Descent

by Tim Johnston

  The young deputy sent him on back, and at Grant’s rap on the doorjamb Joe Kinney swiveled and brought his chair level with a sharp mechanical outcry. “Well now,” Kinney said. He got to his feet and Grant came forward to shake his hand. The sheriff’s hair was getting whiter and thinner, coming into the blown, snowy style of his father. But unlike Emmet, the sheriff was yet a big man, with a high, hard gut he wore as if according to some official stipulation.

  Grant told the sheriff he’d got a hankering for the Black Bear, and Kinney, hitching his thumbs in his belt, affirmed that it was worth the drive.

  In the outer room the young deputy opened a drawer, shut it, and muttered something.

  “Do you mind if I close this door one minute, Joe?” Grant said, and the sheriff said, “No, sir. Shut it and sit down. You want Donny to get you a coffee?”

  “No, thanks. I’ll only take a minute here.”

  “Take as long as you like.”

  On the desk between them a walkie-talkie faintly hissed. Grant knew the exact heft of it, its leathery, electronic smell. Off to the right, staged with a father’s pride, stood the picture of Kinney’s daughter on her horse at the rodeo, cowboy hat sailing behind her.

  Kinney offered him a cigarette and he took it and leaned to meet the lighter. The sheriff lit himself and said, “Everything all right down there at Dad’s?”

  “Well,” Grant said, and the other man said, “Shit, don’t tell me he fell off another roof—”

  “No, nothing like that.”

  “Man his age, climbing on roofs.”

  “Nothing like that,” Grant said. He gazed critically at the tip of his cigarette. “I just wondered if you knew Billy’s come home again.”

  The sheriff leaned back and drew on his cigarette. “Last I heard he was in Nevada.”

  Grant sat forward to tip his ash into the glass ashtray. “No, he’s back. I thought you might like to know about it, if you didn’t already.”

  “I appreciate that, Grant. But I guess if anything was wrong I’d of heard from Dad.”

  Grant nodded. “It’s not my place, Joe. But your dad and Billy. Well, your dad’s getting on.”

  The sheriff smiled crookedly. “I know he is, Grant. But if you’re sitting here telling me he can’t handle that piss-ant little brother of mine, well, I’d say you ought to know better by now.”

  “I’m not trying to tell you anything, Joe. I probably shouldn’t have said anything at all. I just thought you might like to know he’s come home again, that’s all.”

  The walkie-talkie crackled, throwing a quick, reflexive flurry into Grant’s heart. Kinney scooped it up and frowned at it and set it down again.

  Grant said, “Well,” and he stabbed out his cigarette and began to rise. But the sheriff motioned with his hand and said, “Now, hold on a minute, Grant. I got something to tell you too.”

  “All right.”

  “It’s about Angela.”

  “What about her?”

  “She’s been calling again. Day, night, it doesn’t matter. ‘What are you doing, Sheriff? What’s your plan? What are you people doing up there to find my girl?’ She’s been working that phone and . . . I don’t know how else to put it, Grant, but she don’t sound like she’s got both feet altogether on solid ground. I’m sorry for what she’s had to go through—what you’ve both had to go through—you know that. But . . .” He lifted a hand and dropped it again.

  Grant studied his own hands. The truncated two fingers. He’d heard this tone from the man before—that first time, that first morning, when the sheriff wanted to know what a fifteen-year-old boy was doing way up on that mountain by himself.

  Kinney tapped his cigarette, staring fixedly at the ashtray. He had something more to say but he wasn’t going to say it, not today. Behind him was the large green map of the front range; in a few square yards of paper and ink it contained all the millions of true, godless places a person might be. How long was long enough when it wasn’t your child?

  And when it was?

  “I’m sorry to hear this, Joe,” Grant said. “I’ll talk to her.”

  Kinney shook his head and stubbed out his cigarette. “I just thought you might like to know, that’s all.” He came around the desk and opened the door and followed Grant into the outer room. At the front door Grant turned and the two men shook hands again.

  “I want to thank you for keeping that up,” Grant said.

  The sheriff didn’t turn to look at the bulletin board. He looked down and scuffed the old floorboards with the sole of his boot and he studied the scuffmark a long time.

  “I don’t believe it’s in the papers here yet, I haven’t looked. But I heard from a lawman yesterday about this gal in Texas got kidnapped when she was twelve. Dragged into a car right in front of her house. Fifteen years ago and they just now found her. Living in a garage all this time behind the man’s house not ten miles from her home. Neighbors never knew a thing. Say they never saw her. Never saw the little girl she had by the man, neither.”

  The sheriff looked up. “Twenty-seven years old now, this girl. A little daughter same age she was when she got taken and who don’t know a thing about this world but that garage.” He drew a breath through his nostrils and shook his head.

  Grant held his eyes.

  “I didn’t know if I should tell you about it or not,” Kinney said. “I guess I decided I should.”

  Grant nodded. “Thanks, Joe.”

  “Oh, hell.” The sheriff drew himself up. “You’d of read about it anyways.”

  14

  She walked in the rain’s aftermath along wet sidewalks and under dripping trees with the clouds coming apart in the sky like rotted fabric. The old brick library was gone and the new one with its soaring glass facade like a church stood in its place. There was a history. During construction, people had called it the Lindsay Suskind Library because it was Lindsay Suskind who’d gone rolling backward down the wheelchair ramp of the old building, and it was Lindsay’s mother, Jeanne, newly certified in the law, who threatened action.

  Wide, smooth sidewalks now coming and going, glass doors parting at ground level, book aisles like boulevards. Walking into the building was like walking into a botanical atrium, plant life and the sound of water chuckling somewhere, bright shafts of daylight. But the smell of the new library was like the smell of the old library: paper, bindings, the faint whiff of mold. Like the smell of buses, it was a smell of childhood. Of young girls out on their own on a summer day. Long empty days of sunburn and ice cream and the pursuing eyes of boys. Of men.

  Angela stood staring at the new releases. Picking one up. Putting it back. Choosing another.

  On a stool behind the counter sat a plump older woman who’d been at the old library and who had a way of smiling that made you believe she remembered you, though it had been years. Angela handed her the book and looked beyond her. A seated young man with a silver hoop earring, gazing into a computer screen. That was all.

  “Does Lindsay Suskind still work here?” she asked the woman.

  The woman scanned the book and smiled. “Oh, yes. She’s taking her lunch break.”

  Angela glanced about.

  “She’ll be back in fifteen minutes, if you care to wait.”

  Angela took the book and her card. “Thank you, it’s not important.”

  She walked into the cafe annex and ordered a small black coffee and sat at one of the smaller tables and opened up the book.

  The girl was parked at one of the larger tables, reading. Dipping her fork from time to time into a Tupperware. In a final act of amends or whatever you wanted to call it, the new library had installed Lindsay herself at the checkout desk, where she excelled. After a year, Angela heard, she earned her library science degree through the evening and weekend program at the university where her father taught and slept with graduate students, and the library had promoted her accordingly. Mike and Jeanne, separately, were prone to boasting about her in a way they hadn’t when
the girl ran track.

  Angela remembered the day—her own daughter walking in, hair still dripping from the Owensby pool, so brown and lean in her bikini, so beautiful it startled her. As if some undressed woman had come striding through her front door. You walked home like that? she was about to say when Caitlin ran damp and sobbing into her arms.

  What is it, sweetheart, what happened? Her mind leaping to the worst—rape, pregnancy, HIV. It was like falling into blackness. The end of everything. A daughter was your life; it was as simple as that. Her body was the only body, her heart the only heart. The most absolute, the most terrible love.

  The July sun was burning in the kitchen window. The air was roaring. The girl couldn’t, or wouldn’t, speak; her body was convulsing (the feel of that body pressed to hers, the wet and sun-hot skin, the softness and the firmness, the smell of the pool, of coconut, of the sun itself in her skin, in her dripping hair!).

  It’s all right, just tell me, just tell me, sweetheart . . . She’d heard the sirens, she would remember later.

  Lindsay, Caitlin said at last. Oh, Mom, it was awful . . . and Angela holding her the tighter and her heart crying, Thank God thank God thank God, and only later thinking of her own sister, Faith, diving off the dock.

  Then the day, the bright December day perhaps a week after returning from Colorado when she answered the door and a dark-haired girl was on the stoop in a wheelchair and for just a moment, just an instant, she’d thought, Caitlin.

  Angela closed the book and walked over, and the girl looked up. Smiling in recognition, and then true recognition taking hold and the smile falling.

  “Mrs. Courtland,” she said. “Gosh. Hello.”

  “I’m sorry to bother you, Lindsay. I know you’re having lunch. I just wanted to say hi.”

  The girl closed her book and set down her fork. “No, gosh.” She put a hand on Angela’s wrist. “Would you like to sit down?”

  “No, you’re eating—”

  “Please, sit down.”

  Angela pulled out the chair and sat and the girl studied her, searching her face with large brown eyes. For a moment Angela was lost in them. Why had she come? What did she think she would say to this girl, this young woman whom she’d once picked up and dropped off, fed, watched over like one of her own?

  “Mrs. Courtland, is there . . . I mean has something . . . ?”

  “Oh,” Angela said. “No. No, I’m sorry, I should have said so right away.”

  “It’s just, I haven’t seen you here. I mean I’ve never seen you here before. I thought maybe . . .”

  Angela shook her head.

  “I’m so sorry,” said the girl.

  A man came to the counter and ordered something in a low voice, as though he didn’t want anyone to know, and the barista girl set to making it.

  “I saw Ariel this morning,” Angela said.

  “You did?”

  “Yes. I was substituting.”

  “You were?”

  The girl didn’t want to look or sound surprised, Angela knew, but she couldn’t help it, she had no guile. Her heart had been through too much.

  “I’m sorry,” Lindsay said, “I thought you were . . .”

  “I was. But that was months ago.”

  Lindsay nodded. “Did she behave herself—Ariel?”

  “Yes.”

  Angela stared at her hands where they lay upon the book. They looked like someone else’s. Her heart was aching.

  “She’s gotten to be a pain at home,” said the girl.

  “I’m sorry, Lindsay.”

  Lindsay shrugged. “She’s what they call a teenager, I believe.”

  “Not for that.” She held the girl’s eyes. “I’m sorry for the way I was that day you came to the house.”

  Lindsay shook her head. “Don’t, Mrs. Courtland—I shouldn’t have come like that, out of the blue. It must have been a shock.”

  “It was. But everything was. Everything. I didn’t know what to say to you.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “No, it’s not. I never came to see you at the hospital either. After your accident. I’m sorry for that too. That was hideous of me.”

  “It was hard for people . . .”

  “You were friends with my daughter. I was friends with your mother. I should’ve come.”

  Lindsay looked down, and for a moment Angela saw her in flight, one long leg thrown out before her and the other folded under like a wing as she took the hurdle. Effortless, magnificent.

  “Caitlin came,” Lindsay said. “Every day after school. Or after practice. I’ll never forget that, Mrs. Courtland.”

  Angela smiled. Lindsay smiled. Without thinking, Angela reached and thumbed the tears from the girl’s face, one side, then the other.

  “I’m sorry I ambushed you like this. I’m sorry to upset you. I just wanted to talk to you.”

  “I’m not upset. I’m glad to see you.”

  Angela stood to go.

  “Mrs. Courtland?” said Lindsay.

  “Yes?”

  “I know about what happened.”

  Angela stood looking at her.

  “Between my mom and your—with Mr. Courtland. Years ago. I know about it. I know that’s why you and my mom stopped being friends. I know that’s why you didn’t come to the hospital.”

  Angela stared at her. Then she remembered—but it was like something she’d lost, or buried. She had no idea what it once felt like to know that her husband had slept with—was sleeping with—Jeanne Suskind. She thought of her own mother in the nursing home, who sometimes called her Faith, who asked, Where’s Angela? Did the mind break down or did it simply correct? Vectoring away from pain? They’d never told her mother about Caitlin and they never would. The old woman would die without ever having lost her granddaughter.

  “That was so long ago, sweetheart,” Angela said at last. “None of that matters anymore.”

  “I know. But Caitlin and I talked about it sometimes. I think it made us closer. Almost like sisters. Weird as that sounds.”

  Angela nodded. She smiled. “I’m glad I got to see you, Lindsay. Will you please tell your mother I said hello?”

  “I will. And please—” The girl’s eyes filled again. “Please come back.”

  Lindsay watched her walk away. From where she sat she saw Angela pass through the library’s automated glass doors and stop to open the small brushed-nickel door of the deposit chute, lift her book, and drop it in. She seemed to listen for the dull bang, then she let go the little door and walked on.

  15

  A whistle shrilled and three girls burst bare-legged down the black lanes, ponytails whipping, but then pulled up laughing and loped onto the field where other girls lay strewn and twisting on the grass. Cross-country girls, not sprinters, they’d mostly been freshmen when Caitlin was a senior, yet they all knew her and they all knew him, and when one girl contorting in the grass looked up the hill and saw him, and tapped the hip of the girl nearest to her, he turned and limped away.

  Deep painful blue of sky, the first stains of autumn in the elms and oaks.

  The buses were long gone and there was nothing to see or hear at the front of the building but the snap hooks lashing at the high barren flagpole with that silvery hollow sound, and when he reached the street he turned south toward the railroad tracks. VFW stood for Veterans of Foreign Wars and the old vets would hail him and arm him with a pool stick and tell him stories of shitstorms in the jungle where men, boys really, not much older than he, best buddies, brothers, were there one second and gone the next. Headless. Cut in two. They wouldn’t let him smoke or drink. They called him the Young American. They swore they would find the piece of shit who did that to his leg and make the cocksucker beg them to put a bullet in his cocksucking eye. The old vets knew nothing about Caitlin—there one second and gone the next.

  Before he reached the tracks a truck pulled alongside him in the street, and the passenger’s window descended and behind the wheel was his fa
ther. The boy stopped, and the blue Chevy stopped too.

  I was up at the school, his father said. Up and down those halls. Where were you?

  Just walking. The boy felt dizzy. The sun appeared to yo-yo in the sky. What are you doing here?

  Came to talk to you.

  The boy waited.

  It’s not about Caitlin, he said. Hop in, he said, and the boy breathed. He slipped the backpack from his shoulder and hauled himself up into the cab.

  Where were you going?

  Nowhere. Just walking.

  Just walking, his father said. That knee must be feeling pretty good.

  The boy shrugged. Though the windows were down, the cab held a humid personal odor like a bed just vacated. It was the smell of a man’s long drive alone. His uncounted cigarettes and coffees. His souring skin and all his human emanations, including his thoughts, all the miles and miles of them collected within the cab like a dew that would lift from the glass on the tip of a finger.

  The Chevy joggled over the tracks and Grant turned left and drove past the old VFW lounge with its antiaircraft gun aimed at the sky. The faded flag lifting feebly from the pole and falling again.

  You’ve got your aunt Grace pretty concerned with all this just walking.

  Is that why you’re here?

  No, I was coming anyway.

  Why?

  To talk to you, like I said.

  You could’ve called.

  That only works when the other party answers his phone. Did you lose your phone again?

  The battery died. So you drove all the way here to talk?

  Do I need a better reason?

  They drove south, out of town, on Old Airport Road. Grant had just come from seeing Angela, from sitting across from her at Grace’s kitchen table, a mug captured in her thin hands, her eyes dark and strange. As if watching a scene that had nothing to do with that kitchen, with him. There was one morning she couldn’t forget, she said.

  A twin-engine Piper raced the Chevy on a parallel course and rose from the runway and immediately banked and headed for them as if in attack. It droned overhead, darkened them in a blink of shadow and went wobbling off into the west. When Sean was small they would come here to watch the small planes take off and land, and Grant had told him the story of Sean’s great-grandfather who had been a navigator on raids over Germany and whose plane had been shot down. How one of the crewmen came home two years later to tell that he’d seen the boy’s great-grandfather parachute out just ahead of him but had lost him in the night sky, and when the crewman was captured he expected to see the navigator in the camp, and when the war was over he expected to see him at the army hospital, and then he expected to see him back in the States, but he never did. No one ever did.