The Mourning Hours (11 page)

I looked at her sharply. It hadn’t fully occurred to me that I would be involved, guilty merely because Johnny Hammarstrom was my brother and Stacy Lemke had been his girlfriend.

Her voice was gentle, continuing. “At this point, it’s looking like—even if they do find Stacy, she’s not going to be okay. I just think—I think you should know all of this.”

I nodded slowly, taking it all in. Really, I was grateful; this felt like the first real conversation of my life. Wasn’t this what I had always wanted, not to be treated like a little girl, the youngest kid, the runt of the litter? But I was terrified, too. Maybe it was easier to be too young to know anything.

“So, look—I just want to say that you can come to me for anything. Whenever things get tough, you just give me a call. Or come over. You could even stay with us for a while.”

“Okay,” I said woodenly.

“No matter what happens—and it can get worse, maybe a lot worse—we’ll just have to weather the storm. We can do that together, okay?”

I swallowed, remembering a video I’d seen in school of a tornado. In slow motion, the wind had picked the shingles off a roof, one by one, as if they were nothing but scraps of loose-leaf paper. Now I imagined it being our house, our barn, our lives, caught up in a wind and blowing away piece by piece. And there would be the Hammarstroms, hanging on to whatever we could, weathering the storm.

Aunt Julia put her arm around my shoulders. “You okay?”

I stared at the field, barren and lifeless in the snow. “I wish the horses were out,” I said finally. “During the summer, I feed them apples right out of my hand.”

“Maybe we could call them?” Aunt Julia suggested.

So that’s what we did. We called them, even though they were tucked away in their stable for the night, acres away, deaf to our voices.

“King Henry!” I screamed. And then, again and again, “Come out here, King Henry!”

Beside me, Aunt Julia bellowed, “Queen Anne!”

The air was icy, burning my lungs, but at the same time it felt wonderful. I put everything I had into those screams. I turned to look back at our house, but no other lights came on, even though I was screaming loud enough to wake the dead.

And then it occurred to me, and I screamed,
“Stacy! Stacy Lynne Lemke!”

My voice seemed to echo off the snow, off the treetops and the farm buildings, off the dark ceiling of the sky itself. If she were anywhere in the world, I thought, she had to hear me. She had to know someone was calling her name.

When my throat felt raw and I couldn’t scream anymore, Aunt Julia wrapped my body in a hug from behind and helped me down from the fence.

twenty

I
dreamed of snowstorms, of frostbite, of being a toddler and losing Mom’s hand in the middle of a department store. I dreamed I was following Stacy through a maze, always one turn behind, just catching sight of her green coat. I had almost reached her, almost grabbed that bit of fabric when I jolted awake. Salty tears slithered down my cheeks, and I licked them away. In the dream, I’d felt I almost had her, that it was almost over. Awake, I knew that wherever she was, it was out of my reach.

The darkness outside was blue-black, and there was an eerie quiet to our house. I could almost believe that each member of my family was suddenly missing, scooped out of their beds by a giant, godlike hand. Listening to the predawn silence, unbroken by breath or voice, I thought: these are the mourning hours. And this is only the beginning.

Coach Zajac was our first visitor on Monday morning, rapping with his big fist against our back door just after seven o’clock. He explained he’d been in Milwaukee all weekend at a meeting with WIAA officials and learned about Stacy only last night.

There was an awkward silence, and Mom said, “Johnny hasn’t been down yet.”

I knew Johnny was awake, though. The first sounds I’d heard that morning had been from Johnny, throwing up in the bathroom.

Dad gestured Coach Zajac to a chair, and Mom offered a cup of coffee.

“He’s pretty low right now,” Dad explained. “He’s got a lot on his mind. I tried to talk to him last night, but...”

“Maybe I can help?” Coach asked, pouring a dollop of milk into his coffee and swirling the cup slowly in his big paw. “I could talk to him, see where his head’s at.”

Mom glanced at Dad, and Dad shook his head. “I appreciate the offer, but not right now.”

“Of course,” Coach said, rising, his coffee untouched. “Will you tell Johnny I stopped by?”

I wandered into the living room, climbing carefully onto the arm of the couch to avoid Emilie, who had spent the night there, covered by a heavy quilt. Her face was buried in the crook where the top cushion met the bottom cushion, and she groaned as I approached. I watched Coach Zajac’s car stop at the end of the driveway, signal and turn left. A minute later, at 7:15 exactly, the yellow Manitowoc County School bus approached down Rural Route 4, slowed at our driveway and then resumed speed as it headed to its next stop, without me.

“Wake up,” I said, nudging Emilie’s foot. “It’s Monday morning.”

“So?” She rolled over, pulling the quilt over her face.

In the kitchen, the phone rang. I slid off the couch.

“Hello?” Mom asked. A half-million phone calls between Saturday night and this morning, and still she was hopeful with each one. She cupped the receiver to her shoulder and whispered, “It’s someone from the
Journal-Sentinel,
out of Milwaukee. He says he wants our side of the story for his article. What do I say?”

“We don’t say anything,” Dad said. “We have nothing to say.”

Mom cleared her throat. “I’m afraid we have nothing to say at this time,” she said into the receiver. She listened for a moment, then said, “No, thank you. I appreciate the phone call, but, no, thank you.... No, I’m sure. Thank you.” When she replaced the receiver, her hand was shaking, her face pale. “But don’t you think we should speak up and defend Johnny? It makes sense to tell his side of the story—”

Dad shook his head. “Anything we say could be taken out of context, spun in a dozen different directions.”

“But Bill Lemke will be all over this—”

“Let him be all over it, then. We can’t beat him at this game.”

The
Manitowoc Herald Times Reporter
was next, then a reporter from a radio station in Green Bay, then someone from the
Journal Times
in Racine.

“Racine,” Mom marveled. “That’s four hours away—”

“The story is everywhere by now,” Dad said.

“What are we going to do?” Mom asked, but this time I knew for sure it was a rhetorical question, one that we weren’t supposed to answer, and one that we couldn’t.

Johnny came down the stairs after nine, freshly showered. “Where’s Dad?” he grunted.

I gestured to the barn. Where else?

“Are you doing okay, Johnny?” Mom asked. “I mean, of course you’re not okay, I know that, but are you feeling okay?”

Johnny sat heavily at the table, silent. He looked straight ahead, as if she hadn’t spoken.

“He was sick earlier,” I volunteered. “I heard him throwing up in the bathroom.”

Johnny didn’t react, didn’t confirm or deny, didn’t shoot me a look that told me to mind my own business.

Mom reached over to touch her palm to his forehead. “Let me see,” she said, but Johnny pulled away.

“Come on, Johnny,” she said. When she reached for him this time, he jerked completely out of her reach, and they stayed like that for a moment, his head leaning to one side and her empty hand extended.

Mom sighed. “Suit yourself, then.” She went to the refrigerator and started pulling out ingredients. The whole world might be falling apart around us, but there were meals to be made. There were cows to be milked and calves to be fed.

I sat at the other end of the table, watching Johnny carefully out of the corner of my eye. In the space of twenty-four hours, he had split into two people, or at least two halves of his former self. He was my seventeen-year-old brother still, who could be a grump or a sweetheart, depending on when you caught him. He had slammed the front door more than his share of times; he had been known to peel out of the driveway in a spray of gravel. But I knew the other Johnny, too, the one who had sneaked into my bedroom late at night, shaken me awake and carried me piggyback down the stairs, across the lawn and into the barn to see a new litter of kittens, the one who hoisted me onto his back for a run around the bases. He had been in love with Stacy Lemke. Had been? Was still, I told myself. He was still in love with Stacy Lemke. Didn’t these things add up, somehow, to proof? Wasn’t this more convincing than finding movie stubs or a receipt from a dinner?

“What do you want?” he asked, his voice sharp.

Caught staring, I blushed. “Nothing.”

“Then knock it off.”

I looked away, embarrassed. It was hard to say what Johnny was. All his individual parts added up to a pack of contradictions. True, he struggled to maintain a C average, but he could strategize on the mats with the best of them. He could get angry, plunk plates on countertops, pound his fist on the table, slam doors behind him. And he was strong as anything. Did anyone know what he was really capable of doing?

Somewhere between the night of March fourth and this morning, Johnny had become an adult, a man. For the first time, I realized he was taller than Dad, broader and stronger, if not heavier. His steps on the stairs, I knew suddenly, were a man’s steps. His hands were a man’s hands. He had been shaving for more than a year, but it wasn’t until right now, sitting across from him, that I saw the pale brown hairs on his chin, sprouting down his cheeks.

Later that morning, Detective Halliday and Officer Parks returned, walking purposefully from their cars and then standing in our open doorway to deliver the news: with the snow cleared, a fresh batch of patrolmen and volunteers from all over Watankee had gone through the fields near the site of Johnny’s crash. Police dogs had been sent into the surrounding woods.

“What did they find?” Mom asked sharply.

They shook their heads in tandem. Nothing.

“We’d like to take Johnny back to the scene,” said Detective Halliday. “To go through his story one more time. The district attorney is going to meet us there.”

Johnny agreed immediately, reaching for his boots.

“The district attorney? My husband should go with you,” Mom said.

Dad, seeing the patrol car, was already halfway back from the barn. “More questions?” he asked flatly as the screen door tapped shut behind him. “What are you hoping for, a different story this time?”

“John—” Mom shook her head.

“We’re just trying to get some answers. There’s a girl missing here,” Officer Parks said.

“They’re involving the district attorney,” Mom told Dad.

Dad’s face registered surprise. “The district attorney? I thought you said yesterday... Does this mean Johnny is going to need a lawyer or something?

“It’s his right to have a lawyer present during questioning, although he hasn’t been formally charged with anything,” Officer Parks clarified.

Detective Halliday added, “But if he waives his right to speak with an attorney, we can proceed without any of these technical holdups.”

“I’ve got nothing to hide,” Johnny said, looking from Dad to Mom. “Let’s go.”

Dad nodded. “Okay. Let’s roll.”

“I don’t know about this. I’m going to make some phone calls,” Mom said. The men ignored her, heading outside. “John!” Mom called after Dad from the doorway, her voice rising dangerously. “John!”

Emilie came in, most of her hair having escaped its droopy ponytail. “What now?” she demanded. “Where are they going?”

By this time, I was getting used to seeing Dad and Johnny duck into the back of a patrol car. It no longer surprised me.

Mom shut the door, hard. “Back to the accident site.”

“Jesus,” Emilie said.

“Emilie Janine!”

“They said they were sending search dogs into the woods,” I repeated, thinking aloud. “But why would Stacy go into the woods? Do they think she was trying to take a shortcut or something?”

Neither of them answered, not even Emilie, who could normally be counted on to tell when I was being stupid. It didn’t make any sense; the Lemkes’ house was a mile and a half from the ditch where Johnny’s truck had been found, a straight shot from Passaqua Road to Center Road to the Lemkes’ long, paved driveway. Even walking without her heaviest coat, even in the pretty brown leather boots she got for Christmas, Stacy should have been home in twenty minutes.

“I’m going to take a shower,” Emilie announced disgustedly, heading upstairs.

The oven timer dinged, and Mom took out three loaves of bread, which she would later punch down with flour-coated fingers. “Do you want to help?” she asked me.

“Am I going to school tomorrow?” I asked back.

“I don’t know. No, I guess.”

“What about Wednesday?”

“Kirsten! Enough.”

I thought about the district spelling bee this Thursday night. Mom had forgotten, of course; it was tucked away with everything else that didn’t matter anymore.

Upstairs, Johnny’s door was ajar. I peeked inside, expecting to see a crime scene, rather than a collection of dingy T-shirts and the piles of jeans he’d stepped out of, half holding his form. I sat on his unmade bed, pulling my knees to my chest.

What was it Stacy had said, that day I’d overheard them from my hall closet hideout?
I’ll be quiet. I could camp right here for a week or two, and no one would even notice.

Johnny’s room was as big a mess as I’d ever seen it, the five drawers of his dresser each pulled out, clothes spilling over the sides. His desk, never actually used for studying, was heaped with wrestling gear, the source of the room’s biting, sour smell. A history textbook was visible, buried under a heap of crumpled binder paper. She’d wanted to stay here, amid the cache of sports equipment—the deflated basketballs, a dozen tennis balls rolled loose, the bats and gloves we’d used in our brief time as the Hammarstrom Hitters.

It was creepy being in this room, where my brother slept night after night, dreaming his hidden dreams. Stacy had been in here, too, in this filth that was so different from the crisp clean of her room. I remembered how her bedspread had felt, the little white pills of cotton that would be bumpy if you laid down on it, that would leave the imprint of the spread on your skin. She must have sat on her bed night after night, writing those long letters to Johnny; he must have sat right here, writing her back.

I remembered the photo in Stacy’s dresser drawer, the boyfriend before Johnny whose face had been blotted out, as if he’d never existed. The same thing, I realized, could have happened to Johnny, if he’d left her behind, accepted a scholarship to Iowa or gone off to find a job. It was strange to think this, but in a way it was Stacy who had been blotted out, Stacy who was so far gone she might never have existed at all.

“What are you doing in here?”

I turned. Emilie stood in the doorway, her wet hair streaked with neat rows from a comb.

“Nothing,” I said.

We stared at each other.

“Nothing,” I said again, more loudly, as if that would clear it up. “I mean, I was just thinking.”

Emilie looked at me for a long time. Her hair left a wet stain on her shirt. Finally she said, “What’s there to think about? Johnny was in a car accident. Stacy tried to walk home and got lost on the way.”

“Right,” I said. “I know.”

She laughed, and I gasped, because I didn’t know it was possible to laugh anymore, as if it was an unwritten moral code: we don’t laugh anymore, because Stacy is missing.

“So, you believe that?” Emilie asked.

I sucked in my breath. “Don’t you believe that?”

Emilie narrowed her eyes, the blue of her irises disappearing into a dark line. “We shouldn’t be in here,” she said finally. She gestured with her right arm, and I marched out the door like an obedient soldier.