by Blake Crouch
Vi glares at me as if I’ve slapped her. She takes Max and storms out of the restaurant. I leave a twenty with the check under my ice-filled cup and follow her back to the car.
She’s sitting in the front passenger seat when I climb behind the wheel and close the door. We stare through the bug-splattered windshield at families lumbering toward the restaurant.
"Andy," she says, her voice holding at a whisper, as though volume might break it, "you tell me right now what else we were supposed to do."
"I don’t know."
"Well, I have to know that what I did to that poor boy—"
"There are no answers, Vi. All I’m saying is we aren’t innocent. Me especially. You had a son to protect. You did it for Max. I did it for me."
"But they’d have killed him if you didn’t—"
"I’m telling you, Vi, I did it for me."
She lifts Max up so that his tiny head rests on her shoulder. His eyes begin to glaze and close. He sleeps.
"Only way I’m gonna be able to go on, is if I know there was no other way. That I had to do it. That my son would’ve died if I didn’t."
"Then believe that. But I’ve had enough."
"What are you talking about?"
"I can’t go back to Haines Junction and pretend like none of this happened. Hide in the woods till I’m eighty. I’ve killed two people in my life, Vi. Because I was scared of dying. Orson and Rufus were right about me—"
"Andy—"
"No. They were. That’s the kind of man I am. I have murder in my heart. But so do you. So does that little girl walking between her parents. So does your sleeping baby boy."
"I don’t believe that."
"Fine. Believe whatever it takes so you can look yourself in the mirror and not shudder. I can’t anymore. That’s why I’m doing this."
Her voice quivers: "Doing what?"
I hand Vi the car keys.
"Surrendering. To you. Right now. I want you to take me to your precinct tonight. I’m done, Vi."
"Are you crazy?"
Her voice wakes Max. The baby emits a feeble cry.
"You want to go to prison?"
"Think that’s how it’ll end up?"
"Andy, it won’t be too difficult for them to pin murders on you you didn’t do, considering where they found some of those bodies."
"I don’t care. I’m going to tell them the truth. What they do with me is out of my control."
"You gonna tell them about Portsmouth?"
"I’m going to tell them the truth, Vi."
Crying now, "About me killing that boy?"
"I don’t know."
"Andy, please. Let me help you. You feel like this right now, but will you feel like this for the next fifteen years? Or the rest of your life? Do you honestly want to rot in prison?"
I sigh, lean back into the warm vinyl, the summer sky now fading into dusk. I can’t imagine next week. Can’t even see tomorrow. I could cry, but I don’t.
"Look, if I don’t do this, I won’t last. I’ll get up to the Yukon, kill myself. I’m close to it now. I want to. There’s comfort in the idea of it. Please do this for me, Vi. Please."
# # #
Vi guides us home—64 to Statesville, I-77 to Davidson. I sit in the passenger seat holding Max, asleep in my arms, watching rivers of carlight streaming south toward Charlotte.
As we cross Lake Norman, rimmed with the light of wealth, I think of my old home, glowing somewhere out there in a distant cove.
Vi reaches over, steadies my hands.
# # #
The knot in my stomach tightens when she veers onto Exit 30. I shut my eyes, feel the car come to rest at the stoplight. Ten seconds. Accelerating again. Turning left. Cruising through Davidson, the college close now. In the autumn, I’d take a manuscript and spread a blanket out on the grass of its lovely campus, surrounded by those tall, molting trees.
We make a right onto Jackson Street, my heart throbbing. After several blocks, we turn again. The car stops, Vi shifts into park, and the engine dies.
My eyes open. We’re parked in front of the Davidson Police Department.
It’s real now.
Vi says, "Sure you don’t want us to make a go of it up in Canada? Speak now or forever."
She’s kidding, but it sounds forced, her voice thick with tears. I look at her and see that she’s aching to be home. To forget.
"Better take him." I hand Max over, careful not to wake him. "Will you come in with me?"
"I need to go home, Andy. They’ll try to keep me here, and I want to see my husband before the madness starts."
I’ve gone short of breath.
"So just walk in there, huh?"
"Tell them who you are, that you’re turning yourself in."
I notice two men in plainclothes sitting on a bench near the entrance, having a good laugh. One of them gets up and staggers around, impersonating what can only be a bombed sobriety test.
"You’ll be all right, Vi?"
"Sure."
I open the door, step outside, and close it. The window is down. I peer back through it. Vi reaches out, squeezes my hand.
I walk toward the entrance. When I reach the sidewalk, I glance back, see Vi sitting in the Kites’ Impala, her pretty face lit by a streetlamp, crying.
I hear one of those men near the entrance say, "And this fuckwit didn’t even know he had the stop sign wrapped around his bumper. He’d been draggin’ the damn thing for two miles. I just followed the trail of sparks!"
The approach of my footsteps arrests their harsh laughter.
They exchange looks of fleeting embarrassment, caught in a moment of levity. Wiping their eyes, they regard me with the newfound scowls of lawmen, beefy blonds, clean-shaven, with hard, alert eyes and trimmed mustaches that blend into their pale faces.
I address the man who’s standing.
"You fellas police officers?"
"I am," he says.
The engine of the Impala roars to life.
"Could we have a word in private, please?"
# # #
The first thing Vi notices are the forsythia bushes. They were seedlings when she and Max planted them last September. In her absence, they’ve shot up nearly to the windows. She can’t bare to wonder what else has grown and changed and died.
She parks on the street and turns off the engine. Arcadia Acres twinkles in what she takes for eight p.m. silence, but as she gazes across the treeless subdivision at all the glowing houses, she detects a symphony.
Here are the instruments: whisper of lawn sprinklers, hammering, crickets, voices passing through thin walls, the mechanical tone of the nearby interstate. Suburban music. Fruit of a peaceful species. Vi basks in it. Lets it speak to her. Anesthetize her.
This is the norm. This is what is real.
She lifts Max from the passenger seat and opens the door.
As she walks around the car and onto the upward-sloping driveway, she notices that the garage door is open. A man kneels inside on the concrete, gently tapping a nail into a board. His back is to her, the shape of his body indistinct in the weak illumination of the overhead light bulb. Only when she stops, ten feet away, does she know with certainly that this man is her husband.
The tears begin to roll as she stands there, watching him start the nail. From the back, he seems to have lost his lean runner’s physique.
Max raises the hammer, strikes the nail with a concussive clack that startles Max Jr.
When the infant cries out, the man glances back.
A ghost stands in the driveway with a child in its arms.
# # #
In the late summer of twenty twenty-two, I was on the plains of west Kansas.
I was three days out from North Carolina, en route to Denver, to be interviewed by a reporter who had something I very much wanted back. She’d purchased an old manuscript of mine at auction for an embarrassing price. It had been taken from my cabin in Haines Junction, Yukon, many years ago when I was newly i
ncarcerated. But instead of publishing it, she’d called me, informed me of her recent acquisition, and offered to return it on the condition that I agree to an exclusive interview, that would serve as the basis for my only authorized biography: Life of Darkness: The Andrew Thomas Story.
I quit the interstate two hours shy of the Colorado border and drove into the town of Voda, Kansas. I checked into the only motel in town, The Voda Inn, and walked three blocks to The Voda Restaurant, adjacent to Voda Pawn, and across the street from Voda Auto, Voda Video, and Voda Liquor.
The seeming inconsequence of the town was only amplified by its position on the immense prairie. It was just a black speck on my roadmap, the sort of place you pass through in wonderment that people actually live there. So isolated, so dwarfed by the expanse of land and sky, it seemed it should have all the permanence of a solitary raindrop in a desert, and yet it held on, defying evaporation.
It was near dusk as I strolled the sidewalk toward the restaurant.
Three boys skateboarded down the center of Voda Street. I sat down on a bench to rest my legs and watch them. You could see the prairie behind the motel, glowing bronze in the sun, going on forever.
The hideous lighting and putrid jazz endeared the Voda Restaurant to me immediately. I imagined this place was a hot reservation on prom night and Valentine’s Day. It was rural fancy, the cloth napkins and suited host undermined by the linoleum flooring and tire store light fixtures. I even detected a faint rubbery odor.
Marge, my sturdily-hefted waitress, seated me in a corner. As I browsed the menu, I heard voices slipping through a cracked door in the back wall. I thought it might be a waiter calling out rapid-fire orders to the chef, but considering there were only two other customers, that seemed unlikely.
Leaving my table, I walked over to the door and nudged it open.
"B-eleven."
"Hit."
I peered into a private room, roughly half the size of the main dining hall.
A crowd of thirty or forty sat transfixed by two men on a makeshift stage, absorbed in a fierce game of Battleship.
Marge came up behind me holding a pitcher of ice water.
"It’s a very important match," she whispered. "They’ve been having this tournament every Friday for the last few months. Tonight’s the championship."
I returned to my table and let Marge read the longest description of a special I’d ever endured—basically chicken-fried steak in three hundred words. She couldn’t stop smiling and brushing her ashen hair behind her ears.
When she finished her spiel, I decided to splurge—ordered the chicken-fried steak and a glass of Woodbridge from an unspecified vintage. I winked at Marge as she took my menu.
Applause issued from the banquet room, signifying what could only mean the end of one fleet admiral’s career. I leaned back and savored this transitory moment of contentment, old enough at last to know better than to analyze it, or embrace it longer than it meant to stay.
# # #
I limped back to the motel, a little drunk, a little tired, my bum leg aching from a day on the road. My room was on the second level, and it faced the prairie. I’d expected to see some sort of residential glow out there, but not a solitary porchlight disrupted the gaping darkness.
The Jacuzzi beckoned. A family of six had just vacated the pool area, and in the absence of screaming children, I could hear the humming jets and the turbulent churning of the lighted water. I hadn’t packed swimming trunks, so I donned my baggiest boxer shorts, grabbed a towel from the bathroom, and headed down to the pool.
The night was dry and cool. I laid my towel on a chair and walked to the shallow end, the water dark and calm. I held onto the railing and waded in up to my waist, nipples hardening, skin turning to gooseflesh. I took a breath, went under, and came up gasping, like someone had punched me in the stomach, ready for the Jacuzzi now.
Scrambling out of the pool, wet feet slapping concrete, I limped quickly to the steaming spa. I nestled down into the luxurious warmth, a jet pounding the stiffness out of my neck, closed my eyes, let my legs float up toward the surface, and moaned with pleasure as those miles of driving melted out of my shoulders.
The bliss lasted thirty seconds.
Then came the patter of flip-flopped feet and small voices.
Three black-haired children surrounded the spa, gazing ravenously at the roiling blue water.
"I want in cuzzi," said the little girl, who couldn’t have been older than three.
One of the twin boys hoisted her up.
"No, Jason," boomed a voice from the second level of the motel. "You kids stay out of the water till we come down."
"Dad, I just wanna—"
"All of you. Go wait over there. Now."
The children obeyed. I watched them waddle away and sit poolside on the cooling concrete. One of the boys advised his little sister to be careful because she couldn’t swim, which in turn ignited a heated debate concerning who was and was not the boss of whom.
The parents came down shortly thereafter.
Roughhousing ensued.
The father tossed his sons screaming into the brisk water and dove in after them as the mother lifted her little girl and waded into the shallow end.
I closed my eyes and tried to block out everything but the hot, soothing fracas that massaged me. In prison, during the bad times, when Orson tormented me, there was a place I would run to—a field of soft grass that waved endlessly into the horizon like a green sea.
I was just managing to slip away when the sound of footsteps obliterated my mental oasis. My eyes opened. One of the boys was swinging his leg over the side of the spa.
"Jason!" his father yelled, treading water in the deep end of the pool, "Told you not to bother that gentleman."
Jason dipped his toes into the water and hollered.
"Boy!"
His father climbed out of the pool and marched over.
The boy bolted past him and cannonballed into the shallow end, drenching his mother and sister. The little girl screamed that she’d been blinded and began to cry. As Jason’s mother commenced to thoroughly dress him down, the boy’s father approached the Jacuzzi.
He had pure white hair, and the closer he came, the younger he looked, his face pale and without wrinkle, a hard and slender build.
He said, "Sir, I apologize for the disrupt—" The family man smiled, muttered, "Oh, my," and climbed in.
I didn’t understand until I looked him in the eyes. It was their black intensities that convinced me I was sharing this Jacuzzi with Luther Kite, his hair as white and cropped as it once was long and black, glistening with chlorinated water.
"Boy, it feels good in here," he said.
The woman in the shallow end called out, "Where’d Daddy go?"
Luther cocked his head back and said, "I’m in the Jacuzzi, Christie! Entertain the children please!"
Luther looked back at me, said, "So, old man, do you feel redeemed?"
I started to rise, felt Luther’s smooth legs wrap around my ankles.
"Sorry, I didn’t introduce myself," he said, extending his hand. "Bob Crider."
I just stared at him, and he withdrew his hand, unshaken.
"Please. I’m curious," he said. "You turned yourself in. Spilled your guts. Spent sixteen years in prison. Paying for your sins. I kept up. Read the articles. Your slobbering confession. Justice is served. Penance performed. Do you feel redeemed?"
"I don’t know. Look, I’m really tired. I should—"
"Whatever happened to that sweet little detective and her son?"
My throat tightened, as it always does when I think of Violet.
"She killed herself."
"How?"
"Shotgun under the chin."
"Hmm. Always thought that’s how you’d end up."
"Yeah, well, there’s still time."
"What? Being out, free again not what you thought it’d be?"
"When you’re on the inside, there’s always t
he outside to look forward to. But when you’re on the outside, and freedom and blue sky don’t do it for you, all you have to dream about is death."
"Why do you suppose that detective killed herself?"
"Guilt."
"Try loneliness."