Everyone who lived in Belham called it the Hill, but the official name was Roby Park, named after the city’s first mayor, Dan Roby. Back when Mike was growing up, the Hill had been nothing more than a long, wide stretch of grass, and at the top was Buzzy’s, the only place in town where three bucks bought you a large Coke and a burger on a paper plate stacked high with fries or the world’s greatest onion rings, your choice. Buzzy’s was still there, along with a liquor store and video store, and now the Hill boasted one of those fancy jungle gyms and a new baseball diamond with stands.
The real attraction was the floodlight. Winters in New England meant the sky turned pitch black by four, so the town splurged and installed a telephone pole with a floodlight that lit up every inch of the hill. Now you could go sledding any time you wanted.
Mike found a spot in the lower parking lot, the one abutting the new baseball diamond. Daylight was gone, and the snow was coming down a bit harder than an hour ago, but still it was light and still enjoyable. He got out first, went around to the other side of the truck and helped Sarah out, then grabbed the sled from the back of his truck. He held out his hand.
“I’m not a baby anymore,” Sarah said and marched off.
The place was packed. The right side of the hill, the less bumpy area, was for kids Sarah’s age and younger; the left for the older kids, the snowboarders. Watching the snowboarders brought Mike back to the days when he came here. When his mother could cover up the bruises on her face with makeup or hats, she would join the other mothers and talk with them as she smoked her Kools, all of the mothers watching as their boys did stupid things like stand on their cheap plastic sleds and have races down the hill. Bill would crash into him or give him a good shove and Mike would go tumbling across the snow, laughing his ass off the entire time. Everyone did—including some of the mothers. Back then, it was okay for kids to horse around and fall. Kids got bumped and bruised and cut and got themselves back up and then got bumped and bruised and cut all over again.
“DADDY!”
Mike looked down at his daughter and saw that she had stopped walking and was now pointing at the hill. “There’s Paula, Daddy! There’s Paula! Here she comes!”
Here came Bill’s oldest daughter, Paula, riding her blue snow tube, Mike about to call out and tell Paula to watch out for the ramp—too late, Paula was airborne. It wasn’t a big jump—less than a foot off the ground—but Paula wasn’t prepared for the landing. The snow tube bounced against the ground, and Paula lost her balance and fell off, tumbling hard across the snow.
Sarah said, “I want to go sledding with Paula.”
“Let’s go,” Mike said and held out his hand.
Sarah swatted it away. “No, Daddy, just with Paula.”
“Paula’s eight.”
“So?”
“So you’re six.”
“And a half, Daddy. I’m six and a half.”
“Peanut—”
“I told you I don’t like that name.”
Oh boy, she’s in a mood. “You’re right, I’m sorry,” Mike said, and knelt down so he was eye level with her. Snowflakes had melted against her glasses, the pink snowsuit’s hood wrapped tightly around her head, the white imitation fur lining it blowing in the wind. “What I mean is Paula’s bigger than you. The big kids’ hill is very bumpy, and some of the kids have set up ramps.” He pointed to where Paula just wiped out. “If you hit one of those ramps, you’ll go flying in the air.”
“Like a bird?” Sarah seemed very excited by the possibility.
“Last time you fell off the sled you hit a patch of ice and got you a big bump on your head, remember?”
“Oh yeah. That hurt.”
“So let’s go down together,” Mike said and stuck out his hand.
“No,” Sarah said, swatting away his hand. “I want to go with Paula.”
Seeing her act this way reminded him of last summer,when he was teaching Sarah how to swim—only she refused to wear her floaties and she certainly didn’t want a helping hand from her father. So Mike let her do it her way and watched, unsurprised, as Sarah sank right to the bottom. No sooner did Mike bring Sarah up for air than she wanted to try it again—on her own. He was so in love with this part of his daughter, her stubborn, almost unbreakable need to fight to do things in her own way, that he had to do everything in his power to keep from smiling.
No, Jess’s voice warned him. Don’t you dare let her go down that hill by herself. What if she falls and hurts herself bad this time? What if she breaks a leg or cracks her head open—Jesus Christ, Michael, look at how small she is. What if—
What if she has fun, Jess? You ever stop and think about that?
Your mother never spoke up, another voice added. You want to raise a girl to become a woman who’s terrified to speak her mind? You let Jess kill off this part of Sarah, she’ll end up marrying a prize like your old man. That the life you want for her?
“Daddy, Paula’s getting ready to go back up the hill, can I go pleeeease—”
“Sarah, look at me.”
She heard the tone in his voice and snapped her attention to him.
“You go up the hill with Paula, you come back down with Paula, understand?”
“What did I say?”
“Up and down with Paula.”
“Right. I’ll be standing over there next to your godfather, okay?”
Sarah grinned, her top teeth crooked, the bottom two missing, that smile of hers blowing straight through him, scaring him for some reason. She gripped the rope for the sled and trudged through the snow, screaming for Paula to wait up.
You realize what you’ve done.
Yes. He had committed the worst of parental sins: siding with the child. And guess what? It was worth it. Real life, with all of its sucker punches and bone-weary bullshit, would always be there. You only got one turn in life to be six—excuse me, six and a half—and if that meant he had to spend some time in the doghouse, so be it.
Bill O’Malley stood alone, a good amount of space between him and the people who had formed small groups, talking to themselves and, Mike noticed, occasionally cutting sideways, nervous glances at Wild Bill. That Bill, people said with a shake of the head. Full of piss and vinegar. Soft in the head for sure.
Everyone in town knew the story of the time when Bill was twelve and decided to drive himself and his friends to school, a move that landed him on the Boston news, one of those cutesy “Kids Do The Darndest Things” segments. But it was the stunt he pulled during the all-conference playoffs his junior year that cemented his reputation.
The Belham High football team had their first shot at a championship title, and on a cold, overcast Saturday in November, it seemed as if the entire town had shown up at the football stadium in Danvers to watch Belham’s own go up against the snot-nosed, rich brats of St. Mark’s Preparatory High School. With thirty seconds and more than forty yards to go, the ref made a bad call that cost Belham the championship. Bill lit into the ref, got right in the guy’s face, and by the time the coach ran over, Bill had ripped off the ref ’s toupee and was running around the field with it, holding it high over his head, everyone in Belham on their feet, cheering.
“When you grow up and get married, I hope you have twin girls just like you,” a weary Clara O’Malley told her son after the game.
Come this spring, Bill would get twins—twin girls, according to his wife Patty’s latest ultrasound. Paula O’Malley was the oldest and only at eight had inherited her father’s crude sense of humor. Last week Paula got her first detention for bringing a whoopee cushion to school and placing it underneath the seat cushion of her teacher’s chair.
Bill saw the familiar pink snowsuit slide up next to his daughter and then turned around just as Mike walked up to him. A plug of chewing tobacco bulged from Bill’s lower lip, and his black Harley Davidson baseball hat was pulled low over his head. A small gold loop earring dangled from each ear.
Bill leaned in close and whispered, “Seriously, does Jess ever get jealous when you wear her jacket?”
The jacket in question, a Christmas gift from Sarah, was made of black wool and cashmere. More importantly, it was clean and new—unlike Bill’s faded blue Patriots jacket that dated back to the early eighties, Bill refusing to give up the old, ratty jacket with its grease stains and torn pocket until the Pats won the Super Bowl.
“What’s wrong with it?”
“Nothing,” Bill said. “All the prettiest girls are wearing ’em this year.”
Mike removed the pack of Marlboros from coat pocket, his eyes locked on Sarah, watching her and Paula chugging their way up the hill. “I take it you ran into Jess.”
“Yeah. She told me sledding was a no-go. Glad she had a change of heart.”
“One of us did,” Mike said.
Bill spit into his Dunkin Donuts cups, didn’t say anything. Now Mike was suddenly filled with the need to talk. I can’t take it anymore, Bill. I’m tired of living with a shell. I’m tired of living with a woman who is terrified of life and has made me a prisoner in my own home. I’m tired of having to fight for the simple things like taking my six-and-a-half-year-old daughter sledding. I’m tired and I want out.
That last thought wasn’t new. It had been floating in and out of his gray matter over the past year—only now it stuck around more, and when Mike was driving back and forth to work or doing some boring task like shoveling, he played around with the idea of leaving, a part of himself excited by the possibilities, this new life out there waiting for him, a new life without all these walls and barriers.
Mike glanced over to his right, at East Dunstable Road, where cars were piled up on both sides, and saw a taxi crawling west toward the connection for Route 1. Mike pictured his mother sitting quietly in the back of the cab, her twelve years of marriage packed up in one suitcase, the driver asking, “Where you headed? North or south?” And for the first time his mother would make a decision and a man would listen. When she picked her new direction, Mike wondered if that scream trapped inside her skull had finally died.
Paula’s snow tube slid over to them.
“What’s with the puss?” Bill asked.
“Jimmy MacDonald’s up at the top pushing everyone around,” Paula said.
Jimmy Mac was Bobby MacDonald’s youngest, supposedly, Bobby Mac the kind of guy who liked to have litters of kids with different mothers in the Mission Hill projects.
“He pushed me down and then he pushed Sarah down,” Paula said.
Wonderful. Mike flicked his cigarette into the air. “I’ll go up and get her,” he said. “You guys wait here in case she comes down.”
“He’s always picking on us,” Mike heard Paula say as he walked away. “We were walking home last week from Stacy’s house and Jimmy Mac saw us and blew his nose all over Joanne Finzi and she called him wiener face.”
“Nice call,” Bill said.
The cold air was charged with giggles, shrieks and laughs as Mike climbed the hill, brushing his way past the parents and kids lumbering their way up the walking path. The snow, Mike now noticed, had turned bad. He could barely see a few feet in front of him.
He stepped out of the glare of the floodlight onto the top of the hill. The cars parked along Delaney Road were trying to merge with the cars snaking their way down the curvy road from Buzzy’s parking lot. Dozens of headlights were pointed at him. Mike shielded his eyes with his hand and looked around the crowd of bodies for his daughter.
“Sarah, it’s Dad. I’m at the top of the hill.”
Out of nowhere a group of kids rushed past Mike as if being chased—or chasing someone. Mike looked over his shoulder and watched as the kids bolted down the road, disappearing into the snow. He turned his attention back to the hill and moved forward, taking slow steps as he looked for the pink snowsuit.
“Sarah, I’m here at the top. Where are you?”
She can’t hear you.
Right. He had wrapped Sarah’s jacket hood so tight around her head she probably couldn’t hear him over the wind, over the shouts and screams, the drivers with their fists planted on their car horns. He peeled his way through the crowd, searching for her, yelling out her name.
“Sarah, it’s me.”
“Sarah, wave to me.”
“Sarah, where are you?”
The bodies disappeared and now Mike stood on the end of the Hill where the older kids went snowboarding and sledding. A few feet from the top of the hill, where the kids were lining up,was a long blue sled that looked an awful lot like Sarah’s. Mike jogged over to it, knelt down and brushed the snow off the padded seat. SARAH SULLIVAN was printed in black block letters, in his handwriting.
Maybe she walked down the hill, chasing after Paula.
“Bill?” Mike yelled. “Bill?”
“Yeah?”
“Sarah down there?”
“Not yet.”
Mike felt a flutter in his heart. He turned to his right. Twenty feet away there was an embankment with a steep drop off. The place was well marked and sectioned off—and Sarah knew to stay away from there.
He looked back at the sled and searched around it for a pair of small footprints that matched Sarah’s. At the end of the sled was a thin shaped piece of plastic sticking out of the snow. He picked it up, shook the snow off.
Sarah’s glasses.
The flutter turned into a cold, hard lump that knocked against the walls of his heart. He stumbled to his feet, a scream rising in his throat:
“SARAH,WHERE ARE YOU?”
Please God, please answer me.
All around him cars were leaving the parking lots, waiting for their turn to merge onto the mess on East Dunstable, the traffic moving forward in inches.
She still could be here.
No,Mike said to that rising, panicky voice. No way. Sarah wouldn’t leave here without me or Bill.
But what if she did?
Almost slipping on the snow, Mike ran up to a Honda Accord parked only a few feet from Sarah’s sled. He banged on the window until the guy with the Red Sox baseball cap, a guy Mike didn’t recognize, rolled down the window. The man’s son, all of four or so by the looks of him, sat in the passenger seat.
“A girl in a pink snowsuit,” Mike said. “She was standing right over there next to the sled.”
“I didn’t see her.”
“You sure?”
“I can barely see the car in front of me.”
“I can’t find her. Help me look, would you?”
The guy nodded and tried to pull over to the side. Mike ran toward East Dunstable, dodging his way through the spaces between the cars, a tightness growing inside his chest.
She’s here, Sarah’s still here.
“Sully?” Bill called out. “Sully?”
An Explorer was about to pull onto East Dunstable when Mike jumped in front and held out a hand. Car horns blared as the driver rolled down the window, Mike seeing it was the guy from the lumber yard at Home Depot, Billy something.
“What’s wrong?”
“I can’t find my daughter,” Mike said. “She’s wearing a pink snowsuit.”
“Haven’t seen her. You want some help?”
Mike nodded, said, “Do me a favor. Block off this road with your car, tell everyone what’s going on.”
“You got it.”
“And make sure you check the backseats and under the cars. She might have got hit or something.”
People had stepped out of their cars and were swearing at Mike to get out of the road. Mike was about to stop the next car, a Ford Mustang, when Bill appeared out from a curtain of snow, Paula beside him.
“I found her glasses next to her sled,” Mike said. “Paula, what happened up here? Tell me what happened.”
Paula flinched at the sound of Mike’s voice.
“Sully, it’s okay, calm—”
“Sarah can’t see without her glasses.”
“I know.”
“She’s terrified when she can’t see.”
Bill put his meaty hand on Mike’s neck and squeezed. “I’m sure someone saw her all worked up and had the good sense to bring her inside Buzzy’s. She’s probably in there right now pigging out on a burger and fries. Don’t worry. We’ll find her.”