Danny, Rachel said, talk to me—and he stopped on the stairs. Then turned back to her.
Why are you even here, Ma?
She stared at him.
Why aren’t you on your date?
Danny, she said again, but then faltered. His eyes so hard, so cold. What had she done?
They stood that way for a while, he on the steps above and she below, before he turned again and continued up the stairs. Marky watching him go, turning back to Rachel, and finally going up the stairs too.
She moved woodenly from room to room then, locking the doors, drawing the curtains. It crossed her mind to pull the phone line from the wall, and at that second the phone rang. Rudy again. There was nothing for her to worry about, he told her, he’d been talking to the lawyer… telling her other things she hardly heard, something about physical evidence, the phrase erratic, troubled girl, and Rachel mechanically took down the number of the lawyer.
There was a silence, and then she said, Do you think he knows?
Who? said Rudy.
Gordon Burke. Do you think he knows, about Danny?
You haven’t talked to him?
Yes, earlier. Briefly. He wasn’t—He… She didn’t finish.
He’s a good man, Rach, Rudy said. And he’s been good to those boys. But what he’s going through right now… Hell, I don’t even want to imagine.
SHE WAITED FOR the sheriff to return, but he didn’t—not that night, not all day Friday.
She waited for Gordon to call, although she knew that wouldn’t happen either. And then it was Friday night, Halloween—Danny emerging from his room at last, on his way to Jeff Goss’s waiting car, and off they went. Rachel sitting at home with Marky, who sat in his Vikings helmet and jersey ready to dish out candy for kids if any came, and then announcing after a while that none were coming. And none did; not one. It was a bad night for it, a bitter wind blowing, so no wonder.
Later, after Marky had gone to bed, something sailed through the living room window, puffing out the curtains and dropping with a light thud to the carpet. A small stone out of the sky. Surprising, what a clean, small hole it made in the glass, with only a few slender shards to pick up. The pieces were still in her hand when the phone rang.
Hello? she said. Hello—?
Hello? Mrs. Young?
Mrs. Young! The blood went out of her. She steadied herself on the counter. It wasn’t him, it wasn’t Gordon. It was his brother, Edgar.
Rachel managed to give her sympathies, then listened while Edgar explained that Gordon wasn’t going to open the store tomorrow, so the boys should plan on staying home.
She saw the scene over there, at Gordon’s house: Edgar at the phone and Gordon beyond him, heaped in a chair, staring into his coffee. Meredith on the sofa, and their daughter, their only child, laid out somewhere in some cold, awful place, dead.
—under the circumstances, Edgar was saying, they should plan on staying home until further notice.
After he hung up, Rachel kept the phone to her ear, listening to the strange silence there, a sound from outer space, an eerie wind. She stood frozen in it, her chest hollow. There’d been a day, years ago, when something happened, or nearly happened, between her and Gordon Burke. A gray afternoon, the windowpanes ticking with bits of ice. She’d come out of a bath and felt weak and had sat down on the bed. Before her was the cheval glass that had belonged to her grandmother, then her mother, now her. Who would she give the mirror to, this girly keepsake?
Rachel—?
A man had come into the house, downstairs. There was the sound of his footfall across the living room, and then her name again, lobbed up the stairs. A stair tread creaked and she reached for her robe but stopped.
Two days ago they’d buried Roger. This afternoon, Gordon had picked up the boys and taken them to a movie so Rachel could sleep. Now they were back.
Rachel—? he said from around the corner.
Yes, she answered. That was all. He came anyway, into the frame of the door.
Oh—he said. His big face filling with the sight of her there, on the bed. I’m sorry, he said.
She heard the kids in the yard, already into some kind of contest. Holly could be mean but Danny would keep things fair and good for Marky.
Brought the boys back, Gordon said, not looking away, looking her in the eye. He reached up and worked the flesh under his jaw with a coarse, sandpaper sound. He was a man who was sure before he acted, who didn’t operate by guesswork or even intuition, but who held in his head all the hard facts of mechanical things. Over the years there had been moments, yes, when she’d wondered what it would be like to be with him instead of Roger, to simply switch. Innocent, helpless thoughts such as every wife must have.
He took a step, then came certainly toward her. In the wash of movement she smelled the outdoors, the steely clouds and the wet, moldering leaves. Her heart was beating in her breast. She turned to the mirror and the picture there was incredible: this naked, wet-haired woman, this man beside her dressed for cold.
Rachel…, he began, and in the next instant Holly’s voice, cold as a queen’s, penetrated the room.
Hands off, retard.
Out there in the cold, Danny said something low, and there was silence.
Gordon’s face had gone red. His jaw muscle jumped.
She knows better, by God, he said.
It’s all right, Rachel said.
The day was going dark. In the mirror she saw Gordon’s arm drift toward her shoulder, then beyond it. She saw the robe rise up like a phantom, felt it brush her skin. In the mirror, as in the flesh, he got the robe over her shoulders and over her breasts without quite touching her.
THERE WAS GLASS in her hand, Rachel had noticed standing at the sink. Slender fragments pressed into her palm, and after a moment she remembered the broken window, the strange little stone. She dumped the glass in the trash and rinsed her hand under the faucet. She had wanted to tell him something, that day—something true and unafraid, such as how she’d often felt, her secret thoughts. Holly’s voice had stopped her.
And if it hadn’t? If everything had gone just a little bit differently? Meteors, they said, were on their way, right now, crossing billions of years of chance. The smallest bump changed everything. If Holly had not spoken and Rachel had—would things be different? Would Holly be alive?
It was late, almost midnight. Wind was moaning in a gap somewhere. She began locking doors, switching off lights. She was halfway up the stairs before she remembered that Danny was still out, but she didn’t go back down to turn on the light. In a few weeks, he’d be gone. Taking off one day while she was at work, leaving just a note saying he’d gone down to Saint Louis, to work construction with a friend of his. Leaving the dog behind. His classes. His girlfriend. When Rachel would try to call, a message would tell her the number was no longer in service. There’d be a postcard, the Gateway Arch—they’d gone once when Roger was alive, Marky terrified to go up until Danny explained the mechanics of the thing, the strength of arches!—and a few sentences on the back saying he was fine, he was working, he’d be back in a month…
But he wasn’t. Two months and he wasn’t back. Six months. One day she’d see that Gordon Burke had finally changed the sign on the side of the Plumbing & Supply building, whitewashing out the hyphen and everything after—and that’s when she’d decide to go too. Her father still had the farm and there was room for her and Marky and the dog. It was a place, a life, she’d left behind. But you never do, and the first time she cooked for him, at the old stove, her father wept. Two months later he too was gone, laid to rest next to her mother and her father’s parents, Grammy and Granddad Olsen, those dusty souls, those ghosts.