The Siege (5 page)

“I know, babe, I know,” Dale said, still leaning close and stroking the back of her head.

When she was four and her mother had died, Angie was too young, really, to register the true depth of her loss. It had seemed like one day her mother just stopped being around, and after a long while she got used to it. Mommy had “gone away from us—gone back to God,” her father had told her. Figuring she was too young, Dale hadn’t let her go to the funeral or anything, so she had never really experienced a deep, personal loss before.

“Why doesn’t stuff like this happen to… to other people?” she sobbed. “Larry never hurt anyone.”

Dale’s eyes were stinging, but he knew he had to be strong for Angie now, like he had been when Natalie died.

“No one ever says life is fair, babe,” he whispered. “And I think that’s one thing, maybe the only thing, that separates kids from adults. You begin to realize that life never has been and never will be fair.”

Angie looked at him with grief twisting like smoky clouds over her face and said, “We maybe realize it, but do we have to
accept
it?”

Dale shook his head as he got up and went to the refrigerator. He took out the juice jug and poured each of them a tall glass of orange juice. He got a couple of ice cubes from the freezer and dropped them into Angie’s glass, the way she always liked it.

He sat back down, and they drank silently together, each reassured by the nearness of the other. The only sound in the kitchen was Angie sniffing back her tears.

“Well,” Dale said at last, once their juice was gone and neither of them had moved from the table.

“Well, what?”

“Nichols said the funeral would be Monday afternoon, up in Dyer,” Dale said. “I’ve got the week off so I can go up. I was thinking you could probably stay at Mary’s for a couple of days.”

“I want to go, too,” Angie said.

There was a willfulness in her voice that Dale had never heard before. He looked at her and saw the resolve in her eyes. She was biting down hard on her lower lip, turning it a bloodless pink. She looked so small and scared, Dale wanted to smother her in hugs.

“I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” he said solemnly. “I mean, funerals aren’t exactly the funnest things going, you know.”

The resolve in her eyes got steelier, but then she let her gaze drift past her father and out the kitchen window to the arc of clear blue sky.

“You know,” she said, almost dreamily, “I always thought funerals were such a waste of time. Like—you know—like they were just so the people still alive could get rid of guilt and stuff they were still feeling.”

Dale smiled gently. “Well, I don’t expect the person who has died really cares one way or another.”

“I never did, either,” Angie said. “But you know, with…” For an instant she paused, almost unable to say his name, but she braced herself and went on. “With Larry, though, I have this feeling that it’s… it’s different somehow. Like it’s important for me to go to his funeral so I can help keep his memory fresh in my mind.”

Standing up quickly, Dale walked over to the sink and, leaning on the counter, looked out over the backyard. His mind was a confusion of half-thoughts and scattered memories, but the overriding thought was that the void, the black, bottomless void had opened up and swallowed another person he loved, just as someday it would slide open and pull him and Angie and everyone down. He knew he had to deal with it his way, and he also recognized that Angie was old enough to decide for herself how she would deal with it.

“You know, it’ll be like—like a part of him is still alive as long as I remember him.”

Dale turned, unable to distinguish his daughter’s face through his swirl of tears.

“What you said before, though,” Angie said, “about how the person who’s dead doesn’t care one way or the other. Do you think that’s really true?”

“What do you mean?” Dale asked, controlling his voice only by an immense effort.

“I mean, do you think that once you’re dead, that’s it? Or do you think the person—like goes on, somehow, like to Heaven or something.”

Dale shook his head and ran the cuff of his shirt sleeve over each eye.
She’s not four years old anymore
, he told himself.
She’s growing up. She’s starting on that rocky road to adulthood, and it would be dishonest not to tell her the truth as I see it
.

“No,” he said, still shaking his head. “I think when you’re dead, that’s it. It’s final. You go back to where ever the hell you were before you were born, and all that’s left of you is what they bury in the ground.”

“So then it is important,” Angie said, a sudden intensity in her voice. “ ’Cause, like, if
I
don’t go to Larry’s funeral, if
I
don’t
remember
him, then it’ll be like he never ever lived.”

Dale nodded and, sighing deeply, ran his hand over his forehead.

“Okay,” he said. “You better get packing if you’re coming with me. I’ve got a few things to take care of, but I want to be on the road before lunch.”

IV

D
onna LaPierre had thought, foolishly, perhaps, once upon a time, that she would never have to see the town of Dyer again, but it came into view as she created the hill just as she remembered it. After too damned many miles of twisting, narrow roads through Mattawamkeag and Haynesville, the pine forest thinned out, giving way to a scattering of houses and stores that marked the center of town, such as it was. North of town, toward Houlton, the woods had been pushed back, leaving low-knolled hills and wide, flat fields, covered now with the green vines of potatoes nearing harvest time.

Donna looked at the photograph taped to her dashboard just above the AM/FM radio. On the drive north, she had done something incredibly immature; it hadn’t made her feel good then, and it didn’t make her feel good now…
but still
, she thought,
he deserved it!

With the tip of her cigarette, she had burned two small holes through the eyes of Bradley Phillips, the man in the photo… the man standing on a white-sand beach in Jamaica dressed in cut-off shorts and a T-shirt with the logo
NO PROBLEM
… the man with his left arm draped lovingly over Donna’s shoulder… the man whose bright gold wedding ring sparkled in the Caribbean sunlight… the man who had told Joan, his wife, he was in Jamaica “strictly on business”… the man who had finally told Donna.

“You self-centered, chicken-shit little
prick
!” Donna said, feeling her upper lip curl into a nasty snarl. She stuck up her middle finger and waved it savagely in front of the photograph, but the ash-rimmed eyes didn’t look back at her… or if they did, they were as sightless as if he were dead.

In spite of her embarrassment about what she had done, though, Donna didn’t just take the photo, shred it, and cast its tatters to the wind. She liked keeping it there—for just a while longer—as a memento of a love affair gone bad.

The two hundred and fifty dollar fine for littering wouldn’t be worth the pleasure, she thought, replacing her hand on the steering wheel as she slowed to a stop at the blinking red light in the center of town.

“Bradley, my man, you’ve littered up my life enough already!” she said, automatically snapping on the turn signal for the left turn onto Burnt Mill Road.

Taking the turn, she glanced over at the Mill Store, and sure enough, Sparky Wilson was sitting there, slouched in the shade of the gas pumps with his hat pulled down over his eyes to shield them from the afternoon sun. Donna couldn’t remember a time when Sparky hadn’t been propped out there by the pumps, and she seriously wondered if maybe, in the time she was away, Sparky had died and the town had put a life-sized statue out there to commemorate him. But no. As she completed her turn, she gave her horn a quick beep, and Sparky shook awake, glanced at her, and waved even though she could tell by his squint that he didn’t know who in hell she was.

Some things around here never change
, she thought. And that was exactly why, as soon as she graduated from high school, she had left town for college with the intention of never coming back. That had been eleven years ago, and she had pretty much done just that. Only twice within the last five years had she come back to Dyer. And both times it had been for funerals, first her mother’s in 1984 and then her father’s in 1986.

As she drove slowly through town, Donna noticed plenty of other things that hadn’t changed. It was spooky how much it felt like she had never left and in some ways, that was exactly true. Small towns like Dyer do seem to create their own little sinkholes in time. While the rest of the world spins along, changing and growing, towns like Dyer stay the same. The population remains almost constant, the birth rate balancing the death rate. A few new houses go up on the outskirts of town, but lumbering and potato-growing have already seen their boom days, and nothing, not even the new varieties of potatoes, could revive them to their former glory days. There’s no influx of new jobs to lure new families. Sons and daughters assume their parents’ jobs and social positions, and only a few, usually the brightest students, get away to college and never come back.

Maybe that wasn’t Sparky back there at the pumps
, Donna thought. Maybe Sparky got married, and that was Sparky Jr. out there, manning the pumps for the old man. It was possible… But she liked the Sparky memorial statue idea better.

“And here
I
am,” Donna said under her breath. “The one that almost got away.”

When she saw the yellow siding of her sister’s house up ahead on the right, she fished a cigarette out of her purse and lit it with the car lighter. She slowed for the turn into the driveway and a weary sense of sameness came over her. The driveway was still unpaved; it still had its Mowhawk centerstrip of grass and weeds where the wheels from Barbara’s car and Al’s truck hadn’t worn it away.

How many years had it been since Barbara had said she wanted to get it paved? Donna wondered. Maybe she should just give them the money to get the damned thing done while she was here visiting. Then, when she left again, she would be secure in the knowledge that at least
something
had changed in Dyer recently!

The screen door in the shade of the boxed-in porch opened, and Donna saw a wide smile spread across her sister’s face as she came quickly down the steps into the sunlight. Donna pulled in behind the family car, an old, sun-bleached blue Volvo station wagon, knowing she was taking Al’s parking space, and killed the engine. By the time she pulled the keys from the ignition and dropped them into her purse, Barbara had run down the steps and was reaching in through the open driver’s window to squeeze Donna’s shoulder.

“Oh, you’re early,” she said, her voice nearly squealing. “I wasn’t expecting you until ’round suppertime.” Donna popped open the door and stepped out to be engulfed in a warm hug. She held her cigarette away from them at a safe distance and gave her sister a quick kiss on the cheek.

“Radar detector,” Donna said, nodding toward her car. “A great invention if you want to make good time on the road.”

Barbara shook her head as she stood back, holding Donna at arm’s length and studying her.

“You’ve lost quite a bit of weight since I saw you last,” Barbara said.

Donna took a puff of her cigarette, and snorted out a thin burst of smoke with her laughter. “Yeah, I have, about a hundred and eighty pounds of dead weight.”

Again, Barbara shook her head as though in disapproval of her sister, or at least of her life style. “I’m sorry to hear about you and Brad,” she said, “but you didn’t really expect him to give up his wife and family, did you?”

Donna expelled smoke and dropped the cigarette to the driveway, grinding it out in the dirt with her heel. Drawing her hair back with her fingers, she sighed deeply and said, “Come on, now. Don’t start in with your big sister routine with me already, okay? I’ve had a bitch of a week.”

“Okay, okay,” Barbara said, and again she clasped her sister in her arms and squeezed her. “I’ve got the guest room all ready for you, and like I told you on the phone, you’re welcome to stay with us for just as long as you like.”

Donna smiled wanly as they broke their embrace. Reaching in through the open car window, she popped the trunk release. Hoping her sister hadn’t yet seen the photo on the dashboard, she reached over and flicked it to the floor. It landed face-up, and now it
did
look as though Brad was staring up at her with a blank, zombie stare. She repressed a shiver as she walked around to the back of the car to get her luggage.

“Do you want me to try and find Junior to help with this stuff?” Barbara asked as Donna unloaded three large suitcases and several tied-shut boxes.

“If you can take this, I can get the rest,” Donna said. “Gosh, I’ll bet he’s grown up some since I saw him last.”

Barbara smiled with parental pride. “You should see him. He’s already up to here on me.” She tapped her arm almost at the shoulder, then held her hands out for the package Donna was holding out to her.

“Be careful with that,” Donna said. “It’s breakable. A little surprise for you.”

“What is it?” Barbara asked, giving the box a gentle shake.

Donna’s smile widened slightly, and she glanced to one side. “Remember that table lamp from the house? The one I took after Dad died?”