Things that made no sense flooded his head – the hard rubber sound of children’s roller skates on pavement, the smell of his father’s pipe tobacco, Abigail’s smile when he met her, like light piercing his confused heart – and then the flashlight shut off and everything went equal and dark.
He took a few more steps, then stopped.
“I know you’re here,” he said.
I flooded the cornfield, I flashed fires through it to light it up, I sent storms of hail and flowers, but none of it worked to warn him. I was relegated to heaven: I watched.
“I’m here for it,” my father said, his voice trembling. That heart bursting in and out, blood gorging the rivers of his chest and then cinching up. Breath and fire and lungs seizing, releasing, adrenaline saving what was left. My mother’s smile in his mind gone; mine taking its place.
“Nobody’s awake,” my father said. “I’m here to finish it.”
He heard whimpering. I wanted to cast down a spotlight like they did in the school auditorium, awkwardly, the light not always hitting the right place on the stage. There she would be, crouching and whimpering and now, despite her blue eye shadow and Western-style boots from Bakers’, wetting her pants. A child.
She didn’t recognize my father’s voice infused with hate. “Brian?” Clarissa’s quavering voice came out. “Brian?” It was hope like a shield.
My father’s hand loosened on the bat, letting it fall.
“Hello? Who’s there?”
With wind in his ears, Brian Nelson, the beanstalk scarecrow, parked his older brother’s Spyder Corvette in the school lot. Late, always late, sleeping in class and at the dinner table but never when a boy had a Playboy or a cute girl walked by, never on a night when he had a girl waiting for him out in the cornfield. Still, he took his time. The wind, glorious blanket and cover for what he had planned, whipped past his ears.
Brian moved toward the cornfield with his giant torch light from his mother’s under-the-sink disaster kit. Finally he heard what he would later say were Clarissa’s cries for help.
My father’s heart was like a stone there, heavy, carried inside his chest as he ran and fumbled toward the sound of the girl’s whimpering. His mother was knitting him mittens, Susie was asking for gloves, so cold in the cornfield in winter. Clarissa! Susie’s silly friend. Makeup, prissy jam sandwiches, and her tropical tan skin.
He ran blind into her and knocked her down in the darkness. Her screaming filled his ear and poured into the empty spaces, ricocheting inside of him. “Susie!” he screamed back.
Brian ran when he heard my name – full-speed-ahead awake. His light hopped over the cornfield, and, for one bright second, there was Mr. Harvey. No one but me saw him. Brian’s light hit his back as he crawled into the high stalks and listened, again, for the sound of whimpering.
And then the light hit target and Brian dragged my father up and off Clarissa to hit him. Hit him on the head and back and face with the survival-kit flashlight. My father shouted and yelped and moaned.
And then Brian saw the bat.
I pushed and pushed against the unyielding borders of my heaven. I wanted to reach out and lift my father up, away, to me.
Clarissa ran and Brian swung. My father’s eyes caught Brian’s but he could barely breathe.
“You fucker!” Brian was black and white with blame.
I heard mumblings in the dirt. I heard my name. I thought I could taste the blood on my father’s face, reach out to draw my fingers across his cut lips, lie down with him in my grave.
But I had to turn my back in heaven. I could do nothing – trapped in my perfect world. The blood I tasted was bitter. Acid. I wanted my father’s vigil, his tight love for me. But also I wanted him to go away and leave me be. I was granted one weak grace. Back in the room where the green chair was still warm from his body, I blew that lonely, flickering candle out.
