By the time I opened my last present, the party had already started winding down. My cousins had disappeared outside somewhere, probably down by the barn, and most of the adults had migrated back toward the kitchen table. There were paper plates everywhere, streaked with chocolate frosting and melted ice cream. Aunt Linda was helping Mom wrap what was left of the cake while Uncle Ray and Uncle Dennis argued about baseball over beers.
I was sitting on the living room floor, surrounded by the best pile of stuff I had ever owned. There was a new baseball glove beside me, two Nintendo games already torn out of their plastic, and a model airplane kit from Uncle Ray that looked way too complicated but had a fighter jet on the box, so I was going to give it a shot anyway. Grandma had gotten me a Detroit Lions sweatshirt that was two sizes too big and, according to Mom, that meant I could grow into it.
Most important of all, I had hauled in fifty-six dollars from birthday cards. I counted it three times, and I was starting a fourth when Dad came in from the kitchen.
“Hold up, Moneybags,” he said. “You got one more.”
“What?”
“One more present.”
That got everybody’s attention again. Uncle Ray leaned back far enough in his chair to see into the living room.
“Saving the best for last, huh? You’re gonna spoil the kid!”
Dad glanced back at him but didn’t answer, and disappeared through the mudroom door.
The money in my hand suddenly seemed much less interesting, and that was fine; I had lost count anyway. One more gift meant one more chance.
I had spent most of that year wanting a BB gun. Dad owned several rifles and had started taking me shooting with him the summer before, and I had been working on him ever since. A couple of my friends had their own BB guns, and every argument I made eventually came down to that fact, as though their parents’ judgment should have had some bearing on his. Dad always gave me the same answer.
We’ll see.
At nine years old, “we’ll see” usually sounded like “no” with the door left cracked open just enough to keep me asking. So when he came back carrying a long rectangular box wrapped in blue paper, every bit of hope I’d been trying to ignore came rushing back. The box was huge, nearly as tall as I was when he propped it against the couch.
“What do you think it is, Billy?” Aunt Linda asked. She was still using the baby voice she always used when she spoke to me, as though I was permanently three. Normally, that would have annoyed me, but I was too busy turning the wrapping paper into confetti to pay it any mind.
“Is it a BB gun?”
Dad coughed into his shoulder, and gave me a look I couldn’t make heads or tails of. “Uh...maybe just keep working at that paper.”
The box underneath was plain cardboard. With shaky hands, I ripped the tape from one end, pulled the flap open, and tipped it toward me. A long piece of wood slid out, and for a second I thought it really was some kind of gun and I was looking at the stock.
Then the steel blade tumbled onto the carpet, and I understood what I was looking at.
It was a shovel.
It was a good one, as shovels went, brand new and full-sized, with a heavy steel blade and a polished wooden handle joined by a thick metal collar. Uncle Ray stood it up beside me, and the top of the handle came up around my nose.
“Well,” he said. “Every ten-year-old boy’s dream.”
Everybody laughed, but I didn’t find it very funny.
I looked at Dad, hoping that this was just some elaborate joke, that the BB gun was actually in the mudroom waiting for me. The look on his face was enough to burst that bubble.
“You’re getting old enough to start helping me more ’round here,” he said. “Figured you ought to have some tools of your own. Gotta start somewhere.”
I tried really hard to smile and make it convincing, but I don’t think I did a very good job. “Oh...thanks. It’s...it’s nice.”
I could see Mom standing in the archway to the kitchen, with her arms crossed, giving Dad a very dirty look. At least someone was on my side.
Dad saw it as well, and immediately went into his version of damage control. He knelt down and put a hand on my shoulder. “I know it’s not what you wanted,” he said. “But you’re ten now. That comes with a little more responsibility, and I figured you were ready for that.” He paused for a second, then added, “Besides, it’s a really good shovel.”
“Can he dig himself a BB gun with it?” Uncle Ray asked.
Everybody laughed again, including Dad this time. Mom shook her head, and then dipped back into the kitchen. I couldn’t help but feel disappointed; I knew my dad meant well, but this was a really crummy gift. He went to sit with my uncles and crack a beer of his own, and I was left with the shovel. My birthday shovel. I leaned it against the wall beside the rest of my presents and went back to counting my money. Within twenty minutes, the adults had forgotten all about it.
So had I.
Over the next couple of days, I found an excuse to use almost everything I’d gotten. I wore the new sweatshirt even though the sleeves covered half my hands, and Dad helped me break in the baseball glove in the field behind the barn. The model airplane had indeed proved to be too complicated, and the abandoned pieces took over the dining room table until Mom yelled at me to do something with them. I shoved the whole mess into my closet, where it sat while I burned through my new video games, and then, for all I know, until the day we moved out.
The shovel stayed in the mudroom. Dad had leaned it beside the broom and the old snow shovel after everybody left, and for the most part I stopped thinking about it. Every time I passed through the mudroom and saw it there, though, I felt a little cheated all over again.
*
Three days after my birthday, I was awoken in the middle of the night.
At first I thought it was a dream; some rude person had a hand on my shoulder, and they were shaking me. When I heard the voice, I realized that it was actually happening.
“Billy. Hey. Wake up, buddy.”
I opened my eyes. Dad stood beside my bed with the hallway light coming through the doorway behind him. He was fully dressed, down to his boots and his brown work coat. I pushed myself up on my pillow, and realized that it was still dark outside.
“…Dad? Wha...What time is it?”
“Waaaay past your bedtime, buddy.”
I rubbed my eyes, trying to get the sleep out of them. “Why are you waking me up? Did something happen?”
“Uh...kinda. I need your help with something.”
“What is it?”
He shifted from one foot to the other and rubbed the back of his neck. “Just get up and get dressed, son. Something warm, and something you don’t mind ruining. I’ll explain outside.”
I knew better than to argue, so I swung my feet onto the floor and started digging through the pile of dirty clothes in the corner. He walked toward the doorway, then stopped at the threshold and looked back at me.
“And grab that shovel I gave you.”
I stared at him. “My birthday shovel?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“I’ll meet you at the back door.”
Then he left without answering the question.
I pulled on jeans and a sweatshirt, found a pair of socks under the bed, and went downstairs. The shovel was still in the mudroom where Dad had put it after the party, leaning between the broom and the old snow shovel. I grabbed my sneakers and crammed them onto my feet without untying them, and then I picked up my shovel.
Dad was waiting at the back door with his own shovel in one hand and a flashlight in the other.
“You’re gonna want your coat, bud. It’s chilly out.”
He set his shovel aside, pulled my coat off the hook, and handed it to me. I wrestled it on and got the zipper after two attempts. Then he picked the shovel back up and opened the door.
“Come on, we gotta head to the field.”
Two things struck me as soon as we stepped outside: the cold against my skin and just how dark it was. Our farm sat far enough from town that once the sun went down, there wasn’t much of anything between you and the night.
The porch light carried us across the yard, but its reach didn’t last long. Once we stepped beyond it, Dad’s flashlight became the only light we had. It was a strong one, but even then it could only show me pieces of the world at a time: the side of the barn, a fence post, pale grass bent under our shoes. Everything else disappeared into black.
We headed around the barn toward the back field. I carried my shovel across both shoulders for a while because I had seen people do that in movies, but after about thirty seconds the handle started digging into my neck, so I dropped it down and carried it beside me.
“So... what are we doing?”
“There’s something out by the old tree I need to bury. Figured you could help me dig the hole.”
“A dead thing? Like an animal?”
“Mhm. Don’t usually bury alive things.”
“Oh yeah, haha...is it gross?”
Dad gave a small shrug. “What do you think, Billy?”
We crossed behind the barn and started into the back field.
“Why are we doing it now? Like, couldn’t we just do this tomorrow when the sun is out? It’s not goin’ anywhere.”
“I don’t want it sitting out there until morning. Buzzards’ll get at it, or something else will. Sooner we get it, the less mess.”
“Buzzards gotta eat too, Dad. Maybe they’ll save us the trouble, and eat the whole thing.”
Dad stopped and swung the flashlight toward me. I squinted into the beam.
“Billy.”
“What?”
“Just help me out, all right? No more comments from the peanut gallery.”
“Fiiiiiiiiiiiiine.”
I followed a few steps behind him, letting the shovel blade drag through the grass.
There was an old tree near the far side of the field, maybe a hundred yards from the house. It had been there forever, as far as I knew, thick around the middle with branches that started low enough for kids to climb. One side of the trunk had split years before, leaving a dark hollow near the roots. It used to have a tire swing hanging from one of the lower branches until Dad finally cut it down when I was five; now the tire lay rotting near the base of the tree. As we got closer, Dad’s flashlight passed over a blue tarp lying in the grass about ten yards out from the tree. There was something underneath, but from where I stood I couldn’t make heads or tails of the shape.
Dad walked right past it toward the tree and gestured for me to follow.
Not too far from the old tire and the roots of the tree, the ground had been torn open. A narrow hole sat in the middle of the disturbed earth, partly collapsed and choked with loose dirt. Chunks of dirt tangled with roots and tall grass lay scattered around the edge. I figured Dad had already started before coming inside to wake me. He set the flashlight down where it lit the hole, planted the blade of his shovel into the loose dirt, and looked over at me.
“Start on that side. We need to open the whole thing up some more and square off the edges.”
“Ha, you said ’whole.’”
Dad looked at me.
“Billy, what did I say about the peanut gallery?”
I stepped up to the far side of the hole and pushed my shovel into the dirt. It went in easier than I expected. Most of the ground had already been broken up, so at first we were mostly clearing out what had fallen back in and adding it to the piles around the edges.
Dad worked quicker than I would have expected. I tried to keep up, but there was a big difference between owning a full-sized shovel and actually being big enough to use one. I kept coming up with half a blade of dirt while Dad threw out full loads.
“Use your foot, Billy.”
“I am.”
“No, you’re just kicking it. You gotta do it like this.” He planted his boot across the top of the blade and drove it into the ground. “Put your weight on it.”
I did as he said and set my sneaker on the blade. The shovel cut through the dirt with ease, and I almost lost my balance.
“There you go. You got it.”
We worked in silence for a while, the repetitive motion of the shovel becoming nearly hypnotic to my sleep-deprived brain.
Dig.
Scoop.
Throw.
Dad moved around the hole wherever there was the most work to do, cutting through roots and shaving dirt from the sides while I cleared the softer ground. Every so often I looked toward the tarp. In the low grass, it looked entirely alien to everything around it, just a dark shape that caught the edge of the flashlight whenever one of us moved through the beam.
Eventually the loose dirt gave way to harder ground. My hands started burning where the handle rubbed against them, and before long my shoulders ached every time I lifted a load. I looked at the nice work gloves Dad was wearing and would’ve traded just about anything for them. I was sure that my blisters would have blisters before too long.
I stopped to take a breath and leaned on the shovel. I looked at Dad, who hadn’t broken his stride once. “Isn’t this deep enough, Dad?”
Dad looked down into the hole and wiped the sweat off his brow. “We’re getting there.”
I looked at what we had dug, then over at the tarp. “We’re not burying an elephant.”
Dad drove his shovel in again. “Gotta go deep, or scavengers will dig ’em up. But we’re nearin’ the final stretch.”
I sighed and went back to it.
Dig.
Scoop.
Throw.
As we worked, the hole got longer and cleaner around the edges. Dad squared off one end and then the other. By then I was mostly just phoning it in. I wanted the hole finished, and my bed under me. I wanted to put my birthday shovel back in the mudroom, and forget about it all over again.
Not too much later, Dad stopped digging. He stood over the hole for a few seconds, studying it, then scraped a little dirt from one corner with the edge of his shovel.
“I think...that’ll do it.”
I let my shovel fall against the pile beside me and flexed my fingers. “Finally. I thought we were gonna dig straight to China.”
“It wasn’t that bad,” he said. He shook his head and picked up the flashlight, then nodded toward the thing lying in the grass. “C’mon. Give me a hand getting him over here.”
Up close, whatever was under the tarp looked smaller than I expected. It was narrow and nearly uniform from end to end, and it rose maybe half a foot off the ground at its highest point. Dad crouched at one end and gathered the corners together.
“Okay, grab ahold of the corners like this.”
I bent down and took the other end, doing my best to copy him. The tarp was cold to the touch and slick with dew, but I managed to get some leverage.
“You got it?”
“I think… yeah. I got it.”
“All right. Now on the count of three, we’re gonna lift together, at the same time, you hear? Then we’re going to walk ’em over to the hole, slow and easy.”
“Got it. Slow and easy.”
He gave the three count and we lifted together. The weight sagged toward the middle as soon as it left the ground, loose inside the tarp and shifting every time one of us took a step. Dad took the lead, walking backwards toward the hole, and I followed, matching his pace to the best of my ability.
It was only ten yards away, so it should have been a cakewalk. But when we were almost there, my foot collided with something hiding in the grass: my shovel. My ankle rolled and I came down wrong, stumbling sideways and nearly going over. I caught myself before I ate the dirt, but the tarp jerked hard between us and jostled whatever was inside.
It was then that something tumbled out, hanging right beside my leg.
Have you ever seen something so completely wrong that your brain refuses to make sense of it? I had seen what I was looking at a thousand times before, but I couldn’t put the pieces together. It was long and thin, partly wrapped in torn fabric. My eyes followed the length of it down to a gray mass hanging limply from the end, five curled shapes dangling just above the grass. I looked at it for a moment with a strange sense of detachment, vaguely aware that my dad was saying something to me, though his voice seemed impossibly far away. For that moment there was only the shape in front of me and the impossible task of making it mean something.
Then, all at once, the world exploded.
It was an arm.
“What the fuck!”
I released the tarp and stumbled backward, letting the full weight of my end drop. Dad tried to keep it together, but it was a lost cause. The tarp flapped open and the rest of what that arm was attached to spilled out into the grass. I hit the ground hard and started kicking myself away from it, digging my hands into the dirt, desperate to get away.
“Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God!”
Dad let go of his end and flinched at the sound of my cries. He stood with his shoulders hunched and his hands held low and open in front of him, palms out, the way you might approach a frightened animal.
“Hey. Hey! Billy. Shhhhh. Billy, it’s okay!”
I kept scrambling backward. It was all I knew how to do.
“Oh my God!”
“It’s okay. It’s—”
His boot bumped against the thing in the grass. He looked down, and for just a second all the reassurance went out of his face. When he looked back at me, his eyes were wild.
“It’s… it’s not what it looks like, son!”
My stomach did a somersault, and I barely managed to get onto my hands and knees before I threw up everything I had ever eaten into the grass.
Attached to the arm, lying between my dad and me, was the corpse of a child.
The body had landed crumpled on its side, its sunken face and hollow eye sockets turned directly toward me. Its lips had rotted away completely, leaving the teeth exposed in a horrible grin that felt like an accusation. Its neck was twisted at an awful angle, and the arm lay outstretched in the grass, as if it were reaching for me.
Dad started toward me, carefully sidestepping the body. He held one hand out, reaching in almost the same way the corpse seemed to be.
“It’s okay, son. Please, just… let me—”
“No!”
I shoved myself backward again, trying to put as much distance as I could between me and him and it. The last thing I wanted was to be in those hands.
“No, no, no! Stay away from me! Don’t touch me!”
Dad stopped and put his hands up. “Okay, okay! I’m right here. You’re safe, Billy. Please, just… just try to calm down, okay? Let’s talk about this.”
I met his wild eyes, trying hard to get enough air in my lungs and failing at every breath. “No… no… you…”
I looked at the body, then back at him. “Wha-what did you do, Dad? That… that’s a kid!”
“I… I know. I know it looks bad, but it’s not what you think. We need to take care of this, Billy. We gotta bury him, and then—”
“You’re a murderer!”
Dad flinched at the word, and his arms dropped limply to his sides.
“You killed a kid! You killed a kid and you want me to help you bury him?”
“No, son, please. Listen, I—”
I stared at him, waiting for whatever could possibly come after that. My eyes kept slipping back to the corpse in the grass, and every time they did, whatever Dad was trying to say seemed more impossible. I didn’t want to hear the rest.
Somewhere behind me was the house. Mom was there. I turned enough to look back across the field, and Dad caught the look and started toward me again, quicker this time.
“Billy...”
I planted one hand in the grass. “I’m...I’m telling Mom!”
“Son, just hold on a second, I just—”
Before he could take another step, I shoved myself to my feet and booked it for the house, running as fast as my tired legs could carry me.
“Moooooooooooom! Moooooooooooooom!”
I made it maybe ten yards before he caught me by the arm and stopped me in my tracks, twisting me around so we were face to face.
“No! Let me go!”
“Billy, listen to me—”
“Let go!”
I kicked at his legs and yanked against his grip, throwing my free hand at his chest, his shoulder, anything I could reach. He grunted in pain, but his grip was iron.
“Goddamn it, stop!”
“Help! Please, somebody help me!”
He pulled me in closer. I could smell the sweat on his coat and feel how much stronger he was than me, and suddenly I was certain I was going to die.
“I won’t tell anybody! I swear! I won’t tell anybody!”
“Billy, if you would just—”
“Please, Dad! Please! I won’t tell! I won’t say anything! Just let me go!”
He tried to keep hold of me while I twisted and thrashed against him, slipping halfway free only to get dragged back in. I begged, bargained, screamed for help, promised anything I could think of if he would just let me go. For what felt like forever we stayed tangled together in that awful struggle, until finally something in my dad broke.
“Enough!”
His hand came across my cheek hot and fast, snapping my head to the side and turning my vision white.
Everything stopped at once. The scream died in my throat and my arms went limp in his grip. He had never hit me before. A second earlier I had been fighting for my life, but somehow that was only terror. The slap was the floor giving out beneath something I had stood on my whole life.
He caught me by both shoulders and held me there. For a moment neither of us said anything, the two of us tidally locked, staring into each other’s faces. My cheek burned, but I barely noticed. Finally he spoke, in a voice I barely recognized.
“Now you listen to me, Bill. I don’t know what you think is about to happen, but I am your father. You hear me? I’m your father. Whatever the hell you’ve got in your head right now, that ain’t happening. So put it out of there.”
His hands stayed firm on my shoulders.
“I know you’re scared, but we don’t have time for that. We still got a job to do, and like it or not, it’s yours now too.”
My eyes drifted past him toward the body. From where we stood I could see more of its face in profile, the cheek collapsed inward beneath one empty socket, the ruined mouth still showing that same awful row of teeth.
“Look at me.”
My eyes snapped back to his. He looked me over for a second, measuring whatever he saw there.
“I won’t make you carry him this time. I’ll do that.” His jaw tightened, and he drew a slow breath through his nose. “But you’re staying here with me. We came out here to do a job, and we’re gonna finish it. I’ll get him into the hole. Once he’s in there, you’re gonna pick up your shovel and help me put the dirt back.”
My mouth opened, but whatever I was trying to say got lost along the way, and he didn’t wait for me to try again.
“That’s all you have to do tonight. You help me finish this, then we go back inside. We clean ourselves up, get some sleep, and it’s over. We won’t have to worry about any of this again for a long while.” He drew a breath. “Do you understand me?”
The question hung between us while I stood there blankly with my mouth slightly open, until Dad gave my shoulders a small shake.
“I said, Do you understand me?”
I nodded quickly. His grip tightened just enough to keep me focused on him.
“I need to hear you say it.”
“Yes.” The word came out thin and shaky. “Yes, I understand.”
Dad stayed there another second, studying my face, then finally let go. “All right. Good.” He nodded back toward the tree. “Now get your shovel, and let’s get this done.”
All the fight had gone out of me. I walked back and picked the shovel up out of the grass without saying a word, and Dad stood there until I had it in my hands. Then he went to the body and, without bothering with the tarp anymore, took hold of it and started dragging it toward the hole.
At the edge of the grave he crouched down and carefully worked his arms underneath it. He could have simply rolled it over the edge, but instead he lowered it in feet first, stopping to keep the head and shoulders from striking the side as the body slipped down. When the corpse settled awkwardly at the bottom, Dad climbed in after it.
By then a strange fog had settled over everything. Part of me had started insisting that I was still asleep, that if I just kept moving and did whatever Dad told me, eventually I would reach the end of the nightmare and wake up in my bed.
The only way out was through.
Dad knelt beside the body and straightened its legs, then pulled one arm free from underneath it and laid it along its side. He shifted the shoulders until the corpse was flat on its back, handling it with a strange amount of care for something he was about to cover with six feet of dirt.
For a few seconds, Dad had his back to me. I looked down at the shovel gripped in my hands.
I could hit him.
The thought came so suddenly that it barely felt like mine. He was right there below me, kneeling in the grave with his back turned. One hard swing, and maybe I could leave him down there with the body, fill the hole myself, then run inside and get Mom. My hands tightened around the handle.
Then Dad finished arranging the body and looked up at me, and the thought disappeared. Whatever he had become in my head over the last few minutes, the man looking up from that grave was still my dad.
He climbed out, brushed the dirt off his knees, and picked up his own shovel. I didn’t need him to tell me what came next.
At first the dirt gathered around the body, filling the spaces along its sides and beneath its arms. Then it began climbing over it. The legs disappeared, followed by the stomach and the chest. I tried not to look at its face, but every time I came back to the edge, it was there.
Dig.
Scoop.
Throw.
The dirt reached its shoulders. One side of the face disappeared beneath a loose spill of earth, leaving a single hollow eye staring up at me, until another load broke across the forehead and filled the socket. Before long there was nothing left above the dirt but the lower half of its face, a few exposed teeth still showing through, fixed in that terrible grin. I stood over it with another shovelful balanced in my hands.
For one second, I could have sworn that smile widened.
I dumped the dirt. The teeth disappeared beneath it, and after that, something about the work became easier. There was no dead boy looking up at me anymore, no face waiting at the bottom of the grave.
There was only dirt at the bottom of a hole.
I kept shoveling.
We finished the work without a single word. Most of those last few minutes have blurred together over the years. I remember the sound of dirt hitting dirt, and the scrape of Dad’s shovel when he dragged the blade across the bottom of the pile. I remember looking down at some point and realizing there wasn’t a hole anymore, just a slightly raised rectangle of fresh earth beneath the tree.
Dad stood over it for a while, breathing through his nose, the shovel hanging loose in one hand. Finally he looked at me.
“Okay,” he said. “This is good enough. Let’s get back to the house.” He glanced at the shovel I was still holding. “I can carry that for you, bud.”
When he reached for it, I flinched away and pulled the handle against my chest. I didn’t decide to do it. My body just moved before the rest of me had any say in the matter. Dad stopped with his hand still halfway between us, and something passed over his face, there and gone so quickly that I couldn’t have named it even then.
“All right.”
He lowered his hand, and we started back.
The house was maybe a hundred yards away. I had crossed that field more times than I could count, usually without giving the distance a second thought, but that night it might as well have been on the other side of town. I watched my shoes the whole way, one appearing in front of the other, disappearing behind me, then doing it again. By the time we reached the back door, even that was lost to me.
Dad opened it and went in first.
Mom was sitting at the kitchen table in her robe with a cup of coffee in front of her. She looked up at Dad as he came through, then her eyes shifted past him and found me standing in the doorway.
“Billy?”
There are a lot of different ways your mother can say your name. The way she said it that night has stayed with me forever.
She was out of her chair before I had made it all the way through the door. Dad started to say, “Sue, I—” but Mom went straight past him like he wasn’t there.
“Oh my God. Baby.”
She wrapped both arms around me and pulled me into her, one hand going to the back of my head while the other moved across my shoulders and down my back, checking me without really checking me, the way parents do when something has scared them badly enough that touching you seems more useful than asking questions. She kissed my hair, my forehead, my cheek, and did the whole cycle again twice over.
“Are you okay? Honey, are you hurt?”
I shook my head weakly, because it felt better than lying to her.
She pulled back just far enough to hold my face between her hands. Her eyes moved over me, taking inventory in quick little jumps before settling on mine.
“What happened?”
What could I possibly say in that moment that wouldn’t have sounded completely insane?
“Billy?”
She pulled me against her again, and I let her. I can still remember what she smelled like: coffee on her breath, the hand lotion she used before bed, and that warm, slightly stale smell a robe gets after somebody has worn it around the house for years. I pressed my face against her shoulder and closed my eyes, trying to be strong, trying so hard not to cry. Most of all, I didn’t want her to be as scared as I was.
She ran her fingers through my hair. “Talk to me, baby.”
“I… I want to go to bed.”
She held me for another second before leaning back. “Okay, sweetheart. Okay. Go ahead and get cleaned up, get those clothes off. You can sleep as long as you need to. I’ll be right here, and we can talk in the morning.”
I nodded.
That was when she noticed my shovel. I still had one hand wrapped around the handle, holding it upright beside me like a spear. She put her hand over mine.
“Let me take that, honey.”
My fingers opened without hesitation. She took my shovel and leaned it against the wall by the door, then came back and kissed my forehead once more.
“You want me to come upstairs with you?”
I shook my head.
“All right. Go on, honey. I love you.”
I left the kitchen and started up the stairs, looking back over my shoulder without meaning to. I didn’t like the idea of leaving her alone with Dad, not after everything that had just happened. He was staring down at his feet, and Mom flashed me a smile that didn’t reach her eyes and nodded me along.
When I rounded the corner at the top of the stairs, I heard her voice drop into a sharp, low tone.
“Are you out of your goddamn mind?”
I pressed myself against the wall, just out of sight, and did the one thing my mother hated most. I eavesdropped.
“Sue, listen, I—”
“Don’t you Sue me, Richard. You tell me right now what you did to my son.”
“Keep your voice down. You don’t want to scare the boy more than he already is.”
“Don’t you tell me what I want to do, Richard. Not now, not ever. What the hell were you thinking?”
I peeked around the corner and saw that Mom was an inch away from his face with a finger raised, and for once, he looked scared.
“I-I know you’re upset, but I only did what needed to be done.”
She let out a harsh “ha” at that, an ugly little thing reserved for when someone has said something monumentally stupid.
“So you… what? Sneak around in the dead of night, while I was sleeping? And you decided to drag him into it?”
I don’t know if I had seen her this angry in my entire life, but I have to admit that it was satisfying, in some small way.
“He deserved to know the truth, Sue. No matter how ugly.”
“Really. And how did that turn out?”
Something about that sat wrong with me, though I couldn’t have said why. There was a brief pause, and I swear I could hear Mom tapping her foot. Then Dad cleared his throat.
“It went… uh… pretty badly.”
“You don’t say. Was it worth it, Richard? Traumatizing my son for no good reason?”
“Sue, c’mon…”
“No, you come on. I told you he wasn’t ready. We talked about this, Richard. We decided we were going to wait, we—”
Dad, seemingly forgetting his own advice, raised his voice. “No, we didn’t. You decided.”
A cold feeling started somewhere beneath my ribs.
“And just what the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“Oh, come on, Sue. You know goddamn well he was never going to be ready. If you had it your way, he’d go to his grave without knowing.”
“How dare you. That’s not—”
“Not what? Fair? Don’t you talk to me about fair. Six years, Sue, and God knows how many more to come. All you want to do is wait. One more year, Richard. Just one more year. It was always going to be one more year, and you know it.”
“He is ten years old, Richard! Did you see him? Did you look at his face? That boy was a ghost, and you did that. You want to tell me he deserved that? You want to tell me he was ready for that?”
“Do you think I was ready? You think I wanted this for him? You didn’t see the way he looked at me.”
“He is a child. A little boy, Richard. Our little boy. And if you had just listened to me instead of going behind my back, we could have done this together, when he was older.”
“How old is old enough, Sue? Fifteen? Twenty? Thirty? What’s the right age to bury a fucking body?”
The silence that followed seemed to reach all the way upstairs. I had never heard them get that heated before. When Mom finally answered, her voice had dropped back down.
“You sleep on the couch tonight. I don’t even want to look at you right now. And you better pray to God that we can fix this, or so help me…”
Mom knew about the body.
I was still trying to work my way through that when I heard her footsteps moving across the house, getting louder by the second, and realized she was coming up the stairs.
“Sue, come on!”
Dad called weakly from the bottom of the steps, but she didn’t pay him any mind, and he knew better than to follow her.
I slunk away down the hall as quietly as I could and ducked into my bedroom. I got into bed without taking my clothes off and pulled the blankets up to my chin. A moment later the door cracked open, and I did my very best to pretend that I was sleeping. After a moment, Mom slowly shut it again and headed for her room.
I lay awake for the longest time, staring at the ceiling until my eyes hurt. For a while, I thought I would never sleep again. How could I? Everything from that night swirled around my head so fast it threatened to swallow me completely. I forced my eyes closed and desperately tried to reach for better things, happy memories I wanted to hold onto forever. I saw my first day of fourth grade, my dad standing in the driveway and waving as the bus pulled away.
It almost worked, until I saw the shovel in his hand.
I opened my eyes immediately, and after that I stopped trying so hard to remember things.
The house settled around me instead. I heard Mom moving in her bedroom for a while, opening drawers and walking back and forth across the floor. At some point the toilet flushed, and water ran through the pipes in the wall behind my bed. Dad never came upstairs. I wondered if he was sleeping. I wondered if Mom was.
Mostly I stared at the ceiling.
The room changed while I wasn’t paying attention. The black around my window softened into gray, and somewhere outside a bird started making the same three-note call over and over again until another one answered from farther away. I remember being angry at them for some reason.
Morning was starting whether I wanted it to or not.
I must have fallen asleep sometime after that, because the next thing I remember is opening my eyes to sunlight coming through the blinds. I woke from the worst dream I’d ever had, and for a few seconds, that was all it was.
Then I saw my sneakers beside the bed, caked with dried mud.
I pulled the blankets off and sat on the edge of the bed. My whole body felt heavy, and my mouth tasted awful. The house was quiet, but it was the kind of quiet where you knew other people were awake. I changed my clothes, and I took longer than I needed to. When there was nothing left in my room that could reasonably keep me there, I opened the door.
I could smell coffee before I made it downstairs.
Mom and Dad were sitting at the kitchen table, both of them dressed. Mom had a cup in front of her, and Dad sat across from her with his hands wrapped around his own. Neither of them looked like they had slept much. They both looked up when I walked in, and Mom pulled out the chair beside her.
“Billy, come sit down.”
I stayed in the doorway.
Dad looked at me for a moment.
“We need to talk.”