But her face wasn’t in darkness now, and a savage urge entered me. “Was it kind to burn Jonah’s clothes? His boots? To douse them in gasoline or lighter fluid to ensure the evidence would be destroyed? Was it kind to let me and Katherine keep searching for our son?” Her mouth opened, but I cut her off. “I saw the smoke. I was worried about you, so I went over.” I laughed a little here. “I cared about you. I cared about Nells and Jonah. Even then, even exhausted, late at night with my son missing, I cared about you.”
I stopped there, wanting the silence to torment her. Lorrie’s knees seemed unable to hold her, and she sank into a chair.
“Jonah killed a deer,” she whispered. “He brought home the meat. It was deer blood I couldn’t get out.”
“Then why burn the clothes, the boots? Why not mention any of this to the police?”
She stared at the floor, silent, then stood and turned as if to go. But I was on her, grabbing her arm and yanking her around, shouting, “For all you knew, my son was still alive somewhere, bleeding and injured, but alive! You were willing to let him die, to protect your son! You were willing to let him die!” I didn’t realize I believed this until the words were released.
Lorrie’s face was oddly blank, almost serene, as if in acceptance of her fate. “No,” she said. “I would never have put Daniel at risk.”
“But you did.”
“No. He wasn’t at risk,” she said, her voice as flat as her eyes. “If the blood was Daniel’s, I knew he was already dead.”
Who could prepare for words like these? Now it was my knees that couldn’t hold my weight. And there we were, a man and a woman collapsed on kitchen chairs, hardly able to breathe.
“Jonah told you?”
“No,” she said, pushing herself to stand.
“Then how did you know?”
She started walking out, turned, and said in that same dead voice, “Because of all the blood, so much blood. Because of the smell.”
I heard her leave. I sat stunned in that kitchen for long minutes, until I managed to rise, to enter the mudroom and dead-bolt the door.
50
Day of My Death
It was strange how quickly Daniel’s eyes turned glassy like the buck’s. How the body, the carcass, wasn’t Daniel at all, wasn’t even human. Just another forest creature in the wrong place at the wrong time. A creature who never was, under any scenario, going to live forever. I began to believe I could leave him there with all the other animals who would meet their end someday, that I could walk out of that forest and back into my life.
It took a half hour, but I managed to hide the body deep in thorny brambles. I dragged the gutted deer over the spot where Daniel had bled, spread the entrails to camouflage the sprays of blood. If scavenger birds drew attention by circling, the animal’s remains would answer any questions. Finally I carved off the buck’s tenderloins and left the rest. My mother would scold me for the off-season kill but would eat those steaks all the same. And how better to explain my blood-soaked clothes than a deer I mistook for dead, a deer that thrashed under my knife and gushed blood all over me?
I drove home under a blank night sky, the seat covered in contractor bags, hunks of bloody meat beside me. I kept smelling Daniel. Unlike with the buck, I’d hacked right into his guts. Twice I had to pull over to puke. And the whole while, I racked my brain, trying to remember if anyone saw Daniel climb into my truck after practice. I didn’t think so, but then who pays attention when their life isn’t yet on the line?
When I got home that night, I peeked in the kitchen window. My mom sat hunched at the old Formica table studying for her nursing exams. After Dad died, Mom took on extra shifts and started school, set on “becoming somebody” if it killed her. Seeing her like that, exhausted after a day changing diapers at the nursing home, looking more like my grandma than my mom, made me want to cry. And here I was about to walk in with another load of suffering. I started to turn away, but she saw me and smiled.
With the poor kitchen light and my dark clothes, she didn’t spot the blood right off, but I wasn’t two steps in before she noticed the smell. “Lord, Jonah, what’d you gut-shoot? Must have been something big.”
Around eleven, I went to say good night. She was standing at the kitchen sink. The jacket I’d been wearing was wet and bunched in there. One of its arms had flopped onto the pale counter and was leaking all over the place. Mom’s mouth was loose, hanging open, but she wasn’t looking at the water that was pooling red, splattering bright on the floor; she was looking at her palms. She held them before her, staring like she’d never seen them before, like maybe somebody else’s hands had gotten sewn onto the ends of her arms.
She must have known I was there. I was at the edge of her vision, standing at the kitchen door. She didn’t move, didn’t speak, but when the floor creaked under me, her breath hitched as if it were something in her that had just popped loose. I waited a moment, and when nothing more happened, I turned to go.
“Nells.” She said it fierce, like a warning.
“In her room. Asleep.”
“Make sure she stays there. You got that?”
* * *
—
THE NEXT DAY, news spread quickly about Daniel being missing. Turned out a couple freshmen girls saw him getting into my truck after football practice. I should have known. Girls always kept tabs on the guy. But instead of making me a suspect, it turned me into a celebrity. Everyone wanted a piece of the action, and skinny Jonah Geiger was as close as they were going to get. Sammy and her friends sat by me at lunch, trying to work Sammy into the story line, turn it into a tragic love story. I could tell she was hoping for the headline “Brokenhearted Boy Disappears.”
I told them all the same thing: I’d dropped Daniel off at the small grocery near the gym. “Said he was going to pick up an energy bar and Gatorade before hitting the weights.”
The police figured out quick enough that he’d likely never made it to the store or the gym. Still, no one suspected me of anything other than giving him a lift. Everyone thought he would reappear. Even my mother didn’t ask more about my story. She did obsess about my clothes though. She pretreated and scrubbed and washed them again and again, then came home a day later with new jeans and boots, saying my old ones were “irretrievable” and she’d thrown them away.
As for the meat, she slipped it to the Wileys’ dogs. She didn’t scold me. She just said, “I never knew anything could bleed like that.”
When Daniel had been missing for two days, Principal Thibodeau canceled school so students could join the search. Which tells you all you need to know about who Daniel was in our town. I showed up with the rest to help post flyers around the area. It wasn’t as hard as you’d think to act like nothing had happened. In the presence of people who couldn’t imagine me as anything other than harmless, neither could I. Yet whenever I was alone, most of all at night, the smell of Daniel rose off my skin and filled the room.
On the third day, the police called and asked me to come down for questioning. Sammy had been pumping up the romantic-distress angle, and Mr. Balch had told them Daniel was agitated the morning he went missing. They claimed to be investigating “the possibility of self-harm” and thought maybe I could help.