The Distant Dead

NORA

NORA

The day they found the math teacher’s body, Nora was late to work. It was her father’s fault.

The morning started like any other. After she ate breakfast she carried her father’s tray across the backyard to his camper, stepping around the sandbox he’d built for her brother when Jeremy was five. After thirty-two years in the desert sun the sandbox’s wooden frame was rotten and the sand where Jeremy once drove his Tonka trucks was crusted with bird s**t. Nora knew she should take it out, but she also knew she wouldn’t. Most days she didn’t even see it.

Her father’s camper was a 1990 Fleetwood Prowler, white with faded teal-and-brown trim, that he’d bought used when Nora was ten and Jeremy was thirteen. He’d been proud of it in the good-humored way he’d been proud of everything then, from his barbecue grill to his athletic son to his pretty auburn-haired wife. He’d never been farther from home than Elko, where his brother lived, but now that he had the camper he was going to drive his family all over the country, maybe as far as Florida. Nora’s mother’s smile was as dreamy as a child’s. Florida, she’d said. Just imagine.

That summer he drove them to Yellowstone. The park itself was a blur of neon-colored pools, but Nora never forgot how it felt to leave Nevada for the first time. Idaho hadn’t looked any different – scrubby desert, rolling hills – but when she saw the welcome to idaho sign something inside her opened. She loved that they would go somewhere else the next summer, and the summer after that, every trip widening the world a little bit more.

But that fall Nora’s mother was diagnosed with cancer, and they never took the camper anywhere again. After she died, during Nora’s freshman year of high school, Nora assumed her father would sell it, but he didn’t, and while Nora was away at college it had migrated here, to the back fence. Since the accident it was where he lived, even though he still had his bedroom in the house. Nora had never questioned this arrangement, figuring it was part of some complicated penance only he understood.

She walked up the makeshift plywood ramp and opened the camper door to find him sitting at the banquette table in his undershirt and pajama bottoms. He hadn’t shaved, and when Nora saw this a thin band tightened around her forehead. The days he didn’t get dressed were bad. The ones he didn’t shave were worse.

She set the tray on the table – Wheaties, toast, and coffee – and put her hands on her hips. She had a tall, angular body, with long limbs and sharp elbows. She’d been a frilly girl, all tutus and spangles, then a teenaged beauty in Daisy Dukes and halter tops, but now she was a woman who didn’t make a fuss: crisp khaki pants and a plain blouse, hair in a ponytail, no makeup.

Her father stared at his breakfast, and Nora knew he wouldn’t eat it. She told herself she didn’t care. She had to be at the school in fifteen minutes; she didn’t have time for this. But when she reached the door she stopped. Through the worn screen she saw the back of their small ranch house, its white siding gone a ruddy gray. Her father’s rusted Weber and the empty planters where her mother used to grow tomatoes sat on the cracked cement patio, and the fenced yard was bald except for clutches of weeds in the corners. It all looked the same as it had yesterday, and the day before that, but for a moment Nora saw it the way it had been when she was a girl, with pansies along the fence, tomatoes in the boxes, the siding a crisp white. Even a few years ago there had been grass. She couldn’t think when the last blade had died.

Her father coughed a sodden, weepy cough. Nora took a steadying breath, then turned around. In the light from the window his blue eyes were watery. She sat on the vinyl seat and put her arm around him. ‘How about I come home for lunch today?’

‘You don’t have to,’ he said, but of course he wanted her to. Nora didn’t know what had set him off. A dream, maybe, or a memory. What was the date? March 14. It sounded familiar. It wasn’t the anniversary of anything she could think of, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t the anniversary of something.

‘It’s no trouble. I’ll heat up the pot roast.’

Usually Nora’s father defrosted a Stouffer’s in the camper’s microwave for lunch. He brightened at the thought of the pot roast, and she promised to be home at twelve fifteen. Then she had to reheat his coffee, because it had gotten cold, promise twice more to come home for lunch, and take the pot roast out of the freezer. When she grabbed her car keys it was five to eight. She drove too fast down Franklin, but it was still four minutes past the bell when she ran through the double doors of the middle school, feeling like her seventh grade self, dashing late into this same building, her face hot with the same shame she’d felt then.

When the math teacher didn’t show up, nobody thought much about it at first. Dee Pratzer, the office secretary and emergency substitute teacher, covered his first period class with her usual aggrieved competence. Between first and second period Mary Barnes, the science teacher, stopped by Nora’s social studies classroom and said, with a hint of malice, ‘Adam’s late. I wouldn’t want to be him when Dee gets hold of him.’

Adam Merkel had never been late before, but he’d only been teaching at the middle school for seven months, the replacement for old Jim Pfeiffer, who’d finally retired. He was new to the town, too, which was unusual in itself. Lovelock was a sand-blasted hamlet of ranch houses, prefabs, and mobile homes strung along a mile of Interstate 80 a hundred miles east of Reno and seventy-five miles west of Winnemucca, surrounded by a desert so vast it ran into three neighboring states. Nobody moved there except divorced second cousins from Sparks with no place else to go and the occasional mine supervisor doing hard time on his way up the corporate ladder. When Adam applied for the job it had created a buzz: a professor from the University of Nevada wants to teach here! Think what that will do for the school’s test scores! But when he turned out to be a curled-up middle-aged man whom the students promptly named Merkel the Turtle, the buzz died away.

‘Has anyone called him?’ Nora asked. She didn’t like Mary. Mary was a divorced, faded beauty who, thirty years and thirty pounds past her prom queen heyday, still acted like a bitchy high school girl. She’d circled around Adam when he first arrived, but Adam had been unmoved by her pushup bras and red-glossed lips no matter how many times she brought him coffee from the staff room. Now she lifted her shoulder in a who-cares shrug.

‘I imagine. Isn’t he throwing that party today?’

That was when Nora started to worry about Adam, because that was when she remembered March 14 was Pi Day. 3.14, Adam had explained at last week’s staff meeting, was a national math holiday, and he was going to bring pies for all thirty-six eighth graders. The other teachers were surprised. They didn’t expect parties from Mr Merkel. Or pie baking. Good for you, Nora had thought. In the hallway afterward, she told him it was a great idea.

‘In Reno,’ he said, ‘everyone in the math department brought a pie on Pi Day.’ He smiled, but the sadness that had drawn Nora to him was still there. She’d gone to the University of Nevada in Reno herself, graduating with a major in anthropology. She’d planned to go to Africa to hunt the earliest traces of humanity. Or to Europe, to dig for Neanderthal bones in the caves of Spain. Anywhere, really, that was on another continent and promised a bunch of ancient mysteries that had nothing to do with Lovelock. Other people went to college and came back, as her best friend Britta never tired of reminding her, but Nora hadn’t wanted to come back, and she suspected that Adam hadn’t wanted to come here, either. Something in the way he carried himself, as if he were heavier than his bones, made her think his reason might even be as tragic as hers.

‘I can help you bake,’ she’d offered. She made a good rhubarb pie, her mother’s recipe.

‘No, thank you. I can manage.’ His eyes were normally a light gray behind his silver glasses, but that day they had a darkness in them. That darkness had almost been enough to make Nora insist, and more than enough to make her wish, later, that she had. Now, as she looked at Mary Barnes in her frilly pink blouse, she knew Adam wouldn’t miss Pi Day if he could possibly help it.

Dee was erasing the whiteboard when Nora walked into Adam’s classroom after second period. ‘Adam’s still not here?’

‘No. He hasn’t called, either.’ Dee snapped the eraser down on Adam’s desk with her long, organist’s fingers. The desk was so neat that even Dee, with her prim skirt and shellacked hair, looked disheveled beside it. An in-box, desk blotter, stapler, and tape dispenser were arranged with linear precision beside the district-issued Dell computer. The only thing that wasn’t utilitarian was a single chess piece, an ivory rook, that sat next to the stapler.

‘He’s supposed to have that party after lunch,’ Nora said.

‘He’d better get here quick, then, hadn’t he?’ Dee saw Nora’s frown and sighed. ‘Talk to Bettina if you’re worried. I’m too busy covering his behind.’

Bettina was the principal, a no-nonsense, white-haired woman who reminded Nora of Barbara Bush. Bettina would care more that Adam hadn’t arranged a substitute than about where he might be, so Nora went reluctantly back to her classroom. As it filled with seventh graders she tried to convince herself there was nothing to worry about. It was strange that Adam hadn’t called, but surely he would be here soon, and all would be forgiven in the glow of watching thirty-six eighth graders eat homemade pie.

Near the end of third period Bettina came on the loudspeaker and called everyone to the gym for an assembly that wasn’t on the schedule. Nora was in the middle of a lesson on Lovelock’s glory days, when covered wagons filled the Big Meadow, the last stop on the California Trail before the Forty Mile Desert. Every year she dutifully presented this piece of history as an exercise in civic pride, as it had been presented to her, even though she thought it merely highlighted the shabby ruin Lovelock had become in the 150 years since. Her students were grateful for the reprieve, but one look at Bettina in the doorway fanned Nora’s misgivings about Adam into full-blown anxiety. The principal was as pale as her white linen skirt, and as each teacher arrived she sent him or her to the staff room. Behind her, in the gym, Dee snapped orders at 130 confused and excited middle schoolers. Nora headed down the hallway with leaden feet.

In the small staff room the school’s seven other teachers and two counselors crowded together, buzzing about what was so urgent it couldn’t wait fifteen minutes until lunch. Nora wrapped her arms around her ribs and leaned against the counter beside the P.E. teacher, Josie Wilson, a bubbly girl who’d played soccer at the high school five years before and looked young enough to play there still. Then Bettina walked in with the sheriff, and everyone else stopped talking. Dee had let the students onto the playground, and in the silence they heard them: the shrieks of the sixth and seventh graders playing, and the lower tones of the eighth graders, gossiping, probing, posing.

The sheriff closed the door. Bill Watterly was the same age as Nora’s father, with a jowly face and the soft body of an ex-football player. His shoulders carried his weight with the ease that only a big man’s shoulders can, but they didn’t carry bad news well at all. He’d only been to the school once since Nora started teaching, when Chris Mitchell, a junior at the high school, shot himself with his father’s Colt and Bill needed to pull his sister out of class to tell her. His shoulders hadn’t been up to the task then, and they weren’t bearing up well now, either. Nora braced herself against the counter.

‘We’ve found a body up by Marzen.’ Bill looked at Bettina, and she nodded at him to continue. ‘We think it might be your new math teacher.’

The room erupted in shocked exclamations, but Nora barely heard them through the sudden chaos in her head. Adam Merkel was dead. Of course he was. That was why he wasn’t here. But he couldn’t be dead. He was having a party after lunch. He definitely couldn’t be dead up by Marzen. Marzen was a crummy little town in the hills where nobody from Lovelock went if they could help it. Adam probably didn’t even know where it was. Yet here was Bill Watterly, stocky and grim in his tan uniform, saying they’d found Adam’s body. Up by Marzen.

‘How did he die?’ she asked. Everyone looked at her, then looked back at Bill Watterly.

The sheriff puffed out his chest. ‘I’m not at liberty to say.’ His belly hung over the black belt of his uniform and his crossed arms were smug against it. She’d misjudged him, Nora realized. He was enjoying this. She felt the slow tightening in her mind, like small screws winding shut, that meant she was about to lose her temper.

‘Everyone in town is going to be talking about this by dinnertime,’ she said. ‘If you don’t want speculation and rumors messing up your investigation, you should tell us what happened.’

A tide of pink crept up the sheriff’s thick neck, but a look from Bettina made him swallow whatever he was about to say. He drew himself up and looked around the room. When he felt he’d regained his authority he said, ‘You all might as well know what happened. We received a call this morning from the Marzen fire department. When we responded we found one male, deceased, about a mile from the town. The body was burned.’ He paused for dramatic effect. ‘We’re treating it as a homicide.’

‘Oh my God,’ said Josie.

Nora imagined Adam burning, his arms pinwheeling in flame, and her stomach slipped sideways. She made herself think instead of the last time she’d seen him: in the staff room yesterday morning, putting three creamers and four sugars into his coffee. Kevin Keegan, the language arts teacher, told him he was killing himself with condiments, and Adam had laughed in his uncertain way, not knowing if he was being insulted or teased. He’d had only a few hours left to live, but he’d shuffled out of the staff room with his coffee in one hand and his briefcase in the other as if it were any other day.

Your new math teacher, Bill had called him. He hadn’t even said Adam’s name. But why would he? To the sheriff and his fat, inadequate shoulders, that’s all Adam Merkel was. Seven months hadn’t been enough for him to become anything else. Even seven years might not have been. Back in Reno, Nora was sure, Adam Merkel wouldn’t have been just a dead math teacher. He would have been a dead friend. He might have been a dead brother, or a dead son.

Shit. Her body jerked backward. She couldn’t believe she’d forgotten. March 14 wasn’t just Pi Day. It was also the day, twenty years ago, when Lovelock’s high school basketball team played in the state championship for the first and only time, and Nora’s brother, Jeremy, senior point guard and team captain, scored 43 points in a win that was still the biggest thing to happen in this town since the last covered wagon pulled out of the Big Meadow. Nora’s father was never more proud of anything than he was of his son that night. He sealed Jeremy’s jersey in Lucite and hung it in the living room. He hung a brass plaque beside it with the date, the score, and the words: 43 points. For the next seven years he bragged about that game to anyone who would listen, and many who would not, right up until the night he drove his truck into the guardrail on the Highway 95 bridge and killed his son instantly.

Fucking March 14. Her father was alone right now, in the camper. He was probably already drunk.