1.
On Main Street, Christopher Shelton’s mother is making cocoa and trembling with relief that Emily Houchens has been found alive. There was a moment today, so brief that she can almost convince herself it didn’t happen, when she wondered about her son, doubted him. Thought him capable of horrors. She whisks the chopped slivers of chocolate into the cream vigorously, stomach clenching at the thought of so much sweetness. But what else can she do? What more can she offer him? Chris retreated to the guesthouse as soon as they arrived home from the police station, and Nita doesn’t know how to go to him without some kind of offering in hand. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, she thinks, stirring, almost praying. Praying to her son. He is as distant as a star right now. She doesn’t know what it would take to reach him.
At the police station, Sergeant Pendleton fills out a report on his typewriter, working with such slow concentration that the point of his tongue peeks from the corner of his mouth. He took a semester of typing back in high school, but he is better off using his index fingers—faster, more accurate. “I RESPONDED TO CALL AT APROXIMATLY 7:10 PM AND WENT DIRECTLY TO PARENTS HOME,” he types, legs restless beneath his desktop. He is starting to feel pangs of nervousness about talking to Johnny Burke earlier—letting slip not just news of the body but also the name Tony had uncovered, Wyatt Powell. It was stupid, stupid (he jabs the return key angrily in time with his thoughts)—stupid!—to fall for Burke’s little routine. How he came by, acting friendly, interested, asking Pendleton when he was going to let Johnny bring him to the country club as his guest, so they could play nine holes together. (It has never once happened. Always the jocular invitation, the phrasing that suggests Pendleton is holding out on him, when in fact Pendleton always said, “You know I’d love to come, Johnny. Just name the date.” And Burke always replied, “Yes, yes. I’ll call you about it. Just got to get your name down with the secretary out there first.”) Then Burke started asking questions, and he didn’t even have to press Pendleton much—Pendleton just started spilling what he knew, loving the way Burke’s eyes brightened with interest, thrilling each time he said something like “You don’t say?” or “I’ll be damned.” It is just that Johnny Burke is such a big, important guy around here, was even interviewed on national TV once a couple of years ago, when CBS News came to town that time the Ku Klux Klan promised to riot at a Martin Luther King, Jr. Day parade. There is talk of his running for district judge next year. To be the friend of such a man—to get invited to the country club, or to Burke’s fancy house on the outskirts of town—well, that would mean something. That could mean a whole lot. Especially if Pendleton hopes to be considered for police chief when Evan Harding finally retires.
Johnny Burke is, like Pendleton, a man of ambition—but his ambitions transcend small-town politics. Sure, he’d once set his sights on district judge. Had once thought a position like that mattered. But then CBS came down to Roma and put him on television, and he watched himself on the news that night, handsome and ruddy, his prematurely graying hair swept back pleasingly from his forehead, and he thought, That, that is what I’m meant to do. That is the kind of life I ought to be leading. But how?
Now, rocking gently in his leather office chair, watching through his window the procession of traffic around the square, he smiles a little, thinking of Wyatt Powell. He wasn’t convinced of the man’s guilt when he called—Pendleton isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, and his eagerness to please sometimes moves him to exaggeration—but he is convinced now. The knowledge came to him, fully formed, in that too-long pause between Johnny’s speech and Wyatt’s denial: I—I have no idea what you’re talking about. Scary, really, to think of a man like that living in your community, shopping at the same supermarket as your wife, maybe commuting to work on the road that runs past your daughter’s school. He’d have to be a monster to not consider these facts. But still, every accused man is entitled to a defense, and Johnny Burke has no reservations about providing Wyatt Powell with one. This is the kind of case that comes to Roma once in a decade, maybe even less than that, and if Johnny can’t prosecute it, he’ll defend it. Simple as that.
While Johnny watches the square, his daughter watches the front door of her house. Her mother stepped out twenty minutes ago for groceries, and so she has perhaps half an hour—max—to make some more phone calls and try to find out the intel on Emily Houchens. She feels infuriatingly out of touch. She tried Christopher first—word had gotten around, even to the ALC trailer, that he’d left school today with a cop, shortly before Mr. Burton announced that Emily was found—but his mother answered his private line and told her, sharply, Leanna thinks, that Christopher was indisposed. “And you know he doesn’t have any phone privileges this week,” she added. Then Leanna tried Maggie and Anita. Maggie is in the same boat as she—friends only with the exclusive crowd that had been hidden away in supply closets all around Roma Middle—and knew nothing. Anita, to Leanna’s constant mystification, has a pretty decent friend outside of their circle, a black girl named Lauren who is with her on the basketball team, but Anita isn’t answering her phone. Could she call Lauren herself? Leanna pages through the phone book to the J’s, chewing her lip. She can’t remember Lauren’s father’s name, and there are, like, a hundred Johnsons. Where would she even start?
She racks her brain for names—someone, anyone. Chelsea Brodzinski? How many Brodzinskis can there be in this town? Just one, she sees, running her finger along the list of B’s, and she gets ready to dial, then hesitates, thumb poised over the seven. Chelsea Buttinsky, she’d called her when she moved to town four years ago. They’d been at a birthday party together, Chelsea foisted onto the group of girls by a well-meaning parent, and Leanna hadn’t been able to stop herself: Buttinsky, Buttinsky, she chanted, pulling Chelsea’s braid as Chelsea tried to play Super Mario Bros. on Lily Peterson’s brother’s black-and-white TV. Chelsea’s braid was thick and bumpy, because her hair was snarled with natural curls the circumference of a pinky finger, and Leanna was so repulsed by its oily texture that she’d pulled harder, observing with satisfaction how Chelsea only continued to silently play, tears rolling down her cheeks. She’d tired of this only when Lily’s mother yelled “Pizza’s here!” from the kitchen.
No, she probably shouldn’t call Chelsea Buttinsky.
Back on Main Street, Christopher Shelton spins the dials on his foosball table. The cocoa his mother brought sits cooling by the door, untouched. Why is she always forcing that shit on him? It makes him sick to his stomach. He pops the ball halfheartedly with one of the players on the right-hand side of the table, stops it from scoring with his left-hand goalie. He likes the sound of the spinning rods, how something in them ticks when he rolls the handles off his palms. There is a hypnotic draw to this: standing, staring at the table, watching the ball move back and forth across the painted field. He lets his eyes blur, and the foos men double, triple. There is an army of foos men. He feels almost sleepy considering them, and so he closes his eyes, and then he opens them again, and then he goes to lie on his bed and closes them again.
He dreamed last night about that day at the tennis court, and in his dream he had suddenly realized that it was Emily, not Leanna, going down on him, and the feeling accompanying this realization was at first relief, and then fear. He recalls the dream now, punishing himself. What is he afraid of?
Susanna drives straight to Harper Hill, but by the time she arrives, the van Dale mentioned—the one marked KSP FORENSIC LABS—is gone. There is a single state police cruiser on the shoulder, and she thinks for a second of stopping, telling him who she is, demanding an answer. But some fear kicks in. Of authority? Perhaps. Or maybe just of getting confirmation. She won’t be able to believe what a stranger on the side of the road tells her, no matter what kind of uniform he is wearing. She will only believe Tony.
She thinks then of going to her mother. She ought to. If the gossip mill came through for Dale on this one, it is only a matter of time before someone calls Susanna’s mother. Better for Susanna to prepare her—to assure her that nothing yet is certain, no matter what people are whispering. That the police haven’t even reached out to her. You can’t know anything until the police tell you so, can you? If it weren’t for Dale’s nosiness, why, she’d still be in the same position she was in yesterday: wondering, yes, and worrying, certainly—but also hoping. Dale stole her hope, but that doesn’t mean she has to steal her mother’s.
She brakes suddenly and grips the steering wheel until she can feel the rubber parting beneath her fingernails. The sob seems to come from outside of her—or rather, she feels outside of herself, the sob lodged in the body she left behind. Had she hoped? Really?
Her thoughts race. She imagines leaning over a casket. Ronnie, her eyes closed, her small hands folded across her rib cage. Susanna wonders how she would dress her, what Ronnie would want. Not a dress—does her sister even own one? Susanna remembers a blouse, oddly prim and old-fashioned: cream-colored satin, a ruffle on the collar, a line of fabric-covered buttons along the cuffs of the sleeves. She wears it to wedding showers. She had worn it to a funeral. Always with trousers, mannish, shapeless black trousers that look almost comical with that exaggeratedly feminine blouse.
She was a user, Susanna. She used people.
Say it’s Ronnie in the woods. Not a body in the hospital, the blood pressure monitor a sudden flat line, the arms snaked with IVs. Not a very old body, in bed, face slack with peace. Not a body behind the steering wheel of a wrecked car, like their father’s body—a body too bruised and battered to display at the funeral but not so bad that they couldn’t look at him privately, say their angry, grudging good-byes. No. Ronnie, in the woods. A found thing, a discarded thing. There is a truth here, a terrible truth that Susanna wants to walk away from, leave buried, and it occurs to her that this is why she left home, left Dale. Not to find a cop and get answers. Not to tell her mother. So that she can hide from this truth awhile longer.
She can’t go back. She can’t go forward. Where does she go? The car isn’t even in park; she has been holding the brake down with such force that she has to think to unlock her knee.
3.
Tony is just driving past Wyatt’s, noting with a sinking stomach the still-empty driveway, when the radio crackles, then beeps: “Available units, we have a call at the Advance Auto on Sweetbriar. Please copy if you’re in the area.”
Tony waits. He is perhaps two miles from the Advance Auto, could be there in a minute with sirens running, but everything is close in Roma. He trusts that someone else can take it. Anyway, he isn’t even supposed to be on duty right now—or is he? Maybe he has been on duty so long that his next shift has, technically, started.
“This is Eight oh eight, dispatch. I’m out by Wal-Mart.”
“Eight oh four, dispatch. I’m at the Pantry on the bypass.”
“Eight oh four, why don’t you take it. You’ll be meeting an ambulance. Situation appears to be assault and battery, two men involved, both down.”
“Inside or outside the store?”
“Out in the parking lot, Eight oh four. Employees noticed the disturbance and came outside.”
“Copy, dispatch. I’m on my way.”
“Eight oh eight, stand by for backup.”
Tony finds himself driving in the direction of Sweetbriar. It is more or less on his way, and his curiosity is piqued. He will take a look, make sure the situation is stable. Then he’ll try Wyatt’s again one more time before giving in and going home, to bed. He is so tired that he has to remind himself to care about all of this: his job, Susanna’s feelings, his essential obligation to do the right thing. He has to remind himself that these things will be just as important to him—even more important—on the other side of that much-needed night’s sleep.
4.
“Are you coming down with something?” Jan asks. “You haven’t been yourself all day. Or yesterday, for that matter.”
Sarah has been staring at the computer screen, eyes unfocused, and she tries to focus them now. She was about to type something into Mr. Anderson’s file—something about his meds—but she has forgotten what. She pinches her eyes shut and takes a deep breath. “Um. No. I mean, I’m OK.”
“You sure?”
“Just tired.”
Jan points to the clock. “Go on and take off. The girls will be here in a little bit, and I can hold down the fort until then.”
Sarah nods and picks up her purse. She looks around, confused, feeling as if there’s something she has left behind. “Oh,” she says. She waves her hand, as if beckoning Jan to supply the words that have eluded her, and Jan’s brows draw in confusion. Sarah’s brain is fogged; it is like a morning after too many beers. “You know. Mr. Anderson.”
“You want me to log in that dose for you?”
“Yes,” Sarah says, practically sighing with relief.
“You should go home,” Jan says. “Take some vitamin B and scramble yourself an egg.”
Sarah manages a wan smile. “You know how I feel about eggs.” Her stomach clenches; she hasn’t been able to stomach more than a bowl of cereal today, and nothing at all since Wyatt’s call.
“That’s why you’re so peaked.”
Sarah sketches a halfhearted wave of good-bye, slips into her winter coat, and draws her purse strap over her shoulder. She is the one feeling scrambled, her thoughts disconnected and contradictory, her body so tired and weak it seems mired in quicksand and yet restless, so that she hasn’t been able to stop herself all day from jostling a leg or thumping out a rhythm on the tabletop with her thumb. The worst thing is that she feels short of breath. Her passageways aren’t constricted—the right amount of oxygen is entering and exiting—and yet her chest feels weighted, compressed. When she was in her twenties, she had a tabby cat named Peggy Sue who would climb up on her breasts as she slept. Sarah would be dreaming about drowning, or about being held down in a fight, and she would struggle to wakefulness to realize that the cat was a heavy, tight ball on top of her, ridge of its bony spine tucked against her chin. “The little shit’s trying to kill me,” she complained to her friends, and she had to at last start putting the cat out of her bedroom at night and learn to sleep through its steady, plaintive cries. Eventually, when Peggy Sue died of old age, she had to learn again to sleep without them.
He did nothing wrong and she has abandoned him.
He did something wrong—terribly wrong—and she was foolish enough to fall for him.
The wind is very bad today; it is whistling beneath the hospital’s canopies and making the three flags on the pole outside of the emergency room—American, Commonwealth of Kentucky, and Tri-Health—ripple loudly. Sarah buries her fingers in her pockets and walks to the car with her head tucked down. She has always liked the cold, thrives better in winter than in summer, but it is only anesthetizing now, not invigorating. She doesn’t know where to go or what to do. She was happy to leave work, but she is not ready to confront the emptiness of her home. The library? She can’t concentrate well enough to read. Out for a beer? Bad idea, she thinks. Bad, bad idea. Not now. Not feeling like this.
She is considering going by her brother’s, because her nieces almost always lift her spirits, when she hears the distant whine of sirens—multiple sets, if she isn’t mistaken. The sound cuts through her mental fog, barely; it stimulates something, causes the faintest twitch: of curiosity, of concern. It is like desire. There will be stretches, weeks and weeks, when it is easy for her to not think of sex, easy for her to accept that sex isn’t something she needs or even cares about. Then, out of nowhere, something will light her up, spark that dormant thing within her, set her to aching. What she feels now is a different kind of desire, but she acknowledges it, tries to hold on to it. Any old lifeline out of this gloom that has descended on her, she’ll take.
The ambulance rolls into the parking lot, quivering a little with the speed of its turn, and Sarah presses back automatically against someone else’s car. The ambulance she expected; the two cars following it, both with lights flashing, one a marked Roma police car and the other unmarked, she did not. The three sirens overlap and vibrate so that Sarah feels the sound in her teeth, and she puts her palms over her ears. It’s not completely unusual for a police car to accompany an ambulance in, especially when there’s been a car accident and suspicion of DUI, but at five o’clock on a Tuesday, it makes her wonder. She watches uneasily as the ambulance parks under the emergency canopy. The unmarked car brakes and pulls abruptly into a nearby empty slot; its driver, a tall black man, runs for the ambulance. The sirens stop within seconds of each other, but the lights on the ambulance keep throbbing like a heartbeat.
The pressure on her chest increases.
“Back up, stand to the side,” the ambulance driver says as he emerges from the cab and unhooks the rear double doors.
The man from the unmarked car backs up, lifting his hands a little as if to say sorry. Sarah, meanwhile, starts back across the parking lot toward them. She watches as the driver starts to pull out the stretcher. The wheeled legs drop, accordion-style, and the EMT in the back of the ambulance unhooks the safety latch, then jumps down after the stretcher to help roll it into the emergency bay. By now a couple of nurses from the emergency room, Marjorie and Ricky, have come out to assist, and the EMTs pass the stretcher on to them. There is an oxygen mask over the person’s mouth, so she can’t see his face, but a pair of shiny black cowboy boots with red stitching make a jaunty V at the end of the stretcher, as if the man they’re attached to is just kicked back in a lawn chair, napping after a barbecue.
There’s something familiar about those boots. She knows them.
The men walk more slowly back to the ambulance, where the tall black man is waiting and looking through the gaping double doors. Sarah approaches them, and they seem at first not to notice. The man from the unmarked car points inside to a second gurney.
“What about him?”
“I had to call it,” the EMT who’d been riding in the back says. “His heart stopped. There wasn’t any kick-starting it. Oh, hey, Sarah.”
She nearly jumps. She recognizes him now, but it’s been years since she put in hours at the ER. She can’t place his name. “Oh, hello.”
“You working ER today?”
“No,” Sarah says. “My shift just ended. I was on my way out when I heard the ruckus.”
The driver is shaking his head. “I just loaded this guy up last week out at Harper Hill. I’ll be damned.”
It is as if she has known all along that Wyatt is dead. “Harper Hill?” she manages.
“Yeah, had a heart attack. I can’t think of his name.”
“Wyatt Powell,” Sarah says, and the black man looks at her sharply.
“You knew him?” he asks.
She nods hard, unable to speak. She swallows past a sharp ache and feels her eyes well up with water, but she doesn’t blink, and the tears do not—quite—spill. “I treated him. He was in my wing.”
“Well, he had a screw loose,” the EMT who knows her says. “He beat the living daylights out of that kid we just wheeled in.”
“Lucky he didn’t kill him,” the driver said.
The black man gestures toward the building, and Sarah notices the bags under his eyes. “The young guy. Will he recover? What are his chances?”
“That’s not for me to say. His heart rate’s steady. It might look worse than it is.”
“It looked pretty bad.” The man again—Sarah guesses he is some kind of a cop.
The driver lights a cigarette, waves the pack around, gets no takers.
“His name is Sam Austen,” the cop says. “I’d like to talk to him when he wakes up. It’s important.”
The EMT—Ryan, Sarah thinks, his name is Ryan—hops back up in the ambulance and starts working on the second stretcher, this one on a bench attached to the wall. She can see Wyatt’s fine gray hair move as Ryan jostles the gurney. She remembers combing it into place with her fingertips as Wyatt slept.
“Talk to the doc,” Ryan says with a grunt from inside. “That’s his call.”
The two EMTs get the second stretcher unloaded. Wyatt’s eyes are half-open, the eyes of a child fighting sleep. The gurney straps hit him at the shoulders, stomach, and knees, pressing his arms tightly to his sides. Sarah covers her mouth, pinches her lips together. She can smell his cologne, the English Leather he wore the night they met at Nancy’s and on the evening he came home from the hospital. The backs of his hands are still freckled, the curly hairs on his forearms, visible where the cuff of his shirtsleeve is pulled back, still the color of rust. The EMTs start to wheel him inside, not getting in any hurry about it. She doesn’t reach out to touch him. She doesn’t dare to.
“Are you OK?” the cop asks her when Wyatt—what is left of him—is gone.
“Yes,” she whispers.
“You knew him,” he says.
A tear slips down her cheek, and she backhands it roughly away. “I took care of him.”
“You must be a good nurse,” the man says. “To care this much.” His voice is gentle. She doesn’t think he is being sarcastic. “I bet he appreciated it.”
“You care about some more than others,” she says finally. “I thought he was a kind man. He was kind to me.”
5.
Billy Houchens, like his sister, Emily, is a walker. Once a day—usually at four P.M., so that he can time his return home with his father’s arrival from the factory—he makes a circuit of about half a mile, never altering his course, never reversing it. He starts on his street, Forsythia, and takes it until it makes a right angle at Poplar. Poplar he takes to Marigold, a name that always makes him smile, because when he was a little, little boy he thought Marigold was a kind of treasure, but now he knows that it is a kind of flower. From Marigold he cuts through an alleyway between two fence lines to reach Washington Lane, the dead-end street, which is where Emily goes to be by herself in the woods. He has hidden here many times and watched her scurry past the Potters’ barking dog. He does not think he is being sneaky or sinister in doing so; he thinks only of his curiosity about Emily’s comings and goings, a curiosity that has increased these last few weeks. He has not, like his parents, sensed Emily’s sadness; he has not speculated about her loneliness or wondered why she, like himself, doesn’t have any friends. Emily is as she has always been to him: an object of interest and bright, simplistic affection. When Emily was three and he was nine, he was her tireless playmate. He turned the crank on the jack-in-the-box as many times as she wanted him to. He pushed around a Matchbox car after hers. When Emily started kindergarten and came home with books of letters and numbers and pictures of farm animals, he sat beside her on the couch, following her progress from page to page, learning right alongside of her. At eleven he finally started reading for the first time on his own, and now he can understand comic books—if he reads the dialogue out loud, he can follow how it goes with the pictures—and TV Guide. He watches a lot of television. He likes to know what is coming up next.
He likes schedules, patterns. He likes his routine. And so it is not Emily’s changing emotions he has noticed these last weeks but her changing habits: the frequency of her trips into the woods past the dead-end street, her tardiness coming home, her smell—there is something different there, something foul. It makes him want to keep his distance from her. He has been maintaining, in his way, a mental log of her comings and goings, a log that failed to receive its entry last night, when Emily didn’t come home. Not at six, or at seven. Not at all. He didn’t like it. He didn’t like it when dinner cooled with nobody eating it, and he didn’t like it when his parents (he always thought of them as “his,” not “their”) started pacing and making scared faces. He didn’t like it when they got on the phone with their trembling voices, or when his father went out alone in the truck, or when the police officer came over and started looking around their house and asking questions. He didn’t like the police officer with the thick mustache. And so he screamed, and he did the good bumping thing, which was how he made his head better. And his parents said, “Quiet, quiet,” then, “Shut up, shut up,” and it wasn’t good anymore, and so he went to bed and slept as long as he could.
It still isn’t good today. He knows now where Emily is: the hospital. He doesn’t like her there, but he likes her there better than nowhere, which is where she was last night, and so he is a little calmer. But his parents are gone much of the day, and his mother doesn’t come home to cook dinner at five o’clock. Instead, his father brings him home a bag with fish ’n’ chips (which aren’t chips, but French fries) from Captain D’s and tells him that Aunt Bonnie will be coming over later to stay the night. He likes Aunt Bonnie, but he doesn’t like her sleeping in his house, in his mom and daddy’s bed, and he doesn’t like eating Captain D’s when no one else is around to eat it with him. He doesn’t like eating at four o’clock, which is when he is supposed to have his walk, even when his daddy tells him that Aunt Bonnie will heat him up some mozzarella sticks later if he doesn’t give her any trouble.
He doesn’t consider not going for the walk; in his hierarchy of rituals, an outright omission is a greater sin than a shuffling of the schedule. So at five o’clock, after washing the grease from his supper off his fingers, he goes to the kitchen window to check the thermometer: 40 degrees. He trudges to the utility room, chooses his parka with the hood, and slips into it, then dons the gloves tucked into the right front pocket. None of this feels quite right, but going through the motions is calming. He thinks of it as making even. In his mind is a scale, and the more right he does, the more balanced the scales. When the scales are off, the good bumping can help, or rocking in his chair can help, and it’s as if he’s jostling the thing that’s off back into place.
It is too dark and too cold out. But he starts walking.
He feels, despite himself, some fresh interest in this new vantage point. It is November; at five o’clock the sun is already low enough in the sky that the houses are illuminated from within, dioramas visible from the road. In the Clemmons house, a woman is stretching—lifting her arms, arching her back—in the picture window. The sight arouses Billy, and he pauses to watch. The stretching woman stops, drops her arms, swings them a little at her sides. Then she moves out of sight.
He moves on, too.
He is on Washington Lane and circling back toward Poplar when a large figure crosses the street in front of him. Billy, unafraid, peers ahead. The streetlights will not kick on until six o’clock, and so the road is washed in shadow.
“Boss?” Billy says.
The dog trots easily toward him, unhurried. Billy holds out the back of his hand, as his mother taught him to do, and grins as the dog sniffs it, enjoying the tickle of its whiskers. When the dog has gotten its fill it snorts out air, then shakes its head back and forth, sending jets of saliva flying. Billy groans and wipes a string of the stuff off his chest with his shirtsleeve.
“Ew, Boss. You aren’t supposed to do that.”
Boss looks up at him.
“Where’s Mr. Powell?”
The dog’s expression is comical. Billy likes Boss. His sister got to do most of the walking with him while Mr. Powell was in the hospital, but Billy and Boss were friends before Emily came home from school. He reaches out to scratch the top of the dog’s head. There is a hard knob of bone, like a knuckle—Billy’s father called it a “knowledge bump.”
If his parents were home, he would go back and ask them what to do. But they are at the hospital with Emily, and Aunt Bonnie is still finishing her shift at Wal-Mart. Billy crosses the street to Mr. Powell’s house, which, like his own, is a white, aluminum-sided rectangle with a big front window and a gravel drive. Mr. Powell has a carport, though, and Billy’s parents do not. This difference interests him. He thinks that Mr. Powell must be richer than his family to have a carport.
There aren’t any lights on in the house, but he knocks anyway. He looks over his shoulder. Boss is still standing in the road. He knocks again. Then he tries the doorknob, thinking that he ought to get Boss to go back inside. Mr. Powell doesn’t have a fence.
The door is locked. He returns to the road.
“I don’t know where Mr. Powell is, Boss. I wonder how you got outside.”
He knows the dog doesn’t understand him, but he likes talking aloud to him this way.
“Well, I’ve got to go home.”
He resumes his walk. He likes the smell out here—the moldy sweetness of damp leaves, a whiff of gasoline from somebody’s running car. There is a head bobbing in the kitchen window of Jake and Lottie Summers, and he wonders if Mrs. Summers is washing dishes. He likes Mrs. Summers. When he walks by here in the summer, and she is sitting out front in a lawn chair, she always says, “How’s life treating you?” and Billy always says, “Fine, just fine.”
He has reached Poplar Street when he realizes the dog is following him. “No, Boss, you need to go home,” he says, making a shooing motion, and the dog backs up a step. But when Billy proceeds, the dog keeps time, and there is something so appealing about the cheerful clack of Boss’s toenails on the cement that Billy can’t bring himself to protest again.
His mother won’t be happy to see Boss. She was always saying, “Ugh, Boss stinks,” and “Ugh, I think I have a flea bite.” But nothing is even right now, nothing is normal—and if his parents can make him eat Captain D’s alone at four, and take his walk at five, and have Aunt Bonnie make his mozzarella sticks, then he reckons he can have Boss, too. At least until Mr. Powell gets back home.
6.
Emily has been in and out of a fog, struggling just enough to wakefulness to wish that she were still sleeping, when she notices that Christopher Shelton is at her bedside. He looks worried, earnest; he sits up straighter when he realizes that her eyes are on him, and Emily shifts around in the bed, self-conscious in her hospital gown.
“Hey,” Christopher says bashfully. “You’re awake.”
“Hey,” Emily says. She doesn’t know until she speaks how hoarse her voice is, how sore her throat. When she swallows, her tongue feels broad and stupid in her mouth. “What are you doing here?”
“My mom brought me. I wanted to check on you.”
Her chest swells with gratitude. “Really?”
“Really.”
She can’t stop herself from asking: “You’re not mad?”
He shakes his head, and the dark curl of hair on his forehead trembles. “Of course I’m not mad. It turns out you were right all along, Emily. There really was a body. It was there, just like you said it was.”
“I knew it,” she murmured.
“You’re a hero. Everyone at school is talking about it—about how brave you were. We’ve all been so worried.”
Emily frowns. Something is nagging at her, tickling the back of her mind. “Where was the body?”
“Where you said it was,” Christopher says.
Her mother and father are in the room—she hadn’t noticed before. They smile in that bland, stupid way they can have around people they don’t know well, and she is embarrassed, then confused. “Mom?” Her mother nods encouragingly. Emily looks back at Christopher. “No, I looked there. I crawled around on the ground. It wasn’t there.”
Her father says, “That’s just because you got turned around out in those woods. You took Christopher to the wrong tree.” Emily is bothered, because the answer seems somehow too right, too close to what she had wanted to hear. It’s as though her father has seen into her heart, answered her thoughts.
A dark knowledge settles over her. She wishes her parents away, and they’re gone. She puts out her hand, and Christopher takes it. “You’re not mad at me?” she repeats, and Christopher says no, but now she doesn’t believe him. A tear slides down her cheek, and a soft cloth presses it away.
“Don’t cry, kiddo. We’re here. Me and Daddy.”
She opens her eyes. How could she be so easily fooled by dreams, by fantasies? Reality is coldly inarguable—it’s there in the dark pores on the end of her mother’s nose, which looks red from getting rubbed too many times with a tissue; in the smell of her father’s cheeks and neck, which she can tell with eerie certainty is tinged with the remnants of his Barbasol shaving cream and his usual splash of Old Spice. It’s there in their looks of desperation, how badly they need her to tell them she’s all right, and she resents them for needing this from her, for wanting reassurance more than the truth.
“Go away,” she says, and her mother seems to crumple into the tissue she’s holding.
“Now, don’t say that.” Her father has his arm firmly around her mother’s shoulder, and though the tone of his voice is firm, Emily can tell that he’s just as shaky; her parents are like pins she is knocking down, and she takes a small, bitter pleasure in watching them fall.
“Go away,” she repeats, and she thinks of her brother, Billy, of how he acts when he is displeased, the way her parents scramble to satisfy him, to shut him up. She lifts her head off the pillow, drops it. Lifts, drops. It feels good. It feels right. Bop, bop, bop, she is being like her brother, and her parents exchange terrified glances, seem to say to one another without speaking aloud, Please, God, not her, too.
“Stop that, Emily,” her mother says sharply.
She gets her shoulders into the motion now. She is crazy, isn’t she? Seeing things that aren’t there? The guardrail starts to rattle, and the IV rack trembles. Her eyes are open, and so the square of silver light on the ceiling becomes a bright blur streaking across her vision, and her parents are dark, frantic smudges.
“Press the call button,” her mother says, her voice choked with fear.
“Where? I—”
There is pressure across her middle, on her shoulders. She moves her head faster. She could stop, but what will happen then—what questions will she have to answer, what truths will she have to face? She is talking. She doesn’t even know what she’s saying. And then a new face leans over her, and the silver streak of light becomes a square again, and then it winks out.