What Comes After: A Novel - Softcover

Tompkins, JoAnne

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593332555 ISBN 13: 9780593332559

Verlag: Riverhead Books, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

Finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize

Named a top beach read of summer by Oprah Daily, Good Housekeeping, The Wall Street Journal, and more

“Nail-biting wallop of a debut . . . a thoughtful, unexpectedly optimistic tale.” —The New York Times

“If you enjoyed The Searcher by Tana French, read What Comes After by JoAnne Tompkins. . . . a mystery—and a gritty meditation on loss and redemption, drenched in stillness and grief.” —The Washington Post

After the shocking death of two teenage boys tears apart a community in the Pacific Northwest, a mysterious pregnant girl emerges out of the woods and into the lives of those same boys’ families—a moving and hopeful novel about forgiveness and human connection.

In misty, coastal Washington State, Isaac lives alone with his dog, grieving the recent death of his teenage son, Daniel. Next door, Lorrie, a working single mother, struggles with a heinous act committed by her own teenage son. Separated by only a silvery stretch of trees, the two parents are emotionally stranded, isolated by their great losses—until an unfamiliar sixteen-year-old girl shows up, bridges the gap, and changes everything.

Evangeline’s arrival at first feels like a blessing, but she is also clearly hiding something. When Isaac, who has retreated into his Quaker faith, isn’t equipped to handle her alone, Lorrie forges her own relationship with the girl. Soon all three characters are forced to examine what really happened in their overlapping pasts, and what it all possibly means for a shared future.

With a propulsive mystery at its core, What Comes After offers an unforgettable story of loss and anger, but also of kindness and hope, courage and forgiveness. It is a deeply moving account of strangers and friends not only helping each other forward after tragedy but inspiring a new kind of family.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

JoAnne Tompkins was inspired to become a writer by the human resiliency she observed in her first career as a mediator and judicial officer. She lives in Port Townsend, Washington.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

2

 

Newly sixteen and trying to get a handle on her finances, Evangeline McKensey spread the last of her money-a twenty, three ones, and six oxycodones, which she counted as fives-on the scarred wooden table. The candle she'd lit started to gutter. She coaxed the wick with a pocket knife, her breath seized till it flared brighter. If it died, there would be nothing but darkness in the abandoned single-wide.

 

She stopped, snatched up a wastebasket and retched, holding back her tangle of red hair as best she could. No point in racing to the toilet. The water had been cut days ago. She swiped an arm across her mouth, smearing the foul stuff on her new denim jacket, the one that fate had left for her on a park bench last week. She'd hoped to avoid the puking. Some women did. It made the place smell horrible.

 

In the morning, she'd empty the wastebasket, fill it from a spigot on a neighboring horse pasture. Too rough out there now. The fall wind was churning the firs into a fury, sending high-pitched vibrations across the home's aluminum sides.

 

Evangeline pulled a can of chili from her duct-taped backpack. She'd slipped it from a shelf earlier in the day, but the picture of the greasy red beans and bits of ground meat now caused a rising in her throat, and she shoved it away. She could have pocketed a pregnancy test while she was at it. But why? Her boobs had made it obvious weeks ago, irritated at everything, even soft cotton bras and tees. She knew what she knew and marveled at anyone who needed a plus or minus on a plastic stick to fill them in on what their body was up to. Now, if somebody came up with a device to tell her the precise day this whole thing started, that would be worthwhile. That would answer a question that had been plaguing her.

 

She shoved aside the latest eviction notice ripped from the door. This one mentioned the coming appearance of the sheriff. Which figured. The pattern of her life had been set: horrors followed by small reprieves, glimmers of possibility, then wham, everything back to shit.

 

A few months back, she couldn't have imagined any of this. She had walked home from town on a warm July evening, the air clear and sweet, the sky glowing silver, thinking how her mom might let her enroll at the high school in the fall despite the likely presence of the devil. But when she entered the clearing and their rented trailer came into view, it radiated a stillness that stopped her breath.

 

She pushed the door. "Mom?" The cabinets hung open, only a jar of peanut butter and a couple cans of tuna left. A scrawled note waited on the table: I'm praying Jesus forgives you. She tore open an envelope next to the note. Two hundred dollars and her grandmother's jeweled brooch fell out. Evangeline slid to the floor, whimpering. "Please, Mama. You don't mean it." But her mother did mean it. Her mother had promised this day. Many times she had promised. And now she had done it, washed her hands of her daughter and slipped clean away.

 

Evangeline cried for days, praying to Jesus, afraid to leave for even a second in case her mother returned. But, as usual, the prayers didn't work, produced neither parent nor food on the shelves. She guessed her mother was using again. Years of sobriety down the drain. "My stalker boyfriend," her mom had called heroin. "A real son of a bitch."

 

As the weeks passed, Evangeline prayed less and less, until one day she realized she was done. She'd probably burned the Jesus bridge with the drinking and stealing and messing around with her mother's ex-boyfriend. Just as well. He'd never been that reliable. And the way she saw it, you could invite someone into your heart, but if they refused to come, you had to move on. You had to save yourself however you could.

 

It was early October now, winter lurking at the edges of gusting winds, in the damp gray that hung over the town. She'd survived three months alone in this dismal place. The only relief had been the two boys who'd appeared in September, a brief island of company-both tender and ugly-in the middle of all that loneliness. But within days the boys had disappeared. She'd only seen them again on the front page of the newspaper.

 

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...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Riverhead Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2021
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593332555
• ISBN 13: 9780593332559
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 432
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: RIVERHEAD; https://www.penguin.com/riverhead-overview/; ; Attn: Andrea T Sheridan 1745 BROADWAY, 14-1; NEW YORK; NY; 10019; USA
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