We Are All the Same in the Dark - Julia Heaberlin Page 0,1
hold it open. I know what that means.
My daddy lost an eye when he was a kid. Depending on his mood, he wore a patch or a bad fake. The fake looked like he ripped it off a brown-eyed teddy bear minding his own business. Nothing was safe from Daddy, especially if it was minding its own business. Daddy overheard a joke I made about this when I was eight, which was a mistake on my part.
He liked to remind Trumanell and me that most pirates didn’t wear an eye patch because they had a missing eye—they wore it to condition themselves for fighting on ships and killing people in pitch-black night. This was his way of telling us he was good in the dark.
The girl’s missing eye makes me full aware she’s another of God’s tests, some kind of omen.
I focus on the other side of her nose, on the eye that is shiny and full of terror.
“Our daddy was missing an eye,” I say conversationally. “People all around here have lost bits and pieces. Arms. Thumbs. Legs. Toes. Farm equipment, war, firecrackers—they bite off stuff and you go on about your business. Out here, nobody cares. My daddy said one eye made him stronger.”
What my daddy really said was that his teddy-bear eye could blind me if I looked straight at it.
All the while I talk, I hear Trumanell in my head. Don’t touch. Don’t touch. You’ll catch it. We both know the rules of bad luck by heart, and bad luck burns off this girl like a terrible flu. She caught it from someone else. That’s how bad luck works, a germ that travels as fast as it can from one of us to the next, hoping for a mortal wound, but happy with whatever it can get.
I could still walk away.
That good eye of hers is a flickering green jewel, powerful. It says she’s already made her choice. She’ll take her chances with a big guy like me in a truck rather than alone out here on this land with the gang of rattlesnakes and buzzards that run it.
“My name is Wyatt,” I say. “Until you tell me otherwise, I’m going to call you Angel because that’s what you look like. Your head sparkling. Your arms spread out like you were doing snow angels in the dust. Were you?” I’m joking with her, trying to set her at ease so I can throw her in the truck without a scene. Getting nothing back, not even the curve of a smile. Hell, she might not have ever seen a fleck of snow. Some kids in West Texas don’t feel rain on their face until they’re five.
She grabs the water bottle I offer and pours it down her throat way too fast. When she settles down from choking, I hand her the scrap of beef jerky, what I intended to use to coax my new damn dog out of the field.
That’s when I get a fresh spook down my bone. I steady my arm to stop the quivering. I see what I should have seen in the grass right off.
I’m not afraid of dandelions. It’s just that I have a history with them. The girl has carefully laid them out in a circle around her like a fairy tale ring of protection. That, or somebody decorated a grave for her before they dumped her off.
A pile at her feet have their heads blown off, already shriveling in the sun. I kneel down and count stems. Seventeen wishes. The most I got to in our field, on my worst day, was fifty-three, and it wasn’t fifty-three separate wishes, just one desperate wish over and over.
Who knows what this girl’s thinking? What she’s wishing? All I know is that I have one foot in and one foot out of her dandelion grave, and I don’t like the feeling.
Trumanell used to play games with wildflowers when we hid out in the field behind our house. She’d tell stories to keep me from running back with my pocketknife to kill our dad, who bragged every other day that he had the right to snuff us out like a candle flame.
Trumanell would say bluebonnets were pretty pieces of broken sky. She’d tickle me with Indian paintbrush and tell me that Indian ghost boys painted their petals orange and yellow at sunset. The cornstalks turned into soldiers at night, watching out for us so we could hide. Dumb things like that.