41

The rain is slackening off, and Ed kicks the wipers back to intermittent. He has no idea where he’s going, a fact that bothers him. He wasn’t brought up to do meaningless things. Every car trip must have a purpose; every man feeds his family. The weight of his unemployment, call it that, a more accurate name for early retirement, feels like shame. Even in the darkest days after Stacy’s death, he had his job, his work to retreat into. Retreating from Alice, from her unassailable grief. He grieved, too, but Alice’s grief was like a mushroom cloud, obscuring and consuming. He might have believed that she loved her grief. So he worked. He kept his distance. He allowed his own sorrow to form a thick scar of manliness. No one ever asked him how he was doing, patted his hand or his back. The workers in his plant did treat him with a softer deference for a few months, but then they allowed him to master his tragedy.

“So, where’re we going, Buddy?” Ed pulls gently on the dog’s ear.

The dog sighs, a rattling exhalation. He seems to sense Ed’s distress and leans against him as if to help shoulder the burden of his thoughts.

“I know where.”

The rain has stopped completely as Ed reaches the old pistol factory ruins. A rude parking lot has developed alongside the road, where fishermen and hikers leave their cars. Shattered glass, cigarette butts, and soggy beech leaves litter the stony turnout. The place is empty right now, midday, a school day, a workday. He and Buddy are the only souls there. Ed realizes that he has no leash; he’s left the house in such a hurry, he’s forgotten it. Rather than chance the dog’s getting hit by an oncoming car, Ed takes him into his arms and carries him across the road to the ruins. The dog doesn’t even squirm, but he does lick Ed’s nose, as if to say, This is cool.

The brick facade of the pistol factory is intact, although all the windows are gone and the interior has been gutted over the past hundred years. Rumors at the zoning meeting last night suggest that some developer has a plan to buy the place and turn it into something. Someone said condominiums; someone else had heard shops. Locals chuckled at the notion that anyone would buy a condo in Moodyville, much less draw the traffic that would support a bunch of chichi shops. Ed would love to see it purchased by a small manufacturer and have it restored back to its original purpose. Maybe not pistols, but certainly something could be produced here. The place still has good bones.

Ed sets Buddy down and he and the dog climb down the steep stairs to the apron that runs around the building to the millpond and the steps that lead to the old path. Immediately, the dog sets about squirrel hunting. “You already scared them off.” He pats his thigh and the dog comes bounding back. “Stick close. It can be dangerous here.”

The millpond is low, a good foot beneath the lip of the dam, as the dry summer has depleted the dammed river of its volume. It halfheartedly escapes through one open sluice gate. Today’s rain has given the usually placid surface a little motion, and leaves float like little empty boats, ganging up where the unseen force of the thwarted river pushes them against the stones.

Ed hasn’t been here for seven years.

Ed stares down into the bronze-colored water of the millpond. The power of the moving water to make the shaft work is in the flowing of it into the waterwheel, long since gone. Only the real old-timers remember when it was there, and even then just a broken vestige of industry.

Five feet deep. A mere five feet of accumulated river water, and all the power of strategically released water moves the wheel. Five feet. Deep enough to swim in. Deep enough to keep the trout alive. Deep enough if your pockets are full of rocks.

*   *   *

Moodyville doesn’t have a police force. When emergencies happen, car crashes and the like, the resident state trooper does what is necessary. A 911 call will get the volunteer fire department out, and the EMTs. Neighbors. Colleagues. When a fisherman who was hoping only to catch a fish on opening day snagged his line and discovered the drowned body of a young girl, it was left to the resident trooper, arriving after the fire department and the EMTs, to make the unhappy connection between the girl in the pond and the parents who had made the missing-person call two days earlier. The fire department lieutenant and the driver of the town ambulance looked each other in the eye and were glad that they, who know the Parmalees well, wouldn’t have to make that visit. No one wants to bring that kind of news into a neighbor’s house.

*   *   *

They think that she’s run away. Unlike many parents who would default to a belief that their daughter has been abducted, Ed and Alice both know that this is Stacy’s doing. Although there is no note, no missing items—not even her stuffed rabbit, which, even at her age, she still clings to—they know that there is no outside force. When she was a little girl, maybe five, she decided to run away and got as far as the end of the road before turning back, informing her parents that she had decided not to run away that day after all. Alice, who had watched her march down the road, her stuffed rabbit tucked under one arm and her Barbie backpack bouncing against her little bum, thought that the few minutes it took for Stacy to “run away” felt as long as the time it had taken for her to take her first breath; it felt similar, the wait for the breath of life, or for the childish threat to resolve. Would she take that first gasp of air? How long to wait before running after her?

Stacy has seemed so much brighter in the past month. She has smiled more, listened to more cheerful music, spent more time with them at the dinner table. She even went to a sleepover. Ed has begun to relax, thinking that if things continue to improve, it will just prove that he was right to insist on her taking this course of medication. He has been collecting the evidence of Stacy’s being more like herself, like the self they understand, to show for his bold defiance of his wife. This running away is a mistake, a misunderstanding. They know that the antidepressants can cause odd behavior as a side effect. They call her cell phone and it rings in her empty bedroom. They call all her friends, but no one has seen her. Her bike is in the garage. Her purse is on the counter.

And then the resident trooper, Trooper Rossman, is at their front door. He is the same trooper who took their missing-person report, asking questions about Stacy’s friends and whether they thought she took drugs.

“Antidepressants.” Alice spit the word out, and Ed knew that however this ended, he might never be forgiven.

Ed had insisted that they follow doctor’s recommendations and put Stacy on the antidepressants. The side effects were simple legal jargon to cover the pharmaceutical company’s liability. “We have to try. She needs a little help so that the counseling can help.”

“No.” Being her mother, Alice had known that this was a bad idea. Stacy didn’t want to take them, and Alice stood by her right to defend her daughter’s decision. She wasn’t a little child; she was a young woman who knew her own mind.

Overruled.

Trooper Rossman holds his hat is in his hands now. Uncovered, he looks younger, more human. Regretful.

It is an April afternoon, the sun just sliding behind the hills to the west. The air is fresh but damp; rain is imminent—the first of the April showers. Alice is standing behind Ed as he lets the trooper into the house. Ed knows he is letting death in. By opening the door, death is invited in. He should have shut the door and barricaded it with his shoulder.

They don’t go into the living room this time; for some reason, Ed leads them into the kitchen, where he gestures for the trooper to sit at the table. He then holds a chair for Alice. She doesn’t look at him as she sits. She has barely spoken. The prescription bottle is on the counter, its label facing the wall.

Alice says nothing as Rossman gently breaks the news of finding Stacy in the pond.

“But I went to the pond. She wasn’t there.” Ed isn’t calling the man a liar, just mistaken. “How could I not have seen her?”

“She was under the water.”

Ed has to ask if it was an accident, and the need to ask that question reveals his deepest fear. “She fell in? How?”

“There will be an investigation.”

“But you think that it was”—Ed hits upon a word he can’t utter—“not an accident?”

“As I said, there will be an investigation.” Rossman has set his trooper’s hat on the empty chair at the table and he touches it gently on the crown. “I have to ask. Is there a note?” He asked this before, when Stacy was simply a missing person. This time, it is less of a question and more of a demand for a piece of evidence.

Ed remembers the warning on the bottle: Thoughts of suicide may increase when first taking this medication.

Alice stares at the trooper, great tears running unchecked down her cheeks, into the grooves that have appeared at the corners of her mouth; she makes no noise, makes no attempt to wipe them away. It is as if she has no idea that she is crying.

Trooper Rossman stands up and gathers his hat to his chest. “Mr. and Mrs. Parmalee, I am sorry for your loss.”

Ed sees the trooper out. He turns to take Alice in his arms and is met with a flat-handed slap.

“I never want you to touch me again.”

*   *   *

Buddy whizzes past Ed at a dead run, the lure of low-hanging squirrels too much for him. Suddenly, the dog finds himself perched on the lip of the dam. Daintily, he travels the edge like a gymnast on a balance beam, moving skillfully away from Ed, toward the opposite bank of the pond.

“Buddy!” Ed watches the dog disappear into the woods. “Goddamn it! Buddy!” He’s going to have a heart attack right here and now. “Buddy! Come!” He tries to whistle, but his mouth is too dry. He claps and calls, shouting the dog’s name. He’s never not come before. Every time Ed has let him off the leash, in defiance of Alice’s overprotectiveness, the dog has come like a shot at his call. Now the only sound is the brush beneath the trees rustling as the dog moves away from him. Ed braces himself against his knees and fights a surge of panic. He’s been their dog for only a little while. What if he’s running away from them? “Buddy!”

Then the dog is back on the dam, trotting along the six-inch-wide coaming as unconcernedly as a high-wire walker on pavement. He sees Ed and picks up the pace.

“Easy, slow down.” Just as the dog reaches Ed, who is kneeling on the rain-slick cement of the abutment, his hind foot slips on a scattering of wet leaves and suddenly he is scrambling. Ed reaches out and grabs the dog by the ruff.

“Sweet Jesus, I thought I’d lost you.”