Page 106 of Devil

But obviously that’s not really the truth. Time isn’t the reason I don’t come back here.

I push through the grass and volunteer trees, thinking distantly that I’ll need to check for ticks later and then forging ahead anyway, until I start seeing purple sprays of aster and finally the wind-rippled surface of the pond.

The trellis is overtaken with climbing weeds, and the wooden swing has broken, with one side still attached to the upper beam by a rusted chain, the rest swallowed by vegetation. The sweet little idyll that a farmer once built for his bride is unruly and choked now, a forgettable spot on a forgettable wedge of land with almost no one left to remember it anyway.

I find a large rock near the bank of the pond and sit. The wind is tugging and pulling at everything, making the asters toss and the surface of the pond distort.

It was a bright and sunny day when Mom came here for the last time. She’d left her sunglasses on the rock I’m sitting on now and a tube of lipstick.

Lots of people drink too much in the summer and think they’re okay to swim, the deputy told me, and then he assured me that he’d never seen someone touch up their lipstick and then intentionally drown themselves. He’d never seen someone take care to set their sunglasses on a nearby rock with the arms folded up and the lenses facing away from the stone before dying. It was obviously an accident. It couldn’t have been anything else. I could rest easy knowing that much.

He didn’t know my mother, of course, couldn’t have known that Amy Cooper was a devoted wearer of lipstick, had grown up with her own mother who never left the house without a full face of makeup. My mother didn’t wear a full face every day like Mimi did, she hadn’t needed to, but the lipstick—she never skipped a day. When we were little girls, Busy and I took turns in the mornings handing it to Mom, having carefully uncapped the tube for her, a tiny privilege we used to fight over, helping make our pretty mom even prettier. Mom had high cheekbones and blond hair to her waist and a mouth always painted red or pink, and even in those last two years, you could still see it, see the girl that our steady, cheerful father had wooed away from the college boys in Lawrence.

In the end, even on the days when she never left her bed, she always wore lipstick, reapplying it throughout the day, so good at putting it on that she could do it by feel alone.

She would have made sure it was perfect before she saw Dad again, just like she used to before he came inside after a long day on the tractor.

I feel the splat of a raindrop, see another on the water, but I don’t bother moving. I barely even notice. I’m thinking about what Busy said about suffering. I’m thinking about what Busy said about not needing me to make her whole anymore.

You can have your own life now.

But what life? What life could I have? The suffering had nearly broken me, but at least it had given me meaning, had given every unlucky or wretched thing some kind of utility. More than a silver lining, it was a purpose in and of itself. Maybe I’d been born to suffer. Maybe I’d been born toendureand to endure for the sake of the souls who needed it.

Maybe that was my gift all along—not carving, not art, but weathering, bearing. Stubbornly existing.

What would I be if that suffering were less? If no one needed it from me anymore?

I don’t know. I’m not sure. I’m too numb to think it through maybe, and the loneliness is too close. It’s closer than the dragging clouds, closer than the solitary drops pattering loosely onto the grass, and I can already feel what it will be like once I’m inside it again. It’ll be like falling off the ladder. Or maybe it’ll be like the moment just after I fell—struggling to breathe, pain like my nerves were lit on fire…and knowing that no one was coming to check on me, that there was no one around to help. That I had to roll over and drag myself inside because there was no other option and there never would be.

That’s what loneliness will feel like. That’s what it is—falling, suffocating, crawling off to do it again another day.

The rain is heavier now, wetting my old T-shirt to my shoulders and the top of my back. I still don’t move from my rock.

I could go back to the warehouse, back to Bell. He’d welcome me back, I think. He’d let me slip into his arms and nestle against his chest and pretend. He’d keep the loneliness away; he’d let me love him and let me believe he loved me, and our make-believe would delay the inevitable, for however short a time.

Why delay it, though?a cold and tired part of me wonders.What’s the point?Eventually, Bell would ask me to leave. He would stop wanting me. It was beyond fixed, beyond inescapable, it was something on the order of preordained, and why wouldn’t it be? Why would he want me, really?

My own mother hadn’t wanted me. Not enough to stay.

I stand up from the rock and then slip through the asters and weeds to the farm track, not looking back at the pond. The ghost of Amy Cooper isn’t there, only the ghost of the Birdie who found her, and I’m sure she’ll follow me anyway.

The rain is white in some places, bouncing on the ground, and I look down to see tiny hailstones caught in my hair. The temperature feels like it’s dropped twenty degrees, and goose bumps are pebbling my arms and the nape of my neck. And then the hail changes, rocks hurled from the sky, and I dart through it to the cracked-open barn door, moving without thinking, a mindless animal.

I get inside just as the hail picks up, grapes of it and then limes. They clunk and ding against everything—against my new truck, on the part of the roof I’d repaired just before I moved in with Bell, against their brethren already on the ground—and they tear through the trees like strafing artillery, taking wet leaves with them.

The barn is deafening.

I don’t know where my thoughts go in the noise, in the falling ice, but it takes me a long time to realize that it’s slowing down, that it’s stopping. I move outside, and nothing is quite right with the world because the green grass has turned white with hail and the sky has turned green. The wind has stopped too. There are no birds chirping, no bugs in the grass. It’s quiet, but the quiet isn’t right either, it’s all wrong—a silence that isn’t silent.

The dripping of water off the eaves comes to me like I’m at the bottom of a bathtub, slow and unreal, and then there’s that other noise, falling and rising, that familiar first-Wednesday-of-every-month blare.

They’re setting off the sirens.

As soon as we got old enough, Dad would stand with Busy and me where the gravel driveways for the hill house and the farmhouse met, and he would tell us what to look out for when the sirens went off, where to watch. The edge of the storm, just when you can glimpse lighter sky. A part of the clouds that drags down like the train of a dress.

When we see flashes of blue light, we hide; when our ears pop, we hide; if it’s nighttime, no matter what, we hide. And if a tornado stands still, thenwedon’t.

We move. We run.