Chapter Nine

nine

Paul Zuggenhagen lay with his head beneath his pillow and the damp, dark covers locked over him. He could hear his younger brothers running up and down the hall, getting ready for school. He squished his fingers into his ears, but sound leaked in through his fingertips, and then his dad was pounding on the door. “You’re going to get your butt to school if I have to kick it there, you understand?” Regular attendance was one of the terms of Paul’s suspended sentence. Passing grades were another. And within three months of graduation, he’d be expected to show evidence of full-time employment or enrollment at an accredited university. Dad felt employment was the route to go; he’d been talking with an old college buddy who owned three auto dealerships in Indianapolis. “Best to give yourself a fresh start,” Dad said, and Paul nodded, pretending he hadn’t figured out that Dad was sending him away. Dad was senior vice-president of the Ambient branch of First Wisconsin, and even now he worried about how all this would affect his job. “Community relations is the number-one priority in banking,” Dad liked to say. “You boys reflect on me, don’t you forget that.”

“Paul?” It was his mother now, her voice soft and pleading, and he got out of bed and said, “I’m up.” It was too late to take a shower—not that it mattered. Everybody stared at him regardless of what he looked like, remembering how he’d stood before the DA and told his story, just the way Mr. Powell had made him rehearse, only leaving out the part about the flash of light. “We were running after him, but we didn’t touch him physically,” he said. Then his mind went blank and he forgot what he was supposed to say next. “It was a joke—it was just supposed to be a joke,” he said, and then, right there, in front of the court and the community cable cameras and everyone, he’d broken down and started to cry. Mr. Powell said it had worked in his favor. Later, his brothers giggled when they showed it on TV. Mom hushed them and laid her hand on Paul’s arm and told him they were just too young to understand what was going on. She was the only one who touched him anymore. Today she’d fixed his oatmeal with brown sugar sprinkled into a heart. On his way out the door, she hugged him, just the way she always had, just as if it had been someone else on the bridge the night Gabriel Carpenter died.

The snow had melted, except for a few thin gray patches along the roads. The trees were budding; daffodils and tulips poked up from the soft spring soil. At school, the other kids avoided him, and most of the teachers didn’t call on him. There’d been a petition—some of the parents had started it—saying that he should be permanently expelled along with Randy, but Mom and Dad went to the superintendent and Paul was allowed to finish his last term. He felt as if he’d materialized in another country, somewhere he’d never been before and yet knew intimately. Everything was the same and not the same. His court-appointed psychologist said that was pretty normal, and then he asked Paul what he had dreamed about during the past week. Paul always made something up about snakes and tunnels and trains. The truth was that he had never been able to remember his dreams.

At lunchtime, he sat by himself in the far corner of the cafeteria, eating his fried chicken and Tater Tots and chocolate pudding without really tasting anything. A group of girls walked by, Lisa Marie Kirsch among them. None of them said hi. Each wore the little gold angel pendant you could get for free if you visited the shrine. All over town, you could see those same little angels hanging from rearview mirrors; businesses posted angels in their windows and, beside them, the words I believe. Paul hadn’t seen the shrine yet, though he very much wanted to. Kids said you could make any wish you wanted. They left things underneath the white stone angel that Cherish’s mom had bought with money from hundreds of donations: rings and candles and barrettes from girls’ hair, flowers and photographs. Paul wanted to leave something too. He didn’t know what; he hadn’t decided yet. But Dad said that if Paul showed up at Ruthie Mader’s barn, it would be like pouring gasoline on a fire, and why in God’s name would Paul want to do that? He said maybe Paul would have been better off at a military school, where people could do his thinking for him.

Randy had been sent to a military school to finish his senior year. It was in West Virginia. He’d mailed Paul a picture of himself, posing in a crisp uniform in front of the American flag, and Paul could tell his face was set so he wouldn’t flinch when the flash went off. He said he liked the academy OK and that he’d enlisted in the navy for next year. He hoped to wrestle for the navy team. Maybe we can hang out next time I come home, he wrote, but Paul didn’t think he meant it. A few days after the sentencing, Paul had sneaked over to Randy’s house, waited by the back door till the coast was clear, then followed him down the stairs to his paneled bedroom in the basement.

“If that little fucker only hadn’t jumped,” Randy said, and he punched the sandbag that hung from the ceiling. “It’s his own damn fault. He’d be fine if he hadn’t jumped.” Paul sat at the desk, wishing he hadn’t come. The room was too warm, and it smelled of sweat and pot and Randy’s rage. “But Cherry’s the one who takes the cake,” Randy said, and he threw himself on the bed. “Ol’ Cherry pretending she was too drunk to remember anything. All she had to say was that we didn’t touch the kid.”

“You really think she remembers?” Paul said.

“Where have you been for the past two years? She can drink like a soldier. She just didn’t want to get herself involved.”

“Well, it worked out anyway,” Paul said.

“Worked out, yeah,” Randy said. “Three hundred hours picking trash by the highway and whatever other shit they decide we have to do this summer. The rest of my senior year at a fucking military—”

He broke off then and started to laugh. “But I got to hand it to you,” he said. “That story you told the papers. A flash of light! I nearly wet my pants when I read about that.”

“You didn’t see anything?” Paul said faintly.

“You mean like an angel?” Randy said, and he wasn’t laughing anymore. “Get a grip on yourself. You know what happened. The kid freaked. We never laid a hand on him. We didn’t do anything wrong.”

They hadn’t seen each other after that, but Paul still saw Cherish nearly every day, passing by him like a ghost in the halls. He tried to catch her eye, but she never lifted her gaze from the floor, and the few times he’d approached her, she’d scuttled off in the opposite direction. She didn’t seem to hang around with Lisa Marie anymore. She hadn’t found another boyfriend. Like him, she kept to herself. Girls whispered about her—after all, she’d nearly died. The doctors said she was lucky. He’d heard she was working at the public library after school, saving for tuition. He wondered if what Randy had said was true—that she really hadn’t been all that drunk. That she remembered everything. He wondered if she’d seen the flash of light. He wondered if, each time she crossed the highway bridge, she searched the water, the sky, the fields, the way he did, looking for clues, trying to understand what had really happened.

The lunch buzzer rang, and Paul picked up his tray, carried it to the cafeteria window. As he separated his silverware and glassware and paper products, Cherish reached her tray onto the conveyor belt, then walked away before he could say anything, as if she hadn’t even noticed him there. You could see the scars on her face from the whiskey bottle, red creases like lipstick around her mouth and under one eye. One side of her chin was still swollen. He envied her. At least she had concrete evidence, proof of what she’d done. To him the whole night seemed like something made up, like a lie he’d told and now had to live by. During class, when he should have been paying attention, he went over it again: how Randy had leaped from the car, how he’d followed, how the boy had taken off running like a deer. The ache in his lungs from the cold, still air. The whiskey spin in his head. The bridge and the long shine of the guardrail. Randy had run past the boy, cutting him off; the boy spun around, and Paul had lunged, missed, and then—

What he remembered for certain was Randy’s face afterward, the wide-eyed, open-mouthed expression, like somebody mimicking shock. Where the fuck did he go? There was nothing in the water. There was no one on the road. There was the strange feeling that they’d dreamed the whole thing, even after he’d run back to the car and found Cherish in the road.

After school, he walked home slowly, his back tensed for the mudball, the soupy clot of leftover slush. A busload of kids passed by, and one of them spit a gluey-gray lunger that missed him by an inch. Robins waddled over the lawns, fat as toddlers. Spring clouds nudged each other across the sky. He had fifteen minutes to make it to his supervised service assignment; the tracking bracelet he wore around his ankle could be checked by his caseworker at any time. And yet when he passed the library, he stared at the front door as if he might be able to catch a glimpse of Cherish through the small, square window. What could it hurt to ask her? It would only take a minute. If he was late, he could blame the beautiful day. He could say he’d just stopped by Cradle Park to watch the ducks paddling under the footbridge, toss a penny into the water for luck.

The library was quiet and clean. Other than an older woman sitting behind the checkout desk, there didn’t seem to be anybody inside. He wanted to ask if Cherish was working, but he was afraid the woman might recognize him, say something mean, which people often did. They said he should at least have gotten involuntary manslaughter, if not worse; they said what goes around is sure to come around, and maybe he thought he’d gotten away with something, but God would make him pay. They said what they would do to him if he were their son, if Gabriel Carpenter had been their son, if they had five minutes with him in the alley behind Jeep’s and they could guarantee there’d be no angel to save him. The day after the Ambient Weekly ran a photograph of old Pops Carpenter, weeping in the barn where the body was found, someone had scrawled Murderer in permanent marker across Paul’s locker. He worried that it had been Pete Carpenter, who was only a freshman, but big for his age, and was rumored to carry a switchblade in his pocket.

It didn’t seem to matter to anyone that Paul was sorry. It didn’t seem to matter that he’d written long letters of apology to the Carpenter family, as well as the families of Joy Walvoord and Sammy Carlsen. It didn’t matter that he’d have to pay back the cost of their private counseling, which was part of the settlement Dad had made to keep things out of civil court. It didn’t matter that, when he’d first heard the Circle of Faith was collecting money for a monument, he’d taken his checkbook and written Cherish’s mom a check for three hundred and twelve dollars and fifty-three cents, which was everything he’d saved. “Are you crazy?” Dad said when he found out, but Mom said, “Bob, his heart’s in the right place; he’s trying to do what he can.”

“A donation to a reputable charity is one thing,” Dad said, “but these people are fanatics. God knows what they’ll do with that money.”

Cherish’s mom had sent a kind note back; it had made Paul feel better for a while. Time and time again, she wrote, I’ve seen how goodness comes out of tragedy. I know you must grieve over everything that’s happened. Be good to yourself and remember that you were—and are—a part of God’s plan.

The woman at the checkout desk was looking at him. He ducked down the nonfiction aisle and nearly collided with Cherish, who was reshelving books from a cart. She started to back the cart out of the way, but then she looked up and saw him. He smiled, but she didn’t smile back. “What do you want?” she whispered.

“How are you?” he whispered back stupidly.

She started reshelving books. “I’m working,” she said. “I can’t talk now.”

“When can you talk?”

She evened out a row of books, dusted their tops with a feather duster.

“I was just wondering if you remember anything else about that night.” He fought to keep his voice from trembling. “Like, some kind of light from a train going by? Or maybe a truck passed while we were—”

“I don’t remember anything,” Cherish said. “How many times do I have to tell people that?” She picked up an armload of books. He stared at the scars around her mouth, which were every bit as real as the books she was shelving, one by one. He’d lunged for the boy, he was certain of that, and suddenly the world had shattered with light. And then Randy’s face with its shocked clown mask. No one in the water. No one on the road.

He was going to be late. But as he turned to leave, Cherish touched the back of his coat, and for that gift he wanted to embrace her, to put his nose into her neck and weep. Something in his eyes must have told her that, because she quickly stepped away. “All I remember was you running toward me,” she said. “Just like I told the police. I wasn’t at the bridge with you. I didn’t see a flash of light. I didn’t hear thunder. I don’t know what happened out there, OK?”

The boy. The light. Randy’s face, and the dark, still water. He was crying, right there in the library, crying like a little sissy girl.

“I don’t know, either,” Paul said.