At the first thaw, when icicles began to drip and the newest goldenrods broke out from beneath the white, Saint looked back and recalled little of that winter, or how she had noticed the first ephemeral flourish. The only evidence could be found on her camera, where choice shots captured pink wild geraniums, spiderwort, and the delicate white anthers of Jacob’s ladder. She watched a disaster in Yuba City on the nightly news and wondered how there could be room for so much devastation, how Patch could possibly compete for attention from a God who planned with such grand abject cruelty.
On Patch’s birthday she took to her bed and told Norma she was too sick to attend school that day. Norma offered to take her for ice cream at Lacey’s, but Saint told her she was no longer a child. Norma bought her a thousand-piece jigsaw, and each evening a little more of Mount Rushmore was depicted.
Beneath a bluebird sky Saint sat on the bench in the middle of Main Street, set back by a flash of coral roses that burst from hanging baskets beside her. She breathed spice as she waited for the bus.
Jimmy Walters sat beside her.
“Hey.”
Saint did not reply.
“I see you at school and you…I miss seeing you smile.” He nodded, like he’d said his piece.
“How’s that fox you’re feeding?” she said.
“Had cubs. Four show up now.”
Saint tried to smile, tried to feel something else, even just for a moment.
“I see you with your camera. You know, if you wanted to see some whitetail I know a nice spot.”
She glanced at him and wondered just how easy his life was, how small his troubles were. He carried an easy confidence her grandmother said came from true faith. Like he did not know that the other boys called him a church pussy, or if he did, he simply didn’t care.
When the bus arrived Saint rode with her grandmother, on the plum leather perch just behind her. When she was small, Norma would let her push the lever, her face locked straight in concentration because her grandmother told her it was the most important job, that without her the good people of Monta Clare would not be able to get where they needed to go.
“You want to, for old time’s sake?” Norma said, catching her eye in the big mirror.
Saint smiled and shook her head.
The bus shone. Though there was a team of cleaners at the depot, Norma brought an old leather cloth to catch the water marks. She made her inspection, tutted if she found an ashtray had not been emptied, sometimes found discarded comic books and brought them home for Saint.
People said it was noble that her grandmother went out to work like that. Taking the seat her husband had occupied back in the city, driving near thirty years. The girl’s got to eat, Norma said in reply. Though Saint knew that purpose in its many forms was what kept the living just so. In quieter, shameful, moments she wished her grandmother was like the others, on those days when Norma would show at school and stand apart from the mothers, smoking a Marlboro and wearing her cap.
They eased up Marshall Avenue, the engine low and loud as Saint looked out over Edgewood Canyon, the emerald river buffeted by lime grass that fed the water’s edge. Trees grew between slate boulders. An old waterwheel retired before the arc of a wooden bridge so faded it almost matched the gray bulwark that held off the blues. She leaned over and fired off a shot with her camera, and far above saw two men on horseback framed by that Missouri morning so crisp and beautiful she could not stand it.
“I miss the bees,” Saint said.
Norma did not turn when she spoke. “We can order some more.”
“No. I want my bees.”
“Bees are bees. They’ll all sting you if the mood takes them. I do wonder where they are.”
“Dead. They’ll be dead now.”
A sheer cliff of limestone. Lichens and mosses and liverworts dropped to lush pediment, and the stunt of trees. And as they chased along she saw rogue cherts a million layers thick.
In the small town of Fallow Rock people climbed on and smiled at Saint like they remembered the girl she used to be.
Her grandmother had arranged to change over at Alice Springs, four towns from Monta Clare, and they stepped out and walked down toward the parkland and settled on a bench.
Saint removed their sandwiches from the picnic basket, unwrapped them, and set down two cans of lemonade and two apples.
“You want to talk about it?” Norma said.
“No.”
“I miss him, too.” Norma had been slow to warm to Patch, mistaking his smile for trouble, his pirate clothes for delusion. It had turned around on a late afternoon walk in the spring of 1974 when they passed the Macauley house and saw the street door ajar. Norma followed her granddaughter up the path; both stopped still when they saw through the window Patch cleaning the vomit from the floor beside his mother, who lolled back on the sofa. Patch laid her down, fetched a shawl and covered her over, then got back to work with his bucket and sponge.
Saint had moved to enter the house, but Norma had placed a gentle hand on her shoulder, smiled sadly, and led the girl away from a neglect Saint could not yet understand. They had finished their walk in silence. The next time Patch showed at their house, Norma baked banana muffins and said nothing when the boy took one for now and another for his pocket.
“Is this what happens? Kids get taken and never come back, and no one ever finds out what happened to them?” Saint said.
“You know that it is.”
There had been no more missing since Callie Montrose. Whoever had started seemed to have stopped. Some nights Saint fantasized that Patch had killed him and was slowly finding his way back to them. That he had found his mean, like Edward Low. Sometimes he was sailing, leaning out over the bowsprit as his ship carved out a path toward her.
Far below she watched the wind of the river like a serpent threading trees and rock, its back so clear and startling blue. “You still pray,” Saint said.
“I pray like I did when your grandfather died.”
Saint wanted to ask what it was like, to lose the thing that defined you. But perhaps she knew: it left you someone else. A stranger you had no choice but to tolerate, and see each day and feel and fear.
“Will it go away? Because I can’t—”
Norma took her hand.
“I want everything to mean something, to lead somewhere.”
“I saw the Walters boy sitting with you,” Norma said. “You might like to take him as a friend. You could get some more bees and make some honey and—”
“Jimmy Walters is dull.”
“And how would you know that?”
“He just talks about animals. And God.”
“Maybe if you just gave him a chance.”
Norma removed her hat and placed it on her granddaughter’s head, then took the camera from her and poked out her tongue.
When Saint did not react, Norma recalled the time Patch had tried to fix her up with the lunch lady at Monta Clare, who also wore her hair short.
“Of course, he later found out she had the cancer. And a husband. And that I’m not a lesbian,” Norma said.
And at that Saint finally smiled. And Norma took the last photo on her roll.
It had taken her near two full seasons to fill that first roll of film, so sparing was she in what she deemed worthy to hold on to.
“If you ever get the chance to make someone smile, or better yet, make someone laugh, then you take it. Each and every time,” Norma said.
“What about if it’s at your own expense?”
“Especially then.”
“I will hold on to him forever,” Saint said.
Norma smiled, like she knew that a child’s forever fell far short. Like it would not always be this way. Like she underestimated her granddaughter fully.