The Mourning Hours

by Paula Treick DeBoard

  Mom glanced at Dad, and Dad shook his head. “I appreciate the offer, but not right now.”

  “Of course,” Coach said, rising, his coffee untouched. “Will you tell Johnny I stopped by?”

  I wandered into the living room, climbing carefully onto the arm of the couch to avoid Emilie, who had spent the night there, covered by a heavy quilt. Her face was buried in the crook where the top cushion met the bottom cushion, and she groaned as I approached. I watched Coach Zajac’s car stop at the end of the driveway, signal and turn left. A minute later, at 7:15 exactly, the yellow Manitowoc County School bus approached down Rural Route 4, slowed at our driveway and then resumed speed as it headed to its next stop, without me.

  “Wake up,” I said, nudging Emilie’s foot. “It’s Monday morning.”

  “So?” She rolled over, pulling the quilt over her face.

  In the kitchen, the phone rang. I slid off the couch.

  “Hello?” Mom asked. A half-million phone calls between Saturday night and this morning, and still she was hopeful with each one. She cupped the receiver to her shoulder and whispered, “It’s someone from the Journal-Sentinel, out of Milwaukee. He says he wants our side of the story for his article. What do I say?”

  “We don’t say anything,” Dad said. “We have nothing to say.”

  Mom cleared her throat. “I’m afraid we have nothing to say at this time,” she said into the receiver. She listened for a moment, then said, “No, thank you. I appreciate the phone call, but, no, thank you.... No, I’m sure. Thank you.” When she replaced the receiver, her hand was shaking, her face pale. “But don’t you think we should speak up and defend Johnny? It makes sense to tell his side of the story—”

  Dad shook his head. “Anything we say could be taken out of context, spun in a dozen different directions.”

  “But Bill Lemke will be all over this—”

  “Let him be all over it, then. We can’t beat him at this game.”

  The Manitowoc Herald Times Reporter was next, then a reporter from a radio station in Green Bay, then someone from the Journal Times in Racine.

  “Racine,” Mom marveled. “That’s four hours away—”

  “The story is everywhere by now,” Dad said.

  “What are we going to do?” Mom asked, but this time I knew for sure it was a rhetorical question, one that we weren’t supposed to answer, and one that we couldn’t.

  Johnny came down the stairs after nine, freshly showered. “Where’s Dad?” he grunted.

  I gestured to the barn. Where else?

  “Are you doing okay, Johnny?” Mom asked. “I mean, of course you’re not okay, I know that, but are you feeling okay?”

  Johnny sat heavily at the table, silent. He looked straight ahead, as if she hadn’t spoken.

  “He was sick earlier,” I volunteered. “I heard him throwing up in the bathroom.”

  Johnny didn’t react, didn’t confirm or deny, didn’t shoot me a look that told me to mind my own business.

  Mom reached over to touch her palm to his forehead. “Let me see,” she said, but Johnny pulled away.

  “Come on, Johnny,” she said. When she reached for him this time, he jerked completely out of her reach, and they stayed like that for a moment, his head leaning to one side and her empty hand extended.

  Mom sighed. “Suit yourself, then.” She went to the refrigerator and started pulling out ingredients. The whole world might be falling apart around us, but there were meals to be made. There were cows to be milked and calves to be fed.

  I sat at the other end of the table, watching Johnny carefully out of the corner of my eye. In the space of twenty-four hours, he had split into two people, or at least two halves of his former self. He was my seventeen-year-old brother still, who could be a grump or a sweetheart, depending on when you caught him. He had slammed the front door more than his share of times; he had been known to peel out of the driveway in a spray of gravel. But I knew the other Johnny, too, the one who had sneaked into my bedroom late at night, shaken me awake and carried me piggyback down the stairs, across the lawn and into the barn to see a new litter of kittens, the one who hoisted me onto his back for a run around the bases. He had been in love with Stacy Lemke. Had been? Was still, I told myself. He was still in love with Stacy Lemke. Didn’t these things add up, somehow, to proof? Wasn’t this more convincing than finding movie stubs or a receipt from a dinner?

  “What do you want?” he asked, his voice sharp.

  Caught staring, I blushed. “Nothing.”

  “Then knock it off.”

  I looked away, embarrassed. It was hard to say what Johnny was. All his individual parts added up to a pack of contradictions. True, he struggled to maintain a C average, but he could strategize on the mats with the best of them. He could get angry, plunk plates on countertops, pound his fist on the table, slam doors behind him. And he was strong as anything. Did anyone know what he was really capable of doing?

  Somewhere between the night of March fourth and this morning, Johnny had become an adult, a man. For the first time, I realized he was taller than Dad, broader and stronger, if not heavier. His steps on the stairs, I knew suddenly, were a man’s steps. His hands were a man’s hands. He had been shaving for more than a year, but it wasn’t until right now, sitting across from him, that I saw the pale brown hairs on his chin, sprouting down his cheeks.

  Later that morning, Detective Halliday and Officer Parks returned, walking purposefully from their cars and then standing in our open doorway to deliver the news: with the snow cleared, a fresh batch of patrolmen and volunteers from all over Watankee had gone through the fields near the site of Johnny’s crash. Police dogs had been sent into the surrounding woods.

  “What did they find?” Mom asked sharply.

  They shook their heads in tandem. Nothing.

  “We’d like to take Johnny back to the scene,” said Detective Halliday. “To go through his story one more time. The district attorney is going to meet us there.”

  Johnny agreed immediately, reaching for his boots.

  “The district attorney? My husband should go with you,” Mom said.

  Dad, seeing the patrol car, was already halfway back from the barn. “More questions?” he asked flatly as the screen door tapped shut behind him. “What are you hoping for, a different story this time?”

  “John—” Mom shook her head.

  “We’re just trying to get some answers. There’s a girl missing here,” Officer Parks said.

  “They’re involving the district attorney,” Mom told Dad.

  Dad’s face registered surprise. “The district attorney? I thought you said yesterday... Does this mean Johnny is going to need a lawyer or something?

  “It’s his right to have a lawyer present during questioning, although he hasn’t been formally charged with anything,” Officer Parks clarified.

  Detective Halliday added, “But if he waives his right to speak with an attorney, we can proceed without any of these technical holdups.”

  “I’ve got nothing to hide,” Johnny said, looking from Dad to Mom. “Let’s go.”

  Dad nodded. “Okay. Let’s roll.”

  “I don’t know about this. I’m going to make some phone calls,” Mom said. The men ignored her, heading outside. “John!” Mom called after Dad from the doorway, her voice rising dangerously. “John!”

  Emilie came in, most of her hair having escaped its droopy ponytail. “What now?” she demanded. “Where are they going?”

  By this time, I was getting used to seeing Dad and Johnny duck into the back of a patrol car. It no longer surprised me.

  Mom shut the door, hard. “Back to the accident site.”

  “Jesus,” Emilie said.

  “Emilie Janine!”

  “They said they were sending
search dogs into the woods,” I repeated, thinking aloud. “But why would Stacy go into the woods? Do they think she was trying to take a shortcut or something?”

  Neither of them answered, not even Emilie, who could normally be counted on to tell when I was being stupid. It didn’t make any sense; the Lemkes’ house was a mile and a half from the ditch where Johnny’s truck had been found, a straight shot from Passaqua Road to Center Road to the Lemkes’ long, paved driveway. Even walking without her heaviest coat, even in the pretty brown leather boots she got for Christmas, Stacy should have been home in twenty minutes.

  “I’m going to take a shower,” Emilie announced disgustedly, heading upstairs.

  The oven timer dinged, and Mom took out three loaves of bread, which she would later punch down with flour-coated fingers. “Do you want to help?” she asked me.

  “Am I going to school tomorrow?” I asked back.

  “I don’t know. No, I guess.”

  “What about Wednesday?”

  “Kirsten! Enough.”

  I thought about the district spelling bee this Thursday night. Mom had forgotten, of course; it was tucked away with everything else that didn’t matter anymore.

  Upstairs, Johnny’s door was ajar. I peeked inside, expecting to see a crime scene, rather than a collection of dingy T-shirts and the piles of jeans he’d stepped out of, half holding his form. I sat on his unmade bed, pulling my knees to my chest.

  What was it Stacy had said, that day I’d overheard them from my hall closet hideout? I’ll be quiet. I could camp right here for a week or two, and no one would even notice.

  Johnny’s room was as big a mess as I’d ever seen it, the five drawers of his dresser each pulled out, clothes spilling over the sides. His desk, never actually used for studying, was heaped with wrestling gear, the source of the room’s biting, sour smell. A history textbook was visible, buried under a heap of crumpled binder paper. She’d wanted to stay here, amid the cache of sports equipment—the deflated basketballs, a dozen tennis balls rolled loose, the bats and gloves we’d used in our brief time as the Hammarstrom Hitters.

  It was creepy being in this room, where my brother slept night after night, dreaming his hidden dreams. Stacy had been in here, too, in this filth that was so different from the crisp clean of her room. I remembered how her bedspread had felt, the little white pills of cotton that would be bumpy if you laid down on it, that would leave the imprint of the spread on your skin. She must have sat on her bed night after night, writing those long letters to Johnny; he must have sat right here, writing her back.

  I remembered the photo in Stacy’s dresser drawer, the boyfriend before Johnny whose face had been blotted out, as if he’d never existed. The same thing, I realized, could have happened to Johnny, if he’d left her behind, accepted a scholarship to Iowa or gone off to find a job. It was strange to think this, but in a way it was Stacy who had been blotted out, Stacy who was so far gone she might never have existed at all.

  “What are you doing in here?”

  I turned. Emilie stood in the doorway, her wet hair streaked with neat rows from a comb.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  We stared at each other.

  “Nothing,” I said again, more loudly, as if that would clear it up. “I mean, I was just thinking.”

  Emilie looked at me for a long time. Her hair left a wet stain on her shirt. Finally she said, “What’s there to think about? Johnny was in a car accident. Stacy tried to walk home and got lost on the way.”

  “Right,” I said. “I know.”

  She laughed, and I gasped, because I didn’t know it was possible to laugh anymore, as if it was an unwritten moral code: we don’t laugh anymore, because Stacy is missing.

  “So, you believe that?” Emilie asked.

  I sucked in my breath. “Don’t you believe that?”

  Emilie narrowed her eyes, the blue of her irises disappearing into a dark line. “We shouldn’t be in here,” she said finally. She gestured with her right arm, and I marched out the door like an obedient soldier.

  twenty-one

  That night, I dreamed I was Stacy Lemke. I was tall and lean, wearing my new boots, my red-tipped fingernails tucked into a pair of knitted gloves. Wind was swirling around me, snow slapping against my face, blinding me. Everything was white—the ground, the sky, my breath as I called for Johnny. Where was he? I burrowed my hands into the pockets of my green coat and screamed for him. My lips froze, stung by the cold. “Johnny!” I screamed, the wind erasing my words. I spun around and suddenly he was behind me. But something was wrong. His eyes were blue and hard, unblinking, as if they were frozen in his face. He reached for me, but I pulled away. I tried to run, but my feet were stuck, buried in a mound of snow. I tried again, and this time I lost my balance, falling backward—

  “Hey, wake up.” Emilie was shaking me, her hair hanging in my face. “Are you okay?”

  I sat up, trembling.

  “You kept calling for Johnny.”

  “I had a bad dream.” I closed my eyes, and it came back instantly—I was Stacy, and Johnny was standing over me, his hands reaching for my neck.

  Emilie gave me a long look.

  At breakfast, Mom felt my forehead, dosed me with medicine and ordered me back to bed. The day passed in a cold, dull blur. Propped up on one elbow, I read in Myths and Half-True Tales about strange appearances and disappearances—a Roman soldier in full dress who was found wandering in a Nebraska cornfield; ships found unmanned, their crews nowhere to be found. I drifted in and out of sleep, imagining once that Stacy had suddenly appeared in an African village and another time that she had fallen, Alice-like, down a rabbit hole. Downstairs, life went on without me.

  Wednesday morning I woke up feeling refreshed. There was a long, peaceful moment before I remembered that Stacy Lemke was missing, and everything in my entire life had changed. When I came down to breakfast, Grandpa was just coming in the back door. “I’ve been chasing reporters off the property all morning,” he announced.

  “What reporters?” Mom asked, peeking out the window.

  “The ones in the white vans parked at the end of the driveway.” Grandpa gestured over his head with a heavy arm.

  “We’re going to be on TV?” I asked.

  “Well, actually—” Mom took a deep breath “—we are going to be on television later this morning.”

  I swallowed, imagining myself in front of a bulky video camera. “We are?”

  “Not you, honey.” Mom ran her hand up and down my back. “Your dad and Johnny and me. There’s going to be a press conference this morning.”

  “Oh.” I waited, but she didn’t continue. “What does that mean?”

  “Stacy’s parents are going to talk about what’s happened. They asked us to be there, too.”

  “Damn fool idea, if you ask me,” Grandpa commented.

  “It’s not your decision to make,” Mom told him, and he let the screen door slam into place behind him. “Everyone’s just upset,” Mom continued, giving me a tight smile.

  This was a terrifying development. My family on television? For the past couple of days, I’d been able to convince myself that only a few people knew about our situation. Now everyone would know, for sure.

  For the first time in days, we moved as if we had purpose. Emilie, grumpy, ironed Dad’s and Johnny’s dress shirts, and Aunt Julia came over to help Mom pick out her clothes. I sat on the bed, watching them reject item after item in Mom’s wardrobe. Ninety percent of Mom’s wardrobe consisted of white pants with elastic waistbands and baggy pastel-colored smocks, her nursing uniform.

  “Not this—it’s going to wash you out too much,” Aunt Julia said, tossing away a light brown cardigan. “You basically disappear in this sweater.”

  “I do?” Mom held up the red pullover D
ad had bought her for Christmas, the one she’d worn all through the holidays. “What about this sweater? I like this one.”

  Aunt Julia shook her head. “Too festive. You don’t want to look like you’re having a good time.”

  “I should go with something conservative.”

  Aunt Julia snorted. “All of your clothes are conservative.”

  “I mean, tasteful,” Mom clarified. “I don’t want us to look like country bumpkins next to the Lemkes.”

  This was a real possibility, I feared—remembering the Lemkes in their starched linen at Stacy’s birthday party.

  Aunt Julia smiled. “Then tell John to leave his rope belt at home.” Her smile was just a flash and then gone, a guilty pleasure that couldn’t be indulged.

  “I just hope— I mean, they told us we wouldn’t have to say anything. We’ll just be there to present a united front. I can’t imagine what I would say, anyway....”

  Aunt Julia dug out a navy blazer from the recesses of Mom’s closet. “What about this?”

  Mom slipped it over a white turtleneck. It was a little tight at the shoulders and looked as though, if she flexed too hard, it would tear at the seams.

  “Not bad,” Aunt Julia judged.

  Mom turned to face the mirror, grimacing at her reflection. “All this damn food,” she said. “That’s all I’ve been doing, sitting and eating.”

  “It’s fine. It’s conservative. Reserved. Tasteful. And here—” Aunt Julia dipped her head to one side and then the other, removing her gold studs. “These will help.”

  Mom poked the earrings into place and turned from side to side, viewing herself from all angles. “I just don’t know if I trust them—the Lemkes, I mean. The other night they were determined to hang Johnny right there. And now, today...” She slipped into the seat at her vanity table, and Aunt Julia hovered over her with various little tubes of makeup.

  “But this is to help find Stacy,” Aunt Julia reminded her. “That’s all it is. Get the word out, see if anyone knows something and can come forward. Now, hold still.” When she was finished, Mom looked like a costumed version of herself, as if she was dressing as a school board member for Halloween.