“Abby.” Sheriff Kahn looks like a mourner at a funeral he’s secretly excited about: like he’s trying a little too hard. Some tragedies are inexplicable. People run. Girls run away all the time. “I’m sorry to bother you so early.”
The morning light feels like a terrible uninvited houseguest. I stand there blinking and sweating, while Sheriff Kahn refracts light from his shoulders.
“Not as sorry as I am,” I say, and then immediately regret it. I try again. “Can I help you?”
“I have some bad news,” he says. I watch him force himself to look directly at me.
“I saw you called.” I pause, taking in his expression, but I can’t read it. “And honestly, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Kahn flinches. He waves a hand as if to shake off a fly. “I’m not here about that.” The pause is long enough to contract the whole world into a heartbeat. Not here about that means here about something else, and I make a sudden pivot to possibilities I didn’t even know I should fear. For a wild second I think he must be here about Kaycee Mitchell, or whoever was pretending to be her.
“I have some bad news about your father.”
What’s funny is that right away, it feels like I was waiting for him to say it.
“Can I come inside for a minute?” he asks, in a softer voice.
—
It’s amazing how many different ways there are to suffocate. You can suffocate in water as shallow as a puddle, by smothering and by choking. You can even suffocate by breathing if you’re breathing the wrong air.
It was TJ who found him. He went to see him just a few hours after our meeting with Dr. Chun. It was part of their routine. On Mondays he usually went over to inspect the trees of course and for a ginger ale. It seems important for me to tell Sheriff Kahn this, about the routine of it. It seems important for me to prove I knew his routine—at least, some small part of it.
I don’t know why I feel the need to give off the impression that I know more about my father’s daily life than I actually do—like when I justified renting my own place to Monty’s mother. Strangers make you feel like family should be the most important thing. Blood is thicker than water, that kind of thing. How are you supposed to act when it’s not?
TJ’s story is short. He says my dad seemed moody and confused. He talked a lot about my mother. He ranted about cancer and the government, how the disease was invented by a U.S. lab back in the fifties to try to get people off their Social Security.
He gave TJ his hacksaw as a gift, one of his favorite tools.
And then TJ called me twice, with no answer. Sheriff Kahn doesn’t say that part. I doubt he knows.
My head is full of ringing echoes, voices I can’t make out, someone screaming for air.
Sheriff Kahn tells me that TJ cried in his office. He feels guilty, he tells me, for taking the saw.
When TJ found him this morning, the car was still running in the garage, coughing out its last vapor of gas.
Sheriff Kahn tells me that he would have felt no pain. It’s a peaceful way to die. He tells me it’s just like sleeping.
I wonder whether when he opened up to me in the car, he’d already decided.
For a moment, I can’t remember if I hugged him when I said good-bye.
But I know I didn’t.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
I don’t sleep. I don’t eat much, either. But somehow a day slips by, and then two.
My father committed suicide two days ago now. Choked to death on his own car fumes. Maybe it was the confusion, maybe he was just too proud to be taken to the ground, or maybe his loss of faith was too dark to bear.
Sheriff Kahn is nice enough to give me those two days before returning to arrest me. Breaking and entering. Vandalism. Maybe he feels bad for me because he skips the handcuffs and just reads me a sworn statement made by the night manager at the U-Pack. Zombielike, I watch Kahn’s lips move as he explains what I did. That I failed to stop my car and present identification to the night manager. When he tried closing the gates, I steamrolled right on through them anyway. They don’t seem to know about Kaycee’s paintings, and how I hauled them off with me. Shitty security cameras, apparently.
The paintings are still stashed under my sofa and bed—I can almost smell them. I can’t bring myself to confess or return them. I’m even afraid to see them again—afraid that, like dead bodies, they’ll have started to rot.
“To be honest, what they’re after is a check. Frank Mitchell’s another story, though. He’s a wildcard. I know I don’t have to tell you that. He could press charges.”
Wildcard. The word makes me think of playing cards with Kaycee, sitting cross-legged on my porch. Whoever had won the last round got to pick a wild card, and Kaycee always picked the king of hearts. “Suicide King,” she called it, because of the knife drawn straight through his head.
“What were you doing out there, anyway?” Sheriff Kahn asks.
I’m too exhausted to lie. “Frank Mitchell got that unit right after Kaycee supposedly ran away.”
“Supposedly, huh?” Sheriff Kahn stands up, working his hat around and around in his hands. “I thought you wound up tracking her down.”
“Who told you that?” I say, feeling a spark of interest—the first spark in days, like a cigarette flaring in a dark lot.
“Your partner. Guy with the, ah, shirts. Said Kaycee gave you a call when she heard you were looking.” He pops his hat into place with one hand, like a cowboy in an old western movie.
“Joe’s not my partner anymore,” I say. “I’m suspended.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Sheriff Kahn says carefully. “What’d I tell you about rooting around in old messes? Let sleeping dogs lie. That’s what my grandma always said. Don’t get up,” he adds, though I haven’t offered to. “I’ll find my own way out.”
Before he can slip outside, I blurt out, “Don’t you want to know where she is?”
He stops, pivots, frowns at me. “Where…?”
“Kaycee Mitchell.” I force myself to look at him. “You’re not even curious where she ended up?”
“Not really,” he says, with a thin smile. “None of my business.”
“Florida,” I tell him, and for just a second, he freezes. Another ember sparks in the darkness. “Sarasota. You’ve got a timeshare down there, don’t you? Or was it a friend who loans you a place?”
“Take care of yourself, Abigail.” Sheriff Kahn opens the door. “Try and get some sleep. You’re not looking too good.”
—
I’ve been avoiding Condor’s calls, along with everybody else’s, and hiding out whenever I see him coming, no matter how long he stands on the porch. Now—three days after my dad died—he finally gives up knocking. But I hear a rustling sound and, after I’m certain he’s gone, I swing open the door to the night air. Tucked behind the screen door is an envelope marked with my name. Inside, enfolded in a soft bit of cotton, I find a beautiful fishing hook and a handmade lure, feathered and beaded in rich stripes of gold and blue, work my dad would have found impressive.
A short note is attached. I hope you catch your big fish.—Dave
Seeing his first name, a name he almost never uses, jolts something in me. I suddenly think I’m going to cry, am overwhelmed with the memory of his mouth on mine, the urgency of him, his anger, his concern.
Carefully, I rewrap the fishing hook and stuff it into the pocket of my dad’s old work vest. It still smells a little like he did: like car oil and Old Spice and wood shavings.
The note, too. I can’t bring myself to throw it out.
Dave.
—
The team returns to Chicago, and I bury my father with only TJ in attendance, under a bleak sky hinting at a storm that never comes. Although a few other people expressed interest in showing up for the funeral—Monty’s mother, Condor, and Brent among them—I know I won’t be able to stand the weight of their sympathy and how little I deserve it. Besides, it seems fitting t
hat my father’s burial is as lonely and brutal as his death.
Afterward, I stop at the gas station for two six-packs and what my dad would have considered party food: frozen mozzarella sticks, Hostess crumb cakes, nacho cheese dip from a jar, salsa and chips. The house is hot, and it smells. I haven’t yet been able to bring myself to start cleaning, and there are week-old dirty dishes in the sink attracting a swarm of flies.
Instead, we set up on the back porch, overlooking the woods. TJ brings Jim Beam, and he and I take turns sipping straight from the bottle, feet up on the railing, creaking back in the rocking chairs my dad built for my mother when I was a baby. My father’s mess has even spread to the porch: stacks of plywood, old air-conditioning screens, salvaged pipes, and electronics that haven’t worked in decades. The view has hardly changed since I was a kid, only gotten a little wilder, a little overgrown. I can see the hard glint of the sun off the reservoir—not the water itself, exactly, but little solar flares, as if something behind the trees is catching fire.
If I breathe deeply, I imagine I can smell the lingering smoke of a bonfire.
Only the present is solid. The past is smoke.
“You need any help sorting through your dad’s stuff, you let me know,” TJ says. He twists to grab the whiskey bottle with his “good” hand and we drink for a while in silence.
“What happened to your arm, TJ?” I ask him, when I’m drunk enough to think it’s a good idea. I’ve heard of phantom limb, of course, of people feeling a twinge in their missing fingers or getting an itch on an amputated kneecap. But I never heard of anyone with the opposite problem.
“IED,” he said. “Iraq, 2004. Blew up half our unit. I got lucky.” Then: “My friend Walt lost his head. He always made me swear I’d take his wedding ring back home to his wife, but I couldn’t get it. Too many bodies, and people blasting us from all sides. Eventually we had to pull out.”
I nod, even though his story doesn’t answer my question. Maybe the past doesn’t have to explain everything. Maybe it can’t.
—
It doesn’t take me long to pack up the rental. The hardest part is trying to move Kaycee’s paintings. I can’t just carry them openly. So I wrapped them and tied them all together, but now they have a gruesome kind of weight to them. I imagine I’ll have to cart them with me wherever I go, forever.
Hannah, Condor’s daughter, has returned from her grandparents’ house with a new toy: a plastic tablet she keeps about an inch from her nose. But she glances up from her perch on the front stoop when I wheel my suitcase out to my car.
“Are you leaving?” she asks me, very solemn, and when I nod she scrunches up her face. “Are you going back to Chicago?” She says Chicago like someone might say the moon.
“Nah.” I still have to dispose of my father’s things, get his house in order, sort through the accumulation of his junk. But my rental contract in Barrens is up and there’s already a new tenant scheduled to move in.
Maybe all along this is what my future held—what I tried so hard to escape, and what, ultimately, is inescapable. Time isn’t a line, but a corkscrew, and the harder I’ve pushed, the more I’ve drilled back into the past. “I’m going home.”
Chapter Thirty-Nine
TJ borrows an industrial-size Dumpster off a friend with a roofing business, and the next morning, I sort and dump. Mostly dump.
My father’s belongings hold no nostalgia, no feeling at all besides shudders of bad memories. Mismatched plastic place settings, holiday mugs, frayed chamois shirts, stained towels, a La-Z-Boy, a three-legged bookshelf: these are my inheritance. I chuck the contents of my dad’s refrigerator and spray the whole kitchen down with disinfectant, chasing insects out of the open windows with misty clouds of Windex.
I would throw out the whole refrigerator if I could lift it.
I’m lonelier than I’ve ever been in my life. My inbox fills up with e-mails in the days after my dad’s death—even Portland sends me a note, morbidly titled “Digging,” which I don’t bother to open—and then the communication, predictably, slows. Brent calls stubbornly, every day, always leaving a version of the same message. Hello, it’s Brent, I’m worried, please call me. An arrangement of flowers arrives, a wreath of lilies appropriate to an enormous church service. They go right in the trash.
I don’t want to see anyone. I can’t.
Ironically, Barrens has never been fuller; first the local news channels arrive to speculate about a growing corruption scandal. Protesters begin to gather outside of the Optimal gates, preaching the importance of clean water, and every day their camp swells. Then come ambulance chaser personal injury lawyers and lobbyists with their talking points and political agendas.
All of it seems distant, as if it’s happening in some other town. The few times I turn on the local news I’m surprised by Joe’s face, conferencing in from Chicago to give updates, and even by footage of the whole team hard at work looking busy and official in the Chicago office. No one on the team even mentions me.
The one exception is the county prosecutor, Dev Agerwal, suddenly the darling of Indiana news: he never fails to mention that a local woman, Abby Williams, tipped him off to long-standing corruption in the office of his predecessor and inspired his current mission to end Optimal’s influence in local and state politics. One enterprising reporter from WABC even tracks me to my father’s house. When I answer the door, carrying a trash bag rattling with junk from the bathroom cabinets, he takes a step backward and nearly tumbles off the porch. I tell him he has the wrong Abby Williams.
My days are achy and hot. Wearing my dad’s work vest, sleeping on the couch in the indent left by his body weight, sorting his belongings, making coffee that tastes like scorched grounds in the crappy drip machine: I feel as if I’m slowly slipping into my father, becoming him, bringing him back to life.
The only other company I have, besides TJ, is the mailman, who knocks on the door to tell me he can’t get anything in the mailbox because it hasn’t been emptied in two weeks. There isn’t any more to say, but still I find myself trying to delay his departure.
“What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever had to deliver?”
He hardly blinks. “I don’t open the mail, ma’am. That’s a federal crime.”
“You must have some idea, though,” I persist. “Bloody hearts gift-wrapped for exes, exploding glitter bombs, anything like that?”
He glances at the beer in my hand.
“Forget it,” I say. “Dumb question.”
“Nah. I’m just thinking. Trying to remember,” he says. “Every Christmas some of the kids send letters to the North Pole. I get letters to the tooth fairy, too.”
I wish I hadn’t asked. Loneliness turns from an ache to a hard punch. I think of all those rose-cheeked children, all those families at their dining room tables making wish lists: snowglobes of normalcy.
The mailman lifts his cap to palm some sweat off his hairline. “I once knew a widower kept sending his wife letters,” he adds. “A few months after the funeral the letters started coming. He’d leave one for me every day. No address, just a name and Rome, Italy. He’d convinced himself that she’d run off with somebody else. He told me she always wanted to go to Rome.” He shakes his head, plays with the buttons on his uniform with stained fingers. “He wrote her every day until he died, begging her to come back. Funny, isn’t it? He’d rather she had an affair. He wanted her alive, even if it meant she’d done him wrong.” He shakes his head.
“Funny,” I echo.
He nods and turns back to his truck.
I stand there for a while, looking out over nothing, leaving sweat prints on my father’s mail, thinking about that old man sending letters to his dead wife, thinking about Misha and Frank Mitchell, everyone insisting Kaycee had run away. Maybe Condor was right—maybe it wasn’t so much a lie as it was wishful thinking. Maybe they just wanted to believe she’d escaped.
Wanted to believe they’d let her.
My father’s
mail is all coupons and junk mail, plus a flyer—obviously recent—calling for residents to show up to a town meeting about the water crisis. I’m about to chuck all of it when a manila envelope slides out from between a wedge of leaflets and skitters across the floor.
There’s no address, only a name marked in neat Sharpie: Ms. Abigail Williams.
As I reach for it, my whole body seems to pour down into my arm, into my fingers fumbling off the tape keeping it closed. Instinct. Premonition.
Inside, there is no note, only a dozen Polaroid photographs, all of high school girls. High school girls topless, posing, making kissy faces despite the obvious drunken blur of their eyes. Girls unconscious on couches, legs splayed so their underwear is visible. One naked, entirely, her face obscured by the glare of a flash.
Sophie Nantes is in one of the pictures, her skirt hitched to her waist, hair catching in smeary lipgloss, eyes half-lidded from alcohol. I sort through the photographs carefully, more than once, even though it turns my stomach.
Apart from Sophie Nantes and a girl I identify as one of the friends who tailed her in Tatum’s hospital room, I recognize three other faces.
All of them have pictures hanging in the new community center.
Five girls, all of them the new bright stars of Optimal’s youth scholarships, hand-selected by the vice principal of Barrens High School.
Chapter Forty
Lilian McMann looks surprised to see me, though I called to let her know I was coming. Or maybe she’s just surprised by how bad I look. Catching sight of myself in the mirror mounted behind the reception desk, I get a sudden thrill of the unfamiliar: a girl with hollow eyes, blue-tinged skin. A stranger who bears only a passing resemblance to the reflection I remember.
It probably doesn’t help that I’m still wearing a pair of paint-splattered jeans and my dad’s work vest.
“Come in,” she says. “Can I get you anything? A water? Tea?”
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