the extent of her scrawniness, my fingertips considering the bone of her elbow.
“My sister, Lydia, quit eating one summer,” I recalled. “She insisted only on watermelon so she could pee it all away.” I hadn’t thought about it in years. Lydia had been a teenager, and though there’d been only five years’ difference between us, she’d seemed, in her distance and mystery, far more sophisticated than I’d sensed I’d ever be. The starvation had lent Lydia even more gravity and refinement, despite how peaked and sunken-cheeked she’d grown by August. “The only reason my father worried was because he thought no one would marry her because ‘Who wants to marry a girl who looks like an old lady already?’ Back then, nobody thought a girl like that might need some help. We just thought she was being stubborn. Nobody knew what anorexia was, or anything like that.”
Tiff stopped in the middle of the street, closed her eyes tight, and grabbed her head. “Oh. My. Gawwwwww-duh,” she wailed. “I am not anorexic.”
“No, no, no, I know, I know you’re not, sweetie,” I said, but I swiftly ended with my denial, uncertain whether I might be making matters worse. You can always make matters worse these days, no matter where your heart is. When I was a young parent, we never used the word parenting. The only bad parents were parents with bad children. Now a parent can be doing the wrong thing even when she’s doing the right thing. We’ve all come to know too well the psychology of childhood.
“I just get a stomachache sometimes,” she said. She sighed. “A firefly,” she said then, reaching up with her fingertip as if she might be able to tap its light back on.
“They’re as thick as mosquitoes this summer,” I said, and certainly, there they all were as we looked up and down the street, the insects’ slow, delicate sparks giving the evening its character. “I’m a terrible cook,” I said. “It’s as simple as that. That’s why you can’t eat. You’re being poisoned. Who could blame you?” Tiff rolled her eyes, and she took my arm and led me from the street and up my front walk. “Lydia could cook,” I said. “She even cooked for my daddy and me during her hunger strike. That summer that she was starving herself, she stuffed us to the gills. To distract us, maybe. I think we were half asleep half the time, we ate so much and so often. Oh, how Lydia could cook before she got old. If she could still cook, you’d eat. You’d gorge yourself.”
“You wouldn’t worry I was too thin; you’d worry I was too fat,” she said.
“I’d worry you were too fat, yes, probably,” I said, and as I touched again at her arm and felt her lean against me, I wondered if it were too wistful and naive to hope that Tiff might make it through life neither too fat nor too thin and perhaps entirely undamaged in general.
· 11 ·
The farm on which the girl Lenore was said to have lived was a patchwork of agricultural projects: minor orchards and mostly fruitless gardens. A forest of evergreens, intended for Christmas, trudged up one side of a low hill and down the other, each tree long since too big for any house. Daisy’s father had planted them, and he’d died before they’d grown. The trees’ branches stretched up and out, the air around them thick with the medicinal gin-scent of juniper. Back when the evergreens had been right-sized for a holiday, no families in parkas had come with their little axes, so the trees, unsold, continued to grow and grow, overgrowing any potential, darkening the paths of dry needles beneath them.
And along a trellis, a vineyard had perished, the plants choked one summer by the herbicides carried over on the wind from a neighboring farm. Now all that remained were the knobby sticks of dried vines.
A narrow plank that hung from a few thin chains at the farm’s entrance bore the name of the farm—the Crippled Eighty—which had been burned into the wood, in that shivery, lasso-like, cowboy cursive, with a wood-burning kit by Daisy’s father. But the farm had actually been named, in mockery, by Daisy’s mother, long before Lenore was even born (if, indeed, she’d been born at all). “Nothing will grow,” the woman had told her husband. “It’s eighty acres of hills,” she’d said. She hadn’t even looked at the landscape as she’d stood in the sun, squinting instead at her reflection in a small mirror, the glass of it dusted with aspirin that had broken at the bottom of her pocketbook. She’d dabbed on lipstick as she’d spoken. “You bought the only acreage within miles that doesn’t have an inch of flatness. What are you going to do? Grow olive trees?”
But the land, uncrippled after all, had come to life for Daisy’s father, and for thirty years there’d been a lush harvest of corn one summer, beans the next, then corn again; there’d been cattle, hogs, chickens, eggs, milk. There’d been pasture choked with musk thistle and a narrow creek that had always made Daisy think of the baby Moses shoved off in a thatched basket. At least that was how things had been before Daisy’s mother had left the farm.
Daisy, a woman none of us had known at all well, told all this to Doc. She trusted Doc to tell her story. From the very beginning, she confided in him, and as Doc featured her on his front page week after week, and as the newspaper gained new subscribers not just from the region but from far beyond, far even outside the United States, his was the voice most closely associated with the facts and fictions of Lenore’s disappearance. While other writers from other towns approached the subject with big-city insensitivity, their every word a coy wink, Doc lent Lenore a beating heart.
Lenore’s absence only days old, Daisy took Doc on a tour of the farm. Here, she told him, was a stump where Lenore sat and startled spiders and let them bite her so she could watch the effect of their venom; here was Lenore’s own patch of garden, where she tried to grow things no one else in the local countryside grew, from seeds sent in the mail and fertilized with bat guano: tomatillos as hard and bitter as green apples; a Mexican melon with thorns on its skin. Tiny, foreign tomatoes, still plentiful on the vine that July afternoon, tasted like mango.
Nonetheless, the County Paragraph gave voice to its share of skeptics. Spiders bit her! a local wrote in a letter published on the Letters page. Lenore wasn’t kidnapped! She died! Daisy buried her in the pasture! Take a shovel and turn up that garden of exotic vegetables, and you’ll find Lenore’s corpse!
· 12 ·
The people of our town learned, from the County Paragraph, details about the night before Daisy discovered Lenore gone: a rusted-out pickup, its tireless wheels up on blocks, downhill from the house among other scrap metal—junked tractors, bent fence posts, the shell of a Studebaker filled with leafy cocklebur plants. Elvis would become famous by the police artist’s sketch, his eyes sleepy and heavy-lidded. In the sketch, he had a kind of beard, and we debated what to call it—was it a Vandyke or a goatee? Was it an overgrown soul patch? Across his forehead fell a forelock, a sweep of thick, dark curl that we knew was the thing that was probably most seductive. How do you see past such a cute lick of boyishness? We could imagine it coming loose always and flopping forward, distracting and handsome. And he was handsome, in a way, truth be told, even with that creepy pout the artist gave him. There were more than just a few among us who thought they could easily have seen past that silly beard long enough to fall in love. Some of us had fallen for worse, of course.
“You probably think I’m a child,” Daisy had told Elvis, down the hill from the house. The truck had been lit by the moon. She’d sat on the passenger side, barefoot, in a lime-green dress of a gauzy material patterned with daisies. Elvis had bought the dress for her from a boutique in the city.
Her mother had given parties with daisies frosted on cakes, daisies on the paper napkins and Dixie cups, real
