Others came too: the same mothers of childhood friends who’d visited her in the hospital, bringing this time casseroles, bringing lasagna, Just put it in the oven at three-fifty, sweetie, or do you have a microwave…?
Lastly came another lawman, the man who’d replaced her father when he retired: Sheriff Wayne Halsey. The sheriff looking so awkward on the porch that she didn’t even bother inviting him in; she thanked him for checking on her, promised to call if she needed anything, watched him walk back to his cruiser, waved when he waved, then shut the wooden door again and locked it.
The sofa was still warm, and she lay staring at her father’s things on the coffee table, listening to the ticking of his watch, and when she woke again it was morning—Monday morning. The weekend was over.
SHE’D REMEMBERED TO charge his phone, at least, and the first thing she saw when she lifted it was his face, next to hers—the two of them red-faced and smiling in their black knit caps.
Audrey, this is a bad idea… Her father, the sheriff, mincing out onto the ice in the rented skates. He was from Illinois and had not played hockey as a kid, and had not been on any kind of skates since he was ten years old, he said.
It’s like riding a bike, she said.
Have you ever, in your life, seen me on a bike?
She wiped her eyes, her face. Then she found the number she was looking for, and a woman answered the phone and put her on hold—no music, just fizzy silence. The phone smelled like smoke. The woman came back and told her yes, he could see her at ten thirty this morning, would that be all right?
She was in the shower a long time, lathering and scrubbing and shaving all one-handed, a plastic bag rubber-banded over the cast, and afterwards she found socks and underclothes in her dresser and she stepped into a pair of old jeans once too tight and now too loose and she took an old flannel shirt from the hanger it had hung on untouched for maybe three years, and lastly she brushed out her hair and bound it tightly in a damp ponytail at the back of her head.
The canvas jacket was too big and too heavy and it reeked of smoke, but her cast slipped right into it, and she loved it. She stood outside on the porch, squinting in the sunlight and rooting up the sunglasses from the breast pocket and putting them on, the glasses loose at her temples and heavy on her nose. Dark- green tint. The aviators he’d worn for years.
The Ford sat where it always sat. A male nurse from the hospital had driven it while another nurse, a woman, had driven Audrey in a little car that stank of the nurse’s gym bag, both nurses making sure she got inside all right, that she would be all right—could they get her anything, was she sure they couldn’t call someone?—before leaving her alone in the house at last.
Now, climbing into the Ford, she thought she’d cry again from the smell of it—the smokiness, yes, but also something beneath that, or within it, some old sheriffy scent or combination of scents that was the very smell of—what? Of safety.
She didn’t cry. She scooted the seat forward, buckled up, made an adjustment to the rearview mirror, and put the Ford in gear, and with each of these movements her father’s watch slipped and swung on her wrist like a heavy bracelet.
It had snowed but not enough to bring out the plows, and the river when she crossed it was snowy at its bends but clean at its center—glassy black ice maybe a foot thick, maybe more depending on the currents underneath, how fast or slow, and was there an equation for that, such as the rate of descent for a projectile depending on its weight and its speed? For ice thickness you’d have to figure temperature too. And the temperature over how many days. The ice on her river—their river, the Lower Black Root—had been thick but not thick enough. The current too fast there, rushing toward the dam where the water never froze.
Oh, Audrey, sometimes I just love you.
I know. It’s the same with me.
She fed the meter with quarters from his console and crossed the sidewalk toward an image in the glass she took to be someone else altogether, someone on the other side of the glass coming out, before she realized it was her, and she removed the sunglasses and stowed them in the breast pocket of the canvas jacket and opened the glass door and stepped inside. Ten minutes later by her father’s watch the lawyer came up to her in his shirt and tie and took her good hand in both of his as she stood from the chair. “Audrey, I am so sorry. I am so sorry.” Holding on to her hand, looking into her eyes. “I came to see you at the hospital but you were absolutely conked out. How’s your arm?”
“It’s fine, Mr. Trevor, thanks.”
“Please, call me Tuck. What can I get you?” Letting go her hand and turning to the counter. “Debbie, is there yet some coffee back there?”
She’d known him since she was young, tagging along with her father to the courthouse, or he’d show up at a campaign rally when her father had to campaign, or she’d see him at school, where his girls were in the class ahead of hers, the Trevor twins, a double dose of pretty and mean. Call me Tuck, he always said but she couldn’t do it.
He walked her back to his office and told her to please sit, and before he’d even settled into his own chair behind his desk he said, “I don’t know where to begin, Audrey. All you’ve been through. Your friend Caroline. And now your father. I have to say I’m surprised to see you up and about at all.”
On the wall behind him was a framed photograph of the Trevor twins in their high school graduation caps and gowns, their white smiles. They’d gone to a school out east, some big-deal college where they could go on being pretty and mean together.
“He told me to come see you, if this happened,” she said.
“Yes, he told me the same thing—to make sure you came to see me, that is. He wasn’t a man who liked to leave things to chance, was he.”
She watched him—did he know? Maybe he did and maybe he didn’t. What did it matter now anyway?
She said, “I guess you know about what he did then.”
“I know what they say he did. News travels fast along certain channels. And if there’s a bigger group of gossips you’d have to prove it to me.”
She looked down at the water bottle the woman had given her. She twisted the cap to break the plastic seal but did not remove it.
“As a father,” the lawyer said, and when he didn’t go on she looked up. Trevor sitting there, not quite looking at her. “As a father, under the same circumstances, I can’t say I wouldn’t have done the same thing. Not that I expect that to console you.”
She didn’t know what to say to that.
Trevor adjusted his glasses. He cleared his throat. “It may be a poor time to ask,” he said, “but have you heard anything more about the investigation?”
She told him about the sheriff coming to see her at the house and showing her the pictures.
“He brought you a photo array?”
“Yes.”
“To your house?”
“Yes.”
Trevor frowned, watching her. “And was he there?”
“Sorry?”
“The boy who attacked you. Was he in the photo array.”
“I don’t know. I couldn’t say. They all looked like the same boy to me.”