by I made Nell a mouth from the sleeve of my black dress. The cloth held the shape of my elbow when I cut it free. I laid it over the lower half of her face and stitched around the edges with red thread. The book said to leave the lips open. The dead would have things to say before morning.
On the last night of October, the wronged may wear the living dark. Give her your face, and she will give you her grievance. She may keep your shape until the debt is paid.
A leaf after that page had sealed itself shut with damp. I tried one corner with my thumbnail. The paper began to tear, so I left it.
Mother slept down the hall with the television murmuring through her door. She had asked at supper when Nell would be home. I told her soon. Her illness had taken the years out of order, and I had stopped correcting her about Nell. That small cruelty had become our easiest way to live together.
Nell died at sixteen in the Callow Elevator. Three older boys took her into the west grain bin during a harvest party. Owen Vale held her arms. Caleb Rusk shut the gate. Gideon Mudd started the sweep auger because Nell had stopped screaming, and he wanted to hear her start again. They left her under six feet of corn.
The county called it an accident. Every statement matched. Owen became a dentist. Caleb became sheriff. Gideon inherited the elevator and put his name on the baseball field. I spent eighteen years hating them from a distance.
Owen told me the truth at his mother’s funeral. He drank four cups of fellowship wine and followed me into the kitchen while I washed dishes. They had only meant to scare her, he said. Nell had bitten his thumb hard enough to draw blood. Then he put two hundred dollars in my wet hand and asked me to stop bringing it up.
I used that money to buy the red thread.
The guise lay cold against my wrists when I lifted it. Nell’s empty eyes looked past me. I had cut those holes too wide, and the white table showed through. For a moment, I saw my own fingers under her chin. They looked old.
I put her on.
The cloth touched my skin and tightened. I reached for the edge. There was no edge. The guise pulled my lips flat and drew them through the mouth I had sewn. I bit down on red thread. It tasted of pennies.
My kitchen dropped away from me. I grabbed the table with both hands, but my arms had shortened. My left wrist snapped sideways. The chair struck the floor. I tried to call Mother and spat a stream of dry corn onto the linoleum.
The pain stopped all at once.
Nell stood in my kitchen with me inside her.
She was smaller than I remembered. The top of my head no longer reached the cupboard handle. Her green coat hung from my shoulders, wet and heavy. One sleeve was twisted where Owen had gripped her. My left hand had two broken fingers. I could feel corn packed under my tongue.
The mirror over the sink showed her scar. Below it, she had my frightened expression.
I touched the glass. Nell touched it too.
A voice moved inside my mouth without using my tongue.
Don’t leave me in there.
I dropped my hand. “I won’t.”
Mother coughed behind her door, but she did not wake. I waited another minute, then took my truck keys from the hook and walked into Halloween wearing my sister’s ruined face.
The Callow Elevator glowed over the empty lots at the north end of town. Gideon had strung orange bulbs along its rusted legs. A plywood sign advertised SHERIFF RUSK’S HAUNTED HARVEST. Families paid five dollars to walk through the old loading floor. Teenagers in rubber masks jumped from behind feed sacks. Smoke drifted from a barrel beside the ticket booth.
No one stopped Nell.
A girl selling cider saw her first. The girl’s paper cup buckled in her hand. Cider ran over her knuckles and into the straw.
Nell smiled with the mouth I had made.
The girl fainted.
People turned toward us. Someone laughed, thinking the girl was part of the show. The laugh thinned as Nell crossed the loading floor. Corn fell from her coat. Each kernel struck the concrete with a dry tick.
Owen stood beside a cardboard skeleton, drinking from a silver flask. His dentist’s coat had replaced the letter jacket he wore in my memories. He watched Nell come toward him and looked annoyed before he looked afraid.
“You’re late,” he said. “The children’s tour started at eight.”
Nell held up her left hand. The broken fingers pointed at him.
Owen’s flask struck his shoe.
“No,” he whispered.
I wanted to speak. Nell wanted his thumb. She reached him before I could decide which of us moved our arm.
He caught her wrist. His hands were broad and clean. The same hands had held a sixteen-year-old girl while corn climbed over her mouth. I felt Nell’s old terror enter my arm. Then I felt my own anger underneath it, older and less clean.
Nell bit him.
Owen screamed into the cardboard skeleton. Blood spotted its painted teeth. He swung at her, and she caught his other wrist. They stood locked together while parents hurried children toward the exit.
“You held me,” Nell said.
Owen shook his head. “We were kids.”
“You held me.”
His knees gave way. Nell held him up by his wrists.
I thought I would feel pity when one of them begged. Owen begged with snot running into his mouth. He promised money again, then a headstone. He would tell everyone if we let him live. Each promise made Nell stronger. Her coat filled my nose with wet grain and the sweet chemical reek of decay.
I helped her drag him into the west bin.
The west bin had not held corn in years. It still smelled of it. Owen stumbled over the threshold, and Nell shut the gate behind him. His shouting became a blunt pounding inside the steel walls.
A handwheel stood beside the discharge chute. Nell turned it.
Corn poured from the darkness above.
I heard Owen cough. I heard him fall and get up. His wedding ring clicked against the steel as he searched for a grip. Nell watched through a slit in the gate. Her hunger filled my body until my teeth ached.
“Tell them what you did,” I said.
Owen heard me through the slit. He began talking.
He talked about Nell’s arms and Caleb shutting the gate. Gideon had laughed at the control panel. They stood outside until the corn stopped moving. Gideon made them wait another ten minutes before calling anyone.
Nell let the corn rise over his head.
The pounding stopped. My left hand uncurled for the first time.
Caleb found us there. He came through the loading door with his pistol drawn and his sheriff’s shirt starched flat across his belly. A plastic pumpkin badge hung over his real one. He looked at Owen’s hand sticking out of the corn and crossed himself with the barrel.
Nell turned toward him.
Caleb fired twice.
The shots drove her back. Two holes opened beneath her collarbone. Corn trickled out instead of blood. She looked down with mild curiosity. Then she took one step and broke his trigger finger against the pistol frame.
He dropped the gun and punched her. His fist sank into the mouth I had sewn. Red thread snapped across his knuckles. Nell closed her teeth.
Caleb screamed until she released him.
I had imagined this part for years. He always apologized in my imagination. The real Caleb called Nell a freak. He called me a liar too, though he had not yet seen my face. He threatened the chair, the county jail, and the state hospital. His power had made him stupid.
Nell caught him by his plastic badge and pulled him close.
“You shut the gate,” she said.
Caleb stopped struggling.
The public address microphone hung from its hook outside the bin. Its red light was on. Gideon used it to direct the tours. Caleb looked at it. I looked too.
“Tell them,” I said with Nell’s mouth.
He refused.
Nell laid his hand across the gate track and shoved the gate. The steel edge took off his little finger. He told us after that.
His confession went out over the loading floor. It reached the ticket booth and the parking lot. It followed the fleeing families across the road. He named each boy before naming himself. He described the second scream, the one Gideon had wanted to hear. Nell’s name came out eleven times.
Nell listened without blinking.
When he finished, she asked, “Did you hear her after the gate shut?”
Caleb held his ruined hand against his shirt. Blood had soaked the pumpkin badge.
“No,” he said.
Nell pushed him into the bin and shut the gate.
She did not turn the handwheel. She left him in the dark with Owen under the corn. Caleb kicked the steel until something in his leg cracked. Then he begged Nell to open it. He used the gentle voice he saved for television interviews.
We walked away while he was still begging.
Gideon waited at the control panel. He had grown heavy around the middle, and his white hair had been cut close for the campaign photograph on his office wall. He wore a red sweatshirt with CALLOW ELEVATOR printed across it. His right hand rested on the auger switch.
The loading floor behind him was empty. Orange bulbs swung in the wind. A paper witch struck the wall again and again.
Gideon looked at Nell with tears standing in his eyes.
“There she is,” he said.
Nell stopped.
He opened his arms. His voice had softened into something almost sweet. “I’ve seen you every night since. Did you know that? You stand at the foot of my bed. Sometimes you’re little. Sometimes you’re what they pulled out.”
Nell spat corn onto his shoes.
Gideon smiled. “There she is.”
His hand closed on the switch.
The auger woke beneath us. Its screw caught with a bang and began pulling air through the chute. Nell’s coat lifted toward it. I felt the machinery tug at her loose hair.
Gideon kept his hand on the switch. “I can stop it,” he said. “You go back wherever you came from, and I stop it.”
Nell walked into the chute.
I screamed for her. My fear belonged to Mara Callow, who had washed dishes beside Owen and kept her mother’s pills in a plastic box. Nell had no use for it. She stepped over the safety rail and let the auger take her coat.
The screw pulled her down. Metal shrieked against her bones. Her body stretched through the machine in a wet tangle of cloth and corn. I felt every part of it.
Then the auger reversed.
Nell came out whole.
Gideon tried to run. She caught him by the back of his sweatshirt and lifted him onto the rail. He kicked with the frantic energy of a man who had paid other people to do his hurting. Nell held him there until he understood.
I understood too.
Gideon went into the chute feet first. The auger stopped and started. His red sweatshirt wound around the screw. He shouted something about the baseball field, then something about his daughter. Nell watched his shoes disappear.
The machine coughed out a spray of corn and stopped.
Silence settled over the elevator. The paper witch kept tapping the wall. Mother was humming in our kitchen three miles away, though that made no sense. I tried to hold on to the sound.
Nell’s grievance had left my body. I knew because I could remember her bedroom again. Her posters had come down before the funeral. Mother could not bear the sight of them, so I took them down while she sat on Nell’s bed and held a pillow. I had wanted to keep one. I could not remember which one.
My debt remained.
Nell walked out of the elevator. No one approached us. People stood beside their cars in the road, watching the green coat pass. Some held phones. Some held children against their hips. Caleb’s confession played again from someone’s phone near the ticket booth.
Nell reached my truck and looked into the driver’s mirror.
I saw my own face.
The guise had released me. Relief made me laugh once. The reflection laughed too, but I had stopped.
Nell raised my hand and touched my cheek.
“Thank you,” she said with my voice.
I told her to take it off.
My hand stayed on my cheek.
I shouted until Nell put my fingers over my mouth.
“Stop that,” she whispered. “You’ll frighten her.”
My body got into the truck. Nell knew where I kept the spare key. She knew how the ignition caught on cold mornings. She adjusted the seat before starting the engine. Each familiar movement made me more afraid.
We drove home.
Mother stood at the kitchen window in her blue robe. She had turned on every light. The television showed a man selling knives to people who could not sleep. When Nell entered, Mother wrapped both hands around her mug.
“Mara?”
Nell answered before I could.
“I’m here.”
Mother looked at the dirt on my shoes. She looked at the dried blood on my sleeve. Her confusion passed over both. “I dreamed Nell came home.”
Nell set down the truck keys.
“She did,” she said.
Mother nodded and went back to bed.
I tried to follow her. Nell stayed in the kitchen. She rinsed the mug, turned off the television, and found Mother’s morning pills in their plastic box. She knew the yellow one came first. I had taught her that without knowing it.
“Please,” I said inside my own head.
Nell picked up the truck keys again.
We drove to Saint Bridget’s before sunrise. Nell’s grave sat at the rear of the cemetery, below a cedar that dropped needles into the grass. Her stone had weathered around the dates. Mother had chosen an open book for the carving. I had always hated the blank pages.
Nell knelt and pressed my palm against the stone.
“The page was stuck,” she said.
I remembered the damp paper tearing under my thumbnail.
Nell traced her own name with one finger. “Aunt Tildy wrote that a guise opens both ways. You wore the wronged into the living dark. Now the wronged wears you home.”
I told her I had not agreed to that.
“You gave me your face,” she said. “You thought it was a costume because you wanted it to be one.”
The sky had begun to gray. Somewhere beyond the cemetery wall, a delivery truck downshifted. Nell listened to it with my head tilted. She had never heard that truck or watched Mother forget a kettle on the stove. Eighteen years had waited for her, and she meant to have them.
“I can bring you back sometimes,” she said. “Halloween. If that’s how it works.”
I begged her not to leave.
Nell’s eyes filled with my tears. She wiped them away with the heel of my hand.
“I was down there a long time,” she said. “Don’t make me feel bad about it yet.”
The ground opened under me.
Nell’s grave replaced the world. I lay on my back in rotten satin. My bones were small and bare. Roots had pushed through the green coat and fastened it to the earth. Something moved in the cavity below my ribs.
Nell stood above me. Darkness hid her. My own weight settled over my face.
“Mother made coffee,” she said. “She called me Mara. I answered.”
I tried to tell her where we kept the filters and that Mother took the yellow pill with food. Then I tried to say her name the way I had when we were children and she hid behind the furnace during storms.
My mouth was full of roots.
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