Chapter Three

Gus could barely contain himself for the rest of the school day and all through the eternal bus ride home. Had his mom not been out front when the bus dropped him off, he probably would have bolted into the pasture right then.

Gus hopped off the bus and waved to the driver, Mr. Jones, who waved back. One thing about country roads: everyone waves at everyone. It’s obligatory. If you’re out by the road, or anywhere in view of it, and a car comes by, you wave. And the folks in the car always wave back. Doesn’t matter if you know the people or not, you just wave. Gus had pondered this—he didn’t wave at everyone who passed him in town. Why was the country road different? Was it just the homespun aw, shucks farming atmosphere? Maybe, but that didn’t feel right, because not everyone out here was aw, shucks. Gus thought it might be an acknowledgment of the shared loneliness of country living. Or it might be don’t try anything buster, because I see you. Maybe a bit of both.

Gus’s mom was pruning the rhododendron. That’s the state flower of West Virginia, Gus’s dad had been fond of reminding anyone in the vicinity of a rhododendron. Mom had pruning shears, but a machete would have been more suited to the task. Over the years it had spread out until it was less a shrub and more a horizontal tree. Upward branches blocked some of the windows, which was what Gus’s mom was rectifying.

“Gus!” Mom called as he walked up the concrete path. “How was school?”

“Fine.”

“Any trouble with anything?” Mom asked, which gave Gus pause. Was she making conversation, or had Deb told her about Mrs. Miller holding him after class? Or, like Mrs. Miller, had his mother also become psychic?

“Nope, fine.”

“I’m glad to hear it.” From her tone, Gus could tell she had been making conversation, which was a relief. Gus hopped up onto the porch.

“Hey,” Mom started, and Gus stopped. “Tell me about things. We haven’t, you know, talked.”

Gus understood that she was apologizing for her distant behavior during the past few weeks. “It’s okay, Mom. Things are fine.”

Gus didn’t want to make his Mom feel bad, but he was eager to get inside and plot out his approach to The Spot for later tonight. Without meaning to, Gus began the fidgety scooching-away dance of someone who wants to be somewhere else.

Mom noticed. “You in a hurry?”

Gus heard the hurt in Mom’s voice, and willed himself still. “No hurry, Mom.” He added a little lie: “Lots of homework, you know.”

“Get it done before dinner, then. What do you want to play tonight?”

Gus didn’t know what that meant. “Play?”

“It’s game night!” For the first time in weeks, a little joy peeked out through Mom’s sorrow.

That little bit of joy was like a dagger in Gus’s gut. Did it have to be game night tonight? Just last night he had seen the tractor, and he had a “date” with Meghan—your standard “hang out with your brother’s girlfriend where your parent died” sort of date—and now Mom wanted to play board games?

Gus looked for a way out. “Tonight? Gosh, I don’t really want to play anything.”

Mom insisted. “But it’s Tuesday! Tuesday is game night! How do you think Dad would feel if we stopped all our family traditions?”

Somehow, in a few seconds, Gus’s I don’t want to play a board game had turned into not playing a game would betray the memory of my father. He was bewildered, but he knew he wasn’t getting out of this one.

“What do you want to play, Mom?”

“Oh, anything,” Mom said, in a tone that suggested otherwise. “Maybe Risk?”

Risk?!? Mom didn’t even like Risk. She was jumping straight to Dad’s all-time favorite game. Worse, it would take three or four hours to play. He wasn’t going to be meeting Meghan in the field tonight, not before midnight at least. But if Mom wanted to restart this tradition, and she wanted to do it so boldly, Gus didn’t feel right trying to stop her.

“Risk sounds fun.”

Tonight is a no go, Gus texted Meghan the moment he got to his room.

Cold feet? Meghan prodded.

You’re just trying to get out of this, aren’t you? Meghan wasn’t going to let it go easily.

Back and forth they went while Gus finished a quick trigonometry assignment. They didn’t text at all during dinner. Mom had made her famous meat loaf, with a glaze so sweet that no self-respecting young man could turn it down. It was the first time all three of them had eaten together, at the table, since Dad died, and Gus couldn’t bear to spoil it by texting anyone, even Meghan.

Their texting resumed—surreptitiously—during Risk.

How much longer? Meghan asked.

Gus excused himself to the kitchen for some water while Deb deliberated whether to mass his armies for an assault on Iceland from Greenland.

I’m losing as quick as possible! Gus texted. Which is kind of easy. Deb’s actually really good at Risk.

Deb? Meghan messaged back. A strategist? Are you sure you’re not just bad?

It flashed across Gus’s mind that, maybe, Deb’s girlfriend shouldn’t be dissing him to his little brother. But he knew Meghan didn’t mean anything by it—it had been clear enough this morning that she adored Deb.

Don’t come over, Gus typed. He checked the top of his screen to see what time it was. This won’t be done before 9.

Then I’ll meet you at 9:30. Meghan was nothing if not persistent.

Gus had been in the kitchen longer than it took to get water, but when he got back to the table, Deb was only just finishing his move. He had indeed attacked Iceland, wiping out the bulk of Mom’s army in the process.

Deb finished off Gus by taking Gus’s last stronghold—Congo—at 8:50. Gus had been careful not to appear like he was losing on purpose, and Deb had helped by stomping him thoroughly.

Gus breathed a sigh of relief when Deb announced he was going to head to his room and play some Xbox. Gus assumed Mom would turn in as well, and he could say he was going for a walk. Then he could meet up with Meghan.

To Gus’s chagrin, Mom had other ideas. “Oh, if you want to play Xbox, that’s fine.”

Deb stopped in his tracks. “Did you want to play something else?” he asked.

“I thought maybe,” Mom began, then paused, perhaps for effect, “we could watch Hoosiers.”

It took willpower for Gus not to scream. Hoosiers? That was that. It would be 11:00 before they finished. He couldn’t message Meghan right now, in the room with Mom and Deb, but he couldn’t say no to Dad’s favorite movie either.

Mom needed this. Risk and Hoosiers were not arbitrary choices. Gus sat down on the rightmost of their three couch cushions while Mom sat down in the middle. Deb slipped in the Hoosiers DVD then joined them on the couch.

Gus couldn’t immediately get out his phone. Mom had always enforced a “no phones during family time” rule, especially during movies. His first opportunity to sneak a message was fifteen minutes in. Mom was enthralled with Coach Norman Dale laying down the law and losing some players along the way. Gus slipped his phone out of his pocket and, glancing at it, typed Don’t come.

He dropped the phone on the couch cushion so he could see when Meghan responded.

She didn’t until thirty-five minutes into the movie, when Coach Dale elected to play four men on the court rather than put his fifth player—who was benched for not following the game plan—back in the game. Meghan’s message said, Well, I’m here.

Gus glanced at Mom out of the corner of his eye. I messaged you not to come!

The basketball movie? Meghan asked.

Gus was typing his response when Coach Dale stopped right in the middle of giving an ultimatum to his team.

“Gus?” Mom was holding the remote and glaring at him. “Don’t I always say ‘no phones’?”

“I was just IMDb-ing Gene Hackman,” Gus lied, “seeing what else he’s been in.”

Mom wasn’t convinced. “Let me see your phone.”

Oh no. Mom would take the phone and see he was messaging Meghan and they would know he was meeting her in the field and they would learn he was delusional about a tractor and they would institutionalize him but not before Deb beat the crap out of him for having a late-night pasture tryst with Meghan and he would spend the rest of his life in a straitjacket in a padded room and—

“Let’s just watch the movie, Mom,” Deb said.

Mom was reluctant, but relented. “Put the phone away.”

Gus slipped the phone back into his pocket. Mom pressed play.

Later, shortly before the Hickory Huskers captured the 1952 Indiana high school basketball championship, tears streamed down Julie Marsh’s cheeks. She couldn’t wipe them away, because there was a seventeen-year-old asleep on her left shoulder and a fifteen-year-old asleep on her right shoulder. Her sons. Her husband’s legacy. Her little boys.

Julie let the credits roll and the DVD return to the home screen. The tears had dried on her face before she eased her boys off her shoulders and guided them, half-asleep, to their rooms.

Gus woke enough to notice the time—11:17—and he was sure Meghan had gone home. He dashed her a text: Obviously I couldn’t make it out. See you tomorrow. He intended to stay awake until she responded, but snoozing on his mom’s shoulder for the first time in years had left him calm, cozy, and comfortable. He curled into his covers and drifted back to sleep.

Meghan didn’t get the text. Around 10:30 she had dozed off in their pasture, still convinced that Gus would find a way to slip out and meet her.

A little after midnight, Meghan woke with a start to find a cow staring at her. She glanced at her phone and saw Gus’s text, started to respond, then laughed, shook her head, and shut off her phone’s screen.

Meghan crept across the field and got into her car. When she got home, she switched off her headlights so her parents wouldn’t see her park. She slipped into her home and into bed unnoticed.

At no point did she see the tractor. But then, it wasn’t hers to see. Not yet.

While Gus slept on his mother’s shoulder and Meghan slept under a cow’s gaze, Judy Miller barely slept at all. This was the case most nights for her, and had been for years.

Tonight, though, was a bit different. Since the first day Gus attended her class, Judy had sensed something off with him. It wasn’t unusual for her to sense things about her students. Given her “background,” as she euphemistically referred to it, she was quite a bit more attuned to her students’ psyches than her fellow teachers were.

Judy sensed obsession all the time. In Gus’s class alone there were several students obsessing about this or that. When she was feeling nosy, she could watch a kid for a few moments and figure out what the obsession was. The standards were romantic crushes, upcoming quizzes, sporting events, and the like. Occasionally it was something she couldn’t divine, not even with her specially honed awareness.

Still, even those she couldn’t figure out were orders of magnitude less fascinating than Gus. Fascinating was a cold word, she knew, for someone’s grief, but she believed in being honest with herself. He was fascinating, terrifying, inscrutable, but above all, familiar. Yes, inscrutable and familiar, simultaneously. She couldn’t get at the root of his obsession because of its power—it was like staring into the sun—but even a dunce like Coach Logan would be able to put two and two together as to the obsession’s source. The kid’s dad just died. It had to be that.

This is where things got familiar. This obsession with life and death was the defining feature of Judy Miller’s “background.” It was the reason she saw what others missed. It was the reason she barely slept, the reason she had moved from Elkins into a brand new house, one she built in a meadow so remote that no one had ever lived within a mile of it.

Judy assumed Gus’s death obsession was what she called a “who, what, when, where, why, or how.” She knew it couldn’t be “who” or “when,” because Gus knew those. Probably not “what” or “where” either, since the tractor and the pasture seemed like clear enough answers. That left “how” and “why.”

Judy hoped for Gus’s sake that his was a “how” obsession, because at least there might—might—be answers down that path. He might walk the scene and research the tractor and comb through the facts until he figured it out. She hoped it was more research and combing, and less time at the scene, because on-location obsessing could lead to some, well, less-than-ideal consequences. Most of all, she hoped it was, for sure, a “how” obsession.

Because “why” obsessions almost never have answers. No matter how many times you go over the details, “why” remains elusive.

Judy’s own death obsession had been a “why.” It had made her more perceptive, which could be useful, but was often horrifying. It had cost her hours of sleep, and likely shaved years off her life.

Worst, her obsession had led her to watch her husband die over and over again, literally thousands of times. That takes a toll.