Marilou Is Everywhere Read online

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2019 by Sarah Elaine Smith

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Control Number: 2018040295

  ISBN 9780525535249 (hardcover); 9780525535263 (ebook)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design: Grace Han

  Cover art: George Wylesol

  Version_1

  For Janice Hatfield

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Part I

  Part II

  Part III

  Part IV

  Part V

  Part VI

  Part VII

  Part VIII

  Part IX

  Part X

  Part XI

  Part XII

  Part XIII

  Part XIV

  Part XV

  Part XVI

  Part XVII

  Part XVIII

  Part XIX

  Part XX

  Part XXI

  Part XXII

  Part XXIII

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  I used to think my troubles got legs the summer Jude Vanderjohn disappeared, but now I see how they started much earlier.

  Before that summer, the things that happened to me were air and water and just as see-thru. They were real but I didn’t care for them much. I did not care for the real. It didn’t seem so special to me, whatever communion I could take with the dust spangles, or the snakes that spun in an oiled way along the rotting tractor tires stacked up by the shed, or the stony light that fell in those hills and made the vines and mosses this vivid nightmare green. None of it had a purpose to me. Everything I saw seemed to have been emptied out and left there humming. I watched the cars. I read catalogs, which I collected and which my family called Cindy’s magazines. My life was an empty place. From where I stood, it seared on with a blank and merciless light. All dust and no song. Rainbows in oil puddles. Bug bites hatched with a curved X from my fingernails. Donald Duck orange juice in the can. Red mottles on my brother Clinton’s puffy hands, otherwise so white they were actually yellow, like hard cheese. The mole on my belly button. You get to know things this way, by looking at yourself. You know the world by the shape of what comes back when you yell.

  I had only ever been myself, and found it lacking. Even when the sun was shining, when the world was up, when I was born. And some days, I was really, really born. Most of my day I spent carving little pits in time where I could hide out in a texture of light or an idea. And then, that summer, I made a space between myself and all that. I guess how I could say it is, I began to see the other world, and it was not real and yet I could pull it across the real at will, like a thin cotton curtain. When I stood just far enough outside of it, my life, suddenly the blaring light resolved itself into a huge movie screen blooming out of the dark, a woman’s jaw jutting into the abandoning tilt of a kiss. The beginning of romance came from that distance. Black and white, the sparkling velvet dark and always someone else is there in the mind, in the cavern above my head. But a stranger. But it doesn’t matter, really. The point is that at that moment in my life, I would kill or die, die or kill, to be anyone else.

  I wasn’t trying to become Jude. Not exactly. But I wanted to disappear, and she had left a space. When I stepped into that space, I vanished from my senses. It changed me into someone who didn’t have my actual mind. The same way it changed Jude, when Virgil called her Marilou as they walked the halls of our high school arm in arm, shining like magazine people you’d never see. She became that other girl, and it lit her up, and that is what I wanted.

  Now, I know how that sounds: teenage, teenage. I was, and it brought me to wickedness. Except in wickedness, I loved the world, too, in a way so fierce I assumed no one could imagine. And I love it still. It was, quite simply, how I survived.

  I

  Jude Vanderjohn was last seen in the parking lot across from Burchinal’s General Store in Gans, just over the West Virginia border, where she had been camping in Coopers Rock State Forest with four other girls from the newly graduated West Greene High School senior class. The quickest way back went through Morgantown, but they had gone instead through Fayette County. When asked why they took the long way, Kayla apparently said that they wanted a prettier drive, they weren’t anxious to come back so soon. Then, when Detective Torboli asked again, she admitted they had wanted to smoke a blunt in the car, and Jude had a strict personal law against blunt smoking on interstates. Which did turn out to be true, but it wasn’t the real reason either.

  Eventually Crystal admitted that they had been followed, and took the other route because they were trying to lose the boys who had been hanging around their campsite. The boys had seemed vaguely related. They all had a similar smudge of mustache and they spoke in a brisk mystery language. At first, Shawn, B.D., and Caleb had loitered in a helpful way, starting the fire and sharing from their thirty racks, showing off places around the margins of Cheat Lake where the fish were so gullible you’d think they wanted to die in your hands.

  The second night of the trip, the boys took them on a hike through some path that wound around the massive blocks of limestone stories below the lookout pavilion. They took secret avenues through the rock where slim light fell through, silvery and ancient. At the Ravens Rock Overlook, they had produced homemade blackberry wine in a three-liter Pepsi bottle. They were romance minded, of course. The girls didn’t rebuff them too hard at first. It is sometimes nice to see a little attention. A little of that light lands on you, say, on a dizzy vista, and sweet wine is sweet, or so I’m told.

  Thrill seekers prefer Ravens Rock Overlook because it is unfenced. The view isn’t troubled by those coin-op lookie-loos. It feels likely, if you place a foot wrong, that you will spin off into the sky and never again trouble with gravity. So the boys dared to touch the girls in the dark, on the small of the back, the casual first declaration. It was romance. Apparently Kayla even held hands with Shawn, the tall one with the buff of his arms showing through his cut-up T-shirt. They talked about the souls of animals and the things the stars looked like, and they talked about their idiot worried parents and how they would all be just fine.

  Shawn walked Kayla closer to the edge. He said he wanted to show her a place where you could see the river down below like a moving silver chain. Close to the drop, he kicked her in the back of the knee, sly, to make her stumble and grab on to him dearly. Kayla pantomimed this by pinwheeling her arms in dismay when she told me the story. Shawn had probably intended for her to swoon into his arms, but she instead shrieked and tore back up from the edge, and running blind in the dark she turned her ankle in a gophe
r hole. The boys carried her back to camp and bound her ankle with duct tape and even went to the Eagle Lodge Café to bring her ice, a Coke, a stack of cordwood to apologize.

  But things had turned. Suddenly Kayla’s absent boyfriend asserted himself a bit more firmly in her memory. She started to talk about him a lot. Maybe she was trying to remind herself as much as anything, but she did allude to Lyle’s WPIAL wrestling trophies and bow-hunting expertise something on the heavy side. The musk wore down to a lean little smell. But the boys kept working their angle, saying how cold a night for May. Saying, man, what a lonely thing, to sleep alone on a night so cold. When the girls didn’t respond they laid it down for a while and kept up the friendliness, but Jude had already heard the sour note. She said she didn’t like their manners and they could go bang their dicks together if they were so fucking cold. The smallest of the boys, B.D., feint-stepped to her with his hand rared back, like he would slap her in the face, and they noticed then that he had a knife. It was nothing special, with a black plastic handle like for a kitchen, but he let it wave around meanly all the same. Jude brought out a canister of pepper spray—none of the others knew she even carried such a thing—and scorched B.D. right at the bridge of his nose.

  Tia and Crystal and Kayla wanted to leave immediately, but it had already been dark for some time and they had left the cars outside the park limits to avoid the vehicle fee. Jude and Amber doubted the boys would come back, and with Kayla on one foot it would take forever to hike out in the dark. But the boys did pass through a few times in the night to thrash around in the underbrush and scare them, muttering under their breath in a simmering way: bitches, bitches, bitches. Crystal was sure someone had peed on her tent in the middle of the night.

  In the morning, they broke camp as soon as the light started to change and hiked back out of the park. Jude’s car was scratched up with key marks that bit down to the metal. They had not told the boys where they’d left their cars, but Jude realized one must have followed her when she had made the trek to get bug spray from the trunk. Still, she didn’t seem scared, they said. Pissed off, though, like anyone would be.

  Once they were loaded up and driving off, a shitty Chevy Corsica pulled out of the brush by the highway entrance and kicked up hard behind them on the turns, swinging out into the oncoming lane and passing them on blind curves, then slowing down to nothing so the girls would have to go around. Amber, who was driving the other vehicle, claimed the Corsica nipped her rear bumper a few times, and though they brought it in to gather evidence, nothing could be discerned from the condition of her car. Jude, who was driving in front, pulled off toward Uniontown. She said she knew a back way. The boys didn’t follow.

  Jude’s car was still in front. She didn’t know her way so well as she thought—they were about to enter a toll road, and she swerved off at the last exit before the turnpike. Her vehicle was knocking and slugging to accelerate, and as they went through Gans, it slowed up and seemed to shake on the turns. On one hairpin she hit a pothole and limped it into the parking lot across from Burchinal’s, where a hand-lettered sign advertised a pepperoni roll sale for the students of Ferd Swaney Elementary and the American flag hung rigid like it does everywhere. An old boy in greased coveralls and no undershirt was smoking in a watchful way on his porch, right up by the road, as they peeped the dark windows. Closed, Sunday morning, for church. He came out from behind a dismembered Honda Rebel to look at Jude’s car. From what they described, he said it sounded like someone had put sugar in her gas tank and the fuel filter would have to be dumped. He offered his services, or she could use the phone inside to call AAA. Jude chose to call, even though it would take a few hours. She waved him off and called on her cell. She must have had it with friendly men by that point.

  The other girls were getting anxious. They had a mutual friend who was getting married in Nineveh that afternoon, and while they didn’t want to abandon Jude, it happened that Kayla, Crystal, Amber, and Tia were all in the wedding party, and Jude was not. Morgan, the bride, expected them at eleven to have their hair duded up with mini rhinestones and all that. More to the point, Morgan was a real grudge keeper and had already dis- and reinvited Amber multiple times, so they were relieved when Jude told them to go on. The old boy said Jude could wait inside the store. It just so happened to belong to his uncle. He fished a key out from the mailbox and let them into the unlit place already decided. He gave them Cokes to calm them down, and said he hoped they would all pass through again someday on happier errands.

  It was not even clear whether he or his wife had been the last person to see Jude. His name was Denny Cogar and he advised that the tow truck arrived around two, many hours after it was supposed to come. He also advised that he had watched Jude hitch herself up into the cab and laugh with the driver about something. But Cheryl Cogar recalled that Jude had spent a long time on her cell phone, pacing along the crick behind the store, talking to someone, fighting, kind of, and hours before the tow truck arrived, she had gotten into a low little hat-shaped sedan that had skidded up from nowhere.

  “And they was playing loud music about riding for the devil,” Cheryl said. “Gangster music, I think it was.”

  “You saw Jude get into this car?”

  “I heard it.”

  “What kind of car was it?” Detective Torboli asked.

  “Red,” she said.

  “Nothing else?”

  “It was red.”

  The interview pressed on along this line for hours. The detective named all types of cars in a soft, chanting voice.

  II

  The summer Jude disappeared, my brothers and I had turned basically feral since our mother had gone off for a number of months and we were living free, according to our own ideas and customs. Our mother disappearing was nothing new, but she usually came back within a few weeks. This time, we had not exactly been counting the days, but we had run out of food maybe a month past and been improvising ever since. I was fourteen and ruled by a dark planet. My brothers were grown, or seemed so to me at the time. In winter, they ate Steak-umms in front of the TV and made up theories about the New World Order while Clinton got lazy angry drunk around twilight. But in summer, Virgil lined up mowing jobs all over, and they were suddenly honest workingmen, and you couldn’t tell them a single thing.

  Our well was low from a dry spring, so we bathed in the pond. We called it Heaven Lake because we had grand imaginations and no sense, but it was really just a retainer pond. The family that owned it was called the Dukes and they had built a house, too, which looked like a blank face. They had made the pond, just scratched it right in and pulled the silver into it somehow with backhoes and a spillway of cinder blocks. They peopled it with catfish and bluegill. It was fenced in at the road with an eighteen-foot chain-link gate. The family kept it locked all the time except when they wanted to swim or fish, although they only came up a few times each year and the place was essentially ours.

  We usually walked along our ridge and dropped down to it through the brambles and little saplings that gave way under our hands. It was harder to get over the fence. Once I’d gotten stuck at the top with a leg on either side, petrified of swinging the other leg over and losing my balance. Virgil got me down by shaking the fence with his fists. I didn’t so much as smile at him for two weeks.

  Clinton slid down the steep parts on his feet, going in long pulls, and caught himself on hemlocks to slow up. Virgil walked down steady with his feet slanted sideways, sometimes testing the branches and footholds before he dropped his weight down on them. Virgil wasn’t scared of much, but he hated walking down steep places, especially if they were rocky and shifting. It always surprised me to see him look so careful. When he focused, it painted something hard and solemn over his eyes.

  The pond looked alive to me, even the shape of the hills around it. I lit it up by looking at it. I had made its very image. I felt, all at the same moment, that it was valiant for b
eauty and also so plain that it embarrassed me to belong to it. On the steep tractor paths and under the hawthorns, fine dappled mushrooms winked like they had invented themselves, sporelike, and had materialized from the floaters in your eyes.

  The good thing about washing up at the pond was we could also catch fish in it. I didn’t ask anymore why we were going to do something. This made it easier, because then I just did the things that happened and each moment was like turning a page in a book and it felt easy to me. The shade was icy. Something in the air was touching on the cold water and carrying it in big bold rushes under the trees.

  I couldn’t remember how long she was gone, except there had still been snow when our mother left. I knew because I remembered the cold air shoving itself in while she stood in the doorway and gave Virgil a bank envelope. It was supposed to last us. There was a job, she said, and the money could last us a long time, but she had to be away to do it. She told Virgil how to go pay the light bill at the customer service counter at the grocery store in town. Her car was already running with the fumes sinking down and snaking and spreading. It had seemed like midnight but it was just after dinner.

  Virgil carried the fishing poles. Clinton wasn’t allowed to carry anything since he more or less let himself fall down the hill, just stopping before the last drop. He once had smashed the tackle box when his foot hit a mud skid that sent him tumbling down to a broad shelf held up by tree roots. All the lures and hooks went dazzle in the undergrass, shining so much I could hear them almost. I had to carry the tackle box since then.

  Near the bottom, Clinton dropped out of sight. There was a wall of shale there. You could either pick around the side and come down to level slowly, or race off and fall the last six feet. Virgil and I wound around to the side. He put me in front and laid his huge hand on my skull.