As Wide as the Sky

by Jessica Pack

  “I’m sad we won’t get that,” Melissa said. “Even Paul didn’t know Robbie before he got sick.”

  “We can have it with each other,” Amanda said. “We shared a lot of good years with him.”

  “Yeah,” Melissa said. “And maybe you’re right, maybe this guy has a good memory we can add to the others. We’ll see you on Saturday.”

  14

  Steve

  Ten years, five months, two days

  It was almost 7:00 when Steve finally got home. He changed out of the Brigham Brothers polo shirt and jeans, and put on an old NASCAR T-shirt and flannel pajama bottoms. He made fried eggs for dinner and turned on the Cavaliers game. It was the second quarter when his phone rang. He glanced at the screen before answering.

  “Hey, Rachelle,” he said as though they were old friends. Which, technically, they were. They’d been friends before they started dating their junior year. Then lost that friendship somewhere between her telling him a few weeks before high school graduation that she was pregnant, and him throwing up his hands and walking away ten years later. Would he ever talk to her without remembering how badly he’d treated her? He paused the game. “What’s up?”

  “Well, I hate to ask . . .” She trailed off, not finishing her sentence. It used to drive him nuts the way she’d do that, like she didn’t want to actually ask for something so she’d set it up so that the person on the other end of her question had to do it for her. Now it was just a quirk.

  “Ask,” Steve said with a laugh.

  “Well, I’m planning out next week and the guest toilet is running and the bottom hinge on my pantry door is stripped out or something. So, I was wondering . . .”

  “Could I do it Thursday morning?” Steve turned the phone to speaker and toggled to his calendar. He had the last part of the week off so he could go see his mom for a long weekend—he hadn’t taken any time off for Christmas so that his guys could have more flexibility but he’d promised Mom to clean out her basement as soon as he could get away. “I could try and make it over earlier in the week, but I’ve only got Sunday off before then and I’ll be working long days because of the trip, but maybe I could—”

  “Thursday is perfect,” Rachelle interrupted. “I’ve been meaning to ask for a couple of weeks and keep forgetting—which is why I’m calling you instead of talking about it at Emma’s party, but well . . .”

  “I could come by around ten thirty—would that work?”

  “That’s perfect,” Rachelle said, her tone relieved. “I should probably just hire someone for stuff like this, but with Mitch’s medical bills piling up and my working extra hours as it is and . . .”

  “It’s not a big deal,” Steve said when he realized she wasn’t going to finish the thought again. “How’s Mitch doing?”

  Mitch and Rachelle had been dating when Steve moved back to Florence just over a decade ago. It was awkward at first even though Steve hadn’t come back with the expectation of him and Rachelle getting back together. Rachelle married Mitch a year later. Nine months ago, Mitch was diagnosed with cancer: non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. His chances for recovery were good, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have a battle ahead of him.

  “He gets his treatments on Fridays, and it lays him flat for the weekend,” Rachelle said, then must have noticed the heaviness of her tone because it suddenly lightened. “He’s usually feeling better by Tuesday, though, and is able to work the rest of the week. It’s a blessing.”

  She’d started going to a new church after Steve had left; that was where she met Mitch. She talked a lot about blessings and gifts from God now, but he knew her faith wasn’t dispelling her fear entirely. Mitch was supposed to be her reward for what Steve had done.

  “I’ll run to Home Depot before I come over and get a new flapper for the toilet. Do you need help with anything else while I’m there?”

  “Just the toilet and the pantry door. Max said you’re heading down to Decatur. This won’t get in the way of your trip, will it?”

  “Nope,” Steve said. “I’ll do it on my way south. Is the spare key still under that same paving stone?” Mitch was an accountant and good at a lot of things, but he wasn’t very handy. At family events Mitch would ask Steve how to do something, like re-caulk the sink or fix the clothes dryer, and in the end Steve would offer to come do it and Mitch would say he could probably figure it out. Steve would assure him he didn’t mind, and Mitch would relent. Steve would then replace the furnace filter or fix the sticking drawer and feel like he’d fixed something from those lost years too. Dealing with Rachelle directly hadn’t started until Mitch got sick.

  “Yes, but you’re sure you don’t mind?” Rachelle asked. “I don’t want to mess up your trip—I know you don’t get down there very often.”

  Both he and Rachelle were from Decaturville, and it was where they’d been living when he left her. If she hadn’t gotten pregnant in high school, she probably would have gone on to law school and become an attorney. Instead she’d raised three boys, first on his paltry salary, and then on her own paltry salary. Rachelle and the boys had been forced to move in with her parents once he was gone, and his parents paid for her to take some night classes so that she could become a paralegal and make more than minimum wage. She was offered a job in Florence once she graduated and moved almost four hundred miles north of her support system. Her family still hated Steve for what he’d done, and he couldn’t blame them. She still worked for that law firm. She was good. Really good. But she would never be an attorney. Fixing toilets and pantry doors was a lousy payback for what he owed her.

  “I’m happy to do it, and it won’t take me long.”

  “Thanks, Steve. We really appreciate it.”

  “Of course.”

  They finished the call and Steve pressed play on the TV. He washed the dinner dishes during the final quarter—the Cavs lost—confirmed with Max via text messages that he’d be babysitting for them tomorrow night, and then got ready for bed. The house was always quiet, but it felt emptier than usual tonight. He thought about his other boys while he turned off the lights and checked the locks. He called Jacob and Garrett every Sunday, since they both lived out of state now. Garrett had had a big project due this week in his domestic economics class. Jacob, his middle son, was living in Virginia and working for a cabinet company. He didn’t usually answer Steve’s calls, but they had texted a little last week and Steve took that as a good sign. While brushing his teeth, Steve let his thoughts drift to Tara from work. What would it be like to date her? Her kids were young, under ten he thought. He shook his head as though he’d asked a question. He wasn’t interested in Tara. He’d gotten a second chance at life because Rachelle had worked with him on payments and because his boys had forgiven him for the turmoil he’d caused. He was happy with things the way they were. Besides, dating a coworker was always a bad idea. Right?

  It wasn’t until he turned off the bedroom light and was feeling his way to the bed that he thought about that Mallorie guy again. He’d meant to read up on him a little bit. Tomorrow before he went into work, maybe. He got into bed and rolled onto his side, facing the window and listening to the sound of cars going by on the street.

  15

  Amanda

  One day, eleven hours, forty-two minutes

  Amanda waited outside of Skyline High School Friday afternoon after having made good time on the drive. According to the bell schedule posted online, there would be a class break in about two seconds. When the mechanical bell sounded, she entered the front doors, blending with the mêlée of students as she walked past the reception area. This situation didn’t necessitate a conversation with anyone, and therefore she’d planned her entrance to avoid one.

  She reached the library a few minutes later—identified via the evacuation maps posted intermittently through the halls—and stepped out of the gurgling mass of students making their raucous way to class. What was it about teenagers that made transitions, which could be carried out in absolute si
lence, such rowdy affairs? Back when she’d taught in an actual school, she’d had a theory that, for boys especially, their vocal cords were connected to their arms and legs. They could not physically move without making noise about it.

  A thin boy with blond hair came careening around the corner, looking over his shoulder to laugh at something. He almost ran into her, except that she stepped to the side, butting her shoulder against the wall.

  “Sorry,” he said, facing forward and catching her eye. He lifted a hand to push the shaggy hair off his face. For an instant, he was Robbie. She knew he wasn’t, of course. He was too tall and this boy had brown eyes and thicker hair. Yet he was Robbie, in a sense. Robbie had been young, carefree, happy, and innocent within the walls of a high school not much different from this one. Once upon a time.

  “It’s fine.” Amanda looked away; the eye contact was almost painful. The boy moved forward, his mind already past the middle-aged woman he’d nearly run over. His future was wide open—“As wide as the sky,” Amanda used to tell her children when they would stress or strain over some aspect of their future. “There is nothing in your way, your potential is limitless.” Then, bit by bit, choice by choice, that sky became a window. Not that every choice was bad, only that choices imposed focus, which in and of itself invoked natural limits. Choosing which college to attend limited the people and ideas they would be exposed to. When Melissa had become Paul’s girlfriend, her future, to a point, had become set. She changed her major from Accounting to Elementary Education because a career that would allow her to stay on the same schedule as her no-longer-vague children had become important. Amanda had been proud to have her daughter follow in her footsteps and pursue teaching, proud of Melissa’s ability to see her future and plan accordingly, and she was relieved to like the man Melissa was falling in love with. But the choices were limiting all the same. Not every choice led to a better path, the way Melissa’s had, and therefore resulting in a lovely window with amazing views. These kids here at Skyline High School still had the sky above and around them. Endless chances to be and do and become. One day—not too distant for some of them—their sky would start becoming a window. And for a few, a very few she hoped, the window would disappear completely. Like Robbie’s. Like hers? She’d chosen to love her son to the end, and that choice had made her window very small.

  Is that where the analogy ends, she wondered? Or could she bring the sky back into her life? Could new choices usher in an expansion of the view, change the location, and bring the light back in?

  The glass-walled library brought her back to the present and Amanda slowed her steps. As she pushed through the doors, she glanced cautiously toward the desk. A black woman—the librarian, probably—and a student, perhaps a library aide, were looking at something on the computer together. A dozen or so students sat or stood in various spots around the room, wrapped in the library hush. Amanda quick-stepped behind a row of shelves in hopes no one would notice her. If they didn’t see her, they wouldn’t stop her, ask her who she was and what she was doing there. Even a simple interrogation was frightening.

  The yearbooks at Jefferson High in Sioux Falls had been kept on the back wall of the school library, out of the way, yet semi-archived and available. The kids liked to go back to old volumes sometimes, usually to make fun of the hair and clothes of yesteryear. This school’s library couldn’t be that different. Amanda headed toward the most likely place for the yearbooks to be stored—the corner farthest from the doors and tables.

  It took a few minutes for her to find her way from where she expected the yearbooks to be on the back wall and where they actually were—on an aisle—but the fact that she didn’t have to ask anyone and was still hidden from the reception desk calmed her nerves. The yearbooks went back as far as 1965, and Amanda counted the years in her mind as she moved forward in time. Eighty-five, eighty-six, eighty-seven—the year she’d graduated in Watertown, South Dakota—eighty-eight . . . She used one finger to tip the spine of the 1989 volume toward her, then pulled the book out with one hand. She considered taking the book to a table, where she could more conveniently look through it, but she didn’t want the librarian to see her. She also considered sneaking the book out in her purse but imagined the headlines: ROBERT MALLORIE’S MOTHER ARRESTED FOR THEFT.

  Amanda had always been someone who bottled emotion until the pressure forced everything out like a flash flood. As a little girl, she’d have her feelings hurt, but not react for days—usually not until she was alone so she didn’t have to feel bad about causing anyone else distress. After Robbie’s arrest, there had been so much to do that there was no time to give in to the building pressure. Lawyers to meet with. Criminal code to study. Neighbors, family, and friends to suffer with—she’d had neighbors, family, and friends back then. They would come over to console her, but they were the ones who seemed to draw the comfort. Not her. She shook inside her own head, counting the minutes until they would leave so she could finish the article on South Dakota’s requirements for capital punishment—Robbie met three of them: murder in a public place, murder of a law enforcement officer, and murder of a child under the age of thirteen. Dustin Sommer had been eleven. She’d told herself she needed to be informed, but she had already begun to shrivel up inside; she had felt it day by day.

  Then the trial started. Melissa came with her at first. Amanda’s mother flew out for a week until she couldn’t take it anymore. A few neighbors and friends tried to support her, but there was only so much they could do, especially as she continued to pull further inside herself. Eventually, only Amanda went to the courthouse. It was on one of those days, when she was attending alone with space on both sides of her because no one wanted to sit too close, that Robbie, sporting a fresh haircut, was led into the courtroom with manacles and a broken collarbone from a fight he’d gotten into over the weekend—he’d told her about it during his phone call the night before. He was being held at the jail during the trial, in the general population despite his dire charges. The prison doctor had put his arm in a sling to isolate the fracture, but the authorities still insisted he be manacled. She could tell the chains were hurting him when he met her eyes and gave the same sad, sheepish smile he gave her every day. She’d smiled back, sitting on her hands to keep from leaping the short wall that separated the viewers from the court. “Can’t you see this is hurting him?” she wanted to scream at the guards. “Surely you don’t think he’s going to get violent with a broken collarbone?” But, then, surely no one had expected he would go on a shooting rampage in a mall two weeks before Christmas.

  When Robbie had faced the judge, she caught sight of his first prison tattoo—he had not told her about this new development that must have been there before but gone unnoticed because his hair had been grown out. It was a spider on his neck. Anger had begun to rise in her chest—didn’t he know that would make him look like a criminal? Didn’t he care what she would think? It was a physical representation of how lost he was to her, how not-Robbie he had become, and it sent her mind into a panic.

  She’d held herself together throughout the day, then the dam had broken loose on the ride home. How could everything go so horribly wrong? The sentence repeated over and over in her head. The emotion built and boiled. She could not do this. She was not capable. She’d thought of pulling off the road when she couldn’t get control of herself, but she wanted to go home and lock herself inside and finish her breakdown under her covers. Alone and away from the world. At home she could cry until she fell asleep and wake up the next morning to go back to the courthouse again.

  Amid her overwhelming grief and sorrow she’d run a stop sign. There were no other cars in the intersection, no one was in danger, but a cop had seen it and pulled her over. She tried to apologize to the officer despite the fact that she could barely draw a breath. She said something about her son and that she needed to get home. He asked for her license and registration and went back to his car. She hadn’t even cared that she might get a ticket; sh
e just wanted him to hurry so she could go home. She’d put her head against the steering wheel and kept crying, unable to stop herself. She kept seeing that horrible tattoo while simultaneously castigating herself for focusing on that. Of everything Robbie had done, was it really a tattoo that she was upset about? A van pulled up behind her about the same time the cop came back, but she barely registered it. The cop didn’t say he knew who she was, but he did. He only gave her a warning, and said he’d follow her home to make sure she got there all right. The kindness was so unexpected she’d fallen apart all over again. Eventually she did as he said and drove home, comforted by his presence and forgetting all about that van.

  The next day her story was in the paper: ROBERT MALLORIE’S MOTHER ON THE WRONG SIDE OF THE LAW. The article claimed she was pulled over for reckless driving. There were pictures of her car from the back, the officer leaning into the window. In hindsight, she realized there had been a note of compassion included with the article, a reminder that Robert Mallorie had a mother who loved him and was upset as she’d left the courthouse that day. But it had felt like an invasion of her privacy at the time. It made her feel vulnerable and watched and distrustful. She’d wondered if the cop had called the newspaper reporter. Or had the van been following her from the courthouse? Were people watching her all the time? Waiting for her to do something the least bit sensational?

  Amanda blinked herself back to the present and reminded herself that she wouldn’t steal the yearbook so there was no fear of an article showing up in the newspaper about her doing so. Focus. Look how far you’ve already come. Everything is fine. She leaned her back against the bookshelf and opened to the yearbook’s index. She looked up “football team” then flipped to page 57 for the team photo. Thirty-some teenage boys looked back at her through grainy black-and-white portraiture and the shaggy hair that was all the rage in the mid-80s. Some smiled but most didn’t, attempting, it seemed, to strike a more sophisticated pose. We are football players. We are too tough to smile for the camera. Amanda scanned their faces for a moment just in case she might recognize someone, but no one looked familiar. Number 76 was on the first row, second in from the left. He was sitting cross-legged on the ground rather than standing or “taking a knee” like the others. He had a hand on each knee, palm down, his head cocked to the side, and one eye closed as though squinting into the sun. Blond, broad, unsmiling. She scanned through the names listed beneath the photo until she matched the face to the name: Stephen Mathis.