Dale eased the Wrangler down Lucinda’s childhood street.
“I’ll need help with this,” Lucinda said, her voice flat. The horridness of what she was about to do, what she suspected, made it hard to speak. Her body felt dull and deadened even while her senses seemed too intense to bear. The sky had cleared overnight in the valley, and the mean morning sun pierced her eyes. Her breath raked through the cilia of her lungs. The sound of the Wrangler’s blinker blasted in her ear.
“Help from Kirk?” Dale said as he turned off Main.
“What?”
“You’ll need help from Kirk?”
“From you. And . . . the state police.” Exhausted from her sleepless night, Lucinda thought she might be sick but closed her eyes and tried to calm herself. She seemed to be vibrating, as if her skeleton were a tuning fork that had been struck hard against a rock.
Dale pulled the Wrangler up out front.
“You okay?” he said.
“No.” She slipped her hand into Dale’s hand.
He squeezed it.
Lucinda stepped out of the Wrangler and stood on the street where she’d learned to ride a bicycle with her father’s help. Where she’d played hopscotch, kick-the-can, and hide-and-seek with Sally. Where she’d sat out in Kirk’s parked pickup truck after the drive-in, hurriedly buttoning up her blouse and checking her lipstick and trying to hold him off against her own desires before she slipped into the house to find her widowed father asleep on the couch in front of the flickering TV.
Dale got out and put his arm around her and led her to the house.
She was unsteady of feet and of mind, as if she had not slept or eaten in years.
Each step and thought was a precarious labor.
Dale knocked on the kitchen door and a moment later it opened, Dot standing there bleary eyed and puffy faced with slumber.
“Hullo. What brings you so early?” Dot smiled. She pulled the top of her robe tighter around her throat, squinting. “What’s wrong?” she said, her smile vanquished.
“We need to come in,” Lucinda said.
“What’s wrong?” Dot said, opening the door wider to allow them entrance.
Lucinda and Dale stepped into the kitchen.
The clock on the microwave blinked from 6:45 to 6:46.
“What is it?” Dot said.
“It’s personal,” Lucinda said. “Is he up?”
“He had a rough night. Moaning, agitated, crying out. Worst night he’s had in my memory. I gave him something to help him rest. I doubt he’ll be awake before noon.”
“What was he calling out about?” Lucinda said.
“Nonsense. The stuff of nightmares.”
“I need to use the phone.”
Lucinda shuffled to the phone on the wall and dialed.
Dot looked at Dale. “What’s this about?”
“I can’t say,” Dale said.
As the phone rang, Lucinda ran her hand along the doorframe to the living room, over the pencil marks that had measured her height over the years. Her mother had been the one to keep track. The last mark’s date read: 10/29/87 44¼ʺ.
Sally had disappeared a week later.
The phone on the other end rang, and rang.
“Hello,” Lucinda said finally. “This is Deputy Sheriff Lucinda Welch in Ivers. I’d like to have a trooper sent to fifteen Maple Street here in Ivers.”
Dot stared.
“No, it’s not an emergency. Okay, all right. That’s fine. Thank you.”
Lucinda hung up the phone. She stared at the penciled marks her mother had made to measure her on the doorframe. She tried to stave off the ugly images petitioning her for attention. They came anyway. Her mother at the bottom of the stairs. Her father kneeling at her side, looking with a fear Lucinda had believed was a reflection of the dread he felt for his wife. Now, she wondered.
“Why are you calling the state police?” Dot asked.
Lucinda emerged from her murky reminiscence. A chill ran through her.
“Dot,” she said. “I’d like to be alone with my father. In our house. Maybe you could run to the Lucky Spot and get coffee.”
“But what’s—”
“Dorothy. Please.”
“I’ll go change,” Dot said. “I can’t go in my bathrobe.”
Dale took some bills from his wallet, handed them to Dot.
“Will you stay here,” Lucinda said to Dale, “and wait for them? I need to see him.”
“He won’t have his wits about him,” Dot said as she left.
Dale sat at the table and looked out the kitchen window at the street as Lucinda walked down the hall to the door to the room where now her father lay confined.
She inched the door open and peered into the dark room.
Her father lay on his back in his bed, the rails up at the sides. Three years and more of suffering. Who knew how much was yet to come beyond this life. The balancing for deeds done. He’d never been anything but a good father to her. Never anything but that.
She shut the door behind her, the room going dark save a gash of hurtful morning sunlight at the bottom of the window shade.
She could hear his breathing. A wheeze followed by a protracted silence. Another wheeze. High-pitched and frothy, like air drawn through a collapsed straw at the bottom of a nearly empty glass.
Heeeeeeegh.
“Dad.”
She drew closer.
“Dad.”
She sat in his bedside chair, her whole life, her past collapsing around her.
He’d lost weight in the past days.
Mouth agape as if he’d stopped talking midsentence.
Let me not ever come to this, Lucinda thought. Let my end come quick, and with mercy and dignity.
Not this.
Lucinda leaned close. Kissed her father’s forehead.
Whatever he’d done, whatever she might discover, he was her father.
The same man she’d cherished her entire life.
Yet he wasn’t.
Cast now in her suspicion, her father gave off an aura before unknown to her. Her nerves crackled with disquiet, as though in his dying state her father’s body was preparing to transform, split open to reveal an alien being within. Grotesque and unfatherly. Unsafe. Above all, a child in a parent’s presence ought to feel safe. Though he lay there feeble, Lucinda did not feel safe. She felt locked in with an evil she could not rid through denial alone. Would never expel from her blood.
The wheezing and quiet stillness and darkness weighed on her, suffocating.
She gathered her will and kissed his forehead again.
A light knock came on the door.
The door opened a crack.
“He’s here,” Dale said.