“Garbage night, isn’t it?” Scott had turned back to the sink and the glass pan that Ruth had told him not to wash. He filled it with sudsy water. “It’s raining. Few more weeks and it could be turning to snow. You want me to pull the can out? I’d hate to see you slip.”
“It’s fine, I’ve managed it all these months. But thanks, if you don’t mind.”
While he was outside, she plugged in her phone and found herself back in the living room, staring at that photograph of Annie Oakley shooting over her shoulder.
She wanted to be here, now, focused on Scott. But she couldn’t help imagining their future together, all the secrets she would have to keep. She was still researching Annie’s early life. She wasn’t taking her antipsychotics. She still had visions, had in fact learned how to prolong them. There was no point in restarting a romance based on delusion.
On the other hand, he had come back. He had kissed her. They had made love, and after that, eaten lasagna. Life should include both those things—love and pasta, in equal measure.
Maybe she could tell him about the journal and letters. Or, she could just relish the pleasures of the last hour or so. Ruth closed her eyes and inhaled. She could smell him—smell them. It had been good. It had always been mostly good.
The talk with John Regatta hadn’t changed anything. Scott hadn’t done anything to stop Vorst.
Scott opened the door again, hair wet from the rain. He came toward her, rubbing his hands together to warm them, and stopped short. His smile faded as he saw her expression.
“What?”
It was exactly like the moment he had stepped into the house last year. Back from his cycling trip, just in time to see the realtor leaving. He had stood there, waiting for the signal: Good news? Bad? It was up to Ruth. The fate of their relationship had always been up to Ruth.
“Nothing,” she said. “You look cold, that’s all.”
38
Caleb
Caleb spent the late morning biking down the old river road and sitting at the picnic shelter until he got cold and bored. His phone was running out of battery. He’d already received a dozen messages from people who rarely texted him—a girl he’d carpooled with briefly forever ago, a science project partner, and Reece, who was definitely still mad at him. They all wanted to know the same thing.
Where are you?
Is it true?
WTF?
He hadn’t made a bomb threat. He hadn’t brought a weapon to school. He hadn’t even made a plan. What he had done—stupidly—was tell Justin, a freshman on the Rockets who kept pestering him about why he’d suddenly quit, that he wished Vorst would stop hanging around their practices.
“Guy’s a pervert,” Caleb had said, staring at his Spanish textbook.
“I guess you would know.”
Caleb had held it in—the anger, the embarrassment, the panic that Justin really knew something and would tell the others.
“I hate that asshole,” Caleb said.
“Sure you do. But don’t worry. He’s already got a new pet. I saw him give Mikayla a ride yesterday.”
A sheaf of blank quizzes was coming down the row toward Caleb. He took the stack and passed it on without bothering to grab a copy. He didn’t have a plan, other than to skip the quiz. A moment later he realized he did have a plan: to leave. So he did.
In his worst moments, Caleb felt that he was to blame for what Vorst had done. He’d accepted the pathetically transparent bribes: twenty dollars when Caleb was broke, a pack of cigarettes, then a carton, then a six-pack of beer. He’d accepted the rides. He’d said nothing when they parked and Vorst put his hand on Caleb’s thigh and deep down into his jeans. He’d gone to his cabin once, and since nothing had happened on that particular visit, pretended that the parking lot had been a one-off. But the worst moment that came back to him was the moment he didn’t object to Vorst’s new game—not until he started to pass out and thought that moment might be his last.
What would it be like to actually die?
Caleb almost asked Reece that once, the day he went over to his house. But the conversation zigged and zagged, and before you knew it, Reece was pressuring him the same way everyone did, asking too many questions. Irritated, Caleb let the question go unspoken. He didn’t ask about Reece’s suicide attempt, how exactly he had failed. If Caleb ever did it, he didn’t want to fail.
Caleb’s phone vibrated in his pocket again, almost out of charge.
Lockdown. WTF?
Where are you man? Are you at school? Don’t do anything crazy.
You’re in such deep shit.
An hour later, when boredom got to him, he pulled everything out of his backpack. Out fell his Spanish textbook, two spiral-bound notebooks, the notebook and papers of Kennidy McClintock’s that he was still carrying around, and a copy of To Build a Fire, which he was supposed to have finished but had read only until the middle, where the main character built his first fire. It seemed so easy: Then he took some matches and proceeded to make a fire. In the bushes, the high water had left a supply of sticks. From here he got wood for his fire. Working carefully from a small beginning, he soon had a roaring fire.
Caleb had already burned the photos he’d taken from Vorst’s cabin, and each one had felt like an itch scratched, a wrong almost set right. How much better it would be to build not just a fire but a roaring fire, big enough to burn up ¡Hola, todos! and notes from history and chemistry and even more than that?
Caleb tried it Jack’s way first, gathering little sticks from the bushes around him, but no matter how long he held his lighter to the damp ends of each twig, he couldn’t get a single one to remain lit. Giving up, he started tearing pages from books. These flamed up obediently, but they burned too fast. He ripped his Spanish text and his notebooks and the blank pages from Kennidy’s notebook and even a few with writing on them, plus all the pages of Jack London. When he was frustrated at the end, he burned Kennidy’s essay and the only photo he’d kept of her, too.
Burning those first photos of the other girls and guys had felt right, almost like a purification, but this one didn’t. It wasn’t just that it was wrong, because she was a person he felt like he knew and these were things her family might have wished they could have back. It was because it wasn’t enough.
He used up the rest of his lighter fluid and ended up with a charred mess of pages and thick, mostly unburnt bindings, and none of it had given him satisfaction.
Now he had only an old pack of matches and nothing good left to burn. Even arson was something you had to learn how to do right, evidently.
At 4:15, an hour before his stepdad was due to get home and with just enough time to sneak in, get warmer clothes and some sandwiches, Caleb biked up to his house. Big mistake.
His stepdad’s pickup truck was there, next to his mom’s Hyundai, as well as two police cars. One was empty. In the other, there was a cop behind the steering wheel, a woman looking down at a clipboard.
He could hear a booming voice even before he stepped into the house. “Her son’s not crazy, and he’s not one of those mass shooters. He’s just a fuckup. Remember when there used to be dropouts and losers, but it wasn’t a fucking federal crime?”
Loser. Fuckup. And also, “her son,” not “our son.” Yep, that was his stepdad, Roger.
When Caleb pulled open the door to get inside, the cop standing next to the door swung around and grabbed him by the shoulders. The next thing he knew, Caleb was on the floor, being frisked. He wanted to laugh. If he’d wanted to sneak up on his parents or that cop in his living room, it would’ve been easy. If he’d actually been a shooter, he would’ve aimed through the living room window and taken out all three of them. Boom. Boom. Boom.
The next two hours were hell. Caleb kept thinking they were going to push him into a cop car, drive him to the station and take him to one of those rooms with mirrored
windows that he’d seen in movies. Instead, they just hung around his house. Weren’t there crimes happening somewhere?
One of the cops sat down at the kitchen table opposite Caleb and his parents. Another stood near the door. A third wandered around the living room and, with Caleb’s mom’s permission, took a tour of the upstairs bedrooms. They could hear his footsteps, which made the floorboards squeak.
The kitchen table interview was like the worst parent-teacher conference he’d ever attended, multiplied by a hundred.
What did you say to your friend Justin?
How many other friends you got?
Do you like school? What are your favorite subjects?
Do you get high?
Do you get angry?
Do you play video games?
Do you have a girlfriend?
Do you have a boyfriend?
The last question pushed Caleb’s stepdad over the edge. He was hungry, no one had made a move to start dinner and he’d already had a shitty day at work before all this. “You’re calling my wife’s son gay? That’s it. That’s enough.”
Roger stood up, went to the fridge, took out a beer and a container of leftover Chinese food that he pushed into the microwave, slamming its door shut. Caleb’s mom had said never to put those containers in the microwave. They had staples and a metal handle. But Caleb’s four-year-old half sister, Jessica, loved their flap tops and pagoda pictures on the side. She wouldn’t eat the exact same Chinese food in normal Styrofoam containers.
“If my stepson’s doing drugs or building pipe bombs or especially screwing around with boys, you won’t have to come pay us a visit, because he won’t be here—not on this earth, do you got that?”
Caleb kept his eye on the microwave door. There were only twenty seconds left. He heard a zap. He thought he saw a spark. But then again, his whole head felt like it would explode.
Meanwhile, Roger kept yelling, even when the police officer guarding the front door came into the kitchen doorway. The cop at the table stood up. The third guy, walking the rooms above, heard the commotion and came down the stairs as well.
“So, we’re about done with this chat, then.” Roger set his bottle on the counter so hard, it sent a big splatter flying. He ignored the brown liquid flowing across the counter. His face was purple now. “We’ve got it covered. She’ll see you out.”
Caleb’s mom hadn’t moved.
Caleb’s stepdad said it again, louder. “She’ll see you out!”
They all knew, after Caleb’s mom walked the three cops to the door, eyes on her feet, that it was going to be a bad night. Roger wasn’t a raving drunk, but once he got going, he drank steadily and with purpose. One of the cop cars stayed behind at the curb for an hour after the other cops had left. Roger kept walking between the kitchen and the living room window, staring at the car and cursing. Caleb’s mom was so worried she went to a back room and called 911. She was routed to their nonemergency number, and Caleb could hear her trying to put on her best bank teller voice, trying to sound friendly and reasonable, asking why there was still a police car outside her home when her son had done nothing.
As far as Caleb could tell, she got no answer, but ten minutes after she finished the call, the car finally pulled away.
At 11 p.m., Roger was still drinking. Still pacing. It was true that many more lights were flashing down their road—some extra cop cruisers every hour or so, but also normal cars. Curious onlookers? Maybe high school students. Maybe others who’d seen the false-alarm story on the local news or read people’s angry comments on Facebook.
“Come on down here,” Roger called up the narrow staircase at 11:30, a half hour after Caleb had retreated to his bedroom. “I know you’re not asleep.”
He was slurring his words. His rifle, which Roger usually kept carefully locked up and well away from Jessica, was on the couch, just sitting there for anyone to see. The drapes were open.
Any time headlights flashed or he heard the sound of an approaching motor, Caleb’s stepdad would step toward the couch, pick up the rifle, and not aim it exactly, just hold it, while he walked back and forth in front of the wide windows.
“What’d you do to make them so interested all of a sudden?”
“I didn’t do anything.”
Caleb took a step toward the stairs.
“You’re not going anywhere. Get me another beer.”
Pace; pick up rifle; turn off lamp to see through the windows better; turn lamp back on; pace again. An hour passed.
“Get me another.” Roger’s tone softened. “You want one?”
“No thanks.”
But then he turned mean again. “What’d you do to make them think you’re a shooter or a faggot?”
“Nothing,” Caleb said. “Kids tell rumors. They’re, you know, bullies.”
“Bully ’em back.”
“Yeah, sure,” Caleb said.
The cops wanted Caleb to skip school in the morning and asked his mother to bring him to the station for a psychological evaluation, though he was pretty sure she couldn’t get time off work. She’d been a single mom for a long time. She knew you couldn’t risk losing your job.
“Get me another,” Roger said. But his eyelids were heavier now, and for minutes at a time, when he set down the rifle and collapsed into the lounger next to it, he snoozed.
“What you’d do . . . ?”
Caleb waited until he thought he heard a light snore. To test, he asked, “I can get you another beer if you want. Or some potato chips.”
Silence.
Caleb got up. He went to the windows and closed the blinds. Through them, he could see the flicker of lights again. Definitely more traffic. When he parted the blinds stealthily from the corner, he saw the glint of a beer can as it sailed through an open window and hit their curb. His mother would have a fit in the morning if people spent the whole night throwing garbage in front of their house. It occurred to Caleb that they might do worse, like TP the hedges or break something.
Just as he was walking away from the window, he heard the clatter of the metal garbage can, then laughter and then the sound of tires peeling out. Caleb went outside to look. They’d spray-painted the garbage in red with the letter C.
Okay, Caleb thought, heart pounding. Okay. It’s not so bad.
They’d either heard him coming or realized it wasn’t so easy to fit big letters on a round garbage can. But he’d scared them off. “C” for Caleb, like they were just letting the world know he lived there. Whatever.
Then Caleb turned around and faced the closed garage door. And there it was, their second draft in large, glowing pinkish-red letters: cocksucker.
“Fuck.” He looked back at the street and in through the window. Inside was the rifle on the couch. Inside was his stepdad: mad, drunk, ready to make his own justice. Inside was his mother and his four-year-old sister.
“Fuuuuuuck.”
Caleb stepped into the living room. Roger stirred and went slack-jawed again.
When Caleb pictured them bringing Vorst in for questioning, he didn’t imagine the coach looking ashamed or repentant. He could hear Vorst’s voice, loud and clear, talking about Caleb drinking, Caleb taking pills, Caleb asking to sleep over, Caleb coming on to him. He didn’t know how guys like Vorst got away with it, but he knew for sure they always did.
Caleb didn’t hate his mom. He didn’t even hate Roger. There wasn’t a single kid at school he truly detested, even though plenty of them got on his nerves. He wasn’t one of those kids they talked about on the news.
The last thing Caleb wanted was attention. If they’d just left him alone and not overreacted—the school lockdown, the questioning—maybe he could’ve slunk off and disappeared. But they’d shone a spotlight on him that wasn’t about to go away.
Two hours later, Caleb grabbed all the cash he could find in his m
om’s purse—only sixty dollars. He packed an extra pair of jeans, a loaf of sandwich bread, a jar of peanut butter, a gallon of water and the long lighter his stepdad used to light the grill since the starter was broken. Then he grabbed the rifle and put it in the cab of his stepdad’s pickup truck, under a tarp. He told himself he was doing it to protect others from harm.
Canada, he thought. It was pretty much the only thing Vorst had talked about at his cabin that didn’t drive Caleb up the wall: the Canadian baseball and hockey teams he liked; Boundary Waters, the place he’d gone canoeing; memories from when he was a kid and everyone talked about escaping the draft by going north, if you could believe that.
Caleb would have to ditch the gun somewhere, of course, but far away, so his stepdad wouldn’t have it when he woke up or during the questioning that was bound to follow for several more days. No one was going to thank Caleb for taking that precaution, but he was used to it. No one had thanked him for doing anything for as long as he could remember.
39
Ruth
Scott was asleep. Ruth lay with the sheets pulled up to her armpits, staring at the place on her bed that had been empty for over a year, trying to feel lucky instead of apprehensive or confused. When she was certain his breathing was deep and even, she rolled toward her nightstand and pulled on her phone hard enough to separate it from the charging cord, then positioned herself comfortably to read.
She had less than a quarter of the scanned document left. She reread the last part of the sixth letter, which had been nearing its sign-off when her phone had died, then moved on to the seventh.
Dear H.D.,
I’ve received two of your letters, but nothing in the last three weeks. I expected you to question my claim to be able to visit the past, but I didn’t anticipate you’d question whether the Wolves existed or acted as they did. Surely you won’t pretend these are things that don’t happen to young girls or that happen only beyond your own experience, in places like Ohio or Oklahoma.
Annie and the Wolves Page 28
