Chapter 2 - The Girl in Green

We left our apartment at six in the morning with everything we could manage to pack into the trunk or shove into the back seat of the old Toyota. We drove north through the flat dry expanse of nothing between Waco and Dallas, then turned east toward Arkansas. She drove into the night. When Mom finally got too tired to drive, we pulled over to a rest stop and spent a sleepless night in the car, a towel balled up under my head and an old blanket around my shoulders.

I woke up the next day in the early gloom. Mom was outside, leaning against the car, studying her phone. I stepped out of the stale, musty warmth of the car into a cold breeze so bracing that it felt hostile. I folded my arms across my chest and rubbed the bare skin of my arms. Somewhere in the pile of crap in the trunk, I had a hoodie.

There was what looked like a giant black storm cloud looming behind the rest stop, which would explain the cold.

“Think it’s going to rain?” I asked.

Mom looked up from her phone.

“Rain? What makes you think that?”

I nodded my head in the direction of the dark cloud.

“That’s not a cloud, that’s a mountain,” Mom said.

I studied the dark, formless shape that stretched to the sky. I’d never seen a mountain before. When I thought of mountains, I’d imagined a Swiss ski village in the bright sunshine, not a giant, lurking cloud-like shadow.

After a trip to the bathroom, we got back on the road and found a McDonalds. We ordered hash browns and split a large coffee, which was cheaper than buying one for each of us.

The sun didn’t shine as much as it dimly illuminated the surroundings, turning the early morning purple into a uniform gray. Small towns rose out of the fog, barely clearing the shadows of tall mountains. If you grew up like that, you’d have to feel like the sky could topple in on you at any moment.

I hugged the coffee cup, expecting Mom to complain that I was drinking more than my fair share.

She didn’t.

“So where are you going?” I asked. “After . . . this.”

Mom tightened her grip on the steering wheel.

I knew she wasn’t going back to Austin.

Something about the gray morning light made her look older than I was used to. Tired.

“Jess, we’re doing this for you. So you can make something of yourself.”

I handed the last swig of coffee back to her. She finished it and gave me the cup back without taking her eyes off the road.

“Right,” I said with as much contempt as I could muster. “And while I’m ‘making something’ of myself, you’ll be . . . ?”

“Clear asked me to come for a visit,” she said.

Clear was a digital artist who’d lived at Michaela’s briefly before moving to Chicago. He and Mom had a thing, but it had never seemed—serious. Maybe it was.

I should have known that this was coming. Mom’s maternal instinct always had an expiration date. Or maybe she just got tired of my endless escapes from low-level detention facilities masquerading as schools.

We’ve never had an easy time of it before, but everything got worse after Oliver.

* * *

I was thirteen when the Oliver incident happened. Thinking back on it fills me with a bone-deep sense of shame. Shame that has nothing to do with what happened to me and everything to do with who I am. Anger issues, lack of impulse control.

Too big, too strong for a girl.

Oliver was my mom’s shitty boyfriend at the time.

Oliver had come up behind me and had put his hand on my ass while I was cutting up an apple with a serrated steak knife.

Did I know this was coming? I think in some way, I did. Occasionally, I’d catch Oliver looking at me, and I’d feel strangely unsettled, but I couldn’t put a name to it, because it wasn’t something I’d experienced before. It always happened when Mom and Michaela were out of the room.

When Oliver put his hand on my ass, I’d turned and stabbed him without thinking.

What sent me to juvie was not that first stab. It was that I pulled the knife out and stabbed him again. And again. I went off. I don’t really remember that part of it.

What I do remember is Mom.

Mom arrived home after the ambulance left with Oliver the shitty boyfriend. The police were still there, interviewing me. I was covered with blood, and at first she thought the blood was mine. She refused to believe that I was unharmed, even as they loaded me into the back of a police car. The sight of her screaming, being restrained by not one but two cops, is forever emblazoned on my mind.

Mom hadn’t known about Oliver. She’d called him a louche bastard, but he was smart, and he could be funny, which went a long way with Mom. I’d never liked him, but I didn’t know why I didn’t like him until he put his hand on my ass.

Because of what the police called the “ferocity” of my attack, it wasn’t the kind of thing anyone was willing to let slide. On my third stab, the tip of the cheap steak knife broke off and lodged in his rib.

Oliver ended up in the hospital for a long time, with a deep infection that nearly killed him. Not that Mom, or any of us, ever saw Oliver again.

I was remanded for psych evaluation, and the fact that I couldn’t remember much didn’t help my case. I spent three months in Gardner-Betts juvenile detention center on lockdown. At Gardner-Betts, I learned to hate captivity.

There was no escaping Gardner-Betts.

After I served my time there, I was sent to a minimum-security girls’ facility. Minimum was right. The outer wall of that place was designed for a much shorter girl. I took a running jump at the wall, got one shoe flat on the wall, threw my other leg over, and I was out. I was particularly proud of that escape.

Then there was the horse camp behavioral school in Hill Country. I actually did kind of like that school. Horses are cool, but it didn’t last. The county only paid for six weeks. They might have extended my stay, but my escape attempt went against me.

I wasn’t in great shape emotionally after I got out of horse camp. I probably would have spent the rest of the year lying on the couch, playing video games, but Michaela had hurt her back and needed help weeding the garden and doing chores around the house. When I look back at that time, I’m not actually convinced that Michaela really did hurt her back, or that she needed help with anything. I think she was just trying to get me off the couch.

I got a job at the corporate coffee shop. It wasn’t great, but at least it was something. I thought Mom would be fine if I quit school for good and went to work.

I guess I thought wrong.

* * *

We drove for hours. Mom was right about the countryside—it was beautiful. Terrifying for someone who’d been raised two feet on the ground in central Texas flatlands, but beautiful. Whole forests of trees shimmered gold and orange in the sun once the fog burned off.

It was beautiful—until it wasn’t. We cleared the pass and the road took a long sweeping turn around the side of one mountain.

In the distance on the other side of the road was a mountain that looked like it had been cut in half, the top sheared off into an ugly pile of gray rubble, a stunted forest lapping at the base.

“What is that?” I asked.

“It’s a coal mine, I think,” Mom said. “It’s called mountaintop removal.”

“It’s horrible.”

The scar of a mountain seemed to go on forever. As we drove around a descending curve, the view revealed more destruction.

“They don’t mine like this anymore,” Mom said. “At least I think they don’t.”

“Good,” I said.

“Coal mining is a terrible, dangerous job,” Mom said. “At least this way was safer for the miners.”

We rounded a curve and we were back to an unbroken view of forested mountains again.

Hours later, we descended into a valley where sunlight seemed exhausted, ready to call it quits long before sunset.

I closed my eyes and drifted.

Filtered light hit the back of my eyelids. The twisting turns of the road sent my stomach into a low-grade queasiness. The coffee and hash browns sat uneasily on top of nothing. Either I was hungry, or I’d never be hungry again.

Sleep, when it came, was a relief.

The car came to a slow stop, gravel crunching under the wheels like a sigh.

My head rested against hard glass, my neck stiff from sleeping at an awkward angle. I had no idea where we were or why we were traveling. It had been a long sleep. Any longer and my name would have disappeared from me as well.

I opened my eyes slowly.

In front of the car was an old wrought-iron gate in a rough gray stone wall. Beyond the gate was an open field, a tall grove of trees in the distance. The trees were bathed in late afternoon light. The land behind the stone wall looked utterly desolate. There were no cars on the road behind us, and I could imagine there hadn’t been for miles.

The car engine ticked in the cooling air, punctuating the thick silence.

We’d taken a wrong turn.

“Maybe the school is behind the trees?” Mom said.

I’d heard this uncertain tone of voice from Mom before.

Maybe your toe isn’t broken. (It was.)

Maybe the city won’t turn off the electricity. (They did.)

“We’re in the wrong place,” I replied. Mom had managed to get us completely lost. Even with Google Maps. “We should turn around.”

“Just get out and open the gate, Jess,” she said sharply. “It’s got to be on this road.”

I got out of the car reluctantly. I was sure we weren’t anywhere near the school. I should have been happy about that, but an odd sense of foreboding settled in the pit of my stomach. If we weren’t anywhere near the school, then where were we?

The world was quiet. The only noise was the soft hum of the car. The air felt damp and surprisingly chilly. Being here didn’t feel right. I noticed for the first time that the lane had narrowed into two rutted dirt trails, grass growing in the middle strip. The trail curved around a slow bend and disappeared into the thick stand of trees. Private and forgotten.

“This has gotta be somebody’s driveway,” I murmured.

From the car, Mom made impatient hand signals.

I opened the gate and Mom drove past me slowly, down the lane, without stopping. I had the sudden irrational fear that someone would emerge from the stand of trees with a shotgun and start firing at us both.

I jogged after her, but a dark, rectangular piece of metal in the grass caught my attention.

I stopped.

I walked toward it, and as I did, I noticed there were dozens of bronze or brass rectangles stuck firmly in the ground.

I leaned over. The writing on the plaque read, Jimmy 1937.

Nearby, Margaret Chandler 1921–1953.

Graveyard.

The grave markers were small and sad, some without even a last name or a date of birth. I looked up. There was a whole field of metal plaques stuck in the ground. Nearby, a solitary metal cross leaned over in the grass. We’d driven into the middle of an abandoned graveyard.

Ahead, Mom stopped the car and got out. I jogged to where she knelt. She leaned down and brushed her hand across the raised name on the plaque: Tabitha.

“This is a potter’s field,” Mom said, her voice uncharacteristically solemn.

“Potter’s field? What’s that?”

“A potter’s field is a place where people are buried if they don’t have money or family. Like the graveyard on North Loop.”

In Austin, in the middle of vintage stores, coffee shops, and vegan food trailers, there was an open field with a collection of abandoned gravestones.

Something was off. The graveyard on North Loop had a couple dozen crosses and plaques. And that was for all of Austin. The nearby town we’d breezed through was so tiny it only had three stoplights. How could there be this many people buried here?

“There must be more than a hundred graves here,” I said. “Where did all these people come from?”

“The building your school is in used to be a state mental hospital,” Mom said. “It was for the whole area.”

“Danvers-Cutteridge?”

“It was called something else then, but yes,” Mom replied.

I shivered suddenly—violently. It was cold here: the kind of damp cold we never have in Austin, the kind that sinks into your bones. But it was more than the cold.

Normally, I love graveyards, but this one felt simultaneously abandoned and unfinished. Like the whole yard was waiting impatiently for someone to come along and fill in the blanks. To care about the nameless people who died alone here, miles from home.

I couldn’t stand here in a potter’s field discussing sad dead people for another moment. I sprinted toward the distant stand of trees. The run helped me shake off the cold, and I arrived at the clump of trees panting slightly, but feeling more alive.

The trees formed a U shape. As I drew close, I caught sight of something large and gray between the trees. Not a house and certainly not the school.

A statue.

It was clear that the trees had been planted to form a perfect, magical grove around the statue.

In the middle was a huge bronze angel in flowing robes. Square-faced, with a pensive brow, hair brushed back. In its right hand was a raised sword. Hard to tell whether the sculptor had intended the figure to be male or female. Everything about it was massive and muscular, and at the same time soft and sensual.

“Hello, beautiful,” I said to the statue. My voice felt too loud and too present in the quiet glade of trees.

At the bottom of the statue, in large solid letters and all caps, was the word FORTIS. Below that was a list of men’s names and a year: 1910.

The glade was ringed with stone benches, which made the clearing feel more like an amphitheater than a graveyard. I sat on a bench at the bottom of the U and studied the face of the angel.

“Well, someone in this town has money,” Mom said.

She’d followed me to the clearing, and her voice broke through an almost mystical quiet.

“Shhhhh,” I said softly.

“What, you think someone is going to hear you?” Mom said, laughing.

Mom was right—someone had money. And it wasn’t just slap your name on the biggest, most phallic obelisk you could find to let people know that you’d been important when you were alive money. Whoever had put up this angel had enough bucks and taste to hire a real artist.

“Fortis,” Mom said, reading off the bottom of the pedestal. “I’ll bet you anything the Fortis family owns the local coal mine. This area is filled with mining families who run their towns like miniature fiefdoms.”

“The Fortis family probably paid for my scholarship, so maybe . . . not getting on your socialist high horse right now?”

Mom ignored me. She craned her head and studied the statue.

“She looks a little like you. Minus the sword.”

Like the statue, I am tall—five eleven and a half. Just shy of six feet. And not a willowy, supermodel kind of five eleven. I’ve got a certain muscular thickness that makes shopping for clothes difficult. I went through a phase of trying to diet in middle school, hoping I’d land somewhere south of a size 16, but since I’m ADHD and have zero impulse control, dieting was a no go.

Maybe that’s why I was drawn to the angel. It was a paean to unapologetic largeness, of both size and personality.

Mom turned away and was walking back toward the car.

I peered through the trees to find an even older part of the cemetery, with small metal crosses and plaques on poles. There were very old headstones tilted at odd angles, pushed awry by the roots of volunteer trees. I thought about stepping through a break in the tree line to explore a place that seemed truly abandoned.

“Jess!” Mom called. “We need to get back on the road.”

I took one last look at the angel before turning back toward the car.