The Far End of Happy (3 page)

“What? Hello? Don’t leave me—”

“I’m here, ma’am. Hold where you are. Police are intercepting a vehicle trying to come up your drive.”

Ronnie strained to see, but the farm store blocked her view. “Is it a tan Chevy Blazer?”

“One moment.”

The wait felt interminable. The room seemed to shrink. She glanced over at the boys. Andrew’s leg was tossed over his brother’s at the ankle, and Max had his paws and nose wedged between the boys’ hips. Will rubbed his blanket on his cheek. Movement in her peripheral vision. A few of the men on the Schulzes’ hill dashed to cover behind closer trees. It was eerily quiet. On any other day, the Schulzes’ Jack Russell terrier would have been nipping at their heels. Even the leaves, so recently whipped by the wind into frenzy, now clung to their branches as if listening.

“Confirming here—Beverly Saylor is your mother?”

Relief invigorated Ronnie. “Yes, she’s coming to get the boys.”

Down below, movement. Her mother’s car pushed up the drive, its familiar decade-old grille like a smile.

“An officer is in the car with her. One more minute here…”

Another minute. How many more would there be? She needed this to be over. She looked at the boys, who were laughing at Wakko’s antics on the screen.

“You’re okay to move, ma’am. Go down to the door facing away from the road—”

“The kitchen door.”

“Yes, and let her in.”

Ronnie told the boys she’d be right back—for herself, more than for them, as they continued to stare at the TV. The boys had inherited her “extreme focus,” she liked to say. Jeff called it disrespect, but Ronnie understood the occasional need to escape to another world.

Down in the kitchen, she opened the door to the backside of a police officer. Beside him stood her mother. Determined to be the bright spot in any situation, Beverly was wearing a red velveteen jacket with metallic gold flowers sewn into it, her dyed blond curls a living flower blooming through its neck. But her face was drawn. One hand twisted the ring she always wore.

Ronnie pulled her inside. “Are you coming in too?” Ronnie said to the policeman, using her foot to hold back the dog.

“I’ll stay here,” he said.

Unsure of how to greet her mother in the odd circumstances, Ronnie let Max do the work, wriggling and snuffling at Beverly’s knees.

“Come away from the windows.” Ronnie pulled her mother deeper into the kitchen.

“Where’s Jeff, honey?”

Ronnie shook her head. Shrugged. Tried to hold back the tsunami of emotion threatening to engulf her.

“Are the boys okay?”

Ronnie couldn’t keep her lip from quivering. “They’re upstairs watching cartoons.”

“Is this…another suicide threat?”

Ronnie blew out a deep breath and tried to hold steady. “Not sure it’s just a threat this time.”

Beverly reached out and patted her daughter’s arm. “Well. At least he doesn’t have access to a gun. This will be okay.” She looked around the kitchen as if taking comfort from its familiar inventory. Sink, stove, refrigerator. “This will be okay.”

Ronnie didn’t speak. Couldn’t.

“You brought me the guns. This will be okay, right?”

Choking out each word, Ronnie said, “He had one in the car. A shotgun, I think. I must have missed it.”

Her mother turned away and put her hand to her face.

“Ma’am? Ma’am?” came the muffled voice from the phone.

“Mom, I have to stay on the line with the 911 operator. Can you go up to the boys’ room and pack a bag for them? Use Will’s sports duffel. They’ll tell you which toothbrushes are theirs.”

Beverly nodded. Once on the step, she turned. “For how long?”

“Ma’am?”

“I’m here,” Ronnie said into the phone. To her mother she held up a finger. One day. Then held up a second. A third. She shrugged. Ronnie had no clue what today would hold. But her mother would see to the boys, the police would see to Jeff, and soon enough this nightmare would be over.

“Police cruisers are pulling up your driveway.” Ronnie could hear the distant sound of doors shutting. Lots of doors.

A knock on the kitchen door startled her. Beyond it stood several police officers.

“Thank goodness,” Ronnie said when she opened the door. “Can you have everyone back their cars out so my mother can leave with the boys? They’re almost ready.”

“That wouldn’t be advisable,” one of them said and took the phone from her to sign off with the 911 dispatcher. Her lifeline, severed. No chance to thank him or to say good-bye.

“I hate to be a burden, but I’d really appreciate it,” Ronnie said. “I made arrangements for the boys to leave so they wouldn’t have to see any of this.”

“Our main concern is for your safety,” a different officer said, as if the first had already run out of patience. “Your husband is intoxicated and armed. We can’t take the time—or risk the exposure—to move all those cars. We’re going to evacuate all of you.”

Beverly arrived on the stairs, Adidas bag in hand, the boys cowering behind her. Each boy clutched his blanket; the tip of Will’s thumb had found its way back to his mouth.

Ronnie couldn’t protect them from what horrors the day held. It was too late.

She struggled to order her thoughts in light of this new plan. “But the horses are still out. I haven’t fed them yet.” As if she wanted to go out to the barn. The words immediately sounded stupid.

They filed down the staircase to Ronnie’s office, Max scrambling after them. The house was set into the hill so that the office door opened onto ground level. Full-size windows faced the store and road, allowing Ronnie to see that the driveway could no longer contain all of the cruisers. Taking into account the part of the road obscured by the farm store, dozens of additional state police cruisers must be snaked down the length of the road. One sat directly below, in the driveway that ended beside the farm store.

Ronnie, Beverly, Andrew, and Will stood huddled on the tile hearth of the walk-in fireplace in Ronnie’s office, surrounded on every side by stones pulled more than two hundred years ago from the fields of this very farm. Hatchet marks were still visible on the exposed beams and rough-hewn mantel. This room had once been a summer kitchen where a woman had stirred the stew that would welcome her husband home from the American Revolution, Ronnie had always imagined. Now, several uniformed police officers stood between them and the back door.

Thwack, thwack, thwack.
The chop of a low-flying helicopter. Really low. She felt its thrum in her bones. Max came over and sat on Ronnie’s foot.

“You can set down the bag, ma’am,” one of the officers said to Ronnie’s mother. “We don’t want any encumbrances.”

Beverly set the Adidas bag on the low windowsill by the door and returned to the huddle with her arms wrapped defiantly around her purse. Andrew looked over at Will, speaking to him through the silent understanding that passes between brothers. One at a time, as if knowing today would require manlike courage, each boy approached the duffel and laid his blanket on top.

One of the officers spoke with the helicopter pilot via walkie-talkie. A voice squawked: “I have a good view. Clear.”

Before she realized they would be separated, a policeman picked up Ronnie’s younger son and set him on his hip. Will was still wearing shorts—it was always hard to get him to part with them at summer’s end—and the pale flesh of his thigh pressed against the butt of the officer’s holstered gun. Will looked at Ronnie with that sweet, stoic face, only his eyes revealing his panic. There was no time to speak. The officer ran through the door with her son, across the patio, down the grassy hill, and past the farm store into the awaiting cruiser. After he and Will climbed in the backseat, the cruiser sped away, taking part of Ronnie with it.

Another cruiser pulled into its place.

A policeman grabbed Andrew by the hand and waited.

“There’s still dew on the hill. Be careful,” Ronnie said. The pair ran without regard to dew or incline, got into the waiting car, and drove away.

“Clear.” Ronnie’s mother was next. Strong at fifty-two but with knees battered by her active lifestyle, she would need to take the hill slower. Two policemen, one at each elbow, supported her as she picked her way across the grass.

That left Ronnie. “Where we’re going—can I take my dog?” With the thrum of the helicopter, the cars, the strangers, and the palpable tension, Max, who had never once flinched during a thunderstorm or fireworks display, was quaking with fear.

“No.”

She couldn’t bear to think of him alone in the house, surrounded by strangers, not one of whom would care to take him out. If it were safe to go out.

Ronnie lifted Max into the recliner. Beside it was the windowsill with the Adidas bag, the boys’ blankets on top. All things abandoned. She held his floppy ears and looked into his trusting brown eyes. “Be brave.”

“Clear.”

The policeman took her elbow and rushed her down the hill, his other hand resting on his weapon. The cruiser’s tires squealed against the road as the driver pulled away.

“Why did you have to separate us?” Ronnie said.

“To minimize loss if any shooting started.”

The policeman accelerated down the hill until he passed the edge of the property. He soon pulled over beside an empty field not visible from the house due to the way the road curved through the woods. Beside several police cruisers stood an ambulance.

“What happened—”

“Everyone’s fine,” he said. The ambulance’s back doors stood ajar. “Check inside.”

When Ronnie peered into the ambulance, she found her family, huddled on a bench built into one side of the vehicle. There was no gurney. Sitting on the other side was her seventy-five-year-old neighbor, Mr. Eshbach. Seeing Mr. Eshbach mowing his lawn, clearing his roof gutters, or fixing their constantly vandalized mailbox cluster was common enough. But sitting still? He looked embarrassed to be caught doing so.

You could tell the days of the week by this man’s habits. Today was mopping. Ronnie knew because one Monday that summer, when Andrew had cut himself and she’d needed to borrow some gauze, Mr. Eshbach had removed his shoes to venture into the house to retrieve it. Now every Monday, when Ronnie went down to open the farm store, she looked for the comforting presence of the overturned bucket draining by his side door.

As she climbed into the ambulance, it was hard for Ronnie to look him in the eye, with their chaos splashed all over him.

“I’m sorry about your floors,” she said, sitting beside him on the bench.

“Got half done.”

“Still. You had plans.”

“Well.” He shrugged. “That was then, and this is now.”

Beverly put an arm around each of the boys and pulled them close.

Ronnie fidgeted. She should be calling in to the school. Her boys would be marked absent; the school would be trying to reach her. Amber, the sole employee at her and Jeff’s farm store, would be showing up soon for work. On her desk, Ronnie had left interview notes for her
Organic
Farming
PA
article on aquaponics, a system that combines edible fish production with the growth of food crops that thrive in water. The speaker was coming to a nearby town this weekend; it would be too late for her editor to reassign the story. She had wanted to tweet a teaser of her upcoming
Psychology
Today
feature on resiliency, featuring the interview with Kevin that had riled Jeff so. Her laundry room was covered in dirty clothes she’d whisked from the attic floor last night with the hope of cleaning the boys’ room later. Their allergies were the worst in the fall. She had to stay on top of it.

How was she supposed to stop her life midthrottle?

Her mother twiddled that ring, always that ring.

“Mom, would you stop?”

“Stop what?”

“Twirling that ring. It’s driving me mad.” If not for the twiddling, no one would notice it; unlike the bold red button earrings she wore today, the tiny, colorless stone did not live up to Beverly’s usual splashy statement. It was just a dime-store trinket, her mother had once told her. If it bothered her so, why did she wear it?

After they waited in the ambulance for an uncomfortable stretch of time, an officer informed them of two things. First, a command post had been established at the Bartlesville Volunteer Fire Station, a mile from the farm, and that the ambulance would take them there shortly.

Second, in the area surrounding their property, the manhunt for Jeffrey Farnham had begun.

Janet Farnham brushed the crumbs from the bust of her Hello Kitty sweatshirt. She’d swung wide of the local haunts to find this little Pennsylvania Dutch diner, telling herself there was nothing better for the soul than a drive out to the country to enjoy the autumn foliage—and a breakfast of pumpkin pie. She ordered coffee as well, and after the waitress turned her back, Janet improved on its contribution to her morning from a bottle she carried in her purse.

She checked her watch. Ten till. Over at the Y, Tai Chi for Seniors would soon be over. Earlier in the year, she’d promised to take an exercise class to satisfy, in some small way, her best friend’s crusade to transform her life. “You don’t go to the doctor. You don’t eat well. You don’t exercise,” Beverly had said. “That has got to stop. If you don’t stick around, who will I spend my golden years with?” January had been just a day old when Beverly had staged a private intervention, making Janet swear with her hand on a vegetarian cookbook that she would “embrace current scientific evidence on the health benefits of a meatless diet and daily exercise.”

Since then, Janet hadn’t exactly disavowed Beverly of the notion that she’d followed through on her promises. Beverly’s heart was in the right place. What was the harm in letting her think she’d been helpful? Especially now, as they tiptoed around each other, feeling so impotent with their kids poised for divorce, both fearing what it meant for their friendship. But fitness was Beverly’s thing, not Janet’s. Beverly was constantly extending invitations to play golf and walk a 5K and join her tennis league—it would be fun, she said—but you couldn’t just pick up sports at sixty-five. Janet had arthritis to think of, and this roll on her belly. She wished she’d never told Beverly she feared it was cancer, but that horrid story in
Reader’s Digest
about the woman who thought she’d simply been gaining belly fat got her thinking. Now Beverly was a ready source of unwanted, “anticancer” recipe links with foreign-sounding ingredients.

No doubt about it, the healthy approach worked for Beverly, who still entertained a string of suitors. But Beverly was a special breed of middle age—full of pizzazz, single by choice, and still fantasizing that some white knight would come sweep her off her thinning bones. Janet, on the other hand, had accepted her plight. She was a widow getting by the best she could as she looked out over a stretch of lonely years, unless the cancer got her first, and she wouldn’t deny herself the few small pleasures life still offered.

Janet went to the register, paid her bill, and left a ten percent tip. Damn waitress hardly lifted a finger.

Out in the parking lot, Janet put the window down a few inches and took a deep breath. She loved autumn, with its fresh-pressed cider and hearty stews, sweet breads with butter, a two-box ration of candy corn, and a spooky birthday cake for her Halloween baby—Jeffrey, the one thing she’d done right in her life.

Janet took back roads all the way toward the kids’ farm store. She loved these hills, so picturesque with their short strings of houses and colorful windbreaks accenting big parcels of farmland. She drove past her own place and admired the way it sat tucked into the side of the hill, untouchable by rising waters or the ravages of wind. Somewhere along the way, she passed the invisible boundary between her land and Jeff’s.

Before she could make the final turn up to the farm store, Janet saw a commotion ahead. Flashing lights. Black-and-white cruisers. It wouldn’t be the first time a car went into the woods here. Folks zipped along too fast on these country roads, and more than a few heading downhill couldn’t make the curve at speed. Janet lowered her window more and peered into the woods for an overturned car but saw nothing.

Two officers were setting up an orange-and-white-striped barricade. One was Karl Prout’s boy. Ed? Fred? Back when Karl’s wife was dying of stomach cancer, Janet babysat the kid. Janet put her hand to the roll on her belly. The woman had met an ugly end.

Janet leaned out the window. “I’m trying to get to the farm store. Up ahead, on the left. Can I get through, or will I have to go around?”

“New Hope Farms?” said the second man.

“Yes.”

“You’re not going to get there at all. We have an ongoing disturbance on that property.”

“Like a car accident?”

“I can’t say more.”

Lingering tastes of cloves, cinnamon, and almond liqueur soured in her mouth. “You can certainly tell me. I own the property you’re parked on. That’s my son’s place. Let me speak to the Prout boy.”

“Sorry, ma’am, we’re new on the scene and don’t have all the details. The family has been relocated—”

“Goodness, where?”

“Hold on, let me check.”

Janet let her head tip back against the headrest. They didn’t need any more problems.

Who on earth would have caused an “ongoing disturbance”? The boys were so levelheaded, and too young to cause any real problems. And certainly not Ronnie and Jeff. That couple never fought. Even now, poised for divorce, Ronnie was so damned civil about it that Janet wondered why she even found it necessary. Ronnie wouldn’t hurt Jeff. Ever since grade school, she’d been crazy about Janet’s son.

A red-tailed hawk swooped down into the field beside Janet’s car and lifted off, a wriggling mouse in its talons.

Wait.

There was that time when Ronnie was depressed after college. And hadn’t Jeff mentioned that Ronnie was seeing a therapist? Yes—one determined to break them up, he’d said, because that’s when all this divorce talk started. Then the ranting about Jeff’s alcoholism and his need for medical intervention. And Ronnie had a spending problem, Jeff had told her. That sort of thing had a clinical name…oniomania. She saw it on
The
View
.

Janet recalled how ashamed Jeff had been when he came over. When was it, the beginning of September? He admitted to overextending himself to make his wife happy. Oh dear, it was all coming back to her now—how worried he’d been about Ronnie lately, that she’d taken on so much work that she was coming undone. Janet hadn’t made much of it, because truth be told, her son could be melodramatic at times. But his love for Ronnie, and his deference to Janet, had summoned her dormant maternal instinct back to life. And for the first time since his wedding, Jeff had wrapped his arms around Janet and thanked her. Janet felt plugged in. Important. Capable of making a difference.

Where was that damn Prout boy?

For the life of her, she didn’t know why Ronnie wasn’t as keen to accept help. As if Janet would draw the line at helping them financially, when they already lived in a house on property subdivided from hers. Janet would have given Jeff that fixer-upper for free if her lawyer had let her. Had she hoped the fifty thousand from her brother’s will might have seen them along a little further? Of course. But kids these days didn’t know how to stretch a dollar.

The important thing was that Jeff had asked her for help when he needed it. Janet loved Ronnie, but that girl was just like her mother when it came to money—didn’t have a clue—and Janet certainly wouldn’t let Ronnie tell her how to deal with her own son.

It would be his money anyway, once she died. Who knew? If this roll on her belly was cancerous, that might be tomorrow. So Janet had slipped him a check two weeks ago. That’s what family was for.

What if the way Ronnie had been lashing out at her son lately had really been a reflection of her daughter-in-law’s own instability? By focusing on her words, had she missed the subtext of Ronnie’s plea for help?

Just thinking this way made Janet’s brain ache. She was ill-suited for the role of counselor. Emotions were a messy business. She’d been a business teacher, everything in its place: A-S-D-F, J-K-L-semicolon, always beneath the same fingers. What could she offer Ronnie now, when their lives were such a mess? Her heart started to race. She took a long pull from the bottle in her purse.

An
Action News
van nosed up to the police barrier. Right behind, an ambulance pulled into the field downhill, its wheels fitting perfectly into a set of tracks already visible in the long grass. A
second
ambulance?

Why would—no. What if Ronnie had hurt herself? Some people resorted to such measures. Even Jeff had spoken of it when he was younger. Janet couldn’t bear it. Losing Ronnie to this divorce was bad enough. It was as if Janet’s own daughter sought emancipation. But losing her to self-harm would be a knife to the heart. Adrenaline prodded Janet’s memory. Genetics, if you believed in such a thing, were not on Ronnie’s side.

Janet reached into her purse for another bolstering draft but pulled her hand out when the man she had queried before returned. “Please,” she said. “You’ve got to tell me what’s going on.”

“The family is down at the firehouse. You can find out more down there.”

The car stalled as Janet turned the wheel. “Don’t die on me now,” she muttered. The engine coughed a few times, then kicked back to life. The twenty-year-old Ford Escort wagon had rolled past 100K two times, but why worry about it; she’d go before it would.

Janet pointed her car downhill and coasted to the firehouse, her need to know barely outweighing her need to avoid knowing. She could hardly think by the time she pulled up to the brick building. She parked in back, where you had to watch not to mow down families when picking up your barbecued chicken dinner during the twice-yearly fundraisers.

Today, the lot was all but deserted.

She went in the back door and walked down the hallway beside the fire truck bays. A policeman greeted her at the bottom of the familiar metal stairs that led up to the bar and second floor social hall. She and Beverly were both social members; their dues had helped purchase a secondhand ladder truck one of the larger companies was replacing.

“I’m told my family is here,” Janet said. She wondered if she shouldn’t turn around and go home. Mind her own business and let Ronnie deal with the consequences of her own rash actions. But the boys. And Jeff—she pictured her soothing arms around him. “I need to see them.”

“May I have your name, please?”

“Janet Farnham. Jeffrey is my son.”

“Do you have ID?”

Janet tilted her large purse away from the man and pawed through it. Between raw nerves and light-adjusting lenses that never seemed to change fast enough when entering a dark building on a bright day, she could barely see and had to feel for her wallet. “Where’s Everett? He knows me—”

“Jan.”

Beverly appeared at the top of the stairs. Janet abandoned the cop and climbed to meet her.

They threw their arms around each other and at the same time, each said, “I’m so sorry.”

Janet closed her eyes and relished the moment. For all their differences, theirs was a friendship forged in the kiln of shared pain. It had survived the trauma surrounding Beverly’s teen pregnancy, Janet’s widowhood, Beverly’s divorces, and countless other disappointments. When life required that they surrender and readjust, they’d always had each other. As painful as it would be, she’d be the rock that Beverly and Jeff could cling to as Ronnie swept them into the torrent of her crisis.

But Beverly was patting her back—comforting, not clinging. And why had Beverly said she was sorry? Janet pulled away. Looked at her friend. Looked past her and into the hall.

Calmly conversing with a police officer at an unadorned banquet table, her hair returned to its youthful curls, sat Ronnie.