by Stephen King
Fred and Ollie did their clean-up work silently, each wrapped up in his own thoughts and his own grief. After receiving condolences for hours—and to be fair, even those from total strangers had been heartfelt—they were unable to condole with each other. Maybe that was strange. Maybe it was sad. Maybe it was what literary types called irony. Fred was too tired and heartsick to think about it.
During all of this, the dead boy’s mother sat on the sofa in her best meet-the-public silk dress, her knees together, her hands cupping her fat upper arms as if she were cold. She’d said nothing since the last of the evening’s guests—old Mrs. Gibson from next door, who had predictably held on until the bitter end—finally took her leave.
She can go now, she’s got it all stored up, Arlene Peterson had said to her husband as she locked the front door and then leaned her bulk against it.
Arlene Kelly had been a slender vision in white lace when Father Brixton’s predecessor married them. She had still been slender and beautiful after giving birth to Ollie, but that had been seventeen years ago. She had begun to put on weight after giving birth to Frank, and now she was on the verge of obesity . . . although she was still beautiful to Fred, who hadn’t the heart to take Dr. Connolly’s advice, at his last physical: You’re good to go for another fifty years, Fred, as long as you don’t fall off a building or step in front of a truck, but your wife has type two diabetes, and needs to lose fifty pounds if she’s going to stay healthy. You need to help her. After all, you’ve both got a lot to live for.
Only with Frankie not just dead but murdered, most of the things they had to live for seemed stupid and insignificant. Only Ollie retained his former precious importance in Fred’s mind, and even in his grief, he knew that he and Arlene had to be careful about how they treated him in the weeks and months ahead. Ollie was also grieving. Ollie could shoulder his share (more than that, really) of clearing away the remains of this last act in the tribal death-rites of Franklin Victor Peterson, but tomorrow they would have to let him start going back to being a boy. It would take time, but he would get there eventually.
The next time I see Ollie’s socks under the coffee table, I will rejoice, Fred promised himself. And I will break this horrible, unnatural silence as soon as I can think of something to say.
But he could think of nothing, and as Ollie sleepwalked past him into the den, pulling their vacuum cleaner by its hose, Fred thought—with no idea of how wrong he was—that at least things could not get worse.
He went to the doorway of the den, and watched as Ollie began vacuuming the gray pile with that same eerie, unguessed-at efficiency, taking long, even strokes, first pushing the nap one way and then pulling it the other. The crumby remains of Nabs, Oreos, and Ritz crackers disappeared as if they had never been there, and Fred finally found something to say. “I’ll do the living room.”
“I don’t mind,” Ollie said. His eyes were red and swollen. Given the age difference between the two brothers—seven years—they had been amazingly close. Or maybe it wasn’t so amazing, maybe that was just enough space to keep sibling rivalry to a bare minimum. To make Ollie something like Frank’s second father.
“I know,” Fred said, “but share and share alike.”
“Okay. Just don’t say, ‘It’s what Frankie would have wanted.’ I’d have to strangle you with the vacuum hose.”
Fred smiled at that. Probably not his first smile since the policeman had come to the door last Tuesday, but maybe the first real one. “It’s a deal.”
Ollie finished the carpet and trundled the vacuum to his father. When Fred pulled it into the living room and started in on the carpet, Arlene got to her feet and trudged toward the kitchen without looking back. Fred and Ollie glanced at each other. Ollie shrugged. Fred shrugged back and began vacuuming again. People had reached out to them in their grief, and Fred supposed that was nice, but golly-willikers, what a mess they had left behind. He consoled himself with the thought that it would have been much worse if it had been an Irish wake, but Fred had quit the booze after Ollie was born, and the Petersons kept a dry house.
From the kitchen came a most unexpected sound: laughter.
Fred and Ollie stared at each other again. Ollie hurried for the kitchen, where his mother’s laughter, which had seemed natural and easy to begin with, was now rising to a hysterical pitch. Fred stepped on the vacuum cleaner’s power button, killing it, and followed.
Arlene Peterson was standing with her back to the sink, holding her considerable belly and nearly screaming with laughter. Her face had gone bright red, as if she were running a high fever. Tears coursed down her cheeks.
“Ma?” Ollie asked. “What the hell?”
Although the dishes had been cleared from the living room and den, there was still a ton of work to be done here. There were two counters on either side of the sink, and a table in the kitchen nook, where the Peterson family had taken most of their evening meals. All these surfaces were loaded with partially eaten casseroles, Tupperware containers, and leftovers wrapped in aluminum foil. Resting on top of the stove was the carcass of a partially eaten chicken and a gravy boat full of congealed brown sludge.
“We’ve got enough leftovers for a month!” Arlene managed. She doubled over, guffawing, then straightened up. Her cheeks had turned purple. Her red hair, which she had bequeathed to both the son standing before her and the one now underground, had come loose from the clips with which she had temporarily tamed it, and now stood out around her congested face in a frizzy corona. “Bad news, Frankie’s dead! Good news, I won’t have to go shopping for a long . . . long . . . time!”
She began to howl. It was a sound that belonged in an insane asylum, not in their kitchen. Fred told his legs to move, to go to her and embrace her, but at first they wouldn’t obey. It was Ollie who moved, but before he could get to her, Arlene picked up the chicken and threw it. Ollie ducked. The chicken flew end over end, shedding stuffing, and hit the wall with a horrible crunch-splat. It left a circle of grease on the wallpaper below the clock.
“Mom, stop. Stop it.”
Ollie tried to take her by the shoulders and pull her into a hug, but Arlene slipped under his hands and darted toward one of the counters, still laughing and howling. She grabbed a serving dish of lasagna in both hands—it had been brought by one of Father Brixton’s sycophants—and dumped it on her head. Cold pasta fell into her hair and onto her shoulders. She heaved the dish into the living room.
“Frankie is dead and we’ve got a fucking Italian buffet!”
Fred got moving then, but Arlene slid away from him, too. She was laughing like an overexcited girl playing a spirited game of tag. She grabbed a Tupperware container full of Marshmallow Delite. She started to raise it, then dropped it between her feet. The laughter stopped. One hand cupped her large left breast. The other lay flat on her chest above it. She looked at her husband with wide eyes that were still swimming with tears.
Those eyes, Fred thought. Those are what I fell in love with.
“Mom? Mom, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she said, and then: “I think my heart.” She bent to look at the chicken and the marshmallow dessert. Pasta fell from her hair. “Look what I did.”
She gave a long, whooping, rattling gasp. Fred grabbed her, but she was too heavy, and slithered through his arms. Before she went down on her side, Fred saw that the color was already fading from her cheeks.
Ollie screamed and dropped to his knees beside her. “Mom! Mom! Mom!” He looked up at his father. “I don’t think she’s breathing!”
Fred pushed his son aside. “Call 911.”
Without looking to see if Ollie was doing it, Fred slipped a hand around his wife’s big neck, feeling for a pulse. He got one, but it was disorganized, chaotic: beat-beat, beatbeatbeat, beat-beatbeat. He straddled her, gripped his left wrist in his right hand, and began to push down in a steady rhythm. Was he doing it right? Was it even CPR? He didn’t know, but when her eyes opened, his own heart seemed to
give an upward leap in his chest. There she was, she was back.
It wasn’t really a heart attack. She overexerted herself, that’s all. Fainted. I think they call that a syncope. But we’re getting you on a diet, my dear, and your birthday present is going to be one of those wristbands that measure your—
“Made a mess,” Arlene whispered. “Sorry.”
“Don’t try to talk.”
Ollie was on their kitchen wall phone, talking fast and loud, almost shouting. Giving their address. Telling them to hurry.
“You’ll have to clean up the living room again,” she said. “I’m sorry. Fred, I’m so, so sorry.”
Before Fred could tell her again to stop talking, to just lie still until she felt better, Arlene drew another of those great, rattling breaths. As she let it out, her eyes rolled up in her head. The bloodshot whites bulged, turning her into a horror-movie deathmask Fred would afterwards try to erase from his mind. He would fail.
“Dad? They’re on their way. Is she all right?”
Fred didn’t reply. He was too busy applying more half-assed CPR and wishing he had taken a class—why had he never found time to do that? There were so many things he wished for. He would have traded his immortal soul to be able to turn the calendar back one lousy week.
Press and release. Press and release.
You’ll be all right, he told her. You have to be all right. Sorry cannot be your last word on this earth. I will not allow it.
Press and release. Press and release.
5
Marcy Maitland was glad to take Grace into bed with her when Grace asked, but when she asked Sarah if she wanted to join them, her older daughter shook her head.
“All right,” Marcy said, “but if you change your mind, I’ll be here.”
An hour passed, then another. The worst Saturday of her life became the worst Sunday. She thought of Terry, who should have been beside her now, fast asleep (perhaps dreaming about the upcoming City League championship, now that the Bears had been disposed of), and was instead in a jail cell. Was he also awake? Of course he was.
She knew there were going to be some hard days ahead, but Howie would put things right. Terry had once told her that his old Pop Warner co-coach was the best defense lawyer in the southwest, and might someday sit on the state’s supreme court. Given Terry’s cast-iron alibi, there was no way Howie could fail. But each time she drew almost enough comfort from this idea to drop off, she thought of Ralph Anderson, the Judas sonofabitch she’d thought of as a friend, and she came wide awake again. As soon as this was over, they would sue the Flint City PD for false arrest, defamation of character, anything else Howie Gold could think of, and when Howie began dropping his legal smart-bombs, she would make sure Ralph Anderson was standing on ground zero. Could they sue him personally? Strip him of everything he owned? She hoped so. She hoped they could send him, his wife, and the son with whom Terry had taken such pains, out into the street, barefoot and dressed in rags, with begging bowls in their hands. She guessed such things were not likely in this advanced and supposedly enlightened day and age, but she could see the three of them that way with utter clarity—mendicants in the streets of Flint City—and each time she did, the vision brought her wide awake again, vibrating with rage and satisfaction.
It was quarter past two by the clock on the nightstand when her older daughter appeared in the doorway, only her legs clearly visible below the oversized Okie City Thunder tee she wore as a nightshirt.
“Mom? Are you awake?”
“I am.”
“Can I get in with you and Gracie?”
Marcy threw back the sheet and moved over. Sarah got in, and when Marcy hugged her and kissed the nape of her neck, Sarah began to cry.
“Shh, you’ll wake your sister.”
“I can’t help it. I keep thinking about the handcuffs. I’m sorry.”
“Quietly, then. Quietly, hon.”
Marcy held her until Sarah had gotten it all out. When she was quiet for five minutes or so, Marcy thought the girl had gone to sleep, and felt that now, with both of her girls here, bookending her, she might be able to sleep herself. But then Sarah rolled over to look at her. Her wet eyes shone in the dark.
“He won’t go to prison, will he, Mom?”
“No,” she said. “He didn’t do anything.”
“But innocent people do go to prison. Sometimes for years, until someone finds out they were innocent after all. Then they get out, but they’re old.”
“That isn’t going to happen to your father. He was in Cap City when the thing happened that they arrested him for—”
“I know what they arrested him for,” Sarah said. She wiped her eyes. “I’m not stupid.”
“I know you’re not, honey.”
Sarah stirred restlessly. “They must have had a reason.”
“They probably think so, but their reasons are wrong. Mr. Gold will explain where he was, and they’ll have to let him go.”
“All right.” A long pause. “But I don’t want to go back to community camp until this is over, and I don’t think Gracie should, either.”
“You won’t have to. And when fall comes around, all of this will just be a memory.”
“A bad one,” Sarah said, and sniffled.
“Agreed. Now go to sleep.”
Sarah did. And with her girls to warm her, so did Marcy, although her dreams were bad ones in which Terry was marched away by those two policemen, while the crowd watched and Baibir Patel cried and Gavin Frick stared in disbelief.
6
Until midnight, the county jail sounded like a zoo at feeding time—drunks singing, drunks crying, drunks standing at the bars of their cells and holding shouted conversations. There was even what sounded like a fistfight, although since all the cells were singles, Terry didn’t see how that could be, unless there were two guys punching at each other through the bars. Somewhere, at the far end of the corridor, a guy was bellowing the first phrase of John 3:16 over and over at the top of his lungs: “For God so loved the world! For God so loved the world! For God so loved THE WHOLE FUCKIN WORLD!” The stench was piss, shit, disinfectant, and whatever sauce-soaked pasta had been served for supper.
My first time in jail, Terry marveled. After forty years of life, I have landed in stir, the calaboose, the joint, the old stone hotel. Think of that.
He wanted to feel anger, righteous anger, and he supposed that feeling might arise with daylight, when the world came back into focus, but now, at three o’clock on Sunday morning, as the shouts and singing subsided to snores, farts, and the occasional groan, all he felt was shame. As if he really had done something. Except he would have felt nothing of the kind if he had really done what he was accused of doing. If he had been sick and evil enough to commit such an obscene act upon a child, he would have felt nothing but the desperate cunning of an animal in a trap, willing to say anything or do anything in order to get out. Or was that true? How did he know what a man like that would think or feel? It was like trying to guess what might be in the mind of an alien from space.
He had no doubt that Howie Gold would get him out of this; even now, in the darkest ditch of the night, with his mind still trying to get a grip on the way his whole life had changed in a matter of minutes, he didn’t doubt it. But he also knew that not all of the shit would wash off. He would be released with an apology—if not tomorrow, then at the arraignment, if not at the arraignment, then at the next step, which would probably be a grand jury hearing in Cap City—but he knew what he would see in the eyes of his students the next time he stepped in front of a class, and his career as a youth sports coach was probably finished. The various governing bodies would find some excuse if he wouldn’t do what they’d see as the honorable thing and step down himself. Because he was never going to be completely innocent again, not in the eyes of his neighbors on the West Side, or in those of Flint City as a whole. He would always be the man who was arrested for the murder of Frank Peterson. He would always be the man
of whom people would say, No smoke without fire.
If it was just him, he thought he could deal with it. What did he tell his boys when they whined that a call was unfair? Suck it up and get back in there. Play the game. But it wasn’t just him who would have to suck this up, not just him who would have to play the game. Marcy would be branded. The whispers and sidelong looks at work and at the grocery store. The friends who would no longer call. Jamie Mattingly might be an exception, but he had his doubts even about her.
Then there were the girls. Sarah and Gracie would be subjected to the sort of vicious gossip and wholesale shunning of which only kids their age were capable. He guessed Marcy would have sense enough to keep them close until this was sorted out, if only to keep them away from the reporters who would otherwise hound them, but even in the fall, even after he was cleared, they would be marked. See that girl over there? Her father was arrested for killing a kid and shoving a stick up his ass.
Lying on his bunk. Staring up into the dark. Smelling the jailhouse stench. Thinking, We’ll have to move. Maybe to Tulsa, maybe to Cap City, maybe down to Texas. Somebody will give me a job, even if they won’t allow me within a country mile of boys’ baseball, football, or basketball practice. My references are good, and they’ll be afraid of a discrimination suit if they say no.
Only the arrest—and the reason for the arrest—would follow them like this jailhouse stink. Especially the girls. Facebook alone would be enough to hunt them down and single them out. These are the girls whose father got away with murder.