I was afraid of the future. I didn’t think I’d ever thought about the future before, beyond fantasies. Fantasies didn’t require anything from me, but real life, the real future, did. I held the lifejackets against the slight swell of my belly. I had never had a future before.
What had we been celebrating? Just the fact that we had enough money in our pockets for one of us to get shit-faced. Another trip around the horn of a weekend. Another scraping by.
The men in the boat had long ago given up on hearing my answer. They had drifted a polite distance away, where they might ignore me completely. The talkative guy motioned for the other to pick up the oars, and there was no question that they meant to make the distance far more than polite. The first guy took out his phone but we didn’t get much reception out this far. When he put it back in his pocket, he turned resolutely away from me so that no one would feel as though they had to say anything in parting.
Later, the guy with the phone could say I was alive and well and alone until such-and-such time. Alive and alone, at least. No one had spoken for my well-being in a while. But I hadn’t been hurt at 12:39 p.m., and these men turned out to be above suspicion, churchgoers and family men, one of them a grandfather, the other a veteran. He walked in the Fourth of July parade over in Rhinelander every summer.
One of the men would say to the papers that they’d noticed two lines in the grass, like the feet of a body being dragged to the shore. It hadn’t been my body, of course, and by the time people were curious about where my body was, the grass had dried and the twin tracks from the oars had disappeared. But it was the kind of thing that got people thinking.
The men paddled away, and I dropped the lifejackets and cords into our boat and took the stairs two at a time.
I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I knew I was doing something. I was making the choice as I went, hoping I would know what I had decided when I reached the deck or the yard or the car or the road.
At the top of the stairs, Ray, his bare chest tan, sat back in a folding chair. His eyes were holes in his head.
“Who were your friends?” he said.
I had a lot of experience with knowing when I was in trouble. A part of me observed us from a high branch of a nearby tree. Maybe from the bald eagle’s nest we’d spotted last week. I was an eagle, and all these human problems down here were none of my business.
“They seemed to be friends of yours,” I said.
“No friends of mine.” And that was true, because Ray didn’t have friends. He had twenty or thirty guys he could buy a beer for down at the Clipper, but hardly anyone would buy a round for him. So he admitted, when he was in the mood to count his grievances.
“One of them was at the Clipper last night, I guess,” I said. This was fact. The guy knew Ray was somewhere sleeping off a bender. Or maybe that had just been a good guess. I was musing about this when Ray reached for me.
Chapter Twenty-three
Men and men and men. They stormed the apartment and tried to find something to do that wasn’t already being done. They poked around, moving items from place to place and back again, taking papers and the game system from Joshua’s room.
I sat in the front room and watched their sensible black shoes and boots walk into and out of my field of vision. The sheriff kept close by, stepping away now and then to respond to his hissing radio. Each time he left my side, he directed another officer to be my guardian.
“Do you want anything?” someone said. The voice was unconvinced it could offer me anything, maybe hoping I wouldn’t need anything. I looked up. Tara Lombardi, the young, smug deputy who was supposed to have a crush on the sheriff but might be dating a hooligan instead. The one who might have been on the scene of a murder a little too soon, who might have patrolled a crime scene just before a body was found.
“No,” I said. The only thing I wanted was for the sheriff’s radio to hiss and crackle and say He’s OK, for the good news to come in quickly—good news was always better when it was fast—and for all these people to leave. I wondered if the rumor about my whereabouts had already sneaked out the sheriff’s office door. If Sherry knew, soon everyone would.
I answered the same questions again. Had I noticed any strange behavior? Had he been hanging out with any new friends? Was there anywhere I hadn’t thought of that he might have gone? Could he be at a friend’s house without telling me? They stopped asking this after a while, so I knew the friends and football teammates had been called, no extra boy discovered. Could I sign this form? And this one, for the release of the things in his room? It was Mullen who was filling out the details and who placed the clipboard gently on my knee. I signed, then watched as he checked it over and signed his own name, tapping his pen a few times before committing and then tilting the clipboard away from me.
Could he have gone to his father’s house?
“No,” I said.
As though his father’s was a place in the realm of reality, a place the kid could just go. I felt the officers looking at one another over the top of my head. “He doesn’t have a father.”
“Technically speaking . . .” Lombardi started.
He couldn’t have gone there. He didn’t know the town name. He didn’t know his own father’s name. All the lies we’d lived. He might have gone anywhere, thinking he was chasing down the truth. But I couldn’t forget the feel of my palm against his soft cheek. “He and I had a big fight,” I said. “He’s never—talked to me like that. And I . . . I hit him. I’ve never laid a hand on him before.”
I was ashamed, and started to cry. I had never meant to hit my kid. It was the promise to myself I had kept all these years.
“Enough,” Keller said. “Let’s give Ms. Winger some air here.”
Mullen hustled the crowd away. The sheriff sat on a couch arm and leaned down so that I had to see him. “I don’t want to get into any details you don’t want to share,” he said, his voice low. “I’ll only ask once. Are you sure?”
He smelled like hay. I concentrated on not gagging. “He doesn’t have a father.”
He waited, then pulled away. “OK.”
The party of men grouped and regrouped in the rooms of the apartment and in the hallway, fidgeting like a first-grade choir. The radio hisses came further apart. The extra people began to peel off in pairs and out the door. The neighbors across the street, who had been on their lawn all evening, went inside. The night passed as I sat staring at my own knees, listening for a phone, the radios, for Joshua’s shoes on the stairs, and for everything to be fine.
“Anna.”