Timothy Johnston - The Current

Grounded? she says, and laughs. You can’t ground me, I’m nineteen .

Hell I can’t. My house, my rules .

Oh, really? Whatever happened to our house? Our home?

If you spent more time here. If this wasn’t just a place for you to sleep it off .

You want me to find somewhere else to do that? Is that it?

You know I don’t. I want you safe .

You want to control me. You’re ashamed of me, just like you were of Mom .

Don’t say that. I’m not ashamed of you .

Yes you are! And you— jabbing her finger at him— you think I don’t know about that grocery store woman, that Irene or whatever her name is? The whole town knows, Dad. The whole freaking town. So who’s ashamed of who, here—huh?

By the time she comes downstairs in the morning, stretching and stumbling half-asleep, wild-haired and smelling of bed, all the anger will be gone from you like a bad night’s dreaming, forgotten in the light of day—home again—forgotten in the smell of her as she passes by—safe again—and you will get up, however sick you are, and make her those thick, half-burnt pancakes she loves.

But then again, on such a morning, with the new sun spilling into the living room, with the flames rising and dropping in the woodburner, a man might hear, instead of his daughter’s footsteps overhead, instead of the clap of the bathroom door and the moments of silence and then the toilet flushing… he might hear instead the sound of car tires in the drive—at this hour?—and setting aside his breakfast he might get up from his chair and go to the window in time to see a man stepping out of a white sedan in the dawn and putting a hat to his head—stiff, wide-brimmed hat such as a sheriff or state trooper would wear, and then he’d recognize that the car is in fact a sheriff’s cruiser, and that the man putting the hat on his head is in fact the sheriff.

The heart spins, the mind falls backwards as you understand that she is not upstairs in her bedroom at all—has not been there all night—and you look again at the cruiser, waiting for her to emerge: blond head of hair followed by a small frame followed by a too-short skirt and bare legs and shoes that say to you nothing but trouble, her head hung low in shame, you’d like to think, although more likely it’s the heaviness of whatever kind of high got her a ride home in the sheriff’s cruiser, in bad trouble maybe but safe, thank God, with the sheriff…

And then, when no second figure appears, when you understand that the girl in the passenger seat is far too young, far too dark-haired—that the sheriff’s cruiser has brought only the sheriff and this little girl who is not yours—that is the moment your heart truly falls and somehow you are already on the porch when the sheriff, coming up the walking path, sees you, and does not pause but in some way flinches, as if you’ve drawn down on him with a weapon, and on he comes, and reaching the bottom step raises one of his hands to his sheriff’s hat and actually, what in the hell, takes the hat off — Don’t take your hat off, Sheriff, you son of a bitch, what is wrong with you?

Gordon , says the sheriff.

And some time after that, unremembered time, the sheriff’s cruiser is on the 52 South and the bright world is sweeping by and yet there is the sense of not moving at all, of the cruiser standing still while it’s the land, the trees, the wire fences that rush by. Like a fish holding its place in a stream.

Just the two of them now, the sheriff having stopped at the station to drop off the little girl, and the sheriff driving ten miles over the posted limit not out of official urgency but out of decency maybe, or maybe the sooner to get his errand over with, and only when he comes up on drivers who slow him down on the rural two-laner does he throw his lights and give a short whoop of siren. Passing these drivers without a glance while his passenger looks hard at every face, every car, each one of them worth pulling over, questioning, searching. She’d been struck by a vehicle, the sheriff believed, her body pushed afterward into the river. A drunk in a panic. A kid or kids high and believing, in that moment, that the river would carry the evidence away like a bad dream and their lives could go on—college, marriage, kids of their own.

Do you want a smoke, Gordon?

The sheriff, Sutter, pushing his pack at him. Gordon can smell it, taste the smoke in his lungs, feel the nicotine speeding to his brain. He hasn’t smoked in years, not since Roger Young’s cancer. The cigarette would be good but who wants good. Who wants relief of any kind if it isn’t the relief that will last forever. He raises his hand no thanks and Sutter withdraws the pack, and it’s a long while before Gordon thinks to say, You go ahead, and Sutter goes ahead—lights up and draws the smoke deep and cracks the window and exhales into the rush of wind.

Next he’s moving slow and heavy down a hospital corridor, the air reeking of sickness and ammonia and old burned coffee, Gordon a step behind Sutter, who pushes through a gray metal door saying authorized personnel only, and on the other side of the door the linoleum turns to concrete and the walls are cinderblock and the air is almost too cold for smell but not quite, smell of chemical fumes and the faint putrid stink of meat. A third man emerging now from somewhere, thin man dressed like a surgeon down to his surgical gloves, and this man leading them to the large stainless-steel what, refrigerator? A bank of three square doors side by side at waist level and each with a large latch handle. Rubber-gloved hand on latch, the unlatching echoing on concrete and cinderblock, the suck and gasp of rubber seal pulled from metal, the greased clicking of the large industrial glides as the bed—what else do you call it? slab? gurney?—floats from the dark square like a magician’s trick all the way into the room, into the light.

Morgue man standing on one side of the floating bed, Gordon and the sheriff on the other. A body in the white bag, under the zipper. Shape of a female chest. Shape of a face. A nose. Sheriff standing back and Gordon stepping forward for the unzipping, the most terrible sound, and the breath of the river it releases.

And there she is. Her hair tangled and damp. Her face blue. Lips a darker blue and slightly open, the white of her front teeth bright in the blue. Eyelids down over the curve of her eyeballs, tender thin lashes on her cheeks, washed of all makeup. Over these blue, unmoving features play living expressions, like projections, faces of her youth surfacing, rippling, sinking away again into the blue mask. Wake up, daughter. Wake up. Breathe . Placing his large hand over her forehead as if to take her temperature. So cold. Smooth, cold skin over a hard curve of bone, nothing more. Her bare blue neck, enough of her blue chest to see that she is naked in the bag—yes, Gordon nodding yes, it’s her, and the zipper makes its sound again.

The morgue man wants a moment alone with Sutter but Gordon isn’t going anywhere. Hears his own voice in that place: Whatever you’re gonna say to him you can say to me. And the morgue man fusses with the fit of his gloves, pinching latex over his knuckles and letting go with sharp little snaps until Gordon wants to slap him, until Sutter says, Go ahead, Doug, and the morgue man, Doug, looks up and says, Well, Tom, there was water in the lungs. A good deal of water.

Sutter standing there taking this in. Nodding. Gordon looking from one man to the other, his sight crossing over the body and back. Neither man speaks. Neither man will look at him—and then he understands.

He stands staring dumbly at the white bag. The white shape of her. This body once tiny enough to hold in one hand. To lift over your head two-handed, a squirming, soft giggling little girl. To hold by her hands and spin her around until her skinny legs lifted from the earth and flew.