The Mourning Hours

by Paula Treick DeBoard

  Aunt Julia swallowed. “Well, right. There’s a big jump between arguing with someone and hurting them. I mean, Lord knows your uncle Paul and I have had our disagreements.” She gave me a crooked smile. “And if we mentioned it right now, it might make Johnny look guilty of something he’s not.”

  “But he might be,” I said, my voice small. Aunt Julia’s eyes narrowed.

  Just then the phone rang, and Aunt Julia grabbed for it. She listened, then pursed her lips tightly. “The family has no comment at this time,” she announced, and placed the receiver back in its cradle. She looked at me. “That was a reporter from the Green Bay paper.”

  So Johnny’s name was out there, and people all the way in Green Bay had heard about it.

  I spent much of the afternoon watching our driveway, like a sentry at a fortress, on the alert for all visitors. I was alone with my uncomfortable thoughts—Emilie slept away the afternoon, Aunt Julia disappeared to talk with Grandpa for an hour, and Jerry Warczak came once to check on the cows, this time without stopping by the house. Throughout the day, the phone rang, as if it was a living thing on its own.

  Detective Halliday’s car didn’t turn down our driveway until nearly seven. Aunt Julia had made us peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, but I hadn’t been able to take more than a bite. Dad and Mom, climbing out of the backseat, didn’t look at each other. Dad went straight to the barn, and Johnny, more like a ghost than a person, headed upstairs before I could say anything to him. But what would I have said?

  “I’m so exhausted,” Mom groaned, collapsing into a chair. “I feel like I could sleep for days.”

  “So there’s still no word?” Aunt Julia asked.

  Mom shook her head, her eyes closed. “There are still people out there, searching.” She went quiet, letting her sentence hang in the room. There was an odd choking noise in her throat, and I realized she was trying not to cry.

  “Oh, Alicia,” Aunt Julia said. “Oh, you poor thing.”

  “You should have seen the Lemkes, Julia. For God’s sake, she’s only sixteen years old. If it was Emilie or Kirsten, I don’t know what I would do.” Mom looked directly at me, and I squirmed under her glance. Suddenly I felt guilty that I was safe and Stacy wasn’t, that Johnny was safe but Stacy wasn’t.

  “Bill kept saying these awful things, like how he knew Johnny wasn’t ever good enough for his daughter. And the pregnancy test—my God. Johnny just sat there the whole time and took it, and Bill and John ended up screaming at each other. And Sharon Lemke couldn’t even stay in the room during the questioning, she was so hysterical.” Mom bit her lip. “I tried to comfort her, but what could I say? If they don’t find her, Julia—”

  I swallowed hard, trying to imagine Mrs. Lemke as anything less than perfectly poised, her hair coiffed, her linen dress starched wrinkle-free. I thought of Mr. Lemke at the party, singing happy birthday in a big, showy voice. He’d orchestrated the whole show that day, from the tour through his house to the grand unveiling of Stacy’s Camaro, as if the day had been as much about him as about Stacy. He was someone who liked to call the shots, but where did that leave him now?

  Aunt Julia put her hand on top of Mom’s. Her skin was still somehow dark, although it had been months since she’d tanned on her deck. “We can’t think like that, Alicia,” she said, rubbing her thumb back and forth in an oval across Mom’s pale skin.

  “What about Johnny? What’s going to happen to him?” I asked, but Mom kept talking to Aunt Julia as if I wasn’t even there.

  “I don’t know what to think,” Mom whispered, her voice strained with exhaustion. “There’s really no proof of anything from that night, one way or another. Johnny says they went to a movie in Sheboygan, but he didn’t keep the stubs. He told them all about the movie, but admitted that they’d seen it once before, so that didn’t prove anything. The officers have interviewed the employees from the theater, and no one remembers seeing them.”

  “But Sheboygan is a bigger city than Watankee,” Aunt Julia said. “So there wouldn’t necessarily—”

  Mom continued, not listening. “And the detective asked him why he went all the way to Sheboygan, twenty-some miles away, when Manitowoc had a perfectly good theater, and snow was coming?”

  I’d wondered the same thing.

  Aunt Julia nodded. “What did Johnny say?”

  Mom shrugged, smiling grimly. “That they wanted to get away from everything for the night, just be by themselves.”

  “Well, that’s understandable.” A hint of a smile had crept into Aunt Julia’s voice. “They’re teenagers, after all.”

  “No one remembers them at dinner, either,” Mom continued, still whispering. Maybe, I realized, she didn’t want Johnny to hear. “Johnny says they went to The Humble Bee in Cleveland. He described exactly what they ordered. The waitress remembered some young couples in there, but the officers showed her a picture of them and she said they didn’t look familiar.”

  “Hmm,” Aunt Julia said. “It doesn’t prove anything either way, does it?”

  I pictured the inside of The Humble Bee, where we’d stopped a few times coming back from Sheboygan, all of us piling into one of the round corner booths. Dad had described the decor as “fussy”—with bright yellow curtains and bumblebees printed on the menus. It wasn’t Johnny’s kind of place, either, but I could see how Stacy would like it.

  “And no receipt?” Aunt Julia prompted.

  “He thought it might have fallen out of his pocket sometime last night, while he was trying to push his truck out of the ditch, or later, with all the running around we were doing.”

  “Of course,” Aunt Julia murmured. She was still touching Mom’s hand, her thumb kneading Mom’s skin.

  “I don’t see how I have any choice but to believe him.” Mom slid her hand from Julia’s grasp and leaned wearily against her. “But it doesn’t look good.”

  We heard Dad’s boots on the stairs and froze. He came in, still wearing the mask of a hundred-year-old man.

  “John—” Aunt Julia began, rising.

  “I’ve got to get some sleep,” he mumbled, shuffling past us, a ghost, just like Johnny. His footsteps clumped heavily on the stairs. I listened to him walk down the hallway, pause at Johnny’s door, and continue on.

  “What about tomorrow?” I asked, my throat suddenly tight. “It’s Monday. We have school.”

  Mom seemed startled, as if she hadn’t realized I’d been sitting there the whole time. “For now, we’re all just going to stay right here.”

  I nodded, thinking of Kevin and the spelling bee, of my desk at the front of the room with my textbooks waiting inside. School would go right on along without me, without Emilie and Johnny, without Stacy.

  “I think that’s a good idea,” said Aunt Julia. She smiled at me, bright and false. “I’m going to go check on Dad and then head home for the night. I’ll be over first thing tomorrow morning....”

  Mom gave a crooked, thankful smile.

  “But what’s next?” I demanded. “What’s going to happen to Johnny? Is he under arrest?”

  “Of course he’s not,” Mom said immediately, reflexively. “But...we don’t know what’s going to happen next.”

  At the doorway, Aunt Julia looped a scarf around her neck several times and pulled on her coat. “Want to walk me out, Kirsten? You’ve been cooped up all day.”

  I looked to Mom, who nodded absentmindedly. “Wear your coat,” she said.

  The chill was surprising, even in my too-big hand-me-down winter coat and snow boots. We crunched our way around the side of the house, past Grandpa’s house. A light was on in his living room; he was sitting in one of the matching recliners with his heating pad. He did this every night after dinner, but tonight he was leaning forward, his head in his hands.

  “This is going to kill him,” Aunt Julia murmu
red.

  “What?” I asked, not sure I’d heard right, but she shook her head.

  It was dark but clear, the wind calm, the snow settled into stiff peaks like meringue. If it had been like this yesterday, I thought, Johnny wouldn’t have driven off the road. If it had been like this yesterday, Stacy would have made it home. Only twenty-four hours ago, Johnny and Stacy had been driving back through a storm. Only twenty-four hours ago, Johnny had watched Stacy walk away, her red hair and green coat visible for a few moments, before being sucked away into the night. Except...except. I kept thinking of what Mom had said, that no one had seen Johnny and Stacy on their date, not at the movies and not at dinner, which meant that maybe they hadn’t been on a date at all. My stomach churned, thinking this. If that was true, what had they been doing? How had Johnny come home safe and Stacy not at all?

  We passed the long rectangle of Grandma’s old garden, which Grandpa tended haphazardly in the years since her death. Deep furrows of new footprints, partially hidden by new snow, trailed across the boundaries of our property, to the outbuildings and the farm itself. The men must have been out here, crisscrossing our property in their search.

  “Doesn’t this feel good, to be out of the house for a minute?” Aunt Julia asked. Her words came out in a thick puff of air.

  “I guess.” Suddenly I worried that I was missing something important that was happening inside our house, the phone call that said Stacy Lemke was okay or Johnny’s confession of what had really happened that night. “How far are we walking?”

  “Let’s head over to see the fence,” she suggested, her gloved hand gesturing to the place where our property met up with the Wegners’ property.

  We approached the line of firs at the front of the yard, the moon bright and the stiff branches in dark relief against the snow. It was the sort of winter night you’d find on a Currier and Ives cookie tin, where the cold looked harmless. At the side of the yard I paused and looked back at our house. The kitchen light was still on; Mom, I imagined, was still at the table, too exhausted to move. It was dark upstairs, except for a light in Johnny’s room. For a moment his shadow darkened the window, passed, then returned. He was pacing back and forth, his back hunched. What was he thinking? Was he going over every moment he’d ever had with Stacy? I shivered, and not just from the cold.

  We picked our way across the field, which for three short seasons of the year was dotted with dandelions and clover and other weeds Dad cut back with the riding mower. The snow was deeper here, and I fell behind, my footsteps landing in the deep depressions where Aunt Julia’s feet had been. I wasn’t wearing snow pants—under ordinary circumstances, Mom would have killed me for wandering through thigh-high snow with nothing more substantial than a pair of jeans to protect my legs from the chill. But these weren’t ordinary circumstances; I realized sharply that the rules I’d followed my whole life were no longer important. Who cared about snow pants or eating dinner on time? Maybe there would be no more ordinary circumstances, ever.

  The snowdrifts were deeper close to the fence, and Aunt Julia took my hand, hoisting me onto the bottom slat. She was much taller than me, of course; the snow barely came to the top of her boots. In the middle of the pasture, the snow was flat and smooth; at the fence line it had gathered in curved ridges. I wondered if they had searched this field, too—if men had walked arm’s-length apart through the Wegners’ horse pasture, scanning the snow for the slightest clue—fresh footprints, a dropped glove.

  “Kirsten, listen to me,” Aunt Julia said suddenly, as if she’d been chewing over the words for some time. “Things are going to get tricky from here on out.”

  I nodded, a movement so slight that Aunt Julia couldn’t have seen it, but she continued anyway.

  “People are going to be saying things and speculating—making assumptions—about Stacy and your brother. Do you understand?”

  The cold caught in my throat. “Yes.”

  “I’ve lived in Watankee my whole life,” she continued. “I’ve seen that it can be the best place in the world. When Paul’s mother had cancer, I swear to you that everyone in town must have stopped by with a casserole for us. But it can also be the kind of place where people gossip, where people turn against each other....”

  “I know,” I said, leaning back from the fence, letting the weight of my body swing free while my hands gripped the top slat. Even the people we knew, friends of my parents, members of our church, stared at me curiously, whispering to each other: She’s so small! “I’ve lived here my whole life, too.”

  “Of course you have,” she chuckled, then continued seriously. “Our family has been in a tight spot before, when your parents were first together. It takes a lot of courage to go on living your life when everyone’s watching you.”

  For once I knew what she was talking about without having to ask, although try as I might, I couldn’t imagine a younger version of Mom, pregnant with Johnny. I knew there had been some bitterness between Mom and her parents, who had retired to Arizona and only called on Christmas, and between Mom and Dad’s parents—particularly Grandpa, who was critical of her every move.

  “Why can’t people just...” I shook my shoulders helplessly.

  She sighed. “I don’t know, sugar. I don’t know what it is in people that we like to find something to pick on. I guess we want someone to take the blame when things go wrong. This is something so big...bigger than Stacy and Johnny, you know. It’s bigger than Hammarstroms and Lemkes. The whole town is going to take sides. It won’t be hard to find someone to blame. I think you should know that, because it’s going to be tough for Johnny, and for your mom and dad, and for you and Emilie, too.”

  I looked at her sharply. It hadn’t fully occurred to me that I would be involved, guilty merely because Johnny Hammarstrom was my brother and Stacy Lemke had been his girlfriend.

  Her voice was gentle, continuing. “At this point, it’s looking like—even if they do find Stacy, she’s not going to be okay. I just think—I think you should know all of this.”

  I nodded slowly, taking it all in. Really, I was grateful; this felt like the first real conversation of my life. Wasn’t this what I had always wanted, not to be treated like a little girl, the youngest kid, the runt of the litter? But I was terrified, too. Maybe it was easier to be too young to know anything.

  “So, look—I just want to say that you can come to me for anything. Whenever things get tough, you just give me a call. Or come over. You could even stay with us for a while.”

  “Okay,” I said woodenly.

  “No matter what happens—and it can get worse, maybe a lot worse—we’ll just have to weather the storm. We can do that together, okay?”

  I swallowed, remembering a video I’d seen in school of a tornado. In slow motion, the wind had picked the shingles off a roof, one by one, as if they were nothing but scraps of loose-leaf paper. Now I imagined it being our house, our barn, our lives, caught up in a wind and blowing away piece by piece. And there would be the Hammarstroms, hanging on to whatever we could, weathering the storm.

  Aunt Julia put her arm around my shoulders. “You okay?”

  I stared at the field, barren and lifeless in the snow. “I wish the horses were out,” I said finally. “During the summer, I feed them apples right out of my hand.”

  “Maybe we could call them?” Aunt Julia suggested.

  So that’s what we did. We called them, even though they were tucked away in their stable for the night, acres away, deaf to our voices.

  “King Henry!” I screamed. And then, again and again, “Come out here, King Henry!”

  Beside me, Aunt Julia bellowed, “Queen Anne!”

  The air was icy, burning my lungs, but at the same time it felt wonderful. I put everything I had into those screams. I turned to look back at our house, but no other lights came on, even though I was screaming loud enou
gh to wake the dead.

  And then it occurred to me, and I screamed, “Stacy! Stacy Lynne Lemke!”

  My voice seemed to echo off the snow, off the treetops and the farm buildings, off the dark ceiling of the sky itself. If she were anywhere in the world, I thought, she had to hear me. She had to know someone was calling her name.

  When my throat felt raw and I couldn’t scream anymore, Aunt Julia wrapped my body in a hug from behind and helped me down from the fence.

  twenty

  I dreamed of snowstorms, of frostbite, of being a toddler and losing Mom’s hand in the middle of a department store. I dreamed I was following Stacy through a maze, always one turn behind, just catching sight of her green coat. I had almost reached her, almost grabbed that bit of fabric when I jolted awake. Salty tears slithered down my cheeks, and I licked them away. In the dream, I’d felt I almost had her, that it was almost over. Awake, I knew that wherever she was, it was out of my reach.

  The darkness outside was blue-black, and there was an eerie quiet to our house. I could almost believe that each member of my family was suddenly missing, scooped out of their beds by a giant, godlike hand. Listening to the predawn silence, unbroken by breath or voice, I thought: these are the mourning hours. And this is only the beginning.

  Coach Zajac was our first visitor on Monday morning, rapping with his big fist against our back door just after seven o’clock. He explained he’d been in Milwaukee all weekend at a meeting with WIAA officials and learned about Stacy only last night.

  There was an awkward silence, and Mom said, “Johnny hasn’t been down yet.”

  I knew Johnny was awake, though. The first sounds I’d heard that morning had been from Johnny, throwing up in the bathroom.

  Dad gestured Coach Zajac to a chair, and Mom offered a cup of coffee.

  “He’s pretty low right now,” Dad explained. “He’s got a lot on his mind. I tried to talk to him last night, but...”

  “Maybe I can help?” Coach asked, pouring a dollop of milk into his coffee and swirling the cup slowly in his big paw. “I could talk to him, see where his head’s at.”