The Mourning Hours

by Paula Treick DeBoard

  “Well, hello, Kirsten,” she said, her voice icy and dangerous. If the yellow ball hadn’t been strung to the pole, I think she might have clobbered me with it right off the bat. The crowd, after a few cries of “oooh,” was suddenly quiet, not wanting to miss anything. Someone gave me another shove from behind, and I landed inside the half-circle of the tetherball court across from Heather. In the confusion, I dropped my brown lunch bag and looked over to see it trampled beneath the feet of some sixth grade boys.

  “I don’t want to fight,” I said, and everyone laughed as if I’d said something hysterical. I strained my neck to look for the teacher on duty but couldn’t see over my classmates’ heads.

  “It’s not a fight, you dummy,” Heather Lemke said. “It’s a game.”

  “I don’t want to play,” I said, my heart smashing into the walls of my chest cavity like a billiard ball. “You know I’ll lose.”

  “Are you chicken, Hammarstrom?” she asked, and the crowd took it up like a mantra: “Bawk! Bawk!”

  Yes, I thought. As a matter of fact, I was a chicken. I knew that Heather Lemke was the biggest and toughest of the sixth graders; I’d seen her beat just about every boy in the school into submission on this very court. I remembered the way she’d galloped around the yard at Stacy’s birthday party, with kids bouncing up and down on her back. I could barely carry my own backpack without tipping over.

  “No,” I said, my voice wavering with the obvious lie. “I’m not chicken. I just don’t want to play.”

  “Bawk! Bawk!”

  Heather snickered and tossed me the ball, lightly. I lunged forward, almost missing it. “I’ll even let you start.”

  I’d read enough books and seen enough after-school specials to know that the underdog could sometimes be victorious, through courage or wits or some previously untapped source of superhuman strength—but the second that tetherball was in my hands, I knew it wouldn’t be the case with me. I was short on courage, wits and strength. It wasn’t going to be the sort of match my classmates remembered for years to come because I had pulled off some amazing feat. Standing in front of Heather Lemke, I felt like David confronting Goliath without even a slingshot at his side.

  “Take your best shot,” Heather sneered, crouching down into playing position.

  I prayed right then for something to happen, like an earthquake or a tornado or a crack of lightning to split the sky in two. I prayed for a teacher to come, or my mother, or even Johnny, who could have lifted me onto his shoulder and carried me straight out to the parking lot. But nothing happened and no one came, and I had to throw the ball. “Bawk! Bawk!” someone clucked behind me. I’m not a chicken, I thought, my eyes narrowing. Heather, catching the expression on my face at that moment, opened her eyes wide in surprise. I wound my right arm back behind my head, gathered all my strength and let it fly.

  The best part of what happened next was that I’d caught Heather Lemke slightly off guard, and she missed my first throw, which flew through the air with more height and speed than I would have thought possible, the ball just missing Heather’s outstretched hand, the cord wrapping itself once around the pole. The crowd yelled, “Whoa!” as one. But the worst part was that the ball continued with too much height, so that I had to jump for my own throw, slapping the air with my hand as the ball whizzed by. Heather was ready this time, stopping the ball firmly in her hands.

  With an easy lob, she reversed the direction of the ball and unwound the rope. I jumped for it and missed, and then jumped and missed again with her second throw. I willed myself to stay put, to not even try, but I couldn’t resist reaching for the ball each time it passed. With each swipe and miss, the crowd cheered louder, the rope wrapping hopelessly tight around the pole out of my reach. Finally, she was left with one more throw.

  “This one,” Heather Lemke announced, in a voice I would remember forever, it was so full of rage and tears, “this one is for my sister.”

  And one final time the ball soared overhead, wrapping tightly against the pole until there was no rope left.

  Heather Lemke held her arms to the sky as if she’d just won an Olympic medal. Our classmates swarmed her, pushing me to the outside of the circle now to give her hugs and high fives.

  “Heath-er! Heath-er!” they chanted.

  If she had been any smaller, they might have hoisted her onto their shoulders and taken a victory lap around our blacktop, but at this point one of the fifth-grade teachers wandered over, smiling curiously, and the crowd dispersed.

  “Are you okay, honey?” the teacher asked, bending down to me. I hadn’t realized that I was crying until then, but at the sound of her voice I felt the full shame of hot tears trickling down my face.

  “No,” I said, wiping away the tears. It was stupid to come back, to pretend that no one held anything against me. I was guilty just because I was Kirsten Hammarstrom, and my brother was Johnny Hammarstrom, and his girlfriend had been Stacy Lemke. If my life was an after-school special, I would turn the other cheek and keep coming back, day after day, until I convinced my classmates that I was the same Kirsten Hammarstrom I had been and would always be, despite the circumstances. But life wasn’t a television show, and no screenwriter was going to be able to write me the courage and the smooth dialogue I would need to make it through the rest of fourth grade.

  “No,” I repeated loudly. “I want to go home.”

  thirty-two

  “Was someone mean to you?” Mom asked that night as we sat on my bed, smoothing my hair back from my forehead. I’d spent the entire afternoon there, refusing to get up for dinner. “Did someone say something?”

  I shook my head miserably. It wasn’t someone who was mean; it wasn’t just anyone who had said something. I couldn’t bring myself to tell her about Heather Lemke and the tetherball match.

  Instead I asked, “Do I have to go back? Maybe I could just start fifth grade this fall.”

  Mom sighed. “Honey...”

  “I’m not going back, either,” Emilie announced from the doorway. She had made it through the whole day at Lincoln High School but afterward collapsed on the couch with an afghan, refusing to talk to anyone. I remembered the phone calls Emilie used to make each night, the giddy weekend sleepovers with her friends. Maybe it had been even worse for her than a humiliating tetherball match.

  “Emilie,” Mom scolded. “It was only the first day back....”

  “My last day back,” Emilie said firmly, crossing her thin arms over her chest.

  “It can’t be that bad,” Mom said, but the end of her words rose up in a question. “Is it that bad?” She looked from Emilie to me. My tears, which had dried by the time Dad had picked me up from the school office, started again under her scrutiny.

  “Mom,” Emilie said. “You don’t get it. It’s not just Johnny that they hate. It’s us, too.”

  There was a long silence. I leaned against Mom’s chest, pushing my head beneath her chin. Everything felt different all of a sudden. We were the same people, in the same house, in the same small town, but I could tell that we didn’t belong anymore. The place that I’d always felt was reserved for me—the little corner of the universe where I had lived every minute of my life—had disappeared. Maybe it had vanished right along with Stacy Lemke, and I was only now noticing it.

  “Okay, then,” Mom said softly, wiping my tears with her index fingers. Her own eyes were moist and red-rimmed. “We’ll see.”

  After Mom left, I rolled over on the bed to face Emilie. She had reached into the drawer of her nightstand and was now applying purple polish to her toes with fierce concentration. “Thanks,” I whispered.

  Emilie scowled. “What are you thanking me for? I just made it possible for you to be a fourth-grade dropout. At least I made it all the way to ninth grade.”

  It might have been the first time I’d laughed in wee
ks.

  That year, the snow lingered late, still falling off and on into April, when it was followed by blustery days of wind and rain. Dad and Jerry talked about planting, about the price of corn per bushel. It was the first hint that life might go on, that the cycle of birth and death and renewal was about to begin all over again. Stacy Lemke was only a tiny glitch in the overall rotation of the world.

  We settled into a new routine: Dad worked in the barn or visited Grandpa in the rehab center; Mom picked up extra hours, arriving home late at night to flop onto the couch in her scrubs. Johnny’s truck peeled out of the driveway after the first milking, and Emilie and I sighed with relief. Mostly, on lonely afternoons, we found ourselves in front of the television, drawn to it like mosquitoes to fresh blood. We watched reruns of The Cosby Show and The Brady Bunch and new episodes of Boy Meets World. Emilie held every strand of her hair up to the light, checking for split ends. I finished the books in my Nancy Drew collection and started them again from the beginning.

  The investigation had tapered off, due to a lack of credible evidence, but Stacy was still everywhere, her picture plastered to public surfaces. Volunteers had diligently posted signs that stretched throughout the countryside, papering every telephone pole. There was even a sign at the end of our driveway, put there on purpose, I was sure, by the Lemkes themselves or one of their friends, someone who wanted to make sure we didn’t forget. Every day when I walked down the driveway to check our mail, Stacy’s black-and-white face stared back at me. I made it part of my daily ritual to touch the palm of my hand to her grainy gray cheek, as if I was offering her a blessing or checking for fever.

  Candlelight vigils for Stacy continued outside Lincoln High School, attended by nearly a hundred people each weekend. The news stations ran short videos of Stacy’s friends—girls with tear-stained, rosy cheeks and tapered candles clenched in their fists. Someone had printed a giant banner that served as a backdrop to these events: STACY LYNNE LEMKE, LAST SEEN MARCH 4, 1995.

  I desperately wanted to go, to light a candle for Stacy, to say a prayer—but it was unthinkable. I imagined the good people of Watankee, the people I’d known for my entire life, the people who’d known my parents before I was even born, chasing me away from the vigil with pitchforks. This was the sort of thing I’d begun to dream when I fell asleep—of a pack of armed men charging through our back door, taking over our house room by room, while I listened, terrified, from my bathroom hideout, of waking to find that every inch of my bedroom wall had been covered by hideous graffiti.

  “We can’t keep up like this,” Mom said, a daily mantra. “We can’t just be hermits for the rest of our lives.”

  But that didn’t seem fair—she herself spent every waking moment at the hospital, clocking in early, clocking out late. It wasn’t exactly clear where she expected us to go, anyway—back to our pew in church, under the watchful eyes of Mrs. Keithley and Sandy Maertz? To birthday parties at the homes of our former friends, who barely acknowledged our existence?

  If Stacy was everywhere, then Johnny was nowhere, as if he were the one who was missing. He continued the lonely drives in his beat-up truck, often missing dinner, never calling to report when he’d be home. We set a place at the table for him as if everything was normal and left it out for him, for whenever he returned. All night we kept an ear cocked for the sound of Johnny’s truck coming down the driveway. We listened, braced for his boots on the back steps. We were ready for his icy silences, the sudden, angry way he now had of dismissing everyone.

  Once Aunt Julia reported that she’d seen Johnny in a café in Two Rivers, between Manitowoc and Green Bay, and another time Uncle Paul passed his truck outside Port Washington, nearly an hour and a half away. Dad shared this with us at yet another meal where Johnny was missing in action.

  “I don’t understand,” Mom said. “What does he do out there? Where does he go?”

  Dad shrugged. “He’s just getting away. I don’t really think he does anything.”

  Mom scraped a helping of leftovers from dinner into the bowl by the door, which I would later bring out to Kennel. “Well, isn’t that nice,” she said, facing out the window to where RR4 gently unfolded for miles to the north. “How nice for him that he just gets to go away whenever he wants, while the rest of us are stuck—” She stopped short, and I wondered how she meant to finish the sentence. Stuck in this stupid little town? Stuck here with each other?

  One night, only halfway through Mom’s ham-and-Swiss bowtie pasta casserole, Johnny’s truck pulled into the driveway. Mom raised an eyebrow dramatically. Dad ignored her, focusing instead on the tiny black-and-white TV he’d borrowed from Grandpa’s house and hooked up in our kitchen. Most nights during dinner he found something to watch on TV with the volume down low, so he only had to half listen to our conversation.

  “Well, look who’s here,” Mom said. “Have a seat, Johnny.”

  Dad’s eyes flickered briefly from the television to Johnny and then, pointedly, to his empty chair. Johnny slumped into his seat, grunting thanks when Mom gave him two giant scoops of pasta and I passed the milk. I watched as he ate and ate, bringing silent spoonfuls to his mouth, the days of cutting weight behind him for good. His body looked healthier than it had in months. This was a weird contrast with his eyes, which were dead in his face.

  Mom folded her arms across her chest and cleared her throat. “Well, as long as we have you here, Johnny, your father and I are wondering if you’ve made any plans for next year.”

  Johnny let out a hollow sound, half a laugh. “Now that I’m no longer going to college on a wrestling scholarship, you mean?”

  I watched Mom’s face. Her lips had tightened into a thin line, and she seemed to be chewing her lower lip with her upper teeth, as if she were holding in her words.

  Dad said, “All right, Johnny,” without glancing up.

  Johnny took a bite of casserole and reloaded his fork.

  “There are other things you can do. If you want, we can help you start looking for a job.”

  “I know,” Johnny said, fork halfway to his mouth. “I hear there’s an opening for the position of town asshole.”

  Mom stiffened.

  “Watch your language,” Dad scolded.

  “You know, Mom, maybe it would be better if you just said it.” Johnny took a bite, chewed, swallowed and opened his mouth in a deliberate smack of satisfaction.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Mom said, working the edge of her placemat with nervous fingers. We had all stopped eating by now, Emilie and I carefully watching the others as if we were minor actors in the drama, left out of the script.

  “I want to hear it. I want you to say it.”

  “Johnny, you just simmer down,” Dad said, glancing back at the TV. I followed his eyes—it was a commercial for dish detergent.

  “I don’t know what you want to hear, Johnny. I’m not saying anything.” Mom stabbed a hunk of ham with her fork, then swished it through a mound of cream sauce.

  “Fine.” Johnny slammed down his fork and stood up. A few drops of white sauce splattered against the blue tablecloth. “Fine. I’ll say it. I’m the screwup son no one wants to talk to, the brother no one wants to acknowledge. I don’t need to apply for the position—I’m already the town asshole. I get it. Believe me, I get it. So, what do you want from me, then? You want me to confess to something—”

  I had this funny feeling in the back of my throat, as if something was caught there. Yes, I thought. Confess. Come clean, cough it up, make things right.

  “Sit down,” Mom ordered.

  “Really, you think I should sit down? Should I finish my casserole? Should I eat my peas and carrots, too? Should I just be the good boy while you all stare at me like I’m some kind of killer?”

  “Maybe you should have thought of that before,” Emilie muttered. Our heads all snapped in her
direction. “I mean, before you decided to ruin all our lives.”

  “Emilie! That’s enough out of you,” Dad threatened, his face suddenly red. “Down,” he repeated to Johnny. “Sit down now.”

  Johnny half obeyed, leaning backward into his chair, one leg folded beneath him as if ready again to pounce.

  No one said anything for a long time. The theme song for Jeopardy began faintly in the background. In our previous lives, Mom would have snapped off the TV, forcing us into conversation. But now, the distraction was a relief. Maybe when it came down to it, no one really wanted to know what Johnny had to say. Maybe we didn’t want to know the truth. Instead, we all strained to hear Alex Trebek introduce the contestants, their accomplishments, their weird obsessions.

  Without warning, Johnny stood again. We all watched him, even Dad, our mouths open. This was further than any of us had ever gone in defiance. Even Emilie, who toed every boundary, would have backed down at this point.

  “I can’t do this anymore,” he said.

  What did he mean: Eat dinner? Talk to the people who had known him for his entire life?

  Dad stood, too, but Johnny was faster. He was out the door in a second, digging in his pocket for his keys. We heard the whine of the ignition and then the catch. Dad sat back down, and I was still gripping my fork when Johnny’s truck roared by. Although they’d worked on it a few times, Johnny hadn’t had anything professionally fixed. One headlight flashed across the window, and the other pointed slightly upward, as if it was searching the stars.

  thirty-three