C Box - Below Zero

“No it can’t,” he said, his stomach roiling.

aspen

is that where u live?

no.

where do u live?

noplace really. in a car I guess. lol.

W/yr family?

w/a man & his son. not family. its weird. we’ve been all over theplace.

where?

chicago madison mt rushmore aspen. some places I dont know. cheyene.

do U have a real home?

not rly. for 2 weeks its been this car. i used to live in chicago.

what r u doing?

im along for the ride. its weird. They r doing bad things but im not.

what kinds of bad things?

rly bad things.

like what?

some pple died.

omg, April! R u ok?

im OK.

Joe sat back, rubbed his eyes. “This can’t be true. This can’t be happening.”

shld i call the cops? dad knows cops everywhere.

no. 2 complicated.

u shld call the cops.

do u still have toby?

yes. R u safe?

i think so.

Why did u take so long 2 call me?

2 complicated.

Why can’t i talk 2 u?

they’ll kno I have a phone.

call ME

cant. robert will get mad.

who is robert?

the son. i don’t like him. i like his dad. hes nice to me. he saved me.

Why r u in aspen?

Wedding & footprints.

who? what?

G2G. bye.

Joe looked at the time stamp: 12:58 A.M. He sat back, his mind racing, trying to put together what he’d just read. There was a lot there; locations, names (Robert), disjointed facts. “I’m tempted to call the number.”

“Don’t!” Sheridan said from the hallway. She was in her nightgown and her feet were bare. “If you call they might hurt her, Dad.”

“Hurt who?” Lucy asked, looking from her sister in her nightgown to Joe and Marybeth in their robes at the kitchen table. Lucy was dressed for school in a denim mini, a white top, flip-flops. She narrowed her eyes and put her hands on her hips. “Hey, what’s going on? Why isn’t Sherry dressed for school?”

Sheridan said, “April’s alive.”

“I CAN’T EAT,” LUCY SAID, SITTING BACK IN HER CHAIR AND dropping her fork on the table in front of her with a deliberate clatter. “I just keep thinking about April.”

They were at the breakfast table. The morning was dawning crisp, clear, and cool outside. Sheridan and Lucy had met Tube and thought he was sweet and hilarious. Tube showed his astute political instincts by curling up equidistant between their chairs. Joe had never been around a dog that was so self-assured and manipulative. Tube’s acceptance was instantaneous, and Tube knew it.

“You need to eat something,” Marybeth said. “I can’t send you to school without breakfast.”

Lucy crossed her arms over her chest and tilted her chin up. “I’m not going to school. Sheridan isn’t going, so I’m not going.”

“She was up half the night, Lucy,” Marybeth said softly.

“And I didn’t sleep the other half,” Sheridan said.

Joe and Marybeth exchanged a quick look. Had she heard them when they went to bed? Sheridan gave no indication she had. Joe breathed again.

“April calls and no one tells me,” Lucy said, looking from Marybeth to Joe to Sheridan, accusing them all.

“It’s not like that,” Marybeth said.

“It’s exactly like that. Sheridan told me she wanted to talk to me.”

Sheridan turned from her sister to Joe. “I wonder what she meant by ‘footprints.’ Do you think she remembered what you always tell us when we go camping?”

Said Joe, “Leave only footprints, take only memories.”

“Yeah-that. Do you think she remembered it?”

Joe was cognizant of Lucy’s smoldering at once again being left out of the conversation. He said, “I don’t know. What do you think, Lucy?”

She sat back and crossed her arms over her chest and refused to be drawn in by such a transparent ploy.

“Honey,” Marybeth said to Lucy, looking to Joe for help, “we weren’t sure it was April at the time. We still aren’t completely sure.”

“Sheridan is. Right, Sherry?”

Sheridan looked away, confirming Lucy’s statement.

“Lucy,” Joe said, treading into dangerous waters, “we aren’t sure. It doesn’t make any sense. We’re still trying to figure out what’s happening.”

“You people always leave me out,” Lucy said, her face a mask as she fought back her emotions. “My foster sister calls and you don’t wake me up.”

There was the silence of the guilty.

“She was my sister,” Lucy said. “I think about her every day. Nobody else does. I never really believed she died.”

“Lucy!” Marybeth said, raising her fist to her mouth.

“It’s true. I never believed it.”

Said Marybeth, “Don’t talk like that.”

Joe and Sheridan watched the exchange in chastised silence. Lucy had always been happy-go-lucky, fashionable, pretty, and very observant of Sheridan’s mistakes so she wouldn’t make them herself. In many ways she chose to make herself peripheral. She kept her own counsel. And she was so rarely righteously angry that Joe was slightly stunned.

“I want to talk to her,” Lucy said.

Sheridan said, “You can’t call. She said not to call.”

Lucy glared at her sister and reached across the table and snatched the phone.

“Lucy!” Sheridan said, looking to her mother for help.

“I’m not calling,” Lucy said, opening the phone, finding the text thread in an instance, and writing a message so quickly-a blur of practiced thumbs-that she pressed SEND before Sheridan or Marybeth could wrest the phone away. Then she handed the phone back to her sister and gave one last spiteful deadeye to all of them in turn before grabbing her backpack on the way out the door.

There were a few beats of silence.

“Wow,” Joe said.

“This will take some work,” Marybeth said. “She’s got a point. We’ve got to consider the fact she’s growing up. She’s not that little girl anymore.” She looked blankly at the kitchen window. “Lucy’s growing up whether we want her to or not.”

Sheridan snorted as she read aloud the message Lucy sent:

april come back. still scared of closet. we need revenge. love, luce.

LUCY’S BLOW-UP seemed to hang within the walls of the house like a scorching odor long after she left for school. While Sheridan slumped down the hall to take a shower and get dressed-a process that would rarely take less than an hour, Joe knew-Marybeth listlessly cleared the dishes, something on her mind.

When the sound of the shower coursed through the wall, she turned to Joe and said, “Let’s go for a drive.” He nodded. By her tone and her choice of words, he knew where they were going.

They took her van to the Twelve Sleep County Cemetery, ten minutes away, in complete silence. The cemetery was on the east bank of the river, overlooking a bluff and a shallow bend. During the flash flood three years ago, the river had swollen as if suddenly hungry and had eaten into the soft dirt wall like a beast. The horrified citizens of Saddlestring formed a sandbag brigade that diverted the wall of water before it ate too deeply into the bluff and devoured the coffins. The sandbags were still there, scattered and broken and sunken into the embankment, six feet above the current benign level of the river. Looking at the river, Joe saw violence in remission, a sleeping brute capable of rearing up whenever it wanted if for no other reason than to remind them who was in control.

April’s grave was one of those nearest the bluff above the river. The headstone was small and thin, a wafer of granite, all they could afford at the time. It used to be shaded by river cottonwoods, but the trees had washed away in the flood and so had the shade, and the high-altitude sun burned the grass and whitened the stone itself, aging it well past its six years. All it said was: