The Bright Forever (13 page)

It was 7:05—Gilley checked his watch—when the front door opened, and his father, water dripping from him, stepped inside. He didn’t bother to wipe his feet. He walked straight to Patsy and took her in his arms. He had his eyes closed, and Gilley could tell he was squeezing his mother so tightly that it was uncomfortable for her. She put her hands against his chest and tried to push herself free.

“Is it Katie?” she said. “Gil, is it some news about Katie?”

Gilley felt as if the house were shrinking, the walls closing in on them. He waited for his father to answer, and when he did, what he said was this: “Patsy, they’ve got a man. The police. They picked him up in Gooseneck.” Junior was speaking calmly, as if he were explaining how glass was made, or the way to read a green before making a putt. He had spoken to Gilley in those same hushed tones more than once on a golf course, encouraging him to keep his cool, and now he was doing the same with Patsy. “They think he knows something. This man. They’re talking to him now.”

Patsy broke away from Junior. “Did he take her? For God’s sake, Gil, is that it?”

“They’re trying to find out.”

“I want to go there. To the courthouse.” She was already striding toward the door, which Junior had left open. Gilley watched the rain blowing up onto the porch, where one of Katie’s pencils, all silver-and-gold glitter with a troll doll on the eraser end, was getting wet. He wanted to go out and bring it in and comb out the troll’s hair and put it somewhere to dry, but his mother was already in the doorway. “I’m going to talk to that man. I’m going to ask him what he’s done with my little girl.”

“Patsy,” Junior said. “I’ll take care of things. You stay here and leave this to me.”

“No.” She turned on her heel and pointed her finger at him. The word came out with a force that had been gathering through the long night. “You won’t tell me what to do. Not this time. Not like in Indianapolis.”

Gilley saw his father’s shoulders stiffen. “For God’s sake, Patsy,” he said.

“I mean it,” she told him. “I’m going to talk to that man.”

Junior followed her out into the rain. Gilley stepped out on the porch and watched them get in the truck and then drive away. He bent down and picked up the pencil. Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw something on the porch swing. It was a snapshot of Katie, the one that he had taken earlier that summer with his Polaroid camera. She had been sitting on the stone bench between the two Japanese maple trees in their backyard, and the sun had been slanting just so through the low branches so that the light fell over her, and her hair shimmered. She was sitting on the bench with her back against one of the trees. Her bare feet were on the bench and her knees were drawn up to her chest. She had on a pair of pink-framed sunglasses, and later when she saw the snapshot, she said she looked just like a movie star. She loved that picture, she said. Loved it, loved it, loved it, darling Gilley, because it made her look a little bit like Marcia Brady—well, almost—and everyone knew how pretty and popular she was.

All summer, the picture had been tucked into the corner of Katie’s dresser mirror, but now here it was on the porch swing. Gilley picked it up, and when he did, he noticed that on the back, in a handwriting he didn’t recognize, someone had written with what he could tell was the rich indigo ink of a fountain pen:
Katie, Age 9.

BY THE TIME
Junior and Patsy got to the courthouse, the rain had stopped. The sun broke through the clouds. When Junior got out of the truck to follow Patsy up the courthouse steps, he had to shade his eyes with his hand.

“Patsy,” he said. “Patsy, wait.”

She marched ahead of him, her arms swinging. In the truck, she had said, “I won’t have another child taken from me. I won’t.”

Finally, he caught up with her on the steps. He grabbed her arm and swung her around, more roughly than he had intended, and that force broke her. She leaned into him as if her spine had turned to dust. He took the dead weight of her in his arms and he held her while she wept. He held her, and he said very quietly, “We’ll do whatever we have to, Patsy. I swear that to you, whatever it takes to bring Katie home. Believe me, whatever it takes, I’ll do it.”

She clutched the front of his shirt. She balled the material up into her hands. “That man,” she said. “I want to look that man in the eyes. I want to ask him what he knows.”

Raymond R.

P
ROVE IT.

Mr. Dees

I
STOOD IN
my kitchen with Tom Evers, and I told him as much as I could stand to say. Yes, it was true that I’d told Raymond R. about the way Katie had struck my fancy. Such a darling little girl. Who couldn’t help but love her?

“But Tom,” I said, “you know me. Do you really think I’m the sort of man Clare Wright claims I am?”

“Right now I’m just asking questions,” Tom said. “I’m just trying to find out what’s gone on.” He was facing me, but I could tell his eyes were glancing around my kitchen, taking everything in, and for an instant, I wondered if I’d forgotten anything. That rose petal, that fluff of hair. Then I remembered the snapshot, the one of Katie sitting on that stone bench. I’d looked for it earlier and hadn’t been able to find it. I had no idea where it had gone. “Mister Dees,” he said, “I need to know where you were last night.”

“I told the officer who came here. Tom, I was home last night. I was right here preparing lessons.”

“Is there anyone who can vouch for that? Anyone see you out in the yard maybe? Anyone call you on the telephone or see you in the house?”

It pained me to have to answer that question. “Tom,” I said, “I don’t have many friends. I pretty much keep to myself.” He studied me for a good while. “Is there call for me to prove something?” I finally asked him.

“I can’t say that there is. No, I can’t say that. I’m just trying to eliminate whatever I can. You understand? Some people say you were a friend to this Raymond Wright.”

“He’s done some repair work at my house. Not long ago, he gave me a ride home from the Moonlight Madness Carnival. Neighborly things like that. I wouldn’t say exactly that we’re friends.”

“I’m just trying to whittle things down, trying to learn what happened to Katie Mackey.”

“I understand that, Tom. Like I said, Katie is a splendid little girl.”

“If you know of anything that might help me, I trust you’ll let me know.”

“Believe me, Tom. If I had something to tell you, I would.”

I didn’t tell him about the nights I hid myself away and watched the Mackeys in their backyard. I didn’t tell him about taking the petal from Patsy’s rose or the fluff of hair from Katie’s brush—thank goodness Clare hadn’t said anything to Tom about that—and I didn’t tell him about the time that summer when I went into Katie’s room.

It was only that one time. Trust me; this is true. It was a Sunday morning, and I knew the Mackeys would be at church. It was easy to get into the house. Most folks in our small town only used their locks when they went away on vacation. I opened the back door and stepped inside.

It was quiet there: the refrigerator humming, the grandfather clock in the foyer ticking—so quiet that I could hear the chains and gears in the clock as the weights rose and fell.

I stood at the foot of the stairs. I had waited in this foyer more than once that summer, eager for Katie to come down for her lesson, but this morning I was free to go wherever I chose. I could imagine that this was my home and soon it would be filled with the sounds of my family: Patsy’s sharp, bright laugh; Gilley’s rock-and-roll music playing on his stereo; and Katie—oh, my dear, dear Katie—she would come hopping down the stairs, singing some silly rhyme:

Eenie, Meenie, Disaleenie

Ooh, aah, Gotchaleenie

Hotchy Totchy

Liberace

I love you!

I laid my hand on the stairway railing, put one foot on the carpeted runner, and then it was easy—one foot after the other, climbing the stairs to Katie’s bedroom.

The house smelled of roses—vases and vases of roses—but in Katie’s room the scents were more varied, and to me, who had never lived with a child, more exotic. There was a necklace of candy beads and a chain woven from Fruit Stripe gum wrappers, bottles of Avon Sweet Honesty cologne and Maybelline Rose Lustre nail polish, modeling clay and rub-on tattoos, crayons and Magic Markers, construction paper and paste, stuffed bears and snakes and dogs.

I memorized each scent. I took my time. I told myself I would never do this again, never be in this room. That certainty made me bold, and I opened her dresser drawers. One held neat stacks of shorts and tank tops and T-shirts; in another were balls of socks and tights. A third drawer was for her camisoles and underpants, and I know you expect that I lingered there—pervert that you’ve surely decided I am—that I pressed my face into cotton and rayon, perhaps even wadded up a pair of panties and stuffed them into my pocket. I know you expect the worst of me. I’d be ashamed to have the thoughts that you do now.

The truth is this: I was a man who didn’t know what to do with his passion. I was a teacher of mathematics, and numbers taught me that there was always an answer. Noodle around long enough, and I could solve any problem. But this love I felt for Katie, this child I wished were my own—that was a knot I couldn’t untangle. I was trapped in it, helpless. I trembled with the thought of how far I had gone. There I was in her room, overwhelmed. Me, a decent man. You have to believe me. I have nothing to offer as proof except the rest of my story.

I closed her dresser drawer, the wooden runners squealing just a bit, and that’s when I saw the picture wedged into the corner of the mirror: Katie sitting on a stone bench in her backyard, smiling at the camera, her eyes hidden behind dark glasses. It seemed that she was smiling at me, and I couldn’t help myself. I plucked the picture from the mirror and slipped it into my pocket before stepping out into the hall.

A door opened before I could make it to the stairs, and Gilley came out of his room. He was in his boxer shorts and bare-chested, his hair tousled from sleep. I remembered how kind he had been to me when I had asked him whether I could take home the jackets from Penney’s and then return the ones I didn’t want. How he had trusted me.

“Mister Dees?” he said, his voice full of surprise and wonder, and I knew immediately that I could tell him any lie, and he would believe me.

But you, I won’t lie to. Don’t worry. You, I’ll tell the truth. Every bit of it. No matter if you want it or not.

Gilley

I
T WAS THE
Sunday before Katie disappeared. I woke and heard a drawer open and close and then footsteps in the hall. I thought I’d slept so long that everyone was back from church. Normally, I would have been with them, but instead I’d slept in and finally my parents had given up on rousing me.

When I got out of bed and went out into the hall, I was surprised to see Mr. Dees about to go down the stairs.

“Mister Dees,” I said, and he turned to me, a sheepish grin on his face.

He said, “I was just using the bathroom while I waited for Katie. I let myself in. I’m here for her lesson.”

“It’s Sunday,” I told him. “Katie’s at church.”

“Sunday,” he said after a pause. “I thought it was Monday. In the summer, you know, one day’s just like the rest. I feel like a ninny. Such a mistake.”

At the time I thought it was strange, but not so odd as to be unbelievable. Mr. Dees always acted a little different from most folks, like he was in his own world. A confusion. Nothing more.

“I didn’t hear you knock,” I said. “I didn’t hear the doorbell.”

“Oh, sometimes people forget I’m coming. Sometimes they go somewhere and they’re late getting back. I usually let myself in and wait.”

So there I was, face-to-face with Mr. Dees, and I didn’t know what else to say. Later, I would wonder why, if what he told me was true, he hadn’t used the guest bathroom downstairs. It would come to me that the sound of the drawer opening and closing had come from Katie’s room.

“I’ll be going then,” he told me. Then he shook his head. “Such a dolt I am. Sunday. Don’t tell your parents. Please. They’ll think I’m an idiot. They’ll think, What can he possibly teach Katie? He doesn’t even know what day it is.”

He walked down the stairs. He didn’t hurry. He even stopped at the mirror by the front door and straightened the knot in his necktie. Then he let himself out, and our house was quiet, that lazy, Sunday quiet I’d always loved.

Clare

T
HERE CAME
a time that day—yes, I’m talking about that Thursday, the sixth—when the police finally stopped asking me questions (mercy, so many questions my head was spinning) and it was just me, alone in the house, the way it was after Bill died, when I didn’t rightly know how my life, without him, would pick up and go on.

Keep looking up, Mama used to tell me. There’s nothing on the ground but your feet.

The police took away a pair of Ray’s overshoes. They took a pair of knives he used to cut bait. I told them that’s what they were, but they took them anyway. They took the burn barrel. A tow truck came and hauled away the pickup.

Could I see him? I wanted to know.

“No, ma’am,” Chief Evers said. “Not just now.”

It was so quiet in the house after everyone had gone—only the Regulator clock ticking and the refrigerator humming when it came on. The policemen and the detectives had left their smells: the leather of their gun holsters, their aftershave lotions, their hair tonics, the cigarettes they smoked. Everything seemed strange to me. I moved through the house the way I did after Bill died, afraid to sit down, unable to sleep, staring at the furniture, the rugs, the pictures and doodads hanging on the walls—things I’d seen every day of my life for years, only now it seemed that they belonged to someone else. That was how I felt the day they took Ray away in handcuffs—like I was in someone else’s house, like I was living some other woman’s life.

I kept imagining that soon I would hear the back door open and then Ray calling to me like this was just any night, “Darlin’, name your paradise.”

Did I think he’d kidnapped Katie Mackey like they said—snatched her off a street corner uptown when it was still light?

Don’t ask me such a thing. Do you really think I could lay down every night with a man I thought might do like that?

If that’s what you think, then you won’t want to hear the rest. You won’t have room in your heart for the story of how that evening, after the police left me alone, I opened the bedroom closet, stepped inside, and closed the door. There in the dark, I breathed in air that was still familiar to me, still a comfort, not dirtied up with the smells the policemen left. I picked out what I knew: the powdery smell of my Secret deodorant cream on my uniform dresses, Ray’s Hai Karate cologne on his good shirts, the smells of sweat and mortar and clay bricks on his twill work suits. I ran my hands over that twill, petting the shirts and pants, and at one point I put my arms around a shirt and I hugged it to me, just like I was a young girl mooning over a boy, only inside I knew I was old and at the end of something. The shirt was all air. It caved in when I tried to hold it, and I cried because I missed Ray so much, and maybe, just maybe, I sensed somewhere deep inside me that he wasn’t ever coming home.

That’s the part you won’t abide if you’ve already made up your mind—if you’ve decided that there are people in the world whose lives don’t matter because they’re ragtag, full of wrong turns and dead ends and stupid choices, if you’ve decided I’m one of those.

You’ll want to hear instead about later that night when I was sitting in the dark house—just sitting, not knowing what to do with the strange turn my life had taken—and suddenly there was a knock on the front door. I hoped in my heart of hearts that it was Ray, that the police had finally seen that they had made a mistake and now he had come home to me, but deep down I knew it wasn’t true. That knock was a mousy tapping, not the sort of knock he would have made, and anyway, why would he knock on his own door? Then I heard a voice—“Clare? Clare, are you awake?”—and I knew it was Henry Dees.

I went to the door and laid my hand on the knob. It was cool in my palm, even though the night was sultry and still.

“Clare,” he said, and it gave me a spooky feeling, like he could tell I was standing there on the other side. “It’s about Ray,” he said. “Clare, let me in.”

I didn’t want to open the door. If I opened it and saw Henry Dees, I’d know the police had questioned him and then let him go. I’d know what that meant about Ray.

“I know all about you and that little girl,” I said. “That girl they’re looking for.”

“You don’t know everything. Clare, it’s not your fault.”

Yes, you’ll want to know about how I opened the door and let Henry Dees come into my house. You’ll want me to tell you that we sat in the front room—me in the rocking chair by the window, him across from me on the couch—and I never turned on a light. I listened to his voice—calm and gentle—and I never said a word until he was done.

He said he knew I’d turned the police onto him. He said he didn’t blame me for that. He knew what it seemed like, especially if Ray had told me the stories he suspected that he did. Did he spy on Katie Mackey? Yes. It was a fact he couldn’t deny. Did it mean that he was guilty of something? Just loving her, he said. Like she was his own.

We sat there in the dark a good while, and I could hear him swallow from time to time, as if he was trying to choke something down. When he finally spoke again, it was like there were twigs stuck in his throat, bits of dried leaves, dead grass, straw, a bird’s nest made from misery.

“Clare,” he said, and it was like everything had gone away—all the noise—and it was just us, me and Henry Dees, saying things no one else could hear. “Clare, after Bill died, I used to think about you down here in this house. I used to walk by after dark and see a light on back in the bedroom—oh, it was so faint, just a little speck of light—and I’d know you were getting ready to go to sleep because it was better to do that than to face all those minutes alone. You and I know that, don’t we, Clare? That loneliness. I’ve known it all my life.”

“Bill had a mermaid tattooed on his arm,” I said, because I didn’t know how to tell Henry Dees what I really wanted to, that yes, he was right. When someone you love disappears, it’s like the light goes dim, and you’re in the shadows. You try to do what people tell you: put one foot in front of the other; keep looking up; give yourself over to the seconds and minutes and hours. But always there’s that glimmer of light—that way of living you once knew—sort of faded and smoky like the crescent moon on a winter’s night when the air is full of ice and clouds, but still there, hanging just over your head. You think it’s not far. You think at any moment you can reach out and grab it. Bill used to sing “Fly Me to the Moon,” and he’d really jazz up that part about playing among the stars. “Do you remember that mermaid?” I asked Henry Dees. “Bill could make it dance the hootchy-kootchy.” Then, although I hadn’t planned to say anything like it at all, I said, “I’m sorry Bill and me never had kids. A boy. That’s what I wish. A son so I could see Bill in his face. So I could have that much the rest of my life.”

Henry Dees let that be. Lord love him. He didn’t say a word. He didn’t tell me I was silly to be as old as I was and to wish such a thing, didn’t throw a pity party and say, “Oh, I know what you mean.” He didn’t have to. I knew that already, and what’s more, I knew that I had told him, without saying as much, that I understood how lonely all these years had been for him. That I knew how a girl like Katie Mackey could carry a light to him, that I believed him when he said he never would have hurt her.

That’s when I felt the truth rise up in my throat, a knot of grief so hard and tangled I swore it would choke me. This is the part you’ve been waiting for, the ones of you who think I only got what I deserved. This moment when it all hit me. I tried to take a breath, felt the ache in my throat and chest, thick and rough like the cement blocks Ray had stacked and mortared to make that garage, the place where he hid his truck that night I found him setting fire to his clothes in the burn barrel. The sob that tore loose from me was a miserable sound I’ve never been able to forget, like everything inside me was scraped away and I was nothing more than a white uniform dress or a cook’s apron hanging from the clothesline, flapping in the wind.

Henry Dees got up from the couch. I felt him move toward me in the dark. I heard the soles of his shoes scuffing over the floorboards. He laid his hand on my head. He stroked my hair. “Clare,” he said in a voice, patient and kind, the way I imagine people talk all the time in Heaven.