There’d been a time when I thought of the Geigers as close friends. I’m not sure why. A distance always existed between us. Though friendly as we chatted at our back fence, Lorrie and Roy never invited us over. Even when we dropped Jonah off after a playdate, we didn’t get beyond their door.
Katherine and I suspected it related to the disparity in our homes, so we were the ones to invite them for dinners and gatherings. While the three-year-olds became fast friends, Katherine never took to Lorrie. “She’s more like you than me,” she said once, and I understood that to mean she found Lorrie too quiet. As for Roy, he’d always bring along a six-pack and offer me a beer. We’d pop a couple open, stare at them vaguely a few minutes, and then he’d say, “Do you mind if I check out the game?” There was always a game on the radio or TV, and he’d help himself to ours.
Katherine and I worried about Roy. He was as soft as Lorrie was hard. His baggy pants slid under the weight of a large belly, and his eyes were bloodshot and tear rimmed, so much so I wondered if he had a medical condition.
As the years went on, our concern grew. Sometimes, when we were in the back lot, we heard loud swearing coming from their house. Once, Lorrie arrived at our door, jittery, her eyes inflamed, a dark shadow on her cheek. She said their phone wasn’t working and asked if she could use ours, “in private if possible.” We left the kitchen and closed the door. A few minutes later, she opened the door and thanked us, offering no explanation.
Roy committed suicide when Jonah was sixteen, his little sister twelve. We were visiting Katherine’s relatives in Spokane when Lorrie called. “Roy’s dead,” she said. “Killed himself. It was that back surgery years ago. . . . No job and all those pills. I didn’t want you hearing it from someone else. It’s a private matter. I hope you understand.”
It was a late-summer day, the sun burning, and Daniel and his cousins were blaring rap music and nursing Cokes on the covered patio. Katherine collected him, led him into the guest room we’d been assigned. When we gave him the news, his face didn’t change, but he seemed to have pulled back from his features somehow. “Shit,” he said, his breath shaking. “I mean . . . Shit.”
I suggested he call Jonah. “He needs to know he’s not alone with this.” Daniel promised he would, and though he was back on that patio in a minute, though I never heard him make the call, I believe he did. I believe that.
Around ten, I was heading down the hall when Daniel called from behind. “Dad.” I turned, and he approached, wrapped his arms around me. He held on like a frightened child, tight and urgent, no guarding of his body against mine. It was a long hug, nearly interminable, and I felt in it a request for more than I had. Then he went rigid as if stung and pushed away.
This is the last time I recall touching my son.
* * *
—
WHEN WE GOT HOME A FEW DAYS LATER, Janice Wilson, a gossipy neighbor prone to exaggeration and salacious content, made a beeline when she saw me collecting the mail.
“You heard about Roy? I don’t care what she says, it wasn’t any pills. He shot himself, that’s what he did. I heard it. Twice. When they hauled him away, that sheet was covered in blood.”
That couldn’t be true. Sheriff Barton would never have removed him like that. And the children had been there. If a shot had been fired, they’d have run to it, they’d have seen. No, Roy must have quietly overdosed, and Lorrie found him in their bedroom or bath. The children had been spared at least that.
* * *
—
A WEEK AFTER ROY’S BURIAL, I sat reading the paper early on a Sunday morning. Katherine was working, and Daniel still slept. I was enjoying the sound of rain dripping off the back eaves when someone knocked at the door. I opened it to find Lorrie. Her hair was soaked, her overalls splattered with mud.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” she said, her voice quavering. “But I could use your help.”
I grabbed my rain jacket and followed her to the joint easement outside our fences. She pushed back brambles and stepped aside. Stretched savagely on the ground lay a torn and dismembered animal. I didn’t recognize Brody at first. I hadn’t seen their ancient chocolate Lab for some time. About a month before, I’d noticed the old guy outside, standing on wobbly legs, looking near collapse. It didn’t surprise me a predator had taken him down.
“Do you think a bobcat got him?”
She was crying now, visibly shaking. “No,” she said, wiping a dirty glove across her wet cheek, leaving a dark streak behind. “He died over a week ago.” Her face was a sea of confusion. “We buried him. Jonah and I. We buried him.”
She led me to the grave ten feet farther on, the spot where I’d found the mutilated fawn nearly a decade before. The hole was a good three feet deep, dug out in a fury, dirt and rocks scattered across an eight-foot radius. This was the work of scavengers, probably the coyotes we often heard yowling in the night.
Lorrie collapsed to her knees, heaving with great racking sobs, gasping that she couldn’t do it again, that it was too much. “I can’t ask Jonah, I can’t ask Jonah again,” she kept saying.
I lifted her up, let her convulse against me. “I’ll do it,” I said. “I’ll rebury him. Deeper this time. Nothing will ever get to him again.”
After a moment, she collected herself and pushed away, swept her arm across her nose and mouth, sniffling, smearing more dirt across her face. She didn’t make eye contact after that.
She nodded, one tight little nod, muttered thanks, and turned away.
For days afterward, as I taught my classes, ate my dinner, showered before bed, I could feel her in my arms, the pure kinetic density of her. That tiny, hard thing.
* * *
—
I USED TO DREAM OF LORRIE, of holding her that day, the mist dissolving the dirt on her face. And then she, too, would dissolve, her fingertips and hands, her feet, then legs, her hair and face turning to a soft glow, until I was alone in those brambles, a mangled dog at my feet.
I’ve dreamed of Lorrie once since the murder. It started the same way: Lorrie tight against my chest. Only this time, it wasn’t mist but fire that flared between us, that burned her away.
30
In the next week, Evangeline walked the trails with Rufus each afternoon. It made him crazy happy. He’d forget his achy old body and pad through puddles like a young pup, leap storm-downed trees, dive after creatures not quite seen. Always he was scenting the air. Sometimes he’d land on an aroma so wild and rare it tensed every muscle, raised the hackles up his spine.
With Rufus at her side, the woods became a cauldron of mysterious life. As the light fell, she’d plow deeper into those dark trails, turn corners holding her breath. She searched out the edges of her fear like a tongue worming to a pulled tooth. It was a controlled fear, like a controlled burn, and it amplified the exhilaration of returning to a warm, lit house.
She needed that rush of blood to wake her mind, to ready herself for schoolwork that took all her concentration. On the last Thursday of October, she returned from her walk and went straight to her room, planning to dig into her calculus and trig. The courses were insanely hard. She wouldn’t have had a chance, but the teachers were helping her during lunch and after class. Yesterday Ms. Swanson even slipped her an answer sheet so she could check her work.