10
HE WAS AWAKE and out of bed while the house, and the woods all around the house, were still in darkness, with only a lesser shade of darkness in the east-facing windows, and that shade a good ways farther along than he cared to see in his windows before he was shaved and dressed and downstairs for coffee, but he’d slept poorly, passing in and out of a nagging dream in which he walked and walked, like the last man, over a burned land, and when at last he got up from his bed and walked to the bathroom his legs were all rubber and ache, and there was a thickness in his head and a drainage at the back of his throat that he kept swallowing like a sour rope, and by the time his coffee was brewing he knew he’d taken sick, as his mother used to say, and only then did he remember his trip to the hospital the night before: Tom Sutter coming out to meet him, standing outside in the cold so Sutter could have himself another cancer stick, then the long drive home with no heat in the van and his entire body shivering, until at last he was under his covers and shivering there too until he slept and then shivering in his strange dream of walking. He’d gone out into the world and taken sick and brought it home.
In the kitchen he washed down a handful of aspirin with orange juice, then fried up two eggs, and carried eggs and coffee to the living room. He hauled his chair closer to the fire and took up the old blanket from the sofa and shawled it about his shoulders. His face was hot to the touch, and yet he was so cold—the mug trembling when he lifted it.
He cocked his ear to a noise above him. What day was this? School day? He thought to look at the paper but he would have to go out to the porch to get it. And he did not remember hearing it hit the porchboards, so was it Sunday? That would explain why that girl was still in bed. How late did she come home? Or did you fall asleep again waiting for her? A great clomping, thudding, music-playing, phone-yammering creature except when she chose not to be—quiet as a ghost in slippers then, able to pass soundlessly through doors, to float by you and up the creaky stairs without a creak and into the bathroom to brush the beer and smoke from her mouth, into her PJs and into her bed, late as hell again but safe, thank God, not out with some drunk boy driving, not in some accident but home, safe…
Until one morning it’s a sheriff’s deputy who brings her home, drunk, high, something. Her license long gone. Her face puffy, her eyes red, wobbling in her shoes. You should just let her go to bed but you can’t. You can’t. It’s all out of control. A goddam sheriff’s deputy!
Grounded? she says, and laughs. You can’t ground me, I’m nineteen.
Hell I can’t. My house, my rules.
Oh, really? Whatever happened to our house? Our home?
If you spent more time here. If this wasn’t just a place for you to sleep it off.
You want me to find somewhere else to do that? Is that it?
You know I don’t. I want you safe.
You want to control me. You’re ashamed of me, just like you were of Mom.
Don’t say that. I’m not ashamed of you.
Yes you are! And you—jabbing her finger at him—you think I don’t know about that grocery store woman, that Irene or whatever her name is? The whole town knows, Dad. The whole freaking town. So who’s ashamed of who, here—huh?
By the time she comes downstairs in the morning, stretching and stumbling half-asleep, wild-haired and smelling of bed, all the anger will be gone from you like a bad night’s dreaming, forgotten in the light of day—home again—forgotten in the smell of her as she passes by—safe again—and you will get up, however sick you are, and make her those thick, half-burnt pancakes she loves.
But then again, on such a morning, with the new sun spilling into the living room, with the flames rising and dropping in the woodburner, a man might hear, instead of his daughter’s footsteps overhead, instead of the clap of the bathroom door and the moments of silence and then the toilet flushing… he might hear instead the sound of car tires in the drive—at this hour?—and setting aside his breakfast he might get up from his chair and go to the window in time to see a man stepping out of a white sedan in the dawn and putting a hat to his head—stiff, wide-brimmed hat such as a sheriff or state trooper would wear, and then he’d recognize that the car is in fact a sheriff’s cruiser, and that the man putting the hat on his head is in fact the sheriff.
The heart spins, the mind falls backwards as you understand that she is not upstairs in her bedroom at all—has not been there all night—and you look again at the cruiser, waiting for her to emerge: blond head of hair followed by a small frame followed by a too-short skirt and bare legs and shoes that say to you nothing but trouble, her head hung low in shame, you’d like to think, although more likely it’s the heaviness of whatever kind of high got her a ride home in the sheriff’s cruiser, in bad trouble maybe but safe, thank God, with the sheriff…
And then, when no second figure appears, when you understand that the girl in the passenger seat is far too young, far too dark-haired—that the sheriff’s cruiser has brought only the sheriff and this little girl who is not yours—that is the moment your heart truly falls and somehow you are already on the porch when the sheriff, coming up the walking path, sees you, and does not pause but in some way flinches, as if you’ve drawn down on him with a weapon, and on he comes, and reaching the bottom step raises one of his hands to his sheriff’s hat and actually, what in the hell, takes the hat off—Don’t take your hat off, Sheriff, you son of a bitch, what is wrong with you?
Gordon, says the sheriff.
And some time after that, unremembered time, the sheriff’s cruiser is on the 52 South and the bright world is sweeping by and yet there is the sense of not moving at all, of the cruiser standing still while it’s the land, the trees, the wire fences that rush by. Like a fish holding its place in a stream.
Just the two of them now, the sheriff having stopped at the station to drop off the little girl, and the sheriff driving ten miles over the posted limit not out of official urgency but out of decency maybe, or maybe the sooner to get his errand over with, and only when he comes up on drivers who slow him down on the rural two-laner does he throw his lights and give a short whoop of siren. Passing these drivers without a glance while his passenger looks hard at every face, every car, each one of them worth pulling over, questioning, searching. She’d been struck by a vehicle, the sheriff believed, her body pushed afterward into the river. A drunk in a panic. A kid or kids high and believing, in that moment, that the river would carry the evidence away like a bad dream and their lives could go on—college, marriage, kids of their own.
Do you want a smoke, Gordon?
The sheriff, Sutter, pushing his pack at him. Gordon can smell it, taste the smoke in his lungs, feel the nicotine speeding to his brain. He hasn’t smoked in years, not since Roger Young’s cancer. The cigarette would be good but who wants good. Who wants relief of any kind if it isn’t the relief that will last forever. He raises his hand no thanks and Sutter withdraws the pack, and it’s a long while before Gordon thinks to say, You go ahead, and Sutter goes ahead—lights up and draws the smoke deep and cracks the window and exhales into the rush of wind.
Next he’s moving slow and heavy down a hospital corridor, the air reeking of sickness and ammonia and old burned coffee, Gordon a step behind Sutter, who pushes through a gray metal door saying authorized personnel only, and on the other side of the door the linoleum turns to concrete and the walls are cinderblock and the air is almost too cold for smell but not quite, smell of chemical fumes and the faint putrid stink of meat. A third man emerging now from somewhere, thin man dressed like a surgeon down to his surgical gloves, and this man leading them to the large stainless-steel what, refrigerator? A bank of three square doors side by side at waist level and each with a large latch handle. Rubber-gloved hand on latch, the unlatching echoing on concrete and cinderblock, the suck and gasp of rubber seal pulled from metal, the greased clicking of the large industrial glides as the bed—what else do you call it? slab? gurney?—floats from the dark square like a magician’s trick all the way into the room, into the light.