Sabrina
“Pick one to take home: A puppy or Paul Ortez?”
She held a rope candy at the side of her mouth, waiting for me to answer, but
my face betrayed me with a rashy blush. “I knew it,” she laughed, pushing my
shoulder in a friendly but hard-enough way that I fell backwards from my knees.
We were sitting on the peeled linoleum of her kitchen floor when a sallow
looking woman came in without knocking. Sabrina looked at me, her own face
soured. She said, “That’s my aunt.” She raised the back of her hand to her
mouth and whispered in my direction, “She forgot her baby in the car,” as if to
explain the dense feeling of dread the woman pulled into the trailer with her.
I
felt my stomach drop; I told myself it was the potato chips and chocolate syrup
chasers we just dug out of the back of a bottom cabinet.
She
led me over gravelly carpet, through the plasticky, wood-paneled hallway, to
the almost last room on the left. It was the size of my bathroom at home; the
air was thick and musty and it gave me a headache to breathe through my nose,
but Sabrina didn’t seem to even notice. She pulled out an extra-large vinyl CD
case from under her bed, on its top the name “Eric” was written in
lightning-bolt letters with white-out.
“Alice
in Chains,” she said, grinning. The CD was black. The cover in the sleeve
showed four long-haired men, old and ugly. I was still thinking of Sabrina’s
aunt. Was her baby dead?
She
pulled me up by the hand, squeezing for longer than felt normal. “Let’s dance!”
she said. We watched ourselves gyrate awkwardly in front of her body mirror. A
single framed picture jumped against the wall behind us, then we dropped at the
sound of pounding on the door.
“Sahbreena!”
her mother’s voice slurred.
The
trailer stilled, but the song whined on. Sabrina winked at me, a snicker just
reaching the surface. Thuds as her mother walked back down the hallway,
Sabrina’s face sinking. I didn’t smell the smoke anymore and all I could think
was that I wanted to go home. So I did.
That was the night Sabrina went
missing.
When I left that night, her aunt and
mother were sitting in two armchairs that were really meant for outside. The
aunt never spoke, but Sabrina’s mother lit a cigarette, said: “Ever seen smoke
rings?” She blew blobs of smoke in my direction that looked more like a chimney
stream than circles, then laughed. I saw her yellowed, buck teeth. I remember
thinking that’s what horse teeth look like. “Your mom’s on her way, honey. I
called her already. Sahbreena!”
Sabrina
was sulking in her room, miserable and mad that I wanted to leave. All the kids
probably did, when they came. Even the ones who lived here. Sabrina especially.
Mad because I could and she couldn’t.
Mom
drove me back a few weeks later, parking the SUV half in the grass, careful not
to get too close to where a tire-sized trench had formed from the unusually
high number of visitors. I leapt over the trench, feeling especially the power
in my muscles, me—still alive. It had filled up with muddy rainwater, a small
moat. Sabrina’s body had been discovered only a mile away, by an
eighteen-year-old boy with the volunteer fire department, wearing camouflage
and crying. I heard the 911 call on the news. Beside the piles of rain-sogged
teddy bears and candy and ballerina jewelry boxes, I left a teddy bear and a
card at the front steps, but I knew that Sabrina would have rathered a CD or a
pack of candy cigarettes.
It was dusk, but early in the day.
That time when the sun sets too early, when you’re not prepared and you think
you’ve got more light still but the shadows insist on covering the parts they
hadn’t yet touched. A scream in the voice of Sabrina’s mother escaped the
trailer suddenly, and I knew I had heard that exact scream before—at home, an
early winter dusk, Daddy told me it was the scream of a red fox, but I knew
better now. Now that I had really heard it, up close. It was the scream
of a woman dragged by her hair up the hills, of unmuzzled mourning. It stringed
itself through the trailer door that was more like foam board with a lock.
“Sahbreena! Oh God, Sahbreena!” The door padded open and Sabrina’s mother
pulled herself onto the small porch. She stared at me, frozen and silent, and
she looked a lot like the still-lifes on Sabrina’s Alice in Chain’s CD and I
wondered if it was in there just now, through the hallway to the almost last
room on the left.
“Hey
kid,” she said, leaning over the wood railing. I heard the driver’s side door
thud open, my mom getting out. “Sahbreena’s not home.”
She
really looked like she had been dragged up the hills by the hair. “She didn’t
like any of this shit.” She flicked her half-smoked cigarette toward the tire
trench and when she opened the door I saw Sabrina’s aunt, sitting on one of
those indoor lawn chairs. The cloud of dread was everywhere, now.
The End
Stacey Lounsberry
Stacey Lounsberry is a
full-time mother and writer, and her work has appeared in The First
Line and Inscape. She earned a BFA in Creative Writing
from Morehead State University, and later an MAT in Teaching Special Education.
She lives in Eastern Kentucky with her two sons and husband.