Dark End of the Street

OFF HIGHWAY 7 near Oxford, Mississippi, Abby MacDonald stared at the house that once held her entire world. Seemed like another lifetime ago when she lived there with her parents. The old house was one-story, broad and white, with a tin roof and wraparound porch. On the corner by the driveway, a wooden swing hung from metal chains. Her mother’s plants and flowers – that had withered and died since late summer – lay by the front door.

Behind the house stood the stables, but the horses had already been taken away. She guessed that her cousin Maggie had picked them up. Their dogs Hank and Merle, too. She remembered what the cop had said about Merle finding them. How he stayed at their side. Whimpering.

From the shoulder of the two-lane, she could just make out the crumbling plywood of her old playhouse in the magnolia tree. A knotted rope hung loose below.

She wished she could climb through its twisted branches, through the white, fragrant flowers, and into the safety of a world she’d created for herself. Up there, she never had any worries. True evil never existed. Only the sweet voice of her mother calling her to dinner, making her leave tins full of mud pies and discarded toys.

Her scarred knees and broad grins were all gone now.

She pulled the keys from the old F150’s ignition and took a deep breath. It was about 5:00 A.M… Loose traffic blew past her on the way to Holly Springs and Memphis as she looked at herself in the rearview mirror. A weak, predawn light crept around her.

Dark circles rimmed her brown eyes. Her curly blond hair was limp and dirty and her face flat – washed of any color. Any life. Twenty-two years old and already tired of living.

Maybe it was that she was tired of being on the run. For the past two months, she’d existed in a hazy fog in roadside motels and truck stops. No one knew where she’d disappeared. She only wanted to be left alone and for the pain to stop. The days had passed with bottles of cheap wine and a blur of blacktop and scattered yellow median lines.

Being anonymous could be reassuring.

Abby gritted her teeth and got out of her car, a black duffel bag in her hand. The silence was almost too much. Each step she took on her lawn, as she looped to the back of the huge house, was pain.

She remembered how proud her father had been when he’d bought the place back in the late ‘eighties. Always told people he’d renovated it. But, really, he’d just paid the contractor to make some adjustments. There was a large skylight in the kitchen where he cooked his spicy Cajun food, and a sunken room he’d added that he called his theater where he made her watch John Wayne movies on a big-screen television. Big bowl of popcorn, Cokes in those small green bottles.

Never let her just watch the film, always talked about patriotism and true grit.

Seemed like she always wanted to be out with her friends, cruising the Square, or trying to sneak into frat parties. But now she’d give her life just to watch one of those faded, hokey movies with him. The smell of his cheap aftershave. His silly laugh.

On the side of the house, she took the brick steps onto the creaking porch. Yellow crime-scene tape sealed off the landing but she ducked beneath it. The sky was starting to turn a swirl of yellow and purple like a halo that surrounds a healing wound. A few small clouds were black and thin.

She went to the back door and dropped the bag, pulling out a crowbar and a flashlight. More crime-scene tape sealed the back door. She ignored it and sank the crowbar behind the metal wedge that held a new Master lock in place.

She pulled the wedge until her muscles screamed and the lock broke free. She inserted her own key into the door’s lock and pushed it open with her foot.

This was the first time she’d been inside since it happened. She’d been living just a few miles away at her sorority house on campus when she got a call from her cousin. She remembered speeding along the highway and seeing the ambulance and squad cars lined up outside. All of them parked haphazardly on the lawn.

Today, she felt like she was walking through a mausoleum. The kitchen was hot as an old attic. It smelled of stale bread and rotten oranges. The sun was rising over the barn in the backyard, its rays filtering through an oak tree. Beams shot into an antique stained-glass window mounted over the kitchen sink.

Abby turned on the flashlight and walked through a narrow hallway, passing pictures of her family on horseback and on ski trips, and into the den. More tape blocked her path and she ripped it aside as she felt her face break and her throat crack.

Her legs buckled and she dropped to her knees when she saw his old chair. Brown leather, a history of the Civil War lying in its well-worn seat. She pulled herself up and slid into the chair still smelling his presence.

She imagined her mother cooking now. Maybe shelling peas or chatting with their maid, Lucy.

She closed her eyes and felt the tears bleed down her face.