No Hiding in Boise Page 6

  We are silent as we sip. Then he folds the paper in half and turns to me.

  “So what’s on the docket for today?”

  I can’t help but smile at the word—docket. I’d forgotten about his affinity for this word. Every Friday, without fail, he used to ask, “So what’s on the docket for this weekend?”

  “I don’t even know what day it is,” I say. Because I don’t. I know it’s the day after I identified my son’s body. That’s all I know.

  “It’s Saturday,” he says.

  This means nothing to me.

  “I don’t have anything on the docket,” I say.

  “We should probably go by your house. Or I can do that, if you like.”

  “I can go,” I say.

  “You sure?”

  “Cleaning up after their mess will give me something to do.”

  AS WE TURN the corner onto my street, my heart beats faster. I brace myself—literally, grab onto my own thighs—in preparation for the news vans, the reporters trampling my lawn. They are not there though. Once the police came and left, once I got into Gary’s Jeep and sped away, they must have realized there was nothing more to see.

  I’m looking down at my lap when we pull into the driveway. Gary says, “Oh, crap,” and I look up, see what he sees.

  Someone has spray-painted, in black, across my white garage door:

  K I L L E R

  “God dammit,” Gary says, shoving the car into park and getting out, leaving his door open.

  He walks to the garage, inspects the paint, shaking his head.

  “I’ll go to Home Depot and get some paint to cover this,” he says.

  Home Depot. Where Jed used to work. Gary doesn’t even realize what he’s said. He has no idea that I may never be able to set foot in a Home Depot again.

  I sit in the passenger’s seat, not ready to get out.

  “Are they talking to me?” I say.

  Gary leans in through his open door, his hands pressing into the driver’s seat.

  “Huh?” he asks.

  “On the garage,” I say, flicking my wrist toward the graffiti. “Is it meant for me?”

  Gary looks at the garage, then back at me, then at the garage again.

  “What are you talkin’ about?” he says, not understanding at all.

  “Are they calling me a killer?” I ask, point-blank.

  Gary lets his head hang, defeated.

  “Christ, Joyce, they’re talking about Jed.”

  He speaks like I’m an idiot. Maybe I am.

  “But Jed’s dead. Everyone knows that. It feels like it’s a message for me.”

  He shakes his head.

  “It’s just some teenager who wanted to mark the house, show all his friends on the Instagram or what have you,” he says.

  I can’t help but smile when he says “the Instagram.” Jed used to tease me about Gary being a grandpa. He’s actually a few years younger than me, but he has no interest in keeping up with the times. He doesn’t even use email.

  “What?” he says, noticing my smile.

  “Nothing.”

  He comes around to my side and opens my door for me. When I get out, my legs feel like Jell-O, like I walked a marathon the night before.

  The lawn looks terrible, green blades smashed down, ripped out in several places. There’s a Snickers bar wrapper on the front porch, a Big Gulp cup sitting on top of the mailbox.

  I put my key in the door, reluctantly turn the knob.

  It’s not as bad as I thought—at least from what I can see. I was expecting ransacked; instead, it looks … investigated.

  I walk through the living room, noting couch cushions slightly askew, the TV stand rolled away from the wall. Every cabinet and drawer in the kitchen is open. It seems rude. They could have just closed them on their way out.

  In my bedroom, the sheets have been pulled back, dresser drawers opened, closet combed through. Shoe boxes and an assortment of hangers have been pulled out into the open, displaced from where I’ve stowed them at the back of the closet for years.

  Gary follows me as I make my way down the hallway to Jed’s room. I don’t realize I’m holding my breath until I get to the threshold and exhale loudly.

  His room is a mess.

  The mattress is flipped over, laid to rest against the sliding glass closet door. His laptop is gone, as expected. He had a desktop computer too, which is also gone. There are drawers open, clothes strewn about—though, admittedly, some of those were there before the police came (cleanliness was never one of Jed’s strong suits).

  I go to the mattress, start to attempt to flip it.

  Gary comes to my aid. “Let me,” he says.

  I do. He places the mattress back in its frame and we stand back, proud of ourselves.

  “That’s a start,” I say.

  Gary says he’ll straighten out the kitchen and living room while I tend to Jed’s room. He seems to understand that I want to be left alone in here, with Jed’s things.

  I fold his clothes, one article at a time, then place each piece back in its dresser drawer. I get choked up when folding his boxer shorts into nice, tidy squares.

  Everything in his closet is in disarray. He had stacks of books. He wasn’t stupid; he read heavy, philosophical texts, Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky. He claimed to be an existentialist. There are photo albums too, dusty, memory-filled. I hope the police flipped through them, realized that my son had friends. Or he did, back then, back when people printed photos for albums.

  I open one of the albums. It was filled with photos from high school. That was the time of his life I thought I had to worry about—all those hormones, teenage angst. Jed seemed to do just fine though. He wasn’t popular, but he wasn’t an outcast. He didn’t wear a trench coat and listen to heavy metal. That’s what people will want to think, isn’t it?

  Jed was average, that’s what I thought. He was a B student; he got the occasional A, the more-occasional C. He wasn’t an athlete, but I blamed that on the fact that his father died when he was young and I never tried to pretend to care about sports. He wasn’t a loner, not when he was younger. They’ll want to think he was, but he wasn’t. His best friends were class-clown types, goof-offs. I know they all experimented with pot and drank occasionally, but they were good kids. He even had a girlfriend, or who I suspect was a girlfriend—Lindsey Benton. She was in theater, if I remember correctly. Jed always said they were just friends, but I saw the look in his eyes; if they were, in fact, just friends, he longed for something more.

  He started to have trouble in college. DUI. Cocaine. He was busted for selling pot to a minor. Those are the things I know about; I’m sure there were more. I was paying his tuition at the University of California in Santa Cruz, so I got the notices about his failure to attend classes. I told him I wasn’t going to continue paying his tuition. Out-of-state tuition isn’t cheap. I told him he should come home, go to the local community college, get back on track. He laughed at me, said he wasn’t coming home, he wasn’t a child. I knew he didn’t have money for rent, figured he would come crawling back after a few weeks, but he didn’t. I don’t know if he slept on sofas or camped on the beach or what.

  Over the next few years, we spoke often enough for me to know he was okay, health-wise, and not in jail. But he was distant, caught up in something he wouldn’t explain. A voice whispered to me: You’ve lost him. But to others, to friends like Diana, I said he was going through a phase. I clung to this.

  I hadn’t seen him for four years when he showed up on my doorstep, unannounced, looking strung out and desperate as a stray cat. He didn’t wait for me to invite him in; he just walked in. I should have set some kind of boundary then, I guess. I should have said, “Jed. You can’t just show up like this.” Would that have prevented what happened?

  My phone buzzes in my pocket, jolting me from my thoughts—a blessing, probably. I don’t recognize the number, so I don’t answer. So many people are calling lately, mostly acquaintances who
leave messages saying they are “checking in.” Everyone just wants details. They are hungry for them. I understand, I do. But I am starved myself.

  The voice mail notification flashes. I listen to the message, a message telling me that my son’s body is ready to be released. They want to know what mortuary I want the body released to.

  I need a mortuary for my son.

  Gary comes into the room, asks how I’m doing. I tilt my head back and forth, indicating “so-so.”

  “I have a task for you,” I say.

  He looks at me, eager. Gary is someone who needs to feel helpful. When we dated, we argued regularly about how he couldn’t just listen to me vent; he always had to offer solutions. Sometimes, I just wanted to lament the fact that my son was floundering. I just wanted hugs, assurances, nods of understanding. But he was insistent on fixing it and became frustrated when I waved off his suggestions—“You should get him to enlist in the military,” “You should sign him up to run a marathon, get him committed to something,” “You should sell the house and buy a place that doesn’t have a room for him.”

  “At your service,” he says.

  I know he means it.

  I tell him about the mortuary.

  “What one did you use for Ed?” he asks.

  I’ve always appreciated his use of Ed’s name. He doesn’t shy away from it, doesn’t just say “your husband.” He knows I loved Ed. He’s never been threatened by that. It’s probably because he knows about loss; his wife, Sandy, died ten years ago. Breast cancer. I have no problem mentioning her by name, either. He does, though. He doesn’t like talking about her. It’s too hard for him, I think.

  “I don’t even remember the name. It was family-run. They’re not in business anymore,” I say.

  It was a few years ago when I drove by and saw they had turned it into a pizza place called To Die For. I was so infuriated that I posted a Yelp review—my first one—with just one word: “Tasteless.”

  “Do you want to bury him or …” Gary says.

  Bury him or burn him. These are the choices, the terrible choices.

  Ed wanted to be cremated. I felt strange about it at first. I had a hard time picturing his body in fire, and I struggled with accepting that there wouldn’t be a gravesite that I could visit. It wasn’t my choice though; he was adamant about it. He didn’t like the idea of taking up unnecessary space on Earth. So I have an urn with his ashes on my nightstand. I talk to the urn sometimes. I picture him chuckling when I do.

  “Cremation might be best,” Gary says.

  I know why he thinks this. Putting Jed in the ground with a marked grave will invite people to deface that grave, spray-paint it like they did my garage door. Boise still has that small-town feel, even though it’s growing, even though it keeps appearing in magazines as one of the best places to live, attracting people from other states, people nobody wants here. The small-town feel is what I’ve always loved about it. Now I wish we were in a sprawling metropolis with millions of people, someplace where it’s easy to be anonymous, to hide. There is no hiding in Boise.

  “Right,” I say. It’s all I can say. “I still want a service for him. He deserves a service.”

  “Of course,” Gary says with a nod.

  “Okay, then,” I say.

  “Okay,” he echoes.

  He clears his throat and scans the photo albums in front of me.

  “What’cha lookin’ at?” he asks.

  I pat the bed, invite him to sit next to me.

  “Come look,” I say. “This was the Jed you didn’t know.”

  JASON MAGUIRE

  VICTIM #2

  I DON’T KNOW how Leigh could think I don’t love her. I work fifty hours a week to put food on the table and fund all her damn Amazon purchases. I don’t say a word when those boxes arrive every freaking day. We have a nice house, health insurance, some savings for several rainy days. I’ve done the things we talked about in therapy—I’m making more of a point to ask her how her day is, that type of thing. And, after all that, she wants a divorce, or separation or whatever you want to call it. She fantasizes about it.

  We sit at a high-top table along the back wall of Ray’s. There are cheaply framed photos on the walls, dates scribbled in the corners: “Ray and the boys, 1992,” that type of thing. This place has been here a few decades. It’s a hole in the wall, but I’ve always liked it. I used to come here in college. It hasn’t changed much since then.

  “I’ve never been here,” Leigh says.

  “Really?”

  She shakes her head. Leigh grew up in Boise, same as me. I thought most native Boiseans had been to Ray’s at some point. “I used to come here in college,” I tell her.

  “Really?”

  Just like that, we have learned something new about each other. It feels, suddenly, like we’re on a date. There’s that rush of discovery.

  “I’ll get us a couple beers,” I say.

  I go to the bar, order from a twenty-something girl who barely looks me in the eye. She’s busy, seems to be training the other bartender. She passes two pints across the bar top and thanks me.

  A few sips into our first beers—I’m hoping for a few more, enough to get to the bottom of this trial separation business—I say to Leigh, “Look, I know I’m an idiot about a lot of things. But I don’t want to separate. I don’t want a divorce.”

  Her face looks softer than it did in the shrink’s office. Maybe it’s the dim lighting.

  “You are kind of an idiot,” she says, with the smile that made me fall in love with her. We met on an online dating site, back when it was taboo. We told our friends we met at the farmers market because we thought that was a better story. Most of them still don’t know the truth. My sister had put my profile on the site; it definitely wasn’t something I initiated on my own. She said there were several women who sent messages, but decided Leigh looked the most promising. After one date with Leigh, I told my sister she should make all my life decisions.

  “You really think I’ve been ignoring your feelings for years?” I say.

  I try to sound curious instead of angry, but the truth is I am angry. I don’t like the implication that I’ve screwed up. If I’m honest, I feel like she’s taking for granted all the good things I do. Like I said, I put food on the table. I fund all those Amazon purchases. Many women would be happy with a husband like that.

  “I just think we don’t connect, emotionally,” she says. “And maybe I didn’t notice that when we were dating because I didn’t need as much emotional connection then. We didn’t have a child then. A child changes everything.”

  I nod. In one of our sessions, Tracy advised, “When in doubt, nod. Pay attention. Leigh wants to know that you’re listening.”

  “Okay, well, I want to connect,” I say. “You’re going to have to help me with that one, though.”

  She lets out a little laugh. That laugh gives me hope.

  NEARLY TWO HOURS later, we’ve each had three beers (well, Leigh had me finish half of her third one) and we both agree we need to go home. Things are better, or maybe they aren’t. I suppose I’ll find out the reality tomorrow, when the alcohol has left our systems. Leigh says she’ll give it a few weeks, though. She says we can try “connecting” and see how it goes. We agree we’ll be completely honest with each other. We say this now, of course. The beers help us make grand promises.

  “Text Hannah that we’ll be home in ten,” I say.

  We both stand. I go to the bar to pay my tab. The bartender girl is talking to a guy sitting on a stool across from her. She is telling him to calm down—about what, I don’t know. I feel for her. She must have to counsel men on a nightly basis, and she doesn’t get paid the same as Therapist Tracy does.

  I turn to head for the exit, where Leigh is waiting. That’s when a man barges in through the front door, knocking Leigh backward. She looks up at me from the floor, shock on her face.

  “Hey!” I scream, charging at the guy, ready to throw a punch.


  That’s love, isn’t it—being ready to fight anyone who disrespects your wife? Shouldn’t that matter more than connecting emotionally?

  This is what I’m thinking when I realize he has a gun. Leigh sees it at the same time I do.

  “No!” she shrieks.

  There is a bang. All goes black.

  ANGIE

  SAHANA LIES NEXT to me in bed, in Cale’s spot. She wears earplugs and a silk eye mask, which is a very Sahana thing to do. She would be horrified to know that she snores. It didn’t wake me; I was up anyway, my mind unable to quiet.

  I keep playing back scenes of Cale and me. We were happy in the early days—at least that’s what my memories tell me. Memories, I suppose, can deceive.

  We met at a speed dating event at the historic Owyhee building downtown. I’d been dragged there by Sahana; he was dragged there by his coworker, a guy named Jeff. It was a simple premise: The women were each seated at individual tables, a full wine glass in front of them, an empty chair across from them. The men rotated from table to table, spending five minutes with each woman. There was a loud buzzer when the five minutes were up, like we were on a game show. The women and the men were each given a note card to rank their top three “dates,” and if two people picked each other, it was a match.

  There were about twenty people there, and I had my eye on one guy in particular—the quintessential tall, dark, handsome. He had a cleft chin, something I’ve always liked that Sahana does not understand (“It’s like there’s a butt on his face,” she argued). That guy was the first one to sit across from me, and my hopes were up. Then he started talking. I asked him about his hobbies, and he spent the entire five minutes telling me about the love he had for his sports car (it should say something that I can’t remember this guy’s name, but I know the sports car was a Nissan GT-R). When the buzzer went off, he hadn’t asked me a single thing about myself. I took a long sip of wine and prepared myself for an exhausting evening of disappointment.

  Then Cale sat down.

  I could see right away that he was older than me (by ten years, I’d learn). When he smiled, lines fanned out around his eyes. He had a good smile—kind and genuine. I was surprised when he said he worked in sales. Usually those guys are as fake as they come. He said his job was boring (he sells mutual funds to financial advisors) and then turned the conversation to me. He didn’t ask me the routine questions I’d had in mind: What do you do for work? What are your hobbies? Instead, he asked me my ideal Friday night and ideal Saturday morning. For Friday night, I said, “Takeout, wine, early bedtime.” When I was younger, I would have lied, said something about dressing up and checking out the newest restaurant downtown—to sound cool or something. My thirties, I’d decided, were all about honesty. He nodded, poker-faced, and then I told him Saturday morning would involve a hike and breakfast at a café. He nodded again. He was about to say something when the buzzer went off. He stood, shook my hand, smiled without showing teeth, then turned his attention to the woman at the table next to me. I had no idea what he thought of me, but I was smitten.