Dead of Night

Wade Baldwin lay in bed listening to the shrill rattle of his cell phone as it danced across his nightstand. Soon it would thump to the carpet, and perhaps it would hop beneath the bed and allow him to finally get a moment’s rest.

Already that night he had answered the phone twice, both calls coming from the same number, and had heard only a heavy, unsteady breathing. It was the same technique stalkers used in movies to let their victims know they were coming. But who would be stalking Wade Baldwin, a small time middle-aged manager at a regional bank that kept less than fifty thousand in its vault on any given day? Someone he had denied a loan?

The phone finally slipped off the nightstand. Instead of bouncing beneath the bed, however, it struck the aluminum radiator and gave off a tinny buzz. Any moment now Janice would wake and demand to know who was calling, and there were few things that frightened Wade more than the pale, oblong glow of his wife’s face in the dead of night.

Better to shut the phone off and let her sleep.

Fumbling along the fuzzy fringe of the carpet, he had a passing memory of catfishing around the island his family used to own up in Maine: the murk around his ankles, the westering sun refracted brilliantly across the spine of the harbor, the impulsive dart of his hand among the rocks where the fish had disappeared. The fish had given him a gummy nick on his knuckles and he had fallen back, splashing about while his older brother – a true pioneer of the waves – laced his fingers across his taut hairless belly and laughed.

“City boy,” Carl had taunted without any meanness.

Strange, how memories came ashore like driftwood no matter how many times you cast them back.

Wade’s questing fingers met plastic and he pulled the phone to the surface. As he held the power button, however, his unease grew. He did not relish the idea of staring all day into the columned foyer, wondering which of the many milling customers might be carrying a bullet with his name on it. If someone had a vendetta against him, a bank robbery would be the perfect way to hide it.

Stop letting it get to you, he told himself. It’s probably just some teenage punk amusing himself while he waits for the last energy drink to wear off.

Still, his curiosity brooked no argument. Slipping his legs to the floor, Wade curled his body over the phone and answered it.

“Who is this? What do you want?”

The heavy breathing returned. Wade could hear the rasp of wind across invisible lips.

“Bob, is that you?” he asked. “Is this about last fall? I promise I wasn’t the one who brought up that thing with your wife—ex-wife. That was uncalled-for. I never would have done it. If you want to contest Peterson’s decision, why don’t we talk face-to-face tomorrow? There’s no need for these silly games.”

He fell silent and the heavy breathing grew louder. It was like looking through a peephole to see the devil lingering in the hallway.

Well, Wade thought, I tried to be civil.

His voice grew firm. “I’m hanging up now. Don’t call again, understand? I don’t care who you are—”

“It’s me, Wade. It’s Carl.”

“Carl?” Wade felt his jaw swing ajar. He hadn’t heard his brother’s voice in—what? Eight years? Nine?

“Why the hell didn’t you say so sooner?” he said.

Carl’s voice was low and resigned; the sound sent a curious chill up the backs of Wade’s legs. “Wasn’t sure I ought to call you. Still ain’t.”

“Is something wrong? Are you in trouble?”

Silence fell over the line. Wade became aware of the soft squeak of air rushing through his wife’s nostrils.

“Carl?”

“You’d better come on down and sort it out for yourself.”

“Where are you?”

“Settin’ in your old seat. It’s all just as it was then. You believe in ghosts, Wade?”

The abrupt question surprised Wade. I do now, he thought. “You mean you’re at the farm?” he asked.

“The farm. That’s right.” Carl’s voice was a far-off whisper. He sounded as if he was drifting away.

Wade sat up straighter and took a look at Janice—still sleeping. Good. Inchoate alibis gathered like morning fog in his mind, excuses ranging from a New Year’s resolution about jogging to pressing work responsibilities to restless leg syndrome. Or, better yet, he would deal with whatever trouble his brother was having and be back before Janice woke up.

“Just stay there, okay?” he whispered to Carl. “I’ll be there in thirty minutes. Can it wait that long?”

“Suppose it’ll have to.”

Wade hung up and leaned on his thighs, thinking. In the twenty or so years they had spent growing up together, Wade had never heard Carl sound so desperate, so thinly tethered to reality. A formless fear, pregnant with awful possibilities, stole over him like a dark cloud. Then he recalled the wandering tone of Carl’s voice and thought, He’s been drinking again. That’s all it is. Some woman left him and he’s at the end of his rope, and he needs his older brother to come rescue him.

It had happened before, after all. Though Wade was the younger, he’d always found himself leading Carl by the hand through the briar patches of life—at least up until the last few years, that was.

Now they were back at it, playing their old roles.

Still, the thought that this might be about something as simple as drinking set Wade’s mind at ease, and he rose, slipped his glasses on, and silently dressed in the darkened bedroom. Just in case he didn’t return before Janice woke, he pinned a note to the refrigerator: “LEFT EARLY TO BREAKFAST WITH OLD FRIEND. CALL YOU AT LUNCH.” A small lie, but he was not sure how he would have told the truth even if he had wanted to.

The tarmac unrolled beneath the moon like the shed skin of a snake as Wade piloted his black BMW through the maze of one-way streets that would take him out of the tangled city and to the highway, and finally into the countryside. The clock read 3:53 AM. Half hour there, half hour back—that gave Wade just over an hour to solve his brother’s problems before opening the bank at 6:00. Time enough, certainly, for a quick pep talk before spiriting Carl off to bed and then hunting through the cabinets to pour out any emergency liquor Carl might keep on hand.

Still…this episode had to be pretty bad to compel Carl to call after nearly a decade of silence. Maybe that was why he had called three times before working up the nerve to talk.

The old farmhouse loomed suddenly out of the mist, a single light glowing in the kitchen like a lighthouse calling Wade home. The thought deepened his unease and he pulled over to the shoulder of the road, staring at the plywood boxes from which he and Carl had once sold firewood – their first business venture – and considering driving on, leaving the past where it belonged. Carl might very well be asleep by now anyway, and sleep was probably the only medicine he needed.

Yet Wade could not quite convince himself to leave. It was magnetic the way the familiar fence line and the lead-enclosed chimney drew him, summoning something inside him that had lain dormant ever since driving off to college with a guitar poking up from the seat beside him, determined to never call this place home again.

He rolled down his window and tasted the spring air. It was damp, and he thought he could smell the fresh grass silently teasing up through the earth and the mushrooms bulging from the forest mold—life, that was what you called it. Everything was dead in the city: concrete, glass, tarmac, plastic, steel. Dead like old bones. But he liked it that way. What was dead had no memory.

He turned off the engine and felt the urge to leave subside. Carl was his brother, after all, and no lapse of years could change that. Leaving the car at the side of the road instead of pulling into the driveway seemed to place an asterisk on his visit, a visible reminder that this was no longer home to him. He felt that he could now go into the farmhouse without surrendering his identity.

The garden between the road and the house was freshly plowed, and the upturned earth had a rich, sooty darkness to it. A pile of wooden stakes lay on the grass, empty seed packets sandwiched over their heads. A pair of scissors, traced with a patina of rust, rested on a ball of string nearby.

It was not like Carl to leave his tools out overnight. Yet one more concession to the drink, Wade supposed.

The boards creaked in all the right places as Wade mounted the porch. Square nails stood sentinel around his shoes where the wood had been worn from traffic. The cedar clapboards along the side of the house were gray and weathered, the caulking along the seams shriveled.

Wade paused at the door with his fist in the air, uncertain whether to knock or just go in. His brother must have been watching for him because the door swung open and Carl, dressed in a dirty white t-shirt and red suspenders, leaned out.

What were those spots on the t-shirt? Rust stains? Oil stains?

“It really is you,” Carl said softly, studying Wade in the indirect ambience of moonlight. 

A board groaned as Wade shifted his weight, uncomfortable beneath his brother’s unrelenting stare. “Gonna let me in, or just the mosquitoes?”

“Ain’t none this early. Suppose you don’t get too many of them, anyway, over in the city.”

Wade, unable to tell whether the words were meant as a jab or not, remained silent. At last Carl nodded to himself and slipped into the shadows of the house, pausing with one hand outstretched behind him to hold the screen door.

It was all just as Wade remembered it—every picture frame in the hallway, every knick knack on the kitchen shelves. A place frozen in time, a painting into which one could step to escape the real world for a while. Wade had once promised himself, dangling his feet in the pond beside a girl who had believed Wade to be the answer to all her questions, that he would escape and never come back. Yet here he was, back in the painting, and not a crack showed.

“Suppose it’s been a while for you,” Carl said as they entered the kitchen. He made a vague gesture at their surroundings, but Wade knew what he meant.

“Not since Mom.” The words had no emotion, no color. An image broke through his defenses – the long aisle between the pews, the coffin waiting like some greedy clam ready to gulp him down – and then he closed the door on it, pressed his weight against it, and after a few moments breathed easy again.

“She was glad you were there, even if she couldn’t say it,” Carl said. “Always liked to have the boys together.”

Wade nodded vaguely, his eyes wandering across the dishes piled in the sink as he wondered whether anything still bound him and his brother beyond the shared tragedy of loss. Were they the same boys they had been decades ago, cutting down weeds with sticks and conquering every acre of neighborhood wilderness? Same in the way an oak is still an acorn? Or had they in growing revealed the differences of their natures, one an oak and one a pine? One a stalk of corn, the other barley?

The thought began to unravel, and Wade felt his brother’s eyes on him.

“How’s the job?” Carl asked. “Same place?”

“The bank, yes. Manager.”

Carl whistled low through his teeth. “Always did say the cream rose to the top, didn’t he?”

Wade knew without asking that he was referring to their father, a grim Puritan of a man whose ghost even now showed itself in the handcrafted balustrade and chair rail, a ghost whose strength – usually relegated to the dark recesses of Wade’s dreams – lived on here like royalty, undeniable and unapologetic.

“Everything all right?” Carl asked.

Wade studied his brother for the first time. Carl had lost most of his hair, leaving only a graying horseshoe with a tanned center that gleamed beneath the punched-tin chandelier like an egg. There was a thinness to his cheeks and a growing thickness to his jowl, as if the flesh had all drawn downward, a drip gathered at the mouth of a faucet. His eyes were bloodshot, and the smell of gin clouded the air around him like a cheap perfume, but nonetheless there was an alertness to his movements that suggested he was on the upswing again.

He’s getting sober again. Whatever was bothering him, he’ll be fine now. There’s no need for me to be here.

Despite these thoughts, however, he found himself answering his brother’s question.

“The girls have moved out,” he said, distracting himself by grazing his fingers against the brick of the fireplace. “Beth is getting married to a firefighter now. And Cindy—” He laughed softly. “Cindy’s off in Serbia, doing who-knows-what. Something about orphans. Just me and Janice in the house now. It’s funny—we thought we’d sleep better with them gone, but now the house is too quiet.”

Tentatively his eyes slid to Carl’s to gauge his reaction. The cast of Carl’s face, thoughtful beneath a sheen of pale sweat, suggested he wanted to explain something but did not know how. It occurred to Wade that his brother might have meant something different by his question.

Wade decided to move the spotlight off himself. “So, what’s the bad news? Do you need money?” He wanted to wrap his hands around this problem, to clothe it in flesh and look into its eyes. He wanted it, most of all, to be outside himself.

As soon as Wade saw his brother’s wincing glance, however, he regretted the words. But he had no more power to recall them than the lost years.

“Guess I should show you,” Carl said.

Wade waited, but Carl just stared intently at the floor, as if searching for some way to avoid involving his brother. Wade’s unease deepened.

“Well,” Carl finally muttered, shaking off his trance. “No sense waiting for daylight.”

Wade followed his brother out of the house, down a dirt path, and toward the barns. There were two of them, connected in an L-shape. The longer limb housed cows, the shorter one horses—or had, back when Wade’s parents were alive. Now as they walked along the dark windows he heard no sound from within: no shift of a startled horse, no thumping of a hoof.

Their footsteps chased rabbits as they came around the corner of the cow barn. Blackberry bushes and birch saplings had grown up close to the building, and in their depths Carl’s roving flashlight caught a glimmer of red—a truck.

Carl placed his hand on the top of the tailgate and handed the flashlight to Wade, the two men acting in ritualistic silence. Wade took it, and Carl dropped the tailgate.

When Wade saw the white sneaker protruding from beneath the tarp, he was troubled to learn he was not surprised. As soon as he had met Carl’s eyes in the kitchen, he had known something worse than the bottle was on his mind. Here it was, sunk shapelessly beneath a blue tarp buckshot with holes, one shoe sticking desperately out.

Now he understood why Carl had called several times before gathering the courage to speak.

Wade felt nothing as his gaze rose from the shoe to the tapered, hairless ankle, all the way up to where the knee disappeared beneath the tarp. A young woman, certainly—perhaps still a teenager. The fact that she had once been alive – that the traces of dirt buried in the treads of her sneaker might have been packed there mere hours ago – seemed academic and unimportant, a trivial detail to be pondered at a later time.

And still, he found it necessary to verbalize the obvious.

“Dead?” he asked.

Carl nodded. His skin had the dirty pallor of a gourd whose insides have been scooped out. His eyes kept up a staccato blinking.

Wade suddenly became aware he was holding his breath. He turned away from the truck and inhaled the faintly sweet odor of the birches, his eyes crawling over the moss growing at the base of the barn. A rat poked its head through a hole between the battens, sniffed the air, and then vanished inside again.

When Wade could breathe easily again, he straightened but kept his back to his brother. “Tell me,” he said.

The silence stretched into a membrane so thin a whisper could have punctured it. The forest, the livestock, the whole world seemed to hang on Carl’s words, waiting for him to explain a thing that could not be explained.

“I was driving, you see,” Carl began, then paused. Seconds rolled on. “Just needed a chance to clear my head—it’s been five years to the day since the accident with Dad, and—”

“Were you drinking?”

Carl’s voice was as thin as if he were speaking through a straw. “I was.” Then his voice rose, pleading. “I was just out clearing my head—just needed to get out and drive, you understand? Don’t you feel like that sometimes, Wade? You just need some fresh air? All’s I was trying to do was get away for a little bit—to stop thinking about it, you understand, to stop seeing him lying there in the ditch with the tractor still running and coughing diesel smoke in his hair, to stop going over every damn little moment and thinking as how I was the one supposed to be with him that day, balin’ them fields, but I was up in Hatterly with Kit and his sister on account of it being my birthday—just shooting the breeze and walking around town and bowling. Bowling, Wade. And how was I to know that was the day?”

Wade knew what his brother was after. He wanted to be absolved of the past, and if that had been all of it, Wade would have told him it wasn’t his fault. But he knew his brother too well for that. This was Carl’s roundabout way of saying that this death was just as much an accident as their father’s—that he was no more than a bystander in the tragedies of his life, as much a victim of fate as the dead themselves. Wade considered saying the words anyway, just to calm Carl, but he found he resented his brother for dragging him into this and had no pity for him.

“How was I to know?” Carl asked again, his voice fainter than before.

Wade watched that hole between the battens along the barn to see whether the rat would reappear. Nothing seemed of greater importance in that moment than the knowledge that he could climb back into his car and drive wherever he pleased, drive all the way to the Pacific if he wished, and this strange occurrence would melt away like a dream at sunrise, leaving only a dark residue in the corners of his mind.

“Anyway,” Carl said, as if resigning himself to the fact that his brother was not going to come around to his view of things, “what do we do now? We can’t just leave her there.”

Wade’s thoughts snagged on the word we. He turned, ready to set the record straight, but the look of desperate hope in his brother’s eyes stopped him. At last he felt a stirring of the old affection, and he cupped his hand over his forehead and sighed.

“Only one thing we can do now.”

“Wade…” Carl’s mouth seemed to have gone dry. He licked his lips and swallowed. “They’ll put me away. Manslaughter. And bringing her back here…” He shook his head. “Don’t that make it premeditated or something?”

“You screwed up, no question about it. But the best thing we can do now is get ahead of this.” He fished his cell phone from his pocket, the same one that had offended him earlier. “It was an accident, that’s what counts. I’m sure the jury will—”

Carl slapped Wade’s hand. The phone twisted beneath the pickup and out of sight.

“Jury?” Carl repeated. “Who needs a jury for this? I was drunk, Wade. Must’ve burned rubber all over the road. I ain’t going to prison, Wade.”

“Then what?” Wade demanded, stung by the clap of Carl’s hand against his wrist. “You want me to help bury her beneath the house? Should we go out on a boat and sink her into the Atlantic? I have a family, Carl.”

“Ain’t I family?”

Wade could not meet his brother’s gaze. His thoughts were beginning to spiral, and he saw himself watching the news as the camera zoomed in on several people with shovels digging in a section of woods squared off with yellow tape.

They would suspect Carl…but would they suspect Wade? How much would Carl tell them?

“You always did want to get out,” Carl was saying. “Going big places, doing big things. None of this was ever enough for you.”

There was a note of bitterness in Carl’s voice, and the words brought Wade back into the moment. He felt himself growing angry, resenting Carl for dragging him into this. He had no right to implicate him, no right to ruin his life.

“I did get out,” he said. “You know I promised myself I’d never come back?”

“How noble of you.”

The saliva in Wade’s mouth went sour. “It was never the same for you. You were the runt; they didn’t expect anything. But me— Nothing was good enough, no accomplishment grand enough. There was only one path to follow, as far as he was concerned, and my shoes weren’t big enough to fill the prints.”

He cut himself off, breathing heavily now. The memory of his childhood, a door that occasionally creaked ajar in the night, had slammed shut when he left the farm and he had never fully opened it again until now. He felt the rush of stale wind in his face, heard the scudding of dead oak leaves on the porch and the hollow pattering of milk into a pail. But most of all he saw the silhouette of his father: tall, hunched, and faceless, accusing in its anonymity.

Yes, Wade thought. I do believe in ghosts. He’s been right here, waiting for me all this time.

The long fuse of Carl’s anger was burning up. His nostrils flared with every breath; his upper lip twitched toward a sneer. “Still blaming it all on the old man? He loved you in his broken way, Wade, more than he ever loved me. But I stayed.”

“Why, because you didn’t have the guts to strike out on your own?” With a chill, Wade recognized the old man’s voice coming out of his own mouth—that same contempt.

“I stayed,” Carl answered with a raised finger, “because a man has a duty to his family. You’d like to think you washed your hands of all this when you left, but it don’t work that way. We’re blood, Wade, like it or not. I suspect you know that. Don’t know why else you’d come.”

Wade turned to the grassy path behind him. Through the weeds, along the barn, and past the farmhouse his car waited for him, a dark bullet to carry him as far from this place as he cared to go. He had only to start walking; his feet would do the rest of the work themselves.

After two steps, however, his feet stopped and he looked back. “You really think you can get away with it?”

“Don’t expect a man gets away with anything, not in the final tally,” Carl answered. His anger was cooling into that terrible sadness again. “But I can’t go to prison. I’d sooner braid a noose out of twine and hang myself from one of the rafters in this barn right here.”

“Don’t say that. Don’t ever say that.”

“Not even if I mean it?”

Wade felt the world behind him – the BMW cooling at the side of the road, the smooth whistling highway with its flashing mile markers, the cold half of his bed where he had taken Carl’s call earlier that very morning – go twisting away, swirling down a gurgling drain. It was lost to him now. He felt its absence as a lightness in his gut. By what conspiracy of accident had his path and Carl’s met again beneath such an unfavorable moon? He supposed it did not matter. He was here now, and he might as well have never left.

He felt a primal instinct rising in him to protect his brother. What happened with the woman did not matter; she was dead, and no trial could ever bring her back. The important thing was to make sure a good man did not lose his future over a foolish mistake anyone could have made.

“Listen,” he said, hearing a note of uncompromising authority in his voice. “If we do this, we do it all the way. There’s time enough as long as we think it through.”

He waited for Carl to disagree, but Carl didn’t. There was a look of desperate hope in Carl’s eyes.

You expecting company today?” Wade asked.

“Farrier. Usually turns up seven or eight.”

“Then we’ll make seven our deadline.”

They stared at one another, a silent question hovering between them. Finally Carl said, “The back lot.”

Wade nodded, and they climbed into the truck. As they drove beneath the spider-limb shadows of the trees, it occurred to Wade that his brother could just as easily have made this drive on his own without calling him. But maybe Carl did not have the courage to do it on his own.

Or was this an act of cowardice?

The back lot was a scattered patch of old trees, lanced by grass-grown logging paths that looped through the brush and came to abrupt ends. Carl seemed to know his way even in the dark. He kept the headlights off, and the gray gloom of the twisted trees gave Wade an eerie sense of judgment, as if the forest itself would swallow them whole.

Briars whined against the body of the truck as the path narrowed. Carl kept both hands on the wheel, his head bent forward in a fixed grimace, his face a vague cloud in the dark cabin. Looking at him, Wade wondered how serious his brother had been about the threat of suicide, or if it had been no more than a ruse to enlist his help. He supposed it was better not to know. He could not take responsibility for his brother’s choices, could not live the rest of his life with that millstone around his neck.

Once this business is over, he thought, I’ll move. The bank’s got a branch on the west coast. Janice has always wanted to see California, hasn’t she? We’ll go and we’ll never come back this way.

Carl parked the truck and the two men slumped in their seats, silent in the idling darkness. Waiting. Waiting for something that had nothing to do with them to happen. Wade’s body was not his own; it was a puppet whose strings were being pulled by an invisible master, and all he could do was to wait for his legs to bring him back home again.

“Farrier,” Carl murmured.

Wade nodded and tried his door, but it would not budge.

“Need to shove it,” Carl said.

Wade threw his shoulder against the door and it came free with a rusty whine. He stepped in front of the truck and leaned over the slope that slipped down beneath the young trees. Way down, down into darkness. The ground was loose, more sand than soil, rootless and shifting and apt to carry off anyone who stepped too close.

“It’ll work,” Wade said. “For a time, anyway. You sure no one comes back here?”

“None ‘cept the devil on holiday.”

“It’s not a long-term solution, but it’ll do for now.” Until we’re both in the ground. Until the secret has hounded us to our graves, and there is nothing left to damage but our reputations.

Brushing away these thoughts as if they were a cloud of gnats, Wade turned to go around to the back of the truck. It was then that he noticed the dent in the bumper. Strange, how little damage had been done. There was no blood, no hair, no reason to believe the truck had collided with anything other than another vehicle. It seemed cruel somehow. Pitiless.

Wade continued on to the bed of the truck and waited for his brother. Seconds passed, and he began to worry Carl had fallen asleep.

“Carl? The sooner we get this done, the sooner we can forget about it.” A lie, but a necessary one. “Carl?”

At last, like a dead man shaking off his slumber, Carl stumbled out of the truck and joined Wade, leaving the door ajar. He faced the bed of the pickup but he would not look in. He kept licking his lips and swallowing.

“Carl,” Wade said, feeling a spike of impatience. It angered him to see Carl’s hesitation. He had no right to it.

“I can’t do it.” Carl’s voice was a bare whisper. “It’s wrong, Wade, tossing her down there like a bag of trash. What if she’s got family?”

“Everyone’s got family. Now we made a decision, and I told you we’d have to see it through. We’ve gone too far to turn back now.”

Carl nodded as if this had occurred to him already, but he made no move to help as Wade lowered the tailgate and climbed into the truck. With a disgusted grunt, Wade grabbed the exposed ankle and tugged. She was light, and when the tarp came free with a rustle and exposed her face, he felt an involuntary gasp rise from his throat.

“She’s still a child, Carl.” She couldn’t have been older than thirteen or fourteen, and somehow this made everything far worse.

“I know. What was she doing out at such a time, you think? Been wondering that ever since, settin’ in your old seat and just wondering.” He sniffed.

Hearing the self-pitying note in Carl’s voice, Wade’s anger rose up in him. He tamped it down, however, packing it into the depths of his bowels. There would be time for anger later—time to crack open a few beers and think whatever he needed to think, when he was miles away and safe.

For now, there was work to be done.

“Well, it don’t make no difference now,” he said. “Would you give me a hand, or do you mean to make me do this by myself?”

With unsteady hands, Carl reached up and took hold of the leg. Together the two men managed to maneuver the body onto the tailgate, where it lay limp and sunken like a dead fish tossed ashore. It, not her—a slight difference, but a crucial one to Wade’s mind, and he clung to it.

Running shorts pressed damply to pale, smooth thighs; the shadowed outline of a bra pressed through the pink polyester shirt. Scratches of mud crawled up the calves in lines. The wonder of it all was that Wade could see no injury, no explanation for where the life had gone. Perhaps it was hidden beneath the wet leaves plastered to the girl’s stomach.

When Wade reached beneath the girl’s shoulders, however, his hands brushed slickly against the side of her head. It was the smooth, slippery feel of a skinned knee too shallow for the blood to start, when instead a translucent gel arises and every touch of the cloth brings a sharp pain. Grimacing, he clutched the girl’s shoulders – so bony, like that of a fledgling sparrow – and prepared to lift her.

“Carl?”

Carl, however, was not there. His eyes were on the girl’s shoes, but his mind had gone elsewhere.

“Damn it, Carl, I can’t do this alone!”

A moment longer and Wade would have struck his brother. Carl stirred, however, and mechanically lifted the girl’s legs. His eyes were vague and unseeing, like an artist’s rendition poorly done.

Wade’s shoes stamped into the mud as he dropped down from the tailgate, the girl’s head lolling against his chest. So young, he thought. More potential than person.

“On the count of three,” he said as the girl’s body slumped between them. “One, two, THREE!”

With a practice swing between each count, they finally released the body. Carl went early, however, or perhaps Wade went late—either way, Wade felt the entirety of the girl’s weight in his arms pulling him forward, and he lost his footing and stumbled down the steep embankment. He somersaulted headlong among the trees, at last coming to a stop in a small hollow.

“Wade? Can you hear me?” The sound of Carl’s harsh graveyard whisper gave Wade a chilling sense of unreality, as if he himself were the body being disposed of. He sat up, brushing pine needles from his hair.

“I’m alright. Nothing broken, anyway. Just stay there and I’ll come up to you.”

As he rose, however, his right ankle gave a painful protest. It felt as if someone had placed a glowing red anklet around it. He bumped it against an unseen stump and took in a sharp hiss of breath.

He had only limped a few steps when he realized his glasses were missing. He leaned against a tree and called up to his brother.

“Would you bring the flashlight down? I dropped my glasses.”

The mist of early morning curled around the beam of the flashlight as Carl descended, picking his way carefully among the old trees. He swept the light across the hill in a wide arc, but no glint of glass returned.

“Can’t you get a new pair?”

“Need them to drive. Besides, I can’t leave them down here.” He imagined a gloved hand plucking the glasses from a bush before dipping them into a clear plastic bag. He shuddered.

They searched for most of an hour, not giving up until the glow of the unseen sun filled the air and the voices of the songbirds filled the trees. Soon the farrier would arrive, and it would not do for him to find them sneaking around in the back lot.

“Give you a ride home?” Carl suggested, sounding oddly cheerful, optimistic.

Wade hesitated.

“I’m sober now, I swear,” Carl said.

“It’s not that. I can’t leave my car here. I’ll…I’ll just have to make the best of it.” The glasses were bad enough—but leaving his car here, too, where the farrier and anyone else could find it? No, that was too much.

Suddenly he remembered his phone. That, at least, couldn’t have gone far. Leaning one hand on the rust-spotted side of the truck, he used the other hand to sweep through the grass, searching. At last he spotted the phone and fished it out.

No calls, no messages. As if nothing was wrong.

“And what will you say when you get back?” Carl asked. “About the ankle, I mean?”

Wade straightened and watched the sun come boiling over the trees. He had never before been so unhappy to see the sunrise.

“I’ll tell them a story, Carl, and then I’ll tell myself that story, and sooner or later it will start to become true. I suggest you do the same.”

There was a beat of silence. Then Carl said, “Don’t suppose we’ll see one another again.”

“No, I don’t suppose so. Goodbye, Carl.”

“Goodbye, Wade. And thank you. Damnable thing we did, but Wade…it was just an accident. You know that, don’t you?”

“Just an accident,” Wade agreed, catching his brother’s eye before glancing aside. It was all slipping away; he felt it go, the way thoughts start to slip into dream. There was nothing left but the dream.

Wade climbed back into his car and started the engine. He pulled away, watching the farmhouse and the little garden plot and the white fences until they were buried by a turn in the road, and then he rolled down the window and let the cold morning air wash over him.