“Was Mom part of the train?”
“Maybe. She was surrounded by everyone from her church. She let them do what they wanted. Unless she believed it was the right thing too. I don’t really know.”
At the end, what had gone through their mother’s mind? Charlie had not been with her when she died, nor had William T. or Crystal. She had died at home, her fellow congregants around her. Had the baby been there too?
“You think she was lonely when she died, Charlie? Do you think she had regrets?”
“It’s not something I can think about, Mal. If she did, it was too late. Too late to rethink things. Too late to stop the baby from happening.”
Darkness
How it happened began with Mack. No. How it happened began with Mack’s brother. No. How it happened was he, Darkness, was in trouble. He was in trouble and the things he did to stay in trouble were worse and worse, were out of his control. How it happened was he was walking down the street and she was at the end of it in the mist, peering down at something on the street and then he pushed her down and snatched her bag and ran, and as he ran he felt for the wallet and he pulled out the cash and he threw the whole thing, the whole of it — bag, little things spilling out of it — into the yard of the church. On the ground behind the bush by the church. By the side of the church.
How it happened was he went back. He was out of his mind. Wasn’t he? Wasn’t he out of his mind? He was going back to see if she was okay. Except he wasn’t. He wasn’t going back to see if she was okay. He was strung out. That was the term, strung out. Otherwise he could not have done what the paper said he had done. It wasn’t in him to do something like that. He didn’t remember doing it. Right?
He had been twenty. He was going to start at MVCC in January. He still lived with his mother and his sister but that was about to change because he was going to get an apartment with Mack and the others.
In the photos they kept showing afterward she was pretty. Smiling. Her in a blue dress, her in jeans and a T-shirt that said imagine on the front, like his mother’s favorite John Lennon song. All the interviews with people who knew her, her mother, her brother, her boyfriend — Zach was his name — that older guy, William something, William, who wouldn’t shut up.
His DNA was on file now. It must be. It was the first thing they checked for, on the crime shows, anyway. Samples. She must have been unconscious when they took the samples. He hated imagining it. But he couldn’t stop imagining it either. How it was dark and raining and what she must have looked like when the first cop showed up. What the EMTs must have thought when they saw her. How they must have stabilized her head before they got her up onto the stretcher and slid her in through the double doors, the way you slide a package of hamburger into the refrigerator.
He thought about it all the time. If there was some way to erase memories, like in that movie about the spotless mind, he would do it. He would start all over again. It would be good if they could take out everything but leave the memory of how to shingle a roof, so he could still get a job. But if it was all or nothing, he’d go with nothing. Then he wouldn’t have to think about that night anymore.
It had been dark. The kind of rain that was more like heavy mist, like the air itself was rain. She must really not remember a thing. Otherwise wouldn’t she have said something by now? And if they found him, if somehow they found him, then they would take a cheek swab and they would match it against the DNA that they had on file. Wouldn’t they?
If he couldn’t remember it, all of it, he wasn’t entirely responsible. Was he?
Did he remember more of it than he thought he did? Was it buried inside him somewhere?
Up on the roof it was quiet. Sound was muted. Even this little bit farther off the ground, the wind blew stronger. You could feel its power. Once he had lain down on the roof — the others were off getting lunch but he told them he would work through — and looked up. Way high up, the wind was blowing stronger than you could imagine. It circled the earth in an endless stream. It carried the dust and the dirt and the gas and the filth that everyone gave off there on the ground, the endless stream of filth, and it swirled it up and away. It hauled up good things too, like songbirds that floated on its currents. Where the rest of it went, the filth, he didn’t know.
Sometimes he played Possible Futures when he was up on the roof. In one possible future, he was there in Utica, walking down the street, thirsty because it was an all-day-long job on a roof with no shade. And spur of the moment, he spun around and detoured down the next block to Hassan’s Superette because Hassan had a whole shelf of root beer from all around the country. Root beer was his favorite soda and Hassan knew it, because he used to go to Hassan’s with his little sister, Beth, to buy her a frozen candy bar in the summer. He had quit going after that night. He quit most of his familiar places after it happened. They might know somehow. They might be able to look into his eyes and know what he had done. What they said he had done.
In this particular possible future, he decided that it was time to change the course of things and go back to Hassan’s. Because he was thirsty, and Hassan had a whole shelf of root beer, and it wouldn’t be so bad, seeing him again after all this time. In this future he pushed open the door and it made the same needs-to-be-planed scraping sound it always made. He was ready to say hi to Hassan, ready to tell him he was sorry he hadn’t been back, that things had been rough. The words were on his tongue. It was like he’d practiced saying them so often that they were just ready to come tumbling out.
“Hi, Hassan,” he said.
Hassan was behind the counter talking to a woman, who turned around and looked at him. It was her. It was the girl. She was wearing the blue sundress from that one photo. It was her. She was back.
“D —” Hassan said, and there was surprise in his voice. But the girl was looking right at him, she was looking right at him and, Jesus, maybe it would click in, maybe she would remember right that very minute, and Hassan was starting to come around from behind the counter, and that was when he ran back out the door and right back to the same future that he was already living in.
“D, tell me what’s going on,” his mother said. She kept saying that. Every week or so, she’d ask him again. She was worried about him. “You’re not yourself. Tell me what’s going on in that still-waters-run-deep head of yours.”
But what could he tell her?
A sky full of silver needles slanting down and disappearing once they fell past the streetlight. One streetlight, at the far end. A girl looking at something on the pavement, her bag dangling at her side. Go. Quick. Run. It had happened fast. He wasn’t himself when he did it. Had he done it? He must have. He needed money. He remembered some things. She fought back, and that pissed him off — it filled him with rage and he wanted to hurt her. Right? Was that how it happened? He remembered how hard it was to shove her when she came after him screaming, to shove her down and shut her up. When it was over she opened her mouth and she was going to start again, start screaming. She kept fighting him. She wouldn’t stop. There was a big clay pot. She was going to keep on screaming and keep on fighting and he had to stop her. He had to stop her. He was strung out. That changed things. Didn’t it?
It had been 543 days. He walked down that block sometimes. Not the first few weeks, when it was all still happening. When the news was everywhere, every newspaper and every news station, the internet, posters, even, stapled to poles and taped on store doors. Witnesses or anyone with any information, please call.
The first time he walked by, he made himself look at it. Look at it. Goddammit, look at it. This was where it had happened. He tried to make himself remember.
They had gone up and down the block, over onto the next one too, and they knocked on all the doors and questioned everyone, every single person, about what they had heard. No one remembered hearing anything.
Who made the call from her cell phone, then? W
ho was it who called 911? They hypothesized it was the attacker but they didn’t know for sure. The voice was a male’s. It was a little garbled, they said, but he sounded tense. Maybe distraught. The television people had played the tape so many times that he heard it in his head like a soundtrack. Sometimes when he was up on the roof it looped over and over like a song he hated but couldn’t get out of his head.
911 operator. Please state the nature of your emergency.
There’s a girl. She, I don’t know, she’s . . . maybe she’s dead.
Where are you, sir?
Hawthorne, I think. Yeah, Hawthorne. Between Redmond and Forest.
Okay, stay there. Don’t hang up. Is the woman moving or making any sounds?
I don’t think so . . . no.
Help is on the way, sir. Do you know CPR?
She’s not . . . fuck. Fuck!
Then there was a buzz and a clicking noise and the tape in his head went quiet. Sometimes he could nail down another square, measure the distance with his eyes from the ridgeline to the edge, gauge how far it would be from the edge to the ground if he dove head first before it started up again:
911 operator. Please state the nature of your emergency.
There’s a girl. She, I don’t know, she’s . . . maybe she’s dead.
No one knew who made the call. Nothing could be traced. You would think that now, the way the world was, where so many things were invisible but not really, that the voice on the call could be traced. That someone could figure out whose voice it was. That the person could be found.
No one had been found. She went to sleep for a long time and then she woke up but she didn’t remember a thing.
There was no going back. That was the thing. In his mind, sure, he went back in his mind, over and over in his mind he went through the sequence of events, but nothing in real life was going to redo itself. Not the fine, fine drops of rain, autumn rain. Not the girl bent over the pavement at the end of the block. Not the streetlight shining down on her and the bag dangling from her shoulder. Not the way she fell forward when he grabbed the bag and ran. Not everything that happened afterward.
The tape played itself in his mind.
William T.
When Mallie was little, a fierce and unswerving belief in reincarnation had sprung up in her after her father died. William T. remembered her peering at babies at the diner, or on the sidewalks down in Utica when he took her and Charlie there in the summer while Lucia was at work. She had a way of staring at them, her whole body rigid with focus, that made him want to laugh and cry. The soul appears through the eyes, she used to tell him back then, and she would stare and stare at the eyes of a newborn until it unnerved the parents and they removed the baby to a safe
distance.
“Remember how you used to stare at every new baby that came your way?” he had asked her once, when she was in high school and they were picking sweet corn. “Back when your dad died?”
She had shot him a look that he couldn’t interpret.
“You tried to train Charlie into doing it too but he would have none of it.”
“I wanted my dad to still be in the world, William T.,” she said. “And thinking he might be reincarnated was one way to do that.”
She had turned back to the sweet corn, dragging the burlap sack to the next row. This was shortly after she and Zach began dating. His parents were pulling up stakes for Alaska but Zach just shook his head when they told him of course he was coming with them, they were a family, it would be an adventure. I’m eighteen, he had said, and I’m not leaving Sterns or Mallie. Young, and Mallie even younger, but a future together was already a done deal between the two of them. Zach began building the cabin, and later, when Lucia gave herself over to the church, Mallie and Charlie moved into it with him.
Zach was a Miller, and Millers, with the single exception of Zach’s father, stayed put in Sterns. They were upstate New York men of the woods and the fields. They made their livings with their hands. The Millers were thought to be wild — teachers and principals and coaches feared their presence — but to William T., they were wild in the way of animals. They knew what they wanted and there was no bullshit about them.
And what Zach wanted was Mallie.
William T. had long figured they would end up together. One night in particular, the annual Octoberfeast at the Twin Churches on the village green, he and Crystal had been waiting in line with everyone else to pay their $9.99 and be shown to a seat at one of the long tables. Mallie had been the ticket seller, sitting on a stool by a makeshift cash register, making change and tearing tickets off a heavy roll. He had watched as Zach Miller and his cousins Tom and Joe handed over their money and took their tickets. He had seen the way Zach’s fingers touched Mallie’s, the sideways smile he gave her.
“Mark my words,” William T. said to Crystal, and nodded toward the head of the line. “Zach Miller and Mallie Williams are about to embark.”
A strange way to put it. But Crystal had known what he meant, and he had been right. A few weeks later he had been in Utica getting his hair cut, walked out of the barbershop and saw the two of them standing outside the Golden Dragon restaurant. Mallie was holding a white waxy box of leftovers and a couple of fortune cookies and Zach was jingling the keys to his truck. She had looked up at Zach, laughing, and he reached out and brushed a lock of hair out of her eyes. And that was it. They had been together from then on. Nights she had class late at MVCC, Zach would sometimes drive down with her and read a book at the Roasted Bean next to campus until class let out. None of the books he read — complicated essays about human beings and the natural world by people like Wendell Berry and Aldo Leopold — were books William T. would touch with a ten-foot pole. But William T. was not a reader. He wouldn’t have pegged Zach as one either, but it just went to show that you could not predict.
Like Zach abandoning Mallie. In a thousand years, he would not have predicted that one. He could still see Mallie rising up from the pillow in the hospital, alive and alight for the first time, at the thought of Zach Miller. What sort of look had he himself had on his face, that she would shut down so completely? It must have been bad. Charlie had said Zach turned out to be an asshole, as if trying to convince himself it was true. But it was bewilderment, more than anger, that filled William T. now when he thought of Zach.
Zach was the one who had come up with the One Hard Thing game in the first place.
“Try,” Zach used to say to Mallie. “One good thing. There has to be one tiny, good thing about this.”
The trick with Zach was that he had chosen to believe that something good could be found in any situation, and that gave him the patience to search until he found it. It was a game that had always frustrated William T., and it still frustrated him. One hard thing about Zach moving to Montana? That he’d left Mallie behind. One impossible thing? That he’d left Mallie behind. One good thing? That was where William T. got stuck. Hard things, impossible things: they were easy to name. It was the good things that came hard or not at all.
Take the Stampernicks. William T. had wrestled with their presence in the whole unbearable story of Mallie’s assault and the aftermath. But meeting Aaron Stampernick and talking with him, experiencing the young man’s politeness, the quiet about him, had been unsettling. Aaron Stampernick struck him as less judgmental and more understanding than he had built him up in his mind to be. The conversation had been hard. But it had not been unbearable. If a situation was not unbearable, could there be something, even a tiny something, good about it?
On the spur of the moment, he got in his truck and headed south to the Stampernicks’ house. There was something new in the yard: a water sprinkler in the shape of a daisy with a bendable stem writhed and twisted and danced on the grass, shooting sprays of water in unpredictable directions. Something that little kids would love.
At the far end of the block, adjacent to
the playground, a team of roofers swarmed the high peaked roof of a two-story frame house. A hand-lettered sign, one of those temporary ones on wire legs, was stuck into the boulevard grass. billy’s roofing. 315–555–9723. no job too small. At the ridgeline, a young roofer was standing straight up, his arms stretched over his head as if he were about to do jumping jacks. William T. peered up at him and shook his head. Kid couldn’t care less that he was thirty feet in the air with no support. Where did that kind of fearlessness come from? Here’s your strung-out roofer, Mallie, he thought, and then wondered if it was a mirage: the roofer, the roof, the sun that turned him into a dark outline.
William T. killed the ignition and got out of the truck. Something good. He was trying to find something good. That was his goal here. He walked up the steps, his heart pounding, and he put his hand on his chest as if to comfort it. This was an unbearable situation and he was looking for one good thing.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
He kept up a steady, calm rhythm of knuckles on flimsy wood. He would keep knocking until someone answered. Knock, knock, who’s there? William T. Eventually someone would have to come to the door and open it, if only to stop the nonstop knocking. But the door opened right away.
“Mr. Jones?”
Aaron Stampernick stood on the other side of the screen door. He did not seem upset or surprised at the fact of William T. standing there. He opened the door and dipped his head, as if to say, Come in, and William T. stepped into the house. Melissa Stampernick was standing in the doorway of the kitchen, a bowl of chopped apple in her hand and a toddler pulling at her shirt. Another child, elementary-school-age from the look of her, was sitting at a table with a book. A third child was standing at the top of the stairs in his underwear, peering down. “Who’s that?” the upstairs child shouted. “Who’s that? Who’s that? Who’s that?” and William T. remembered how exhausting small children could be.
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