Earthbound Creatures

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many thanks to my family: David, Patrick, and Mary Ann (who always liked this story the best); my readers: Susie, Sharon, Carrie, Robyn, and Dr. Michael Hall; Kaitlin Severini, for your editing skills and so much more; R.P., for the lifelong inspiration; Patty; Dr. Cummings, my freshman English professor at Chatham College, and Elaine Spencer of The Knight Agency, who inspired me to think before I write.

For Mary Ann

PROLOGUE

September 9, 1981. Three in the afternoon and a gulping-thick, ninety-four-degree incarnation of a Thursday. No chance for rain, shade, or any other environmental reprieve until well after sundown.

A Southern Point school bus, its yellow paint granulating and flaking in revolt against the brackish assault it cut through every day, hissed to a stop, depositing two middle-schoolers at the edge of Goose Pond Road. After the bus had swung around the bend—all the way around the bend—KM’s Algebra I workbook skated down the center aisle and skidded to a dead stop next to the bus driver’s door lever. By then, its rightful owner, Kerry McCullough, had sprinted from her side of the gravel lane that separated Jimmy Whistler’s sprawling farm from her family’s 25-acre homestead and caught his stride.

You get hot in that shirt? she asked. They walked side by side. I surely would.

Nah, it’s okay, he answered, trying his best to sound nonchalant as his neck and forehead slicked up with a salty mix primed for a crawling descent onto his cheeks. His striped shirt was darker in several spots where a full sweat had already broken out, and the pale skin on his neck was beginning to flush from the trapped heat.

Maybe—um—are you just cold all the time? Kerry’s slender arms flowed out of her sleeveless white blouse, toned and tight like a dancer’s. She was strong for a girl of twelve, accustomed to helping her grandmother in the family garden and with daily housekeeping, since her own mother had died years before. Long legs, flawless and perfectly proportioned, separated her blue skirt and white sneakers. A straight ponytail sat at the nape of her neck. Each morning, Grandma Sally ironed Kerry’s dark hair before fastening it at the nape of her neck with a small bow, reasoning that if she looked a little more like the white children at school, they might accept her better, if only in the smallest of ways. There were mornings that the hot iron burned a spot of skin on Kerry’s neck. Sorry, honey, but I do this for your own good, Grandma Sally explained. I’m hopin’ it’ll help make things a little more…fair for you.

Jimmy’s chestnut hair was now saturated, stuck to the contours of his face. He fumbled with his shirt sleeves a little, trying to cool his arms. The button on his left sleeve popped off, exposing his forearm.

Kerry stopped in her tracks. Let me see that!

Jimmy jerked down the shirt sleeve. No!

Come on! She folded one arm over her chest and played with her short ponytail, waiting for him to give in. He always gave in when she did that.

He hiked his left sleeve back up to the elbow.

Eeeew. She curled her upper lip, then caught herself and remembered her manners. I—sorry—I mean—what is that, Jimmy?

Just a cut. He tried to pull down his sleeve again, but she grabbed his arm, staring at the blistered wound, a dark red bullseye crowning translucent white skin.

She frowned. That doesn’t look like any kind of cut to me. Are you sick? Her brown eyes held his, stubborn and unblinking. Jimmy, what’s wrong with you? Do you have chicken pox or somethin’?

No! he said as indignantly as a fourteen-year-old could.

Come on, Jimmy. Where’d you get that?

They stared at each other for what seemed like forever. She won the contest.

My…dad, Jimmy mumbled, looking at the ground.

She was bewildered. Your dad? What do you mean? Did he give you something—is he sick too?

Shame passed over his face. No. It’s—well—when I do something stupid, he—he—punishes me.

But how’d you get that kinda mark? she asked.

Cigarettes.

You mean a lit one? She tried to make sense of what he’d said. She had known no significant punishment in her short life save a harsh word or two, or an hour’s restriction to her bedroom, and those meager sentences were reserved for the rare instances in which she talked back to her grandmother or was lazy with her chores. Her small family was a solid, loving unit. She stared at the ground, calculating the sum of the last three exchanges. "Wait, now. Your dad—he burned you?"

Yeah, but I reckon I deserved it, Jimmy replied.

How come? What did you do that was so bad to get burned like that?

We get on his nerves—me and my mom. I’m worse than she is though. He spoke the words as if he believed they were true.

Kerry reexamined his scabbed arm. I don’t think that’s right, Jimmy. I mean, on some days, my grandma burns my hair—in the back—by mistake. But she doesn’t mean to—and she’s real sorry! I know she is. She hugs me. And, my daddy says nobody should hurt anybody else unless the other person’s tryin’ to hurt you or your family. He says that’s why the war back then was wrong.

What do you mean ‘wrong’?

Daddy says we shouldn’t have ever been over in Vee-et-nam, killing all of those people. He said some papers about the president prove it was wrong to make my daddy be in the war, too. He heard all about it in a book when he was up north in Washington—on a hauling job.

Well, I don’t care what y’all think. I hope they start a new war—an even worse one—’cause I’m gonna run away from here and fight in it, soon as I can.

No! You shouldn’t go fight! She stomped the ground with one foot. And your daddy shouldn’t be doin’ that to you! Oh, anyhow, my grandma’s got special cream that’ll work for that cut. She makes it herself. I’ll be sure and bring it with me tomorrow.

They reached the split in the road: a dirt lane taking Kerry home to her doting grandmother and overprotective father; a gravel road to Jimmy’s house leading in another, darker direction.

He stopped and turned back to Kerry. Kerry, promise ya won’t tell, please, he pleaded, his eyes searching hers for reassurance. "Promise—or I’ll get in worse trouble with my dad. Please."

Kerry put one hand over her heart. I won’t tell anyone, no matter what they do to me. Not ever. She kept her promise.

≈

CHAPTER ONE

Hazel eyes, more gold than green, burned a reflected glance back at Rory Fielding from the rearview mirror of her black 2016 pickup as she cruised at a fast clip along Southern Point, Virginia’s lone main road. Too fast. It was early December, but unseasonable temperatures and the intense southern Virginia sun made the cab’s dark interior stifling. Rory almost nodded off—until a sharp turn in the road brought her within yards of a head-on collision with a 25 MPH speed limit sign. She cranked the steering wheel hard left, ducking both the sign and a short skate across the road’s slim gravel shoulder, which would have led to an even shorter nosedive into a yawning drainage ditch, bubbling with runoff from the last night’s rain. Her violent steering maneuver jostled a thick stack of collapsed cardboard moving boxes—boxes that had been riding quietly in the truck’s bed for the past hour—out of their twine tethers.

The box flaps began a loud, frenetic dance against opposing sides of the slick bed, threatening to take flight and scatter across the road. A large digital camera, Rory’s constant companion, flew off the front passenger seat and slammed against the glove box before bouncing onto the floor.

Damn it! she cried, jamming down the brake pedal until the truck slowed to a crawl and the boxes settled back inside the bed. She strained to reach for the camera and scrutinized its latest damage before returning it to its open case on the seat. Accelerating again, to just below the speed limit this time, she counted each mile that hummed underneath the truck’s tires, ticking each of them off like a small weight shed from her shoulders and cast off through the truck’s windows, all four of which were now wide open.

Amber tendrils, caught up in the wind, competed with every feature of her face, except for what she had spent four decades convincing herself was an overly generous lower lip, slicked over with a glaring shade of red lipstick that a Macy’s saleswoman had insisted was a spring gotta-have. It had been a bad day when the woman—who couldn’t have been more than twenty years old—stalked and then pounced on Rory in the store’s cosmetic department. To Rory, the lipstick sounded frivolous enough to evoke a positive change, yet despite a generous application of Crimson Gala Rouge, no such transformation occurred. She scrubbed the lipstick from her lips with a fraying gray linen handkerchief that she’d dug out of the center console, tugged off her suit jacket, and turned up the volume on Finis Tasby asking for a kiss once in a while. Like most days, Rory was leaving behind meetings, pollution, and a grinding twelve-hour stretch in Norfolk to head home to rural Southern Point. Today was different, though. The start of a new life, pitching out the past and its collection of disappointments for an uncharted mix of equal parts fresh possibility and potential catastrophe. That trade—those blind prospects—sent a rush of excitement through her. Excitement tempered only by a more familiar emotion. Fear.

CHAPTER TWO

Where are you? Rory’s voice rose above a pyramid of moving boxes and echoed through the empty rooms of her old farmhouse. The elusive phone rang again, its synthesized horse whinny too faint for her to track to its precise location. Who was calling, however, was clear from the phone’s virtual assistant: Tom is calling. Tom is calling. She strained her ears and hoped for one more ring to serve as a homing device. If she missed this call, a dozen more would follow—rapid fire—until she picked up. The hall table, she guessed, leaping over a box to retrieve the phone before the call went to voicemail.

A deep breath in. Hey there, Tom.

Rory, have you actually reasoned this thing out? Tom Fielding pressed, dodging niceties in exchange for a straight shot to his agenda. Are you serious about throwing away your money on this silly gamble? How do you see your non-master plan reaching fruition?

She clenched her jaw hard before answering him, knowing her response would abruptly end what had been a peaceful, if somewhat somber, morning. What do you mean by ‘silly,’ Tom?

First, you throw away twenty-five grand on that overpriced nag of yours. Now you want to turn him into a business? Seriously, is that a good example to set for Ian?

Her frustration melded with hurt. And he knew just how to hurt her. Nice one, Tom, she said, as even voiced as she could. We’ve discussed this many, many times. And you know that my grandmother specified in her will to ‘use the money to fulfill one crazy dream.’ Not everybody’s dreams involve turning a massive profit, Tom. What’s wrong with loving your work and having enough?

Fine. You got that ‘crazy dream’ of a horse on your grandmother’s dime a few years ago. But let’s live in the present. How long is enough going to be enough? Everyone wants more. You should have let me invest your half of our profit from the agency sale. You could have lived out the rest of your life on the interest. You’re pushing forty-eight, so living conservatively, figuring another thirty, forty years—

Tom, she interrupted, it’s my money. I did earn it, and I’ve done a lot of planning—research—on this. She switched her phone to speaker mode, sorting through the desk drawers of her mirrored secretary while she talked. It had taken an hour-long struggle involving three people to move the towering desk into what was supposed to be its final resting place five years earlier. Now, here she was, readying the fragile antique for another precarious journey. The phone slipped from the secretary and dropped to the floor. She seriously weighed the option of stomping on the thing, but then relented and retrieved it.

Hello? What was that? Tom demanded. What the hell is going on over there? I’m on speaker! Who are you with?

Nothing—no one. Just trying to make some progress with packing my things for the movers next week. What were you saying?

I was saying, it’s a total lifestyle change, Tom continued. You’re trading those designer pumps of yours for—for horseshit. Or, maybe for bullshit.

Thanks for that analogy, she said, I’ve actually been shoveling crap for years—here and at work. There’s more to this—you know it. I’ll be home based, Tom, and right now Ian needs at least one of us around more. Besides, at our age, change is good. As soon as the words passed her lips, instant regret. It was all the fuel Tom needed.

Right, he answered back, his delivery scorching. And you know all about that, don’t you?

With that exchange, their conversation had officially turned the corner on ugly, but she reasoned he had the right to say it. A few months earlier, after two decades of marriage, she had shocked him, their fourteen-year-old son, Ian, and even herself, by asking for a divorce.

≈

If Rory had planned things out—which she always tried to do—she would never have picked the hottest Sunday in August to break the news to Tom. It just happened that way. Ian was at a friend’s house for the weekend. She had run through every possible rationalization and trick to play on herself. Honored the final this-really-is-the-last-time bargain with her soul to forfeit her own happiness in favor of stability for Ian. Still, as often as she rehearsed the words, uttering them was the hardest thing she’d ever done. A half dozen times that afternoon, as she and Tom sat at opposite ends of their sunporch, wading through familiar silence, Rory opened her mouth to speak, but no words came out. She pretended to read The Beautiful and the Damned, tilting her head and then staring blankly at each page for a minute for two before turning to a new page and repeating the ruse. She had read the novel a dozen times over the years and knew the story and all of its characters by heart. Each time she reached the end and closed the cover, she came away with something she’d missed in the previous read. She wondered if Tom, a self-proclaimed non-consumer of anything that wasn’t business-related, knew that about her. It seemed irrelevant now.

An hour later found the two of them still a yard away from each other on the sunporch, the space of time hanging heavy between them, heavy as the sticky, midday humidity that clung to the sunporch’s walls and windows. The cloying air hit the windows and quickly softened, forming thin teardrops that ran down the glass panes. But the silence between Tom and Rory only hardened—until it grew into a stony, unbearable wall. Rory didn’t know if she was beautiful, and she accepted the mantle of being damned for what she was going to do next.

Tom, she bowed her head toward her lap, staring at the worn grain on the cover of her book. We have to talk. You know that we have problems.

Huh? he answered distractedly from behind the Wall Street Journal. What problems? What is it now, Rory?

She was nauseated from anticipation. Tom, we both know we’re not happy. We haven’t been.

Happy? he huffed. "Happiness. That’s such a relative term."

Tom, please, put down that paper and listen to yourself, she said, short of breath from raw nervousness. She hated confrontation and conflict and usually worked as hard as necessary to avoid it. A relative term…relative to—what? Happiness is an absolute. She surprised herself by breaking into a shout. You either are—or you are not! We are not happy!

What is this? What is wrong with you? He stood and hurled the newspaper at her feet. If you’re not happy—leave! he yelled. Go! Get the fuck out! Just don’t change your mind and try to come back. That’s not part of the deal.

Deal? Is that what our marriage is? A deal?

Without a reply, he stomped off the sunporch. As she collapsed onto the cushioned window seat, her body shaking uncontrollably, she heard him through the porch wall, moving in the kitchen, filling a glass with ice from the refrigerator, step one of his daily gin-and-tonic mixing ritual, a little earlier than usual today. Minutes later he drove off in his Suburban. They never slept in the same bed again.

≈

Rory kicked an empty moving box across the farmhouse’s pine floor and made an angry face into her phone. Tom, it’s been months since we agreed to separate. We should be past this.

Okay, fine. Sure. But this horse hotel idea of yours…

It’s horse-boarding barn, not a horse hotel.

Whatever you call it.

I’ll be doing something I know—that I do now—but on a larger scale, she said, pushing past his resentment. Horse boarding is a solid business out here and the three biggest barns in Southern Point are closing within the next year. I already have six horses waiting to transfer over to my new place next September. Filling the other ten stalls should be easy as long as I get the land cleared, seeded, and fenced by spring. The rest is manual labor and some office work. And…I want to help out a rescue horse or two, on the side.

Your place. Listen to you. I think you’re forgetting that Mac Daddy barn, he scoffed. Construction projects are notorious for not finishing on time, and it’s almost January. And out here in Podunk central, who knows what timetable contractors operate on?

It’s a prefab, Tom. They go up in six to eight weeks, and I’ve got five months. If I stay on schedule, I’ll be okay. As she talked, she crouched her six-foot frame down to the desk mirror again and tried to smooth her hair into a braid. It wouldn’t obey, instead producing a halo of small ringlets. She gave up.

I don’t know how someone like you expects to run a horse farm alone.

I won’t be doing it alone, she started, I’ll hire some help. I’ll find my way through it—

Find your way? He cut her off. Oh, please! What’ll you do when you have one of those heart things of yours? I’m not gonna be there to help you out. You’re on your own now.

The heart thing. Random, terrifying episodes when Rory’s heart took a crazy arrhythmic ride, lasting anywhere from a few minutes to an hour. Minutes that began with the sensation of being thumped on the back, immediately leading to breathlessness, her chest like a sponge being squeezed tight by massive, crushing hands, accompanied by the fear that this time might be the time she would lose consciousness, or her angry heart would transition from tachycardia to fibrillation, requiring hospitalization, maybe a pacemaker. Or, it could get stuck out of rhythm and just stop beating. Slam into blackness. The end. It was in those minutes that she ran through a series of embarrassing, often futile maneuvers her doctor had taught her, regardless of where she was or who was watching: pressing her fingers against her eyeballs, holding her nose and holding her breath, squatting down and coughing. And then there was the spontaneous anxiety and shaking, brought on by an overload of adrenaline coursing through her system, which was induced by a heart rate of more than two hundred beats a minute. Unpredictable episodes resulting from both known and unknown triggers, keeping her perpetually one step short of ever feeling complete relaxation.

Is that fair? she asked him, exhausted from their sparring. That new medication they’ve got me on has made a huge difference. I’ve gone weeks between episodes, and the last one wasn’t too bad. Although Rory’s daily beta-blocker couldn’t prevent the episodes from occurring, it did manage to restrict her heart rate to the mid one-hundreds when an episode struck, providing her with a small degree of comfort in knowing that her arteries wouldn’t explode and her blood pressure wouldn’t escalate to stroke-inducing levels. Besides, I don’t know that I equate you threatening to call 9-1-1 every time I have one with ‘being there.’ You know that if those episodes show up on my medical records, I could lose my driver’s license.

Just forget it. It’s obvious that you’ve already made up your mind, Tom snapped, then fell silent for a few seconds. I should have your first settlement check when I get back from DC next week…unless you need me to loan you some cash to close on the new place. The mere mention of money produced a calming effect on Tom.

"No, I don’t need a loan.