J.
From the moment of Hailey’s murder I had assumed that Guy, somehow, was at the heart of the story leading to her death. He was my contact in, my secret rival, the third point of our triangle of betrayal, and so I couldn’t conceive of his somehow not being to blame for her murder. But after hearing Guy’s story I suddenly had a different sense of it all. Guy was a pawn, so was I, and the master strategist was Hailey herself.
So my focus now was where it should have been from the start, on Hailey. The answer to her death lay somewhere in her life, and she had given me a map to its most significant moments. In her safe-deposit box she herself had chosen what I would see. The photographs and documents that she had left for me would be my lever to pry open her past. And included among them were the letters, mash notes typed or scribbled by a boy long dead, words that bristled still with raw emotion.
H.
I know you’re mad at me and you got good reason and so I got nothing to say but I’m sorry. I’m sorry for everything. I don’t know what got into me. It was for a time like the only place I felt free was with you or on the ball field and now, after the fight and the suspension, there ain’t no place left. My dad he blames you for everything and tells me I’m not to see you no more and I tell him to go to hell and that also is on the razor’s edge of blows. So it all keeps getting worse and worse and I don’t know why. We’re just friends, just friends, why can’t everyone see that? What’s going on between you and Grady got nothing to do with me and what happened between Grady and me got nothing to do with you neither. We’ve been cruising toward this for years, Grady and me, only so many times you can hear yourself being called mountain trash without doing something about it. This has been coming since our boyhoods, you was just his excuse.
But I’m not here writing to apologize about Grady. It’s the other thing, the thing that got you pissed at me in the first place. I can’t be like you want me to be, I can’t be all chatty and confessional, it’s not in me. I know plenty of folk who go around telling their life’s story to anyone who happens by but I’ve got no urge to puke my guts out on anybody’s front porch.
We all got a secret. I know you got yours, I can feel it, large and dark, but I got mine too. When I think about what I keep hidden it’s so large it dwarfs me. Whatever you see on the outside is just some sort of a lie, it’s the insides that matter and that’s got to stay inside. Sometimes the secret is so heavy I feel about to be crushed, but it’s never hard keeping it. I might as easily just rip out my insides and let you take a look as to start blatting about like a sheep. It’s me, it’s what I am, I wouldn’t want to survive without it but like a kidney it ain’t nothing I want to be showing around neither. I don’t want you getting pissed at me but it won’t do me no good talking about it, that won’t change a thing. It’s there and I live with it every day, and there’s nothing to be done. So when you say I’m not communicating well there it is. I ain’t. And if that’s gonna keep you mad at me, so be it.
I don’t know when I’ll be back in school. Coach wants me back out there soon as he can the way Delmore’s been booting the ball around short but it’s not up to him. Grady’s due out of the hospital in a few days and Chief Edmonds says I have to wait until he’s out to see if they are pressing charges. They won’t let me back in school until then so if I’m gonna see you before I’m going to have to sneak out but I’m willing if you are.
Just take a little pity on me and don’t ask too many questions cause right now things are such a mess I don’t know what I’m going to do and I don’t know how I’m going to do what I need to do if you stay mad at me.
J.
Along with the letters in the box were the photographs, heartrending because I knew how it all turned out, how but not why. There was a picture of two girls, young girls, just kids, arm in arm, blond in their shifts, frowning both. I could see her face in the picture, Hailey’s face, the cheekbones not yet pronounced, the eyebrows not yet arched, the lips not the full buds they would become, but there it was, her sad face – twice. I knew she had a sister, I never knew she had a twin. Roylynn and Hailey.
I didn’t glimpse the pictures once and quickly, like moving through a friend’s photo album. Instead I thumbed through them often, obsessively, time and time again. It was a strange sensation, this examining of the photographs, unseemly in a way, like pawing through the dresser drawers of some other family’s memories. But they were a part of my route into her past. Roylynn had stayed in West Virgina and Hailey had left, Roylynn was still alive and Hailey was dead. How had that happened? They had shared each other’s features, but what else, what history? I wondered if the pictures would provide a clue. I stacked them and restacked them, I shuffled them randomly and went through them again, trying to find, in the differing orders, a sense behind them, trying to divine the story.
Here was one, the nuclear family, twin girls, still just babies with their mother and their father, their poor doomed father, short, swarthy, his forearms thick and meaty. What little girl wouldn’t feel safe in those forearms? They were smiling, the parents, in that picture, and the babies had that satisfied contempt on their shapeless faces that marked them as happy. This was the “before” picture. Another, burned into my memory, Hailey dead and bloody on the mattress thirty years later, was the”after.”
A photograph of the father, alone now, in a uniform of some sort with a peaked cap, his truck driver’s uniform. Smiling, cocky, gladiator of the road, master of his destiny, hero of country-and-western song, off to haul his cargo of lumber until a load shifted and a brace failed to hold and he was gone.
Where was the sense in the order?
I shifted them around, and now the father was replaced by another. It was a picture of one of the girls holding the hand of a man, not the father, a tall, rawboned man with a grizzled beard. Oh, I recognized him, yes I did. Lawrence Cutlip, younger and harder, not a man to be messed with for certain, but there, holding on to that girl when she needed him most. Who was the girl, Roylynn or Hailey? I couldn’t tell, but there she stood, the girl in the picture, her father gone, squeezing, as if for dear life, the hand of the man who now was her sole protection against an oblivious world.
H.
I am flying, I am floating through the air and I don’t never want to come down. Never. I always thought when it came it would be heavy, leaden, that it would clutch me at the throat like it did before, but this is like drinking freedom pure. I am soaring, held high by something so magical it has no name. The moment we left apart I ran home, to my room, to my desk, so I could write all the things I found it impossible to say in the moment.
I know I’m still in a world of trouble but that don’t have grip on me no more. When you hit a ball solid on the meat of the bat there is an instant when the whole force flows though you like an easy wave. It’s why I love the game so, the feel of that easy wave that flows through you for the instant it takes to finish the swing and send the ball a flying. But now I feel like I am riding that wave, surfing it like a Beach Boy’s song all sweet and sure. All I can think about is you, your smile, your soft hands, the red of your lips, the silver tang of electricity I tasted in your mouth. How did this happen, I keep asking myself, how? One moment we’re in the quarry, talking about something that happened in the past, huddling on the rock, talking as friends, leaning close, our knees butting up one against the other like friends, talking in near whispers, and the next moment I am overcome with something so powerful that it starts me to shaking and has me shaking still. There was a switch and I don’t know how it turned or why but suddenly everything changed and the world was lit with a light I didn’t know existed and I am flying. I don’t know how it happened, I only know I have never been happy before, never, not like this, no, never.