Laura McHugh - The Weight of Blood

“He’s not my boyfriend.”

“Well, Daniel, whatever he is, he cares about you, and he’s older, and… You know I’ve taught you to keep your pants on, and I haven’t changed my mind about that. I hope you realize he’s over eighteen and you’re not, and if I found out anything happened, I could have him prosecuted.”

“Dad! We’re not even— He’s… “I didn’t know how to explain my relationship with Daniel, and it wouldn’t do any good anyway.

He kept filing. The grating of metal on metal vibrated through my bones. “What I’m saying is I tried to raise you right. But I don’t know how good a job I did. People make mistakes. I don’t want you fooling around with that boy, but more than that, I don’t want you getting pregnant and ruining your life. You need to go to college, get yourself some fancy degree, and make a decent living. I’ll do whatever it takes to make that happen.”

I thought carefully about what I wanted to say to him. “Did it ruin Mom’s life when she had me?”

Heat reddened his ears, stained his throat. “She was coming from a completely different place. She wanted you more than anything.”

I’d heard that before. “Didn’t she want to go to school?”

Dad slid the file back into its plastic sheath. “If her life had gone differently, if it hadn’t got thrown off the tracks, she’d have been in school somewhere. She never would’ve met me or had you. But things happened. And she told me she wouldn’t have changed any of it; she wouldn’t have given you up for anything. All the good parts missing from her life, she wanted those for you. She said there was plenty of time for her to go back to school when you were older.”

Except there hadn’t been time. “So she had plans. She wanted to raise me and go back to school… What happened? What changed all that?”

“I wish I knew,” he said. “She was depressed about something, but she wouldn’t talk about it. And then she was gone.” He gassed up the saw and pulled his gloves on. “Back to work,” he said.

“Speaking of work,” I said, “I’m scheduled to go in tomorrow. Will I still be under house arrest?”

“I seem to remember, when you took that job, you promised to follow some basic rules. Which you broke. From here on out, you work for me.”

“You’ve got to be kidding. I was late one time! You can’t take away everything just for breaking curfew.”

He yanked the cord, and the saw grumbled fitfully. Dad’s expression dared me to keep arguing, and when I didn’t, he turned his back and resumed deconstructing the tree.

After three days of hauling wood and splitting last year’s logs, I was worn out and getting cabin fever. I hadn’t been able to talk to Bess, and I hadn’t heard anything from Ray. I’d practically given up hope of Daniel calling. I didn’t know if Dad had given him the sex talk, too, but whatever he’d said surely hadn’t helped. I was still angry about my overblown punishment, though secretly, I was relieved not to have to go to work. Just thinking about Crete made my stomach hurt.

It was Dad’s last night before heading back to work in Springfield, and he was drinking, like he usually did after talking about Mom. It wasn’t the best time to ask him a question, but I couldn’t wait any longer for the answer.

“Hey,” I said, poking my head into the living room, where he was listening to an old bluegrass album. “I need to ask you something.” He looked up, his expression blank. “You know how I’ve been trying to figure out what happened to Cheri. Would you tell me something if you knew? I can keep quiet just like you. You know I can. It’s important to me to know the truth. You might not realize how important.”

He got up and crossed the room to the stereo, where he flipped clumsily through a stack of records. “Sure, I know something. She was killed and chopped to bits. End of story.”

“Dad.” I waited until he turned to look at me. “Somebody thinks you had something to do with it. I don’t believe it… I know you didn’t kill anybody… but she was my friend, and I—”

He dropped the record he was holding and moved toward me, unsteady on his feet. I had pricked a nerve. “ Somebody ? I can guess who that might be. What else did somebody tell you about me? Huh?”

I took a step back. He’d scared me a few times when he was drinking, and I’d seen him plenty angry, but rarely had he ever directed such anger at me.

“He tell you I killed somebody?” His whiskey breath soured the air.

“I didn’t believe him,” I said quietly.

“You’re wrong,” he said, gritting his teeth. “I killed a man once.” He clamped his hands on my shoulders and pushed me back against the doorframe. “It was an accident that haunts me every day of my life. Somebody convinced me to keep it quiet, took care of things for me. So I owed him a favor. When he needed my help, I came running.” I squirmed, but he didn’t seem to realize how tight he was gripping me. “He’s my brother, and he needed my help, so I helped him. I’m the gravedigger in the family, and it was just another job. Except when I got there and saw… it was her.”

“Cheri? Crete killed her?” I felt a rush of anticipation. I was so close to the answer.

Dad shook his head. “He didn’t kill her, and he didn’t tell me who did. He just called me to clean up the mess. He said the whole thing started out as an accident, but it happened on his property, and he didn’t want to get messed up in it. She was already dead, no point calling the law.”

He let go, and my shoulders ached where he’d clutched me. “But you didn’t bury her.”

“No. I tried, but I couldn’t. She didn’t deserve to disappear like that.”

“You… you put her in the tree?”

“Right across from Dane’s,” he said. “Crete is family, and I’d never turn him in, but I wanted him to know it wasn’t okay. I won’t go around burying murdered little girls, no matter what he has on me.”

“How do you know he didn’t kill her?”

“He’s never been afraid to tell me the truth. He don’t hide who he is, not from me.”

That didn’t mean Crete wouldn’t mislead him. He had known the truth about Cheri all along, yet he’d tried to make me think Dad was the guilty one. He’d twisted the truth about my mother, about how she came to be here. He wouldn’t have shown Dad the papers I’d seen in her folder. Wouldn’t have admitted that he’d handpicked Lila as his own. And I didn’t believe that Crete would tell my dad if he’d had something to do with her disappearance.

“What are we going to do?”

“Nothing,” he said. “We’re gonna keep quiet. There’s no bringing Cheri back. Crete got my message loud and clear, I’m not doing him any more favors. School’s about to start. Your job is to stay out of trouble and graduate, and you don’t need to worry about anything else. You can let Crete think you believe him… hell, he didn’t really even lie to you. No doubt I’d get thrown in jail right along with him if any of this came out.”

“Do you think he did something to Mom?”

“In the sixteen years she’s been gone, I’ve thought through every imaginable possibility. So I thought about it, yeah. I even asked him once, straight up, did he have anything to do with her leaving. I asked everybody the same thing. I don’t believe he did. I know him better than anybody. His idea of right and wrong might not be the same as yours or mine, but he stands by his family. I took a risk when I laid Cheri out like that. He was pissed. He could’ve taken away everything we have in a heartbeat, but he didn’t. He won’t. He was disappointed when I told him you wouldn’t be working for him anymore, but he didn’t argue.” Dad sank into his recliner. “Everything’s gonna be fine now. You can focus on school, and you’ll be safe and sound at Birdie’s while I’m gone.”