CHAPTER EIGHT

1962

I crept downstairs, still wearing my nightgown. The house was silent as I pulled back the living room curtains. Taking my grandfather’s leather-bound atlas off the bookshelf, I sat down on the floor in a patch of sunlight behind the couch where no one would see me. I sifted through countries, looking for our own. I wanted to count how many states lay between Nebraska and New York, where my uncle lived. Tracing my finger along the green edge of the Great Plains, I pressed my thumb into the blue of Lake Michigan. I wondered if it was him my mother had called, and how long it would take him to travel through six states.

My grandfather had circled places on the map where Capital Steel had constructed bridges. In a yellowed clipping that fell out of the book, I read that in Fort Madison, Iowa, two construction workers had died building a bridge across the Mississippi. In the atlas, my grandfather had marked the spot with carefully shaded pencil crosses, scrawling their names in the margin as if he had been haunted by responsibility. The names were long and Russian, with several syllables I could not decipher. In Council Bluffs, a bridge over the Missouri connected Iowa to Nebraska. The lead-gray circles were smudged with fingerprints. I imagined steel against steel glittering in the autumn sun as my uncle sped over wide muddy rivers on his way to rescue my mother from whatever it was she couldn’t stand about our life.

In the kitchen, my mother startled me. She was staring out the window, already waiting, I guessed, and I started to panic. She didn’t turn around when I opened the icebox door. I put the jar of milk down on the counter heavily and fumbled around in the cupboard for a box of cereal, even though I knew there wasn’t any left. “What are you waiting for?” I said finally.

My mother turned around and faced me. She wasn’t wearing any makeup. She didn’t look ready to go anywhere. I wondered if she’d been up all night. “Not waiting,” she said. “Wishing.”

“How long does it take to drive from New York to Lincoln?” I asked.

“How would I know?”

Then she turned around and unlatched the window and pulled it open. My mother just stood there, breathing in the air like she wasn’t cold at all. She folded her arms on the windowsill and pressed her nose against the screen. Standing behind my mother, I wanted to touch her, rest my head on her shoulder, put some part of myself near to remind her I was still there. It seemed like we should need each other.

Moving up beside her, in front of the window, I touched my fingertips to the collar of her shirt. “Mother?” I whispered, but she didn’t seem to notice. She kept staring through the screen. I opened my mouth to speak, but then I couldn’t remember what I’d wanted to say. A cold wind blew my cotton nightgown back against my skin. My hair tickled my neck like fingertips.

Out the window I could see the driveway lined with rhododendron bushes and the elm stumps. When I was little and we had come to visit, I would follow the trail of my grandfather’s cigar smoke out the back door and down the driveway into the summer shade of the leaves. The breeze tickled shadows in the tire marks. The roses always bloomed. Somehow, the thick hum of the insects and the fingers of my grandfather’s smoke had made the whole world seem ancient and wise.

*   *   *

My mother spent the weekend staring out windows, waiting for her brother to come whisk her away to some bright grander place. I was sure of it. This was my secret. I held it inside. My father spent hours on the bench in the garden, reading the newspaper, though the fall air was cold. He drank coffee with brandy instead of cream. I’d seen him go into his study twice without looking at me and heard the clink of the crystal decanter against the side of his mug. Red leaves fluttered down through the light, and he kept shaking them off the crease in his newspaper. Finally, he put the paper down and raked the whole garden. He gathered the leaves in garbage bags and loaded them into the trunk of the Chevy. He drove off and didn’t come back for a long time.

I wanted desperately to talk to Lucille. She seemed like the only person who had ever listened. I thought about writing out what I would say: Lucille, Mother needs you. The situation is dire. She’s drinking herself to death. She took all the tranquilizers. She’s going to slash her wrists and stick them under the faucet. She’s planning to jump off the roof of the Cornhusker Hotel. If you ever cared about anything, you’ll come back now.

I thought about where my mother might keep Lucille’s daughter’s telephone number in Detroit. Creeping down the hall, my stocking feet sunk into the thick beige carpet. Pausing by the stairwell, I listened for a sound, but there was nothing. My parents’ bedroom door was open, and I slipped inside. It was dark and shadowy, cluttered like I’d never seen it. Dirty button-down shirts were piled in the corner waiting to be dry-cleaned. The bed wasn’t made. Stockings and bras exploded from the bureau drawers, as if someone had been caught emptying them out and had just run away.

I went over to my mother’s nightstand and opened the drawer. There was an eye mask to keep out the sunlight. A package of wax earplugs. A Sucrets box full of hairpins that I had never noticed my mother wearing. At her vanity table, I rummaged around in her makeup drawer, through little pots of pink paint that said Chanel on the lid, powder and brushes, lipsticks, brown pencils and black pencils, mascara. I didn’t know what to do with any of it. Beauty seemed like a house I hadn’t been invited to. It had to be constructed carefully, controlled, and I thought I was the kind of person whose hands would always be too shaky to ever pull it off.

Opening my mother’s jewelry box, I took out her engagement ring and slipped it on, surprised at how perfectly it fit. Holding my finger up to the light, I looked deep into the diamond sitting like a sparkling eye in a delicate square of black enamel. Sometimes it felt like my mother’s heart was a diamond. Glittering and hard, meant to be admired.

The telephone number was tucked into the lid of the ring case, scrawled in black pen on a folded piece of stationery. I didn’t recognize the area code, but I knew I had stumbled upon something mysterious and important. It seemed right that my mother would keep the telephone number in a special place like that. Lucille was close to her heart. I sat down on the edge of the bed and dialed, then quickly put back the receiver on the cradle, then dialed again. I waited while it rang and told myself, “No fooling, this is your duty.”

“Hello?” a man said, sleepily.

Surprised, I didn’t say anything back.

“Hello?”

“Who am I calling?” I said.

“Who is this?”

“Does Lucille Leopold work there?” My voice sounded nervous and small.

“Excuse me?”

“Uncle—”

“You’ve—”

I placed the black receiver back on the stand and twisted off my mother’s ring. My chest fluttered. I had been so close to falling into another skin. Slipping the number into my pocket, I quietly left the room just as my father was coming up the stairs with one shirttail untucked, the buttons open at his neck.

“Hello there,” he said, breathing heavily, as if the stairs had taken everything out of him. “It’s hot. Stuffy in here, don’t you think?” He seemed so helpless, so feeble in that moment, trying to pretend like everything was fine.

“I guess,” I said.

“I’m opening some windows to make a cross flow.”

“Do you need any help?” I called after him, but he didn’t answer, so I went to my room and shut the door. I put the telephone number in my bureau drawer with the Starkweather story hidden under my cutouts of Frankie Avalon surfing at Venice Beach and Fabian behind the scenes during the making of Five Weeks in a Balloon. That was the way it worked. You hid something precious in an unexpected place. My uncle had told me that my grandmother had traveled everywhere with her jewels in a brown paper bag so no one would think to steal them, but she confused the bag with her lunch on a train in Italy. When she went to put on her emeralds for an important evening, she found nothing but stale bread.

*   *   *

Things were going to straighten out, I was convinced. They had to. I started putting more time into my appearance before going to school, not that it made too much difference. I smoothed my long hair down over my cheeks to hide the roundness and tucked in my blouses. No more little-girl nonsense. I convinced myself I was losing weight without Lucille around. Hidden safely within my peacoat on the way to school, I was conscious of each step I took, each hair that blew across my cheek, every delicate pang of hunger that told me I was one inch closer to a comforting emptiness.

I ate sparingly in the cafeteria, but by the time school let out the hunger was always like a jackknife, and on my way home everything rushed too quickly around me. The white houses on Van Dorn Street looked shocked by Big Red football banners, and it was all I could do to reach the soda fountain at the pharmacy without fainting. I’d sink down gratefully on a stool and buy a vanilla milkshake with the change I’d picked from my parents’ coat pockets in the hall closet, and finish up with a bagful of candy. Then I’d feel terrible about what I’d done, like I’d always be on the outside of everything.

On my way home one afternoon, I did a strange thing, which I’d been thinking about for a while. I went up South 24th Street with the intention of presenting Cora with some sort of peace offering. I felt bad for what I’d done and bad for her. I wondered if she thought about how easily it could have been her dead on the floor in a pool of blood instead of the Bowmans. People said it all over town: What lovely people the Bowmans were.

I emptied my pockets of Mary Janes, which I was sure Cora liked, but at the last moment I put them in the Bowmans’ mailbox instead of hers. My hands were shaking. I couldn’t believe what I had done, but I didn’t take them back. It was an important message, a secret signal to the boy whom I imagined living all alone in the big house where normal people were scared to visit.

All through dinner I couldn’t sit still. The Bowman boy was my Boo Radley, only handsome, a beautiful combination of those sad faces in the newspaper reports, those pictures of his parents who looked so perfect and attentive. I had often thought that if Mrs. Bowman had been my mother our lives might not have felt so strange.

Later, I grabbed my coat and tiptoed out the kitchen door and through the shadowy garage. The inside of my nose ached with cold. I buried my hands deep in my pockets. The moon sat like a plate on a table of glittering knife points, and strange shapes bloomed from the rhododendrons. I stood on our frozen lawn looking back at the house. There wasn’t any motion or warmth. Only the television flickered behind the living room drapes like faraway heat lightning.

A few minutes later, I found myself standing outside the Bowmans’ house. The windows were illuminated on the ground floor. The outdoor light winked, a long-awaited beacon. The house looked warm and safe. No one would ever have been able to guess such horrible things had once happened there. Cora’s house was the dark one. The windows gaped like deep black mouths.

I opened the mailbox and held my breath when the hinge squeaked. I stuck my hand inside, just to see. Nothing—the candy was gone. My fingers were stiff with cold inside my mittens. A dog barked, and I jumped. When it barked again, sharp and insistent, hollow with cold, I turned on my heel and hurried home.

I came around the side of our own house, and my parents’ bedroom light was on. Looking up between the branches of the oak tree, I could see my mother, her arms folded on the sill, her eyes turned to the sky, as if she were trying to find another universe. I remember how warm the squares of light looked in the other houses on our street during that time, how each window was a satin treasure box, containing a safe little world.

*   *   *

My father was standing over the sink drying the dishes when I opened the back door. “Where have you been, young lady?” he said.

I felt giddy. “Lying in the grass looking up at the stars,” I said. “Trying to find the Big Dipper.”

“Just because your mother has stepped out to lunch doesn’t mean everything else goes haywire around here,” my father said. “The rules are the rules.”

“Have you been fighting again?”

He picked up a plate and ran a dish towel over the surface. Then he sighed and leaned an elbow on the counter and studied my face. “What can I do, Susan? What do you need?”

I thought about it for a moment, and then I realized I didn’t know what it was I wanted or needed. I wanted to look different, I wanted to be different, but these weren’t things he could do anything about. He never did the things he promised anyway. “I want a hula hoop,” I said.

“A what?”

“Never mind.” I went upstairs, opened my bureau drawer, and moved aside the cutouts and the article about the electrocution. I took out the telephone number and unfolded it. I stared at it, trying to figure out if it was my mother’s handwriting or if someone had slipped it to her across a bar, but I couldn’t remember what her numbers looked like, only her decadent script swooping across the page.

*   *   *

In calisthenics I made a point of standing next to Cora. “Hi,” I said, but she wouldn’t look at me. She shrugged her shoulders and stared down at the tips of her dirty tennis shoes until Miss Winter blew her whistle and we all had to run from the red line to the blue line and then back again.

That afternoon, I followed Cora past my street, up South 24th, half a block behind so she wouldn’t see me, so I could think about what to say. I didn’t want to go home until my father got there. I didn’t want to have to be the one to tell him my mother had left with my uncle or that strange man on the telephone. I didn’t want to find the note beside her wedding ring on the kitchen table, the closet and drawers empty of her belongings. I wondered if my father would cry when he saw there wasn’t a trace of her, if he’d be strong in front of me or angry.

I stood behind one of the last elms that still remained, old, gnarled, and twisting out of the sidewalk. Leaning up against the rough trunk, I watched Cora open the gate. The hem of her camel-colored coat disappeared behind the side of the sprawling house. A blue pickup truck with white lettering on the side pulled out of the Bowmans’ driveway, but I could see it wasn’t anything to get excited about. The bed of the truck was full of tree limbs. A man sat behind the wheel wearing a baseball cap. He stared straight ahead as he turned past me. I waited another minute before walking boldly up the path. I stood there with my finger extended and rang Cora Lessing’s doorbell.

I could hear footsteps, and then the door opened and a skinny little boy with red hair and a catcher’s mitt on one hand stood there frowning at me. He put the mitt in front of his nose and sniffed it.

“Hi,” I said. “Is Cora home?”

“Who wants to know?”

“I’m a friend from school.”

“I don’t believe you. My sister doesn’t have any friends.” He opened the door farther, stepping back, and I went inside, taking advantage of the moment. The hall was light and airy. I stood beneath a chandelier made of colored glass that cast shapes on the ceiling. A staticky radio played somewhere far off, announcing a voice from another part of the world.

“Where is she?” I said.

“Out looking for the cat. I boomeranged pop tops at him yesterday, so he ran away. I hate the cat.” He wrinkled his nose and scratched his head with the mitt and sat down on the stairs. “I hate my sister, too.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I just nodded and looked at the floor. The wood was shiny and waxy, the kind you could skate over in your stocking feet or see your reflection in. “Maybe I should come back,” I said, but then Cora appeared, unbuttoning her camel coat. She stopped in the doorway and squinted her pale eyes at me. Then she looked at her brother. “I still couldn’t find Cinders, Toby. You are in so much trouble now.”

The boy stuck out his tongue and darted up the stairs. Cora waited for me to say something.

“I’m sorry about your cat,” I said.

She just stared at me.

“I came to talk to you.” My voice sounded smaller than I wanted it to. I didn’t feel so sure of myself anymore. I picked a hangnail. The radio jabbered upstairs, some sort of interview. I could hear questions being asked, and then a pause before someone answered. I remembered Starkweather’s brother interviewed on the radio before the execution. It felt like so many years ago. Who would have thought I’d end up so close to it all? “I’m sorry I wasn’t nice to you that time in the locker room,” I said quickly. “I didn’t mean it.”

Cora didn’t look at me. She unbuttoned her coat and opened a closet door. “I didn’t notice. I don’t even know what you’re talking about,” she said, but her voice sounded like she did know, like she hated me.

“I hope we can be friends,” I said.

“You never wanted to be friends before I caught you staring at the neighbor’s house.”

“I didn’t come to stare at the neighbor’s house. I came to say I’m sorry,” I said.

“It’s never as simple as that,” Cora said. She went over to the front door, held it open, and shot me a smug look with her pale blue eyes. A gust of wind ripped through the hall and a door slammed shut, making us both jump. The chandelier chimed. The white wall swirled with color. Then the air went still.

“I feel bad,” I said.

“I doubt it. Only poets and artists identify.” She wrinkled her nose like someone else had told her to say this, and she wasn’t sure exactly what it meant. “I can’t talk about it anymore. I have things to do,” she said.

But I didn’t want to go home. I had the urge to undo it all, to unravel my life right then and there and stitch it back together in a different way. People started over all the time. The Bowmans’ son had started over after the death of his parents. Or maybe he hadn’t been able to. You can’t start over if you haven’t faced what came before. Maybe Cora had looked through the fence and seen him crying in the rose garden. No one to dry his tears. I would catch them in my hands.

“Please,” I said. “Let me stay.”

She gave me a bitter look.

I stepped out into the cold air. “I’m going to look for your cat,” I said. The radio upstairs crackled, and my heart jumped. Someone had twisted the volume the wrong way. Cora closed the door.

I stood on the porch for a moment, thinking about what to do. Dark clouds gathered in the sky. The air smelled of winter. I knelt down in the barren flowerbed and peered under the porch. “Come here, Cinders,” I said, but nothing happened. I wasn’t even sure you were supposed to call a cat the way you did a dog. We’d never had any pets. I went around the side of the house and looked up into the branches of the trees. I didn’t see anything except a clear view of the Bowmans’ house, behind a low white fence that couldn’t have kept anyone out. I felt my throat catch and my pulse quicken, being so close to a mystery. But I also felt small, like a dried leaf in a breeze, helplessly going wherever the wind felt like taking me. The air bit my cheeks, but I didn’t care. I buried my hands deep in my pockets and kept myself from looking over the fence. I imagined Cora watching me from an upstairs window, testing my loyalty.

The front of the Lessings’ house had made it seem like any other in Lincoln, contained on its neat little plot of land, but when I went around to the back there were a million places someone could hide. The garden unfolded before me, wild and unexpected, larger than I could have possibly imagined. Toward the back was a stand of small trees, and stepping between the spindly trunks I felt more at ease. I had a perfect view of the Bowmans’ garden. I ran my hand along the points of the picket fence and swirled a pile of dried leaves around with my foot, as if the cat could somehow be hiding in there. But I didn’t really care. I peered over the fence into what reminded me of a secret grotto where forbidden lovers met. There was a small fish pool, with a stone statue of an angel balancing on one foot, pointing a trumpet up toward the sky. I imagined Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate sitting down with their guns propped up against the side of the bench, blood on their shirts, staring into the pool, thinking about all the terrible things they’d done for love. It had been cold then too, the dead of winter, with snow instead of leaves everywhere, and I pictured their hearts like two frozen boxes slamming against each other. Everything had been white.

As if the sky had read my mind, the first flurries of snow swirled through the trees. I tried to see where the flakes hit the ground, whether the snow was melting or sticking, but the wind wouldn’t let it settle. Then I caught sight of what looked like the twitch of a tail twisting around the base of the stone fountain. It was the only reason I needed. I didn’t think twice. I just climbed over the fence and slipped into the garden.

I fixed my eyes on whatever it was and tried not to breathe. My pulse thudded in my ears. My feet crunched over the brittle grass. I stepped carefully forward into the circle of gravel, where those murderers must once have stepped, trying not to scare it away. I crept up to the frozen pool and called the cat. My voice sounded shrill and uncertain. The tail twitched and flipped behind the statue. The metal end of something hit stone.

A woman emerged from behind some bushes, pulling the end of the black hose toward her. I backed up, but it was too late. She’d already seen me.

“Well, I never—” She broke off suddenly, dropping the hose and putting one hand over her heart. I could see rings flashing beneath the wool sleeve of her coat, her earlobes sagging with the weight of pearls. “I never, never, never was so startled,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m a friend of Cora from next door,” I explained. “We were looking for her cat. I thought I saw Cinders, but I guess it was just the hose. I’m sorry.” I could feel my face going red. Had she been the one to find my Mary Janes?

“Who are you?”

“I’m the Hurst girl,” I said, tucking my chin into my collar. I was surprised at myself. I’d been on the verge of lying.

“What?”

I turned up my face and looked straight into her hard beautiful eyes. “Susan Hurst,” I said, using my full name.

“Well, I’m sorry to say I haven’t seen a cat. If I do, though, I’ll let them know.” She picked up the hose again and started winding it awkwardly over her arm.

I turned to go. “Sorry,” I said, looking back over my shoulder, but she’d already disappeared behind the hedge. The snowflakes were falling more heavily now, collecting on the trumpet of the stone angel. The pool was frozen, and the orange ghosts of goldfish drifted beneath the surface.

By the time I got home, a delicate trace of snow had cupped in the rhododendrons. A silence had crept over the street, and our house was like a tomb. Something felt missing, and I went through the gray rooms searching for my mother.