What Remains of Her

by Eric Rickstad

  Jonah set the girl on the cabin porch and lay on his back beside her, exhausted, his lungs feeling punched through with holes. He shut his eyes.

  When he opened his eyes again, the light had changed. The sky had darkened. He’d slept, as he had done at the kitchen table so many years ago while correcting papers.

  He bolted upright, cramped and sore. Cried out. “Sally!”

  The girl was gone.

  All But Forgotten

  Lucinda sat on the fireplace hearth enrapt by the fire; its heat crawled up the nape of her neck, yet did nothing to warm her. She needed to tell Dale about the letter, which she’d finally dared read just before heading home. Yet she wanted to soak up the news a bit herself first. Soak it up and let it be for her alone for a spell, before the good news brought conflict. It would blindside Dale and, as much as he would be pleased for her, it would uproot his life too. She had one week to accept or decline, to discuss it with Dale, even if she already knew her answer. The letter, folded and wedged in her jeans pocket, felt hot against her skin.

  Now, instead of telling Dale about it, she said, “I feel awful about Jonah. He was always good to me. I’ve waffled all day about it, unable to focus. In the end, I feel awful.”

  “It’s Jonah’s choice, how Jonah lives,” Dale said as he sat at his desk sipping his black coffee. How he could drink coffee in the afternoon and evenings and not be wired all night, Lucinda had no clue. He set his mug down and swung a desk-mounted magnifying glass in front of his peering eye, then, with fastidious precision glued a steering wheel to the aluminum replica car’s steering column. The car, according to its box, was a BB Korn Indianapolis 1930s Tether. Whatever that meant. It was smart and sporty, though; one of those old, silver, roofless one-seaters in which drivers wore round goggles like those worn by biplane pilots. The replica was remarkable in detail, composed of hundreds of pieces made of stainless steel, brass, leather, and real rubber tires. Dale had a dozen of the replicas on display in his tiny real estate office in the back of the house.

  He turned on a swan-neck light above him, lighting his desk with the brightness of a surgery theater. He was always cautioning Lucinda against her worrying, and she braced for it now. She did not perceive herself as a “worrier.” But to Dale, any worrying at all got a person nowhere, achieved nothing. It muddled one’s thoughts instead of clarifying them. It wasn’t as though he didn’t care about Lucinda’s anxiety about Jonah. He just didn’t understand it. Her.

  She wished he cared less and understood more. Caring was like worrying: What good did it do? It didn’t lessen pain, dull heartache, or salve grief. In the days after Sally had gone missing, every adult Lucinda had known told her how they cared for Lucinda, loved her, yet it had not comforted her, or brightened her; it had often darkened her. Made her feel more alone. Understanding, that was the more important of the two. It was what men missed in the equation, understanding. And listening. If they could only manage these two easy concepts. Mr. B., Jonah, he understood. That morning he’d followed her to the pit, helped her out of it, and sat beside her in the snow, he’d cared. Of course. Yet more importantly, he had understood. It had eased Lucinda’s heartache, if only in that moment.

  Lucinda still wondered on occasion about the man in the woods, who he was and what had become of him. Had he been just a hunter or hiker, or had there been something more nefarious about his presence in the woods? Instead of diluting her memory, the years had intensified Lucinda’s clarity and certainty, that what she’d seen were a man’s boots, and that the way they had crept through the woods, the owner of them had been looking for Sally and Lucinda, or, at least, Sally.

  Sally, a voice said.

  “Christ,” Lucinda said.

  Dale looked up from his work. “What?” he said.

  That’s why Jonah had been so deeply wounded. Today marked twenty-five years to the day of Sally vanishing. With plans of remodeling the store consuming her attention, Lucinda had lost track of the days, the date, until now. Lucinda had shunned Jonah on his very worst of days. Guilt rode her, not just for how she’d treated Jonah, but for forgetting the day. I’ll never ever forget her. Ever. That’s what she’d promised the day she’d taken Jonah to the pit to look for Sally.

  “If you’d seen him at the store,” Lucinda said, not wanting to broach the anniversary with Dale.

  “It’s Jonah’s choice,” Dale said again.

  “Still.”

  “There’s no still.” Dale scrutinized the mounted steering wheel through the magnifying glass, grumbled. Tweaked the steering wheel.

  “Still,” Lucinda said again.

  Dale smiled. His state of Zen appealed to Lucinda most days, though at times, as now, it grated her. She wished he could just let her be upset. What her friends labeled in Dale as calm and centered, mature, Lucinda saw as impatient with her emotions. He seemed to always counter her with the other side of the coin, the positive side. He seemed at times to goad her into being argumentative by trying to bring her back to center when she did not want to be centered. She wanted to feel her anger, or sorrow or guilt, or whatever else she wanted to feel.

  “You’re not responsible for Jonah,” he said.

  “He’s been through so much. You don’t know.”

  “That was a lifetime ago.”

  “His lifetime. It’s still his life. It’s in him. In me. As if time has not passed. Sally and I. We were like—”

  Dale stood and sat beside her on the hearth, put his arm around her shoulder. She slipped her hand in her pocket and felt the letter with her fingers. “I should just shut up sometimes,” Dale said.

  She leaned into him. “I feel hard,” she said. “I never wanted to be a hard person. It doesn’t wear well on me. I need to get up there and find his cabin and apologize.” She wondered what had happened to the girl she’d been, the one who’d felt sorry for no longer using a tire swing, or who tried her best not to fib. Here she was in a single day shaming Jonah, faulting Dale for being patient and level, and clutching a letter in her pocket that could change her life, Dale’s life, yet she remained mute about it. A lie of omission. A fib.

  Lucinda slipped out from under Dale’s arm and stood, grabbed a bottle of wine from the mantel and poured wine into a glass.

  She wandered to Dale’s desk and admired his handiwork. His dedication to this precise work reminded her of her father’s birdhouse hobby, too, the hours he’d labored in the basement designing new models for varied species of birds, tinkered and perfected, or tried to perfect. Having something to focus on had been his own balm for whatever regret churned in him after the disappearances, and after her mother’s unexpected death not even two years later. She supposed now her father’s failing health had one silver lining: he was too busy dying to worry anymore about a case that had ruined his dearest friendship and had haunted him all these years as the case he failed to solve. If Lucinda were honest, her father had been slowly dying ever since it had become clear he’d never arrest anyone for the crime and had not done enough to clear his friend’s name and end the suspicion Jonah endured to this day and, it seemed, would follow him to his death, perhaps beyond.

  The meticulous care and steadfast patience it took to piece together the replica of the car was not unlike what it took to reconstruct artifacts, or a skeleton from an excavation site, Lucinda imagined. Except with artifacts and bones there was no picture on a box and no diagram to guide you on how the pieces fit and what the object or skeleton looked like. And you would almost never have all the pieces, the work would almost always remain unfinished.

  Lucinda sat on the couch with a sigh.

  Dale sat beside her.

  “It’ll be all right,” he said.

  “You always think everything’s going to be all right.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?” He put his hand on her shoulder.

  “The world doesn’t work that way. ”

  “Who says?”

 
; Sally says, Lucinda thought and remembered being outside Sally’s bedroom door the night Sally had disappeared, thinking, swearing, Sally had made a noise behind the door just before Lucinda had opened it, only to find Sally was not there.

  “Why so quiet?” Dale said. “What’d I say?”

  “It’s not you.” It’s the date, and Jonah, and the demands of the store, and the letter, she thought. The letter. Dale was right; perhaps some things did work out. Just not everything. Or the ones you wished for most.

  She downed her wine, her mind troubled, emotions flayed. The letter seared the flesh of her thigh from inside her pocket, branded her.

  “I think I’ll hit it.”

  “It’s early.”

  “I’m sapped,” Lucinda said, exhausted from the afternoon, yet knowing she’d not sleep all night.

  What’s Wrong with You?

  Where had the girl gone?

  How had she slipped away so fast? How long had he dozed?

  Darkness had claimed the woods.

  The old fear crackled down Jonah’s spine.

  Jonah stepped to the edge of the porch. “Hey,” he said, his voice projecting but calm. He did not dare scare the child. “It’s cold and dark out here. It’s warm and light inside. I’m harmless. I swear.”

  He could not blame the girl for hiding, but she’d never survive the night in the cold woods.

  He had to cajole her out from wherever she hid.

  Jonah squinted, but the woods were lost to an endless blackness as dark as the eyes of the girl herself.

  He turned back for the door to go inside and grab a flashlight.

  There. Through the window, he saw her. She lay asleep on his sunken, moldered couch, curled on herself like an infant whose muscle memory is still informed by the womb. So still she might have been—

  No, he thought. He hurried inside and took a wool blanket from a chair; a funk of mildew and body odor stirred into the air. Dust motes cycloned.

  He stared at the girl, to make certain she was not some imagining of his dotage. Her pale temples pulsed with life.

  She was there. Real. But too still. Too quiet.

  The backs of her hands were gouged from thorns and caked with dried, black blood, her lank body pale and knobbed. He had to get her warm.

  He slipped a pair of his old socks onto her cold feet, pulled them up to her knees, covered her nakedness with the blanket and watched her chest rise and fall in her sleep. He laid a palm on her forehead. It felt hot.

  She needed clothes.

  He gazed at the door to the back room of the cabin. He had not been back there in twenty-five years.

  He went to the door, opened it.

  The wooden trunk sat at the center of the otherwise empty room. He stared at it but could not bring himself to move farther into the room, closer to the trunk.

  He shut the door. Joints stiff, he walked back to the couch herk-a-jerk, like an old-time wire piano man, and sat and watched her in the ring of light cast by the flashlight.

  Her eyes. What did all this mean, to find her where he had, in a pit. On this day.

  A voice said: You were sent to me.

  Then: Ludicrous.

  Yet the thought persisted, as clear as spring water.

  She’d have died in the night if he hadn’t found her. The coyotes and crows would have claimed her. There was no one else up here in these woods who could have found her, and the woods and mountains up here went on for miles, tens of thousands of square acres. Yet he’d been the one to find her. No one else. He alone.

  The hunters would soon come, the loggers after that. Searchers. Someone had to be missing the girl, someone had to be searching for her. He and the girl were not safe here. She was his to protect now.

  We need to get away, he thought.

  Stop, the voice urged. She’s not yours.

  His fleeing with the girl was a cruel, insane thought. He knew the girl’s parents were at that moment in anguish, from the torture of unknowing. Why didn’t you bring her to town straightaway? the voice prodded. Why did you keep her?

  I didn’t keep her. She needs warming up. I brought her here to save her.

  You kept her for yourself. What kind of man keeps a girl? What’s wrong with you?

  Nothing was wrong with him. The girl was on the edge of death, needed warmth to keep her from going hypothermic. And now it was dark. She, and he, needed to rest, to sleep and eat and gain their strength. He’d return her in the morning and gift her parents the relief he’d never known. What harm would a night make, what difference?

  He knew when he returned her in the morning the authorities would prod and slice him with questions. They’d ask how he of all people had come across this girl, so close in age and size and appearance to his daughter that . . . Identical, the voice said.

  The police would ask:

  Why did you keep her overnight?

  Why is she naked?

  How did she come to get those wounds?

  He’d tell the truth: he’d found her that way, naked and despoiled, and had needed to get her to his warm cabin straightaway. They’d want to know why he’d not brought her to town after she was warm and out of danger. He’d tell them it was dark by then, and he didn’t dare navigate the woods in the dark.

  Why not? You know the woods as well in the dark as the day. Couldn’t you make your way to the truck with a flashlight?

  He’d tell them his vision wasn’t what it once was and it was easy to get off the trail at night. A grave risk with the talcum mines. He hadn’t wanted to take that risk with her.

  Still, they’d press. And each of his answers would bring more questions, be sensationalized and dissected.

  Perhaps, even if she would not speak to Jonah, she’d tell the authorities what had happened. Corroborate Jonah. Perhaps not. She’d not said a word. She was traumatized and frightened. She might confuse events. A strange old man in the woods. With a gun.

  It mattered none.

  Jonah would suffer the questions for the sake of the girl, though it wasn’t true that he worried about the mines in the dark. He knew where each mine was located, dark maws open to depths nearly bottomless. He’d tell the authorities his only thought was to get her warm and keep her safe. This answer would not sate them. No answers would ever sate them. To the law, the only correct action was to have taken her at once to the sheriff. And what would they have said then, when he’d brought her in beaten and naked?

  He’d been doomed to this fate since he’d found the girl.

  Naked.

  He would have to get the girl dressed come morning. He did not dare try to do it now. He did not dare to touch the girl; but come morning he’d look in the trunk to see if the yellow dress and coat he’d bought lifetimes ago still existed, or if time had returned them to dust.

  Warned

  “Gretel! Where you at? I find you. You’ll be sorry. I swear, you will this time.”

  Arlene Driscoll stared at the empty closet with the blinking eyes of a toad. The girl wasn’t there. Arlene slammed the door, wincing against the stink of soiled panties heaped in the corner. These kids, this one in particular, weren’t worth the meager pay the state offered to house ’em, just weren’t worth the trouble.

  The girl was in first grade and she still couldn’t control her bowels. Well, she could clean her own panties or go without, maybe then she’d learn, if she had to clean them herself and smell it. Rubbing her nose in her mess sure hadn’t done nothing so far.

  Arlene stomped down the hall, beer slopping from the plastic cup she gripped in her hand.

  “Look now what you made me do! Spilled on my good jeans. You’re making me miss my show!” Arlene licked at the beer suds on her wrist. The girl was maddening. She acted like a baby. Hiding. Moping. Whining. She was way too old for this crap. I’m too old for it, Arlene thought as she stormed to the front room and watched her TV show and chugged what was left of her beer.

  “Three hundred fifty!” she shrieked at the TV
. “You’re all overbidding, you buncha jackasses. That recliner ain’t worth a dime over three hundred bucks.”

  The show host exulted, “You all overbid!”

  Jackasses. Arlene blinked hard as if she’d just snapped awake. “You better hope I don’t find you,” she shouted at the girl she could not find.

  She looked behind the chair where the girl sometimes hid herself, even though she’d looked there twice already and the girl wasn’t there now anymore than she’d been there the first two times. Arlene swung open the door to the cellar and yelled down, “If you’re down there you better come up. I’m not going down there this time. Come up or I’m going to close this door and lock it and you can just stay down there all night. Maybe learn something this time. How’d that be? I mean it. I’m gonna give you to three.

  “One.

  “I’m not playing.

  “Two.

  “All right then.

  “Three!

  “Don’t cry say you wasn’t warned, because you was.”

  Arlene slammed the door so hard the casing split. She threw the deadbolt and poured herself another beer, slumping on the couch to watch the tube.

  She shuddered at the thought that the girl had run off. If the girl had run off, Arlene would face far worse from Lewis than that brat had ever faced.

  The game show host shouted: “You all overbid!”

  “Jackasses!” Arlene shouted.

  Each and every one. Jackasses.

  What was wrong with people?

  Over the Rainbow

  “She’s gone,” Arlene said to her husband, bracing herself to be struck. “I told you I looked everywhere.”

  “How in the hell did you lose track of a girl?” Lewis said. “What were you doing that you could do that?”

  “Nothing. Watching my game shows.”

  “That’s not nothing. That’s something.”

  “It’s not my fault. One second she was here, the next second she wasn’t.”

  He clenched his fists, face red and gnarled. “Lucky for you, I ain’t got time to straighten your ass. We gotta find her. They find out, they’ll take her. We’ll have to look ’round the woods in the dark somehow.”