The Mourning Hours

by Paula Treick DeBoard

  Johnny breathed hard through his nose. “I already told Officer Parks, we were driving home—”

  “No,” Detective Halliday interrupted. “Let’s start with Saturday morning.”

  Johnny leaned back a few inches. I saw him struggling to understand the question. Saturday morning? What did that have to do with anything?

  I thought about Saturday morning. It was only yesterday, but it felt like a million years ago. I’d been at the kitchen table reading the comics when Johnny had come in from milking the cows. “Colder than a witch’s tit out there,” he’d said, once he was sure Mom wasn’t in earshot. It had been too cold for a run, but I’d heard him later in the garage, jumping rope for minutes at a time, stopping to catch his breath, and starting up again. That’s where he’d been when Mom had sent me outside for a can of orange juice from the extra freezer. I’d heard his breathy count: “One seventy-five...one seventy-six...”

  Yesterday morning he had been my brother. Now, things had happened so fast that I couldn’t be sure who he was.

  Mom walked past into the kitchen, giving me a look, the look, the one that told me I was too young to be part of an adult conversation, even if it was the most important conversation of my life. We left Johnny to mumble his answers for Detective Halliday and assembled around the kitchen table. Aunt Julia pulled me onto her lap, and I breathed in her musky cigarette smell.

  “I hope Stacy’s okay,” I whispered to no one in particular. Aunt Julia hugged me a little more tightly.

  From the doorway, Emilie said, “She’s not okay, you idiot.” Her hair was mussed on one side from sleep, her face wrinkled from being pressed against a pillow.

  “Emilie!” Mom snapped.

  “She’s not okay,” Emilie repeated quietly.

  I stared at her. “What do you mean? How do you know?”

  “Are you kidding me?” she scoffed. “She’s been out in the cold for hours now. It’s got to be ten degrees out there. Think about it.”

  “That’s enough, Emilie,” Mom hissed, but of course Emilie was right. I tried to picture Stacy in her appliquéd jeans and her Ships sweatshirt, or maybe her red sweater with a row of white hearts across the chest. She would have been wearing her new boots, a Christmas gift from her parents. Emilie and I had both idolized those boots: soft brown leather, with laces that went all the way up her shin bones. Not boots for walking in the snow. Her winter coat was Kelly-green with big toggle clasps, which she topped with a knitted hat with dangling pom-poms. For some reason I couldn’t imagine her whole face at once: strands of red hair, green-gray eyes, the crease of skin on her cheek when she smiled. Already I had lost a clear vision of her; already I was seeing her in pieces.

  Stacy’s boots would be ruined by now, soaked through, her toes freezing inside. Her face would be rubbed raw from the cold, snowflakes sticking to her eyelashes. The cold would have seeped inside her coat, through her jeans, down her sweater.

  I imagined her coming up the steps to our back door, her fingers and toes brittle with frostbite, snapping off like autumn branches. I’d read about the Titanic, how the people who went into the water froze to death before they could be scooped out. I felt a sob rise in my throat and tried to disguise it with a cough.

  Emilie glared at me.

  Mom said, “We’ve just got to pray for her. We’ve just got to pray that God keeps her safe.”

  Emilie folded her arms across her chest. “Might be too late for that.”

  Mom hissed across the table, “Now you listen to me—”

  But just then a police radio sputtered to life in the living room, and our phone rang. Mom lunged for it, picking up on the second ring.

  She’s alive! She’s safe! Emilie was wrong, the detectives were wrong, I was wrong for thinking what I had thought. Stacy was alive and everything would be okay.

  “Oh, my God.” Mom’s face was flushed. “It’s Uncle Paul. Says he just heard on the scanner...”

  The men filled the doorway, led by Detective Halliday.

  “What’s going on?” Emilie demanded.

  “We’ve got a report of someone matching Stacy’s description at a gas station up north, near Highway 10,” Officer Parks said. “We’re heading up to check it out.”

  Johnny, eager, reached for his coat.

  “Can we go, too?” I asked, squirming in Aunt Julia’s lap.

  “No, baby. They’ve got a whole team out there,” Dad said, and I could tell from his voice that he was hopeful, too. He and Mom exchanged a long look, and then the men headed out the door. I wrestled free of Aunt Julia’s grasp and watched from the window as Officer Parks opened the back door of his patrol car and Johnny and Dad piled in. Their faces were lit for a moment until the light inside the car faded, and they vanished into the dark. A knot of fear stuck in my throat, thinking of Dad and Johnny behind the protective screen, riding along like a pair of criminals. The patrol car did a quick turn in the driveway before heading off into the night. The digital clock on the microwave read 4:37. Was it possible that this was still the same, long night?

  “Highway 10? That’s a long way to walk,” Emilie said from the door. She had pulled one of Dad’s hooded sweatshirts over her pajamas, its sleeves flopping beyond her fingertips. With the hood cinched tight, only a small oval of her face showed—the inside corners of her eyes, her nose, the sad set of her lips. “How would she even get there?”

  “Shush,” Mom said, but the house was already quiet, absent the police officers. “We’re going to wait and see.” We shushed obediently and listened to the silence, which wasn’t really silent at all. We were breathing, the coffee was percolating, the wind was smacking snow against the windows. Stacy was missing, and now Dad and Johnny were gone, too.

  I took a deep, ragged breath. “They’re coming back, aren’t they? Dad and Johnny, I mean?”

  Mom was chewing on her thumbnail again, worrying the ragged edge. “Of course,” she said. “Of course they’re coming back.”

  I waited for them on the couch, tucking a crocheted afghan around my body. How long would it take to get there, up to the juncture with Highway 10? Was Emilie right, or would Stacy be waiting for them, as if she’d been there all along? I heard the grandfather clock chime five before I fell asleep. It was almost morning, then. It would be morning by the time I woke up. And in the morning, everything had to be better.

  eighteen

  Dad called later, when the sky was changing from black to blue and the snowfall had slowed. It was maddening to wait for Mom to hang up the phone and tell us the news. A lifetime seemed to pass in those seconds.

  “Did they find her?” I demanded the second the receiver was back in its cradle.

  Mom shook her head. “Nothing. A false report.”

  So Stacy Lemke wasn’t near Highway 10; she wasn’t headed north to anywhere. I didn’t understand how there could be a false report; either there was a frostbitten teenage girl wandering in the area at 4:00 a.m., or there wasn’t. It didn’t seem like the sort of thing that could be mistaken.

  Aunt Julia stretched in the doorway. “They’re coming back, then?”

  Mom fidgeted uneasily. “They’re taking Johnny in to look at his cut.”

  “It’s that bad?” Aunt Julia asked.

  “His hand will be fine. The police need to, you know, examine the cut in case there are...well, you know. Fibers and things.”

  We let this sink in. Outside, Kennel began to bark.

  “Is Johnny a suspect?” I demanded.

  Mom swallowed. “I don’t know if that’s the word—”

  Emilie asked, “What other word is there?”

  The knock at the back door made us jump. I craned my neck around Emilie and Aunt Julia—hoping for what? Stacy? Dad and Johnny? It was Jerry Warczak, stamping to clear the snow from his shoulders and boo
ts.

  “I’ve been out with the search team,” he explained, peeling his hands out of his gloves. “Heard all the commotion and wondered if I could be of any help here.”

  Mom started to her feet. “Oh, thank you, Jerry. Thank you. But I’m not sure—”

  He flexed and tightened his fingers, working the cold out of them. “I thought maybe I could help out with the milking.”

  The milking. We’d all forgotten, in the chaos of things, that we lived on a farm, that there were a hundred cows to milk. Dad usually took this early shift, heading out to the barn long before the rest of us were awake, returning to doze while Mom got breakfast going. Weekdays, he and Jerry worked together, sometimes with Grandpa’s interference. Weekends, the job mainly belonged to Johnny. It might have felt like a million years since last night, but it was only Sunday, after all—time for Johnny to begin his shift.

  “Yes—that would be wonderful,” Mom gushed. “I’m sure John would be so appreciative. And I know he’ll want to thank you somehow—”

  “He’d do the same for me,” Jerry said, brushing her off. Maybe he felt awkward to stand in our kitchen without Dad or Johnny there. “Well, then,” he said after a moment. “I’ll just go ahead and get started, I think.”

  “Thank you again, Jerry,” Mom called as he left.

  For what seemed like the first time in my life, none of us went to church that Sunday. Mom suggested we all shower and get dressed, I guess to be prepared for whatever else the day might bring. Meanwhile, she set out bread and butter and jam, just to keep busy. Aunt Julia went to her house to “freshen up,” promising to return the second we needed her. Right now! I thought, watching her Buick head down the driveway. Right now, we need you.

  Grandpa came over with a dozen questions Mom couldn’t answer, then wandered out to the barn to help Jerry. It was nearly eight when Dad and Johnny arrived, blurry-eyed. We reassembled around the kitchen table, exhausted. Johnny’s hand was rewrapped in a thick bandage. He slumped into his chair at the table and immediately fell asleep leaning on one arm. He’d been awake for more than twenty-four hours at this point.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever been so tired,” Dad said, forcing down a few bites of toast. He looked as if he’d been gone for a year instead of a few hours. Give him some gray hair and he’d look as old as Grandpa. “And Johnny—they’ve really been putting him through the wringer.” He glanced at Mom pointedly, a glance that said he would talk to her later, without Emilie and me listening.

  Mom nodded, understanding. “Hopefully he can just rest for a bit. Take a shower, sleep a little.”

  “They’ll want us back at the station later, you and me, and Johnny,” Dad said. “Detective Halliday said he would send a car for us.”

  “Okay,” Mom said carefully. “I’ll see if Julia can stay with the girls.”

  “We can stay here by ourselves,” Emilie protested, but Dad’s look shut her down.

  Dad and Mom went upstairs, closing the door to the stairwell firmly behind them. Emilie and I cleared away the breakfast dishes, most of which were untouched, and walked carefully around a sleeping Johnny. Wordlessly, we finished the tasks Mom had started and abandoned: the heap of laundry to be folded, the dishes that lurked in the sink under a few inches of soapy water.

  The phone rang and Johnny bolted upright. Emilie and I stared at it as if it was a grenade about to explode.

  “Think we should answer it?” Emilie asked, but someone intercepted the call on the upstairs receiver.

  The morning wore on, with the entire town of Watankee checking in by phone or traipsing through our kitchen. “It’s all over the news,” Aunt Julia reported when she returned, her hair blow-dried and curled, her makeup carefully applied. Grandpa came by to tell us what he’d seen on Channel 10; Uncle Paul drifted in and out; a friend of Mom’s from the hospital stopped by with a pot of soup. Mom and Aunt Julia stood in the driveway talking for a long time. When they came inside, Mom had tears in her eyes. Jerry Warczak must have finished the milking; he left without coming inside.

  After church let out, Pastor and Mrs. Ziegler came over, refusing the offer of coffee. “We don’t want to cause any additional trouble,” Mrs. Ziegler said. Pastor said a prayer in his booming voice that seemed too loud for our kitchen; afterward, Mrs. Ziegler clasped us, one by one, in an uncomfortable hug. It was as if we were having a funeral service, as if Stacy was buried and gone already. Or maybe the funeral was for Johnny; he might as well have been dead, too.

  “Now you hang in there, son,” Pastor Ziegler said, putting his hand heavily on Johnny’s shoulder.

  By now, I realized, everyone in Watankee must have known, from the butcher to the librarian to the kids in my fourth-grade class. Had my Sunday School class prayed about this? Was everyone staring at our empty pew and whispering, speculating, gossiping? In their minds, had they already buried Stacy, and tried and convicted Johnny?

  Detective Halliday came over just before noon, his large frame filling our doorway. “We’re going to have a little meeting down at the station with the Lemkes,” he announced. “Just to get a few things out in the open.”

  Dad said, “Yes, sir.”

  Mom nodded, running her hands through her hair to tuck in a few stray curls. “Do you want us to follow you?”

  Detective Halliday shook his head slightly. “If it’s all the same, I’ll just take you in my car.”

  “Let’s go, then,” Johnny said. He swished past me and banged out the door, his coat tucked under one arm.

  “Listen to your aunt, now,” Dad commanded, giving Emilie a pointed glance and me a kiss on the cheek as he went. The three of them clambered into the back of the detective’s navy sedan and left.

  “Okay, then,” Aunt Julia said brightly, as the car pulled away. “Should we get some lunch together?”

  In response, Emilie wandered into the living room and snapped on the television. Aunt Julia and I followed, perching mutely on the couch. We watched a string of commercials about heater repairs and used car sales before the news came on. A perky blonde woman informed us that the local area had been hit hard by snow, with the Manitowoc area receiving nearly thirteen inches in the past twenty-four hours. The roof of the Toys “R” Us in Sheboygan had collapsed. I half tuned out, picturing thousands of toys buried in the snow, when suddenly I heard Stacy’s name.

  “Turn it up!” I yelped, and Emilie obliged.

  “...vanished last night during the snowstorm after some car trouble in rural Manitowoc County.”

  “Vanished?” I repeated, the word salty on my tongue. People didn’t just vanish. They fell into holes or got into cars, but they didn’t vanish.

  “Shut up!” Emilie snapped.

  “Throughout the night, volunteers from all across the county searched the neighboring fields for any sign of the missing girl.”

  There was a shot then, of a field I recognized farther down Rural Route 4, and a group of men walking across it, about an arm’s length apart.

  “Early this morning there was a report of a teenage girl spotted up north, close to Whitelaw, but authorities have dismissed the lead. Anyone with information about the disappearance of Stacy Lemke is asked to call—”

  Emilie turned down the volume, and the reporter’s voice dissolved.

  “It’s not going to help to hear any of this,” Aunt Julia said gently, touching her palm to Emilie’s shoulder. Emilie had put on Dad’s sweatshirt again; it was big enough that she could disappear inside it. Maybe she wanted to vanish herself.

  “Maybe she was hurt in the crash,” I suggested, trying out the idea. “That must be what happened. She was hurt, and then she—”

  Emilie waved the floppy cuff of the sweatshirt at me. “If she was hurt, she wouldn’t have left the truck. And Johnny would have said something, wouldn’t he?”

  “I don
’t know,” I admitted. “I’m just thinking.”

  “Well, try to use some sense when you think.”

  “Okay, let’s come away from the television,” Aunt Julia suggested, helping me to my feet.

  “And do what? Play some checkers or something?” Emilie sniffed. “I mean, what’s the point? He’s fucking ruined everything.”

  Aunt Julia frowned. “We don’t know that your brother has done anything.”

  “I’ll tell you what he’s done,” Emilie huffed. “He took his girlfriend out on a date, and he didn’t bring her back. That’s all anyone is going to need to know.”

  As much as I hated her for saying it, I knew she was right. All the regular things from our regular lives were pretty useless now.

  Everything was fucking ruined.

  nineteen

  Aunt Julia made macaroni and cheese from a box; in between haphazard stirs of the noodles on the stove, she went out for at least two smokes. “There’s no point trying to quit during a time of stress,” she explained. The noodles ended up overcooked, limp, coated in a sticky paste of orange cheese. Emilie took one look and excused herself to lie down in front of the television again. I moved the macaroni around my plate and scraped the rest into Kennel’s bowl by the door.

  “Did you tell my mom what I told you?” I asked Aunt Julia. “About the fight and everything else?”

  Aunt Julia closed her eyes. “You know, I’m just not sure it’s the right time.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She opened her eyes, rubbing one hand across her temple. “Well, I don’t think it necessarily proves anything. They might have had an argument, but that doesn’t mean that Johnny...”

  Her voice trailed off, but mine filled in the blank.

  “Killed her?” I prompted, then clapped my hand over my mouth. It was a horrible thing to think, let alone to say. I had a woozy feeling that by saying the words, I’d made them true.