In Reach (12 page)

“We should find a hospital. You’re bleeding.”

“Head wounds bleed. It’s superficial. Oh, God. He took my billfold.” Annie’s voice rises at the end.

“You might need stitches. We can ask at the hotel.”

“It’s not here.”

Emily grabs her mother’s arm. She’s got to get her mother to a hospital. She’s not taking any chances. Her mother wrenches out of Emily’s grasp.

“I don’t need a fucking hospital.”

“Mom?”

“He took my billfold. Don’t you understand?”

There, on the streets of Seville, her mother starts to sob. Horrified, Emily thinks her mother must have a concussion. She must be in way worse shape than she looks. She said “fucking.” She’s hysterical. She never loses control like this. Never. Not even in the hospital. Or at the funeral. Emily tries to remember what she learned in her high school health class about shock. She takes off her light jacket and wraps it around her mother’s shoulders. Her mother trembles while Emily walks her over to the curb and gently presses her to sit. Emily lowers herself next to her and throws one arm over her mother’s shoulder. By now, Annie has stopped sobbing, but she hiccups and gasps to catch her breath. No one has come by. In this crowded city, how could they have chanced upon such a deserted street?

Annie fishes a tissue out of a pocket and blows her nose. The bleeding on her head has abated, but her hair is matted with dried blood.

“Shit,” her mother says. Even her voice wobbles.

“We can go to the embassy in the morning. Get a new passport.”

Her mother shakes her head. “I don’t carry my passport. Just a copy.”

“We’ll cancel your credit cards at the hotel.”

“I don’t carry those either. Not at night.”

“What’d he get?”

“Cash.”

“How much?”

“I don’t know. Forty, fifty bucks.”

That’s it? Emily has seen her mother hand over more than that to homeless drifters. “So . . .” She can’t think how to finish the sentence.

Her mother shudders. Emily feels it ripple through her like a tsunami. “Pictures,” Annie whispers.

“Pictures?” Emily echoes.

Her mother shrugs. “You. Your dad. The three of us.”

Every muscle in Emily’s body hardens. She feels herself poised, a hunting dog sniffing strange prey. Something is way off-kilter here. “Aren’t there copies?”

Her mother shakes her head. Sniffles.

“You carried one-of-a-kind pictures in your billfold?” This, the same woman who makes photocopies of her credit cards, leaves her passport in the hotel safe?

Annie only nods and breaks out into fresh sobs. Emily wraps a protective arm around her mom. Helps her to her feet. “C’mon,” she says. “We’re going to get your head looked at.”

The hotel clerk rustles up somebody on the staff to inspect the gash on her mother’s head. Emily suspects the man has no medical training, but he does clean the wound. It’s ugly but not deep. He dresses it with antiseptic cream and a bandage and sends them up to their room. Emily and her mother don’t say much. They’re
both spent. Emily waits for Annie to finish up in the bathroom before she goes in herself. When she comes out, her mother is asleep, her mouth slack and drooling onto the pillowcase. Emily stands over her a few moments, watches her breath rise and fall. The blanket has fallen away from her mother’s shoulders, and Emily reaches down to snug it back in place. She throws herself onto the other twin bed, and before she can begin to think through the events of this night, sleep overtakes her.

The next morning they rise early so they can have breakfast together before Annie’s flight to Madrid. She’ll catch another to Amsterdam, then to Lincoln, a long travel day ahead. They decide to splurge and eat in the hotel restaurant. They are unnaturally polite, offering each other more coffee, cream, sugar, additional sweet rolls.

Eventually Annie clears her throat. Here it comes, Emily thinks. Here comes the speech. She’s prepared to tell her mother she’s coming home. She’s already booked a flight. A lie, but so what?

“The sabbatical is not really a choice.”

Her mother sounds—Emily gropes for the word—apologetic?

“What do you mean?”

“Dean Ross thinks I need some time off. I’m not in the classroom this spring. I’m assigned to admin stuff. Research. At least that’s the public line. He couldn’t arrange the sabbatical any sooner.”

Emily drops her gaze to the floor. The ground keeps falling away as she stares at the tile. She finds herself following the tiles until the floor meets the angle of the wall, up the wall to the ceiling. Not an earthquake, then.

“Wow,” Emily manages. It comes out as a whisper.

Her mother nods. “Yeah.” She reaches over and covers Emily’s hand with hers. “I don’t want you to worry. They can’t fire me. I have tenure.”

“Is it . . . is it that bad?”

Emily waits while her mother decides what and how much to tell her. Annie’s teeth worry her lip. Her hand trembles. She looks past Emily at an apparition over her shoulder. Emily fights the urge to turn around and see what her mother is staring at. Finally, her mother returns to her.

“Probably not. I’ve known the dean a long time. He’s looking out for me. I need some time to get it together. Get my focus back.”

“Were there complaints?”

Her mother nods.

“From students?”

“I missed class a few times. Overslept. Sleeping has been difficult.”

How is this possible? Her mother’s classes have always been favorites; she’s the star of the department.

“What . . . what will you do?”

“See a therapist, I expect. Try yoga. Take up golf. What other people do when bad things happen.”

“No, I mean next year.”

“I don’t know, really. You’ll be in your last year at Madison. I could go somewhere. London, maybe. I still have a few friends there.”

“I could come with you.”

Her mother dabs at her mouth with her napkin. She’s buying time. When she does speak, her voice is pitched high and tight.

“Maybe it was wrong of me to insist that you get on with your life. I don’t know. I didn’t want you to be saddled with your sad sack mom.”

“I’m sad, too, Mom.”

“I know, darling. Of course you are. This happened . . . the timing was so bad, just when you are supposed to be enjoying your independence.”

“This spring . . . I could come home.” She means it, too. She could come home. And she would. Only now, she realizes that she doesn’t want to.

“What about Bea and Nieves?”

“They’re nice girls.”

“Do you really hate it here?”

“It’s been hard. Maybe it’s me. I’ve made it hard.”

“I’m sorry.”

Emily answers quickly, staving off more sobbing.

“Me, too.”

Emily’s not sure what either of them is sorry for, but it seems the only thing to say. They’re sorry for themselves, for each other, for the way things are.

“Your home will always be your home,” her mother says. “I want you to know that.

“Okay.”

“But, do you think it will be any easier at home?”

Emily looks down at her plate. She wets her finger and uses it to raise a pastry crumb to her mouth. Finally, she’s ready to say what she must. “Will you . . . will you be okay?”

Her mother smiles, sits back hard in her chair. Lets out a long sigh. “I might come back. Around Easter.”

Emily nods, afraid if she speaks, her voice will squeak like a rusty hinge.

“We could go north to Bilbao,” her mother says. “How about Barcelona? Even Provence. You must have a week or so off.”

“That’d be great.”

“Something to look forward to.” Her mother’s voice sounds so wistful that Emily’s chest hurts.

“But next year . . . ,” Emily says, prepared to say she’ll stay home or go wherever her mother wants to go. She could transfer to Lincoln, if it came to that. Or why not take some time and enjoy England with her mom?

Her mother waves her hand. “We don’t have to decide now.”

They drink more coffee, eat more pastries. They settle into an easy silence. Emily knows she’s been allowed access to a hidden
part of her mother’s world. She wonders if this is what it means to be a grown-up. She doesn’t quite have the language for it. It will be years before she understands that she is trading certainty and righteous indignation for ambiguity and compassion. Now, she knows only that she feels honored and strangely forlorn.

Back in the room, when she’s packing the last of her bags, Annie holds out the bundle of lace. “Would you like to keep this with you?”

“You take it. Put it in a safe place. It may have to wait a long time.”

Annie drops her head back and laughs. So quickly, there she is. The mother Emily has known. Emily swallows around the ache in her throat and waits, knowing this mother will say the perfect thing. And then she does. “We can always turn it into a tablecloth.”

Harvest

Marlene Gustafson stood with a smoking rifle cradled in her arms. Vernon lay in a heap on the ground, his body having pitched forward over the corral fence when she shot him in the back of the head. She thought he might hang up there, which made her cringe, the idea of him hooked on the fence like that, but he slumped down once the force of the blow subsided. She rolled him over with her foot so he’d be faceup. His head looked like a tire blowout, one side gone, exposed brain and bits of bone. Her nostrils quivered at the metallic tinge of gunpowder and blood. She reached down and straightened out his legs. He wore his best boots, handmade in Durango. She’d pulled them on him herself that morning, straddling his legs to get a grip. His right arm lay twisted awkwardly behind his back, but she decided to let that go. She didn’t want to touch him more than she had to.

It was dusk, early May, and a full moon strained to rise. Marlene covered Vernon’s body with a woolen blanket they’d bought long ago from a Navajo woman, hand-woven colors of the desert, sky, and sand. She stood over him a moment and watched the sun blister down in the west. The windmill creaked in the light breeze, and she snugged her sweater tight around her gaunt figure.

She left the rifle leaning against the corral fence and trudged up to the house. The screen door banged behind her as she stepped into the kitchen. She smelled the pot roast she’d put on earlier in the day. She walked across the worn green linoleum to a wall phone. They lived so deep in the Nebraska Sandhills that it cost her long distance to dial into Reach. She waited while the phone rang, wondering if everybody’d already gone home.

“Pinski, here,” a voice said.

“Sheriff?”

“That’s right.”

“This is Marlene Gustafson, out on the Triple B.”

“Oh sure, Marlene. What can I do for you?”

“Vernon’s dead.”

“My God. Do you want the coroner?”

“That won’t be necessary.”

“Who’s your regular doctor?”

“What good’s he gonna do now?”

“Well. There’s cause of death to determine. Was it a heart attack?”

“No. I shot him.”

“You . . .”

“I had to, Sheriff.”

“Marlene, don’t say another word. I’m on my way. And call yourself a lawyer.”

Everybody knew Vernon Gustafson could be a mean sonofabitch. Marlene knew that herself when she married him. He hired on as a hand the summer she turned eighteen, and she saw the way he reacted when a calf broke loose or a horse wouldn’t follow his lead. Once, he threw a calico kitten to the ground and broke its back because it nipped him on the thumb. He had a wild streak, but she was young and thought it manly of him to be impatient with fools. Besides, she’d hardly stepped foot off her father’s ranch,
what did she have to compare to? Her father rarely spoke more than five words at the supper table, and she’d watched her mother grow dim and gray and lonesome and nearly out of her mind with boredom. Then, her mother died when Marlene was but thirteen. That was no life for a young girl, out there, cooking for her dad and the ranch hands. She thought Vernon would keep things exciting. Her dad didn’t like Vernon, and that appealed to her, too.

They were married in the living room of the house on a Friday morning, June 16, 1922. By evening she’d found out how hard a man Vernon Gustafson could be. He shinnied up inside her like he was taming a wild mare, bucking and bumping, and then he got off, leaving her bereft and sore. She limped to the bathroom in their hotel room in Cheyenne and washed the smell of him off her.

When she didn’t come back to the bed, Vernon tapped on the door with his knuckles. “Marlene?” His voice was the softest thing about him.

She nodded but could not speak. She was afraid if she opened her mouth she’d cry, and she knew that would infuriate him. Sitting on the stool, she leaned her head against the cold enamel of the sink and shut her eyes.

He sat with his back braced against the door and told her about his life. He’d been raised by a man who believed his four sons were given to him for labor and no other reason. His mother died of pneumonia when he was five. He left home soon as he could get his legs under him, at fourteen. He was thirty now, and he’d never loved another woman. He’d known a few intimately, but she couldn’t expect him to be a monk.

“You’re such a little bitty thing,” he said. “I never saw anyone as pretty as you. I didn’t mean to hurt you, if I did.”

She came out of the bathroom then. Her night shift skimmed her knees, peach satin with white eyelet edging. Narrow straps that slipped easily off her shoulders. He lifted her in his arms and carried her to a rocking chair. He sat with her in his lap, petted
her and whispered to her, and by morning they’d found a way to be together that didn’t make her quake in fear.

Not long after that her father died when his horse stumbled and fell down a ravine. She had no siblings; the ranch fell to her and Vernon, the two of them alone out there except for summers when they had to hire a few hands to help out on the place. Through the long winter months she sometimes fell into melancholy. While Vernon pitched hay or rode the fence line, she sat for hours and looked out on the bleak prairie, nothing or nobody for miles. Other times they lay together in the big brass bed. He stroked her body with a hand tuned to living things, and she quickened under his touch. Hungry to pleasure each other, they studied anatomy and the French pornography Vernon had saved up from his ranch hand days. He showed her how various animals managed, and they laughed and tried each inventive pose.

Over the years she got pregnant five times, and five times she miscarried. The first time tore her apart; the second nearly killed her. She caught Vernon sobbing in the barn, and they clung to each other. The third time, she half expected the slow leak of blood, and the fourth and fifth, she didn’t bother calling the doctor.

She had Vernon and no one else. When branding time rolled around, she made small talk with the women who showed up with salads and pies, awkward and nervous, which they mistook for disinterest. No one knew her. No one knew if she was capable of murder.

The trial took place in Reach, the county seat. Onlookers packed the courtroom, despite the fact that it was located on the second floor of a courthouse built in 1865 and stifling in the August heat. Judge Hawley, under a heavy black robe, wore glasses that slid down his sweat-lined nose. The bailiff said the judge’s back hurt from driving all the way from Kearney in a Buick with a weak suspension system.

Marlene’s attorney, Drew Avalon, drummed his fingers on the oak table, his right knee jiggling up and down. He had a lot at stake in this case, his first murder trial. Drew had grown up in Reach and offended everyone with a sour valedictory speech on graduation night, calling his teachers narrow and his classmates hicks and rubes. Most thought he had a lot of nerve coming back home to set up a law practice. Marlene hadn’t known another lawyer in town, so he’d been assigned.

Cecilia Parker sat in the third row on the opposite side of the courtroom from Marlene. She did not miss one minute of the trial, leaving her husband, Earl, to fend for himself on his lunch hour home from the John Deere Implement Company. She held her knitting in her hands and worked row after row of stockinette stitch into a shapeless blue sweater, eyes riveted on Marlene’s face.

The ceiling fan whined. Out of balance, it clicked once during every rotation. Dill Harmon, the county prosecutor, sat under the fan and tried not to blink with every click. He was sixty years old, knew everybody in the surrounding region, including Marlene. She sat straight and prim on the witness stand, her natural shyness and years isolated up on that ranch making her look prudish and out of touch. She was guilty, no contest there, but the question was, why? Afterward, people would say Dill threw her a bone, hell, everybody knew he’d been in love with her once, too awkward to say so and scared off by her father.

“Marlene,” Dill said, standing close to the witness box, one hand on the oak railing. “Did you feel that you just had no choice?”

She raised her chin. Still a pretty woman, that peppery hair and lanky figure. She shifted in her seat, pulled at the front of her white blouse to get some air moving. “No. I had no choice.”

“No further questions,” he barked. On the way back to his table, he looked over at Drew Avalon and nodded his head. Take it home, he seemed to say to those watching, especially Cecilia Parker, who believed all lawyers worked in cahoots. Everybody
knew Cecilia despised lawyers and doctors, ever since her son died of a mistreated snakebite and the courts did not hold Dr. Metcalfe accountable.

It had been Vernon’s idea for Marlene to go to town with bruises. He thought they needed to establish a pattern.

“You’ll have to go alone,” he said. By then, he wasn’t being seen in public. His symptoms had progressed to the stage where he couldn’t walk without help. She held a straw to his mouth for drinking. They’d driven to Denver for the diagnosis, and when she first heard it, she didn’t know what it meant. Who’s Lou Gehrig, she said.

Nobody thought that much about it when Vernon sold off their herd. They were getting up in years and had no sons to carry on for them. Vernon leased the land to their neighbors. People felt sorry for it, but the O’Briens were glad to have the extra acres.

Months later, Marlene and Vernon sat at the kitchen table. Vernon needed a dishtowel tied around him to keep from tilting out of the chair. Drool streamed from the sunken side of his mouth.

“Marlene, I can’t live like this,” he said.

She stirred fresh cream into his oatmeal at the stove, her back turned to him.

“I know it’s hard,” she said.

“You got to help me,” he said.

She brought the bowl to the table and picked up a spoon to feed him.

“I’ll tell you how to do it,” he said.

She pressed her lips tight and looked out the window onto the prairie where wild grasses swayed and bowed to the wind. She’d seen plenty of animals put down; the thought wasn’t new to her.

He raised one shaking hand and placed it on her arm, his eyes glazed and sad. “I’ve always loved you, darlin’.”

She placed her hand over his, patted it.

“I want you to shoot me.”

A shudder passed through her.

“I’ll leave the place and time up to you.”

Her tears fell on their clasped hands. She ran her sleeve under her nose.

“Don’t carry on,” he said.

She picked up the spoon. “C’mon, now,” she said. “Eat your oatmeal.”

At the trial Drew Avalon brought in Dr. Metcalfe, who testified that he’d seen bruises on Marlene in the last year. He told how she’d come into his office looking frightened, and he’d noticed the black eye, her upper arm showing thumbprints. No, he hadn’t taken pictures. (Here, he fidgeted in his chair.) She came to him for indigestion. He supposed it was anxiety and prescribed an antidepressant. He’d asked her if everything was all right out on the ranch, and she said it was, and he couldn’t make her do what she wouldn’t do for herself, could he?

The pharmacist, Wade Pritchard, testified that she’d had a prescription filled. No, she hadn’t had it refilled, but that wasn’t unusual. People who lived so far from town often didn’t get their prescriptions filled regularly, and anyhow, ranchers are a cussed, independent lot who don’t like medication. (The crowd chuckled.) Yes, he had noticed the bruises around her eye and upper arms. No, he hadn’t said anything to her; he didn’t know what to say.

The minister of the Presbyterian Church, Reverend Finley, said he hadn’t seen them for some time. He knew there was a deep sorrow over their lack of children. No, he’d never been out to their ranch. (Cecilia Parker snorted, and Judge Hawley rapped his gavel for silence.) They lived thirty-four miles up in the Sandhills, and he couldn’t be absent that long from his responsibilities around town.

When it was Marlene’s turn to take the stand, Drew Avalon looked at her with concern. He poked out his lips and let puzzle
ment and pity pour out his eyes. Marlene kept her answers short and truthful, like she and Vernon had practiced.

“Did Vernon give you that black eye?” Drew asked her, in his mealy-mouthed voice. She tried not to smirk. (In fact, she’d blacked her own arms and hit her face against a towel-covered door. Then, she braced Vernon’s arm while she rammed her eye into his fist, so she wouldn’t have to lie outright.)

“Yes.”

Drew Avalon painted quite a picture, their isolation, her being an orphan, Vernon taking over her ranch. Drew made her sound helpless as a newborn calf, but she let that go by. Finally he turned her over to the prosecutor, and Dill asked that one question: “Marlene, did you feel that you just had no choice?”

She answered truthfully. “No, I had no choice.”

Everything had gone just the way Vernon had planned. He told her she would have to admit she shot him (who else was there?) to avoid an inquest, or it would come out that he’d been sick. No jury would believe a sick man could batter his wife. Vernon said it was a hell of a thing that a woman could get off for killing a man who beat her, but she’d go to jail for helping him avoid suffering. He said if she’d cover his body, they wouldn’t look too close, and he’d been right about that, too. Sheriff Pinski peeled back the Navajo blanket, saw the pulpy mass of Vernon’s head, and turned aside. After that, Vernon’s remains were cremated (no undertaker to study the body) in compliance with his will.

Marlene watched Dill walk back to his seat and felt the grip lessen around her chest. She gathered her feet under her, as if to rise, when Cecilia Parker stood up. Cecilia wore a flowered skirt and a tank top, her upper arms taut and speckled with brown spots from years in the sun. Her hair clouded in a tangle of curls atop a long body, like a nest crowning a fence post.

“Not so fast,” Cecilia said. “I got something to say.”

The judge pounded his gavel, commanded Dill and Drew to approach the bench. The bailiff took it on himself to escort Marlene back to the defendant’s seat. The whole room buzzed like a disturbed hornet’s nest, until finally the judge banged his gavel. “In my chambers,” the Judge said. He pointed his gavel at Cecilia. “You, too.”