1MAY 3, 2015
NOW
Brandi Addams is finally leaving Eternal Springs. She’s been planning it under their noses for months, and nobody suspects a thing. After thirty-two years, Brandi is as much a part of Eternal Springs as tornado season, or the springs that burst fever- warm from the ground. She was born in this town; everyone expects her to die here. She’s a homegrown cautionary tale: the girl who squandered her entire future before high school graduation.
But she’s leaving, and she’s going farther than any of them.
There’s only one more thing left to do. Which is why she’s trudging through the Ozarks forest, fifteen miles outside the city limits, in the thorny wilderness that sometimes requires search parties to retrieve hikers from its depths. It rained last night, and the rocky downhill slope is slick with mud. Brandi’s fallen twice, a scrape seething under her jeans. She keeps going. She hopes to god she’s not wrong about this. She’s been wrong about so many things in her life, but she’ll accept every mistake and heartbreak if she can be right this one time.
Brandi’s looking for a house, but the question is whether the house wants to be found. She scans the tree trunks until her eyes hurt, seeking that glimpse of a rooftop or the gleam of a window. She’s avoided the Forever House for so long now that maybe she’s missed her chance. Or maybe it’s withdrawn into hiding, scared away by growling ATVs and hungry bulldozers. Even a wilderness this deep is getting invaded. But Brandi’s got to try. She trusts that the house can sense the bright beacon of her need.
Her legs are growing tired. She asked Amber to drop her off miles back, near the old Asher Lake trailhead. There are no markers on a map that point to her true destination anyway, so she invented a cleaning job at the Motts’ vacation home. In truth, the Motts aren’t even in town, the expensive views of the lake wasting away in those picture windows. Ms. Mott used to follow her from room to room, jawing about how they’d never considered vacationing in Arkansas before Eternal Springs came up in the world. The Motts are the new type of tourists, thronging in to revitalize, reinvigorate, other shiny verbs that hide what they intend to do. Replace. Remove.
When Amber dropped Brandi off, she rolled down the car window to call after her, “Don’t go raiding the liquor cabinet, hear?”
During the fifteen years she’s cleaned houses, Brandi has never swiped any stray benzos or watered down the pinot noir. Not once. It’s been her own uncrossable line, and Amber knows that. But looking behind the joke, Brandi saw that Amber was just worried about her. This latest sober streak is Brandi’s personal record.
“Promise I’ll be good,” she’d said, overcome with tenderness for Amber, who was already in her work uniform. Black button-up forever smelling of grease and spice. And Amber smiled.
One thing Brandi never realized: how easy it is to be generous when you’re about to leave. No wonder the others looked so free before they left town, everything bad already in the rearview mirror.
Overhead, the sky is a washed-clean blue. Brandi’s close. She can feel it, that shift in the air. Birds quieting. Breeze stilling. Her heart swells with cautious hopefulness. She wouldn’t blame the Forever House for rejecting her. Brandi’s not the girl she was the last time she came here, that’s for damn sure. But—but—
There, between the trees. Russet siding, peeling shingles. She picks up her pace.
There’s a buzzing in her pocket. She fumbles her phone loose, tilts the screen so that she can see the display behind the starburst crack. Roy’s texting her. I wish you’d tell me.
Brandi pauses to type. Not til tonite. Its a surprise.
Have I mentioned lately that I hate surprises?
She sends back a single heart. The ellipses bounce for a second, then vanish.
The house stands across a low gully, joined to the forest by a wooden bridge. Near the center, a fallen branch merges with the wood, as if the bridge is devolving back to its source. The house is in the same disrepair as the bridge. Roof slumping in spots, windowpanes missing. Even so, it’s beautiful: a two-story log structure, a high gable roof.
Brandi stands on the other side of the bridge, echoes falling into formation around her as she remembers the first time she saw the house. The triumph they’d felt, brave explorers, the world coughing up its best-kept secrets just for them. Jay bent over her sketchpad, like she couldn’t handle such wonder without a buffer. Iggy bouncing with excitement.
It’s the first time in a while that she can think about the others without pain. After she first found out, their betrayal turned her favorite memories sour. Like she couldn’t even be happy in retrospect. But Roy’s helped her let it go. Forgive; forget; all that church-basement sobriety bullshit that finally makes sense.
The front door is unlocked, as always. Behind her, a startled cardinal rises from a branch, wings flutter-sharp. Brandi steps inside.
Instantly she feels time settle into her bones. Even the sunlight looks different through these windows, honeyed, thicker. Outside, the cardinal is no longer a quick flash of red, but is hovering in midair, wings fanned to show the white. Like flags of surrender.
The place looks centuries older than when she last saw it. The wallpaper sheds in strips, the wall beneath speckled with mold. A settee, back curved like the prow of a ship, sags with age. Brandi remembers the oil painting over the window blooming with color, the scarlet apple skin, the pebbled gem of a tangerine. The paint is cracked now, the apple palest pink. She spots the shriveled shell of a left-behind juice box on the floor. She remembers Jay sprawled across the settee, the rough slurp the straw made when the juice box was almost empty. That noise made them laugh till she had to pee. The ridiculous memory glows until she blinks away tears.
Upstairs, the windows show sweeping views of the forest, still as a photograph. From up here, the cardinal is a stark, unmoving burst of red against the trees. Brandi moves directly to the room at the end of the hall.
The child’s bed is frosty white, the canopy a tattered ghost. In spite of herself, Brandi’s heart gallops nearly out of her chest. Going to the closet, she reaches high on the shelf, groping around for a wooden box. There. Still safe, still untouched. Her hands shake with anticipation as she lifts the box down. She prays the house is looking out for her, that Theodora still favors her. Because everything that comes next could undo fifteen years of hurt.
Please let me be right, Brandi thinks. She sifts through the box’s contents. A class ring, mint-green with oxidation. The white pellets of baby teeth, a braid of pale hair. Letters, letters, so many letters, thin and brittle. And—and yes, there it is, an antique key, simple and gold-plated, unadorned. So small that it’s taken her all this time to fully appreciate it.
Brandi lets the relief hit her in one precious wave. She slides the key into her pocket and gives it a little pat. Now. Now she has everything they need. She can leave Eternal Springs for good, knowing that she’s done her best, that she’s ready.
“Thank you,” she whispers to the house, hoping its creator will hear.
Back downstairs. If the bird’s wings have moved, it’s by a fraction of an inch. Brandi remembers the hold of this place, the way it feels like she’s getting away with an amazing trick. But she knows better now.
As she crosses to the front door, her foot hits something. It rolls a few inches, leaving a clean trail through the dust. Everything else in the house has been exactly as she remembered. This—this is new, unaccounted-for. Easy to miss at first. Someone’s been here.
Brandi looks around, pulse kicking up. Her eyes catch on the unassuming door that leads down to the cellar. She tries the doorknob. Locked. When Brandi slides the bolt, the door falls open as if it’s been waiting a long time to release. It takes her a moment to understand the nasty feeling in her gut. The wood around the doorframe is scratched: a crosshatch of marks, gouged deep in some spots, growing thinner at the edges.
The stairs are steeped in darkness, cool air rising like icy water. She should leave. If she was watching herself in a horror movie, she’d be rolling her eyes, muttering, Get out, lady, just go. What had Roy told her recently, all love and exasperation? You’ve always made other people’s problems your own, and it’s going to kill you one day.
This isn’t her problem. She’s gulped down enough bitter guilt to last a lifetime. Here she is, on the brink of escape, and she has every right to leave and never look back.
Old memories stir, rise. Brandi shakes her head as if that will scatter the growing awareness of what she has to do. Doesn’t work. She knows the right choice, in a clear-eyed way that would shock everyone who’s watched her make nothing but wrong choices. She can’t leave town without knowing for sure. She’s come too far for that.
And so Brandi Addams descends the cellar steps.
2MAY 17, 2015
NOW
The vigil’s nearly over by the time Jay shows up. She spotted the flyer stapled to a telephone pole right outside her motel, like a bad omen. Hot-pink paper, no-nonsense details scribbled in Sharpie. A candlelight vigil to bring Brandi Addams home, held at Thermal Park, six o’clock. In a daze, Jay stole the flyer off the pole and stuck it to the corner of the motel mirror. She’s not helping Brandi much, hoarding this information all for herself, but then that fits with the overall pattern of the past fifteen years.
There’s a photo. Brandi’s xeroxed grin is so oversaturated that it could belong to anybody. That hasn’t kept Jay from staring at it, willing it to explain exactly what she’s supposed to do now that she’s bought a last-minute, one-way ticket to Eternal Springs, only to find her old friend missing. Gone.
Jay spent the entire plane ride preparing herself to see Brandi again. Wondering what she could possibly say. Practicing apologies and excuses and justifications, the ones she’s carefully crafted in her head for years, varying with the ebbing levels of her shame and regret. Maybe, she let herself think, Brandi has put everything behind her. Maybe this could be an overdue reunion. Jay was so worked up by the time she arrived in Eternal Springs that she was scarcely breathing, and then—then she saw the flyer, and all that hope and anxiety collapsed together into complete confusion.
So. No reunion, no forgiveness. Just a vigil and a xeroxed face and the one-line, two-word letter that drew Jay here. You promised.
The worst thing? In a horrible corner of her mind, Jay’s relieved that she doesn’t have to face her friend just yet.
Walking to the vigil, Jay looks around, marking the differences in her hometown. Eternal Springs has changed quite a bit since she left town on the heels of her high school graduation. Earlier today, on the hour-long shuttle ride from the regional airport, she noticed whole patches of forest stripped bald, making room for chain restaurants and boxy McMansions. The changes have even crept into downtown. New storefronts, expensive and sleek. Gleaming park benches and streetlamps.
It should be a kind of relief. Like each felled tree and refurbished building erases more of Jay’s history here. But no. The memories only press in tighter.
At the entrance to Thermal Park, she stops to check her phone one more time. Still no reply. She swallows disappointment. With Charlie and the twins, she’s not sure she has the right numbers. Iggy’s silence, though … that hurts more.
Thermal Park is stubbornly unchanged. It’s less a traditional park than a rising forested bluff in the middle of town, wound with stone steps. The hot springs are cordoned off into little pools, bottoms glittering with coins left by wish-makers. These springs are responsible for turning Eternal into a town in the first place: back in the late 1800s, they drew travelers hoping to cure their edema, restore their eyesight, mend their heartache.
It’s nearly seven-thirty. Only a few people linger. Jay accepts a candle from a teenager she doesn’t recognize. The muddy dusk hides her as she climbs the steps, pausing behind a cluster of older women. They pop up in her memory with disconcerting ease. A classmate’s mother, the librarian who was always nice about overdue fines.
“I’m telling you, it’s no coincidence. That girl’s past finally caught up with her.”
“I’m not even clear on what happened,” the librarian says. “Is she missing or … you know?”
“Dead?”
The cheap foil candle holder scalds Jay’s fingertips. Dead? The world tilts unsteadily, but she makes herself listen.
“Who knows,” the classmate’s mom—Ms. Suarez—goes on. “Amber dropped her off to clean some vacation house weeks ago, Kathy said.”
Kathy. So Brandi was still employed by the same boss who hired her when she was eighteen. Still cleaning the same houses. It’s as if these past fifteen years have moved differently for her than for Jay.
“Amber hadn’t heard from her and got worried enough to go by her trailer. Found blood everywhere. No sign of Brandi since. They combed the woods.”
“At least with Gene, they had a suspect,” a third woman says. They all seem to realize the implications of this; the librarian laughs strangely, changing the topic.
“Jadelynne Carr?” The voice ambushes her from the opposite direction. Jay turns, heart hammering. Amber looks like she’s about to poke Jay to make sure she’s real. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“Uh. Jay. I still go by Jay.”
“I ain’t seen you in years and years. Your dad don’t even live here anymore.” Amber’s face flickers in and out of familiarity, her teenage and adult versions colliding. This is the first time Jay’s encountered anybody from high school in the flesh. It’s not like she attended the reunions; those invitations went directly into the trash.
“You came all this way for Brandi?” Amber asks. “That’s real decent of you.”
Jay realizes she’s braced for a fight. Part of it is muscle memory. Amber Penske has never been Jay’s biggest fan—or Brandi’s.
“Remember how the kids would call you two Bradelynne?”
Hurrying past the pain of that nickname, Jay gestures at the lingering dots of candlelight. “Who arranged all this?”
“I did. She don’t really have a lot of people around here. I can’t get hold of her mom, no surprise there. I’m not sure how else to help, but I gotta do something. Brandi’s my best friend.”
The surprise hits Jay in a gut punch. Amber and Brandi, friends. This feels wrong, like Jay’s memories have been replaced behind her back. “You were the last one to see her?” she asks, repeating what she overheard. When she glances over her shoulder, she sees the women have moved down the hillside, out of earshot. “Do you mind explaining what happened? I’m confused.”
“Well, I’m not sure I understand myself. I dropped her off about two weeks back, then had to get to my shift at Francesco’s. After that, life got busy. She stopped answering my texts. I reckoned she was just busy with her own stuff. It took me over a week to go by her place. I should of gone by sooner, I should of noticed something was wrong. I’ve replayed it a thousand times in my head. If I’d known…”
The raw guilt in Amber’s voice tugs at something in Jay’s chest. “I’m sorry.”
“Hey, not your fault.”
It’s something polite to say. Amber doesn’t mean anything by it. But Jay’s stomach churns. “Do you think—does this have anything to do with Brandi’s … addiction issues?”
Jay instantly regrets that. Addiction issues.
Sure enough: “What do you care about her ‘addiction issues’?” Amber asks, mimicking Jay’s awkward cadence.
“Uh. It could…” Jay feels every year she’s been gone, all the time she spent whittling down her Southern accent, dissolving the h in what and why, shortening her twangy, wayward vowels. She runs her tongue over her newly straightened teeth. You don’t belong here anymore, Jay; don’t worry, this is just temporary. “It could help narrow down what happened to Brandi.”
Copyright © 2023 by Sara Flannery Murphy
