” said Dani, when she saw Willa reading the book. “I'd plant a goddamn tree.”

The doctor's office was in a string of buildings, each one made up to look like an identical house with a triangle roof and an eave over the door. Dr. Davis, who was an old friend of her mother's (they used to play in the marching band together), wore gray braids, and she had a low, kind voice. First Willa' s mother went alone into the office, and Willa could hear her through the door.

“We don't want it to get out, whatever happened. Willa made a mistake, that's clear enough. Can you just take a look at her?”

The doctor's talking went on in a muffled way.

“She's just a girl. I know. I don't want the police. You know what they might make it out to be. You know what they'll say.”

The doctor said more Willa couldn't hear. She stared at the window's calico curtains. The tiny red flowers were meant to seem homey, but here among the modern, plain furniture, they seemed cheap and dishonest.

When her mother came out, she said, “Go on in, okay?”

Dr. Davis led Willa to an examining room, handed her a blue paper gown, and gently asked her to undress.

On the wall, there was a diagram of the female anatomy cut neck to midthigh, the purple uterus a paisley at the center. Next to it, the tall
T
of the scale. Overhead, the white lights sputtered like lightning.

Dr. Davis examined Willa's body under the drape, while Willa stared at the ceiling, crossed with strips of fluorescent fixtures. She'd managed to scrub the inked letters off her skin, but now Dr. Davis would know what happened anyway. Making her voice extra gentle, the doctor warned her about the speculum, which was somehow worse than it would have been if she'd been brusque. “Now, here,” she said. Against her eyelids, Willa saw dancing orange fireworks. She wanted to ask how two sips of vodka and Red Bull could make you lose your memory. She wanted to tell her how she'd trusted Cully, and then the hours flew away, but the doctor
wasn't asking any questions, just seeing for herself. The orange fireworks stretched and disintegrated.

“Are you in any pain, honey?” That had gone away days ago.

“No.”

“You and your mom can trust me, you know.”

“I know.”

“Do you want to tell me?”

Willa opened her eyes and turned her head to the wall. “There's nothing to tell. I don't remember.”

“You don't know who did this?”

Willa's eyes began to ache. She started to speak, but only a crushed sound came from her throat.

“Okay, Willa,” said the doctor, her smooth hands patting Willa's ankles. “You can get dressed now.” She left the room, and Willa heard the doctor's soothing, professional voice, talking to her mother on the other side of the closed door.

There was a bottle on the equipment table with a wide bottom and a narrow top, and a small fracture at the top of the glass. So now her mother would know too. Below the table, near the floor, something emerged from the white, its horns short and conical, the face a lamb's. Another one. When it opened its mouth, maggots crawled around the tiny body of a dead mouse: its paws folded together, its tail hung stiffly over the tongue. The beast averted its face, and in its whimper, there was that same voice she'd heard before: “What does she want?”

Willa pulled off the gown and stepped into her jeans, buttoned her shirt, and when she looked up, the beast was gone. She came out from the examining room, saw her mother's face, terrible and red.

On the way home in the car, the sun fell in flat yellow panes on the windshield. They passed the junior high school, ornate lettering on the faded green sign. It seemed unbelievable that just three years earlier, in the seventh grade, Willa had sat in the ancient auditorium, studying
scratched initials on the old wooden seats, wondering whether or not the kids who'd scratched them were grown-up now or already dead.

Her mother said, “I think you better tell me.”

She wanted her mom to stop talking, but she knew now, and there was no good way for Willa to explain. “Well, I had some vodka. I didn't think it would do that to me.”

“Do what to you?”

“I didn't think it would hurt me.”

Her mother's hands trembled on the steering wheel. Willa had to tell her what she didn't know, or the questions could go on forever. “I can guess what probably happened.” The air in the car seemed frozen, as if she'd have to hack through it to speak again. “But I don't remember it.”

Her mother shook her head. “Now what will you do?” She rooted around in her purse, and Willa knew she was searching for a cigarette. She smoked secretly, away from their father, and kept extra cigarettes in the zippered pockets and pencil bags. She always said she was praying for the will to quit. “Was this Holbrook the one you talked to after church?”

“Yeah.”

“Evil,” she said, so upset she forgot to roll down the window. “But no one's going to care about that because we have to protect you instead of getting to him.” She exhaled, and for a moment smoke clouded her face.

They passed the Kroger's, a small kingdom of cars organized by parking lights and red and green flags. “We've always looked out for you. We have. Don't you understand? No one else ever has to know. Just tell me.”

Willa's eyes stung in the smoke. “I shouldn't have had that drink. It just wiped out everything.”

Her mother stopped at a light. She put her hand on Willa's arm. “Alright. Alright. I believe you.” She shook her head, a screen of smoke between them. “We just need to pray,” she said, lifting her chin. “And pray and pray. There's a way out of this.”

Willa watched the houses pass by, the bikes leaned against garage
doors, the swing set with the drooping double seat, the bouquet of pink balloons tied to a front door.

H
ER PARENTS PARTLY BL
AMED
D
ANI
for what happened, even though she'd told them, Dani wasn't even there. They didn't want Willa to see her, and Dani was practically the only person she wanted to see. “I can't believe he left you. That's the thing that gets me,” Dani said on the phone. “You know he had the nerve to ask me how you were. ‘Well, how the hell do you think she is?' I told him. I gave him a chance to tell me his side of the story, but he said I wouldn't understand. He only got suspended for two weeks for skipping school and getting drunk. Big effing deal. Willa, I don't care, he should get more than that. They should lock that guy up. How could they not know what really happened? They really should know.”

No one could help her with her brain erasing those hours, just as no one else could see the beasts—they were just there. She kept turning it around in her head, what it could have been that had made him hate her so much. He had held her and talked to her in that voice, and then he'd let that happen. “Anyway, it's all over with now,” she told Dani.

“Well,” said Dani, “I'm sure not ready to put it behind me. For instance, why are you the one who's not in school?”

“Look, I don't want to be there. You know that.” None of Willa's other friends—Miranda or Amy—or any of the others from church—called or texted. The life she was supposed to have led had somehow slipped off without her. She missed being careless, having conversations about shoes or hair, all those things that didn't matter. He might as well have shot her or run her down with his truck.

At dinner, over pork chops and rice and greens, her father spoke to her, but with his head turned sideways toward her mother, using her as some kind of shield. Jana chattered on about a dodgeball game. She wore a tiara with pink fur along the top in her dirty-blond hair.

After dinner her mother came to her room, stood at the door and sighed, her hair awry on one side, mascara flaked under her eyes like bits of tar. “We have to pray about this,” she said. Willa knew this was what they were supposed to do—to pray for a way out of crisis, to pray for peace—but it wasn't something they often did together, and it embarrassed her, even at the dinner table if her father veered from the script
. God is great. God is good. Let us thank him for this food.
There was no script now, and to pray with her mother felt as awkward as it would have to bathe with her.