He was too riled up to return to the picnic and make small talk. He sat down on the bottom row of a pyramid of hay bales. But then some old instinct took over and he felt the need to climb to the top. The bales were arranged like stairs and as he made his way up he recalled boyhood summers when he was allowed to roam through the stables where his father worked.
Now, when he visited his father, he would think of what she’d done. She must have known that, she must have known and decided she didn’t care. Or maybe she thought it would be better than doing it at home. She knew how much he loved their house. Then again, maybe it had nothing to do with that. Maybe she saw the rope swing and thought, This is my chance. Maybe she had the swing in mind the whole time they were planning their vacation, maybe that was why she had been so eager when he suggested it. Going to his father’s farm was supposed to be a kind of last hurrah for Stephanie, a chance to visit with the horses she had grown up riding. And a chance, too, for Stephanie to return to a sweeter, more girlish phase of her adolescence.
Nicole had waited until he and Stephanie were out on a trail ride together. Robbie and Bry had been swimming with their grandfather. She was supposed to go with them but had begged off. Dean remembered her saying that she needed a nap. He remembered thinking that it was nice that she had time to take a nap. That she should take more naps. He hated his innocent, optimistic thoughts. He wondered how long she had waited. She’d probably assumed he would find her, when he brought in the horses after the ride. It probably never occurred to her that Robbie and Bry would come back early, that Robbie would race ahead in his wet bathing trunks, wanting to swing on the rope she’d knotted — and where did she learn to make a slipknot? More planning that Dean didn’t want to think about. He had tried so hard to understand her state of mind in those days leading up to it. She had seemed fine, even better than fine; he had thought she was finally returning to normal. He specifically remembered the relief he felt as he watched her swim across the lily pond, the swimming hole of his teenage years, the first place he ever skinny-dipped, the first place he ever saw a girl naked. She seemed so graceful and whole in her yellow bathing suit. And then she’d performed her old trick of swimming underwater for a full minute or two, emerging unexpectedly at some random point in the pond. When the boys were little, they would stand worriedly at the water’s edge, waiting for her to appear. She would burst out of the water, out of breath and exhilarated. A show of athleticism, Dean had always thought, but now he wondered if there wasn’t something ominous in her performance.
Dean lay back on the straw bale, looking up at the barn’s peaked roof. He was so tired of remembering that week, trying to decide if her good mood was faked or authentic. He felt doubly betrayed as he tried to calculate her motives, wondering if she’d faked her mood in order to leave them with good last memories, or if it was a way of convincing him that she was okay so he wouldn’t suspect what she was plotting. And if she had the self-control, the wherewithal, to put on such a good show, then why did she not have it in her to get well? Or was it darker than that? Was she genuinely happy that week because she knew she was at the end of her life? Was the vacation actually her last hurrah? He hated to think of her secret thoughts; he felt almost jealous of them, as if she’d been having an affair with death. They’d had sex that week, sex like they hadn’t had in months, maybe years, if he was honest. He’d made some crass joke, implying that all she had needed were a few good orgasms. He hadn’t really meant it. He was just teasing her, feeling high off her high, happy to see her appetite restored. The memory made him sick now, because he’d felt close to her and maybe it was a lie. And there was shame because if he’d known it was the last time, he wouldn’t have been crude for one second. He would have memorized her, he would have told her again and again how much he loved her. Not that professing his love had ever helped. He’d tried that. He’d tried many times.
He heard the barn door swinging on its hinges and sat up. Bryan was walking down the wide center aisle, his small figure half-illuminated by the uneven light. Dean called to him, taking pleasure in his surprised smile. “Come on up!”
Bryan climbed up quickly and sat next to Dean on the bale, leaning back as if they were on a sofa. “Guess what? Robbie fell in the creek. He was trying to catch a crayfish.”
“Is he okay?”
“He’s totally fine,” Bryan said, sounding like Stephanie. “He’s wearing one of Uncle Ed’s shirts with cow shit on it.”
“Don’t say the S-word.”
“With cow crap on it. You should see it; it’s so big that it covers his shorts. It’s like he’s wearing a dress.”
Dean sucked in his breath, thinking that Bryan was going to bring up the cross-dressing incident from the other day. But instead he began to talk about his mother. How she would have enjoyed going to the barbecue and what she would have brought to eat and did Dean remember the time that she made “dirt,” the dessert that was layers of chocolate pudding and crumbled Oreos and then she put gummy worms in, too? He chatted so happily, as if Nicole were not dead but just on a trip somewhere, that Dean wondered if he should say something to bring home the reality of the situation, but then Bryan asked if Mommy was watching them from heaven, able to enjoy the barbecue from afar.
“Maybe,” Dean said. “I don’t know for sure.”
Bryan frowned. “That’s what Aunt Joelle said, too. She said God might have kept her out because it’s cheating to kill yourself.”
“I doubt that’s what she really meant,” Dean said, too shocked to come up with a counterargument. This was Joelle’s version of forgiveness?
“So she’s definitely in heaven?”
“I don’t know. And neither does Joelle.”
“So she might not be?”
Dean paused; he didn’t believe in heaven, at least not in the sense that Joelle did, and he didn’t want to encourage Bryan in beliefs that were anything like Joelle’s. At the same time, he didn’t want to take away Bryan’s fantasy of his mother living somewhere, happily.
“If there’s a heaven, I’m sure your mother’s in it, waiting for you.”
“I just want to know if Mommy’s looking down on us,” Bry said. Tears began to pool in his brown eyes. “That’s what Pastor John says.”
“Then that’s who you should listen to. He’s the expert.” Dean didn’t know why he couldn’t tell his son yes, there was a heaven, and yes, his mother was in it. He knew it was a flaw of his, this inability to give simple comfort. He was better at telling people to buck up, at getting them to push through pain.
“I didn’t mean to make you mad at Aunt Joelle.” Bryan was such the peacemaker, had always been this way, starting from when he was little and was trying to get his toddler brother to like him, giving him his baby toys and smiling guilelessly when Robbie threw them back at him.
“I’m not mad,” Dean said, taking his son’s hand and leading him down the bales. “Come on, let’s go find your brother.”
Outside the barn, the sun seemed unreasonably bright. It was hot and only going to get hotter, one of those days that required a late-afternoon or midnight thunderstorm to crack it open. Dean liked nighttime storms best of all, the way they awakened him for a few minutes, and the way Nicole would move closer to him in the darkness.