Though Doug didn’t trust or agree with John’s methods, and wouldn’t start to, the guy had provided him this moment, an opportunity to belong, and actual belonging, a chance to feel like somebody, which wasn’t lost on him as he ran home grinning.
But not all the kids shook the distress of the woods so easily that night. John and E. were followed closely by Alex as they wound through the many blocks of seemingly quiet, well-lit homes of upper Palos. Alex lagged a bit, composing a three-column list of all Erika’s friends that E. could remember having visited their house: “During the last year,” “Three months prior to the killing,” and “The week of the killing.” E. went through the girls’ physical descriptions and names slowly and deliberately, but really sorting through hazy bits of birthday parties, sleepovers, hangouts, and phone calls. This included several aggressive fights between Erika and their parents over missed curfews and not checking in for hours after school, and the mostly fruitless interrogations by their mother about who Erika had “gone for a drive” with. All these incomplete recollections churned into two distinct impressions of her little sister: the girl’s manner of speaking, as if cramming all her opinions on a subject upon a single breath, and a conglomerated image of her face, somewhat smug, but harmless, more happy than not. Starker than these moments in her sister’s company were the gaps, the time she’d spent avoiding Erika, locked in her room or away at the library. E.’s loss—no longer remote, but crowding—overwhelmed her. All that remained of her sister was the steam of memories from a pot boiled down to empty, and a cheery, three-color drawing on a tree overlooking the site of her murder.
“I should’ve been there,” E. said. It took the reserves of her restraint not to cry out the words.
No longer was she answering Alex’s questions. The sidewalk was bleary. E. stumbled into someone’s lawn who must’ve just watered because her shoes were wet. She didn’t care and stopped without explaining why.
John took her hand. His slender fingers were cold. But they clung to her, and E. willed herself to love the coldness. Bent and silent, she pulled the boy closer. His other hand touched her back, delicate as a breeze.
“I’m sorry to need you right now.” E.’s voice trembled.
“You’ve helped me plenty,” he said.
“I don’t want to make you late.”
“Don’t worry about that.”
“Thank you, John.”
“We’re all here for you.”
“That’s right,” Alex said and shuffled away the investigation notes.
They waited for E. to wipe her eyes and clear two lines of snot onto the lawn. Both were adamant about dropping her off first so she could rest up. Alex hugged her in the driveway, and John squeezed her hand. Then the boy waved and said brightly, “Goodnight, Mrs. Summerson.” Her mother had flung open the front door in a panic to confirm that, though five minutes late, yes, her oldest daughter was alive.
“Was that John Walker?” the woman asked. She bolted the door and peeped through the blinds.
“Didn’t think I could do as good as Erika?”
“Honey, stop. He’s not your usual company, that’s all.”
“You’re right,” E. said.
“I’m glad for you.” She didn’t look it.
E. mounted the stairs for her room.
“You know I love you very much.” Her mother moaned the words.
If E. didn’t reach her bedroom quickly, a sobbing fit would ensue. Not over anything she’d done. Over what Erika never would.
“Even from a great distance?”
“What are you saying?” The woman started up the stairs behind her.
“Night,” she said and locked her door.
E. struggled to sleep in peace. She closed her eyes on the feeble half-moon light only to slip and spiral backward into a much deeper, black-hole blackness that distended her atoms until she was nothing more than a vibrating string of matter. She woke from the dream terrified to sleep again. Then she fell asleep, had the same nightmare, and woke terrified to sleep ever. So the girl stayed up until after midnight and experienced a convulsing, existential pain at the base of her brain like a dying that would not kill her. E. lost all conviction in her emotional strength. She wanted to call out for John, her sister, her sister’s murderer—anyone to end her suffering.
John didn’t love her. Maybe he did. She knew his holding her earlier in the grass had been an expression of acceptance, no matter what she’d not done or not felt for her sister in the past, and that helped absolve some of her guilt about being withdrawn when she’d died. But his and E.’s relationship was too tenuous for her to ask for more. The boy wasn’t in love with her, she knew—from his careful choice of pronouns to his lack of attempts to possess her—just as E. knew that only an all-consuming romantic love could keep her shielded from the reality that she would never see or hear from her little sister again. From a certain point of view, perhaps John’s, she understood there was a gift in that, in allowing her to deal with the immensity of that loss on her own, for which she was grateful and angry, too. E. wasn’t weak, but she was hurting and alone and without any experience in dealing with the pain, and all those books she’d read over the last few months about grief counseling and the various stages of coping were inert truths, flimsy facts, useless against it.
All night E. listened to grief claw around under her skin. It compelled her to pace the room deliriously, then to tear off all her clothes and lie naked on the floor and stare up at the motionless blades of the ceiling fan, and then to throw on a sweater to do it all over again. All the while, she whimpered pleas for release, until the sun rose from a strange angle.
She woke in her sister’s bed, clutching the pink sheets. One arm snuggled Erika’s favorite stuffed animal, a blue bear named Honey Bun. E.’s mother stood over her, heavy tears in her eyes.
The sentimentality of that moment was so cloying that E. actually felt sick to her stomach. Perhaps it was from anxiety or having eaten candy for dinner. She sat up in bed, as if to retch, when her mother caught her in her arms. E. gave in. She hugged the woman, who said, “Oh, baby … My baby girl …” She felt plainly and selfishly loved, as if for the first time because she’d at last let herself. They cried together for a long while over what they’d lost, and then, much later, they cried for what they still had.
11
Friday at Palos Hills Junior High was a half-day for teacher in-service. That morning, the halls were exceptionally vacant. Most students, it seemed, knew the day’s lessons would be mindless worksheets and teasers of movies, and hadn’t bothered to show up to pretend otherwise.
During classes, the group barely heard their teachers or school acquaintances. Despite yesterday’s thrill over the discovery of the thumb bones and their last-minute dash from the woods, the building’s emptiness resonated against the uneasiness each had woken up with. Although none of the kids spoke to one another at school—Alex’s recommendation so they might keep from arousing suspicion, nor were any of them prepared to bridge the social gulf between the outside world and the woods—they caught each other’s despondent gazes from across the lunchroom or while unable to focus on busy work in study hall, searching the face of the other for some answer as to why they felt so apprehensive about returning to what John called The Work. The sentiment went beyond their previous concerns about safety or usefulness. It had something to do with having experienced joy and heartache in their new relationships, what life beyond the mystery was like. Each kept dwelling on fond memories from their short time in Bachelor’s Grove. Though creepy, the place was removed from the social expectations and general bullshit of junior high. What they were doing, their work, was becoming friends. But at some point, post-graduation or when the Dead Man went his way, their time in the woods would end, and they feared that would extinguish their bond.
That afternoon, walking down Oketo Street toward the rec center—no one admitting their worries, heads hung to watch the sidewalk slide beneath their sh
oes, or else squinting at the glary windows of the houses that floated by, allowing the group’s momentum to carry them forward, no one saying a word—the kids spotted a white van, a shiny black car, and several dusty trucks parked around the walking trail entrance across the street. “Told you so,” Tiffany said about the team of workers in neon vests. They assembled a tripod and unpacked tools from the vans. Two business people in construction hats stood back from the survey crew, near the decorative bushes that’d been crushed by the vehicles. One hitched his thumb, pointing deeper into the woods. The other laughed. Tiffany folded her arms and hid behind Greg. The kids weren’t sure which was her father. The laughter trailed eerily as the group walked on, a wrongness in the man’s pleasure that fouled the air.
Along their secret path behind the rec center, the group discussed the possibility of the woods being sawed and dozed. They imagined the entire stretch of trees erased from 115th to the moraine. Would the valley be spared? How fast could a crew clear-cut a forest that had existed for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years? Alex was quick to remind everyone that City Council’s vote on the development had yet to be made. “Trust me, it’s already gone,” Tiffany said. Her surety made the land distinctly what it hadn’t been all week—not theirs. For all its magic, the woods couldn’t protect itself. The idea of strangers irreverently coming in charged the group with indignation, though of an ineffectual kind. They wanted to shout insults at the workers, City Council, but what could kids possibly do about it? They avoided the question. An answer would mean committing to a course of action.
Down in the Grove, they came upon a more upsetting sight. Their digging tools were ruined, shovels and rakes and sieves cracked in half and charred to sticks by a fire in the original hole. The toasted blades were plunged around it neatly in a circle. The discovery was alarming. They’d hidden their tools back in the bushes, leaving almost no chance of being randomly discovered. They’d been watched. Somebody was out here, invested in this place, and knew that others were, too. That person might even be the killer. The implacable emptiness that’d consumed them all morning returned, followed by the hollow frustration of defeat by a faceless tormentor. Greg kicked up the blades. Tiffany swore every few seconds. Josué slowly scanned the damage, then lowered his head as if he couldn’t bear to look anymore.
“This was just some assholes being assholes,” Greg said. “Right?”
“It looks deliberate.” Alex roved the camp, alternately squatting and touching objects, examining the damage. “The work isn’t chaotic. It’s exceptionally dismantled. To me, it exhibits the kind of mind that could organize late-night rendezvouses with kids like Erika.”
“Naw, maybe it was the construction guys just doing their jobs?” Greg said. “Like a warning to clear out.”
“The killer,” Josué said and pointed at the Big Tree.
There, E. vacantly stared up at the defaced image of her sister. Erika’s eyes and smile had been filled with charcoal circles so that it appeared she had three spider-like eyes. Her body was cocooned in smoke.
They felt as though something were ending.
“We must be close,” John said.
Alex nodded at his side.
“Yeah, close … to our deaths,” Doug said before Alex or E. could begin agreeing with the Dead Man.
“Oh, shit.” Greg faced the trees, as if expecting the killer at every turn.
John looked up at the canopy as he did whenever conversing with them, or maybe it was with the wind between the leaves. He’d never used the word God.
“What am I doing wrong?” he said.
Sick of his kookiness, Doug faced the group to try and reach them. Someone had to stop another kid from getting killed.
“Maybe we don’t need to know,” he said. “Not ourselves, on our own. I mean … this looks like the right time to call the police. Just—maybe we let the adults take over?”
Discerning that Doug was attempting to reason the others out of continuing the investigation, Alex came over and countered, “But it appears we’re closer now than the police to discovering the identity of the killer.”
“Maybe that’s not a good thing … is what I’m saying.”
“Yeah, no offense to anyone,” Greg said, “but I don’t want to die a virgin.”
“You’re still a virgin?” Tiffany walked away toward the creek as if totally creeped out by him.
“She is leaving?” Josué asked Doug.
“We all should—now—together.”
“I’m staying,” John said.
“Big surprise,” Doug said.
“I’m staying the night. Tonight. He’ll come back, and I want answers.”
Doug really was surprised, then. “Dead Man—John, I mean—he’ll kill you.”
“I don’t think he can. Anyway, I’m already dead, as you say.”
“It’s more probable that you’ll leave us prematurely if out here alone,” Alex said. “I can’t let you make that miscalculation, sir. I’ll stay with you.”
“You want to confront a—a killer?” Doug said. “You two are … beyond—”
“It’s the simplest solution to solve the bigger problem.”
“You no fight alone,” Josué said.
He stepped up to John and Alex. The three kids stood in a triangle and smiles broke on their faces as if the decision to throw away their lives to learn the identity of a madman before being gutted were the cause of great celebration.
“This isn’t a joke,” Doug tried. “The three of you—you can’t take a kid … killer.”
“How about four?” Tiffany said and brushed passed Doug. In one hand, she balanced a large stone with sharp edges lifted from the creek bank. “Sorry, genius. You’re right. But I’m not here because I’m smart.”
“Greg? Don’t—”
“Ugh … I don’t know, man.”
“E.?”
The kids turned to E. She knelt at the Big Tree. She sobbed while scrubbing at the drawing of her sister with her shirtsleeve. In removing the charcoal, some of the colored paint had come off and left gaping holes in the girl’s head and chest. These wounds caused E. to cry harder. Still, she didn’t stop from trying to free her sister from the tormentor’s handiwork, not even when she turned her head and noticed the others standing around her.
“Help me,” she pleaded, her face deep red, “please.”
Greg went to the creek. He wet his jersey to use as a rag. Josué passed out his paint markers. He and Tiffany began re-drawing the girl in an ornate dress. E. rendered her sister’s face beneath a golden crown while Alex and John peeled away the gray bark to make the picture even larger and higher than before. The kids filled in the background with green hills and puffy clouds and a vast sky, the sun high above and, far above that, the darkening heavens, stars.
Doug kept away and watched the group bring Erika back to life, and E. back.
“Higher, Dougy?” She turned to him, her eyes still wet but hopeful.
“It can’t go any higher than that,” he said.
She gazed up into the boughs. “There’s so much tree left.”
“What goes above stars?”
“You tell me.” She held out her marker. She was really looking at him, ready to listen.
“OK,” Doug said. “Get me up there.”
Greg and Josué hoisted the dork. Each supported one of his trembling, runty legs. Doug added the finishing touch. It disappeared up into where the bark began again: the tips of Erika’s pink flats.
12
John had said the woods had said weapons were OK to bring in, but unnecessary. The group would be protected so long as they continued to treat the Grove as a sacred space. That evening, everyone came armed but the Dead Man.
Greg brought a stubby wooden club that was his grandfather’s, who’d owned a bar on Archer Avenue and had sworn to his grandson that it’d long proved hard as steel. Josué brought two throwing stars that he and Greg lost within the first hour while waiting for the rest of the g
roup to slip their parents. Tiffany was late again, but the jagged rock she’d earlier carried from the creek sat at the base of the Big Tree. Even Alex brought something: a pewter letter opener that resembled a dull knife, though a bit weak where the handle met the blade. E. brought a pair of handcuffs, which, she admitted, wasn’t technically a weapon, but cuffs seemed practical and she’d assumed the others would do a better job in the attack department. She added that she hoped they wouldn’t have to find out. The group agreed.
Doug came best armed. Clipped to a fraying army belt he’d received many Christmases ago was a flashlight and a hammer, and the first thing he did before saying hi to anyone at the camp was pick up the rusted crowbar from their evidence hideaway behind the Big Tree. Doug wouldn’t set down the bar for a minute to help Josué roll over a few stumps from the old camp to make theirs more hospitable. Even when raising the weapon to adjust his glasses, nostrils flared, the kid almost looked intimidating. The haircut helped. When he’d asked his mother if he could spend the night at a friend’s house, she’d made him agree to a haircut to look presentable to the friend’s parents. Doug only weakly resisted because he did want to look good for Tiffany. His mother had taken him to Fantastic Hair, where a stylist whose nametag declared STAR ignored his warnings about what made his lumpy head look less like a fuzzy tumor. It didn’t help that Doug began his usual stutter and blurt routine after noticing the bull ring in her nose and that, despite her nods and yeah-yeahs as he attempted the natural human capacity known as language, the girl was wearing ear buds—well, he first heard them in the form of tinny guitar shredding seemingly emanating from her eyeballs when she leaned over with the electric shaver and mercilessly buzzed him down to stubble. To be made repulsive on his first and most likely last night with a girl (if the haircut didn’t end it, in all likelihood the murderer would kebab him—probably first, too) had put Doug in an awful mood.
Into that Good Night Page 12