Missing
by Tim Lynch
J.J. Sheridan went missing in the clear, cold air of last February’s last evening. He disappeared easy as a flock of blackbirds behind the rolling hills—tiny thunder in the grass, quiet in the clodded earth, sunshine somewhere earning its name.
The night he went and disappeared, I roasted hot dogs over an open fire and ate them off the forked skewer. They sweated together through the worst heat they’d ever known as the flames they cooked in eddied up around a log, then did what they do when flames stray too deep in the dark. Old snow huddled at the east foot of the basin and diminished glacially.
I’d been living alone three months then, and had begun doing things I forgot I could do, things I did when I was younger, on those long days my mother’d go to work in the afternoon and not come back until midnight, that vast, exciting aloneness I trampled before I knew I was lonely. Building a fire on a Monday night. Stopping in the middle of the lane to hear mice scritch dry grass in the ditch. Walking to the old mill, cupping my hands at the window to see the machinery and scrap, marveling too long at flies bustling around a crack in the craquelured white door frame. When you know no one’s waiting on you, those little noises, the grass and fast wings, wild things, they call you from miles away, and you drift toward them with the silent flutter of that proverbially doomed, enchanted moth. They make you forget.
But before we get into it, a few things about J.J.
For one: things felt dirty when he was around. He slicked grease from his father’s combine into a shaggy mullet already oilier than a muskrat in an olive grove. Kid used to ride down the lane showing off his butt crack, almost his whole ass just hanging over the back of his bike seat. And it was a good bike too, or seemed to be. A classic red Schwinn or Gran Tour, but was so scratched and scarred to hell, who could say. He’d blow a raspberry over his shoulder as he rode away, like he was getting away with something, though no one had ever intended to get close enough to stop him. He was like a one-man carnival, performing routines all by himself on a windswept fairway acreage. Except he wasn’t a man yet, I guess. Still, it was funny, almost. Annoying. Confounding. Sad.
It was more than taunts and a trash bike though, that dirty feeling. Back before we were trapped in the back-and-forth limbo that is waiting for one another to sign papers neither of us quite understands, Maud and I did occasional Friday dinners with all the neighbors on the lane. One of them told a story they’d heard from their kids. J.J. found their boys one afternoon as they collected beetles under bark ripped off a fallen tree. A bulge undulated in the pouch of J.J.’s folded-up shirt. “Look what I found,” he said, and revealed a squirming nursery of infant groundhogs, red streaks on one of his hands. He told them to get a bucket. When they brought the bucket back with a towel at the bottom, J.J. tossed the towel and carried the bucket to the spigot. He filled the bucket and drowned each groundhog by hand. Needless to say, his parents were not invited to these dinners, not least of all because they didn’t live quite on the lane, but a half-mile off, on Alden Drive.
The parents of Sheridan Lane seem to sleepwalk through their lives. They go to the office downtown, pick up their kids on the way home, spend too long deciding out loud which pick-me-up latte flavor to get before resigning to habit. But they don’t sleep quiet. Carrying farm-raised steaks in baskets through the co-op, they talk low in the aisles and across the potato and onion bins. Low, but never whispering. Talking low means what’s said is important but private. Whispering would mean they’re telling someone else’s secrets, which of course they are. I’ve heard my own from the other end of the canned aisle more than once. They look at you sometimes, and they don’t look away.
Quiet costs a pretty penny these days, and the lane in winter does stay pretty quiet. If the trees have any secrets but squirrels’ nests and a raptor circling the high distance, they smother them deep. Tires grind the gravel mornings and late afternoons, and up until last year, you could fall asleep relying on J.J.’s ass crack to come again next evening.
With J.J., you got what you saw, but what you saw made no sense with what you’d known. He was a good kid, when he was little. He was maybe six when he picked a bouquet of wildflowers and knocked on every door on the lane to let us each pick whichever one we wanted from his hands. A few years later, he’s hocking loogies on those same doors. Someone up the lane was renovating their big Victorian, adding on a whole other house in back of it, and the contractors left an extra cable spool overnight, turned on its side like a table; there’s no doubt who took a shit inside it. No one knew what changed, but J.J. hated you, and he got hated right back. Still, he was like the neighborhood fox everyone shoos away but which no one has the heart to trap, even chicken farmers. I mean he was the kind of fox who’d never take any chickens, despite what he was. He’d cross your doorstep, snooping for some of that old time negative attention, then steal away without a trace except the story he gave you to tell whoever was waiting for you inside, if you were lucky enough for that. When he stopped coming around, well, the metaphor tracks; people looked out for him, even those chicken farmers who said good riddance. You heard low musings in grocery aisles about what might be happening at home, but mostly, life went on.
So it was a surprise twice over when I was asked to find him: one, because I didn’t know he was actually, truly missing, and two, I didn’t know anybody cared. And, well, three, I wasn’t a detective. I wasn’t a P.I. I wasn’t even an old, bite-happy hound you can’t wait to put down. I think I was just pitiful.
I used to write up court cases for background checks. I’d receive raw case files, and then type the information manually. One of those companies that delegates menial labor to humans until they can automate it. And they did. That’s not why I got fired though. I got fired because I stopped working. I’d clock in at eight in the morning, then go back to bed and sleep all day till I clocked out at four-thirty. Took a few weeks for them to notice. Sitting on the call with my supervisor after she’d asked what was going on, I saw the path forked in my mind: lie and keep this charade going and probably jump into a lake with my ankles chained to cinder blocks, or tell the truth and see what happens.
No unemployment. Time theft. Disqualified.
It’s not like I advertised any of this, but it’s a small town. Little secrets find their way. When there was a new neighbor or family guest staying the week, they’d be invited to the dinners on the lane, and, in a show of decorum to the morose, childless man with a wife who took pains to look at literally anyone but him, they would ask what I did. Someone would answer for me and say I worked legal. After a moment, they’d revise, “Well, data entry.”
But Maud, done as she was with me by then, would still interject on my behalf to say that I told the stories that made other people’s possible. Without my outline, there’s no script, no movie, no well-manicured society in which to perceive ourselves.
Well, data entry. I can only imagine what they said after I got sacked, but they put that kind of logic onto what happened with Maud too. Used to tell new neighbors my wife and I had split up, and then they’d revise, “Well, she just hasn’t come back.” They’d either wear these patronizing half-grimaces, or the slightest, nascent hook of a smirk would begin to curl at the edge of their lips.
I quit showing for those dinners a little while back. Still, she isn’t back, so who’s wrong?
The call came one rainy night after I’d dumped my rinsed microwave dinner tray in the recycling—I do try. The area code was my own. When I picked up, I could’ve mistaken the voice for Joe Cotton’s.
“Hear you’re looking for work.”
“Maybe,” I said.
“I’ve got some for you. Meet me at the tree that has no branches.”
Everyone knows that tree. It’s near the end of the lane, a short way before the long arm of Alden Drive. It’s dead, dryer than your grandma’s vellum skin, and white as a bleached, pitted cattle rib. Helluva way to make a date.
I tidied the heirloom doilies in each room, which looked just fine, I’ll admit, but everyone’s got their thinking work. I knew his voice of course. We all recognized it at a higher pitch and rasp though, the old man mainly yelling at the kid as he pedaled off, or muffled through kitchen windows late afternoons. We all knew the kind of man he was too; dangerous, but the kind of dangerous that watches under the surface of black water, the kind that doesn’t strike often, but you have to be ready to dodge nonetheless if you wanna take a sip.
The rain was coming down like the bottom of God’s swimming pool had just dropped out. All I saw from my porch was the backside of a waterfall.
Out of all the questions to get stuck on, I kept coming back to one: How the hell did he know I’d gotten fired? And the answer I kept coming back to and couldn’t entirely believe, whatever that might say about me, is that even he went to the co-op for a good steak once in a while. And whatever he had for me, to try to get me out in this weather, I knew it must have been urgent, which probably meant his same old brand of unhinged, which was either innocuously stupid or morally repugnant, neither of which I was itching to waste my time on. But, I could see the ribs on my savings account, and the nine-to-five had made me want to hang myself in my office chair. Maybe, I thought, I could hone some skills with whatever scheme he’s got, at least for a minute. My connections had run dry, and who knew who he might know, somewhere else.
I microwaved a supplemental frank and scarfed it down, clipped my knife on my back pocket, got my rain slicker and headed down the lane.
Folks here are pretty sure that J.J.’s family has nothing to do with whatever Sheridans put down Sheridan Lane, but what proof they have I couldn’t say. Just that it-couldn’t-be-true-so-by-Jove-it-isn’t confidence you get from the prematurely offended, to whom the most offensive thing is the idea that they don’t already own every bit of knowledge that could be discovered. What I can say is that J.J.’s father knew what they thought they knew, what we thought we knew. When someone pointedly refuses to blink every time you pass them by in their overstuffed garage, you get the feeling they get the feeling.
He never got into any legal trouble—I can tell you that for sure—but those neighbor dinners had their fair share of stories on the old man too. Seems the Sheridan family did go back a ways, and they had the heirlooms to prove it. Had.
One night, mid-’80s, when J.J.’s dad was about the same age as J.J. now, he got drunk on his old man’s whiskey when his parents went to bed. And I mean when—never had the privilege but apparently the man’s a hyperventilating fish. So he gets tipsy, which turns into a buzz, and then a full-on drunk, and, silent as only the most self-conscious drunks can be, he sneaks up into the attic to see what else might cure the small town soulsuck you either bust free from or give in to when you don’t have the money for the former. In one of the trunks up there, what does he find but the heaviest little scabbard you’ll ever see, an ornate Civil War antique. Some versions say a Confederate Lieutenant, some say a recreation from an estate sale. But the point is it was heavy. How heavy? Well, heavy enough to knock the heads off every mailbox down the lane. And mind you, this boy didn’t drive. He schlepped his ass up and down the lane, and thwacked the boxes on each side clean off, one by one. And oh yes, they knew it was him. Found him the next morning passed out against that dead tree. But like I said, no legal trouble. No charges, no wrist-slapping, just another doldrum day. It was almost as if it didn’t matter, as if he didn’t matter. He’d even dragged one of the boxes with him to the tree, laid it beside him, the scabbard cradled in his arm as he slept. But it was like the wind had taken it and laid it there, like the head of each box had just fallen off, and the Sheridan boy was just the Sheridan boy, now and forever, wash your hands and shut the door, amen. Maybe that’s why he let the kid go on like he did. Let him be maybe the first in that family to finally exist in this town.
There’s also a story that the old man killed his brother. Again, nothing courtside on that, but let’s just say there’s not no indication that the story might be true. Just, same day his brother went missing, that heavy, old scabbard did too.
When I rounded the bend off the lane, I saw him standing next to the tree. Frightened enough by the silhouette, and maybe those old stories, to forget what I was doing, I stopped a moment, kinda staggered, then skipped back to pace. When I got close enough, he began to walk away down the road. I figured, perfect, I’ll follow, go missing too, great opportunity to be town lore, get a good rumor going at the neighbor dinners on the lane: “I always knew that old man was gonna crack some day. You remember what he used to be like. Shame it wasn’t just the kid. Oh, and his brother, don’t forget that one. We’ve got our very own serial killer!”
Of course the idea that the old man had done J.J. in had crossed my mind, hence the knife. I knew this could be my first step down that six-foot staircase underground. It just seemed to make more sense to me right then—watching someone else walk away from me, barely a shape in the sheets of rain and getting more lost—to follow him, than it did to go home and pretend I was okay. My slicker kept the rain off my hands, but the cold fit them like a glove. I hurried the first few steps and fell into pace with him, still stiff and cautious in the dark. If it weren’t for the streetlight at the bend in the lane behind me, I wouldn’t have seen my breath ahead of me.
He stopped, up where the stream flows under the pavement and spills into the pond on the other side. I stopped a good few yards back, shivering in the noise of water diving into water. He turned over his shoulder, pulled his cap low, put a finger to his lips, and yelled over the noise, “Follow me.”
I know. But we’re only human in this stupid town.
I followed, and when he turned onto Alden Drive, I knew exactly where he was going, but kept my distance just the same.
Alden takes such a long and snaking path off of Sheridan that it almost ends up on Sheridan Lane itself, J.J.’s parents’ ranch house almost near enough the lane to chuck a stone at, near enough at least for us to hear those slammed doors and loudmouth arguments.
By the time we got to his house, the rain had petered to a drizzle. I was still a ways behind and shivering. After he stepped over his front door threshold, he turned back to me on the road and jabbed a pointed finger twice toward the side of the house.
Around back, a puddle and the freshly cut grass made it hard to tell between earth and concrete, and I tripped on the patio edge coming to the back door. My hands splayed wide and slammed the concrete. Barely holding myself up, I thought then about just turning back, fed up with what felt like a goose chase runaround before there was even a goose to chase, nearly prostrate in mud in the dark shadow of a dark house that I regarded so long almost as a Sodom of our own. But Christ, so many days I’d just been moving with time and maintaining—struggling just to shower, eat, dump coffee to make a fresh pot, not drown under the weight of my own apparent drowning. Dimly, slowly, but doubtlessly, I was dying. And here, right in front of me, was something else.
Soaked from the last confounding half hour of my life, I stood up, wiped my detritus-dotted hands down my slicker, and knocked on the door. Drizzle crackled on my shoulders. A light illuminated the sheer curtain on the window pane, a shadow approached, and a hand swept it curtly aside. J.J.’s mother’s worried brow and keen eyes met mine. She let the curtain fall, then opened the door, pulling it from behind and stepping with it, so the door seemed to open on its own. I could see no one waiting for me. The linoleum looked warm in the yellow light hung above a little table at the wall. I was cold. I stepped in.
The night he went and disappeared, I roasted hot dogs over an open fire and ate them off the forked skewer. They sweated together through the worst heat they’d ever known as the flames they cooked in eddied up around a log, then did what they do when flames stray too deep in the dark. Old snow huddled at the east foot of the basin and diminished glacially.
I’d been living alone three months then, and had begun doing things I forgot I could do, things I did when I was younger, on those long days my mother’d go to work in the afternoon and not come back until midnight, that vast, exciting aloneness I trampled before I knew I was lonely. Building a fire on a Monday night. Stopping in the middle of the lane to hear mice scritch dry grass in the ditch. Walking to the old mill, cupping my hands at the window to see the machinery and scrap, marveling too long at flies bustling around a crack in the craquelured white door frame. When you know no one’s waiting on you, those little noises, the grass and fast wings, wild things, they call you from miles away, and you drift toward them with the silent flutter of that proverbially doomed, enchanted moth. They make you forget.
But before we get into it, a few things about J.J.
For one: things felt dirty when he was around. He slicked grease from his father’s combine into a shaggy mullet already oilier than a muskrat in an olive grove. Kid used to ride down the lane showing off his butt crack, almost his whole ass just hanging over the back of his bike seat. And it was a good bike too, or seemed to be. A classic red Schwinn or Gran Tour, but was so scratched and scarred to hell, who could say. He’d blow a raspberry over his shoulder as he rode away, like he was getting away with something, though no one had ever intended to get close enough to stop him. He was like a one-man carnival, performing routines all by himself on a windswept fairway acreage. Except he wasn’t a man yet, I guess. Still, it was funny, almost. Annoying. Confounding. Sad.
It was more than taunts and a trash bike though, that dirty feeling. Back before we were trapped in the back-and-forth limbo that is waiting for one another to sign papers neither of us quite understands, Maud and I did occasional Friday dinners with all the neighbors on the lane. One of them told a story they’d heard from their kids. J.J. found their boys one afternoon as they collected beetles under bark ripped off a fallen tree. A bulge undulated in the pouch of J.J.’s folded-up shirt. “Look what I found,” he said, and revealed a squirming nursery of infant groundhogs, red streaks on one of his hands. He told them to get a bucket. When they brought the bucket back with a towel at the bottom, J.J. tossed the towel and carried the bucket to the spigot. He filled the bucket and drowned each groundhog by hand. Needless to say, his parents were not invited to these dinners, not least of all because they didn’t live quite on the lane, but a half-mile off, on Alden Drive.
The parents of Sheridan Lane seem to sleepwalk through their lives. They go to the office downtown, pick up their kids on the way home, spend too long deciding out loud which pick-me-up latte flavor to get before resigning to habit. But they don’t sleep quiet. Carrying farm-raised steaks in baskets through the co-op, they talk low in the aisles and across the potato and onion bins. Low, but never whispering. Talking low means what’s said is important but private. Whispering would mean they’re telling someone else’s secrets, which of course they are. I’ve heard my own from the other end of the canned aisle more than once. They look at you sometimes, and they don’t look away.
Quiet costs a pretty penny these days, and the lane in winter does stay pretty quiet. If the trees have any secrets but squirrels’ nests and a raptor circling the high distance, they smother them deep. Tires grind the gravel mornings and late afternoons, and up until last year, you could fall asleep relying on J.J.’s ass crack to come again next evening.
With J.J., you got what you saw, but what you saw made no sense with what you’d known. He was a good kid, when he was little. He was maybe six when he picked a bouquet of wildflowers and knocked on every door on the lane to let us each pick whichever one we wanted from his hands. A few years later, he’s hocking loogies on those same doors. Someone up the lane was renovating their big Victorian, adding on a whole other house in back of it, and the contractors left an extra cable spool overnight, turned on its side like a table; there’s no doubt who took a shit inside it. No one knew what changed, but J.J. hated you, and he got hated right back. Still, he was like the neighborhood fox everyone shoos away but which no one has the heart to trap, even chicken farmers. I mean he was the kind of fox who’d never take any chickens, despite what he was. He’d cross your doorstep, snooping for some of that old time negative attention, then steal away without a trace except the story he gave you to tell whoever was waiting for you inside, if you were lucky enough for that. When he stopped coming around, well, the metaphor tracks; people looked out for him, even those chicken farmers who said good riddance. You heard low musings in grocery aisles about what might be happening at home, but mostly, life went on.
So it was a surprise twice over when I was asked to find him: one, because I didn’t know he was actually, truly missing, and two, I didn’t know anybody cared. And, well, three, I wasn’t a detective. I wasn’t a P.I. I wasn’t even an old, bite-happy hound you can’t wait to put down. I think I was just pitiful.
I used to write up court cases for background checks. I’d receive raw case files, and then type the information manually. One of those companies that delegates menial labor to humans until they can automate it. And they did. That’s not why I got fired though. I got fired because I stopped working. I’d clock in at eight in the morning, then go back to bed and sleep all day till I clocked out at four-thirty. Took a few weeks for them to notice. Sitting on the call with my supervisor after she’d asked what was going on, I saw the path forked in my mind: lie and keep this charade going and probably jump into a lake with my ankles chained to cinder blocks, or tell the truth and see what happens.
No unemployment. Time theft. Disqualified.
It’s not like I advertised any of this, but it’s a small town. Little secrets find their way. When there was a new neighbor or family guest staying the week, they’d be invited to the dinners on the lane, and, in a show of decorum to the morose, childless man with a wife who took pains to look at literally anyone but him, they would ask what I did. Someone would answer for me and say I worked legal. After a moment, they’d revise, “Well, data entry.”
But Maud, done as she was with me by then, would still interject on my behalf to say that I told the stories that made other people’s possible. Without my outline, there’s no script, no movie, no well-manicured society in which to perceive ourselves.
Well, data entry. I can only imagine what they said after I got sacked, but they put that kind of logic onto what happened with Maud too. Used to tell new neighbors my wife and I had split up, and then they’d revise, “Well, she just hasn’t come back.” They’d either wear these patronizing half-grimaces, or the slightest, nascent hook of a smirk would begin to curl at the edge of their lips.
I quit showing for those dinners a little while back. Still, she isn’t back, so who’s wrong?
The call came one rainy night after I’d dumped my rinsed microwave dinner tray in the recycling—I do try. The area code was my own. When I picked up, I could’ve mistaken the voice for Joe Cotton’s.
“Hear you’re looking for work.”
“Maybe,” I said.
“I’ve got some for you. Meet me at the tree that has no branches.”
Everyone knows that tree. It’s near the end of the lane, a short way before the long arm of Alden Drive. It’s dead, dryer than your grandma’s vellum skin, and white as a bleached, pitted cattle rib. Helluva way to make a date.
I tidied the heirloom doilies in each room, which looked just fine, I’ll admit, but everyone’s got their thinking work. I knew his voice of course. We all recognized it at a higher pitch and rasp though, the old man mainly yelling at the kid as he pedaled off, or muffled through kitchen windows late afternoons. We all knew the kind of man he was too; dangerous, but the kind of dangerous that watches under the surface of black water, the kind that doesn’t strike often, but you have to be ready to dodge nonetheless if you wanna take a sip.
The rain was coming down like the bottom of God’s swimming pool had just dropped out. All I saw from my porch was the backside of a waterfall.
Out of all the questions to get stuck on, I kept coming back to one: How the hell did he know I’d gotten fired? And the answer I kept coming back to and couldn’t entirely believe, whatever that might say about me, is that even he went to the co-op for a good steak once in a while. And whatever he had for me, to try to get me out in this weather, I knew it must have been urgent, which probably meant his same old brand of unhinged, which was either innocuously stupid or morally repugnant, neither of which I was itching to waste my time on. But, I could see the ribs on my savings account, and the nine-to-five had made me want to hang myself in my office chair. Maybe, I thought, I could hone some skills with whatever scheme he’s got, at least for a minute. My connections had run dry, and who knew who he might know, somewhere else.
I microwaved a supplemental frank and scarfed it down, clipped my knife on my back pocket, got my rain slicker and headed down the lane.
Folks here are pretty sure that J.J.’s family has nothing to do with whatever Sheridans put down Sheridan Lane, but what proof they have I couldn’t say. Just that it-couldn’t-be-true-so-by-Jove-it-isn’t confidence you get from the prematurely offended, to whom the most offensive thing is the idea that they don’t already own every bit of knowledge that could be discovered. What I can say is that J.J.’s father knew what they thought they knew, what we thought we knew. When someone pointedly refuses to blink every time you pass them by in their overstuffed garage, you get the feeling they get the feeling.
He never got into any legal trouble—I can tell you that for sure—but those neighbor dinners had their fair share of stories on the old man too. Seems the Sheridan family did go back a ways, and they had the heirlooms to prove it. Had.
One night, mid-’80s, when J.J.’s dad was about the same age as J.J. now, he got drunk on his old man’s whiskey when his parents went to bed. And I mean when—never had the privilege but apparently the man’s a hyperventilating fish. So he gets tipsy, which turns into a buzz, and then a full-on drunk, and, silent as only the most self-conscious drunks can be, he sneaks up into the attic to see what else might cure the small town soulsuck you either bust free from or give in to when you don’t have the money for the former. In one of the trunks up there, what does he find but the heaviest little scabbard you’ll ever see, an ornate Civil War antique. Some versions say a Confederate Lieutenant, some say a recreation from an estate sale. But the point is it was heavy. How heavy? Well, heavy enough to knock the heads off every mailbox down the lane. And mind you, this boy didn’t drive. He schlepped his ass up and down the lane, and thwacked the boxes on each side clean off, one by one. And oh yes, they knew it was him. Found him the next morning passed out against that dead tree. But like I said, no legal trouble. No charges, no wrist-slapping, just another doldrum day. It was almost as if it didn’t matter, as if he didn’t matter. He’d even dragged one of the boxes with him to the tree, laid it beside him, the scabbard cradled in his arm as he slept. But it was like the wind had taken it and laid it there, like the head of each box had just fallen off, and the Sheridan boy was just the Sheridan boy, now and forever, wash your hands and shut the door, amen. Maybe that’s why he let the kid go on like he did. Let him be maybe the first in that family to finally exist in this town.
There’s also a story that the old man killed his brother. Again, nothing courtside on that, but let’s just say there’s not no indication that the story might be true. Just, same day his brother went missing, that heavy, old scabbard did too.
When I rounded the bend off the lane, I saw him standing next to the tree. Frightened enough by the silhouette, and maybe those old stories, to forget what I was doing, I stopped a moment, kinda staggered, then skipped back to pace. When I got close enough, he began to walk away down the road. I figured, perfect, I’ll follow, go missing too, great opportunity to be town lore, get a good rumor going at the neighbor dinners on the lane: “I always knew that old man was gonna crack some day. You remember what he used to be like. Shame it wasn’t just the kid. Oh, and his brother, don’t forget that one. We’ve got our very own serial killer!”
Of course the idea that the old man had done J.J. in had crossed my mind, hence the knife. I knew this could be my first step down that six-foot staircase underground. It just seemed to make more sense to me right then—watching someone else walk away from me, barely a shape in the sheets of rain and getting more lost—to follow him, than it did to go home and pretend I was okay. My slicker kept the rain off my hands, but the cold fit them like a glove. I hurried the first few steps and fell into pace with him, still stiff and cautious in the dark. If it weren’t for the streetlight at the bend in the lane behind me, I wouldn’t have seen my breath ahead of me.
He stopped, up where the stream flows under the pavement and spills into the pond on the other side. I stopped a good few yards back, shivering in the noise of water diving into water. He turned over his shoulder, pulled his cap low, put a finger to his lips, and yelled over the noise, “Follow me.”
I know. But we’re only human in this stupid town.
I followed, and when he turned onto Alden Drive, I knew exactly where he was going, but kept my distance just the same.
Alden takes such a long and snaking path off of Sheridan that it almost ends up on Sheridan Lane itself, J.J.’s parents’ ranch house almost near enough the lane to chuck a stone at, near enough at least for us to hear those slammed doors and loudmouth arguments.
By the time we got to his house, the rain had petered to a drizzle. I was still a ways behind and shivering. After he stepped over his front door threshold, he turned back to me on the road and jabbed a pointed finger twice toward the side of the house.
Around back, a puddle and the freshly cut grass made it hard to tell between earth and concrete, and I tripped on the patio edge coming to the back door. My hands splayed wide and slammed the concrete. Barely holding myself up, I thought then about just turning back, fed up with what felt like a goose chase runaround before there was even a goose to chase, nearly prostrate in mud in the dark shadow of a dark house that I regarded so long almost as a Sodom of our own. But Christ, so many days I’d just been moving with time and maintaining—struggling just to shower, eat, dump coffee to make a fresh pot, not drown under the weight of my own apparent drowning. Dimly, slowly, but doubtlessly, I was dying. And here, right in front of me, was something else.
Soaked from the last confounding half hour of my life, I stood up, wiped my detritus-dotted hands down my slicker, and knocked on the door. Drizzle crackled on my shoulders. A light illuminated the sheer curtain on the window pane, a shadow approached, and a hand swept it curtly aside. J.J.’s mother’s worried brow and keen eyes met mine. She let the curtain fall, then opened the door, pulling it from behind and stepping with it, so the door seemed to open on its own. I could see no one waiting for me. The linoleum looked warm in the yellow light hung above a little table at the wall. I was cold. I stepped in.