by Tim Johnston
And you never told anyone? Gordon said after a long silence, lying there in the dark. His heart drumming.
Not a soul, she said. She’d watched the news to see if some other girl would go missing, but none did, not around there.
Dumb, dumb girl, she said in the dark, dreamily, and Gordon said nothing.
Then he said, You should of told your parents. You should of told the police, what in the hell were you thinking?—his heart pounding, his voice rising, until she switched on the lamp and said to him, Gordon, Gordon, as if to wake him from a dream, and he was up on his elbows and she was a frightened forty-year-old woman, and then she understood—Oh, Gordon, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have told you that story . . . Because his own daughter was sixteen and would get drunk, would get high. Would get rides home in cars he’d never seen before and would never see again, and every night that she wasn’t home by midnight was the longest night of his life and he was all alone in this and had no idea what he was doing, only that he was doing it all wrong.
Anyway it wasn’t long after that night—the night of the story—that whatever it was between him and Eileen Lindeman ended, just ended, like a bulb burning out. And the next time she called him, a year or two later, it was a busted pipe spraying water into her basement, she didn’t know who else to call, and he’d done the job and that was all. Like none of it had ever happened.
Which was how he came to be in her house again today, easing his head around her bedroom doorjamb and saying, over the TV, “Eileen—?”
She sat in the same white reading chair with her bare feet up on the footrest. Only the feet were bare; otherwise she was dressed as she’d been when she let him in, the black pants and green sweater she’d worn to work. A glass of wine on the small table there, its shadow dark red on the white tabletop. The big white bed neat and smooth. The six o’clock news was on the TV and when he looked finally at her face he saw the stains under her eyes—dark streaks on her cheekbones like big fallen eyelashes.
“You all right?” he said, and she looked at him strangely, wet-eyed, and turned back to the TV.
It was a story about an accident, the night before: two young women in a car, just across the border in Iowa. Slick roads. The Lower Black Root River. College girls. One of the girls was local. He knew who she was. He knew her father. Everyone did, of course; he was the county sheriff, or had been, and hearing his name in the news again—or his daughter’s name—opened a crack of memory, of old misery, in Gordon’s heart.
Eileen pushed up out of the chair and stood holding the back of it with one hand, as if she needed to. “I heard about this at work,” she said, “but they hadn’t said any names.” With her free hand she wiped at her face and then wiped her fingers on the back side of her slacks. Then she raised this hand toward him, as if to touch him. “Gordon, I’m so sorry. It’s so awful . . .”
But he’d turned back to the TV.
It was a series of clips from the scene: a shot of the river from above, from a bridge maybe, a shot of the broken ice, beams of light crossing like swords over the ragged hole. A woman’s voice reporting from off camera: “As to the question of a second vehicle, as to the question of possible foul play, no comment at this time from law enforcement.” A shot of the car: a small SUV being reeled up the bank as if by an off-screen fisherman, the car coming along on its back, wheels up. One girl in the hospital up in Rochester, the other still missing. He watched until the report ended and a commercial replaced it.
Around the edges of the screen the room had gone all black. The sound he heard was like water rushing through copper pipes, a pressure like small hammers beating on the eyeballs. It was the old blackness, the old rage, and in the center of the blackness was an image of himself, on his knees as he so often was but now like a man at prayer, the big Stillson wrench raised two-handed, raised high, and swung down on the offered skull. The cracking, crushing blow. No more thoughts or feelings or memories forever, just the pink wet stew of bone and brains.
Slowly, the blackness receded, his heart pounding on but less wildly. His fists at his sides opening again.
Her hand was on his arm—for how long?
He raised his hand so that hers fell away, and looked at his watch.
“One hour,” he said.
Eileen Lindeman standing close, searching his face. “One hour—?”
“Downstairs. One hour.”
She was trying to hold his eyes but he wouldn’t. Gordon looking instead at the room beyond her, the big bed, neatly made in white with white pillows at its head. A bed like any bed. Or a staging of a bed, with matching furnishings, as in a department store.
“Of course,” she said, “of course.” And she led him out of the bedroom so she could find her purse and pay him what she owed him.
3
The nose of the car drops over the edge of the bank and the world pitches, and their own weight rolls forward through their bodies as at the top of a roller coaster just before the drop—the deep human fear of falling, the plunging heart, and there’s no stopping it and no getting out and nothing to do but hold on. And down they go, fast and easy in the snow, toboggan-smooth, hand in hand, their grips so tight, the grips of girls much younger, girls who will not be separated, their faces forward, watching the surface of the river, the black glistening ice as it rushes up toward them, larger and larger, until there’s nothing in the windshield but the ice, dark and wide as an ocean and they are going to it, they are going to strike it nose-first with the car and they can imagine that, the sudden ending of forward motion as the car meets the plane of the ice, but after that they cannot imagine, they have never been here before and there is no way to know what will happen next except to go through it, and this is the most terrifying thing: the understanding, within those few plunging seconds, that there is no time to figure it out, to prepare—it is here, and the physics that rule the world cannot be altered, and time cannot be stopped, and no one can be called upon to help them, and they are all alone in the instant of experience and the car will strike the frozen river and that is that.
But then, incredibly—it doesn’t. At the last moment the bank levels out, or the snow grows more deep, or some other variable they cannot account for lifts the nose of the car, and the impact is jarring but brief, and all at once the car sits upright on its wheels and they are spinning out onto the ice as they’d spun on the sleety road, the world once again turning round and round, headlights sweeping the perimeter like a haywire lighthouse, the beams selecting out of the darkness trees and bridge and bank and trees and bridge and bank, the bank of their descent farther away with each turn, their bodies thrown with such turning and their stomachs rolling. When the car at last comes to rest, their minds lag behind and the world keeps spinning, as in childhood games of dizziness, until finally even that illusion ends and they are still. They are dead-still in the middle of the river, and everything is silent and dark and they are OK, they are all right.
Still holding hands. Holding their breaths. Hearts whopping in their chests. Finally they breathe—Holy shit, holy shit—and they see the look on each other’s face and they laugh then, breathily, helplessly, the laugh of fright and relief. The laugh of love for each other and for being alive!
Now what? one says, and the other says, Now we get out and walk back. We go back exactly the way the car came and we—
It’s a sound that stops her, a sound they feel as much as hear—a great deep pop in the floor of the world. A sound to stop the heart and freeze it all the way through. The great pop is followed by silence: nothing but the roar of silence in their ears, of listening so hard, but it doesn’t last—the ice pops again and the car shudders, it lists, and the girls let go of each other’s hand, Get out—now! and the ice is shattering, it’s exploding beneath them in blasts like gunshots, and the car is on the move once again, aslant to the axis of the far bank and slipping down beneath the plane of the ice as they struggle with the latches of the doors, and for just a moment, before the
water comes flooding in through the driver’s-side door, there is the bizarre effect across the ice of one beam of light skimming the surface above while the other beam probes the same length of ice from below, underwater, revealing ice that moments ago looked so black and solid to be, in fact, bubbled and fissured and a terrible, ghostly translucent yellow.
And then the car begins to roll.
4
Rachel Young was in her chair in the living room, writing a letter to one of her two sons, when she heard about the accident. The other son, who still lived with her and who had worked all day, had gone upstairs to bed, and Rachel had the ten o’clock news on with the volume low, and she wasn’t paying much attention to it anyway; she was writing the letter to the son who lived now in New Mexico, just a few words catching him up, such as she wrote every month. In the old trunk under her feet were old photo albums and sheaves of yellowed letters tied up with string and a great hoard of hardback ledgers filled front to back with figures that meant little to her but that told the story of her grandfather’s life, from the neat, fluid hand of his youth to the shaky scratchings of old age. She was using one of the hardback ledgers for a writing surface, and each time she lifted it or set it down she smelled the farm—this farm—and her grandparents’ bodies, and the forever-hot kitchen where her grandfather sat over his figures, slurping coffee as thick and dark as tractor oil.
In the space between the chair and the trunk, beneath the bridge of her legs, slept the old dog, so that she would have to be careful when she stood.
Something on the TV caught her eye and made her look up. It was a young woman’s face, a photograph, a nice one, probably a high school graduation portrait, and Rachel’s first sinking thought was, Oh, no, as it always was when the news showed a pretty young woman’s picture so early in the broadcast. Her next thought was that she knew this girl, had definitely seen her before, and she picked up the remote and raised the volume in time to hear the girl’s name—Audrey Sutter—and she must have cried out then, for the dog raised his face and stared at her with his clouded eyes.
An accident, a slick road, the Lower Black Root River—Rachel’s own heart going cold even before she saw the footage of the frozen river, the jagged hole in the ice, the car already pulled out and taken away.
By the time the program went to commercial break she was out of her chair, the letter forgotten, and she was pacing before the TV, the old floorboards creaking and the old dog watching her. Her heart thudding. Her mind tumbling. What should she do? Who should she call?
Her heart flew immediately to Gordon Burke, a man she’d known so well for so many years—or had known so well until that terrible business ten years ago, that awful business with his own daughter, in this same river—the great sorrow not just of his life but of Rachel’s too. She would like him not to see it on the TV, would like him to be forewarned. But not by her. Then by whom? She thought of Meredith, Gordon’s ex-wife, with whom she’d once been so close, but that friendship had died long ago along with everything else, and as there was no one for her to notify, no one from that old life to talk to, not a thing she could do, she began to clean the kitchen—quietly, her son upstairs sleeping—and when she finished there she cleaned the downstairs bathroom, and when that was done she sat down on the toilet lid and wept as the old dog looked on from his place on the bath mat.
She fixed herself a mug of decaf tea, intending to take it up to bed with her and read her novel until she could sleep, but after fifteen minutes she was still standing at the sink looking out at the cold night, the black oak tree against the snow. Those poor girls! That ice . . . the water running below—the deep, cold under-river that never froze. She stared so long out the window that the snow melted away, and there was grass, and the autumn leaves were tossing in the oak and the view was not of the farm but of the yard and the driveway where she had lived before, when her boys were boys, and she stood now not in the farm kitchen but in that other kitchen, and something had woken her up in the night.
Water.
Water was running in the pipes somewhere. Not the shower, or the toilet, or the kitchen sink: this was the distinctive one-inch-pipe gush you heard when the boys were washing the truck, or the dog, or filling the plastic pool for the dog to splash in. She’d married a plumber and she knew about pipes.
Lying awake that night, in that other house, listening. One of her sons would stay out late but when he came home he was like a burglar and if she heard him at all it was because she’d gotten up to use the bathroom, pausing by his door just long enough to hear him clicking at the computer in there, or humming to his headphones, or shushing Katie Goss, his girl.
But she’d heard none of that, that night. Heard nothing at all but the water rushing in the pipes and the wind in the trees. Late October, this was. Almost Halloween. The alarm clock’s red light burning in the dark: 1:59 a.m. Then 2:00 a.m. Rachel pushing back the bedding and standing into her robe, her slippers, and padding down the hall past the boys’ rooms—Danny’s door open, no Danny; Marky’s door shut but him in there, a mound of sleep she could feel like a current in the air—and then down the stairs and into the kitchen, where the water sound was loudest, and there, in the window, was Danny’s truck, lit up by the light she’d left on for him. Two yellow smiley faces staring in at her, plastic hoods for the fog lights or whatever they were he’d mounted on the cab. She saw the truck’s red front fender, the tire, a thin pool of water leaching into the gravel, but no Danny. She leaned closer to the window and just then a face popped up before her so suddenly her hands flew up. Danny, out there, saw the movement and then saw her, and Rachel’s heart surged, as if he were hurt, as if he were washing out some wound she couldn’t see. In the next moment she heard the dog shaking its hide, rattling its tags, and she understood: he would let the dog out in the park, where it would find some other animal’s filth, or carcass, to roll in, and then later would stand under the hose, stupid and happy as Danny hosed it off.
The spigot gave a squeal and the water stopped running and in they came, and the cold air with them. Wyatt shoving past Danny’s legs to dive face-first into her carpet, driving his upper body along with his hind legs, first one side, then the other, grunting in some kind of dog ecstasy.
Wonderful, Rachel said, and Danny said, I’ll dry him when I get back. I gotta go help Jeff. His battery is dead.
Did you get it all off at least? she said, and he flinched, as if she’d shouted.
What? he said.
Rachel gestured at the dog. Did you get it all off?
I got it all off, he said, and turned and was gone again. Nineteen and free to do as he pleased, including, apparently, drinking. There were places they could get into, he and Jeff Goss, and some mornings she smelled the bar on him like he’d slept on its floor. Other mornings she smelled strawberries and knew that Katie Goss, Jeff’s younger sister, had been in the house. Rachel did not approve of such things, of course . . . but then she’d remember the night she heard them laughing behind his door and she could smell the strawberries and she’d been so angry she rapped on the door and hissed that it was late and he was going to wake up his brother, and the laughing stopped and the bed squeaked and to her horror the door swung open and there he stood, with his smile, fully clothed. Beyond him, on the bed, sat Katie Goss and Marky, smiling at her too, holding their hands of playing cards. Ma, said Danny, come in, we need a fourth. Yeah Momma come in we need a fourth! cried Marky. Plenty of room up here, said Katie Goss. And there they’d sat on the little bed playing cards until one in the morning, when finally she’d gotten Marky to go back to his room, and Danny had driven Katie home to her parents.
He would test her in some way, Danny would, and then he’d fill her heart with love. He’d been taking classes at the college then—engineering! Bridges and dams!—and he could’ve moved out, he had a good job with Gordon Burke, but he was staying home to save money, he’d said, and that was fine. He could call it whatever he wanted; she knew it was for his brot
her. She knew he’d stayed home for Marky.
5
There was the direct way home, across the new concrete bridge—or new fifteen years ago, when the county had finally rebuilt it—but Gordon drove past the turnoff and kept going south, to Old Highway 20, so he could get the engine heated all the way up; the cab was closed off from the back of the van and would warm up fast, but frost was climbing the inside of the windshield, and when he put his bare fingers to the vent the air was no warmer than his fingers.
He hit the Old Highway 20 bridge doing fifty and he would not think of the other bridge, the new concrete bridge, upriver. Although it wasn’t the bridge, it was the river that ran beneath it, which was the same river wherever you crossed it and wherever you looked at it and wherever you went into it.
From the county road you could see the light of his front porch, the sixty-watt bulb blinking a Morse code in the passing pinewoods, and he took the winding drive through the trees and pulled up to the outbuilding and put the van in park, then sat there with the engine running, the air blowing. The cab warmer now but not warm enough by far.
He hauled up the bay door and got back in the van and pulled in behind the old tractor plow and killed the engine, then he popped the hood and got out again and stood staring at the engine in the dark. He stood there a long time, no sound but the ticking of the engine block and his own breathing, before he dropped the hood and hauled down the bay door, booted home the side latches, and crossed the clearing to the house, his bootsoles on the shoveled path so loud in the cold, in the stillness of the woods.
He got his fire going, then clattered a frozen pizza into the oven and sat down at the kitchen table to go over his receipts and his appointments for the rest of the week, and he did not look up again until he smelled something burning—forgot to set the timer, Jesus Christ . . . and he carried the blackened pizza still smoking on the cookie sheet to the front porch and shucked it into the snow, where it hissed and steamed and went down slowly like a ship.