thirty
M
om called Dennis Gibson first thing in the morning, and he drove down from Green Bay to be with her when the police arrived. The deputy on duty looked like a teenager, with a thin face and a knobby Adam’s apple. He snapped a photo of the barn with his Polaroid and waggled the print back and forth while he waited for the picture to develop. Mom watched this scornfully, as if she had absolutely no trust that this flimsy photo would ever do her or anyone else a bit of good.
“Nice of them to send Barney Fife along,” Mom said, coming into the house with Mr. Gibson in tow. “Dennis is going to help us get started on a restraining order.”
Dad folded his arms across his chest and leaned back against the countertop. “We don’t even know for sure who it was, Alicia. You’re reacting without thinking things through.” From his tone I knew that their argument from the night before wasn’t finished.
Mom ignored this and smiled icily at Mr. Gibson. “You see, my husband thinks that we shouldn’t do anything, and somehow it will all go away.”
Mr. Gibson, in his fancy pin-striped suit, said, “Now, sir, I would have to disagree with you there....” He reached into his briefcase and pulled out a stack of papers.
“Kirsten,” Mom said pointedly, gesturing toward the stairs. I took each step slowly, letting my foot drag across the carpeting. It seemed funny that Mom was intent on keeping people away from us. I had begun to realize that people wanted to keep
us
away from them.
The adults-only conversation halted only when a nurse from the hospital returned Mom’s call. Grandpa was in pain, but he was alert and had been asking for us. After Mr. Gibson left, we piled into the Caprice again, minus Johnny.
“Aren’t you coming?” Mom called, spotting Johnny on the steps.
He shook his head.
“Your grandfather is in the hospital,” Mom said coldly.
He only stared at her, so we piled into the car and headed out. It was impossible to tell what Johnny was thinking, as if he was locked in his body without a means of communication.
“Why should he get to stay?” Mom demanded. “Isn’t he going to take some responsibility for this situation?”
Dad looked at her sharply. “He’s not responsible for this situation.”
Mom seethed all the way into Manitowoc, getting a grip on her anger only when we entered the lobby of Holy Cross Hospital and it was time to smile at her coworkers. “I’m coming back next week,” she promised, and a few of the women stepped forward to hug her.
In the hallway, a compact man in a white coat introduced himself as Dr. DeGuzman. He explained there would be surgery, some kind of pin inserted, recovery time in a rehabilitation unit. “The concussion appears to be minor, although he was disoriented yesterday when he was brought in,” he continued, opening the door to Grandpa’s room.
The man lying in bed didn’t look much like Grandpa; he looked smaller, somehow, with an IV hooked to his arm and an oxygen tube trailing from his nose. The pale blue hospital gown was nearly translucent; where the sleeve ended, his arm was covered in a purplish bruise up to the point where it disappeared beneath the bed sheet.
“How are you holding up, Papa?” Mom asked.
Dad went right over to Grandpa, smoothing back the wisps of hair that lay against his forehead. He gave his shoulder a little tap. “Papa?” Grandpa didn’t respond. His body was limp, the way people looked in cartoons sometimes, but never in real life. When Dad touched him again, Grandpa’s head flopped over like a Raggedy Ann doll.
“Is that normal?” There were tears in Dad’s voice.
Dr. DeGuzman said, “He was awake only a few minutes ago. The medicine must have tired him out.”
Suddenly Grandpa’s eyes fluttered open, and he shifted in the bed. The movement was obviously painful; he winced and looked around wildly.
“Now, you just stay still, Papa,” Mom said.
Grandpa looked back and forth, taking everything in. “Where—”
“You’re in the hospital,” Dad said. “You fell yesterday. Do you remember?”
Grandpa’s eyes focused on Dad’s face for a moment, then darted to Emilie and me, who had crammed together into the room’s single chair, our legs overlapping.
“You’re in good hands now,” Mom said, close to his face. “Dr. DeGuzman is one of the absolute best.”
Grandpa closed his eyes, exhaled painfully. “The barn...”
“We saw it, Papa. We’re going to take care of it right away,” Dad said. “I’m sorry that it happened when you were by yourself.”
Grandpa wanted to say something but only gasped.
The doctor cleared his throat. “Maybe that’s enough for now. We should let him sleep. You can always come back before visiting hours end tonight.”
Emilie and I, taking this as a cue, stepped forward and gave Grandpa twin pecks on his cheek.
“I still wish you hadn’t tried to take care of that yourself, Papa,” Mom said, helping him lean back against his pillows. “You could have been hurt much, much worse.”
Grandpa struggled to come to a sitting position once again, but the jostling motion caused him to howl with a primal, animal-like pain.
Dad sprang back, but Mom leaned over Grandpa, settling him. “Just take it easy now, okay,” she said.
Grandpa shook his head, trying to move out of her reach. “Don’t you tell me...”
“He still seems to be in pain,” Dad complained. “Can’t you give him something else?”
“Don’t you...”
“What’s he trying to say?” Mom asked, inclining her ear toward his head. “Papa? Is there something you want to tell us?”
“Don’t you...touch me...you...bitch.” His voice came more clearly now, his blue eyes alert.
Mom recoiled as if she’d been slapped.
“You’re nothing but a...dirty...whore.” The words out, Grandpa collapsed onto the pillow, his chest heaving with the effort.
Mom took a step backward, and then another, holding her hands out in front of her body, palms up. She gave a short, nervous bark of a laugh and looked from the doctor to Dad and back. All of our eyes were on Mom, as if she was a bomb that might go off if we didn’t focus our full attention on her. “This is what I get for trying to help!”
Dr. DeGuzman cleared his throat again, clearly uncomfortable. “You know, sometimes with a concussion...” he began, and launched into medical-speak about head injuries and temporary memory loss.
Mom smiled tightly. We left a few minutes later, when a nurse arrived with a syringe to be emptied into Grandpa’s IV.
“Nice of you to come to my defense,” Mom said when we were back in the Caprice. She was driving this time, taking the turns a little too fast.
Dad, looking out the window, closed his eyes. “Oh, come on. He was delirious. There’s no point in getting all worked up about it.”
Mom’s laugh was biting. “He was not delirious! You know what it was? For once in his life he was actually saying what he meant. He’s felt that way for eighteen years!”
Mom took the turn onto Passaqua Road particularly fast, and I had to hold on to the door handle not to go flying.
“We don’t need this on top of everything else now, Alicia.”
“You’re right—we don’t need this,” Mom agreed, but she seemed to mean something else entirely.
A stony silence persisted between them, until we pulled into our driveway and saw that Johnny was nearly finished painting over the graffiti on the barn. Dad joined him for a second coat, and I stayed outside, too, brushing out Kennel’s fur. But I kept sneaking peeks at Dad and Johnny, at the easy way they worked together. I could hear their voices, although not their exact words. I wondered what they were saying to each other that they wouldn’t say to the rest of us—was Johnny confessing something? Was he saying he was sorry for throwing his wrestling match, or was Dad saying that it didn’t matter, that he was the one who was sorry, that Johnny’s losing mattered less than anything else in the world?
When Dad and Johnny came in later that afternoon to grab something from the refrigerator, it was obvious to me that they had some new understanding, as if they were on one team, and Mom, Emilie and I were on the other. They’d worked shoulder to shoulder in their private male kingdom while we women only meddled, only complicated matters by saying the wrong things and placing blame and getting emotional. After that day, I felt a divide between us, and when Dad went outside for one last check on the animals, I simply didn’t follow.
thirty-one
O
n Sunday, I read in the
Manitowoc Herald Times Reporter
that Dirk Bauer had won the state title in the 121-pound division. His photo was on the front page, with the ref holding Dirk’s triumphant, skinny arm over his head. Colleges, the article implied, were jumping over themselves with offers for him. There was no mention of Johnny Hammarstrom. It was as though he’d never even existed.
None of us mentioned church, especially now that Mrs. Keithley had as good as condemned Johnny on television. Although he had called several times last week to see how we were holding up, Pastor Ziegler didn’t stop by again to see us. I wondered if it were possible to pray against someone, and if that’s what the St. John’s prayer chain was doing now, praying that Johnny Hammarstrom come clean about what he’d done to Stacy Lemke and face the music once and for all. If I was being honest with myself, that’s what I was praying for, too.
Mom went to get groceries and returned twenty minutes later, shaken. “The way they were staring at me... It was like I had the plague or something.”
On Monday Detective Halliday stopped by to say that the blood analysis had come back. It turned out that the blood inside the truck and on Johnny’s clothes belonged to Johnny.
“I told you it was mine,” Johnny complained. “That’s what I said from the beginning.”
Detective Halliday explained, not unkindly, “We can’t ignore any kind of physical evidence, especially in a case like this. We have a responsibility to follow up on everything.”
“What about finding the people who vandalized our barn?” Mom insisted. “Are you following up on that?”
Detective Halliday frowned. “With all due respect, ma’am, my efforts have been concentrated on the missing girl who is presumed to be the victim of foul play.”
Stacy.
Sometimes, in the middle of everything, I almost forgot that she was at the center of all of this.
Detective Halliday also reported that Johnny’s truck, now that it had been processed for blood and fingerprints and fibers, was ready to be picked up. Dad drove Johnny to the police station and Johnny returned in the Green Machine, its front right fender bent at the passenger side—the last place where Stacy Lemke was known to have sat. He spent an afternoon with a hammer, crudely banging the metal back into place. It looked wounded but it still ran, and Johnny still drove it, much to my envy. I wished I had a truck of my own, so I could escape for a few hours.
Later that week, we invited Jerry Warczak over for dinner; he was one of the few people in town who was still speaking with us, it seemed. Dad thanked him repeatedly for finding Grandpa. “If it hadn’t been for you...”
“I was just coming over for the milking,” Jerry said, both cheeks dotted with a red circle of embarrassment.
“Still, we’re grateful.”
Jerry ducked his head, accepting Dad’s appreciation. “How’s he doing?”
Dad reported what he knew, which was that Grandpa had made it through surgery, that when he had his strength back he was going to begin a stint in the rehabilitation center. It was Mom who called each morning for the report, slicing through the red tape that would otherwise have entangled Grandpa’s records, but it was Dad who visited in the evenings to help Grandpa with his dinner. “I’ll go,” Mom had huffed, “when he’s ready to apologize.” Dad had thrown up his hands as though he was giving up.
For the first few weeks after Stacy’s disappearance, Mom dutifully retrieved our homework packets from school on Mondays and returned them on Fridays. I had always loved school, but when learning was reduced to a stack of worksheets, I became bored quickly. To occupy my free time, I volunteered to help out around Grandpa’s house. There seemed to be a delicate balance between overwatering and underwatering his ferns; one day they looked limp and waterlogged, the next day the leaves were crispy, breaking off in my fingers. But taking care of Grandpa’s house—as badly as I’m sure I did it—was a wonderful reason not to be in my own house, where a desperate silence had taken hold, punctuated occasionally by heated arguments. It seemed lately that none of us could do anything right.
True to her word, Mom went back to work right away, jumping at the chance to pick up an extra shift here and there. The transition back to work was awkward for her, though. I overheard her confide to Aunt Julia that few of her patients seemed to realize or care who she was, but the other nurses treated her differently, mostly talking in hushed whispers and avoiding direct contact with her.
Still, she believed that life had to go on. Sitting Emilie and me down one night, she said, “It’s going to be difficult for you both, but this has to be done.” She compared it to pulling off a Band-Aid; there wasn’t much pain after the initial sting. “In no time, you’ll be back in the swing of things, going places with your friends....” Her voice was too upbeat, propelled by a false cheer, and Emilie and I knew it.
Mom notified our schools that we would be back the following Monday. She was working that day, so Dad would bring Emilie and Johnny would bring me, on his way to who-knows-where. Johnny wouldn’t be going back to school—he refused to go, and the school district didn’t want him, anyway. Mom supplied him with a stack of GED review books, still seeming to believe that Johnny had a future in front of him, including—if not college on a wrestling scholarship—at least a decent job. I wondered who in all of Wisconsin was going to hire him, with his picture plastered all over the evening news.
Johnny’s life was a mystery to me then. Each morning he shoved his feet into work boots and tramped out to the barn for chores. Later, when the rest of us assembled loosely in the kitchen for breakfast, his truck wheezed to life, the ignition caught, and he rumbled away from us. Much later he returned, heralded by the crunch of tires on gravel and the
whack
of his boots against the porch steps. He entered the house, sloughing off his jacket and hanging it on the peg that was, and had always been, his. We didn’t ask where he went, and he didn’t tell us. Sometimes the only proof of his physical presence was in the bathroom, in the puddles of his jeans and flannel shirts on the floor, or the smeared handprints against the fog of the bathroom mirror. No one called for him, no one stopped by to see how he was doing.
When he took me to school that Monday, it was the first time we’d been alone in weeks. He turned up the radio, a Pearl Jam song at a numbing volume that prevented conversation. That was fine with me. We had nothing to say to each other, and my stomach was a nervous mess. Would I pick up with my classmates right where we’d left off, or would I have to start all over again, forming new alliances? If Mom had been driving, I might have asked her to pull over, but with Johnny I had no choice but to force my nerves to quiet down.
We mostly rode in silence, with Johnny drumming his fingers against the steering wheel each time we came to a stop sign.
Stacy sat here,
I suddenly reminded myself, running my fingers over the cracked leather seat. She had buckled herself in with this very buckle, had rested her arm against this very armrest. Adjusting the sun visor, she had seen her own reflection in this very mirror—her wide gray-green eyes, the freckles on her cheeks.
“Where do you go, Johnny?” I asked him suddenly, my voice rising as loud as the music as we hit the single blinking red light that led into town. “Do you go looking for her?”
His glance shot to me, and I saw that his mouth hung open slightly in surprise. Of course he didn’t go looking for her, I rebuked myself. No amount of driving around was going to do a thing for Stacy Lemke. He didn’t need to look for her, since he knew exactly where she was.
“Never mind,” I said quickly. “Don’t tell me where you go.”
“Kirsten, I don’t even—”
“No! Don’t tell me!” I screeched, afraid that in this moment, our one moment alone together in weeks, he would suddenly say things that he could never unsay and that I could never unknow.
It was a huge mistake to take a ride from Johnny, I realized the instant his Green Machine pulled into the parking lot. The teacher on yard duty stopped reprimanding a little boy to stare at us; some kids I recognized as sixth graders pointed at Johnny’s truck as they walked past. Suddenly I knew I couldn’t just go back to class, quietly learn my multiplication facts and my Wisconsin history. I couldn’t blend in with my classmates as if I was one of them, after all that had happened. For a moment I wished I could take back what I’d asked him, so that he would bring me with him, wherever it was he went.
“I guess I’ll see you,” he grunted, the truck idling.
I slammed the dented, hammered door of the Green Machine behind me just a touch too hard, and Johnny swerved back onto the road, leaving me on the curb. I watched as his truck shot forward, away from Watankee, away from Manitowoc. I guessed that he wasn’t going anywhere in particular. He was driving the countryside in widening loops, taking roads he hadn’t taken before, just to end up somewhere he hadn’t ever been.
Miss Swanson welcomed me with a little hug and pointed me to my desk, which was in the same place, with the same pens and pencils and crayons inside my plastic zippered pouch. Like a shrine, I thought, to the girl I was a month ago. It seemed that my classmates had been instructed not to say anything to me about Johnny or Stacy or missing girls or murderers. That was fine, except as the day wore on from the morning bell to the Pledge of Allegiance to the first recess, I realized that this meant that no one was going to say anything at all to me, period. Boys who used to tease me for being so small ignored me completely. Katie and Kari, who I used to sit with at lunch, linked arms and moved in the opposite direction when I approached. The other girls stopped talking when I came within earshot and resumed when I left. I felt like a hot potato—get too close for too long, and you might get burned.
Kevin Coulie passed me a note during our math lesson that said
I’m sorry.
He didn’t need to say what he was sorry for; I understood he was sorry that I missed the spelling bee, that my brother was a murderer, that neither he nor any of my classmates was ever going to speak to me again.
When the bell for lunch rang, I lingered in the room until Miss Swanson said she needed to head up to the teacher’s lounge. She smiled at me kindly, but I couldn’t take anything at face value anymore. Maybe she was simply a good actress, too.
As soon as I rounded the corner onto the playground, my brown lunch bag clenched in my hand, I was swarmed with kids. “There she is!” someone called, and a few others took up the chant, “Kir-sten! Kir-sten!”
“What is it?” I asked, terrified. If their silence before had been painful, their enthusiasm for me now was simply alarming.
“Tetherball match!” someone yelled, and it was instantly echoed as a chant. “Teth-er-ball! Teth-er-ball!” I shook my head, looking around for Kevin or another friendly face in the group of twenty or so. I didn’t see him, but every other kid in the fourth grade was there, even the ones who went to my church, even the ones who had invited me to their birthday parties.
“You have to!” another person yelled. “You don’t have a choice!”
“No!”
I yelled, but someone gave me a push from behind, and I found myself propelled forward onto the tetherball court, where Heather Lemke was waiting. She looked even bigger than the last time I’d seen her. Stacy had been slim, but Heather was muscular, her thick legs planted on the court like tree trunks. If I just focused on her face, though, she could have been a miniature Stacy. Curls of reddish hair escaped her braid, framing her face. She had more freckles and her eyes were farther apart, but she was undeniably Stacy’s sister.
“Well, hello, Kirsten,” she said, her voice icy and dangerous. If the yellow ball hadn’t been strung to the pole, I think she might have clobbered me with it right off the bat. The crowd, after a few cries of “oooh,” was suddenly quiet, not wanting to miss anything. Someone gave me another shove from behind, and I landed inside the half-circle of the tetherball court across from Heather. In the confusion, I dropped my brown lunch bag and looked over to see it trampled beneath the feet of some sixth grade boys.
“I don’t want to fight,” I said, and everyone laughed as if I’d said something hysterical. I strained my neck to look for the teacher on duty but couldn’t see over my classmates’ heads.
“It’s not a fight, you dummy,” Heather Lemke said. “It’s a game.”
“I don’t want to play,” I said, my heart smashing into the walls of my chest cavity like a billiard ball. “You know I’ll lose.”
“Are you chicken, Hammarstrom?” she asked, and the crowd took it up like a mantra:
“Bawk! Bawk!”
Yes, I thought. As a matter of fact, I was a chicken. I knew that Heather Lemke was the biggest and toughest of the sixth graders; I’d seen her beat just about every boy in the school into submission on this very court. I remembered the way she’d galloped around the yard at Stacy’s birthday party, with kids bouncing up and down on her back. I could barely carry my own backpack without tipping over.
“No,” I said, my voice wavering with the obvious lie. “I’m not chicken. I just don’t want to play.”
“Bawk! Bawk!”
Heather snickered and tossed me the ball, lightly. I lunged forward, almost missing it. “I’ll even let you start.”
I’d read enough books and seen enough after-school specials to know that the underdog could sometimes be victorious, through courage or wits or some previously untapped source of superhuman strength—but the second that tetherball was in my hands, I knew it wouldn’t be the case with me. I was short on courage, wits and strength. It wasn’t going to be the sort of match my classmates remembered for years to come because I had pulled off some amazing feat. Standing in front of Heather Lemke, I felt like David confronting Goliath without even a slingshot at his side.
“Take your best shot,” Heather sneered, crouching down into playing position.
I prayed right then for something to happen, like an earthquake or a tornado or a crack of lightning to split the sky in two. I prayed for a teacher to come, or my mother, or even Johnny, who could have lifted me onto his shoulder and carried me straight out to the parking lot. But nothing happened and no one came, and I had to throw the ball.
“Bawk! Bawk!”
someone clucked behind me.
I’m not a chicken,
I thought, my eyes narrowing. Heather, catching the expression on my face at that moment, opened her eyes wide in surprise. I wound my right arm back behind my head, gathered all my strength and let it fly.