by Tim Johnston
“You put it someplace top secret that only you know about, all right?”
“All right.”
“And I don’t mean your sock drawer.”
Marky dipped his head to give him a look. “Give me a little credit Danny.”
“Give you a little credit? Where’d you get that from—Jeff?”
“No I just said it.” He sat studying the face of the envelope as if by doing so he could know all that was inside.
“Well, get up outta that bed a minute,” Danny said.
“Why?”
“Because I’m not hugging a grown man good-bye while he’s lying in his goddam bed, that’s why.”
“Don’t cuss Danny.”
“That’s not cussing. Come on, now.”
Most of his gear was already in the truck—he’d never taken it out—and so he only had to go down the stairs once with a duffel in each hand, the old steps creaking but if she woke up she did not get out of bed, and when the duffels were packed into the cab he shut the passenger door quietly and stood looking at the farmhouse, lit up by the farmlight, and the light casting shadows on the snow. The clothesline post stood at its tilt and its shadow lay like a second post on the snow, the two of them conjoined and bent where they met in a trick of the eye—like it was all one continuous piece that was not planted at all but stood upright from its own T-shaped base, like sculpture. Like a demonstration of some principle. He saw two boys swinging there, one on each side of the T, dropping to the ground when the post began to give under the turf, Oh shit oh shit . . .
We used to play with her when we were little she was our friend.
But Holly Burke had not been their friend, exactly. More like a cousin, forced into closeness with them not by marriage but by business, by that hyphen in the Burke-Young Plumbing & Supply sign. Nice enough when she was little, fun enough, but you had to be careful. Moody, your mother said. Like the time you were playing tag in the yard and Marky tagged her on her chest and she shoved him hard and called him a retard and you could’ve hit her, you could’ve just about gut-punched her like she was some dumb-ass boy on the playground. By middle school there was no goofing around with Holly Burke and no saying hello in the halls even, and if you ever told anyone you’d once wrestled with her on the living room floor she’d call you a liar and a pervert, and by high school you wouldn’t even believe such a thing yourself—suddenly it was hard to believe she’d ever been a little girl at all.
You can say it, Danny. She was a good-looking young woman and you desired her. You wanted Holly Burke.
No, sir . . . No, sir.
He saw that night again—the dark road winding through the dark woods, the bending limbs, the boughs that dipped and swayed. What if you’d left the bar a few minutes earlier? What if you hadn’t stopped to let the dog out? You’d been drinking. Hell, you were drunk. Taking those turns. The trees tossing and you are in your truck and you are nineteen and nothing can touch you, and you come around the bend and suddenly . . .
And what if you had? What if you’d come around the bend with the beers in your blood and not seen her in time? What if what they wanted to be true was true? What if your life now was exactly the one you deserved?
He walked around to the driver’s side of the truck, the night so still and cold there was only the sound of his boots on the packed snow, the sound of his own breath, but then, under these sounds and far off, he heard a tinny jangling, a faint rattling that was the sound of a dog running somewhere and he turned back toward the yard, toward the fields beyond. But there was no dog, no dark shape moving fast over the white. There was only the snow and the farmlight and the dark, unmoving shadows on the snow.
48
He was sitting at the table eating his cornflakes when she came down and she already knew, it was in her face, her eyes. The way she moved.
“He couldn’t wait till I came down?” she said, crossing to the sink to look out the window.
“He left last night Momma.”
“What time last night?”
“Two a.m. Momma.”
“How do you know?”
Marky stirred his cornflakes, chewing.
“Marky?”
“He woke me up to say good-bye that’s all.”
“That’s all?”
Marky nodded. Spooned up more cornflakes.
“Did he say where he was going?”
“No Momma.”
She stood watching him eat. The sound of the cornflakes so loud in his ears.
“So he woke you up to say good-bye but not me,” she said, and he looked up at her tired, sad face.
“He didn’t want to wake you up Momma. He told me to tell you good-bye for him.”
“What was the big rush?”
“I don’t know Momma he just said it was time for him to go again.”
She lit the flame and put the kettle on the stove and then stood looking out the window.
“He’ll come back Momma. He always comes back.”
She wiped at her face and then she turned and crossed the kitchen and ran her hand down the back of his head and said, “I’ll go get dressed and then we’ll go.”
“OK Momma.” When he heard her on the stairs he got up and checked the kettle, ran tap water into it, and returned it to the flame.
He spent the morning in the back, stocking shelves and matching inventory to what was on the computer, and it was a long morning. At lunchtime he sat at the little table in the back office and after a while Jeff came back and took his bag out of the fridge and tossed his burrito into the microwave and punched the buttons, then stood looking at Marky as the machine hummed and blew the spicy meat smell into the room. Marky took a bite of his ham sandwich and washed it down with his bottle of Sprite.
“You’re awful damn quiet today.”
“Yeah I been working on the inventory Jeff.”
“I see that. Very shipshape. Very shipshape.” Jeff watching him. Marky sipping at his Sprite. “How about that bag of chips?” Jeff said.
“How about it?”
“You gonna eat it?”
“No.”
“You’re not gonna eat your chips?”
“No do you want them Jeff?”
“Hell, if you don’t want ’em,” he said, and he popped open the bag and began eating the chips. The crunching loud chip sound. The microwave humming and blowing. Mr. Wabash banging on something in the garage. Then, holding a chip partway to his mouth, Jeff said, “Shit, I know what this is. This is Danny, isn’t it.”
“Danny left last night Jeff.”
Jeff stood watching him. “I’m sorry about that, Big Man.”
“It’s OK Jeff he’ll come back he always comes back.”
The microwave dinged and Jeff pulled the burrito out by the plastic wrapper and dropped it fast on a paper plate and sat down at the little table to eat.
“I gotta go to the drugstore now,” Marky said, standing.
“The drugstore?”
“Yeah gotta get something for Momma,” he said. His heart beating so hard as he said it. Jeff watching him as he bagged up his sandwich and put it back in the fridge.
“Hey,” Jeff said, and Marky stopped. Jeff just staring at him. “You knew he’d have to leave again, right? You knew he couldn’t stay.”
“Yeah I knew it Jeff. Momma and me we always know it and even Wyatt did too before he died.”
“Doesn’t make it any easier, though, does it.”
“No it doesn’t Jeff.”
He put on his jacket and he got out of the garage without Mr. Wabash seeing him and he walked six blocks through town, stopping only to look at the sheriff’s station—one of the white Tahoes parked out front, the 2014 V-8 with the 5.3-liter engine—and then he walked the six blocks back to the garage and Jeff was just finishing his lunch and Mr. Wabash was standing in the lot talking to a woman beside her red car. Danny had not called.
49
The girl came in the afternoon, just after Rachel herself got
home from errands and before she’d even gotten out of her coat. There were footsteps on the porch and then the doorbell rang and the dog didn’t bark and she remembered, once again, that he was gone.
Danny gone now too. The house so empty and quiet.
The girl stood on the porch in big sunglasses and a big canvas jacket, and even with the sunglasses Rachel knew who she was, and her heart gave a strange hop in her chest. She opened the stormdoor and the girl said, “Hello—Mrs. Young?”
“Yes.”
“I’m Audrey Sutter. I’m sorry to just show up like this, I tried to call.”
“Yes, I know who you are.” The girl removed the sunglasses and Rachel saw the purple cast, and she knew it must’ve happened in the accident, when she and the other girl had gone into the river. “I’m sorry—” Rachel said, and didn’t know how to go on. She should give the girl her sympathies, she knew, for her father, and for the other girl too—but instead she said, as kindly as she could, “Is there something I can do for you?”
“I was actually hoping I might speak to your son?” said the girl, and Rachel’s heart stumbled, it fell back in time. It was those words—speak to your son—as the girl’s father had once spoken them, standing just so on her stoop, at the old house, but it was the eyes too: those same blue eyes looking at her again out of that past, those terrible days. And she looked into these eyes now, trying to find the connection between her son and this girl, the sheriff’s daughter, but it was impossible. What had she missed?
“My son . . .?”
“Danny,” the girl said. “I couldn’t find his number anywhere, so finally I just—”
“I’m sorry,” Rachel said, “but what is this about?” and the girl was silent. Unprepared for the question. Did she even know what her father had done to Danny? To Rachel herself, to her family? The girl would’ve been what—nine, ten years old. But you could not grow up in this town and not know. Especially if you were the sheriff’s daughter.
“If I—” the girl began. “I mean if I could talk to him for just a minute, Mrs. Young, then I think he could explain it better.” And Rachel, her heart beating, said, “You can’t speak to him. He’s gone.”
“Gone, as in left town?” said the girl, and she looked down the road, as if she might catch sight of his departing truck. In the driveway, behind Rachel’s car, was the white sedan she’d seen Tom Sutter driving after he retired as sheriff. After the cancer had gotten too far along.
The girl stood there, in that big canvas jacket that must have been her father’s, having no idea what to do next. What to say.
When she turned back to Rachel, looking at her again with those eyes, Rachel held the stormdoor wider, and the girl stepped into the house.
It took ten minutes, or maybe thirty, for the girl to tell her everything: what she’d heard Danny tell Gordon Burke about that night ten years ago—what she was even doing at Gordon Burke’s in the first place! What Danny said about the deputy pulling him over, that piece of cloth . . . Gordon talking to the deputy, or sheriff now, down in Iowa; what Sheriff Halsey up here had not told the girl and what his secretary had; and finally what Katie Goss had told her three nights ago, Friday night, the girl not saying this last outright, careful not to betray a confidence, but her body and her hands and her eyes saying it anyway—sweet, pretty Katie Goss who smelled like strawberries and was her son’s first love, and maybe his only love . . . and Rachel all the while holding the mug like it was her own heart, hot and pounding in her hands.
She knew the girl was finished when she picked up her own mug and sipped from it and set it down again quietly on the tabletop. Then the girl began turning a large metal bracelet on her other wrist, her good wrist—or not a bracelet but a man’s wristwatch, and that soft clicking was the only sound. Rachel’s own hands, clutching the china mug, looked sinister. Like hands wrapped around a white little neck. If the girl had come Saturday, or Sunday—or had called—Danny might still be here.
“I’m sorry,” said the girl. “I shouldn’t be the one telling you all this. You don’t even know me.”
Finally Rachel let go the mug, and her breath came back to her, and after a moment her voice did too—or something like it.
“And where is this cloth now—this pocket?”
“I think Danny must have it with him,” the girl said. “Or else he left it here.”
Here, in this house, all this time. And the old house before that. Ten years!
Or did he keep it with him, wherever he went, so she would never find it?
She looked at the phone then and saw the blinking red light on the machine, and she got to her feet and crossed to it and played the message, but it was the girl herself, asking if she might speak to Danny, leaving her number. So she did call—but not until this morning.
“. . . really so sorry,” this same voice was saying, behind her. “I shouldn’t be the one telling you any of this, like this—except that I think I can help him. If I could talk to him, I think I could help him.”
“Why did you wait?” Rachel said, as if to herself.
“I’m sorry?”
“All weekend . . .” She pushed two buttons on the phone and raised it to her ear again. After four rings she knew it would be his voicemail but her heart kicked anyway at the sound of his voice, as it always did. This is Danny . . .
“I’m sorry,” said the girl. “I guess I was trying to figure out what to do. If it was even any of my business.”
“He’s not picking up,” Rachel said, and the girl said, “He’s driving. He might not even have his phone on.”
“Yes,” said Rachel. Holding the phone in her hands, holding it to her chest. She’d been here before, in this moment. It was too familiar.
Then she remembered: the night she’d heard the water running, and Danny had been washing the dog, and he’d driven up to the cabin, and she’d called and called but he hadn’t answered.
In custody.
The girl said, “He didn’t say anything before he left, about where he was going?”
“No,” Rachel said, “not to me.”
And some few minutes after that she was alone again—the girl having made her good-byes, her apologies once more, and driving off again in the white sedan, and Rachel going immediately upstairs to his room, to stand in the doorway looking in. As she’d stood that night ten years ago, watching him stuff clothes into his duffel. How frightened he looked, in her memory, how terrified. Why hadn’t he talked to her? Why hadn’t he told her? She could have helped him!
Everything in the room was in order: the sheets and pillowcases pulled off and placed in a neat pile on the mattress for her to wash and no other sign in the room that anyone had been there. The sheriff and his deputies had gone through his room once before, at the old house, and she didn’t think he would leave it here, not in this room, and after a moment she stepped across the hall and went into Marky’s room, and five minutes after that she was downstairs again, at the stove again, watching as the kettle came slowly, so slowly, to boil. He’d done his best to hide it but her eye had gone directly to the light-blue envelope, one of hers, among the other letters and valentines in the shoebox in his closet. This envelope never opened. This envelope addressed to Sheriff Wayne Halsey.
The kettle began to whistle and she played the seal of the envelope over the steam, helping it along with a butter knife until the flap popped free, then she took the envelope to the table and sat down with it before her.
Inside were several sheets of her stationery, and when she opened these up the square of cloth slipped out and fell without a sound to the table and her heart stopped beating. Just stopped. A square of white silk so sheer she could see the grain of the tabletop beneath it. Her fingertips trembled on her lips and she didn’t have to touch the cloth to know; she’d touched it before, in the store, when the blouse lay draped over her arm, and again when she’d folded it into its box . . . you’d have to wear something under it, a camisole, and did the girl have anything
like that?—you couldn’t ask her father and you couldn’t ask the girl herself . . . Well, let her figure that part out for herself, the blouse was not cheap even with her store discount, and she might not even like it, or she might not like it out of spite, but a birthday was a birthday and the girl could always take it back for something she wanted and you just couldn’t worry about that, but wasn’t it lovely, wasn’t it nice to buy something fine for a young woman when all your life you’d bought clothes for boys . . .
And Holly had worn the blouse that night, the night of the river, and one way or another, by accident or by some other encounter gone wrong—by some kind of violence—the pocket had been torn from the blouse and had not gone into the river with her but had been kept, had been hidden, and had been brought out of hiding all these years later to fall without a sound to her kitchen table.
She wiped her eyes, then wiped her hands on her lap and when her fingertips were dry she picked up the three pages of stationery and read the letter her son had written to the sheriff.
50
After lunch Jeff got a Chevy Impala up in the air and began tearing out the exhaust front to back while Marky stood by to hand him the tools he asked for, and Danny didn’t call and you gotta stay busy is all, you just gotta keep working and not even thinking about it, not watching the clock and not even thinking about it and then he’ll call, he’ll call to say he’s far away now and everything is OK . . . and at 2:15 Tony the parts man came with the new exhaust parts and Marky was entering those into the computer when his phone vibrated in his pocket, and he fumbled for it and got it out and read the screen and it was his mother, and his heart dropped back into place.
“Marky, can you talk a minute?”
“I’m at work Momma.”
“I know, but Marky I need to ask you—did Danny say anything else last night, when he woke you up?”
Marky stood with the phone to his ear, his heart kicking.
“Marky—?”
“He didn’t say anything else Momma he just said to say good-bye.”