Empty Mile

by Matthew Stokoe

  She went into the house and a couple of minutes later Stan and Rosie came out.

  “Rosie put the stereo on and we practiced a dance.”

  Stan looked flushed and excited. Rosie leaned against the railing that ran along the outside of the stoop and stared out at the meadow. She sighed and her eyelids drooped a little.

  “Can you hear the wind in the trees? I can hear it. Sometimes I wish it would blow through my head like that, then all my thoughts would be untangled. Like ribbons.”

  Stan looked uncertain. “I gotta go now, Rosie.”

  She turned from the view and kissed him on the cheek and wandered back into the house. Stan called goodbye as the screen door bounced against its frame.

  We climbed down off the stoop and started back toward the car. Stan was quiet and I wondered if the whole thing had been too much for him.

  “Everything go okay? You still like her?”

  “You bet. I hope she doesn’t think I’m a dumb-o.”

  “Didn’t look that way when she said goodbye.”

  “Yeah, I know! And in the house, when we were dancing, she kissed me on the lips. It made my head spin round.”

  My father dropped us back at the house and went into town to finish off his working day. Stan and I took the pickup over to the garden center to check out the warehouse we’d just leased. Bill Prentice wasn’t there when we arrived, but the manager, Rachel, had a set of keys for us and a business card for a plant wholesaler in Sacramento.

  The warehouse stood to the side of the garden center at the end of a short white-gravel driveway. It was made of pressed steel and had a row of corrugated fiberglass skylights down each side of its roof. From its front entrance the view was as beautiful as that from the garden center-a sweep of meadow, a line of trees, the river on the other side of the road, and then forested hills marching back into the distance.

  Stan and I unlocked the sliding door that formed part of the front wall and went inside. The layout was simple-a single open space with a small office built into the back left corner. The concrete floor was dusty and the air in the place was hot and stale. The fiberglass panels let in a diffuse light that made the place feel vaguely churchlike.

  “Wow, Johnny, this is it! This is the beginning of everything. I can’t believe it.”

  “Believe it, man. The papers are signed, no one can take it away from us, not even Bill if he changes his mind.”

  “I’m going to be something, Johnny, something!”

  We poked around for a bit, talking through what the best way to arrange the place would be, how we were going to kick off the business.

  “I got a great idea for that, Johnny. What we’ll do is get a whole lot of leaflets and put them in all the stores’ letter boxes and all the rich people’s houses. Advertising is essential. We better call those plant people too. And we have to tell Dad.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “He’s going to feel a lot better about me now.”

  I wasn’t sure that my father would see things in exactly the same light Stan did. I could already hear how it would waste Stan’s hard-earned money, how it was irresponsible of me to enable this fantasy, how it was a lousy idea…

  “Listen, Stan, let me tell him, okay? I want to make sure he doesn’t get the wrong idea about what we’re doing.”

  Stan shrugged.

  “Okay, Johnny, if you want.”

  We locked up the warehouse and headed back to the pickup. On the way we dropped into the garden center so Stan could grab a Coke. While we were there Rachel asked us if we could take a couple of flowering plants around to Bill’s house. He was working from his office in the town hall and wouldn’t be coming into the garden center. He wanted them delivered to his wife that day.

  Bill and Patricia Prentice lived a half mile north of the garden center on a plot that was almost the size of a playing field. The house was a large white single-story Californian with green shutters and a brick driveway that made an S from the road up to the front door. Patricia’s olive Mercedes was parked carelessly under a tree in front of the house.

  There was no answer when I rang the bell beside the front door. From inside the house I could hear the babble of a talk radio show. I rang a couple more times, but no one answered.

  “Maybe we should just leave the plants out front.”

  “But she’s got to be here, Johnny. Her car’s here. She just can’t hear us because of the radio. I don’t want Bill to get mad because we didn’t do what he said.”

  I tried the door. It was unlocked and swung open to show a foyer tiled in white stone. We could have left then, it would have been easy enough to do. We were only dropping off a couple of plants, after all. But there was a feeling about the house that didn’t seem right to me. A car out front, a radio on, someone who should have been home…

  Stan and I stepped through the doorway. After the heat outside the house felt cool. From the foyer I could see into a sunroom on my right and, directly ahead, a large living room. It was from there that the radio noise was coming. The blinds in both rooms were down and the light in the house was muted and didn’t fully dilute the shadows that pooled in corners and under furniture. Air-conditioning whispered through vents near the ceiling. There was no one in either of the rooms.

  Stan shouted nervously, “Mrs. Prentice, it’s Stan! We’ve got some plants!”

  When no one answered we put the plants beside the door and with Stan glancing about apprehensively and holding onto my sleeve we went through the living room and turned right into a long hall that followed the rear wall of the house. On our left, as we walked along it, there were windows that must have looked out onto a back garden, but these were shuttered and I could see only thin strips of sunshine around the inside of the frames. On our right there were three doors. Two of them were closed, but the last was open and it was through this that we found Patricia Prentice in what was obviously the master bedroom of the house.

  There were curtained French doors at one end of the room and a large bed with a white cover and a wide space of pale carpet. Against one of the walls there was a writing desk and a chair, and against another a wide-screen TV made a sound like surf, its screen effervescent with static.

  Patricia Prentice lay on top of the covers of the bed. She was wearing clothes similar to those she’d been wearing the day I’d seen her with my father-a knee-length skirt, a peach-colored blouse, black patent leather sandals, one of which had fallen from her foot. It looked like she’d gotten up that morning and dressed to look nice.

  Perhaps when she lay down on the bed she had composed herself, positioned herself elegantly on her back, her arms folded across her breasts, legs crossed at the ankles. Perhaps… She looked anything but composed now. She was curled on her side and her clothes were twisted about her body as though she had slept through a fever. Her tongue was swollen and dark and stuck obscenely through lips that were drawn back over her teeth. A blot of milky vomit had collected around her neck and the lower half of her face. The back of her skirt was wet.

  On a nightstand beside the bed there was a collection of empty Halcion blister packs and an empty half-bottle of whiskey. Beneath the bottle there was a slip of notepaper with a single line of writing: I waited as long as I could.

  When my mother died in her car my father had insisted on a closed coffin to spare Stan and me the sight of her injuries. So I had never seen a dead body before, but I could have told anyone who asked that Patricia Prentice was dead beyond any hope of resuscitation. Even so, I checked for a pulse in her neck. Her flesh was too cold and too solid and I had to steel myself against its touch.

  “Should we do mouth-to-mouth, Johnny?” Stan was rubbing his hands rapidly back and forth across his chest and his voice trembled.

  “She’s dead. It wouldn’t do any good.”

  “She killed herself.”

  “Looks like it. The pills and everything.”

  “Poor thing.” Stan’s voice broke and he wiped his nose with th
e back of his hand. “Bill’s going to be so upset.”

  We were silent for a moment while I worked up the nerve to start calling people. As I was about to reach for the phone Stan groaned and put his hands over his ears.

  “That TV noise is freaking me out.”

  There were two remotes on the floor by the side of the bed. I picked them both up and hit the power button on one of them. The tray in a DVD player beneath the TV slid out. The hissing electron jumble on the screen went black and quiet. I pressed power on the second remote and turned the TV off.

  “Thanks, Johnny. My head was going crazy. She must have been watching a movie.”

  Wondering what someone might watch while they killed themselves I checked the disk that sat in the player’s tray, but it had been burned on a computer and there was nothing on its surface to identify it beyond a small smiley-face sticker. I left it where it was.

  “Can I go outside, Johnny?”

  “Yeah, go wait out front. I’ll be along soon.”

  I picked up the phone, called the garden center, got Bill’s cell phone number from them, and called that. When he answered I did it as well as I could, but there was nothing I could say that would make anything any easier for him. He cried out and dropped the phone. I waited a long time but I didn’t hear anything else, so I hung up and called the police. After that I went outside and sat with Stan on a large ornamental rock at the edge of the driveway. He looked pale and stunned. I put my arm around his shoulders.

  “I don’t understand how anyone could do that, Johnny. I can’t think how it would even be possible.”

  “She must have been very unhappy.”

  “Can we go home?”

  “Not yet, we have to wait.”

  Stan leaned into me and put his head on my shoulder. A few minutes later Bill’s BMW SUV skidded to a halt in front of us. He threw himself out of the car and ran for the house. His face was set and he was shouting as he passed us.

  “Where is she? Where is she?”

  But he didn’t stop for me to answer and ran on through the front doorway as though by his speed he could somehow turn back what had happened. I let him have five minutes alone, then I went inside to check on him.

  As I walked along the corridor to the bedroom it seemed to me that the air was not as silent as it had been, that there was an ambience to it, a sense of space, as though the outdoors could be heard inside.

  The door to the bedroom was almost closed now. I knocked, not wanting to walk in without warning. Bill shrieked an obscenity and I heard him move across the floor. The sound in the air stopped.

  I wasn’t sure what to do, but I felt obliged to at least offer some sort of support. After hesitating a moment I pushed the door open and went into the room.

  I thought I might find Bill with his head bowed over his wife, broken, crying, on the point of collapse. But he was nothing of the sort. He was standing near the TV holding the remotes. His light windbreaker, which had been open as he ran from his car, was now zipped closed. I glanced at the DVD player. The disk with the smiley sticker was gone.

  Bill’s face twisted when he saw me and he began screaming. The torrent of abuse shocked me but the man’s wife had just killed herself so I put it down to grief. I took a step forward, intending to comfort him, but he raised his fist and told me to fuck off. It was obvious that he was beyond comfort, at least from any I could offer, and, figuring that maybe I was doing more harm than good by being there, I backed out of the room and left him alone.

  An ambulance was pulling into the driveway as I joined Stan outside again. A cruiser from the Oakridge police department had already arrived and two uniformed cops were climbing out of it.

  They both had mustaches and one of them wore yellow-lensed sunglasses. They asked us briefly where in the house Pat was and how we came to be there, then the one with the sunglasses and the two ambulance men, who’d just pulled a gurney from the back of their wagon, went inside. The other cop got out a pad and took our details and asked more questions and wrote down our answers. In a little while the ambulance guys came back out and told the cop there was no chance of resuscitation. They got into their truck and started the engine for the air-conditioning and sat in the cab making notes on a clipboard. The cop said he wanted us to walk him through exactly what we’d done inside and took us into the house.

  When we got to the bedroom the cop in the yellow glasses was standing with Bill by the writing desk and it looked like they were just finishing up. Bill’s anger seemed to have dissipated and he was reasonably composed, but as I entered the room he shot me a quick hateful glance which neither of the cops caught. Stan and I reenacted what we’d done. When I mentioned turning the DVD player off, the cop with the glasses went over and looked at the machine. When he saw there was no disk, he asked me what I’d done with it.

  Bill spoke before I could answer. “I took it out of the machine. I’m sorry, I didn’t think it was important.”

  “What did you do with it?” The cop’s tone was only one of mild inquiry. We hadn’t been rushed or cross-examined during their inquiry and as far as I could tell no one here was treating the scene as suspicious.

  “I put it on the pile.”

  “What was it?”

  Bill looked blank for a moment.

  “I can’t remember.”

  “That’s okay, don’t worry about it. Was it this one here?”

  There was a stack of DVDs on a cabinet beside the TV. The cop took the one off the top and held it up. “This it?”

  Bill nodded. “It must be. I didn’t look at it.”

  The cop took the disk out of its cover and nodded to himself. “Barefoot in the Park. I like that movie.”

  The DVD was a commercially recorded rental and certainly not the disk I had seen when Stan and I first found Patricia. Bill was lying. I was pretty sure he had the real disk concealed under his windbreaker. But what difference did it make? If Pat had been watching something more personal than a Hollywood love story-a family video of happier times, perhaps-who was I to interfere if Bill wanted to keep part of this horrible event private? So I said nothing. And Stan, who had paid no attention to the DVD beyond wanting the TV to be quiet, had no idea that there was anything to say nothing about.

  Stan and I went outside again, but Bill stayed in the bedroom with his dead wife. We spent another half hour making formal statements which the cops typed into a computer in their car; after that they told us we could go.

  When we got home, Stan put on his Captain America suit, jammed his glasses on over the mask, and settled himself in front of the TV. I made him the peanut butter sandwiches he asked for and he sat and munched and focused his attention on some Japanese action cartoon.

  “How come you put the costume on?”

  “Huh?”

  “The costume. Why?”

  Stan looked down at himself and smoothed the red, white and blue material over his belly. He turned his attention back to the TV and said without looking at me, “Protection.”

  He didn’t answer when I tried to talk to him further, so I went into the kitchen and called my father and told him about Pat. The conversation was not long. I outlined what had happened, he asked for details and then he was silent. He cleared his throat a couple of times but was unable to say anything else. Eventually he thanked me and we hung up.

  I went upstairs to my room and lay down on the bed and called Marla on my cell and gave her the same news. After we’d arranged to meet the next day I put the phone down and turned on my side and closed my eyes. The windows were open and a hot, slow breeze moved over me.

  I woke to Stan shaking my shoulder. It was dark outside but the light was on in the room and moths pestered the bulb. Stan was still in his Captain America suit.

  “Dad’s downstairs. Something’s wrong.”

  “What time is it?”

  “He came in and went into the kitchen and when I said hi he wouldn’t lift his head up. He just kept staring at the table. He’s got
a bottle of booze.”

  “Booze?”

  “Yeah, booze.”

  “He’ll be all right, don’t worry. I’ll go see him. You go to bed.”

  “Shouldn’t I come down with you?”

  “No, just let me talk to him.”

  “Okay, Johnny.”

  I walked Stan along the landing to his room. He climbed under the covers of his bed and took off his glasses and mask.

  “Aren’t you going to get rid of the costume?”

  Stan shook his head.

  “Are you okay about Pat?”

  “Yeah. You don’t have to worry about me, Johnny.”

  He nestled against his pillow and for a moment I saw him as a young boy again and was freshly overcome with a sense of loss for all the time that had passed while we were not together.

  I turned out the light and went downstairs to see my father. He was sitting at the kitchen table in his suit. His tie was loose at his throat and his hair was mussed. There was a half-full glass and a bottle of whiskey on the table in front of him. He looked up as I came into the room and smiled weakly. He was a man who rarely drank and he seemed embarrassed at himself.

  “I’m afraid I’m a little drunk.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Just had a few at the office after work.”

  “Dad, I know you were seeing Patricia Prentice. Marla told me about the room.”

  “Oh… I see.”

  He nodded slowly. Everything about him was heavy-the words he pushed from himself into the over-bright kitchen air, his head on his shoulders, his arms bent on the table. His gaze would not hold mine and slid constantly to his hands. He seemed a man monumentally overwhelmed by the weight of being alive.

  He lifted his glass and drank from it like a child forcing down medicine, then coughed and wiped his eyes.

  “Pat was a person who needed emotional support. Her mistake was looking for it in me.” He shook his head disgustedly. “I couldn’t give her what she wanted. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to. I did. I just didn’t have it in me.”

  “I don’t think there was much you could have done either way. She was a sick woman.”