by Tom Hunt
As she’d been waiting for him to arrive home, she’d envisioned how he’d react when he saw the letter. She’d pictured him laughing, crying, hugging her, overwhelmed with the euphoria of seeing his college dream come true.
Instead, he sat there. Stared at the letter. Barely any emotion on his face.
“Feel free to react,” she said.
“This is awesome,” he said. “Really awesome.”
“You’ve been waiting for this letter for months. I figured you’d be dancing on the roof when you read it.”
She reached over and took the letter from his hand. Placed it on the table.
“What’s going on?” she said. “You’ve been acting so blue all day.”
“It’s nothing.”
“Don’t worry about Ashley. You’ll find another girl. Any girl would be lucky to—”
“It’s not my girlfriend, Mom.”
“Well, something’s going on,” she said. “Just know if you want to talk, I’m here. You know that. If you need anything, I’m here.”
“Thanks. But I’ll be fine.”
Joshua grabbed the letter off the table and carried it to his room, leaving his barely touched burger on the plate.
* * *
• • •
Joshua sat at the small desk in his room, holding the acceptance letter in his hand. He read it and reread it, over and over again.
A dream come true, the letter was, but reading it brought no joy, not even a shred of happiness. He had too many other things to worry about.
He set the letter off to the side and stood up from the desk. He looked around his room. His backpack was in the corner, underneath a shelf with a few bobbleheads of Cubs players. Below the shelf were golfing trophies and mementos—ribbons and medals; his trophy for finishing fourth at regionals last year; a small plaque commemorating the only hole in one he’d ever gotten in his life, out at Brown Deer a few years ago. There was a small pushpin board covered in ticket stubs from concerts and movies he and his friends had gone to.
On top of his dresser was a small television with his PlayStation 4 hooked up to it. Maybe a video game or two would help take his mind off everything. He inserted a disc and played Madden against the computer for a while. He could barely concentrate.
There was a knock on the door and his mom stuck her head in. She looked at the television.
“You get accepted to college, so you figure you don’t have to do homework anymore, huh?” she said.
“It’s already done.”
“Not sure if I believe that one or not.” She smiled. “I just wanted to tell you good night before I went to bed. Promise me you won’t stay up late?”
“Promise,” Joshua said.
She walked into the room. “Pause it for a second,” she said. After he’d paused the game, she reached down and hugged him.
“Congrats again,” she said. “It’s amazing you got in. How many times did I tell you all that hard work would pay off? I’m so proud of you.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
She kissed him on the cheek. “Have a good night.”
She left the room. Once she was gone, he quit the Madden game. Lay back down in bed. Stared at the ceiling. Brought up Netflix on his iPad and endlessly scrolled through movies and TV shows. Couldn’t find anything to watch. He wasn’t in the mood to laugh, wasn’t in the mood to watch something that would depress him further. Really, he wasn’t in any sort of mood. He felt only that constant, dull gloominess.
* * *
• • •
Karen lay in bed, head resting on the pillow, the room pitch-black. She closed her eyes but she couldn’t sleep. She was still wired from that Clemson letter. It was something incredible, seeing Joshua’s dream come true—but it was a little bittersweet, too. The acceptance letter made it real: he’d be leaving soon, for a college that was halfway across the country, hundreds of miles away.
Hard to believe how the past eighteen years had flown by. She still remembered how she thought her life was over, so many years ago when she found out she was pregnant by Teddy Watson, a guy she’d been dating for only a few months. Both in their early twenties, neither ready for the news. Teddy had been more concerned with his golf handicap than with growing up. She was focused on figuring out what to do with the communications degree she’d graduated with two years earlier. Their relationship had been mostly about fun. They were both young. He was irresponsible, a little bit of a goofball, but that was all she was looking for at the time.
Then came the bombshell news. After Joshua was born, life became chaotic. Late nights. Endless work. No sleep or social life, even less when she went back to school for her nursing degree a few years after his birth. Her parents had helped her raise Joshua for the first seven years, until her mother passed away and her father was admitted to a nursing home a few months later.
And Teddy . . . Well, he did his best. He tried. He’d still never really figured his life out and hadn’t changed much from the early-twenties guy she dated (the car salesman job was the latest in a series of jobs he’d held over the years), but he truly cared about Joshua. That counted for something—counted for a lot, actually—but he was more of a friend to Joshua than a father. Golf was the bond that linked them. In the summer, they’d go to the golf course for entire days, sunup to sundown. They went on a road trip to a few golf courses last summer. They met up and watched all the professional tournaments together.
Teddy cared about Joshua, but she’d been the one who raised him, devoted her life to him. And now it was coming to an end. Joshua was about to leave. She supposed it was just that time, that juncture in life, but it still broke her heart.
She thought about everything for a long time until, finally, she fell asleep.
SATURDAY
FIVE
At nearly three in the morning, once he was sure that his mom was asleep, Joshua left his bedroom. He crept down the hallway and walked out into the cold, still night. In the backyard, he grabbed the bag of clothes he’d stored underneath the deck Thursday night.
It was time to get rid of them. He couldn’t keep them here at the house, and the ground was too frozen to bury them. He’d have to find a river to throw them into. All the nearby, smaller rivers were frozen over, but he hoped the Cedar River wasn’t. It was a larger river that cut through Cedar Rapids and the surrounding rural areas. If he drove out far enough, he could toss the clothes in the river without anyone spotting him. The river was big enough and deep enough that they’d never be found.
Before leaving, he set the bag on the ground and opened it. A smoky smell wafted up. He took a final look inside to make sure there was nothing he’d overlooked.
One by one, he lifted the items out.
His jeans, charred and blackened. He checked the pockets. Nothing inside.
His half-melted shoes.
His socks.
His coat. The expensive coat he’d gotten for Christmas. It was made of heavy-duty Gore-Tex and the flames had done little damage to it. A few sections were burned but the coat was mostly intact. He searched the coat’s pockets and found a glove.
He froze.
A glove. One glove. He looked through the pockets again, but there wasn’t another one. He looked back in the bag. Nothing was left inside.
His hurried into the garage and threw open his car door. Looked under the seats, in the backseat, even in the glove compartment. No glove.
He sneaked back inside, moving quickly, quietly. He looked everywhere in his room, in the bathroom, in the living room.
No glove anywhere.
The second glove was missing.
He grabbed his phone and pulled up the number from earlier.
Still awake? he texted.
The response came almost instantly: Yeah. Can’t sleep.
I can’t find one of my gloves. Did you g
rab it last night?
What? No.
Joshua thought back to the frantic moments after the accident and everything else that happened. He vaguely remembered throwing the gloves into his coat pocket. One of them must have fallen out at some point. That was the only explanation he could think of. They’d searched the scene before leaving and found nothing, but they must’ve somehow overlooked the glove.
His phone chimed again. What’s going on? Starting to get worried here.
Joshua stared at the screen. He could fix this. There’d been nothing on the news about the body yet. It hadn’t been found. If the glove was out there, he could grab it, get rid of it, and everything would be fine. No—not fine. Not fine at all. But it would be a bullet dodged. A potential disaster averted.
It’s nothing, Joshua texted back. False alarm. Going to bed now.
He put his phone in his pocket and went back outside. He threw the bloody clothes back into the garbage bag and hid it under the deck in the same spot as earlier.
He walked into the garage and hit the button for the automatic garage opener. It clattered open. He was worried the noise would wake his mom, but it didn’t. Thank God for that—he was far too shell-shocked to come up with a rational explanation for why he had a sudden desire to leave the house at three in the morning.
He got in his car, pulled onto the gravel road, and headed toward Hawkeye Wildlife Management Area.
* * *
• • •
Joshua stared out past his car’s cracked windshield, his headlights cutting through the darkness of the night and illuminating the gravel road in front of him. The houses appeared less and less frequently as he drove farther into the deep maze of the country—a house every half mile, then every mile. None had lights on; many had been abandoned for years. He reached Hawkeye Wildlife Management Area and turned onto one of the paths that led through the forest. This was the true boonies. Acre after acre of endless woods, bushes, trees.
He drove on. The forest swallowed him. Large trees bordered his path on both sides, rising into the starry night sky. There was little organization to the paths that cut through the forest. Roads that went this way and that. Some that abruptly stopped. Trees and bare, frozen ground everywhere. It all looked so identical. No buildings, no landmarks, nothing distinguishing.
He turned onto a dirt path. Drove for a while. Ran into a dead end. Turned around.
More driving. Another path. Another dead end.
It didn’t take long to realize he had no idea where he was going. He thought he remembered how to get to the site of the accident, but everything looked so similar.
Up one road, down another. He looked at the dashboard clock and realized it had been nearly an hour since he left the house.
He started to imagine the worst-case scenario. Someone had already found the body. An investigation was currently happening. Or maybe the person hadn’t been dead, only unconscious. He’d walked away from the scene and reported everything to the police. But no, the person he’d hit was definitely dead. No doubt about it.
He drove on, eyes scanning the road, the surrounding land, so nervous and scared he was practically shaking. He felt like—
There it was.
The body.
He slammed on the brakes and his car skidded to a stop. A huddled dark mass was in the ditch a few feet off the road. The black coat and dark pants made the body blend in with the shadows. Had he been driving a little faster, he probably would’ve passed right by.
He killed the engine and stepped outside, taking in a deep breath of the frigid night air.
He had to find the glove and get out of here.
It was time to hurry.
* * *
• • •
He hit the button to pop the trunk and walked over. He rummaged through the trunk contents—a blanket, some jumper cables, his golf clubs—until he found what he was looking for. A small cardboard box with EMERGENCY written on the outside.
Inside were a couple of granola bars, a flashlight, some tools. He grabbed the flashlight and turned it on. He could see the body in his peripheral vision, only a few feet away from his car. He was nearly standing right on top of it. He kept his head turned, refusing to look directly at the body. He didn’t know if he could handle seeing it up close.
He scanned the ground with the flashlight beam, sweeping it back and forth as he slowly walked away from the car and the body, the beam passing over pine needles, frozen dirt, patches of dead grass, trees with thick trunks and skeletal branches.
No glove.
He slowly walked farther and farther away from the car, moving the flashlight back and forth like a searchlight.
Still, no glove.
The cold air stung his lungs. Plumes of fog every time he exhaled. His heart started beating faster, faster.
He walked for a minute and stopped. The night of the accident, they hadn’t gone this far away from the body; the glove wouldn’t be all the way out here. He walked back toward the body, sweeping the flashlight across the ground as he continued searching.
* * *
Amber trudged through the forest, following Ross. More accurately, following the beam from Ross’s flashlight. They’d found it in a pouch on the backpack a few hours ago and thank God for that—without the flashlight, the darkness would have been impossible to navigate.
She walked on. Everything hurt. Her stomach, from hunger. Her legs and feet, from the endless walking. Her chest, from breathing lungful after lungful of cold air.
It felt like they’d been wandering around the forest forever. The disposable phone she’d bought at the gas station earlier turned out to be junk—the reception was spotty and the battery died after barely twenty minutes of trying to find a signal—which made it impossible to tell which direction they were heading. They’d simply started trekking around after leaving the car in the woods. They’d now been wandering for so long, she was certain they must be walking in circles. Everything looked so similar. Just trees and grass. They’d found a few worn roads they walked on for a while, but none had led anywhere.
It was so dark that she could just barely see Ross, fifteen feet in front of her, the backpack slung over his shoulder.
“Would you hurry the hell up?” he said.
“I’m trying.”
Ross walked in the sped-up, jerky way he always walked when he was riding high from drugs. He’d taken at least three or four pills over the past few hours, his mood fluctuating between loudly grumbling and complaining and a silent, sulking anger. She listened to him, not saying much. When Ross got like this, it was best to remain quiet. Didn’t take much to set him off.
Everything seemed close to hopeless now, but she still believed that somehow, someway, it would all work out. They’d come too far and been through too much to give up now. As they trudged through the forest, she thought back to all the events that had led up to this point.
After Ross was locked up in jail, she left Tennessee and moved to Nebraska to escape everything. She tried to start over and had the worst year of her life. She was sad. Lonely. Depressed. Bored. She found a job at a tire factory and threw herself into it, working fifty, sixty hours a week to distract herself from the boredom.
Almost a year after he’d been arrested, Ross showed up on her doorstep. The first thing he did when he was released, he said, was track her down. He begged her to take him back. Promised that he was a changed man. Insisted that he was through with the wild and crazy nights, through with travel and the music scene, and that he only wanted to be with her.
She had missed him so much, more and more with every lonely month that passed, that she told Ross she’d give him another chance. Ross moved in, and for a while, life in Nebraska was good. They both turned thirty. Ross started working a construction job and their lives became shockingly normal and routine—instead of endless tours around
Tennessee and partying all night afterward, they worked nine-to-five jobs and spent every evening together. They moved into a nicer apartment. Started having money for groceries, setting aside a little for the future. At one juncture, their lives reached a point of such normality that they started spending their Saturdays focusing on different weekend projects—painting the bathroom, laying down new living room carpet, finding cheap furniture on Craigslist.
Then Shane showed up. He’d gotten in a few fights in jail and hadn’t been released early for good behavior like Ross had. He tracked Ross down and came to him when he was released. Claimed he needed a place to stay. Had nowhere to go.
The last thing she wanted was him reentering their lives when things were better than they’d ever been, but Ross insisted. He said that he had to help Shane get back on his feet, couldn’t turn his back on his brother.
Shane started sleeping on their couch, and soon, he and Ross fell back into their previous lives. Late nights. Shady characters. Ross lost his job. He and Shane started disappearing for hours at a time.
She asked Ross to leave Shane, and the response came back same as before: family. He couldn’t turn his back on family. It was like he was blind to the fact that Shane was dragging him down—that, or he just didn’t care. It was that old inability to stand up to Shane. Like he was scared of him.
At some point, Ross started using amphetamines like Shane. He became more irritable. Snapping at her more often. Staying up for entire days at a time, then crashing. It was like he was transforming into someone totally different, someone out of control.
The nights became later; the people Ross and Shane hung out with were shadier. Drugs became an everyday habit. Before long, they weren’t even hiding their drug use. It was more than pills. Sometimes they would inhale household cleaning products and huff spray paint for a quick high. Other times, they would smash pills and snort the powder while she was a few feet away.