Swallowing Stones (2 page)

“What?” Michael asked.

“Shut up,” Joe said, his voice a low, raspy whisper. “Listen.”

The news reporter’s voice was as smooth and even as a freshly planed board as he talked about the bizarre death on the Fourth of July of a man from Briarwood, New Jersey. The man had been repairing shingles on his roof around noon when a bullet from nowhere had dropped from the sky and killed him instantly. The reporter concluded by making an appeal to anyone in the area who might have information that would help the local police solve the case.

Michael never finished parking the car. In fact, he was a mile down the road, heading no place in particular, before he realized he was still behind the wheel and presumably in control. Neither of the boys spoke for several minutes. Joe never bothered to tell Michael he was headed in the opposite direction from the DMV.

When Joe finally did speak, he said, “It could have come from anywhere. It could have been anyone.”

Michael’s hands were so wet he was barely able to hold the steering wheel. He wanted to believe his friend. Joe was right. Lots of people had been shooting off firecrackers the day before. Probably shooting guns, too. Especially if they couldn’t get their hands on a few packages of illegal fireworks. Anything to make noise. That’s what the Fourth was about, right? Making a lot of noise. Guns probably had been going off all over the place.

Michael squeezed his eyes shut, as if he were fighting off a headache. Who was he kidding? The reporter had said it had happened around noon. That was when Michael had been showing off the Winchester to Joe. He looked over at his friend,
saw the limp dirty-blond waves of his shoulder-length hair brush his pale cheek as he stared down at the floor, and he knew Joe was thinking the same thing.

“I shot it into the air,” Michael said, scarcely able to breathe. “In the air, man. The bullet wasn’t supposed to go anyplace.” He pulled the car over to the shoulder and stopped. He did not trust himself to drive. Joe looked at him and shook his head. Michael couldn’t tell whether he was disagreeing with him about the shooting or saying he didn’t want to drive either.

The two of them sat in the car, letting the sun bake them through the roof. It never occurred to Michael to turn the engine back on so that they’d at least have air-conditioning.

Finally Joe pulled himself up straight and brushed his damp hair behind his ears. A single gold earring in the shape of a skull dangled from his earlobe. He grabbed Michael’s upper arm as he might have grabbed the arm of a drowning man. “Listen,” he said, leaning forward, “it was an accident.”

“But it’s still manslaughter, right? You could go to prison for something like that, right?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.” Joe shifted his gaze away from Michael’s eyes. “Anyway, I think when it’s an accident it’s called involuntary manslaughter or something like that.” He tightened his grip. “Look, nobody has to find out. Not if you get rid of the gun.”

Michael felt the crablike pinch of Joe’s fingers digging into his bare flesh. He yanked his arm away. “I’ll know,” he said.

“Get serious, man. Even if they don’t send you to prison, think how this is going to look on your record. You can kiss off all those fancy colleges you were thinking of applying to.”

Michael thought about the stack of university catalogs and applications on his desk at home. He might not have been Ivy League material, but he was counting on going to a good
school, Lehigh maybe, or Lafayette. The full impact of what Joe had just said was beginning to sink in. This was his future they were talking about, everything Michael had been working for.

“There’s some things you just got to live with,” Joe was saying. “Things you do. You know? Stuff you don’t want anybody to know about.”

Michael looked over at his friend. He’d known Joe since second grade. They’d been best friends all these years, even though they were as different as night and day. He also knew he was Joe’s only real friend. Most of the other kids at school had more or less written Joe off back in eighth grade when he’d been caught smashing roadside mailboxes with a baseball bat at one o’clock in the morning, drunk.

But no matter what kind of trouble Joe got into over the years, Michael still believed he was basically a decent person. And, even more important, he was the most loyal friend Michael had ever had.

Michael licked his lips. They were dry and tasted like salt. “Yeah, well, what would you know about it?”

“Come on, man. I’ve done things I ain’t proud of. Nobody knows that better than you.” Joe nodded slowly, his eyes narrowing to dark slits. “You just live with it, that’s all.”

But Joe was wrong. Michael knew he couldn’t live with this. How could anybody live with this? Joe was watching him carefully, as if he expected him to suddenly lunge from the car into oncoming traffic.

“Anyway,” Joe said, “we can’t be sure. That bullet would’ve had to travel over a mile.” He wiped the sweat from his face with his Woodstock II T-shirt. “Doesn’t seem possible, you know? It would’ve hit a tree or something before it got that far.”

Michael wanted to believe him, but something in his gut told him otherwise. What were the odds that someone else had
fired a gun into the air right around noon? He knew what he’d done. He knew that a bullet, unobstructed, could travel as far as a mile before it finally headed back toward the earth. His stomach was churning violently. With one swift movement, he flung the door open, leaned over the side, and vomited.

Joe slid further down in his seat. He covered his eyes with his hand and shook his head. “We got to make a pact,” he said as Michael let his head flop back against the headrest. When Michael didn’t respond, he said, “Neither of us says anything, okay? I mean, I was there, remember. I was a witness. And if I don’t come forward, that makes me an accessory to the crime. I’m in just as deep as you, man. But I’m not about to help you screw up your future.”

Michael was only half listening. He felt as if his insides had been drained from him, as if he’d been stuffed with cotton. He did not trust himself to speak.

“Are you listening?” Joe said. “Because we got to act like nothing’s happened. We got to turn this car around, and you got to take your driver’s test just like everybody expects.” He slapped the door handle with his hand, kicked the door open, and came around to the driver’s side. “Move over.” He shoved Michael’s shoulder. “Get over,” he said, pushing him to the passenger side. Then he slid behind the wheel and drove them to the DMV.

Later Michael hardly remembered the driver’s test, remembered only how he’d felt as if he’d left his whole future sitting back there on the shoulder of the road. And when the man who gave him the test told him to turn right, Michael thought of all the years he had spent becoming the best track star Briarwood Regional had ever had. And he thought about the college applications he was planning to fill out.

When the man told him to do a three-point turn, Michael
carefully put the car in reverse and thought about his parents and his younger brother, Josh. What would they do if they knew they were harboring a killer under their roof? For that was what he was, right? A murderer. He tried to let the word penetrate, but it lay like a lump of lead, silent and unspoken, on his tongue. Accident or not, he had taken another person’s life.

And when the man told him to drive down the block and turn left at the stop sign, Michael thought, for some crazy reason, about Amy Ruggerio and her torn bikini top, and suddenly he wanted to cry.

He did not pass his driver’s test. He would have to try again later. He did not pass, because when the man told him to pull up next to the orange cones and then parallel park, Michael found he could not think clearly. His eyes burned so badly he couldn’t see. His hands shook so much that he could not hold the steering wheel. Desperate, he reached for the key, shut off the engine, and climbed out of the car, leaving the keys in the ignition. The man, wearing a short-sleeved white shirt but no jacket, had loosened his tie and stared through the window at Michael, who had simply turned and walked away.

Later that day Michael went to a hardware store and bought a three-and-a-half-foot piece of PVC pipe and two end caps. That night, while the rest of his family slept, he put the Winchester inside the pipe, sealed the two end caps to keep water from getting in, carefully unstacked the firewood from the pile behind the garage, dug a three-foot-deep trench, buried the rifle, and restacked the wood. Then he went to bed and lay awake the entire night, wondering if he would ever sleep again.

c
harlie Ward’s death made the national news only hours after it had happened, although few people noticed. They were too caught up in watching the brilliant dazzle of color exploding above them in celebration of Independence Day. The anchorman on one major network called Charlie Ward’s death a “bizarre accident”; another referred to it as a “rain of death from the sky.” But Jenna Ward did not watch the news that night. Fred Campbell, the family’s physician, concerned about the effect that the barrage of firecrackers and cherry bombs in the neighborhood would have on Jenna and her mother, had given them each a sedative and sent them to bed. They had slept through the entire night, unaware of the reporters stalking below their bedroom windows.

The Briarwood police had cordoned off the area, stretching yellow tape across the front yard to ward off morbid spectators. Dave Zelenski, the local police chief, had stationed police officers round the clock at the scene of the accident. And so it was that Jenna, her head dulled from the aftermath of the sedative, peered out her bedroom window on the following morning to see a police officer standing at the end of her driveway. That
was how she knew the nightmare of the day before had really happened.

Outside, the July sun was just spilling over the rooftop of the church across the street. Without checking her clock, Jenna knew it was early, probably no later than six. As she watched the police officer take a Thermos from his car and pour himself a cup of coffee, she wondered what she should be feeling. Because the truth was, she felt nothing.

Below, on the roof of the front porch, a tight line of mourning doves had gathered. They sat as rigid as little gray soldiers, their feathers pressed so close together that Jenna thought if one flew off, they would all be lifted into the air in a long silver rope of birds.

For a long time she watched the birds, because she did not know what else to do. Then she rummaged through one of the drawers for a pair of shorts and a top, dressed indifferently, and wandered into the bathroom to brush her teeth.

She splashed cold water on her face and reached for a towel. The unmistakable scent of her father’s Royal Copenhagen aftershave rushed up to greet her. He had used this towel, probably only the day before. She held the towel in her hand for a few minutes, then folded it neatly and hung it on the rack, as if she were expecting him to use it later.

Barefoot, her dark blond hair still a tangled mess, she descended the stairs. The house seemed unusually large and silent. But it smelled the same: an odor of rose-petal potpourri, strategically placed in bowls and baskets in every room by her mother. The odor had never seemed so overpowering before. It made her gag.

The kitchen was no better, so she took the basket of rose petals from its place on the counter and dumped the contents
into the trash compactor. Her mother would be furious. Jenna shrugged at the thought. So what else was new?

She reached for the teakettle, filled it with water, and put it on to boil. It was all so odd, she thought. Here she was, calmly going about her morning routine as if nothing had changed. She felt as if she were standing outside herself, watching as she opened the small white envelope and pulled out the tea bag. Watching as she set it in a mug. Watching for her hand to shake, which it never did. Not so much as a tremor. She poured the boiling water and added a packet of sugar substitute, all very matter-of-factly.

While she waited for the tea to steep, she studied the list of chores that her mother had made up for her father and taped to the refrigerator door. The list was an old joke between her parents. Her father had called it the “Honey Do” list. At the top of the list, underlined twice, was
PATCH LEAK IN ROOF
. Jenna lifted the magnetic pencil from the door and crossed off that first item.

When her tea was ready, she picked up the mug and carried it down to the basement. In the far corner was her father’s workshop. She knew she had come here on purpose. The smell of sawdust was as powerful a reminder as his aftershave. She set the mug on the workbench and positioned herself on his stool. The metal rung bit into the arches of her bare feet.

She looked around the workshop. This had been her father’s sacred place. He had loved nothing better than to spend a few hours on weekends building things.

Jenna lifted a hammer from the bench, turning it over and over in her hand, feeling its weight. Her father had never spent as much time down here as he’d wanted. His life had been an
endless round of meetings and negotiations. He had been in upper management at AT&T for as long as she could remember.

She set the hammer down, reached for her mug of tea, and blew into the rising steam. Usually her father would be halfway to his office by now. And in some strange way it seemed as if he
were
on his way to work, just like any other day. At six o’clock that evening or thereabouts, he would come bounding through the front door, fly up the stairs, grab his swim trunks, and make a mad dash for the pool in the backyard, just as he had done every night in the summer. That was the reality. It had always been the reality.

Jenna could not make herself believe otherwise. Yes, the ambulance had come. Yes, the attendants had strapped her father to a gurney. And yes, the blood from the wound in the back of his head had leaked onto the white sheet. But that didn’t mean he was dead, did it?

She stared down at the floor. Small piles of sawdust littered the area like anthills. Her father rarely had bothered to sweep it up. He’d liked it on the floor. She dug into one of the piles with her big toe, suddenly aware that she had her ear cocked toward the staircase, listening for her father’s footsteps.