Only Lies Are Safe

Chapter One: The Anniversary

The smoke came down off the ridge like water finding a drain, and Blair Hamby watched it move across the road ahead of them in long grey ropes, and thought: it looks like something breathing out.

There were six of them in Wes's truck, which was one more than the truck was built for. Wes drove, because Wes always drove. Blair sat in the middle of the bench seat with the gear shift between her knees and her funeral shoes off, and Blake Teague had the window, one elbow out in the hot dry air, sunglasses on at seven in the evening. In the back seat, Kayla Wooten was pressed against one door and Brianna Hollins against the other, and Corey Elledge sat between them with his knees up and his hands folded like a man in a waiting room. Nobody had said anything for eleven miles.

They had done this every month for a year. Not the church part — the church part was only today, the one-year memorial, the anniversary of the funeral. The monthly part was the riding together. First Saturday of every month, one vehicle, all six, out to the cemetery at Rockhouse and back. It had been Blake's idea, and Blake had presented it as respect.

It was not respect. It was custody. Six people who each knew exactly what the other five had done, keeping close enough to hear each other breathe. As long as they were in the same truck they were not somewhere else, talking.

"They closed 42," Wes said. His voice made Blair jump. "That's what the sign said back there."

"They'll open it," Blake said.

"That's not what closed means."

"They'll open it," Blake said again, pleasantly, and turned the radio up.

The radio said the Sawpit Branch fire had crossed a firebreak on the north face and was running uphill on a two-week drought and a fifteen-mile wind. Ledbetter County. Voluntary evacuations for Dyer's Fork and Little Ivy. Route 42 closed at the state line and the gap road closed at the switchbacks. The dispatcher's voice had that flat professional calm that Blair had been trained to imitate. She was nineteen weeks into her EMT certification. She knew, now, the difference between calm and calm.

She had learned it in a church basement four hours ago, drinking bad lemonade out of a paper cup while Wanda Speer held her hand and told her that Daniel had been so happy that first month at school. So happy. He called every Sunday and every Sunday he had a new name to tell her. He was making friends. That's all he ever wanted, honey, he just wanted people.

And Blair had said, He was a good guy. He was a great guy. We all loved him.

And Wanda Speer had squeezed her hand with both of hers, the way you'd hold a bird you were trying to warm up, and said, I know. I can tell. You've got kind eyes.

Blair had stood there and let a woman thank her for killing her son.

The truck went up through the switchbacks with the air conditioning off because Wes said the compressor was tired, and the smell came in the windows: burned laurel, burned pine, a sharp chemical sweetness under it like scorched paint. The sun was a bad orange coin low over the ridge, and the light in the cab was the color of an old photograph.

"Can we not," Corey said suddenly.

Everybody looked at him. He had his hands over his ears, then he took them down like he'd caught himself doing it.

"The radio," he said. "Can we just not have the radio."

Blake reached over and turned it off, and the silence came in worse than the noise. Corey had not eaten anything at the church. Blair had watched him hold a plate for forty minutes without putting food on it, and she had made herself stop watching, because when you watched Corey you started thinking about the actual night, and the rule they had never said out loud but all obeyed was that you did not think about the actual night in front of the others, because thinking led to the mouth.

The actual night had been the twelfth of April, thirteen months ago.

The club soccer team at Tanager College had a tradition that was older than any of them and had never hurt anybody, which was how they all said it afterward, in their heads, in the shower, at three in the morning. There was a corrugated drainage culvert that ran under the practice field, four feet across, thirty feet long, with a steel grating at each end. Every spring the first-years got taken out there after the last home match, hands zip-tied, put in the pipe, and left for one hour while the rest of the team drank on the hill and yelled things down at them. Then you cut them out, you gave them a beer, and you all went to the party together, and they were in.

Daniel Speer was eighteen and small and from a town with one traffic light, and he had a laugh that came out of him like a hiccup, and he had wanted so badly to be in that he'd volunteered to go first.

Blake had brought a padlock that year. An improvement, he called it. A little extra. Because the year before, some kid had wriggled the grating loose and gotten out in twenty minutes and ruined it. So there was a padlock on the downhill grating, a bright new brass one from the hardware store in Dyer's Fork, and the uphill grating was pinned with a length of rebar through the frame.

Then the party. Then the drinking, which had started before the culvert and did not stop. Then the sequence of things Blair could recite forward and backward and did, every night, in bed, like a rosary made of broken glass.

At eleven forty, Kayla asked if somebody had gotten the kid.

At eleven forty-one, Blake said Corey got him.

At eleven forty-two, Corey — who had already been asleep once that night, in the truck, with the windows down, forty feet from the culvert, with Daniel's voice coming up out of the ground — said yeah.

At one in the morning, Blair sat on the tailgate of Wes's truck in the parking lot of an apartment complex, sober enough to know she wasn't, and thought about the bolt cutters in the toolbox six inches behind her hip. She thought about them for a long time. She had a very clear picture in her mind of the walk, of the grating, of the bright brass lock, of Daniel's face when she got him out and how she'd have to apologize, and how the apology would be embarrassing, and how everyone would know she was the one who got scared and went back.

She thought about the embarrassment for about two minutes.

Then she went inside and slept on a couch.

It rained thirty-one hours later. Three inches in a night, the kind of April storm that comes up the valley and stands there. The culvert did what culverts do.

He was found on the sixteenth, four days after, by a maintenance man checking storm damage. The coroner's finding was exposure and drowning. There was a secondary finding about his hands that Blair had read once, on a courthouse computer, and would carry to her grave: that he had worn the tips of his fingers down through the nail beds to the bone on the corrugation of the pipe, trying to get purchase, over what the coroner estimated as many hours.

And it was Blair who had made up Florida.

That was the part that would have surprised anyone who knew her. Not Blake. Blair. Because the police came to the field house three days in, when Daniel was only missing, and everybody was gray and shaking and about ninety seconds from confessing, and Blair heard herself say, in the calm voice, the trained voice: He talked about hitchhiking to Florida. He said it a couple times. He said he had a cousin in Ocala and he hated it here.

It was such a good lie. It was warm and sad and it explained the backpack he didn't take. The officer wrote it down. And Blair looked around at the other five and saw the lie go into them like a drug, saw their shoulders come down, and she understood in that second that she was going to be the author of all of it, forever.

Within a week the five of them could tell that story better than they could tell the truth. Within a month, Blair sometimes had to stop and deliberately remember that there was no cousin in Ocala.

Nobody had said the real version out loud, one time, in thirteen months.

"Roadblock," Wes said.

Blair came back into her body. Ahead, where the gap road ran up into the pass, there was a sheriff's cruiser parked across both lanes with its bar lights going, and beyond it two orange trucks and a scatter of men in yellow shirts, and above them all, on the shoulder of the mountain, a line of orange sitting in the trees like something staged. Not a wall of flame. Worse than that: a slow, patient, individual burning, tree by tree by tree, each one going up on its own schedule.

The smoke was already down on the road. It came through the cab in a solid roll and Kayla started coughing and Wes hit the window switches.

A deputy walked up. Late fifties, sweat lines on his hat band. He put a hand on the door frame and looked in at all six of them, at the black dresses and the ties, and his face changed a degree.

"Y'all coming from the Speer service?"

"Yes sir," Blake said, before anybody else could.

The deputy nodded slowly. "Sad thing." He looked down the road behind them. "Gap's closed. Fire's crossing above the second switchback, and I got no interest in you sitting in it. You want to get back to the college?"

"Yes sir."

"Then you got to go the long way, and the long way's four hours if the Little Ivy bridge is still there, which I don't know." He straightened up. "Or you sit down at the Rockhouse fire hall tonight with everybody else and go home in the morning."

Blair opened her mouth to say fire hall.

Blake said, "There's the service road."

The deputy looked at him.

"Redlick Gap," Blake said. "The tunnel. My dad's outfit's got the contract. It comes out the other side above Little Ivy, past the bridge. It's paved most of the way."

And Blair, who had known Blake Teague for three years and had learned to listen to the underneath of him the way you learn to listen for a bad bearing, heard something in that sentence that made the hair stand up on her forearms in the middle of the smoke and the heat.

He had said it too fast. He had said it like a man who had been holding a card all evening, waiting for a hand to play it in.

"That thing's been shut eleven years," the deputy said.

"There's a gate. I've got the code."

The deputy considered it, and then he looked up at the ridge, and the ridge made the decision for him. A pine went up all at once about a quarter mile above the road, a bright soft whoomp, and the men in the yellow shirts all turned to look at it the way you'd look at a bad neighbor.

"Ain't my road," the deputy said. "Ain't my tunnel. If your daddy's got the contract, that's between you and your daddy." He stepped back and waved them at the gravel cut that came in from the left, where a man in a hard hat and a Teague Construction vest was standing with a flag, already turned toward them, already waving them in, as if he had been waiting there a while.

Wes put the truck in gear.

Blair said, "Wes."

"What."

She couldn't say it, because it wasn't a reason. It was just the smell of the smoke and the orange light and the way the flagman was already waving.

"Nothing," she said.

That was the last easy lie she ever told.