by Gian Sardar
You give Dad God’s power, Anna says, and Eva can never argue. Confessions, prayers, wishes, all are directed at her father, who she’s convinced loves her unconditionally from his cloudy perch. Long ago their mother joined the wolves by turning away from God and keeping her daughters out of church, but the death of her husband somehow allowed this, providing something of a free pass. A drifted lamb. But Anna. Anna was the one who tried against all odds to fit in. Anna was the one who returned to church, who joined quilting bees, who hunched alongside other women over rows of strawberries and canned tomatoes in kitchens filled with late July heat. It’s Mary and Jesus you need to direct your prayers to, is what Anna says. Anna, good Anna, who will marry Jim Dear the farmer and spend her days scrubbing the pig scent from his denim.
“There are reasons I’d like to not be here. In this town,” Eva tells her father. She won’t spell out those reasons for fear he doesn’t know, though sometimes she thinks he does. Sometimes she thinks he had a hand in the punishing broken fence that kept her uncle searching through the night for his missing bull, or the gust of vengeful wind that dropped an elm branch atop his truck. Sometimes she thinks the reach of a father’s love might be just this great.
Others enter the graveyard, so she turns to her father with a whisper. “I feel like I was put here by accident. With him, I don’t feel that. I don’t feel like I’m trying to go somewhere all the time—I feel like I’ve arrived. So, I’m sorry to ask again, but if you can help, I’d appreciate it.”
From here she can see her house, bought by her father’s brothers when he passed, a merciful way to get Margaret and two young kids off the farm and into town. White clapboard with black trim. In the winter, with the snow and the white sky, it’s reduced to an outline. A pencil sketch of a house. An idea. The beginning of something, or maybe a faded end.
—
At home the table’s set. Anna, who was two months old when their father died and rightly has no memories of him, is across from Eva, while their mother sits at the end. Macaroni and cheese in a Pyrex casserole, the edges burned onto the glass, and string beans baked with a can of mushroom soup. Everything their mother makes goes into the oven, while the stovetop remains sparkling white.
There is a glass of milk at each place setting, the bottle in the center of the table. Around it is a ring of moisture, catching the tablecloth’s thatched fibers and spreading geometrically. Eva knows that if you lift the fabric, there is a stain in the wood, the finish worn in a circle from years of milk bottles, just as the floor is darker beneath the area rugs and the cherry end table would be spotted from the sun should you remove the empty vase and the broken music box, which you would not, because they belong right there.
There’s a knock on the back door. Margaret scoots her chair from the table. Eva’s and Anna’s eyes meet. Soon there’s the sound of boots stamping on the doormat, the kitchen floor creaking, and hushed voices. Then Uncle Lucas is standing in the dining room. He nods to each of the girls, then nods to the food. “Looks like a feast.”
He’s got overalls on, and even from across the room Eva catches that smell again. Though she hasn’t eaten yet, something rises in her throat.
“We’ve got more,” Margaret says, and tucks a short strand of hair behind her ear.
“Wish I could.” He looks to Eva. “Had a good breakfast at Gerry’s today.”
Margaret scratches her neck, hard enough that red remains, and turns to Lucas. “Did you bring chicken?”
“Chicken? No. Got pork and beef. Didn’t know you wanted chicken.” He nods at the girls as Margaret disappears into the kitchen. “Enjoy your supper.” His eyes linger on Eva, her hands on the table. “Pretty nails,” he says, and looks back up, though his eyes never make it to her face.
When finally he’s gone, Eva hears him tell her mother he’ll meet her downstairs, and then hears the gate of his truck slam shut, then the back door to the house open once again, this time without shuffling and stamping his feet. After all, Margaret’s in the basement already, with whatever she’s canned this week, waiting. No need for niceties.
With their mother and uncle gone, Anna gets up and turns on the radio that sits on the sideboard. Nat King Cole’s voice slides into the room. The volume is low, but enough. Both girls begin to eat. Their mother’s food gets cold. They’ve learned there’s no point in waiting. And the music, the music they like, as it helps to drown the sounds.
5
Now
AIDAN LOOKS TO THE NUMBER on the house before him. Wrap it up or put it on hold, Schultz had said about other cases, but after his run today Aidan went to talk to Sarah Breining’s best friend—mascara a smear on her sleeve, tissues scattered like flowers—and realized he was two doors down from Rick Sullivan’s house. In his mind he saw the photo of Rebecca Sullivan’s young boys, the ones who’d lost their grandmother, who couldn’t play in a yard anymore, and decided one quick visit on the forgery case was fine. In fact, he now realizes, he’ll be in St. Cloud tomorrow, questioning Lila McCale’s ex, a perfect time to drop off the handwriting samples to the examiner. Just those couple of things, that’s all he has time for—and all his mind can handle. Fixated, that’s how he feels about the rape cases. For almost ten minutes he’d looked through photos of Lila McCale, a cute girl with blue eyes and dark hair that fell in spirals to her shoulders, the face of someone open, an optimist who’d naturally see potential in a person and never think of ulterior motives. Until now, of course.
The house, the crux of what’s being contested in the will, is a white single-story, with bushes that practically obscure the windows. It might as well have come out of a catalogue or been won on The Price Is Right, it’s that basic. And it’s across the street from Applebee’s, the parking lot already full. As he steps up the front path, he figures he’ll grab dinner when he leaves, take it to go.
The door swings open.
“Yup,” Rick says. “I’m him. And yup, this is the house.”
“Great. Detective Mackenzie.”
“I know. I remember you.” Rick swoops his arm toward the hall and turns back into the house, revealing, as he does, a scar along his neck. Car accident, Aidan always knew in that way that knowledge can be present and yet unexplored. What he now understands is that Rick must’ve been in the car wreck that killed his father.
A step inside. The place smells a bit like smoke and Aidan spots an ashtray on an end table, emptied but fragrant. He takes a seat on an old corduroy couch. “Nice that you’re across from Applebee’s.”
Rick nods. “Haven’t used the stove since I moved in.”
“They got a big menu.”
“I only get the ribs.”
Every wall is covered with the whitened shapes of former paintings or prints. A few nails are left in place. Aidan sees the light shape of a cross near a door.
“You’re a painter, right? Houses?”
Rick just blinks at him. Slowly. Calmly. “You think all maids have clean homes?”
“Fair enough.” On the opposite side of the living room is a plasma TV. The mother passed away just a month ago and already the guy’s packed up everything, moved in without bothering to paint, and hung a big-screen TV. Could be he’s really motivated to move on, or could be he’s not nearly as affected as a devoted son who inherited everything should be. If he won’t talk about his family, he’ll talk about his TV, Aidan knows. “What’s that, fifty inches?”
“Forty-six.”
“That’s what I need. Perfect size.”
“Get bigger. That’s what I should’ve done, but they had a special.”
A special that started the day after your mother died, Aidan thinks. We all got the flyer. “So Rebecca.”
“Yeah. Sorry she’s bugging you. She’s got a history of it.”
“Of what?”
“Bugging cops. Anyone who’ll listen. Histrionic personality disorder. Ever
since we were kids, she’s telling lies. Sky’s always on its way down.”
Aidan makes a note, hating that he didn’t know this. “So you weren’t there the other night?”
“I was there. Trying to talk to her. But I didn’t try to run her over.”
“What made her think you did?”
“Hell if I know. Could’ve just been she was standing at the edge of the sidewalk when I pulled up. She’s making a mess of things with this will contention. I wanted to talk to her.”
Aidan spots today’s paper on the table by a Barcalounger. SERIAL RAPIST STRIKES MAKADE FALLS. Serial Rapist. They couldn’t have come up with a nickname, maybe? Meager details, he knows. The key ones haven’t yet been given to the press, thankfully. Nothing will be the same when those come out.
“Nice house,” Aidan says.
“It’s a shithole. It’s coming down.”
Aidan looks back at him. “Once this is resolved. Not before then.”
“Yeah.”
In the distance a police siren starts up and a neighbor’s dog begins a low howl. Through the window Aidan spots the climbing structure Rebecca’s boys used to play on, tall weeds shrouding its base.
“You don’t think it’s odd that your mother gave you the house, when your sister’s got two kids in an apartment?”
Rick smiles. “I think it’s fucking perfect.”
Claire Ballantine. You knew Claire. After the estate visit this afternoon, Abby called her mother back. I was hoping for this, Dorothy said, voice unsteady. If the dreams are there, you might as well come home, right? Abby could feel her mother’s happiness fanning across the country. No doubt she’d already started the grocery list, bed linens tumbling in the dryer.
Outside her apartment, Abby looks up and sees that their living room window has a crack. A bright line caught in the sun’s last effort. Beautiful, really. Once inside, she studies it, traces her finger along its path. It’s as if the world suddenly snapped with cold and one brilliant streak screamed into the air.
“What is it?”
She turns. Robert’s sitting in the chair at the dining room table, watching her. She’d not even seen him when she’d walked in, so intent she’d been in examining the glass. “There’s a crack in the glass.”
“Well, don’t touch it.”
“Want to go to Minnesota?” she asks.
He looks surprised. “What?”
She tells him then about Claire Ballantine’s connection to her family, the letters in her mother’s basement that could hold an explanation for her dreams—the fact that she’s not sleeping here, that there’s no reason now not to go home. As she talks, an excitement builds within her. Already she’s seeing the reflection of clouds in a lake. “It’s my reunion. I have vacation time. Candace said I can go. Two weeks, even—it’s slow and I’m useless. But you don’t have to stay the whole time.”
Guilty almost, she feels bad that her mind has already conjured scenarios and heard the comments at the reunion: a few studios are interested; so much hinges on what actor can green-light a film; a lot of “hurry up and wait” is what it is. A person she’d hate, that’s who she’ll be, warding off her schoolmates’ joy and green yards and houses and hallways lined with family photos, all with Hollywood bragging rights that here, in Los Angeles, wouldn’t make the valet think twice.
“That’s next week,” he says. “I can’t go. Not with the script going out.”
Her eyes find the line in the window. She can’t look at him. The first time home in over a decade, her world a jagged spiral, and he won’t be there with her. She feels off-balance; that’s how convinced she’d been that there’d be nothing more important, nothing that could stop him. “You won’t go,” she says, a statement she’s trying to understand.
“Abby,” he says. “Not won’t, can’t.”
“But I need you. I don’t think I can do this alone.”
“Three years it took to write this script. If it doesn’t sell, I need to do something else with my life. Do you have any idea what that’s like? I want to be there with you, but look at it from where I sit. And think of what it can bring. A wedding, a down payment.”
“You could fly home. If there’s a meeting. Easily.”
“You know how this works. A call, an opening, I have to take it. I can’t wait on a flight, I can’t drive hours to get to the airport.” A pause. “You have something you love. This is it for me. There’s nothing else.”
But a cloud has moved within her, blocking the pledge of his words. You have something you love. This is it for me. She understands, she does. Of course he only meant career, she knows this, and so with every minute the cloud slips a bit further and the light, diffused at first, is at last glimpsed. This is what they’ve been waiting for, as a couple. This is exciting, the moment, the turn. Feedback from this script has been great, and for the first time he has an A-list agent. This really could be it, just the beginning. She tells herself this over and over, though still the shaded, eclipsed part of her mind holds the response What about me?
—
In no time she’s at the trip’s precipice, staring down the night hours until the morning’s flight, the return to Minnesota, what could be a mistake. Tomorrow marks two weeks since the first nightmare, and every night now the debate has been the same. Does she try to stay awake, to prolong these clear, dreamless hours, ignoring the dread that hems her thoughts, the anticipation that even a heavy eye blink might trap her once again in that meadow? Or does she rip the Band-Aid off, reach for a bottle of Ambien and swallow a pill that could inflame her dreams, but surely is the fastest way to the other side? One pill, no fighting it, she’ll be asleep. But then she sees the sky above the oak tree, churning with what’s yet to be unleashed, the table below set for a guest she’s yet to encounter. No, she always decides, no Ambien if there’s a chance the dream will be worse.
Makade. With Claire’s name and the letters, Abby feels as though she’s being led there—or, depending on her mood, chased right back into the lion’s den. A lot will have changed, she knows. Her old friends, faces firmly tucked away in her past, are all adults now, most likely sleeping in sprawling houses with plush carpeting, the yards behind them wide and fenceless. At first there’d been efforts to stay in touch, emails and phone calls, but then the snowball of catching up loomed until calls just never happened and emails went unsent. The one time Abby had gone back to visit during college, the nightmares started again, and from that point on it became easier, safer, for her mother to visit California, to spend time in the sun, bragging to her friends about the Hollywood sign that curved against a sky she only ever painted as blue.
Almost everyone Abby went to high school with will still be there, she’s decided. Just about everyone came from generations born less than an hour away, and the few from out of state were considered exotic. Even Aidan Mackenzie, from Idaho, could stun the class with simple talk of mountains.
Marc Blanchard, the first boy she’d kissed, was from Louisiana. That was the detail she’d always start with when recounting the story, a fact she’d been strangely proud of. His accent was thick and draped over words that were slow and infrequent, but the tales he did tell made up for his silence, involving water with gators and catfish like nothing you’d ever seen, nothin’ like these northern cats. He was short and had hair that always seemed flattened, as if every morning he emerged from a rainstorm. And actually, the night of the kiss did involve a rainstorm, one so bad the party was moved downstairs when the winds picked up and the walls pressed and creaked. Little basement windows flashed with light and the hostess whose parents weren’t home suddenly became worried, perhaps picturing a tornado lifting the house away and revealing her disobedience. Abby, herself fifteen and guilty, was holding a warm beer in her hand when she saw Marc standing in an area sectioned off for laundry, smelling the fabric softener. I prefer Downy, he’d said. It’s
what my mom uses. She let him kiss her, the cap still in his hand. That’s the part she loves, that the cap was still in his hand as the windows flashed and the rain pounded everything it could. End of story.
Though it wasn’t, because then he reached into his shirt pocket and produced a joint, and with that offering, she felt adulthood crashing in on her, sex and drinking and drugs—nothing that she was really ready for, despite what she wanted her friends to think. It was too much. Never could she be unkissed—that girl was gone—and in that moment she missed her innocent self so much she had to walk away. When later asked what had happened, she’d said he had bad breath. Horrible, a lie. He was supposed to have been there for only a year, but his father, who set up grocery stores for a living, had had a stroke and suddenly travel was a problem, and so there was Marc in the halls every day, avoiding her eyes.
It makes her sick to think of this. Both because of what she’d done and because still, to this day, she misses herself.
And now she’s thinking of another boy she’d been cruel to, one whom her mother, an English teacher, used to tutor. He’d bring her gifts, a little leather pouch filled with stones. Tourmaline. Obsidian. Jade. Pyrite. She’d loved them, the shine, the smoothness of the polished rocks, but she was young and what was she supposed to do with rocks? So she tossed them into her desk drawer. Shut away, forgotten.
She can’t be awake with her failings, not now, not in the darkness of her room. Carefully she folds back the covers and goes to the hall, where she sees Robert’s screen saver, a torrent of stars, soon gone with the jiggle of the mouse. She pulls on the chain of his desk lamp and the reflection of the room springs into the window before her. William Ballantine, his name as fixed within her as Claire’s. She’ll look him up, just to see. What had her mother said? Killed himself, in the basement, on the housekeeper’s day off.