A flash of oncoming headlights eclipsed his profile as he shook his head. “Stupid kids who’ll never grow up and figure out they’re better than that. Never go see the world and realize what it means to come home. That their life’s only worth the friends they find in it.”
Long miles passed with only the sound of the rhythm of the wheels over the asphalt. There was nothing to look at except the dark, burgeoning fields, no distraction from the choices Hattie, Mary, Tommy, and I all made that had brought us to this place and time. I’d confessed to something I didn’t do, thinking I could trade it off for the wrongs I had committed. Now there was no avoiding the past. I rode toward it, heart thumping in sick anticipation of the reckoning I knew I deserved.
It was after three in the morning when the lights of Rochester began glowing on the horizon. The roads remained empty as we came into the commercial district.
When we passed the turnoff to Pine Valley without exiting, I sat up straight. Confused, I swiveled around to make sure I hadn’t misread the sign and then looked back at the sheriff, who was still calmly driving the speed limit. It wasn’t until the Mayo Clinic became visible on the horizon that he exited, working his way through the residential streets, and pulled into a nondescript gas station. He parked away from the pumps, letting the engine idle.
I waited and after a minute he slid open the partition between the seats.
“Don’t suppose you remember what day it is.”
I didn’t. I hadn’t thought days would mean much anymore.
He reached into his glove box and pulled out some pieces of paper, pushing them through the window. I unfolded them toward the gas station lights, reading, and my mouth fell open.
They were the bus tickets Hattie bought for us. A one-way trip to New York, leaving at 3:38 a.m. on June 9, 2008. I hadn’t thought about these tickets since I’d confessed to murder. The brief stolen giddiness Hattie and I had shared in that barn seemed like a dream now, a hallucination that couldn’t have been real. Yet here were the tickets in my hand, the paper creased and crisp, with both our names typed in neat black letters. Before I could even process what was happening he passed an envelope back, too. It had Hattie’s name on the outside, in my handwriting, and held a note and three hundred dollars.
“That’s not evidence anymore,” he said, facing away from me.
“I don’t understand. I thought . . .” As I stumbled over what I had thought, a Greyhound bus lumbered into the gas station lot and parked with a grumbling whoosh of its engine. A few blinking, rumpled people climbed out and wandered into the building.
“Better get going.”
I looked at the tickets and money again and then the back of the sheriff’s head.
“Why are you doing this?”
He sighed and I didn’t think he was going to answer. Then he shut the glove box and cleared his throat.
“Bud Hoffman’s been my friend almost as long as you’ve been alive. I’m not going to let him do anything he might regret later. Better that you get gone.”
He turned around then and looked at me for the first time that night, not like a police officer looking at a criminal or a righteous man looking at a sinner, but with a strange kinship born of loss, like two men passing in a graveyard. There was something quiet and consuming about the sheriff’s look and several moments elapsed before I swallowed and nodded, folding the tickets in my palm.
As I climbed out of the car, I realized I’d just learned everything I needed to know about the sheriff of Wabash County.
Crossing the parking lot, I breathed deep, tasting the Minnesota air for the last time. I handed my ticket to the driver and boarded, then stared at the car across the lot until the bus revved into gear. Without any visible emotion, the sheriff picked up his hat and put it on, straightened the brim over his brow, and eased his cruiser out on to the road. As he passed my window, his fingers lifted an inch off the steering wheel. By the time I raised my hand in return, he was already gone.
The bus rumbled out of the city. The musty upholstery and hint of sweat from sleeping travelers confirmed that I was actually here—this was really happening. I leaned into the cool pane of the window and stared at the country. Hours passed and the sky lightened. The hills rose and fell like a silent soundtrack and it was only now that I’d been exiled from them that I fully appreciated their beauty. An ocean of plants flourished here, roots secure and leaves bathing in the dawn of a new day. I saw Mary in this land and Hattie, too, despite everything she had claimed; I saw her spirit and determination.
As the sun broke over the horizon in fiery oranges and reds, I opened the envelope the sheriff had given me and pulled out the note.
Go to New York . . .
Although it was my handwriting, the words were hers, whispered in the air all around me, breathing in the land rushing past, and they filled my chest with a buoyant kind of pain, a lover’s keepsake that I would carry for the rest of my life, guiding me toward an impossible atonement.
. . . Know that I loved you.