by S. M. Hulse
Hawkins takes the empty trays to the kitchen and I cross the living room to the mantel, study the portrait of Kev. I remember him only a little. He came to the house sometimes, but mostly he and Samuel spent their time in town, or the mountains. Kev was nice to me, in the way you might be nice to your friend’s cute puppy. “Hey, Kid,” he used to say when he saw me. I try to recall if he ever used my name, but I don’t think so.
“You’ll take him a Dr Pepper once in a while?” Hawkins asks.
He’s in the doorway, watching. I nod, turn back to the portrait. Kev is in uniform, the stark colors of the flag behind him. So much sterner than I remember. He smiled a lot. More than Samuel ever did. “Do you think Kev ever killed anyone?” I ask quietly.
“I know he did.” Hawkins shoves his hands into his pockets. “Last time he was home on leave he told me about it. It was when he was stationed near Baghdad. A man approached the base, wouldn’t stop when Kev ordered him to. They found all kinds of weapons on the man after.” Hawkins slumps onto the couch. “Kev knew it was the right thing, but it shook him up pretty bad. I could tell right away when he came home. Wasn’t himself. When he finally told me, he asked me how you cope with it. Killing a man.” Hawkins meets my eyes. “He thought I’d be able to help him, see? Because of Ben Archer.”
“Devin asked me about the report,” I whisper. “This morning.”
“I know.” Hawkins sighs. “He asked me about it, too.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him I knew it was a hell of a story but it was God’s honest truth.” The words come slowly, like they weigh more than most. “I lied about it this long, Jo. Don’t see how it would help to stop now.”
So many secrets.
“Hawkins?”
He looks at me.
“Have you ever killed anyone?”
He shakes his head.
* * *
Later, when that staccato sound memory wouldn’t leave me—one, two, three, four five six seven eight nine ten eleven—when it circled in my head, over and over, so loudly and incessantly I couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t hardly breathe, Samuel was there. He spent so many nights in the hallway outside my bedroom, slumped lengthwise across the hall, head propped on a folded pillow, one hand draped over our father’s rifle. And I would look over and see him there, guarding me, and the sound would quiet, subtly at first, a little at a time, until the memory of those gunshots faded to an echo, fainter and fainter until I couldn’t even imagine their sound anymore, and finally I could sleep. Because I knew Samuel was there. Because I knew he would protect me. Because he had done it before.
* * *
Something I have never told you, Jo. Something I have never told a soul. Something I hesitate to write even here, so I cross the words atop one another until they build to a heavy, thatched black along the backs of Eden and Gethsemane. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t got up from the floor that night. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t stopped him. Sometimes I wish I had let him kill us all.
* * *
A beautiful morning. The sky above the eastern ridgeline is like a clear, deep lake, such a pure blue I think if I look long enough I might be able to see through it to the stars. When I go to feed Lockjaw, I’m greeted by a gentle breeze, absent the lingering chill of winter, the lightest of touches against my face. There will be only a handful of days like this all spring, and I’m not sure I’m glad they have arrived now. Rain would make it easier to leave the place behind.
Two days left. I try not to calculate the hours, the minutes, but the figures run constantly in my mind against my will. How do you leave a place knowing you will be someone else without it?
Inside, I spend an hour in my bedroom, sketching the ridgeline of Eden and Gethsemane from memory, then going to the window to test my recollections. Every sketch is identical. Accurate enough for a map.
I hear a car pull up late morning, watch Asa walk toward the house. I’m surprised to see him. We didn’t part at the hospital on bad terms, exactly, but I left with the sense that Asa would never be able to fully separate me from my brother. That maybe he was right not to.
“I should have called,” he says, when I open the door.
“No need.” He steps past me into the empty living room, hesitates when he sees that the couch, table, and chairs are missing. “I put the things in storage yesterday.”
He settles himself slowly on the brick of the hearth, bending one joint at a time, like an old man. Asa seems even more exhausted than at the hospital, and it crosses my mind that the lines on his face—new lines that weren’t there when I first met him, too deep for the heavy stubble on his face to hide—might be permanent. Despite the temperate weather, I have a sudden urge to wrap a blanket around his shoulders.
“I hope you don’t mind that I came,” he says. “After we last spoke…”
“It’s fine, Asa.”
“I didn’t want to go home. And I didn’t want to be alone.”
“I understand.” He looks at me, and I’m afraid I’ve offended him—I only meant that I know homes feel wrong when they’re missing one of their usual occupants—but he nods, then puts his hands to his face and rubs his eyes. I consider asking about Emily, but the memory of his anger at the hospital stops me. Asking after her would be the right thing to do if I were anyone else, but I’m not, and I suspect Asa can no longer pretend I am. “You haven’t slept,” I say instead.
“I know I look like shit.” The profanity startles me, and I’m embarrassed by my own surprise; Asa is a preacher, not a monk. He’s heard all the same words I have.
“I have coffee,” I offer. “Not real coffee. Instant. But it’s better than nothing.”
His eyes are closed when I come back from the kitchen, but he opens them at my approach. I hand him one of the mugs I’ve balanced on the tray across my knees, and he takes a cautious sip, then a greedier one. I move my chair back a few feet, stopping short of where the desk used to be. An automatic accommodation of absent furniture.
“What I can’t understand,” Asa says suddenly, as though continuing a conversation we’ve already started, “is why I would be given this ability to heal if I can’t use it when I need it most. When the people close to me need it most.”
I look down at my mug. My hands are pressed tightly around the hot ceramic, welcoming the overload of sensation. “I don’t know what to say about that kind of thing, Asa. Theology, the whys and wherefores…”
“I already know all the answers you could offer,” he says. “I’ve been to seminary. I’ve read books on theodicy and the will of God and spiritual gifts. God knows I’ve prayed about it.” He sets his own mug beside him on the hearth, holds his hands in front of his face. Long fingers, prominent knuckles. “But still I’m left with the memory of healing that boy on the road, and the knowledge that I have not done a thing like that since. And I’m left with a belief—or a remnant of belief, a memory of belief—that God does have a plan. That things happen for a purpose, even if it’s a purpose that serves God’s interests rather than my own. And I can accept—try to accept—that it might be a purpose I can’t fathom. That I see through a glass, darkly.” Something weary in the words. “That’s what I’m meant to say, isn’t it? I know what I’m meant to say. I know what I’m meant to believe. I know I’m meant to trust. But I can’t help looking for that purpose.” He lowers his hands to chest level, turns them palms-up, and I am reminded of Samuel praying in church all those years ago, how ready he seemed to receive whatever it was he thought or hoped God had to offer. “I can heal,” Asa recites. “I’ve done it. It’s possible. My daughter was caught in your brother’s bombing. There must be a purpose. A reason. And if there’s a reason, it must be one I can see, understand. Maybe it’s arrogant to think so, maybe I lack humility, but surely in this case it’s a reason I can understand? Otherwise where’s the purpose in it? If I can’t heal her, then whom am I meant to heal?”
Asa looks at me then, and though nothing obvious changes on his fea
tures, I see that he thinks he’s worked it out. That he came here today for a reason. I see that he has to grab on to something, that his faith is evaporating and he might want to let it, that this is a last attempt to contain it. I back my chair a few inches without meaning to, invading the space where the desk used to be. “It’s not me,” I tell him. “Asa, it’s not.” I don’t want to be harsh with him, but I force an edge into my voice and emphasize each word. “I do not need to be healed.”
“It’s not a judgment,” he says quietly. And then the anger rises suddenly, the steel in my voice matched in his. “You have to let me try.”
Hard not to yell at him, throw him out. But he’s desperate, and I don’t want to be unkind. My family has hurt him enough. And it isn’t that I never had those kinds of thoughts in the early days. The Maybe someday I’ll walk again no matter what the doctors say thoughts. The daydreams—yes, some of them even populated by a benevolent Jesus who looked very much like the one in the illustrated children’s Bibles used in Sunday school—in which someone fixed me with a touch, undid everything Ben Archer’s bullet had done, and just as quickly. But those were fantasies, nothing more, and I left them behind long ago.
“I’m fine the way I am,” I say, as gently as I can. “I really am, Asa. I’ve been paralyzed a long time. Longer than not. This is who I am, and I’m okay.”
Already the anger has bled away. Its absence leaves him hollowed out, his voice thin. “I could just try…”
“Asa, no.” Might be a kindness to let him. What would it really cost me, a minute or two to let him lay on hands and say a prayer? It would do me no harm; I didn’t believe it would work, so it wouldn’t hurt me when it didn’t. But it would disappoint him at best, devastate him at worst. I don’t want to be responsible for dashing the last of his hopes. “I don’t know if there’s an answer out there or not. A person you’re supposed to heal. But I do know it’s not me.” He’s staring into his coffee mug, and if he hears me, he gives no indication. “Just try to forget about all this for now, Asa. Stay focused on Emily.”
“Em’s gone.”
I hear the word NO tumbling through my mind, but it doesn’t make its way to my tongue. I close my hands tightly on the handrims of my chair, watch my knuckles go white.
“She’s dead.” The word seems forced through Asa’s throat, razor-edged and longer than its single terrible syllable, and I know it’s the first time he’s said it aloud.
I should say something. Must say something. But I’m afraid that if I open my mouth I’ll vomit and I cannot do that, cannot do anything that will make this moment worse. Finally I fight it all down and say, “I’m so sorry, Asa. I’m so sorry.” And it is grotesquely inadequate, but it is all I have to offer, and it is long overdue, so I say it twice more and am quiet.
Then words are spilling from Asa, too softly and quickly for me to catch most of them, but I hear neurologic and brain stem reflexes and apnea and others like them, and I hear the way the grief makes every word strange and painful, and ultimately I hear enough to understand that whatever happened in the early morning hours in that hospital room, Asa watched his daughter die.
And all the while I’m listening to Asa, I’m hearing another voice in my head, and though it is silent it tries to overpower Asa’s spoken words. It says Samuel has killed. It says Again. It says This time everyone will know, and This time no one will understand, because there is nothing to understand. It says Emily is dead and your brother killed her.
* * *
She’s gone. She’s gone. How can I know it with such wrenching certainty and disbelieve it all at once? Twice tonight I’ve driven myself nearly mad thinking about where she is now, what cold room she’s lying in, whether she feels alone, whether she feels frightened. And then I remember she can’t feel. She is not. There is no she anymore.
They are the most familiar words: For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son … I’ve spoken them aloud, heard them spoken aloud, perhaps more than any of the other words in Your book. They were the first I taught my daughter. My only child.
You sacrificed Your only child for the world. I would never do such a thing—I would sacrifice the world to save her, yes, but never the other way around—and I don’t know whether the fact that You did makes You unfathomably benevolent or unfathomably cruel. I don’t know if it makes Your love greater or lesser than my own.
But You knew there was a reason. Thousands of reasons, millions. Whatever Your pain at losing Your child, You knew His death would save the rest. But what of us down here, the ones You supposedly so loved? What reasons do we have when we lose our children? What purpose does my beloved daughter’s death serve? She is gone and for nothing. You’ve taken her and left me without even the meager salve of meaning.
I know I am to believe she is with You now—and I hope she is, and I must believe it, and You will care for her, won’t You?—but she is lost to me, and in this grief a moment is an eternity.
And in these endless moments, in this blackest loss, I cannot help but fear that if she is no longer here with me, then perhaps You are lost to me as well.
Asa cries for a long time. I sit near him and stay mostly quiet. There are no words of comfort, and I know better than to search for them. It is not okay. It will not be all right. I wonder if rage might chase the grief, and try to be prepared to weather it if that is what he needs me to do, but there are only the tears, and then silence. The sun dips behind the western mountains and slowly the light leaches from the room, and I let it. At dusk I feed Lockjaw. I offer Asa dinner when I come back inside, but he declines, and I am glad because it means I don’t have to eat, either. Eventually I turn on the lights. I wonder if Devin will contact me about Emily, but no car comes. My phone vibrates once; when I look later there is a missed call from Hawkins, but no message.
Whether my presence is any comfort to Asa, I don’t know. I hope it is. I hope, at the very least, it is not a burden. He leaves just before midnight. I try to convince him to stay the night—he could use my old bed upstairs—but he insists he wants to go home. When he is gone, I brush my teeth and change into pajamas and transfer from my chair to the bed. I lie in the dark and try to weave sleep from the threads of fatigue and sorrow. But there is only the dark. No sleep.
The strangest thing is that Samuel will not know. I barely register my certainty. Not long ago—even this morning—I would have reminded myself he could be anywhere, could be somewhere with radio, television, Internet. But now I am sure he does not know, and maybe I have always been sure, and tonight, in the dark, it seems deeply unfair. He’s the one who conceived of that bomb, built it, detonated it. He shouldn’t avoid full knowledge of the consequences. That heavy comprehension shouldn’t fall only on me.
I knew Emily might die. Maybe even expected it, as much as I tried not to. But now Emily is gone and the finality of it weighs on me even as part of my mind tries to deny it, tries with a frantic urgency to figure out what needs to be done to undo this, go back, fix it.
I can’t even grieve properly. I try to summon tears, and muster a few, but I can’t swear they’re for Emily and not for Asa or Samuel or myself. Because I never had the chance to know Emily. I prayed for her at the community service, sat beside her hospital bed, heard her father say her name with such desperate love the memory of it hurts. But what do I really know of her? That she liked horses with coats the color of the sun. That she still believed in heaven. That her father loved her, maybe even more than he loves his God. It’s a sketch, not a portrait, and as much as I yearn for a purer grief, the one I feel is weak and muddled and no less terrible for it.
* * *
In the morning the break of aspens along the front of the property glitters again: the cars are back. Mostly press, I imagine, but at least one must be FBI. Not a surprise; my phone started ringing again last night. Not so many cars as before, not so many calls. A blip is all Emily’s death amounts to. An excuse to check back in with that story in Montana—Remember
? That crazy militiaman or whatever who bombed that building last month?—during a slow news cycle.
I’m scheduled to work at Fuel Stop, but I don’t put on my uniform and don’t call in. One Bear stocks the papers; he’ll figure it out. Instead, I call the man who came with his son to look at Lockjaw. I ask if he’s still interested in buying the mule; he is, can pick her up this afternoon. Better make it tomorrow, I tell him. Then I take my painting supplies out beneath the pine one last time. I glance over my shoulder once I’m set up, see the bright glimmer through the trees. They can probably spot me if they look hard enough. Might even be able to get a picture with the right lens. It wouldn’t look good—“Terrorist’s Sister Paints in Wake of Child’s Death”—but the only person who could truly be hurt by it is Asa, and I think he would understand.
I open the Bible I brought outside; it falls, as always, to the Twenty-Second Psalm. Carefully, I razor half of a single verse from the thin page: my heart is like wax / it is melted within my breast. I thought slicing apart a Bible might feel blasphemous, but if it does, the feeling is too subtle to rise above the other emotions of the day. I put the narrow strip of paper in a shallow metal bowl, place a stone on top so it won’t blow away. I turn to the front of the Bible, find the papers I’ve tucked there. I cut again: the headline: “Prospect Woman Killed,” and the drophead below: “Two Children Wounded by Gunfire.” And lastly, I hold the photograph of my father in my hands. I don’t want to damage it, though there are a handful of others in the albums sealed in a box in the storage unit. Finally I cut just a corner of the picture away: a few blades of grass, the toe of my father’s boot. I add the bits of newspaper and photo to the bowl, remove the stone, add a lit match. The onionskin Bible paper burns quickest, the aged newspaper only a moment behind. The slick photo paper takes a few seconds longer, but soon it, too, is reduced to ash.
