“Come on, Marcus.”
No. Please, Aubrey … come back.
“We need to get away from here. Come on, son.”
“I’m not leaving her here.”
“Not like this,” Chuck said. “The Constabulary would end up on my porch, and Belinda can’t lie to save her life. But the ground might be too hard to bury the body.”
The body. She wasn’t a body, she was a person. But the person wasn’t here anymore, so this was just a body. Marcus could hide it and leave it and think about the person later. He jumped down onto the snow, grasped the wrists, tugged it down off the truck. The legs flopped into the snow, and the torso bumped his shins.
“Somebody needs to go back to the kid,” Chuck said.
“Go.” Marcus scooped up the thing, the shell. Its knees and its neck bent over his arms.
He carried the body into the woods that stretched on this side of the ditch. Unruly brush reached for his bare hands and face, his hair. He ducked, sidestepped, then shoved through. The snap of twigs announced his intrusion. When the road was concealed, even Chuck’s headlights, with nothing but the sound of the engine to guide him back, Marcus knelt in a small clearing. Snow blew in lazy circles along the ground, drifted against one tree. He lowered the body and pulled his arms back. It didn’t look much like Aubrey, after all, more like a doll that was supposed to resemble her but didn’t. The sleet had softened again. Flakes settled on the body’s red sweater and didn’t melt.
She hadn’t taken Lee’s coat this time.
“Aubrey,” he said, and something colder than the air knifed his chest.
A twig had torn a bloodless gap in the skin of her cheek. The snow might provide a burial, but not for long. Not out here with coyotes and foxes and other animals.
“I’m sorry.”
His heavy feet retraced his path to the road. He leaned inside the car. Chuck sat on the passenger’s side and rocked Elliott as if he knew what he was doing.
“Screwdriver?” Marcus said.
“Got some tools in the trunk. What for?”
Marcus reached down and tugged the release lever. The trunk sprang open. Not a single car had passed them in all these minutes. The solitude had to survive till he’d finished this final task. He found a Philips in Chuck’s sparse toolbox and crunched through the snow back to the truck. Cans of formula and the rest of the diaper package lay in a corner of the truck bed. He threw the stuff in Chuck’s trunk first. Then he worked as fast as his cold fingers would allow—not really cold, though, not like Aubrey was cold—to remove the license plate, in case somebody found the truck before he and Chuck could return for it. They had to, right away. Chuck’s tractor could haul it out of the ditch. And they had to bury the body.
He slid into the car on the driver’s side and tossed the metal rectangle onto the floor. Chuck held the baby out to him.
“Good thinking,” Chuck said with a nod at the license plate.
“No.”
“Sure it was, covers your tracks.”
“No, you hold him. I’ll drive.”
“I’d rather you—”
Marcus backed the car away from the ditch and cracked his window. The drive to the Vitale house was only a few minutes. Chuck kept talking until Marcus reached the twisting driveway. Then the quiet resettled, weighted like the spruce trees on either side of them, sagging with snow. Silence was good. Marcus let it shroud him and fill him up. He pictured his hands holding it, blanket soft, not warm exactly but less cold than his hands, less cold than the hole in his chest.
He parked the car. He waded through five inches of snow to the back of the house and rapped hard on the glass door. Chuck trailed somewhere behind him with Elliott. After a minute, the curtains swung aside, and light poured into Marcus’s face. Belinda bounced up onto her toes and tugged the old door open wide with an anxiousness that jiggled at least her arms, if not other parts of her. She waved him and Chuck inside and hurried to shut the door.
A voice drifted quietly from the TV across the room. “And that ends the two-minute minor for interference and Detroit’s now back at full strength with one and a half minutes left in the second period …”
“Now, Marcus, I want the whole story, as fast as you can tell it—my heavens.” She stared at the baby.
The whole story. She wanted words.
“Pearl,” Chuck said.
Her eyes jumped from the baby in her husband’s arms to Marcus, then back to Chuck. She stepped close and eased Elliott into her arms.
“This is the same baby, that young girl’s baby,” she said. “Where is she?”
Marcus couldn’t unlock his teeth. Splinters of pain filtered from his body to his brain. His head, his neck. The spasm that clawed at his shoulders was starting to reach down into his back.
“Something’s happened, Pearl.” Chuck glanced at Marcus, then cupped his wife’s elbow and guided her to the couch.
“Marcus.” Belinda tilted her chin toward the love seat.
Maybe she was right, and he should sit. But his knees locked like his jaw.
“Chuck, what in heaven’s name—”
“Aubrey Weston died tonight.”
Belinda went still, but not completely still. Her pulse still beat in her neck. Her chest rose and fell. “Oh, no.”
“There was an accident,” Chuck said. “With Marcus’s truck. She was driving here, to ask us for help, and she spun out on the ice, went off the road.”
“She was … but why was she driving? Marcus, why weren’t you driving?”
Belinda should stop talking. Leave the silence alone. She looked up at him, and tears washed her face. Why was she crying? What would that fix?
“Oh, son, what happened? Didn’t you get her to a hospital? They might could do something, they—”
“Belinda,” Chuck said.
“She was gone too fast?”
Yeah. Too fast.
“But the baby’s not hurt?” Belinda rocked Elliott as if the motion could heal hidden injuries. “Marcus, you’re not hurt? How could she be the only—”
“Marcus wasn’t there. She took the truck, and we found it.”
“But how, why, why would she be out there like that? Why wouldn’t you be driving her, if she needed to come here?”
“Belinda.” Chuck squeezed her arm, and the rocking ceased. “Knock it off.”
“It don’t make sense—”
“He look like he wants an inquisition right now?”
What Marcus didn’t want was her gaze crinkling at him, warm with care, trying to view his insides. His feet thawed enough to step back.
“Heaven help us, Chuck, she was just a girl, and this poor child—”
Chuck grunted at his wife, lurched to his feet, and headed for the kitchen.
“We’ve got to go back,” Marcus said. “Now.”
Chuck nodded. “In a second.”
The moment Chuck vanished through the doorway, Belinda tore the quiet into fragments too thin for Marcus to hold. “I don’t understand what went on. Why was she coming here? Did you tell her to? Was there danger?”
Elliott’s heels beat Belinda’s arm with an alternating rhythm, and the gurgling noise didn’t sound unhappy. She must be soft enough. Marcus’s legs brought him closer to Belinda and her questions, closer to the little person in her arms that had just lost his mother. That would ache someday, when Elliott was old enough to understand. He wouldn’t remember Aubrey. Maybe Marcus could write a letter. He’d have to describe not just her hair and her eyes and the curve of her nose, but also the funny tugging on her earlobe, the nightmare screams of fear for Elliott, the insistence that every child should be raised with books. The kindness of her massaging hands. The willingness to trade herself for the people she loved, and the peace that cloaked her when she held her baby, when she embraced the forgivenes
s of God.
“Marcus?” Belinda’s crowing had waned to a whisper. “What happened?”
“She didn’t listen to me.”
“What do you mean?”
He meant what he said. She’d galloped off into the night and killed herself and left her baby. She’d left her body, and now it lay unprotected, submerging in snow.
“What did you tell her?”
“To stay.” He should have hidden his keys. He should have rigged the door with some kind of alarm, something loud enough to wake even him. He shouldn’t have fallen asleep at all.
“Why’d she want to leave?” Belinda said.
“I should’ve known she’d do this.”
“Did she tell you she would?”
Of course not … did she? “I … don’t know.”
“Maybe you weren’t listening to her, either.”
But he had listened. She’d spouted panic, mostly. She’d said … well, she’d demanded he take her to Chuck’s. Later, they’d talked about forgiveness. She’d prayed. For Lee. If a hint of her plan had hidden in her words, he couldn’t decipher it even now.
“You are utterly incapable of listening.”
Maybe Lee was right. If he listened better, he might be home right now, with Aubrey furious at his thwarting of her plan.
The seal of a can cracked open as Chuck strode back into the room. A yeasty smell attacked as the beer fizzed. Marcus’s headache spiked.
“Help yourself, more in the fridge,” Chuck said.
The fall was too fresh. Barely on his feet again, and he was going to cave in. Again. Right now. It didn’t matter, anyway. Nobody left to know.
“You don’t look so hot. It’ll help.”
“Yeah,” Marcus said.
“Well, go get one for the road, then.”
His feet carried him into the kitchen. He didn’t need this. He wanted it, to stop the tremors in his hands and fill up the holes inside. He didn’t want this. He needed it, so he could do what had to be done. His hand closed around the refrigerator door’s handle. Nobody saw.
He jerked his hand back and fled the kitchen as if distance from cans of beer could make distance from himself.
48
He lifted the body from the snow. He set it on the blue plastic tarp and rolled it up. He lifted it again, into the bed of the truck Chuck’s tractor had hauled from the ditch. Drive. Back to Chuck’s, past the driveway, past the frozen pond, over a barely cleared path into the snowy woods.
He got a shovel and started to dig.
Square blade and hard ground, not an easy combination. More muscle, more weight. Turn the ground. Break it up. Sweat and break.
“Marcus.”
A corner of the blade bent down, but the ground was giving in. The hole deepened, widened, a dark mouth against the snow, a yelling mouth. Not that he heard anything, but he should. Some sound ought to be coming from somewhere, to drown the thunk of shovel against dirt, the clink when the blade rammed into a rock.
“That should be enough.”
Of course it wasn’t enough.
“Marcus. You can stop.”
Stop what? Stop failing them all? No. If he could do that, a corpse wouldn’t lie in the back of his truck.
Hands on the wooden handle tugged it away.
“It’s deep enough.”
Over the top of a gray scarf, Chuck’s face peered at him. Reddened with cold and creased with worry, which was pointless, since the body was already dead.
He climbed out of the grave. Traipsed back to the truck and lifted the body again. The tarp crinkled around it. Then he was kneeling to lower it into the silent maw of dirt, then covering it up, shovelfuls of dirt raining down.
“Okay, that’s all. You ready to go?”
He snapped two twigs from a bare, poking bush. Now, something to fasten them together.
“What’re you doing?”
A loop of twine dangled from the shovel’s wooden handle. He yanked, but it wouldn’t snap, only tightened. Come on, break. Chuck’s hands stole the shovel again. He pulled off one glove and loosened the knot of twine.
“Here. Are you making a cross?”
He had to remove his gloves, too, to tie the twigs together.
“Marcus? Are you hearing me at all?”
He knelt beside the snow-flecked mound.
“Come on, son, I need you to say something.”
He pushed the cross into the ground. It broke. The two pieces dangled, then flopped apart in his hands. He held them together.
Chuck crouched beside him. “Don’t worry about it. Come on, we need to go.”
Not until this was fixed.
“Marcus.”
The more he pushed the twigs together, the more their edges frayed. The fit was ruined now. Even glue would leave them ragged at the break, if he had glue.
Chuck scooted nearer, in front of him now. “Marcus, it’s time to go. Let me have that.”
His hands curled around the twigs. One of them punctured his palm, but he couldn’t let go. Chuck’s fingers pried at his, grasped his wrist. It wasn’t a wrestling match or a tug-of-war but both, and then the cross fell into the snow and Marcus struck out at something. No give when his punches landed, just an explosion in his knuckles, and finally that dark mouth he’d filled with a body, filled with dirt, wasn’t silent anymore. It yelled now. For the body it had swallowed tonight and every other person ever failed by his uselessness.
He yelled until he was empty. Until his fists drooped and bled into the snow.
His forehead leaned against smooth birch bark. He shivered.
“Are you with me, son?”
Marcus lifted his head and remembered. Oh, no. But Chuck’s face wasn’t a pulp of punches.
Chuck’s mouth twitched. “I know what you’re thinking, but in fifty-five years, I did learn how to duck. When you missed me, you lit into that tree. Let me see your hands.”
Marcus raised them from the snow. The throbbing in his left hand pulled a hiss through his teeth.
“Easy does it. I tried to stop you, but by then you didn’t know I was here.” Chuck cradled Marcus’s hand in both of his and squinted. “Not enough light out here. Does it feel busted?”
He shook his head, though maybe it did.
“Come on up to the house.”
49
When Belinda met them at the door with Elliott in the crook of one arm, Marcus’s hands clenched and widened the splits in his knuckles. A drop of blood spattered to the gray rug. Belinda stared down at it, then at Marcus’s hands. She cupped a hand over Elliott’s eyes.
“Stay here, Pearl. I’ll fix him up.”
Chuck’s hand weighted Marcus’s shoulder, shepherded him into the bathroom that seemed even smaller with its dark blue walls. “Blood makes her woozy. Hold your hand under the light there.”
Marcus pushed up his coat sleeve, flexed his fingers, blinked the wince away. “I’ll just go home.”
“And patch yourself up one-handed?”
Not like he hadn’t done it before. Or tried to, anyway.
“Stand still.” Chuck dug through a drawer of Band-Aids and bug spray. He held up a spool of white medical tape. “Great stuff. All-purpose.”
“I can take care of—”
“You’re not driving that truck on the roads, either, or didn’t you notice it’s totaled?”
Marcus thrust his hand under the faucet. It throbbed in the icy stream, then numbed a little. Water swirled down the drain, first red, then pink. Yeah, this looked familiar, but it wasn’t as bad as the last time he’d tried to beat up a piece of wood, when the water stayed red for twelve minutes. After a while, Chuck shut the water off and snagged a towel from the chrome wall rack.
“It was an accident, Marcus.” Chuck dabbed his hand dry and ignored the blood
now spotting the pale blue towel. “But you’re thinking about pitching a tent on the side of a mountain somewhere and never coming back.”
Not a bad idea. Chuck pulled a length of medical tape and bit off the end. Lee would lecture him for half an hour about lack of sanitation. A smile twitched for release. A burning filled Marcus’s chest.
“But what would that accomplish, son? You tell me.” Chuck stretched first one length of tape, then another, over Marcus’s knuckles. “Well?”
Marcus’s teeth clenched, half to stifle the gasp when the tape tugged at raw skin. Blood soaked through, but didn’t seep around it. Lee would say that was good.
“See, in the big picture, hiding yourself away is nothing but selfish. Pretty clear there are a lot of folks that need you to—”
“Nobody needs me.” The words ricocheted off the mirror and close walls.
Chuck pressed the last piece of tape to Marcus’s hand, stood back, and hooked a thumb through his empty belt loop. “Look what you’ve done so far.”
“You don’t know what I’ve done.” He brushed past Chuck, into the hallway.
That same hand fell onto his shoulder again, held him still.
Leave me alone. “Some mountain would be better. For everybody. I’m just going to keep on—”
Chuck held out his hands, palms up, and spoke quietly for the first time since Marcus had met him. “Okay, son. Okay.”
Oh. Marcus had been shouting. He stalked toward the door. The ache in his chest didn’t need witnesses, especially if he broke down and started hitting things again. He passed Belinda in the kitchen, but he couldn’t look at her. His right hand fumbled the lock on the sliding glass door.
“Marcus,” Chuck said.
His hand stilled on the lock. Let me go.
“That’s it, then? You’re writing yourself off?”
His arms remembered the weight of Aubrey’s body. The rest of him remembered the cluster of powerless paramedics, Mom stretched out on the kitchen floor, mouth open and eyes shut.
“Everyone’s done something they can’t take back, son.”
Seek and Hide: A Novel (Haven Seekers) Page 29