The Mourning Hours

by Paula Treick DeBoard

  What I felt now, like a punch to the chest, was her absence. Watankee was the place where Stacy had once lived, breathed, flirted with her boyfriend, vanished without saying goodbye.

  I slowed instinctively when I reached the exit for Watankee, as if it could be avoided for just a few minutes longer, as if somehow the entire trip could be prevented by not taking the correct exit. I wasn’t just going home to say goodbye to Dad, who I had been saying goodbye to for years. I was going to have to reconnect with the past, with the nine-year-old girl I had been, the girl who was holding her breath, fearing discovery in her hiding spot, the girl who had been sick in the bathroom the night Stacy Lemke had gone missing.

  It wasn’t far now; my mind knew exactly where to go. Watankee was basically the same small town, but its differences were glaring to me. It was like visiting a Twilight Zone version of the world. When I was nine years old, we had literally known every car on the road. Dad could point to any farm and tell you who owned it, how long he had been on the land, how many cows he milked, how the harvest was coming along. Now everything was both too modern and unfamiliar; the SUVs parked in driveways, the IGA that had replaced Gaub’s Meats, once boasting to be “Butcher to the World.”

  The harvest was under way, and my headlights illuminated the razed crops, the dregs of stalks that still waved spookily in the slight breeze. Something clutched in my chest, and I slowed when I passed the spot on Passaqua Road. Part of me had always been a nine-year-old girl, even when I was ten and thirteen and eighteen and twenty-four. Part of me was stuck in 1995, like a stubborn coat hanger tangled on a rack. One shoe had dropped on a snowy night sixteen years ago; ever since then, I had been waiting for the corresponding thud.

  thirty-six

  Aunt Julia practically threw open her door at my tentative knock, causing me to gasp. In shadow she looked the same as always—tiny, wiry, her hair dyed a dark, Jackie-O brown. Her eyes were red, shadowed by puffy pouches that told me she’d been crying. When she stepped onto the porch to give me a fierce hug, I caught a glint of light off her oxygen tube, which trailed from her nose down to a portable tank at her feet on two tiny wheels. I started sniffling the second I was in her arms.

  “Now, hush,” she wheezed. “Let’s not have any crying tonight. Your Uncle Paul’s been asleep since seven-thirty, and you just missed your mom. She’d been driving all day and I sent her to bed only half an hour ago. She’s—well, I guess I don’t need to tell you, but she’s pretty much a wreck.”

  I followed her inside, wheeling my suitcase behind me. “I’ll just wait until morning,” I said, grateful for a few hours of relative peace before the next emotional onslaught. “What about Emilie?”

  “She had a show tonight, so they’re going to take the first flight out of Vegas tomorrow morning.” She switched on lights as I followed behind her, carefully avoiding the oxygen tank. Aunt Julia had always had her finger on what was current—the result, no doubt, of the dozen magazines she subscribed to each year. Her house was a curious mix of old and new—travertine tile floors, a low brown leather sofa, a massive oak buffet. She led me down a short set of steps to the den.

  “I put you on the pullout bed for tonight. Is that okay?”

  “That’s fine, thanks.” I was so exhausted I could have slept in the driver’s seat of the Malibu, reclined at a forty-five degree angle.

  “When Emilie gets here, we’ll have to figure out some other arrangements, I guess.” She switched on the lamp next to the sofa. The bed was already pulled out, made up with a set of white sheets. She pointed toward a folded blanket and quilt. “In case you get cool down here.”

  “We could share, though. That’s no bother.” I hadn’t slept in a bed with my mother since—well, since ever, but it wasn’t a problem.

  “Okay, then,” Aunt Julia said, stepping back, hands on her skinny hips.

  “What about...” I hesitated. It felt so strange to say his name, like claiming something that didn’t belong to me.

  “Your brother? I don’t know. I left a message on his machine, though I can’t imagine getting a message like that.”

  I considered this soberly. Thank God I’d had my phone on, heading to class. “So he’s still in Texas.”

  “Last I heard.”

  “I wonder if he’ll come.” I plopped my suitcase onto the end of the pullout bed and tugged at the zipper.

  “Course he’ll come,” Aunt Julia said, the sharpness of her voice causing me to look up. “He was close to your dad. Called a couple times a week.”

  She didn’t say: not like you. Not like your halfhearted monthly calls with the gaping silences.

  “I didn’t realize,” I said, which was true. When I’d talked to Dad, he’d rarely mentioned Johnny. Mom only spoke to him occasionally, on birthdays and holidays. He’d sent me a card for my college graduation, one of those schmaltzy cards with a long, preprinted message that implied he’d always known I would succeed, blah, blah, and signed it simply: Johnny. There had been a return address for Lubbock, Texas, but when I’d replied months later, it had come back marked Return to Sender.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, because in the yellowish glow of lamplight, I saw that Aunt Julia was crying. For a moment I worried I’d offended her somehow, and then I saw that she wasn’t expressing a complicated, tangled sort of grief, the way I was. Hers was as uncomplicated as it comes: the plain, simple grief of someone who has lost her brother. A grief that I had never been able to summon for Johnny. I clasped her to me, feeling the sharp edges of her clavicles beneath her sweater, the prominent bones of her rib cage. “Oh, Aunt Julia. I’m so, so sorry. You were such a good sister to him, all these years.”

  She pulled back after a moment, the toughness of her voice contrasting with her tears. “All right, enough of that. What are we going to do, cry ourselves completely out on the first night?”

  I swallowed, summoning a wobbly half smile.

  “So, look, it’s way past my bedtime, and I definitely need some beauty rest. There are towels in the downstairs bath, some juice and soda in the fridge, and the good stuff in the cabinet above the fridge. Nothing fancy, but—”

  I wiped my eyes on my shirtsleeve. “Are you kidding me? It’s the Watankee Hilton.”

  When she gave me a dry peck on the cheek, I caught a whiff of smoke. Some things never changed.

  Left alone, I wriggled out of my clothes, pulled on an oversize T-shirt and slid between the cool sheets. My body sank into the mattress, but my mind was still going strong. After years of living in cramped dorm rooms and apartments clogged with secondhand furniture and books, the vastness of Aunt Julia’s den was unsettling. The refrigerator kicked on, ran hard and suddenly clicked off. At one point there were steps walking overhead, a flush and steps walking back. The house creaked, adjusting itself. Suddenly I thought of Grandpa, who used to stand on the front lawn in the evenings, listening to the corn grow. I’d stood beside him, listening impatiently, unable to tell if he was kidding or serious, if he had a farmer’s sixth sense. He had never fully recovered after his hip injury; in the rehab center, there had been a bout of pneumonia and weakened lungs, and it had seemed safer to move him into an assisted-living facility. That was probably what had killed him in the end, around the time I entered junior high—not being near the land, not hearing the corn grow.

  Looking back on the kid I’d been, it didn’t surprise me that I never heard what Grandpa heard. I was too distracted by the blowing of a gentle breeze through the oak trees, a bee buzzing nearby, or the low rumble of a tanker truck heading down Passaqua Road. I couldn’t have separated the sound of corn growing from the steady beat of my own heart, the slow thrum of pulse through my veins.

  “I’m back in Watankee,” I whispered, pinching myself on the thigh. Mom is upstairs. Emilie will be here tomorrow. And maybe, maybe...Johnny. I felt a tiny twinge of something—anticipa
tion, hope?

  But Dad—

  Dad would still be dead.

  And, of course, Stacy Lemke would still be missing.

  thirty-seven

  I woke to a hand rubbing my back, and rolled over to see that Mom had crawled into bed next to me. Sunlight from the mini-blinds landed on her face in parallel beams. Her face was puffy from crying, but she was composed. She was already dressed in jeans, a sweater and tennis shoes.

  I threw my right arm around her in a half hug. “What time is it?”

  “About ten. I was going to let you sleep in longer, but pretty soon I’ve got to head into town to deal with some things at the funeral home. I didn’t want to miss you.”

  I struggled into a sitting position. “I’ll come, too. Just let me shower and grab some toast or something.”

  “There’s no need for you to come.”

  “And there’s no need for you to deal with everything alone.”

  She sighed. “You’re stubborn as your father, that’s for sure.”

  I grinned. “And here I always thought I took after you, that you were the stubborn one.”

  Half an hour later, we were buckled into my rental car, and I was finishing the last bites of a massive blueberry muffin foisted on me by Aunt Julia.

  “You know, you can’t drive like you do in California,” Mom reminded me. “None of those rolling stops.”

  “Or what? The traffic cameras at each intersection are going to catch me?” I teased, backing out of the driveway. It hit me then, what I’d been too tired to realize last night. The last time we’d all been together, it had been here, at Johnny’s eighteenth birthday party, a million years ago. One minute the biggest danger had seemed to come from hordes of mosquitoes hovering above the water, and in the next minute, we’d been running around the side of the house to see what all the commotion was. The dozens of thrown eggs, the Murder Machine.

  We drove slowly, since there was no one behind us on the road, and despite Mom’s appointment in town, no hurry to get where we were going. I slowed where the horse pasture had been, now home to a circular driveway and a four-stall garage.

  “New neighbors,” Mom commented. “I think the Wegners moved down to Arizona to be closer to their grandchildren.”

  I stopped at the end of our driveway, next to the mailbox marked Hammarstrom, J.

  Just seeing Dad’s name sucked the wind out of me. And then seeing the house—it was as if my heart was a deflating balloon, careening in my chest cavity. At first glance, everything was the same—the fields, the barn, the silo, the long, low cattle pens, the two houses, the trees lining the driveway. At second glance, everything had changed—the barn a faded red, the house a crisper white. Grandpa’s house, empty all these years, had its windows shuttered, with leaves and small twigs littering its porch.

  “What about the cows?” I asked, the only question I seemed to be able to form. “Is someone taking care of them?”

  “Jerry’s been milking them. He said he’d help out in the short term.”

  I faced her. “Jerry Warczak?”

  “Of course. Who else?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I figured... I don’t know.”

  Mom blew her nose into a Kleenex. “We’ll have to come back here later, start sorting through things.”

  “What’s going to happen to everything—the house, the animals?”

  “I guess we’ll talk about all of that this weekend. There are a lot of decisions to make.”

  “But you won’t be—?”

  “Me? Moving back here?” Mom’s laugh was genuine, and it was a relief, the first funny thing to break through our sorrow.

  “I guess that wouldn’t happen.”

  “No. It definitely wouldn’t happen.”

  At the funeral home, the director informed us that Dad had already made all the arrangements, five years back. He’d picked out and paid for his coffin, his plot, his simple gray tombstone next to Grandpa and Grandma. His thoughtfulness, the quiet, uncomplaining care he’d taken, broke my heart more than anything else. Dad had known he would die alone, his wife and children scattered around the country. He’d wanted to make everything easy for us, so all we’d have to do was sign on the bottom line.

  “He didn’t want a visitation,” the director said, showing us a note in Dad’s handwriting taken from his file. “Nothing formal, at least. Just for family. As for the service, he wanted it to be graveside only.”

  “No fuss,” Mom said softly.

  “Simple,” he agreed. “Your sister-in-law thought that Saturday would be fine.”

  Mom nodded. It was Thursday.

  We had lunch in town at Sprouts, a sandwich shop that hadn’t existed when we’d lived in Watankee. It surprised me that it existed here at all—the menu seemed more suited to Berkeley than a sleepy town in Wisconsin. I had an eggplant sandwich with roasted peppers and Fontina; Mom had a bowl of butternut squash soup. We didn’t know the cashier or the waitress; they didn’t know us. A few of the patrons stared at us curiously, but more because we were strangers than because they recognized us. Even so, I half expected to find a flat tire when we returned to my rented Malibu.

  Aunt Julia, Mom and I dithered over Dad’s obituary that afternoon, while Uncle Paul dozed in a recliner in front of FOX News. Aunt Julia had bought a white half sheet cake from the bakery, and we ate it with plastic forks off paper plates, making small heaps of too-sweet frosting. It was the sort of cake people purchased for baby showers and birthdays and graduations and decorated with bright lettering and balloons. Ours was plain, just a blank white canvas. It wasn’t clear, exactly, what we were celebrating.

  It was a relief to spot Emilie in late afternoon, pulling her rental car into Aunt Julia’s driveway. I would have known her anywhere, despite the spiky black hair with blue highlights and her arching silver eye shadow. “Kiddo,” she said, unfolding her lanky legs from the driver’s seat. I punched her on the arm.

  Darby climbed out of the passenger seat, stretching. At twelve years old, she was the spitting image of no one I knew—not Emilie or any other Hammarstrom. She was tall and dark; her brown eyes flecked with gold peered at me from beneath side-swept bangs. Emilie never talked about Darby’s father, who could have been any of a number of musician boyfriends she’d had over the years. She alternated between percussionists and bass players, keyboarders and vocalists, men she changed like accessories. “Her father,” Emilie told me once, “is completely beside the point.”

  “Either you’re getting shorter, or I’m getting taller,” Darby said when we hugged. Her legs, encased in skinny jeans, reminded me of Emilie’s when she was a teenager. She wore a faded Dead Kennedys T-shirt, the hem reaching almost to her knees.

  “Funny girl,” I said, and she smirked. I linked my arm through hers. “Let me give you the grand tour.”

  There were hugs all around, including from Uncle Paul, who woke long enough to say hello and ask about supper. Emilie told us about the drama on last-night’s set—there had been a problem with her amplifier, a drink thrown on stage and a rowdy bachelor party that needed to be hustled out the door. Aunt Julia’s eyes grew slightly wider, but if Emilie seemed to be speaking a different language, none of us let on. Over dinner we filled Emilie in on Dad’s wishes and finalized our sleeping arrangements for the night—Emilie and Darby in the bed in the den, Mom and me upstairs in a spare bedroom.

  “Tomorrow we’ll head over to the farm,” Mom said, her voice decisive, although tears betrayed her once again. “It’s going to be so hard to go back there...”

  Emilie raised an eyebrow at me. She wasn’t the type of person to cry; she was more the type to raise her chin in defiance, to clench her jaw against the world, the situation. Whatever emotions she had stayed bottled up within her, as they had always done. “Think I’ll shower tonig
ht,” she announced, heading to the bathroom with a massive shoulder bag.

  Darby and I, wrapped in a couple of Grandma’s old quilts, went onto the deck to look up at the stars. “I can’t wait to show you all my favorite spots in the barn,” I told her.

  With her head tipped back, Darby’s face looked even younger, more like a child and less like an adolescent poised to be a teenager. “I still can’t believe you and my mom grew up here,” she told me.

  I tried to see Watankee through Darby’s eyes, all the things that were second nature to me—the huge open spaces, the tractors making their way down the road at fifteen miles per hour, the stench of manure that rose suddenly on the wind. “Well, we did,” I said. “Somewhere, I bet your grandma has photographic proof.”

  “But my mom especially.” Darby sat up, leaning on one elbow. “What was she like back then? She never talks about it.”

  I chuckled. “She was a clarinetist in the Lincoln High School pep band.”

  “Seriously? Did she sing at all then?”

  “Hymns in church, Christmas carols, that sort of thing.”

  Darby lay back, clutching her stomach. “That’s freaking hilarious.”

  “Well, yeah.” The last time I’d been to see Emilie in Vegas, she’d been wearing a shredded black miniskirt that had barely covered her assets, her mouth pressed so close to the microphone that her voice had been throaty and unrecognizable. They’d come to visit me twice since I moved to Berkeley, sleeping head-to-toe on the couch in my apartment. I’d been busy with school each time, so I’d shuttled them off to various landmarks and beaches during the day and met up with them at night. Emilie had asked, “Where’s the nightlife around here?” and I’d had to confess I didn’t really know. Somehow I’d known that the Irish pub where I gathered with my fellow graduate students wouldn’t quite pass muster.