Excerpt from What Comes After by JoAnne Tompkins, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Dead boys. It was wrong to think of Jonah and Daniel that way. Dead. Boys. Nameless, generic. As if she'd had nothing to do with it. She pressed her hand to her belly. Would she wreck the baby too? Probably, but there was only her to save the poor thing.

"Bad break for you, baby," she whispered. "But you get what you get."

She picked up the eviction notice. A week till she'd be forcibly removed. She wadded it, tossed it in a corner, and dumped everything from her backpack onto the table: dozens of newspaper clippings, empty candy wrappers, dirty socks she'd hoped to wash in a public sink, her mother's copy of St. Augustine's Confessions, which she couldn't get into, and Dorothy Marsten's hydroxyzine, which, in her haste, she'd mistaken for hydrocodone. She forgave herself the error. Lingering was ill advised when trespassing in a stranger's home.

She rifled through the clippings. Though weeks old, their headlines still detonated painfully in her chest. Missing. Murder. Suicide. She picked up an article with a photo of a gray-haired man, studied it for the thousandth time. Isaac Balch. That was his name. But a single worn image couldn't tell her who the man was, and she set it back down.

She needed a plan and was beginning to suspect that Isaac Balch would be part of it somehow. She folded the clippings and tucked them into the pack. As for Dorothy Marsten's pills, she would return them tomorrow, slip them back during the old lady's nap the way she'd slipped them out. People could live with pain, but for all she knew, these were for the old lady's heart.

Nothing from her mother. The two hundred dollars was long gone, and she'd thrown the brooch in a slime-covered pond the night it tumbled from the envelope. She had wanted to dispose of her mother as quickly and indifferently as her mother had disposed of her. Now she hadn't a single possession to prove she'd ever mattered to anyone else.

She shoved back, considering. There might be something yet. Not from her mother, from the boy. She had lost it in a night wood, but she closed her eyes for a moment, trying to visualize. With surprising clarity she saw a tangle of thorny bramble, the shattered limb of a wind-damaged fir, and knew where she might look. With the right tool, she could cut it free. She could wrap it once more against her skin.

3

News of my son's death traveled even faster than that of his disappearance. It was a loss felt by our entire community and made all the more painful by its violent cause, by Jonah's suicide, by Seattle news teams that swooped in to sensationalize. Many in town speculated about girls and jealousies, drug deals and psychotic breaks, but not one fact surfaced that lent the slightest credibility to any of it.

The need for public outlets of grief was intense. Within the week, a student memorial was held in the school's overflowing gym. This was followed a few days later by a Catholic Mass filled to capacity, mourners packed even in the vestibule.

Katherine had insisted upon the Mass. Though Daniel never considered himself Catholic, I didn't object. Katherine, who had divorced me the year before, grieved as deeply as I did, likely more so for having chosen to live elsewhere, for failing to be present the last ten months of her son's life. I understood this and wished her whatever comfort she could find. Still, for my part, these events left me cold. And I am not a cold man.

At least, at one time, I was not.

 

Daniel's third service, his last, was the Quaker memorial I requested. I donÕt recall how I made it to the meetinghouse that day. I must have walked as I usually did, but the first thing I remember is standing in the clerkÕs office with Peter Thibodeau, my closest friend and principal of the high school where I taught. Though not a Quaker, Peter had led me away from the gathering as soon as he saw me at the meetinghouse door.

Excerpted from What Comes After by JoAnne Tompkins. Copyright © 2021 by JoAnne Tompkins. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.