Paula DeBoard - The Mourning Hours

The next time we would see each other, Stacy wouldn’t be there. The next time we would see each other, the Lemkes and the Hammarstroms wouldn’t even pretend to be friendly. But that afternoon, we all smiled and said polite goodbyes, and Johnny announced, “Think I’ll stick around and give Stacy a driving lesson.”

“Don’t be too late,” Mom said automatically, which was funny, because Johnny had been coming home later and later, and no one seemed to know what too late was anymore.

When we were at the end of the driveway, Emilie and I craned our necks to look back at them. “Look at them—they’re like a magazine advertisement,” Emilie marveled.

Even from that distance, we could see Mrs. Lemke standing on a folding chair, unpinning a row of streamers. Mr. Lemke was scraping down the grill with a long-handled brush. As we straightened out of the turn heading onto Passaqua Road, we got a clear view of the Camaro behind the shed. Stacy was sitting on the hood, her arms wrapped around Johnny’s neck, her legs hooked around his thighs. He was standing, his body pressed tightly against her in a way that was—well—

Mom cleared her throat suddenly, and all four of our heads swiveled on our necks, facing the road in front of us once again.

“I’ll bet he teaches her how to drive,” Emilie whispered, but I knew better than to laugh.

eight

Fourth grade wasn’t much different from third grade, with its spelling tests and vocabulary words and the maps of Wisconsin we traced diligently from our social studies textbook. In gym class, my teacher seemed to plan our activities around things a small person simply could not do—shoot baskets, break through the chain in Red Rover. It was shocking how tall my classmates had grown over the summer. Mom resisted my constant pleas to write a note that would excuse me, permanently, from gym. In retaliation I lugged several of her old medical books to the hayloft and spent my afternoons trying to pull off a case of rheumatoid arthritis or intestinal polyps.

Emilie, with her hordes of friends, fit in perfectly at the high school. She was one of only two freshmen chosen to play clarinet in pep band, and she already knew that she wanted the lead in the spring musical, Annie Get Your Gun.

And Johnny—well, Johnny had wrestling and Johnny had Stacy. “You should see them at school,” Emilie told me one afternoon, pointing a finger down her throat in a fake gag. “It’s disgusting. I’m so embarrassed to know them.”

After only a month of school, Johnny’s English teacher called to report that Johnny hadn’t yet turned in his Macbeth essay—hadn’t, for that matter, seemed to have read a word of Macbeth. Mom repeated the conversation to Dad in the kitchen while I eavesdropped from outside the kitchen window, where I was brushing some burrs out of Kennel’s coat.

“This is his senior year,” Mom said to Dad. “He only has a few classes left, and all he has to do is pass them. Instead he’s spending all his time with that girl—”

I paused, midstroke. That girl.

“I’ll talk to him about the essay,” Dad offered. “He’s going to have to keep his grades up if he’s going to be eligible.”

They lowered their voices, but I could tell they were arguing. Then the door slammed, and Dad came down the porch steps. “Hey, kiddo,” he said, spotting me. Kennel jumped up, abandoning his brushing to follow Dad, whose long legs seemed to cover the distance between our house and the barn in only a few steps.

Whatever talk Dad had with Johnny did prompt a slight change in Johnny’s behavior. He spent more weeknights in his room, presumably catching up on homework—although in reality he seemed to be doing nothing more challenging than throwing a bouncy ball against his bedroom wall and catching it with a loud clap. Throw, clap, throw, clap, until I thought I’d go insane.

One night after dinner, Emilie ran into our bedroom and thrust her hand over my mouth. “Ssshh!” she hissed.

“I wasn’t saying anything,” I protested into her hand. At the moment I was nose-deep in The True Story of Bonnie and Clyde. I’d skipped ahead to the pictures, fascinated by Bonnie’s tiny, gun-toting, cigar-smoking figure. When they were ambushed and killed in Louisiana, Bonnie had been twenty-three years old. She was four feet, eleven inches tall and officially my hero. I wondered if she had been routinely chosen last for P.E., and if her classmates regretted that later.

“Listen,” Emilie said, still holding me around the neck.

“You’re hurting me,” I seethed back.

And then from downstairs, I heard raised voices—Mom’s and Johnny’s.

Emilie loosened her grip on me long enough for me to whisper, “What’s going on? Where’s Dad?”

She whispered back, “He went over to Jerry’s for something. I guess Mom found a note from Stacy.”

Uh-oh. I knew this could be bad. Stacy was the queen of writing long notes—it was what she did instead of homework on the nights she came over, a math book open on her lap, bent over pages of dense writing in purple ink, with tiny hearts to dot her i’s. Plenty of times, at the end of the night, she’d fold the note into an ingenious little package and pass it over to Johnny.

“We could hear better from the stairs,” I suggested. For once, Emilie paid attention to me. She released my neck, which had started to cramp at that point, and we crept halfway down the stairs, stepping carefully to avoid creaks, and wedged ourselves onto the same step.

Johnny’s voice was raised, easily traveling across the kitchen, through the closed door and up the stairs. “I don’t understand. You were going through my stuff?”

“I was not going through your stuff,” Mom clarified, her tone deadly. “I was simply doing the laundry like I always do, and part of doing the laundry is to empty all the pockets.”

“Okay,” Johnny huffed. “But you didn’t have to read it. That’s an invasion of privacy!”

Emilie let out a small wheeze, a stifled laugh.

Mom laughed, too, a hard laugh, the kind I knew better than to cross. “Invasion of privacy! Do I have to remind you that I’m the parent and you’re the child?”

“I’m seventeen! I’m an adult.”

“Not yet. Not an adult—yet.”

“I’m old enough to get a letter from my girlfriend without you—”

“This isn’t just any ordinary letter, Johnny!”

I heard a rustling of paper.

“You’re going to read it?” Johnny’s voice was incredulous.

“First it starts with how much she loves you. She probably says that a dozen times. Then, ‘The whole school could have caught on fire and I wouldn’t have noticed, because I was just looking at you. I would have kept staring at you until my hair was singed and the skin started to drip from my bones...’”

“Whoa!” Emilie breathed into my ear.

Ick, I thought.

“Give it back to me!”

“And here she says that she might as well be dead if she can’t be with you....”

Johnny bellowed, “You have no right!”

“I have every right! Later on, and I quote, ‘It’s like you’re the best drug in the world and I need you in me all the time, pulsing through my veins.’”

I didn’t realize how clenched my body was until I bit my tongue sharply and tasted warm blood in my mouth.

“All right! You’ve made your point!”

“No, Johnny. I haven’t. The point is, this isn’t just puppy love. It’s getting way out of hand. Stacy is just getting way too obsessed—”

“She’s not obsessed! What are you saying?”

“She says in this letter that she can’t live without you. She says if she can’t see you every day, she’ll kill herself. It’s not normal, Johnny!”

I shivered, remembering the picture in Stacy’s nightstand again, with the boy’s face obliterated, the pen almost wearing through the paper. Had she felt like that with him, too, that she would kill herself if she couldn’t see him?