a hurry, shuffling around church and town, too busy to pay me mind. She regarded me as if I were only distantly familiar, someone she once knew maybe but couldn’t place. I wondered if she knew what her own son had done to me. I wondered if she knew and she couldn’t stomach it.
Sharon looked like she’d been dragged by a tractor through the scratch of a cotton field. She wore deep red welt marks on her back where I imagined her father had taken to whipping her. She walked around aimlessly swinging a little Hello Kitty purse, her teeth soft and gray, eyes of yellow.
I was down in the canal on my way to the red house when I saw her walking along swinging that purse, slow and forlorn above me.
“Hey,” I said. “Down here.”
She squealed in fright. Jumped. “Jesus Christ, Lacey. What are you doing?”
“Just ease down, I’ll help you.”
She sat on the edge of the canal and then lowered herself in but slipped, landing hard on her knees like I had my first time. “What is this?”
“This way no one can see me from the road. I like it down here.”
She looked around squeamishly, taking in the cracked dry canal bed, the bones of the tiny rat rib cage near her foot. “Where do you go?”
I could share the Diviners with her, I thought for a moment. Take her to my other world. But in the land of scarcity there was no room for one more, so I shrugged.
She squinted up at the clear blue above us. “I wouldn’t care if this whole place burned,” she said. “In Paradise when that happened, a man held his wife in a swimming pool all night while they watched their house burn around them, and then the wife died in front of him.”
I shuddered. I hadn’t heard that story on the news. “Does dirt burn?” I asked.
She was quiet then and lay on her back. I saw her stomach quiver when she breathed and I wondered if she had been feeling like I was, that something inside was bubbling. I pictured a pot on Cherry’s stove boiling over. Perhaps I was boiling from the inside. In any case the sensation was worrisome, like nothing I’d ever felt. If I were in a romantic mood, I’d say it felt like a swarm of butterflies. But I was not feeling romantic.
“You ever feel anything in there?” I said. “Like, movements?”
“Oh yeah,” she said. She poked her stomach with one finger hard like it wasn’t a part of her own body. “My mom told me it was just gas.”
I nodded. Gas. This wasn’t gas. It seemed like Sharon knew it too.
“You weren’t touched by God in the night,” I said.
She turned her head toward me. “My brother.”
Laramie, the beefy red-faced boy who laughed in a dull stutter. I closed my eyes. A part of me had already known.
“My mother told me I was dreaming. Dreaming. She said, ‘Sharon, don’t let the Devil complicate it.’ She baked a cake to celebrate my usefulness.” She started to cry. “I’m going to hell, Lacey. They’re telling me this is what God wanted but I saw. I had a vision that the whole valley just kept dropping and dropping and I fell through the cracks.”
“Do you think Derndra ever tried to stop him?” I asked.
Sharon shook her head. “Her own daughter ain’t a part of it. Tells me she isn’t too keen on the whole thing.”
But I wasn’t sure it was so simple. All Derndra kept behind her placid face. She knew everything, didn’t she? I’d always thought her a snob, someone who was too holy to talk with the rest of us, someone too perfect. But perhaps she was too scared.
Sharon took a deep breath. Her tears had made pale rivers down her dirty face. “You know I tried to tell the cops after Laramie came at me, and my mom got on the phone and told them I was being dramatic because I hadn’t gotten my way. Geary backed them up just like Vern said he would. No one will help us.”
“It will be okay,” I said, but it came out flat and dead.
“I’ve been looking into ways of ending it myself,” she said. “I figure I can eat enough poison to kill it but not kill me.”
“I’ve never heard of anyone doing that,” I said.
“Of course you haven’t. Women don’t walk around wearing a shirt that says, ‘Hey, I ended my own pregnancy!’ But