We Are All the Same in the Dark - Julia Heaberlin Page 0,54

the ground like a crab.

Now it makes me shiver. I see what I didn’t see at sixteen. I see an omen. I see myself in her crippled legs and defiance. I see Trumanell in the tight braid and the longing.

I see beauty and entrapment.

Andrew Wyeth said he wondered later if he should have painted the field empty, with only the sense of Christina being there. Standing here, I understand that for the first time. Trumanell is filling up every molecule in this room.

My gun is still trained on the closet door. My eyes glued to the bed.

Frank Branson used to pull up a chair by his children’s beds and sit for hours. He carried a very particular odor with him, not unpleasant, of whiskey, barn, and mint leaves he’d chew from the garden. Trumanell and Wyatt had it timed—how long his smell would linger so they’d know if he’d left and they could open their eyes.

I blink back tears. Two children. Communicating in the dark, not making a sound, in their beds, under the creaky porch, in that goddamn field. Soldiers.

“Odette.” Rusty is at my back, breathing hard enough to tickle a strand of hair on my cheek. “All clear up here. Do you know where the breaker box is? Is it in the house? The attic, maybe? Is there a basement? Outside?” He grips my arm. “Odette. Are you all right? What’s wrong with you?” He follows the aim of my gun. “Did you check the closet?”

I shake my head. This isn’t good.

We’ve been in this position many times before. A closed door. Something uncertain on the other side. Once, it was a shotgun. The blast tore a twelve-inch hole, nicked the walls, pocked my shoulder, Rusty’s hip.

Rusty likes doors best when they are splintered on the ground. When we shared our worst nightmares at the bar one night, I expected his to be set during his tour of duty in Iraq. Instead, he described an endless walk down a hall of closed doors, which he kicked down one by one until he woke up.

Rusty is itchy, slinking in from the side, a foot from the closet. “Wyatt, are you in there? It’s Rusty. I’m with Odette.” His voice is easy. Coaxing. “We’re both here in our capacity as police officers. Please open the door slowly. We just want to make sure you’re OK. Don’t want any problems.”

The words are right. But I don’t trust them. Neither would Wyatt.

“Rusty,” I hiss. “Wait.” I can’t see his eyes behind the sunglasses, but I know.

He isn’t waiting.

Rusty thrusts his heel into the door.

The closet, empty.

Rusty’s already inside, kneeling, examining a knob on the back paneling. A small crawl space door is nailed shut. His gun is holstered, knife out. He’s not going to let this opportunity go.

I can feel the shift. Forget Wyatt. Find Trumanell.

There’s an exclamation, a snap, as he frees a board.

I had to get out of the house. I had to breathe.

A gray-and-orange sky is waking up over the Branson place. Everything feels dreamy and unreal, like time is repeating itself, the sun rising again over June 7, 2005.

Cops are searching the field in tidy rows. They are carrying boxes and trunks out of the house, down the porch, and plunking them in white vans. Rusty asked for every available unit in the county. They wailed their way here, an early alarm for anyone residing in a fifty-mile radius.

The crawl space was loaded. Plastic bins marked Trumanell. Boxes marked Daddy. A trunk marked Mama Pat. Black garbage bags, undetermined.

It only took the flip of a single breaker in the downstairs hall closet to light the bottom floor. “This could be a whole lot of nothing,” Rusty said to the first cops who arrived. “Or a whole lot of something. I can’t believe they didn’t catch this crawl space last time.”

In the kitchen sink, a plastic bag of chicken was defrosting.

Rusty thinks Wyatt has run, which he was instructed not to do. But I know about the ditches and cubbyholes he drew like a little da Vinci, starting at age six, and I’m not sure.

Rusty is on the porch, alternately directing traffic and sucking on his vape pen. Occasionally, he glances at me, leaning against the patrol car, like I’m his sick child he had to bring to work.

Every puff of toxic air he inhales makes me seethe a little more. He strolls over, his eyes hidden behind those two mirrors, wearing a smile that smirks victory. “You feeling