Stranger Will (25 page)

William steps through the guts of kitchen cabinets aided by his aluminum crutch—pots, pans, paper towels, and bottles of cleaners spilled over the floor. She’s cleared every shelf. Emptied every drawer. William kicks through towels, sofa cushions, knick-knacks pulled from their homes. Every step further displaces the carnage.

“Julie,” he says, his heavy face matching hers.

“Where is my baby?” she asks. “Everyone says I did something with it.”

“I don’t know.” He wades further through the debris.

“And if I did,” she says, “I just want to know where it is. I don’t care. I’ll go to jail if I have to.”

He kneels in front of her. “We’ll look together.” He drops his eyes to her stomach, flowing from the bottom of a sweaty t-shirt. It hangs empty, stitched like the rest of her but still as flaccid and weak as the day their baby left.

“It’s what you wanted, though,” she says. Philip quietly exits the back door. Julie pivots the wheelchair, her skin vibrates to the littered floor. Pregnant nutrition, fat packed on for the survival of a child flows over the armrest, the seat, and her skin burns as it rubs against the wheels. “You can’t be too upset.”

William stands. He finds a twisted cigarette in his shirt pocket. As his muscles relax, as the smoke fills his body where for days none existed, he chews his tongue and understands everything about what Julie has become. Her silhouette bleeds, backed by the setting sun outside the front-room window. Her features grow grey, then black, then to nothing, becoming as the world created her. “It
was
what I wanted,” and he walks out the door to Philip.

On the front porch, Philip turns from a weak chair. The plastic twists and moans as if mortared with spider webs. “Getting thick in there.”

“Can’t say I blame her.” William falls into a bleached version of Philip’s dirty chair, pulling a full breath from his cigarette. He lays his crutch to the ground.

“Don’t worry about the mess. I can’t even begin to imagine what she is going through.”

“It’s tough,” William says. “She’ll remember, though.”

“You thought about checking out your lot?” Philip smacks his arm, yelling “damn it” as the skin swells to red. “Bugs are heavy this evening.”

“They are.” William lets the cigarette hang, intertwined in the fingers of his right hand, abandoning the bandaged grip of his left. The gesture is so uncomfortable it feels stolen. He is conscious with every pull to his mouth, with every dust of ash he flicks to the ground. “I’m not sure there’d be much to see.”

“Well,” and Philip stretches his legs, swings his arms, missing every mosquito in the air. “She hasn’t been tearing up just my house.”

William forces a grin. “Couldn’t be tearing up mine either.” Philip ignores the comment, swinging harder through the air.

“She has a guy, Dennis, Danny, something. He’s been working out at your place since Julie got out of the hospital.” He looks out from the porch and nods to a streetlight as it flickers against the darkening sky. “There’s some light left tonight. He’s probably still out there. No reason he wouldn’t be. She pays by the hour.” “Maybe I’ll check it out.” William lifts himself from the chair.

He holds the last drag of his cigarette in his lungs, limping away from the porch, and flicks the spent butt back as far as his weak fingers will allow. The spark smashes against Philip’s thigh and dies in the dirt at his feet. “Sorry,” he says and asks to borrow his friend’s car.

Suffocating the flame with dirt, Philip reaches into his pocket and pulls out the keys. “You want company? Might be a tough drive.”

William doesn’t answer. He just says “thanks” and takes the keys. Philip still swats at pests on the porch as the house disappears beyond the horizon.

Every stretch of woods between Philip’s home and the site where his own once stood William imagines as a burial ground claimed by Mrs. Rose.
We live above defeated generations
—the car dodges potholes and fallen tree limbs stretched across the road—
and search for all the ideas they must have missed
. These words lap through his head until smooth, until he slows to the empty space of his home, until a man with a shovel wipes sweat from his lip, until only the words
must have missed
exist on William’s lips.

“Danny,” he says stepping from the car. “Or Dennis,” and he extends his right hand.

“The first one,” the man says. He grabs William’s hand and shakes with a grip hardened by labor. “You with Julie?”

“We’re getting married.”

The man comments with a tired smile and a nod. The smile could be genuine, but his age defies sincerity. Even as the man nods, his eyes speak of joint-pains and a life worth abandoning so he can dig. “So you come to look?”

“What are you looking for?”

He breaks his smile. “I was hoping you’d know. She told me to just dig, that I’d know what I was looking for when I found it.” Danny brings back his smile.

“How long you been out here?”

“A while.” He throws the shovel to the side and waves for William to follow. Over a slight hill, once William’s driveway, the man puts his arm out and says, “watch your step” with wide eyes, like he had witnessed neglect once prior and the result burdens him still.

William looks down. A hole, five feet deep and just as wide kisses his toes. He grabs Danny’s shoulder for balance

“Not sure I could help you out of something like that,” Danny says.

As he regains his stance William surveys the property. The ground is filled with holes. He steps through the ashes of his home, knocking the black dust to the bottoms as he balances on the thin bridges of dirt between them. Doors and fallen walls are pushed aside, room made for more holes. The skeletons of his furniture are cleared away. William bends down and picks up a blackened fork from underneath the buried frame of his kitchen table.

“Had people coming the whole time I’ve been here, just taking stuff, anything that might still work,” Danny says. “Fucking scavengers.”

William continues navigating the vacant islands, but as the eight minutes of sunset dwindle, the sky darkening to match the black at the bottom of the holes, he finds it hard to distinguish between the present and the empty earth. Danny pulls out a flashlight and points the beam to William’s feet. “You need get back over here,” he says. Everywhere William steps, a tiny flashlight sun leads the way.

“She never told you what you were looking for?” he yells back to Danny.

“Nope. She was pretty intent on finding it, though. I don’t want to be rude but she looked terrible. Seems her whole life she’s been doing nothing but searching.”

William knocks a broken faucet into a hole with his crutch. “It’s getting dark,” Danny yells. “I’ve got to keep digging.”

A toilet seat, bubbled from the heat of the fire, William pushes into its own separate grave.

“If I find it—whatever it is—will I get something extra?”

A light bulb, more silverware, the burnt tinder of a crib all fall to black.

William looks again, before the sun disappears, across his home, his life with Julie, and fits everything into graves. Every charred stick of wood, every surviving shred of cloth William imagines covered in dirt, forgotten. “Go home,” he yells back to Danny.

“I’m not done here.”

“There is nothing to find.”

“She paid me for twelve hours. I’m not giving it back.” William waves the man away. “Go,” he says and keeps his eyes to the earth. The light turns with Danny and leads the old man to a truck parked along the road. As the burdened engine fades William is left hearing locusts harmonize and dirt hit heavy against the deep ground as he feels his way throughout the holes, careful not to drop down into them.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Three nights pass ticked by a hammer ’s claw to dirt. William works inside the house trying to regain the strength of his weak hand. He washes dishes, eats cereal, and opens doors with his unhealthy limb, slowly trying to understand the strained muscles. Julie has migrated from the bedroom, to the porch, and now to the fenced backyard, digging with the back end of a hammer.

William blames his tears on his weak hand. When a cigarette slips from his new fingers, he hides his face with them, their touch foreign against his wet cheeks.

That first night he approached Julie, dirt still on his knees, and told her that Danny hadn’t found anything. He told her on his knees, their eyes as close as they’ve been for years, that he sent Danny home because the yard couldn’t hold anymore holes. “I want to know where our baby is, too,” he said, “but there is only so much he can do.”

She dropped the hammer to the grass and gripped the wheels of her chair. “It’s dark. I’ll pick this up in the morning.”

William watched her struggle up the muddy hill, climbing the mounds she had created. He thought, underneath the optimism, she must know his role. She had been enduring his rants for months, staying strong to her familial ideal, and here was the end to what he had wanted all along: his weak fiancée fighting up hills of dirt dug in search of her child. He considered telling her that first night, explaining everything, but instead he picked up the hammer, felt the dry handle in his new hand, and threw the tool as far as his shoulder would let him. He heard it land in grass too thick for any wheelchair.

The second night Julie had found a crowbar and used it like the hammer as sweat shined her red skin, baked under all-day sun. William brought her sandwiches and iced tea, which she left for the ants, and a feral cat Philip called Brisket. “That cat doesn’t go near anyone,” Philip said, his conversation reduced to casual observations after having been dismissed by William each time he tried for the obvious topics: Julie, their child, their engagement, their medical conditions, all stopped by a simple, “not yet.”

The third night, Julie still digging deep, William approaches her with his own hammer and kneels close to her feet. He hacks at the dirt until out of breath. He wipes sweat from his face digs, digs, digs until shin deep.

“If we spread out,” Julie says finally, “we have a better chance.”

“Not too thin, though,” he says. He turns observation to admiration for a moment watching Julie fight through the earth. “Start together, branch out might be the best option.”

Julie nods. Dirt decorates her face.

William steps from his hole. He maneuvers to the grass-line and kneels with the hammer already cocked. The claw thumps hard in the moist ground. “The baby could be anywhere,” he says. “Anywhere you’ve been.”

Thump. “I know.” Thump.

“Did the doctors say anything?”

“We had a bad wreck. That’s it.” Thump.

“It was.” He turns his back to Julie and pulls at grass, tosses pebbles into the tallest tufts around them, digging only as Julie checks his progress. “The van was totaled.”

“Philip said that.” Thump.

“And I was barely sore. Seems a little unfair, really.” Thump.

“Do you know of any other places the baby might be?” he asks.

Thump. “No.”

“Do you remember
anything
?”

She rests silent for a moment. “Do you?”—waits one breath and…thump.

William drops his hammer. He limps over to Julie, wipes a streak of dirt from her face and takes the crowbar from her, one finger at a time. He drops it to the ground. “Come inside,” he says and even though she says to stop, says “keep me outside,” with a weak voice worn thin by exhaustion and the draining heat, he pushes her to the house, and helps her to the couch. She falls asleep before William can get a blanket around her.

The fourth night William wakes to a ringing telephone. He is back to sleep by its third ring, but Philip, as he reaches across William’s lap for his keys, wakes him again.

“Sorry,” Philip says. “Just got a call for a job.”

William orients himself, scans the room still torn to shreds, hopes this is a dream, and settles back into the chair. “It’s okay,” he says. “Just scared me is all.”

“I should be back sometime in the afternoon. The lady said it was quite a mess.”

William yawns. “Need any help,” he asks already closing his eyes.

“Maybe,” Philip says. “The way she made it out the job might take all night, even with both of us.”

William sighs and kicks himself out of the chair. He hasn’t been to a site since finding Shelia and plans to live his life by the improbability of a similar find. If he doesn’t search, he can’t discover. “I don’t know how much help I would be,” he says raising his weak arms in faux surrender.

“I could really use all you can offer,” Philip says. “The longer it sits, the tougher it’s gonna be.” He waits a breath. “And I’ve got some news.”

Nausea. That is what William first feels when he thinks again of a body reduced to mess. He wants to fall back into the chair and try again for a dream. But “what news?” is all he can say.

“We’ll talk.”

William grabs a pair of pants from the floor. “What news?” he asks again.

“It was a lady,” Philip says ignoring the question. “She was crying hard, but I got an address. Said she’d leave the place unlocked.”

He wants to ask again but decides instead to wait for Philip. His friend is not a patient man, he reasons, and will spill before William gets the chance to forget. “Always makes it easier,” William says, “to have an unlocked door.”

Shelia pops into the living room with a grin. She greets Philip at every pass with a kiss. They share smiles at breakfast, at lunch, and William guesses at dinner, too, but for three nights they’ve reserved the final meal as their own. They bring home greasy bags for William. He pretends to be thankful, wondering with each bite what might be hidden inside the meat. As William and Philip dress for the job Shelia steps between them, continuing her conscious attempt to push William further and further away from her newly shared life with Philip. She kisses Philip and wishes him luck.

On the ride over, they talk about the future to a soundtrack of sad love songs. Philip cycles through radio stations until the static clears enough for a voice to reach their empty town. “Maybe one day we’ll be neighbors in a big city,” Philip says. “A place with so much noise we’ll get tired of it.”