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Franklin’s funeral was confusing and too much in more ways that Ash could have ever described. It was all too big for him, too much that he just couldn’t wrap his head around. One minute, his biggest worry had been getting ready for his last year of middle school, and the next, his cousin was dead.
No one would tell him or Cheryl what had happened. That might have scared him more than whatever the truth was. All he knew was that their cousins had been on a road trip with their friends, and now Sally was the only one left.
The funeral was okay, as far as funerals went—not that he exactly had a large frame of reference.
He didn’t get to see Sally much. She sat with his aunt and uncle up in the front, while he, Cheryl, and Dad were a few rows back. She didn’t go up to speak, even though she was asked to. Nobody bothered pushing her, though her mother had given her a sad look before going in her stead.
There was no body to bury, only a closed, empty casket. They got him a headstone anyway, near where Ash’s great aunt and uncle, Franklin and Sally’s grandparents, were buried. As it was lowered into the ground, he wondered how many of the other graves around them were empty.
He kept getting hung up on weird things like that; little details that shouldn’t have been important in the face of something so big. The uncomfortable squeeze of the new, fancy shoes his dad had bought for him to wear, the fact that his aunt’s hair kept falling in her face. It felt wrong to think about anything but Franklin, but it seemed like those were the only things he could bring himself to focus on.
It felt like all of his senses were on overdrive, like he was hyperaware of everything he was feeling. The material world around him was brought into sharp focus all at once in the face of the reality that Franklin wasn’t part of it. That he’d been there, once, and now he wasn’t.
After the burial, everyone was standing around talking. What they were talking about, he had no clue; what do you even say at a funeral? He definitely didn’t really feel like saying much of anything. He was mostly just sad, and there wasn’t much else he could say about that.
Sally and Franklin used to come up to Michigan all the time when they were kids. It was a tradition, really. For a few weeks every summer, the two of them and their parents would make the drive out to visit them, and it was always the highlight of the season—maybe even the whole year.
Franklin was always a little weird, but in a cool kind of way. He told weird stories, the kind that Ash never heard from anyone else, about the slaughterhouse his grandpa had worked at and other things that made Cheryl go green around the gills. Sally would usually scold him for it, which only made Ash want to hear them more.
With Franklin, nothing was ever really off-limits, just explained differently. Things like that didn’t seem so scary when it was just his goofy cousin trying to gross him out. Plus, it was nice to not be talked down to for once; maybe because he understood what that felt like, even when he was almost an adult. He saw it sometimes, in the way Sally looked at him, somewhere between exasperation and pity.
Suffice to say, even if they didn’t see each other often, he’d say he and Franklin were pretty close. It felt impossible that he was just gone.
But if Ash was being honest, Sally was always really his favorite.
He never said it, because you weren’t supposed to play favorites. Plus, if anything, Sally was supposed to be Cheryl’s favorite, meaning Franklin had to be his. And he loved Franklin, he really did, but Sally was just different somehow.
Maybe it was because she was the oldest, or maybe it was just because he’d never really had any girl friends. It was always hard to get the other boys to take him seriously, but somehow it was even harder with girls. They just didn’t get each other.
But Sally had never seen him that way. Sally was always kind, always eager to hear about what he and Cheryl had been up to while they were away. She always liked seeing Cheryl’s drawings, praising her work and aweing at the intricate scenes she could make. She’d even been the one to get Ash into piano, and lit up whenever he played for her, even long after she’d given up on it herself. Where Franklin would always eventually get bored with them, Sally never did.
But everyone has to grow up eventually.
Sally started college, and Franklin wasn’t far behind. They would both still come, but it felt different somehow, almost awkward. It felt stupid to think that their adult cousins would still want to hang out with a couple of little kids. Franklin had no problem making that pretty clear, though never to their faces.
Honestly, it was a miracle they’d even played along before; what teenager wants to waste weeks of their vacation listening to an eight year old talk about schoolyard drama and how he was coming along with the cello? To them, it had probably been nothing more than babysitting.
Sally still acted as interested as ever, but he started to wonder how much of that was real. He didn't want to think about it; it felt so bad it made him feel sick to think that they didn’t actually like seeing him. He wondered why he couldn’t just be like Cheryl, blissfully unaware that anything had changed and happy as ever to show off her drawings while she babbled on about the latest book she was reading.
And then that year, they hadn’t come up at all.
Cheryl had been disappointed. Ash had figured it was only a matter of time until it happened. Sally was almost done with her degree, meaning soon she’d be too busy to waste her time on them. It was no wonder she’d rather spend her summer with her friends.
He couldn’t help but wonder, though, if maybe putting it off another year could have saved them.
While everyone else talked about a million things that had nothing to do with Franklin, Ash wandered off. His dad watched him go but didn’t say anything, holding Cheryl close while she sniffled and wiped her face ineffectually.
He took a deep breath as soon as he was out of earshot. Why seemingly everyone felt the need to wear about a gallon’s worth of perfume or cologne and then sweat through it anyway, he didn’t understand. Even though he hadn’t said it, he glanced behind himself on instinct. The coast was clear, though, everyone still gathered around making small talk.
He hadn’t really taken the time to get a good look at the graveyard beforehand. It wasn’t all that different from any of the ones they had up in Michigan, rows and rows of carved and polished stone in browns and grays stretching farther than he could see. He shucked off his jacket, the black fabric too hot and stifling in the Texas heat. At least it wasn’t quite as humid as Michigan was this time of year.
It wasn’t too long before he came to a stop, finding Sally sitting alone on the steps of the mausoleum. As he approached, she didn’t look up. He figured she probably wanted to be left alone. He didn’t really know what else to do, though, so he sat down a few feet away from her. She didn’t even seem to notice him. She didn’t seem to notice much of anything, really.
There was a new, strange look in her eyes, one that felt familiar in all the wrong ways. She stared blankly at the grass, the gravel, or maybe something else entirely that no one could see but her.
Ash’s grandpa had been a soldier in World War II. His dad had made sure to tell him and Cheryl, very seriously, to never ever ask about it. Even so, sometimes he would get this look in his eyes, like the one Sally had now, something that wasn’t quite sad and wasn’t quite scared, either.
Their grandmother would usher them out of the room on the rare occasions they were around to see him like that, but the sight stuck with him. Shell-shock, his history textbooks had called it. PTSD, no one yet knew to think, not that they'd have ever dared to say it. Of course, Grandpa wasn't there to tiptoe around anymore, anyway.
He had already known that something terrible had happened. But he knew then that his cousin would never be the same. He knew that now she was fragile, even if she grew hard on the outside. He couldn’t imagine a Sally who was no longer gentle—who had had it beaten out of her.
But it seemed like they were well past that.
He wanted to say something. He didn’t know what, but he didn’t feel right just letting the silence stew between them.
“Ashley,” a quiet voice rasped beside him.
He turned to see Sally looking at him, arms wrapped around her legs protectively. He had the odd thought that it made her look like a kid, even more so than when she’d been his age.
“Take good care of Cheryl, okay?” she asked, voice soft and trembling.
Even as she sounded so terrible, so worn down and broken, her voice had the same sweet, gentle tone to it as ever. He couldn’t say the same for her face—her eyes were completely dead, empty. It was like she wasn’t even looking at him.
“Of course,” he said.
A little bit of focus came back to her eyes as she looked at him, like she was trying to see if he was lying. He tried not to fidget under her scrutiny.
Suddenly, she started to look scared. Ash almost began to panic, thinking he’d done something wrong, when she surged forward and gripped his arm tightly with one hand. It hurt a little bit, but he didn’t want to make her feel bad, so he didn’t say anything about it.
“Promise me,” she begged, leaning in close. “You have to promise you’ll keep her safe.”
He nodded slowly. “Okay,” he said. “Okay, Sally, I promise. I won’t let anything happen to her.”
After a tense moment, she sighed in relief, her grip on his arm finally loosening before falling away entirely. As she held her face in her hands, he winced and rubbed his arm.
She looked up before he could think to act natural, and her eyes zeroed in on where he held his arm. She gasped in horror, tears springing to her eyes as she realized what had happened. Her hands hovered shakily, and he couldn’t fight the way he tensed up. To his distress, it only made her tears flow faster.
“Oh, Ashley,” she blubbered, covering her face in shame. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, sweetheart.”
“It’s okay,” he tried to say, but she didn’t seem to be listening, sobbing into her hands. “Look, I’m okay, promise.”
She didn’t react at all. He started to think that maybe her complete unresponsiveness from before was better if this was the alternative.
He didn’t know what to do. Sally had always been the one who knew, the one who was able to calm Cheryl down when she fell and hurt herself, or when something Franklin said freaked her out. She was the one who always knew the right thing to say, knew how to be comforting without being overbearing.
Ash could hardly even calm himself down after a nightmare. And nightmares, at least the ones that he had, were easy. At least those weren’t real, most of the time.
But this? This was realer than anything he’d ever had to deal with. Maybe even realer than the old, softer Sally would have known how to help with.
But he couldn’t just sit there and watch her cry, either.
Hesitantly, praying he wasn’t about to just make everything worse, he gently wrapped his arms around her. Her breath caught, and for a moment he feared he’d made an even bigger mistake. But then she was reciprocating, her wet face pressed into his hair as she sobbed and wailed.
Ash wished he was anywhere else in the world. He only held her tighter, resting his chin on her bony shoulder. She smelled like stiff, new fabric and a kind of flowery perfume she’d never have worn on her own. It only made the moment feel that much more inescapably surreal.
“You’re a good kid,” she told him, rocking them as if he was the one being comforted. “You’re such a good kid, Ashley.”
Eventually, she let go, still hiccuping and wiping her face with shaking hands. As he watched, he wondered if her hands would ever not shake again.
“It’ll be okay,” he said, not knowing what else he possibly could say, and prayed life wouldn’t make a liar out of him.
The next day, her hand was inked in purple on his skin.
It was gone a few weeks later, but more permanent was her face, those eyes, etched into his mind forever.
Years later, he would see the same ones staring back at him when he looked in the mirror. He didn’t like looking in them very much after that.
Sally thought that she was doing pretty alright, all things considered.
Her life was quiet now, which was about all she could ever ask for.
After the initial media storm surrounding the worst day of her life had died down, after the case went cold and more and more people were convinced that she had simply lost her mind, there really wasn’t much left for her back home. Her parents had wanted to keep her close, had never wanted to let her out of their sights ever again, but she just couldn’t stay. She could feel the eyes on her everywhere she went, could practically hear the whispers, even when they were polite enough to keep them inside.
If they’d had it their way, she would have gone back to the hospital for another month, had her dosage upped and been kept a compliant zombie, never straying from home again. And honestly, it shouldn’t have sounded like all too bad of a deal; she was tired of being afraid all the time, tired of feeling like it had never truly ended, only waiting for her to let her guard down before taking everything else she had left.
But maybe the only way to truly be rid of her fears was to face them, and she couldn’t do that at home.
She missed her family every day. She missed the friends she left behind, who didn’t know how to approach her anymore. She wrote home every now and then, though there wasn’t much to say. In a way, she was almost glad for it. At least then she didn’t have to think about it for too long.
She wasn’t sure how to approach them either. The world she lived in before the farmhouse and the one she lived in now felt completely different. It felt impossible to try and walk into one as the Sally who was born in the other.
It was odd to think that not even ten years had passed since that day. It felt more like fifty. Every day, though, truly making it that far seemed like less and less of an impossibility. The only question was whether it was worth it.
She still wasn’t sure.
Making new friends was hard. She couldn’t say she’d quite mastered it yet. As friendly and accommodating as the people in the small town she lived in now were, they didn’t get too close. They minded their own business for the most part, and while it was nice to not be bothered after having reporters swarming her for months on end before, by now it was getting a little lonely.
Not to mention that none of them had thought to ask about the unfamiliar car parked on the side of the road into town.
Now, one thing Sally had been practicing in her time away was not always assuming the worst. Maybe they had broken down, or maybe they didn’t have enough for a room that night.
In any case, it couldn’t hurt to check. She just wished that there was anyone else around to do it, cursing herself as she parked a little ways away.
Shotgun in hand, she crept over and squinted to see in through the grimy windows. No one was in the driver’s seat. In fact, once she got a closer look, she realized that the whole windshield had actually been removed. If someone was sleeping in there, they were probably freezing. Or maybe it really was just abandoned.
Just to be sure, she knocked gently on the side window, trying to see through to the back. Nothing moved, but she saw what looked like the shape of a person laying across the backseat, outlined by the moonlight filtering in from where the windshield was supposed to be. She knocked again, this time on the door and much harder, and didn’t stop until she saw the body shift. A quiet groan followed as they sat up, rubbing their eye.
A man, it looked like, though it was hard to tell with so little lighting. She unconsciously shifted her grip on her gun.
“Hello?” she called. The man shifted, sitting up fully and facing her. Something tugged at her heart as she got a better look at him.
Through the darkness, tired, bleary eyes met her own, and she felt a strange sense of familiarity as she looked into them. He gave her an awkward grin, which did little to alleviate the tension in her shoulders.
“Hey,” he greeted her with something just to the left of shame coloring his voice. “Nice night we’re having, huh?”
“Sure. Would you mind stepping out here for a moment?” she asked, breezing past the remark.
“Yeah, ‘course,” he said, sluggishly crawling out.
She stepped back as the door opened and he finally stood before her. He was tall, taller than she’d expected him to be. But he was scrawny, too, almost boyishly so. His eyes landed on the shotgun clutched in her hand, though he made no comment on it.
Finally getting a good look at him, she still couldn’t shake that feeling of familiarity, though she reckoned she’d remember a tall, gangly thing like him. Maybe he’d lost weight?
“Have we met before?” she couldn’t help but ask as she watched him stretch, hearing a few more pops than was probably healthy for a guy his age. He looked young—a man in his own right, to be sure, but definitely a ways younger than her.
He frowned at the question, tilting his head and squinting at her. It didn’t take long before something seemed to click, and he blurted out, “Sally?”
“Yeah,” she confirmed cautiously. “And you would be?”
“You don’t– uh, it’s Ash. Your cousin?” he said uncertainly, as if she wouldn’t know who he meant. Her eyes widened, wondering how she hadn’t seen it before.
“Ashley?” she exclaimed, disbelieving. She gave him another look, searching for familiar features as she dusted off the memories of happier times, long left to rot in the back of her head.
Big brown eyes, just like his mother, God rest her soul. His hair had gotten a little bit longer and curlier since last she saw him. Darker, too; he must have been getting less sun lately. But that awkward little twist in his eyebrows, the one he got when he wasn’t sure if he was in trouble—that was unmistakable.
“My God,” she quietly marveled to herself. Her wonder was quick to fade, though, giving way to confusion. “What the hell are you doing out here?”
He opened his mouth as if to explain, but caught himself and looked away instead. He rubbed a hand—his only hand, she realized—over his mouth, looking caught out. He suddenly couldn’t meet her eyes.
“Ashley?” she prompted, more gently. He still didn’t look up.
It was then that she noticed the scars. Red lines painted all over his face, some more healed than others. She had no doubt in her mind that there were others she couldn’t see, hidden under fully-buttoned denim. Bruises, too; a fading shiner by his left eye and another on his jaw.
She couldn’t wrap her head around how the sweet little boy she used to know had wound up here, beaten, scarred, and miles away from home. She was starting to understand her family a lot better, if this was how they’d felt back when she’d first come home.
Lord.
“What happened to you?” she wondered aloud, not really expecting a response.
He turned away and shut his eyes, looking pained. She watched him take a breath to try and steady himself, and then another, and then another. None of them seemed to do him any good.
Finally, he said, “Dad kicked me out,” like that explained much of anything.
And that, that didn’t make much sense, either. From what she remembered about her uncle, Brock could be a hard-ass, but he loved his kids more than anything. Either Ash had messed up bad, or something else was going on.
“And your hand?” she asked, gesturing, completely lacking any sort of tact. Maybe it would shock him into being straight with her. Or maybe she’d just gotten meaner than she thought; she wasn’t sure.
He inhaled sharply, glancing down at the stump where his right hand used to be like he hadn’t realized it was gone. He pulled down his sleeve almost self-consciously, not answering.
“Ashley, please,” she sighed, not wanting to beg but not knowing what else to do. “Just tell me what’s going on.”
He shook his head, stepping back towards his car.
“I should go,” he said, tense. She threw up her hands.
“And go where, exactly?” she pushed, to which he had no answer.
“I’ll figure it out,” he decided, staring at the ground.
“You’d really rather sleep in your car than just tell me what’s happening?” she scoffed. “You don’t even have a windshield. How the hell did you get this far out?”
“You won’t believe me,” he insisted, voice shaking. That gave her pause.
She looked him over, looked closely at the tense way he held himself; back bowed like he carried the weight of the world on his shoulders, head held low as if waiting for damnation he’d already received.
It was uncomfortably familiar. She didn’t want to believe it. It couldn’t be true, but what else could it be? The hand was evidence enough on its own, but something like that? That was survivable. Maybe not easy, still worth mourning. But it wasn’t something that gave you that certain look, not all on its own.
It wasn’t the kind of thing that made your father kick you out.
The pieces were finally starting to fall together. She didn’t like the picture they made.
She hadn’t prayed in years, let alone set foot in a church. She doubted God wanted much to do with her by now, and most days, she’d say the feeling was pretty damn well mutual. But still, in that moment, she found herself begging him to let her be wrong.
Please.
“Where’s Cheryl?” she whispered, the words as damning as the crack of a gavel, echoing through the empty night.
Something broke, then.
Ashley just about collapsed onto his car, defeated. He shook like a leaf, hiding his face as well as he could one-handed. She stood there and watched him silently fall apart, no tears left in him even if he could afford to let them fall.
Ashley and Cheryl both had always had big feelings, even when they’d been so small themselves. They felt deeply and loudly and weren’t shy about it. Over the years, they’d both gotten quieter, but those big hearts of theirs had never withered, even as they tried to hide them away. Seemingly endless wells of tears had dried up far too quickly to be pinned only on maturity, scaredy-cat screams swallowed like being caught making them would have been worse than whatever they were afraid of.
She wondered if whatever Ashley had gone through had stolen the last of his tears away, or if they were already long gone before it’d had the chance to.
“You won’t believe me,” he repeated, voice hoarse and painful-sounding.
As much as she had always enjoyed their company, she and her cousins had never been all too close, what with the age gap and all. A part of her really regretted that, especially now. She wondered if maybe she had tried to keep in touch, if she had stuck around for them, things wouldn’t have gone the way they had.
But she just as quickly realized that was a damn fool thought if she’d ever had one. Whatever had happened, some accident or something more like what she’d gone through, very well could have happened anyway. Not to mention, she could barely even talk to her own parents for quite a while after the farmhouse. She doubted she could have given them much sage advice; even if she could have, it probably would have come across more like just the deranged ramblings of a madwoman.
She had to wonder, though, where all the time had gone. Little Ashley Williams, her baby cousin, was suddenly a man, and she’d missed it. She’d missed birthdays and graduations—all of it, and she’d never even given it any thought until now, when it was too late.
She couldn’t go back in time and be there for that boy. She couldn’t stop whatever had happened to Cheryl from happening.
But she could be there for him now. That had to count for something, or at the very least it was worth trying.
“Oh, Ashley,” she croaked, her throat feeling tight.
She walked over to him, laying the gun down and holding his face gently in her hands. She tilted it towards her, feeling his one remaining hand come up to hold her wrist loosely. He didn’t try to pull it away, just holding it there before finally opening his eyes.
She stared deep into them, wanting so badly for him to know that she understood.
“If anyone’s gonna believe you, it’s gonna be me,” she said quietly, begging for him to understand, to hear what she really meant.
He still just shook his head, as much as he was able to in her hands.
She didn’t know what to do. Something had happened to her baby cousins, to the sweet little girl she should have thought to visit sooner, the one who never ran out of new beauty to find in the world and put to paper. Something had happened to the little boy with the precious little curls who’d looked at her and Franklin like they held the entire world in their hands, like they weren’t just a couple of dumb teenagers with no clue what they were doing.
One thing was clear, and that was that Ash wasn’t ready to talk. There wasn’t much she could do on that front.
She glanced past him at the beat up Oldsmobile he was leaning on. She thought about how, not even an hour ago, he’d been curled up in it, cramped and shivering in the back seat.
“You’re coming with me,” she decided, leaving no room for argument.
“Huh?” he sputtered. “But–”
“No,” she interrupted, fixing him with a hard stare. “I’m not letting you sleep outside. Just for tonight, if nothing else.”
She let go of him, stepping back to retrieve her gun and starting to walk towards her car. She glanced back towards him, finding him glancing between her and his own car.
“You can follow, if you want,” she offered. “But so help me God, Ashley, if you try and just drive off on me, I will hunt you down and–”
“Alright, alright, I got it,” he huffed, rightly cowed. He fidgeted uncomfortably a moment longer before finally stepping into the driver’s side. Seeing this, she took a breath, then walked to her own.
As she started to drive towards her apartment, she kept glancing back to check for the yellow hunk of junk that was meant to be following behind. A part of her didn’t trust that he wouldn’t just take off the second he thought she wouldn’t notice, but he followed diligently until they arrived at her place.
She parked on the street, not getting out until he did the same a little ways behind her. Only once his lights were off did she finally kill the engine and step onto the walkway. He didn’t join her right away, still sitting in his car.
She waited, staring back at him. Even with the busted windshield, she couldn’t see him through the dark, but she could imagine the look on his face well enough; the one he always got when he was dragging his feet, not wanting to do something. Once upon a time it had been the dishes or his English homework. How far they’d come since then.
Eventually, he worked up enough nerve to come out, or simply realized that she would wait all night or longer, if she had to. Stubbornness was in her blood just as much as it was in his, maybe more; Hardesty women were notorious for it. Maybe that was why her Auntie Carol had stuck with Brock for so long, or maybe that was why they didn’t work. Not that it was any of her business.
He kept glancing around like he was expecting someone to jump at him from the shadows, like he wasn’t meant to be there. She could understand the feeling, even as it made her sigh sadly.
At the very least, the way he kept swaying on his feet told her he probably wasn’t going to try and bolt. The morning was a different story, but she was a light sleeper, so she wasn’t overly concerned.
She still had a million questions on her mind and about as many concerns to match—he was too skinny, shivered too much even for the cool night around them, among other things—but that would have to wait. He looked like he could barely keep himself awake for another minute. As she yawned into her hand, her own tiredness hit her like a brick, the stress of the encounter starting to wear off and leaving her more drained than before.
“Come on, Ashley,” she murmured, prompting him forward with a hand on his back, feeling every tense muscle there. “Let’s get you to bed.”
Everything else could come later. For now, she’d just take it one step at a time, and hope it could almost be enough.
She’d lost enough family already. She wasn’t letting him go without a fight.