Stephen Markley - Ohio

“But you two had a thing.”

“So to speak.” He twisted his glass, leaving spirals of moisture on the table, and remembered how he’d once actually believed he’d loved that girl. The storm raging outside reminded him of the first night they’d spent together at her grandmother’s house in Dover. “How do you know about that?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

She’d actually learned this from Dan Eaton, who she met in the visitation room of the Crawford County Correctional Facility in Pennsylvania where he was serving a year for felony assault after beating a man in a grocery store parking lot. Stacey asked him about Kaylyn, but he had no clue. She asked him about Lisa, and he truthfully told her he hadn’t spoken to her in over a decade. Stacey pretended her visit was to see how he was doing, and Dan never volunteered the information that might have proved crucial: what Hailey told him the last night he ever saw her. He’d refused Hailey’s visit to Crawford. After his guilty plea, the judge had given him a considerably lenient sentence. One that Dan didn’t feel he deserved. What he’d done in the wars? Yeah, that didn’t go unnoticed by God. It required payback. Depression, PTSD, self-blame, these were buzzwords, he decided, jargon to describe an ancient human hurt written in the bones, sung in the sinews of muscle, ground out in the anamnesis of cells. And yet Danny still had love in him, which is a kind of bravery. He’d spent his year in prison corresponding with Melody Coyle. She’d taken a week off work and left Hanna with Greg’s folks to visit him. She so easily saw the decency and courage Greg had spoken of. Dan described the scenario, an encounter in a Neff’s grocery store parking lot with a good ole boy hassling a Mexican kid, cussing him out for putting a dent in his Tundra. The guy wore flannel and work boots but had a rich man’s haircut; he’d snatched this terrified boy by his T-shirt collar and bounced him off the hood of the kid’s decrepit car. Dan saw too many of these bullies in the world now, growing more and more sure of themselves. So Dan grabbed this man’s forearm, and brought the heel of his hand down swiftly at a high, brutish angle. How pleasing the sound of that awful crack had been. He hadn’t even realized how long he wanted to do something like that. Then he simply kept on going: broke the man’s collarbone, five of his ribs, cracked his skull, all in front of the man’s wife and two boys. He told all this to Melody in his soft student’s voice. Melody Coyle slid a warm hand over his, her eyes as bright as daybreak. How interesting, she thought, that she might very well be about to fall in love with a man who’d held her husband as he died.

“Can I ask you something?” said Bill. “If all this is true—really true—and Todd’s the monster you say he is—what’s it matter? He’s still somewhere out in the woods back home. He got his.”

He knew something more, Stacey was sure.

A peal of thunder boomed through the bar, vibrating the glasses, rocking the whole city. A car alarm went off in the distance. The couple and the bartender looked at one another, eyes bugged, and then burst into laughter at how they’d flinched so simultaneously.

“You know what I think?” said Bill. “I think the simplest explanation is usually the right one. Todd Beaufort is rotting in those woods. Kaylyn OD’d in some McDonald’s bathroom without an ID on her or tried to coat-hanger her baby out, and Lisa—Lisa just never looked back. Simple as that.”

“I still have to know,” she said, her nerves too raw, her teeth grinding too painfully, to realize that Bill had just admitted to knowing of Kay’s pregnancy. She’d learned this during a forty-second conversation through a screen door with Mrs. Lynn (“Don’t know, don’t care,” she said when asked where her daughter was), but when Bill copped to knowing that Kaylyn had been pregnant, it blew right past her.

Kaylyn, for her part, almost never thought of Stacey, had no idea that it wasn’t the pursuit of the authorities that she should fear but her old friend from the volleyball team now working as an adjunct professor of English. She returned from waitressing shifts to her unhappy apartment in a subdivision on the outskirts of Anchorage. She paid Blanca her pittance for watching her son, kissed Scotty in his bed, and collapsed on the couch to breathe black mold she could never quite clean entirely from the ceiling’s corners. Then she drank vodka and watched television until she passed out. It was the only way she could sleep. With Hailey’s money, she’d chosen the airline ticket that would take her the farthest she could go without a passport, and when she found herself in this land of mountains hurtled together, sheetrock sky crashing against a slate sea, a place where people really could still disappear, she at least knew she’d found something resembling a second chance. The things she had done to con her way to a new identity—she was resourceful, a survivor, and her son would be too. She ignored the passes men made at her at the bar and saved money on laundry detergent by throwing all their clothes in the bathtub with some soap. She and her little guy rolled up their pant legs and danced, and he thought it was a game. The winters were bleak, frigid, lightless, and somehow invigorating. Nothing she could do about the dreams and ghosts, though. As resilient, relentless, and restless as the mold. In the drawer of her nightstand she kept the picture Bill Ashcraft had dropped in her house that night, the one of all of them at homecoming, cut into quarters by the folds. She took it out only when she woke from indissoluble nightmares. Screaming at Todd to stop, wanting to jump on his back and tear him away even as her legs felt rooted in place. Just please, stop . It was all she’d been able to say.

The bar could have been a sepulchre, a boneyard for their collected memories. Between them, they had stories they could never tell, and it was these moments intrinsic to their pasts that lingered in this quiet mahogany-and-brass niche of the world, creaking among the connecting joints of the bar stools or the maroon material of the booths, a place where adults would hear settling wood but children would hear spirits. When the dark fell, the pictures of the old city disappeared into shadow. The glasses hanging from a rack above the bar captured light from the street, and that fragrant blend of oil soap wood cleaner and disinfectant wormed its way into their nostrils. For the rest of their time on this earth, that specific scent would forever return them to this place. Even if it was the smell of countless taverns the world over, it would bring them back to consider and dread all these rumors and theories of scattered slag.

“You know, I found your dissertation online.” He said it out of the blue, and her wet eyes darted back to him.

“Why?”

“Scared the shit out of me, I gotta say. And now I look around at what’s happening, and it’s hard not to see it. The world unraveling in this very specific, slow-rolling wave of horror and absurdity. That’s why for those of us who want to do something about it… To stop it. You know. Those of us who want to stop it.” He paused and looked up at her, his mouth hanging open and uncertain for a very long moment. “We now belong underground. We’re going to have to do drastic things. Unthinkable things. It’s still dawning on people how scary this all is, but it’s the only way left.”

Stacey chuckled, a tired, exhausted sound. “Bill. My dissertation was eco-crit. It was about literature. What the fuck are you talking about? I came here to ask for your help. In finding Kay. And then finding Lisa.”

He gathered himself, simultaneously shook his head and licked his lips. “I need you to trust me. I need you to forget we met. And I need you to understand—I swear to you—that I know nothing about Kaylyn, about Lisa, about any of this.”