The Weight of Night

by Christine Carbo

  “You need to eat, Gretchen. You need some strength.”

  I nodded to show I understood, but I had no plans to eat. There was such deep anger and every other awful emotion in my parents’ eyes. Of course there was. How could there not be? One child had taken the other.

  “I’ll talk to the kitchen and see if they can get you something a little tastier, something you can’t resist. You like pizza, don’t you?”

  I nodded again.

  “You don’t want to talk?”

  I shrugged. A part of me did, but a part of me had become too scared to speak. What could I say—that I was a crazy freak? a monster? that in the course of just one night I suddenly despised myself and I knew my parents did too? that when they came the day before to see me, my father couldn’t even look me in the eye and my mother cried the whole time? Neither one could say more than a few words to me: Are they treating you well here? They both looked like ghosts. I’d never seen them look so broken in my life. Two sturdy, active people reduced to sagging, broken puppets.

  No, talking implied normalcy—and I didn’t deserve normal—but it came out in spite of me. “What can I do? How can I go on? They think I’m a monster.” It all came out more as a series of whimpers. “And I am.”

  “Look, Gretchen, you’re going to get more counseling, and I’m not a therapist, but I’m going to tell you that you should expect these feelings, and your parents’ response is normal under the circumstances. But you should know that they’re working through their bereavement and it’s going to take some time. It’s going to take time for you too—to forgive yourself.”

  “I’ll never forgive myself.” I looked at him like he was insane for suggesting it. But I was the insane one. “I want to plead guilty and for them to find me guilty.” I was referring to the court that would hear the case.

  “Your tests already show that you routinely go through hypnagogic states in your sleep where you are part awake and part in REM sleep. Basically, you’re dreaming, and when most people dream, their motor skills shut down, but yours don’t. And you won’t be the only person to have done this in their sleep.”

  “You mean other people have done this?” I couldn’t even say the word “killed.”

  “There are cases. I’ve read about them. In Canada, in the U.S., even in Sweden.”

  I was curious, but suddenly Per’s face came into my mind again and none of it mattered. Nothing could make any of it better, ever. “The explanations don’t matter.”

  “They will,” he said. “Trust me. They will.”

  I looked at the floor.

  “Gretchen, listen,” he said, “These events are unusual, but they happen—instances where one child can be blamed for the loss of the other. Car accidents where a family member drives drunk and kills the other. Babysitting mishaps where an older sibling gets distracted and the younger drowns.”

  “But . . .” I felt tears streaming down my face, and I was surprised to feel them. How does a zombie—someone capable of maiming and killing while sleepwalking with glassy, open eyes—feel delicate tears on her cheeks? “Those examples are all accidents,” I said. “No one actually took a weapon and murdered anyone like I’ve done.”

  Dr. Haugen pursed his lips and agreed that not all of these cases were identical, but then said, “It was still an accident—just one caused by your sleep disorder. Eventually you’ll have to come to terms with it.” He gave me a faint smile and his eyes were gentle and well meaning.

  I didn’t know how to explain the things I was feeling. I didn’t understand everything spinning through my mind, every acidic sensation pooling in my stomach. I felt like a beast with no control—like some cold-blooded predator straight out of National Geographic. I felt like I was on the verge of being sucked into an infinite black hole with no discernible boundaries.

  I didn’t know to tell him that no matter what he said to help me see my way through this warped trauma, the overwhelming feeling of guilt and emptiness that was drowning me—that would continue to drown me in the years to follow—was unlikely to go away, ever. It was more than guilt and grief. It was a knife of self-loathing that sliced into the very fibers of how I—how my parents—saw me. I knew I would forever loathe myself, but what I didn’t expect was that their silences, their anguished looks, would cut so deeply that I would feel like I could no longer live another day because the ache was too great. “How long can someone live like this?” I asked him.

  He looked at me with a deep sorrow and kindness, which in retrospect was really intense pity. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know. But you’ll find out because you have no choice. And it doesn’t have to be right now, but as time goes on, you’ll find ways to keep going.”

  I stared at him and my eyes must have held both doubt and hope because he answered me as if I’d pressed him for certainty.

  “Yes, Gretchen, yes. I do think you’ll find a way. Find some resolve. Others have.”

  I still think about those early conversations with Dr. Haugen. I hang on to them because just when it seemed I couldn’t bear one more moment of my self, of my life, along came his kindness—a certain sweetness—that changed nothing really at all, but somehow gave me a thin rope to grab onto during my free fall into that black hole and allowed me to go on another minute, another hour, another day.

  14

  * * *

  Monty

  IT STILL HADN’T rained by the time we left the farm to take the Tuckmans and Brady Lewis to the county headquarters in Kalispell for more questioning. The sky stayed angry and shone like silver, but refused to rain, as if the storm was only teasing, cruelly stewing up dust in the fields and stirring the fires in the deep woods. We used both of the interrogation rooms—Walt in one, Brady in the other—and put Anna in the general waiting room. We went over all their alibis again, including Paul Stewart’s, whom Herman had brought in. Apparently, Stewart had done as he was asked, and stayed close to home.

  His alibi became even stronger the more we checked it out. Just in case, we reconfirmed that he truly had spent the entire afternoon golfing. It turned out that in addition to Paul Stewart’s golf buddies and the guy at the starter booth, the bartender remembered everyone buying Stewart a beer because he’d hit an eagle on the thirteenth hole. The bartender said that probably five other patrons could attest to the fact that they were celebrating the eagle because they were being chatty and very loud about the whole thing, holding their beers high and hooting about it. It didn’t take long after he arrived for us to cross him off our list and send him on his way.

  The Tuckmans were almost as straightforward, but married couples are always a bit tricky because they tend to protect each other and will say and sometimes do anything to help one another.

  They questioned Anna first, and neither agent sensed that she was covering for Walt or lying about his whereabouts on the day Jeremy was taken. Walt and Anna had been together that day. They’d been visiting a carpet and tile store in Kalispell because they were remodeling their master bathroom. She had dragged Walt along because she didn’t want to pick the color scheme and then have him complain about it later. They had left around nine a.m., gotten some breakfast at a local pancake shop, then visited three different stores in the valley, checking out tile and granite selections. They didn’t return home until two p.m., when Walt went into his office to catch up on work.

  “I already told you”—Walt had held out his hands to Ali when she questioned him after Anna—“the university is coming to make their annual checks and do their testing on our tubers—make sure they’re disease free—and there’s still a lot to do to finish up the irrigation.” I watched her interview him through the one-way mirror. “I didn’t even want to go to town, but if I didn’t, I knew Anna would be angry with me for the rest of the day, so I went. As soon as I got back, though, I headed straight to the office.”

  “But, you were out workin
g on the irrigation too?”

  “Yeah, we have to change some lines—the wheel lines—twice a day. The others are automatic and just need to be monitored.”

  Ali nodded like she cared about the irrigation process, and continued to pin down his whereabouts that day while Herman went and checked details with Anna. She confirmed that he was, indeed, in his office working from 2:00 to 5:30 p.m. To our dismay, we also found out when Ali asked to see Mr. Tuckman Senior’s records of all workers in the past (wondering who else might have known about the truck) that Anna had gotten rid of all his old files because they were taking up too much space and she assumed they were no longer needed. “I figured if we ever get audited,” she had said, “they’d never need records that many years back.”

  We were in the process of calling some of the tile stores to verify their visit, but it didn’t take long before all our focus shifted to Brady Lewis. Both his girlfriend and his boss at the agriculture store had said he’d probably gone fishing, which wasn’t much of an alibi.

  We made him wait a while in the interrogation room with the one-way while Ali and Herman discussed how they wanted to proceed. Ali had forgotten about sending me to get some sleep and seemed glad to have Ken and me at the station making all of the confirmation calls. We spoke to a woman at one of the stores who remembered helping the couple and even recalled which kind of tile they looked at—some kind of Franciscan slate tile.

  “Harris, Greeley.” Ali waved us both into the small observation room to discuss a game plan after we had taken the Tuckmans’ statements and sent them home. “How should we do this?” Ali asked us all once we were gathered in the room. Through the glass, Brady sat annoyed in his metal chair, one hand tapping on the bolted-down table before him and occasionally running his fingers through his hair.

  “I think you should start,” Herman said to Ali. It seemed to me that Herman always deferred to Ali, but this time I disagreed with that approach. I stayed quiet and watched them continue.

  “Okay,” she said. “I go in, act all sweet and girl-like and see if I can’t set him at ease.”

  “Then I can come in later and pour on the mean big guy act if we need it,” Herman added.

  “Hmm,” I said.

  Ali and Herman both looked at me. “What?” Ali said.

  “I don’t know, let’s think about this.”

  “That’s exactly what we’re doing.”

  I wondered why she wanted Ken and me in the room with them in the first place if she didn’t want to hear what we had to offer.

  “Okay,” I said. I’d walked on eggshells nearly my entire life when I was around my family, and quite frankly, I was good at it, a Master Tiptoer, in fact. But a boy was missing and I was too tired on this particular afternoon to try to tread around her irascible ways. “Look,” I said, “you asked us in here. I could be wrong, but this Brady guy”—I looked down at my notes—“he’s lived here for about five years, right? That’s what Samantha, the girlfriend, said when we went there.”

  “Walt said the same,” Ali said. “That they both moved here from Massachusetts and that he’s worked for him since he got to town.”

  “Exactly,” I said.

  “What’s your point then, Harris?” Herman chimed in.

  “My point is that he’s been with his girlfriend for probably more than five years, hasn’t bothered to marry her, fishes on his days off instead of doing something as a couple. My guess is he hates commitment, hates the idea of compromising for a woman. When we spoke to her, she seemed irritated about the whole fishing thing, like fishing was the other woman.” I looked at him through the glass again. He leaned back in his chair and folded his arms, his head positioned in a dogged tilt to the side, like he was bracing himself, fortified with a teenage stubbornness. “Look”—I motioned to the glass—“obstinacy is his go-to stance. Guys like that . . . a woman makes them feel like they’re sacrificing, being controlled. So I’m just suggesting that Herman goes in first. He might relate to the guy better than to a strong-willed female agent. Ali might make him clam up, you know, like his mother is busting him in front of the cookie jar.”

  “Jesus, Harris, you’ve got an overactive imagination and what, you think you’re a psychiatrist now, too?” Ali crossed her arms, leaned against the cinder-block wall, and glared at me. “All that just by looking at him through a one-way?”

  “Just telling you my gut instinct on this. Take it or leave it.”

  Ali and Herman looked at each other. Herman gave a twitch of a shoulder, turned, and studied the guy through the mirror. Through the glass, Brady continued to look sullen, more annoyed than scared.

  Finally, Herman said, “I think Monty might have something here. Let me go in first, see what I can get. He might relate better to one of the guys.” He curled his fingers into quotation marks. Then, if we need a hardass, we bring you in to scare the little boy in him.”

  Ali rubbed her face, making her cheeks pink. She thought for a moment, then agreed. “Okay, we’ll stay in here and keep a close eye on his reactions.”

  • • •

  Herman started out nice and cordial, apologizing for keeping him waiting, asking Brady how he was and if he needed anything, but then grew a bit more serious. “Brady, we’re really sorry to bother you, and we wouldn’t even have you in here if we didn’t have a very serious situation on hand—a missing boy.”

  Brady looked confused as to why he’d be brought in for something like that, and Ali, Ken, and I looked at one another, wondering whether he was just putting on a good act.

  “How does this have anything to do with me?” Brady asked.

  “For starters, the Chevy truck that all of you farmhands have access to has been identified as the truck involved in the abduction,” Herman said, stretching the truth. We had not yet verified that the boy had gotten into that truck. “We’re not accusing you, but the other farmhand, Mr. Stewart, has an alibi, and so do Mr. and Mrs. Tuckman. We need to see if you have any information for us. That’s why you’re here.”

  I was impressed with Herman’s ability to dance around any accusations in an attempt to keep Brady unguarded. He didn’t even bring up the fact that fishing could be construed as a sketchy, unverifiable alibi.

  “This is the first I’ve even heard about any abduction,” Brady said.

  Herman nodded calmly. “Okay, well, can you tell us what you were doing on the morning and afternoon of the sixteenth, two days ago?”

  “I think you know that. I already told one of the officers when I arrived that I was fishing.”

  Herman took him through it all again, asking where he went, all the parts of the river, what time he left, when he returned, what stops he made. His answers matched up with Samantha’s. He’d been fishing up the North Fork of the Flathead River, by Glacier Rim, and no, he didn’t make any stops. He returned home around nine in the evening.

  “Mr. Lewis,” Herman said, “did anyone go fishing with you?”

  “No,” he said. “I usually go alone because most of my friends can’t hang as long as I do. They start bitching and getting bored and want to go home before the evening bugs even come out.”

  “Mr. Lewis,” Herman said. “Is there anyone who can verify that you were fishing?”

  “Samantha already did.”

  “No, I mean, is there anyone who actually saw you while you were fishing?”

  “No, I told you, I went alone.”

  “You didn’t see anyone you know up there—anyone else out on the river who might remember you?”

  “No, just a few rafters going by, a few other fishermen that I stayed far away from, but no one I knew personally.”

  Herman laced his fingers together and leaned casually and attentively on the table toward Brady. “Okay, well, would you be willing to run some prints, just for elimination purposes?”

  “Prints? What the hell for
?”

  I glanced at Ali to see if she caught it, too. In that instant, the defenses I sensed in Brady from the minute he came in cropped up. We could hear it in the tone of his voice, sharp and peevish.

  “I just said, for elimination purposes. We’re dusting the truck as we speak. If we come up with a number of prints and we identify yours, the Tuckmans’, and Stewart’s, then that’s useful information.”

  Brady leaned back, folded his arms in front of him again, his eyes hooded as he looked to the side and considered it. “Makes no sense to me. You know my prints are in it, since I’ve driven the truck many times, so why do you need them?”

  “We need them to eliminate them, that’s all—so that we can figure out which ones might be the foreign ones if something shows up.”

  “I’m sorry if it takes you a little more time, but I got no desire to give the government any more information on me than they already have. Why the hell do you think I moved to Montana?”

  “Jesus Christ,” Ali whispered. “How many of these nutwings are there in this state?”

  “I don’t know, Mr. Lewis,” Herman’s voice grew sharp. We all turned back to the one-way. Herman indulged Brady: “Why don’t you tell me?”

  “To get the hell away from having the government breathing down my neck—always coughing up some state tax at every fucking store I went to back east, always paying at tollbooths to drive on the highways that should belong to us in the first place, never having access to streams, the price of fishing licenses going through the roof. . . . I just want to work, fish, and be left alone.”

  I rolled my eyes, knowing that it was the state government that allowed him access to all lakes, rivers, and streams in Montana. That we had a law that allows the public to use rivers and streams for recreational purposes up to the standard high-water mark. It doesn’t allow people to enter through posted land or to cross private lands to gain access, but if you access it somewhere legitimately, you can continue to follow the body of water as long as you are within the high-water mark. When I was a game warden, I ran into this type all the time—entitled enough to fish anywhere and take any game they damn well pleased, but not interested in paying the state taxes or appreciating the very laws that gave them access to all the places they wanted to use.