The Shadow Year (6 page)

That Saturday afternoon, when my father got home from work, he called us kids into the living room and made us sit on the love seat. My mother and he sat on the couch across the marble coffee table from us. Before they spoke, my mind raced back through the recent weeks to try to remember if we could be in trouble for something.

All I could think of, besides the incident with Hinkley, which seemed to have blown over by then, was a night a week or so before school started when Jim and I had made a dummy out of old clothes—shirt and pants—stuffed with newspapers and held together with safety pins. The head was from a big, mildewed doll, an elephant stuffed with sawdust someone had won at the Good Samaritan Hospital fair that had been lying around in the cellar for as long as I could remember. We cut the head off, removed some of the sawdust, tied the neck in a knot, and pinned it to the collar of the shirt. The figure was crude, but we knew that it would serve our purposes, especially in the dark. We got it out of the cellar unseen by pushing it through one of the windows into the backyard.

We'd named our floppy elephant guy Mr. Blah-Blah and tied a long length of fishing line around his chest under the arms of the shirt. We laid him at the curb on one side of the street and then payed out the fishing line to the other side of the street and
through the bottom of the hedges in front of the empty house that had, until a little more than a year earlier, belonged to the Halloways. We knew that it wouldn't pay to do what we were planning in front of our own house, and the one we chose had the benefit of having a southern extension of the woods right behind its backyard. We could move along the trails in the pitch black, and anyone who tried to chase us would be hopelessly lost and have to turn back.

Hiding behind the hedges, we waited until we saw the lights of a car coming down the street. When the car neared the hedges, we pulled on the line, reeling in the bum, and in the dark it looked like he was crawling across the road in fits and starts, like maybe he'd already been hit by a car.

The car's brakes screeched, and it swerved, almost driving up onto the curb and nearly hitting the telephone pole. The instant I heard the brakes, I realized that the whole thing was a big mistake. Jim and I ran like hell, bent in half to gain cover from the hedges. We stopped at the corner of the old Halloway house, in the shadows.

“If they come after us, run back and jump the stream, and I'll meet you at the fork in the main path,” Jim whispered.

I nodded.

From where we stood, we had a good view of the car. I was relieved to see it wasn't one I recognized as belonging to any of the neighbors. It was an old model, from before I was born, shiny white, with a kind of bubble roof and fins that stuck up in the back like a pair of goalposts. The door creaked open, and a man dressed in a long white trench coat and hat got out. It was too dark and we were too far away to see his features, but he came around the side of the car and discovered Mr. Blah-Blah in the road. He must have seen the fishing line, because he looked up and stared directly at us. Jim pulled me back deeper into the shadows. The man didn't move for the longest time, but his face was turned straight toward us. My heart was pounding,
and only Jim's hand on the back of my shirt kept me from running. Finally the man got back into the car and drove away. When we were sure the car was gone, we retrieved Mr. Blah-Blah and threw him back in the woods. But that had happened more than a week earlier.

My father cleared his throat, and I looked at Jim, who sat on the other side of Mary. He looked back at me, and I knew that his memory was stuffed with that mildewed elephant head.

“We just wanted to tell you that we don't think Aunt Laura is going to be with us much longer,” said my father. His elbows were on his knees, and he was looking more at our feet than at us. He rubbed his hands together as if he were washing them.

“You mean she's going to die?” said Jim.

“She's very sick and weak. In a way it will be a blessing,” said my mother. I could see the tears forming in the corners of her eyes.

We nodded, but I was unsure if that was the right thing to do. I wondered how dying could be a good thing. Then my father told us, “Okay, go and play.” Mary went over to where my mother was sitting and climbed into her lap. I left before the waterworks really got started.

Later that afternoon I took George and my notebook, and we traveled far. When I set out, I felt the weight of a heavy thought in my head. I could feel it roosting, but when I tried to realize it, reach for it with my mind, it proved utterly elusive, like trying to catch a killifish in the shallows with your bare hands. On my way up to Hammond Lane, I saw Mr. and Mrs. Bishop being screamed at by their ten-year-old tyrant son, Reggie; passed by Boris, the janitor from East Lake, who was fixing his car out in his driveway; saw the lumbering, moon-eyed Horton kid, Peter, big and slow as a mountain, riding a bike whose seat seemed to have disappeared up his ass.

We crossed Hammond Lane and went down the street lined on both sides with giant sycamores, leaves gone yellow and brown. To the left of me was the farm, cows grazing in the field; to the right was a plowed expanse of bare dirt where builders had begun to frame a line of new houses. Beyond that another mile, down a hill, amid a thicket of trees, next to the highway, we came to a stream.

I sat with my back to an old telephone pole someone had dumped there and wrote up the neighbors I'd seen on my journey—told about how Mrs. Bishop had Reggie when she was forty-one; told about how the kids at school would try to fool Boris, who was Yugoslavian and didn't speak English very well, and his invariable response: “Boys, you are talking dogshit”; told about the weird redneck Hortons, whom I had overheard described by Mrs. Conrad once as “incest from the hills.”

When I was finished writing, I put my pencil in the notebook and pulled George close. I petted his head and told him, “It's gonna be okay.” The thought I'd been carrying finally broke through, and I saw a figure, like a human shadow, leaning over Aunt Laura's bed in the otherwise empty room at St. Anselm's and lifting her up. He held her to him, enveloping her in his darkness and then, like a bubble of ink bursting, vanished.

That night, well into her bottle of wine, my mother erupted, spewing anger and fear. During these episodes she was another person, a stranger, and when they were done. I could never remember what the particulars of her rage were, just that the experience seemed to suck the air out of the room and leave me unable to breathe. In my mind I saw the evil queen gazing into her talking mirror, and I tried to rebuff the image by conjuring the memory of a snowy day when I was little and she pulled Jim and me to school on the sled, running as fast as she could. We laughed, she laughed, and the world was covered in white.

We kids abandoned our father, leaving him to take the brunt of the attack. Jim fled down the cellar to lose himself in Botch Town. Mary went instantly Mickey, encircled herself with a whispered string of numbers for protection, and snuck next door to Nan and Pop's house. As I headed up the stairs to the refuge of my room, I heard the sound of a smack and something skittering across the kitchen floor. I knew it was either my father's glasses or his teeth, but I wasn't going downstairs to find out. I knew he was sitting there stoically, waiting for the storm to pass. I shoved off with Perno Shell down the Amazon in search of El Dorado.

Some time later, just after Shell had taken a curare dart in
the neck and paralysis was setting in, there was a knock on my door. Mary came in. She curled up at the bottom of my bed and lay there staring at me.

“Hey,” I said, “want me to read you some people from my notebook?”

She sat up and nodded.

So I read her all the ones I had recently added, up to the Horton kid on his bike. I spoke my writing at a slow pace in order to kill time and allow her a long stint of the relief she found in the mental tabulation of my findings. When we finished, the house was silent.

“Any winners in that bunch?” I asked.

“Boris the janitor,” she said.

“Go to bed now,” I told her.

The next morning my mother was too hungover to take us to church, so she told us to each say a good act of contrition and a Hail Mary. We raced through them. When we were finally gathered at the breakfast table, my father recounted some of his stories from the army. I wondered if my mother's assault the night before had put him in mind of other battles. The phone rang, and my mother, now light and smiling, as if suffering amnesia of last night, answered it.

When she hung up, she told us the news—yesterday Charlie Edison, who was in my class at East Lake, had gone out to play and never returned. At dinnertime, when he didn't appear, his mother had started to worry. When night fell and he still hadn't gotten home, his father called the police. My mother said, “Either something happened to him or he's been abducted.” Nan's lips moved in and out, and she said, “Maybe he'll show up for lunch.”

Charlie Edison was even more weak and meek than me. We'd had the same teachers since kindergarten. In class photographs he was clearly the runt of the litter. His arms were as thin as pipe cleaners, and he was short and skinny, with a pencil
neck and a face that looked like Tommy the Turtle from the old cartoons. His glasses were so big it was as if he had stolen them from his old man, and every time I thought of him, I pictured him pushing those huge specs up on the bridge of his nose with one extended twiglike finger. Charlie's daily project was trying to achieve invisibility, because the meaner kids liked to pick on him. I felt sympathy for him and also relief that he existed, since without him those same kids would probably have been picking on me.

For gym we had Coach Crenshaw, who for some reason always had at least one hand in his sweatpants, and I'm not talking about the pocket. When it rained or the weather was too cold to go outside, we'd stay in the gym and play dodgeball. We divided into two teams, one on either side of the gym. You couldn't cross the dividing line, and you had to bean someone on the other side with one of those hard red gym balls in order to get him out. If he managed to catch the ball, then you were out and had to sit on the side.

One day, right before Christmas, Crenshaw got that glint in his eye, blew his whistle, and called for dodgeball. The usual game ensued, and Charlie managed to hide out and practice his powers of invisibility long enough so he was the last one left on his side of the line. On the other side of the line, the last one left was Bobby Harweed. No one knew how many times he'd been left back, but it was certain he'd already been arrested once before he'd made it to fifth grade. His arm muscles were like smooth rocks, and he had a tattoo he had given himself with a straight pin and india ink: the word “Shit” scrawled across the calf of his left leg. When Crenshaw saw the final match-up, he blew his whistle and instituted a new rule—the two remaining players could go anywhere they wanted; the dividing line no longer mattered.

Charlie had the ball, but Bobby stalked toward him, unworried. Charlie threw it with all his might, but it just kind of
floated on the air, and Bobby grabbed it like he was picking an apple off a tree. That should have ended the game, but Crenshaw didn't blow the whistle. Everyone in the gym started chanting Bobby's name. Bobby wound up, and as he did, Charlie backed away until he was almost to the wall. He brought his hands up to cover his face. When it came, the ball hit him with such force in the chest that it knocked the air out of him and slammed him backward so his head hit the concrete wall. His glasses flew off and cracked in half on the hardwood floor, and he slumped unconscious. An ambulance was called, and for that Christmas, Charlie got a broken rib.

My father and Pop went out in the car to join the search for Charlie, and Jim and I hooked up George and headed for the woods to see if we could track him there. On the way we passed a lot of parents and kids from the neighborhood either in cars or on bikes out looking for him, too.

Jim told me, “He must have just gotten lost somewhere and couldn't remember how to get home. You know Charlie.”

I didn't say anything, as my imagination was spinning with images of myself, lost, unable to find my way home, or worse, being tied up and taken away to a place where I would never see my family or home again. I was frightened, and the only thing that prevented me from running back to the house, besides the daylight, was that we had George with us. I said, “Maybe the prowler took him.”

We were, by then, at the entrance to the school, and Jim stopped walking. He turned and looked at me. “You know what?” he said. “You might be right.”

“Do you think they thought of it?”

“Of course,” he said, but I remembered the hatbox in the garbage can and had my doubts.

Our tour of the woods was brief. It was a beautifully clear and cool day, the trees all turning red, but the idea that the prowler was now doing more than just peeping kept us on edge.
We ventured only as far as the bend in the stream before giving up. Once out from under the trees, we peered into the sewer pipe, inspected the basketball courts, gazed briefly down into the sump, and followed the perimeter of the fence around the school yard back to the entrance.

“I have thirty cents,” said Jim. “You want to go to the deli and get a soda?”

There were cops all over the neighborhood for the next week or so, interviewing people about the disappearance of Charlie Edison and trying to piece together what might have happened to him. The story was on the nightly news, and they included a shot of East Lake in the report. It looked different in black and white, almost like some other school a kid would want to go to. Then they flashed a photo of Charlie, smiling, from behind his big glasses, and I had to look away, aware of what he'd been through since I'd known him.

There had been honest grief over his absence and the anguish it caused his family, but at the end of the second week the town started to slip into its old ways, as if some strong current were pulling us back to normalcy. It distressed me, though I couldn't so easily put my finger on the feeling then, how ready everyone was to leave Charlie behind and continue with the business of living. I can't say I was any different. My mind turned to worrying about Krapp's math homework and the troubles of my own family. I suppose the investigation into Charlie's disappearance continued, but it no longer entranced the neighborhood.

Even though the hubbub surrounding the tragedy was quickly receding, I'd still get a chill at school whenever I'd look over to Charlie's desk and see his empty chair, or when out on
my bike I'd pass his mother, who had certainly lost her mind when she lost her son. Every day she'd wander the neighborhood, traipsing through people's backyards, inspecting the Dumpsters behind the stores downtown, staggering along the railroad tracks. She was one of the youngest mothers on the block, but the loss had drained her, and overnight she became haggard, her blond hair frizzed, her expression blank.

In the evenings she'd walk around the school yard and stand by the playground calling Charlie's name. One night, as darkness fell and we were eating dinner, my mother, quite a few glasses of sherry on her way to Bermuda, looked up and saw, through the front window, Mrs. Edison heading home from East Lake. She stopped talking and got up, walked through the living room and out the front door. Jim and Mary and I went to the window to watch. She met Mrs. Edison in the street and said something to her. Then she stepped in close, put her arms around the smaller woman, and held her. They stood like that for a very long time, swaying slightly, until night came, and every now and then my mother would lightly pat her back.

Since it involved going out before sunrise each morning, Jim had to quit his paper route, and certain precautions were taken, even including locking the front and back doors at night. We weren't allowed to go anywhere off the block without another kid with us, and if I went to the woods, I'd have to get Jim to go with me. Still, I continued to walk George by myself at night and now felt another specter lurking behind the bushes with Teddy Dunden.

On the first really cold night, near the end of September, the wind blowing dead leaves down the block, I went out with George and started around the bend toward the school. As we passed Mrs. Grimm's darkened house, I heard a whisper: “Is that you?” The sudden sound of a voice made me jump, and George gave a low growl. I looked over at the yard, and there, standing amid the barren rosebushes, was Mrs. Edison.

“Charlie, is that you?” she said, and put her hand out toward me.

The sudden sight of her scared the hell out of me. I turned, unable to answer, and ran as fast as I could back to my house. When I got home, my mother was asleep on the couch, so just to be near someone else I went down to the cellar to find Jim. He was there, sitting beneath the sun of Botch Town, fixing the roof on Mrs. Restuccio's house. On the other side of the stairs, Mickey and Sandy Graham and Sally O'Malley were working hard in Mrs. Harkmar's class.

“What do you want?” asked Jim.

My heart was still beating fast, and I realized it wasn't so much the sight of Mrs. Edison that had scared me, since we were by now used to her popping up anywhere at just about any time, but it was the fact that she thought I was Charlie. I didn't want to tell Jim what was wrong, as if to give voice to it would make the connection between me and the missing boy a real one.

“I guess the prowler is gone now,” I said to him. There had been no reported sightings of him since Charlie's disappearance. I scanned the board to find the shadow man's figure, those painted eyes and straight-pin hands, and found him standing behind the Hortons' place up near Hammond Lane.

“He's still around, I bet,” said Jim. “He's lying low because of all the police on the block in the last couple of weeks.”

My eyes kept moving over the board as he spoke. Botch Town always drew me in. There was no glancing quickly at it. I followed Willow Avenue down from Hammond and around the corner. When I got to Mrs. Grimm's house on the right side of the street, I was brought up short. Standing in her front yard was the clay figure of Mrs. Edison.

“Hey,” I said, and leaned out over the board to point. “Did you put her there?”

“Why don't you go do something?” he said.

“Just tell me, did you put her
there
?”

I knew he could tell from the tone of my voice that I wasn't kidding.

“No,” he said, “Why?”

“'Cause I was just out with George, and that's exactly where I saw her a few minutes ago.”

“Maybe she walked over there after I turned the lights out last night,” said Jim.

“Come on,” I said. “Did you move her?”

“I swear I didn't touch her,” he said. “I haven't moved any of them in a week.”

We looked at each other, and out of the silence that followed, we heard, from the other side of the cellar, the voice of Mrs. Harkmar say, “Mickey, you have scored one hundred on your English test.”

A few seconds passed, and then I called out, “Hey, Mary, come here.”

The voice of Sally O'Malley said, “I'll have to do better next time.”

Jim got up and took a step toward the stairs. “Mickey, we need you over here,” he said.

A moment later Mary came through the curtain behind the stairs and over to where we were standing.

“I'm not going to be mad at you if you did, but did you touch any of the stuff in Botch Town?” he asked, smiling.

“Could you possibly…?” she said in her Mickey voice.

“Did you move Mrs. Edison here?” I asked, and pointed to where the clay figure stood.

She stepped up to the board and looked down at the town.

“Well?” asked Jim, resting his hand lightly on her shoulder.

She stared intently and then nodded.