“I will.”
“Listen to me. I know where your daughter is, I know where Sally is.”
Yes, the voice said, but she’ll never take her from us.
“Sally and your wife,” Lucinda said.
Lucinda’s eyes fell to the children’s books stacked on the table. The coloring books. Two place settings. “What is all that?”
“Sally’s stuff.”
Lucinda stepped closer to it.
“Stop,” Jonah said.
“That’s a new coloring book. New crayons.”
Stop her, now, the voice said.
Lucinda flipped through the coloring book.
“They’re Sally’s,” Jonah said.
Lucinda looked at the door to the back room.
“What’s back there?” she said
She picked up the backpack. “Are you packing, going somewhere?”
“Leave my things be,” Jonah said. Why wouldn’t she listen? Why was she making him have to do something he didn’t want to do? He thumbed the rifle’s hammer, cocked it back, hammer worn smooth.
Click.
Lucinda stared at the rifle. She was trying hard to keep her breathing calm but her chest rose and fell heavily, Jonah could see that. She unzipped the top of the backpack.
Jonah lunged at her and yanked her arm, the rifle barrel swinging wildly. Food and children’s books and clothing tumbled to the floor as Dale grabbed at the rifle and wrested it from Jonah’s weak grasp, clutched it to his chest awkwardly. The man had never held a rifle, that was clear.
Jonah spun, grabbed at the rifle, but the younger man was stronger than Jonah, who could not wrest it free.
“Get out of here,” Jonah shouted. “Get out. Get out. Get out of my home. Get out and leave me be.”
Lucinda looked at the backpack and children’s books. The two place settings on the table, astonishment flooding her face. “What’s in that back room, Jonah?”
Jonah reached for the rifle again, but Lucinda grabbed his shoulders with both hands and pulled him back.
“What’s back there?” she said. “Who is back there? I can help you sort it out if she’s not hurt. I can get you help.”
Just like her old man. She knew all along, the liar, the voice said. Came up here prattling about Sally, baiting you, distracting you. Pretending to be a friend. She knew.
Lucinda strode to the door to the back room.
“Stop,” Jonah railed. “You have no right.”
“We’re here to help,” Dale said.
“I’ve heard that before,” Jonah said.
Lucinda turned the doorknob.
“Goddamn it,” Jonah shouted and shoved Lucinda as hard as he was able, sent her reeling to the floor. Her forehead cracked against the table edge. Blood came. Goddamn it. Look what she’d made him do. Look at it. Good.
“I told you!” Jonah spat as he stood over her, frothing, seething, that ancient rage roaring up out of him as he grabbed her by the jacket and shook her. “Goddamn you, this is my house!”
Jonah grunted as he was slammed into the wall and crumpled to the floor.
Dale stood over him, rifle trained on his forehead, steady.
Lucinda grunted and managed to gain her feet, her forehead torn and dripping blood. She took hold of the doorknob to the back room.
“No,” Jonah said. “Please.”
“Tell me what’s in there,” Lucinda said. “Who’s in there.”
“I—” Jonah stared at the door. He wanted to tell her. That he’d found her. She’d found him. She’d come to him. He had meant to take her back, had tried, but the things he’d heard, he couldn’t return her to that. He knew that life. He knew. The odds of escaping it. So he’d kept her here with him, safe. He’d found her for a reason. She came to him, found him, for a reason. It could not be for nothing. She was his now. His. And he was hers. They were all each other had now.
But he didn’t say it. Couldn’t. They’d never believe him. They never had believed him.
“Okay,” Lucinda said and opened the door to the back room.
The lone trunk sat in the barren room.
Dale stepped behind Lucinda.
Lucinda wiped blood from her eyes, her face pale and grim yet her eyes keen with mistrust as she looked back at Jonah.
“Open the trunk,” she said.
“You think I put a girl in a trunk?” Jonah said. “You think I’d do that? You lied, told me you know where my daughter and wife are, but you came here because you think I have Sal—, have her, that other girl, up here?”
“Open the trunk.”
“You open it,” Jonah said. “You want it open so bad, you open it.”
Lucinda stepped into the room and stood over the trunk. Blood ran from her wounded forehead.
“We need to get you out of here, to a doctor,” Dale said.
Jonah watched helplessly from the doorway as Lucinda lifted the trunk lid open and peered down into it.
She drew a sharp breath and reeled backward, staggered into the doorframe.
“I— I don’t know what to say,” Lucinda said and put her face in her hands, blood leaking from between her fingers.
Jonah limped into the room, looked down into the trunk.
It was empty.
“I’m sorry,” Lucinda said. “I thought. What with the coloring books and the place settings—”
Jonah stared unblinking into the trunk’s emptiness.
As empty as his heart. As confusing as his memories.
“The books,” he murmured, “and place setting are for my daughter, for when she comes back. I keep them ready for her. Buy her new ones.”
He shut the trunk lid to see behind the trunk. Nothing. The room was empty. Where was she?
He turned in a circle. Swooning.
The lone window was shut tight.
The walls breathed.
“No,” he said.
The floor fell away.
The ceiling floated.
He heard voices far away, calling, calling.
He lifted the trunk lid again.
“No,” he said.
His own voice far away.
Thin and hollow.
Calling from the distant past.
A long ago life.
Another life.
A life that had ended years ago.
He careened back through the doorway and collapsed into a chair at the table. Had she ever been here at all? Old man. Old fool. Had he heard the story on his transistor radio and been bitten by a spider or fallen into a fugue? What had happened?
Lucinda sat in the chair beside Jonah. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“She’s gone,” Jonah said, trying to reason out the past days, untangle his labyrinth of dark thoughts. “My daughter’s gone.”
“She’s been gone a long time, sir,” Dale said.
“You don’t understand,” Jonah murmured.
“No, I don’t,” said Dale.
“I think I know where she is,” Lucinda said, her voice one of sorrow. She put her hand on Jonah’s.
“Where who is?” Jonah said, his voice a ghost.
“Your child. And your wife.”
“My daughter,” he whispered. “I thought—” He hung his head. “I get confused.”
Lucinda looked at the coloring books. The two place settings. “It’s okay,” she said.
“It’s just,” Jonah said. “I miss them. Still. I know how long it’s been. I know what people said. What people say. I know the world moved on. Long ago. I’m not stupid. I’m not crazy.”
“Of course not,” Lucinda said.
“I just. I miss them. I want them back.”
Jonah rubbed his face.
“My heart doesn’t know they’re gone,” he said. “It might as well be yesterday. Every door I walk through is my front door, every room I enter is my daughter’s room, and every time it’s still empty. Every day. Every second is a lifetime. Even up here. I kept waiting. Thinking. Maybe. Maybe. Today. Bu
t they never come back. All I want is for them to come back. All I want is to see them again.”
“I’m sorry I doubted you.”
“I’d doubt me too,” he said.
“I think,” Lucinda said. “I think news of this missing girl triggered something in you. You saw her posters in town, maybe, or heard it on your truck radio or transistor radio up here, and it brought back memories—it made you want something so badly that you imagined—I’m so sorry.”
“No,” he said. “My daughter. She went out the window. She’s out there in the cold. The dark.”
Lucinda touched his cheek. “Your daughter’s dead. Sally is dead.”
It was the first time she’d said it, because it was the first time she truly believed it. Knew it.
“Yes,” Jonah said. “Of course she is. Of course. I know that.”
His body caved and his shoulders collapsed as if the wiring from his brain had been cut with a razor. He thought he’d go blind. Mad. He’d thought the pain could be no worse. He’d been wrong.
“Come to town with me.” Lucinda placed a hand on his shoulder.
“I can’t. I can’t leave her. Here,” he said.
“Please, Jonah.”
“I can’t. I can’t.”
“If I find her, them,” Lucinda said, “I’ll have things to do. Take care of. So if I’m not back soon, you’ll know I’ve found them.”
She patted his hand.
“Where are they?” he said.
“I have to find out for myself before I say,” Lucinda said. She squeezed his hand once more. “We’ll see ourselves out. But please. Come to town. Jonah. Come back.”
Jonah said nothing, stared through the doorway into the room at the empty trunk, the shut window.
An icy wind chilled him as Lucinda and Dale left the cabin.
The door clicked shut against the outside world.
Jonah sat in the pulverizing silence.
He put his head down on the table and wept.
No Answer
Jonah awoke, jarred awake, as if from a Van Winklean sleep.
Dawn bled through the windows.
He pressed his face into his palms and moaned, the sound an ancient wind conjured from deep within him. He stood, unsteady, the room aglow in dawn’s slow golden light, the sun’s mindless warmth creeping along the floor.
Dust motes turned in the light.
He shambled to the doorway to the back room. A spider skittered across his boot then squeezed itself into a crack in the floor.
Jonah stepped into the room and lifted the trunk lid.
Empty.
Fool.
He shut the lid on the empty trunk.
No. Not empty. Not quite. Something caught his eye. He lifted the lid again. A tiny scrap of paper lay at the bottom. Blank.
No, not tiny. Folded small.
He bent and picked it, unfolded it.
Not blank.
A drawing. Two stick figures. A man and a girl. Sitting on a porch swing.
Had she been here after all? His mind spun with confusion; the fever from the spider bite left his memory opaque. He slipped the drawing in his pocket and went to the window.
It was closed.
No.
Not quite.
It was open, a hair, the width of knife blade. A slice of frigid air leaked into the room.
On the floor at his feet, a droplet of water. Melted snow.
“No.” He backed away from the window, his heels striking the trunk.
No. If she were out in the cold all this time. If she’d fled. Again. Fled him. Was alone again. She’d die. Was already dead.
He rushed out of the room and stumbled out onto the porch, looking about wildly, shouting, “Sally!”
He stepped off the porch, the snow a blinding white with the rising sun shattering off of it, trudged around the side of the cabin.
A ruffed grouse busted from beneath a stunted spruce with a spray of fresh snow, startling him.
He continued around the back of the cabin.
Virgin snow. Not a mouse track upon it.
He circled the cabin but saw no tracks.
Had the falling snow covered her tracks? How would he ever find her if she didn’t answer his call?
“Sally!”
He’d failed her.
Again.
He traipsed into the woods, his aching legs leaden. Snow cascaded from limbs. He fell, cold snow melting at the back of his hot neck. He cried out for her.
No answer came.
Panting, he pulled himself up, jacket stuck to his back with sweat. He was too lame, too old, and the snow too deep for him to tramp any farther so blindly. He worked his way back to the cabin. Went into the back room to reassess. The cold air leaked under the window, but the droplets of water could have come from snow melted from Lucinda’s boots.
He went back out and stood on the porch, listening.
If she’d existed, she was gone now and he’d never find her. She was lost, and a primal grief crowded him. For a moment, standing there, he smelled her, the milky fragrance of her breath. Then a breeze caught her scent and carried it away.
If it had ever been there at all.
The door creaked behind him.
His heart stopped. He dared not move.
The door creaked again.
It was her. She’d hidden elsewhere in the cabin. Somehow.
The door creaked.
By degrees, he turned to see—
The door swaying in the wind. The emptiness within him opened wider.
Home, she’d said.
He sniffed at his shirt collar but no hint of her remained.
There was nothing left to prove she’d ever been there at all.
Home
Dale eased the Wrangler down Lucinda’s childhood street.
“I’ll need help with this,” Lucinda said, her voice flat. The horridness of what she was about to do, what she suspected, made it hard to speak. Her body felt dull and deadened even while her senses seemed too intense to bear. The sky had cleared overnight in the valley, and the mean morning sun pierced her eyes. Her breath raked through the cilia of her lungs. The sound of the Wrangler’s blinker blasted in her ear.
“Help from Kirk?” Dale said as he turned off Main.
“What?”
“You’ll need help from Kirk?”
“From you. And . . . the state police.” Exhausted from her sleepless night, Lucinda thought she might be sick but closed her eyes and tried to calm herself. She seemed to be vibrating, as if her skeleton were a tuning fork that had been struck hard against a rock.
Dale pulled the Wrangler up out front.
“You okay?” he said.
“No.” She slipped her hand into Dale’s hand.
He squeezed it.
Lucinda stepped out of the Wrangler and stood on the street where she’d learned to ride a bicycle with her father’s help. Where she’d played hopscotch, kick-the-can, and hide-and-seek with Sally. Where she’d sat out in Kirk’s parked pickup truck after the drive-in, hurriedly buttoning up her blouse and checking her lipstick and trying to hold him off against her own desires before she slipped into the house to find her widowed father asleep on the couch in front of the flickering TV.
Dale got out and put his arm around her and led her to the house.
She was unsteady of feet and of mind, as if she had not slept or eaten in years.
Each step and thought was a precarious labor.
Dale knocked on the kitchen door and a moment later it opened, Dot standing there bleary eyed and puffy faced with slumber.
“Hullo. What brings you so early?” Dot smiled. She pulled the top of her robe tighter around her throat, squinting. “What’s wrong?” she said, her smile vanquished.
“We need to come in,” Lucinda said.
“What’s wrong?” Dot said, opening the door wider to allow them entrance.
Lucinda and Dale stepped into the kitchen.
The cl
ock on the microwave blinked from 6:45 to 6:46.
“What is it?” Dot said.
“It’s personal,” Lucinda said. “Is he up?”
“He had a rough night. Moaning, agitated, crying out. Worst night he’s had in my memory. I gave him something to help him rest. I doubt he’ll be awake before noon.”
“What was he calling out about?” Lucinda said.
“Nonsense. The stuff of nightmares.”
“I need to use the phone.”
Lucinda shuffled to the phone on the wall and dialed.
Dot looked at Dale. “What’s this about?”
“I can’t say,” Dale said.
As the phone rang, Lucinda ran her hand along the doorframe to the living room, over the pencil marks that had measured her height over the years. Her mother had been the one to keep track. The last mark’s date read: 10/29/87 44¼ʺ.
Sally had disappeared a week later.
The phone on the other end rang, and rang.
“Hello,” Lucinda said finally. “This is Deputy Sheriff Lucinda Welch in Ivers. I’d like to have a trooper sent to fifteen Maple Street here in Ivers.”
Dot stared.
“No, it’s not an emergency. Okay, all right. That’s fine. Thank you.”
Lucinda hung up the phone. She stared at the penciled marks her mother had made to measure her on the doorframe. She tried to stave off the ugly images petitioning her for attention. They came anyway. Her mother at the bottom of the stairs. Her father kneeling at her side, looking with a fear Lucinda had believed was a reflection of the dread he felt for his wife. Now, she wondered.
“Why are you calling the state police?” Dot asked.
Lucinda emerged from her murky reminiscence. A chill ran through her.
“Dot,” she said. “I’d like to be alone with my father. In our house. Maybe you could run to the Lucky Spot and get coffee.”
“But what’s—”
“Dorothy. Please.”
“I’ll go change,” Dot said. “I can’t go in my bathrobe.”
Dale took some bills from his wallet, handed them to Dot.
“Will you stay here,” Lucinda said to Dale, “and wait for them? I need to see him.”
“He won’t have his wits about him,” Dot said as she left.
What Remains of Her Page 25