After I put everything away, I took a shower. All day in the heat had made me sweaty, and I felt sticky between my legs. Wrapping up in a towel, I took my dirty clothes into the laundry room and put them in the hamper. In the dryer were clean clothes, mine and Kellen’s mixed together. I put on a pair of my panties and one of his T-shirts that I liked to sleep in.
When I opened the freezer, I was hoping for ice cream sandwiches, but I found something better. Thirty-one little foam cups of ice cream. On top of each plastic lid, Kellen had written a letter in black marker. Setting them out on the table, I moved them around until I solved the puzzle: HAPPY BIRTHDAY WAVY! I LOVE YOU!
He’d drawn lopsided hearts on the other four cups.
I opened the first one and took a bite. Chocolate with cherries in it.
5
AMY
After Wavy ran away from the hospital, we walked to the police station. Mom asked one of the deputies about our car, but he shook his head.
“I don’t know anything about that, but I expect the DEA will impound everything on the property.”
“The DEA?” Mom said.
“It’s crazy up there. I went out to help with roadblocks and it’s knee-deep in feds.”
“Because of the murders?”
“What? No. Mrs. Newling—there’s—your brother-in-law has a meth lab up there about the size of a—it’s big.”
Mom made all the right noises of shock, but I don’t think it surprised her. After all, she knew what he’d done in the past. Did she really think he was ranching?
Whatever she thought, she was too tired to argue. Leslie was too tired to even whine. The three of us sat in the police station, our backsides going numb on hard plastic chairs, until the sheriff’s wife took us to a motel.
She was a tiny, wiry woman, what I imagined Wavy growing into. Physically, anyway, because the sheriff’s wife filled up dead air with talking. Probably she had to. Mom, Leslie, and I were like zombies, trudging into the motel room.
“Don’t you worry, Mrs. Newling. We’ll find your niece and nephew.”
The sheriff’s wife put her hand on Mom’s shoulder, and that’s when she fell apart. The night we found out about Grandma’s cancer was the first time I saw Mom cry, but the night of Wavy’s fourteenth birthday was worse. Mom let the sheriff’s wife hold her, and she cried so hard it shook the bed they were sitting on. Leslie and I just watched. We were cried out. More than anything, I wanted to go home, so I was relieved when the sheriff’s wife said, “Now, have you had a chance to call your husband?”
When Dad answered the phone, Mom went stiff and she didn’t even say hello. She said, “Bill, I need you to come pick up the girls. Something happened with Val.”
He must have said a lot more than hello, because she listened for several minutes. She got up and dragged the phone around to the other bed to sit down facing away from Leslie and me.
“Bill, I need you to drive up to Powell in the morning and pick up the girls. We’re staying at the Blue Moon Motel that’s on the highway into town. Room One-Oh-Seven. Bill, I don’t want to talk about it on the phone. They’re fine.”
She was quiet again, listening, her shoulders tight.
“I don’t care about your stupid meeting! Come get your daughters and take them home!” When she glanced over her shoulder at us, I could see she was getting ready to cry again. “They’re safe, but they want to come home.”
Mom came around the bed and held out the phone. “Tell your father that you’re okay.”
Leslie took the phone and said, “Hi, Daddy.”
“Leslie, are you okay? Your sister’s okay?” I heard my father say.
“We’re okay.”
“What happened? What’s going on?”
“Aunt Val’s dead. And Unc—”
Mom jerked the phone away from Leslie.
“Ow!” Leslie clamped her hand over her ear, and when she pulled it away there was blood on it. Mom had yanked her earring out. Not hard enough to tear the lobe, but hard enough to make it bleed.
“No. You don’t need to come tonight. It’d be after midnight by the time you got here,” Mom said to Dad.
It wasn’t, which meant he’d sped to get there. He didn’t wake us up, because we weren’t sleeping. We had changed into nightgowns donated by church ladies, and crowded together in a bed that smelled of bleach and cigarette smoke. Lying in the dark, we were staring at the ceiling when he pounded on the door.
He’d come straight from work, wrinkled and tired. Pulling all three of us into his arms, he hugged us hard. Usually I hated his stale coffee breath, but that night it was familiar and comforting.
“I’m so glad you’re safe,” he kept saying. Sitting on the edge of the bed, with Leslie under one arm and me under the other, he listened to Mom tell what had happened. When she was done, he said, “Let’s go home.”
Leslie and I didn’t have to be told twice. We were ready to leave that dark paneled room with the sticky carpet. We picked up the plastic bags that held our clothes and Leslie’s puked-on shoes, ready to go out to Dad’s car in our borrowed nightgowns. I thought of Wavy, going from one place to another, never knowing what stranger’s clothes she’d have to wear.
Mom stayed sitting on the edge of the bed.
“Come on, Brenda. We’ve all had a long day. You don’t want to hear it, but I have to be at work in the morning. Let’s go.”