The road ended five hundred yards in, at the rear bumper of a twenty-year-old Dodge Omni. It was parked in the bare dirt yard of the last trailer, a single-wide with a satellite dish beside it. I climbed warily from the car. There was a refuse pile behind the trailer, at the point where the land fell away to the river. A few lifeless items hung from a clothesline. A light burned behind one of the windows.

I knocked on the aluminum door.

The woman who opened the door was clearly the woman I sought. Her face and hands were severely scarred, not only from the fire but from the glass of the window she’d leapt through to escape the flames. The right side of her face, from the nose to the ear, was a textured nightmare, and long scars, puckered and white, crisscrossed her face. She had wild gray hair, thick glasses in pink frames, and a cigarette with a plastic filter on the end.

“Who the hell are you?” she asked. “And what the fuck are you doing at my house this early in the fucking morning?”

“Ma’am, my name is Work Pickens. I drove up from Salisbury. I’m sorry to bother you so early, but it’s very important that I speak to you about your daughter.”

“Why the hell should I talk to you?”

“I honestly don’t have an answer for that. You don’t know me and you don’t owe me. I’m just asking.”

“You want to talk about my daughter? Are you a cop or a reporter or something?” She looked me up and down.

“No. I’m none of those things.”

“What are you, then?”

I ignored her question. “Virginia Temple. She’s your daughter, right?”

She took a drag on the plastic filter, studied me with reptile eyes. “She came out of me, if that’s what you mean. But she’s no daughter of mine.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“That girl was ruined by the time she was ten. She wasn’t my baby no more, even then. But when she did this to me, when she set the fire and killed my Alex, well, I decided then and there that she weren’t no child of mine. Not then and not ever again.”

I couldn’t help but look at the scars, and I thought of what it must have been like to wake up engulfed in flame. “I’m sorry about your husband.”

“Are you stupid?” she asked. “I don’t care about that worthless shit. He got what he deserved and I’m better off with him dead. I’m talking about my Alex.” Her eyes misted and she swiped at one of them.

“Alex? I don’t understand.”

“Alex was the only thing good in my life.”

I stood there, confused. “Ma’am…”

“Goddamn it. Alex was my other daughter, my baby. She was seven when it happened. That bitch Virginia killed her, too. Or didn’t you know that?”

CHAPTER 30

Rhonda Temple pretty much shut down after her outburst. She wouldn’t talk much at all, not about Virginia and not about why she’d done what she did. But she did tell me how Alex, her youngest daughter, had come to die. The story stayed with me on the drive back to Salisbury, and I knew that the time had come to confront Jean. I had to ask the question. I had to know.

I parked Dr. Stokes’s car and walked to the entrance of the emergency room. I nodded at a doctor who stood smoking outside, then entered the brightly lit hospital. It was quiet, and for a moment it felt more like a mausoleum than a hospital. The triage nurse’s desk was empty. No one sat on the long benches or chairs in the waiting room. I could hear the hum of fluorescent lighting and the pneumatic hiss of the door as it slid shut behind me. I saw movement behind a glass partition, a flash of white coat, but that was it. The place was dead. So, feeling more like a ghost than ever, I passed through the reception area and into the long hall. It led me past vending machines, telephones, and the closed doors of the small hutchlike offices where low-grade administrators worked from nine to five. I found the bank of elevators and stepped inside. I pushed the button for the third floor.

The nurses’ station on Jean’s wing was empty and I walked quickly past it. As I reached my sister’s room, a nurse turned the corner, moving toward me, but her head was down. She didn’t see me, so I went inside and closed the door. The room was dark after the hallway, but not entirely without light. Some filtered in from outside, and the monitors cast their eerie glow. I half-expected to find Alex there, and honestly didn’t know what I’d do if I did. Fortunately, she wasn’t there. I needed Jean’s attention, not another pissing contest.

When I took Jean’s hand, it felt desiccated, as if she had bled out after all; but it was warm, and I looked down at her as I held it. Her eyes moved beneath her lids, and I wondered what she was dreaming about. Something bad. Her life was a nightmare. There would be no reprieve behind closed eyes. I wanted to wake her but did not. I sat in the chair by her side and held her fevered hand. Eventually, I put my head on the narrow margin of bed, and leaning forward, perched on that unyielding chair, I finally fell asleep.

At some point, I, too, must have dreamed. I felt her hand on my head and heard her voice. How could you, Work? How could you do it? Her hand fell away, along with her words, but in the clairvoyance of dreams, I knew that she was weeping.

When I woke, it was with a start. Jean’s skin was washed charcoal, her eyes twin slits of darkness, but then she blinked, and I knew that she was awake and had been watching me.

“When did you get here?” Her voice was as arid as her hands. I rubbed my eyes.

“Do you want some water?” I asked her.

“Yes, please.”

I poured some into the plastic cup on her bedside table. “There’s no ice.”

“It doesn’t matter.” She drank the water and I refilled her cup.

I looked at the saline bag suspended above her, followed the tube to where its needle entered her arm beneath a white X of tape. It was easy to recall the red sea of her blood on the floor of our parents’ house. She’d probably be dehydrated for a week.

I looked at her face, saw the slackness around her mouth, and wondered what she was on. Antidepressants, maybe? Sedatives? She saw me looking and turned away.

I did not want to ask her the things that had to be asked. She was transparent, and I knew that I had never seen a more fragile person.

“How are you, Jean? Are you holding up okay?”

She blinked at me, and for an instant I thought she wouldn’t answer. She drew up her knees, puddled into herself, and I thought she was going to turn away from me, as she’d done the last time.

“They say you saved my life.” The statement was utterly devoid of emotional context.

They say your car is blue. Like that.

I almost lied. I didn’t want her to hate me for doing what I’d done. “I might have,” I said.

“Even Alex says it. She says you found me and put tourniquets on my arms. She says one minute later and I would have died.”

I looked at my fingers, remembering the slipperiness of her blood; how hard I’d jammed those fingers into her neck, looking for a pulse. “You called me,” I said. “I came.”

“That’s the third time,” she continued. I felt her movement and looked up in time to see her turn her face away. “You must hate me,” she said.

“No.” I put my hand on her arm, turned her back so that I could see her face. “Never, Jean. Don’t you ever think that. I could never hate you.” I squeezed her shoulder and said the words that should have come easily but never had. “You’re my sister. And I love you.”

It was her turn to nod. She did so in fitful jerks as folds closed over her eyes like curtains and tears pooled on the shelf of her wasted cheeks before spilling down her face in two long, hot arcs. She swiped at the tears with one arm, scrubbing them away with the heavy bandage that covered her wrist. She opened her mouth to speak but then closed it, the words unsaid. Instead, she continued to nod. But I understood. The words were hard. That’s how we were raised.