Chapter Eighteen
The Coast Guard boat cuts effortlessly through the lake water. It is nothing like the trip to the island: with the storm spent, the lake is placid, almost friendly. Jimmy sits between his parents and all three hold hands. Alison has received some first aid. She has a butterfly bandage closing the gash by her right eye, and several sterile pads covering wounds on her knees, her elbows, and her stomach. Although she has changed into her sweat clothes, it is not enough because she is cold from the inside and so she is wearing Hank’s coat, and still, in the bright sunlight, she shivers. Most of the mud is gone, but not all.
Back at the cabin, Hank had become concerned when she had stepped into the shower. He checked on her and he found that she’d forgotten to turn on the hot water and was standing inert and oblivious in the cold pour. He jumped in, wrapped his arms around her naked beaten body, and held on as he cranked up the hot water and waited for it to come through the pipe. Tenderly, he washed her body and her hair as best he could while cursing the teeny travel shampoo bottle that kept slipping from his hands. Jimmy yelled in every minute, “You okay, Dad?” He did not like that he couldn’t see his mom and dad. He sat with his back up against the shower door waiting.
As the boat carries them along the water, Alison’s head is angled back so she can watch the island recede. The others on the boat sit and stare at the floor. Grant’s eyes brim with tears and Dan comforts him with a pat. His broken wrist is vigilantly wrapped. These two will never lose touch. They will know each other for the rest of their lives.
“Dad?” Jimmy whispers, “Mom’s not okay.”
“She needs some time, Jimmy. We all do.”
Hank squeezes her hand. She does not respond. She can’t take her eyes off the island. She wonders, where are you? I know you’re there. I know you’re watching. I feel you.
The Coast Guard vessel pulls into its slip. Coast Guard Officer Frank steps out and extends his hand to help the others get onto the dock. Once they are all off the boat, they begin the walk toward the Station House. Coming from the end of the dock a mass of reporters race toward the group. They are yelling. They’ve done their homework fast and know exactly which one is Alison Kraft. Coast Guard Officer Joe leaps quickly onto the docks and joins Frank. The two try to shelter and shuttle the group toward the building.
“Mrs. Kraft?”
“Alison?”
Guard Frank says, “Who let these guys in?”
Guard Joe responds, “Freedom of the press.”
Hank yells, “What about her freedom?”
“This isn’t freedom. It’s harassment,” Dan adds.
The hostages press through the chaos.
“Get back!” Ed pushes one of them.
Jimmy’s eyes are wide with confusion. He doesn’t understand. One of the reporters reaches in and grabs Alison’s shoulder to make her turn toward him. Jimmy kicks him hard in the shins. The reporter recoils. Another one says, “Oh, like mother like son!”
A reporter yells “Mrs. Kraft! Have you ever handled a weapon before?”
Everyone seems to be yelling at her.
“Alison!”
“Mrs. Kraft!”
“Alison, were you scared?”
Alison puts her hands over her eyes. Hank takes the lead and pulls her through behind him trying to shield her and Jimmy with his body. A reporter reaches his arm inside the protective shell and clicks his camera near her face. Her eyes shoot up, and when they do, she doesn’t see the dock she is on, she sees the woods. She is back in the woods, back up on the tree limb pointing her gun at Ben. She pulls the trigger and click…click. The reporter near her face…click…click. Alison flails out suddenly and violently smashing the camera away from her face and sending it to the dock where it shatters.
The reporter reacts angrily, “Hey! What the…”
She makes eye contact with him for a split second and the dead frost in her gaze shuts him up.
A police car pulls into the circular drive at the end of the dock. Officer Bill Thomas steps out of the driver’s side and trots toward the group breaking through the swarm of reporters. Thomas is in his late forties, a tall stalk of a man who drinks milk shakes every night before he goes to bed hoping to put on some pounds. He is a no gloss guy with a serrated edge. For the department, politically, he’s a nightmare, but he’s an expert on the Burne brothers. He yells over the reporters to Hank. “This way, Mr. Kraft.” A reporter slides in between them. Thomas says, “Get back or I’ll arrest you.”
“You can’t arrest me.” The reporter sneers. “Freedom of the press, baby.” Thomas sticks out his foot and the reporter trips over it swearing as he hits the dock.
“Shit. Hey!”
Thomas replies, “Oops, sorry.” To Hank, “Did you hear me say sorry?”
Hank answers, “Sure did. I’d swear to it.”
Hank grabs Alison and Jimmy and follows Officer Thomas to the police car. He opens the door for them and they slide inside. Officer Thomas has wide bull-like nostrils and he is breathing heavily as he gets into the driver’s seat. It isn’t from exertion but from irritation. “Damn vultures. I’m Bill Thomas. Chief asked me to pick you guys up and then do a quick debrief at the station and…”
“No, debrief. Take us home,” Hank tells him.
“It’ll only take a few…”
Interrupting, “Take us home or stop this car.” Thomas meets eyes with Hank in the rearview mirror. He sees the three of them nearly on top of each other and he thinks they look like baby birds in a nest outside his window when he was a kid. Thomas picks up the radio. He has been working on the Burne brothers cases for years. He is the officer who found Mrs. Burne smothered to death. Ingesting each of their files, and predicting their moves, he has come as close as anyone could to getting inside their perverted heads. With his eyes now on this fragile twig of a woman, he cannot reconcile what she did with what he knows to be true about those men. He is dying to ask her questions - a ton of questions. And while he would not admit it aloud, he is disappointed that he didn’t get his own shot at Gravel Burne. Several months ago, Thomas was honored by the force for tracking down Ben Burne and putting him behind bars. He was uncontrollably angry when the warden fell for the kidney ploy, which Thomas never would have bought, and now people are dead and Ben is loose. He stomped around the department yelling obscenities and ready to shoot the warden and the doctor for criminal stupidity.
Thomas speaks insistently into the cruiser’s radio, “Nope, takin’ ‘em home.”
The voice on the other end of the radio sounds stressed, “Thomas, Chief wants to see them at the station.”
“I said I’m taking them home. Out.”
Hank and Alison feel a surge of gratitude toward him. All they want is to go home.
“If you guys get a chance to jot down some notes, and things you remember, ‘cause we’re tracking Ben Burne right now and that’d help me out some with my boss. You, know, whatever you remember exactly.”
“I remember everything exactly.” Alison says sadly, as she looks off at the passing scenery. “Forgetting won’t be a problem.” Hank wraps his arms around Alison and Jimmy. They lean their heads in together and in a cocoon of their own bodies, they block out the world.
Half an hour later, they pull up in front of their home. News vans are parked on the street in front and several cameramen and reporters leap out and race toward them as the police car pulls into the driveway.
“Can’t you get rid of them?” Hank asks distraught.
“They gotta right.” Thomas shrugs.
“What about our rights?”
“You can keep ‘em off your property. That’s about it.”
They get out of the car. The reporters surge forward.
Thomas yells, “Back it up! Back!”
The four of them hurry toward the front door. The reporters yell Alison’s name repeatedly and she holds her palms over her ears as she runs inside. Once inside the foyer, Hank slams the door. Alison runs upstairs. Jimmy follows. They crawl into her big bed together, pull up the covers, and lie completely swept up into the sweet comfort of home. Hank is alone in the foyer with Thomas.
“My family is not public property.”
“Tell me about it,” he agrees sarcastically.
Hank goes to the front windows in the living room and starts pulling all the drapes shut. Reporters use their telephoto lenses to shoot right into his house and pictures of him closing the drapes hit the press.
“She’s suffering. We need privacy.”
“I can put a unit in front and keep them off your grass that’s about all unless they break the law.”
“This is harassment!”
“They call it news now. The public eats this stuff up.”
“What can we do?”
“Stay inside until it blows over and it will blow over.”
For the next three days, Alison and Jimmy stay in her bed. They soak Alison’s wounds in hydrogen peroxide and then coat them with Neosporin. Her bruises turn purple and yellow. Jimmy takes a colored pencil and makes a circle around one of them and adds petals so it looks like a flower. She smiles and tells him it’s beautiful. They watch mindless cartoons, and eat in bed, which Jimmy knows was never allowed before.
Meanwhile, Hank fumes about the relentless dogs of the press outside. The “I’m a mother” comment leaked to a reporter and made front-page headlines. Then, it turned up on T-shirts by day two. The NRA immediately started a new website called “Mother-loaded.” Jay Leno and David Letterman wove it into their monologues. Jon Stewart made fun of Leno and Letterman for weaving it into their monologues. Hank held onto his rage with a slippery grip, after everything they’d been through, to be subjected to this was heartless. What gave them the right to stalk them, to badger her, to hang around their yard, to peek in their windows, to talk to the neighbors, to follow their car? She is wounded. She is a victim. All three of them are victims. They are forever changed. Hank sees his life sliced into two finite sections - before and after. Before, he believed in a god and in goodness. Before, he believed in fairness and in human decency. Now, he believes there is a brutality beyond reason, and that it survives on the bloody edges of life, and there is a society of sofa slugs, whose lives are so tedious, they find that brutality entertaining.
On Monday, their neighbors Pam and Jessie fought their way through the frenzied group of reporters to deliver casseroles so that the Krafts didn’t have to leave the house to shop. Hank passed a few words with them in the living room, but Alison never came downstairs. She can’t chitchat. She can’t talk about it and she can’t talk about anything else. The casseroles unnerved her. They reminded her of when her mom died and the neighborhood ladies would come by with food for her and her dad. A tragic association was cemented, which she never completely shakes off, and so the casseroles only serve to reinforce her belief that something is deathly wrong - why else would there be casseroles? The telephone rings constantly with relatives and friends checking on them. It becomes so intrusive Hank leaves a message for the people close to them and unplugs the phone.
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