The Mourning Hours

by Paula Treick DeBoard

  Mom shook her head. “Aunt Julia’s coming over to stay with you two.”

  Emilie rolled her eyes, but didn’t say anything. Maybe we did need a babysitter now. Maybe there were more things to worry about than who would make us lunch or make sure we weren’t watching inappropriate shows on TV.

  Dad, Mom and Johnny left, dressed up as if they were headed to Sunday service. Mom drove and Dad reclined in the passenger seat, holding an ice pack against his eye. Johnny stared out the window at nothing. I wondered what he would say to his lawyer. Maybe he would even confess, and this whole thing could come to an end.

  “So,” Aunt Julia said, too brightly. “Who wants to go to town?”

  Emilie and I agreed to the trip warily. It was Thursday, and we had only missed four days of school, but it felt as if we’d been locked in the house for a month. I wondered if I would come back eventually to find that my classmates had already mastered long division, that they had finished our entire unit on the early Native Americans in Wisconsin. On the other hand, town was an intimidating place, where we were sure to bump into people we knew, people who had seen our family on the news. We piled into Aunt Julia’s Buick anyway, Emilie ducking behind the passenger-side visor mirror, and me sitting directly behind her. A news bulletin was just coming on the radio, and Aunt Julia turned the dial to Alannah Myles crooning “Black Velvet.”

  We turned onto Rural Route 4, then Passaqua Road, passing acre after acre, farm after farm. It must have snowed again that morning, because everything we passed was dusted white. I usually loved the way snow covered things up, made every car and every house look the same, but today it looked depressing. Somewhere around here, I thought, they had looked for Stacy.

  “Is that it?” Emilie cried suddenly. “Is that the spot?”

  “Where?” I craned my neck, rubbing away the condensation on the window. There wasn’t much to see, just the ridges of tire tracks. Snow had long submerged any footprints, any trace of Stacy Lemke or Johnny Hammarstrom.

  “There—” Emilie pointed, and I followed the line of her finger to a single white cross, almost lost against the backdrop of snow.

  “Shit,” Aunt Julia said, pulling her car onto the shoulder. “Who put that there?”

  It was the kind of cross that was planted on the graves of veterans in the memorial cemetery just outside Watankee, and it was sort of strange, because of course Stacy wasn’t a veteran, and for that matter, we didn’t absolutely know she was dead. Only Johnny knew that, I thought, and instantly regretted it.

  Emilie opened her door and slipped out. She crossed in front of the Buick and then jogged across the road.

  “Shit,” Aunt Julia said again and rolled down her window to call after Emilie. “Where are you going?”

  Emilie waved with one hand over her head but didn’t look back.

  “This isn’t a good idea,” Aunt Julia said, strumming her fingers nervously on the steering wheel. She met my eye in the rearview mirror. “Not you, too. You’re staying put.”

  I rolled down my window and watched Emilie pick her way through the snow. She was wearing her tight black jeans, the ones that had spawned an argument when she’d first brought them home from the Shopko in Manitowoc. She knelt in front of the cross, and for a second I thought she was going to yank it out of the ground.

  “What’s she doing?” I asked. Aunt Julia shook her head, watching the road nervously. Emilie pulled on her jacket, and then I realized she was unwinding her red scarf from her neck, and rewinding it around the cross. When she stepped back, we could see the cross clearly. It looked more purposeful now, more permanent somehow, draped in her scarf.

  Emilie loped back to us, wrapping her coat around her body. I wondered how she would explain her missing scarf to Mom, or if it would be just one more thing nobody noticed, now that there were bigger things to care about.

  “All right, then?” Aunt Julia asked, looking somewhat peeved. Once Emilie’s seat belt was clasped, Aunt Julia pulled back onto the road. None of us mentioned what Emilie had done.

  We were in town a couple of minutes later, heading straight down Main Street, as if we didn’t have a thing to hide. It was strange to see that the town hadn’t changed without us in it. A few sedans were parked at the bank, and a Volkswagen Bug idled outside the library. I held my breath when we passed Watankee Elementary School, but the playground was deserted.

  “I’m going to run in for a couple of things,” Aunt Julia said when we got to the Stop ’N’ Go at the edge of town. “You want to come in?” We both opted to stay in the car, and Emilie fiddled with the radio station. Looking up, I saw that the marquee, which had boasted congratulations and good luck wishes after the big wrestling match, now said, Missing: Stacy Lynne Lemke, 5 7 , 130 pounds.

  Aunt Julia came out of the store gripping two plastic bags. “Here you go,” she said, handing each of us a can of Coke and a couple of tiny bags of candy, the ones you could pick up at the register for fifty cents.

  “This was what you needed to buy?” I asked, confused.

  “Thanks,” Emilie said simply, and ripped into a package.

  On the way home, we passed the roadside memorial again. Emilie’s scarf was the single dot of color on the landscape. I’d been straining to see it, leaning my head forward so that my chin rested on the middle of the front seat between Aunt Julia and Emilie. But even so, the splash of color surprised me for a moment. It looked for all the world like a smear of blood across the snow.

  twenty-seven

  Mom’s spirits seemed buoyed by the meeting with the lawyer. “Mr. Gibson says it’s a good sign that the district attorney hasn’t pressed charges yet,” she reported, dropping her purse on the kitchen counter and easing her feet out of her gray pumps. Dad, his face even more puffy and swollen, immediately headed to the barn. “If they had even the slightest bit of evidence, Johnny would have been arrested. Mr. Gibson seems to think that Johnny is in the clear, barring any new developments.”

  It was hard to know how to react to this news. Be thankful that he was free, that he hadn’t been found out? I turned to Emilie, who was looking deliberately at the floor. Aunt Julia stepped forward, giving Johnny a hug that, for once, he didn’t back away from. I stepped forward toward Johnny. I was the right height to throw my arms around his waist, to bury my face in his stomach with a hug, and I’d done that before.... Now, all I could manage was a clumsy one-armed embrace.

  “Thanks, shorty.”

  “It’s good news,” Mom continued, with such conviction that it almost sounded true.

  But I doubted that the men from last night would see this as a positive sign. It might not make any difference in the world to them that Johnny hadn’t been arrested. This made me think about the rest of Watankee—everyone from Pastor Ziegler to my teachers at school. Everyone must be talking about it—all the kids in my class, their parents. It was hard to imagine that they weren’t talking about it every night at dinner. We would be talking about it—if the circumstances were different.

  “And what about last night?” Aunt Julia asked.

  Mom looked confident when she said, “They’re absolutely not allowed on our property. In fact, we could even apply for a restraining order against them, which we still might do. John doesn’t think that’s such a good idea for right now.”

  Although Mom seemed certain that we had nothing to worry about, that other people would start to see Johnny was innocent, not everyone had received the memo. More television vans appeared at the end of our driveway by early afternoon. Grandpa, against Mom’s protests, went down to shoo them away and succeeded at least in moving them across the road, where they camped out as if they had no intention of leaving.

  We flipped back and forth between television stations, catching snatches of soap operas and the occasional update on the case—although as far as I could tell, there were
no real updates. At one point, a camera shot showed “live footage” of our house. Way in the background, Dad walked from the shed to the barn. In the foreground, Grandpa stood in front of his porch, as if he was one-half of the American Gothic painting, minus a pitchfork.

  “Doesn’t this get old?” Mom sighed. “What are they waiting for? Do they think Johnny is going to run across the street and offer up a confession?”

  In the absence of real news, however, the media found plenty of people who were eager to comment on the case. An older woman, describing herself as a “friend and confidante” of the Lemke family, said that Stacy had been a sweet, innocent girl, as all-American as they come. “She never gave her parents a minute of trouble,” the woman said, tearing up. Mom rolled her eyes.

  Next, the announcer introduced Stacy’s former boyfriend, now a freshman at UW–La Crosse. I sat up suddenly, paying attention. This was the boy whose face Stacy had methodically scratched out in the photo I’d found in her bedroom. He was dark-haired, broad-shouldered. “You hear something like this on the news, and you just can’t believe it,” he said, shaking his head. “Stacy was so loving and trusting—those were her biggest strengths as a person. But I could see her loving and trusting the wrong person, and getting into trouble that way.”

  “That’s practically slander,” Mom commented.

  The special report concluded with one more testimonial, and this one a clincher. The reporter intoned dramatically, “Although the district attorney has declined to press charges against Johnny Hammarstrom at this time, there are quite a few people in Watankee who feel this is a mistake.”

  We gasped when the screen cut to Mrs. Keithley, the children’s Sunday School teacher at St. John’s for the past twenty years, who had sat on a tiny little stool in one of the church classrooms each Sunday, listening as a line of kids recited their catechism. She was standing in front of the bank downtown, where a little crowd had gathered, eager to be part of the excitement. During the long focus on Mrs. Keithley, other people from the community—parents with their toddlers, a few teenagers—stepped into the background.

  “It sure is such a tragedy for our community,” Mrs. Keithley began, the camera glinting strangely off her thick glasses. “But it goes to show you that you never can know the heart of another person. You take that Susan Smith who has been in the news, the one who concocted that crazy story about her kids being taken, when all along they were lying at the bottom of a lake.” She paused for a moment, indignant, and continued in a louder voice, “Now maybe Johnny Hammarstrom is telling the truth when he says that she just got out of his car and wandered off into the snowstorm, but I tell you, it doesn’t seem likely. Johnny can hide the truth from us, but God knows. God always knows.”

  Behind her, the small crowd erupted into a cheer.

  The reporter said, “Certainly a lot of tension in this community right now. We’ll come back to this story later, with an update about the search of a local forest.”

  We sat too stunned to move, as if we’d been punched in the gut and couldn’t get our wind back. Finally Mom said, “I’m calling Mr. Gibson right now,” and disappeared to use the phone upstairs.

  Not long after, Coach Zajac’s rusted-out Subaru passed the bank of TV vans on Rural Route 4 and pulled into our driveway. It surprised me to see him, because with everything else going on, I’d completely forgotten about wrestling. Also—it suddenly occurred to me—no one else had been stopping by to visit, or calling to see how we were doing, or making any of the polite gestures that were pretty much ingrained in the fabric of Watankee. Not one single other person who wasn’t family had reached out to us since the press conference.

  Dad and Coach Zajac had a long, man-to-man conversation at the kitchen table, too quiet for me to overhear. After a while, Dad called for Johnny, and he came downstairs and joined them.

  “What do you think they’re saying?” I asked Emilie, who was lying on her bed staring at the ceiling. It seemed unfair that I was old enough to witness a group of drunk men attack my father but wasn’t allowed to listen in on other adult conversations.

  “Oh, you know, the usual.” She leaned on her elbow and delivered her next lines in a pretty good imitation of Coach Zajac’s voice. “Bad luck, chum. Girlfriend goes missing. But life goes on. You can’t just give up because of one loss.”

  I giggled in spite of myself. “But Johnny’s not going to wrestle anymore.”

  Emilie raised an eyebrow. “The last I checked, he’s still on the schedule at state.”

  “There’s no way,” I said at the same time Dad called for Mom. Emilie and I followed Mom down the stairs.

  “It’s not going to look good,” Mom said, shaking her head.

  Dad said, “Coach has a point, you know. Someday soon, the truth is going to come out that Johnny had nothing to do with any of that mess. He shouldn’t have to miss out on the one thing he’s worked so hard for these past four years.”

  “It’s going to seem like we’re running away,” Mom said, touching Johnny on the shoulder. “How are you feeling about this?”

  Johnny shrugged miserably. “I think I should be here, in case something happens.”

  Dad asked, “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. Like maybe they find Stacy. I want to be here when that happens.”

  “If there’s any news, we’ll come back instantly,” Dad promised. “If you don’t go, Johnny, you’re always going to wonder what would have happened.”

  Johnny shrugged again.

  I thought maybe it was Dad—and Coach Zajac, too—who would always wonder.

  Surprisingly, it didn’t take much convincing for Mom to go along with the plan. “I suppose people have made up their minds anyway, no matter what we do,” she said finally. “Especially if they’ve been listening to the news.”

  In the end, the decision was made by Mr. Gibson, who acknowledged that Johnny had the legal right to represent his school, since no charges had been filed against him. He even agreed with Mom that getting out of town might not be a bad idea, at least for a few days, until things settled.

  Mom made arrangements for a hotel in Madison, and Dad called Jerry Warczak to see if he could help Grandpa with the milking, since Grandpa couldn’t be persuaded to go. I imagined him falling asleep in his recliner, the shotgun stretched across his lap.

  It felt almost like a vacation, the sort we were always planning but never actually ended up taking, since it was nearly impossible for Dad to take time off from the farm and Mom’s three shifts a week often included weekends and school holidays, too. Eagerly, I pulled out the suitcase I’d gotten for Christmas from Aunt Julia and hadn’t had a chance to use. I’d loved it only a few months ago, but now it was too babyish—Tinker Bell–themed and impossibly pink. Had I grown up without realizing it?

  We set out on Thursday evening in Mom’s Caprice, as soon as the last television van had moved for the night. Coach Zajac was going separately, on the team bus. For every other wrestling match of his career, Johnny had traveled with the team, too. It was telling that no one from the team had stopped by, not even Peter Bahn or Erik Hansen. Of course, Erik’s dad had stopped by—and it was easy to figure that he had spoken for all of them.

  Johnny took a window seat in our car, his head leaning sleepily against the glass. Every so often he would wake with a jump and a wild look around, like he wasn’t sure where we were going or why. I kept watching him out of the corner of my eye and caught Dad watching him, too, in the rearview mirror. If I couldn’t sleep without dreaming about Stacy, then I imagined Johnny couldn’t, either.

  We stopped at a Denny’s outside Madison, and Dad steered Johnny toward the endless stack of pancakes, plus eggs, sausage and hash browns for good measure. “Eat, eat,” he urged, worried that Johnny would be underweight for his class. Johnny ate everything put in front of him—including half of my
ham-and-cheese omelet—but without seeming to enjoy a single bite.

  We packed into a hotel room with two double beds—Mom and Emilie in one, Dad and Johnny in another, me in a green folding cot that Dad said looked like surplus from World War II. We took turns with the bathroom, carrying our pajamas in and our jeans out, then settling into our spots quietly. Dad watched a movie on television with the sound muted. Absent the sound, it became nothing more than one bright flash of color after another. With one elbow propped against the frame of my cot, I watched two actors in a heated conversation, their mouths literally inches apart.

  “Are you feeling okay about tomorrow, Johnny?” Mom asked, and Johnny gave a grunt that could have been yes or no.

  “I just wanted to say—” Mom continued, and although her voice was soft, it was distinct against the quiet of the room “—with everything else going on, I think we’ve forgotten to say that we’re proud of you.”

  After this statement, the quiet was even more obvious. On TV, there was some sort of silent explosion, and a car went wheeling through the air, its tires catching on nothing. I was waiting for someone else to chime in—Dad, at least—to echo Mom’s feelings. But listening to the silence, I realized that it didn’t matter anymore. No matter what, we would never escape what happened that night.

  I think that’s when it hit me that no matter what else Johnny Hammarstrom ever did with his life, he would always be Stacy Lemke’s boyfriend, the boy who killed his girlfriend and somehow got away with it.

  twenty-eight

  Early Friday morning, Dad and Johnny left to get Johnny checked in, and I crawled into their empty bed and flipped between morning news shows with the volume on low for an hour before Mom or Emilie stirred. There was nothing about Stacy Lemke, no news bulletins about a missing Watankee girl. We were three hours away from our lives. If we stayed here, I wondered, would we always be three hours removed from all our troubles?