What Remains of Her

by Eric Rickstad

  “You wanted her to come back to you? You were never hers to come back to. All that time, all those years? You were happy. You had a wife and a daughter.”

  “Didn’t matter. All that mattered. Was. One day. She’d look at me. One time. Look at me like she’d looked at you. She came that morning. Angry.” He sagged in the wheelchair, wheezing, closed his eyes, as if to remember that day. “So angry. Sally with her. Told me. She knew it was me in the woods, stalking Sally. Stalking. Said I had to stop. For her, for Sally. For all our sakes. She brought her own daughter, as a pawn.”

  “So you—”

  “No.” His chest heaved, his mouth gaped, as if he were about to be sick. “No. Never.”

  “They’re in your cellar—”

  “I wasn’t home. Was gone. Called out for stolen tractor. It’s in dispatch records. I was not here.”

  “How do you know Rebecca came to see you that morning if—”

  “She told me.”

  Jonah wondered if Maurice were lucid, if he even knew what he was speaking about, or where he was. “How could Rebecca—”

  “Julia. Told me,” Maurice said. His face turned to stone before Jonah. Not out of anger or fear, but out of restraint, as if every cell of his face was fixed against the tiniest betrayal of emotion. Jonah heard the truth in Maurice’s voice, saw the truth in Maurice’s stone face, in the torment in his eyes at having said what he’d just said. “I came home, afternoon. Before school was out. She was. Kneeling over them. Mouth open, like a roar. Silent roar. No sound. Eyes wide. Not seeing. She’d been there. Hours. Kneeling over them, rocking, drooling.”

  “Julia,” Jonah said.

  “She could not stand,” Maurice said. “Even with help. Knotted and stooped from kneeling over them. For hours. She told me. Rebecca came, looking for me. Demanding. Refused to leave. Shoved the drawings in her face. Shouted I was stalking Sally. Raving. She scared Julia, like that night at your house. The night Rebecca struck you. It. Scared her. Scared Sally. Julia thought it was Rebecca obsessed with me.”

  “Don’t blame what you did on your dead wife, that’s—”

  “The truth. Julia tried to get her to leave. Sally got between. Julia shoved her. Rebecca went wild. Swung at her.”

  “Don’t you dare.”

  “Just. Telling you. Julia. Sally was crying, hysterical.” Maurice coughed up bloodied phlegm. “Rebecca pounded her fists at Julia. Julia. Grabbed a knife.”

  “No.”

  “When she turned around with it, Sally was there.”

  “No,” Jonah croaked.

  “The knife. It sunk deep. Julia dropped it.”

  “No. No. You’re lying. You did it.”

  “Rebecca fell to her knees beside Sally. But Sally. Was gone. Rebecca was wild. Shrieking. Wailing. Julia begged her to stop, begged her to let Julia call an ambulance. She tried to get the phone. Rebecca. Grabbed the knife and lunged. Julia picked up a marble paperweight. Hit her. Once. Just. To stop her. To stop it.”

  Jonah’s legs gave and he caved into the chair behind him, his flesh afire as he buried his face in his hands.

  “You,” Jonah whispered. “All those questions you had for me, asking if I knew of anyone, a friend of Rebecca’s, if I had any reason to think it might be someone else, you were trying to see if I knew if Rebecca had told me about you. About you bothering her.”

  Maurice nodded. “I tried. To keep focus off you. I tried. So you would not be blamed. You would not pay for something you didn’t do.”

  “I paid. All this time,” Jonah said. “You let me live with not knowing what happened to them.”

  “It was too awful. I couldn’t—”

  “Nothing is more awful than the horrors in my mind.” Jonah stood. “You lied and deceived. Went on as if you knew nothing. Kept it from me. All this time. Made me suffer. How could you do that? Cover it up, continue to protect Julia even for years after she passed. You were the sheriff. You were my friend. How could you do that?”

  “She was my wife.”

  Jonah paced in the suffocating darkness and heat of the room.

  “Why tell me now, if you wanted to protect her name and memory?”

  “You deserve it. But. I want you to keep it to yourself. Lucinda. Can’t know.”

  “Why should I believe any of this? Someone who frightened my wife and child. Betrayed me. Followed Sally in the woods.”

  “I didn’t. Follow her.”

  “You told Lucinda just now.”

  “She assumed. I did not correct her. I don’t know who the girls saw. If it was a person. Or just imagination. But it was not me in the woods.”

  “Why should I believe you, about anything? How can I believe you? That you’re not just blaming Julia for what you did?”

  “Because. I’m dying. And . . . I was your friend. Once.”

  The Swing

  Jonah pulled his truck up into the yard to stare at his old house, his mind empty ruins.

  He got out and stood in the front yard.

  In the gray daylight Jonah saw again that the old place was in as much ruin as his mind. He looked again at the tree he’d planted as a sapling those years ago, which had died and fallen and lay now among its own dead and broken branches scattered across the lawn. He stepped around the tree. The rotted wooden porch steps sagged beneath his weight.

  The porch swing, its paint chipped and faded, slats caked with dried bird and bat shit, swayed from rusted chains in the breeze. He took hold of a chain, gave it a tug. Tested it. He eased himself down into the swing and sat on its front edge, holding it steady with his feet.

  He sat there, with his eyes closed and tried not to think or feel.

  An impossibility.

  All these years, he’d believed nothing could be worse than not knowing what had happened to Rebecca and Sally; yet being in the dark had given him perpetual if slight hope that one day his wife and daughter might by a miracle return to him. Knowing what had become of them did not diminish the pain or lessen the feeling of absence that carved him hollow. It deepened it. The law needed to know who, how, and why, know the specifics of what happened, but he did not. The answer he’d sought, that he’d lived for, changed nothing. It did not resurrect his wife and daughter, did not bring them back, did not alter a single thing. What mattered, he realized, was not what happened and how, but how he handled himself afterward, what he did with the life his daughter and wife no longer had.

  “I let you down,” he said. The porch swing creaked.

  He hadn’t lived since that evening he’d fallen asleep correcting papers. He’d never really even woken up. He’d wallowed in a purgatory of anger and loss and absence instead of forging on alone without them but with courage. He’d hidden from the world. Shamed his wife and daughter’s memory for not continuing on in a way of which they’d be proud. He’d lived a life of delusion when he had known, deep down in his marrow, as a fact, that his wife and daughter were dead.

  There were no miracles.

  This godless world.

  He was alone in a life he’d refused to live.

  He thought about how consumed and beleaguered he’d felt those years ago before the disappearance; the money issues, his stalled teaching career, and parenting doubts had strained him, seemed so singular to him and so unnavigable and insurmountable. The future so remote. He’d lived with the fear that with a single wrong word or decision, his world would disintegrate. How young he’d been, and how unremarkable his and Rebecca’s trials. He saw them now for what they were, a phase of a young married couple, of young parents, a phase his wife and he would have managed and overcome, eventually, if given the chance.

  He opened his eyes and looked out at the valley and the mountains beyond. A thread of smoke unspooled from the forest up in the Gore. He’d not told Lucinda what he’d gone to her father’s house to tell her. That he’d found the girl, kept her, and this had led to her death. He would tell Lucinda. He would confess. He would not wait to be on his deathbed to acco
unt for it. He could not live with keeping it to himself. But he could live keeping Lucinda from ever knowing what her father had said about her mother. He did not know if what Maurice had told him was a lie or the truth, and he did not care. It did not matter who was responsible. Not to him. Not anymore. But it would matter to Lucinda.

  He leaned back in the swing.

  He watched the smoke, a smudge in the morning sky, a sky as blue as ever it had been or ever would be.

  Slowly, he began to move the swing with his legs. The chains squeaked but there was an oil can in the shed, sitting on a shelf with the gasoline cans for the mower. Oil did not go bad with the years. He’d oil the chains and they would fall quiet again.

  There would be time for that.

  Rest

  The whole town showed for the burial of his wife and daughter, save the two ghouls who’d masqueraded as caring foster parents, and Lucinda’s father.

  Jonah stood graveside, hands clasped before him, head down, solemn and aggrieved yet moved by the presence of the many who’d come. He forgave each of them their past gossip and suspicion. What good would it do to cling to his tired anger in the face of their showing of support? What point would it prove, or purpose would it serve, except to isolate him? The solace of forgiveness warmed his blood. Loosened his knotted soul.

  As he turned from the graves, a hand rested on his shoulder.

  Lucinda.

  Snowflakes piled on the shoulders of her black wool coat as they had that day at the pit. He searched her eyes now for that frightened little girl but he could not find her.

  The two stood there, saying not a word, the snow gently alighting on them.

  The crowd disassembled, and folks departed with silent nods and glances, murmurs of condolence, not a few faces shaded with regret and guilt for their own failings toward him.

  Jonah worked loose the knot of his tie at his throat.

  “They found her,” Lucinda whispered. “The girl.”

  Jonah looked off toward the Gore. He knew they’d found the girl. He’d watched LeFranc uncover her body in the snow.

  “She’ll be okay,” Lucinda said. “Considering.”

  “She’s—” Jonah said.

  “Alive.”

  A keen and desperate longing to see the girl welled in him; he wanted to know more about her, ask Lucinda how this was possible, that she was alive, that she even existed. But he did not dare show interest in her. He’d planned to confess today about the girl, confess his part that had led to her death.

  “Dale and I have taken her in, for the time being,” Lucinda said.

  Jonah could not speak.

  “She told us about an old man who kept her,” Lucinda said. “It hasn’t been made public. Yet.”

  Tell her now, a voice said. Come clean. Speak the truth.

  “We’d like to find him,” Lucinda said.

  Jonah unslung his tie from around his neck, the tie so tight he felt it would strangle him.

  “We’d like to thank him,” Lucinda said.

  For a moment the old ugliness of paranoia crept into Jonah’s heart, and he knew what Lucinda told him was a trap, to draw him out. A lie to make him feel safe. He wondered what Lucinda really knew and suspected. He’d nearly gotten the girl killed. And they wanted to thank him?

  “She’d never have survived that first night if she’d not been found and taken in,” Lucinda said. “We deduced that his age and the poor weather impeded him from getting her to town straightaway. There’s no indication he was anything but good to her.”

  Jonah wrapped the tie around one of his forearms.

  “If you ever want to stop by my place, say hello to her,” Lucinda said.

  “Why would I—”

  Lucinda took his hand. “She looks so much like Sally. Her eyes. And has her spirit, now that she’s coming out of the trauma. I think seeing her, it might do you some good.”

  Jonah looked back at the two headstones.

  “I’ll leave you be,” Lucinda said.

  She squeezed his hand then headed down the hill to leave him with his family.

  Why?

  Lucinda sat with Dale on the couch, curled in front of the fire, its heat a comfort as she leaned into him, bone tired, Gretel asleep in the guest room Lucinda and Dale had decorated in a way they hoped comforted and pleased her.

  From the other room, Gretel cried out in her sleep.

  Lucinda stiffened.

  “She’ll settle down,” Dale said.

  “That poor girl,” Lucinda said. “What kind of God allows a child to come to this earth only to have her treated as she’s been treated? Left without anyone.”

  “She’s with us.”

  “For now. But the abuse she’s suffered along the way. What reason could God have for bringing her into this world and having her treated this way?”

  “I don’t know.” Dale pulled her closer to him. “You send your confirmation email?”

  Confirmation. Canada. The dig. She’d forgotten it.

  She had one day left to confirm her acceptance or be replaced. There was so much to do to prepare. And there was Gretel now too. Lucinda wanted to go. Yet she wanted to remain here too. “I think I’m going to call them instead. Explain things. The exceptional circumstances. Maybe they’d let me defer, participate in the next one. I hope they would understand.”

  “They’ll understand,” Dale said.

  “Maybe. Not everyone’s you.”

  “Or you.”

  The fire crackled.

  Outside, a snowstorm had picked up, buffeting the windows with wind and snow. Inside, Lucinda was warm and safe, if mystified at the wrongs of the world, as sleep claimed her.

  Spring

  Spring returned as spring will, and its breeze carried the sweet and tanged odor of manure turned into fresh thawed earth.

  The song of peepers chorused in the swamps.

  Rivers rushed, choked with mud, to finally run clear.

  Those solemn bears that had slumbered away the winter, lumbered again from their dark caverns to scratch and to blink back the brightness of the world.

  With life insurance funds he’d never before dared touch, Jonah had bought back his home for a song.

  Now, with the help of his neighbors, he sawed up the dead tree that had fallen in the yard and planted a new tree. He cut back the weeds, and raked up the sticks, and strew new grass seed. Shutters and gutters were rehung, and the porch rail and steps repaired. He oiled the porch swing’s rusted chain.

  Inside the house, he opened the shades and windows and let spring’s cool air and warm light pour into the house. He swept and scrubbed the floors, washed the windows and walls until his bones rang with the ache of work.

  On good days, he ambled into town to buy groceries, stopped in the Grain & Feed to sit and have a coffee and biscotti and watch the people pass on the street outside the new bay window. He’d return home and sit on the porch swing, rock idly, and watch kids jump from the One Dollar Bridge into the river as they had always done and probably always would do, their screams splitting the shimmering air.

  Sometimes he dozed and awakened much later, frightened and confounded to find the sun at a strange new angle in the sky.

  He thought of his daughter and wife, and when he heard the song of their laughter in the house, he let it run over him like river water over stone, giving himself up to it and letting it move him wherever it liked.

  And he missed them. More than ever. He missed them.

  One summer morning, as he sat out in his swing, he spotted Lucinda strolling down along the sidewalk. With the girl. A gasp escaped him and he felt his heart tighten with nervousness and fear. He’d never gone to visit the girl. Never dared.

  Lucinda and the girl walked hand in hand.

  He watched them as his panicked heart pounded.

  Lucinda waved.

  Jonah waved.

  Lucinda and the girl walked across the yard toward him, the girl with a small canvas bag slung ove
r her arm. He smiled as they came up the steps. He wanted to stand and wrap the girl in his arms, pull her tight to him and feel her warmth, but he stayed put.

  He looked in her face for some recognition of him, worried she might be afraid or confused. He saw none.

  The girl had grown. Her hair had lightened to the color of honey and now fell past her shoulders. Her face was pink with health and her fingernails trim and clean.

  She wore a yellow dress.

  Lucinda sat on a porch rail as the girl sat in the swing beside Jonah, her bag on her lap.

  Jonah took a deep breath and exhaled it in a long thin thread. “I like your dress,” he said.

  “She picked it out herself,” Lucinda said.

  He thought of the impossibility of his finding her that day.

  If he’d not found her, she’d have died. And he’d have died alone.

  If he’d not kept her, he’d never have come back here that night with her, to look around his old home for ancient drawings, and Lucinda would never have come here to investigate it and found more drawings—made connections—without the girl.

  What should one call such events?

  Coincidence.

  The stars aligning.

  Fate.

  Jonah smiled down at the girl and she smiled back.

  “Well,” Jonah said, his face warm. “It’s nice to meet you. What might your name be?”

  The girl offered a shy, coy look.

  “You know,” she said, her voice soft as dandelion tuft.

  “Do I?”

  The girl nodded.

  “Let’s see if I do,” Jonah said.

  He leaned in and whispered in her ear.

  She looked up at him.

  “Did he guess it?” Lucinda said.

  The girl smiled, and her eyes shone deep and dark and bright and lovely.

  And Jonah thought of the world’s many misfortunes, and of its many miracles.

  What came next, God knew.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to all who’ve encouraged, improved, and championed my writing over the years. My lovely wife, Meridith. My daughter, Samantha, and son, Ethan, for their smiles, hugs, and joy, and for their love of books and stories. My mother. My sisters: Beth, Judy, and Susan. All of my nieces and nephews: Jaclyn, Jacob, Harrison, Emily, Bryanna, Eric, Willa, Boone, Hailey, and Poppy. Gary Martineau. Libby and Herb Levinson. Todd and Diane Levinson. Allyson Miller. Ben Wilson. Dan Myers. Dan Orseck. Tom Isham. Mark Saunders. Lailee Mendelson. Kimberly Cutter. Anya DeNiro. Rob O’Donovan. John Mero. Roger and Susan Bora. Jeff Racine. Mike and Janice Quartararo. Stephen and Carole Phillips. Eric Weissleder. Chris Champine. Dave and Heidi Bouchard. Jim Lepage. Phil Monahan. David Huddle. Tony Magistrale. Bill and Mary Wilson. Jamie and Stephen Foreman. Bruce Coffin. Matthew Engels. Daniel Nogueira. Lucinda Jamison. Greg Cutler. Paul Doiron. David Joy. Steve Ulfelder. Roger Smith. Meg Gardiner. Hank Phillippi Ryan. Jake Hinkson. Lisa Turner. Drew Yanno. Tyler Mcmahon. Howard Mosher. Rona and Bob Long. A special thanks to my agent, Philip Spitzer, and to Lukas Ortiz and Kim Lombardini. And to the wonderful and creative people at HarperCollins, especially my editor, Carrie Feron.