Timothy Johnston - The Current

“My son…?”

“Danny,” the girl said. “I couldn’t find his number anywhere, so finally I just—”

“I’m sorry,” Rachel said, “but what is this about?” and the girl was silent. Unprepared for the question. Did she even know what her father had done to Danny? To Rachel herself, to her family? The girl would’ve been what—nine, ten years old. But you could not grow up in this town and not know. Especially if you were the sheriff’s daughter.

“If I—” the girl began. “I mean if I could talk to him for just a minute, Mrs. Young, then I think he could explain it better.” And Rachel, her heart beating, said, “You can’t speak to him. He’s gone.”

“Gone, as in left town?” said the girl, and she looked down the road, as if she might catch sight of his departing truck. In the driveway, behind Rachel’s car, was the white sedan she’d seen Tom Sutter driving after he retired as sheriff. After the cancer had gotten too far along.

The girl stood there, in that big canvas jacket that must have been her father’s, having no idea what to do next. What to say.

When she turned back to Rachel, looking at her again with those eyes, Rachel held the stormdoor wider, and the girl stepped into the house.

IT TOOK TEN minutes, or maybe thirty, for the girl to tell her everything: what she’d heard Danny tell Gordon Burke about that night ten years ago—what she was even doing at Gordon Burke’s in the first place! What Danny said about the deputy pulling him over, that piece of cloth… Gordon talking to the deputy, or sheriff now, down in Iowa; what Sheriff Halsey up here had not told the girl and what his secretary had; and finally what Katie Goss had told her three nights ago, Friday night, the girl not saying this last outright, careful not to betray a confidence, but her body and her hands and her eyes saying it anyway—sweet, pretty Katie Goss who smelled like strawberries and was her son’s first love, and maybe his only love… and Rachel all the while holding the mug like it was her own heart, hot and pounding in her hands.

She knew the girl was finished when she picked up her own mug and sipped from it and set it down again quietly on the tabletop. Then the girl began turning a large metal bracelet on her other wrist, her good wrist—or not a bracelet but a man’s wristwatch, and that soft clicking was the only sound. Rachel’s own hands, clutching the china mug, looked sinister. Like hands wrapped around a white little neck. If the girl had come Saturday, or Sunday—or had called—Danny might still be here.

“I’m sorry,” said the girl. “I shouldn’t be the one telling you all this. You don’t even know me.”

Finally Rachel let go the mug, and her breath came back to her, and after a moment her voice did too—or something like it.

“And where is this cloth now—this pocket?”

“I think Danny must have it with him,” the girl said. “Or else he left it here.”

Here, in this house, all this time. And the old house before that. Ten years!

Or did he keep it with him, wherever he went, so she would never find it?

She looked at the phone then and saw the blinking red light on the machine, and she got to her feet and crossed to it and played the message, but it was the girl herself, asking if she might speak to Danny, leaving her number. So she did call—but not until this morning.

“…really so sorry,” this same voice was saying, behind her. “I shouldn’t be the one telling you any of this, like this—except that I think I can help him. If I could talk to him, I think I could help him.”

“Why did you wait?” Rachel said, as if to herself.

“I’m sorry?”

“All weekend…” She pushed two buttons on the phone and raised it to her ear again. After four rings she knew it would be his voicemail but her heart kicked anyway at the sound of his voice, as it always did. This is Danny…

“I’m sorry,” said the girl. “I guess I was trying to figure out what to do. If it was even any of my business.”

“He’s not picking up,” Rachel said, and the girl said, “He’s driving. He might not even have his phone on.”

“Yes,” said Rachel. Holding the phone in her hands, holding it to her chest. She’d been here before, in this moment. It was too familiar.

Then she remembered: the night she’d heard the water running, and Danny had been washing the dog, and he’d driven up to the cabin, and she’d called and called but he hadn’t answered.

In custody .

The girl said, “He didn’t say anything before he left, about where he was going?”

“No,” Rachel said, “not to me.”

And some few minutes after that she was alone again—the girl having made her good-byes, her apologies once more, and driving off again in the white sedan, and Rachel going immediately upstairs to his room, to stand in the doorway looking in. As she’d stood that night ten years ago, watching him stuff clothes into his duffel. How frightened he looked, in her memory, how terrified. Why hadn’t he talked to her? Why hadn’t he told her? She could have helped him!

Everything in the room was in order: the sheets and pillowcases pulled off and placed in a neat pile on the mattress for her to wash and no other sign in the room that anyone had been there. The sheriff and his deputies had gone through his room once before, at the old house, and she didn’t think he would leave it here, not in this room, and after a moment she stepped across the hall and went into Marky’s room, and five minutes after that she was downstairs again, at the stove again, watching as the kettle came slowly, so slowly, to boil. He’d done his best to hide it but her eye had gone directly to the light-blue envelope, one of hers, among the other letters and valentines in the shoebox in his closet. This envelope never opened. This envelope addressed to Sheriff Wayne Halsey.

The kettle began to whistle and she played the seal of the envelope over the steam, helping it along with a butter knife until the flap popped free, then she took the envelope to the table and sat down with it before her.

Inside were several sheets of her stationery, and when she opened these up the square of cloth slipped out and fell without a sound to the table and her heart stopped beating. Just stopped. A square of white silk so sheer she could see the grain of the tabletop beneath it. Her fingertips trembled on her lips and she didn’t have to touch the cloth to know; she’d touched it before, in the store, when the blouse lay draped over her arm, and again when she’d folded it into its box… you’d have to wear something under it, a camisole, and did the girl have anything like that?—you couldn’t ask her father and you couldn’t ask the girl herself… Well, let her figure that part out for herself, the blouse was not cheap even with her store discount, and she might not even like it, or she might not like it out of spite, but a birthday was a birthday and the girl could always take it back for something she wanted and you just couldn’t worry about that, but wasn’t it lovely, wasn’t it nice to buy something fine for a young woman when all your life you’d bought clothes for boys…

And Holly had worn the blouse that night, the night of the river, and one way or another, by accident or by some other encounter gone wrong—by some kind of violence—the pocket had been torn from the blouse and had not gone into the river with her but had been kept, had been hidden, and had been brought out of hiding all these years later to fall without a sound to her kitchen table.

She wiped her eyes, then wiped her hands on her lap and when her fingertips were dry she picked up the three pages of stationery and read the letter her son had written to the sheriff.