The Lost Husband (24 page)

I finished my work in the cheese kitchen early the next day and went back to the house to take a shower. But from my room, as I looked out the window and started to undress, a little break in the edge of the forest caught my eye. I felt restless. My shirt was halfway off, but I pulled it back down. I walked to the spot and found a little footpath I’d never seen before. It led up the hill through the forest. On a different day I never would have noticed that spot. But on this day, there was no question: I was following that path.

And so I went walking. Sometimes you just have to do something—anything—a little different.

It was cool under the oaks and pines, and patches of sunlight cropped up here and there. Jean said the forest had never been cleared, and described it as “Texas in the wild.” It felt good to walk, to breathe deeply, and to be somewhere outside my own head for a while. I kept thinking I should turn around and go back, but I didn’t.

At the top of the hill, the path opened up to a clearing. I stepped into it, a little breathless from the climb. And there I discovered, of all things, the haunted house.

It didn’t look nearly as haunted in the daytime. In the moonlight, it always glowed a ghostly white. In the sunlight, it was butter yellow. And it was in good shape, too. No peeling paint, after all, or rotten wood. I guess sunlight makes everything seem cheery, but bumping into this house here, so far out into the woods, felt like running into an old friend.

I climbed the steps to the porch to peer in the windows and get a good look. The rooms were all empty. Then I walked around the back and passed the fire pit, where I’d sat with Sunshine for our séances. At the back steps, I peered through the door at a kitchen with black-and-white tile and scalloped cabinet trim.

On impulse I tried the handle on the back door. It opened.

I stepped inside, amazed at my luck.

I walked all around the downstairs, my shoes knocking on the wood floors, taking in the feel of the rooms and the archways and the high ceilings. The kitchen had a little built-in hutch. It was not dusty, just empty. But it didn’t feel empty. It felt expectant. Like a rental house waiting to be rented.

For some reason I didn’t want to leave. I still needed that shower, and it was time to go, but instead of going, I started looking for reasons to stay. I made my way back to the kitchen and found myself nosing around, opening and closing cabinet doors. I wasn’t looking for anything, really—just killing time.

I decided to find a souvenir before heading home. For some reason I’ll never be able to explain, it felt crucial to do this. I went through the pantry. I looked under the sink. I even checked inside the oven. I checked every drawer in the kitchen for even a paper clip. Nothing. Nothing at all. Until I got to the last drawer. The
one at the end of the counter closest to the back door. And inside it was a little pad of message paper and a couple of ballpoint pens. It felt like a major find, even though the white pad was completely anonymous and the pens were completely generic. It was something, at least. Way better than a paper clip.

I reached in to lift the pad out. I thought I might even take it home as a treasure. But when I lifted the pad, I found something vastly more interesting underneath: a vintage photograph. It was of a family—a mom, a dad, and a baby—sitting on the front porch of this very house.

I set the pad back in the drawer and pushed it shut—but held on to the photo. And then, as quickly as if I were picking the house’s pocket, and without even thinking about what I was doing, I popped the photo in the pocket of my overalls and slammed the kitchen door on my way out.

Chapter 20
 

By the end of the day, the photo I’d found was completely forgotten. If it had been in my back pocket, I might have heard it crinkle when I sat down. If it had been in my hip pocket, I would very likely have stumbled on it with my hands when I was looking for my keys. Instead, nestled up high in that bib, it just lay against my chest and didn’t make a sound. And it’s embarrassing to admit how long I could wear and rewear those overalls before I got inspired to wash them, but it took me a whole week to discover it again.

Granted, the intervening week was pretty busy. Tank got a stomach virus, which he gave to Abby. Elizabeth Bishop, Cleopatra, and Edna St. Vincent Millay all went into labor in the wee hours on three different nights. Bob Dylan spent about six hours hobbling around like he’d had a stroke, but then bounced back out of nowhere and went running off to the catfish pond like a puppy. And, last but not least, Sunshine wound up in the tabloids.

Tom Hunt called Jean about it at four in the morning, when a
stack of papers arrived at the feed store. Sunshine was on the front page—in a grainy, desperately unflattering paparazzi photo. The wide-angle lens made her look far plumper than she was. She was biting a Snickers bar and, Tom Hunt confessed after some prodding, something about the photo made it look like she was giving that Snickers a blow job. The three-inch headline across the paper read: “Amber McAllen Fat & Ugly!! WTF??”

Jean was at my door in seconds explaining it all. I got dressed and threw back on that same pair of overalls. “How did they even find her?” I asked. “Why were they even looking for her?”

“Who knows?” Jean said. She shotgunned her coffee and told me there was more in the pot.

I followed her down the hall toward the kitchen. “What’s this going to do to Sunshine? How is she going to take it?”

“I don’t know,” Jean said, her jaw tight.

In the kitchen, I sipped my coffee like I was preparing for battle. We both stood at attention as we talked the situation over. Doing something had to wait until we’d figured out what to do.

“The truth is,” Jean said, “people let us down and harm us and treat us like shit over and over. Part of learning to be happy is—”

“Avoiding people who do that?” I offered.

“That,” Jean said, nodding, “and learning to bounce back after it happens. Because it will happen. Even people who love you will knock the hell out of you sometimes. That’s just life. And the more we practice, the better we get at shaking it off.”

“So suffering is good?”

“Suffering is very good,” Jean said. “You come out of it stronger.”

“Or it destroys you,” I offered.

Jean shook her head. “It’s only years later that you realize it didn’t.”

Outside in the yard, Dubbie the rooster woke up and started crowing. Jean went on. “They did a study a while ago that discovered old people were quite a bit happier than young people. And nobody could understand it. How could it be that people in nursing homes were happier than their sexy young counterparts? All these theories went around. Maybe it was because they’d made their big decisions already and didn’t have them looming ahead. Maybe it was because they were past the intensity of dealing with children. Maybe it was some kind of age-induced brain damage.” Jean set her coffee cup in the sink. “But then one researcher got it right. He said they were happier because they had already learned what life had to teach them.”

Jean lifted her car keys off the peg by the door. “I think about that idea a lot when we talk about Abby and her bully—about whether his behavior is tearing her down or making her stronger. And I wonder if stepping in and protecting people from the pain of life actually makes life more painful in the end. And I’m thinking about it now with Sunshine.”

“You’re saying it’s good for her to see this tabloid all over town?”

“It might. In the long run.”

I studied Jean’s face as she stood there by the door. “So you’re just going to let whatever’s going to happen happen?”

Jean met my eyes. “Hell, no,” she said. Then her face broadened into a smile. “I’m going to gather up every last one of them and burn them all to ashes.”

I smiled back. “I’m coming with you.”

And that’s how we wound up carrying the kids, still half asleep,
to the minivan in their pajamas. We brought their school clothes and backpacks for later, and wound up feeding them doughnuts for breakfast in the car. The kids gobbled them down and sang a medley of kid songs as Jean drove us from storefront to storefront and I stole stack after stack of tabloids and tossed them in the back of the minivan. We hit the drugstore, the supermarket, the library, the feed store, the bank, the Hampton Inn, and every other place we could think of.

At one point Abby said, “Mom? Are you stealing?”

“No, sweetheart,” I answered, dusting off my hands. “I’m taking out the trash.”

When we’d covered the entire town, we drove the kids to school. I promised myself I’d have them in bed an hour early that night to make up their lost sleep. They dressed in the car and then brushed their teeth, rinsing with a water bottle and spitting onto the gravel road. We pulled up to the school entrance just on time, and I watched the kids unbuckle, adjust their backpacks, and make their way up the steps to face the day.

I watched the herd of kids going into the building. One of those kids was PeePants—though I had no idea which one. My eyes followed face after face, looking for malevolence. I could have stayed to eyeball every last one of them. But Jean leaned over, tapped the steering wheel, and said, “Let’s move.”

I turned to Jean. “What’s next?”

“Next,” Jean said, “we build a fire.”

We made one more loop through town to make sure we hadn’t missed anything, and then we drove toward Jean’s south pasture, where there was a pit for burning trash. The back of the minivan was filled to the roof with newspaper stacks, and I pulled them out one by one and catapulted them in. I marched back and forth, lugging one heavy stack after another, breathing hard, my arms
aching already and my shoulders sore. Jean helped some, too, and when we were done, she pulled a can of lighter fluid out of her satchel and set the thing ablaze.

As we watched the fire roar to life, we thought back through the morning to decide if we’d missed any places.

“What if she gets hold of a copy?” I said.

Jean stared at the fire. The flames cast a light on her like sun rays. “She’ll handle it the best she can.”

“Do you think something like this could …” I searched for the word. “Destabilize her?”

Jean looked at me. “Sure,” she said. “She’s human.” We watched the flames. “As a therapist, I always tell people that it’s not really what happens to you that matters as much as who you become in response to those things.” She tucked her hair behind her ears. “Maybe Sunshine will handle it with grace.”

“You don’t really believe that,” I said, “not deep down. Or we wouldn’t have just burned all these tabloids,” I said.

“I do believe it,” Jean said, eyes on the fire. “But we burned them anyway. Because that’s exactly what she’d have done for us.”

Sunshine didn’t see the papers that day. When I got back for milking that morning, she looked up and said, “Why do you smell like smoke?”

“I was burning trash with Jean,” I said.

Sunshine didn’t ask me what kind of trash, or if it had a monstrously unflattering picture of her on it. She just milked and we chatted, exactly like any other day. I kept thinking she’d figure it out, but she didn’t.

Though she did keep looking over at me with curiosity. As we
were finishing up, Sunshine frowned at my bib pocket and said, “What’s that, anyway?”

Before I had even looked down or remembered what she might have been talking about, she’d whisked out the old photo and was studying it.

I said, “Oh, it’s just something I found.”

It was my first chance to really look at the photo. Here were these people again: the mother and father and baby. They were on the steps of the haunted house. The mother had the baby on her lap, and both she and the father were gazing down with that love-smacked expression parents get. It was clearly the moment before they expected the shutter to click, and they hadn’t yet looked up to smile.

We studied the picture for a minute, Sunshine and I, and then she said, of all things, “That’s Jean.”

“It is?” I asked.

Now that she’d said it, though, it couldn’t be anyone else. The hair was brown, the body was slim, but the eyes were the same. Exactly.

“Sure,” Sunshine said. “That’s Jean and Frank.”

In the photo of Frank that Jean kept on her dresser, he was bald on top with a walrus mustache. This guy, in contrast, had a full, shaggy head of hair. And he was young, flat-stomached, and wearing a T-shirt with the American flag.

“Where did you get this?” Sunshine asked.

“In the haunted house.”

“You went into the haunted house?”

I nodded. “I kind of stumbled on it. On a walk. In the daytime.”

“How did you get in?” she asked. “They boarded up that window.”

“The back door was open.”

“That’s weird.”

“Yep,” I agreed. And then, because Sunshine seemed to know everything, I asked her the next logical question. “Who’s the baby?”

Sunshine only shrugged like she didn’t know. “Why don’t I just finish up here while you go ask Jean?”

In the kitchen, Jean was making tea and reading a romance novel. She waved when I walked in, and I sat across from her at the kitchen table with the photo held to my chest.