The voicemail cut off. Her mom had been crying hard at the end. Kasey hollered Silas’s name into the night.
*
She told him to stop before he turned up the driveway.
“You have to leave me here,” she said, getting out of the truck.
“Hell no, Kasey! You’re not going in there by yourself. Get back in.”
Kasey lied and told him she needed to get right home because her mom was pissed, but she didn’t tell him about moonshadow. That it was her and her mama’s code word. They’d never had to use it in any real situation, and it started as a joke.
If I ever need you to help me get out of a conversation, I’ll say, “Moonshadow.”
Once, Kasey’s mom picked her up from school in fifth grade, and some kids in class had been talking about zombies and how sometimes they take the form of people you know, and it’d scared Kasey so much that when she got to her mom’s car, she told her mom to tell her something only she would know, something her zombie mom would never be able to figure out. Her mom said Moonshadow and smiled at her, easing her fears.
“Silas. I have to go in there by myself, but I swear I’ll call you as soon as I can. It’s just me and my mom. Roy’s not here!” she said. Maybe. She didn’t know where Roy was and she didn’t care, unless Roy was dead. “I need to talk to my mom. She didn’t show up tonight and I’m mad at her about it and she’s pissed at me now and we’ll probably have one of our fights like we always do…like sisters,” Kasey said.
“Ah…I don’t want you walking the rest of the way by yourself, though. Get back in. I’ll drive you up,” he said, leaning over and opening the door. Kasey slammed it closed.
“Silas! I love you. I’ll call you soon—I mean it. Very soon! Please.” She started down the driveway toward the house.
Running.
Faster now.
“Kase! Kasey!”
She didn’t turn around.
When she reached the house, Kasey ran past her daddy’s truck, which was now wrecked. The front bumper was completely smashed, and the back wheel was sticking out in a way that a wheel shouldn’t stick out.
It didn’t matter.
She had to find her mom.
And she did.
Bloody on the kitchen floor with Roy standing over her. Her mom looked dead, but maybe she wasn’t? She was pale and not moving. Maybe she was just unconscious? Kasey didn’t even look for a gun or a knife in Roy’s hand. She jumped on him and punched, clawed, bit, told him she was going to kill him. He growled it back to her. Told her he was going to kill her like he wanted to kill her mother. Like he wished he could kill all the whores on earth.
Where was her phone? She needed to call an ambulance. Not the police.
Her mom had told her never to call the police, because they weren’t on a woman’s side in cases like these. They’d find a way to blame her for everything. There wasn’t even a woman on the force; it was all men.
Men could never understand. Men thought this was okay.
Fucking Earls.
Silas wasn’t like that, though. No.
Maybe Silas was still at the end of the driveway?
Maybe Silas would hear her if she screamed?
She opened her mouth to let it out right as Roy knocked her off him and sent her flying. She felt the back of her head dent the wall, and she was falling asleep. She couldn’t see, couldn’t move.
Or maybe she was dying?
Maybe this was what it felt like. Maybe she’d meet her mama somewhere in the quiet, static dark. Somewhere in the moonshadow.
Kasey’s body tingled and shook; the inside of her thighs warmed wet when her bladder let go. She tried to open her eyes, but they wouldn’t work anymore. She heard Roy telling her not to tell anyone what happened. Didn’t she? He said if she did, he’d kill her. Didn’t he? She couldn’t hear anything anymore. She fell inside of herself so deeply she kept right on going through the floor into cold layers of black nothing.
*
When she came to, Kasey saw her mom across the floor and Roy passed out next to an empty bottle of whiskey. She crawled to her mom and touched her arm. It was warm. Wasn’t it? She checked for a pulse and found none. She checked again. And again. Kasey took her mama’s head and held it to her chest, rocking back and forth as quietly as she could in silent agony for fear of waking Roy, who was only a few feet away from them. He could wake up at any moment, and when he did, he’d kill her too.
Or she could kill him.
If she could get up quietly enough and grab a knife. Be sure to stab him somewhere that would kill him immediately so she wouldn’t only make him mad.
Run, baby girl.
Run, baby girl.
Kasey knew what she was feeling was total powerlessness—a potent, real fear. A fear more real than any other emotion she’d ever felt. A fear as real as a stopped heart. A fear as real as death. She kissed her mom’s cooling forehead, sobbed with her hand covering her mouth to keep quiet. That real fear was what moved her body to get up and wash off, change clothes.
Run, baby girl.
Go to her bedroom for her backpack.
She filled it with what she could, including clothes, toiletries, and the six hundred dollars she’d saved from tutoring. She went to her mom’s bedroom and took the money she knew she kept in a box of tampons at the top of the closet—five thousand dollars. She put the picture of her as a baby held between her parents and the picture of her daddy that she sometimes kept in the truck in her backpack. She checked the container of poisoned black-eyed peas in the fridge, and they hadn’t been touched. She took it and her mom’s cell phone from the table too.
One last look at her on the kitchen floor.
Roy made me an orphan. My mom is dead and I have no one. Alone. I’m all alone.
Never.
Run, baby girl.
She’d never come back to that farmhouse.
Never.
*
Kasey threw the black-eyed peas in the trash and walked the miles to Caroline’s trailer in a daze. She tapped on Caro’s bedroom window, hoping she was in there sleeping and hadn’t stayed over at Ada’s. Kasey probably didn’t believe in God anymore after what she’d just seen on her kitchen floor, but there was a small godlike mercy when Caro opened the window.
“Kase. Oh no. What’s wrong? Silas told us—” Caro said as Kasey climbed inside.
“My mom…I got in a big fight with my mom, but we made up. It’s fine now. I need to go to sleep,” Kasey said. She hadn’t seen herself, but her face must’ve been a hot, crying, snotty mess.
She crawled into bed with Caroline, thinking that she’d die because she probably had a concussion. She wasn’t supposed to sleep, but she’d never been this tired in her life. She hoped it wouldn’t scar sweet Caroline forever if she found her dead in the morning. She used up her last prayers praying for her mama and Caro as she sank into the black again.
*
When Angie didn’t show up for work, Duke had been the one to tell Kasey that she needed to file a missing person report. She was too scared to tell anyone what she’d seen, what really happened; she was too scared of what Roy would do. He’d told her not to tell.
So she went along with it.
She didn’t know what Roy had done with her mom’s body. Duke had taken Kasey to the police station, and Mimi had been there with them too. After Kasey lied to Grandma Mimi and told her she’d fallen off a rope swing and hit her head and wanted to make sure she didn’t have a concussion or anything, Mimi took her to the hospital so they could take a look. No concussion, but Kasey’s heart rate was elevated, and her blood pressure was high. The doctor joked that she was too young to have high blood pressure and suggested she get some extra rest. As he said it, Kasey pictured her mom’s lifeless body.