The Mourning Hours

Emilie, with her hordes of friends, fit in perfectly at the high school. She was one of only two freshmen chosen to play clarinet in pep band, and she already knew that she wanted the lead in the spring musical, Annie Get Your Gun.

And Johnny—well, Johnny had wrestling and Johnny had Stacy. “You should see them at school,” Emilie told me one afternoon, pointing a finger down her throat in a fake gag. “It’s disgusting. I’m so embarrassed to know them.”

After only a month of school, Johnny’s English teacher called to report that Johnny hadn’t yet turned in his Macbeth essay—hadn’t, for that matter, seemed to have read a word of Macbeth. Mom repeated the conversation to Dad in the kitchen while I eavesdropped from outside the kitchen window, where I was brushing some burrs out of Kennel’s coat.

“This is his senior year,” Mom said to Dad. “He only has a few classes left, and all he has to do is pass them. Instead he’s spending all his time with that girl—”

I paused, midstroke. That girl.

“I’ll talk to him about the essay,” Dad offered. “He’s going to have to keep his grades up if he’s going to be eligible.”

They lowered their voices, but I could tell they were arguing. Then the door slammed, and Dad came down the porch steps. “Hey, kiddo,” he said, spotting me. Kennel jumped up, abandoning his brushing to follow Dad, whose long legs seemed to cover the distance between our house and the barn in only a few steps.

Whatever talk Dad had with Johnny did prompt a slight change in Johnny’s behavior. He spent more weeknights in his room, presumably catching up on homework—although in reality he seemed to be doing nothing more challenging than throwing a bouncy ball against his bedroom wall and catching it with a loud clap. Throw, clap, throw, clap, until I thought I’d go insane.

One night after dinner, Emilie ran into our bedroom and thrust her hand over my mouth. “Ssshh!” she hissed.

“I wasn’t saying anything,” I protested into her hand. At the moment I was nose-deep in The True Story of Bonnie and Clyde. I’d skipped ahead to the pictures, fascinated by Bonnie’s tiny, gun-toting, cigar-smoking figure. When they were ambushed and killed in Louisiana, Bonnie had been twenty-three years old. She was four feet, eleven inches tall and officially my hero. I wondered if she had been routinely chosen last for P.E., and if her classmates regretted that later.

“Listen,” Emilie said, still holding me around the neck.

“You’re hurting me,” I seethed back.

And then from downstairs, I heard raised voices—Mom’s and Johnny’s.

Emilie loosened her grip on me long enough for me to whisper, “What’s going on? Where’s Dad?”

She whispered back, “He went over to Jerry’s for something. I guess Mom found a note from Stacy.”

Uh-oh. I knew this could be bad. Stacy was the queen of writing long notes—it was what she did instead of homework on the nights she came over, a math book open on her lap, bent over pages of dense writing in purple ink, with tiny hearts to dot her i’s. Plenty of times, at the end of the night, she’d fold the note into an ingenious little package and pass it over to Johnny.

“We could hear better from the stairs,” I suggested. For once, Emilie paid attention to me. She released my neck, which had started to cramp at that point, and we crept halfway down the stairs, stepping carefully to avoid creaks, and wedged ourselves onto the same step.

Johnny’s voice was raised, easily traveling across the kitchen, through the closed door and up the stairs. “I don’t understand. You were going through my stuff?”

“I was not going through your stuff,” Mom clarified, her tone deadly. “I was simply doing the laundry like I always do, and part of doing the laundry is to empty all the pockets.”

“Okay,” Johnny huffed. “But you didn’t have to read it. That’s an invasion of privacy!”

Emilie let out a small wheeze, a stifled laugh.

Mom laughed, too, a hard laugh, the kind I knew better than to cross. “Invasion of privacy! Do I have to remind you that I’m the parent and you’re the child?”

“I’m seventeen! I’m an adult.”

“Not yet. Not an adult—yet.”

“I’m old enough to get a letter from my girlfriend without you—”

“This isn’t just any ordinary letter, Johnny!”

I heard a rustling of paper.

“You’re going to read it?” Johnny’s voice was incredulous.

“First it starts with how much she loves you. She probably says that a dozen times. Then, ‘The whole school could have caught on fire and I wouldn’t have noticed, because I was just looking at you. I would have kept staring at you until my hair was singed and the skin started to drip from my bones...’”

“Whoa!” Emilie breathed into my ear.

Ick, I thought.

“Give it back to me!”

“And here she says that she might as well be dead if she can’t be with you....”

Johnny bellowed, “You have no right!”

“I have every right! Later on, and I quote, ‘It’s like you’re the best drug in the world and I need you in me all the time, pulsing through my veins.’”

I didn’t realize how clenched my body was until I bit my tongue sharply and tasted warm blood in my mouth.

“All right! You’ve made your point!”

“No, Johnny. I haven’t. The point is, this isn’t just puppy love. It’s getting way out of hand. Stacy is just getting way too obsessed—”

“She’s not obsessed! What are you saying?”

“She says in this letter that she can’t live without you. She says if she can’t see you every day, she’ll kill herself. It’s not normal, Johnny!”

I shivered, remembering the picture in Stacy’s nightstand again, with the boy’s face obliterated, the pen almost wearing through the paper. Had she felt like that with him, too, that she would kill herself if she couldn’t see him?

Johnny’s voice was quieter when he spoke, as if maybe with Mom reading the note he’d heard Stacy’s words for the first time. “She’s not being serious, though. She’s only trying to say...”

“Johnny.” Mom’s voice was lower now, more controlled. “I’m worried that you’re spending so much time together. You’re not seeing your friends, you’re not keeping up with your grades. The things she says in this letter—they’re not things a sixteen-year-old girl should say. You’re both very young to be so serious.”

“Oh, no,” Emilie said. I felt her grip on my arm, tightening like the blood pressure cuff in the doctor’s office.

“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?

All of a sudden, the sounds stopped, and Johnny said, clear as anything: “I don’t know about this.”

Fifteen...sixteen...seventeen...

“I told you, I’m ready,” Stacy whispered.

“But I just—I don’t want you to think you have to—”

“I don’t think I have to. I know I want to.”

“You’re sure about this? I mean, really sure?” Johnny’s voice was husky, too. All of a sudden I realized it was a man’s voice, not a boy’s.

Twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine.

“I told you, yeah. I’m sure. What can I do to get you to believe me?” She laughed then, and Johnny groaned.

“But what about...?”

“Don’t worry about it. We’ll be careful.” She gave him a light smack, her voice teasing.

“Everyone always thinks they’re being careful.”

“I never thought I’d be the one who had to convince you,” she said, sounding almost annoyed for a second. Then she switched back to her throaty, teasing voice. “I mean, most guys wouldn’t mind...”

Johnny’s voice then was husky. “All right, you’ve convinced me.”

There were more kissing sounds, the bedsprings creaking. Even if I wasn’t hiding in the linen closet, I would have heard this. I started again. Forty-eight, forty-nine, fifty... My cheeks burned. The bed frame rattled against the wall.

Katie and Kari had illustrated the process for me in a notebook, behind pages of multiplication tables. It didn’t make much sense until I equated her drawing with bulls and heifers. “So the man puts this—” a crude mushroom-shaped object “—into this—” a petal-shaped fissure I only vaguely equated with my own body “—and the woman gets pregnant,” Katie had told me.

“And then her breasts get really big because they’ve filled up with milk,” Kari added. I suspected they were missing a few steps in between, but still, I was unnerved to realize that this scene from the animal world in our barn translated so closely to human life. It shocked me to think that this happened all around me, to my parents, to my married cousins, even to people from church.

Johnny and Stacy were panting now, and it was as if they were breathing directly into my ear. I got stuck for a second: Seventy-one, seventy-one, seventy-one...

“Ouch!” Johnny’s voice. “Did you just bite me?”

Stacy laughed. “Go ahead, bite me back.”

Eighty-six... There was a rhythm to the bed creaking, the groans. I could hear—or was I imagining it?—two pairs of lungs, breath heavy, in sync. I hit one hundred and started working my way down. Ninety-six, ninety-five...

“Oh, Stace, Stace, Stace,” Johnny said, his voice high-pitched and rapid.

What if I stood up, announcing my presence right then? I wondered if I could sneak out of the closet, down the stairs, out the screen door and then in again with a slam, the world’s smallest superhero, here to save the day. I’d come charging up the steps and bang on Johnny’s door, yelling, “Stop—or you’ll have a baby!”

Seventy-five, seventy-four...

It was suddenly quiet, their bodies still. I felt as if I was going to suffocate in my hideout, I was so warm. If I moved, they would hear me. I had no choice but to stay still, breathing in the stale closet air until there was no more oxygen and I passed out. They would find my body there days later, and Johnny and Stacy would feel horribly guilty for what they’d done. I counted all the way down to zero and sat, listening to their silence. I imagined them together on Johnny’s bed, skin against skin, and felt a warm flush on my neck.

“Shit,” Johnny said suddenly, his voice startlingly close. “Look at the clock—it’s after five. We’ve gotta get moving.”

Stacy giggled. “Nah, I think I’ll stay here.”

Johnny was getting up—the bedsprings protesting, his voice moving farther away. “I don’t think so.”

“Why? Because your mom wouldn’t approve?” Stacy laughed her lilting laugh. “Come on, Johnny. I’ll be really quiet. I could camp here for a few days, and no one would even notice.”

“Very funny.”

I could hear Johnny moving around the room, dressing.

Stacy continued, her voice wistful, “If you want, I’ll explain it all to them. I’ll say, ‘Mr. and Mrs. Hammarstrom, I know you don’t really like me, but I’m moving in with your son.’ I’ll tell them that we love each other and that I’m already physically your wife.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Johnny said, annoyance creeping into his voice. “Put your clothes on. Let’s go.”

Stacy’s voice was smug. “Nope—I told you. I’m not leaving. I’m going to have a little talk with your parents when they come home, mister.”

She seemed pretty pleased with herself for coming up with this bizarre plan. I tried, and failed, to imagine a world where my parents would let Stacy Lemke live in my brother’s bedroom.

“Stacy, come on.” There was an edge to his voice now, something I’d heard often enough as his sister. I remembered how angry he’d been when Stacy interrupted the wrestling night, that breathless moment when I couldn’t tell if he was serious or joking, when it could have gone either way. Stacy had won that match, but I knew she wasn’t going to win this one.

Again she laughed. “Sorry! No can do. I guess you’re just stuck with me, Johnny Hammarstrom.”

“I’m serious.” Johnny’s voice was level, but there was an edge to his calm. If Stacy got up right then, everything would be fine. If she didn’t...well... “Any second now my sisters are going to be here, and we need to be gone.”

“I’m perfectly serious, too,” Stacy purred. “I’m just going to lie here on your bed, all stretched out, deliciously naked....”

“Stacy—now!”

They were both alike, I realized. Johnny never knew when to stop being the aggressor, and Stacy didn’t know when to stop egging him on.

Stacy ignored him. “I’d be like your own little princess in the tower, catering to your every whim. And I’d be good to you. I’d be so, sooo, soooo good to you. Come over here, we have time for more—”

There was a slapping sound, as if Johnny was batting Stacy’s hands away. “What are you, crazy? Get dressed! You’re going to get me in trouble!”

I’d been holding my breath for so long that I felt dizzy.

“Well, we wouldn’t want that.” Stacy sounded hurt, but as far as I could tell, she hadn’t moved yet.

Johnny sighed, trying to be patient. “Are you going to get up?”

“I don’t know,” Stacy said simply.

“What the fuck, Stacy!” Johnny exploded suddenly. There was a thunk, like he’d kicked something—an open dresser drawer or his bed frame. He swung his bedroom door open, banging it against the wall, and took the stairs two at a time. At the bottom of the stairs, he called back over his shoulder, “I’m going to be in the truck, and if you’re coming, you’d better get moving.”

Slowly, too slowly, Stacy stood up. She seemed to be muttering under her breath while she gathered her clothes. I pressed my ear to the wall, trying to pick out her words. But, no, she wasn’t muttering. She was humming—as if she had all the time in the world.

Johnny’s voice carried up the stairs, dangerously. “Stacy...”

“All right, I’m coming,” she called finally, starting down. “What’s the hurry, Hammarstrom? Got another girl to visit before dinner?”

When I heard the back door slam behind them, I unfolded myself from my hiding spot, taking in fresh gulps of air like a deep-sea diver coming to the surface. I rushed to my bedroom window, careful not to disturb the curtain as I peeked out. Johnny had already started his truck. Hands on the steering wheel, he stared straight ahead. Stacy only had one leg inside when he gunned the engine. As they made the half turn in the driveway, I saw her reach unsteadily out with one hand and, straining, pull the door shut.

ten

There was no way I could tell anyone about that afternoon. Mom and Dad would yell loud enough to be heard in three counties. Emilie would use the information as a bargaining tool in the future.