The Virgin of Small Plains (11 page)

The Mitch Myth, Rex called that one, though nobody liked it when he did.

How this image fit a man who didn’t return for his own mother’s funeral was a conundrum nobody seemed willing to address. Just like they had never figured out how to harmonize the dissonance between the Abby they all knew as a nice person, and the pushy broad who forced her boyfriend to leave his hometown forever to escape her clutches. Both paradoxes—the actual eighteen-year-old boy and the romanticized one, the actual Abby and the One to Blame—existed in many minds, like alternate realities held in opposite hands.

It all came down to one twenty-four-hour period:

Before January 23, 1987…

After January 23, 1987.

You were seventeen years old and fell asleep over your homework one night,
Rex thought, as he left the reception early. Memories he had fought all day to keep at bay came roaring in like the wind that had snaked around his ankles at the cemetery.
And when you woke up, everything was changed. For you, for your family, for your best friends, for your hometown, forever.

Chapter Nine

January 23, 1987

By the time Mitch got home that night from Abby’s house, his bare hands were so cold he could hardly get his house key out of his pants pocket and insert it in the door. When he finally got inside, he looked down and saw that his hands and feet were red from the cold. His coat and shoes were back in Abby’s bedroom. Snow coated his clothes; he felt it dripping from his hair, he felt it on his eyelashes.

Nothing on the outside of him matched the freezing shock he felt within.

He lifted his head and slowly looked around, as if seeing his own home for the first time. There was Persian carpet at his feet and climbing the stairs to the second floor. Paintings lined the front hallway. His mother’s favorite potpourri, scattered about the rooms in widemouthed Chinese porcelain bowls, permeated the air in a comforting, suffocating kind of way. He looked left into the living room, then right into the dining room. Everything was immaculate as both of his parents preferred for it to be. He felt glad to step back into an ordered universe, but it also felt unreal to him, as if he had stepped into a fantasy.

A door to his father’s office at the back of the house opened, and suddenly his father stood in the doorway, dressed in pajamas, slippers, and a bathrobe, staring at him. Tom Newquist was a big man; at six feet four, he was four inches taller than his only child. With a jowly face and beefy physique, he cut an imposing figure, whether in the judicial robe of the Sixth Judicial District, or at home in his bathrobe. It wasn’t unusual for him to be working late; he liked to work in the quiet and solitude of his home after his wife and son had gone to bed, and didn’t like it whenever either one of them decided to stay up late for some reason.

“Mitchell! What in the world—”

“Dad.” His lips trembled, his voice shook. “I have to tell you something.”

“You’re barefoot! Where have you been? Are you drunk?”

“No! Dad, listen to me, something’s happened—”

His father stepped forward. “Were you in a car accident? Are you all right? What were you doing out driving in this storm?”

“Dad!” He raised his voice. “I was at Abby’s! I wasn’t in a car! Listen to me!”

His father frowned, unaccustomed to such a tone. “Put on some other clothes first. Get warm. Then come down to my office. And don’t wake up your mother.”

“Dad.” Mitch took a pleading step forward. The single word hung in the air. His voice strained from what felt to him like a superhuman effort to speak in a calm, quiet tone that might compel his father to finally listen to him. Speaking slowly, trying to penetrate his father’s infuriating assumptions, he said, “Do you remember…the girl who used to come and clean for us? Her name was Sarah? She wasn’t from around here. I mean, she was from Franklin.” It was another, much smaller town about twenty-five miles from Small Plains. “Dad, she’s dead. I saw her…I saw…”

His mouth wouldn’t form the words that should come next.

Staring at his father’s face, a face that had gone blank and puzzled, Mitch was struck dumb with the enormity, the awfulness, the sheer weirdness of what he was going to have to say next.
Say it!
he told himself, screaming at himself inside his head. But he couldn’t, his voice gave out on him, his brain refused to kick in the orders. He was filled with dread at the effect the news he had to give his father might have on the judge. These were his father’s best friends he was going to…to what?
Betray
was the word that came to him. But that couldn’t be right. He wasn’t betraying anybody, he was only telling about the horrible thing that he had witnessed. It wasn’t his fault that he had seen them do it. It wasn’t something he could just witness and then never talk about to anybody. His father might be their friend, but he was also a
judge.
Mitch had to tell him, he knew he had to…

His father was frowning, as he might have over some ill-prepared legal briefs that an attorney had submitted to him.

“Who? Was this girl in an accident? What are you saying?”

“Sarah,” Mitch repeated, but then he began to shiver uncontrollably. He couldn’t remember her last name. How awful was that, he berated himself, that he couldn’t even come up with her last name? Through chattering teeth, he managed to say, “I…can’t…talk.” Ten feet away, his father didn’t move. Mitch said, “W-wait for me, okay? I’ll ch-change clothes. I’ll c-come back down…”

He fled to the stairs, and ran up to his room.

When he came back down, he was not only fully dressed in several layers of clothing, including wool socks, but he also had a blanket wrapped around him to try to still his inner, and outer, shivering. But when he sank down on a couch in his father’s office and told the judge what he had witnessed, all he got for his pains, at first, was disbelief.

“First of all,” his father said, sternly, “what were you doing in Quentin’s office?”

“What?”

Mitch froze, taken by surprise by the question.
First of all?
What kind of stupid “first” question was that? What did it matter? Who cared? Hadn’t his father heard anything he said? A girl was dead! Somebody they knew, somebody who used to work for them, was dead! When Mitch heard his father’s all-too-parental question, he nearly laughed, but stopped himself in time. Caught off guard by a question that felt irrelevant to him, his mind went blank. He felt completely unable to think of a lie.

It seemed his father had a whole litany of questions/demands to spring on him. “Secondly, what were you doing in their house at all at this time of night on a school night? And third, you can’t possibly have seen what you think you did. I think you were drinking, Mitchell. I suspect you may have been taking drugs.”

Mitch threw his head back, and groaned.

“Mitchell!”

This was
crazy!
Mitch thought, feeling a kind of desperation deep inside. He had just witnessed a barbaric act committed on the dead body of a beautiful girl by one of his father’s best friends, and all his father could do was act like a fucking robot
parent
!

But then, he thought again, trying to comprehend his father’s strange reactions…
of course.
He was talking about his father’s best friends, men who were as close to Tom Newquist as Abby and Rex were to him. If his father had come to him with such a story about Rex and Abby, he wouldn’t have believed it, either. Not at first, anyway, and not without some pretty goddamned convincing proof.

Mitch was amazed he could even think so clearly.

He knew he was going to have to slow down again, as if his father was a slow learner, which God knew, he usually was not. But this was different. This wasn’t a criminal case in his courtroom concerning people he didn’t know. This was personal. Mitch felt as if he, himself, had nearly gone into shock when he saw it; he knew his own brain had wanted to reject it, so was it any wonder that his father was being obtuse?

With a sigh of resignation, Mitch realized he was going to have to tell the entire truth, condoms and all. There was a bowl of his mother’s favorite buttermints beside him; he took one of the pale yellow candies and popped it in his mouth, buying a little time while he ate and swallowed it.

Then he started talking.

Twenty minutes later, when he had finished doing that, it was his father who seemed to be shivering. Staring at the judge, Mitch caught a glimpse of how his father would look as an old man.

“My God,” his father said, in a near-whisper. “This is true, Mitch?”

“Gospel, Dad.” He forced himself to ask, “What do we do now?”

His father’s head jerked up. In an instant, the temporary aging fled from his face and body, and he was immediately himself again, straight-backed, intimidating, commanding. “I’ll figure that out. You will go to bed, and you won’t do anything until I tell you what it’s going to be.” His voice and face softened just a little. “Try to get some sleep.”

Mitch felt immense relief to know his father had taken the awful burden from him.

He got to his feet, stumbling a little on the bottom edge of the blanket.

Without another word, suddenly far too exhausted to talk anymore, he did what his father had told him to do. When he was leaving the room, his father had a hand on the telephone.

His mother woke him before the sun was up.

When Mitch dragged his eyes open, he didn’t understand what he saw: His mother had two large suitcases open on the floor of his room. She was pulling his belongings out of his dresser drawers, and putting them in the luggage.

“Mom? What are you doing?”

He was tired, with an exhaustion that made his eyes want to sink back into his skull, that made him feel like throwing up.

His vision cleared enough for him to realize she was upset.

“Mom? What’s going on? What’s the matter?”

“Your father’s taking you out of town.” Her voice sounded strange, as if it were clogged with tears or anger. Was she mad at him? What had he done? He heard her say, “Get up and get dressed, and help me pack your things. Take as much as you can. I’ll pack everything else up and send it to you.”

“Send it to me where? I don’t understand. Are you mad at me?”

She finally turned around so he could see her better. His mom was also tall, also imposing in her way, though her way consisted of elegance of fashion and sharpness of tongue. Mitch was honest with himself—he’d never liked his mother very much, and he wasn’t absolutely sure he even loved her. He knew he was supposed to, because didn’t all sons love their mothers? But she wasn’t any fun, she was a little scary, because nobody ever knew who she was going to cut to the quick next, and she was about the least huggable mom there could be. Not like Margie Reynolds, who he loved almost as much as he loved Abby. Not like Verna Shellenberger, who was practically a walking hug. On the other hand, it wasn’t as if he liked his father better. If he could have picked a father, it wouldn’t have been Nathan Shellenberger, though. It would have been Abby’s dad…

His fuzzy brain stopped cold at the words, “Abby’s dad.”