What Comes After

by Joanne Tompkins

  But it was Lorrie I saw standing before the blaze. She had started a fire in the old barrel outside our gates. She picked up a soft bundle—it seemed a pillowcase stuffed with other things—and tossed it onto the flames. Next she threw in what appeared to be boots, but that didn’t seem right, because boots wouldn’t burn like that, and whatever this was shot up a flame that nearly lit the trees. In that sudden flash, her face glowed a startling, hideous red. Only for a second, and then the flame collapsed and she fell into darkness.

  But her face wasn’t in darkness now, and a savage urge entered me. “Was it kind to burn Jonah’s clothes? His boots? To douse them in gasoline or lighter fluid to ensure the evidence would be destroyed? Was it kind to let me and Katherine keep searching for our son?” Her mouth opened, but I cut her off. “I saw the smoke. I was worried about you, so I went over.” I laughed a little here. “I cared about you. I cared about Nells and Jonah. Even then, even exhausted, late at night with my son missing, I cared about you.”

  I stopped there, wanting the silence to torment her. Lorrie’s knees seemed unable to hold her, and she sank into a chair.

  “Jonah killed a deer,” she whispered. “He brought home the meat. It was deer blood I couldn’t get out.”

  “Then why burn the clothes, the boots? Why not mention any of this to the police?”

  She stared at the floor, silent, then stood and turned as if to go. But I was on her, grabbing her arm and yanking her around, shouting, “For all you knew, my son was still alive somewhere, bleeding and injured, but alive! You were willing to let him die, to protect your son! You were willing to let him die!” I didn’t realize I believed this until the words were released.

  Lorrie’s face was oddly blank, almost serene, as if in acceptance of her fate. “No,” she said. “I would never have put Daniel at risk.”

  “But you did.”

  “No. He wasn’t at risk,” she said, her voice as flat as her eyes. “If the blood was Daniel’s, I knew he was already dead.”

  Who could prepare for words like these? Now it was my knees that couldn’t hold my weight. And there we were, a man and a woman collapsed on kitchen chairs, hardly able to breathe.

  “Jonah told you?”

  “No,” she said, pushing herself to stand.

  “Then how did you know?”

  She started walking out, turned, and said in that same dead voice, “Because of all the blood, so much blood. Because of the smell.”

  I heard her leave. I sat stunned in that kitchen for long minutes, until I managed to rise, to enter the mudroom and dead-bolt the door.

  50

  Day of My Death

  It was strange how quickly Daniel’s eyes turned glassy like the buck’s. How the body, the carcass, wasn’t Daniel at all, wasn’t even human. Just another forest creature in the wrong place at the wrong time. A creature who never was, under any scenario, going to live forever. I began to believe I could leave him there with all the other animals who would meet their end someday, that I could walk out of that forest and back into my life.

  It took a half hour, but I managed to hide the body deep in thorny brambles. I dragged the gutted deer over the spot where Daniel had bled, spread the entrails to camouflage the sprays of blood. If scavenger birds drew attention by circling, the animal’s remains would answer any questions. Finally I carved off the buck’s tenderloins and left the rest. My mother would scold me for the off-season kill but would eat those steaks all the same. And how better to explain my blood-soaked clothes than a deer I mistook for dead, a deer that thrashed under my knife and gushed blood all over me?

  I drove home under a blank night sky, the seat covered in contractor bags, hunks of bloody meat beside me. I kept smelling Daniel. Unlike with the buck, I’d hacked right into his guts. Twice I had to pull over to puke. And the whole while, I racked my brain, trying to remember if anyone saw Daniel climb into my truck after practice. I didn’t think so, but then who pays attention when their life isn’t yet on the line?

  When I got home that night, I peeked in the kitchen window. My mom sat hunched at the old Formica table studying for her nursing exams. After Dad died, Mom took on extra shifts and started school, set on “becoming somebody” if it killed her. Seeing her like that, exhausted after a day changing diapers at the nursing home, looking more like my grandma than my mom, made me want to cry. And here I was about to walk in with another load of suffering. I started to turn away, but she saw me and smiled.

  With the poor kitchen light and my dark clothes, she didn’t spot the blood right off, but I wasn’t two steps in before she noticed the smell. “Lord, Jonah, what’d you gut-shoot? Must have been something big.”

  Around eleven, I went to say good night. She was standing at the kitchen sink. The jacket I’d been wearing was wet and bunched in there. One of its arms had flopped onto the pale counter and was leaking all over the place. Mom’s mouth was loose, hanging open, but she wasn’t looking at the water that was pooling red, splattering bright on the floor; she was looking at her palms. She held them before her, staring like she’d never seen them before, like maybe somebody else’s hands had gotten sewn onto the ends of her arms.

  She must have known I was there. I was at the edge of her vision, standing at the kitchen door. She didn’t move, didn’t speak, but when the floor creaked under me, her breath hitched as if it were something in her that had just popped loose. I waited a moment, and when nothing more happened, I turned to go.

  “Nells.” She said it fierce, like a warning.

  “In her room. Asleep.”

  “Make sure she stays there. You got that?”

  * * *

  —

  THE NEXT DAY, news spread quickly about Daniel being missing. Turned out a couple freshmen girls saw him getting into my truck after football practice. I should have known. Girls always kept tabs on the guy. But instead of making me a suspect, it turned me into a celebrity. Everyone wanted a piece of the action, and skinny Jonah Geiger was as close as they were going to get. Sammy and her friends sat by me at lunch, trying to work Sammy into the story line, turn it into a tragic love story. I could tell she was hoping for the headline “Brokenhearted Boy Disappears.”

  I told them all the same thing: I’d dropped Daniel off at the small grocery near the gym. “Said he was going to pick up an energy bar and Gatorade before hitting the weights.”

  The police figured out quick enough that he’d likely never made it to the store or the gym. Still, no one suspected me of anything other than giving him a lift. Everyone thought he would reappear. Even my mother didn’t ask more about my story. She did obsess about my clothes though. She pretreated and scrubbed and washed them again and again, then came home a day later with new jeans and boots, saying my old ones were “irretrievable” and she’d thrown them away.

  As for the meat, she slipped it to the Wileys’ dogs. She didn’t scold me. She just said, “I never knew anything could bleed like that.”

  When Daniel had been missing for two days, Principal Thibodeau canceled school so students could join the search. Which tells you all you need to know about who Daniel was in our town. I showed up with the rest to help post flyers around the area. It wasn’t as hard as you’d think to act like nothing had happened. In the presence of people who couldn’t imagine me as anything other than harmless, neither could I. Yet whenever I was alone, most of all at night, the smell of Daniel rose off my skin and filled the room.

  On the third day, the police called and asked me to come down for questioning. Sammy had been pumping up the romantic-distress angle, and Mr. Balch had told them Daniel was agitated the morning he went missing. They claimed to be investigating “the possibility of self-harm” and thought maybe I could help.

  When I hung up, my mother turned to me. Right off, I noticed her weird tone, a tone that said better listen up or things could get ugly.

  “
They want to talk with me also,” she said. “Too bad I was studying at the library that night. I won’t be any help to them.”

  Later, as I was walking out the door, she used that tone again, saying, “It’s been such a long, long time since you’ve brought home venison, Jonah. Maybe when deer season starts up.”

  I thought she was worried about my out-of-season kill, and I took her lead, telling the police that after I’d dropped Daniel at the store, I’d gotten in a little target practice off the trails near town, something I had in fact done a few nights before his death. After dinner that night, I thanked my mother for not mentioning the deer to the police. She kept mending an old wool jacket she hoped would get me through the winter. Without looking up, she said, “No point in sending them off on a wild-goose chase out in those woods.”

  * * *

  —

  I’VE BEEN TELLING MYSELF MOM DOESN’T KNOW, that she’ll be shocked tomorrow when the sheriff finds my note. I want to think she couldn’t imagine me doing such a thing.

  But she can, and I have the saddest, clearest feeling that she does.

  51

  The Monday after the debacle of a clearness committee, I called George and told him I wasn’t feeling well enough to meet that week.

  “Next week then.”

  I wanted to say no, not that week either, or the one after that. Instead I said, “We’ll see.”

  “Isaac.” I could sense him calculating his words. “I hope we continue our work. You know that resistance is a sign you’re getting close.”

  “Getting close to what? More pain?”

  Again the long pause, then, “I think in the face of great loss, we’re often distracted—”

  “Dear God, just say it! You think my focus on Jonah is . . . what? A false narrative? The boy who slaughtered my son isn’t a psychopath? That the guilt I have for insisting my son spend time with his murderer is a trivial distraction?”

  He didn’t speak for a good minute. When he did, he sounded more himself. “Not trivial at all. But I think you’re dancing around something deeper. And before you ask, I have no idea what. But I feel it there. And I’m guessing you do too.”

  I wanted to shout that I was done with their smugness and judgment. I was done with the Quaker faith and its false promise of Divine connection, its hidden arrogances and silent withholdings. What had it done but estrange me from my wife and son? What had it done but leave me utterly alone?

  “Thank you for your insights, George,” I said, “but I think I’ll pursue a process of discernment on my own.”

  * * *

  —

  WITH THE CANCELLATION OF THE CLEARNESS COMMITTEE, I had removed myself from all aspects of my meeting. At home, I had to confront Evangeline’s confusion and grief about Lorrie’s sudden absence, a distress that manifested in offhand comments: “I think Lorrie said something about working extra shifts,” and “You know, Nells is going through a tough time. Probably really needs her mom there.” She wanted so desperately to explain it to me, this woman abandoning her.

  But how could I discuss Lorrie with her? Whenever I thought of the woman, my heart spasmed. I had wanted to believe I’d misinterpreted what I’d seen, but when confronted, Lorrie offered no defense. And there were her words: If it was Daniel’s blood, I knew he was already dead. How does that not become the evilest of earworms, rising and tormenting you at the mere mention of the speaker’s name? Yet I had not gone to the authorities. I kept picturing Nells shuffled off to a distant relative or into foster care. How could the world bear yet one more parentless child?

  School was lonely too. Despite the promise of the holiday visit, Peter seemed altered in the new year. He was off campus with increasing frequency, and he often appeared stressed when I found him, sneaking discreet glances at clocks, trying to stop a nervous jiggle of his foot. Though he mentioned “administrative hassles” in connection with his absences, he never explained what they were. He no longer asked about Evangeline, and when I inquired about Elaine and the girls, he’d brushed me off with, “They’re all good. Thanks for asking.”

  On a Friday in late February, Evangeline texted to ask if she could stay the night at Natalia’s. I told her she could, then messaged Peter, suggesting we grab a beer downtown. I suspected that Peter had become distant because he didn’t want to burden me with his own troubles. If we could have some relaxed time together, he might open up.

  When Peter didn’t respond, I called his cell, but it rang straight to voice mail. The man sometimes forgot to charge his phone, and I decided to stop by his house, arriving around seven. He lived in one of the town’s few neighborhoods where all the houses are well kept, yards filled with groomed plantings and neat walkways to front doors. Though Peter’s Volvo was parked in front, the house was dark, and I saw no sign of Elaine’s Subaru. I assumed the family had gone out together and was about to proceed on when a light came on in the living room.

  I parked and walked up, noting that the blinds were drawn. During all the meals and games and conversations I’d had in that house over the years, I couldn’t remember a single blind being pulled. I rang and knocked but no one answered. I yelled, “Peter! It’s me, Isaac!”

  Minutes went by, and then a shadow passed the front window. I yelled again. In response, the living-room light went out. Such a strange thing, that vanished light, as if I might forget it had ever been on.

  * * *

  —

  THE NEXT DAY, I called Peter again. “Hey,” he said. “Sorry about missing your message. My phone can’t seem to hold a charge.”

  “I worried about that.”

  “A beer would have been great, but I couldn’t have gone anyway. The Uptown was playing one of the old How to Train Your Dragon movies for family night. Elaine and I took the girls.”

  “You were gone last night?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Why?”

  “I stopped by.”

  “Shoot. Wish I’d been here.”

  “Someone was,” I said.

  “Ah,” Peter said. “So she was up. When we left, Elaine’s sister, Josie, was down with a migraine.”

  “A migraine? She must have loved me knocking and ringing and yelling through the door.”

  “Don’t worry about it. Even with a migraine, if she was up, she should have answered the door.”

  I told him migraines can be pretty debilitating and asked him to apologize for me. “Do you want to schedule a time to catch that beer?”

  “Sounds great,” Peter said. “This next week is pretty crazy, but maybe the one after. Check in with me then—lots of things up in the air.”

  * * *

  —

  PETER WAS RIGHT, a lot of things were up in the air, like why he would lie about tiny Josie being there. The shadow that had crossed the blinds before the light went out? It had the shoulders of a bull.

  52

  Evangeline lay on her back, wearing one of the clinic’s gowns, her head propped on a pillow. It was mid-March, and a drizzly gray pressed against the exam room’s window.

  Things were better at school. She had mainly B’s in her classes, and the harassment had pretty much stopped, which given her spectacular belly was rather surprising. But then her pregnancy was so obvious now that anyone acting like it was an evil secret just seemed stupid. Everyone had moved on, most seeming to accept the story Natalia circulated that the father was a boyfriend from before Evangeline came to town.

  A week back, though, things took a peculiar turn. Two girls in Sammy’s tribe went out of their way to sidle up to Evangeline in the restroom, tell her they thought she “was brave.” A few days later, it happened again with two other girls from the group. Then, only yesterday, she felt a tapping on her shoulder and turned to find herself face-to-face with their ringleader.

  Sammy leaned in so close that Evangeline could smell blue cheese dressing on her
breath. Something odd was going on with her mouth, a twisting bite of her lip. Was she embarrassed? About to apologize? Then Evangeline understood. She had been set up. The bathroom girls were part of a bigger plan. Sammy was biting her lip to keep from laughing.

  When Sammy started up with, “I just wanted to say that I think you’re really—”

  Evangeline interrupted, “Yeah, I know, brave. Okay, what’s the punch line? You’re here to deliver it, right? Just say it.”

  “Punch line?”

  And Evangeline had to give it to her, she did seem confused, but Evangeline wasn’t about to relinquish her premise. “You know, brave to be walking around looking like such a cow, or brave to be carrying Satan’s baby, or—”

  Sammy’s face shifted as if with shocked understanding. “Is that what you think? That I’m here to mock you?”

  Evangeline snorted. “Yeah, can’t imagine why I’d think such a thing.”

  The two girls stood staring at each other. They were so close they couldn’t see much more than each other’s eyes, couldn’t get confused by swinging blond hair or a mammoth belly. It took only a second for Evangeline to realize she’d never seen this girl before.

  And now, as Evangeline adjusted the pillow under her head waiting for the doctor, she thought maybe the Sammy she’d seen in the lunchroom and halls had planned to say something mean or maybe she hadn’t. Hard to be sure. All she knew is the Sammy she met yesterday had softened her eyes, her breath quickening a little, probably scared of being someone new, and said with true sorrow, “I’m sorry. I really am.”