The Mourning Hours (21 page)

thirty-eight

F
riday morning, I put on my sneakers and slipped outside before anyone was awake. I’d become a runner in Berkeley, if a reluctant one, the habit developed more out of necessity—the high price of gas, the tremendous difficulty of finding a parking space within walking distance of campus. Watankee was a runner’s paradise, with its smooth, gently sloping hills unfolding beneath a gigantic blue sky—but I didn’t meet a single other jogger on the road. I stepped onto the shoulder a few times to let vehicles pass—the large, gold family sedans, the cattle trailers with a cargo destined for the slaughterhouse. Each time, I elicited curious stares.

By heading right and negotiating four successive right turns, I figured I would end up exactly where I’d started. What I hadn’t remembered, though, was the length of road between each turn. I slowed as I approached Jerry Warczak’s property, my calves protesting. A pair of overalls hung over the porch railing, and several pairs of boots had been kicked off near the front door. His house was more run-down than I’d remembered.

Out of breath, I walked down the road to our house—
home,
although I’d spent most of my life away from it. I was halfway down the driveway when I noticed the truck near the garage—a black Toyota—parked next to Dad’s navy Dodge. I couldn’t say why, but I felt a tiny shimmer of excitement, as if the little hairs on the back of my neck were standing at attention. Without the sound of engines running, the place was eerily quiet. A few cows mooed low in the pasture, a hawk circled overhead in a nearby field. I approached from behind to read the license plate:
Texas.

Something caught my eye at that moment—a tall, broad-shouldered man with a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes coming around the side of the barn. If I hadn’t seen the license plate, I would have known him anyway, would have known him if it had been twenty years, or thirty, or fifty. There was something about his walk that was familiar, loose-limbed and easy—
like Dad’s.

He stopped short, his face registering surprise, then recognition, then—breaking my heart—wariness.

“Johnny!” I blurted. The tears were already there, stinging, and I blinked them back.

He started toward me, slowly, measuring his steps, but I couldn’t wait. I ran toward him, making up the difference.

“Kirsten,” he said, scooping me up in one easy movement and whirling me around, so the world was a blur of green and red and blue. It was one of those déjà vu moments, where the present melted into the past. Johnny hoisting me onto his shoulders for a run around the bases, carrying me over his shoulders, scooping me up for a gentle takedown on the living room floor.

“Hey, pip-squeak,” he said, setting me on the ground. He took off his hat, messing his fingers through his blond hair. It was thinner now, set farther back on his forehead, but he was still Johnny, handsome and strong. We stood there grinning at each other like a pair of idiots.

“I never would have recognized you, you’ve grown so tall,” he said, and I rolled my eyes. At five feet and one-half-inch, I came about even with his armpit.

“How long have you been here?”

“I just pulled in. Drove most of the day yesterday and spent the night in Racine.” Johnny jerked his head to one side, gesturing. “You know Dad kept that truck all these years? He did some bodywork on it, painted it black. I figured he would have just junked it.”

“The Green Machine?” I asked, then remembered. The
Murder Machine,
with a dented passenger-side door and two slashed tires.

We looked at each other, then away, awkwardly. “We’re all down at Aunt Julia’s,” I said, suddenly shy. “Everyone is probably getting up about now. You should come over for breakfast. I mean it, you should absolutely come.”

He leaned back against the Toyota, looking uneasy. “Kirsten,” he began, then stopped.

“It was all a million years ago,” I told him, as if I was still a kid. My eyes smarted with tears.

He smiled but shook his head. “No, it wasn’t.”

“Johnny—”

“Why don’t you get in? I’ll give you a ride, at least.”

In the truck, he belted himself in, checked the rearview mirror, and then glanced over at me. I remembered the day he’d dropped me off at school, the day Heather Lemke had kicked my ass at tetherball. I’d been so sure, then.

“What?” Johnny demanded, glancing over at me. I couldn’t stop staring at him.

I shook my head, more to clear it than anything else. I hadn’t thought of it in years—the way he’d wrestled with Stacy on our living room floor, with a roughness that bordered on violence. The slammed doors, the chair he’d thrown against the wall. These were the images I’d had of Johnny over the years—my brother, the wrestling star, the lover, the
killer,
the murderer, the vagabond, and now the absent but doting son to his father. Last night Emilie had laughed when I’d said I didn’t know if Johnny was guilty; today, riding in the truck next to him, I knew that he wasn’t.

It came to me with sudden clarity: the snowstorm, that night. Johnny had come in, shivering with cold, blood trickling from his hand. He had been so young then, just a seventeen-year-old boy worried that he’d crashed his truck. He wasn’t worried about Stacy—a fact that had made him seem callous and cruel at the time. But I saw it now for what it was: he hadn’t been worried about Stacy, because he’d assumed she was already at home, peeling off her jeans and stepping into her pajamas, maybe sipping from a mug of hot chocolate. Her disappearance had been as much a shock to him as it had been to us. I had cried for Stacy, for the girl who had been in my life one day and was gone the next, but it must have been exponentially worse for Johnny, who had loved her. Yet we hadn’t let him grieve properly; we had kept him—for fifteen years now—on the defensive.

We pulled up in front of Aunt Julia’s house too soon.

“Johnny—” I began.
Keep driving,
I wanted to tell him.
Take me around town, through the countryside, anywhere, so that I have time to get my thoughts together.
I wanted a chance to say all the things I hadn’t said to him since we’d parted, and all the things I hadn’t said those last months we were together, when I’d put him on trial and found him guilty without ever giving him a chance to speak in his defense.

Instead, I said the only thing I could grasp at that moment. “Johnny, I’m so, so sorry.”

He closed his eyes, and for a few beats, I thought he wasn’t going to respond, that maybe he was just waiting for me to get out of the car. It would serve me right; it was a fitting punishment for being a horrible sister. But then he half turned toward me, his eyes blue and moist, and said, “I want you to know that I’m sorry right back.”

thirty-nine

D
ad’s burial service was attended by maybe twenty-five people, some neighbors, some friends from way back. This was what life had come to for a man who was decent and hardworking, a man who kept to himself and was content not to challenge his status as a social pariah. Standing in a short row, Johnny, Emilie and I sobbed, our hands linked. Mom and Aunt Julia clung to each other, dry-eyed at last. Our cousin Brent was there from Milwaukee with his wife and two preteen daughters, perfect strangers. Darby held a red rose in her hand to be placed on Dad’s coffin at the end of the service.

I didn’t know if Dad believed in the resurrection of the dead and the life everlasting, or any of the other passages the funeral director read from his tiny, official-looking black book, or if he had counted on it all ending with ashes and dust. I wanted to ask; I was already formulating a list of about a million questions for the next time I saw him. Which I guess explains what I believed myself, even if I hadn’t practiced that belief in years.

All day Friday, reconnecting, we’d told our favorite Dad stories, laughed and cried and said what needed to be said. Darby had warmed right up to Johnny; they’d had nothing to forgive each other for and could start with a blank slate. For the rest of us, the initial awkwardness had disappeared as the day wore on. We’d carefully avoided all mention of
that
spring, as if we were all imagining what life would have been like without Stacy, if she’d never even existed. When we’d all crammed onto the couch for an impromptu family photo, I’d thought that Dad would have been proud of us, acting like a real family. Or not acting, just
being.

Mom was invited to deliver the message from the family, and she stepped forward, slim and strong in a dark suit. “I’m not going to make a grand speech today, because that’s not what John would have wanted,” she began. Only that morning she’d been a mess, slow to get herself dressed for the day. Now, I knew, she was drawing on her reserve strength, the way she must have done during her shifts in the E.R., facing one family’s tragedy after another. “John Hammarstrom was a loyal man, a good father, a supportive husband. He had a kind of courage that I haven’t encountered much in this world, and more courage than I’ve ever had myself.” Her voice wavered slightly, and she caught my eye. “He would be proud of his kids today, and grateful to everyone for coming.”

My whole body shook. Emilie, leaning down, laid her head on top of mine. Johnny brought an arm around both of us. We lingered for a long time in this three-way embrace, watching the coffin be lowered into the ground. Mom thanked everyone in attendance personally, her discomfort at being in Watankee forgotten, or at least, momentarily stowed away.

I couldn’t help wondering: if whatever had happened to Stacy Lemke hadn’t happened, where would the rest of us be? I used to have a pretty clear idea of where we would all end up, in the world according to nine-year-old me. Johnny was going to win a state title, graduate from college and come back to the farm speaking a new language of breeding and genetics. He was going to marry Stacy, of course, and produce enough strawberry-blond children to fill the upstairs bedrooms. Dad and Mom would have moved next door; on spring afternoons, they would have headed out to Fireman’s Field to watch their grandchildren smash the ball off the tee. They would have lived long, happy lives. Emilie would have gone to college on a music scholarship. She might have ended up on a soundstage in Vegas, anyway, but that was only after turning down the philharmonic.

And me? Back then I’d wanted to be everything at once—a veterinarian, a detective, the celebrated reader who checked out every book in the library. I would have gone to college, too—but I would have come home on every vacation, bursting out of the car, taking the steps two at a time, not being able to wait a second longer before saying hello.

Maybe. Or maybe not. I’d lived long enough to understand that every family had its share of tragedy, large or small. No one got a free pass from heartache.

For the first time in fifteen years, I realized that I didn’t give a damn what had happened to Stacy Lemke. It was sad and awful, but true; we’d let her disappearance have this strange power over our lives. What I cared about now was what I should have cared about then. My family, the five of us staying together.

A few sprinkles started then, propelling us to action. “I’d better get back to the house,” Aunt Julia said. That morning, we’d helped her make up ham-and-cheese buns, a salty-sweet German potato salad and two kinds of Jell-O desserts for the funeral luncheon. She and Uncle Paul were among the first to leave, followed by handfuls of other people, in ones and twos.

“Are we ready to head back?” Mom asked, fishing the keys out of her purse. We’d come together, knowing we couldn’t handle it alone. I could see how exhausted she was, how much effort it had taken to put on a brave face.

“I don’t know,” I said, suddenly needing more time. If I flew back to Berkeley tomorrow, there was no telling when I would be here again. But Emilie and Darby had already started walking back to Mom’s car. “You know what? Go on ahead. It’s not too far to walk. I’ll catch up with you.”

Johnny frowned, glancing at the dark clouds overhead. “It’s going to start raining.”

“I’ll be fine. I just need to stay here for a few minutes.”

“Okay, then,” Mom said, giving me a squeeze on the arm.

Johnny took off his coat and draped it over my shoulders. “Don’t be too long,” he said.

I watched Mom and Johnny walk back to Mom’s car. Darby raised her hand to wave at me, and I waved back. Johnny was right—as soon as they pulled onto the road, the sprinkles came. I slipped on his jacket, breathed in his smell.

Maybe being here, with Dad’s death suddenly real, was what brought back the flood of memories. The faded wallpaper in our kitchen. The neat rows of Grandma’s garden. The rungs on the ladder to the hayloft. The summer of the Hammarstrom Hitters. Racing Dad back from the barn and him letting me win. His hand on my head, tousling my always-messy hair. It was painful to remember these things. For so long when I thought about my childhood, I’d remembered it only from the moment Stacy Lemke went missing to the moment we packed Mom’s Caprice Classic to the gills and headed out of town, as if nine years of life had been reduced to that short span of three months. Maybe, if I really considered it, I’d find that the next sixteen years of my life hadn’t counted, either.

I knelt down, taking a handful of loose soil and sifting it through my fingers. Burying Dad here, in the small cemetery just down the road from where he’d lived his whole life, felt like a fitting final home. Dad had known this land, worked this land, loved this land. His heart attack had come midmorning, according to the coroner’s report. The milk hauler had found him just after noon, only a few feet inside the barn. He’d felt for a pulse, then waited outside for the ambulance. “It must have been quick,” Mom had reassured us, and we were happy to defer to her medical knowledge, happy to believe that Dad’s death had been fast and unpreventable, to save us from the guilt of a father dying alone and far away.

The rain started to come down then, the scattering of sprinkles turning to determined, stinging drops.

There was a sound behind me, a quick clearing of a throat. I whirled around, placing a hand on the ground for balance. Johnny, I thought. He came back for me.

But the shadow that fell over me wasn’t Johnny’s, although it was familiar, in the long-ago way everything in Watankee felt familiar. Though he hadn’t aged gracefully, I recognized Jerry Warczak right away. “Saw you out here by yourself,” he grunted. “Figured maybe you needed a ride.”

I pushed myself to a standing position. “No, that’s okay. I’m planning to walk.”

He stared at me. “You’re so grown up.”

I hitched up my pants at the knees, revealing the four-inch heels on my boots.

“You won’t be able to walk in those.”

“Believe me,” I said. “I walk everywhere in these.”

“But it’s raining,” he insisted. “Let me give you a ride.”

I saw that he wasn’t going to leave. There wasn’t going to be a last minute alone with Dad. “That’s fine, then.” I followed behind him, my footsteps falling into the impressions left by his boots.