Wyatt stretches back against the wall.

His eyes glow a little yellow in the candlelight. He reminds me of a beautiful feral tabby that used to hang out at my aunt’s trailer. Sometimes, I’d sneak him into bed with me, not caring if he might wake up in the middle of the night and tear me to pieces.

“What’s the worst thing that happened to you, Angel?” he asks. “In the group home.”

It’s not what I expect him to ask down here. I expect him to ask, Do you think I killed Odette? Trumanell? Why did you really come back to this fucking town?

“It happened to Mary, a friend of mine,” I stutter out. “She ran away afterward. Which is what made it the worst thing that happened to me.”

The sound of wind is howling down the stairs. My aunt used to call it the wolf at the door. She always said the wolf wouldn’t go away without his dinner. Once, with half a bottle of whiskey in her, she shoved me out into the wind and rain and locked the trailer door.

It is my third most terrifying memory.

Wyatt leans over. He blows out the candles.

45

We are all the same in the dark.

My mother said that to me when she kissed me good night.

She meant that in the dark, all that’s left is our souls.

She wasn’t imagining me in a hole with a killer, living out my worst fear.

Totally blind.

Floating in space.

One eye just like the other.

Soot and candle smoke are stuck in my throat. I’ve read that real space smells like something burning. Like a crash at the Daytona 500, or a charred house. The moon, like spent gunpowder. Like death.

How long has Wyatt been silent? Ten minutes? Twenty? How long have I held back a scream?

I try to calm the inside of myself, to imagine the open sky and green fields that stretch on and on and on above me. The air that will whoosh down here as soon as it is given a chance. Our little eye in the ground open to the sky, the sun peering down like a firefighter with a flashlight. But all I can really picture is the red farmhouse, blown to pieces, and every one of those pieces smothering our little metal door.

“You have to talk,” I gasp. “I get panic attacks sometimes. In storms. Being in the dark.”

I reach out a shaky hand as far as I can, arm straight, without moving any other part of my body. I touch nothing, not sweaty skin, not chilly wall.

I can’t hear Wyatt’s breath, just mine. Is he holding it, teasing me? Did I go to sleep? Faint? Did he take off his boots and sneak up the stairs in his socks? Wouldn’t I have heard the sound of the world, seen a shaft of light?

Will Bunny ever find me?

The lazy edges of a yawn break the silence.

“My sister used to tell me stories about wildflowers when I was afraid,” Wyatt says. “I’ll tell you one.”

Wyatt is saying that you can blow into the end of a dandelion stem and it will make a noise.

I’m paying attention to him, and I’m not. My relief that he is here, that anyone is here, even if it’s a killer, is overwhelming everything else.

“It sounds like a little horn when you puff air into it,” he’s saying. “You snap off the head and the root and the stem is hollow inside.” I hear him adjust his body roughly. I hope it’s not so I’m easier to reach.

“It was a signal between Trumanell and me so we’d know where the other one was hiding out in the field when Daddy got drunk. So we could find each other in the field if the corn or wheat was high, or if it was night and we couldn’t see. We practiced blowing on those stems, three short toots, so the sound was not too loud, just loud enough, the chirp of a cicada or a cricket. I was good at it, even better than Trumanell. Except one day, I got a bad stem. It wouldn’t blow. So on the next one I picked, I blew too hard. My father heard. He’s the one who found me, instead of my sister.”

Now my skin is prickling. Now I’m all in.

This is not a nature lesson. Not the kind of story that I bet Trumanell told to calm him down. Wyatt is revealing part of himself. Maybe I’ll be the first one he confesses to. About Trumanell. About Odette. Maybe he will say the words just this once and leave all of us down here in the dark.

“Was that the worst thing that ever happened to you?” My voice is a fragile trickle. “Your worst day?”

“No,” he says. “It was a bad day. Not the worst. But I think you already knew that. You know, you’re lucky. I almost left you in that field when I saw the dandelions. Seemed like a bad omen. Seventeen heads blown off. You made a lot of wishes.”

“One, really.”

“Which was?”

“What I always wished back then,” I say slowly. “For God to give me back my eye.”

“You blew a dandelion right in my face.”

“Except for that one. On that one, I was wishing you weren’t a murderer.”

His laugh grates in the emptiness. “I was wishing you were a dog.”

I don’t ask for the climax of the dandelion story. I let the movie stop with his father standing over him. He still hasn’t asked about my eye, either.

We’re members of the Bad Childhood Club. We don’t push. We don’t need details or proof. I don’t know how Emmaline lost her teeth, but I would have laid down my life for her. I don’t know how Mary got the scar on her cheek, and she doesn’t know how I lost my eye, but I still feel like we crawled inside and lived in the shell of each other, that our blood, our DNA, runs together.

All I want right now is to know about Odette, and I already feel Wyatt slipping away again.

“Do you think Odette’s alive?” I ask quickly. “That it’s just a little bit possible?”

I want to hear his reaction.

But he’s already up the steps and banging into the light.

I’m staring at the most incredible sunset I’ve ever seen, an orange Popsicle melted into big puffs of black cotton candy.

The fields seem five times as bright green as an hour ago. I want to get my phone out of the truck and snap a hundred pictures #nofilter.

Joy and terror, my whole freaking life, just inches apart.

The red farmhouse survived. So did all its buildings. The pickup is right where we left it. The bitch went a different way. She left only big muddy puddles of her tears. There’s no way to avoid them, so by the time I hop the obstacle course to the truck, my new gray Asics are ruined. It seems a tiny price.

As Wyatt whips down the highway, neither of us mentions stopping in the field where he found me. He switches on an all-Beatles station and rolls down the windows. I can’t get enough air or music.

The cab is throbbing with Jennifer Hudson’s voice. She’s singing “Golden Slumbers” full throat, full orchestra. Her vibrato travels into my bones and throbs in my brain.

By the time we pull in front of the Branson place, I’ve gone through the five stages of something. Gratefulness and euphoria were first. Followed by suspicion and wariness. Now I’m angry. It was Wyatt who put us on the open road in that storm and Wyatt who threw me into a cellar and blew out the lights.

When he pulls up to the house, I’m so irritated by its whiteness that I want to scratch my fingernails down the door until I hit the layer with Trumanell’s blood. I want to scratch my fingernails on Wyatt’s arm and draw his blood.

In the dark, in the daylight, it doesn’t matter. That kind of thinking makes me and a killer the same.

46

I open the truck door and slide out before Wyatt brakes to a full stop.

I don’t give him a chance to say goodbye.

It isn’t until I’m a mile down the road that I realize he didn’t speak to Trumanell in that cellar, not once.

It isn’t for another ten miles, when I pull my rental into the Days Inn parking lot, that I realize I’m exhausted and in trouble.

This is where the bitch stopped. She took the roof with her.

Five men on top of the building are struggling to attach black tarps over bare rafters while they yell at a teenager on the ground blinding them with an emergency light. Bushes are ripped out of the landscaping, roots attached.

A crowd of women wearing identical T-shirts rolls their suitcases in the direction of four white minivans. The parking lot lamps are dim and buzzing.

I drag my bag into the lobby anyway. It’s lit with two camping lanterns. The woman behind the counter has been doing some hard crying. She’s about my age, maybe a little older, and is bent over a small mirror lying on the counter, cleaning up muddy circles of mascara under her eyes.

“I have reservations,” I say.

“You’re kidding, right?” She barely looks up. “We’re closing. Your deposit will be refunded to your card within forty-eight hours.”