CHAPTER
19
Y
ears later, after so many retellings, there would come a time when any rhythm or flow to what happened that night was lost forever. The story, if there ever was one, was gone. Each moment seems to exist alone now, a snapshot full of shadows and bare knuckles and bared teeth, all of it washed over by the dull, orange streetlight glow that painted the whole world in a flat and lifeless shade of sick.
There is no narrative now, no “And then,” only a disjointed series of images. A pile of photographs I’ve flipped through so many times that I don’t even need to look at them anymore to know what’s there, to see it, to cover my face with my hands and cry.
There is Craig, stepping into the street, lit from above with lurching, shifting shadows playing under his nose and in his mouth.
There is Lindsay, looking back at me, the smile falling from her face and slinking away into the dark.
There is the song of the katydids, the rush of the wind, the small thud of moths committing slow suicide against the streetlight’s hypnotic orange bulb.
There are the men from Silver Lake, sure-footed despite the sour smell of alcohol on their breath, frozen in time beside the open door.
Their mouths are open.
The air is clammy.
Everywhere, people are shouting.
Craig called out and Lindsay moved, the angles of her body shifting, as though she wanted to go to him. I grabbed her arm.
“Don’t.”
He shouted, louder, “Lindsay!”
“Don’t,” I said again, urgency coloring my words red. She stared at me, confusion painting itself in lines between her eyebrows and at the corner of her mouth.
Every sound was sharp, barking, biting. The front door of the restaurant banged open again, and two more men spilled onto the street. Their too-loud voices ripped through the night as they spotted Craig. The men advanced in lockstep, like soldiers, smelling of whiskey. One of them pointed at Craig and called out angrily, a shout that was more noise than words.
In the sky overhead, the clouds had moved in low and fast, laced inside and underneath with the threatless flash of heat lightning. It burst in flickering threes, muted by the clouds. The leaves on the trees turned their blanched white bellies toward the wind. Rustling. Whispering. Sighing harshly as their dry bodies brushed together.
Lindsay had turned to look at me, her eyes searching my face for answers.
“Becca,” she started, and I looked over her shoulder to the place where Craig stood, heard the deliberate tread of his heavy shoes.
“Lindsay,” I said, and grabbed her by the wrist, to hold her there. My voice broke. “Lindsay, it’s
him
.”
I turned and pulled, feeling her tendons sliding under the thin skin of her forearm, trying to drag her back to the safe light and familiar sounds of the kitchen. She looked at me and then back at Craig, not understanding, seeing my fear but not knowing where it came from or why. She wrenched her wrist away.
“What are you talking about?” she shrieked back.
The words spilled out of me and winged away into the night.
“He was there!” I screamed. “He killed her!”
Lindsay looked at me as though I’d slapped her. She backed away from me, then turned to look at Craig.
And backed away from him.
“The police found his footprints, they found his tracks! And he’s been hiding it and lying to everyone all summer because he was there!”
Craig’s face was contorted with rage.
“LINDSAY!” he roared. “She’s out of her fucking mind! Come here, NOW!”
She turned to look at him with her eyes wide and her mouth trembling.
He glared back, breathing hard, his eyes full of hate and fear, the orange light washing over his face and glinting off the slimy fronts of his teeth. He took a step toward us.
The rock hit him in the face.
Craig yelped as it ricocheted away into the dark, where it hit and skittered drily against the ground. A dark spot, growing vertically as blood began to trickle down, had appeared on his forehead. My eyes traced an arc back to the hand of the tall man, the one with the small teeth and broken nose, still extended with its fingers splayed open in release.
One of them, not the rock thrower, a different, shorter shadow man with hard muscles and squat legs, said, “So.”
“You don’t want to do this,” Craig said, but the color drained from his face. He took a step backward.
“Of course we do,” the man slurred.
And they descended upon him.
* * *
The snapshots are disjointed, now, some of them out of order and some only half lit. The dark is full of movement, the staggering ballet of five men with whiskey in their veins and a score to settle, flailing arms and feet that windmill and rise and fall against the shadow on the ground.
There is Craig, with blood in his mouth, fighting.
There is Craig, with blood running from his nose, falling.
He’s big, powerful, built thickly and with heavy fists, but he is no match for ten hands and ten feet of righteous rage.
There is Lindsay, screaming.
Their blows landed everywhere, forcing Craig back against the car and then onto the ground, shouting. Screaming. Falling silent as he ducked his head between his arms and curled awkwardly on the asphalt. Every movement seemed to originate from the blur of hulking shadows and end somewhere on the prone body of the man on the ground. One of the standing group, less adept than the others, hung back and began to scream, his voice high-pitched and spiraling out of control.
“Tell us what you did! Tell us! Tell us what you did!”
Lindsay ran toward them, shouting something, begging them to stop, stop. Her outstretched hands looked like claws. One of the men caught her and pushed her back. She stumbled and fell to the ground, landing heavily on her knee on the unforgiving road. When she stood up, I could see blood and asphalt.
There is blood on the road.
The air is full of shouting.
Craig had stopped fighting back, had stopped recoiling from the blows that rained down on his heavy body, had gone limp and lifeless. The only sounds came from the men around him, the dull smack of fists on flesh, the asthmatic wheeze of one of the attackers as he sucked in air between punches, the scuff and strike of feet against the pavement. And in the trees, the raucous singsong of the katydids.
Lindsay, her face a slick mess of snot and tears, pushed past me and disappeared, screaming, into the restaurant.
I stayed. My legs had never felt so heavy. They were paralyzed, immovable. They weighed hundreds of pounds.
The hitting went on for minutes, hours, went on forever, until it stopped. Each man stood aside, one by one, shoulders rising and falling in tandem with the bulging, heaving shadows on the ground. Darker than the shadows, creeping in all directions, was blood. It poured out of Craig’s face, out of the place where his face should have been, where I could make out only the mottled hole of his mouth in a mass of wet meat. Air whistled through it, guttural, ragged. One of his teeth was on the ground.
One of the men turned his head away and said, “Oh, shit.”
Another sat heavily and all at once, collapsing gracelessly to the ground.
The lightning flashed again, rolling through the clouds, as everyone’s eyes rolled toward the sky. The brittle scratch of dry leaves came again; the wind lifted my hair from my neck. It moaned in my ears. The dull orange light brightened and then flickered, the shadows jumped and deepened. One of the men walked unsteadily toward the line of parked cars, two halting steps and then three quick ones, bent double, and vomited. It hit the ground like water.
Blood and vomit on the road.
Behind me, a door slammed. Somebody—Tom, I thought—said, “Oh, God.”
And then, slowly, the sick orange night was filled with color. Strobing reds and yellows that played like flickering Christmas on the trunks of the trees and the bare brick face of the bistro building, whites and reds and yellows that bathed us all in light. Ambulance. Police. People clustered and wandered in the street, some running, some shouting, two carrying a stretcher and two others flinging open the ambulance doors.
The chief, his shiny pate slicked with sweat, gave me a long look over someone else’s blood-spattered shoulder and then turned away.
Craig was on the stretcher, two men staggering with the weight of him, now joined by two more. He disappeared inside the ambulance. Lindsay was there, her face a mask of misery. She stood by her car, keys in hand, shifting awkwardly from one foot to the other as the doors closed and the siren sounded a mournful note. When they pulled away, I stepped forward and reached for her.
“Don’t fucking touch me,” she hissed.
“Linds—”
“DON’T!” she screamed, shoving me back. I stared at her, dumbly, while she slammed her car door and twisted the key in the ignition. Her eyes met mine; her lips were moving. When she pulled away, her tires left brief, dark tracks made of Craig’s blood.
In my head, I could still hear her voice—so quiet, but as smooth and clean as ice above the purr of the motor.
“You stupid bitch,” she’d said. “Don’t you get it?”
Don’t you get it?
You do not.
Fucking.
Belong here.
CHAPTER
20
I
t is, after all, these small-town tragedies that truly bring a community closer together. That separate the outsiders from the ones who belong. That keep the gates closed, and the doors locked, and the evil of the wider world safely outside.
We don’t trust you if we don’t know you, and sometimes, we don’t trust you if we do. We band together; we circle the wagons; we peer out of our shuttered windows with weapons in hand and loved ones at our side.
When the blinds are drawn and the stakes are high, only the lucky few are allowed to come in.
Brendan Brooks had been cold in the ground when the questions finally came. Long after the body was pulled from the water in the faint, low glow of the setting sun; long after the somber Chief of Police had sat in an air-conditioned living room, a cup of coffee growing cold between his weather-worn hands, and tried his best to offer comfort; long after two parents had sobbed themselves into a fitful sleep where the words “massive head trauma” and “died instantly” echoed like schoolyard taunts. It was weeks later, with the scrim of exhaustion draped heavy over their bloodshot eyes, that Bob and Linda Brooks asked why nobody had warned them about the monstrous metal beast beneath the surface of the lake.
“Those boys,” Linda said, her voice high and wet with choked-back sobs, “they could have warned him. They were right there. Why didn’t they warn him?”
The last sentence a scream.
“Why didn’t you tell us?!”
Those she asked could only stare, and stutter, and turn away.
How could we explain? That nobody had been told because nobody had ever needed to be told; that to the minds of the boys at the bridge that day, the inviting pool below may as well not have existed; that without knowing why, they knew that on that side of the south shore bridge, you do not jump.
That those who live here knew—had always known—that a red Ford tractor with a long-armed front-end loader was hidden in the water at the south end of Silver Lake.
* * *
It was late in the summer when Linda Brooks came back. Alone and with a bare, pale band of skin on her left hand, in the place where her wedding ring had been. She moved back into the little house by the lake, spending her nights in the wood-paneled bedroom whose window now looked out on the place where her only child had died. Days, she could be found in town—pushing an empty shopping cart slowly up and down the aisles of the grocery, dragging her limp fingers over the fat jars of jam and store-brand canned peas in their even rows, fixing her red-shot glare on the shoppers who dared, as her son lay cold in the ground, to keep on as though nothing had happened.
The store became a tomb. People had always gathered at the butcher counter or around the long, gray refrigerator case lined with cold beer, filling the place with a low hum of chatter that rose and fell with the ringing of the register. But nobody could do that now—not with Linda Brooks pacing her grief up and down the aisles, her hollow eyes full of directionless accusations, blame for every single one of us, the thoughtless secret keepers who let her son die. Instead, the grocery stood empty, occupied only intermittently by furtive people who slipped in and out with their purchases as quickly as possible and who fled, at the sound of the mourning woman’s slow footsteps, to hide behind the produce. We ate every leftover in the fridge, ate canned beans and instant rice from our pantries, ate gas station crackers smothered in E-Z CHEEZ rather than risk encountering that stare, those steps, the plaintive whine of the cart’s wheels singing emptily down the fluorescent aisles. And as the cupboards grew bare, the tension grew thicker.
“Something has to be done,” people said.
“It can’t go on like this,” they said.
Until the evening in August, with the twilight deepening on the lake and the crickets singing in the brush, when three women drove over the bridge, past the watchful eyes of the entry guard, and through the southern gate of Silver Lake. They parked an ancient Jeep at the cracked mouth of the driveway where, just weeks before, Brendan Brooks had crossed the threshold. Where, for a few strange hours on a hot summer afternoon, the gap between moneyed visitor and resentful townie had ceased to exist. They walked up the shadowed drive with deliberate steps. Two wore nervous smiles; one held a pie.
And for once, no matter how much or who you ask, there is nobody in Bridgeton who will tell you what happened that night. Nobody will profess to having been there; nobody will claim to know someone who knows, for certain and without a doubt, the words that passed between the three women on the porch and the shadowy figure inside, as they stood on either side of a closed screen door. Nobody gossips quietly about what happened when the door opened, and the Jeep remained, and a dim, golden light shone from the living-room window for the first time in weeks and weeks.
In a small town, in our finer moments, we keep our secrets well.
The next day, the furtive few who dared to brave the grocery found it changed. No lurking shadow by the door, no slow squeal of the shopping cart, no mourning zombie to dare you, with her silent stare, to meet her eyes without choking on your own guilt.
The next night, the Jeep was back; the burning lamp, too, and another beside it. On the lawn of the little house, a golden square of light revealed four shadows, huddled close, barely bobbing with the rhythm of long-awaited conversation.
And when winter came, the light was gone, and so was Linda Brooks.
But you can find her here. In town, among us, another winter weatherer with drugstore highlights and a four-wheel-drive truck. In a tidy bungalow, on a quiet street, with a well-kept garden and an oak tree in the yard. You can see her in the market on Sundays, moving quickly, plucking items from the shelves and joking with the cashier, as they both pretend no memory of that terrible summer. You can see her smiling, with sad and shining eyes, at the young men—the four strapping sons of three brave women—who show up each winter to shovel her driveway, and mow her lawn twice a month when it’s warm.
And if you ask us, if you ask anyone, she’s always been here. Even though it’s clear, from her tailored jackets and silky voice and the unsullied glow of her rich woman’s skin, that her life was once lived elsewhere. Because she is a good woman, a fine woman. She has strong hands, a quick mind, a generous nature. In the summer, her rosebushes are heavy with blossoms, flourishing and fragrant like no others in the neighborhood; in the winter, her house is warm with the scent of cinnamon and nutmeg. And in her short time here, she’s given without measure. Cuttings from her garden. A recipe for lemon tarts, passed down and closely guarded, going back three generations. An open ear, a listening heart, from someone who knows what it is to grieve.
A boy, with an easy grin and gentle nature, lost forever on the cusp of manhood.
Bridgeton claims her as its own, for what she gives us. For what she gave.
For what we took from her.
We cannot give her son back, but we can give her what small towns give best: a fence to chat over. A seat at the bar. A hundred hands to hold in times of trouble; a hundred hearts to share in life’s small joys. And one day, when it’s time, a patch of sweet, green quiet in the ancient graveyard, where bones both old and new are all at peace beneath the rustling grass.
A place to live, and die, knowing that you were truly home.