“The release lever,” Lisa said. “I used to have a printout of the schematic right on this wall.”
* * *
Even if you’re all grown up, the sound of a parent’s voice calling you awake from sleep can make you feel like a child—like there’s somebody who wants to make sure all’s well with you, who cares enough to ask.
It wasn’t dark yet—the days were getting longer—but it wouldn’t be long. Steve’s voice was gentle, coming in through the haze: “Hey, big man. Hey, big man.”
Jeremy opened his eyes but stayed put for the moment. “How long was I out,” he said.
Steve chuckled. “Well, I wasn’t here when you went down for your nap,” he said.
Jeremy sat up. “Nap,” he repeated, also laughing.
Steve spotted the shirt on the floor and saw the deep stain on the front. “Everything OK?” he said.
“It’s real bad,” Jeremy said, opening his dresser, grabbing the first shirt his hand landed on: Cyclones ’98. “Ezra went into a—his car went off the road.”
Steve’s eyes grew wide. “Where?”
“In Collins. Well, near Collins,” Jeremy corrected himself. “He’s in the hospital now. We called—he’s stable now, they say.”
“Who called?”
“Me and Sarah Jane.”
Steve looked like a schoolboy learning long division, trying to hold too many figures in his head. “Did she see the accident?” He’d reached the end of the obvious questions, but his need to know more was feral: by the time the paramedics pulled Linda from the ditch, she’d been there for hours, no witnesses to the crash, no way of knowing what her last moments had been like and only the pathologist’s estimation of when they’d finally come to pass.
“No, nothing like that,” Jeremy said. “She stays out in Collins sometimes, she was at her friend’s house when it happened.”
Steve took a quick measurement of the expression on his son’s face: he could see that there was more to know. But he knew his own limits. Once an overturned car came into the picture he had only so much time to get onto a different subject before his mind would start wandering to places best avoided. But Jeremy caught him looking, and then it was too late.
“It wasn’t like Mom’s, Dad,” Jeremy said. “He was out in front of the car when I found him. I think he went through the windshield. But there wasn’t—”
“Nothing on top of him,” Steve said, finishing the thought: no point in shrinking from it now. “OK. Thanks. You going to go to the hospital?”
“Maybe tomorrow,” said Jeremy. “Give the family a little time.”
“Good thinking,” said Steve.
“Guess I’ll get a shower,” said Jeremy, stretching.
“Fine,” said Steve, and then, impulsively, clumsily, worried that there wouldn’t be a better opportunity to say it: “Hey, big man: if it’s all right, I don’t want Shauna to know about any of this.”
Jeremy scratched the back of his head with both hands, head down. “Of course not,” he said. “She coming over?”
Steve blinked. “Not tonight, no.”
Afternoon light traced the shape of a sugar maple onto the carpet; the tree’d been there for as long as Jeremy could remember. Once, as a child, he’d asked his dad how old it was. “Who knows?” Steve had replied cheerfully from his station at the Weber, flipping a burger and admiring the fresh black grill marks on it. “Older than anybody here, anyway!”
“It’s all right,” Jeremy said after a minute, with a tenderness beyond his years. His father was still standing in the doorway, visibly waiting for some kind of reply. “I know what you mean.”
* * *
The northbound lane is closed now. Fat orange barrels scroll past the passenger’s-side window, bobbing into view like buoys on a lake. It isn’t clear what kind of work the road needs over there on the other side of the cones; it looks fine, and there aren’t any workers around. At one point a parked steel drum compactor breaks the spell, but there’s nobody up top.
A low table with some back issues of Family Circle on it, and a modest sofa, and an old recliner, and the television resting on a cabinet originally meant for storing plateware. Lisa and Sarah Jane sitting together, visiting in the bluish light of the screen.
“Why are you letting me move in?” said Sarah Jane. “It’s kind of strange, if you think about it.”
“You look tired,” said Lisa.
“It’s a pretty—” She looked for a word that wouldn’t sound like she was complaining. “It’s a pretty generous thing to offer somebody just because they look tired,” she said.
“It’s not a big deal. You’re not the first person to come and stay here for a while.”
She had suspected this fish was down there in the depths somewhere, but it was a surprise to see it flop up onto the deck like that.
“Where’d the others go,” she said.
“They’re fine.”
“What do you mean, they’re fine.”
“They’re all just fine.”
“Where are they, though.”
Lisa waved her hand toward the big window.
“They’re out there somewhere,” she said.
“You knew them, though.”
“Of course I knew them, they were here.”
“Isn’t that them?” Here nodding toward the TV.
Here laughing: “No, no. Those are just people in transition.”
“But you know who they are.”
“Maybe. I think. Mainly in a general sense.”
“In a general sense.”
“Loosely. Generally who they are, were. At any rate they’ve moved on.”
“You mean they’re all dead.”
“Maybe. I guess. I don’t really know. They’re people who were here once. I’m their witness. I keep their memory alive.”
“I don’t get it,” said Sarah Jane.
“Sure you do,” said Lisa. “Everybody does.”
“Everybody what?”
Lisa rose to her feet, took a deep breath, and shook her hair. It was late and the moon was so bright you could see it through the drawn blinds.
“Everybody leaves a little something behind,” she said, heading up the stairs. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
* * *
She lay awake later, thinking: Keep their memory alive. People you once knew who’ve gone somewhere: those memories everyone can understand. They are hothouse flowers. You tend to them because the world will be diminished by their loss. But the memories to which Shed #4 and Farrowing Crate bore witness—whose were those? They were nothing, they went nowhere. No names, half-seen faces, no locatable beginnings or ends.
But there was the one scene, though, that did feel like an end, the last one on the tape labeled State Road. That woman running down the driveway, her hair seen free for the first time. Someone following. The sound of cold gravel underfoot, the cold readily established by clouds of steam emerging from a panting mouth at lens-height behind the camera, fogging the screen as we pursue our quarry out toward the road. Sarah Jane couldn’t fix the outline definitively, couldn’t say why this felt like the one scene after which no other could be envisioned. But in the hidden recesses of her heart, at the bottom of a diagram she’d never looked at under good light, that’s what it was: the concluding moment, the nearest thing to a climax these dozens of tapes had to offer. The opening out onto the blacktop. The last blurred burst of information before the transmissions stopped coming forever.
3
Sometime after dinner that evening, as the washing machine in the garage chugged cheerfully away, cleaning the blood out of Jeremy’s clothes, Steve dug his journal out from the back of the drawer where it had lain unattended for years. He turned to the point where he’d left off; that final entry before the long break ventured so far out into the depths: it had felt like a purging, and it was. He’d seldom thought of the journal at all after writing it. It had taken him over a year, back then, to get to the place where he
could open himself up to say It feels dark a lot of the time. This new entry took the shortcut.
Linda I think Jeremy’s hurt or in trouble and I don’t know what to do, it says. I can’t lost Jeremy. Help me Linda I don’t know what to do.
Ken Wahl never saw this entry, and neither did anybody else. After writing it, not stopping to correct lost for lose, Steve tucked it back underneath the dress socks he never wore. Then he went out to the kitchen to clean up. They’d had chicken alfredo with noodles. By now he could make it without having to read the instructions on the jar. He turned to chicken alfredo when he wanted to feel secure.
* * *
Jeremy was awake and restless by midnight. Turning in early had thrown him off. Shifting and turning in bed, he tried unsuccessfully to calm his mind. After a while he gave up.
“Hey, it’s Jeremy,” he said quietly into the mouthpiece, standing in the living room at the wall phone in the dark, wearing the same basketball shorts and undershirt he’d used as pajamas since high school.
“It’s twelve thirty,” Stephanie said. She’d been sleeping.
“Oh,” he said. For him it was still yesterday, all that blood and sun and glass: for her it was only the middle of the night. “Sorry.”
“It’s OK. What is it?”
“I—” Where was he going to start? “You were right about Collins.”
“Collins?”
“The house.” Nothing. “The one from the movies.”
In some places night gets louder in the summertime. Cicadas were buzzing outside, choral, alien. He looked out at the backyard from where he stood, hearing their sound but seeing no motion, just hearing the drone. They attached themselves to trees and sang all summer. When it got cold they’d be gone.
“No, listen,” she said after a long silence, stirring finally free from sleep. “I decided you were right. You know? You were right.”
“I was right?”
“It’s none of our business.”
“I didn’t say that,” he said.
“You said, ‘I don’t want to know.’”
“That’s right,” he said. “I didn’t want to know, but I had to go out to Collins to talk to Sarah Jane, and I—”
“Sarah Jane lives here,” said Stephanie. “She’s right down the street.”
“Well, but no, she doesn’t. She drives in from Collins most days now, when she comes in at all.”
Stephanie laughed. “This is new,” she said.
“Yeah, I don’t know,” said Jeremy. “She seems kind of worried when she comes in.”
Stephanie was now sitting upright in bed. The San Francisco job was beginning to look like a dead end. She still wasn’t sure how much longer she could really stand Nevada, but when Jeremy’d refused to go adventuring down the county roads, she’d taken it to heart: she wanted adventure, but she didn’t want it to get messy. But it seemed like now it was messy already, and Jeremy was less than a mile away.
“Oh,” she said.
Jeremy felt himself getting ready to do something he wasn’t comfortable doing.
“She’s a nice person. I can’t figure it out. I have to talk to somebody about this,” he said.
He couldn’t see her smiling in the dark, and she calibrated her tone so he wouldn’t be able to hear it, either. “Do you want to come over?” she said.
At one thirty a.m. in Nevada at the very end of spring, his was the only car driving evenly down the side streets, turning cautiously, not even attracting imaginary attention. Jeremy reflected upon the moment as best he could, situated as he was, there at its center. It felt quietly dramatic, inward-turning: an unfamiliar feeling. He settled into it. There was no telling how long it would last.
* * *
“I still have the charts,” she said. She was at the closet door, in her bedroom, still in her nightclothes: Cyclone Red sweatpants and an oversized Lake Okoboji T-shirt. In a previous lifetime, last winter, this would have made Jeremy feel profoundly uncomfortable, but the events of the day had left him open to unfamiliar positions.
Stephanie’s apartment was just off downtown, on the second floor of a three-story building that predated the Second World War. Steve and Jeremy lived in a ranch home that had gone up at the same time as the rest of the ones surrounding it; at Stephanie’s, he felt acutely conscious of how little he actually knew about other people’s lives, and of several assumptions he’d always carried but never named. You could see the whole of the place as soon as you came in through the front door; there was a fern on a single bookcase, and another hanging from a hook in the window frame, and not much else. Her bed was right in the middle of the room with a collapsible table next to it, like the ones in hospitals. The window looked out onto Sixth Street; he kept stealing glances at the sidewalk below.
Her charts consisted of two notebooks and a large sheet of paper from an artist’s sketch pad with an actual map drawn on it: cut sections from laser printouts were affixed to its edges by paper clips. It was big enough to hang on the wall; its four corners bore faded tape marks.
“I was really mad at you,” she said, not looking up from her work.
“I know,” he said, also keeping his gaze downward, following her hands as they smoothed out rumpled papers and tried to settle on a definitive arrangement, keen to keep up as much of his guard as he could readily access without being obvious about it.
* * *
In the future, would he spend as much time in the car every day as he had today? Once you get outside of town after dark you can’t see much through the windows: the night’s still dark and big off the shoulders of the Iowa highways. He was riding out to Collins, too tired to drive his own car, thoughts pleasantly sloshing around inside his head like slurry in a cement mixer. Stephanie drove a 1981 Thunderbird she’d been given by her grandmother; it got eleven miles to the gallon and sailed across the asphalt like a ship.
“What if they’re still awake?” she said without looking over at him.
“It’s three in the morning,” he said, and then, looking at the clock in the dashboard and correcting himself: “It’s three thirty. Farmers might get up pretty soon but Sarah Jane’s no farmer.”
“I thought you said they had pigs.”
“No,” he said, a little dreamily, picturing what the place would look and smell like if there were even a couple of hogs on the plot. Imagining the different feel as he ascended the porch steps earlier that day, his shirt wet with Ezra’s blood.
“Don’t know where I got that, then,” she said, smiling.
Jeremy leaned back against the window, stretching his left leg out a little on the bench seat.
“Thanks for doing this,” he said. “I feel all backwards.”
“I think you kind of like the excitement,” she said. “Can you at least admit you kind of like it?”
“We’ll see if I do,” he said, gently closing his eyes, completely adrift for possibly the first time in his life, hoping that the jolts of fear that kept flashing up through his fatigue weren’t visible on his face.
* * *
What were they expecting: floodlights? High-wattage motion-sensitive lamps that come on with a pop when the car gets within range of the beam? There’s no light at all. The waning moon is visible, but weak; the stars are dazzling, but strictly decorative, useful only for calculating calendar time. Once she’s killed the headlights, midway through her left turn into the driveway, at Jeremy’s urging—he was nearly whispering: “Now, now. Before they hit the living room windows”—everything goes dark.
The voice came from the porch before they were even fully out of the car.
“What are you doing here?” said Lisa Sample, still not visible from where Jeremy and Stephanie stood.
He quickly put on his disguise, the one he’d been born with, that made him look and sound like a man on the other side of middle age who didn’t have any use for conversation. “Worried about Ezra,” he said.
Behind Lisa, the blue glow of a television throbbed and e
bbed against the living room window from the inside.
“Watch your step,” she said, pointing at the stairs leading up to the porch.
4
“Can you go out to Grimes and show Lyle how to operate the Super Boom?” Bill was saying. Jeremy was at the table saw crosscutting wood. It was busywork; most clients who needed wood in bulk could do the cutting themselves. But he’d learned in his first winter at Veatch & Son that he liked to keep his hands busy when it got quiet around the yard. There was always at least one person on a weekend coming in wanting odd lengths of wood for some project or another, so it wasn’t an entirely idle effort. It beat just standing around.
“Lyle,” said Jeremy, not laughing but almost. Lyle was almost seventy years old, and it was time for him to stop farming, but he was third generation. He had a lot of money; he’d held onto every square foot his father handed down to him. Now he rented most of it out, but on the five acres behind his house he farmed—sweet corn, squash, beans. He kept right on buying new equipment every year, but most of it just upgraded things he’d bought the year before. The Super Boom was a mystery—it was a skid steer, something you used on construction sites to move huge piles of dirt from one place to another. The only thing Jeremy could imagine Lyle needing a skid steer for was plowing snow; it was only September, and besides, it was inconceivable that he didn’t already have several machines that’d do the job.
“I don’t know, either,” said Bill. “I’m kind of curious.”
* * *
“There’s really not much to it,” Jeremy said out at Lyle’s farm, climbing into the cab. “You already have a Bobcat; it’s pretty much the same deal.”
Lyle peered in and made a show of looking around, but there isn’t a whole lot to see inside the cab of a skid steer. “Handles are a little different,” he said.
“That’s the joystick control,” said Jeremy. “It’s electronic, but it shouldn’t give you any trouble.” He put the bucket through some motions.
“That’s what I thought, but it started jerking all around when I started it up,” said Lyle.
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