Chapter Thirty-Eight

I don’t sleep. I don’t eat much, either. But somehow a day slips by, and then two.

My father committed suicide two days ago now. Choked to death on his own car fumes. Maybe it was the confusion, maybe he was just too proud to be taken to the ground, or maybe his loss of faith was too dark to bear.

Sheriff Kahn is nice enough to give me those two days before returning to arrest me. Breaking and entering. Vandalism. Maybe he feels bad for me because he skips the handcuffs and just reads me a sworn statement made by the night manager at the U-Pack. Zombielike, I watch Kahn’s lips move as he explains what I did. That I failed to stop my car and present identification to the night manager. When he tried closing the gates, I steamrolled right on through them anyway. They don’t seem to know about Kaycee’s paintings, and how I hauled them off with me. Shitty security cameras, apparently.

The paintings are still stashed under my sofa and bed—I can almost smell them. I can’t bring myself to confess or return them. I’m even afraid to see them again—afraid that, like dead bodies, they’ll have started to rot.

“To be honest, what they’re after is a check. Frank Mitchell’s another story, though. He’s a wildcard. I know I don’t have to tell you that. He could press charges.”

Wildcard. The word makes me think of playing cards with Kaycee, sitting cross-legged on my porch. Whoever had won the last round got to pick a wild card, and Kaycee always picked the king of hearts. “Suicide King,” she called it, because of the knife drawn straight through his head.

“What were you doing out there, anyway?” Sheriff Kahn asks.

I’m too exhausted to lie. “Frank Mitchell got that unit right after Kaycee supposedly ran away.”

“Supposedly, huh?” Sheriff Kahn stands up, working his hat around and around in his hands. “I thought you wound up tracking her down.”

“Who told you that?” I say, feeling a spark of interest—the first spark in days, like a cigarette flaring in a dark lot.

“Your partner. Guy with the, ah, shirts. Said Kaycee gave you a call when she heard you were looking.” He pops his hat into place with one hand, like a cowboy in an old western movie.

“Joe’s not my partner anymore,” I say. “I’m suspended.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Sheriff Kahn says carefully. “What’d I tell you about rooting around in old messes? Let sleeping dogs lie. That’s what my grandma always said. Don’t get up,” he adds, though I haven’t offered to. “I’ll find my own way out.”

Before he can slip outside, I blurt out, “Don’t you want to know where she is?”

He stops, pivots, frowns at me. “Where…?”

“Kaycee Mitchell.” I force myself to look at him. “You’re not even curious where she ended up?”

“Not really,” he says, with a thin smile. “None of my business.”

“Florida,” I tell him, and for just a second, he freezes. Another ember sparks in the darkness. “Sarasota. You’ve got a timeshare down there, don’t you? Or was it a friend who loans you a place?”

“Take care of yourself, Abigail.” Sheriff Kahn opens the door. “Try and get some sleep. You’re not looking too good.”

I’ve been avoiding Condor’s calls, along with everybody else’s, and hiding out whenever I see him coming, no matter how long he stands on the porch. Now—three days after my dad died—he finally gives up knocking. But I hear a rustling sound and, after I’m certain he’s gone, I swing open the door to the night air. Tucked behind the screen door is an envelope marked with my name. Inside, enfolded in a soft bit of cotton, I find a beautiful fishing hook and a handmade lure, feathered and beaded in rich stripes of gold and blue, work my dad would have found impressive.

A short note is attached. I hope you catch your big fish.—Dave

Seeing his first name, a name he almost never uses, jolts something in me. I suddenly think I’m going to cry, am overwhelmed with the memory of his mouth on mine, the urgency of him, his anger, his concern.

Carefully, I rewrap the fishing hook and stuff it into the pocket of my dad’s old work vest. It still smells a little like he did: like car oil and Old Spice and wood shavings.

The note, too. I can’t bring myself to throw it out.

Dave.

The team returns to Chicago, and I bury my father with only TJ in attendance, under a bleak sky hinting at a storm that never comes. Although a few other people expressed interest in showing up for the funeral—Monty’s mother, Condor, and Brent among them—I know I won’t be able to stand the weight of their sympathy and how little I deserve it. Besides, it seems fitting that my father’s burial is as lonely and brutal as his death.

Afterward, I stop at the gas station for two six-packs and what my dad would have considered party food: frozen mozzarella sticks, Hostess crumb cakes, nacho cheese dip from a jar, salsa and chips. The house is hot, and it smells. I haven’t yet been able to bring myself to start cleaning, and there are week-old dirty dishes in the sink attracting a swarm of flies.

Instead, we set up on the back porch, overlooking the woods. TJ brings Jim Beam, and he and I take turns sipping straight from the bottle, feet up on the railing, creaking back in the rocking chairs my dad built for my mother when I was a baby. My father’s mess has even spread to the porch: stacks of plywood, old air-conditioning screens, salvaged pipes, and electronics that haven’t worked in decades. The view has hardly changed since I was a kid, only gotten a little wilder, a little overgrown. I can see the hard glint of the sun off the reservoir—not the water itself, exactly, but little solar flares, as if something behind the trees is catching fire.

If I breathe deeply, I imagine I can smell the lingering smoke of a bonfire.

Only the present is solid. The past is smoke.

“You need any help sorting through your dad’s stuff, you let me know,” TJ says. He twists to grab the whiskey bottle with his “good” hand and we drink for a while in silence.

“What happened to your arm, TJ?” I ask him, when I’m drunk enough to think it’s a good idea. I’ve heard of phantom limb, of course, of people feeling a twinge in their missing fingers or getting an itch on an amputated kneecap. But I never heard of anyone with the opposite problem.

“IED,” he said. “Iraq, 2004. Blew up half our unit. I got lucky.” Then: “My friend Walt lost his head. He always made me swear I’d take his wedding ring back home to his wife, but I couldn’t get it. Too many bodies, and people blasting us from all sides. Eventually we had to pull out.”

I nod, even though his story doesn’t answer my question. Maybe the past doesn’t have to explain everything. Maybe it can’t.

It doesn’t take me long to pack up the rental. The hardest part is trying to move Kaycee’s paintings. I can’t just carry them openly. So I wrapped them and tied them all together, but now they have a gruesome kind of weight to them. I imagine I’ll have to cart them with me wherever I go, forever.

Hannah, Condor’s daughter, has returned from her grandparents’ house with a new toy: a plastic tablet she keeps about an inch from her nose. But she glances up from her perch on the front stoop when I wheel my suitcase out to my car.

“Are you leaving?” she asks me, very solemn, and when I nod she scrunches up her face. “Are you going back to Chicago?” She says Chicago like someone might say the moon.

“Nah.” I still have to dispose of my father’s things, get his house in order, sort through the accumulation of his junk. But my rental contract in Barrens is up and there’s already a new tenant scheduled to move in.

Maybe all along this is what my future held—what I tried so hard to escape, and what, ultimately, is inescapable. Time isn’t a line, but a corkscrew, and the harder I’ve pushed, the more I’ve drilled back into the past. “I’m going home.”