by Julia Keller
And then he dropped the pencil.
Jake leaned over in his chair to try to retrieve it, but couldn’t; it had rolled too far away. He scooted forward, but overshot the mark. Now he needed to scoot backward.
“Damn,” he muttered. Cursing out loud when there was nobody else around was a special kind of pleasure, he’d discovered. You didn’t have to apologize to anybody. You could really let loose.
And all I can come up with is “Damn”? Well, it’s late. And I’m tired.
There. Finally he was able to reach the pencil. He grunted, sitting up straight in his chair again.
It was now twenty-eight seconds past midnight.
Had he not dropped the pencil—this would occur to Jake a few hours later, as he lay in his bed and pondered the night’s big event, one obviously destined to have consequences stretching into the weeks and months ahead—he would have flipped the switch precisely at midnight, the designated time, and the call would have gone to Blythesburg.
He would not have known what had just happened in the driveway of the home belonging to Brett and Ellie Topping.
He would have found out later, of course. This was Acker’s Gap, and eventually everyone knew everything. But there would have been a delay of several hours before the news came back around again to its birthplace. In the meantime, the Blythesburg dispatcher would have summoned whatever unit was closest—Raythune County or Collier County, it didn’t matter, just as long as somebody got there—and Jake could have slept through the night, perhaps not peacefully, because after all he never slept peacefully, but at least without the heavy psychic residue of the knowledge that attached itself to him when the call came in at approximately thirty seconds after midnight, and he answered, and a ragged, desperate voice invaded his headset:
“Help me—please—help me—Oh my God, Oh my God—” she screamed, high and wild.
Second night on the job, Jake thought. Figures I’d get more than a cat up a tree.
“Ma’am, what’s the nature of your—”
“Help me—my husband—please, please—” Again the words were hijacked by screams.
“Are you located at…” Jake snapped off the address that had popped up on his screen. Good neighborhood, was the thought that occurred to him. Unusual: Typically 911 calls came from the same few trouble-prone sectors. He knew that from his days as a deputy.
“Yes,” the out-of-control voice confirmed. “Oh my God—please—”
“What’s going on? Do you need an ambu—”
“He’s in the driveway! Oh my God—”
“Are you in danger? Do you need—?”
“No—I just came home and found my husband—I don’t know—” She screamed again, as if the screams were somehow grounding her more effectively than his words did.
“Ma’am, I’m sending a squad right now.” Jake kept his voice professional and calm but that was not an accurate reflection of what was going on inside him. As a deputy, he’d had plenty of perilous moments and he was known for keeping his cool, but that was three years ago. And now, unlike then, he was stuck in this chair. He felt as helpless as this woman must feel, his heartbeat clattering in his chest.
He called the number for any available squad. Would it be Molly and Ernie Edmonds, her partner? She wasn’t scheduled to work tonight—it was her second night off in a row, an unbelievable luxury—but that meant nothing. She was often called in when the shifts got too busy.
Jake rattled off the address. It was read back to him through a thorny forest of static.
“Squad’s on the way,” he said, switching back to woman. “Be there in minutes. What’s your name, ma’am?”
“Ellie Topping.”
“And you’re sure you’re safe.”
“He’s dead. I know he’s dead.” She let out a new kind of scream, an animal scream that reverberated through Jake’s entire body, at least the parts of him that could still feel. At the same time, he could hear the sound of a distant siren through the phone line; sounds traveled far and fast on cold autumn air.
“Ellie,” he said, using her name, the way Bev had advised him to do. Establish a rapport. “Listen to me. The squad’s coming. Just wait right there. They’ll know what to do.”
“Brett—Brett—oh my God. Oh my—”
He kept talking to her, trying to wedge in his words through the shrieks. He didn’t know how much time passed. Only minutes, he’d find out later, but it felt like hours. He could only imagine how long it had felt to her: days, maybe.
Then, through the phone, Jake heard shouts, the heavy scrape and pant of a very large engine, the stomp of heavy boots on concrete. More screams from the caller. He heard people talking rapidly, giving instructions. And then the line cut off.
The professionals were there. He’d done his job. He could stand down.
He started to make his report, add the last call to the log. But he found that he couldn’t type. Not just yet. His hands were shaking too much. He swallowed several times; suddenly there didn’t seem to be enough saliva in his mouth.
Even though the call had ended, Jake somehow kept hearing the woman’s screams. He knew that didn’t make any sense. He knew he wasn’t really hearing her screams—but still. They were there.
Yes: They were there. He imagined that he could see the screams now as well as hear them; they were vivid red streaks against the iron blackness of the night. Her screams were anguished and lost, rising and rising until they had clawed their way to the tops of the mountains, the visible limit of this sunken world.
Three years previously
Bell came back out onto the front porch. Shirley sat on the swing, It was dark—neither of them had any desire to turn on the porch light, and Bell had turned off the living room light when she left the house—and so Bell could not see her sister’s face.
She didn’t need to. Not really. She knew every line in that face, every hollow. She knew the sad eyes and the way the flesh on her neck separated into vertical folds.
Bell would carry a picture of that face forever. She would carry it not the way you do an actual photograph—in a phone or a computer file or a wallet or an album—but in a much safer place.
She would carry it in her bones.
“So you did it,” Shirley said. Her words seemed to come from a long way off, as mournful as the hoarse call of a faraway train. “You wrote a letter of resignation.”
“Yeah. I’ll deliver it to the courthouse in the morning,” Bell said.
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I know.”
“I didn’t tell you those things so that you’d blow up your life.”
“I know that, too.”
“So why are you doing it?”
Bell rose and moved restlessly around the porch. Her pacing did not have any particular pattern. It was motion without direction. Action without the expectation of progress. Kind of like my life from now on, she thought, and then she banished the thought from her brain because it reeked of self-pity. Stank of it.
The death of their father, Donnie Dolan, when Bell was ten and Shirley sixteen, was the defining moment of their lives. Tonight, Shirley had told Bell the truth: It was Bell, not Shirley, who had killed him. It was Bell, not Shirley, who had slit the throat of the abusive man they always called “the monster.”
Yet Shirley had taken the blame. In the last few desperate minutes they had together before the authorities arrived, she had made Bell believe that she—Shirley—had murdered Donnie Dolan.
Not Bell. Not the real culprit.
And so it was that Bell went on to college, law school, and then the prosecutor’s job. Shirley went to prison.
A terminal cancer diagnosis had brought Shirley here to Bell’s front porch tonight. Her mission was simple: She needed Bell to know the truth at last. To wipe the slate clean between them, so that she could die in peace. But things had quickly moved beyond Shirley’s control. Bell—her stubborn, headstrong, infuriating, beloved little sister—
was going to tell the whole world.
“I wanted to keep it between us,” Shirley said, speaking again because Bell hadn’t. “This is nobody else’s business. You can go on being prosecutor. Nothing has to change.”
“Everything has to change,” Bell said.
“I don’t know why you have to—” Shirley’s cough came upon her quickly. It was violent and prolonged, and it made her whole body shake. That shaking, in turn, made the swing twist and shimmy.
“Can I get you a glass of water? What can I—”
“No.” Shirley, recovered now, took several deep breaths. “Happens.” She patted the spot on the swing next to her. “Sit. That’s what you can do for me.”
Bell sat. “What did the doctors tell you?”
“Not much. I’m supposed to get my treatment plan in a couple of days. In Charleston.”
“No. Not Charleston. I’m taking you to another hospital. A better one. Somewhere else. We’re going to fight and fight hard.” Delivered like a manifesto. Bell Elkins, on the case.
“Won’t matter, Belfa.” Shirley’s voice was calm, a soft repudiation of Bell’s drive and determination. “Lung cancer—it’s the kind of thing you don’t recover from. We both know that. I don’t want you going to all that trouble for something that’s not gonna make a difference. Okay?”
Bell felt Shirley’s hand on her knee. That protective hand, the one she’d felt even when Shirley wasn’t present, when Shirley was far away, locked up. Shirley had always taken care of her.
Now it was Bell’s turn to take care of Shirley.
“We have to fight,” Bell declared.
“Do we?”
Bell shook her head. It was after midnight. The level of fatigue in her sister’s voice was alarming. “We can discuss all of this in the morning, okay? I’ll let it go for now.”
“Deal.” Shirley coughed again, but this time it didn’t go on quite so long. It didn’t make her entire body shudder, the way the earlier cough had. “Too damned tired to argue.” The next time she spoke, a tease had made its way into her tone. “Besides—who in the world ever won an argument with Belfa Elkins? Nobody, that’s who.”
Bell teased her right back. “Oh, but sometimes I let you win, right? Just to keep things interesting.”
* * *
A week and a half later they walked through the glass double doors of the James Cancer Center in Columbus, Ohio. Shirley had agreed to an appointment with a top oncologist there.
That was the exact term Bell had Googled: “top oncologist.” Too many names emerged in her initial search and so she refined it, adding “lung cancer” and “Eastern and Midwestern US.” The name “Frank Karsko, M.D.” popped up enough times to catch Bell’s eye. His office was at the James, on the Ohio State University campus.
Bell had driven them here, rented a room at the Holiday Inn Express near the hospital. The day of the journey was lovely. The colors of the leaves along the way had seemed especially emphatic and intense, the reds and yellows and russet browns, as if they were all clamoring for attention, like dressed-up characters in a parade. Shirley slept for most of the three-hour drive. Bell was sorry that she had missed the leaves, but it didn’t seem worth it to wake her up to see them.
She knew that she’d worn Shirley down to get her to agree to the appointment. How’s it feel, little sister? Shirley had said, a saucy grin on her emaciated face. She’d awakened just as they pulled into the motel parking lot. You pressured a helpless cancer patient. Browbeat a sick person. Bell grinned right back and said, Too easy. It was a snap.
Then, seriously: But thanks, Shirley. For doing this.
By now, Bell’s resignation from the prosecutor’s post was old news. A special election was scheduled to replace her. Rhonda Lovejoy was acting prosecutor. Bell’s trial date had been postponed while she dealt with the opening stages of Shirley’s treatment.
They had a long wait until Dr. Karsko could see them. Two hours and fourteen minutes after their appointment time, they were escorted into a small room with brown walls and minimal furniture. Karsko swept in, the bottom of his white lab coat flapping around his knees as if he always moved so fast that the hem never had a chance to settle. He was a lean, fierce-looking man with a sharp nose, black crew cut, ice-blue eyes, swarthy complexion, and absolutely zero interpersonal skills, which was just fine with Bell: She wasn’t looking for a pal.
While they sat and watched him, Karsko read the report from the Charleston hospital. He held floppy scans up to a lighted box. He checked something on his laptop. He did not react to anything he saw. At no point—Bell was struck by this fact—did he touch Shirley, or even seem particularly interested in her. His attention was solely focused on data. Test results. Shirley’s prognosis was a matter of figures now, of percentages and ratios and graphs. Lung cancer came with long, daunting odds. But I don’t care about your damned numbers, Bell wanted to shout at the man. This is my sister—and she’ll be the exception.
* * *
And then they had to wait. Again. Waiting was their new reality.
Waiting, Bell realized, would henceforth define her sister’s life: waiting for a bed to become available so that she could start her chemo; waiting in a line of other people on gurneys for her radiation treatments; waiting for the nurses to deliver pain medication; waiting for the fleeting, infrequent visits by Dr. Karsko.
His coldness was consoling. He didn’t care about them as people. Bell could tell that he didn’t remember their names from one visit to the next, and had to check the chart each time. Shirley was a packet of information to him. Nothing more. He wasn’t distracted by anything warm or personal. Good, Bell thought. That’s how it should be.
So many times, in her own career, she had let emotions cloud her professional judgment. If you saw people as individuals, you were doomed. To be effective, you had to deal in aggregates.
The night before Shirley’s first round of chemo, a Tuesday dominated by an endless chilly rain, Bell and Shirley went out to dinner near their hotel. She made Shirley pick. Shirley had no appetite and didn’t care where they ate—“It all tastes like sawdust anyway”—but Bell still insisted that she make the selection. “Fine—Applebee’s, if they’ve got one,” Shirley said. She shrugged when she came up with the name.
“Everybody’s got one,” Bell said.
They settled into the booth. Told the too-cheerful waitress that, no, they didn’t want any appetizers and yes, they’d need another minute. Myriad streaks of rain had made a smeary mess of the dark window. The parking lot upon which they looked out was a wavy lake of drowned-looking cars.
“So I’m doing what you wanted,” Shirley said. “I’m fighting.”
Bell looked at her sister over the top of the tri-fold menu. Where was this going?
“And so,” Shirley went on, “you owe me.”
Bell closed the menu and set it to one side. “Meaning what?”
“Meaning I don’t want you to stand trial. I know what people are saying. You don’t have to do it, Belfa. Nobody wants to punish you. You were a kid. And I lied to you. Tell me how it makes any sense—any damned sense at all—for you to go to prison. You’ve already resigned as prosecutor. That’s enough. Right?”
Bell didn’t answer. A gust of wind drove a fresh spatter of raindrops hard against the window, as if even the weather was trying to get her to relent.
“Belfa?”
“Better figure out what you want to eat. The waitress will be back any minute.”
“Belfa—listen to me.” Shirley was agitated now, leaning forward, her bony elbows on the wooden table. “All the years I was in prison—I can’t get them back. They’re gone. Is that what this is all about? I lost my life—and so you have to lose yours, too? It doesn’t work that way. It means that two lives get ruined. Not just one. What’s the point?”
“The salads looked pretty good. The burgers, too. Want to split an order of fries?”
“Is this some kind of martyr thing? Is that wh
at it is? Because that won’t help anybody. Not me, not you—nobody.”
No reply.
“Belfa.” A hectic gleam had come into Shirley’s eyes. “Why are you doing this? Tell me why. At least do that, okay? Just tell me. Nobody wants to punish you—so why are you so bound and determined to punish yourself?”
Bell picked up the menu again. She opened the sections and began to study it earnestly.
“Okay,” Shirley said. Defeat in her voice. She fell back against her seat, too tired to keep on trying. “Okay. You just be that way, little sister. You just keep your damned secret. Lord knows, you and I have had a lot of practice at that. We’re the best there is.”
* * *
Two days later, leaving the hospital by herself in the middle of the afternoon, Bell paused. She had just cleared the glass double doors on her way to the parking garage.
Up in the room on the eleventh floor, Shirley was in the midst of a grueling series of chemo treatments. Bell was going back to the Holiday Inn Express for a short break. She needed to be strong for Shirley, and right now, she was exhausted.
Yet something caught her eye. Two people had passed her, going in the opposite direction—a pretty, middle-aged woman and a much older man. The man was leaning heavily on the woman.
“Excuse me,” Bell said. This was totally out of character—accosting a stranger—but she couldn’t help herself. “I know you, don’t I? Don’t you live in West Virginia? Acker’s Gap?”
“That’s right.” The woman blushed slightly. “I thought I recognized you, too. Aren’t you Bell Elkins?”
“Yes.” Bell snapped her fingers. “Now I remember. You’re Brett Topping’s wife, right? We met at the county commission meeting last year. For the new stoplight.” A group of citizens had petitioned the commission to change a four-way stop near Yeager Elementary School to a stoplight. Too many drivers were blowing through the stop sign. “I’m sorry—I don’t remember your name,” Bell said. “I know Brett through the bank.”
