Lines
The rope that divided Sally’s room into two has long disappeared, but you can still tell there’s a line down the middle. My half of the room is tidy, my bed made, my clothes put away. On my bed is the heart pillow Mom gave me on Valentine’s Day, my Build-A-Bear in her pink dress, and the stuffed green snake Dad won for me at the fair. My books are neatly arranged by series: Betsy, Tacy, and Tib; Little House on the Prairie; American Girls. Above my bed is a poster of Yo-Yo Ma and a Hello Kitty calendar.
On the floor of Sally’s side is a growing pile of clothes, her Walkman, notebooks, CDs, old copies of Teen and Seventeen magazines, overdue library books, and whatever fast food wrappers she’s forgotten to hide from Mom. Her bed is never made. Taped to the wall are her drawings of celebrities: Madonna and Mariah Carey. She tore down her Spice Girls poster after they broke up.
Dad refers to our room as A Tale of Two Cities (the “best of times” is my side; the “worst of times” is Sally’s side), or as “split screen.”
Sally isn’t amused by either name.
After Obaachan is moved to a hospital in Boston, though, my side starts to resemble Sally’s. I put off my homework until the last minute and get my first B’s, jeopardizing my scholarship. I miss so many rehearsals at the Junior Philharmonic that I am put on probation. I even see less of Keisha, who complains that she is now stuck with Gregory and Nathan. I stop meditating and going to church. I stay up late, watching TV with Sally: Friends, 3rd Rock from the Sun, and Boy Meets World.
On the first Saturday of summer, when I get to the breakfast table, Mom, Sally, and Dad look at me like I’m from another planet.
Mom points to the clock. “Every day, you get up five minutes later than the day before.”
“She looks hungover,” Sally says.
“How do you know about that?” Dad glares at her.
Sally shrugs. “TV.”
“Maybe you watch too much TV.” He has not gotten over her smoking.
“Look what I made for breakfast for you?” Mom pushes a plate toward me. “Tamago.”
“Thank you.” I force a piece into my mouth. It tastes nothing like Obaachan’s.
“Don’t I get a special meal?” Sally says.
Dad plops a sugar doughnut on her plate.
“Speaking of doughnuts,” Sally says. “There’s a concert at Boston Common.”
“How is that speaking of doughnuts?” Mom says.
“It’s an all-girl band, a fund-raiser to promote racial harmony.”
“Racial harmony?” Dad jokes. “They should come and visit the O’Neil house.”
“If we went to Boston, we could visit Obaachan at the hospital,” I say. Since she moved to Boston two weeks ago, we have only been once. She was so sick, she couldn’t speak to us.
“How much are the tickets?” Dad asks.
“Only fifty dollars, and it’s for a good cause.”
“Fifty dollars! For each of us? That’s two hundred dollars.”
“Well, I wasn’t going to go with you, exactly.”
“Then with who?”
“Heather and Courtney and Allison, if she can pull her face away from the mirror long enough to do anything. Her dad has a Mercedes. He can drive us. It will be so cool to drive up in a Mercedes.”
“What happened to Molly?” Dad says.
“Oh, I am so done with Molly, Dad. Where have you been?”
“I don’t know where I’ve been. Probably working overtime to buy clothes at Limited Too.”
“I am so over Limited Too.”
“What is this insertion of ‘so’ into every sentence?” Mom reprimands. “Speak English.”
“I’m speaking American. You are so out of it, Mom.”
“At least you used the word properly in that sentence.”
“So, do I get to go?”
“No concert,” Mom and Dad say at once.
“Don’t you hate it when they do that?” She turns to me. “They might as well be Siamese twins. One body. Two heads.”
“You’re still on restriction for smoking.”
“It’s been, like, weeks!”
“I knew a boy whose dad put him on restriction for a whole year,” I say. Actually, Keisha knew the boy. “He was working at his dad’s factory and threw a match into a garbage pail. The whole place burned down.”
“Gee, thanks.” Sally picks up a felt pen and doodles a girl with a guitar.
“Why can’t we visit Obaachan today?”
“That’s all she thinks about,” Sally says.
Dad and Mom look at each other. “I don’t think there are visiting hours today,” Mom says. “They’re low on staff.”
“So?” My voice sounds angry.
“You sound like your sister with that tone,” Mom scolds.
“So?” Sally says. “What’s wrong with sounding like me?”
We both fold our arms.
“A teen and a preteen,” Mom says. “I must’ve won the lottery.”
“I’ve got an idea,” Dad offers. “It’s a beautiful day. What do you say we go fishing?”
“Instead of a concert! No way.” Sally storms off.
“Come on, Linny. Go fishing with me. You can’t just stay inside all the time and mope.”
“I don’t feel like it.” I look down so I won’t have to see my dad’s disappointment. On the table is the newspaper. The headline says: “Missing Boy.” The boy grins from the photograph. Something about his face reminds me of Cole at my old school, the boy everyone made fun of.
Mom says, “There’s sandwiches you two can take.”
“Uh-huh.” I stare at the boy.
“Did she say yes?” Dad asks.
“I think so,” Mom says.
“Huh?” I look up.
“You just agreed to go to the beach.”
“I did?”
“Come on, kiddo. We’re a family. We do things together.”
“Okay.” It’s hard to say no to my dad. “But I want to visit Obaachan soon.”
Dad goes to get his fishing gear. I unfold the paper and read the story: Vincent Serrins, a nine-year-old, disappeared from his front yard two days ago. One person saw him get into a blue van. Another saw him walking down Waterman Street. There have been kidnappings in Florida and California this year, the paper points out, but not in Rhode Island.
Mom clears the table. “Sally drew on my tablecloth.”
“Don’t wash it,” I say. “It’s a good drawing.”
“Ready?” Dad grabs the newspaper. “Do you want to bring a book?”
“No.” I follow Dad out to his truck. “Can I stop at the church? I just want to run in for a second.”
“Sure.” He drives the few blocks to our church. “Take your time.” He opens the newspaper.
The church is almost empty. I dip my fingers in holy water, make the sign of the cross, then slide into the pew, and kneel. “Kneel O’Neil,” Sally used to kid me, when I was little.
I bow my head and say Hail Marys and Our Fathers. I ask God a favor: “Please, bring Obaachan home. Make her well, if you can, but at least bring her home.” Then I sit. I meditate for the first time since she went into the hospital. The familiar blankness flows into me, the feeling of being everything and nothing at once. But it doesn’t last. Instead, an image comes into my mind, sharp as any photograph. It’s the boy, Vincent Serrins, hunched up in the corner of a small wooden building. He’s alone and scared.
“Okay, kiddo?” Dad says when I climb into his truck.
“Uh-huh.”
“Boy! Am I excited. Remember that albacore I caught that time. It was like The Old Man and the Sea. Me pulling it. It fighting back. Your mom cooked it with chili and ginger. Best meal I ever had.”
I pick up the paper and read the caption under the photograph: “Providence Boy Missing for Two Days.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. It’s just . . .”
“What?”
“It’s hard to say. I keep getting a picture in my mind of where he is.”
“Who?” He glances at the paper. “That missing boy?”
“Yeah.”
“A feeling?”
“You know. Like when the phone rings and I know who it is.”
“That’s because it’s always Nora,” he jokes, then looks serious. “He’s been missing for a couple of days. I assumed he was kidnapped and, you know, they’d be finding a body. That’s the way it seems to go these days. What a world.”
“Yeah. But I think he’s alive.”
He pulls the truck over. “Tell you what? I have a buddy over at the substation. I did the drywall on his house. How ’bout we stop in and you can tell him what you see. . . . It couldn’t hurt.”
“The police station?”
“The small one. It’s right by the Laundromat. We’ll just talk privately.”
“They’ll think I’m a weirdo.”
“There are worse things in life than someone thinking you’re a weirdo.”
When we get to the substation, we’re led into a little office and told to wait for the detective. I expect to see a police officer with a uniform and gun, but the man who enters wears blue jeans, a sweatshirt, and a baseball cap. He shakes Dad’s hand. “Detective Perino.”
My stomach flip-flops.
“Bobby O’Neil. And this is my daughter Lin. I was hoping to talk to Harry Saunders.”
“He’s retired. Last I heard, he was in Bermuda. Please sit down.”
Dad leads me to a chair. “My daughter here has a kind of talent. She has feelings sometimes, about who’s calling or what people are going to say.”
Matt’s dad picks up a paper clip and fidgets with it. “Uh-huh.”
Dad holds up the paper. “She was looking at the newspaper, the story about that missing boy . . .”
“Vincent Serrins?”
“Yes, and she got a sort of picture in her mind.”
“What kind of picture?” Detective Perino peers at me.
I tug my eyes back to the photo. The clock is ticking. Phones are ringing in the outer office. My mouth is dry.
“Take your time.”
I swallow. “I see a shed . . . and he’s inside of it.”
“A shed?”
“Like a toolshed.”
“Is he with anyone?”
“I think he’s by himself.”
“What else? What’s around it?”
Circles and lines, I think, but that seems silly. “I don’t know.”
He sighs. The paper clip is now straight. He bends it back into shape. “What’s he doing in this shed?”
“Rocking. Back and forth like this.”
For the first time, he looks right at me, dropping the paper clip. “Vincent Serrins is autistic. He does rock back and forth just like that. Maybe you can draw this place.”
“I’m not good at drawing. My sister is.”
“Try, Lin,” Dad coaxes.
Matt’s dad hands me a pad of paper and a pencil. I draw a square for the shed, then lines in front of it. They are parallel and extend far into the distance like any road. I look at my drawing, meditate on it, and then it comes to me. Within the horizontal lines are vertical ones.
“Railroad tracks!” Perino says, grabbing the phone. “Tell dispatch to send search units out along the railroad tracks. The Serrins case. They can comb a ten-mile area radiating from Providence. And not just the tracks in use; all of them.”
I close my eyes.
“Is there anything else?”
“No.” I feel like I could just slip into a nap.
I hear my dad stand. “My daughter is a private girl. This is just between us.”
“You have my word.”
My dad gives him his cell phone number. “Please let us know if you find the boy. Come on, Lin.”
My legs feel weak as I stand up.
“Thank you so much, young lady. Anytime you have ideas like this, you just come to me.”
“We won’t tell your mom about this,” Dad says as we walk outside. “She might not approve.”
“Am I freaky?”
“No! Why would you say that?”
I shrug.
“You come by your . . . talents honestly.” He switches to an Irish accent. “My grandmother Mary O’Neil, from County Cork, was a great one for precognition. She predicted the war years before it happened, but it didn’t stop her sons from enlisting.”
“Did she have red hair like yours?”
“She did, once. It was said her hair turned white overnight when she got the telegram her son Ian had been shot down over Germany. But I imagine that was an exaggeration. At any rate, when I met her, her hair was stark white.” He opens the trunk door.
“I’ve dreamed about her.” I hop in.
“Have you?”
“I’m so tired, Dad. I just want to . . . take a nap.”
He sighs. “Well, I guess you owe me a fishing trip. I want a rain check. In writing.”
“I promise.”
“Thanks for going in there today. That took courage.”
“But what if I’m wrong about it?”
“What if you’re not?”