Broken river, p.27
Broken River, page 27
Sam is sitting very still now. She’s processing the information. A big guy and a little guy came to the party. They shot her brother and they shot Yetta, both of whom are now dead.
An old car, she thinks. A Cadillac. A light-blue Cadillac.
Why does she know this? An immaculately preserved powder-blue Cadillac. She can see it in her mind’s eye, idling in the dark somewhere, with snow falling on it. She can see it parked across the street from the old theater in the bright daylight, two men emerging from it and onto the dirty sidewalk, the big one in a windbreaker a little too small for him, the little one in a ski parka and a pair of acid-washed jeans. Passing it on the road out to the trailer park, in the shotgun seat of Uncle Bobby’s car, she can hear him saying, “Look at that rig, it’s right out of a time capsule, just look at it.”
Sam has seen the men at Denny’s. She served them. They were there, watching Daniel. Of course it’s them. The big one gazed intently at her. Not the way other men do. Not with longing.
She saw the Cadillac when she was exiting Karl and Irina’s driveway in Karl’s Volvo. She saw the Cadillac pulling away from the shoulder of Route 94 at the bottom of the hill, as though it had been sitting there, watching and waiting.
She saw the man in the ski parka while she hid in the woods with Irina. She watched him climb onto the porch and knock on the door that Sam now must suppress an impulse to turn and stare at.
She doesn’t entirely understand what is happening. She only knows that Daniel is dead, that he has been murdered, how will she ever tell her mother? She doesn’t know what it has to do with her—is it the weed? that Daniel was growing, that she was dealing?—but it hardly matters. She fears that they are coming here. They have, after all, been here before.
From the outside, to the Observer, Sam merely appears, hunched over the table with her hands palms-down on the table, to be deep in thought, as though trying to solve a difficult problem. Her expression is one not of grief or shock but of concentration. But the Observer knows that she is about to act. Her narrative line is clear now. The next half hour she will later remember as a kind of infinitude, a sealed but borderless chamber in her life. At times, looking back, she’ll believe her brain must have shut down, gone into cold storage, for all she can recall. At other times she’ll remember it as a box of memories—her life up until then not flashing before her eyes, like a film flickering by at high speed, but rather a whirling storm of fragments, spinning all around her, revealing themselves only in brief, static images, bursts of speech. Rightly or not, these minutes will serve as a gravity well of her past and future life—a collapsed star of memory, a black hole, all lines bending toward it. (Yes, the Observer tells itself, yes.)
The man named Karl is approaching now, around the side of the house. He’s holding an empty coffee mug and is about to step onto the porch. He does it—he climbs the porch steps, stamps snow off his boots, comes in the door. The girl Sam starts, stands up fast, and the chair clatters to the floor behind her. “Karl,” she says. “Get Irina. Turn out the lights. Go to the studio.”
“What?” he says. He seems dazed, puzzled. The Observer, and Sam as well, know that this is because he has been smoking to excess, out in the studio. To him, events are unfolding slowly, mysteriously, disconnected from one another and from their causes. The redness of his eyes, the dilation of his pupils, are driving Sam to irrational anger.
“Take Irina to the studio,” she says in a near shout, “and turn out the lights!”
A small smile appears on his face. “Hey …,” he says. “What’s going on?”
“Karl!” Sam screams now. “These guys killed my brother! They are coming here!”
He looks down into his coffee mug, as though an explanation might be hidden there. He says, “Wait. Wait.”
“Fuck,” Sam says, then she runs up the stairs two at a time.
Irina is sitting cross-legged on her bed, surrounded by books and papers, holding her guitar. She says to Sam, “Did you just yell at Father?”
“Buddy, you have to come with us now. We’re going out to your dad’s studio.”
Her mouth is a perfect O. She blinks. “Why?”
“Some people are coming, I think. Bad people. It’ll be fine, we just have to go out there and … lay low.”
There is a moment of silence, which, in its new incarnation as an entity of nearly limitless knowledge, the Observer finds shockingly long. The future of these people is clearer now than ever. Everything that will happen in the next thirty minutes is now almost certain to happen, regardless of how long any of the humans spends contemplating his or her potential actions. Lay down your guitar, Irina, and follow.
Irina is paralyzed by doubt. She doubts the reality of this moment, and her trust in Sam, and her faith that there is even a correct choice to be made. For a surprising instant, the Observer actually thinks it might be mistaken: Irina might not go with Sam, and the narrative lines might tremble, flex, and shatter. But then, at last, Irina lays the guitar down before her and scrambles off the bed.
Downstairs, Karl has barely moved. The coffee mug is on the table now. He stares at them, confused. He says, “Okay, what?”
“Your studio,” Sam says. “Come on.”
And like that, he believes. He shakes himself, like an animal coming up from sleep, and says, “Okay, then.” He digs in his pocket for the keys, holds them out. “I’m going to call the cops. Take her.”
“Father?” Irina says quietly.
Sam leads her across the kitchen, takes the keys from Karl as he draws his phone from his pocket. The three hurry to the door and set off running through yesterday’s snow. It has begun to snow again, and the air has the hushed, protected quality that implies much more to come. Then, “Wait,” Karl says suddenly. He points behind them, toward the porch. “Footprints.”
The three of them look at each other. Then Irina says “This way” and grabs Sam’s hand. She leads her back, past the steps, then circles them around the house the other way, clockwise, keeping them close to the shrub line. Their trail disappears in the shadows of the bushes—there is not much moon behind the storm, and the only light is the inside light from the living room.
“Good thinking,” says Sam.
“I always knew this would happen,” Irina says, with no evident fear in her voice.
The Observer feels now, more than sees, a convergence of thoughts in the minds of Irina and Sam; it is true that Irina has renewed her recently dismissed fantasies of involvement with the crimes of the past; her dalliance with CyberSleuths, which not so long ago seemed childish, now seems preordained, consequential, and she believes that her doom is sealed. And as for Sam: she has never imagined herself as old and content, surrounded by loved ones, in some comfortable and uneventful future life. She has always felt hunted. By whom, or what, she has never understood, but tonight it seems right that these men are hunting her. Crazy murderers. They were always going to come for her.
The Observer recognizes that both young women are wrong but cannot see precisely how. It cannot project that far into the future.
Karl is muttering into his phone now, talking to the police. “Tell them it’s the guys from the killings on Gauss Lane,” Sam says. Irina has led them far into the trees, evidently intending to double back from behind the studio. She whispers, “Sam? Is your brother … did they hurt your brother?”
“Yes,” Sam says.
“It’s not your fault,” Irina tells her, with absolute seriousness.
Sam gathers her closer, and the girl throws her arms around her waist. They walk in tandem, awkwardly, moving along the studio wall. Karl is repeating the address into his phone. He seems to be having trouble making himself understood. “No,” he says, “after the entrance to the state forest. Before the church with the reader board.” The snow is blowing gently into their faces.
And then they’re at the studio door. Lights are blazing through the windows above, but no headlights shine from the drive. No sound. As though channeling the Observer’s thoughts, Sam is suddenly confident that she is completely, embarrassingly wrong. The men aren’t coming here. The killings have nothing to do with her, or with Karl and Irina, or with this house, or with the murders of the past. She wants to tell them, Wait, stop, it’s a false alarm. There’s nothing to fear.
Karl unlocks the door, slips in. Darkness arrives with a snap.
Inside, it is hot and close and muggy with marijuana smoke. Sam hears the click of the lock behind them, and then Karl’s phone illuminates the floor. “Other side of the forge.” He leads them there, and they wedge themselves into the corner, between the forge and the wall, and sit cross-legged in a row, with Irina in the middle.
Karl whispers, “The call you got. It said they’re coming here?”
“Not exactly.”
He’s poking at the phone. His head is a black, furry ball. Finally the little rectangle of light disappears. The windows along the ceiling glow faintly with the light from the house; Sam feels a hand on her arm, Irina’s, and the hand travels down and interlocks its fingers with hers. The Observer occupies the corner with them, impatient for events to unfold. It wonders if it will be right; or, rather, it wonders how right it will be.
“The police will be here soon,” Sam says. “Then we can go back inside.”
“Okay,” Irina whispers back. “Sam.”
“Yeah?”
“It’s not your fault,” she says again. But this time she adds, “It’s my fault. I told Jasn and the art teacher about the house and the murders and everything.”
“Who?”
“I told them about how your parents died. Or who I thought was your parents. It’s those men that killed them, isn’t it.”
Irina—
“It’s them,” Irina says. “I’m sorry. They found out.” There are tears in her voice.
“Shsh.”
“Sam,” she says, very quietly now. “I put your picture on the internet. I’m sorry. I told those people, and I put your picture on the internet. Saying you were Samantha.”
Sam says, “My … you have my picture?”
“I took it outside Dairy Queen. I put it on a messageboard. About crimes. I said you were her.”
“Jesus,” Sam whispers involuntarily, and Irina begins to cry. So Sam holds her tighter, says, “It’s not your fault, either. Bad things don’t need reasons to happen.”
A hand brushes Sam’s shoulder; it’s Karl’s. She almost forgot he was here. He was putting his arm around his daughter and then, almost as an afterthought, has extended it to Sam as well. Sam leans into it; she can feel the nearness of Karl’s head to hers, with Irina’s soft hair underneath. The three of them sit there, listening to each other breathe.
They wait. Minutes tick by, or hours. (The Observer is aware that, for these humans, time has slowed to an excruciating degree, and it experiences a moment of irritation at the pettiness of their impatience. They have not, after all, floated for a decade inside an abandoned house. But then it remembers that they fear the imminent arrival of death, and it chastens itself for this lapse in compassion.) Sam is restless; she is on the verge of apologizing for scaring them and for putting them through this. And then, faintly, the sound of footsteps striking wood—specifically, the wooden front porch of the house—drifts through the night and into the dark studio.
“Did you hear that?” Irina whispers.
“It must be the police,” Karl croaks.
But they don’t move. Irina’s hand grips Sam’s tighter. Karl leans in harder. Their heads bump together. His breathing is audible in the room, deep and resonant and hoarse.
The time has come for the Observer to leave its charges here, in the dark studio that is gradually growing colder, and return to the place of its origins. It is time to go back to the house. It gathers itself, contracting, identifying its now-disparate and diffuse parts and pulling them in close. It tries to remember what it was like to move slowly, to confine itself to rooms, to see only one thing at a time, to be blind to the future. It tries to remember what it was like to be more human.
Only an instant passes in human time, but the process feels laborious to the Observer. To limit itself is no longer in its nature. When it has shrunk to a point, the Observer makes its way through the crack between the doorframe and door; drifts through the falling snow to the kitchen wall; flits into a tunnel in the cedar shakes made years before by a carpenter bee; and enters the kitchen through the screwhole of an electrical-outlet faceplate. (The Observer remembers, now, the contractor’s workman who dropped the missing screw and watched it roll into a crack between two floorboards. “Fuck it,” the man said, and left the hole empty.) Soon it is hovering, gently bobbing in the kitchen as it did for much of a decade, enduring the interminable fractions of a second it takes for the men on the porch to push open the door. (The door isn’t even latched. The people left in haste and didn’t pull it closed all the way. If all the humans disappeared right now—and for a moment the Observer wishes they all would, so that it could enjoy, as it once did, the complexity of unpeopled silence—the wind would soon blow the door open, and leaves and rain would coat the kitchen floor.)
At last the door flies open, and the men enter, the big one and the small one, each with a gun drawn. So primitive, these devices made for killing at a distance; the Observer doesn’t understand why the humans have not designed more efficient and precise tools for this simple task. Their technology is certainly capable enough. Perhaps they enjoy the sensation of an explosion in the hand, the noise and smoke. Perhaps they don’t really want to kill and wish to introduce an element of uncertainty into the process.
In any event, the Observer is bored now as the two men creep through the house, seeking the inhabitants who are not there. It draws what would be a breath if breathing were something it needed to do and explodes itself back into its full scope and articulation; it leaves the house now and is instantly with its people in the studio, as they await the conclusions of their narratives.
The girl named Sam has admitted to herself, at last, that it is not the police who have arrived at the house; they would be calling out now if these people were the police. They would shout Karl’s name and tell him it was safe to emerge from hiding. So it must be them—the men. All three of them know it because none of them speaks or moves. They wait a long time for the next thing to happen. It feels to Sam like an hour, though it can’t be more than five minutes—how long does it take two men to determine that a house is empty? Or is it money they’re looking for now? None of it makes any sense. If it is all true, if Daniel is dead, if these men kill Sam as well, it will confirm their mother’s every misapprehension about the world. Everything is exquisitely interconnected, malevolent, and dangerous. They are, in fact, out to get you.
Her thoughts are interrupted by the sound of a door slamming shut. Again, footsteps on the porch, down the stairs. Low voices. Then the voices quiet, and there is silence. But a fuller silence, a more expectant one. Irina shivers, and Karl pulls her closer. Sam leans into them both. Minutes pass, and then the thudding of boots reaches them from outside the studio door. Somebody jiggles the knob, then pounds, violently. “Hey!” a man shouts. Irina lets out the tiniest peep, barely audible even to Sam.
The men are talking. They walk around the exterior of the studio, looking for a way in. Will they notice the footprints? It was dark where Irina led them, and the snow has continued to fall. Perhaps it filled their prints. The men don’t hesitate as they circle the studio, and they don’t speak. Sam can hear their shoes crunching in the snow, their coats dragging along the shrubs. At one moment, the men are mere inches from where the three of them are huddled, separated only by the wall. But the men continue their circumnavigation, confer again at the door.
And then, incredibly, they seem to give up. Their voices recede. Sam hears the words “in the woods,” “fuckin’ freeze to death.”
They have decided to leave. They’re leaving.
(Wait, says the Observer.)
Karl’s phone rings.
It is approximately the loudest noise Sam has ever heard—a grating electric chirp like a motel alarm clock, accompanied by the sudden illumination of their corner as the screen switches itself on. Before Karl can silence it, it rings again. Then it stops. Karl has apparently hit ANSWER. He’s holding the phone in his lap and a woman’s voice is coming out of it, a tiny beacon from the world of safety and freedom, small but distinct. “Karl?” it says, with some urgency. “Karl?” A long pause. “Are you there? Karl, please pick up.”
Surely the men outside can hear. What in the hell is he doing?
“Karl! Please!” the woman says, and then his thumb occludes the display and the call is ended. The screen goes black.
“I’m so sorry,” he says, and a moment later the pounding on the door resumes, the sound of pure, unfettered rage. It sounds like they have found a heavy branch and they are bringing it down over and over on the knob.
