She Walks in Shadows(9)
“Just different. He’s stressed. It’s hard, you know, worrying about feeding a family when your neighbor’s lying in wait, drooling over your property.” She gave him a look. He wasn’t fazed. He’d long-ago reconciled himself to the vulture’s life. “Maybe the water’s gone bad. All the fracking they’re doing out by the aquifer.”
Ambrose clicked his tongue, muttering something about “hippie bullshit,” then leaned in, putting his right hand on the door frame as if he owned the place, as if she wouldn’t have slammed the door on his fingers. His voice lowered. “Do you need help, Abby?”
“No, I don’t need your help. What kind of help could you give me?” She grabbed the door. “Nate’s coming home soon. I don’t want to be a witness in a murder trial.”
Actually, Nate didn’t come home for another hour. She heard his truck pull up, but he didn’t come in. When she ventured outside, he was standing and staring at the freshly scalped corn field with his keys dangling from his right hand, as if hypnotized by an inaudible sermon. She asked if he was all right, but her fingers wouldn’t quite rise to touch his arm. His exhale seeped out like a deflating balloon.
“What did the guy at the mill say?”
“Max Beecham is a motherf*cker.”
“What?”
“Max Beecham doesn’t believe in us.”
Abigail hurried back inside. She called her sister’s cell, but it was off; called her house phone and only got her five-year-old niece. “Will you tell Mommy to call Aunt Abby? Aunt Abby in Cripple Creek.” She dropped the phone when she heard the porch squeak, but it was just the boys, who ditched their dusty backpacks, and started clapping and calling, “Here, boy! Here, boy!” Of course, no dogs answered.
All day, she’d been hoping that some vagabond, some wanderer, had snatched up the dogs in the middle of the night and dumped them in the well. Or that perhaps they’d been run over on the highway, or slain by a disease, or just spontaneously died — and that Nate had thrown the bodies in the well in an attempt to protect the boys from the reality of death. But when the boys were still mewling out in the field well after she’d called them in for dinner, Nate said, “Boys, I told you: They ran away. Told you we didn’t train them well enough. Probably halfway to Colorado by now.”
He turned to the little spoons tucked into the little chipped serving dishes, her meek attempts to ward off sadness. “Why aren’t we eating our corn? Wasn’t that the whole point of moving out here?” She thought they’d ruled out subsistence years ago. “Growing our own food? Living off our own land? Unless you think there’s something wrong with it. You and Pierce.”
She waited until after the boys were in bed, and she had promised Merrill that they would put up lost-and-found flyers all over town, to say something to Nate. That was how long it took to sculpt the nauseous worry in her heart into something spear-shaped. She lingered at the top of the staircase, rehearsing her words — Did something happen to the dogs last night or I found something in the well — when Nate rounded the corner at the bottom of the stairs and started laboriously climbing up.
“What happened to the dogs?” came stammering out when he reached the second floor.
He sighed loudly. She willed herself not to apologize. “They ran away. Like I said.”
“But I found them in the well.”
Nate’s red eyes finally focused on her. Her poor husband was so horrified — so honest-to-the-bones horrified — by this revelation that he grabbed her by the arm, saying he needed to explain something to her — explain — then pulled the string on the door to the attic to drag her up into that spider-webbed lair of things unwanted, things unexplained. He pushed her down toward the boxes of books that they’d never bothered to cut open after the move and descended the ladder again, slamming the door shut behind him as she lay shaking in a cloud of dust.
At the very beginning, she was relieved to be alone. The dark erased everything that taunted her in the light — the carved-up acres of a burned and spent, uniform earth; the harrowing passage of time. She made believe that she was nothing but a set of lungs, expanding and shrinking. She curled up near the door with her palm against the cold wood and slept.
But when sunlight leaked in through the tiny attic window and the attic door was still closed, the muscles around her ribs started to cramp. She tried pounding her fist and then a flashlight against the attic floor. She tried shouting — first at Nate, then at Teddy, then at Zeke. She avoided yelling Merrill’s name until she had no choice. The boys’ voices seemed so quiet, like they were many islands away across a great sea.
But someone was moving down there below the attic door. She tried everything to talk to it. “Nate?” she called. “Nate, please listen to me. Nate, I love you.” When that got no response she started to scream — complicated accusations about his failure as a pharmaceutical sales supervisor and his need to maintain a sense of moral superiority that degenerated into words that degenerated into noise. She chewed off the tips of her nails; she dragged her fingers through her hair so many times that strands began to come off in her fist.
And then, after the sky’s white-blue started turning to pewter, the door swung open. She was slow crawling toward it, but it was Teddy. Teddy, her wonder. Her savior. The only boy they’d named after a president. “Come quick,” he whispered. “Daddy’s in the field.”