Jodi Compton - The 37th Hour

“No,” he said.

“When was the last time you did?”

Like his sister, Bill was taken aback by my question. “I haven’t spoken to him since he left home.”

I nodded. Now seemed as good a time as any to get into that. “Naomi told me that you were a witness to some sort of scene that resulted in his leaving home shortly thereafter. Is that true?”

“Yeah. Does this have anything to do with him being missing now?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s the only part of his life that I don’t know much about. He told me he left home because he was growing away from the religion you all had been raised in.”

Bill raised his eyebrows. “He said that?” He shook his head, emphatically. “No. That’s not what I remember.”

“What was it, then?”

“Drugs,” he said.

“Are you serious?” I saw that he was. “He was using habitually?”

“Habitually? I don’t know,” he said. “My father caught him, though. In our home.”

“Naomi didn’t mention that,” I said.

“Naomi probably doesn’t know,” Bill said. “She and Bethany were really young, and our parents shielded them from a lot of what was going on. But I was right in the middle of it. Do you want to hear the whole story?”

I nodded assent.

“It happened on Christmas Eve.”

Not fireflies in that photo, but Christmas lights.

“We were going to have a full house the next day. I was home from school, and Adam was coming the next afternoon, after he and Pam, that’s his wife, and the baby spent Christmas morning with her folks in Provo. So for one night I had a room to myself, Mike had Sara’s old room, and the girls were where they always slept. The next night I was going to room with Mike, while Adam and his wife were going to take the other bedroom.

“Anyway, back then I was going steady with this girl, Christy. I promised her I would call her at midnight her time, because it was Christmas Eve. Christy had gone home to her folks’ in Sacramento, so I had to call at one in the morning. I got up to do it, really quietly, because everyone else had gone to bed. I called her and I was going back upstairs on tiptoe when I saw the bathroom door open and this girl walks across the hall and goes into the room where Mike is and closes the door. Just like that.”

“You didn’t recognize her as your sister?”

“No. It was sort of dark and she’d cut her hair so that she had a short, stubby ponytail instead of long hair. I could see that she was wearing one of Mike’s T-shirts. I stood there thinking, I can’t believe it. I always knew Mike had a lot of… I guess you’d say sangfroid, but bringing a girl over on Christmas Eve, that was really something.

“At this point, my father’s heard people moving around and gotten up. He opens the door and asks me what’s going on.” Bill stopped at this point, fell silent for just a beat. Then he said, “I’ve thought about that night a lot since then. If I’d known then what I know now, I think I would have said, ‘Nothing’s going on. Go back to bed.’

“But I thought Mike had brought a girlfriend into the house. I mean, a girl in his room, and on Christmas Eve, with all of us there. And all I could do was call my girl on the phone: ‘I miss you, honey, see you soon.’ I was sort of annoyed about it. So instead I say, ‘Mike’s got a girl in his room.’ ” Bill lowered his voice, imitatively, on the last part. “My dad looks at me like he doesn’t believe me but puts on his robe and comes out. He goes to the door and looks back at me like I’m going to be in trouble if there’s no one in there, and then he knocks, opens the door, and flips on the light.

“That was it for being quiet. He yelled, ‘What the hell is this?’ It was the only time I’d heard him use that kind of language. I tried to get a look at what was going on, but he went in and slammed the door.

“I could still hear him yelling inside. My mom came out and so did Bethany from her room. I don’t know how Naomi slept through it. But in a minute or two, the girl came out of Mike’s room and in the light I saw that she was Sara.

“She had on Mike’s shirt still and a pair of sweatpants, and her shoes in her hand and a bag over one shoulder. She ran down the stairs and out without even putting on her shoes. I looked into the room and saw Mike sitting on the edge of the bed with his head in his hands, and then my dad told Bethany and me to go to bed, and I could see he meant business.

“I couldn’t believe he was so mad at Mike just for giving Sara a place to stay. But obviously something was really wrong. Mike left in the middle of the night Christmas night. The next day my dad got us all together and told us that he’d caught Sara and Michael doing drugs together.”

“What kind of drugs?”

“Dad didn’t say. It must’ve been something worse than a little marijuana, not to say that marijuana wouldn’t have been bad enough.” He straightened. “I’m going to have a cup of coffee. You want one?”

“Yeah, that’d be nice,” I said.

When Bill returned with two cups of coffee, I said, “Naomi said Sara left on her own, but you make it sound like she was banned from the house.”

Bill considered. “She did leave on her own. But I guess that our parents told her, ‘If you go, don’t come back until you’re ready to live under our rules. Don’t come around for a cash handout or a hot meal or to do laundry.’ ” He surveyed me, to see how I was taking it. “Tough love, you know?”

“Mmm,” I said noncommittally. I wasn’t here to editorialize about parenting methods. “Before that Christmas, did you know that your sister used drugs?”

“I didn’t. My parents might have,” Bill said, stirring his creamer in.

“Have you heard from her since she left?”

“No, none of us have. I know she’s a published poet, but she uses a totally different name. Her first name, Sinclair, was our grandmother’s maiden name, and then her husband’s last name is… it escapes me right now.”

“Goldman,” I said. A mind’s-eye view of our living-room shelves in Minneapolis had supplied the name, Sinclair Goldman, to me. It was the name on one of the slender books of poetry that Shiloh owned.

“Yeah,” he said. “Goldman. I used to know her husband’s first name, too. Something with a D. He was a Jewish guy.” He paused, then let go of that train of thought. “It’s funny, if a friend of a friend hadn’t told me about her poetry, I could’ve walked past her book in a store and never guessed it was my sister who wrote it.”

“Other than the drug issue, do you remember your sister as being wild?” I asked.

“Wild?” Bill repeated. “Not really. But she was… immovable. If she wanted to see friends, she’d do it, even if it meant sneaking out of the house. I think it scared my folks as much as it made them angry. She was deaf. That made her vulnerable, even though she didn’t want to acknowledge it. And then there was the signing-or-speaking thing.”

“Meaning what?”

“Sara was working on her vocal skills at school, and then she just stopped. It frustrated my folks, because it would have made things much easier if she could speak. But she decided she didn’t want to speak, so she didn’t. That was just the way she was. It was nothing personal, but she’d made up her mind and that was it.”

I nodded. “Was your father a strict disciplinarian?” The coffee was watery and joyless, worse than any I’d had at any rural sheriff’s substation. I set it aside.

Bill shook his head. “No,” he said. “When we’d done something wrong, we got talks. Very long talks, about God’s will for our lives. With plenty of quotation from the Bible.” He smiled, fondly. “If there were actual punishments to be handed out, particularly when we were younger, my mother had to do that part. Why?”