The Mourning Hours

by Paula Treick DeBoard

  On the most humid Memorial Day any of us could remember, we celebrated Johnny’s eighteenth birthday with a barbecue at Aunt Julia and Uncle Paul’s. Johnny had been more or less absent since his blowup, and it looked as if he might bolt from this gathering, too. We ate bratwurst and potato salad and a lemon cake I had helped to frost, licking my fingers carefully in between swoops of the knife. Emilie conducted our pitiful performance of “Happy Birthday” with a fork in one hand and a flyswatter in the other. Stacy had been missing for nearly three months, and we were all trying way too hard to be happy.

  Johnny blew out eighteen candles in a single breath—no girlfriends. After the cake, there was a stack of carefully chosen gifts—T-shirts, blue jeans, a pair of boots. I couldn’t help thinking how his eighteenth birthday party should have been, with Stacy sitting on his lap, sneaking a kiss at every opportunity, and his friends stopping by, slipping some alcohol into the punch. Now we were the only people in the world who loved Johnny Hammarstrom—and that love was tinged by a thousand doubts.

  Afterward, Emilie and I changed into our swimsuits while the adults—Johnny now legally one of them—lounged in chairs on the deck. It was already past dusk, the sky tinkling with the lights of hundreds of fireflies. Aunt Julia lit a cigarette over Uncle Paul’s protests.

  “Please,” she said, twin lines of smoke dribbling out of her nostrils. “I’m quitting again tomorrow. I’m just finishing this pack.”

  “Sure you are,” Mom said, winking at me.

  I floated on my back, watching stars appear in the sky.

  “Mosquitoes,” Emilie announced suddenly. Despite about a gallon of bug spray, they had begun to appear, hovering over the water like tiny, buzzing vultures.

  “It’s because you’re so sweet,” Aunt Julia said. “See? They don’t even bother with an old woman like me.”

  In just a few minutes the sky went from indigo to black, each star glowing more and more visible above us. I knew that you could take a picture of the night sky, and it would look tiny and silly in your hand, just a black canvas with a few tiny white dots. But lying beneath it, the sky seemed immense, powerful and protective. Lying beneath it, it was easy to forget that anything bad had ever happened to anyone. I could almost make myself believe that nothing bad would ever happen again.

  And then Johnny sat up in his deck chair, looking around. “What was that?”

  I flipped right-side up in the pool and made a few clumsy strokes toward the edge.

  “Quiet!” Johnny ordered, and I froze. Straining, I heard a low rumbling sound, not far away.

  Uncle Paul took a long swig and set down his Budweiser. “Sounds like a car stopping out in front.”

  “Shouldn’t be anyone out there,” Johnny said, getting to his feet.

  Although we’d only come from down the road, we’d taken two cars—Dad, Mom, Emilie and me in the Caprice, with me carefully balancing the cake plate on my lap, and Johnny just behind us in his truck. It was understood that he would want to leave early, to go off by himself.

  Johnny was already around the side of the house, in front of Dad and Uncle Paul, by the time I hoisted my body out of the pool and ran dripping behind them. I heard Johnny yell something and suddenly, shattering the night, some loud popping sounds, staccato and uneven. Mom was ahead of me, too—she held out both hands to stop Emilie and me from running past.

  “Oh, my God, they’ve shot him!” Aunt Julia rasped, bringing up the rear, and that’s what I thought, too—that someone had shot Johnny dead, at point-blank range, maybe a dozen times.

  But I could still hear Johnny yelling, joined by Dad and Uncle Paul and a chorus of other voices, and I broke free from Mom’s grasp and ran barefoot through a planting bed to end up on the front lawn. Water from my swimsuit dripped down my legs.

  There were two pickup trucks in the road, just pulling away when I arrived, and each truck had a half-dozen people in the back. Mostly boys, but girls, too—kids about Johnny’s age. One girl was standing in the bed, and for some reason it was her voice I heard the loudest. “We know what you did, you murderer!” she screamed, her otherwise pretty face twisted in anger, her blond curls shaking with indignation. “We’re never going to forget!”

  Somehow it was even more terrifying that I didn’t know her, that she was essentially a stranger, bearing this massive weight of righteous anger against my brother, as if she was angry not just for Stacy, and not just for the Lemkes, but on behalf of everyone in the whole community. Dad ran toward the truck, and someone yelled, “Let’s get out of here!” The blonde girl was nearly thrown off balance with the forward motion of the pickup truck as it pulled back onto Rural Route 4, but she steadied herself with one hand against someone else’s shoulder. Even when the taillights disappeared over a little ridge in the road, I could still hear her voice: “Murderer!”

  Then I saw that they hadn’t been armed with guns, but with eggs—dozens of cracked shells had been pelted against the side of Johnny’s truck, and at least one had struck him in the chest.

  “I’m calling the police,” Uncle Paul said, heading into the house. “They can’t just ride around the county terrorizing people.”

  “It’s only some eggs,” Dad said. He had come around the side of the house pretty fast and was breathing hard now, long deep breaths with his hands on his knees. “I thought we were done with all this by now. It’s been pretty quiet for the past month.”

  Johnny was staring at his truck, and all at once we seemed to notice that it was parked a little funny, as if it was on an incline. Except that it wasn’t—the driveway was completely level where it met with the road.

  Emilie pointed. “Look at your tires!”

  The two tires facing the road were flat, slit all the way across in thick, gaping wounds. Dad stepped up for a closer look. Circling the back of the truck, he said, “Aw, shit.”

  The paint on Johnny’s truck had long been peeling anyway, so that we called it the Green Machine more from a sense of nostalgia than anything else. Now with the dented passenger side and front fender, it looked more like a wreck on wheels. But from Dad’s tone, I knew something else was wrong. We circled behind him silently and read the white paint across the tailgate: Murder Machine.

  Mom gasped.

  Uncle Paul said, “You don’t think I should call the police now?”

  In the midst of our seething, another sound, strangely high-pitched, broke into my consciousness. It was a sound I hadn’t heard before—a shrill, almost screeching cry. We all turned to it at once, more frightened by this noise than the cracking of eggs against metal or the enraged screams of kids in the back of a pickup. It was Johnny.

  He had sunk to his knees on the pavement and was leaning forward, his head between his hands. I had seen him cry off and on when Stacy had first gone missing, a few, intermittent tears of frustration and exhaustion and helplessness, but nothing like this. He’d been bottling up his feelings for months, and they came now in a heady rush. Dad stepped forward, putting a hand on his shoulder, but Johnny shook it loose. His cries rose first from his throat and then from his chest, in deep, guttural heaves, as if he was expelling something trapped deep inside him, like his heart.

  thirty-four

  Two days later, Johnny packed his belongings into one of his old wrestling duffle bags and left Watankee. Dad had given him a ride to the bus station in Manitowoc and also slipped him $1,753 from our savings account, which just about wiped us out. In return, Johnny left us a note on a half sheet of binder paper. He didn’t know where he was going, or what he would do when he got there. He only knew he couldn’t stay in Watankee anymore, and that it would be better for all of us if he left. He signed it: Johnny.

  Detective Halliday, somehow getting wind of this news, stopped by our house to remind us that Johnny had been asked not to leave the jurisdiction, to make himself available
for any questioning that might arise. “You’re kidding, right?” Mom asked, although she’d been furious, too, discovering what Dad had done—both the ride to the bus stop early in the morning and the cash. “Maybe he should just roll over at your feet, so you could give him a good kick from time to time. Would you like that?”

  Dad assured Detective Halliday that Johnny was going to be in touch with us, that he would make himself available to the police if needed. Detective Halliday reminded Dad that if Johnny didn’t make himself available, a warrant could be issued for his arrest.

  That first night without Johnny, I lay in bed feeling the tension releasing from my body, the slow unspooling of something that had been tightly wound within me. Guilt? I had been, in my way, responsible for getting the two of them together. Fear? I hadn’t been personally scared of Johnny, but there was the fear of the unknown things he’d done. For the first time in months, I fell into a solid, dreamless sleep.

  In the morning, Jerry helped Dad tow the Green Machine to our property, where it sat behind our barn, out of view. Dad thought he might fix it up—but with its list of injuries, this was a daunting task. Maybe after the harvest this fall, he said. Maybe when... But his voice trailed off. Maybe when things settled down? Maybe when Johnny returned? Maybe when Grandpa came home from rehab? It might have been as difficult for him as for me to imagine our futures. It was as if the life cycle of the Hammarstroms had somehow stalled, midrotation.

  Of all of us, Dad must have missed Johnny the most. He started spending entire evenings in the barn, making the sorts of repairs he’d been talking about for years. Jerry joined him there, moving seamlessly into the role that had long been occupied by Johnny. Some evenings, when a cooling breeze came through, they opened the hatch on the hayloft and spent hours perched there, barely talking.

  Mom seemed to withdraw, too. On her days off, she barricaded herself in the kitchen, speaking in hushed tones on the phone so that I couldn’t hear. She worked longer and longer hours at the hospital, sometimes coming home after I went to bed. More and more often, I came downstairs in the morning to find her stretched out on the living room couch. “Couldn’t sleep,” she mumbled when I questioned her.

  With both of our parents conveniently distracted, Emilie had started sleeping until noon, and no one cared enough to wake her up. My mere presence irritated her; if I entered the room, she sighed dramatically, turning to the wall. Once, I picked up a pillow and threw it at the back of her head, hard as I could. She rolled over, startled. “I’m miserable, too, you know!” I screamed.

  Only last summer, I thought, there had been five of us in this house, and Grandpa next door, and Stacy living with her parents just down the road. I wished I could take some kind of pill that would send me back in time. When Stacy Lemke asked me if I was Johnny Hammarstrom’s sister, I would say, “No. You’ve got the wrong girl.”

  In the last week of school, the newspaper ran pictures of Johnny’s graduating classmates—the boys in tuxedos and the girls in black drapes with pearls around their necks. I looked for Johnny’s picture, but there was no gap between Aneissa Gunner and Donald Hancock. It was as if Johnny Hammarstrom had never existed. As if he had vanished, too.

  Johnny sent the occasional postcard—from Illinois, then Ohio, then Tennessee. They always said the same thing, as if he were following a template. He was fine, no need for anyone to worry, he would write or call soon. There was never a return address, maybe because he wasn’t staying in one place long enough. Or maybe because he didn’t want to hear back from us.

  At the end of June, Mom sat down with Emilie and me at the kitchen table, while Dad leaned against the stove in the corner. I knew something big was coming. I had known it, I realized at that moment, for weeks.

  Mom’s tone was serious and slightly defensive from the beginning. “Your father and I have been talking, and since things have been so difficult for all of us around here, we think it might be best if we made some new arrangements. There’s a hospital in Kenosha looking for an emergency room nurse, and I think I’d like to try that, for a little while.”

  “What does that mean?” Emilie demanded.

  “Well, Dad will stay here at the farm,” Mom said, with a slight nod in Dad’s direction, as if he needed to be identified for us. He stood with his hands braced on the countertop behind him, not meeting our eyes.

  “You’re leaving us?” I squeaked. This wasn’t how it happened on television—there had been no thrown plates or threats of divorce. But looking back and forth between them right then, I knew that it was over for my parents.

  Mom took a deep breath. “You can decide if you want to come with me, or if you want to stay here with your dad. Either way is fine, and we won’t be that far apart, so we can all still see each other regularly.”

  “But if we went with you, we would go to school in Kenosha,” Emilie clarified. “I mean, we would be living there and everything.”

  Mom smiled gently. “That’s right.”

  I looked from Mom to Dad and back again.

  “I’ll go. I’m sick of Watankee as it is,” Emilie said.

  “You don’t have to decide this minute—”

  “I’ve made up my mind.”

  “Okay,” Mom said carefully.

  Everyone looked at me next, waiting. My head felt light and empty suddenly, and I had to close my eyes to see things clearly. My whole life seemed to be swirling around behind my eyelids—mornings in the barn with Dad, letting the calves suck my fingers, luring the half-wild cats to me with a handful of dry food, untangling Kennel’s fur with my fingers, walking down the road to Aunt Julia’s with a clump of Queen Anne’s lace in my hand, riding the bus, stopping by the library on Saturday mornings while Mom ran errands, sitting stiffly in our pew on Sundays. But that was in the past, I knew. Somehow when Stacy went missing, every bit of that changed for me. Since then, I had only been going through the motions of life.

  “I want to go with you, too,” I said to Mom, and then I set my head down on the table and cried. I couldn’t look at Dad again, couldn’t bear to see if he was looking at me.

  Mom rubbed her hand along the ridge of my spine. Dad, saying nothing, pushed the screen door open quietly and stepped out onto the porch.

  thirty-five

  October 2011

  The close encounter with the Highway Patrol officer had rattled me; I waited for his car to pull off the shoulder and disappear into the night before easing onto the road behind him. The entire experience of being here was surreal, like Dorothy falling asleep in Kansas and waking in Oz. I’d been walking past the crumbling remains on Observatory Hill, heading into class in McCone Hall, when I’d gotten the call from Aunt Julia. And now, only fourteen hours later, I was in a rented car heading north to Watankee, Wisconsin.

  There had been no mistaking Aunt Julia’s voice, although it was raspier now, with large, wheezy pauses between her words. She was sorry to have to be the one to tell me, she said, and I’d fought my way through a throng of students to lean against a wall, trying to focus on her words.

  “Who?” I’d asked, already knowing and dreading the answer.

  “He had a heart attack,” she’d answered softly. “It was very sudden.”

  The news had sent me into a flurry of activity—contacting the dean, cancelling class for the week, packing, leaving a note for my roommate to please feed my cat. Stunned, I’d sniffed back a few tears on the plane, overwhelmed by the impersonal nature of flying, the forced solicitousness of the flight attendants, the close quarters of the strangers who were my seatmates. Even when the plane had landed, I’d been all business—listening to voice mail messages from Mom and Emilie, retrieving my suitcase from the baggage claim turnstile, finding my way to the Hertz counter. Now, at last, I gave into the sheer, overwhelming fact of it, sobbing into a handful of scratchy napkins and trying to see the road th
rough my tears.

  Dad.

  I had talked to him only the week before, one of our quick, just-to-touch-base conversations about the farm, about school. “Maybe this year you’ll come out for Christmas,” he had suggested, and I had pretended to consider the possibility. I didn’t say that I was already making other plans with my professors and a few fellow graduate students who stayed local during school breaks.

  I hadn’t lived in Watankee since the summer of our move, although Mom had taken us back to visit on three-day weekends and school holidays. I would spend weeks preparing for all the things I would tell Dad, all the papers and progress reports I would show him. But each time, something odd had happened on the trip back to Watankee, as if a filmmaker had inserted a giant lens into the camera, turning the world from hopeful to gloomy. By the time I spilled out of the station wagon and greeted Dad and Kennel with giant hugs, I was already anxious to leave. Watankee was equal parts homecoming and heartbreak, comfort and calamity. After the initial excitement, our conversations dwindled to long silences. We exhausted, too soon, everything we had to say.

  Mom and Dad had never divorced—never even discussed it, as far as I could tell. They had just gone their separate ways, which for Mom meant moves around the Midwest to bigger, newer hospitals. Dad had come to visit us a few times—to my high school graduation in 2004 and my college graduation from the University of Indiana in 2008. He’d looked out of place and uncomfortable—exactly as I would have looked back home, in Watankee.

  Sometimes I wondered how Dad had handled it alone, all those years. What would it have been like to be John Hammarstrom in Watankee, Wisconsin, when Johnny Hammarstrom was the unofficial suspect in an unofficial crime? We’d left Dad alone with the fallout from Stacy’s disappearance.

  Even now, approaching Watankee, I could feel Stacy all around me. Not her presence—not the red hair and freckles, or the ghost of her teenage body. I’d spent years looking for her, in shopping malls, in airport queues, in the raucous crowd behind Dick Clark in Times Square. It was illogical, I knew. Even if she was somehow alive, Stacy Lemke was no longer a teenage girl behind the wheel of a red Camaro. She was no longer the girl who sat in the bleachers, chanting my brother’s name.