“I thought so,” I muttered, and with that, I turned through the dimming woods and began the long walk home.
18
I should have put the pieces together about Koen and Van. The way Koen pulled away from me when I leaned into him as we walked. The way his hand felt in mine, slack, no different from how it had felt when I’d held my brother’s hand as a little girl. The way Van had looked when Koen had defended me—like he could have cried, like his heart was breaking.
But I hadn’t. I thought I was perceptive, but I wasn’t. I thought I was smart, but I definitely wasn’t that, either. I had missed so many clues. Not just about Koen. About everything.
That night I came home to a dark house, hung my coat on the hook, and flicked on the galley light. From upstairs I heard Pepper’s cries—long, mournful howls.
“Couldn’t even feed the cat, huh, Abba?” I muttered to myself, and went to the icebox to get Pepper his supper. As I peeled away the wax paper that covered his food, a vision flashed inside my mind. Van’s hands on Koen’s hips. I forced it away with a shudder and set Pepper’s supper on the ground.
“Pepper!” I called, but he didn’t come running. There was a pause and then another low moan from upstairs, then a pause, a shuffle, and another cry. I felt my heart sink down into my stomach. I knew that something was wrong even then, but I did my best to ignore it.
“Pepper? Did I lock you in my room this morning? I hope you didn’t piss on my bed.” I forced a laugh at my own joke. But I took the stairs slowly, one at a time.
I reached the landing. Never before had our hallway seemed so long or dark; never had the way the shadows stretched across the scuffed metal floor seemed so sinister. There was light coming from under the door to my father’s room—a long, thin vein of white. A flicker of shadows passed through it, and then I heard another yowl.
“Pepper?”
My hand was cold when I set it against the door. Colder than Koen’s hand. Colder than ice. The heavy wood swung open under my palm. Pepper darted out before I could stop him. I watched his tail disappear in the halo of light that surrounded the stairs.
Then I turned to my father’s room and brought my hands up to my mouth.
“Oh, no,” I breathed. “Abba, no.”
My father’s bed was crisply made, not a single wrinkle showing, the sheets pulled taut under the mattress. His uniform had been left folded atop the coverlet. In the low buzzing light of his bedside lamp, strange shadows loomed. It took my eyes a minute to adjust—took my brain a minute too—to take in what was right in front of me.
My father had laced rope through the high, dusty rafters. He must have slipped it around his throat, climbed onto his desk chair, then kicked the chair down. My mind noted all of the little details—how his hands, blue and slack, sat against his thighs, how his leather shoes just almost touched the floor. I noted all of this dispassionately. It was like there was a hiccup in my brain.
It didn’t hit me until I went to him and touched his ice-cold fingers. His body spun on the rope, and I saw his face. The open, hazy eyes met mine.
For the second time that night, I screamed.
It’s hard to talk about what happened next. It’s almost like it happened to someone else. All that screaming. Mar Schneider must have heard it. All those years when my father and I had fought, no one had done a thing. But that night, while my hands were still up over my head, my throat raw and stinging, the knocking came. I must have stumbled to my feet. I must have staggered down the stairs. But all I remember was how I tried my hardest not to look at the body that swung from the ceiling.
A guard stood on the front steps. I only stared at him, white-faced. Noise complaint, he said. Would have to keep our voices down.
That’s when everything left me, all feeling, all fear.
“He’s upstairs,” I said, and collapsed just outside the front door. The guard streamed past me, a rush of blue wool and boots.
After that, more guards. Pepper tried to slip outside, and some neighbor caught him, then held him, staring at me. Speaking to me, but I didn’t hear him. The men were in and out with their boots and their knives.
Koen came. Alone. Without Van. I don’t know why. It was too late to change anything.
“I heard,” he said, taking Pepper from my neighbor.
I didn’t say anything. I was listening to the heavy footsteps on the stairwell. Then I was jostled. A line of guards streamed out, holding my father’s cloth-enveloped body.
The crowd that had gathered went silent. They each raised a pair of fingers to their hearts—a salute. But I didn’t do anything. And neither did Koen.
He just stood there, looking pale and afraid as he clutched my cat to his chest. Eventually the crowd thinned. My father’s ghostly figure had faded down the boulevard by then, disappearing into the darkness.
“Terra,” Koen said at last, stepping close.
When I finally answered, I could taste blood in my throat.
“That bastard!” I said. “That selfish bastard! He left me here! That bastard!”
Koen let out a thin sigh. He carried my cat up the front step and left him inside my empty house. Then he leaned out the open doorway.
“Come on inside,” he said. “We have to get ready for the funeral.”
I picked myself up.
“He left me here. That bastard!” I said again, but weaker this time as Koen closed the door behind me.
19
Down in the pasture funeral goers drifted like ghosts, looking gauzy and grave in their white cotton. They held hands. They sang. Some of them looked down at the wrapped body of my father and wondered why anyone would do such a thing. Perhaps a few of them understood. But they all cast down fistfuls of soil, frigid and dry from the frost, and then tried to stop themselves from wiping their palms against their trousers.
Or at least I assume that’s what happened. I didn’t see it.
Instead I lay on the cedar planks on the floor of the clock tower, staring up into the rafters as Koen rang the bells. The sound sank deep into my body, reverberating in my rib cage, making my molars vibrate. It almost hurt. But at least I felt something.
Gone, was all I thought. My father is gone. I will never see my father again.
But the air here smelled fragrant with the memory of him. I could remember sick days spent in the tower when he showed me the gears and cogs, when I sat in his lap, burying my face in the heavy corduroy of his uniform. Back then, when our faces were lit up amber from the dials, we were happy. I wasn’t afraid of him yet. I never rolled my eyes or bit the inside of my cheeks to stop myself from complaining. No. Back then I thought my father was the smartest man on the whole ship.
But now he was gone. Gone, gone, gone.
Koen stopped ringing the bells. From the floor I watched as he plucked splinters of rope from his work-reddened palms. He was wearing his uniform. Abba’s clothes, I thought, the lump in my throat thickening. But they fit him all wrong. The coat was both too loose and too short. The cuffs hardly covered his long arms.
He walked to the face of the big clock and bent at the waist. I watched as he peered out of the translucent amber glass.
“They’re setting him in the ground now,” he said, and then he turned his gaze to me. “Are you sure you don’t want to go say good-bye?”
I didn’t answer. I was sprawled there on the floor, my hands up near my head. When Koen put his palms on his knees, focusing his gaze on me, pressing for an answer, I only looked away.