twenty-eight
E
arly Friday morning, Dad and Johnny left to get Johnny checked in, and I crawled into their empty bed and flipped between morning news shows with the volume on low for an hour before Mom or Emilie stirred. There was nothing about Stacy Lemke, no news bulletins about a missing Watankee girl. We were three hours away from our lives. If we stayed here, I wondered, would we always be three hours removed from all our troubles?
The plan was that Dad would pick us up at the hotel later, when Johnny was weighed in and warmed up, and the real wrestling was starting. The state championship worked on a double elimination basis, which meant that every wrestler had at least two matches today, with the championship rounds tomorrow. Mom, toweling off her blond curls, suggested that we “take it easy”—something we hardly ever did. Emilie and I rose to the challenge, making numerous trips from the complimentary breakfast suite with glasses of cold orange juice, oversize muffins, bear claws and toasted bagels. Mom ate along with us, sitting cross-legged on the bedspread. The food didn’t seem particularly tasteful or fresh, but I was suddenly starving.
Emilie finished a bear claw and lay back, crossing one long leg over the opposite knee. “This is nice,” she said, and gave Mom a quick, apologetic glance.
“It does feel good to get away,” Mom admitted. “I thought I was going to burst if I stayed in that house for one more minute.”
“Are we going back to school on Monday?” I asked, biting the crunchy top off a muffin.
Mom’s face registered surprise, and I realized I had blown our peaceful moment. “We’ll see,” she said tightly, which meant “no” more often than it meant “yes.” It surprised me to think that she might be winging it, that she hadn’t concocted a new master plan for our lives. “Things need to settle down a bit more first,” she added.
I was glad. As much as I’d missed school, it seemed so far away from our lives now, so inconsequential. “What about Johnny? Will he go back to school?”
Mom frowned. “He’s so close to graduation...I can’t imagine how hard it’s going to be for him, but—”
Emilie sat up again, a spray of crumbs falling from her shirt onto the bedspread. “What about me?”
“You’ll go back, too.”
“I don’t think so.”
“What else would you do?”
Emilie stared at her. “No one is going to want us back there, Mom,” she said carefully, as if she was speaking to someone who was slow to understand. “It’s going to be awful.”
As uncomfortable as I was about the whole idea, it would probably be even worse for Emilie, who went to the same high school as Johnny and Stacy, and was in the same class as Stacy’s sister Joanie. It wasn’t hard to imagine Emilie eating lunch alone for the rest of her life, walking down a hallway amid jeers and taunts.
“We’re going to figure this out like we’ve figured out everything else, one day at a time,” Mom said, a hint of annoyance creeping into her voice.
Emilie expelled air through her nose and lay down again. “And if we don’t figure it out? What then?”
Instead of answering, Mom stood, gathering together our napkins and plastic cups and dumping them in the room’s tiny trash can. I was wrong—we weren’t three hours away from our problems, after all.
Dad came back to the hotel to pick us up around noon, and one look at his face told us it hadn’t gone well for Johnny that morning. One loss and he was out of the championship, although he could still vie for third. “The thing is,” Dad reported, not taking his eyes from the road, “the rest of those kids have been nonstop practicing. Johnny’s been through hell this week, and it showed. He looked pretty rough out there, gave away too many easy points.”
“Maybe this was a mistake,” Mom suggested quietly. “Maybe it’s too soon for him to—”
Dad brushed this off. “He can still take third. He’s got another match coming up. Maybe he’ll be more warmed up by then.”
But a blind man could have seen that there was something wrong with Johnny. Instead of waiting near the mats with the competitors or sitting with the members of his team—who had gathered around Dirk Bauer as if he was a celebrity—Johnny sat in the bleachers like a spectator. His face shadowed by the hood of his sweatshirt, he looked way too old to be a high school senior.
Dad went over to sit with Johnny, but Mom, Emilie and I took seats as far away as we could, about ten rows up. There were other people from Watankee there, but none of them approached us. I stiffened when I saw Chris Hansen, Erik’s dad, in the crowd.
They called for the 160s, and Johnny came lumbering down the stands, led by Coach Zajac. He sloughed off his sweatshirt, pulled the straps of his singlet up over his shoulders and stood, arms crossed.
“This isn’t going to be good,” Emilie whispered.
When Johnny stepped into the circle, he already looked defeated. His opponent was a few inches shorter and a little stockier, but he looked young and healthy, as if he could run circles around Johnny. He looked like someone who was thinking only about a state title. Johnny had far more on his mind, and it showed.
The ref blew the whistle, and in a half-second Johnny was down, as if his opponent had rushed nothing more than a massive sack of flour.
“Do something, do something,” Mom whispered.
I flinched, looking away from Johnny’s body twisted under his opponent’s grasp. Dad was standing with his hands clenched into fists at his sides, not daring to look away himself. Maybe it was all flashing before his eyes, the way it was before mine: Johnny wrestling in the living room on summer nights, lifting weights in the barn, strategizing on the mats, taking down his opponent while everyone in the stands cheered, while Stacy Lemke called his name, louder than anyone else. Or maybe Dad was seeing his own wrestling career, which had ended early, too, around the time Mom became pregnant.
It took only twenty-five seconds for Johnny to be pinned. He walked off the mat, grabbed his sweatshirt and kept going, straight for the doors of the gymnasium. Coach didn’t try to stop him or offer words of encouragement this time. Johnny was beyond that now, and no one could reach him.
“That kid bottomed out in the first round, too,” someone behind us said. “That’s what you call an oh-and-two barbecue.”
We stood up, making our way through the stands. From farther back, someone yelled, “That’s what he deserves! How dare you come here like this!” None of us turned around. We did the march of shame across our row in the stands, then down to the next level and around to the exit.
“His heart just wasn’t in it,” Mom said, touching Dad on the arm. Johnny had gone ahead of us and was standing at the entrance to the parking garage, as if he wasn’t an athlete at all; he’d been here simply to view the matches, not contend.
“He didn’t even put up a fight,” Dad said, shaking his head. “That’s worse than not competing. We might as well have stayed home.”
“Maybe he just wanted to be beat,” Emilie commented.
Dad scoffed as if this didn’t make a bit of sense, but I thought she was probably right. When I’d done things that were really bad—like letting the caterpillars shrivel up in that shoebox underneath my bed—I’d wanted to be punished. I’d needed it, like some kind of penance, like Hercules punishing himself with twelve impossible tasks. Was it the same with Johnny? If the criminal justice system didn’t punish him, how far would he go to punish himself?
We were quiet in the Caprice, letting the car take silent turns onto unfamiliar streets. We were getting very good at avoiding the elephant in the room.
“I could run out and pick up some burgers,” Dad offered as we pulled into the parking lot. “Anyone hungry?” When no one answered, he muttered, “Later, then.”
There have been times in my life where I thought that things couldn’t get worse, that no new set of bad circumstances could possibly compound the bad set of circumstances I was already in. I felt that way coming back to our hotel room that night, with the mystery of Stacy unsolved, our collective nerves still unsettled from the confrontation on our back porch steps, and now Johnny going down in what could only be described as a public disgrace.
An oh-and-two barbecue.
That’s what I was thinking when we walked into the darkened hotel room.
Things are bad, really bad, but they can’t possibly get worse.
And then I saw the red light on the phone blinking soundlessly, steadily, and I knew deep down that I was wrong.
twenty-nine
D
ad listened to the message, hung up and lifted the phone to dial. “It was Julia,” he said, as we sat on the edges of the beds, waiting. “It’s Papa, he fell off a ladder.”
Mom gasped. “My God. Is he okay?”
But Dad was busy with the phone call, which left us to decipher the facts based on his side of the conversation. Aunt Julia had received a call from Jerry Warczak, who found Grandpa during the morning milking. She’d called an ambulance and ridden along to the hospital, where Grandpa had gone through all sorts of X-rays and scans. He was alert, but had a possible concussion and a broken hip.
“What in the world was he doing on a ladder early in the morning?” Mom asked, but Dad shook his head, tight-lipped. “What’s going on? There’s something you’re not saying.”
Dad stood. “We’re heading back,” he announced, and just like that, our vacation-that-wasn’t-really-a-vacation was over. Johnny changed clothes in the bathroom and carried his duffel bag to the car, the first one ready to go. I shoved my clothes and books back into my Tinker Bell suitcase while Emilie visited the vending machine down the hall one last time, and Mom haggled with the front desk clerk over the details of our checkout.
“It doesn’t seem fair to be charged for the night if we aren’t actually staying the night,” she huffed, meeting us at the car.
We must have driven for half an hour before Mom turned to Dad and said, “John, I’m sorry.” I couldn’t tell if she was talking about Grandpa or about something else.
“I’m sorry, too,” I piped up from the backseat, and Emilie echoed me. Johnny, locked in his own private pain, stared out the window at the muddy landscape that was beginning to emerge next to banks of melting snow.
Dad grunted in acknowledgment. He drove faster, the suggestion of burgers forgotten, and none of us daring to mention it now.
I stared out the window as night descended like a giant hand being lowered from the sky, trapping us in its shadow. One week, I thought. Everything in the world had changed in only one single week.
Mom looked surprised when Dad took the turnoff for Watankee, instead of heading straight into Manitowoc. “We’ve still got about a half hour before visiting hours end,” she pointed out. “If we stop off at home first...”
Dad didn’t flinch. “There’s business at home to attend to,” he said, and I assumed he meant the night’s milking, or something to do with one animal or another, but when he pulled into our driveway, he didn’t slow to park in front of our house, but headed instead toward the barn, turning the steering wheel sharply at the last minute to pull the Caprice up onto the lawn.
“John, what in the—”
Our barn, built by Grandpa’s dad more than a hundred years ago, had been repainted a beautiful red last year by Johnny. It had been a month-long process that had started when school was out and ended around the time of the softball tournament, involving ladders and scaffolding and, at one point, Johnny dangling from a harness in his paint-blotched jeans. We’d been proud of the result, standing back to admire it all the way from the main road. Best-looking barn for miles around, Dad had said.
Now he flicked on the high beams, and we all saw it at the same time.
Emilie gasped, and Mom cried, “Oh, dear Lord!”
Dad jerked the car into Park and hopped out, Johnny close behind him. Mom and Emilie followed, but I stayed put, still belted into the middle, as they inspected the damage. I didn’t need to be any closer—I could see it perfectly from where I sat. The headlights had illuminated the cheerful red of the barn, but also an ugly smear of white sprayed across it, in letters at least eight feet tall.
FUCK YOU ILLER,
it said. A tipped-over ladder lay sprawled on its side, probably right where Jerry Warczak had found it. At first glance, the ladder seemed to be covered in blood. But then I spotted the five-gallon bucket of red paint, which Grandpa must have dragged out of the shed that morning to paint over the giant
K.
KILLER.
Even before I emerged from the car, I could hear Mom and Dad yelling at each other—Mom insisting that they should have called the police the moment Bill Lemke stepped onto our property the other night, Dad saying it wouldn’t have mattered, that calling the police on Wednesday wouldn’t have prevented Bill Lemke and his cronies from coming back onto our property later.
Mom’s voice bit through the night. “Well, we’ll never know, now! If we had done something to stand up for ourselves—”
“I’m telling you, that wouldn’t have made a bit of difference! Look at the situation we’re in. They need someone to blame, and here we are—”
“Yes, here we are! A bunch of cowards, afraid to stand up for ourselves, afraid of what people will think of us! Maybe your dad had the right idea with that shotgun. Or maybe I should have had it, because I don’t know if I would have fired into the air!”
The strange bubbling noise beneath their yells, I realized, was Emilie sobbing. I don’t know if I’d ever heard her cry before. I was the one who cried when a calf didn’t make it or when I got in trouble, and Emilie was the one who rolled her eyes, scornful of my reaction. Now she stood in front of the barn with tears streaming down her cheeks, her lower lip quivering.
I looked at Johnny, who was staring at the barn, his hands shoved in his jeans pockets. I wonder if I was the only one who heard Johnny say, over and over beneath his breath: “It’s all my fault.”
“What are you doing?” Dad called, and I realized that Mom was crossing the lawn, already halfway to our house. He charged after her, catching her by the elbow, and she pushed him away. “You need to think about this,” he hissed.
“What’s there to think about? Bill Lemke and his cronies vandalized our property, and I’m not going to let them get away with it!”
“You need to cool down first,” he said as she pushed against his chest. I was crying now, too, the tears hot on my cheeks.
“You know what? I’ve had enough! I don’t care how it looks, or what people might say. We haven’t done anything wrong!” She looked at each one of us in turn, her gaze lingering unsteadily on Johnny. That look seemed to say everything we hadn’t been saying—that some of us in particular were innocent, that one of us in particular wasn’t. Mom seemed to catch this slip herself, because she changed focus. “What do they want from us? Are we just supposed to take it and take it and take it—”
Dad whirled around on us, barking sharply, “Inside! Now!” His voice was angrier than I’d ever heard it, and his face was ugly with fury, too, as if he had morphed into some monster version of his human self. There was nothing to do but obey this voice, so Emilie and I walked carefully around them, past Kennel, who was straining at the edge of his chain. Inside, Emilie put her arm around me, and we stared out the window together, as if we were watching some kind of horrible storm blow through and hoping against hope that our house would survive. Johnny came inside a minute later, but Dad and Mom stayed outside for a long time. Even with the door closed behind us, we could hear them yelling.
This was worse, somehow, than drunken men showing up at our door late at night, or someone sneaking onto our property overnight to paint
FUCK YOU
KILLER
on our barn. It hurt worse than anything Bill Lemke might say, or anything that might show up in print about us in the newspaper. Watching them from an upstairs window, I realized that when Stacy Lemke went missing, something had broken within us—not like a chip off a piece of china, which could be superglued back together, and not like a broken pipe that could be mended, at least temporarily, with a strip of duct tape. This was no clean break; it was as if something had shattered and splintered into a million little pieces. Even if there was a way to get it all back together somehow, it would never be exactly the same.