As Wide as the Sky

by Jessica Pack

  “You take such good care of me,” he’d said as they walked past him into the apartment, which was empty except for him. The rest of his roommates were out on a Friday night, but Robbie had pared down his social life, solely focused on his schoolwork.

  They stayed for an hour watching funny YouTube videos and talking about Melissa’s upcoming wedding. Amanda had been filled with wonderful mushy feelings about her children, who had somehow become her friends. Melissa went ahead to the car, leaving Amanda and Robbie to say their goodbyes at the door.

  “I’m so proud of you, Robbie,” Amanda had said, about to burst with the love she felt toward her children, who were growing up but not leaving her behind. Even Robbie’s diagnosis hadn’t troubled her that day; he was doing so well and Amanda had so much hope for him. She had friends, hobbies, a job she liked. She was healthy and capable, and so were her children. A man at church had hinted that the two of them try out a new Indian restaurant and Amanda was seriously considering it. She’d never wanted to date after Dwight left, there was no time or space, but maybe she was ready now.

  Robbie had ducked his head and shrugged off her compliment, but then given her a big hug. “Thanks, Mom,” he whispered into her shoulder. “Thanks for coming.”

  Amanda began walking through the house, pulling the memories from the walls and floors. Lego constructs that had sat in the living room for weeks. The time Robbie slid down the stairs on an old piece of carpet and nearly put his head through the wall. Fake spiderwebs on the bannister at Halloween. Mistletoe in the doorway of the dining room for Christmas. The first time they had Thanksgiving, just the three of them—that had been weird.

  Amanda smoothed her hand across the handrail as she went up the stairs, then looked into each room. She remembered the time Melissa flooded the upstairs bathroom because she was talking to a friend on the phone and forgot that she’d been filling the tub. The red punch Robbie had spilled on the hall carpet. The time Melissa had tried to sneak out her window and fell, spraining her ankle. Amanda left Robbie’s room for last and then stood in the doorway, picturing how the room had looked when he was little and waited in bed at night for her to tuck him in. She would cross the room, sit on the edge of his bed, and then pull the covers to his chin. She’d brush his blond hair off his forehead. “You’re my favorite boy,” she’d say.

  “And you’re my favorite mom,” he’d say back.

  She’d lean in and kiss him on the forehead. He’d give her a quick hug; then she’d leave the room, closing the door behind her and having no idea how limited those moments would be. It had seemed as if her children would be little forever. And then they weren’t. How many of those hugs and kisses had Amanda hurried through, thinking about the assignments she had to correct or the dishes she wanted to get washed or the episode of ER she’d already missed five minutes of? How often was her head already on tomorrow instead of that moment? What would she give to have those wasted moments of her children’s youth be the extent of her regrets?

  She pulled the door closed for a final time, rested her hand against it a moment, then turned and walked down the hall. At the top of the stairs, however, she turned and looked back at the door. The missing D in “DANGER ZONE” looked different all of a sudden. Her smile fell and the sweet nostalgia faded. She stared hard at the words and imagined what someone else might make of them. Would the new owners see an unconscious warning to the world? Would a picture of Robbie’s door end up on a newsstand tabloid? Her mind then flashed to a handful of personal touches he’d left on this house. Things that weren’t only in her memory. Things that would stay behind.

  Amanda swallowed and felt a moment of panic before her mind kicked into solution-mode. She could fix this.

  She found the box cutter on the shelf of the garage with the other tools she’d marked with yellow stickers. She snapped apart the case, removing the straight razor inside, and turned her phone back on. The dinging alerts of voice mails accompanied her up the stairs as her phone came to life. Thank goodness you realized before it was too late, she told herself, ignoring the alerts. It’s not your home anymore, but no one can take the memories.

  She smiled nostalgically at the “DANGER ZONE” door one last time and then took a picture of it with her phone before using a razor blade to scrape the letters off the wood, all but destroying the door she’d fought Robbie about so many years ago. She imagined the new owners shaking their head at the damage. “We’ll have to completely replace this door,” the imaginary wife would say, her arms crossed in irritation. “We should reduce the offer to reflect that.” How much did new bedroom doors cost?

  Amanda turned to the next task, ignoring the emotion that beckoned her. She went down to the kitchen and opened the pantry door. Just a few months after they’d moved in, Robbie had scratched his name into the paint of the middle shelf. He was old enough to know better, but Amanda had seen it as his way of claiming this house as their own; a confirmation that they were putting down roots. He’d still lost TV privileges for a weekend, but she secretly thought it was kind of sweet. Innocent. Amanda took a picture of the scratched-in name, then used the razor blade to gouge it into oblivion, scraping and scratching until no one could tell what had once been there. The damage could be covered with some shelf liner, though the imaginary wife would shake her head at this too. Amanda turned to the doorway of the guest bath on the main floor, where a series of lines and pen and pencil markings had showed Robbie and Melissa’s heights each year on their birthdays. After taking more pictures, Amanda got some toilet paper from the bathroom and her travel-size hair spray from her suitcase in the car, scrubbing until all the dates and ages and names were undecipherable. I’m erasing him, she thought, but not to destroy these scraps of evidence would be inviting people into the memories. Amanda didn’t want that.

  There was only one task left once the door frame was clean. She hesitated due to the fact that she couldn’t perform this last erasing privately and wished she had remembered last night. Even this morning, before the news crews had arrived.

  Amanda did a final check on the windows and doors to make sure they were locked—they were. Finally, she said “goodbye” out loud to the house, letting the words settle into the carpets and walls. She would never come back here again. There had been happiness in this house, but there had also been excruciating sorrow. She had peered out these blinds a hundred times to determine if the press was outside waiting for her. She’d scrubbed spray-painted swastikas and profanity off the front porch three different times. She’d hidden here, cried here, and felt the depth of all her misery until she was numb here. She turned her back on the rooms, returned to the garage, and said a prayer, hoping someone was listening, though she wasn’t quite sure about that anymore. There was a time when God had seemed very real to her; today he was more of a desperate hope. Would that change now that the numbness was leaving?

  The door from the house to the garage closed behind her with a swish and a silence. She was leasing the condo in Cincinnati for the first year, at which time she could buy it if this house had sold. A year seemed so far away, but then it also felt like a blink. The year after that would be another blink. And then another and another and another. Would she make friends? Did she still know how? Was it possible for her to live a life different from the one she’d been living these last four years? She couldn’t imagine.

  She’d left the rakes since the HOA would maintain her green space in Cincinnati, along with a miter saw Dwight kept saying he’d come for one day, and a smattering of other tools she didn’t need anymore but that the new owners might find useful. One of those tools was a sledgehammer—thank goodness. What if she hadn’t left it? What if she’d never owned it? The possibility of not being able to do what she had to do made her heart race. She had to pause and calm herself down again. You did remember. You do have a sledgehammer. With re-steadied determination, she reached out and wrapped her fingers around the handle.

  When she and Dwight had bought this hou
se, there had been a narrow walkway of pitted cement that led from the back patio to the small gardening shed barely big enough for a lawn mower. Had the path been a little more ragged or a little bit wider, it would have been quaint, but instead it looked like a weekend project undertaken by a previous owner who had never done concrete before. One summer—the one after her master’s degree—Amanda decided she hated that stupid walkway. Melissa had created quite an impressive vegetable garden in the back corner of the yard, and Amanda had come to enjoy flower gardening. She had a lovely multicolored border of pansies and phlox surrounding the house, with snapdragons set behind for height. She had decided that the walkway threw off the overall aesthetics and should be replaced by a stone path instead. Her neighbor had put in a stone path a month before and she’d watched it come together. It didn’t look hard to do and since Dwight had left, she’d become rather handy. So, she bought a sledgehammer and decided to tear out the walkway in a single afternoon. Surely it wouldn’t take much longer than that. Robbie took over the demolition when she was barely halfway through. Her whole body ached from the impact of slamming the ten-pound hammer into the cement over and over again. Why hadn’t she noticed that despite the poor quality of the concrete, it hadn’t a single crack? Which should have told her it was thick. Really thick.

  Robbie took out the last of it in half the time she’d spent on the first half. She went into the kitchen, washed her hands, and then watched him through the window. He had looked like such a man that day. Perhaps for the first time, to her eyes at least. He’d been wearing a Mario Bros. T-shirt, but it bulged at the shoulders as he swung and swung and swung. She’d been proud to be the mother of such a strong and helpful boy.

  She’d made them sandwiches and lemonade. They’d eaten their late lunch on the patio. It had been a nice day, not too hot even though Robbie was sweating. As they ate and chatted she’d missed the little boy he had been even though she was proud of the young man he was becoming. She’d reminded him to wash his face so the sweat wouldn’t cause him to break out.

  Now she tightened her grip on the handle of the sledgehammer. Robbie wasn’t here to help her this time, but it wasn’t a whole walkway this time, just a few inches. She pushed the button to raise the garage door, took a deep breath, and headed toward that little spot of cement, underneath where she kept her garbage can when she wasn’t worried that people would go through it. The can had been in the garage for weeks.

  She tried to ignore the clicks of car doors opening and the whispered frenzy of “That’s her,” and “Quick, is the camera ready?”

  She didn’t look up as she walked to the corner of the driveway and leaned the hammer against the wall long enough to take a picture of the handprints frozen in the concrete. She’d never seen the handprints show up in a tabloid or newspaper, not that she followed the articles closely. The voices of the reporters were getting louder as they gathered at the edge of the street, but she refused to let her brain make sense of what was being said. She slid her phone back into her pocket and hoisted the sledgehammer over her shoulder. She let it rest a moment while she took a breath, then lifted the hammer higher and let its own weight carry the iron head into the center of Robbie’s handprint. The concrete barely flaked, and for a moment she worried that she wouldn’t be able to destroy this last bit of evidence the way she’d planned. But she reminded herself that she had taken out almost half of that walkway ten years ago. She lifted the hammer higher over her shoulder and swung it harder. This time it cracked right through Melissa’s palm. The day these prints were made came back to her mind as she lifted the hammer for another blow.

  The kids had been little, Dwight was still here, and they had used that year’s tax return to replace the driveway, which had been falling apart since long before they moved in. It had been one of those projects they promised they would do the very next summer, then put off, and put off, and put off. But, finally, they got it done. After everything was poured and smoothed, Amanda had snuck the kids through the garage and had them press their right hands into the concrete. The cement was more set than she’d expected, and the prints weren’t very deep, but it was enough. The kids had then written their names below their hands using a Popsicle stick. Then she’d added 2002. When Dwight got home they showed him. He’d loved it, and told Amanda what a good idea it was. It had been a good idea. And a good day.

  She lifted the hammer again and shattered the rest of Melissa’s print. Don’t cry, she told herself as the impact reverberated through her in ways that were only superficially related to the physical action. Don’t you dare cry over this in front of these vipers. But she hadn’t cried in months; why would she shed tears now? It was only handprints. Evidence of days gone by. She had the memory and the photo.

  “What are you doing, Mrs. Mallorie?” a man called loudly to her from the street. She ignored him, lifted the hammer again, and swung. And swung. And swung. After what seemed like a dozen swings, the handprints were obliterated. Her chest ached. Her arms throbbed. There were half a dozen people standing at the end of her driveway now, calling out questions, pointing their cameras at her, and talking to one another about this “exciting development.” She dragged the sledgehammer back into the garage without looking at them, leaned the black handle with the yellow sticker against the wall, and ignored the questions being yelled at her. The woman she’d imagined as one of the new owners of the house would shake her head at the broken concrete. “And we’ll have to replace the entire slab because of this one corner. Reduce the offer by however much that’s going to cost us.”

  Amanda slid into the driver’s seat, pulled the door shut, and looked into her rearview mirror before backing out of the garage. Once the hood was clear of the door, she took the garage door opener from where it was clipped to her visor and got out of her car. The voices started again. She did not acknowledge them as she went into the garage and placed the opener on the steps so that the realtor would see it when he came tomorrow. He had the other opener already; she’d told him she’d leave this one here. She didn’t look around. There was no need. It was over now.

  She pressed the button to close the garage door, then walked quickly to the narrowing space between the bottom of the garage door and the driveway, and bent at the waist to fit beneath it. There was supposed to be a safety feature on the door, an invisible laser line that, when triggered, would raise the door to protect children and pets from getting trapped. Amanda had disabled the feature a couple of years ago—she’d worried that one night she’d come home, close the garage, and someone would throw something to trigger the mechanism at the last moment. She wouldn’t notice, already in the house by then, and they would then have access to her life. She’d told herself it was a silly fear, that no one cared about her enough to put such effort into such a thing that was also illegal, but then someone spray-painted “Burn in Hell” on her driveway and she disabled the safety feature. She also installed motion lights at each corner of her house. There was a how-to video for everything on YouTube.

  Amanda was back in the driver’s seat before the rubber gasket of the garage door reached the concrete. She pulled the door shut again and put on her seat belt. The voices of the reporters were like birds on the telephone lines to her now. Slowly enough that the reporters could get out of the way, she backed out of the driveway. She didn’t make eye contact with anyone—not the journalists vying for anything she might choose to say or the neighbors she’d once been friendly with who had come out to watch her go. The sense of community she’d once felt here had dwindled to almost no contact with anyone. The church tried to reach out to her, but she no longer invited anyone inside the house, and doorstep conversations didn’t last long. Now and then a neighbor would come by to see how she was doing.

  “I’m fine,” she would say, then look at her watch as though she were late for something. “Thanks.”

  They would smile sadly, compassionately, judgmentally, and then go on with their lives. Many of them were sincere, she k
new this, but she had lost perspective on whom she could trust and who was using her for gossip they could share. The platitudes of the first year had come to sound like the screeching of tires. “You poor dear.” “I just can’t believe it.” “We all do the best we can.” And then there were the betrayals. The secretary of the high school had given Robbie’s transcripts and yearbook photos to a tabloid. A neighbor had sold pictures of twelve-year-old Robbie with their dog, Coon, who the neighbor claimed died under suspicious circumstances, insinuating that Robbie had had something to do with it. The truth was that Coon had been hit by a car and Robbie had been devastated. He’d always wanted a dog and Amanda had refused; she didn’t like animals in the house. Amanda had burned with the desire to tell the truth about Coon when she learned of the article, but she already knew by then that the media didn’t want the truth; they wanted a story.

  Friends made comments to the press that were then taken out of context; schoolmates exaggerated experiences until it looked as though Robbie had been unstable all his life. The mother of one of Amanda’s students—a woman Amanda had had continuing conflicts with the year before the shooting—claimed that Amanda should be psychologically evaluated, too, and have her teaching certificate revoked. Accusations were lobbed at Amanda for not recognizing Robbie’s symptoms early enough for better intervention, for not getting him the help he needed once she knew, and for sending a ticking time bomb into the world. After enough of these accusations and betrayals, Amanda stopped letting anyone into her life. She resigned her teaching position over the phone after a month-long leave of absence that convinced her she couldn’t go back. The principal’s quick response regarding a plan B for her proved that he had hoped for this outcome. He had a friend who worked with an online high school based out of Utah. She could work from home and under her maiden name—having her master’s degree would make her an asset to the company.