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24
Barbara’s dad had taken her to the river almost as soon as Barbara could walk. Maybe even before. One of her first memories was of sitting on a shallow area of the bank, sharp pebbles digging into her chubby legs as the cool water lapped at her toes.
Behind her, Dad readied his line with bait, the pungent smell of one of his home-rolled cigarettes drifting across the air. Barbara kicked and splashed with her feet.
“You watch them little piggies, Babs,” her dad had chuckled. “Or the fish might just come and bite ’em off!”
Barbara had shrieked and snatched her toes out of the shallow water, tears blooming in her eyes.
Her dad had laughed harder as he cast his line into the river. “Aw, don’t be a baby, Babs. They’ll spit ’em back out.”
It had been a joke, but as she would learn, like all her dad’s jokes, it was laced with malice.
Barbara hadn’t dipped her toes in the river for a long while after that.
When she was older, she would watch as her dad reeled in fish and then killed them swiftly, whacking their heads on a flat stone. At home her mom would gut them for stews and pickle the flesh. They ate a lot of fish in the summer. For years after she left home, Barbara couldn’t stomach the sight or smell of fish.
Her dad had tried to teach her to hold the line, wait for a bite, but Barbara had never been patient enough and even when she caught a fish, she had felt bad for it, flapping wide-eyed on the end of the line. Gasping for breath, snatched cruelly out of its natural home. Once, she had thrown a fish straight back in and her dad had stormed over, eyes blazing.
“What in hell did you do that for, you damn stupid child?”
“I didn’t want to kill it,” she had mumbled.
His face had darkened. “You better get used to killing, Babs. Ain’t no one gonna wipe your ass your whole life. We’re fighting for our survival here, and this family don’t carry no passengers.”
Then he had backhanded her across the face.
Barbara never fished again with her dad. But as she grew older, she often went down to the river alone to read or swim, or just to escape the stultifying atmosphere of home, a slowly simmering cauldron of tension. Her mom, trudging heavily from sofa to stove and then collapsing back on to her armchair to lose herself in soaps. Her dad, sitting wired at the kitchen table, throwing back beers and bourbon.
At some point there would be an argument, always the same—about money, dad’s shit life, her mom’s weight, Barbara. “What the hell’s wrong with you,” she once heard him shout at her mom, “that you can’t carry me a boy? Hey? What kind of woman can’t give her husband a son?”
Things would be smashed, maybe there would be a slap or a punch, from either of them. Violence was as natural as breathing in her family. Her dad was wiry, but her mom outweighed him, two to one. Finally, her dad would storm off to “the lodge,” where he would throw back drinks with his “hunting” buddies and let off about stuff they couldn’t in other places, like “them damn negroes, whore bitches” or “those fucking blood-sucking spawns of Satan.” He spent more and more time there, especially after he was laid off from the post office.
“Is it like a secret club?” Barbara once asked her mom.
Her mom had rolled her eyes. “Something like that, hun.”
Sometimes, her dad would go away for days on hunting trips. Those were always calmer times in their household, and when he came back, he would seem happier, like something inside him had been released, at least for a while. It was only later—too late—that Barbara would start to wonder what her dad actually hunted on these trips. He never brought anything home to eat, nor any trophies to hang on the walls, like the deer heads in the living room or the hog’s head which snarled over the toilet in the bathroom.
“Gotta keep something for the lodge,” he would say with a wink. “Maybe one day, when you’re older, I’ll show you.”
Barbara didn’t really want to see. She liked the times her dad was away (and always felt a little guilty that she did). Her dad frowned on “wasted time,” unless it was his own. So, if Barbara wasn’t at school, her job was helping around the house: cleaning, sewing, “women’s stuff”; stuff her mom was too big to do anymore. When he was away, she would waste as much time as she liked. On hot summer days, she would hike through the woods and swim in the river or take her books and just hang out in a shady spot on the bank. Most of the kids at her school would take inflatables and swim further up, nearer the town. Barbara’s family lived a couple of miles out, close to the woods and the mountains.
Barbara didn’t mind. She didn’t really have any close friends at school. She wasn’t unpopular. Just invisible. And in truth, Barbara kind of liked it that way. Just like she liked the solitude here. The water was clearer and cooler. Barbara could float on her back and stare up at the sky, only the sound of buzzing bees and the circling eagles for company.
Until, one day, someone else came.
Barbara’s first reaction when she saw the girl sitting at the side of the water, in the shadows of the trees, was annoyance. This was her space. Her private space. And then curiosity took over. The girl was around her own age, fourteen or fifteen. Her skin was dark, but her hair was silvery white and it fell in a jumble of dreadlocks almost all the way down to her waist. For a moment, sitting there, legs curled beneath her, Barbara thought she looked just like a mermaid.
And then she had smiled, revealing the sharp glint of her incisors.
Mercy.
—
Barbara blinked her eyes open. The name lingered on her lips, mumbled into the hard pillow. She rubbed at her face, wiping away the cobwebs of the dream. But the strands clung on. The image of Mercy’s smile, the buzz of the bees. And then Barbara realized that the buzzing was coming from the room. The bedside table. Her phone.
Shit. She reached for it. Six twenty a.m. Caller—Decker. Great.
