There are little red dots spattering the image, labeled with long strings of letters and numbers. The dots are clustered more densely toward the north end of town, gathered like ants around an empty square of land. The picture must have been taken in winter, because I can see the pale bark of the big sycamore that stands in front of Starling House.
Baine reaches over to swipe sideways on the screen. There’s a picture of a newspaper headline from the 2000s: FOUR DEAD IN PLANT EXPLOSION; INSPECTORS CITE MANUFACTURING DEFECT.
She swipes again. A screenshot from the Bowling Green Daily News describing a grisly incident at the strip mine, where the boom fell on four workers. She swipes again, and again, headlines blurring together into a litany of misfortune: CHURCH FIRE STILL UNDER INVESTIGATION; HISTORIC FLOOD LEAVES DEVASTATION; DEATH TOLL RISES AT GRAVELY SANATORIUM.14 Wrecks and suicides, overdoses and cancer clusters, missing children and collapsed sinkholes and freak accidents. Some of them look brand-new, grabbed from online papers, and some of them are so old the paper is the color of weak coffee.
The screen swells and distorts in my vision. I close my eyes, suddenly carsick, and when I look back at the tablet there’s a picture of the Mud River in winter. There are men in uniforms standing on the shore, their shoulders squared as if against a strong wind, although I know the air was perfectly still that morning. In the water behind them, just visible above the blur of the current, is the cherry-red bumper of a ’94 Corvette.
She told me once I was conceived in the backseat of that car. God knows where it came from, or what she traded for it.
The headline seems to rise toward me, hovering above the screen in all caps: CONSTABLE MAYHEW SAYS MOTHER OF TWO DROVE INTO RIVER. Baine taps the flrst line of the article with the smooth arch of her fingernail. “Jewell,” she says softly. “What a pretty name.”
And then I’m drowning.
I’m fifteen and cold water is pouring through the windshield. The glove box is open, spewing pill bottles and plastic utensils. Mom is beside me, her limbs drifting gently, her hair tangling with the tacky dream catcher she pinned to the car roof. I’m reaching for her hand and her fingers are slick and limp as minnows and I might be screaming—Mom, come on, Mom—but the words can’t make it past the river in my mouth. And then everything goes very quiet and very dark.
I don’t remember letting go of her hand, but I must have done it. I must have crossed her name off the list in my head and swum for the surface, abandoning her to the river bottom, because the next thing I remember is vomiting on the shore. Clay beneath my fingernails, grit in my teeth, ice in my chest. The shine of the power plant through the bare branches, a cold sun that refused to rise.
I drifted away from myself, dreaming, and in the dream I was not cold at all. I was not the bad-luck daughter of a bad-luck mother, an accident washed up on the shore of a poison river. In the dream I was held tight, safe and warm inside a pair of arms that didn’t exist.
Later, the ER nurse told me that’s how you feel right before you freeze to death.
They discharged me after forty-eight hours, but for weeks afterward I could feel this coldness in the middle of me, like something in my chest had never quite thawed. I even went back to the hospital and made them x-ray my lungs, but they said everything looked good. I guess that’s just how it feels to find out what kind of person you are; to know, when it comes right down to the mean wire between living and dying, what you’ll do.
“Opal?” Baine says my name gently, as if she’s concerned about me, as if she didn’t engineer this entire sick experience. I want to dig my fingernails into her cheeks. I want to open the car door and leap out rather than linger another second in the candy-apple stink of this car.
I keep my hands very still in my lap. I might be sick and dizzy and suffering from classic PTSD, but I still know better than to bleed in front of someone like Elizabeth Baine. “Yeah. Jewell.” My voice sounds ordinary, almost careless. “I’m named after her, sort of. She picked my name off a list of birthstones, so we’re both jewels. Get it?”
Baine sits back a little, studying my face. It’s hard to focus on her features, so I close my eyes.
“Is that how she picked Jasper’s name, too?”
His name runs through me in a dark current, tensing my jaw, curling my fingers into fists. When I open my eyes Baine is smiling again. This one says: Bingo. “There’s no need to be alarmed. We’re a research group. We just did our research.” Her tone is soothing, hands palm up. “And we were hoping you would help us do a little more.”