About fifty yards in they found the bloodstain in the grass. A small depression made where the deer had gone down and then the poachers had lifted the animal and brought it back up the slope with them. There was no more sign than that and Drake knelt, looking the boot prints over, several of them there in the mud at his feet. Possibly two or three men from the size and shape of the tracks. Drake couldn’t say for sure.
Ellie was back in her truck then, asking if the spotter plane had seen anything else, though Drake knew as soon as the poachers turned off their lights they pretty much disappeared beneath the trees.
Ellie and Drake sat for a long time, watching the clearing, their own lights out now, and Drake leaning into the passenger-side window. Ellie occasionally radioing up to the spotter plane for an update while Drake watched moths land on the glass. The insects drawn out by the light of the moon, dusty legs perched along the slant of the windshield. Their wings spread wide, fluttering for a moment, then moving on again to some brighter place among the trees.
They sat for another ten minutes before the radio crackled on again and the plane above gave them their next location. No more than a mile away. From where they sat looking out on the clearing, Drake could hear the crack of a high-powered rifle even from inside the cab of Ellie’s truck.
“These guys are making a real night of it,” Drake said.
Ellie turned the engine on and brought the truck around. “What are the chances they’re still there when we show up?”
“Given what we’ve accomplished already, I’d say not very good.” They were cutting back along the logging road with just their parking lights on, trying to keep a low profile, and in twenty minutes, when they found the location, they would see nothing but a bloody depression in the grass, just like what they had found every weekend for months now.
DRAKE SET THE keys on the counter and looked around. Sheri had left a note on the refrigerator telling Drake what time she would be home from work. The kitchen was completely clean, dishes put away, counter wiped down, a fresh set of towels hanging from the oven handle. Drake opened up the refrigerator and looked inside. Even the condiments had been organized inside the door. The leftovers from a few nights before neatly stacked in Tupperwares and the inside shelves soaped and cleaned. He closed the door without taking anything and went back to the counter.
The kitchen, dining area, and living room all one L-shaped room. Standing there he could see the small four-seat dining table, and then farther out around the bend of the L he saw part of the living room, where it led away to the bedrooms. After he’d married Sheri, they’d made a real effort to make the place their own, switching out his father’s worn and mismatched furniture for a pair of sofas, a matching dining room table and buffet, and twin side tables for the living room. On one of the tables was the box his father had brought with him from Monroe. Drake stared at it for what seemed a long time, waiting until he heard the toilet flush and the door open down the hall.
Drake walked out and stood waiting for his father. Patrick stepped from inside the bathroom, pausing to flip the light off, and then wiping his hands down his pants to dry them. He was looking at all the pictures on the walls as he passed. Some that Sheri had taken, others that Sheri’s mother had taken when Sheri was a girl. All black and white pastoral views of rolling farmland, or bent wood fencing. An artsy sort of thing that Drake had never quite understood, but that he’d grown used to and, truthfully, barely even noticed anymore. Everything, down to the two gray sofas in the living room, with their white piping, a sort of matching set.
Drake watched his father study one of the pictures for a moment before moving on. He passed his old bedroom, the one Sheri and Drake had taken for their own, and he paused, putting a finger to the door and pushing it open on its hinges. Drake tried to imagine what Patrick saw inside. The queen bed with the tall dresser nearby. The sheets pulled all the way to the top of the mattress and tucked beneath a collection of pillows, each a different size and shape, but somehow all appearing to belong. The whole scene put together that morning by Sheri. Her hands tightening down the corners of the bedding, running her palms along the topmost sheet, smoothing the wrinkles before pulling the comforter across it all.
Drake took a step and Patrick looked away from the room, noticing his son for the first time. “Different than you remember?” Drake asked.
Patrick didn’t say anything and Drake wasn’t sure if he’d even asked the question aloud. Lately it had been like that. Like Drake had tried to say something but forgotten to work his lips. Whole moments seeming to disappear from focus, then snapping back into a reality more clear and bright than anything before.
He watched his father step forward down the hall and push the door to Drake’s childhood bedroom open. The door hinges heard in the silence as Patrick looked inside. It was the bedroom that Sheri and Drake had agreed to fix up for Patrick. The one he would have while he stayed with them.
Patrick turned and looked to Drake. “You didn’t say anything about having a…”
Drake watched his father try to find the words. Two blank eyes looking back at him. “There was a complication,” Drake said. “It’s been almost a month now. She was pregnant, but we lost it.”
Patrick turned again and pushed the door farther open. He was silhouetted in the hallway, the dark opening of the bathroom door behind him down the hall. “How far along was she?”
“Four months,” Drake said. “After three they say you’re in the clear.” He hadn’t moved from where he stood in the living room. He felt like he hadn’t moved in weeks. “We painted the room those colors because we didn’t know if it was going to be a girl or a boy. We thought we’d wait and see. Keep it a surprise.” Drake heard the words come out of his mouth but he wasn’t sure they were his. They were just words, mashed together, rushed, a series of observations, of hopes and thoughts on things that had never come to be.
“It was our office. We waited till after the third month to start buying things. To get the crib and find a changing table,” Drake said. “I don’t know why we haven’t gotten rid of them now.” He took a few steps and found he was standing next to his father. “We don’t talk about it much. We keep the door closed.”
What Drake didn’t say was how he’d come into the room a week ago to put the single bed together for his father. He didn’t say how he’d assembled it with the door closed and his back to the crib, trying not to look at the walls of the room, how they spread from light blue at the base, up toward the ceiling, where puffed white clouds were stenciled. The blue paint climbing farther up the walls, past the clouds, until it went pink, yellow, and orange like a sunset. The ceiling dotted with the same sort of glowing stars Drake remembered from his own childhood.
THEY STOOD AT the edge of the orchard, Drake and Patrick, looking down at the small patch of disturbed earth.
“Listen,” Drake said. “She doesn’t talk about it. We never even told anyone, we were going to wait until she started showing. Sheri didn’t want people whispering about her at the restaurant. She didn’t want to cut her hours until it was on her terms.”
“So no one knows?” Patrick stood on one side of the little grave and Drake on the other. Patrick looked up at Drake and then looked away, across the orchard to where the house sat.
Drake checked his watch. Sheri’s lunch shift ended in two hours. “We’d been seeing a doctor in Bellingham. She had some stomach pains one night and she went into the bathroom. She was in there a long time.” Drake didn’t know how to go on. He didn’t know how to tell his father about how Sheri had locked the door, about the sound of her in there, the crying, the way her voice carried through the wood and came to Drake as if through the walls. The crying turning to sobbing and then the sobbing turning to silence. Drake having to ask again and again for her to open the door.