Something Is Out There (14 page)

“Well, we haven’t. We decorated the tree. We went to the hospital.”

She lay back down. “I’m exhausted.”

“You’re just going to stay here the rest of the night? It’s not even seven o’clock.”

“I’ll be out in a little while. Let me get a hold of myself. Christ.”

Dora was Kent’s aunt, and she had come to visit because Paula asked her to—the two of them had formed a close friendship over the years. They could talk to each other; they could tell each other anything. Paula hadn’t told Dora this, but she was thinking of leaving Kent—tension over money, absences, drinking, unexplained aspects of failing business, sadness generally in the bedroom. What she did tell Dora was that Kent was unhappy, had seemed so for a period of months. And in all of this there were similarities: Dora had been in the process of leaving Christopher’s father when Christopher’s father died.
Christopher didn’t know any of this. Dora had kept it from him—and from everyone, really, except Paula. Dora felt that there was something hypocritical in accepting the boy’s sorrowful affection, his worry over how she was taking the loss of a husband for whom as another human being she was sorry, but whose private treatment of her, over ten years of marriage, had earned something other than love.

Paula had been describing her own unrest to Dora, the two of them sitting in the kitchen breaking up stale bread for dressing, when they heard the shot.

The snow was sweeping across the light from the porch now. Paula opened the door again and stepped out into the cold. The boys had gone out beyond the border of the light.

“Luke?” she called. “Virgil?”

Just the wind, carrying its weight of snow. She stepped down onto the sidewalk, which was quickly being covered once more. “Boys?”

Nothing.

She went back up onto the porch and along it, to the end. And here they were, standing over the spot where their father had fallen. They were talking low. She couldn’t hear what they were saying for the wind. But Luke had one hand on Virgil’s shoulder, and now Virgil reached up and wiped his nose with the sleeve of his coat. He was crying. “Boys?” she said.

They seemed startled. They walked around into the yard and along the front of the porch, to the stairs, where she went to meet them. “We’re all right,” she said.

Luke had picked up the broom and begun sweeping the steps. “Yeah,” he said. Virgil held a shovel, but just leaned on it. He had pulled his scarf over his lower face.

“Come inside now. You’ll both catch cold.”

She saw again the way her husband’s gaze had sought her, from where he lay on his back, unable to move or breathe, and later in the hospital as he wept—the helplessness in his eyes, the stare. She shivered.

Luke had stopped sweeping. “I wish it was tomorrow,” he sobbed.

She said, “Daddy’s all right.”

He turned back to sweeping the sidewalk. Virgil stood there, staring at her, holding the shovel. His face was white—he looked scared to the bone. She stepped down and put her arms around him.

Their life had been good; they were so fortunate. This was still true.

Yet she couldn’t stop seeing Kent lying open-eyed on his back in the snow, and the blood soaking it in a widening circle at his legs. “It’s a happy Christmas,” she told them. “A very lucky Christmas after all. Right? It could’ve been so much worse.”

Luke stared out at the road. “I’ll feel better when Christopher gets here.”

In less than fifteen minutes, the work they had done on the sidewalk was visible only as a small declension in the drift of snow. And it kept coming, the wind whistling. Looking at it all, you saw the flakes plunging horizontally, with a force. Paula walked out in it, and struggled to the end of the driveway, hoping to see the lights of Christopher’s Jeep. The flakes stung her face. There was no sky, but only this massive wall of blowing snow, as though the wind had taken on nearly solid form, and here was its shape, blasting down from the mountains. The pathology of this day seemed to be expanding—the world had
broken from its strand of gravitation, was flying off into the blackness.

There was no sign of life down the road.

Inside, Dora had fallen asleep. The boys were staring at television—some newspeople, treating the whole thing like a delightful happenstance. A white Christmas. The first in years. They even played a little of the song. She looked at them and thought of them as beings from another sphere of existence, another species. They were where they were, in the lighted studio, smiling, sure of life; and she was here, in this house where her vaguely estranged husband, only hours ago, had been shot.

“I’m getting worried,” Luke said abruptly. “Why doesn’t Chris call? There’s no way he can get through a storm this bad. I bet the road’s closed.”

“They haven’t reported that,” his younger brother said.

Aunt Dora appeared in the entrance of the room and coughed. When she spoke, her voice was tremulous, filled with dread. “He’s not here yet? He hasn’t called?”

They all looked at her.

“Oh, God,” she said. “Something else’s happened.”

“I’m going to make coffee,” Paula said.

In the kitchen, Dora sobbed, sitting at the table with her face in her hands. “I’m a wreck,” she said. Paula poured more coffee for herself, and a cup for Dora, who looked at it as though she didn’t recognize what it was. The television news-people were now talking about a big accident out on Route 66 West. Christopher would be coming south on highway 17, and would only cross under 66 West.

Kent had taken such a fall after the shot. The bullet had not hit bone, nor cut through any vein or artery; it had hit him in the lower thigh and exited a little higher out the back of the leg. They were making sure there would be no infection; the
wounds were treated and closed. It was the fall that might’ve done something more, might’ve hurt him where they weren’t looking. When she was very young, a boy she knew had crashed on his bicycle and injured his side—a slightly cracked rib, the doctor said. But the boy had ruptured his spleen, and died as a result of it.

Now she watched Dora lift her coffee cup and sip. There wasn’t going to be any coming back from what this day had been. Her boys were talking over the newscasters on the television, and she wanted to tell them to be quiet so she could hear.

In the next instant, the boys stirred from their places—there was a scurrying toward the front door. They had seen headlights coming down the road. When she and Dora got to them, they were standing in the open doorway, in the still-blowing snow, waiting for the lights to get to the turnoff into the driveway in front of the house. The headlights came. They all watched.

“I’m going to give him hell for not calling us,” Dora said. But there was no conviction in her voice.

The car came pushing by, lighting up the hillocks of drifting snow. It plowed through and went on, and they all watched the red taillights until the heavy curtain of snow blotted out the twin embers. For a moment, no one said anything.

“Hell,” Luke said, under his breath. “Where the hell are they going? There’s nothing down that way but Wayside Pond and the gas station.”

“He’ll be here,” said Paula.

Dora wandered back into the kitchen and then on, to her room. The boys talked about shoveling the walk again. Paula said to go ahead; it was something for them to do. She couldn’t quite voice the thought—it was too ordinary, really, almost childlike—but it seemed impossible that the trauma of the
afternoon’s trouble and anxiety could be added to by anything serious where Christopher was concerned. The world she knew did not act that way. She wanted to say something to the boys—to tell them that the day’s misfortune was sufficient, plenty enough for anyone, and surely the world would not add to all that. But then she understood the irrational nature of this line of thinking; there was not going to be anything sensible or logical about this day. She felt a little freezing current of air under her heart, and tried to concentrate on watching the boys shovel the walk again. They barely made any headway.

When she went back into the kitchen, she found Dora standing at the kitchen sink, taking a pill. Xanax, Dora said, to calm her nerves. There was a glass of whiskey on the table, next to the open bottle: Old Forester. Dora had changed into her nightgown. “You trying to calm down or knock yourself unconscious?” Paula said.

“Sometimes this is my nighttime ritual.”

Paula watched her move to the table, lift the glass, and throw it back. She set the glass down and poured another. “He’s stopped for the night, and just forgot to call me,” she said.

“Hey,” Luke called from the other room.

They all moved to the front door again. What looked like the same car had come back down the road—and now it turned in. A man, not Christopher, got out. He was tall, big around, heavy, and he wore a long beige car coat over jeans and boots. The car coat had a hood, which was up, though not zipped tight. The man stood gazing at the upper windows of the house. Paula said, “Get back from the window,” and they all moved.

“Who is it?” Dora said.

“I can’t make out the face,” said Paula, peering out the small opening in the curtains of the window next to the door. The man crossed the snow-covered walk toward the porch. He came up onto the stoop, looked to either side, and back out to the road.

Then he stepped forward and knocked.

The sound brought a little yelp of startlement up from the bottom of Paula’s throat. Dora looked at her. “Well?”

Paula moved to the door. “Yes?” she said, loud enough to be heard through it.

“Hello,” said the man. “I didn’t think I’d make it here. It’s bad out on the highway. Is Kent Goodson at home, please.”

“He went out for a few minutes,” Paula said. “Do I know you?”

“No, ma’am, we never met. I did some work for him, though. I was supposed to meet him here this afternoon but the storm slowed me down. I gotta get some papers filed with the county, you know. For permits on a renovation?”

Paula looked at Dora, and at the boys. They all stared back.

“I can come back later,” he said. “Sorry to bother you. Can I just leave these papers in the mailbox?”

Paula opened the door. “You can give them to me.”

“Oh,” the man said. “Thank you.” He reached into the coat. “I swear I never saw snow gather that quick in my life.” He handed her a sheaf of forms. “They just need his signature as the contractor of record. And—well, I don’t really know how I’m gonna get ’em back though.” He turned a little and looked up the road through the rushing wall of snow.

Paula had the thought that the day’s trouble had made her suspicious, and she looked at the man, who seemed merely perplexed at the problem. “How important are these papers?” she asked him.

“Well, you know, the guy wanted us to pull permits. And the county requires the papers. Can’t really close the deal or begin the work—you know. This is a bathroom these people are adding.”

She remembered Kent talking about it. She said, “Kent is in the hospital.”

He came in, bigger even than he had looked standing out there, looming in the doorway, and then inside the doorway, further strangeness in this very strange and terrifying day. Paula stepped back from reflex, and she thought about how paranoid the day had made her. Dora and the boys had gone into the kitchen—Dora herded them in there as soon as Paula spoke about where Kent was.

“I’m so sorry to hear that. Truly, ma’am.”

She had an abrupt sense of all of it being connected, something unfolding that she was ignorant of, and for which she was unready. He put the hood down on the coat, and snow dropped from it onto the little area rug. “Just so sorry. I guess—”

“He’s going to be home in a couple of days,” Paula said. “Well, three days.”

“Nothing serious, I hope.”

“He took a fall. He’ll be fine.”

The wind was pushing through the door behind him, and now he seemed aware of it. He stepped back to the frame of it, and then out onto the porch again. “I’m sorry about messing up your rug, there. I’ll leave the papers with you. If he can sign them I can come back and pick them up. They just really wanted to get going while the weather’s bad, you know, because this is inside work.”

“I’ll tell him,” Paula said. What she wanted now was for him to be gone.

“Thanks,” he said, and she saw him shiver. It touched her in an odd way—a poor man trying to do an honest thing in the face of suspicion that had nothing to do with him.

“Would you like some coffee?” she heard herself say.

“Oh, you’re so very kind. But I better get going.” He turned and started off the porch. “Oh,” he said, turning. “Is Christopher around?”

“Christopher?”

“I went to school with him, and he e-mailed me he was coming down.”

“He’s on his way. He should be here soon.”

“Well—tell him I said ‘Hey.’ Maybe we can get together while he’s here.”

“What’s your name?”

“Jack,” he said. “Tell him Jack Stallings.”

“I will.”

“Thanks for the offer of hospitality,” he said. “I do appreciate it.” He pulled the hood up, walking away.

She watched him go to the car, swipe the snow from the window, get in, and start it. He seemed now to be in something of a hurry. Dora and the boys had come into the room behind her. Both boys held knives. Dora had one of Kent’s golf clubs. The car backed out of the drive, with some spinning of the wheels, went on back down the road, and was gone.

Paula closed the door, locked it, then looked out the window again. Her hands shook. The others moved to the front windows, and for what seemed a long while no one said anything.

“What the hell is going on?” Dora said. “For God’s sake—you actually let him in.”

“He knows Christopher.”

“I heard that. I never heard Christopher mention him.”

“Well, he’s
gone
, Dora. And—look.” She held up the sheaf of forms. “He had to drop these off. That’s all. He was a nice man doing his job.”

Dora only briefly glanced at her, then stepped to the window and looked out. “Well, I never heard of him.”

Paula looked at the forms. They were all permits for electrical and plumbing work on the job Kent had talked about doing.