May 9, 1973–1985
Shaker Falls, Ohio, and Independence, Indiana
His eyes blinked open and he was awake. The first thing he saw was a canopy of trees above him. The first thing he felt was thick mud-sludge around his chest. The first thing he heard was a bird squawking, perched somewhere not too far.
And then his head hurt. His vision went white, then fuzzed to gray-black. He touched the left side of his head, the source of the pain. It was soft and pulpy and when he pulled his fingers away they were covered with blood. He brought his hand to the wound again and found something hard and round lodged there. When he applied pressure, he felt nothing. But when he tried to pull it out, his head seized with bright, unbearable pain.
Next to him floating in the sludge was someone he recognized as Sunny. His vision blinked black to white to red like a TV changing channels. When it stayed still for long enough, he saw that Sunny was dead. He screamed and climbed out of the sludge and scrambled up a little leaf-covered hill. Then he sat there, holding his legs close to his chest, looking down at Sunny’s body floating in what he now knew to be the swamp. He vomited, mostly greenish bile. His stomach, emptier than it had ever been, clenched in protest. Nearby (shockingly nearby, now that he’d noticed it) was a road.
Sometimes walking, sometimes crawling, he followed along the road but didn’t leave the cover of the woods. If a car passed, he stopped moving. He was sure he was hidden but wanted to be safe.
He followed the road until the woods ended and a bristly thicket began. He stopped, still on his hands and knees, and lowered his head to the ground. The blood rushed to his forehead. It felt good and he stayed there like this for a long time. Finally, he stood up and his vision flashed and settled into a static fuzz bathed in pinkish light. He left the briars and started walking alongside the road.
As he did this, he realized something: his wife and children were probably dead. He’d come from a bad place, he remembered. From Shondor’s massage parlor. Shondor didn’t play. If he was supposed to be dead, which he assumed he was, there was no way they weren’t. He didn’t have much time to think about why it was he wasn’t dead, so he didn’t. He tried walking faster, but after a few steps, his right leg gave out and he collapsed. He looked up at the sky and saw a fighter plane’s jet trails. When he shifted, his back protested, and he could feel the round, tight knots of new bruises forming. Someplace close to his head it felt like there was a piece of flint between his skin and his spine. He got back up and walked slower than he’d ever walked. Then he started crying, because even if he could run that wouldn’t keep Tasha, Caleb, and Aaron from being dead.
He was crying and walking slowly like an old man, the stabs in his heart coming from how he was alive and they weren’t, or how much his body wanted him not to be alive, or maybe a piece of flint stuck there like the one it felt like was stuck in his spine—he couldn’t tell. Cars were going past him, a few of them honking for him to get out of the way. One slowed down and a kid shouted something out the window Reggie had heard before but chose not to hear now, because he was tired of the world wanting him dead. He agreed with it finally: Take me. But the world wouldn’t even let him be taken. Fuck that. A red flatbed truck was approaching from the distance. He could stand in the middle of the road. Or jump out right in front of it, though his legs felt too useless to jump. Right as it was about to pass him, he threw himself in the road and the truck screeched, the sound just about blowing his ears out, one of the wheels almost crunching his right hand. He could hear the car door opening and someone getting out. He was ready to be beaten, but when he opened his eyes he saw an old white woman with braids that had been pinned to the sides of her head like a crown. She was bending down next to him, blinking at him through glasses that made her eyes huge.
“Sir?” she asked, shaking his shoulder. “Sir, are you okay?”
Reggie grunted. It was the best he could do.
“Sir!” she shouted.
“I’m not deaf,” he croaked.
She leaned her arm against the car bumper. She wore the kind of quilted vest white people wore when they called themselves “outdoorsy.” She adjusted her glasses, then crouched closer to him. “You threw yourself in front of my car.” She grabbed his chin, tilted it so she could see the bullet hole. “Oh my God,” she gasped, then stood and staggered away.
“I think I got shot,” he said.
She nodded and made her lips tight. She was small but strong, lifting him like she would an infant and loading him into the passenger seat of her station wagon. She said her name was May.
“What’s yours?”
Eyes closed, Reggie could only think of two first names. “Richard Edwards,” he said.
“I’ll call you Rich for now, how’s that?”
He grunted, turned his head to the side, and murmured, “I don’t care.”
“What’s that?”
He didn’t hear her because he’d fallen asleep. When he awoke, it was out of what felt like the deepest sleep of his life: he was still in the passenger seat of May’s truck, May was still driving them somewhere, listening to what sounded like AM radio. The voice on the radio was saying that if God saw you sinning and didn’t see fit to punish you right then and there, your punishment would come later. Homosexuals, for instance, may appear to be living happy lives in cities across America, but many of them end up dying of AIDS. “And those who don’t will die of cancer or heart disease, let me tell you,” the voice went on gathering steam.
May looked over and saw that he was awake. “How’re things, Rich?”
It took Reggie a moment to understand that she was talking to him. He felt a cloth around his head and realized she’d dressed his wound.
“I always keep some first-aid things with me,” May said. “Doing the kind of work I do.”
Reggie didn’t care what kind of work it was she did. He wanted to die. He was thinking of his days on the block with Cookie, those January afternoons when they were standing out there in their Browns jackets and their boots talking about anything—the fuckability of girls, the dainty way Cookie ate chips, how Nixon was like Hitler without the mustache—the buyers lighting up on the corner, basically asking for a beatdown from the cops. Why had he been so stupid? Why had he thought he could do the same thing he always had but on a bigger scale, with a real family? He was born to die quickly and brutally and he wanted it over with already.
“I want to die,” he said out loud. “I think my family got killed and they tried to kill me, too, and my worthless ass survived.”
He looked at May, who was staring hard at the road.
“I said I want to die,” he repeated. “Stop the car, let me out, and let me take care of it.”
“No.”
He slammed his fists into his thighs, surprised he was suddenly capable of such strength. “Let me do it or I’ll open the door myself.”
“Go ahead.”
The door was locked. He unlocked it, opened it partway. May was still staring at the road. He slammed it shut.
“Please will you stop the car.”
“I’m just trying to get where I’m going,” May said.
Reggie sighed. “Where are you going?”
“Someplace you can rest.”
They drove in silence then, Reggie’s mind wandering in and out of sleep. When they finally stopped, it was in front of a steel barn surrounded on all sides by trucks exactly like May’s. It looked like something from the future. He thought that maybe it was the future and he’d been asleep for years.
She shut off the truck’s ignition, got out, and started walking toward the barn. Reggie didn’t know if that meant he was supposed to stay in the car or follow her, but he did know it meant he could escape if he wanted to. There were woods around the barn, what looked like a pond to the left of it from where he was sitting. The woods looked dense, but they had to lead somewhere. He could walk into the pond thinking about Natasha and Caleb and Aaron as he’d last seen them, at home. The boys running around in their pajamas. When he was dead he wouldn’t be able to think about that anymore. The way Aaron had pouted whenever Tasha tried to feed him applesauce. The way Caleb sometimes tried to wear Reggie’s shoes.
He got out of the car and followed May into the barn.
The barn was lined with cots, rows and rows of them. Some of the cots were filled with sleeping people, some were empty. Some people gathered in a corner, talking quietly. They all wore white T-shirts and blue overalls, just like May, except she wore a red flannel shirt, too. At the back of the barn someone had built what looked like two little plywood rooms with flimsy doors, and a man wearing a white doctor’s coat came out of one. May turned around to look at Reggie looking at the place.
“This is what we call the Stay,” she said. “It’s a place for troubled folks.”
The doctor walked past May, waving, and ignored Reggie. Most of the people there were white. A few were black, a few brownish. Reggie both wanted to leave and to lie down and fall asleep for hours. May grabbed his hand. “You can get better here,” she said. “We know what brought you here, and we know how to fix you.”
Then he was in the plywood room getting examined by the doctor, who was—just like May—a thin and white farmer-type who looked as if he never slept or ate but could still lift a cow. The doctor peeled off Reggie’s bandages and made a hissing sound as if he were looking at roadkill.
“Sir—”
“Richard,” May corrected him.
“Richard, um, you seem to have a bullet lodged right in here. I can actually see it, right here in the left temporal lobe.”
Reggie nodded, his eyelids heavy. The doctor moved to stand in front of him. “Richard, you survived a bullet to the head. At what appears to be fairly close range. That bullet should have traveled through your head. You should’ve been dead instantly.”
“I’m sure he realizes,” May snapped.
The doctor withdrew apologetically. “I’m sorry, of course you probably do. I’m just saying this is, um, this is nothing short of miraculous.”
Reggie sighed. “It happened in Cleveland.”
“I picked him up in Ohio,” May said.
The doctor made his lips tight. “We’re in Independence, Indiana, now. So it’s better that you leave Cleveland behind. Leave all that behind, Richard, and get better.”
He was rebandaged, allowed to shower (the doctor offering him soap from behind the curtain), and given a pair of overalls and a white shirt, which he wore. He wanted to die but something he couldn’t name was keeping him alive.
He slept on his cot, woke up, helped the other people on cots plant vegetables in a garden and milk cows in another, smaller barn. He helped sow a field with soybeans. He ate breakfast (oatmeal), then he ate lunch (ground turkey and mashed potatoes), and then he ate dinner (ground beef, green beans, and mashed potatoes). He held hands with them as they said prayers. They prayed that God would assume them into heaven and punish vengefully those who did not see His light and follow His way. After a few days, Reggie learned the prayers and started saying them with them. He couldn’t do it without smiling at first, because it was some of the stupidest bullshit he’d ever heard in his life. But then the words stopped meaning so much. He said them syllable by syllable until it didn’t sound to him like he was saying anything.
After this had gone on for a little while, May took him aside and told him that he could take a day off from the farm because the doctor was ready for him. She brought Reggie back into the plywood room and sat him down on the old barber’s chair he’d sat in before, but this time they’d rigged it to tip so far back it was almost like he was lying down. She asked him if he could lie on his right side, so he did. Then the doctor was back, wearing a paper mask, a flannel shirt, and latex gloves. He sat down on a stool next to the chair and said, “I’m going to get that bullet out of you, Richard,” some of the best words Reggie had heard in a while. In this makeshift clinic, with this pretend doctor at his side, he was pretty sure he’d die. Then the doctor put a plastic mask attached to a big metal canister on Reggie’s face and he took one big gulp, two, and was asleep.
Just his luck, he woke up. He was still in the chair and his head was throbbing so hard his vision was fading again. He tried to sit up but the pain made him want to vomit, so he didn’t. His left eye blinked on and off and his right eye saw pink, red, white. He could hear the voice of the doctor, who was saying to someone else, a man going “Mhm,” how incredible it was that Reggie had survived.
The chute of his mind narrowed and dumped him at a specific point: the night with Sunny. Sunny in the room talking about the bomb that killed his family. The briefcase full of money. And that was it. Nothing else. Reggie began to sweat. Was it Sunny who shot him or Shondor or one of the other thugs? Was it really night or had it been early morning or the middle of the day? He could remember everything before then, every single detail of his doomed life, but the night of his death was out of reach.
The doctor wanted him to stay in bed for the next two weeks and said they’d give him something called “first induction rights” while he was asleep. He showed Reggie the bullet he’d pulled from his head and offered to let Reggie keep it; Reggie didn’t want it. The doctor said he’d bury it somewhere around the farm and Reggie ignored him and tried to think about the night he’d been meant to die. The doctor told him not to think too hard or strain to remember things he couldn’t remember, and then he smiled with his thin lips and cracked eyes as Reggie asked how the doctor was capable of reading minds.
“I’m not a brain surgeon, but I’m still a doctor,” he said. “I know a thing or two about the way people work.”
After two weeks, Reggie was permitted to go to something called Group Circle, which was a time once in the morning and again in the afternoon when people talked about why and how they came to the Stay. May led every Group Circle, beginning by saying that she’d been a heroin addict who turned tricks for money. She had a child named Alice whom she lost to a man who threatened to kill May if she ever came after them. There was a man there whose face was tight with clay-looking scars because he’d burned himself cooking meth. There was a teenaged girl there who’d eaten balloons of cocaine to smuggle them from New York to Canada.
“We’re all sinners,” May said, “and we’re all drawn closer together in our willingness to purge ourselves of our sin.”
They didn’t make Reggie tell his story in Group Circle until he realized he wanted to. He talked about his momma going away and his dad taking him to Hot Sauce Williams. He talked about the fights he got into with the cops. He talked about stealing from corner stores when his dad drank the rent money. He talked about Cookie and the block, the postal service, seeing Tasha in the window. He talked about Sunny, the money, the people he’d killed. He figured he’d killed at least ten people in his life, all men, none innocent. He was a murderer and he was a druggie and he was a sinner, he said, and it felt good to say it.
“You’re welcome here, Richard,” May said, and Reggie felt bad for still lying about his name. But maybe Richard was a better name. Maybe Reggie was dead and now Richard would live a good and virtuous life.
The farm produced soybeans, corn, beets, arugula, milk, cheese, eggs, and butter in the warm months. In the cold months the pigs and a few of the cows were slaughtered and the meat was preserved. May said it was best to eat in cycles of vegetarianism: cleansing one’s body of meat was beneficial, but only for short periods of time. The doctor checked on Reggie daily, removing the stitches from his wound, applying ointment to it, breaking it to Reggie that his head would never heal right. When he saw himself in the barn mirror, he saw a man with a caved-in temple, a slightly slanted face. So this was Richard. He began to think of himself as Richard Edwards, a God-fearing farmer who was redeeming himself through hard work.
There was a rule against having sex on the cots in the communal barn, but there was no rule against having it elsewhere. After a few months at the Stay, Richard and a girl named Audrey, younger than Tasha, would go into the woods next to the farm and fuck from all angles until they were dirt-covered and exhausted. Audrey had run away from home at thirteen and joined an anarchist gang in Indianapolis: they blew up buildings and beat up the racists who beat them up. But then one of the men in the gang had gotten her pregnant and she’d given herself an abortion with a coat hanger. She’d bled for days and almost died, and she hadn’t been able to get pregnant since. Of all of them, Audrey was the one who reminded Richard the most of himself: doomed to suffer while young and repent while old, the best years of her life wasted as his had been on antics that could easily have resulted in their deaths. Audrey was too young to know about the music he liked or the movies he’d watched, but they would lie together naked in the woods, legs threaded, talking about the things they’d seen and done before The Stay.
“May drives all over the country on special missions rescuing people,” she told Richard. “You’re so lucky she found you when she did.”
“I am,” Richard agreed, and tickled her foot with the bottom of his.
He wasn’t in love with Audrey: he didn’t think he could ever be in love again. He liked her very much. He liked having sex with her. She was shorter than he was by just a little and had broad, flat feet that she always said she thought were embarrassing. He kissed them and told her she shouldn’t be embarrassed. When May saw them holding hands, she didn’t say anything, just smiled. Audrey worked the fields with him in the warm months and slaughtered the animals with him in the cold ones. He liked the way she could chop off a chicken’s head in a single, swift stroke. He liked the way her back muscles strained and swelled as she lifted hocks of slaughtered livestock and bags of grain. He liked the way she found something new to work on every day: some sin buried so deep in her past that she hadn’t even thought to uncover until the moment some sunlight through the window or the lowing of a cow or an expression he made triggered the memory, and her eyes would brighten and she’d say, “I remember something I did when I was twelve that was absolutely inexcusable!” That’s what they called sins: absolutely inexcusable. It had been absolutely inexcusable of him to use drugs, to put the lives of his family in jeopardy, to conspire with thugs and pimps as though they were his friends and brothers. But with the help of Audrey, who had ropy legs that squeezed him like a soft vise, he was getting better.
May performed marriages for couples at the Stay who were sure of their commitment. When Richard and Audrey had been together for five years, she married them. The ceremony was large, with all the Stay members in attendance, even the doctor, and a great white canopy hanging from the ceiling of the sleeping barn. They said their vows, pledged their ever-enduring love to Jesus Christ, danced, and ate a steak dinner. While the Stay members danced and drank May’s fresh-pressed cider, Richard and Audrey snuck into the cow barn and made love in the loft. Audrey called it making love, at least, because they were married—another sin struck from their earthly records. As they lay naked hand in hand in the hay, he was sad for a moment that none of these efforts would ever turn into a child.
Years passed. He and Audrey were allowed a private room, which they built themselves. He made love to her and worked the fields and went to Group Circle. He felt like he was swimming upstream toward his salvation. It was the longest he’d gone in his life without seeing a cop. It was the longest he’d gone in his life without getting in a fight. “Sinning is violent, and visits violence on the heads of those who practice it,” May said. He hadn’t realized until then just how right that was. The other members of the Stay had their children, the children learned to speak, learned to walk, learned to run. They became teenagers, then young adults. Richard and Audrey were known for their ability with kids: the childless couple who could always be counted on for fun and a handful of the toffee treats they sometimes picked up whenever they were in town buying supplies. The children loved him so much that May suggested he lead his own Group Circle for them, which he did, but there was so little to confess among them because they’d all lived such pure lives. So they spent hours discussing how Sammy coveted Courtney’s carrot patch in the garden, or how Julia had stolen a toffee from the jar in the doctor’s office when nobody was looking. May said Richard was a regular example for the children, a miracle man who’d survived a bullet to the head.
“It’s because I think I always had love for God in my heart,” Richard told the kids. “And that love, even if you don’t know it’s there—it protects you.”
Nobody ever left the Stay. Some first-timers tried to run away, but they always wandered back, hungry and delirious. Richard became co-leader with May, in charge of intakes and supervising physical examinations and first induction rites if the person in question hadn’t been baptized (and like him, they often hadn’t been). He got his own truck, his own set of keys to every room in the barn, a pair of overalls with Stayer stitched over the heart. Sometimes new residents tried to demand use of the red rotary phone May kept in her plywood office, and Richard always had to explain that calling the sinning world was counterproductive to the healing process. If they became antsy or angry, Richard let them try to run away, knowing they’d never get far.
He’d been at the Stay a little over a decade and he’d never driven with May to Ohio. That life was gone. There was no use dwelling on what he’d lost. Cookie was gone, his momma was gone, his dad was dead, and so was his family. May thought his decision to stay behind was prudent and congratulated him on his self-preservation. But every time she went to the city, he asked her to bring him a copy of the Plain Dealer. While Audrey gardened, he sat splay-legged in the grass reading it, everything from the front-page news to the obituaries. He told himself he wasn’t looking for anything in particular. And then in the fall of 1985 May gave him a copy that had his son in it.
His son Caleb was alive.
Caleb was fifteen, the article said, and he had a face that looked a little wider than Richard’s, long-lashed eyes that looked womanly. He wore a zippered sweatshirt with a T-shirt underneath. There were words on the T-shirt. He tried to breathe in and out slowly, tried to focus on what the words might say until a dam broke in his brain and he began sobbing. He turned away from Audrey so she wouldn’t see him. His son had won a chess championship. There he was in the photo in the paper, pumping his fists in victory. There he was holding the trophy with his mother and his twin brother.
Tasha and Aaron. Tasha had aged. Her smile was forced, her eyes tired. His heart thumped. What had happened to her? Aaron offered a little grin, wore his hair in a hi-top fade. She had her arms around both of them.
How had he brought these kids, these almost-men, into the world? This long-lashed one and this grinning one, both of them in sneakers, both of them posing for a photographer? How had he managed to marry a woman that beautiful, with eyes that shone even when she was tired, with a face that kept the purity of her child’s face? He was remembering her baby photos now, the box of them her momma sent her when they were living in University Circle: he was looking at this recent picture of his wife, the love of his life, and remembering the photo of her standing in a cotton romper in the grass in front of her parents’ house in 1950. They’d photographed the boys in similar rompers years ago.
He pounded his chest as another sob shook his body. Audrey was down on the ground with him, holding him by the shoulders. He turned the page to the obituaries.
“Sweetheart, what’s wrong?” she asked.
He pointed to the obituary for a woman named Pureena Mace. “She was my neighbor in Cleveland,” he lied. “She made me cookies when I was little.”
“Oh, sweetheart,” Audrey said, nestling her head between his chin and his shoulder. “I’m so sorry.”
May 8, 2009
Independence, Indiana
He had gotten old: they had a sixty-fourth birthday for him at the Stay. The party was as big as their wedding, and Audrey sat next to him the whole time, her graying hair in a loose bun, shouting at the kids so they wouldn’t run into the vegetable garden. May and the doctor had set up a corn maze and they all wandered through it, Richard holding Audrey’s hand, imagining he was finding his way from earth to heaven. He would be there soon—everything reminded him of his mortality: his swollen joints, his fragile memory. His wound still made a cave of his left temple, and his smile was still crooked, but now both looked appropriate on his gaunt old-man’s face. He’d finally aged into himself. They ate cake—the adults slowly, the young ones hungrily, asking for seconds and thirds. Audrey squeezed his hand and told him she was going to go run through the sprinkler with the kids, left him sitting alone at the massive table with the doctor. The doctor moved chairs to sit next to Richard.
“I meant to say, I got you a present,” he said. “You’ve been so busy all day I haven’t had time to give it to you.” He pulled something wrapped in a napkin from a pocket in his overalls. Richard unfolded it to find a blood-stained silver bullet.
“I never buried it,” the doctor confessed. “I knew maybe you’d want to see it someday.”
Richard thanked him and pocketed it. The concavity in his head twinged, as it often did when he thought about his injury.
“You’re a miracle, Richard.” The doctor stood up to get a second serving of cake. “Your entire life’s a miracle.”
Now Richard was alone at the table. He wondered, as he had for the past sixteen years, whether Tasha and the boys still thought about him on his birthday. He’d died on his twenty-eighth birthday, just months away from the boys’ third. He doubted the boys remembered him at all, much less remembered his birthday. Tasha would. They’d celebrated his twenty-eighth a day early because he’d told her he had a big job coming up. She’d gotten him a cake in the shape of Bruce Lee, and he’d eaten Bruce Lee’s forehead while she hummed the theme song from Enter the Dragon. They’d stayed awake until dawn while the boys slept in their cribs. Would she remember that on this day?
His life without them had been much longer than his life with them. A saner man would have simply accepted that returning to them would mean returning to Cleveland, would mean returning to Shondor, who would find out and kill all of them if he knew Richard was still alive. A saner man would have moved on, kept his nose out of the Plain Dealer, thrown himself into his life with Audrey. But Richard was Richard and as much as he wanted to devote his entire being to Audrey’s soft and sensitive one, he couldn’t keep himself from taking the newspapers May offered him. He couldn’t keep from reading them cover to cover, carefully scanning the obituaries at the end. Aaron never made it in the paper, but Caleb would sometimes show up: a finisher in a citywide track competition, one of several finalists in a science fair.
When the Stay got a computer, Richard looked them up online. They’d grown into handsome men. Aaron was a real estate developer in California, wearing a tux at a benefit dinner next to a long-legged woman in a gold dress. Caleb worked at a small law firm in Cleveland and posted a list of all the cases he’d won on the firm’s webpage.
And Tasha. She kept a blog, “Black in Academia.” She posted less as the years wore on, and Richard could barely understand what she did post. A picture of her and the boys on Christmas in an apartment that looked like Cookie’s old place. Aaron standing in front in too-big shoes and Caleb clinging to his mother’s side. And then just photos of Tasha and Caleb: Caleb’s graduations from college and law school, Caleb visiting Tasha in Canada for Thanksgiving, Caleb and a woman who could’ve been his girlfriend hugging Tasha on her birthday. The posts were about “interpretive texts” and “the performance of respectability.” He could believe that the words were Tasha’s, but he couldn’t believe that she’d written them. He couldn’t believe that she was alive somewhere without him.
Even on the days he managed not to think about them, he still dreamed about them at night. In one dream, he was struggling to see through gauze and Aaron was trying to talk to him but he couldn’t talk back. In another he was having sex with Tasha and she had no face. In another he was trying to pick up the boys, swaddled babies, but they kept dissolving through his fingers like water. He woke up crying more often than not, and Audrey woke up with him. Sometimes she massaged his shoulders and reminded him that he was safe and a good Christian and she’d always be with him. Sometimes she threw her pillow over her head and demanded that he stop crying so she could get some fucking sleep. He would sleep again, dreamless, and awaken into dazed anxiety, watch the sun rise through the barn window. Then he would fake sleep as Audrey awoke and got out of bed, would guiltily receive her kiss on his forehead and wait until she’d left to open his eyes to their room full of pale white light. On the mornings after the nights he dreamed of them, he wouldn’t be able to leave the bed for hours.
Audrey worked to keep what she called his “disturbances” secret. He figured they troubled her because she couldn’t explain them. They weren’t linked to any material sin and he described them in terms too vague for her to understand. She asked him to please not bring them up in Group Circle. He didn’t need any convincing—admitting to those types of dreams would reveal that he’d been lingering in the past, an offense that could get him booted from the Stay—but it was painful to keep them to himself, painful like a piece of glass in his foot. He once admitted to Audrey that some of the disturbances were about his old family.
“The family that got killed by Shonda?”
“Shondor,” Richard said.
Audrey sighed. He saw her eyes go glassy with tears.
Then she was shaking in misery and he was comforting her. “Sweetheart, you know the dreams weren’t, I mean…”
“I don’t care what kind of dreams they were,” she said. “I just don’t want to hear about them anymore.”
She stood from the bed without looking at him and ran out the flimsy door he’d built for their room. It didn’t even slam shut properly. He pitied her fragility and envied her love for him. Why couldn’t he feel the same way about her?
He turned the bullet over in his hands. He felt his blood surge, then settle. Why couldn’t the doctor have buried it? What use was there dredging up the past?
Now Audrey was running through the sprinkler with the children, stepping her foot on the sprinkler head to angle the water in their direction. She waved at Richard. He waved back. Her hair was soaked. Water ran down from her forehead, between her eyebrows, off the tip of her nose. Her white dress, wet, hugged her form, revealed patches of her skin. She had accomplished a staggering amount in her time at the Stay. He remembered her as a scared kid who sat hunched over in Group Circle, who wouldn’t speak about her past unless coerced by the Circle leader (“Audrey, you’ve been quiet for two weeks now. Maybe it’s time you shared?”), who cried during meals and barely ate. Now she was his wife and he’d spent the better part of his life with her. She was vibrant, fifteen pounds heavier than when she’d arrived emaciated, a mother to every child on the compound. She believed in God.
And he didn’t. It occurred to him just like that. After years of thinking he did, he didn’t. Holding the bullet, he was now certain there was nothing meaningful and beautiful and Christian about a bullet in the head. Audrey and May and the doctor could pretend there was, but there wasn’t. Nothing happened for a reason. Nothing was won by hard work and abstaining from sin. Nobody could redeem themselves through suffering. He was a part of nothing greater than his pathetic life, which had begun in a water-stained apartment and would end on this farm in Indiana. The greatest thing in his shitty little life had been taken from him.
The greatest thing in his shitty little life.
He stood to get another slice of cake. The children mobbed him, dampening his overalls with their soaked clothes, singing a disjointed chorus of “Happy Birthday.” He waited until they’d finished and sent them back in the direction of their parents, who sat at round tables by the vegetable garden. Audrey called after him but he pretended not to hear.
In the barn, he cut to the front of the cake line. May smiled when she saw him, handing him a slice.
“Here comes the birthday boy!” she chanted. “Here he comes!”
“Do you think I’m a coward, May?” he asked.
“Of course not. What makes you ask that?”
“I didn’t save my family.”
He looked at May, hoping she’d be soft-faced, understanding. Instead her eyes were flat.
“Now is not the time to think about that, Rich.”
He shook his head. “I’m Reggie,” he whispered.
“What?”
Reggie went back outside, pretending not to hear May calling after him. Everyone looked different to him, strange, like he was just meeting them all for the first time. He could feel himself settling into himself, sliding back into his skin. They were part of a cult. They all wore the same outfits and they sat in circles singing about Jesus and did whatever May and the doctor said. He had been living in a cult. He dropped the cake on the ground and balled his hands into fists. What the fuck am I doing here? His voice was back, his mind was back. He hadn’t thought like himself in thirty-six years.
He stood in the sprinkler, grabbing Audrey by the shoulders and kissing her wet forehead. At arm’s length she looked like an aged child.
“Richard, what’s wrong?” she asked. “Why are you acting like this?”
He hung his head. He knew but he didn’t want to say.
“Richard?” she asked. “Can we talk about this later?”
He nodded. He went to their room, where he listened to the sounds of his birthday party ending, confused residents asking Audrey where he’d gone. There was a knock at the door, probably May, and he didn’t answer. He took the bullet from his pocket and rolled it between his thumb and index finger. The doctor had no idea what he’d done, giving this thing to him. If it weren’t for this motherfucking two inches of lead, Reggie would’ve never been Richard. He would’ve gone back to Cleveland and, despite the danger of Shondor, the fear that had paralyzed him all these years, he would’ve saved his family.
His family. The money.
Everything from his old life was a puzzle. The money hadn’t been meant for him—it’d been meant for the goons he’d killed, the fake-Irish ones Shondor and Sunny hired to kill him. The car bomb had been meant for Sunny’s family, not Sunny. Shondor was always five fucking steps ahead. Shondor probably knew that if the goons didn’t kill Sunny when they showed up to collect their payment, then Sunny would kill himself because his family was everything to him. He knew that on the offhand chance Reggie showed up instead of the goons, Sunny would kill him out of loyalty to Shondor. So worst-case scenario, Shondor has to pay some goons to take out Reggie and Sunny. Best-case scenario, everybody dies and Shondor keeps his money.
It was a good plan but it hadn’t worked. Because they’d been thrown in a swamp. Shondor always gave bodies with no outstanding debts a proper burial, whether he hated them or loved them like family. If he’d gotten the money, Reggie and Sunny would’ve gotten their own plots and pine coffins. Which meant something had happened that not even Shondor could’ve anticipated. He’d gone over the details in his head before, but now one missing piece finally fell into place.
The junkie. Leland.
He lay on their bed staring at the ceiling, the bullet in his hand. Back when he was who he used to be, he would’ve done something big right about now. He would’ve kicked in a door. He would’ve fucked up someone who owed him. He would’ve gone down to the scrap place where Leland worked and fucked him up, too. The bullet felt hot; it hurt to hold. His temple twinged. His vision fogged and he massaged his crooked face. Audrey was lying if she said she loved this face.
* * *
She came back to their room after dusk, after extinguishing the campfire around which they’d all been roasting marshmallows, after helping the parents put their children to sleep. She didn’t want to face him when he was possessed by his disturbances: she felt helpless and frightened and a little jealous of his dead wife. Maybe she’d tell the doctor he needed a sedative for sleep. Maybe she’d be more forgiving when he woke up in the middle of the night. He was a loving, righteous husband fully deserving of her compassion. She’d been stingy with it lately: her jealousy, her unwillingness to speak about what troubled him. She would change. She nodded to herself, picked a flake of burnt wood from her overalls. She would change. She knocked on their door and opened it, singing “Richa-ard! We missed you out there.” But the room was empty. She found a note on the bed: I’m sorry. Love, Reggie.