lost boy lost girl (12 page)

12

On the night Mark first broke into the abandoned house, the lost girl, who was the girl she had declined to rescue, came again to Nancy Underhill. Her son had left for the evening, and Philip had vanished into his “den,” where he would remain until 10:00
P.M
., at which time he would emerge, announce that he was going to bed, and look at her as if any deviation from his schedule was an indication of questionable thought processes. At 10:30 on the dot, he would sit bolt upright in bed and listen for the sound of Mark either opening the front door or walking from the backyard into the kitchen. If he failed to hear Mark return before his curfew, he would instruct her to “work out” a suitable punishment for “your son,” then lie back, roll over, and, having fulfilled his duties as CEO of the Superior Street Underhills, return untroubled to sleep.

She had been seated on the davenport with her legs beneath her and a cold cup of coffee before her on the table, staring at, but not seeing, a rerun of
Everybody Loves Raymond
.
Everybody Loves Raymond
was camouflage. Philip detested the program and was unlikely to investigate her state of mind if he found her watching it.

Instead of a scene in which an actor named Ray Romano was pretending to argue with his father, Nancy was looking at something else entirely, a scene that replayed itself across the screen of her inner eye. Nancy’s scene took place not in a fictional Long Island living room, but in the kitchen of a quick-and-dirty tract house constructed by a shady contractor named James Carrollton, then in the second year of a three-year stretch for tax evasion. Standing in for Ray Barone, sportswriter and father of three, was Nancy Underhill, a suburban housewife, still childless after two years of marriage; and before Nancy was Myra Kalendar, the wife of her terrible cousin Joseph, who in adolescence had spirited the neighbors’ dogs and cats away to distant lots, doused them with lighter fuel, and set them on fire. Joseph had referred to this activity as “making torches.”

Myra sat across the table in the tacky suburban kitchen and begged for help. Myra had no friends. She could talk to no one but Nancy. Joseph would kill her if she went to the police. She begged not for herself, but for the daughter who since birth had been Joseph Kalendar’s private project and plaything. In the year of the appeal, Lily Kalendar was six years old and a secret from both the state and the school board. Until this moment, she had been a secret from Nancy, too. Joseph took his daughter out of the house only at night, to conceal her from the neighbors. The one time Lily had managed to go outside during the day—to escape!—she had hidden in the alley, and her father had gone crazy with rage and worry. When he smelled smoke, he saw that it came from the house of a black neighbor with two daughters Lily had often seen playing in their yard; he assumed that his daughter had fled there. On his return, coughing and red-eyed and reeking of smoke, Lily had crawled weeping out of hiding, begging for mercy.

Instead, Myra said, she got the beating of her life. Her father loved her, she was the love of his life, and her disobedience would cost her dearly. And after that, Joseph had built a special room to hold his beloved daughter and a special wall to hide the room. But that was only two of many modifications Joseph had made to their house.

The worst was . . . she did not want to say it.

The scene played and replayed in Nancy’s mind and memory as she stared blindly at the television set. Myra sobbing, she herself trembling and lowering her head, thinking,
Philip is right, she’s unbalanced. None of this is true, she’s making it up.
Nancy knew what she had done; she had backed away. She had said to herself,
Myra had a miscarriage, we all knew that. There isn’t any daughter, thank goodness. They’re both crazy.
Fear of her dreadful cousin had led her to betray her niece. Eight years later, the headlines had shown the world what her cousin was capable of, but Nancy could not lie to herself: she had already known.

Mark surprised her by coming home early. After giving her one of those looks that had become familiar to her, Mark muttered something about being tired and disappeared into his room. At 10:00
P.M
., as if summoned by one of Quincy’s timetable bells, Philip popped into the living room and announced that bedtime had come. Alone, then, she sat in the living room until the next program had chattered to a conclusion. Nancy turned off the television and in the abrupt silence understood that her worst fear had been realized. The world would no longer run along its old, safe tracks. There had been a rip in the fabric, and bleak, terrible miracles would result. That was how it came to her, a tear in the fabric of daily life, through which monstrosities could pour. And enter they had, drawn by Nancy’s old, old crime.

For she knew her son had not obeyed her. In one way or another, Mark had awakened the Kalendars. Now they all had to live with the consequences, which would be unbearable but otherwise impossible to predict. A giant worm was loose, devouring reality in great mouthfuls. Now the worm’s sensors had located Nancy, and its great, humid body oozed ever closer, so close she could feel the earth yield beneath it.

Nancy’s own sensors prickled with dread. Moments before she was able to raise her eyes and look at the arch into the little dining room, she knew her visitor had returned. There she stood, the child, a six-year-old girl in dirty overalls, her bare, filthy feet on the outermost edge of the faded rag rug, her small, slim, baleful back turned to Nancy. Her hair was matted with grease, possibly with blood. Anger boiled from her and hung in the dead air between them. There was a good measure of contempt in all that rage. Lily had come through the rip in the fabric to cast judgment on her weak traitorous aunt, that fearful and despairing wretch. Oh the fury oh the rage in a tortured child, oh the power in that fury. She had come also for Mark, his mother saw. Mark was half hers already, and had been from the moment Joseph Kalendar’s hellhouse had surged out of the mist and knocked him off his stupid skateboard.

13

It amazed Jimbo Monaghan how dumb smart people could be. If
he
understood the reason for most of what Mark had said and done over the past five days, it could not be all that difficult for anyone to grasp. Especially when the reason was so obvious. Mark had come home in the afternoon, strolled into the little downstairs bathroom to take a leak, and in a tub full of tepid, bloody water, discovered the naked corpse of his mother with a plastic bag over her head. The film of condensation on the inside of the bag kept him from making out her face. Mainly, he could see her nose and the black, open hole of her mouth. A second later, he noticed the paring knife dripping blood onto the tiles beside the tub.
At first I thought it was some kind of horrible mistake,
he told Jimbo.
Then I thought if I went out into the kitchen and came back in, she wouldn’t be there anymore.

All that time, his heart seemed not to beat. He thought he had hung in the doorway for an incredibly long time, looking at his mother and trying to make sense of what he saw. Blood pounded in his ears. He moved a step forward, and the tops of her knees came into view, floating like little pale islands in the red water.

In the next moment, he found himself standing alone in the middle of the kitchen, as if blown backward by a great wind. Through the open bathroom door, he could see one of his mother’s arms propped on the side of the tub. He told Jimbo, “I went over to the wall phone. It felt like I was swimming underwater. I didn’t even know who I was going to call, but I guess I dialed my father’s number at Quincy. He told me to call 911 and wait for him outside.”

Mark did exactly that. He called 911, communicated the essential information, and went outside to wait. About five minutes later, his father and the paramedics arrived more or less simultaneously. While he stood on the porch, he felt a numb, suspended clarity that, he thought, must be similar to what ghosts and dead people experienced, watching the living go through their paces.

In Jimbo’s opinion, that was the last time Mark had been clear about his own emotions. The next day, he had turned up at Jimbo’s back door, his mind focused on an unalterable plan. It was as if he had been considering it for weeks. He wanted to break into the house on Michigan Street, and his friend Jimbo had to come with him. In fact, Jimbo was indispensable. He couldn’t do it without him.

He confessed that he had tried to do it by himself and run into some unexpected trouble. His body had gone bananas on him. He’d felt like he couldn’t breathe and it was hard to see. All those spider webs, yuck! But none of that would happen if Jimbo went with him, Mark said, he knew they would be able to pass untroubled into the house. And once they got inside, they would be able to check out the strangest part of that building, which Mark had not mentioned to his friend until this very moment, the pup-tent room. Wasn’t Jimbo curious about a room like that? Wouldn’t he like to get a look at it?

“Not if that guy is in there,” Jimbo said.

“Think back, Jimbo. Are you really sure you saw him? Or did I maybe put the idea in your head?”

“I don’t know.”

“It doesn’t really matter,” Mark said. “Because if it’s the two of us, we’ll be all right.”

“I don’t get you.”

“You watch my back, I watch yours,” Mark said. “I think that house doesn’t have anything in it but atmosphere, anyhow.”

“Atmosphere,” Jimbo said. “Now I really don’t get you.”

“Atmosphere makes you see stuff. It made you faint, and it made me feel sick—it felt like spider webs were all over me. But they weren’t real spider webs, they were
atmosphere
.”

“Okay,” Jimbo said. “Maybe I see that, a little bit. But why do you want to go in there again?”

“I
have
to go in there,” Mark said. “That house killed my mother.”

Silently, Jimbo uttered,
Ooh-kayyy,
startled by an understanding that had come to him as if by angelic messenger:
Mark felt guilty, and he didn’t know it.
Jimbo did not have a detailed grasp of his friend’s psyche, but he was absolutely certain that Mark would not be ranting in this way if, on the day after he broke his promise to his mother, he had not walked into a bathroom and found her lying dead in the tub. Of that, he would not speak. It was unspeakable by definition. Instead, he could not stop himself from talking about this screwy plan. Jimbo resolved not to give in, to fight Mark on this issue for as long as it took.

Over the following days, Mark tested his resolution so often that Jimbo thought that he had been invited to accompany Mark into the house on Michigan Street on the order of something like once an hour. After the first dozen times, he adopted the approach that he would use on every occasion thereafter, to pretend that Mark’s obsessiveness was a joke. Mark might easily have been enraged by this tactic, but he barely noticed it.

One day during that hideous week, Jimbo heard from his father, who had learned of it from an off-duty police officer in a cop bar called the House of Ko-Reck-Shun, that a Los Angeles film crew would be on Jefferson Street early that afternoon, shooting a scene for a gangster movie. He called Mark, and the boys decided to take a bus downtown, an area they did not know as well as they imagined. They knew the number 14 bus would take them past the main library and the county museum, and they assumed that from there they would easily find Jefferson Street in or near the section of downtown located west of the Millhaven River, where theaters, bookstores, specialty shops, and department stores lined Grand Avenue all the way to Lafayette University, west of the library and museum.

They got off the bus too early and wasted twenty minutes wandering north and east before asking directions of a preppy-looking guy who appeared, Jimbo thought, more than a touch too interested in Mark, although as usual Mark failed to notice that he was being admired. Then they walked an extra block up Orson Street and reached the top of Cathedral Square before looking back to the corner and noticing that they had already gone past Jefferson. To cut off some extra distance, they took one of the paths angling through the square. With a pang, Jimbo realized that earlier in the summer they would never have made such a journey without their skateboards; this time, they had never considered bringing the boards along.

“We have to go in there,” Mark said. “You know it. You’re softening up. Little by little, my logic is wearing away your resistance.”

They reached the bottom of Cathedral Square and turned left on Jefferson. Two blocks ahead, a lot of people were milling around alongside the Pforzheimer Hotel.

Mark jumped ahead and turned around, dancing on the balls of his feet. “Don’t you believe in my stunning logic?” He aimed a fist at Jimbo’s left arm and gave him two light blows.

“All right, let’s think about it, okay? There’s this empty house, except it might not actually be empty.”

“It’s empty,” Mark said.

“Be quiet. There’s this house, okay? For a long time you don’t really see it, but when you finally do, you want to spend most of your time looking at it. Then your mother makes you promise to leave the place alone. You get spooked out, but you decide to break in anyhow and look around. And the next day, you find out she killed herself. And
then
you lose your mind, you say the house made it happen, and you have to go in and search the place from top to bottom.”

“Sounds logical to me.”

“You know what it sounds like to me?”

“Ah, a great idea?”

“Guilt.”

Mark stared at him, momentarily speechless.

“It
is
guilt, pure guilt. You can’t stand it. You’re blaming yourself.”

Mark glanced around at the streetlamps, the parked cars, the placards before the buildings on Jefferson Street. He looked almost dazed.

“I swear, no one understands me. Not my father, not even you. My uncle might understand me—he has an imagination. He’s coming here today. Maybe he’s already in town.”

Mark pointed at the Pforzheimer, unaware that I was looking down at him from a fourth-floor window. “That’s where he’s staying, the Pforzheimer. It costs a lot to stay there. For a writer, he makes a lot of money.”

(This was sweet, but not very accurate.)

“Maybe we should go see him right now,” Mark said. “Wanna do it?”

Jimbo declined. An unpredictable adult stranger from New York could only complicate matters. The two boys continued up the street until they were within about twenty feet of the film crew. A burly man with a ZZ Top beard and a name tag on a string around his neck waved them to a halt.

“It’s that dude from
Family Ties,
” Jimbo said.

“Michael J. Fox? You’re crazy. Michael J. Fox isn’t that old.”

“Not him, the dude who played his father.”

“He must be really old by now. He still looks pretty good, though.”

“No matter how good he looks, that car’s going to mess him up,” Mark said, and both boys laughed.

Mark’s father spoiled everything, that was the problem. They had seen Timothy Underhill’s car pull up in front of the house, and Jimbo could tell that his friend was excited just to see his uncle walk up to the porch. Jimbo thought he looked like an okay kind of guy, kind of big, and comfortable in jeans and a blue blazer. He had a been-around kind of face that made him look easy to get along with.

But when they turned off the boom box and went out of the room, Mark’s dad made a dumb, dismissive remark even before they got to the staircase—something about “the son and heir” and his “el sidekick-o faithful-o,” making them both sound like fools. When they were being introduced, Mark’s dad referred to Jimbo as Mark’s “best buddy-roo” and insisted on treating them as if they were in the second grade, which made it impossible to stay in the house. Then Mark’s dad got all anal about what time they had to be back, and Jimbo could see Mark getting jumpier and jumpier. He looked like a guy who had just put down a ticking suitcase and wanted to get the hell out of there before it blew up.

Once they managed to get out, Jimbo followed Mark reluctantly to the sidewalk in front of 3323, where no shadowy nonfigures had not-appeared in the living room window. Jimbo had to agree: whatever might have been true earlier, now the house was as empty as a blown egg. You could tell just by looking at it. The only movement in that place came from the settling of the dust.

“We are going to do this,” Mark said. “Believe it or not, we are.”

“Do you want me to come along to the thing at the funeral home tonight?”

“If you’re not going, I’m not going, and I have to go, so . . .”

“I guess I am el faithful-o sidekick-o,” Jimbo said.

Alone and massive on its little hill, Trott Brothers struck Jimbo as looking like a castle with dungeons and suits of armor. Inside, it was both grand and a little seedy. They were pointed to a small, tired-looking room like a chapel, with four rows of chairs facing an open coffin. To Jimbo, this was terrible, cruel, tasteless: they were forcing Mark to look at his dead mother’s face! It was one thing to respect the dead, but how about respecting the living? Jimbo risked a peek at the pale figure in the coffin. The person lying there did not look like Mark’s mother, exactly; she looked more like a younger sister of Mrs. Underhill’s, someone who’d gone off and known a completely different life. Immediately, the men drifted to the back of the little room, and Jimbo and Mark sat down in the last row.

Mark’s father handed him a card with a Hawaiian sunset on one side. When he turned it over, Jimbo saw the Lord’s Prayer printed beneath Nancy’s name and her dates.

“You okay?” he whispered to Mark, who was turning the card over and over in his hands, examining it as if it were a clue to a murder in a mystery novel.

Mark nodded.

A couple of minutes later, he leaned over and whispered, “Do you think we could sneak out?”

Jimbo shook his head.

Philip ordered his son to get on his feet and pay his respects to his mother. Mark stood up and walked the length of the center aisle until he was in front of the coffin. As Jimbo watched, Philip staged a dramatic moment and put his arm around his son’s shoulders, probably the first time he had done that since Mark’s tenth birthday. He couldn’t help it, Jimbo thought. In fact, he didn’t even know that he was putting on a photo op for a nonexistent photographer. He thought he was being genuine. Jimbo could see Mark squirm beneath his father’s touch.

As soon as Philip relented and walked away, Jimbo got to his feet and moved up to join his friend. He did not want to look at that cosmeticized not-Nancy in the coffin, so he moved slowly, but he could not bear the thought of Mark standing up there by himself. When he reached Mark’s side, he glanced in his direction and saw by a softening in his eyes that Mark was grateful for his presence.

In a voice almost too low to be heard, Mark said, “How long do you think I’m supposed to stand here?”

“You could leave now,” Jimbo said.

Mark stared down at the woman in the coffin. His face had settled into an expressionless mask. A single tear leaked from the corner of his left eye, then his right. Startled, Jimbo glanced again at his friend and saw that the mask of his face had begun to tremble. More tears were brimming in his eyes. All at once, Jimbo felt like crying, too.

From the back of the room, Mark’s father said in a pompous stage whisper, “You have to feel sorry for the poor kid,” and Jimbo’s tears dried before they were shed. If he’d heard it, so had Mark.

The boys’ eyes met. Mark’s face had turned violently red. Timothy Underhill said something too soft to be heard, and this time all but forgetting to keep his voice down, Mark’s father said, “Mark found her that afternoon—came home from God knows where . . .”

Jimbo heard Mark gasp.

“By the time I got home,” Philip was saying, “they were taking her to the ambulance.”

“Oh, no,” said Mark’s uncle.

His face rigid but still flushed, Mark stepped back from the coffin and turned around. A few minutes later, all of them were moving back outside into the roaring heat. The huge sun hung too close to the earth, and the light burned Jimbo’s eyes. Mark’s father buttoned his suit jacket, straightened his tie, and set off down the hill like a salesman off to close a deal. Timothy Underhill gave the boys a look brimming with sympathy, then followed his brother down the descending path. Lines of heat wavered up from the roof of the Volvo.