“Goddamnit!” he practically screamed. “That bitch!” He pounded his fists against the steering wheel. He punched the horn at the center of the steering wheel, then drove his fists into it, holding the horn down to blare. The muscles in his arms were tight, and he thought if he pushed harder, he’d make the noise louder, deafening.
When he let up on the horn, the hollow silence of the night fell again, and he could hear Nina sobbing. Her face was turned away from him, and she held both her hands tight at her mouth, like she was trying to keep herself quiet. Hud gently pushed the hair from Nina’s face and behind her ears. “Nina,” he said, “I’m sorry. I should have just let you sleep.” He should have just taken her out trick-or-treating, to collect some sweets and heave some bad eggs, like everybody else was doing.
“It’s all right,” Nina said, still crying.
Hud wiped her tears with his thumb. She swallowed hard, then wiped her face with her sleeve. She took from her purse a little hinged box and opened it. “I haven’t shown you this,” she said, her voice still all chokey. She displayed her collection of dead desert bugs, identifying each one—the brown recluse, the palo verde beetle, the tarantula hawk. When she touched her finger to a brittle scorpion’s back, its hooked stinger broke off. When Tuesday and Hud first tried a trial separation almost a year ago, the fall before Gatling left, Tuesday had taken Nina with her to Arizona, where her mother lived in a cool, square cottage painted blue. Tuesday had even talked about moving there but had been concerned about the bugs in the house. She wanted to know which ones to fear, to learn about poisons and toxins and antidotes. She’d heard that scorpions climbed up walls and flung themselves into children’s beds, that wasps caught in sheets on the laundry line and stung in the night. “I need to know what to be scared of,” she’d told him on the phone. She’d used a playing card to knock a black widow into a Dixie cup. She’d freeze the bugs, then take them in a little tin that used to be a sewing kit to Poison Control, where she’d have them identified.
“I caught some fireflies for you tonight, but I guess I forgot them at the drive-in,” Hud said. He thought of them dying, slowly losing their flicker in the olive jar. “Nina . . . we’re out of gas, I guess. And I’m not real sure where we are. But see that dot of light over there?” He pointed to someplace far up the road. “I think we can walk over there, and maybe there’ll be a phone.”
Nina shrugged, and said nonchalantly, “Mom won’t be mad. It could happen to anybody.”
Hud took a flashlight from the glove compartment. Outside the car, he squatted so that Nina could crawl onto his back. She wrapped her legs around his waist, clasped her hands at his chest. With her warm breath on his neck, he thought he could walk for hours and hours. And he thought he might have to—the small dot of light was not growing. When Hud nearly tripped on some barbed wire at the edge of a cornfield, it was as if he could feel the danger in his ankles then, a tenseness, and he kept the beam of the flashlight low to the ground. After a while, Nina’s grip loosened, and she was slipping, and he asked if she’d like him to carry her in his arms so she could sleep. He felt her nod her head against his.
In his arms, she was much heavier, and he tired quickly. He sat down to rest on the edge of a ditch. When he looked up for the light, it was gone; the family in the house had simply turned out their lights and gone to bed.
Let it happen, he thought. Let’s stay lost. The summer sun could wear their skin away and bleach their bones. Experts would have to unlock their rib cages and untangle their skeletons. Then, in memory and punishment, the town could celebrate Halloween again, no matter what season of the year, dressing up in skull masks and glow-in-the-dark bone suits.
Nina scratched her ear in her sleep. As Hud ran his finger along her cheek, the bridge of her nose, her lips, he welcomed all the misery that would come in the morning for having kept her in his arms in the middle of nowhere. He felt brave only because Nina felt safe and protected enough to rest.
3.
TUESDAY woke on the sofa,, blinking at the morning light, her shirtdress drenched in sweat. Scratching her head, which itched from the thick Aqua Net in her unraveling beehive, she stood and put her bare foot over the floor vent. She felt only a gust of tepid air. Twice in five days the air conditioner repairman had claimed to have fixed a Freon leak. She got a stomachache thinking of the expense of replacing the unit, and she began to list in her mind all the other fallibilities of her house. The unkempt branches of a tree would soon enough be scratching threateningly against the windows with any gust of winter wind. And the faulty wiring kept the house only halfway electrical.
This was something Tuesday did—she would stop a minute to concentrate on the most decrepit circumstances of her life. She’d close her eyes and immerse herself in the misery until she was druggy with unhappiness, until every obstacle seemed hazy with the impossibility of solution, and she’d drop, tired, into her sofa cushions. If it was just her, Tuesday wouldn’t care about a house hot like an oven. If she was all alone, all she’d need was a tiny corner of a cold-water flat.
When she opened the window to glance outside at the air conditioner, she saw a girl’s legs poking out from the thicket of mums planted alongside the house. Though the legs were long and thin, entirely un-Nina-like, Tuesday felt certain for a second that she’d just happened upon her daughter dead in the grass. Part of her had always been prepared for Nina to go suddenly and absolutely from her life. Some nights she’d be startled awake by the complete silence of the house, and she’d have to wake Nina with a soft shake and crawl into bed with her. Nina would stroke Tuesday’s hair and whisper-sing a new song she’d memorized.
A butterfly landed on the leg blotchy with sunburn, and the girl, not dead after all, slapped at the startlingly sea-blue bug as if it was as useless as a mosquito. Tuesday stepped outside. “Millie,” she said, seeing that the legs belonged to the girl who lived in the country but was always tumbling around town, the twelve-year-old with perpetually dirty knees who would sometimes sneak into the backyard to play with Nina and strip her Barbies naked. Millie wore a yellow tutu and ballerina slippers, and she lay next to candy spilled from a plastic, pumpkin-shaped bucket.
“Did you take Nina’s candy?” Tuesday said. She noticed Nina’s open window and recognized the bucket and its contents from when Tuesday took her trick-or-treating around the block before the costume party. Millie sat up then, her eyes heavy-lidded, her head bobbing on her neck. She seemed startled out of some stupor, looking all caught-in-the-act.
“Nina’s not in her room,” Millie said. Her skin was the white-blue of skim milk, her breath smelling slightly of chemicals. “This was on her bed.” She handed Tuesday a crumpled piece of paper, then stood, her tutu droopy, and stumbled away, nearly tripping over the loose laces of her slippers.
Before Tuesday even read the note, she knew it was from Hud, recognized the skinny, spiky letters of his serial-killer scrawl. Tuesday rushed to the open window, anxious to touch Nina, to feel Nina’s back minutely rise and fall with her slow breath as she slept so late. She reached into the window and, pushing at the empty puff of the goose-down duvet on the bed, she realized how easily any passing stranger could grab Nina by the hair and whisk her away with nothing much more than a flick of the wrist.
Deep in her heart, she knew Hud would never vanish with their daughter, though he wouldn’t be throwing away much of a life, as she saw it. All he loved about the town was the flea market on the courthouse lawn on Saturdays. Trashy teenaged girls gathered in the grass at the steps of the bandstand where he sat to play his guitar and