Where the Broken Lie

by Derek Rempfer

  “Yeah.”

  She sniffs and dabs at her nose with a rolled up sweater sleeve. I reach in my back pocket for a handkerchief that isn’t there.

  She continues, “Anyway, the florist said ‘It matches your outfit so perfectly, I just I had to give it to you.”

  Then Tammy shows me the flower.

  She is wearing a spring sweater that is sort of purplish-red. Like a vibrant mauve, I guess. Whatever the color, the rose she held up was exactly the same. So much so that the rose seems to sink inside of her as she holds it in front of her.

  “I have never seen a flower that color before,” is all I can manage. I pull her into me and wrap my arms around her, careful not to crush the rose between us.

  We had dinner that night with Mom and Larry. Since losing Ethan, things had become uncomfortable between my mom, and me and I was not looking forward to seeing her on Mother’s Day. Especially since my brother Gavin and sister Heather were both out of town at their respective in-laws. I didn’t much feel like telling her I loved her or thanking her for being “The World’s Best Grandmamom!” like it read on the card Tory had picked out.

  While Tammy and Tory helped Larry in the kitchen, Mom and I chatted about Oprah, the latest movies and books, so on and so on. I knew she’d eventually feel the need to ask me how I was doing, and I knew I would feel the need to keep it inside and grind my teeth to dust.

  But she resists the instinct. Instead, she busily knits away on her latest project, looking down through the glasses that rest on the tip of her nose. At times I do not even recognize this grandmother of Tory’s, this imposter who looks like my mom, but with smile wrinkles and touches of gray and other burdens of age. She has been a grandmother for four years now, but is still growing into the part. Soon she would be more grandmother than mother, in the same way that I was already more father than son.

  It’s even worse for her, I suppose, having witnessed all of my metamorphoses—from a baby within her to a man without her. I only picked up the book of her life in the middle, never really knowing how the story started.

  One of my hopes of heaven is that I’ll somehow be able to re-live Mom’s life right alongside her. As a friend, a neighbor, a kid at school—some non-speaking part in all of the scenes of her life. To see her life dreams and her disappointments. I will watch those parts of her life that have been hidden inside of history and outside of memory.

  Maybe some kind of grown-up Ethan is watching me now.

  We ate a quiet dinner that Mother’s Day evening and we had quiet conversations. Mom told us about the neighborhood happenings. Larry played ‘got your nose’ with Tory. It was exactly what normal used to look like. I kept thinking about Ethan in that heavenly movie theater, watching that movie of me. I wanted him to like that story. And I needed him to find a hero in the protagonist.

  Tory is lost. Like Katie. Like Ethan. It is impossible to believe this is happening again.

  Tammy and I each thought the other was with Tory that afternoon. When we searched the house and couldn’t find her, we searched it again. And then the front yard, the back yard, the garage, even the attic that she didn’t know existed. She had never disappeared on us like this before.

  She was gone.

  The thought of my little girl roving the streets alone scares the hell out of me, even these streets of Willow Grove, because they have betrayed me before. Katie Cooper memories scratch at the back of my mind. Like some buried-alive crime victim, they have clawed their way back to the surface and I picture myself having to go across the street and ask Betty Cooper if she’s seen my daughter the same way she had once asked me if I had seen hers.

  The railroad tracks.

  Just breathe, I say to myself as I start in that direction and a Tory memory flashes with every footstep.

  The moment of her birth, that instant when Tammy and I became parents and the trajectory of our lives had changed forever.

  Slow down. Breathe, I think. Yet I step faster and see Tory in her yellow satin dress at her pre-school’s holiday program, singing Still, Still, Still.

  Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.

  I flash back again and see her tumbling on the sidewalk in front of our house and scraping her knees and hands.

  Please breathe.

  I keep breathing and breathing and breathing until my head swirls with too much oxygen. I have a feeling of being outside myself. Aware of the panic and the pain and the fear, but not part of it.

  The lungs burn and whirr, little machines unable to process the oxygen quickly enough.

  The heart thumps too fast and too hard.

  And just when I feel as if I am about to forget how to breathe altogether and collapse into sodden murkiness, I spot Old Man Keller and it is as if the very sight of him defibrillates me back to life.

  I snap my head straight and the world around me stops spinning.

  The Old Man is atop his mower and headed toward me. I wave him to a stop and when he doesn’t turn off the Cub Cadet right away, I reach down and do it myself. He looks offended, like I’m the first person other than him to ever touch the ignition key and maybe I am.

  “What the hell, Tucker. What’s going on?”

  “We can’t find Tory.”

  The wave of rage that comes with being forced to say the words out loud almost lifts me off the ground.

  “What do you mean—your daughter is missing?”

  “Yes. My daughter is missing. Have you seen her?”

  Bushy gray eyebrows furrow together and the Old Man looks for something inside his head, and I can see that he finds it. A thought? A memory? A something.

  “No,” he says with eyes darting back and forth. Then looking up at me, “No, I haven’t seen her. Are you sure she’s not with your wife or your grandparents?”

  “I’m sure. Now listen, if you know something, you need to tell me, Alvin.”

  It’s the first time I have ever said the Old Man’s name and it makes a sharp sound coming off my tongue. He even flinches a little like I had stabbed him in the ear with it.

  “I haven’t seen your daughter, Tucker, I promise.” He says it quietly, but he still quivers with fear. Not of me, though. Frightened of that thing behind his eyes that I can’t see and he won’t share. I want to pluck his eyes out with my thumbs and reveal what hides behind them.

  “If you see her, Alvin. Just come tell me, ok?”

  I find myself walking the dirt path alongside the railroad tracks that I had helped wear into dusty existence so many years ago. I can’t stop thinking about that look on Old Man Keller’s face, but my mind can’t untie that knot.

  I near the area where Katie’s body had been found and the world around me begins to blur with my quickened pace. The rocks flanking the rails melt into a flowing river of purple and silver quartz. A lone bird whistles and an approaching train kills its song with the blare of its horn.

  Stay out of my way, the horn says. Angry freight train coming through! Won’t be stopped!

  I feel the same way.

  I am unstoppable with the anger and the fear of a father who has lost a child. I imagine myself standing on the tracks and bringing that rail monster to screeching stillness with nothing but a hard stare and an upright palm.

  The blare of the horn grows louder, but I keep moving toward it. Images flash before my eyes like the space between railroad cars.

  Katie, Ethan, Tory, Swinging Girl, Old Man Keller, Edie, Son Settles …

  I don’t know if it is the wind from that speeding train or the blast of its horn, but when it screams past me it knocks me to the ground. I lay face down in the dirt and listen to the rhythmic chu-chung chu-chung chu-chung until it fades away.

  Like a boxer rising from the canvas, I push myself up onto my hands and knees and spit blood. I blink the dust and tears out of my eyes, shake my head. Jagged rocks dig into my hands and knees. An especially large one rests directly in front of me. It is one of those shimmering purple quartz that has strayed away from the trac
ks. With clawing fingers, I dig it out and throw it at the memory of the train and the wake of its echo. The train is gone from sight and sound and the thrown rock lands in quiet oblivion.

  That lone bird whistles once more and then all is quiet and still.

  I look back down at the ground where the rock had been, and lying there in the divot it had created was a feather. Not white and pristine, but gray and ruffled. Not from a golden swan, but from a common pigeon. Not what you would ask for, but what you were promised. I looked up and yelled, “Feathers aren’t enough!”

  But when I lift it, when I lift that feather, what I find underneath fills me with grace and shame and hope.

  Lying beneath that broken feather that had been under the sparkling rock is a flattened copper coin. A train-squashed penny dated 1981, and imprinted with every memory of that summer and the little girl it had belonged to. Yet another sign to be accepted with faith or dismissed as coincidence. Alongside these railroad tracks where Katie Cooper’s lifeless body had once lay. In this place and in this moment. Right here, right now, with hands and knees scraped and scratched. Inside of me is the faith to believe or the rational mind to deny. And despite reason and common sense and all other constraints of logic, I realize that I did believe. In that little divot of earth in this big nowhere place, I feel as if I have found proof of the everywhere of heaven.

  It was under a rock and hidden by a feather.

  When I stand, it is with a new peace and with the certainty that Tory was safe. It also occurs to me that I am close to that Garden of Eden that Katie had brought me to. I had never gone back after Katie’s death. I wanted to, especially those times when I was missing her most. I wanted to go there to just sit and remember her, but I never did. Probably because I was afraid I’d be followed and our secret would be revealed. Or because I feared finding someone else there and the memory violated. But probably mostly because Katie would never go there again, and neither would I.

  I walk through the brush and the shrubs and the spindly branches until I come to the clearing that leads to our secret spot. And as I step into that back-in-time place, the first thing I notice is that the pond is nearly dry. Not much more than a muddy pit now, encircled by tall, sickly grass.

  The air is stale and thick, filled with the competing odors of decomposing vegetation, worms, and dead fish. This place had once been alive and the air so fresh that it turned your insides rainforest green, made you feel as if you yourself had sprouted from the earth like the trees and the flowers. But everything has putrefied into must and mold. All that had been green is now brown. All that blossomed now withers. All that had been alive is now dead.

  Across the pond, though, one big old maple tree still stands. And from one of its branches, the rope we had swung from still sways lazily in the breeze. This tree had cradled us in its arms and it sheltered us from the summer sun as we splashed in the pond. Everything around it has wasted away, but this tree, at least, still thrives in the Garden of Willow Grove. A beacon of hope and obstinacy.

  I grip that copper coin tightly in my right hand. There is justice to the dearth of life here.

  I put the coin in my pocket and leave, knowing that I will not return to this place again.

  Still feeling very much the locomotive, I retrace my steps along the tracks and head back into town, a Johnny Cash song rumbling through my head. I was certain now that Tory was safe and discovered as much when I walked through the front door and saw her in Grandpa’s arms.

  “Hi, Daddy,” she says sheepishly.

  “And where have you been, little girl?”

  “I found her asleep behind the door in the spare bedroom,” Grandpa says.

  “Behind the door?”

  We had looked under every bed and inside of every closet in every room. We had not looked behind the doors that opened into the rooms.

  “I was playing with my dolly, Daddy. That’s where she sleeps.”

  Grandpa spins her around to face me and holds her out in front of him for me to come take her.

  “Well, we found you,” he says, giving me a smile and a familiar wink.

  I kneel down and open my arms to my daughter. Tory throws her arms around my neck and cries out her apologies.

  I look up at my wife.

  “It’s all right,” I say, eyes locked on Tammy. “Everything is going to be all right now. I promise.”

  Tory was safe and she’d probably be forty before Tammy or I would let her escape from our watchful eyes again.

  Yet something still feels not right to me.

  I had made a pretty rapid descent from my emotional heights and it had disoriented me, but it was more than that. I was still thinking about Old Man Keller and that secret behind his eyes. Guilt poured out of those eyes and dripped down over his face. But what exactly was he guilty of?

  Tammy pulls Tory from me and hugs her tightly.

  “We thought you were lost, Sweetie,” she says and only I knew what she means by “lost.” It is a word that with deeper meaning for us now. Katie, Ethan, and Tory had all been lost. Only Tory had been found.

  …He knew he was innocent, and yet he felt guilty when he found out about Tucker’s daughter missing. He always felt complicit when he heard stories like that. Like he was part of some dirty brotherhood and was somehow a little bit responsible for every child’s disappearance. Every child’s death. Logically he knew it was beyond his control—all of it. Even Katie. Yet the goodness in him brought out that guilt. Jekyll couldn’t be blamed for the actions of Hyde, but he was still guilt-ridden.

  And now, his very own Hyde—long slumbering—was fully awakened again. It had caught a whiff of something sweet and familiar. Something sugar and spice and he couldn’t stop sniffing at it.

  The Old Man

  A great many things have happened in the blink of eternity’s eye that is my lifetime. Space travel, the pet rock, microwave ovens, the birth and death of the VCR, post-it notes. And all of it happened as Alvin Keller sat perched atop his Cub Cadet, rumbling through the streets and yards of Willow Grove, Illinois.

  Of course, the Old Man had been a young man for some of those things, but something tells me that the Old Man was probably an old man even when the Old Man was a young man.

  Without the growing green grass, Alvin couldn’t have eaten, and wouldn’t have survived or evolved into the Old Man. He would have slept in a chicken shack and died young without ever having achieved the strange sort of small town celebrity that he had earned because of that Cub Cadet.

  No less so than some grazing animal, like some wild goat, Old Man Keller needed grass to survive. But the Old Man had more in common with goats than a grassy subsistence. He had the face of a goat. Wispy white hair on a long chin, narrow eyes that revolved in sockets on the side of his narrow head, next to alert triangular ears. A face shaped by years in the wind, the way a river shapes a canyon.

  The Old Man was a simple man living a simple life, and while he did carry himself with a barely detectable air of superiority, it was almost self-deprecating. Aware that he’s King of some mountain that nobody cares about.

  The Old Man’s Cub Cadet growled and grumbled through every summer of my youth. Sometimes loud as guilt, sometimes quiet as shame. Always there, but like the hum in your head, not always noticed. A distant memory vibrates.

  Old Man Keller has a more prominent spot in my memories than he deserves and it’s all because of that Cub Cadet. All because of grass.

  From a distance I can see that Swinging Girl is back on her perch, which relieves me. But I also see that she is not alone.

  It is not another child with her but rather—of all people—Old Man Keller. He stands next to her as she swings and the sight of them together makes my stomach lurch. He moves behind her and his clingy little wrinkled hands clasp around her hips and I think about that dirty-secret look on his face from the day before.

  I am about a block away, but my eyes zoom and lock on the greedy little fingers he has clenched around
her waist. As I approach, I can see his beady gray eyes, watch him moisten his dry lips with a thick wet tongue.

  He gives her a big push on the swing and when his hands release her, his fingers hang in the air, wriggling slightly as if savoring the residual taste of touching her. They reach out longingly, those touching, tasting fingers.

  Suddenly, the Old Man closes his hands into fists that he tucks away into his overall pockets and marches back across the street where his Cub Cadet sits in the Pullman’s front yard. He gets on the lawnmower and makes his getaway.

  “Hello, Swinging Girl. It’s been a while. Where have you been?”

  “I do have a life, you know. And there’s more to it than just swinging.”

  As I’ve done before, I take a seat on the swing farthest from hers. I don’t want her thinking it’s ok for strangers to get too close.

  As she coasts in for a landing, I ask, “Do you know that man you were talking to?”

  “Sure I do. He’s Lawn Mowing Man.”

  “Yes, he is. He’s the lawn moving man. Alvin Keller is his name.”

  “Okay.”

  “What were you two talking about?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Not really.”

  “Well, you must have talked about something.”

  “Nope.”

  “Can you tell me what he said? Please?”

  She rolls her eyes at me.

  “He said, ‘You’re sure a good swinger.’ I said, ‘Thanks.’ He said, ‘How about a push, beautiful girl?’ I said, ‘Okay.’ And that was it.”

  Beautiful girl … where I had I heard that before? Who had said that?

  “He called you ‘beautiful girl’? Those were the words?”

  “Yes.”

  “He shouldn’t have said that. That’s not right.”