“She called, because you were …”
“In Nebraska. Lincoln.”
“At the university?”
“Yeah. Playing for the Huskers. Well, not playing much. Freshman.”
“What date was that?”
He passed a hand over his hair. “I don’t know. October sometime. We’d played Ohio State the night before. It was Homecoming the next week. I remember that. I’d thought my folks would come. But my mom was gone, and my dad didn’t come, either. You could look it up, I guess.”
“Did you play in that game? The one on that Friday night, the day before you heard?”
He raised his head again and stared. “What, me?”
“Yes. We’re trying to establish everybody’s whereabouts, that’s all.”
“You’re kidding. Me? I killed my mom? I buried her in her car? Why?”
“We’re establishing everybody’s whereabouts,” the detective repeated.
Harlan had never felt murderous in his life. He was murderous now. The red rage was rising into his head, behind his eyes. “I didn’t play,” he said. “I was on the bench. You could look it up. There’s a roster. Somebody might still have it. Afterwards, I went out and partied with the team, because we won, even though I was no part of it. And then I went home with a girl. I don’t remember her name. It takes almost ten hours to drive from Lincoln to Bismarck, and ten hours to drive back again. It wasn’t me, and it wasn’t one of my sisters. I knew how to operate an earthmover. I’d have known how to get it off the lot, how to break into the office for the keys, and I’d have had the guts to do it. How to get her car out there. How to do the … logistics. They couldn’t have done any of that, and they sure as hell wouldn’t have helped our dad do it. We loved our mom. Our mom was great.”
Except that he hadn’t believed it. As the months had gone by, as the postcards had come and she hadn’t, and especially after the postcards had stopped, his belief in her had trickled away. Why had he accepted that? How could he have done that? All the time, she’d been right there, and their dad had gone on like nothing had happened. Driven onto that Deane Road land, probably. Driven right over her, like he hadn’t dumped that dirt on top of her and smoothed it over with the big teeth of some machine, deep in the night. Taken it back to the lot, parked it, and hung up the keys.
And gone home to tell their kids she’d left, because she didn’t love them enough.
“It doesn’t matter anyway,” he managed to go on, “because you know exactly who it was. It was the guy who’s sitting in jail right now. The guy who thought my mom and I wrecked his life and told us so, over and over again. The guy who finally killed her for it and covered her with dirt, when she always wanted things clean. When she worked so hard to make them beautiful. To plant flowers. To show me …” He could barely go on through the tightness in his chest, his throat. “Owls. She was a nurse. She felt sorry for him. Don’t you get it? She felt sorry for him, and she died for it.”
33
Visiting Hours
It was after dark by the time they left. Both Annabelle and Jennifer looked beyond exhausted when Harlan finally locked the door behind them. He put the house key into his pocket and wished he could throw it into the field instead. As far as he could, and that was a long way. Just let it be harvested with the sunflowers or plowed into the ground. Just let it disappear.
Annabelle said, “I don’t want to come back here,” her voice small and hollow in the cold starlight, and Harlan said, “I know.”
As for him, he was in some other space. The one you went into when you knew you’d lost the game, but you had to play your hardest to the end anyway, because there was no other choice. When you thought, I can have emotion later. Right now, I need to do this. Digging deep for your last bit of strength, focusing on getting every action exactly right, and feeling nothing. He’d seen Jennifer taking the family pictures off the wall, going through the bookcase and packing barely-remembered children’s books and old photo albums into a cardboard box, like somebody would want to remember any of this, and all he’d felt was cold.
At her quiet suggestion, he stopped at Dan’s Supermarket on the way over to the other house. He pushed the cart through brightly lit, chilly aisles with Annabelle beside him and Jennifer putting milk and eggs and bread into the cart, and remembered pushing a cart just like it right here for his mom, with somebody hanging onto the end and the youngest one in the basket. She’d talk about ingredients while they shopped, educating all of them in the most casual way on picking out vegetables, on calculating which size of cereal was the best deal, and teaching them the difference between what you wanted and what you needed. It was his mom who’d told him that the store brand was usually the exact same thing in simpler packaging, except when it wasn’t, and when it made sense to pay for better. She’d taught them how to look for the creamy yellow spot on a watermelon, and had made it a game to thump them all and listen for the deep, hollow sound that told you it was good. When they’d chosen their pumpkins for Halloween, she’d made it an occasion. She’d let them draw the faces on for her to carve out with the sharp knife, and when Halloween was over, she’d showed them how to roast the seeds.
Easter egg hunts on the damp grass, the excitement of finding that plastic egg amidst the tulips, and when he’d gotten old enough to hold back and let a little sister find it instead, how she’d noticed, and how she’d smiled. Like kindness mattered more than winning, exactly like Jennifer had said. The Christmas stockings that she’d sewn for them on the machine, with their names picked out in glitter, that always had the things inside that you knew they would, the ones you were looking forward to. A jar of bubbles. A Matchbox car. A roll of tape of your own. They always had a surprise, though, too, that was just for you. A tiny ceramic dog, one year, that he’d kept on his desk. An Irish Wolfhound, because he’d longed for one, and she knew it. A little black notebook with a loop for a gold pencil, when he been a little older, when there were too many sisters and not enough privacy. “So you can write down your thoughts,” she’d said.
How could he have believed she’d left?
How could he not have looked for her? How could he not even have tried?
He was feeling now. He didn’t want to.
At the house at last, and Jennifer unpacking grocery bags as he brought them in. Purple shadows under her eyes, and her freckles standing out against her white skin.
Too tired. And pregnant.
He told her, “Go take a shower. I’ve got this. I’ll get something delivered for dinner.”
She smiled at him, a weary thing, and said, “I’ve got nothing to change into. I’ll wait for my shower until it’s time for bed.”
“Wait here.” He ran upstairs to the bedroom where he’d dumped his hastily-packed suitcase, and came down with Devils sweatpants and sweatshirt, a T-shirt, a pair of boxer briefs, and socks. She looked at them and laughed, but she took them, and when she came downstairs wearing the sweats, he laughed. First time all day.
“Yeah,” she said, “go on and laugh. Dyma would tell you that this is how I dress all the time. ‘Oversized’ is my look. Maybe I’m transitioning from that idea, though. Other than at home, because I don’t care what you say, oversized is more comfortable.”