The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets (7 page)

“Ida?” My father asked. “Do you have something to say to Mr. Mortensen?”

The same hot tears began to stroll down my face. Tasting the warm salt in my mouth, I pushed my tongue against the roof of my mouth, willing the sibilant word I was here in this awful-smelling, sad excuse for a room to say.

“I’m suh, suh, sorry,” I sobbed. “I wanted … I just wanted … her to be back.”

The man gave me the look he probably received all day long, the look that says:
I pity you, but not quite enough to take the time to understand you
. He raised one hand, palm upward, and let it drop. He closed his eyes as if to make the vision of the lanky, crying girl go away. It was more than likely he wanted to share four walls with me as little as I wanted to share them with him. Neither the man nor I had the words for that moment, but my father did.

“Mr. Mortensen, I’ve explained the very serious consequences of her actions to my daughter, and she is, as you can see, extremely remorseful. I can’t imagine what you must have gone through, and can only apologize again for the nightmare that was brought into your home.”

The man, again, flipped his hand up in a gesture that could imply both receiving and offering. He nodded weakly, brought a remote from his pocket, and turned on the television. It was a signal as good as any, and we left.

Two weeks later, the case was solved—though “solved” seems the wrong word for it. (Were it solved, the girl would have been back in the neighborhood, all the photographs and votive candles would be taken off her porch, and our
parents would not think twice if we were not home exactly within the ten minutes it took to return from school.) Though what all the parents wanted was for a broad-shouldered, fiercely virtuous detective type to come across a hidden clue that snapped all pieces together and led to the kidnapper, that was not what happened. There was no hero. Instead, a man with a criminal record that spanned years simply came forward and confessed. He had strangled Anna with a piece of yellow cloth, he said, and would lead them to her grave. The body had decayed for two months, but the blue-and-white-striped flannel pajamas Anna had been wearing served as instant identification. In the photograph that graced the front pages of all the newspapers, taken in the courtroom after the man was sentenced to death, he is smiling.

T
hough on paper I had only given local animal rights activists a cause to unite around briefly and community members an unpleasant aftertaste to gossip about, it seemed to Jackson that I had at least done
some
thing about the missing girl, and I think this is how he avoided the issue of my using what he may or may not have said in his sleep as a reason to go ruining the life of some poor disabled guy with a repulsive amount of cats—although years later, it showed up in his memory as an event altogether
wrong
, something he felt embarrassed to be even slightly connected to. What it did was make him think about consciousness in a way that children are hardly prompted to do. He’d pick things up just for the sake of dropping them; read aloud the backs of packages of macaroni and chicken pot pie his mother kept in the freezer, sounding out consonants; turn on the faucet to slight, medium, strong and feel the various pressures on different parts of his hand. All of these acts sacred, private, even beloved. He grew
obsessed with navigation, pored over maps, saved up his allowance for a compass. It became very nearly a tic, the way he would take out the prized metal object and announce:
north. northeast. southw-southeast!
He urged us to try new routes to school, elaborate zigzags and “shortcuts”—
just a left, a right, and a sharp right
. More: he memorized the bones in his body in order to understand and own how they carried him. What felt like moments before, we’d felt a dumb pride in sticking needles into the thickness of our summer calluses, but now Jackson spoke in metatarsals and phalanges.

Burdened by a capacity he never asked for, Jackson began to process his ability to shift the world around him in his sleep without his specific desire and designed a reaction: he set about wanting small things and making them happen. Even if it meant pressing the doorbell and procuring the expected sound, the fact that he had made it happen, during the daylight, in his favorite thin red cotton shirt, felt important. When his mother regaled houseguests with stories of his sleepwalking and the adults cackled over the absurdity of, for instance, The Family Heirloom Jackson Put in the Fish Tank or The Time Jackson Tried to Put on a T-shirt as Pants, he felt so embarrassed that he had to leave the room. Oh, honey, his mother would say as he left, but she would continue to laugh and then offer her friends the even further hilarious anecdote of the time she found him allegedly using a roll of toilet paper as a telephone and asking more and more insistently to be connected to someone named Rick. Often the laughter at the Rick story carried
enough that back in his room, he would stick his fingers in his ears and hum obsessively, or, if he let me, I’d lead us in song at increasing volumes, keeping in mind what my father told me: it’s hard to know all the words, so the ones you do know, you’ve got to sing really loud.

Jackson was still at the age where praying could be a vagary, and before he slept he made bargains with whoever might accept them. Please, he breathed in and out, let me stay quiet and I’ll be nicer to James. Let me stay in one place while I sleep and I’ll never again ridicule my mother’s cooking until she cries. Please.

T
he church around the corner from our street is long gone (at least in its identity as a church); for years it was left alone, the marquee blank and its plastic yellowing, although the drab add-on unit where the preacher and his family lived was rented briefly several times, always by single people who kept their curtains drawn behind the very small windows. Eventually a gay couple in their forties bought the building, oohing and ahhing at the high ceilings, laughing at the ironic potential of the altar, and envisioning many parties. They kept the windows open for days on end, letting out the smell of Christ, painting all the walls yellow and hand-oiling the floors with organic orange cleansers, shrieking with amusement, playing David Byrne or chaotic piano ensembles. But different sorts of noises began to echo out the windows, and the two gay men became one gay man who did not find the yellows to his suit anymore and certainly did not keep the windows open.

But: it
was
a church, and there was a preacher, and there was a preacher’s daughter, and her name was Heather, and Heather was in the same grade as Jackson and me, and we did something bad to Heather.

She had the brand of eerily white-blond hair that does not get darker with age, skin just as pale, and slits of brown eyes. Her father had encouraged her to befriend the children in the neighborhood, after her arrival in the third grade, and she took a special liking to me. Perhaps because I lived with just my father, perhaps because I did not attend church, perhaps because I was fearless on the rope swing that hung from the oak tree in the front yard. I didn’t want her around. I pushed her too high; she wrapped her legs tight around the two-by-six and squealed as if being held over a fire; I pushed harder and pretended to misunderstand her cries as joy.

Heather was always regurgitating bits of her father’s sermons. Possibly she didn’t yet believe them, but they were the only bits of conversation she had to make, and she wanted badly to be my friend. I was quick and vile in response, and Heather didn’t seem to mind one way or another. It seemed to her that as long as both of us were making sounds, that meant we were bonding. She wanted to play innocuous games with my dolls. “Pretend,” she would say, “pretend she has to go to a dance, but, but”—her imagination was for shit. “But
what
, Heather?” I’d reply. “But her house is on fire? But Spanish pirates are about to kidnap her?” It was no use. Heather just dressed and redressed the dolls, asked me what I thought of the
pink
shoes with
the
blue
dress. When I complained, my father said I had to be nice to her, but I think he found the way her normalcy intricately tortured me privately amusing. At dinner when she said please and thank you and talked about heaven, he had to suppress a smirk while I notably slammed my milk glass, scraped my teeth on my fork, made fart noises in my elbow. “Stop, Ida,” he said sternly, but later laughed until he cried and told me I was his favorite daughter. But I am your
only
daughter, I would say. That’s right, he said with a firm furrow of the forehead, the
only one
. When he said “only,” it meant something different.

Heather got the hint, or at least gave up trying. With the eventual relegation of dolls, the more complex math problems, the beginnings of breasts, Heather’s insipid nature leaned more toward cruelty. We arrived at junior high school and she took to carrying a Bible with her in the hallways, even leading this as a trend of sorts among other girls in high-buttoning shirts and beige pants. When we passed she took to tilting her head in mock sympathy and God-blessing me, she and her comrades snickering in my wake. In classes she raised her hand frequently, fingered the cross around her neck and offered her thoughts, generally framing them as direct from her Father or her father. She declined to engage in certain required reading, brought notes from her dad that forbade her from doing so.

Adolescence had descended on us, though not without our knowing. Jackson and I didn’t speak of the mysteries of antiperspirant versus deodorant, or the different kinds of
underwear the girls in the locker room began to wear, but we related to each other differently, as if circling. We sat on my stoop but spoke of doing something else. We played catch from farther and farther distances down our street, and sometimes, watching the baseball land somewhere besides our mitts, neither of us went to grab it.

One of the first afternoons of spring that year, Jackson and I settled on my front lawn with our Spanish textbooks in our laps and conjugated verbs, learning all the different ways to eat, to listen, to cry, to run. Somewhere between past and present tenses, we lost direct contact with the newly returned sun and found Heather in its path there, blocking our warmth. She was clad in the deep sort of pink that looks good on no one, her backpack adjusted high up her shoulders.

Sensing my choice not to speak, Jackson did. “Hey,” he went, without warmth.

“Hi, Ida.” Heather spoke from her nose.

“I saw your father out walking late last night,” she accused.

“He likes to do his thinking like that.”

“My dad saw too. He says it must be hard on you.”

I went back to quiet, poured my energy into I go, you go, she goes, we go, they go.

“Growing up the way you do. Your dad always working. He thinks it’s not right, you spending all your time alone with those
boys
. But you know? I told him the Lord forgives you. Having basically no family and all. You’re always welcome for dinner at our place, you know. It might be
good for you to be around a father
and
mother. People who really care for your soul.”

“Hey, Heather!” Jackson speciously enthused in the same voice he used when tricking James into doing his chores by some clever trade or another. “Wanna see something we just found? Out back?”

Her eyes lit up like she hadn’t just been pushing at the weakest folds of my heart, and she followed him but immediately.

The tree outside our living room window was sickly and small, but it served its purpose. How long Heather remained hanging there, strung by her wrists and ankles by a string of Christmas tree lights, a bandanna tied around her mouth, I’m not sure. She did not cry out or protest, and right before Jackson covered her thin, pallid lips she asked God to save us.

“Shut up!” cried Jackson. “Shutupshutupshutup,” his words coming fast like a metronome gone mad.

When I returned after dinner, terrified, the preacher’s daughter was gone, the ghosts of tiny lights hanging in apostrophe of the day’s events. I tore them violently from the branches, shaking boughs and loosening leaves, crossed the street, and placed them in my neighbor’s garbage can. The thud of the black plastic lid falling behind me as I raced across the asphalt was deafening, and I expected every window on the street to fill with light as if to ask:
What are you doing? What have you done?