Where the Broken Lie (27 page)

At some point in the insidiousness that followed, Katie cried a little too loud and he put his hands over her face to quiet her. He did not notice when she had stopped making any kind of noise at all.

“How did this happen?”
he had wondered. This was not what he wanted. This was not who he was.

Panicked, he wrapped her lifeless body in bed sheets he had pulled from the hall closet. He went to the kitchen and pulled down a bottle of Scotch. He took a long drink and it calmed him. Grandma was going to be back from Glidden soon, so he had to act fast.

He carried Katie’s body to the garage and laid it on the floor. Then he backed his truck into his garage, put Katie’s lifeless body in the truck bed and threw a crumpled tarp over the top of her, weighing down the edges with bricks. He dumped the body in the high weeds along the side of the train tracks leading out of Willow Grove.

Later on, as the entire town searched the streets of Willow Grove for Katie, Grandpa pulled Keller aside and planted his lie about seeing Slim Jim and Katie. He was actually surprised at how easily he was able to persuade his old bud Alvin to make that phone call to the sheriff’s office.

“It was coming back into town that I saw them, Alvin. Saw Katie and that drifter right at the railroad tracks together. Must have been about 4:30.”

Affecting a tone of harried confusion, he continued, “Mary Lynn would kill me if she knew I’d left little Heather alone in the house like that—even if she was napping. And what kind of witness would that make for anyway? A grandfather who’s left his baby granddaughter alone so he can go get schnockered—and then driving drunk on top of it? I’d hate to think Slim Jim would get away with this just because I screwed up, Alvin.”

“So, what do we do, Hollis? What do we do if the anonymous tip isn’t enough?”

At this Grandpa grabbed Alvin by the shoulders and gave him the most earnest look he could muster. “Alvin, if that time comes, I need you to tell folks that it was you who saw that hobo with that Cooper girl by the railroad tracks. It was him who killed her, Alvin. You know that. A complicated story and he may walk. Not to mention the trouble it could bring on me. I may be a drunk, Alvin, but I’m no liar. And I know what I saw. Hell, we all know it was Slim Jim killed that girl, right?”

“Right, right.”

Old Man Keller paused for a long moment and with a determined and distant look he said, “Sheriff Buck, I’m calling to say that I think I know who killed that Cooper girl.”

The grave letter contains no real apology. No accountability. Grandpa was confessing to someone else’s guilt.

When I finish reading, I fold up the letter and slip it back inside the envelope. It represents the death of so much that I briefly consider digging a tiny grave and burying the letter itself. But I had buried too much in my life, so instead, I walk the graveyard with that letter safely in my hands, taking in the sight of the many-colored envelopes adorning the graves. Reading the names on each headstone as I pass, searching for one name in particular.

Buck.

We go to Church on Father’s Day.

I sit dead center in the middle of the pew with a straight and clear path to the altar laid out in front of me. I can still see Ethan’s tiny white coffin at the end of it.

Behind the altar on the east wall of the church, the stained glass image of an open-armed Jesus confronts me. He is larger than He has ever been and His eyes meet mine.

“Tucker, would you mind holding Griffin while I dig out a towel?” my cousin Allison asks.

Griffin, who had been born three weeks after Ethan, has spit up and Allison is looking for something to clean her lapel with.

“Sure.”

His chest expands and air whistles from his nose. I close my eyes and hold him tight to my chest, listening to the lovely sound of his blessed breathing. Tears began to trickle down my face, leaving my mouth salty. I open my eyes to again see the arms of Jesus still opened before me and I hold that baby boy tighter, cannot imagine letting go.

When Allison sees me crying, she realizes what’s going through me.

“Oh, Tucker. How stupid of me. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s okay. Really.”

“No, it’s not. That was really insensitive. I’m so sorry.”

I sit back down and wait for the faithful to file out. When all have left, I look up once more at Stained-Glass Jesus and I thank Him for the gift he’d just given me. The gift of a breathing baby in my arms.

After church, Tammy takes Tory back to the house to finish packing up our things. We are leaving Willow Grove and with Grandma and Grandpa both gone now, I am not sure when I will return to this place again.

I take one last walk up to the playground, but Swinging Girl isn’t there. Her swing isn’t only empty, it’s broken. The chain has snapped on one side and the seat hangs helplessly from the other. I sit down in the swing next to it and try to make sense of the past few weeks.

I suppose that I found what I was supposed to find in Willow Grove, even if it hadn’t been what I was looking for. Maybe we always find what we’re meant to find.

I think about the odd marvel of the Grave Letters and wonder whether the townspeople of Willow Grove will continue writing them. I hope so. It feels like something beautiful that should continue. And other than helping start those letters, I don’t think I’ve done much
good
here. I just hope that I’ve done some
right
. Right by James Johnson. Right by the Coopers. Right by me and my family. Most importantly, I hope I have done right by Katie and Ethan. I want them to be proud of me.

I kick at the gravel beneath me and look again at the empty swing dangling to my left.

Just another broken part.

Maybe Old Man Keller was right. Maybe we are all just a bunch of broken parts. Broken souls walking on the grass that he mows until we became one of the broken bodies that lie beneath it.

I get up from the swing and leave the park without looking back. I was ready to leave Willow Grove. I was ready to go home.

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The last thing eighteen-year-old Ann Leigh remembers is running from her boyfriend in a thick Nebraska cornfield. This morning she’s staring down a cool Italian sunrise, an entire continent from the life she once knew. The events of the eighteen months in between have inexplicably gone missing from her memory. 

All at once she’s living with Tommy, an attractive, young foreigner asking for her continued love. Though he’s vaguely familiar, she recalls a boy named Shane in America who she reluctantly agreed to marry. Juggling a new world while her old one is still M.I.A is difficult enough without the terrifying movie scenes spinning a dizzy loop in her mind: glimpses of a devastating house fire, a romance gone wrong, an unplanned pregnancy, and a fractured family – each claiming to be part of who she once was – a girl and a past somehow discarded. 

Ann Leigh must collect the pieces of herself to become whole again, but she doesn’t know who to trust especially when Tommy’s lies become too obvious to ignore. And above all, her heart aches to discover what became of the child she may or may not have given birth to.

The Making of Nebraska Brown tells the story of one girl’s coming apart from the inside and the great lengths she’ll go to reclaim herself and find her way home.

Last thing I remember, Shane Kirkland had his left hand on my right boob, and I could feel the nub—the missing chunk of his pinky finger that got chewed off in the gristmill. So I ran, mostly because the idea of marrying him and his sad punk of a finger sent a shiver straight through to my bones.

Then I recall the wind under my feet as I left him in the raw evening mist that settled over the cornfields as soon as the sun was done burning a hole through the Nebraska day. And if memory served, I kept my mouth closed because my 12th grade track coach used to say that if you don’t, you could unknowingly swallow an entire bellyful of summer gnats in less than a mile.

I motored past the silo at McClusky’s farm and down the path that lays parallel to the stream. I don’t know why I was running so fast. He would never catch up, wouldn’t even attempt to. He couldn’t, what with his pancake-flat feet and bad ankles that dislocated at high speeds. Shane was as good as any maimed man, twenty-one years old, horny, in love, and gloriously imperfect.

“Ann Leigh!”

His voice certainly could carry. Always said he could holler clear across town. There was some talent to that; I suppose.

“Ann Leigh, come back!”

I kept the pace for a while, only slowing when I neared the water tower. The vision in my mind turns grey and sketchy from there. Had I scaled all the way to the top? If so, it wouldn’t be the first time. Had I reached that skinny lip of a ledge and lost my footing, toppling over? Or had I slipped somewhere along the climb?

I recall the moonlight slicing through the trees, a sharp silver spear on my face while thoughts slashed my brain like a razor—thoughts of becoming Mrs. Shane Kirkland the Second, thoughts of working in his daddy’s restaurant alongside his mother, slinging hash—whatever that meant—and refilling the tampon holder in the ladies room known as the Hen House.

“Ann Leigh, where are you?
Where are you
?”

I pried my eyelids open. A clean blue sky strung out above me. And then a face, a man’s face. His lips were moving slowly, his words like seasoned gibberish.

“Sta bene signorina?

I squinted against the light, so bright, so unlike a Nebraska morning.

Morning?

“Pardon?” My own voice was tiny and far off.

“Sta bene signorina?” he repeated.

I felt the ground beneath me, a cool, damp mattress of low grass and smooth white pebbles. I sat up on my elbows to look around, over the man’s shoulder. My temples knocked from the inside out.

“Signorina?”

“I–I don’t understand.”

But somehow I
did
. I knew what he was saying. He was asking me if I was all right—
young lady, are you all right
. That’s what he’d said. How did I know that? There was no way. I’d transferred out of Spanish 1 in junior year to take Photography where we shot rolls and rolls of film—still life of apples and lampshades.