Jonah pulled his truck up into the yard to stare at his old house, his mind empty ruins.
He got out and stood in the front yard.
In the gray daylight Jonah saw again that the old place was in as much ruin as his mind. He looked again at the tree he’d planted as a sapling those years ago, which had died and fallen and lay now among its own dead and broken branches scattered across the lawn. He stepped around the tree. The rotted wooden porch steps sagged beneath his weight.
The porch swing, its paint chipped and faded, slats caked with dried bird and bat shit, swayed from rusted chains in the breeze. He took hold of a chain, gave it a tug. Tested it. He eased himself down into the swing and sat on its front edge, holding it steady with his feet.
He sat there, with his eyes closed and tried not to think or feel.
An impossibility.
All these years, he’d believed nothing could be worse than not knowing what had happened to Rebecca and Sally; yet being in the dark had given him perpetual if slight hope that one day his wife and daughter might by a miracle return to him. Knowing what had become of them did not diminish the pain or lessen the feeling of absence that carved him hollow. It deepened it. The law needed to know who, how, and why, know the specifics of what happened, but he did not. The answer he’d sought, that he’d lived for, changed nothing. It did not resurrect his wife and daughter, did not bring them back, did not alter a single thing. What mattered, he realized, was not what happened and how, but how he handled himself afterward, what he did with the life his daughter and wife no longer had.
“I let you down,” he said. The porch swing creaked.
He hadn’t lived since that evening he’d fallen asleep correcting papers. He’d never really even woken up. He’d wallowed in a purgatory of anger and loss and absence instead of forging on alone without them but with courage. He’d hidden from the world. Shamed his wife and daughter’s memory for not continuing on in a way of which they’d be proud. He’d lived a life of delusion when he had known, deep down in his marrow, as a fact, that his wife and daughter were dead.
There were no miracles.
This godless world.
He was alone in a life he’d refused to live.
He thought about how consumed and beleaguered he’d felt those years ago before the disappearance; the money issues, his stalled teaching career, and parenting doubts had strained him, seemed so singular to him and so unnavigable and insurmountable. The future so remote. He’d lived with the fear that with a single wrong word or decision, his world would disintegrate. How young he’d been, and how unremarkable his and Rebecca’s trials. He saw them now for what they were, a phase of a young married couple, of young parents, a phase his wife and he would have managed and overcome, eventually, if given the chance.
He opened his eyes and looked out at the valley and the mountains beyond. A thread of smoke unspooled from the forest up in the Gore. He’d not told Lucinda what he’d gone to her father’s house to tell her. That he’d found the girl, kept her, and this had led to her death. He would tell Lucinda. He would confess. He would not wait to be on his deathbed to account for it. He could not live with keeping it to himself. But he could live keeping Lucinda from ever knowing what her father had said about her mother. He did not know if what Maurice had told him was a lie or the truth, and he did not care. It did not matter who was responsible. Not to him. Not anymore. But it would matter to Lucinda.
He leaned back in the swing.
He watched the smoke, a smudge in the morning sky, a sky as blue as ever it had been or ever would be.
Slowly, he began to move the swing with his legs. The chains squeaked but there was an oil can in the shed, sitting on a shelf with the gasoline cans for the mower. Oil did not go bad with the years. He’d oil the chains and they would fall quiet again.
There would be time for that.