ramshackle house. The girl had held the seventh book before her like a shield, protecting herself from the shattered glass while her mother’s flesh was ripped to ribbons.
“Mrs. Most,” the church secretary called up the attic stairs. “Are you up there, Mrs. Most?”
Abby paused for a moment, holding her breath, keeping still. But then she heard the creak of the stairs as the secretary climbed up anyway. “I’m here,” Abby said. “Yes, yes, I’m here, I’m here, I’m here.” She dropped the book into a box marked Xmas.
“You need to come to the chapel right away,” the secretary said when she reached the top of the stairs. “There’s a crisis.”
“I’m up here because I have a migraine,” Abby said. As she reached up to rub her temples, she hesitated, wondering if that gesture was just a touch too much. The devil’s in the details. “I have to keep … well, I’m up here because I have to keep elevated.”
“The elders are all in the church, but we need a woman right now,” the secretary said.
“You’re a woman,” Abby said.
The secretary sighed. “Mrs. Most,” she said. She shrugged her shoulders and took off her glasses to clean them with the cuff of her blouse. “You and your husband have run roughshod over this church since the second you darkened our doorstep. Now you have a chance to redeem yourself, and I’m trying to help you.”
“Well, for goodness’ sake, what’s going on down there?”
“There’s a woman … I don’t know if she was beaten or if she was raped or if she was thrown out of a truck on the highway. She’s just a mess. And she’s not talking.”
“What am I supposed to do about it?” Abby asked, but not in a snide way.
“Oh, Abby,” the church secretary said, sighing some more. “You’ll bring her here into the house. You’ll clean her up, get her a robe and a brush. You’ll make some tea. Put out those cookies I brought you yesterday. You’ll be calm, and certain, and comforting.”
“Okay,” Abby said. “Okay. I’ll be down in just a minute.”
“No, not in a minute,” the secretary said. “You’ll come with me now.” She held out her hand, and Abby took it, and the secretary led the minister’s wife from the attic. She led her from the parish house, and into the church, and to the chapel, where the elders stepped aside to allow Mrs. Most to sit next to Daisy in the pew.
“What’s your name, dear?” Abby asked. Daisy slouched, tired and docile, tracing a finger around a flower in the pattern of her dress. Abby put her hand on Daisy’s wrist. “It’s all right,” Abby said. “You don’t have to say anything at all.” To the elders and to the reverend, this seemed exactly the right thing, this invitation to silence, and they were impressed by Mrs. Most’s strategy. But it was Mrs. Most’s own silence that she was negotiating. She was happy for Daisy to reveal nothing at all in her presence.
At first no sheriff, no doctor, was called. In the parish house, as Abby Most stood in front of the stove, arms folded, staring at the teakettle, dreading its whistle, the church secretary, in the other room, dabbed a cotton ball soaked with alcohol on the minor cuts from the leaves of the cornstalks.
The reverend’s wife then led Daisy to the spare bedroom, where Daisy rested, the grandmotherly pillowcase—a baby-blue sateen—chilly against her cheek.
“Are you married?” Abby Most asked Daisy. Daisy shook her head. “Do you have any children?” No, again. “Do you live in town? Or nearby?” No. “On a farm?” No.
The reverend’s wife touched at a string tied in a bracelet around Daisy’s ankle. It was with that touch, that finger on that string, that everything came back in a horrid rush of clarity. Lenore, the night before, had tied that string there—the string had come loose from a ratty mop Daisy had used to wash the kitchen floor.
Lenore had been under the table, knotting Elvis’s shoelaces together. Lenore, having grown bored by Elvis’s visit and annoyed with all of Daisy’s attention to him, had spent the day disappearing, scooting beneath tables, burrowing into closets.
So Lenore had tied the mop string around Daisy’s ankle as Daisy had wiggled her foot around, gently kicking Lenore away. “Don’t,” Daisy had said, “that tickles.” But Lenore had persisted.
And when the reverend’s wife touched the string, it stung like a jolt of electric fence, and all the lack of feeling left Daisy’s body, and the pain from running over the jagged furrows of the cornfield pulsed in the bottoms of her feet and worked up through the rest of her, returning the ache to her legs and her back. She didn’t know what to do but cry. She curled up into a ball on the bed, buried her hands in her face, and wept and wailed, attracting the Board of Elders, who’d collected in the living room to worry as they’d stared into their cups of chamomile tea. They all slunk into the spare room like priests at a possession.
“Comfort her, Mrs. Most,” the reverend told Abby. Her husband had never before called her Mrs. Most, and on his tongue the name sounded like a scolding. Abby blushed. She hated his tone and the unspoken condescension of the old men in her house.
Abby scooted closer to Daisy on the bed and leaned over to whisper, “Tell me what to do.” She took Daisy’s hand, and Daisy gripped tightly. “Tell me what to do to help you, and I’ll do it. I just need you to stop crying.”
Daisy brought Abby’s hand up to cover her own mouth. “I can’t say it,” it sounded like she said, in between sobs.
Abby Most turned to look back at the men in the room and in the hall. She fixed a mean squint on her husband, a man who’d at one time, on their first dates, their first months as boyfriend and girlfriend, been so careful not to scare her off. Back then, if he hadn’t pleased her for even a moment, she could spend an afternoon not speaking and drop him into paroxysms of regret and apology.
“She says to get those old bastards out of here,” she lied. The reverend opened his mouth but then closed it again. He turned to the elders, who’d already begun to leave the room. He then left too. He closed the door, making the knob latch as quietly as he could.
· 18 ·
It’s my fault,” Daisy, still crying, told Abby. She sat on the bed with her knees up, rocking, and she twisted the string around and around her ankle.
“You can tell me about it,” Abby said. “Or not. You don’t have to tell me anything.”
Daisy looked at Abby. “I have a little girl,” Daisy said, slowly, as if confessing.
“Oh?” Abby said. “Oh?” she said again. She laughed a half laugh. “Then where is she? Your little girl?”
Daisy pulled her legs in tighter and pressed her forehead against her knees, whimpering. “I don’t know,” she said.
Abby had been imagining for Daisy nothing much more than some banal downward spiral of all-night liquor and squabbling. She’d pictured herself spending an afternoon braiding Daisy’s hair, lending her a sensible dress, the husband showing up, sheepish, his very best cowboy hat held in his hands, and Daisy accepting his apology, but only after she’d made a handful of weepy, weak protestations.
But the suggestion of a lost girl hit Abby hard. Abby and the reverend had been trying for two years to have a child. And that child that wasn’t, that might never be, took the blame, in Abby’s imagination, for any minute too many of silence at dinner, or any terse word or spark of anxiety. Comfort her, Mrs. Most. That Mrs. Most at the end of his command—as if she were nothing more than a piece of him—certainly had as its source, at least partly, Abby’s failure to get pregnant. Didn’t it? Why else had things changed so much for them so quickly?
“Wait here,” Abby told Daisy.
Abby