by Tim Johnston
The hospital had cleaned and dried the clothes she’d been wearing when she came in—which now that she thought about it, should they have done that? Shouldn’t the clothes have been preserved? Or did the river already ruin them as evidence? In any case, she was dressed as she’d been dressed when Caroline had come to pick her up four days ago, minus the peacoat and the black knit cap, both still in the RAV4, or in the river, or else hung out to dry with the rest of her clothes on the bars of some jail cell down in Iowa, and she would ask him to find out and they could stop and pick them up on their way down to Georgia . . . but he had to get here first and get her out of here, and when she looked back into the room it was only the clock she saw and not the terrible mechanical bed or the dying flowers or all the little stuffed animals she was leaving behind, a childish menagerie sent or dropped off one by one by old childhood friends or the mothers of old childhood friends she hadn’t seen in years, none of whom stayed long or said anything she could remember now.
Audrey rolling the wheelchair forward and back, listening to the squeak of the rubber tires on the floor, and she didn’t need a wheelchair obviously but who knows—you might slip on the squeaky floor and crack your head before you got out of here and you could sue because you were still technically under their care, and she had waited for him one time in the nurse’s office at school and not outside because that was school policy, the nurse said, and at last he’d come for her in full uniform and all business and impatient with the nurse, hearing just enough to learn it wasn’t anything serious, something she ate maybe, and then he’d done something he never did in his full uniform and in front of people; he bent down and took her into his arms and held her close and kissed her near her ear with his sandpaper jaw that smelled of smoke and he squeezed her, hard.
Then it was just his hand on your shoulder as he led you down the school hall and outside to the cruiser, where he’d parked in the fire lane, waiting for you to buckle in before pulling away from the curb and right away talking into his cell phone as he drove, and something was happening, something was going on, and you still felt a little sick to your stomach but you couldn’t ask him to slow down on the turns, because he was talking . . . and then after a long moment of saying nothing, the phone resting on his thigh, he said they’d have to take a detour, he needed to make a stop and he didn’t have time to take you back to the office to sit with one of the deputies and you wanted to know were they going to arrest someone but he didn’t seem to hear, but then he did and turned to you and almost-smiled and said no, it wasn’t that kind of stop, but he needed you to sit in the car and mind yourself for a bit while he talked to a man and did you think you could do that, did you feel well enough for that? and of course you said Yes, Sheriff, I can do that.
And it was another two, maybe three days back at school—the huddled, whispering girls, the passed notes and the big eyes and the open mouths—before Audrey finally put it together, that the man they’d gone to see that day at his house in the woods and then driven into town was the father of the girl in the river, Holly Burke, a high schooler who’d been walking home through the park and had been beaten up or hit by a car or messed with by some man or men, or boy or boys, who had then tossed her into the river as you would toss an old piece of wood to see it splash and float away.
It was her boyfriend, my dad said, said one girl. He says it’s always the boyfriend.
How would he know?
My sister said it was a college boy, said another girl. He got her drunk and took her to the park and gang-raped her.
Oh, was your sister there, Christine? Do you even know what gang-rape means?
Do you?
Yes, do you?
Ten years ago that was and no one talked about Holly Burke anymore, the whispering girls grown into teenagers themselves, into young women gone off to college or some of them staying put and having daughters of their own, and whoever had done that to Holly Burke was still alive in the world, somewhere, still walking around, and whenever Audrey had seen the man she’d first seen on that porch in the woods—saw him getting into his van outside the hardware store, or pushing a cart down the cereal aisle, or walking toward her on a sidewalk—her heart would race and she’d try to meet his eyes, to see if he would recognize her, say hello or even nod at her, but he never did, he never did, and it was exactly as if she’d become invisible to him.
Or maybe it had nothing to do with her, and everyone had become invisible to him. He was a ghost who everyone could see but who could see no one else.
And her father had not found the man or men, or boy or boys, who’d done it and no one talked about that anymore either, or at least not in front of Audrey they didn’t. Nor did they talk about it themselves, she and her father, although she knew he thought about it always, that it was in him every day like his cancer and maybe it was even part of his cancer. Or his cancer was part of it, had grown out of it, feeding on it . . . And just then the particular sounds and smells of hospitals, of human sickness, returned to her in the moment and she remembered she was in a hospital once again, and she turned her head just enough to see the clock and not the bed itself, not the wilted flowers and the stuffed animals.
Forty-five minutes late now.
An hour late now but she wasn’t angry, she wasn’t mad, she could never be mad at him again, there wasn’t time for that. But finally she couldn’t sit there any longer, and she rolled to the open door to see was the coast clear, and she’d no sooner crossed the threshold than she saw a doctor coming toward her, and it was her own Dr. Breece—less breezy than usual, the wings of his white coat weighted down by his hands like stones in the pockets, a man deep in thought, and she thought she could roll back into the room without him seeing her but she couldn’t—he looked up and saw her there and she saw him catch himself up, saw the recognition in his eyes and she knew at once he wasn’t passing by but had come to see her especially, walking all the way from some far wing of the hospital, some altogether unrelated place where people weren’t waiting to leave their quiet little rooms but were arriving in bursts of noise and urgency, nurses converging, doctors commanding, a place of blood and pain and emergency.
And next she knew, she was walking in a dream to that far other place in the hospital, one hushed and squeaking long hallway after another, a long humming elevator ride down, just she and the doctor alone, and following him toward a gray metal door that hissed open for them like it knew them, was expecting them—icu personnel only—and lastly there was the silvery cold whisking sound of metallic rings along a metallic bar as the doctor drew the curtain aside and there he lay on the bed—partly raised and neatly tucked in as if for a night’s sleep and not for the long cold forever sleep that she saw everywhere she looked, starting with his hands so white and still on top of the sheet. The bony pale chest neither rising or falling as she watched. The eyes that would not open and the mouth that would not smile and say to her in its old torn-up voice, There you are, Deputy . . . was just coming to get you.
PART III
27
When she next awoke, rising once again through depths of water and color, she was not in the hospital but in her father’s house. As if they’d made it there after all: Caroline upstairs in her bed, sleeping off the drive, she downstairs on the sofa, a corduroy throw pillow that smelled of smoke pressing its design into her cheek. The dampness on the pillow was from drool, she thought, but then she remembered the tears and then she remembered everything else. Caroline gone. Her father gone. The house so empty and quiet you could hear his watch ticking on the coffee table.
But something had woken her—a ringing, or chiming—and she reached out with her good hand and picked up his phone and pressed the button, pressed it again, but the screen remained dark. The room itself was dark, or almost dark; the sun going down. She sat up and put her feet to the floor and as she did so the doorbell rang again. Her boots were still on her feet—so heavy as she crossed the floor, as if still soaked from their time in the riv
er. The plaster cast a strange weight on her arm.
She drew aside the little curtain on the door just as he raised his fist and rapped his knuckles on the wood, and he stopped at once, opening his hand in hello, in apology, and by the time she turned the bolt and opened the door his hat was off and in his hand. Standing there in full uniform on the porch, winter sheriff’s jacket, sheriff’s badge shining. His cruiser was parked in the driveway behind her father’s car, and her first thought was of her stuff—her suitcases, her backpack with her school books, all of it dried out and repacked and hand-delivered. But there was nothing else on the porch other than him. Then she looked into his bulgy eyes and knew what he would say, and he said it: “Audrey, I’m so sorry. I am just so sorry.”
“Thank you. Sheriff,” she said. Her mouth strange and thick. She’d taken one of the pills, the pain pills, after she’d gotten home from the hospital, she remembered. Remembered crying on the sofa—and nothing after that.
Moran stood holding the stormdoor in his free hand. Audrey holding the wooden door in a mirror image. She noticed snowflakes in the brown nap of his jacket collar, and then she noticed the snow falling beyond him. The snow on the windshield of her father’s car did not look thick and she didn’t think she’d slept very long. And he’d had to drive up here from Iowa—so how had he known?
She asked him this, “How did you know so fast?” and he looked down, and looking up again said, “I’ve been calling his phone since noon and finally I decided to just drive on up here, and on the way I called the hospital and they told me.”
There was movement and she looked beyond him to see Mr. Larkin standing in his driveway. All geared up in boots and parka and both his gloved hands resting on the handle of his shovel. The snow still falling and him out there shoveling. Or not shoveling. Moran turned too, and Mr. Larkin coughed a pale cloud and began pushing the shovel over the concrete, raising a grinding scrape that was terrible to hear in the snowfall, in the quiet of the cul-de-sac.
Moran turned back and said, “Audrey, I sure don’t want to bother you right now—” He looked past her. “Are you alone?”
“Yes.”
“No one’s here with you?”
“No.” Grandma Sutter and her husband were on their way from Illinois, and Uncle John was flying in from Houston, but it was too much to say.
Moran stood looking at her. “Well. Do you mind if I step inside for just a minute or two?”
His tone, his face, woke her somewhat from her stupor, and she stood aside so he could enter. He kicked the snow from his boots before stepping in, and Mr. Larkin in his driveway pitched a white cloud of powder with his face turned to watch the sheriff go into the house, before the front door shut off his view altogether.
She turned on the light and they both stood looking around. It was weird and she knew what the weirdness was: she’d never been alone with him in the house before.
She saw him see her father’s things—the watch, the phone, the Zippo lighter, the cigarettes, the little black notebook, the ring of keys and the old .38 revolver—all in a row on the coffee table.
“Can I get you anything?” she said, remembering her manners. “There’s probably coffee.”
“Thank you, no,” said Moran. He was looking at her face now. He put a finger to his own. “You’ve got these . . . lines.”
She reached and felt the small ridges on her cheek. Tried to smooth them out. “It’s that,” she said, gesturing, trying to think of the word. “Pillow.”
He looked. “You were sleeping,” he said. “Shoot, I’m sorry. What a time to have some guy in a uniform banging on your door.”
“It’s all right.”
He stood there. Then he fanned his face with his hat and said, “Warm in here. I’ll just get out of this jacket if you don’t mind.”
“Glass of water?” she said.
“Water, OK, sure.”
“Sit down, if you want.”
In the kitchen she ran the tap into two clean-looking tumblers and carried them back to the living room and handed him one where he sat on the sofa. He was sitting forward, forearms on his knees. She knew he’d picked up the revolver and checked it. If there’d been bullets, someone had kept them.
She sat in the armchair opposite him and crossed her legs.
“How’s that arm doing?” he said.
She lifted the cast from her lap. “Itches like crazy.”
“Bet it does. My dad fell off a ladder once and broke his shinbone. He had one of those backscratcher things he’d wiggle on down there.”
She raised the tumbler and drank, lowered it again. Outside in the dusk Mr. Larkin scraped the powder from his drive. He’d scrape one way across the drive, pause, scrape back the other way.
Moran looked around the room again, and she looked too: the hodgepodge of wooden chairs and little tables. The small walnut dining table where he sat to pay his bills, do his taxes. Stacks of unopened envelopes there. An electric printout calculator. An ashtray. A coffee mug. Vials of prescription pills. She followed his gaze to the fireplace mantel, where paperbacks stood racked between two leaping bass that were the cast-iron bookends she’d gotten him one Christmas. Antiques, supposedly. The framed photographs to either side of the books: her father and her mother, both young, on their wedding day. Herself as a newborn in her mother’s arms, still at the hospital. She and her father in Granddad’s johnboat on the river, her first fish, a perch, swinging from her pole. Her high school graduation picture, which she hated.
Moran’s eyes came back around to the coffee table and the items lined up there. He sat staring at them. Then he drank from his water and looked for something to set the tumbler on and finally set it on the table, matching it to one of the rings already there. He cleared his throat and looked up at her.
“Audrey, I just want you to know I thought the world of your dad. He was a good lawman and a good man. When I lit out of here he didn’t hold any kind of grudge about it like some other man might have, and he didn’t say anything against me to Sheriff Gaines down in Iowa either, and I’ll never forget that.”
She said nothing, and Moran went on talking, but she was thinking about a time years ago when she’d run from her father in tears, because he’d snapped at her . . . and he’d snapped at her because she’d asked why Deputy Moran was leaving the department and he’d said it was none of her concern, which only made her more curious, of course, pestering him until finally he turned on her and said, What did I just say? and she’d run from him in tears. Because she was his deputy too, and she understood then that that was just for play and there were things she would never know about—grown-up things. Real sheriff and real deputy things.
“. . . so I just want you to know,” Moran was saying, “you need anything, and I mean anything, you give me a call.” He unsnapped a breast pocket flap and plucked out his card and set it on the table and snapped the button again. She saw the bright gold star of the card.
“Thank you, Sheriff. I will.”
He laced his fingers in the space between his knees and seemed to study them. Then he said, “Shoot, there’s just no good way to get into this, especially so soon after . . .”
“I’m all right, Sheriff,” she said. “You drove all the way up here so you might as well just say it. Is it about those boys?”
“It is. It surely is. It’s about one of them anyway.”
She waited. He looked up.
“Did you know your dad headed down there, two nights ago?”
“Down where?”
“Iowa.”
She shook her head.
“Well, he did. He went looking around, asking questions at that gas station, and then he spent the night in a motel and in the morning he went looking around some more.”
She watched him. Waiting.
“And so now I gotta ask you, Audrey: Did you tell your dad anything about that night, about those boys, that you didn’t tell me? Anything you might’ve remembered after I left the hospital?”
She knew what he was after and she didn’t pretend she didn’t. She told him about the backscratcher, and how she thought she’d scratched the one boy’s face with it.
“You said at the hospital you never got a good look at their faces,” he said. “That it was too dark.”
“It was. But I felt it when I got him. And he yelled, and yanked it out of my hand. So I knew I got him.”
He was watching her face, her eyes, her hands. As he would anyone he was questioning.
“Did he find it?” she said. “When he went down there?”
“No. It would seem not. If he had, he might not have shot that boy through the hand.”
Audrey said nothing. She knew at once that it was true.
Moran raised his own right hand and pointed at the palm with his opposite forefinger. “Right there. Close range. Then left him bleeding in a parking lot.”
She looked at the old .38 on the coffee table.
“He didn’t use that,” Moran said. “It was the boy’s own .45.”
Audrey was silent, staring at the .38. “Was it him?” she said at last.
“Was it who?”
“That boy. From the gas station.”
Moran watched her with those eyes of his. “How am I supposed to know that?”
She stared at him. She couldn’t think. “I mean—didn’t you talk to him?”
“I did. Talked to him this morning, but all he said was he wasn’t talking to any more cops without his lawyer. Said he knew who shot him and wanted him arrested. That’s why I was on my way up here.”