11

“Do you want to take the rental?” Katherine said earnestly.

Mary Alice scoffed. “Take whatever car you please. I’m not coming along.”

“You’re not coming along or you’re not driving?”

“This is your business, not mine.”

“But you’re the only one who knows how to get there. I’ve never driven there myself. I’ll miss every turn. There’s no way those roads are on my GPS. Plus, I doubt my phone will get service out there.”

“You’re right about that, but I can write you some directions. Pour yourself a cup of coffee and I’ll take care of that.”

Katherine opened her mouth as though she was ready to keep up the protests, but she shut it after remembering the particulars of her sister’s stubbornness. She’d once been stern and knowing but malleable, convincible. But tragedy had solidified everything about Mary Alice that once had some give. She was overfired.

Mary Alice opened the drawer of the secretary desk behind the breakfast table and retrieved a yellow legal pad. As she spread her palm against the paper and clicked the ballpoint pen in her left hand, Katherine thought it looked like her sister had just been electrified. There was a newfound sharpness to her movements that she quickly realized was a sense of purpose. When she had shown up bringing news of Michael’s return, Mary Alice seemed to collapse from the news, as though it had been so long since she’d been a parent that she didn’t know how to do it any longer. But writing out directions, preparing a sort of lesson plan for a student, this is what she knew how to do. This was a muscle that hadn’t yet atrophied.

Mary Alice worked quickly and without even the smallest mistake. She didn’t have to drive to the old place to remember how to get there; she went there every day. She was going there now, in fact, her daily journey to the most inescapable memories of her life. And though she always longed for them, in her mind there were never any roadblocks, any gates she couldn’t open, or any waters she couldn’t cross. It was right there, always.

“Done,” Mary Alice said as she ripped the page from the tablet and smiled at her work. Her handwriting was crisp and pleasurable to read, as precise as a font but with a delicate flow that had to be human.

“Does Bubba still go check up on it like he used to?”

“Once a month.”

“You pay him?”

“He’d never accept it.”

“You ever try?”

Mary Alice scoffed with a wry smile and handed her sister the directions. “Good luck. Call me if you run into a gate I didn’t mention. Wouldn’t be surprised if someone threw up another, even if it ain’t theirs to meddle with.”

“You sure you don’t want to come, even if I’m behind the wheel?”

Mary Alice nodded. Even though she’d hated the question, it was sweet of Katherine to ask. “It’s not being there that I can’t do, it’s getting there. I don’t like—” she said, taking a sharp breath before continuing. “I don’t like remembering the last time. The waiting. The wondering.”

“That’s sad,” Katherine said almost imperceptibly. She regretted saying it out loud, but it was the truth. Not that Mary Alice would agree, but sometimes the truth needs to be spoken. “I thought you always wanted to fix it up. Retire out there.”

“Sammy did, or at least he said he did, but it’s not just a fix-up. It’s a reconstruction. It’s tearing down and rebuilding and spending money I’d rather use on something else.”

“Such as?”

“If this is your way of saying you want to go all HGTV out there, be my guest.”

“Ha! John would rather die. I just, I don’t know, I always saw you ending up out there. Someone ought to.”

“Out there? Sad and alone? Far from everyone else?”

“Happy, Mary Alice. Happy.”

Katherine’s eyes bulged as she scanned the directions. “How the hell did we ever do this at night?”

“We didn’t. I did.” She added a laugh to soften the critique.

“Well, thank you. This is perfect.” She grabbed her keys and walked outside to her car.

It was the first time Katherine had seen her old home in the full light of midday since arriving, and she nearly gasped at the sameness of it all. These were not memories she returned to often, and on the plane ride there she wondered if she would be unable to even recall them. Would the sights of Billington and its residents be all but brand-new to her? Had she willed them out of her past? Would anyone even recognize her?

Names darted into her mind as she passed each house. The blue gravel on the Langfelds’ drive. The steep slope of the Attaway roof. The small corner porch at the Richardsons’, where she had her first beer. The Miller place, twice as far from the street as any other house, not an ounce of character to the empty, closely cropped front yards. The Schlortts’ and its eerie arches. And then the Meyerses’, the last house on the road, and one she’d never once entered, which felt strange to her, even then.

After crossing the railroad track, she pulled to a stop and waited for the light to turn red. The dangling, faded yellow thing was new to her, though not spanking. She remembered how fast she and her friends used to drive down this stretch of 90—flat and straight, all the way to the horizon. Oh, the way people used to drive when she was in school. It’s a miracle she made it out alive. As her blinker continued its low click, she remembered Kenny. Of course they put up a light. When the light turned green, she turned right and passed the sign that told visitors not to drive through their heavenly town “like hell,” and laughed. Who on earth ever thought that would work?

She drove west for a few miles before taking a left on an unmarked dirt road that stretched halfway to the sky, where it was obscured by a line of mesquite. The low, gritty hum of dirt roads pleased her. That is, until it became more dirt than road. Once you’re in the trees, start looking right, one of Mary Alice’s steps read. Katherine gripped the steering wheel more tightly as she wobbled between the gnarly branches and squinted back and forth from the directions to her right side, hoping the brush opened up enough for her at each turn to make an accurate count.

“One . . . two . . . THREE!” she shouted before making a sharp right as a plume of dirt filled the air around her. The next few minutes were just like this: counting and turning, counting and turning. And then: hoping she’d counted right. Her breaths became louder and shorter, slowing to a crawl unwarranted by a car as powerful as the one she’d rented.

But the simmer of anxiety she felt throughout the drive dissipated the moment the old place appeared in the distance, just when she thought it was about to boil over. The house, the Porta Potty–sized toolshed, and then the pond, which stretched from the windshield into the passenger window.

After fiddling with the lock on the front door, she jiggled the knob and shook the whole thing violently before finally getting it to turn. The door opened with a pop, like a cap freed from its bottle, and Katherine walked inside, shutting it behind her. She closed her eyes and tried to return to the good memories from this place, but they wouldn’t come. She sat on the couch, coughing as it exhaled a puff of dust, and scanned the room from a lower angle, but still felt nothing but a tickle in her throat. She was surrounded by junk, not memories. That’s all junk is, she thought. Objects with no stories to tell. But then again, she just wasn’t exactly in the mood to listen.

She emerged from the house, wiped her hands on her pants, returned to the driver’s seat of her rental, and pulled out her phone.

“Hi,” John said calmly on the other end.

“Hi. How is he?”

“Fine. Watching TV upstairs. I made him breakfast, but he didn’t eat much of it. Drank coffee, though. Where are you? What’s up?”

“I’m at the old place.”

“Just you?”

“Mm-hmm. Mary Alice gave me directions.”

John sighed louder than he would have in person, like he wanted to make sure the phone got the message, too.

“How’s it look these days?”

“Depressing.”

“So you won’t be going for a dip?”

An extended silence passed between them, one that neither knew how to interpret. With the phone still on her ear, Katherine inhaled and looked at the crumbling sprawl of memories surrounding her. The house needed new paint, new siding, a new roof, new everything. And the water, well, it needed more water. She wondered if it was still deep enough to drown in. “I just want to come home.”

---

•   •   •

The last time Mary Alice had been to the old place was twelve years before, the day after Michael ran off. She’d only stayed for a minute or two—just long enough to make sure he wasn’t hiding out there, that he was actually gone for good. She found empty beer bottles and rustled sheets; small, happy scenes that broke her heart. But that visit didn’t really count, she thought. It was little more than a drive-by. Nothing like the last time she went to check in on Samuel.

Kenny and Ellie were still years away from moving in, and up until recently she and Samuel were happy, at least she thought they were. Or maybe it was just that she thought Michael was happy enough for the two of them. That was the summer they went to SeaWorld. The summer her and Samuel’s marriage grew tense and quiet, without acknowledgment from either of them. It was the sort of change that hurt them both, the sort of change they should have talked about, but isn’t that what always happens? You hope for the best for long enough, and by the time you’re done hoping, you’ve settled into an understanding that “the best” is out of reach. Unhappy becomes normal, easy. The issue with being happy is that it takes work.

When Samuel said he was going to the old place to swim, the darkest of thoughts crossed her mind like a fly buzzing through one ear and out the other, off and away, never to be seen again. She was in the kitchen, giving Michael a snack—he loved hard-boiled eggs back then—and heard Samuel come down the stairs. The final step had always creaked, and still does, but after she heard the noise, he didn’t appear around the corner. There was a pause. Must have been fifteen, twenty seconds, she remembered now. Fifteen seconds watching Michael smile as he grabbed wiggly slices of egg and shoved them in his mouth, wondering why her husband was just standing at the foot of the stairs, staring at a wall.

When he turned the corner, she noticed the smile pasted on his face. “How’s someone enjoying their snack?” he said before tickling Michael’s arms.

“It’s good,” Michael said. “I was hungry.”

There was relief in that exchange, Mary Alice thought, but it went as quickly as it came. Samuel’s smile changed after he’d interacted with Michael; it didn’t disappear, or even stop being a smile, it just took a cue from his drooping eyes and turned into something melancholy.

“Going somewhere?” Mary Alice asked when she noticed his hands were clutching a set of keys.

“Yep,” he said. “The old place. Gonna go for a swim.”

She looked down and noticed he was holding his overnight bag behind his leg, as if he were trying to obscure it, as well as his swim trunks. It seemed off, even if it were the most normal thing in the world: he was leaving to swim and was bringing a change of clothes. At that moment, she wasn’t sure what her worry was made of, or where it had come from. It was a nebulous thing, existential worry, and one that had been manifesting more and more frequently since the summer began. More like a vision or a force; her worry had become something biblical. A burning bush appearing from time to time in the corner of a room as she watched her son play with his toys, or under her bedroom window the moment she woke up, or to the left of her husband, underneath an old painting of an oak tree. But she ignored the flames and waved goodbye, reminding him to be safe. Those were the last things she said to him, in fact. “Be safe.” A ridiculous thing to say to anyone, really. It takes a special kind of self-delusion to presume anyone could have that much control over the world around them. But still, she said it. She remembered her cadence precisely. Samuel looked at Michael, then turned his head to his wife, but what he didn’t do was move his eyes. His face was pointed at her, the gesture was there, but his attention was not. He maintained focus on Michael, and walked into the garage. The door shut softly behind him. And then he was gone.

“When did he say he’d be back?” was the first thing Maria asked when Mary Alice called to see if Samuel was at the Buckhorn hours later. She could count on one hand the number of times he’d gone there without her, but still, it was the first place she’d thought of.

“He didn’t,” Mary Alice said. “He just left and said he was going for a swim. I thought maybe he dropped by on his way home, saw Frank’s truck in the parking lot. But I guess not. Maybe he fell asleep after his swim.”

“I certainly get tired after being in the water. An afternoon dip in the summer? I’m out like a light the moment I lie down.”

Mary Alice threw Maria a kind laugh and thanked her. “Well, anyway, I’ll see you later.” She hung up.

It was dark. Nearly ten o’clock. Michael had been asleep for hours, and while she knew he wouldn’t wake up in the hour it would take her to run there and back, that would be awful, leaving him alone like that. She wasn’t that kind of mother. She wasn’t the kind of neighbor who called her friends after dark for a babysitting favor, either. So she made the difficult decision to wake up Michael. He would be miserable, she was certain he’d throw a brief fit, but there was no other option.

She entered his room without flipping the switch beside the door. Too harsh. No one likes waking up to that. A sliver of light from the hall and a spinning dinosaur contraption on his nightstand were all that illuminated his face. She watched him for a second, worrying that worry, and then shook his right shoulder until he stirred. “Sweetie,” she said. “You have to come with me in the car, OK? We have to take a drive.” He was conscious, but unbothered. He didn’t ask questions, he didn’t raise his voice, he just let her lift him up and walk him downstairs, and into his car seat. She snapped the belt shut and noticed he had already fallen back to sleep.

The highway was dark. No one else on the road, just Mary Alice and Michael and the moonlight. She turned the radio on at a whisper, just loud enough to drown out her own thoughts. It was a different kind of dark when she parked, thanks to a whisper of clouds covering the moon and diffusing the light into something gray and eerie. Her headlights sliced through the darkness and landed on Samuel’s little red truck, then as she turned to park, the front of the house. There were no lights on inside. There were no signs of life at all.

Mary Alice looked back to find Michael sleeping, his arms squirmed up around his head like a cat avoiding an overhead light during an afternoon nap. She pulled out the keys and exited the driver’s side softly, so as not to stir her cargo as she stepped onto the gravel. The night was loud, the white nighttime noise of crickets surrounded her. The first thing she noticed that alarmed her was the front door; it was slightly ajar. She pushed the ancient thing open as quietly as she could, but the hinges seemed to scoff at her attempt to be silent. They released a wail of squeaks as Mary Alice noticed a note propped up on the kitchen counter—the one with her name written out in perfect cursive. She didn’t even read it. She didn’t have to.

Briefly forgetting her sleeping child, she ran back to the car, swung the door open, and reached inside for the headlights. Once they were on, she ran the twenty yards to the lake, but it didn’t take more than five for her to see it: the outline of Samuel’s back, floating in the far end of the water. His head was fully submerged, limp at the neck, as were his legs. It was an awful, unnatural pose, the kind of thing a body would never allow if given the choice.

As she screamed, she felt a moment of shame. She wasn’t the type for hysterics. But it just erupted from her core, like something that had been waiting impatiently to escape her entire life. She screamed and screamed as she ran to the lake’s edge, where her cries were drowned out by the chaotic splashing. As she pulled Samuel onto the bank, it was easy, not because of adrenaline, but because he was light. Because he was floating. This wasn’t a rescue, or even a dive, she was just pulling a dead man out of the water. There were no revolting muscles of a drowning person. There was hardly any friction. All she had to do was pull, and there he was, Samuel in his swim trunks.

Michael was crying now; she heard him once the splashing stopped. How long had he been wailing? she wondered, running back to the car and leaving her husband behind. Inside, he was trying to wriggle out of his seat, but the belts did their work. He couldn’t move and was much too small to see over the dashboard and into the water. All he knew at this moment was that Mommy was upset. She didn’t have to tell him why.

“It’s all right,” she said, fully aware of how scarring this bit of improvisation might be. She was going to lie to him, and the lie was what he would remember forever. “I just got scared in the dark, but now I’m fine! Now I’m fine. Settle down, sweetie. OK? Settle down. I’ll settle down, too, I promise. We’ll both settle down.”

She unbuckled the straps and lifted him out and into her arms, making sure to keep him facing toward the dark. She walked him inside the house and put him in the bed, still made, and told him to wait. “Mommy will be right back, OK?”

“OK.”

Mary Alice took the phone from the receiver, an old rotary that had been hanging in the kitchen since the fifties. This was before 911 had come to this part of Texas, so she dialed Maria, hoping she would be able to get the sheriff. Time slowed as she watched the rotary recoil after the first digit. As she dialed, it was like she was being punished, laughed at, and ignored all at once. She didn’t know which of the seven numbers was worse. Ninety minutes and countless wrong turns later, flashing lights shot through the old place’s window.

She wasn’t surprised to find him dead, though she’d never admit that to a single person, including herself. The pause at the bottom of the stairs is what did it, and for the rest of her life she would wonder what he was thinking for those few seconds. Was he taking in the entryway for the final time? Extracting as many memories as he could from the walls and photographs and windows? Was he staring out the cut glass of the front door at the distorted view of their front yard, deciding which words would be the last he’d ever speak to his family? Or maybe he was thinking, I hope they can’t tell. I hope they can’t tell. Of all of them, that’s the explanation she liked most. A final gesture, the thought. The kindest thing he could do was leave Michael with a happy memory.

When the police arrived, they noticed the things she hadn’t: the books on the coffee table, the change of clothes in his overnight bag, and a receipt for a full tank of gas on the passenger seat of his truck. These were not the signs of someone planning to take his own life, they said, but if there was anything else they should know, she should tell them. She said there wasn’t. She never told them about the note. She never told anyone about the note.

The death was ruled an accidental drowning with the swipe of a pen in a small room thirty miles away, after which she closed his bank accounts and submitted a claim for his life insurance. When the check came in the mail weeks later, the number was so big she nearly wrote them back to tell them the truth. Instead, she deposited it into Michael’s college fund. She wouldn’t have to think about it for at least a decade.

Katherine came down for the funeral, ready to repair their estranged relationship in the face of this new tragedy. She had more than enough luggage in that little red car to prove her intentions, and for a few hours, absolution seemed to be exactly where the two of them were headed. After Katherine swept up the ashes, she went out onto the porch and held Mary Alice in her arms until her cheeks were dry. For a moment, their heartbeats were in sync. Their wounds, sutured. At the funeral, they sat on either side of Michael, a seemingly unbreakable chain of held hands. People looked at them and saw two sisters holding each other together, not two sisters stuck in the middle of a decade-old confrontation. One that hung between them, festering but fully unacknowledged. For a week they went through the motions of normalcy, running errands, cooking, eating together, playing with Michael in the backyard, but every night, once Michael went to sleep, they shared little more than silence before heading to bed themselves. All of Katherine’s attempts to talk about what had happened went ignored at first, until they were angrily rebuffed.

“I just want you to feel comfortable talking about it,” Katherine said, sipping from her bottle of beer on the couch. Mary Alice was cross-legged in the love seat, looking almost childish and staring out the front window.

“I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t ever want to talk about it. How does talking about it make it any better? It happened. He’s dead. I’m alone. What else is there to say?”

“It’s not healthy, Mary Alice.”

“Is that what your therapist told you?”

“As a matter of fact, it is,” Katherine said before finishing her drink. “And you’re not alone. You have Michael. And you have me.”

“Pretty soon you’re going to leave and be a thousand miles away again. And in no time Michael’s going to leave me, too.”

“But I’m here now.”

“Why is that, by the way? To make yourself feel better? Or are you just trying to dig up a little dirt on your poor big sister?”

Katherine scoffed. “What are you talking about? Dig up dirt? Mary Alice, I’m here because you need me.”

“I don’t need anybody. Samuel knew that all too well.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It means I’m tired. I’m so damn tired, Katherine.” The many clocks in the living room filled the air with ticks and tocks, and when they all chimed at the hour, Mary Alice stood up and put her hand on Katherine’s shoulder, giving it a gentle squeeze. “You can go home.” The next day, she did.

Mary Alice put Samuel’s note in the old trunk in their bedroom the night of his death, but didn’t read it until months later, a Friday night in November, when she was still getting used to dark’s early arrival. Her students had been restless and combative at every level, and when she picked up Michael from Mrs. Wools’s house, where he spent his days along with three other kids in town, she was informed he was sick. The early stages of a cold. Dinner was leftovers, not that either of them were in the mood to eat, and when she finally got him to bed after a dose and a half of cough syrup, the night seemed like it would never end. Saturday felt impossible, as did everything beyond it.

So she pulled out the note and lifted the flap, which, to her disappointment, had never been sealed. She wanted to smell it, the glue he would have licked. She wanted a piece of him. She didn’t want ink, she wanted actual DNA. But what she was given was a single sentence: I love you both eternally, and I’m sorry I could not love myself. And then his name, Samuel. Just Samuel.

Tears did not come, nor rage. Only sadness. At a certain point, she decided then without argument, life becomes a straight line with no branches, a road with no exit ramps. Grief would define the rest of her years, and it was time for her to get used to that.