Evidence of Life

Chapter 6



In May, nearly seven weeks after the flood, Dennis Henderson came to Abby’s house to collect DNA samples. When Abby opened the door, he took his hat from his head and said, “I’m sorry I have to put you through this.”

She widened the door, allowing him to enter. “I can’t believe it’s come to this.”

He followed her through the house, and Abby saw how it must appear to him. He couldn’t fail to notice the neglect, the musty smell, the dust everywhere, the sheet and blanket tossed in a heap on the sofa in the den where she was sleeping. She thought of making an excuse. Or she could tell him the truth, that she couldn’t bring herself to do the household chores, to wash the clothes, to dust and scour. The messiness and smells were all that was left of her husband and daughter, and she clung to them.

“I expected one of your deputies.” She poured tea over ice into two glasses.

“I’m trying to give them a break.” He put the metal case on the table next to his hat. “We’ve made a lot of progress since the flood, but it’s still pretty much nonstop.”

She brought the tea to the table, indicating he should sit. She set the sugar bowl within his reach, and Abby sat down across from him. “I thought you were the boss.”

“Yes, ma’am, but the work is the work and has to be done. This has to be done.” His eyes were grave, quiet.

“I know you explained what you needed when you called, Sheriff Henderson, but I’m still not sure I understand. On television, the police take hair and—”

“Hair will work, and please, call me Dennis.” He opened the case and took out square envelopes made from something transparent.

“We’ll have to go upstairs,” Abby said, standing.

Again she was conscious of his steps following hers, that she was leading a stranger deeper into her family’s private quarters. She felt exposed. Vulnerable. She hesitated in the doorway of the bathroom that joined Lindsey’s bedroom to the guest room. There was a scrap of white, lace-trimmed nylon poking out of the hamper door. Abby recognized it was a pair of underwear, Lindsey’s underwear, and her discomfiture increased. An athletic sock lay on the floor underneath. She had left it there on purpose, knowing when she picked it up, it would feel crunchy. It would leave a powdering of fine dirt from the barn on her hand.

Dennis saw the focus of her attention and smiled when their eyes met. He was trying to reassure her, to ease her anxiety. She opened a drawer and took a round-bristled hairbrush with a polka dot handle from the jumbled collection. “Her hair is long,” she said, “and there’s so much of it. She wants to get it cut, but she worries her dad will be unhappy if she does.” Abby looked ruefully at Dennis. “I end up having to do it for her about half the time.”

When Dennis smiled again, Abby noticed one of his front teeth was chipped. She imagined there were fights in his line of work, men hitting each other. She looked away. “Nick says it’s fine with him if she wants to cut it short. Almost anything she does is fine with him.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You think they’re dead, don’t you?”

Dennis rubbed two fingers near the center of his forehead.

Abby began unwinding long hairs from the bristles of Lindsey’s brush, seeing them through the prism of her unshed tears. She tucked them into the envelope Dennis held open.

He bent to label it. “Of all the things in the world that are hard,” he said, keeping his eye on what he was doing, “not knowing is the worst. I want to find your husband and daughter, Mrs. Bennett, and I’m going to do everything I can to accomplish that. So will my deputies. I want you to know that.”

She brought her hands to her face. He plucked a tissue from the box on the vanity and gave it to her. And he waited for her to mop up and blow her nose as if he had all the time in the world, as if he had been born to wait through a woman’s tears.

“I guess you’re used to hysterics.”

“I don’t like this part of the job, ma’am. I never get used to it.”

“Abby, please. Ma’am is what my students called me.”

“You teach school?”

“I did. I’ve been thinking of going back.”

“What grade?”

“Kindergarten for a while and then second grade.”

“Man.” Dennis grinned. “Of all the years I was in school, through college, the academy, you name it, my kindergarten teacher is the one I remember. Miss Sneed. She taught me to read. Taught me to tie my shoes. I thought when I grew up, I was going to marry her.”

Abby said, “I thought all little boys wanted to marry their mothers.”

“I never knew mine,” Dennis said. “She and my dad were killed in a bus accident right after I was born.”

Instinctively, Abby reached out, touched his wrist, murmured regret.

“It’s all right,” Dennis said.

Abby led the way into the hall. The bedroom she and Nick shared was to her left, but she hesitated, reluctant to go into that room with Dennis. She said Nick only had one hairbrush, and she didn’t think he would have left it behind. “Is there something else that will work?” she asked.

He cleared his throat. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Abby.”

“Abby,” he repeated.

He kept her gaze, and her face heated as she took his meaning, the nature of the “something else” that would suffice. “We didn’t.” She caught her upper arms in a tight clasp.

Dennis was quiet. Abby stared at the floor. An awkward silence was measured in heartbeats, then Abby had an idea. “Nick cut himself shaving that morning badly enough that he put a bit of tissue on it. I couldn’t find a Band-Aid. He was annoyed.”

“You think you still have it? The tissue?”

“Downstairs.” Abby led the way back to the kitchen. “I emptied the wastebaskets from up here into a bag, but I didn’t take it out yet.”

The scrap wasn’t much, and it was weeks old, but Dennis said it was fine. He said, “We have dental records, too.” He repacked his case and they walked to the front door and out onto the porch. Abby thought of telling him about the phone call. She thought of saying that she believed it came from her daughter, but he would only think of her what everyone else did, that she was losing it, and maybe they were right. Maybe she was.

He paused at the foot of the front steps. “You have a real pretty place here,” he said, “a nice home.”

Abby nodded, and in his quiet presence, she felt somehow comforted. It was almost as if he held her within an embrace.

* * *

After Dennis Henderson left, Abby went upstairs and made herself go through Nick’s closet and his dresser drawers. She wasn’t certain what she was looking for. A confession of lies? A map to his destination with his reason for going there clearly stated? A diary exposing his thoughts? Given his penchant for privacy, she had little hope of finding anything, and she didn’t. Not on his closet shelves, nor tucked into the pockets of his suit coats or slacks. There was nothing in his bureau drawers but the socks and underwear she herself had washed and folded dozens of times.

Back downstairs, she opened the coat closet in the front hall, and her knees weakened slightly at the smell of stale sunshine and wind; the too-familiar scent of her family seemed pressed into the very fibers of their assorted coats and jackets. There were gloves and scarves pushed into cubbyholes—Jake and Nick’s ball caps, an old fishing hat. There were the knitted caps Lindsey favored, a riot of color. Her letter jacket. Abby ran her fingertips down the wool sleeve, swallowing the ache of her tears. She touched the cuff of Nick’s leather bomber jacket, the one she had bought him for Christmas last year, and before she could stop herself, she pulled it off the hanger and slipped into it, shivering slightly at the sensation of the silk lining against her bare arms.

Closing her eyes, she gathered fistfuls of the leather in her hands and brought them to her face, and breathing in, she could smell him, feel him there with her, just waiting for her to open her eyes. He would be there; he would materialize. She leaned against the wall, willing it to be so, willing her mind to let her believe, struggling not to cry when it didn’t happen. It was when she took off the jacket that she felt something in the inside pocket, and her heart stalled, but it was only his checkbook. Nick wouldn’t have missed it; they seldom used checks anymore.

Returning it to the pocket, she rehung the jacket and went back upstairs and into Nick’s study, where she sat behind his desk feeling sick at heart and weird. He wouldn’t like her going through his things. Once, a few months after they married, she had been gathering clothes from their bedroom to do a load of wash, and when Nick had found her emptying the pockets of his jeans, he’d been upset. It had startled her to have him pull the pants out of her grasp, to have him say he would wash his own damn jeans and stomp out of the room. Within a minute or two, he’d come back.

His mother had done it to him, he’d said. She’d been furious when Nick’s father, Philip, had disappeared, and she had taken out her anger on Nick. He was no more trustworthy than his father or any other man, and as long as he lived in her house, she’d felt she had a right to search his belongings and pry into his personal business whenever she felt like it. If Nick had objected, she’d cut off his privileges, made his life hell. Abby had already known by the time Nick shared this with her that Louise was a strong-willed, difficult woman with impossible expectations. She had known Nick’s relationship with his mother was complicated, and that he was conflicted about it. She’d sensed it was a source of pain, even resentment. That day she’d gone to sit beside him on the edge of their bed. He’d taken her hand, and it had been as if he was grateful she was there. Abby remembered telling him she couldn’t imagine the kind of pressure he was raised under. He hadn’t answered, and she hadn’t pressed him about it. It just wasn’t in her nature to pry.

Now Abby pulled open the top middle drawer of Nick’s desk and passed a shaky hand over the contents. Even with so much at stake, she felt somehow disloyal.

“Mom?”

Her glance bounced as if on a string, finally settling on Jake in the doorway.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“I didn’t know you were coming home.”

“You sounded pretty freaked the other day when you called about the DNA.”

“Dennis just left.”

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine, honey. You didn’t have to come home. I don’t want you worrying about me.”

“I’m not. I’ve got a chemistry final tomorrow; I came here to study. It’s too loud in the dorm.” He sat in one of the wing chairs. “What are you looking for anyway?”

Abby ducked her chin. She thought of saying it was none of his business.

“Mom?”

“Just there might be something, you know? To say where they were going exactly.”

Jake dropped his keys onto a small table between the chairs.

Neither of them spoke. Morning sunshine from the window behind Abby heated her shoulders. On an ordinary morning in May in her old life, she would have been out in the vegetable garden, maybe with Lindsey, maybe weeding around the tomato plants she’d set out. How long ago was that? March? There wouldn’t be much of anything left of them now.

Jake propped his ankle on his knee, picked at his sock. “I doubt Dad would leave evidence where you could find it.”

“Evidence?” She looked sharply at him. “What do you mean?”

“Nothing, except if somebody’s up to something and they don’t want you finding out, they aren’t going to leave stuff lying around so you can.”

“What could he have been up to?”

Jake stood up, flinging his hands. “How do I know? It’s not like he ever discussed anything with me.”

Abby leaned back and crossed her arms. “I’ll be glad when you and Dad iron out your differences.”

“There’s not much chance of that now, is there?” Jake said.

Abby swiveled the chair around and stared out the window. “I guess you can give up if you want to. I can’t stop you.”

“Mom, Sheriff Henderson didn’t take DNA samples so he could match them to somebody alive.”

“I know that, Jake.”

“Do you? Because it sure doesn’t seem like it to me.”

* * *

Abby began losing time. She would waken on the sofa assuming it was morning only to discover it was three o’clock in the afternoon, or she would find herself in the barn with no memory of having gone there. Every day she would try to follow a routine, but then she would come to and find herself balled up in a corner of Lindsey’s room or standing outside the door of Nick’s study, and her face would be wet with tears and she would not know how long she had been there.

One morning in the first week of June, two months after the flood, she was huddled on the kitchen floor by the stove clutching a wooden spoon when her mother appeared. Abby squinted at her. “Mama? You didn’t drive on the freeway, did you?”

“Never mind that, sweet.” Abby’s mother pushed lank strands of hair from Abby’s eyes. “What are you doing?”

“Making oatmeal, the long-cooking kind. It’s what I should have fixed for them before they left. It’s healthier than French toast.” Tears flooded Abby’s eyes as if more of her tears could make a difference. As if anything she’d done or left undone could have prevented her car from rocketing off the road in wet slick darkness with Nick and Lindsey inside it. As if cooked-from-scratch oatmeal made from steel-cut oats packed with natural goodness and touched with honey would bring them back.

Abby’s mother pulled her up from the floor by her elbow—Abby was always mildly surprised at her mother’s wiry strength—and led her upstairs and into the bathroom she and Nick had shared. While Abby undressed, her mother drew water in the oversize tub and tested it with the inside of her wrist. “Jake called me,” she said, adding bath beads to the water, stirring them with her hand. “He says he can’t come here anymore.”

She turned away, and Abby slipped off her robe and stepped into the tub. She drew up her knees.

Her mother opened a cabinet, running her eye over the assortment of linen stacked inside. “It’s hurting him to see you this way, honey. He’s found a job near campus; he says he’s staying there with friends this summer.”

“I don’t blame him,” Abby whispered. “I can hardly stand to look at him either.”

Her mother found a washcloth and handed it to Abby, and while she busied herself at the vanity, Abby soaped the cloth and moved it over her breasts and down her torso. She lifted each foot, soaped her calves and in between her toes, and as she worked, the tight icy core of despair in her belly thawed a bit, and the sense of her desolation shallowed in the warmth and dampness of the steamy lavender-scented air. She let out the water, turned on the shower and washed her hair, and when she was finished her mother handed her a towel.

She helped Abby out of the tub and into her robe. “I’m taking you home, Abigail,” she said, sitting her down on the vanity stool, drying her hair, “and I won’t have an argument about it. I spoke to Charlie. He’ll look after things, the horses and so forth, for a while. You can’t go on this way. You just can’t.”

Abby didn’t argue. She packed a suitcase and went with her mother, and it grieved her that she was the source of so much consternation. She bent her forehead to the passenger window. “I think Nick was keeping something from me.”

“But you didn’t find anything, did you?”

“Jake told you. He caught me looking through Nick’s desk. I know he was upset.”

“He’s worried, honey. He wants you to be the way you were. I told him grief has its own timetable.” Abby’s mother reached out to pat Abby’s hand.

“I should be driving,” she said.

“No, this once, you can let me.”