The Far Empty (7 page)

Sheriff Ross turned around, backlit by the windows. He was a shadow, his face a blank. Two fingers still held up. “Two murders, two stories, Chris. Murfee is too small for much of anything else. Everything else
is
a river killing. They always are. Most of our dead were dying even before they crossed that damn river, and that’s how it goes.”

•   •   •

The sheriff moved back toward his desk, didn’t sit down, switching gears from talking about the dead. “How’s Melissa, Chris? We didn’t see you at church this past Sunday. The last couple of Sundays, actually.”

“She wasn’t feeling well, sir. Not much more to it than that.”

“Unwell? You and Melissa about to give BBC another quarterback?”

The room got small, hot. Chris felt sweat bead on his forehead and neck, kneading his hands together. They looked huge to him, unwieldy and dirty and wind-raw. He wasn’t sure what to say.
Mel fucking hates it here and pretty soon is going to hate me too and I don’t know what to do about it or if I can do anything about it all.

“No, sir. Nothing like that. Nothing like that at all.”

The sheriff shrugged. “Not meaning to pry, Chris, it’s just we need new blood here in Murfee. Places like this don’t last without
new blood. I don’t mean half of Mexico, either. I mean men like you, coming back home, raising families, settling down. It’s a good thing. It’s necessary.”

Chris couldn’t admit that he’d never planned on coming back. Would the sheriff’s own son, Caleb, finally leave Murfee and never return? Chris had passed a handful of words with him here and there, nothing serious. He was a thin mystery in a black hooded sweatshirt, always standing at the margins, opposite in a thousand obvious ways from his father.

Chris could see—everyone could—how his mother’s up and running off had hit him hard, but wondered if the boy struggled not because he couldn’t understand why she’d left Murfee, but because he understood perfectly why she did.

“Yes, sir, that’ll happen for us, just not now. I guess we aren’t ready.”

“You never are, Chris, not really.” The sheriff sat down, shuffling Chris’s report beneath other papers, dismissing him, but first there was a noise: Duane Dupree coming up the stairs, stopping in the doorway. The chief deputy had his hat off, turning it over and over again in his hands, like a pinwheel. He was tall and thin, but always stooped, feral, with his short-sleeve duty shirt revealing a rancher’s sunburn, as if he’d been tattooed by the sun. He kept his thinning hair slicked back hard against his skull with a handful of pomade, and his smile, like now, was always dust-blown—there and gone again. He’d been with the sheriff for almost as long as anyone could remember, and nothing much happened he didn’t have a hand in or a comment about. He’d been pushing Chris hard for a day now to close out that body from the ranch as a John Doe, or as he liked to call it, a
Juan Doe
.

“Judge . . . Cherry, sorry to bother . . .” He bobbed his head up and down, but didn’t retreat. He remained there, listening. Chris stood,
his knees tight. “About that call to Austin, sir? I was going to make it today, get those remains shipped out, if that’s okay?” He pointed at the place where Chris’s report had disappeared.

He needed the sheriff’s signature, couldn’t do it without it. Duane could sign off on some things, but the chief deputy had made it clear he wasn’t inclined to, not on this, not over a dead beaner in a ditch. The release and DPS request form were stapled to Chris’s write-up, now buried on the sheriff’s desk. Something passed in front of Sheriff Ross’s kilowatt smile, a brief flicker, a shadow, like a moth circling a porch light. There, and then gone again.

“Of course, Deputy. If you still think that’s what we need. Let’s get it done.”

ANNE

T
here had been a note for her on her desk this morning, written on Big Bend County Sheriff’s Department stationery—polite, professional. It was signed in Sheriff Stanford Ross’s firm, almost antiquated cursive, welcoming her to Murfee.

All in all, it had been a good week. A decent one. A normal one, if she even knew what that was anymore. She still hadn’t spent much time with the other teachers, only passing a few polite words here and there with Lori McKutcheon, who taught civics.
Polite
, just like the sheriff’s note. She’d caught more than a few slowing steps by her door, the others pausing to listen to her teach . . . listening for what, exactly? Clues? Because there was so much to catch up on, she didn’t take her lunch in the teachers’ lounge or even in the cafeteria.

Rather, she sat at her desk, working away alone, stealing glances at the mountains holding up the sky outside her open windows. After
the gray pall earlier in the week, that sky had turned hard blue, extending endlessly.

She guessed word had spread quickly among the teachers, probably leaked by Principal Tanner, that Hart wasn’t always her name—that once she’d been another person, in another time and place. It didn’t matter. Not the other teachers or whatever they might think about her. She just needed to get through the year, do her job well.
Teach.
Being in the classroom felt good, even with the two years she’d been away.

Away
—like it had all been a sabbatical, a vacation. She’d probably never convince them anyway that the
other
woman they were hearing about was as dead as the former English teacher. So she watched her students take a quiz.

Even in Murfee, like teaching itself, school kids didn’t change much. There were all the same types; the same cliques, forming and re-forming. Big guys in letter jackets; popular girls, and those who weren’t. Kids who hung in the parking lot until right before the first bell, smoking or laughing by their trucks (in Austin, more than a few might have been leaning on BMWs), and those who were already in their seats fifteen minutes early. She’d taught at three different schools: in Virginia, Austin, and now Murfee, and although they were all very different places, the schools—with their peculiar rhythms and closed ecosystems—were not so different at all. They even smelled alike, whether it was the brand-new building in Austin where everything had been cream and silver and the floor had been polished tiles and the walls modular linen, or this one in Murfee, which was ancient as the mountains around it, carved out of wood and iron and old glass. All schools were haunted the same.

•   •   •

Caleb Ross was done with his exam, had been for several minutes, and she wondered if he’d dropped off the note on behalf of his father. Hands folded, he stared out her windows. He’d lived here his whole life and she wondered what he saw out there—if his view or perspective was somehow different from hers. He was a good-looking kid (
don’t think that,
don’t ever think that
), although far too thin. She’d met his father once before in Austin, a tall, imposing man with high cliffs for cheekbones and iron-gray hair and eyes, and had seen him a few times here too, just in passing. Yesterday, driving away from school, she’d caught sight of him standing on a street corner in his uniform, every bit the cowboy, laughing with two men in a dirty truck. He smiled at her as she passed, gave her a slight wave as if they’d known each other their whole lives, and that had been weird, unsettling, because in that moment, he looked exactly as she always imagined Marc would at that age. She returned the wave without thinking as he retreated in her rearview.

There was very little resemblance between Caleb Ross and his father. The few times she’d seen Caleb outside of class, he’d been with America Reynosa—a pretty name, she thought, for an even prettier girl with a mass of dark hair, which reminded Anne of a flock of birds forever circling her. Anne couldn’t decide whether they were a couple-couple or just friends. They were always smoking together on the benches in the breezeway—an avenue, really—stretching between the school and the giant football stadium; sitting close, but not too close, so it was impossible to read what passed between them. Amé was done with her quiz as well, or had decided not to do it at all. Her grades were a hit-or-miss affair, suggesting the girl was smart
enough but didn’t care all that much. Now she was staring down at her phone, her expression unreadable.

Anne could take the phone, probably should, but in another minute or so the bell would ring and this wasn’t a battle worth having. Besides, she didn’t want to spar over
Heart of Darkness
; she couldn’t blame the girl if she wasn’t into it. At her age, Anne wasn’t, either. Still wasn’t.

Then the bell rang and it was as if all the air in the room sucked upward. A dozen students stood at once, suddenly talking, picking up conversations they had left in mid-sentence at the earlier bell. The room became constant motion and sound, kids swarming past her desk, dropping off their quizzes.

She politely thanked the kids as the hastily thrown papers piled up, drifting higher. A few of them were talking about some reality-TV show they’d gotten hooked on. In the aftermath of Austin, Anne had treated the TV like a live snake, fanged, something to be avoided. For four straight months the nice flat-screen Marc had bought—the one he used to park in front of with a beer too dark and thick for her taste—had sat idle in their apartment, fleeced in thick gray dust, until she’d packed it away with many of their other things. Even turned off, unused, the TV had felt dangerous, poisonous. It held too many memories: shows they’d once liked and all those they’d never have the chance to see. It posed another threat too: of hearing her old name, that other name; or worse, of catching a glimpse of that other her on the news.

She’d looked different then, her dark hair now blond. She no longer had a tan, either. In fact, she felt completely colorless, a pale reflection of what she’d been—ready to disappear again at a moment’s notice—and was even back to wearing her old glasses. Now if she
caught a glimpse in the mirror, she didn’t quite recognize herself, unsure of the eyes staring back at her.

That was good, had to be, because it also meant that other version of her was finally, mercifully, fading away. Her parents paid more attention to it than she did, and although they never said it exactly this way,
that
version had become old news. Last time they spoke, her mother reported there hadn’t been anything written, nothing new—no mention or oblique reference—in more than six months. Anne’s sixty-one-year-old mother, who thought the microwave was too much trouble, spent her days Googling her daughter’s name.

The thought of her mom’s face—anxious, lit by the glare of the laptop she and Marc had bought her parents—still hurt. It had been an investment, a down payment on their future, Marc once said. They’d wanted it for FaceTime, thinking they might soon get a chance to hold a baby up to the laptop’s camera—the grandson or granddaughter that Anne’s parents were more than ready for. Marc had joked they needed to have lots and lots of sex to justify the cost of that damn laptop.

Maybe today was the day to get over her fear of the TV. Tonight she could watch her rented set while she sat on her rented couch in her rented living room, grading quizzes on a book she didn’t even like. Maybe she’d search for that reality show, gawk over someone else’s life. There were worse ways to spend an evening. She’d learned that.

She looked up, expecting to be alone, ready to be alone, only to be startled that she wasn’t. He wasn’t in her classroom, not exactly, more like hovering at the door, hanging back a bit. It was as if they’d both hit pause at the same time, trapping them together for a moment. Caleb Ross stared at her from beneath the shadow of his hoodie, lost in thought, contemplating . . .
what?
Her? Or was he just debating
whether it was okay to ask a perfectly normal question about the quiz or
Heart of Darkness
? Or to mention he’d dropped off his father’s note for her. To fill her in on the fall carnival or that stupid TV show, welcome her to Murfee.

To mouth
You’re so beautiful
where only she could hear it.

No, that was someone else, somewhere else.
She held her breath or just couldn’t breathe at all.
Please don’t, please don’t.
She willed him to disappear, closed her eyes and begged him to, and when she opened them, Caleb Ross and the boy she imagined him to be were gone. Anne waited, just to be sure; then without really thinking, she pulled all the papers together, shuffled and reordered them, bringing Caleb’s to the top.

She hoped against hope that there was nothing there: no tiny note in the margin, no picture or image sketched in No. 2 pencil, no secret message to decode from the circled letters on the quiz questions.

Not again, oh god, not again.

She found his paper, stole a look, only to find
nothing
, just sentences in precise, feminine longhand, so different from his father’s. There were three essay questions and he’d completed them all.

It didn’t matter what his answers were, Anne wasn’t going to read them. She dashed off an A on the top, near his name, pressing a little too hard so her hand wouldn’t shake, and shuffled it back to the bottom.

Not here.
Not again.