THEY SAY HOME is where the heart is, but I’ve known for a long time that it’s far more complicated than that. My heart doesn’t have a home, but if it did, I suppose it would be 1726 Goldfinch Lane, Key Lake, Minnesota. My auntie Lorelei’s house, to be exact. White clapboard siding, diamond-patterned linoleum floors, old windows with wavy glass and a rime of frost around the edges all winter long. We lived in the same farmhouse where she and my mom grew up all those years ago, but I never stopped to consider how that must have made her feel.
Trapped. I know that now.
I don’t talk about my mom often, but I find myself thinking about her a lot these days. She was the younger of the two Barnes girls, but that didn’t mean much in Key Lake. Their parents—my grandma and grandpa—weren’t churchgoing people and kept mostly to themselves, which is to say, they didn’t have a boat. They were godless and boatless, cardinal sins both. People couldn’t understand why my grandpa didn’t, at the very least, own a little aluminum-sided skiff for the odd expedition. He wasn’t even interested in bullheads, and that’s saying something, because on warm spring days after a long, cold winter they would all but leap into your boat, stinking of mud and wet rot. I think he hated their flat, ugly faces and their stinging whips of whiskers.
I know I sure did. And believe me, I went on my fair share of fishing dates that began with hauling bullheads out of the lake (easy pickings—I once caught one without a worm on my hook) and ended with my shoulder blades cold and aching on the damp boards of many a rusty boat. But don’t feel sorry for me. I was a willing participant. More often than not, the instigator.
Auntie Lorelei used to tell me that I was the carbon copy of my mom.
I barely knew her. Okay, that’s not true. I didn’t know her at all. She skipped town when I was four and died not much later just outside a nightclub in Detroit. Why Detroit, I’ll never know, but I can tell you with certainty that she had not overdosed or been hit by a car or anything equally exciting or dramatic. It was an undiagnosed heart condition, according to the autopsy report. One second she was blowing her boyfriend of the week a feathery kiss, and the next she was dead on the pavement. Simple as that.
Not so simple for Lorelei, who had just inherited her parents’ poorly managed farm (they were aging fast and barely able to care for themselves, never mind a hundred acres of soybeans and corn) and was now the legal guardian of one Tiffany Marie Barnes, illegitimate child of her baby sister and four-year-old orphan. I was a gift by circumstance and luck (good or bad, I never puzzled that one out), for there was no will that declared me her charge. I had no father to speak of—my birth certificate remains firmly blank on that matter—and nowhere else to go.
Poor Lorelei.
And poor Mary Ellen. Mother. Mom. Mama. I wonder sometimes what I would have called her had she lived long enough for me to know her as something other than Mommy. Kids grow out of the sweet mommy stage so quickly, morphing overnight into titles that sound more adult. Don’t be fooled—it’s a sort of letting go, that moment when the near-perfect queen of the universe becomes a little more human, a little less divine. I know this from experience, too. When my baby made the switch, it was instant. One moment I was Mommy and she had cheeks like round, ripe peaches and a lisp that made me swoon. The next I was “Hey, Mom” and she was all skinny little girl with sharp elbows and corners to match. Don’t get me wrong, I like straight-up, no frills Mom, but knowing myself the way I do, I’m sure I would have called Mary Ellen all sorts of terrible names along the way. Like I did with Lorelei. Like Everlee would have eventually done with me.
Lord knows there are a lot of things I have to ask forgiveness for. But I think the sin that might trump them all is making sure my girl will never have the chance to cuss me out like a sailor.
That’s not true. Leaving her is my redemption.
I can’t even think of it or I’ll fall all to pieces, lose my resolve. Maybe drive the ten or so miles to Mrs. Sanford’s house and beg her to let me in. Or to the A-frame at the north end of the lake—if Nora followed our plan, then my girl is there with Quinn. I never paid much attention to Nora’s little sister, but in my memory she is a smudge of light and laughter. Always happy, ever sweet. Nora assures me that she’ll hold Everlee close and read her stories. I was never very good at that—the reading stories bit. I guess there are a lot of things I’m not very good at.
Like loving the people I’ve been given. My auntie died alone. Alone and hurting and scared, though the nurse who I called at Pine Hills every Saturday night told me that she passed peacefully.
I know enough to call bullshit when I hear it.
Maybe that’s why I came here one last time. To make amends? To say goodbye? But I’m not nearly as dense as all that. I wanted to be close to my girl for just one more day. I wanted to be home.
I can’t say that I loved Key Lake, but for a couple of years when Nora and I were teenagers I thought that my life could be something good. We were bold and beautiful, wild and free. Nora didn’t know how lucky she was to have a family intact, even if it wasn’t exactly what she wanted. She had big dreams and the means to make them come true. All those things Nora told me? I believed them.
The farmhouse is being rented by a couple with four kids. I know this because their little bikes are lined up in front of the attached garage. Two sparkly pink and purple ones with banana seats, and two in a bigger, more masculine design. Two girls, two boys. One dog who didn’t even bother to stand up and bark when I drove past. I wish I could see the house, wander through the rooms like a ghost, but I know that’s not an option. So I settle for the cabin, the four-room bungalow where my grandma and grandpa spent their final years.
Hair dye and scissors, I’m doing it again. But this time the face in the mirror is mine and even I don’t recognize who I’ve become. Blond, wispy fringes. A messy Meg Ryan do circa You’ve Got Mail. It matches the wig I wore for the photos, more or less. A passing glance at my new driver’s license will cement the truth: I’m not Tiffany Barnes anymore.
It’s dramatic, all of it. Like something out of a movie or one of those fat paperback novels my auntie used to love. Real life doesn’t turn out like this—with families scattered, loved ones abandoned at funeral parlors, kids scared and alone. No, not scared and alone. Everlee is far from alone.
I will be alone. But I don’t have a choice in this, and before you think I’m making much ado about nothing, let me tell you what I know.
I know that he’s a predator.
Of course, I didn’t know this in the beginning or I never would have stayed. In fact, we had a happy season together—or as happy as you can be when you’re juggling dead-end jobs and fighting the easy pull of bad habits. Not that we fought very hard. Life was good enough that when he suggested we make it official I actually felt like a blushing bride-to-be. No ring to speak of, but he was working on it. And even more than that? He wanted to adopt my girl. Make her his own.
We started the paperwork right away because I have a hole in my heart that’s exactly the size of the blank line on my birth certificate where my daddy’s name is supposed to be. And Everlee? She has the same gaping hole. Not because I don’t know who her father is, but because I won’t tell. I can’t decide which is worse.
But Donovan? He loved her. He loved her so much that one day when I was working at the window factory he took her on his lap and put his hand under her My Little Pony T-shirt. And up her flouncy little jean skirt with the three tiers of ruffles.
When I walked into the living room he moved quick. Nothing going on here, nothing at all . . . And because I was reeling and didn’t know if I could fully trust what I had witnessed, I pretended that I hadn’t seen a thing. But the next day I burned that T-shirt and the skirt in the barrel behind the farmhouse. And then I called the cops from the pay phone in the parking lot of the Hy-Vee grocery store and gave them an anonymous tip about the meth they would find in his trunk.
Once, I found the title to a car in Donovan’s underwear drawer when I was putting away laundry. It wasn’t in his name, but the initials were the same so I remembered it: Derick Robertson. Nora helped me look him up on her laptop and what we found is this: Derick Robertson was charged with the possession of child pornography and the abuse of an undisclosed minor less than one year before he waltzed into my life. The charges didn’t stick. Well, the abuse one didn’t.
But I could testify in a courtroom that he was guilty as hell and just as slippery. Thing is, I’m not a credible witness. And I don’t want the world’s so-called justice anyway. I just want my girl safe. The plan was always that we would leave together—we thought it would be easy when Donovan was sent to jail.
They let him off.
Sometimes I think I should just kill him. I could. I hate him enough. But whenever my vision goes black and I burn with loathing so thick and animal it scares me, I pull myself back to Everlee. Her smile. The way she bites her lip when she’s concentrating. The sound of her bare feet slapping, always running, across the narrow boards of our wood-plank floor. Can you imagine? Everlee Barnes, the murderer’s daughter. She doesn’t deserve that.
And I don’t deserve her.