Is this all it is? I thought.
Jon's sheepish look made it seem that it was, as if almost nothing had happened, as if it were all a regrettable mistake, perhaps, but nothing that a shrug of the shoulders and a mumbled apology couldn't fix.
Is this the beauty of it? I thought.
Was that possible?
For twenty years, Jon had been the one who'd known where to find the fusebox in the basement, how to jump-start a car with a dead battery, when to refinance the house, who to call when the furnace died, how to remove a splinter from a finger, where to go during a tornado warning (interior closet, crouching in the dark among our own coats—the suffocating wool of them, the comforting intimacy of them), what to do to keep the food from spoiling in the refrigerator during an electrical failure.
For twenty years, it had been Jon who'd kept track of our finances, the maintenance of the house. It had been Jon who'd set the timer on the water softener, who'd warned us away from the wasps' nests in the yard, who'd sprayed them with poisons, who'd kept the squirrels from getting into the attic, from chewing the wiring, from burning the house down to fine white ash that would have sifted through our fingers.
Had he known, again, simply, what needed to be done?
Had he known it? Had he done it? Was it possible? Had I been married to a man capable of this, and not known it, for twenty years?
Again, he caught my eye when he saw that I was looking at him. He seemed, I thought, surprised by the intensity of it, my gaze. He smiled at me, and it rippled through me like the first smile—the pleasure, the anticipation, this stranger, could he be mine?
Was it possible, this thrill in the blood despite myself—part horror, part confusion—but also, yes, a kind of baffled amazement that I'd misread him for so long, his passion, so furious and wild, I had never seen it, never.
Jon?
I hadn't, I realized, known him at all.
Yes, he was a stranger. My stranger. And he'd killed my lover to keep me.
IN THE morning, I was still asleep when Jon left for work. Down the road, I could hear a dog howling. It was coming from the direction of the Henslins'.
Kujo? Was he trying to come back?
AFTER dropping Chad off at Fred's, I went into the city.
How could I go home? Kujo, down the road, by the time we'd finished breakfast, had begun a yowling and barking so fierce that it sounded as if the Henslins had tied him to a post, then set a fire around him. Desperate, unrelenting. I could not stay home and listen to that. It had to end, eventually, I knew, but I knew it wouldn't end today. Too warm. Ninety degrees at 10:00 A.M. Kujo would be wild with the heat, and the scent. No, I would go into my office, I thought. I would shelve the books I'd left on the floor, on the chairs. I would check my mailbox. I would sit alone, in my office. I would try to think. It surprised me to think that I could. How was it, I marveled, that I could drive? That I could think? That I could look into the future at all and imagine that it would continue to exist? How was it that I had the sure sense that things could go on, and that nothing that had happened could have changed everything?
I had slept peacefully through the night.
I had eaten breakfast.
I had taken my son to work.
All the time, my lover's body, in my backyard.
If it did not seem real, could it be real?
THE COLLEGE parking lot was almost empty when I got there. In the summer there were always only a few classes in session—but the sun on the chrome of those few cars was so bright, I could barely see to park. It flashed in sharp fragments. Blazing. Blinding. Shrapnel, made of light.
My eyes watered.
After I'd parked, I passed a hand across them and saw black triangles and stripes where the sun on the chrome had embedded itself—and then I blinked, and then I stepped out, and then I saw it, parked four spaces away from my own car.
Bram's red Thunderbird.
I HAD to put a hand to the wall of the cafeteria when I saw him—
Wearing a black T-shirt.
Holding a Styrofoam cup.
Sitting at a table across from Amanda Stefanski, who was leaning forward, her eyes watery and bright, wearing that orange dress, laughing at something Bram was saying.
When they saw me watching them, my palm open on the wall (holding it up, my legs like water and air under me), they looked at one another, and Bram stood up, leaving his cup on the table, and Amanda Stefanski behind him. He stopped a few feet away from me. He said, "Sherry, are you okay?"
"No," I said.
He turned and nodded to Amanda, who looked away, and then he said to me, "Let's go to your office, Sherry. Let's not do this here."
IN MY office, I took a sip from a bottle of water that had been sitting on my desk, unopened, since I'd last been there, weeks before.
Aqua-Pura. A mountain on the label. A stream pouring whitely down the side.
But the water tasted warmer than room temperature. It tasted stale, like rain that had puddled in a parking lot—like water that had been drawn from a well that had long ago been abandoned to the animals, to the earth. I sat at my desk. Bram stood above me. "Look," he said. "Is this about Amanda?"
"No," I said.
Amanda?
"Because you're the one who called this off, babe. And you can bet after your fucking husband leveled a .22 at my face, I got the message loud and clear. I mean, I wanted you, I'll admit it, bad—but not bad enough to get myself killed."
That's the beauty of it, now it's over...
Jon hadn't killed him.
He'd threatened him.
No blood had to be shed over this, for this to be over.
And then, as if I were at home, on my own back porch, I heard it, plainly, again—the sound of Kujo howling, that dog straining at his leash, that wild yelping, and I said, "Bram. Garrett's missing, Bram. Did you—say something? Did you do something?"
Bram looked at me blankly. He cleared his throat. He said, "No."
"But you told me," I said, "that you'd threatened him, that if he—"
"No," Bram said. "I never said anything like that to Garrett."
"What?"
"I never said anything like that to Garrett," Bram said, as if I hadn't heard. "I mean, I told Garrett about me and you, but I never had to threaten Garrett. Garrett's no competition. He's just a kid. He's—"
"But why did you tell me—"
"I just wanted you to know that I would" Bram said.
Then, he shrugged.
He said, "I guess I wanted you to think I was a tough guy, babe. But that game's up now." He looked at his hands. "I guess you met my mother."
"Yes," I said.
"Yeah, well, what can I say?" He put his hand on the doorknob. He opened the door. Over his shoulder, he said, "I'm just a tough guy who lives with his mother. And I never threatened Garrett Thompson. Sorry to disappoint you. But now you know."
He stepped out into the hallway.
He closed the door behind him.
KUJO was back by the time I got home, his broken leash trailing him through the scrubbrush.
Ninety degrees. Now, it was summer, utterly. The lilacs were browned. A few still clung withered to the branches. Some had dropped to the lawn, still half in bloom, and to the driveway, making a crushed purple carpet there.
But they were over.
From the bedroom window where I sat I could hear a steady, humming, gray cloud of flies rising and falling in the scrubbrush. And, far above those, in a mercilessly blue and cloudless sky, four enormous buzzards circled, lazily, but descending—a slow, graceful choreography of flight and appetite.
From the bedroom window, I could see everything.
I could see for what seemed like miles.
I could see every blade of grass, as if each one were lit from within.
Every leaf, on every tree, shimmering brilliantly, individually, as if the very source of all life were burning whitely through every vein.
I could have cou
nted them.
I could have named them.
I could have cataloged the differences between each one, the thousands of them. Every detail distinct. Each wing on each bee. Each wildflower, and each speck of dust settling on each petal. Each bristled hair on Kujo's back. The discrete waves and particles of sunlight—on the dead lilacs, on the grass of the backyard, on the scrubbrush, at this moment—distinct from every other moment—and the next, and the next, and the next, until it had all been accounted for, it had all been claimed—but, I knew, I couldn't stay long enough to do it. I could not simply observe it from a distance, write it all down. I had to leave the window, go out there, and be a part of it.
I TOOK a towel with me, held it over my nose and mouth—and still the sweetness was so powerful I had to step back, close my eyes (breathe breathe breathe) before I could step closer, before I could see.
Kujo had cleared away the dirt.
Kujo had finally done it.
He sat at the edge of it, wagging his tail at me.
See? See? See? that wagging seemed to say.
His dog eyes were wide and brown.
You didn't believe me, they seemed to say. You tried to drag me away. But now you see.
OH, YES, I saw it, then—
That bag of fruit Mrs. Henslin had brought to me. (I'd left it on the porch.) The rabbit under the florist's tires. (The bouquet of red roses) The doe in the median. (The blood on my bumper)
The body.
The ruinous rolling on and on of years.
Of decades.
The loosening of flesh. The spots and wrinkles that came with age. My father, tied to a chair, rotting away.
Also, the softness of the child's cheek. The rosebud of the mouth on a breast. The small boys on the living room rug with their miniature cars and trucks. The little motor sounds they made. The coffee table. The scratches on its legs. "Garrett," I said.
He looked up at me with wide, surprised eyes—eyes full of earth, but Garrett's eyes.
"Oh, Garrett," I said.
One arm flung over his chest, like an afterthought.
One knee bent, as if he were trying to stand.
Wearing the white button-down shirt he'd worn to dinner, gray with dirt.
And Kujo, silently standing at the edge, looking down, then looking up at me.
See?
IT SURPRISED me, then, to find myself knowing exactly what to do.
I'd learned what to do.
In the two decades of being a wife, a mother, it seemed that this is what I had, been preparing for—exactly this. The years of housekeeping, as if in a dream, had taught me this. All the dusting and tidying up, all the years spent with my knees in the dirt beside the flower bed—the weeding, the pruning, the seeding, the mulching:
I had been destroying evidence and planting evidence half my life.
I knew exactly what to do.
I went to Chad's room, turned on his computer, dragged the whole hard drive to the trash, and emptied the trash.
I took the clothes he'd been wearing that night to Stiver's out of the laundry basket, to the living room, where, despite the heat—eighty-five degrees in the house, according to the thermostat—I made a fire in the woodstove and knelt in front of it, and fed Chad's clothes to it piece by piece.
They burned slowly but, after a while, they were nothing but ash.
Still, these were the incidental things, these were the worst-case scenario things. Just as you always hoped that the first aid kit in the linen closet would never be necessary, you kept a tourniquet in it just in case. Just as you hoped the guests wouldn't run their fingers along the bookshelf when they came to visit, you ran a feather duster over it before they arrived. After these incidentals, I called Jon at his office and asked him how many loads of dirt we'd need to dig a hole the size of a man, to fill it with dirt, and to plant a garden over it.
"A dump truck should do it," Jon said. "Why, hon?"
I told him to come home early, and I would show him why.
"I can't, Sherry. I've got—"
"You have to," I said. "Chad's in trouble." I hung up.
And then I called Fred's Landscaping and asked them to deliver the fill dirt late that afternoon.
The secretary, a gravel-voiced older woman I had never seen in the flesh but to whom I'd spoken several times in the past when I'd called to find out what time to pick Chad up, told me they couldn't do it.
They could deliver it within an hour, she said, or they could deliver it tomorrow—but they could not deliver the fill dirt at five o'clock.
I inhaled. I put my free hand to my temple. I sighed. I cleared my throat. I thought, how many such arguments had I had in my life? How many little, bitter quarrels about such small things? (We can't issue your refund without a receipt. We can't reschedule that appointment.) Now, it was as if on the phone with this woman every one of those hundreds of disagreements had culminated in this one—this climactic final battle over something inconsequential, and all-important. I cleared my throat again, and she cleared hers. I said, "Look, I have to have the fill dirt today, but I also need a few hours to prepare the space where the fill dirt will be placed. I need it to be delivered at five o'clock."
"No," she said, "I'm sorry, ma'am." Not sounding the least bit sorry.
I said, "I'm Chad Seymour's mother."
"Oh," the woman said, and her voice softened then. She said, "Oh. Just a moment." In less than a minute she had picked up the receiver again to tell me they would do it.
Five o'clock.
She said, "You have, Mrs. Seymour, the loveliest son. Honestly, Chad is the most charming young man I have ever known."
"Thank you," I said.
FRED drove Chad home from the job they'd been doing at a golf course—setting mole traps, planting crab apple saplings.
When they pulled into the driveway, Jon and I were just, then, setting fire to the scrubbrush we'd gathered up from around the hole we'd dug. Jon was standing in the driveway, leaning against the hood of his Explorer, wiping his face with a towel. Two or three times that afternoon he'd had to stop the shoveling to throw up. Once, he'd sat down in the scrubbrush and wept into his hands. "Sherry," he'd said. "How could he have done it? No matter what he believed had happened—how could he? I could never—"
"Of course you couldn't have," I said. Did I sound accusatory, or defensive?
"Sherry," Jon said, looking up at me, surprised, "are you defending Chad? Are you disappointed that /didn't kill someone?"
I turned around to him with the shovel, and said, "We don't have time for this."
It was ninety-five degrees.
The flies were biting at our bodies, which were drenched in sweat.
The sound of them was disorienting, so loud it was as if they were a single, enormous machine, not a thousand smaller machines. It seemed that they'd never clear away, that their frustration was infinite, that they would go on swarming and biting us forever—but, after a while, they grew more subdued, and then dispersed, and eventually even the buzzards—confused? disappointed?—disappeared over the horizon.
As we burned the scrubbrush, despite the temperature, I stood close to the bonfire and watched the dry leaves and stalks light up and disintegrate so fast it was as if they had never existed. That scrubbrush made a swishing sound as it combusted, vanished, as if being blown away, rather than burned. I watched closely, trying to witness the moment at which it was gone forever—trying to see if there was such a moment, and if it could actually be witnessed.
The heat was stunning, and I let it move in on me until I could feel it in my blood.
I crouched over it, staring into it.
Fred came up behind me then and said, "That was a lot of fill dirt. A lot of work. You trying to cover up something here? Got a body back here?"
I looked up. Fred was looking at the place where we'd spread the fill dirt and cleared the scrubbrush. He was wearing a sleeveless undershirt and khaki shorts. I could see the crushed veins on hi
s arms and legs pulsing just under the flesh, as if there were blue butterflies drowning inside him.
"No," I said. "I was just tired of the mess."
"I don't blame you," Fred said. "This is better. You could really do something with this now."
He suggested bushes.
Flowering bushes, ornamental trees—some deciduous, a few evergreens. Juniper. Boxwood. Berberis. Cassinia. "It could be a little topiary garden," Fred said. "If you're the kind of lady who likes to shape a thing herself, and doesn't mind the work."
"I don't," I said.
"You could train some ivy on a frame—a rabbit, or a deer. We could clear more of this scrubbrush. You could have yourself a museum."
We talked about it for a long time, just the two of us.
Chad was inside. As soon as they'd stopped in the driveway, he'd gotten out of Fred's truck and gone directly into the house, slipping in fast without saying anything at all to me or to Jon, but not letting the door slam behind him, either. Jon was still behind us, leaning up against his Explorer, staring at the sky, watching the smoke rise from the fire.
But Fred stood with me right at the edge of that fire. I could see the heat, its wavering shine, in his face, and the fluttering of those veins on his arms and legs.
I looked at his chest, at that scar.
He would, I understood, have no more problems with his heart.
They'd taken it out of him when they'd opened his chest. They'd planted it. A new man had grown. Now, he would live forever.
CHAD said, "I didn't mean to kill him."
I said, "I know."
"How do you know, Mom? How do you know anything?"
"I know you," I said.
"No, you don't," he said. He was sitting at his computer. He'd begun to cry. The blank light from it turned his face in the dark bedroom to an underwater blue. The tears on his cheeks were liquid silver. "You don't know me," he said.