Kevin Guilfoile - Cast Of Shadows

Northwood panicked for a few weeks. The bakery, True Value, Coffee Nook, the fruit stand, two ice cream parlors, six restaurants, three hairdressers, and two dozen or so other shops, including the Gap, of course (but not the White Hen), began closing at sundown. More spouses met their partners at the train, their cars in long queues parallel to the tracks each night. The cops put in for overtime, and the town borrowed officers from Glencoe. If you were under eighteen, you were home before curfew. The Chicago and Milwaukee TV stations made camp for a while on Main Street (news producers determined that Oak Street, where the Gap shared the block with a carpet store, a parking lot, and a funeral home, didn’t provide enough “visual interest” and chose to shoot stand-ups around the corner, where there was more pedestrian traffic and overall “quaintness”), but there turns out to be a limit to the number of nights you can report that there is, as yet, nothing to report, and TV crews disappeared as a group the day a Northwestern basketball player collapsed and died of an aneurysm during practice.

The old routine returned in time. By spring, Anna Kat might not have been forgotten – what with the softball team wearing the “AK” patch, the special appointment of Debbie Fuller to fill the vacancy of student council secretary, and the three-page, full-color yearbook dedication all keeping her top of mind around campus – but Northwood became unafraid again. A horrible alien had killed on its streets; Northwood had been shattered, and the people made repairs. The town grieved and, like the alien, moved on.

Davis prescribed his wife too many pills. When he felt like taking some himself, which was often, he would remove a few capsules from the brown bottle in her bathroom, rub the scar on his belly, and chase the pills with scotch. The bottle’s cap boasted cruelly of a mechanism that could keep his child safe. Sometimes he’d sit on the toilet, rolling a crystal rocks glass between his hands, and wonder if he and Jackie were addicts yet, one day deciding it was okay if they were.

Jackie hardly laughed these days. Davis, always reticent, was noticeably more so. “We never make love anymore,” Jackie said one night across a cold chicken dinner and supermarket wine (the good stuff from their cellar having been depleted and never replaced). Davis agreed.

Old and strictly observed habits enabled them to go days without talking: Davis locked the doors at night and rose from bed first in the morning; Jackie paid the household bills; Davis curbed the garbage and recyclables early Monday before work; Jackie shopped for groceries on Wednesday; Davis kept the tanks in both cars more than a quarter full; Jackie picked up the laundry and dry cleaning twice a week and changed the sheets every Thursday.

Sometimes when they did speak, frequently drunk or numbed, the words came out in cruel, irretrievable bunches:

God, Jackie, is that really a lot to ask? Do I ever ask you for anything? I expect so goddamn little and you can’t even give me that!

You don’t ask for a thing, Davis. You don’t ask for anything, and you don’t give me anything. Honestly, it’s not human to live this way!

Northwood’s senior class president, a thinnish boy named Mark Campagna, came to the house with Anna Kat’s yearbook, or the yearbook she’d ordered anyway, with her name embossed on the cover in gold. Mark explained how he’d passed it around to every kid in the class, and they’d all signed, every single one. He’d made sure of that, even sat at a folding table outside the cafeteria every fifth period for a week and hunted down the kids he’d missed in the hallways between classes. Davis and Jackie thanked him and meant it, but Davis wasn’t ready to read a book filled with sentimental teen angst and melodrama, so he put it on the shelf next to her underclassman yearbooks and they promised each other they’d read it on her birthday next year. Jackie read every word the following day.

Then, just as the winter was ending, Jackie’s behavior went off-axle. No doubt there were many factors besides Anna Kat’s death that snapped her, including her family history and the long, cold winter. These didn’t help, in any case. Returning from work one evening, walking from the garage in the lengthening daylight, Davis noticed her digging in the backyard. After watching a minute, he saw she had already turned over most of the sod in the back, leaving two large rectangles of soil with a narrow walkway of grass separating them. She had to have been up to this for days.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Digging,” Jackie said, not unpleasantly.

Over the next month, she planted obsessively. Flowers and vegetables and even small trees filled the rectangles. To Davis, there seemed no order to it, but clearly there was in her mind. She had an electrician install a floodlight over the back deck, and before bed she would sit at the window in their room and stare down attentively, hand at her chin, as if the backyard were a giant chessboard. Sometimes she seemed pleased, but more often it made her despondent. “No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No!” she’d cry, punching herself just above the knee. Davis would ask her what was wrong and she’d be unable to say. He’d suggest, gently, that she should see a therapist if the garden was causing her so much stress. Then she’d seem all right for a couple of days, hardly mentioning the garden. Then she’d be back in the mud, in her black, knee-high pullover boots and her thick, striped gloves and her sunglasses and baseball cap.

In May, she dug it all up and started over, transferring the plants she could save and basically creating a mirror image of the original, flipping the entire thing on the axis of grass in the middle. Ultimately, she found this configuration even more offensive, and she dug it up again in July and again in September, and on the morning of the first, unexpected frost in early November, Davis found her on the kitchen floor, arms around her knees, sobbing.

The psychiatrist (too late for a psychologist, Davis said) prescribed antidepressants and they seemed to help through the winter. She still seemed cold to Davis, but of course she could have been exacting retribution for the weeks and months he had ignored her when she was calling out to him in the semaphore of odd behavior.

Just before Christmas, almost a year after Anna Kat had been taken from them, Davis asked the detective if the police would return their daughter’s things when they no longer needed them for evidence. Later, wondering why he asked, he supposed he felt helpless, maddened by the investigative inertia. For God’s sake, somebody, do something! Pull Anna Kat’s clothes from the evidence room! Examine the bloodstains. Maybe for ten minutes, you’ll be thinking about her.

Jackie’s therapist suggested she return to the garden in the spring. Her attitude toward it would be some measure of her improvement, a yardstick by which the doctor could adjust the dose as well as the combinations of medicine, psychiatric pharmacology being an inexact science, she told them (Davis managed to hold back a sarcastic reply). Jackie still spent most of her days there, but she seemed to enjoy it. June came and went and she hadn’t replanted even a single bulb.

In his basement office, Davis kept binders and files with notes about his family history. At the Kane County flea market he bought an old library card catalog for $325 (haggled down from $380), and he flipped over the yellowed bibliographic three-by-fives, filling the blank backs of the cards with information about twenty-seven hundred close and distant relatives. Davis had ancestors fighting in every war back to the Revolution, and long-ago uncles who farmed six of the thirteen colonies. He had a grandfather’s grandparents who traveled the world by chartered sail, and great-great-great-greats who never dared a day’s walk from the pile of dirty blankets in which they’d been born. He had relations in silent movies, aunts who’d written children’s books, and in this room he made connections between them – lines drawn from every twice-removed to every in-law to every stepdaughter and illegitimate son. Six different branches of his family tree grew like ivy across the blue walls, and in their comforting shade he trapped himself for hours and hours and hours. More than that since AK’s murder.