I swallowed hard, and nodded.
“I’ll take the truck. The truck is behind you. So you can get out in the morning, Mom. I’m not going to hide.”
Andy said, “Good man.”
“I wish I hadn’t done it though,” Stefan continued.
“Son, you tried to express your truth and that’s all you can ask of yourself,” Jep said.
“But I looked fat,” Stefan said. “I looked like I had three chins.”
We all stood there flat-footed for a moment. Andy was the first one who laughed but eventually, uneasily, we all did. I mean, you’re a twenty-year-old guy. What else would you notice?
Late that night I got a text: Curt Cowrie from The American Association of Mental Health Nurses (AMEN). Give me a call. I have an idea. Anytime is ok.
There was one more text, from the area code shared by Black Creek college and the prison nearby. It said,
Longing Esme/broken grace/passion buried/under lace.
She picked up on the first ring. “I didn’t call you,” she said.
“I called you. I have to ask you something. You said you were there that night. Were you Belinda’s girlfriend?”
There was a long, slightly liquid pause. And then, with the kind of little breath catch that a baby makes falling asleep, she said, “Why would you say that?”
“What is this truth you say you know?”
“You can’t call me anymore. I can’t talk to you anymore. Bad things will happen. I’m sorry.”
She hung up.
The phone pinged again. I glanced down, no text. But a few moments later, a voice mail showed up. Was anyone asleep tonight? I put the phone on speaker, then decided against it and pressed the phone to my ear.
“Thea, this is Jill McCormack calling. This isn’t over, Thea. But I’ve decided that there won’t be any more protestors near your house. Good night.”
Good night.
I lay back down and must have slept. When I woke up again, still feeling awful, flu-like, what I could see from my window looked like one of those lurid sunrises that make false promises for the beauty of the newborn day.
But it wasn’t sunrise. I knew that when I heard Molly whimpering and growling and saw the rolling lights of the fire trucks and heard the banging at the front door. I ran down to open it and saw that the rosy glow came from the old Mitsubishi, which was now on fire in the driveway.
8
The fire demolished more than my sister’s vintage junker. It wiped out Stefan’s confidence too.
Heartbroken, I watched as he parked his truck and stepped onto the porch the next morning. He looked to the left and to the right, then ducked inside, glancing around him as he sprinted.
“I’m fine!” he snapped at me before I could say a word.
Jep said he wanted to install alarms and follow lights.
“Those are good ideas,” said the young police officer who came. She went outside to scold the crime-scene investigators who’d left strips of sticky paper and sticks of blue chalk on the driveway (“Didn’t your mom ever make you clean up your room?”). “But something like this is up close and crazy. It feels like a grudge, don’t you think? The bad thing about a grudge, it’s personal. The good thing about a grudge is that most wear out with time. I’m not going to ask if there’s anybody who has it in for you. I know your story. The best thing you can do is exercise more caution than you ordinarily do, and we’ll be watching, every night for a good long while, for anything that looks funny.”
A good long while: This just suggested that more was on the way. Who was behind this? I was convinced that the answer wouldn’t turn up on Washtenaw Street in Portland.
I called Pete Sunday that afternoon.
“I want to see copies of all the police reports from the night Belinda McCormack died. Not just the ones that pertain specifically to Belinda’s death. I want copies of those too. But I want to see any copies of anything having to do with the drugs he might have been on—whether there were bad drugs circulating at the time that might account for Stefan’s behavior that night. There must be all kinds of things I didn’t see. From the...the autopsy. And the way that the...crime scene looked. I never saw all that.”
“Mrs. Christiansen, why would you? You already had access to all of the relevant documents.”
“I only remember hearing about the report dealing with the emergency call at the time of Belinda’s death, and I’m not sure it was complete at the time.”
Pete Sunday sighed, but somehow, I could tell that it wasn’t from impatience or boredom. He actually didn’t know what to say. It had been several years since that night in the hospital; but I could still picture him, a sharp-dressed man seemingly out of place in the Northwoods hamlet. Belinda’s death had been the most shocking case of his career; to be fair, it would have been among the most shocking cases of anyone’s career outside Baltimore.
“Mrs. Christiansen, there’s a limit to what I can share with you.”
“Okay.”
“Okay what?”
“Can you make copies and mail them to me? Or email them?”
“I can’t mail police reports. We can discuss what you need to see. You’d have to come up here and pick up any reports. The ones I can give you anyhow. Which I’m not sure what they are.”
“I...don’t want to,” I told him.
He said, “Well, sure. That makes sense. But we don’t mail copies of police reports. To anybody. If you want them you have to come up here and fill out a formal request form.”
So that was how I ended up making the decision to go back to Black Creek, to make a journey I had formally forsworn, dragging the ballast of my own misgivings and my family’s disapproval.
“Don’t go,” said Stefan. “The place is bad luck.”
“Wait,” said Jep, “for better weather, better timing, for me to come with you.”
“I have to do it now,” I told them both. “I need to know more now. I need to read everything they have on file. I don’t remember what I actually saw and what the lawyer told us. And I just have to put my own mind at rest. I want to read the police report thoroughly now. And I know I never read any follow-up reports at all. I have to find out what became of everything after you were sentenced. I feel guilty that I never even asked...”
Stefan said, “Mom, I know you’re doing this because you still don’t believe you could raise a kid that could do something like I did. But there is no other story. There’s only one story.”
Jep said, “And what is it you’re really looking for exactly?”
“Insight,” I said, at the same moment that Stefan said, “Trouble.” Stefan and Jep nodded sagaciously at each other, so alike that a wash of tenderness nearly swamped me.
“Look, this isn’t over. At least for somebody it isn’t over. Obviously! Are you both going to ignore the fact that there was an arson at our house? At our own house? Maybe the publicity spurred someone to act. It can still get worse. What about the calls, the stalker? What’s next? The whole house itself? One of us?”
That silenced both of them. Jep said then, “I’m sorry for blaming you, Theaitsa. But we just need to move on as a family.”
“Well I can’t move on. Not until I know...whatever it turns out I need to know. I just need to do this. Maybe there is no puzzle. I just feel like there still is. And I’m missing a piece.”
Then we all subsided to our corners like old soldiers hors de combat.