by Lee Martin
“It’s Sunday,” I told him. “Katie’s at church.”
“Sunday,” he said after a pause. “I thought it was Monday. In the summer, you know, one day’s just like the rest. I feel like a ninny. Such a mistake.”
At the time I thought it was strange, but not so odd as to be unbelievable. Mr. Dees always acted a little different from most folks, like he was in his own world. A confusion. Nothing more.
“I didn’t hear you knock,” I said. “I didn’t hear the doorbell.”
“Oh, sometimes people forget I’m coming. Sometimes they go somewhere and they’re late getting back. I usually let myself in and wait.”
So there I was, face-to-face with Mr. Dees, and I didn’t know what else to say. Later, I would wonder why, if what he told me was true, he hadn’t used the guest bathroom downstairs. It would come to me that the sound of the drawer opening and closing had come from Katie’s room.
“I’ll be going then,” he told me. Then he shook his head. “Such a dolt I am. Sunday. Don’t tell your parents. Please. They’ll think I’m an idiot. They’ll think, What can he possibly teach Katie? He doesn’t even know what day it is.”
He walked down the stairs. He didn’t hurry. He even stopped at the mirror by the front door and straightened the knot in his necktie. Then he let himself out, and our house was quiet, that lazy, Sunday quiet I’d always loved.
Clare
THERE CAME a time that day—yes, I’m talking about that Thursday, the sixth—when the police finally stopped asking me questions (mercy, so many questions my head was spinning) and it was just me, alone in the house, the way it was after Bill died, when I didn’t rightly know how my life, without him, would pick up and go on.
Keep looking up, Mama used to tell me. There’s nothing on the ground but your feet.
The police took away a pair of Ray’s overshoes. They took a pair of knives he used to cut bait. I told them that’s what they were, but they took them anyway. They took the burn barrel. A tow truck came and hauled away the pickup.
Could I see him? I wanted to know.
“No, ma’am,” Chief Evers said. “Not just now.”
It was so quiet in the house after everyone had gone—only the Regulator clock ticking and the refrigerator humming when it came on. The policemen and the detectives had left their smells: the leather of their gun holsters, their aftershave lotions, their hair tonics, the cigarettes they smoked. Everything seemed strange to me. I moved through the house the way I did after Bill died, afraid to sit down, unable to sleep, staring at the furniture, the rugs, the pictures and doodads hanging on the walls—things I’d seen every day of my life for years, only now it seemed that they belonged to someone else. That was how I felt the day they took Ray away in handcuffs—like I was in someone else’s house, like I was living some other woman’s life.
I kept imagining that soon I would hear the back door open and then Ray calling to me like this was just any night, “Darlin’, name your paradise.”
Did I think he’d kidnapped Katie Mackey like they said—snatched her off a street corner uptown when it was still light?
Don’t ask me such a thing. Do you really think I could lay down every night with a man I thought might do like that?
If that’s what you think, then you won’t want to hear the rest. You won’t have room in your heart for the story of how that evening, after the police left me alone, I opened the bedroom closet, stepped inside, and closed the door. There in the dark, I breathed in air that was still familiar to me, still a comfort, not dirtied up with the smells the policemen left. I picked out what I knew: the powdery smell of my Secret deodorant cream on my uniform dresses, Ray’s Hai Karate cologne on his good shirts, the smells of sweat and mortar and clay bricks on his twill work suits. I ran my hands over that twill, petting the shirts and pants, and at one point I put my arms around a shirt and I hugged it to me, just like I was a young girl mooning over a boy, only inside I knew I was old and at the end of something. The shirt was all air. It caved in when I tried to hold it, and I cried because I missed Ray so much, and maybe, just maybe, I sensed somewhere deep inside me that he wasn’t ever coming home.
That’s the part you won’t abide if you’ve already made up your mind—if you’ve decided that there are people in the world whose lives don’t matter because they’re ragtag, full of wrong turns and dead ends and stupid choices, if you’ve decided I’m one of those.
You’ll want to hear instead about later that night when I was sitting in the dark house—just sitting, not knowing what to do with the strange turn my life had taken—and suddenly there was a knock on the front door. I hoped in my heart of hearts that it was Ray, that the police had finally seen that they had made a mistake and now he had come home to me, but deep down I knew it wasn’t true. That knock was a mousy tapping, not the sort of knock he would have made, and anyway, why would he knock on his own door? Then I heard a voice—“Clare? Clare, are you awake?”—and I knew it was Henry Dees.
I went to the door and laid my hand on the knob. It was cool in my palm, even though the night was sultry and still.
“Clare,” he said, and it gave me a spooky feeling, like he could tell I was standing there on the other side. “It’s about Ray,” he said. “Clare, let me in.”
I didn’t want to open the door. If I opened it and saw Henry Dees, I’d know the police had questioned him and then let him go. I’d know what that meant about Ray.
“I know all about you and that little girl,” I said. “That girl they’re looking for.”
“You don’t know everything. Clare, it’s not your fault.”
Yes, you’ll want to know about how I opened the door and let Henry Dees come into my house. You’ll want me to tell you that we sat in the front room—me in the rocking chair by the window, him across from me on the couch—and I never turned on a light. I listened to his voice—calm and gentle—and I never said a word until he was done.
He said he knew I’d turned the police onto him. He said he didn’t blame me for that. He knew what it seemed like, especially if Ray had told me the stories he suspected that he did. Did he spy on Katie Mackey? Yes. It was a fact he couldn’t deny. Did it mean that he was guilty of something? Just loving her, he said. Like she was his own.
We sat there in the dark a good while, and I could hear him swallow from time to time, as if he was trying to choke something down. When he finally spoke again, it was like there were twigs stuck in his throat, bits of dried leaves, dead grass, straw, a bird’s nest made from misery.
“Clare,” he said, and it was like everything had gone away—all the noise—and it was just us, me and Henry Dees, saying things no one else could hear. “Clare, after Bill died, I used to think about you down here in this house. I used to walk by after dark and see a light on back in the bedroom—oh, it was so faint, just a little speck of light—and I’d know you were getting ready to go to sleep because it was better to do that than to face all those minutes alone. You and I know that, don’t we, Clare? That loneliness. I’ve known it all my life.”
“Bill had a mermaid tattooed on his arm,” I said, because I didn’t know how to tell Henry Dees what I really wanted to, that yes, he was right. When someone you love disappears, it’s like the light goes dim, and you’re in the shadows. You try to do what people tell you: put one foot in front of the other; keep looking up; give yourself over to the seconds and minutes and hours. But always there’s that glimmer of light—that way of living you once knew—sort of faded and smoky like the crescent moon on a winter’s night when the air is full of ice and clouds, but still there, hanging just over your head. You think it’s not far. You think at any moment you can reach out and grab it. Bill used to sing “Fly Me to the Moon,” and he’d really jazz up that part about playing among the stars. “Do you remember that mermaid?” I asked Henry Dees. “Bill could make it dance the hootchy-kootchy.” Then, although I hadn’t planned to say anything like it at all, I said, “I’m sorry Bill and m
e never had kids. A boy. That’s what I wish. A son so I could see Bill in his face. So I could have that much the rest of my life.”
Henry Dees let that be. Lord love him. He didn’t say a word. He didn’t tell me I was silly to be as old as I was and to wish such a thing, didn’t throw a pity party and say, “Oh, I know what you mean.” He didn’t have to. I knew that already, and what’s more, I knew that I had told him, without saying as much, that I understood how lonely all these years had been for him. That I knew how a girl like Katie Mackey could carry a light to him, that I believed him when he said he never would have hurt her.
That’s when I felt the truth rise up in my throat, a knot of grief so hard and tangled I swore it would choke me. This is the part you’ve been waiting for, the ones of you who think I only got what I deserved. This moment when it all hit me. I tried to take a breath, felt the ache in my throat and chest, thick and rough like the cement blocks Ray had stacked and mortared to make that garage, the place where he hid his truck that night I found him setting fire to his clothes in the burn barrel. The sob that tore loose from me was a miserable sound I’ve never been able to forget, like everything inside me was scraped away and I was nothing more than a white uniform dress or a cook’s apron hanging from the clothesline, flapping in the wind.
Henry Dees got up from the couch. I felt him move toward me in the dark. I heard the soles of his shoes scuffing over the floorboards. He laid his hand on my head. He stroked my hair. “Clare,” he said in a voice, patient and kind, the way I imagine people talk all the time in Heaven.
Raymond R.
AND I HAD nothing to hide then, and I don’t have anything to hide now.
July 7
IT WAS RAINING again on Friday. Gilley woke to the pop and crack of thunder, the rattle of the rain beating against his bedroom window. It was barely daylight, but he could hear his parents moving about downstairs. He suspected that they had been awake for hours, had perhaps never gone to bed. He heard the tap-tap of cupboard doors closing, the rattle of teacups. Coffee was brewing. The radio was playing the State Farm Insurance jingle about being a good neighbor. It might have been any summer morning: the fresh coffee, the radio, the rain. Only Gilley knew it could never be that kind of morning—ordinary and carefree—never again. Katie was gone, and no one could find her. What was worse, though he could barely allow himself to think it as the days went on, he feared that no one ever would.
He sat up in bed, and through the rain-streaked window he watched the tree branches jerk and thrash in the wind.
Junior and Patsy were sitting at the breakfast table, talking about Henry Dees.
“I remember something that happened awhile back,” Patsy said. “He told me Katie was a pretty girl. It gave me an odd feeling. The way he said it. That was the day you brought Katie the new bike.”
It was all too much for Patsy, remembering the way Katie had ridden the bike in lazy circles on the drive and how her squealing laugh had sounded. How many times since Wednesday evening, when they first knew that she was gone, had Patsy imagined that she heard that laugh, that this had all been a terrible dream and now Katie was home?
She took her hands away from her eyes and reached them out to Junior. “That night in Indianapolis,” she said. “We were so young. Both of us. We were just kids.”
“Patsy.” He held her hands and felt the strength of her fingers curling over his. He knew that she was trying to say that no matter how much she regretted that night and what she believed he had forced her to do, she had finally spoken her piece about it, and now the important thing was that the two of them were together, bracing themselves for whatever lay ahead. “Patsy,” he said again, “I can’t pretend to know what makes some folks do what they do, but I’ll tell you this about Henry Dees: I trust him. Besides, Tom Evers told me someone called that night and said he’d seen Katie talking to that man, that Wright, downtown where we found her bicycle. I think Tom’s got the right man.”
Gilley came down the stairs and moved into the dining room. There, through the archway that led to the kitchen, he saw his parents at the breakfast table. They were holding hands, and they had tipped their heads forward until they were touching. In that way, they sat quietly, and Gilley imagined that they were gathering strength from each other, trying to shut out the noise of the rain and the storm raging outside.
Just for this little while, they were alone together—no police officers milling through the house, no news reporters knocking on the front door, no neighbors breezing in with casseroles and good wishes. Gilley took it all in, the stillness of this scene: his parents holding hands, their heads tipped forward, nuzzling. They might have been young and just then falling in love. He felt he had no right to disturb them with what he was about to say.
Junior heard footsteps. He pulled his head up and saw Gilley coming into the kitchen, a look of misery on his face.
Patsy recognized it as her own. She could feel it in the slackness of her jaw, the tightness around her eyes, the knitting of her brow.
“Gilley,” she said. She got up from the table and went to him and hugged him, knowing that she was greedy for his substance, for the feel of his solid body in her arms. “Dear Gilley. You’re shivering.” She held him more tightly. “I can feel the goose bumps on your arms.”
Junior looked out through the window and saw that the rain was still coming down hard. He thought of all the searchers gathering now for another day of combing fields and woods. Some of the people were strangers to him. Some had come from other towns. There were Boy Scout troops and church fellowships, farmers and store owners, horseback riding clubs and lodge groups. Civil Air Patrol planes, Army helicopters, a team of search dogs flown in all the way from Portland, Oregon. Everyone looking for Katie. Soon he and Gilley would join them. He would tell the boy to get dressed, to grab rain gear, to shake a leg.
Then Gilley showed them the snapshot of Katie, the one he had found on the porch swing. He told them that on Sunday, when everyone but him had been at church, he had found Mr. Dees in the upstairs hallway. “He was just there,” he said. “He claimed he’d gotten the days confused, and he’d come to give Katie a lesson. He let himself in. He came upstairs.”
Patsy put her hand to her throat. “Gil, I told you. There’s something odd about that man. How can you trust him?”
Gilley held out his hand. In it was the snapshot of Katie, the one he had found on the porch swing. “Look on the back,” he told his father.
Junior turned the snapshot over and saw the handwriting, neatly spelling out Katie’s name, her age. He showed it to Patsy. She looked at the handwriting, the letters made of crisp lines and curls and tails. She’d seen that handwriting on Katie’s story problem sheets. She knew that Henry Dees had taken that snapshot from the corner of Katie’s dresser mirror, where it had been all summer, and, with his fountain pen, he had written her name and age on the back as if she were his child. She turned the snapshot over and saw Katie posed on the stone bench, the sunlight falling across her face.
“Gil,” Patsy said, “I know that handwriting. It belongs to Henry Dees.”
JUNIOR DROVE THROUGH the rain, thinking about the way Henry Dees had come into their home, had climbed the stairs to Katie’s room. At the time, what did it mean? An absentminded man. Odd duck. But now, of course, it was everything. He had stolen that snapshot, had written Katie’s name and age on the back as if he were claiming her. What else might he have done? Junior intended to find out.
The rain was still falling, slanting down with such fury that the trees and houses and the smokestacks at the glassworks wavered behind the curtain of rain as if they were shaking. Junior turned down the Tenth Street spur and drove into Gooseneck.
He didn’t even knock. Mr. Dees’s front door was unlocked, and Junior threw it open and stomped in, rainwater dripping from him.
Mr. Dees was at the kitchen counter, unwrapping the white butcher’s paper from a cut of meat. “I woke up feeling like a beefsteak for br
eakfast,” he said, not even bothering to give Junior a glance, as if he had been expecting him. “Steak and eggs,” he said. “Maybe some fried potatoes.”
Junior put his hands on him. He took Mr. Dees by the front of his shirt and shoved him back against the counter.
“You know something,” he said. “Something you’re not saying.”
The rainwater was running down his face, smarting his eyes. He squeezed them shut, and when he opened them, he saw that Mr. Dees had picked up a dish towel from the counter and was holding it up to him, inviting him with that simple gesture to take the towel, to dry his face, to tell him calmly what he wanted.
And that’s what Junior did. He let loose of Mr. Dees and took the towel and used it to dry the water from his face and arms. Outside, the rain had stopped. Junior could see that through the window above Mr. Dees’s sink. The sky was brightening. A single purple martin perched atop his tall house and began to sing. An ordinary thing like that. It overwhelmed Junior, made him think that if things were different, this would simply be another summer day. He sat down at Mr. Dees’s table, and for the longest time he couldn’t speak.
Mr. Dees didn’t move. He didn’t make a sound. He let Junior have the martin’s song with no noise to disturb it. Junior understood that—the kindness that Henry Dees was paying him—and he felt small in its presence.
Finally, he took the snapshot from his shirt pocket and laid it on the table. He raised his head and looked at Mr. Dees, not knowing what to say.
As it turned out, he didn’t have to say anything. Mr. Dees came to the table and sat down beside Junior, and quietly he said yes, he had been in Katie’s room, yes, he had taken the snapshot. He spoke about the life he had—years and years alone in this house—and how the children were the only light that got in. His children, he said, as bright as Heaven. And above all the others, Katie. His dear Katie. He loved her more than he could ever find words to say, loved her because she was funny and smart and spirited. But more than all that, she was kind.
