by David Bell
Bill fought back against the tears welling in his eyes. Focus, he told himself, scraping the stubble off his face. Summer’s health is all that matters. But even the mundane act of shaving was fraught with memories. He could picture Summer standing in the bathroom doorway, age three or so, watching him shave as if it were the most fascinating thing in the world. He always bent down and smeared a dollop of shaving cream on the end of her nose, causing her to squeal with delight. He almost sold the house when Julia died, thinking he couldn’t stand to walk through that kitchen every day, to eat meals and drink coffee over the exact spot where his wife had died alone. But Summer talked him out of it. She said the house had the opposite effect on her. She liked being in the place where her mother had both lived and died. She didn’t want to forget anything.
Bill set the razor aside, then rinsed his face with warm water. It felt good, bracing and cleansing. He’d given in to Summer’s wishes back then and didn’t sell, saying he understood. He wanted to give his daughter the most normal life possible, even if she didn’t have a mother anymore, and if staying in the house helped that along, so be it.
He studied his face in the mirror. Dark, baggy circles under his eyes. Slightly thinning hair. Julia’s death made him feel tired and worn in a way nothing ever had, a power drain he wasn’t sure he’d recovered from.
And now Summer was in the hospital.
If the worst happened, if she didn’t come home, no way he’d stay in the house. He’d burn it to the ground along with everything in it. . . .
“Stop,” he said out loud. “Just stop.”
He left the bathroom for the bedroom. Once dressed, Bill wanted to get out of the house as quickly as possible. It felt painfully empty and lonely, its quiet an oppressive force that seemed to be pushing against him. Every footstep echoed, and every movement sounded loud and lonely.
But he did make one stop on his way out. He went into Summer’s bedroom. Just a couple of years earlier, she’d insisted on a change—the pink walls, the ruffled bedspread, and the American Girl dolls went away in favor of a sleeker, more modern look she chose with Julia’s help. Her room looked clean and crisp, white and gray and modern like the Apple Store at the mall in Nashville. Bill considered the space off-limits. He never entered without knocking, and even then he usually talked to her from the doorway as though an invisible force field kept him from venturing farther inside.
But the police had been through the room more than once during the past few days. They went through every drawer, dug through the closet, shone flashlights under the bed and into every corner. They took her computer and turned it inside out.
And found nothing.
Bill wandered over to her dresser. On top, he saw a picture of Summer and Julia at the beach. They’d driven to Destin, Florida, three years earlier and spent a week on the white sand, Summer spastically running in and out of the tide and all of them acquiring stinging sunburns. She and Julia posed for the photo on the last day, one of many shots taken, but the one on the dresser was the best. Their smiles so big and natural, the love between them burning through the two-dimensional image. The sun-bleached, radiant joy made them look more like sisters than mother and daughter. How could any of them contemplate the accident on the horizon, the one that would kill Julia in the kitchen just a year and a half later?
Bill pulled open the top drawer of the dresser and peered inside. He saw a jumble of colored panties and white socks. Looking into his daughter’s underwear drawer seemed particularly invasive. The items looked forlorn and small, things most of the world never glimpsed. After his conversation with Paige, he expected to find a stash of birth control pills or condoms, but if the police had found anything of that nature, they hadn’t told him. And even with Summer in the hospital fighting for her life, it seemed like a violation of her privacy to dig around.
He closed the drawer and looked at her bed. About the only thing that survived the decorating purge that marked his daughter’s transition from child to adolescent was a stuffed Winnie the Pooh Julia had bought when Summer was still a baby. Winnie rested on top of the white pillows, his chubby stomach and coal black eyes pointed toward the ceiling. The bear’s fur had lost some of its luster over the years, growing stained and dirty from years of being dragged around the house. Bill reached out and grabbed the bear by one of its legs, hoping to bring a piece of home to the hospital for Summer.
CHAPTER TWELVE
On his way down the hallway toward the front of the house, Bill stopped one more time, hesitating in the doorway of the spare bedroom he used as a home office. Bill rarely brought his job home, preferring to do as much as possible on-site at the college, where he worked as a network engineer in the IT division. The job rarely required late hours, and Bill made a point of being home as much as possible when Summer was.
Julia had used the office more than he did. When Summer turned ten, Julia went back to school, working part-time on a master’s degree in counseling, with the goal of working in the school system or for a social welfare agency in the county. The dream never materialized. She was two-thirds of the way through the program when she died. Sometimes Bill considered quitting his own job and going back for a degree like the one Julia was pursuing, an act that would complete her dream in her absence. But he couldn’t justify it financially. With no one else helping out, he needed to hang on to his job in order to pay for everything he and Summer needed—a car, health insurance, clothes, college.
A state budget crunch had frozen his salary for the previous few years, and Bill wondered how long they’d have such a precarious stability. And that was before he had to worry about the possibility of Summer’s medical bills and long-term care. Therapy, nurses, modifications to the home if Summer was disabled . . .
He stopped running through the list. Summer’s health, he reminded himself. Right now. Nothing else mattered. Nothing else was promised or certain.
Bill wanted to resist going inside the office at all, but his mind and heart knew better. He wanted and needed to do it today more than ever.
He set Winnie the Pooh on the desk and sat down, lifting the lid on the aging Dell laptop he still kept there. While the machine booted up, making a low grinding sound, he looked around the somewhat disordered room. There was one filing cabinet with a messy stack of papers and manuals on top. A futon sat against the far wall, converted for the moment into its position as a couch. More papers littered its surface, and Bill knew he’d have to clear it off for Paige to sleep on. He’d been promising himself to clean and organize the place for about six months.
The laptop had belonged to Julia, and she’d used it for her schoolwork. Bill knew the computer wasn’t worth much. It wasn’t even good enough for Summer to use at school, but he held on to it for a variety of reasons, all of them sentimental. He just couldn’t bear to get rid of something that contained so much of who Julia was.
Just before Julia suffered her fatal accident in the kitchen—before she mounted a ladder to scrape wallpaper off the walls and lost her balance, tumbling to her death from a head injury—she made three phone calls. Two to Bill that he didn’t answer. And one to their neighbor in back, Adam Fleetwood, a call he told Bill later he didn’t answer because he was in a meeting at work. Messages stayed on voice mail for only thirty days, so before that time was up, Bill converted Julia’s last words to an MP3 file and kept them on the laptop.
He bent down and reached behind the plastic garbage can in the corner of the room, fumbling for a moment until he found what he was looking for. Julia’s ancient flip phone, the one she refused to trade in for an upgrade and the one she carried at the time she died. The one she called him from. It was attached to the wall by its black charging cord, and when he picked it up, he held it in his hand like a large black jewel, a sleek, obsidian talisman. Bill hadn’t brought himself to disconnect the line. He’d kept it active for the past year for the same reason he kept Julia’s laptop in
the office—it was a part of her. He lifted the phone to his face and took a quick sniff. He liked to think it carried a remnant of her, a reminder of her essence that was transferred to the phone on the day she died. He smelled her familiar scent—the lavender shampoo she used, the lotion she spread on her hands. Did the phone really hold it? Bill doubted it. He didn’t care. He liked having the object around, even if it cost him money to keep it going.
He set the phone on the desk and turned to the laptop. Even though he’d performed the ritual many times before, his hands trembled slightly as he pressed the proper keys and increased the volume. A longer than usual pause ensued, and a quaking panic passed through Bill as he wondered if the file had become corrupt or had been accidentally deleted when the cops went through the house searching everything and anything.
But then he heard the familiar sound of Julia’s voice.
“It’s me. . . . Look, I’m sorry we fought that way. You know I hate it.” She laughed a little. “We both hate it, of course. I’m going to go ahead and paint the kitchen. It needs it. You don’t have to be involved.”
The recording beeped. Winnie the Pooh’s dead black eyes watched him from the desk. And then the next message began.
And Julia sounded more serious.
“I’m sorry that you feel the way you feel, that you’d ever think I’d do what you suggested. I . . . I wish you’d answer. I know you’re giving me the silent treatment, so I guess we’ll talk about this when you get home. We can settle it all, and I’ll tell you what’s been going on with me lately. It’s time.”
Bill wanted to listen again but didn’t have time. He snapped the laptop shut and pushed it back away from the edge of the desk. Holding the phone in his hands for a long moment, he applied pressure from both sides, cupping it like a baby bird.
He didn’t care what Julia had done. He really didn’t care.
“I wish you were here, babe. I really wish you were here.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Before he stood up, Bill heard something at the back door. He listened, his head cocked, and then he understood. Someone was there, knocking and knocking.
Bill’s stomach turned to ice. Was it the police? Had something happened to Summer at the hospital?
He dismissed that possibility. If something had gone wrong, if a crisis had developed, someone would have called. A doctor. Or Paige.
The knocking came again.
Bill grabbed the stuffed bear, sighing loudly. Someone selling something, or a religious freak trying to convert him. He didn’t have the time or the patience for it. But when he stomped into the family room, he saw a familiar figure standing at the back door, trying to see inside, his face pressed against the glass. Relief surged through his body like a flood. A truly friendly face.
“Adam.” Bill undid the lock, then pulled the door open, letting in a cool gust of air. “How long have you been out there? I was in the shower.”
“Not long. I saw your car.” Adam stepped inside, rubbing his hands together. “I was going to call, but I decided to come over instead.” He wore a heavy coat over a white button-down shirt and black pants. Adam stood a few inches taller than Bill and was five years younger. His sales job kept him on the road during the week, and on weekends, he spent his time in the yard that backed up to Bill’s. Tending a garden in the spring and summer and digging and raking in the fall and winter gave him the aura of an outdoorsman, a strong and ruggedly fit man who looked like he belonged in a catalog selling camping gear. More than once, Julia had commented on Adam’s good looks, paying special attention to his broad shoulders and bulging muscles. But some of the color was drained from his face. His movements seemed jerky, uncertain, lacking his usual athletic grace. “I’ve been hearing more things on the radio, Bill, as I drove back into town. I was over in Hughes County for work, or I would have run by the hospital today. None of it makes sense.”
“The cops don’t have everything straight yet.”
“What is the story, Bill? Is there anything new?”
Bill had never heard Adam’s voice so insistent, so pleading. But none of them had ever been through anything like Summer’s disappearance before. Bill gave Adam an update, and running through everything again made Bill feel better. Unburdened a little.
Adam listened with his lips slightly parted, his face still pale. He’d been in the house a few times since Summer disappeared, keeping Bill company and trying to lift his spirits. He’d been Bill’s main support system. Bill had always felt a pull toward Adam and couldn’t help but think it was a vestigial desire, something left over from junior high and high school when he and others like him gravitated toward the better-looking kids, the stronger kids, the more capable kids. Adam once told Bill he’d been a star baseball player growing up, and that piece of news didn’t surprise Bill at all.
Adam’s hands rested on his hips, his coat still on. “I’m sorry,” he said. “On the radio, it sounded bleak.”
“I’m on my way back to the hospital now. I just came home to shower. And I thought I’d bring this guy back for Summer.” He lifted the bear, Winnie’s pudgy legs dangling. “You know, to make her feel more at home or whatever.”
Images of the ICU tumbled through his mind. The scalpel, the rubber tube inserted into Summer’s chest. Her small body exposed to all those strangers. Bill felt weak, his joints loose and rubbery. He took a seat on the couch, the bear in his lap. “She’s bad, Adam. Really bad.” Bill struggled to keep his thoughts and emotions together. “They beat her within an inch of her life.” As he spoke, he found it hard to believe his words applied to his own daughter. That they came out of his mouth at all made him think his own mind was playing a trick, convincing itself that he spoke about another child, one not related to him in any way. “She might have brain damage. Or vision damage.” He swallowed. “She might not even wake up.”
“Is she moving at all?” Adam asked.
“She makes noises.” Bill looked down at his fingernails. He’d forgotten to clip them. “She acts all agitated sometimes. If I try to talk to her or comfort her. It scares me. I don’t know what she’s thinking, if she’s thinking anything at all.”
Adam looked frozen in place. He’d known Summer as long as he’d lived behind them—seven years—and had watched her grow from a child to a teenager. Adam had been married once, with a son, but he and his wife had split up shortly after Bill and Julia moved in. His ex-wife and child moved away, back to Oklahoma where Adam had grown up. Somewhere along the way, Julia had invited Adam to spend Thanksgiving with the three of them when he didn’t have the time to travel home, and they’d spent every Thanksgiving together since, including the past two after Julia’s death. Bill had friends from work, friends from a film club he occasionally attended, but it was safe to say Adam was his closest friend in town, the person he talked to the most outside of his family.
Something seemed to click into place in Adam’s mind just then. He took a couple of steps forward and slumped into a chair across the room, exhaling a deep breath.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You probably want to get back.”
“I do. My sister’s there. She’s sitting with Summer so I could come home and shower.”
“That’s good.” Some certainty returned to Adam’s face, some sense of equilibrium being restored. “Do you want me to go with you? Or I can keep an eye on things here, or . . . Hell, maybe you’d like a drink. Some of that Tennessee you’ve got?”
Adam didn’t wait for an answer. He was out of the chair and into the kitchen, opening the corner cabinet where Bill kept his liquor. Adam brought down the bottle of George Dickel, then reached into another cabinet and pulled out two glasses. He carried all of it over to the coffee table and poured two healthy shots. His hands shook as he screwed the cap onto the bottle.
“Maybe I shouldn’t,” Bill said. “I need a clear head.”
“You’ve had
a hell of a shock. This will steady you.” He pushed one glass toward Bill and lifted the other one for himself. “I know I could use a drink after hearing about this.”
Bill took the glass and tossed the shot down. The burn spread through his throat and into his nasal passages, but then a wave of calm swept through him. The liquor served its purpose, and he wondered why he hadn’t thrown down more shots in the past couple days. Maybe because Adam hadn’t suggested it.
“That’s good,” Bill said. “Thanks.”
“More?”
“No, no. One will do.”
Adam came over and clapped Bill on the shoulder. The gesture felt oddly calming and appropriate. Adam always knew what to do or say. The right word, the right joke. “Want me to drive you? You look a little wrung out.”
“I need to ask you something. And, no, you don’t have to drive me.” Adam stayed standing, forcing Bill to crane his neck up from where he remained on the couch. “I’m going to try to keep this simple, but have you ever seen any boys coming or going over here? With Summer?”
“You mean the day she disappeared? No. The cops went over all this with me. More than once.”
“Not just then. Anytime. The last six months, I guess. Did you see anything?”
“I’m here less than you are, buddy. And even when I’m working in the yard, I guess I’m in my own head.”
“You didn’t see any boys or any parties? After school, you know?”
Adam’s face grew more serious, and his voice dropped lower. “That’s who they think did this? Boys at school?”
“It’s a theory. Summer has a few of them in her social circle, including one she went to a dance with at Christmas. Do you remember that kid at the high school who broke another kid’s jaw at the bus stop? About two years ago.”