by Baird Harper
“Is Victor doing all right?” he asked.
“Oh, he’s doing fine,” she said. “He’s keeping himself distracted with a spraying campaign. You remember how much he worried over his trees.”
“What do you mean by ‘spraying campaign’?”
She thought of the poisonous yellow fog they’d draped over the cemetery, of the vacant expression Victor had worn as the songbirds dropped from the trees in their wake. And as she reconsidered her husband’s question—Is Victor doing all right?—she understood that she would never see her brother-in-law again.
“Anyway,” she continued, “it’s admirable the way Victor’s trying to save his trees from the beetles. It’s constructive, I mean. Maybe I should be saving something. The whales, maybe. Is there a five-K for that? I really felt like running today, for the whales. Or maybe for the men who keep jumping off that one Metra platform . . .” She could hear herself rambling, her voice tightening inside her throat, the words coming out in a tense key. “Anyway, I’ll visit the grave in the morning, and if Victor’s up for it maybe he’ll come too.”
“Up for it?” Andrew asked. “I thought he was doing ‘fine.’ ” His voice seemed to have swallowed itself too, as if it came now from a great distance. Or, it was right there in her ear, but muted, as if he were speaking behind one of those thick glass panels at a prison. And then it struck her—the seedy motel room, the long-distance call—she was ending her marriage. She wasn’t ever going home. Tomorrow she would say good-bye to her sister and then she’d buy up all the jerky at the pharmacy and head west to the mountains. Or south, maybe, to Mexico. Or Canada. Where were the beetles coming from? She would run away from the beetles, to someplace that still had its oak trees. They’d come from the east, she decided, from Amish country. A big red arrow across the continent on a news report, stabbing into the Midwest, like a map of the rust belt or the spread of heroin.
“What?” Andrew asked.
“Did I say something?”
“You said ‘jerky.’ ”
“Did I?” she asked. “Maybe. Yeah. It’s this motel room, it reminds me of the road trips we used to take as kids. My dad always bought us beef jerky at the gas stations.”
Andrew began talking again, about the things he’d learned from the book he’d planted in her purse, which Allie had already ditched in the bedside drawer where the Bible should’ve been. He was talking but she wasn’t hearing it. And as he droned on about the power of self-forgiveness, she reached into the waste bin and lifted the spoon to her face, staring at her dark and distorted reflection in the charred metal oval.
//
In the morning, the bedside phone rang. It was Gunner. He was coming over to pick up Allie for another try at the grave.
“You spoke with Victor?” Allie asked. “This morning?”
“He didn’t come into work,” Gunner said. “But I spoke with June. And June knows where the bodies are buried. So get ready, I’m coming over.”
The boy was there in minutes. His hair had been combed backward and he’d buttoned himself into a white shirt and slacks.
“He’s not poisoning the town or anything,” Gunner explained as he drove. “June says Victor used to be a chemist before he bought the cemetery. It’s true that the birds are taking it hard, but if Oak Hill loses its oak trees, then what will it have?”
The sun was shining in through Allie’s side of the car, stoking something mean inside her head, like a hangover except she hadn’t drunk anything. “The grave you took me to yesterday, was that woman really murdered by a serial killer?”
“The Soyfield Strangler,” Gunner said. “It was never proved that it was actually his handiwork, but it wasn’t disproved either.”
The downtown strip fell away and they passed through blocks of tired housing. The bright morning light was trying to make the place charming again, but it wasn’t working.
“What about you?” Gunner asked. “Does anything exciting ever happen where you’re from?”
Allie thought of the intersection where Sonia had been killed, the piles of flowers that accumulated afterward. She thought of the Metra station where the depressed commuters were stepping in front of trains, the haunted reputation it was gaining. She said, “Can I tell you something? About Victor?”
The boy pulled through Oak Hill’s parking lot. “Okay.”
“He’s sleeping with this June person. Did you know that?”
Gunner glanced at her. The car drifted, then abruptly found the lane again. “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess, maybe I knew. I mean, I suppose I thought it was possible.”
“I figured you did. You’re a sharp kid. I can tell. Okay, well, you should let this slide. For Victor’s sake. It’s an awkward thing to have the boss being intimate with one employee, especially if there are promotions and bonuses and stuff available. There’s a fear of favoritism. But Victor’s in a bad place right now. He’s all messed up in the head, so you can’t call him out on something like that, or else—” A large black bat lay on the stoop of a mausoleum, wings spread wide as if it had perished midflight.
The boy shook his head, mouthing words to himself.
“This June person,” Allie continued. “It’s Victor just blowing off some steam. He needs this right now, or else—”
Gunner swerved around a pair of doves on the pavement.
“He just needs this one distraction, is all. It’s important. Or else—”
“You keep saying ‘or else,’ ” the boy said. “Or else what?”
“I don’t know,” said Allie. “It’s possible he poses some kind of danger to himself, I guess. It’s a traumatic thing to lose someone you love. He needs people around him who are going to be understanding for a while. Do you think you can do that?”
The boy angled the truck down into a shaded meadow surrounded by oak trees. He stopped the truck, glaring into the center of the steering wheel. Finally, he cleared his throat and said in a quiet voice, “June is my stepmother.”
“Oh,” said Allie. “Like she’s your . . .”
“My dad’s wife.”
“Oh,” she said again. “I see. Okay, well, maybe you’re not the person I’m supposed to be talking to about this.”
“Maybe not,” the boy agreed, his eyes still boring into the steering wheel.
“It’s possible, too, that I’m wrong.”
Gunner pointed straight ahead. “The grave’s over there.”
Allie watched the boy a moment longer, then got out. As she walked, she expected to hear Gunner take off in the truck, but there were only the sounds of the wind and crickets and a highway shushing in the distance beyond a row of willow trees. And then there it was in front of her, the stone she hadn’t been able to conjure in her memory. SONIA LOWERY SENN. A simple stone after all. Gray, not big, not small. A reasonable, self-assured monument. Self-possessed. What had she been expecting? To hate the stone and have Victor to blame? To love it and feel joy at its rightness? But it was only a stone, similar to some others around. She stood and stared, trying to have a certain feeling about it, about her sister being beneath it, about anything. A feeling to indulge or refuse. A distraction, a catharsis, anything. And then, as she waited for something to occur to her, as she ran up and down the aisles of her memory, she found herself coming suddenly back into the present, her mind emptying out and her eyes tracking something real instead, on the stone, a shiny little coin tramping across Sonia’s name.
//
Inside the administration building, a short woman in a skirt suit came rushing out of an office to meet them. She had blond bangs and a sharply upturned nose, a dappling of crumbs on her navy-blue blouse. One look at the beetle in Gunner’s hands and the blood left her face. She dumped her uneaten sandwich into the waste bin and teased the creature into the empty ziplock.
“Where the hell is Victor?” Gunner asked her.
The woman ran to her desk phone and frantically dialed a number. “Victor,” she shouted. “Jesus Christ,
Vic, it’s June. We’ve got an oak slayer on the property. Call me back right now.”
“ ‘Vic’?” the boy asked, his eyes darting around his stepmother’s office. “Since when do you call him Vic?”
June stared back at him, her eyes ballooning in the sockets. “He became Vic when I realized we don’t have any time to waste here. Now call your father and tell him you’re gonna be late tonight.”
Gunner reached for the phone on her desk, but she snatched it away and dialed another number, listened, shook her head. Then she hung up and turned, finally, to Allie. “Who the hell are you?”
“I’m Victor’s sister-in-law.”
This information seemed to neither surprise nor impress June, who swiped the crumbs off her blouse and said, “Cemetery’s closed. I’m taking you to the train station. Gunner, lock the gate behind us. Victor’s gonna want to spray.”
“He already sprayed last night,” said Allie.
June, who’d started toward the door, turned abruptly, putting her huge eyes on Allie now. “Well, dear, he’s gonna want to spray again.”
“In the middle of the day?” Gunner asked. He looked at the phone again. Everyone did. It didn’t ring.
//
June’s Cherokee was a mess of fast-food wrappers and parking tickets. A sun-damaged photo of a red-bearded man who must’ve been Gunner’s cuckolded father peered up from the cup holder. June drove leaning forward, hanging on to the wheel. She might’ve been prettier, Allie thought, if not so angry looking. Allie imagined there was a large handgun in this woman’s purse, in her glove compartment, under the driver’s seat maybe. It was possible Victor had been kidding about sleeping with this woman. Allie hoped, now, that it wasn’t true, though she couldn’t decide what stakes her mind had been attaching to the possibility. She tried to imagine Victor in this woman’s hard embrace. Then she thought of him folded up inside the gnarled burning wreck of his truck.
“Don’t start worrying about him now,” June said as she pulled into the train station parking lot. “Victor will figure this out. He’ll be fine.”
Allie checked her phone. She’d dialed Victor three times on the way to the station. No answer. No calls back.
June stopped the truck in front of the stairway heading up to the platform. The train rumbled closer from an unseen distance.
“Do you think he’s okay?” Allie knew it now, as the words left her mouth, that he was already dead somewhere. Hanging from a well-loved oak maybe, or bleeding out inside the crushed cab of his spray truck at the bottom of the quarry. Or, if he wasn’t dead yet, he would be soon, one way or another. A man waiting for total darkness. “I could stay if you guys need me to help with something.”
June shook her head. “I don’t want this to sound mean,” she said, “but having you here is making Victor completely fucking insane.” She paused to consider these words, or perhaps it was the train’s distance she was trying to gauge, wondering how much longer she’d have to endure the presence of this wealthy grief-wounded woman in her car, in her town. “That did sound mean, didn’t it? I’m sorry, dear. None of this is your fault.”
//
As the Prairie Stater carried her away, Allie decided it felt good to be leaving Wicklow even if the idea of returning home didn’t. There were Amish on board again, or Mennonites. Something. But they were real this time. Their faith in refusal was authentic, Allie could tell.
She glanced at her phone again. How many times per minute must she send her mind flying off the edge of that quarry with poor Victor? His grief was greater than hers, she realized, more damaging, more isolating. She checked her phone one last time, then turned it off. A minor relief pulsed through her as the screen went black. Why is it, she wondered, that the pain of others makes us feel less stricken?
//
In the city, she changed trains, back in Tower Hill by midafternoon, getting off one station early at the platform where the depressed commuters were throwing themselves away. She stood there for a time staring at the tracks, indulging the ghosts of their greater pain.
Then the long walk home, past the houses of friends, past the downtown full of boutiques and salons, past the Spot where Sonia had died.
“Allie,” Andrew said, gasping her name. The children, oblivious until that moment, appeared to fill suddenly with the anxiety their father was exhaling. “I’ve been calling and calling,” he said. “I thought you’d have been home hours ago.”
“I got off at the wrong station,” she said. “My phone was off. I needed to take a walk.”
“A walk?” he said, his voice bending with curiosity.
“What are you guys doing?” Allie shed her purse, her shoes. Her family was at the dining room table huddled around a big plastic cylinder. “Is that . . . Is that your old food dehydrator?”
Andrew smiled sheepishly. “You said ‘jerky’ last night on the phone and it got me thinking we should make some.” He looked down at the mess they’d made—strips of raw meat lined up on a serving platter, the girls’ initials drawn in drifts of spilled salt. “I kinda miss jerky,” he said.
Allie came around the table to hug the twins, still in their pajamas. They’d all stayed home, they reported gleefully, on a Monday, just because. Andrew was wearing the sweatpants Allie had bought him years ago so they could run together. So she could have someone to run with when they still lived in the city in the crappy neighborhood. So she could have someone there beside her to talk to and to listen to also—his stomach cramp complaints, his shin splints, his possibly collapsing arches—someone there who was suffering just a little bit worse than you.
BEFORE THE RUST
As Rick LaForge pulled up in front of his best friend’s house, the curtains split open and Janice Page’s face appeared. A miracle, he thought. Time and tragedy undone. But then the fantasy broke apart and Rick understood what he was really seeing.
Glennis in her thirties had become an identical twin to her mother’s final self. The same darkened eyes, the same long hair framing that blameless pout. Rick hadn’t seen much of her in adulthood. Distance was best, he’d decided long ago, as nothing good had ever come of his attempts to help her out in the past. With her husband in Grassland up the road, she’d come back to Wicklow to live with her father, and this had led Rick to avoid Emmit too, in what turned out to be the man’s final years.
He stepped out of his car and waved.
Glennis pressed her middle finger against the glass.
By the time he’d let himself in with the key beneath the mat, she’d vacated the front room, leaving a long crooked dent in the couch cushions. The coffee table was littered with empty bottles of tonic water.
“Glennis,” he called out, “I’m only here to check on you.”
A toilet flushed.
“I know you’re sad right now,” he continued loudly, “and I’m not gonna hang around and try to make you feel better if it’s alone time you’re looking for . . .”
A door squeaked, footsteps padded closer. She appeared in the kitchen doorway, blinking through her hangover. “So,” she said, “what are they saying?”
“Saying?” he asked. “Who?”
“People.”
“What people?”
“The townspeople, Rick. The people of Wicklow. What are they saying about my dad?”
“It’s only been a day,” he said. “And besides, there’s nothing to say. Nothing bad, I mean. What’s to say? He lived a decent life, it should’ve been better.”
“That’s quite a eulogy.” She turned back into the kitchen.
“Wait,” he said. “I came here to help.”
Glennis pulled several juice containers out of the refrigerator and set them onto the counter. “I don’t need help, Rick.”
“I’m talking about with the funeral arrangements.”
“Oh.” She closed the fridge and leaned against it. “Yeah, okay.”
“Do you think your dad wanted one?”
“One what?”
“A funeral, Glen. Christ, go back to sleep if you’re still drunk.”
Glennis winced. “Okay, let me think. A funeral. I don’t know. What if we just did something small, here at the house?”
“Then a burial?” he asked.
She sighed, looked at the ceiling.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Umm, nothing. Never mind. A burial, yeah. He should be next to my mother.”
“I’ll take care of it,” Rick said. “But you’ve got to pull yourself together.”
She gathered up her juice cartons and carried them into the front room, where she lay back down on the couch and turned on the TV.
“You’re gonna need to clean yourself up a little for this.” He stood staring at her, listening to the TV stutter through channels. “Are you listening to me, Glennis? Are you hearing this?”
//
As he pulled into the cemetery, Rick couldn’t help but recall the speculation that had seized Wicklow in the wake of Janice’s death three decades earlier. He’d felt their stares during her funeral, those supposed friends and neighbors, heard them whispering during the burial service. For months the rumors persisted, for years. It was possible that some still wondered about him. People believed what they wanted to believe. If they’d witnessed your last-second touchdown pass in the state quarterfinals, then you received the benefit of doubts. If they could imagine you’d one day return to Wicklow to help stave off economic annihilation, then they thought twice about joining the chorus of rumors. But if all they remembered was that you’d dated Janice Page in high school and that after she dumped you for your best friend you carved her initials deep into both your biceps, then you were a pathetic lovelorn murderer.
“Can I help you?” an unseen voice barked.
Rick shuffled across the marble floor of the cemetery’s administration building and peered into an office.