by Mark Powell
It had something to do with Peach Creek. That much he knew. Seeing Erin Porter, hearing about Karla—all these unseen angles, the stories he’d never known—had excavated something he’d spent years imagining buried. So he had to see Kayla. And here was part of why he had lied to Tess: it was embarrassing, the lengths to which he had gone.
First—
He stopped at Newfound Gap. It was cold and overcast and there were starlings in the trees and on the ground. He made himself slow down, made himself notice. The iridescent plumage, the infant squeaking they made. He intentionally made himself walk down to the restrooms off the parking lot, intentionally made himself read the historic marker mounted on the stone wall, the talk of Roosevelt and the CCC, because what was he doing here?
What had he done?
Well, first, he had found the website of the gym where she worked. Then, he found the community college where she studied, looked up the course schedule, and found the name of the instructor who would likely be teaching radiology tech. Then he called the gym and identified himself as Kayla’s teacher. She was missing an assignment and he had missed her on her cell. He didn’t want to give her a zero because he was sure it was just a mix-up.
Was she in?
And this was the part where he felt his heart ratchet up, because if she was in he wasn’t sure what he would do. Hang up, most likely. But he also felt something heedless in him, some germ of self-destruction that would just as quickly run to self-abasement, and—
She was off today. But would be in tomorrow from eight to four. Did he want to leave a message?
He did not.
Instead, he got up early, lied to his wife, and started north. If it was stupid, it was also harmless. He suspected he would do no more than he had the time he drove up with the boys: sit in the car and watch.
And that was exactly what he did.
Several times he started to get out, once going so far as to actually open the door and put both feet on the asphalt, knowing all the while it was impossible. But he forgave himself. It was like a mole, burrowing out of the ground to stare at the sun. It was too much.
He forgave himself and was back on 441 before it occurred to him what he should have done in the first place. He had to pull over to find Erin Porter’s number, but he did find it, and he did dial it.
“I mean, if you’re free,” he said.
“So you’re back in town?”
“Heading that way.”
“Well, how about lunch?”
“If it’s a late lunch.”
“That’s fine,” she said. “Do you know the Grotto, over on Elm?”
“No.”
“How about the Abbey? It’s out behind the old high school? You know it?”
“I pretty much don’t know anything anymore.”
“Yes, I see that,” she said. “Well, how about this, John? How about you just come by and pick me up, all right? You got something to write on?”
21.
Tess woke alone in the predawn blue of the streetlight. She thought she heard Laurie but it wasn’t Laurie that had woken her. It was the bed’s emptiness and the almost real feeling that its emptiness held or maybe hid the presence of something larger. Was someone in the room with her? It was 3:52 on the bedside clock, but there was no John. She climbed from bed, disoriented, almost staggered to the living room where out the window she saw the car in the driveway: he was home. But where was he?
Should she call to him?
Was that ridiculous?
She stood in the living room uncertain what to do, on the verge of turning back to bed, on the verge of something, though she had no idea what. There was the glimmer of possibility that she might watch the video, the slow decapitation by starlight, and considering it she felt her nipples tighten. Her breasts were rivered with blue veins that roped their way down to the enormous pale pink of her nipples and all of her, the entire construction, drew itself closer. Laurie was going five hours between feedings now—the sleep really was getting better—but what gripped her was something else entirely.
She should go back to bed.
She should sleep.
Yet she didn’t move.
She stood there slatted by the porch light that fell through the blinds and clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. It was a perfect click, the sudden popping of a vacuum and she felt it travel out over the furniture and scattered toys and then she felt it return to her, warped.
Warped, she thought, by the presence of what she had allowed into their house. It was in her hair and her clothes and on her skin—this thing that established itself a little more firmly every time she watched the man die—but it was also in the air. It was in front of her and behind her, and feeling it she sensed herself pulling tighter still.
She remembered then the photograph she had found of four-year-old Kayla.
Thy fearful symmetry—and then she remembered the rest of it, or at least another line. It was addressed, maybe, to the presence she felt around her. It was addressed to what she had let into her house and her life:
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
She kept her eyes shut and waited for an answer.
When no answer came she sent out another click, and followed it.
She found John in the upstairs guest bedroom, dressed and sleeping atop the comforter. Tess locked the door behind her, and no more than slid into bed before she was pushing her hips against him, kissing him, fingers in his hair. In apology. All of it, it should be said, in apology, though who could say for what. But she wasn’t thinking about that. She was moving, simply moving, reaching through the fly of his boxer shorts.
“Tess?”
“Don’t talk.”
“What—”
“Don’t say anything.”
And John seemed to get this, to sense that so long as they were silent in the dark there were ways to make what was imagined real, and what was real no more than imagination, a fantasy, a guilty dream signifying both what was and what never would be again. She felt herself pulling down his shorts, felt herself hooking her thumbs in the waistband of her own underwear. She did it quickly because if she stopped to think about the fastness holding her it would explode into words and tears and all the other things she wanted none of.
What she wanted was this.
Stomach to stomach. Tucking her knees up beneath her while he held her hips, her breasts gorgeously giant. Her breath catching in her throat while below her, her husband chanted to God. Quicker, more desperate, until he curled into her like a burned leaf, something that would destroy itself in fire, but be more alive for it, if only briefly.
She tensed her thighs, the pleasure barely measurable against the grief, for that is what she felt rising: some inarticulate grief, a great swell of sadness, ebbing and flowing so that she confused it with the rhythm of the swaying bed. She shut her eyes. His hard hands gliding the surface of her stomach and out to the tips of breasts, his touch almost painful, but she liked it, wouldn’t dare push his hands away because touching her, she realized she was finding her way into him, his mind.
And—
She thought he was finished and then he flipped her onto her back.
It was sudden, almost violently so, and she found her face in the crook of his neck, his lips somewhere in her hair, panting so that she felt strands go in and out of his mouth. He was moving against her like he hated her and she thought this was a good thing: were there not reasons he should hate her? Were there not reasons she should hate him back?
After, she found herself pinned beneath the weight of this known man who said nothing.
He only breathed, that was all, the very human shuddering of his chest as it pressed to her own, and slowly she was aware of her body again. Slowly, she felt it around her like driftwood beached well past the tide, the presence against her, the brush of the prayer rope he wore on one wrist.
He rolled off her and she waited until she heard him snoring before she clicked once up at t
he ceiling, and that click was enough to carry her back to bed where she lay on her back, covered by the sheet, and waited for her daughter to wake.
He was a good man, but what did he do all day?
22.
He decided to take the boys out to breakfast. It was a Tuesday, and he didn’t have any appointments until ten. He was up before six, showered and dressed and feeling better than he’d felt in days. Tess was already in the kitchen, drinking coffee in an oval of lamplight. The day otherwise dark, the day otherwise unformed.
“Hey,” she said. “You’re up early.”
“You, too. Sleep all right?”
“I guess. There’s coffee.”
He poured a cup and went to the sink, stared at the ghost of himself in the window there, the yard beyond, the trees and bird feeders, the pinecones stripped clean of peanut butter and seed.
“I was thinking of taking the boys out,” he said.
“This morning?”
“I don’t have anything until ten.”
“To your parents?”
“Maybe just the pancake place here. We could go early.”
“I’m sure they’d like that.” She put her finger in her book. “They’ll be up soon.”
“It’s no rush. What are you reading?”
“Oh, this.” As if she’d only then noticed it, this massive doorstop in her lap. “The Great War for Civilisation. Robert Fisk.”
“No more Proust?”
“I gave up on Proust.”
“Poor Marcel. What’s this about?”
“The Middle East.”
“Heavy stuff.”
She shrugged.
He finished his coffee and refilled it. She was reading, or pretending to read.
“Maybe I’ll wait,” he said. “Do it another day.”
“I can get them up.”
“No.”
“They’re probably awake anyway.”
“Are you going to run?”
“I already did.”
“What time did you get up?”
He saw now that beneath her loose housecoat she wore running tights and a T-shirt, her hair pulled back in a ponytail.
“Like three?” he asked.
That shrug again. He hated that shrug. He went back to the window where the day gathered in cold yellow spots, spans of light that slowly crept over the yard. There was something abhorrent to the way it spread, the insistence of it all, the way it wouldn’t be still. It had a neediness that signaled some ill-defined menace.
“We need to take those pinecones down,” he said.
“That the children made?”
“Squirrels.”
“The bird feeders? They made those with your mom.”
He pointed, knowing she wasn’t looking. “They’re just gnawing them. There’s not even any seed left they’re just . . .”
She wasn’t listening. He wasn’t listening, either, and went back to his coffee. He’d make the boys pancakes and go in early. The idea of breakfast out no longer seemed viable. It seemed, in fact, ridiculous. Yesterday, Jimmy Stone had called. John hadn’t answered and Stone hadn’t left a message, but it seemed to require some response, if only internal. He needed to sit with it. He needed to go in and be alone with whatever it implied, even if that were nothing.
“You know he’s learning to write code,” Tess said.
“What?”
“Wally, I’m talking about, at school.”
“I thought it was a Montessori school?”
“They play Minecraft.”
“On the computer?”
“It’s supposed to help with problem solving is sort of the nature of it.”
“Blocks. I thought that was sort of the nature of it, beads on an abacus.”
“I can wake them,” Tess said.
“Forget it.”
“Okay, sure, let’s forget it,” she said, a little brighter than he thought necessary. “Hey, I had a thought. Thanksgiving.”
“What about it?”
“I thought what if we didn’t go to Florida this year. Just stuck around here. I mean we’re right back down there for Christmas.”
“What about your parents?”
“What about them?”
He turned back to the window.
This is my life, he thought.
Right now.
In front of me.
23.
It was late October when Jimmy Stone attached himself to a yard crew contracted to nip and tuck the lawn of Dr. Soren Sharma, chief executive officer for the Reliance Corporation and father to the newly disappeared Reed Sharma. The idea was to act like he belonged and then get close, to listen and learn. Cross fingers and toes that maybe some little goodie of information would fall into his lap.
It was a two-day job, and the first day was nothing but Jiffy Pop bullshit, Stone the only outlier on a team of Salvadorans who seemed to work at light-speed while he stood by the truck drinking coffee. He thought the possibility to get into the house and Reed’s room might present itself, but instead he wound up doing a half-assed job weeding the flower beds and edging along the walk. Thankless stoop work while the economist’s wife eyed him from behind the blinds. Half suspicion, half sexual boredom, and Stone spent the afternoon entertaining thoughts of the lady of the house on the upstairs bed, her legs up around his neck, her hands wringing sheets of a ridiculous thread count. She’d be breathless and flushed and grateful in the way that well-kept fifty-something women always were. She had a loopy deviant grin, or maybe she was just crazy, unhinged by the vanishing act her boy had pulled. He wasn’t really interested—it was like cross-dressing back on the rez—just another way to pass the day.
He came back the second morning, stiff and running on two Aleves and a Rockstar, and she watched him that day too, a little too closely, he thought. When she went inside in the afternoon he worried maybe she had sussed out his intentions and his tenure at the residence was over. Instead she came out looking for him. Hello, sir! she kept calling. Excuse me, please. He was bored and might have gone to her, but he was wary too, and slipped around the edge of the house. He was outside the kitchen when Dr. Sharma stepped out and waved him over.
“I sent my wife after you,” the man said. He stood on the top step, smiling with a glass of orange juice in one hand. Behind him ran one of the zero-turn mowers. “I know you understand me.”
Stone was silent.
“Look,” he said, “you’re obviously not one of them, so let’s just drop the act, okay? In fact, I know exactly who you are. Would you come inside. Come inside, please.” The smile was gone. “You needn’t worry about that,” he said, gesturing perhaps toward his wife’s distant voice, perhaps toward the ongoing lawn work. “But we do need to talk about a few things.”
Stone stepped into the kitchen. The good doctor was shoeless, socked feet and a dark suit, tie loose. There was a noticeable bulge beneath one lapel.
“I’ll be brief,” he said. “But I do have some questions.”
“All right.”
“First, I’m not going to ask who you’re with. Federal, state, some sort of contractor—that’s irrelevant so far as I’m concerned. I would, however, like confirmation you know my son.”
Stone said nothing.
“Look,” Sharma said, “I don’t care if all you can do is nod your head, but I would like some confirmation.”
“Let’s say we’re acquainted.”
“Professionally, so to speak. At least that was how it was explained to me.”
“I guess you could say that.”
Sharma sipped his juice and gestured at the door. “You know you could almost pass for one of them with that skin. More brownish than brown.”
“That how you recognized me?”
“I made some calls. Global Solutions had quite the reputation.”
“So they read you in.”
Dr. Sharma stepped past him and shut the door. “Only to the point where you and your buddies went all Josef Mengele
and murdered an innocent man. Is murdered how you put it?”
“It’s not exactly the company line,” Stone said, “but why not.”
“Don’t get me wrong. I’m not casting aspersions.”
“They declined to prosecute.”
“I want you to know I’m sympathetic.”
Stone shrugged. “It was bullshit anyway.”
“It usually is.” Sharma put his glass in the sink. “I’d offer you something to drink, but we’re both in a bit of a hurry here. Is my wife still out there?”
“Are we on the same team, Dr. Sharma?”
“I believe she’s about so let me be quick. I don’t expect you to tell me anything. But I want some assurance you all know what you’re doing. Can you give me that?”
“Your son’s not exactly incapable. I mean he is, but he isn’t.”
“I heard he’s a rattlesnake.”
Stone offered his open palms. “They aren’t necessarily inconsistent.”
“Well, whatever he is,” Sharma said, “he’s my son. I have a wife to think about. His mother—”
“I understand.”
“I don’t care if he returns here. That may not even be possible. His mother cares, but she isn’t in her right mind at the moment. But I do need some assurances that whatever happens, wherever he winds up, that he’s all right. Can you give me that?”
“I’ll do my best.”
“You know you could have just approached me directly.”
“I’m not so sure.”
“The FBI was here, the Georgia Bureau. You aren’t part of that world, are you?”
“Not officially. Not anymore.”
“You were with Global Solutions and now that Global Solutions doesn’t exist you’re just another bug in counter-terror. Conjectures of another guilty bystander, busy regretting the past and wondering what the hell happened to his security clearance. That sound about right?”
Stone did his shrug thing again. He was starting to miss the yard work, the clarity of pulling and tossing. Then Sharma reached inside his jacket and took out a brick of cash. He placed it on the bar.