And as for any anger he might have felt toward his sons that was that.
I asked, “Did you talk to Karl?”
“I couldn’t get past the front gate, Frank.”
“Do you think they know?”
“I’m sure someone has told them. I just wish I could talk to that boy.”
“Maybe when things quiet down?”
“Maybe, Frank,” he said but didn’t sound hopeful at all.
At home we finished getting ready for the visitation while my father called my grandfather’s house to tell him we’d been found. Then we piled back into the Packard and headed to van der Waal’s.
• • •
We arrived at four o’clock and Mother was already there with my grandfather and Liz. She was different from when she’d stormed from the house because my father had once too often said the name of God in her presence. The hardness was gone and maybe, I hoped, the anger. She looked frailer, fragile somehow, and it made me think of those hollowed eggs that sometimes people elaborately painted. She’d always been a powerful force in our family, a kind of empowering fury, and it was hard seeing her this way.
She smiled gently and straightened my tie. “You look very nice, Frank.”
“Thanks.”
“You guys doing okay?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Sure.”
“I’ll be back,” she said. “I just need . . . oh time, I guess.” She looked away, across the room where the closed coffin sat flanked by two great displays of flowers. “Well, here we go.”
She took my hand unexpectedly as she walked toward the casket and so I walked with her thinking that it should have been my father’s hand she was holding. And I understood that something had been lost between them, something that had kept my mother anchored to us and now she was slipping away and I understood too that we hadn’t just lost Ariel, we were losing each other. We were losing everything.
I had been to visitations before and have been to many since and I’ve come to understand that there’s a good deal of value in the ritual accompanying death. It’s hard to say good-bye and almost impossible to accomplish this alone and ritual is the railing we hold to, all of us together, that keeps us upright and connected until the worst is past.
They came in great numbers, the people of Sioux County, to pay their respects. They came because they knew Ariel or they knew my father and mother or they knew us as a family. Jake and I stood mostly in a corner and watched as our parents received the public condolences person after person and were offered only the best of words about their daughter. My father as always was a pillar of respectfulness. My mother continued to be a hollow egg and it was painful to watch her and feel as if I was waiting for her to break. Liz stood with Jake and me and I appreciated her presence. After we’d been there for what seemed a very long time and yet there was still a very long time to go I said to Liz, “I need some fresh air.”
And Jake said quickly, “Me, too.”
“I think it would be all right,” Liz said.
“Would you tell Mom and Dad?”
“Of course. Don’t go far.”
We slipped from the room and out the front door and into the peach-colored evening sunlight that bathed New Bremen. The funeral home was a beautiful old structure that had once belonged to a man named Farrigut who’d very early on built a big cannery in the Minnesota River valley and had got rich. We drifted far away from the porch where those who came and went might notice us and feel obliged to say something. I didn’t feel like talking to anyone.
Jake reached down into the thick grass at the edge of van der Waal’s property and pulled up a four-leaf clover. He had an uncanny knack for spotting them. He idly plucked the leaves and said, “Think Mom’ll come home tonight?”
I was watching a couple of older people totter up the walk and slowly mount the funeral home steps and I was thinking it probably wouldn’t be long before one or the other or both would be lying in coffins inside and I said, “Who knows?”
Jake threw the denuded clover stem back into the grass. “Everything’s different.”
“I know.”
“I’m afraid sometimes.”
“Of what?”
“That Mom won’t come back. I mean she might come home but she won’t come back.”
I knew exactly what he meant.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s take a walk.”
We left van der Waal’s and drifted down the street and took a left at the next corner and after another block came to Gleason Park where a dozen kids were playing baseball. Jake and I stood at the edge of left field and watched the game for a while. I knew a few of the players, kids younger than me, Jake’s age mostly. He probably knew them too and maybe they were kids who gave him a hard time for stuttering because he wasn’t paying much attention to the game. One of the kids, Marty Schoenfeldt, hit a double and slid into second and kicked up dust and Jake said, “I saw Mr. Redstone.”
“Redstone? Jesus! Where?”
The summer had done much to change us and Jake didn’t even flinch at the name I’d taken in vain.
“I dreamed him,” he said.
“Like a nightmare, you mean?”
“It wasn’t really a nightmare. Ariel was in it, too.”
I never dreamed about Ariel but she haunted my waking hours. Although we kept the door to her bedroom closed I sneaked in sometimes and just stood there. The smell that lingered most powerfully was the scent of Chanel No. 5, a perfume which she could never have afforded herself but was one of the gifts my grandfather and Liz gave her on her sixteenth birthday and which she dabbed on for special occasions. She’d worn it the night she disappeared. When I closed my eyes in her room and drew in the scent of her it was as if she’d never left us. Usually I ended up crying.
Warren Redstone was another matter. I often chased him in my nightmares, stumbling across the railroad trestle trying to tackle him before he escaped.
I said, “What were they doing in the dream?”
“Ariel was playing the piano. Mr. Redstone was dancing.”
“Who with?”
There was some sort of altercation between Marty Schoenfeldt and the kid who was playing second base. We watched for a few seconds, then Jake said, “Alone. They were in this big place like a ballroom. Ariel seemed happy but he didn’t. He kept looking behind him like maybe he was afraid somebody was sneaking up on him.”
Since that moment in the rain when I’d chosen to let the man who’d probably killed my sister get away I’d wanted desperately to tell someone what I’d done. It was a secret whose weight I carried every minute of every hour of every day and I longed to be free from it. Sometimes I thought that if I just confessed, the burden would be gone, and for a second I thought I would tell my brother because maybe if anyone could understand it would be Jake. But I didn’t. I kept the sin to myself and said bitterly, “I wish you’d dream him burning in hell.”