14 years later

Who else died for you?

The wooden billboard in the gravel lot of Glome's Valley First Baptist Church questioned all passing vehicles with a menacing question.

The red script, carefully hand-painted half a century ago, peeled up in random places, uncovering the rotten wood beneath. An almost unrecognizable crown of thorns lay painted at the bottom of the board, bleached after years spent underneath the Oklahoma sun.

Dove Bravermen stared up at the sign from the safety of her 1999 Ford Taurus.

The dim electronic clock on her half-broken radio told her she had five minutes left to shove down all her feelings before the funeral began.

She pushed her blinder down and popped the mirror open. Car mirrors were always unkind, but Dove imagined she could look worse.

Her grey eyes were framed with taupe-colored shadow and black lashes. The dullness of her pale skin couldn't be helped, no matter how much concealer and moisturizer she slapped on last night.

Fourteen hours ago, she was in Colorado, nursing her second glass of cheap wine and preparing to finish the night with the company of a handsome, but pretentious, med student.

Men were always more attractive with a "doctor" before their name. Unfortunately, degree or not, they managed to be just as infuriating.

Dove had been driving since midnight.

Her brother, Jonathon, called at 11:30 p.m.

She sent him to voicemail, like she did to everyone from her past.

He knew just what to say, even when she wouldn't answer.

Cedric LeCruz is dead. Funeral's tomorrow. It'd be nice if you'd come home. I imagine you probably won't.

A week ago, Dove planned to never step foot into Oklahoma again, much less her hometown.

This morning, she found herself within a mile-radius of every first she ever went through—first beer, first love, first smoke, first I-need-to-get-the-hell-out-of-this-place.

"You're fine," Dove promised her reflection. "You're fine, even if you don't think you are. I swear."

She patted her palms on the soft dark linen of her button-down skirt. It was easy to find an outfit for a funeral. She could clothe two dozen mourners with her closet.

She only survived the night by taking energy drinks like liquor shots and blasting her radio at full volume. When her eyes would droop, she sang frantically to well-worn lyrics until her head hurt from the noise.

This wasn't how she imagined her homecoming.

Dove was supposed to come home in a luxury car. She would be thirty-one, childless, and married to someone with old money. Her curly black hair would finally be tamed enough not to frizz in the humidity. Her face would have a tasteful amount of Botox to help fend off fine-lines.

She was only twenty-two-years-old now, and she was thankful she could now legally buy alcohol from Jerry's Liquor Store. Not that she would, rumors followed her wherever she went in Glome's Valley.

She didn't need to confirm the town's theory that all Bravermen were drunks.

"It's now or never," she whispered.

She swung her door open. Instantly, she was met with the frigid December air.

Before she moved to Colorado for her undergrad degree, she used to think Oklahoma winters lasted forever. As a teenager, when she shivered the days away, she dreamed of summer nights spent around bonfires and in rivers skinny-dipping.

Now she knew what real cold felt like.

Tiny lines of goose bumps marked her arm, but aside from that, no other physical evidence of the cold appeared on her body. It was a frigid forty degrees, which was expected of an early December morning.

"It's just a quick goodbye, Dove," she reminded herself.

With her words still in mind, she placed her feet on the gravel parking lot. Suddenly, her legs turned into heavy stone.

She didn't want to move forward into the black sea of familiar faces. She didn't want to face her past with fresh tear-tracks on her cheeks.

She continued walking anyway.

***'

Dove never felt right in church.

She always squirmed uncomfortably between the pews, never knowing when it was appropriate to stand or sit. Her arms turned awkward, indecision forced them to either rise during worship or to remain at tight attention beside her hips.

This morning was no different.

She walked slowly down the aisles and kept her eyes on the back of Jonathon's head. He was standing with Mom.

Fuck, Dove thought. He was standing with Mom.

She continued her walk, even after a half dozen people turned around to gape at her. A corner of silver-haired gossipers glanced up from their huddle and studied Dove carefully.

They needed to remember all the details for Sunday's Bible study group.

Sheriff's daughter's back in town, she heard them say in accents ruined from a lifetime of smoking. Took a dead man to drag her back.

Jonathon and her mother stood three rows back from the front. No shared blood to justify sitting in the front pew, not related through marriage to earn the second tier, but close enough with the deceased to earn the humble third.

The church was the same as it was five years ago, and a decade before that, and fourteen years before.

Dove knew, because that was the first time she ever stepped into the church, a fresh nine-year-old who jumped at her own shadow.

Mom thought she needed counseling, but with the hospital bills, she couldn't afford it. Tommy's mother, the leader of the youth group, just had to pray over her instead.

Although soft piano played in the background—still performed by the same relic known as Mrs. Betty—the plug-in portable heaters buzzed above the music.

A church this old couldn't chase out the cold, not even if the settings were set to maximum.

She glanced at the front of the pew, daring herself to peek.

She hadn't seen anyone from July Night, at least not yet.

Rina was probably off somewhere in Texas, tracking down a law degree. Dove bet Tommy was in the basement of his father's house for winter break, chasing away all coherent thought with cheap whiskey or weed or both.

She knew exactly where Mattie would be, though.

As Dove expected, Mattie sat in the front row of the church like her world wasn't in complete shambles.

Like always, her long dark hair hung in a straight curtain behind her slender shoulders. Although she wore black, it was still a designer dress tailored to her body, like she had a separate wardrobe perpetually prepared for the worst time of her life.

As if Mattie could feel Dove's eyes on her, the young woman turned to stare at her old friend. Or, glared, to be fair.

Dove's breath abruptly ceased.

In high school, Mattie was perfect.

She wasn't the freak with the scar on her neck or arm or chest.

She was Matilda LeCruz, and she could pretend like July Night never happened.

This morning, Mattie was the opposite.

Her entire face was wiped free of makeup, leaving all blemishes noticeable to the naked eye. Because she was Matilda LeCruz, her cheeks and chin remained a flawless surface of baby-soft, olive skin.

Underneath her big, dark brown eyes, patches of blue and bloated skin revealed the truth about her current mental state.

Matilda had been crying.

Matilda was crying, now.

"Dammit," Dove whispered.

She looked away from Matilda and settled once again on the back of her brother's head.

Seeing her like that only made all of it real.

She didn't look away from Jonathon until she stood next to him. He'd saved a space with his suit jacket.

Dove smiled at the tiny detail. He hadn't completely given up hope for her.

"You made it," Jonathon glanced down from where he stood.

Jonathon, unlike Dove, was always the tallest person in the room. He stood at a whopping six feet three and matched his uncommon height with bright ginger hair.

The last time she saw him, nearly a year ago, he was going through a hippie-phase. His hair fell beneath his broad shoulders and he refused to eat anything but farm-raised produce and protein.

He was the opposite now. Dove guessed it could be because he was finally at Glome's Valley High School to be a part-time teacher, part-time football coach.

They did random drug-tests, and there was only a handful of times Jonathon could blame poppy seeds before red flags popped up.

"Of course, I made it," Dove replied.

He shot up his thick, blonde eyebrows in response but kept his mouth shut.

"We're glad you could," her mother, Claudia, announced from the other side of her brother.

Instead of her usual get-up of dark brown khakis and a tan button-up, her mother wore a black blouse and dress pants. Her brown hair, always up in a severe bun tucked neatly into the nape of her neck, remained precisely there.

Even outside of the job, it was still obvious Claudia was the elected sheriff of the small county.

Her mother's familiar hand fell onto Dove's bicep and gave her arm a reassuring squeeze.

Even after years of abandoning her birthplace, her mother's touch made Glome's Valley feel like home. Dove knew, though, outside of the church, Claudia wouldn't be so quick to kindness.

Dove could already hear her mother's thick Texan accent cussing her out around a Marlboro cigarette.

Why did you leave?

Why did you stay gone?

What about your brother and me?

Dove abandoned them, like everyone else in town.

The weight of staying nearly crushed her alive as an eighteen-year-old. Now, she hardly remembered a life with Glome's Valley in it.

She turned her attention to the front of the church, where the wooden pulpit bowed down from the weight of the preacher and the Bible in his hand.

Tommy's daddy, Daniel, still preached, even after twenty years of sermons and the death of his wife. It was hard to pray away Stage Four Brain Cancer.

During Dove's four-year absence, Daniel's thinning hair turned completely grey. The wrinkles on his face drooped downward, caught the weight of his chin, and erased most of his jawline. His shoulders were less broad than she remembered, and he stood with a hunch that wasn't present before.

Mourning had taken its toll.

Beneath where he stood, a white casket lay, sealed shut, completely hidden from the world outside. On top of it, in a golden frame centered in a bushel of flowers.

The portrait of Cedric LeCruz was handsome, but not the man Dove remembered.

Trapped inside the flat dimension of his picture, the dark hair he shared with Matilda was hidden behind his shoulders in a thick braid. His dark eyes sparkled, even if he was just posing for a headshot. From the neck down, he wore a neat, yellow button-up freshly pressed with no wrinkle in sight.

The still-picture contrasted against the real Cedric, a forty-something who refused to wear anything but stretched-out crewnecks and ball caps. Because he earned his Ph.D. in archaeology, he never left his house without a camera-bag swinging around his neck.

Out of some morbid curiosity, Dove wanted to know what Cedric looked like beneath his closed casket.

Maybe the four inches of stone protected the mourners from a spectacle they could never forget.

Dove didn't know how he died. He just did.

There was no continuation of Jonathon's phone call, just facts rattled off before abruptly hanging up.

Maybe the viewing was finished, and the deal already done. No reason to stare at a corpse longer than needed.

Dove shifted her feet on the creaky wooden floors just as Mrs. Betty stopped playing the piano.

The church fell into a harsh quiet, aside from the rattling heaters and coughs muted into sleeves.

Daniel, in his Sunday best on a Saturday morning, took a step forward to the microphone on his wooden pedestal. His Adam's apple bobbed as he coughed into the speaker, which sent a screeching sound through the entire church.

"Jesus," Dove whispered.

"—saves," Jonathon filled in.

She sent her older brother a harsh glare before returning her attention back to the holy man.

"I apologize," Daniel said with all the smoothness a southern preacher possessed. He chuckled, like there wasn't a dead man less than a foot from where he stood. "Old technology. Ever-changing world."

A few huffs of laughter escaped from the sea of mourners. Quickly, the quiet settled back in, cold and uncomfortable in the air.

Daniel stretched and spread his hands out as he spoke. Dove realized, after his fingers caught the glint of the lights above, he still wore his wedding ring.

"Today, we celebrate the short life of Cedric LeCruz," he announced into the microphone. "A beloved man, father, son, and husband."

Dove turned her attention to her feet, suddenly wishing she could be anywhere but here. She never imagined her face would turn hot and tears would threaten to stream down her cheeks.

Shit. You really thought you could do this. You really thought you deserved to say goodbye.

Daniel continued speaking into the microphone. The static distorted his thick country accent. "Although his disappearance shocked our little community, I'm glad he's finally come home."

Dove's head snapped up.

Disappearance?

"Disappearance?" Dove grabbed her brother's elbow with a trembling hand. "What does he mean disappearance—"

"Quiet," Jonathon scolded. "You really want to gossip in the middle of Mr. LeCruz's funeral?" Her brother's harsh whisper made all of the words on her angry tongue dry up and wither away.

Dove dug her top teeth into her bottom lip. She bit hard enough to rip the tender pink skin and draw blood. She stood quietly. Maybe if she just focused on the coppery taste flooding her mouth, she wouldn't let everything she wanted to say go in a scream.

"How long?" she released as Daniel continued his preaching.

"How long what?" Jonathon whispered to her.

"How long has he been gone?"

Her mother gave them a low warning hiss through her barely-parted lips. The two-second sound said enough. Don't you dare make a scene in front of the whole town, not right now and not with me beside you.

Dove didn't care.

Dove wanted to scream. She wanted to run out of the pew, down the aisle, and back into the safety of her Taurus.

She wanted out of here.

And she wanted Cedric back. She wanted him alive, sitting across the breakfast table with Matilda, simply enjoying his daughter's company on a Saturday morning.

"He was missing since the end of November," Jonathon admitted.

Dove grabbed the back of the pew to steady herself. Her nails dug into the well-worn wood, and she wondered if Matilda was doing the same thing: trying her hardest not to lose her shit.

"Three weeks?" she said. "Three weeks?"

"Only two." Her brother shook his head. "Cadaver dogs found his body floating in the Illinois three days ago."

"Cause of death?" Dove asked. Her throat suddenly felt swollen, like all the words she wanted to say blew up in her throat and refused to leave her body.

She stared at the casket, suddenly frightened at whatever lay inside, what Cedric might look like now.

"Wild animal got to him," Jonathon whispered. "Mom said forensics blame coyotes."

She didn't believe it.

Her brother turned his head and cast a glance over his shoulder. Dove's eyes followed his gaze.

People were watching them.

No, people were watching Dove.

She released her tight grasp on the pew in front of her and forced a calming breath down her throat.

"You know how it is." Jonathon turned back to the pulpit. "Cedric was never right in his head after July Night. The whole town knew that."

It hurt to hear it come from Jonathon's lips.

July Night. July Night. July Night.

She turned the two words over inside her head and tried to make them seem small.

Take the power away, her therapist said in every session. And soon handwritten sticky-notes stuck to her bathroom mirror and bedside table said the same thing. Take the power away from the word. Disconnect the trauma. Don't let it be strong.

Dove nodded only because she desperately needed her brother to shut the hell up.

"Yeah," the words burned on her tongue. "Cedric was fuckin' crazy."

She didn't like the way the lie tasted in her mouth.