Chapter Two
~
Rose Weiss descended the wooden steps of her back porch. It was chilly, so she tucked the ends of her dark hair into her fur-lined coat collar. She looked around at the nearest window of the one-and-a-half story house with the brown, imitation-brick siding, and green trim. No one, as far as she could see, was watching, so she continued along the weed-lined walk.
She stopped next to a rusted, long-out-of-use well pump that leaned to one side like a limp flower stalk and extracted an object that she had hidden among the chunks of concrete. The cool air was stirring, as if announcing that something was coming. Rose held the object against the front of her tight jeans as she moved away from the house.
Positioned on both sides of the walk were four rusted-metal poles. Originally, they had been erected to serve as clothesline poles, but she and her brothers had stretched a net for badminton between two of the poles and worn away circles in the lawn by playing the game. The walk itself, pieced together by worn bricks, led to the garage of large cement blocks flanked by three metal trashcans. An orange sticker had been pasted to the side of the first can.
Like all the garages on this street, the garage belonging to Rose’s family faced away from her house. Rose reached the end of the walkway and the edge of the driveway next to the garage. As she crossed in front of the closed garage door, she shifted the position of the book and held it against her thigh.
Across from her was an open field, and the only movement was a bee zipping around a dying flower stalk.
What was it doing there this late in the season?
Sometimes, to find a quiet place to study – her house was often a blizzard of noise with her brothers watching baseballs games and her mother watching sitcoms and raucous game shows – she walked through the weeds of that field. She thought about going over there, and maybe she would have to if people started appearing with any regularity on this back street.
Now, however, she was apparently alone. She opened the book and thumbed through it. What was she looking for? No idea of what she would find. However, Patty must have had some reason for giving it to her and for telling her to keep it away from any members of the Ruffcorn family.
Patty had got the idea of keeping a journal not from a writing teacher but from a television series about a girl who disappeared into another dimension populated by frightening creatures. It was a modern version of Alice Through the Looking Glass. Patty had loved the series –as had many fans across the country –and she had walked around quoting lines from it.
Rose had chided Patty for imitating a popular series on cable TV, but Patty thought it romantic to pattern her life after a fictional girl who, even though the show involved weird characters, was popular because she slept around, and whose diary was of monumental importance to her friends after she vanished. After the popular series left the cable network because the show was supposedly too expensive to produce, Patty stopped behaving like the fictional girl. However, she continued to scribble down her experiences into the journal.
Rose found and leaned against the concrete blocks of the garage where she kept her Kia, propped her foot up on one of the lidded trashcans, and reread the last page of the entry about Patty’s sexual experiences with Crandall Lewis. She had also written a long passage about Rose and her boyfriend, Gordy. Nothing too revealing. Just speculation.
Maybe another entry provided a clue regarding why Patty ran away from home, which is what most people believed. Probably the journal gave no clue at all, but she could not convince herself of that until she read the rest of it. Some of it contained Patty’s attempts at poetry, fragments of short fiction, and notes for school projects taken at the HC3 library – which is why Patty had called it a journal instead of a diary. A diary sounded girlish, and Patty preferred not to be thought of as a young girl.
What if someone found this book? It was not likely, but it was possible.
***
By 1:30 in the morning, the wind which had intensified into a storm swept over west-central Illinois, the nose of the state that met the lower tip of Iowa and the upper border of Missouri. Its violence was somewhat abated by then, but enough fury remained to knock out power lines along the Warrick Bottoms.
Despite the shaking of tree limbs scraping against the roof of the mobile home, Selena Herrmann had decided to use the time to read her old notes. She certainly could not sleep with the erratic disruptions continuing.
Brent had gone stumbling off into the dark, looking for his long-necked flashlight. He now raided the tiny refrigerator, fumbling for another beer and using a fork to fish the cold meatballs and black olives out of the spaghetti sauce she had made for their supper many hours ago.
Their daughter Daphne, Selena had determined before returning to her tine bedroom in the metal domicile, was still asleep.
Anyone who had been raised in the mid-west, as Selena had been, was accustomed to abrupt climatic shifts. It was as if nature in the central states was more temperamental and capricious than elsewhere in the country, serving up unannounced for those who continued to live here dishes of contrasting flavors. “If you get bored with the weather in western Illinois,” farmers muttered to anyone who listened, “wait fifteen minutes.”
Sometimes Selena liked these changes; they matched her own temperament. Brent had quickly discovered this, and she had once told him that he need not point out her own contradictions. She liked weather changes as much as she liked the sun appearing after a ferocious rainstorm to make the street glisten with golden reflections. She enjoyed the feel of the wind before a storm, the smell of the moist air and loamy earth after a deluge, and the sight of snow flickering against windowpanes before it packed itself into the corners of the window frames.
Like most western Illinoisans, however, she hated the suffocating, humid summer days and equally wet, bitter-cold winters. She had been caught in freezing rains that could, in no time, glaze streets and highways until they became perilous sheets of ice. She had watched the swirling of black clouds in gray and pale-green skies that telegraphed an approaching tornado. And she had been stranded in her car when rain slanted at an almost horizontal angle and the winds sculpted the landscape into temporary works of art.
The flame had burned deep into the candle that sat on the nightstand next to Selena’s head. From the hollowed-out valley of wax, the pale flame threw a circle of light onto the ceiling, but onto the pages where her eyes tried to hold tightly to the notes, it threw only a crimson glow.
Crandall, or “Cooter,” Lewis had asked her questions about learning disabilities and the year-by-year decrease in the reading comprehensive ability of many of his students at the Henderson County Community College east of Warrick. He had wanted to know whether there existed a higher number of disabilities or disorders among students who came from dysfunctional families, and she had been able, even by candlelight, to find the files of research material she had used for her master’s thesis.
“Whatcha doin’?”
Selena looked up to see the half-naked figure in the bedroom doorway, hunched slightly forward like a football player in the line. “You are reading at this time of the morning?”
Selena sat up in bed, determined to keep the conversation as reasonable as possible with a man who had been drinking steadily for hours.
“I’m looking at the research I did for my Master’s.” She glanced at him warily. “Cognitive skills in children from alcoholic families.”
Brent lurched toward the bed. “Now?”
“I can’t sleep,” she told him. “Does it matter?”
He took one of the print-out pages from her, scrutinized it in the dim illumination until the lost-little-boy expression transformed his face, and shoved it back at her. “That’s what I thought. This MA crap. What good did it ever do for you?”
Selena took the pages and threw them angrily onto the floor. “I wrote this. I worked hard on it! If you wanted a moron for a wife, you should’ve married one of those bowling alley babes with the padded bras and the horror-movie eye makeup.”
“At least one of them might care about her family.”
“Brent, they probably can’t even spell the word ‘family’.” Selena knew it was senseless to try to talk to him, to try to reason with him, but her anger fed her. “You’ve thrown that at me before. Give it a rest.”
“Shit! You--”
“You don’t want me to have friends of my own. You think I should just talk to yours. But I must live for myself too, Brent. There is more to this world than sports and TV. You want me to sit around like most wives we know, wishing I were somewhere else or with someone else?”
“You saying you don’t do that now?” Brent ran his thumb along the elastic of his underwear. “You don’t have it as bad as you think.”
“Brent. Go to sleep. Let’s talk about it later.”
“When? You’re always busy when I come home. Talking to your mom. Talking to Cooter Lewis. Talking to that screwed-up blonde broad.”
“Patty ’s had a rough family life. Leave her out of this.”
“Yeah. Well. She’s not your student anymore.”
“I know that.”
“And you’re not her psychiatrist.”
“I just try to help her. It helps me to talk to her.”
“You talk to her. Right. But not to me.”
“I don’t like to talk to you when you’ve been drinking. We’ve tried it. It doesn’t accomplish anything.”
“I’m not drunk.”
“Go to bed, Brent. You’ll wake up Daphne.”
He stared drunkenly toward his daughter’s bedroom, then at the empty space beside Selena. “Goddammit, you’re not my mother.”
“Then stop acting like a little boy.”
Brent cleared his throat and turned away, as he often did when he felt himself losing an argument. Soon, she knew, he would be seething inside. He would stomp around, throw things about, and curse. He peeled his underwear down to his thighs, stepped out of them, and turned toward her again. “Does this look like a little boy?”
Selena recognized the look of the half-boy, half lunatic that would be ranting soon if he failed to get his way.
He sat on the edge of the bed and roughly grabbed her breast.
She knew her choices were between two minutes of Brent’s version of lovemaking or two days of drunken verbal abuse. If she chose the former, she could, at least, finish her work after he went to sleep. She helped him unbutton her nightgown. Fine, she thought. Here. Selena had learned long ago to ignore Brent’s thrusting and groaning; she tried to think of something else.
Fortunately, he never seemed to mind. For him, it was an act of possession and a brief release of all that he had been building up to.
Selena looked at the candle flame as it flickered and seemed to change color. She felt it pulling her, drawing her into the center of the tiny flame, into the alien landscape of the other world.
***
“—at 216 Main Street in Warrick,” said the announcer on the truck radio. “Rise and shine with two sausage and egg biscuits for only three dollars at--”
“Okay.” Corey reached across the steering wheel and flicked off the radio. He drove Cooter Lewis’ orange Ford pickup south along Highway 51. In the distance stood the yellow water tower with the smiling face painted on its bulbous tank, the landmark which indicated the turn-off to Titan State Park.
Corey drove past the water tower, past the turn-off that would take him to the state park. He wanted to spend the day – at least part of the day – outside. He thought the clear air might help him decide on what he should do.
And that was what his new therapist, a young and pretty counselor at the county mental health office, had recommended that he do: “Be good to yourself this weekend,” Lenora, or Lennie as she preferred, had said.
“If being good to myself,” he had told her, “means doing some physical work on the farm belonging to my young friend Cooter Lewis, then I am having your prescription filled.”
Corey traced the line of the two-lane highway that rose and fell as he thought about his response to her. One woman and two men, one wearing a headband, jogged along the side of the road. All three were warmly dressed for the late autumn weather. Corey wondered where they were going. They were south of the state park turnoff now with only rolling hills and tilled soil surrounding them.
“I need to get some exercise,” he said, again aloud. He noticed the hollow echo of his voice in the truck cab. “Like those joggers. I haven’t played racquetball for a while. I need to get back into that.”
Physical exercise was reportedly the best antidote for depression and anxiety. His therapist had said that an anxiety attack was like an alarm going off in his body. He could not ignore the cacophony. It was telling him that he had to do something for himself because he had a problem.
Corey remembered how a Warrick doctor had, when he was still in high school, put him on a kind of nerve medication. His mother had been horrified when she found out. He had tried to tell her that he was no worse than any minor physical illness -- a line that he had heard somewhere, maybe in a movie – but she refused to listen. She had accused him of trying to garner sympathy, or of trying to make people think bad things about their family.
***