The window is all dog-eared salty stains. Rainwater slips down and patters on gradually looser wires, vibrating slower, each identical movement pulled further apart until it echoes long after the faces have dropped and shimmered away. Then it is day again.
A bird got in and fluttered about the drop ceiling, singing its panic. An old man bought hot dog buns and iodine. A woman bought strawberry glaze and tonic water. Children bought comics and tubes of flavored sugar. The bird dove at bald heads in produce as the produce manager swung a filthy mop in the air, defending perfectly piled bell peppers. Over one hundred dollars worth of meat was stolen by a woman in a pink overcoat. A man with troubled teeth cashed checks and did a dance. In the back, a pallet of milk overturned and a white sea spread. The bird swelled into shadows.
Three days later, Leah Shepherd woke to the claxon of her cell phone. Her mother was in tears, unable to talk. Leah listened, tried to soothe her, but knew, knew before she even told Leah.
Today in the mail there had been an envelope, no return address, Crow Station post mark. An old article about Jacob and nothing else.
“Who would do such a thing?” Mrs. Shepherd asked, crying into the telephone. Leah tried to comfort her mother, and it worked for a time, but the next day, the Shepherds received a second envelope.
She told him that he had to stop, talking on her work telephone in her office late at night, not wanting this man to have her cell phone number.
“Stop what?”
“You know what.” Nothing. He was making her say it. “The envelopes.”
He told her not to talk to him like that. He told her that he’d done nothing. He kept saying Nothing, nothing. Had he even asked her for anything? Nothing. She responded with silence. Had he? Nothing. He huffed like an impudent heir. Her throat searing with blood. He told her that he was going to see them, her parents.
She offered him money, what money she had, to stay away. “That’s not what I want,” he said, but she knew he was lying and she waited for him to prove her right, for the sharp inhalation of breath and for the studied reluctance, for the voice that sounded like swooning shadows cast by swinging lanterns, but the man was silent and between them hunkered nothing but the hiss of the line and from it emerged the finest crazing on the surface of her certainty. The lights were out in her office and Leah felt that she was alone in a vast, empty space and that the only other thing in existence was this man’s voice, but even that was now gone, leaving nothing but soft breathing that she could barely hear, somewhere else in Crow Station. Cars passed outside of her office, casting their shapes as they no doubt passed outside of wherever he was. And there was then a moment when she almost believed that she was wrong.
But when John Rhodes began to speak again, he said, “All right. Fine. I thought—” a long pause and sounds she could not identify, “—I didn’t think this is how this would end up. When I thought about it. I saw different things. I don’t know who you think I am or what I done, but—” and again he paused for a long time before saying, “I been without you all and I can do without you all.” They agreed to meet the next night at the grocery store on the bypass. He’d stop there on his way out of town and she would give him what she had and he would leave before the snow storm that they were calling for trapped him.
Leah sat in her office, the only light from the power switch on her computer, listening to the dark outside, hoping that whatever was lurking there was gone.
The snow came from nowhere, falling softly on a Sunday night across Crow Station, Kentucky, covering the swelling hills and limestone teeth that jutted up from yellow-green jaws, and everyone stopped to watch it come down, glittering flames in the long light of the setting sun. At a red light Leah Shepherd leaned over and pressed her nose to the window and looked up into the pink sky at the pink snow that sifted slowly from pink clouds that floated above her. The radio scanned the stations trying to find the perfect song for the moment, but she found only the soft pleas of commercials, so she shut it off. Silence flickering, bright snow in headlights passing, she thought about her brother and could still hear his voice calling her name, Leah! Leeeah! again and again, his voice piling in drifts around her legs and hips and chest. The light changed.
At the grocery store, she waited for John Rhodes like he asked, milling among the crowds of people, all hollering at one another, all jawing on cell phones, all panting and cursing. She checked the time. The grocery store was the last thing on the way out of town, the upper edge of Crow Station, the last light before you emptied out on those long country roads and wound yourself through hills dotted with dead trees, bent black branches, howling in the hard wind. The grocery store had seen better days. Its tile floor was pocked and scarred, the ceiling tiles bulging inward from ancient leaks and the flickering fluorescent lights made everything inside look cheap and stale. Usually the grocery store was empty, its shoppers having tapered off in the years, but that night, as the snow came, it was full and the man was late. Leah checked her cell phone. Up and down the aisles, looking at everything on the emptying shelves, looking at the women and men and children, listening to their voices, voices that intermingled with the voices she heard every day, with the voices of the women and their children, the howling men outside the windows of the shelter, the boys on bikes harrowing the dead-end streets looking for lights to break, the voices of her mother and father in their room, whispering, thinking Leah was asleep and could not hear them, with Jacob’s voice that she heard walking in the wind outside of her window, and Leah traced the creases at the corners of their mouths and the shadows under their eyes, the swaying backs and slung forward guts and the skin taut over tired skulls and she could hear all of them all at once, but the man who said he was her brother was not there. Old men smiling at old women and children with cherubic cheeks pitching fits on the dirty tile floors and all around them the trembling motet of people certain they are about to die, voices in close cacophony moving in waves, the voices she heard every day as she listened to the white noise for her brother’s voice, her real brother’s voice to rise through the confusion and speak to her but all she heard was Leah! Leeeaah! Help! because that was all that was left of his voice.
After an hour of waiting, Leah called him again. She could not think of him as Jacob because she knew that he wasn’t. He was just an awful man from Alabama who’d seen her in the newspaper and decided her family would be an easy mark. He was right, she thought. No one answered. She walked to the front of the store and looked out. The fat flakes were making their way down through the still rays of the security lights in the parking lot and it was beginning to coat the ground and was swirling like snakes on the road. She waited a little while longer, feeling the envelope in her pocket. She waited and it grew late. She held her hips at an angle, a swell of quills below her skin. Everyone talking, everyone singing, every throat raised in song, every voice distinct and chiming in harmonies not yet understood by human ears, standing as though they’d always been standing in that exact place, always would be standing there, waiting. She slept and sleep was waiting. She woke and waking was waiting. She worked and work was waiting. She walked by the stream in the trees and walking was waiting. She listened to the voice in the wind that moved through the trees and the voice was waiting until she was ready to speak. If the man came, she knew what she would say to him. She knew that as she handed him the envelope that she would tell him what she’d never told anyone — not her parents or her one friend in high school or any of the men she’d dated or any of the people she’d worked with. She’d tell him about how each night she listened for Jacob’s voice, his voice. How she would lie in bed and listen for him somewhere in the darkness inside and how during the day as she listened to the women at work or to a couple at a table nearby during lunch, she listened for Jacob’s voice. How she wanted to hear it again so as to erase the voice of his that was there, constantly in her mind, his young voice calling out to her, screaming her name and begging for help and how she’d sat inside and ignored it, mad at him for getting her in trouble the day before. She’d thought he’d been putting on so that she would run to him, like she always did, and would beg him to come home, so she sat in the living room as her parents busied themselves upstairs getting ready for church, and Leah ignored his pleas. And that was the last time she heard his voice. She would tell John Rhodes this, this secret thing she’d never even articulated to herself, and she would ask him, no matter who he was, to forgive her.