Boy Who Shoots Crows (9781101552797) Page 15

  To Charlotte, Dylan’s parents looked as button-eyed, as sagging and limp as rag dolls.

  Dylan looked even worse. His mouth was swollen and bruised, the lower lip split open, one eye blue-black and swollen shut. One ear was stuffed with cotton and looked twice its normal size, and his naked chest had been made somehow even thinner by the yards of elastic bandage wrapped around his ribs. His nose was the color of a beet and humped at the bridge, with two strips of white tape over the hump. The thumb of his right hand was in a splint, the pinky and ring fingers taped together. His stare was as vacant as his parents’ and went straight up to the ceiling.

  Whether it was another moaning exhalation from Charlotte or just the adamancy of her thought that she should move, step away, Dylan rolled his head slightly and saw her there in the doorway. “Hey,” he mumbled, his voice raspy with phlegm.

  Immediately Dylan’s parents looked her way. She felt suddenly pinioned by their eyes.

  “My God, Dylan,” Charlotte said, “are you all right? I mean how could this . . . why would anybody do this to you?” Even as she heard her voice and its detestable shrillness, she felt her neck and face flushing scarlet, felt the sudden heat of her skin.

  Dylan’s father pushed himself to his feet. “Let’s go get us some coffee, Mother. Son, you ready for that milkshake yet?”

  Dylan’s mother did not answer or acknowledge her husband. Her eyes were fierce and locked on Charlotte’s, remained on Charlotte even as the woman released her son’s hand, then stood abruptly and crossed toward the door. She was not a small woman, as tall as Charlotte but fuller-bodied, filled out by the daily grind of rural life. Charlotte stood aside to let her pass, but Dylan’s mother turned toward her and stood close, their faces only inches apart.

  “You’re the woman who told the sheriff my son hurt that boy.” Her soft monotone did nothing to soften the blow of her words.

  “No, I didn’t say that, I didn’t. In fact I called him afterward and told him I was absolutely certain Dylan did not hurt Jesse.”

  “Did a lot of good, didn’t it?” she said.

  Her eyes were gray-blue, dirty ice, and Charlotte felt herself shrinking beneath the gaze. Felt her bones turning brittle. Felt exhaustion shutting down her brain so that she could think of nothing else to say, wanted only to close her eyes and drift into a black unconsciousness.

  “Come on, Mother,” Dylan’s father said, and took his wife by the arm. He would not look at Charlotte as they squeezed past. She stared at the floor until their footsteps faded around a corner.

  “You can come in if you want,” Dylan said. His words were raspy and deep and he cleared his throat after speaking. Charlotte wondered but did not have the courage to ask if he had been punched in the throat, or if the paramedics had to force something down his esophagus.

  With tentative steps she approached the bed. She stood looking down at the chair where his mother had sat, the indentation in the cushion. Then she looked at Dylan. His hand still lay exactly where his mother had placed it, fingers splayed across his chest. Charlotte wanted to seize that hand but she did not. She wanted to touch the boy, lean down close to him, but she did not.

  “I’m so sorry, Dylan,” Charlotte said. “I don’t know what to say, what to do about this. Is there anything, something I can do for you?”

  “I can’t stay here anymore,” he said.

  “But you need to stay until they release you. You need to let them tend to you.”

  “I mean in this town. I can’t stay in this town now.”

  “But what . . . ? I mean . . . there’s school and . . . you have your work . . .”

  “Do you know anybody might give me a job somewhere? The farther away, the better.”

  “Dylan, you can’t,” she said. “You have your senior year to think about. Just a couple of months left now, right? And what about your parents? Surely they don’t want you thinking like this.”

  “They want me to go. Thing is, they don’t have any money.”

  “Your parents want you to leave?”

  “That asshole’s going to come back and kill me, I know he will.”

  “You mean Jesse’s dad?”

  He nodded. “If not him, somebody else.”

  “Where did this happen?” she asked, and immediately thought, As if that makes any difference. “How did it get started?”

  “It was at the football field. Must’ve been around midnight sometime.”

  “After the candlelight vigil?”

  Another nod. He cleared his throat again, grimaced when he did so. “There was just twenty, thirty people still hanging around. Standing around drinking. I was just laying on the front seat of my truck in the parking lot. I hadn’t even gone up to the field or anything. Just wanted to be there, is all.”

  “Were you by yourself?”

  “Who else would I be with?” He licked his bottom lip where it had cracked open and was bleeding again. “I heard these steps coming toward me and I sat up to look. And he just reaches in through the window and grabs me around the neck and starts hammering on me.”

  “Oh God, honey, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry that happened.”

  “At some point he yanked open the door and dragged me out onto the blacktop. Nobody even tried to stop him. They was all just standing around, laughing, you know? It wasn’t like I was fighting back or anything. He’d already busted me along the head a couple of good ones.”

  Charlotte lowered herself into the green vinyl chair. She reached for his hand to pull it close, but her grip was too desperate and he winced, his entire body jerked, and she released him, pulled back, clamped her hands between her knees. She heard the little whimpers coming out again, detested them but felt incapable of silence.

  “He just kept stomping and kicking at me,” Dylan said. “He’s a grown man for chrissakes. And I never even did a goddamn thing to that boy!”

  He was crying and Charlotte was crying, and with every breath she felt emptier, more hollowed out, so that soon she was sitting on the edge of the chair cushion and leaning toward him, then she lowered herself further until her forehead rested on the edge of the mattress. She could not control the sobbing now or the way her body shook. She could hear Dylan sniffing and clearing his throat, and then he startled her by laying a hand atop her back, in the space between her shoulder blades, and though his hand was warm and heavy, she took no comfort from it; that is, the intended comfort of his touch entered her emptiness and became its opposite, so that it felt, she would later remember, like a cold wind howling down an abandoned well.

  It wasn’t long before his hand lifted away. The place where he had touched her felt burned, and the phrase frozen fire came to her mind. She forced herself to sit upright. She pulled two tissues from the box on the stand beside his bed, wiped her eyes and nose and tried to pull herself together. “You need to stay with your family,” she told him. “The police will find the man who did this. And then he’ll go to jail for it.”

  “He might, but what about the rest of the town?” the boy asked. “Everybody believes the same thing he does.”

  “That isn’t true, Dylan. People know you. They know you would never do such a thing.”

  He looked at her and blinked once, then again, and winced a little with each blink. Then he said, “There’s nobody else I can ask to help me.”

  All Charlotte wanted was to close her eyes. She ached for forgetfulness and sleep. “How long before they release you?”

  “They said maybe tomorrow. Next day at the latest.”

  “All right,” she told him.

  “Dad said I should drive to Lancaster or Harrisburg and try to sell the truck for a coupla thousand. Then I should get on a bus and go someplace else.”

  She nodded. “How about Muscle Shoals? Isn’t that where you always wanted to go?”

  “I got three broken fingers,” he said.

  She had barely enough breath to speak. “Can you come see me before you go?”

  “I’ll be
leaving in the middle of the night. So nobody sees which way I’m headed.”

  “Nobody will follow you,” she told him, but his fear was too great and she had no authority to conquer it.

  Minutes later Charlotte rode the elevator down to the lobby. When she stepped outside the hospital, she was taken by surprise by the warmth of the sunlight. She had expected winter on its darkest night.

  30

  A day and a half after her visit to the hospital, at exactly 2:37 in the morning—and Charlotte knew this because she was lying awake in her bed, having felt, ever since dusk, the barometric pressure of the world gradually increasing—a loud rap rattled her back door. And it simultaneously rattled her, even though she had been anticipating it. It jarred her into a sitting position, then all the way off the bed as she climbed to her feet.

  She went to the window and looked out. There in her driveway, pulled close to the garage, visible in the dim light of a gibbous moon, was a pickup truck. The previous night she had brought a flashlight to her bedroom, so now she retrieved it from atop the dresser and aimed the light at the truck.

  Blue, she reassured herself, then shut the light off and set it atop the dresser again.

  Next she slipped a chenille robe over her flannels, stepped into her slippers, felt for the bulge in the robe’s pocket to reassure herself it was still there. Then she cinched the robe around her waist and headed downstairs.

  In the mudroom she flicked the yellow bug light on for just a few seconds, long enough to make absolutely certain that it was Dylan Hayes out there huddled close to the back door. Then she brought him inside, through the mudroom and into the kitchen, which was lit only dimly now by the bulb in the KOBE range hood over the stove.

  He looked hardly better than he had in the hospital. Some of the swelling in his nose and ear had gone down, but the bruises were yellowing. He moved and looked at her with a furtiveness she considered new to him, foreign, this brash, gregarious kid who until now had never seemed to give a rat’s ass for the opinions of others, had never shown any fear except for the fear of being too conventional. He stood just inside the kitchen threshold, backed up against the wall as if to minimize his presence, even though to recognize him from more than ten feet away would require the eyes of a cat; the thirty-watt bulb showed the stove top clearly but little else.

  And Charlotte thought, He actually looks guilty. He looks like a criminal.

  She was aware, too, of the shiver of pleasure that ran through her with that observation, as well as the sudden, though somewhat more detached, disgust she felt for herself at that moment. Dylan stood there leaning against the wall, huddled into himself, eyes averted. He reminded Charlotte of the scene in To Kill a Mockingbird where Robert Duvall as Boo Radley hides behind the kitchen door.

  She asked him, “Are you sure you want to do this?”

  “I don’t see as I have much choice.”

  “If you leave, it’s only going to make you look guilty.”

  “Everybody already thinks I am.”

  “But it’s what you know that’s important.”

  “That’s easy to say. Would you like it if everybody looked at you like you was some kind of a pervert?”

  “But there’s not a bit of evidence against you. You can’t even be charged with anything.”

  “It don’t matter, don’t you understand? Around here, people will always look at me like I done it.”

  She realized then that both she and Dylan were shivering, even though the thermostat was always set at seventy-two and the furnace blower was rumbling in the basement. She looked at Dylan a few moments longer, then slipped both hands into the robe pockets. She cupped her right hand around the fat bulge in the pocket.

  “I was planning to leave sooner or later anyway,” he told her. “I hate this fucking place.”

  “What about Reenie?”

  He blew a puff of air through his lips, closed his eyes for a moment, and shook his head.

  “Do you know where you’re going? After you sell the truck, I mean.”

  “I got an idea. But I’d rather not say.”

  They stood in silence. Dylan regarded the floor while she studied his face. A part of her wanted to talk him out of running away, thought about offering him a job of some kind, painting the house, mowing the yard, free room and board—anything to keep him from a desperate, unnecessary flight. Another part wanted to hurry him on his way.

  Finally she withdrew the envelope from her pocket, then nudged it against his hand until he took it. “Jesus,” he said. “It feels like a lot.”

  “It’s going to take you a while to get settled. You need money to live on.”

  “I’ve got three hundred of my own,” he said.

  “The money you’d been saving for an engagement ring.”

  He answered with a grunt of self-rebuke. “She was one of the first to turn against me. Can you believe it?”

  Charlotte felt an overwhelming need to touch him, so she laid a hand on his arm. “You’ll find the right girl, Dylan. Somebody kind. Just so long as you treat her the same way. Don’t let this sour you.”

  He nodded, but soon he was sniffing and blinking back the tears, trying his best to stifle them.

  “Will you write to me?” she asked. “I want to hear how you make out. Okay?”

  “All right,” he said.

  “It will mean a lot to me.”

  She heard her voice, heard the words coming out of her mouth and knew that she meant them, but also knew, also recognized a simultaneous thought: I want him gone. Moments later, after an awkward good-bye—he had moved closer as if to embrace her but then backed away half a step, so that she leaned into him and kissed his cheek—she relocked the door behind him, turned the stove light out, and made her way back to her bed.

  It’s for the best, she kept telling herself in the darkness. You know it’s for the best.

  After a while she got up and went into the bathroom and took two Ambiens with a swallow of water. Perhaps an hour later, she fell into a dreamless sleep from which she did not awake until 12:53 in the afternoon. That she awoke feeling rested, if not wholly refreshed, came as a very welcome surprise.

  31

  SHE stood on the front porch with a mug of tea in her hands—it was the Harney & Sons’ Irish Breakfast, a strong black tea that she had sweetened with organic honey purchased last fall at a little roadside stand ten miles down the highway—and looked out across her yard and thought, Maybe this year I’ll get a riding mower and take care of the lawn myself. The previous summer she had hired a two-man crew from town—boys barely out of their teens, but they had done a good job keeping everything neat. They had even hauled away the grass clippings every week and, in the fall, had vacuumed up the leaves and hauled them away, too. But this year I want to do it myself, she thought.

  It was only then that she realized why the day seemed so bright. There was no tunnel vision that morning, no dark periphery to her field of vision. Not twelve hours earlier Dylan Hayes had stood in her kitchen, but he was gone now, and with him had gone the heavy air and the sense that life was closing in on her. The world seemed a wider place that morning, though not without its sadness—the sadness would always be there, the sadness and regret—but on that fine afternoon she felt ready, finally, to accept the world on its own terms again.

  What is, is, her friend June often said. Happiness can only be achieved when we accept what cannot be changed.

  “What is, is,” Charlotte said aloud. She sipped her tea and allowed herself a smile.

  I can be a better person, she told herself. I can live every day trying to make amends for how I’ve been. All the terrible things I’ve done and never meant to do. I can accept what can’t be changed, but there are lots of things I can change. Lots of things I will.

  It seemed a very long time since she had felt such energy. How long? she wondered, and, counting back, she was amazed to realize that only ten days had passed since she had last worked on a painting. Ten days!
It feels like months at least! she thought.

  Minutes later, as she rinsed out her mug at the kitchen sink, she told herself, “You should go see Daddy today.”

  She had not visited her father in the nursing home since Christmas. That winter he had deteriorated quickly after three or four mini-strokes. She thought of them as tiny explosions in his brain, miniature suns going supernova, flaring up brilliantly for a nanosecond before going forever black. The Christmas visit had been very hard on her. The staff at the home had dressed all of the residents in red and green elf hats with jingle bells on them, and the result, to Charlotte’s eyes, was the antithesis of festive. Her father had barely moved in his chair, never once lifted his eyes to look at her. She had slipped a small Godiva chocolate, his favorite sweet, into his mouth, but the melting chocolate had oozed out over his lower lip and she had had to keep wiping it away with tissues until the wafer dissolved. The sight of her once-vigorous, doting father reduced to a feeble stranger had left her in a melancholy mood for weeks, and afterward, each time she thought about visiting him again, the image of that haggard old man with chocolate drool on his chin kept her away.

  But now, mid-April, with her kitchen warm and bright again, she told herself, “I’ll go see Daddy.”

  While she showered, put on makeup, and dressed, she planned her day, going over it again and again, calculating the minutes and hours. First she would go to the bank and withdraw three thousand dollars to replace the money she had removed from her safe the previous night. The bank would be closed by the time she returned from the nursing home, and she was not comfortable with the idea of having no emergency money in her safe. So she would drive to Belinda, make the withdrawal, return home, and put the money in her safe, then swing north and follow the Susquehanna River all the way to Williamsport, then north on U.S. Route 15 to Wellsboro, her hometown until she was eighteen years old. If she felt like it after visiting her father, she might even treat herself to a garlicky lamb steak at the Steak House. But if you’re going to do that, she told herself, you’ d better phone ahead for a reservation. You know how busy they get.