The Mourning Hours

“We’re too young to be so serious? I’m too young?” Johnny’s voice escalated with each syllable. “You know, that’s really rich, coming from you!”

“Here we go,” Emilie whispered.

I pinched her arm. “What? I don’t get it.”

Emilie pinched me back, hard. “I’ll explain later.”

Mom’s voice had escalated again. “Johnny, you have no right to say that. It was a different time, a different situation!”

Johnny’s laugh was mean. “I can’t believe you’re using that on me. Somehow you’re going to make even that be my fault.”

“Johnny, that’s enough!”

It occurred to me that somehow Johnny had never learned to be submissive, to roll over and give up like Kennel when we caught him gnawing on one of Dad’s work boots. Emilie and I might push the boundaries from time to time, but we gave in just before getting ourselves in trouble. Johnny didn’t stop, and that’s what made him tenacious in the ring. But it also made him act impulsively, and earned him more than his share of punishments over the years.

“So it was okay for you, it was okay for you and Dad, but it’s not okay for me? Stacy’s ‘obsessed,’ but you were just, what? A normal teenage girl in love? You must not have been so pure and innocent, because—”

A slap—a sound so vivid that I could almost see Mom’s palm connecting with Johnny’s cheek. He must have stumbled backward; there was a thud as his body connected with the table. Emilie gasped. I winced, as if it was me who had been slapped.

“Never mind,” I whispered to her. “I get it now.”

Mom’s voice was shaky. “You apologize for that. You apologize right now.”

Johnny didn’t say anything. There was a scraping sound, as if a chair was being dragged across the linoleum, followed by a heavy thud. Emilie’s fingernails dug little half-moons into my arms.

“Johnny!”

But the screen door was already slapping behind him, and before Emilie and I made it to the kitchen, Johnny was down the porch stairs and getting into his truck.

“We’re not done!” Mom yelled, but the Green Machine had already shuddered to life, stirring up a spray of gravel before roaring away on Rural Route 4. I didn’t have to be a genius to know that he was going to see Stacy.

Mom’s words lingered in the kitchen like an ugly bruise. Looking around, I saw what had caused the crash. Johnny had thrown one of our heavy kitchen chairs against the wall; it lay toppled on its back, one of the spindles hanging loose.

Mom tucked her T-shirt into her jeans and, without saying a word, righted the chair. With a little pop, the spindle slipped back into its place, and she slid the chair under the table.

Back upstairs, I lay on my bed, facing the wall, staring at nothing. Maybe Mom was right—Johnny and Stacy were getting too serious. I blushed, remembering how Johnny had pinned Stacy to the ground, the breathless way her chest had heaved beneath his. Did she really think of Johnny as a drug, that she needed to keep coming back for more? Would she really kill herself if she couldn’t see him every day? I pulled my quilt over my head, feeling suddenly as if I knew too much.

nine

That fall, tension in our house lurked around every corner. Stacy still came over sometimes, but she didn’t always come inside. Instead, Johnny went out to meet her, and Emilie and I would spy on them as he leaned her back against the Camaro for one of their long, passionate kisses.

Mom would watch from the kitchen window, flicking the porch light on and off, like some kind of Morse code: I’m watching you. I see what you’re doing.

Each night was its own battle, but the afternoons were generally quiet and peaceful, with Mom still at work and Johnny and Emilie at one sort of practice or another. When the bus dropped me off from school, I’d run down the driveway to check in with Dad in the barn, give Kennel a hundred kisses, fix myself a peanut butter sandwich and curl up in my own secret fort—the back of the hallway linen closet.

This was one of the few benefits of being short, I’d discovered—I could squeeze my body into unexpected places. When Johnny and Emilie used to play hide-and-seek with me, I was always the winner. I could slide into the narrowest of cracks behind an open door, climb into dresser drawers and stand upright in a vacuum cleaner box with inches to spare. Then a few years ago, I’d discovered the hollow at the back of an upstairs closet. It was just a narrow space behind the closet shelves, about four feet high and two and a half feet deep—too small to bother sealing, too awkward for storage, and perfect for me. It was a great place for reading; all I had to do was move our guest towels out of the way and I was in.

With a couple of Grandma’s old quilts and the flickering light of a Coleman lantern, my hiding place was as neat and comfortable as any hobbit hole—and no one could bother me. I could spend uninterrupted hours with books of true crime, or my new favorite obsession, the Guinness Book of World Records. I marveled at the world’s tallest person, who had reached eight feet, eleven inches and only lived to be twenty-two. Eight feet—I couldn’t imagine. He wouldn’t have survived long in our house, where his head would have brushed the ceiling and smacked against every doorway.

One afternoon, when Dad was up in Green Bay and I was up in my hideout studying a photo of Kara Gordon, the world’s shortest person at twenty-three inches tall, I heard the back door bang open. I heard the unmistakable sound of Johnny hammering his boots against the door sill, a habit Mom had drilled into each of us, and then faintly, Stacy’s laugh. This surprised me—since Stacy was only welcome in our house if Mom or Dad were there. And even then, she wasn’t truly welcome.

Straining, I could hear the winter undressing sounds associated with snow—hats and scarves and gloves peeling off with a whack, coats unzipping, feet working their way out of boots. Then two sets of footsteps on the stairs. I held my breath.

“Shh...shh!” Stacy’s hissed whisper.

“We don’t have to ‘shh.’ No one’s here,” Johnny said, whispering anyway. “Mom’s at work, and Dad’s out of town for the day.”

“What about your sisters?”

“Emilie’s at band practice and Kirsten’s probably in the hayloft or something.”

“Are you sure?”

Johnny laughed. “Are you kidding me? If Kirsten were here, she’d be hanging all over you by now.”

That was mean, I thought, my cheeks hot. But not as mean as Stacy’s laugh of agreement. I would have expected her to protest, to say that I wasn’t a pest, that she loved talking to me.

Instead, she hollered, “Hello! Helllllloooo! Emilie and Kirsten! Come out, come out, wherever you are!”

They laughed as if this was the most hysterical thing ever.

Quietly, I folded my legs and brought my knees to my chin. I heard Johnny’s bedroom door squeak open, then thunk as it caught on something, a pair of shoes, maybe, or a football.

“God, your room is such a sty,” Stacy said. “No wonder you’ve never let me in here before.” She laughed again, and I remembered Stacy’s bedroom from her party: the white bedspread, the neat line of books on her shelf.

“Jeez, Lemke. Let it go.”

There was the sound of metal coiling, and I realized they were on Johnny’s bed. My little hideout was situated between the linen closet and Johnny’s bedroom; I might as well have been perched in his closet. Listening to Stacy’s giggles, my hearing suddenly felt very sharp. I plugged my ears and counted to twenty, then unstopped them and listened to their quiet sucking sounds. This was kissing—real kissing, late-night TV kissing, not the short pecks my parents planted on each other’s cheeks on their way out the door or the dry forehead smacks Mom gave us when we professed to have fevers, kisses that were more thermometer than affection. Once, Emilie had shown me how to practice kissing, and we had sucked on the insides of our arms until they were covered with purplish hickeys. It had taken a full week for mine to disappear, and Mom had frowned, noticing my arm as I got ready for bed. “You must be playing too hard in the barn,” she said. “You’re all bruised up.”

Now I imagined Johnny and Stacy burying each other’s bodies in hickeys, a more private version of what Mom termed their “make-out sessions” when Johnny walked Stacy to her car. I wondered if her pink lip gloss, which she reapplied constantly from a little tube that bulged in her back pocket like a strange tumor, had transferred onto Johnny’s mouth, his neck, leaving sweet raspberries on his skin.

I’ve got to say something now, I thought, make some noise, get myself out of here. I had a basic idea of what was happening—anything from necking to going all the way, which I’d learned about from Katie and Kari Schultz, twins in my grade whose college-aged babysitter had filled them in on everything from periods to where babies came from.

Then I heard something else—a zipper?

“What are you doing?” Johnny groaned, loud and low.

Stacy laughed again. “I thought you might like that,” she whispered, a throaty sound that didn’t sound like Stacy at all, but more like an actress in a love scene the moment before Mom changed the channel.

What would happen if someone came in now, like Grandpa with one of his shirts to be mended, or Mom, released from her shift early?

“You are such a tease,” Johnny moaned, and Stacy laughed again.

“Good?” she asked.

“Mmm...”

I started to count in my head again, just wanting this to be over. One, two, three... Something soft like a sweater smacked against the wall, and then there were more sounds, like someone tugging off a pair of jeans. Were these, I wondered, the pale blue jeans with heart-shaped appliqués on the back pockets?