Timothy Johnston - The Current

Rachel—?

A man had come into the house, downstairs. There was the sound of his footfall across the living room, and then her name again, lobbed up the stairs. A stair tread creaked and she reached for her robe but stopped.

Two days ago they’d buried Roger. This afternoon, Gordon had picked up the boys and taken them to a movie so Rachel could sleep. Now they were back.

Rachel—? he said from around the corner.

Yes, she answered. That was all. He came anyway, into the frame of the door.

Oh—he said. His big face filling with the sight of her there, on the bed. I’m sorry, he said.

She heard the kids in the yard, already into some kind of contest. Holly could be mean but Danny would keep things fair and good for Marky.

Brought the boys back, Gordon said, not looking away, looking her in the eye. He reached up and worked the flesh under his jaw with a coarse, sandpaper sound. He was a man who was sure before he acted, who didn’t operate by guesswork or even intuition, but who held in his head all the hard facts of mechanical things. Over the years there had been moments, yes, when she’d wondered what it would be like to be with him instead of Roger, to simply switch. Innocent, helpless thoughts such as every wife must have.

He took a step, then came certainly toward her. In the wash of movement she smelled the outdoors, the steely clouds and the wet, moldering leaves. Her heart was beating in her breast. She turned to the mirror and the picture there was incredible: this naked, wet-haired woman, this man beside her dressed for cold.

Rachel…, he began, and in the next instant Holly’s voice, cold as a queen’s, penetrated the room.

Hands off, retard .

Out there in the cold, Danny said something low, and there was silence.

Gordon’s face had gone red. His jaw muscle jumped.

She knows better, by God, he said.

It’s all right, Rachel said.

The day was going dark. In the mirror she saw Gordon’s arm drift toward her shoulder, then beyond it. She saw the robe rise up like a phantom, felt it brush her skin. In the mirror, as in the flesh, he got the robe over her shoulders and over her breasts without quite touching her.

THERE WAS GLASS in her hand, Rachel had noticed standing at the sink. Slender fragments pressed into her palm, and after a moment she remembered the broken window, the strange little stone. She dumped the glass in the trash and rinsed her hand under the faucet. She had wanted to tell him something, that day—something true and unafraid, such as how she’d often felt, her secret thoughts. Holly’s voice had stopped her.

And if it hadn’t? If everything had gone just a little bit differently? Meteors, they said, were on their way, right now, crossing billions of years of chance. The smallest bump changed everything. If Holly had not spoken and Rachel had—would things be different? Would Holly be alive?

It was late, almost midnight. Wind was moaning in a gap somewhere. She began locking doors, switching off lights. She was halfway up the stairs before she remembered that Danny was still out, but she didn’t go back down to turn on the light. In a few weeks, he’d be gone. Taking off one day while she was at work, leaving just a note saying he’d gone down to Saint Louis, to work construction with a friend of his. Leaving the dog behind. His classes. His girlfriend. When Rachel would try to call, a message would tell her the number was no longer in service. There’d be a postcard, the Gateway Arch—they’d gone once when Roger was alive, Marky terrified to go up until Danny explained the mechanics of the thing, the strength of arches!—and a few sentences on the back saying he was fine, he was working, he’d be back in a month…

But he wasn’t. Two months and he wasn’t back. Six months. One day she’d see that Gordon Burke had finally changed the sign on the side of the Plumbing & Supply building, whitewashing out the hyphen and everything after—and that’s when she’d decide to go too. Her father still had the farm and there was room for her and Marky and the dog. It was a place, a life, she’d left behind. But you never do, and the first time she cooked for him, at the old stove, her father wept. Two months later he too was gone, laid to rest next to her mother and her father’s parents, Grammy and Granddad Olsen, those dusty souls, those ghosts.

TOM SUTTER STOOD just outside the shelter, alone and listening to the sounds of his own smoking, the faint cracklings of tobacco and paper when he inhaled, the sighs of his breath when he exhaled. He smoked the cigarette down and dropped it to the concrete and crushed it under his boot toe before he remembered the receptacle with its long plastic neck. He thought of Gordon Burke—the pain, the anger in those eyes all these years later. Of course still there, of course—where would it go? And he thought of Danny Young, nineteen back then, Gordon’s daughter’s age. Audrey’s age now. What had become of him? Would you even recognize him if you passed him on the street?

Of course you would.

Sutter looked up at stars, the billion stars—far more than that, sending light from distances you could never imagine. Coldness and silence and total indifference as to himself or anyone else alive now or ever alive. He looked into these so-called heavens and said: “Well, what have you got to say about it?” And stood listening.

“That’s about what I thought,” he said. Then he walked to the parking lot and got into his car and began the long drive home. He’d not slept in his own bed for two nights and they wanted to keep her for one more night at least; she was out of danger but they didn’t like her temperature, and they would know more tomorrow.

On the highway, the sedan up to speed, he lit another cigarette and left it to burn between his knuckles. After a while he said, “Why don’t you just say it?” But she stayed quiet. Sometimes he would smell her lipstick. Her skin. The whole complex scent of her. Would see her hands in the corner of his eye. The flash of the diamond he’d put on her finger, years ago.

You don’t need to hear it from me , she said finally. You already know it .

He drove. The cigarette burning down.

“Shoot,” he said. “That never kept you from saying it before.”

TWO HOURS LATER he stood near the trestle bridge, in the rutted and trampled snow there, looking down the beam of his MagLite at the river. The rupture had frozen over but was still visible by its outline of jagged ice. From where he stood it had the mouthy look of a great fish, a prehistoric monster, frozen at the moment of striking. He saw the iced-over hole and he saw the story it told but he could not see his daughter there, struggling to get out, pawing at the busted ice, pulled under into that coldness, that darkness, by the car as it rolled. Could not see that.

Of the car’s tiretracks going down there was nothing left; they’d been plowed under by the car’s body coming up. Nothing left of the tiretracks up top either, where the car had first come to rest; too many vehicles had come and gone and you couldn’t expect first responders to concern themselves overly about evidence—and he wouldn’t have it any other way in this case—but God damn.

He doused his light and stood at the top of the bank with his arms at his sides. The breath smoking from his nostrils. Winter smell of woodfire in the air. Listening, but not a sound. Then, from downriver, traveling some distance along the ice, the baying of a hound dog. Baying. Pausing. Baying again, but answered by nothing Sutter himself could hear in all that hushed valley. He crossed the road and got back in his sedan and shut the door and sat in a darker, closer silence.