All the lights were on at her mother’s; the sunroom shone blue from the eternally-on TV. Mary Byrd’s mother’s neighborhood was exclusive but not really ritzy, but the country club and the Presbyterian church were not far, and this set the tone for the subdivision. Her mom didn’t care about all the WASPy and clubby crap, she just wanted security, a nice yard to root around in, and to be close to Nick and James. She didn’t really know her neighbors. The homely colonial-ish house had been chosen because it had a small, manageable backyard for her birding and gardening, and its rooms were small, uncomplicated boxes.
Marisa D’Abruzzi Rhinehart opened the door to her daughter with a hug and a kiss. Mary Byrd was anxious to get the inevitable beat-down over with as quickly as possible and pulled back a little. It was also a little awkward to hug her mom because she was so tiny, just under five feet and shrinking, and Mary Byrd, feeling enormous, had to bend over for the hug, sticking her butt out.
“Eeew,” her mother said. “You smell like cigarettes.”
“I know,” Mary Byrd said. “I’m sorry.”
Her mother still looked beautiful, even though she insisted on so much tanning that her naturally burnished olive skin had become opaque. But her silver hair, loosely gathered into a bun, set off her pale green eyes, astonishing in such a dark face. She was wearing silky green pajamas.
The familiar scent of cat box and tuna was just discernible under the stronger aroma of garlic and olive oil. Eliza and William referred to their grandmother’s basement, where the cat box was, as “Teetee World.” Her mother’s cats weren’t allowed to go outside because “too many bad things could happen,” and they’d eat her birds. Mary Byrd set down her duffel, removed a personal-size bottle of Sutter Home cab— not the martini she craved, but thank god she had it—and went straight to the refrigerator, the age-old homecoming ritual of all children, no matter what age. Her mother followed. Mary Byrd was more desperate for a drink than for food. She looked around in the fridge, taking out a jar of pepperoncini and fishing one out with her finger.
“Did you really ride up here with a trucker?” her mom asked, the same contemptuous smirk on her face that she’d had the last time they had seen each other and she had plucked at Mary Byrd’s ratty Levi’s jacket, a favorite that had been Charles’s in junior high, and said, “Are you still wearing this? You might think that this jacket is cool, but it’s not.”
“Yes, Mama. He’s a guy we know who works for Valentine Chickens, Mann’s company. It was fine. It was actually kind of interesting.”
“I just think it’s very weird that you did it.”
“Ma, it’s good to do weird things sometimes. Besides, it didn’t cost anything, and because of the weather I never would have gotten out of Memphis if I’d tried to fly, which you know I hate anyway. And you do weird stuff all the time.” Mary Byrd was suddenly really tired.
“Not that weird. And Charles wasn’t happy about it either. I made that hummus just for you.”
“Yum. Thanks. Charles is never happy about stuff I do. How do you know? Did you talk to him?” She sank down at the table and poured the cheap red wine into a glass, restraining herself from taking a giant gulp. Her mother was a teetotaler.
“I called this morning to see when you were coming, since you hadn’t called me. You’d left practically in the middle of the night, Charles said.” Her mother paused for emphasis. “Here’s some wonderful olive bread. Put the hummus on that. And I made podotoli soup. Your favorite.”
“I tried to call Charles but it just rings and rings,” Mary Byrd said around a mouthful of bread and smushed chickpeas. “You know they’re having a huge ice storm down there. The phone lines are probably down.” She was glad to have the conversation change course. What she really wanted was to drink and go to sleep.
As her mother went to the stove Mary Byrd noticed that she limped a little. “What’s wrong with your leg, Ma?”
“Oh,” her mother laughed. “I have gouty tophus on my toe. It sounds like something out of Dickens, doesn’t it?”
Or out of William Byrd’s diary. “Does it hurt?”
“Not much; it’s just ugly,” her mother said happily, showing her the big knob. She loved medical crap.
“Yuck, Mom!”
Her mother dished up some soup and set it, a spoon, and a napkin in front of her daughter. “Here’s the grated cheese. It’s delicious.”
Meatball soup wasn’t her favorite, it was Nick’s, but she dutifully spooned up the meatballs, carrots, celery, and macaroni. It was super-delicious and Mary Byrd said so. Her mother was the greatest cook. “Thanks. I’m eating this and then I’m going to bed. I’m exhausted.”
“Nick and James will be over tomorrow afternoon. They didn’t know if they’d get to see much of you.” She sighed. “I wish Pete were here.” There was never any question of Pete coming. He’d been a baby, and though what had happened had clouded his life in many ways, he didn’t even remember Pop. He wanted it all behind him, and had moved far away, to Portland, as soon as he could. That Pete was probably gay—they knew so little about his life—could only have deepened his estrangement and unease within the family.
“If you’d get over that flying hang-up,” her mother went on, “you and the children could come up more often. We’re never together anymore.”
“I know, Mom,” said Mary Byrd. “I’m sorry. But I’ve got to go right back. Eliza’s in a play. She’d be really upset if I missed it. And we’ve got to do something to help Evagreen. I guess Charles told you about that.”
“Yes, it’s just terrible. I wouldn’t have thought Evagreen and her family were . . . those types,” her mother said. “You’re not going back in that truck, I hope.”
“Mom,” she warned. “I’m not sure what I’m going to do. Maybe I will fly if the Memphis airport is open.” Annoyance added a little defiance to her voice. “So how will this meeting work on Monday?”
“Who knows?” her mother said, shaking her head as she cleared up dishes. “Who knows. That’s such a shame about Evagreen. Charles said he’s going to try to find a good lawyer for her daughter. I told him what they need is that Johnnie Cochran guy who got that big . . . jerk off the hook.”
“Well, that won’t be happening unless Evagreen wins the lottery. But what about us? What about this meeting? Is this going to be over now, do you think?”
“I don’t know. They certainly seem in a hurry all of a sudden. I don’t know if it’s because of this reporter who wants to write a book about the case, or because they’ve figured out how to finally charge Ned Tuttle.”
An enormous Maine Coon cat, wide as a hassock, waddled into the room and bunted the backs of her mother’s green pjs, leaving a visible swipe of fur. “Oh, Mrs. B! There you are! Mary Byrd is here to see you!” she said in the high, enthusiastic voice she used for cat-talking. She picked up the always-open can of human-grade tuna in the sink and put some in the kitty dish.
Mary Byrd’s face flushed at the mention of Tuttle. She didn’t even know for sure if her mother had ever known what the police had suggested about her cock-teasing Tuttle. She didn’t know if her mother had seen her diaries, either. If she weren’t such a pussy, she’d ask. She got up to pet Mrs. B, who gave her an accusing look and lumbered off, probably to hide in the basement wall where she spent most of her time. “Isn’t there some sort of statute of limitations on this kind of stuff?” she asked.
“It doesn’t really matter, if what they’re worried about is this reporter scooping the story and solving it herself, which would make them look terrible. James says there’s not a statute of limitations on murder.” Her mother scraped more tuna into the cat’s dish. “I guess she was expecting ham,” she said sadly.
“They already look pretty terrible,” Mary Byrd said, stretching out her legs. “If all this time they’ve thought it was Tuttle and haven’t been able to charge him before now.” She added, “That kitty does not need more food, Ma.”
“But maybe that’s what’s going to happen. Maybe they can do the DNA thing or something. I hope that doesn’t mean . . . exhumation, though. And that kitty is still just a kitten. She’s growing.” Her mother huffed indignantly.
“Jeez, Mama, surely not!” she said. “Do we even know who Linda Fyce is? Is she from Richmond? Do we really have to talk to her again, too?”
“Oh, you’d remember some of her articles—I’ve sent a few clippings to you. She wrote for the Times-Dispatch, then for the New York Times. Local color stories about, oh, you know, ‘Southern things.’”
Mary Byrd said, “Oh, I know who you mean. She’s a . . . quaint-hound—does stories on barbecue and inbreds who drive Trans Ams and handle snakes.” She pulled impatiently at her boot laces. “Stuff that people in New York and California get all excited about so they can have things to talk about at dinner parties. What Meemaw and Peepaw and them down there are up to now. That sucks.”
Her mother said, “Do you need to say that?”
“Yes, I do,” Mary Byrd said. “Someone needs to.”
“Well, anyway, she’s one of those Fyces from over in Fewtheyville, the ones who have that big mobile home dealership out on the highway, I think. I talked to her a little bit, although Detective Stith asked that we not talk to anybody until we’d talked to them—him—first.” Her mother thought of herself as a respecter of titles and authority as long as those people agreed with her.
Stith. So that was the guy’s name. Mary Byrd started peeling off her boots and socks. “That’s what he said to me, too, so I didn’t talk to her. So why did you, Mom? Do we really want this to be a book, or on TV or something?”
“Well, she called me first. And as far as I’m concerned, I don’t really care who finally figures it out and gets whoever convicted, just so someone does.” Her mother began deconstructing her hair for the night. “I think it would make an interesting book or something. She told me she’s working on that show, Medical Detectives, about solving crimes. I love that show. They’re filming an episode right now on the Southside Strangler. They finally executed that man, you know.” She put the tuna can in the trash. “But I didn’t talk to her very much.”
“But, Ma, it will never go away then. If it’s on TV, or whatever, it will be right in our faces all the time. We will have to be that poor family again. What do we have to gain by that?”
“Oh, I think the truth is always important to tell. And from my point of view, the story has an interesting psychological angle,” she said, pausing provocatively, her head down while she fiddled with her bun. A pile of hairpins had accumulated on the table.
“What do you mean?” Mary Byrd asked cautiously. A throw coated in cat fur was draped on the chair next to her and she pulled it over her. The sneezing would begin any minute. She was only allergic to her mother’s cats.
“I was . . . relieved,” her mother said, slightly rueful, but also slightly triumphant.
“What are you saying?” Mary Byrd asked. She felt the hair on the back of her neck—her hackles—rising.
“I was relieved that he was gone.” Her mother raised her head to look directly at Mary Byrd.
“Mom, Mom, why would you say that?” Mary Byrd wailed, covering her eyes with her hands.
“Because it’s true.”
“Even if it’s true, why would you say it?”
“Because I need to be honest with myself.”
“Okay, that’s yourself,” Mary Byrd cried. “You don’t have to tell every true thing that you feel, do you?” She thought she knew where this was coming from. If her mother thought that her higher power meant for her to take twelve steps into a vat of boiling monkey vomit, she’d do it. She wondered if her mom went to some church-basement meeting, everybody proudly confessing their worst shit to each other, the air thick with affirmation and cigarette smoke. “Don’t you think there are just some things that are better left unsaid?”
“Stevie created so many problems with Pop,” her mother went on. “I resented the fact that Pop favored him over you and Nick. And over me.”
“Mom, Pop was a widower with a three-year-old,” Mary Byrd protested. “Of course he favored Stevie over me and Nick. Even back then, we got that.”
“Well, maybe it’s just this mean streak that my sisters and I all have.” She shrugged, pulling at her bun.
Maybe what her mother wanted was the melodrama, or to be upbraided for having low self-esteem, or some other pop psych garbage. Mary Byrd wasn’t taking the bait. Her mother’s self-esteem was fine.
“Maybe Pop was just trying to protect Stevie from us. Nick and I tortured him so much.” Had they? Maybe they’d teased him a little too relentlessly, but it had seemed like normal sibling abuse at the time. She and Nick had done far more sadistic things to each other than the teasing they had subjected Stevie to.
“Oh, Pop knew how I felt,” her mother said. “Those terrible rages when he was drunk.”
“Well, I never saw it from you. I mean, that Pop favored Stevie and resented us, I saw. But I never saw any mean stuff from you.”
“I was good at hiding things,” she said. “Like my drinking. Anyway, that’s how I felt. It was very hard for me having Stevie in the family. I did try. I went to a therapist for a long time.”
“Uhhh,” Mary Byrd moaned. “God, Mama. I hope you didn’t say anything like that to that woman.”
She looked Mary Byrd in the eye. “I only said that we each had our own issues to deal with about what happened.” She tossed the hairpiece on the table, where it lay like an arctic gerbil.
Mary Byrd scrubbed at her eyes with her fingers, dislodging a contact. “Well, will you please not bring this up with the detective? It has nothing to do with the case.” She popped out the other contact, absently wiping them both into her napkin. “It can’t help anything.”
“Okay,” her mother said, shrugging. “I just thought you should know.”
Her mother’s revelation made the squirrel executions seem charming and warm-hearted. Mary Byrd couldn’t hear anymore. “Okay. I’ve got to go to sleep. See you in the morning.” Mary Byrd gathered her socks and boots and duffel, heading for the guest room. At the kitchen door, she turned abruptly, went to her mother, and kissed the brown cheek that was offered. There was nothing else to say, and nothing to be done until Monday.
“’Night, darling. I’m glad you’re here. I love you,” her mother said pleasantly, as if they’d just been sitting around watching Seinfeld or the Animal Channel.
“’Night, Ma. Luvyatoo,” she said, but thought, ’Night, you scary mother.
In the guest room, Mary Byrd popped half a Xanax, even though being at her mother’s usually made her sleepy and she always slept well, even on the thin, shifty mattress and even when there was disturbing stuff in the air, like tonight. She wasn’t sure why she slept so well here; at home it was lightly and fitfully. Maybe the relief from responsibility: this was her mother’s domain and all problems here were hers to deal with. Or maybe it was the lack of annoying disturbances like a husband, children, and pets. Her mom had the cats, but they had “emotional problems” and hid out when anyone was around, so they wouldn’t be scrabbling at her door or patting her face in the morning like Iggy and Irene did. Maybe it was just because here she was always a child, and always would be, even if she was doddering around at seventy-five and her mother a ninety-three-year-old crone in a wheelchair. Better to be on the safe side with the seepy-seep pill than to toss and turn all night, worrying. Or dreaming, god forbid. She suddenly sneezed three times.
The guest bed looked prissy and crisp and so inviting. She started to undress, but she caught the smell of cigarette smoke, exhaust, greasy food, dirty hair, and sharp, anxiety sweat coming off her and realized she’d have to take a shower. She could never sleep when she smelled bad or felt gross, even with a pill.
After scalding herself, washing her hair, and breathing deep breaths of clean, steamy air, she felt somewhat better. How had women ever endured life without hot running water? Imagine the chronic funk. She knew the pill would kick in any minute and neutralize the adrenaline her mother had stirred up, so she allowed herself to think about her. Had she made her disturbing confession to her brothers as well? She doubted it. Those special hollow-tipped bullets were saved for Mary Byrd alone, and her mother liked to fire them when Mary Byrd was least expecting them, or least needed to hear them. Was it possible her mom was nuts, and maybe had hardening of the arteries or something? No, it couldn’t be that—she was whip-smart in all kinds of ways—it must just be that she was old enough that some of the filters had rusted or loosened, or fallen away. Old people flaunting their vast superior life experience and not giving a shit about saying or doing whatever; they’d be dead soon and they’d earned the right to terrorize, and to exercise their last chances to set the world straight.
There was a list Mary Byrd had kept over the years, for fun, really; she’d intended to show it to her brothers someday and they’d all have a good laugh. It was a list of all the stuff her mother had said, mostly while visiting Mary Byrd and Charles and the children. As Eliza once had complained, “Nana walks around the house and tries to control stuff.” And Mary Byrd had seen her mom and Evagreen conferring disdainfully about laundry, shower curtains, cat and dog hair, et cetera, et cetera. There was no choice but to laugh about it.
If you don’t get that ivy off that dogwood it’ll die.
It smells too much like feet in here.
If you don’t hurry up the ice cream will be all melted.
Why do you let them do that?
You have to prepare the soil.
It doesn’t look like you had many daffodils this year.
I think that happened to me, too, when I was taking Lipitor.
The grits are a little bland.
If you get tan enough those age spots won’t show.
You get that from me.
You get that from your father.
Are the shrimp and grits spicy? I don’t like spicy things.
I’ve got a stiff neck, too.
Why do you let him do that?
You’d better get that ivy off the house.
This pillow has slobber stains. Guests don’t like that.
Go to the bathroom before we drive home.
You should clean off your grocery cart with the wipey things.
This is not fresh.
You boiled the eggs too long; they’re gray.
That stove.
Don’t eat regular mayo, eat fat-free.
Was he drunk?
Don’t use whole wheat bread crumbs in the stuffing; it gives it an ugly taste.
You need to mulch.
She must have been drunk.
These need water.
You’re turning her into a princess.
You probably pruned too late.
It’s freezing, can you turn down the AC?
We need some air back here!
I can see your butt in that skirt.
He’s gay, isn’t he?
Wow. At home these are only five dollars.
That shower.
They must be gay.
This pillow smells like men’s heads.
Why do you let them just run off like that?
This thing is so rusty it can’t be operated properly.
Your skirt is hanging down too low.
That’s because you won’t take calcium.
That’s because you don’t know anything about investing.
You’ve parked way out in the street.
That light is yellow, not green.
You love animal prints.
Water this. It’s going to die.
You’re not supposed to put olive oil in the pasta water, you know.
Her mother terrified her sometimes—the power she wielded over them all. Her potent ability to wound or frustrate. But her mother was a good person. Mary Byrd loved her and knew that so much of who or what she herself was—good and bad—she’d taken from her mom. Meanness? Jeez. She hoped not. Mary Byrd could be plenty mean, but with small, furry animals or helpless stepchildren? Was Eliza going to inherit that? From her mother she’d also learned tons of stuff about plants and flowers and cooking and fossils; a love for cats and antiques and reading; her sense of humor; and, in spite of her mother’s occasional politically incorrect remarks, the importance of rooting for the underdog. Unless the underdog was a squirrel.
She guessed everybody pretty much felt this confusion about their mothers, more or less. But why was the relationship women had with their mothers so often the most complicated relationship they ever had? With your mother and your mother only, you shared the strongest, simplest, and most intimate bonds that two human beings can share. You’ve shared blood, you’ve shared flesh, you’ve been as much a part of your mother’s body as her liver or her heart. You’ve shared the awful abattoir scenario of birth, and after that her fluids sustain you. But with a girl and her mother, the tension and competitiveness. Of course she knew that that was exactly why it was so complicated: it was a lifelong struggle for both of you to separate and become two distinct women, and to gain male attention in the family. Duh, duh, duh. She could see it with Eliza already: Eliza desperately needed her mother but often wished her dead, Mary Byrd knew, and she remembered having the same feeling. With Charles, Eliza was relaxed and happy, even a little flirtatious. Charles could do no wrong in Eliza’s eyes. Well, almost, she thought, thinking of the Mann-kiss joke. And if he did do something wrong, it was going to be Mary Byrd’s fault. Why are so many little cruelties built into us?
Mary Byrd wanted to believe that her mother hadn’t really been glad that Stevie had died. Surely she had just felt more intensely what Mary Byrd and Nick also had felt: a certain relief that the friction and fights between their mother and stepfather had stopped. They’d stopped all right. But there was no possible way that any of them could have been relieved about why they’d stopped.
She sneezed again. She wished she were back at home, at the birthday party. The loud drone of Foote’s truck was still in her head and she tuned to that frequency and fell asleep quickly and slept, as they say, the sleep of the dead.
Eliot Nelson had brought Mary Byrd home in a rain shower that was brief but came down heavily; the bottom seemed to have fallen out of the night sky. She felt a twinge of melancholy as she often did on Sunday evenings. Undone homework. School in the morning, and for four more mornings. And Sunday was tense; a family day. But it would only be another month before school was out for the summer and she’d be free from the stupid junior high, and algebra, forever. There would be end-of-the-year dances and parties. She and Eliot would have more nights like this one and they would have them all summer long. She hoped.
They cruised slowly in the convertible through the cherry tree–lined neighborhood. The blossoms lay thick on Cherry Glen Lane, like snow. It seemed a shame to be driving over them, crushing them into a gray mess.
Mary Byrd could see a lot of cars parked in the middle of the block in front of her family’s white brick house. The Nicholsons, the big family that lived across the street, must be having a Mother’s Day party, she thought before realizing that the cars were Richmond police cars, and her grandparents’ pale pink Cadillac, and her aunt and uncle’s woody station wagon. A large rescue truck, what her cousins Kath and Susan called a “glamour truck” because of all the lights and loudspeakers and crap they had on them, was parked farther down the street, and now she heard loud static and walkie-talkie conversations. A few neighbors stood around in their yards and a policeman was talking to Big Nana, the scary next-door neighbor. Mary Byrd looked at her boyfriend, who looked horrified. She wanted to say “Go!” and keep driving and driving and pretend she hadn’t seen anything, but instead, without a word, she jumped out of the car and ran up the driveway, running a hand down her dress to be sure all her buttons were done, and into the open front door. The small living room was full of standing men. Her mother sat on the sofa between her own sister and mother. Had she been crying? Mary Byrd couldn’t tell; the only time she’d seen her mother cry was when Kennedy died. Her mother wore the dumb turquoise housedress that she’d gotten when she married Pop. Her housewife costume.
“Stevie’s gone,” her mother said. “We can’t find him.” She turned to her sister, Marie, who wrapped her arms around Marisa and looked up at Mary Byrd with wide, blank eyes.
“Where are the babies?” asked Mary Byrd, looking around the room. “Is Kath here?” She desperately wanted her to be. She was glad she didn’t have any sisters; her cousin was her closest friend.
“The babies are asleep,” said her aunt. “The girls didn’t come.”
Nonna, Mary Byrd’s grandmother, solemnly smoked a Viceroy with the usual long, drooping ash. If only it were one of those afternoons when her mother and aunt and grandmother sat at the kitchen table, smoking, sipping Cutty, and laughing at the new Frederick’s catalog. “Daddy Sam and Angelo and the big boys and Nicky are out looking,” she said.
The warm evening and the making out had made Mary Byrd hot and sweaty but now she shook.
“I’m going, too,” she said, but before she could move, a man stepped in front of her. He introduced himself as detective somebody, Richmond police, and in a low, quiet voice said that he needed to ask her some questions. He wanted to know if there were secret hideouts or forts or gathering places in the neighborhood where kids liked to go. Had Stevie mentioned any plans he had that day? When had Mary Byrd last seen him? Where had she been since dinner? What was the boyfriend’s name? Where was the boyfriend now? Mary Byrd blushed. She wasn’t telling this guy she’d been parking, not in front of her family. She just said, “Riding around. He dropped me off and went home.” She said his name. The detective took notes and, without raising his head, looked her up and down. She shivered again, the wet spot in her underwear cold as ice.
“On Mother’s Day?” he asked.
She ran down the street toward the woods and the creek, calling Stevie’s name, which seemed so dumb. He had to be somewhere. He was somewhere, but where? Accidentally locked in a shed or a basement. Dopey kid. Rode his bicycle too far away and was lost. At the worst, maybe was hurt, had been knocked out and couldn’t yell back. A logical dumb-kid explanation for which he would get his butt beaten by Pop when they found him.
When she got to the end of the road and crossed to the woods, she was stunned to see, in the streetlight, her grandfather’s small, shadowed figure dragging the deep part of the creek with a rake—the rake he used when he came to get their leaves up in the fall. He painted all his tool handles acid green, and the rake seemed to glow. They looked at each other but said nothing. Her grandfather’s pants were rolled up and he wore his goofy summer straw hat to keep the rain off. He looked like he looked when they went crabbing at the bay every summer. Mary Byrd stifled an abrupt urge to laugh and the laugh stuck in her throat and burned. She watched her grandfather, wondering why the sight seemed dreamlike but familiar—not the crabbing, but something else—and she remembered a painting they’d talked about at school. Charon, rowing his boat across the River Styx into the unknown dark. How could she possibly be watching her grandfather dragging the creek, looking for her brother’s body?
Daddy Sam said to her, “Go look in the creek on the other side of Willow Lawn.”
“But he’s not allowed to cross Willow Lawn,” Mary Byrd replied stupidly.
Daddy Sam looked at her like she was an idiot and said, “Go look. Look every single place you can think of, or that he might think of, even if he wasn’t allowed, chooch.” He wouldn’t be calling her a dumbass if he was really worried, would he? She was heartened that her grandfather would say something so ordinary, one of his Sicilian epithets, as if she’d left a door open or water running.
She crossed Willow Lawn to their school bus stop on the bridge and looked down into the black water. The creek was rocky and shallow. Someone lying there would be easy to see. Stevie wouldn’t have gone any farther up the creek because he was afraid of the dark culvert. They had always told him that a thing like the Loch Ness monster from the World Beyond had been sighted there. She wasn’t going in that slimy thing by herself, either. She was wearing her new Villager dress with pink and green flowers. But it wasn’t that; she was afraid of the culvert, too. The red-headed twin hoods from the Horseshoe Apartments had covered the culvert walls with alarming sex graffiti and drawings. She took a deep breath and smelled the rain and the light sewage funk of the creek, and she smelled the boyfriend’s dried saliva around her mouth. In the morning she would be standing in this same spot, waiting for the school bus, talking excitedly with the other kids about what had happened the night before, how Stevie had gotten lost but had been found safe and sound, dumb kid, man, was he in trouble, my stepfather almost killed him! It would be that way. It had to be. For now, all she could do was keep looking and calling, like it was just one of the games they all played on summer nights, Sardines or Pushy-in-the-Bushy, or Freeze Tag.
She turned from the creek and looked around the big, wide intersection. Deserted late on a rainy Sunday night, the usually busy streets seemed sinister and forbidding. When they were younger, it had been a fun spot on the predawn mornings she had helped Nick do his paper route. A bunch of them would get up in the dark and meet here where the paper bundles of the Sunday Times-Dispatch were dropped. It had been exciting; they were being allowed out in the dark—practically the middle of the night. They’d serve the papers but they’d also make the traffic lights—they seemed like party lights—change by jumping on the sensor plates. They’d lie in the road, they’d yell cuss words, they’d moon each other. Now the lights were warnings, like something to do with the emergency, signaling on and off, on and off, and reflecting their colors in an eerie way on the wet, empty street, revealing nothing.
She found Nick, who was searching with their older cousins. They went around the elementary school, and behind the Horseshoe. They searched King Stalks, the big bamboo forest that stretched from the Nicholsons’ backyard to the Fleshmans’. They spread out, calling and walking, and then they’d go somewhere else. Off and on it rained and they were soaked and cold. They’d straggle back to the house, sure they would be greeted by happy shouting and police cars driving off. Then, stunned more deeply that nothing had changed, they’d go back out into the night.
Mary Byrd did not see her mother or her stepfather. She didn’t want to. She didn’t want to know what they were doing, either. Finally, one of the detectives said that everyone should stop for now and start looking again at first light, which was only a few hours off. Then, he said, they’d have to notify the media and widen the search. Everyone would need some rest.
Mary Byrd knew she’d need to help with the babies, who’d be getting up before long, so she went to her room and lay on her bed. Never had she wanted anything more in her life than to wake up to a Monday morning as usual, babies crying, chaos in the bathroom and the kitchen, she and Nick and Stevie bumbling and flailing around, rushing to make their buses and avoid their mother’s wrath if they missed them. She’d go to school and have a good excuse for not having her homework, and then the boyfriend would pick her up after school and put the top down and maybe they’d go out to Kentdale Road or even farther, and just drive and drive and drive and drive. Mary Byrd opened her eyes suddenly and from the slow movements and murmuring downstairs she knew they were all still in the nightmare. Something inside her, her heart or her stomach, seized up, her mouth watered, and she thought she was going to throw up.
At her window she saw that two TV trucks blocked the driveway. What little light there was outside was gray with fog. The rain had stopped, though. She supposed that was good, but she wasn’t sure what anything meant anymore. The ordinary touchstones of daily life seemed to mean nothing. Yesterday’s pair of spotted underwear was balled up in an old potato chip bag at the bottom of her trashcan. She pulled on clean cutoffs and a sweatshirt and went downstairs, realizing she’d again forgotten her glasses when she saw all the people who’d assembled in the living room. Relatives, some police and other official people, she guessed. She was glad she couldn’t really make them all out, she was so blind.
Her mother seemed almost normal and was in the kitchen feeding the babies. Nick had gone back out with Pop and the searchers and Mary Byrd was relieved not to see him. There wasn’t anything to say. She stood watching the babies and eating a Pop Tart while her mother did the dishes. Only she and Stevie liked Pop Tarts. There were two in the box and she left one.
James, who wasn’t really a baby anymore, struggled off his chair at the table and took his juice beebah to the bedroom to watch cartoons. He was old enough to be ashamed to have a bottle and would hide it if someone came into the room. The real baby, Pete, banged loudly on his high chair to alert everyone that he was finished pincering up his Cheerios one by one. Mary Byrd freed him from the high chair and set him down. He had recently started walking and wore blue corduroy overalls that were almost white from many washings and handing-downs. They hadn’t been snapped up the legs, so it looked as if he were wearing a tiny evening gown. He staggered around like Frankenstein, going to the drawer where he had his own set of miniature pots and pans to play with. Mary Byrd took a deep breath with the rush of love she felt for him, and also envy. For him nothing had changed. The world was still a good place.
While she and her mother cleaned up after the babies and dealt with all the doughnuts and coffee and cigarette butts in the kitchen, Mary Byrd heard her stepfather’s familiar, heavy tread, a sound she never liked hearing, in the hall. She and her mother turned and there he was, his bulky body filling the doorway. He stood there with his head to one side, hands hanging down, smiling a big smile, she thought—she still wasn’t wearing her glasses—the identical pose he’d strike when he came home from work and spied the babies eating dinner and he’d laugh and say, “I see monkeys!,” making them squeal and chuckle. She held her breath, but he didn’t do that, and instead he brayed loudly, “He’s dead.” Her mother leapt to him and they sobbed, and Mary Byrd scooped up Pete and ran out of the kitchen—where was James?—and flew up the stairs, taking them by twos even with the big, fat baby in her arms.