I put my head in my hands, my eyes landing on, “Mr. Whitman’s most famous writing was ‘Leaves of Grass,’ which some people think is probably about marijuana, but it was not, although it’s hard to believe that a guy who wrote something called ‘I Sing the Body Electric’ wasn’t stoned at least some of the time.”
The next day, Lauren Wells wasn’t wearing her traditional tracksuit. She was in a snug black T-shirt and a pair of designer jeans. Cynthia would have known, at twenty paces, what kind they were. We were watching American Idol one night, on our tiny, non-high-definition screen, when she pointed to a contestant screeching out her own version of Bette Midler’s “Wind Beneath My Wings,” and said, “She’s wearing Sevens.”
I didn’t know whether Lauren was wearing Sevens, but she looked nice, and the male students were craning their necks around, getting a peek at her from behind as she made her way up the hall.
I was coming the other way and she stopped me. “How you doing today?” she asked. “Better?”
I couldn’t recall admitting to feeling anything less than perfect the last time we’d spoken, but said, “Yeah, I’m good. You?”
“Okay,” she said. “Although I almost took yesterday off. This girl, who was in my senior class in high school, she was killed in a car accident up in Hartford a couple of days ago, and this other friend I keep in touch with on MSN, she told me, and I just felt so bad about it.”
“She was a close friend, was she?” I asked.
Lauren offered up half a shrug. “Well, she was in my year. It took me a couple of minutes to place her when my friend mentioned the name. We didn’t actually hang out or anything. She sat behind me in a couple of classes. But it’s still a shock, you know, when something like that happens to someone you know. It makes you think, makes you reassess, which is why I almost didn’t come in yesterday.”
“To reassess,” I said, not sure Lauren’s predicament warranted an outpouring of sympathy. “These things happen.” I feel as bad as the next guy when someone dies in a traffic accident, but Lauren was using up my time to discuss a tragedy involving someone that not only did I not know, but it was becoming evident she didn’t know all that well herself.
Kids shuffled past, dodged and weaved around us as we stood in the middle of the hall.
“So,” Lauren said, “what’s she really like?”
“Who?”
“Paula Malloy,” Lauren said. “From Deadline. Is she as nice as she seems on TV? Because she seems very nice.”
“She has wonderful teeth,” I said. I reached up, touched her arm, motioned her toward the wall of lockers so that we weren’t blocking traffic.
“Listen, um, you and Mr. Carruthers, you’re pretty tight, right?” she asked.
“Rolly and I? Yeah, we’ve known each other a long time.”
“This is kind of awkward to ask, but in the staff room the other day, he was there, and, well, I think he might have, what I’m saying is, did he mention seeing me put something in your mailbox and taking it out later?”
“Uh, well, he—”
“Because, okay, I did leave something there, but then I thought about it, and thought maybe it was a bad idea, so I took it back, but then I thought, oh great, Mr. Carruthers, Roland, if he saw me, he’d probably tell you anyway, and then I thought, shit, I might as well have left it there because at least then you’d know what it said instead of wondering what it said—”
“Lauren, don’t worry about it. It’s no big deal.” I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what the note said. I didn’t want any further complications to my life at the moment. And I was certain I didn’t want complications with Lauren Wells, even if the rest of my life was as smooth as glass.
“It was just a note to you and Cynthia, that maybe you’d like to come over sometime. I was thinking of having some friends over, and thought maybe it would be a nice break for the two of you, with all you’ve got to think about. But then I thought, maybe I was being a bit pushy, you know?”
“Well, that’s very thoughtful,” I said. “Maybe sometime.” Thinking to myself, Not a chance.
“Anyway,” Lauren said, her eyebrows bobbing up for a second. “You going to the Post Mall tonight? They’re having some of the stars from the latest Survivor, signing autographs.”
“I had no idea,” I said.
“I’m going,” she said.
“I’ll have to pass. Cynthia and I, we have to go into New Haven. It’s about the TV show. No big deal. Just a follow-up.”
I immediately regretted telling her. She brightened and said, “You’ll have to tell me all about it tomorrow.”
I just smiled, said I had to get to class, and once I was away from her gave my head an invisible shake.
We had dinner early to give us time to drive in to the Fox affiliate in New Haven, and had intended to get a sitter for Grace, but Cynthia said she had called around and been unable to get any of our regulars.
“I could stay home on my own,” Grace said as we were getting ready to go. Grace had never stayed home on her own, and we certainly weren’t going to make this her first night for going solo. Maybe in five or six years.
“No way, pal,” I said. “Bring your Cosmos book or some homework or something else to do while we’re there.”
“Can’t I hear what the lady says?” Grace said.
“No,” Cynthia said, before I could say the same thing.
Cynthia was edgy through dinner. I’d gotten over being pissed off, so it wasn’t my doing. I attributed it to anxiety over what the psychic would have to say. Having someone read your palm, tell your fortune, lay out some Tarot cards on a table before you, it could be entertaining, even when you didn’t believe it. That was under normal circumstances. This was going to be different.
“They want me to bring one of the shoeboxes,” Cynthia said.
“Which one?”
“Any. She says she just needs to hold it, maybe hold some of the things inside, to pick up more vibrations or whatever about the past.”
“Sure,” I said. “And they’re going to be filming all this, I suppose.”
Cynthia said, “I don’t see how we can tell them not to. It was their story that brought this woman forward. They’re going to want to follow it through.”
“Do we even know who she is?” I asked.
“Keisha,” Cynthia said. “Keisha Ceylon.”
“Really.”
“I looked her up on the Internet,” Cynthia said, then added, “She has a webpage.”
“I’ll just bet she does,” I said, and gave her a rueful smile.
“Be nice,” Cynthia said.
We were all in the car, backing out of the drive, when Cynthia said, “Hold it! I can’t believe it. I forgot the shoebox.”
She had taken from the closet one of her boxes of family mementos and left it on the kitchen table so she wouldn’t forget.
“I’ll go get it,” I said, putting the car in park.
But Cynthia already had her keys out of her purse, the car door open. “I’ll just be a second,” she said. I watched her go up the walk, unlock the house, and run inside, the keys left dangling from the lock. She seemed to be in there for a while, longer than it would take to grab the shoebox, but then she reappeared, shoebox tucked under her arm. She locked up, took the keys out of the door, got back in the car.
“What took so long?” I asked.
“I took an Advil,” she said. “My head’s pounding.”
At the station, we were met at reception by the ponytailed producer, who led us into a studio and to a talk-show set with a couch, a couple of chairs, some fake plants, some cheesy background latticework. Paula Malloy was there, and she greeted Cynthia like an old friend, oozing charm like a runny sore. Cynthia was reserved. Standing next to Paula was a black woman, late forties I guessed, dressed impeccably in a navy blue suit. I wondered if she was another producer, maybe a station manager.
“I’d like to introduce you to Keisha Ceylon,” Paula said.
br /> I guess I was expecting someone who looked like a gypsy or something. A flower child, maybe. Someone in a floor-length tie-dyed skirt, not someone who looked like she could be chairing a board meeting.
“Pleased to meet you,” Keisha said, shaking hands with us. She caught something in my look and said, “You were expecting something different.”
“Perhaps,” I said.
“And this must be Grace,” she said, bending down to shake hands with our daughter.
“Hi,” Grace said.
“Is there someplace Grace could go?” I asked.
Grace said, “Can I stay?” She looked up at Keisha. “Have you, like, seen Mom’s parents in a vision or something?”
“Maybe, what do you call it, a green room?” I said.
“Why is it green?” Grace asked as she was led away by some assistant to an assistant.
After they’d put some makeup on Cynthia and Keisha, they were seated on the couch with the shoebox between them. Paula got herself into a chair opposite them while a couple of cameras were wheeled noiselessly into position. I retreated back into the darkness of the studio, far enough to be out of the way, but close enough to watch.
Paula did some setup stuff, a recap of the story they’d broadcast a few weeks earlier. They’d be able to edit more into the segment later. Then she told her audience of a startling development in the case. A psychic had stepped forward, a woman who believed she could offer some insights into the disappearance of the Bigge family in 1983.
“I had seen your show,” said Keisha Ceylon, her voice low and comforting. “And of course I found it interesting. But I didn’t think much more about it after that. And then, a couple of weeks later, I was helping a client attempt to communicate with a lost relative, and I was not having the success I normally do, as though there were some kind of interference, like I was on one of those old party lines and someone else is picking up the phone when you’re trying to make a call.”
“Fascinating,” breathed Paula. Cynthia remained expressionless.
“And I heard this voice, she said to me, ‘Please get a message to my daughter.’”
“Really? And did she say who she was?”
“She said her name was Patricia.”
Cynthia blinked.
“And what else did she say?”
“She said she wanted me to reach her daughter, Cynthia.”
“Why?”
“I’m not entirely sure. I think she wanted me to contact her so that I could learn more. That’s why I wanted you”—she smiled at Cynthia—“to bring some mementos, so that I could hold them, perhaps understand better what happened.”
Paula leaned in toward Cynthia. “You brought some things, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” Cynthia said. “This is one of the shoeboxes I showed you before. Pictures, old clippings, just bits and pieces of things. I can show you what’s inside and—”
“No,” said Keisha. “That’s not necessary. If you would just give me the entire box…”
Cynthia let her take it, let her set it on her lap. Keisha put a hand on each end of the box and closed her eyes.
“I feel so much energy coming from this,” she said.
Give me a fucking break, I thought.
“I feel…sadness. So much sadness.”
“What else do you feel?” Paula asked.
Keisha furrowed her brow. “I sense…that you are about to receive a sign.”
“A sign?” said Cynthia. “What kind of sign?”
“A sign…that will help answer your questions. I’m not sure I can tell you more.”
“Why?” asked Cynthia.
“Why?” asked Paula.
Keisha opened her eyes. “I…I need you to turn the cameras off for a moment.”
“Huh?” said Paula. “Fellas? Can we hold off for a second?”
“Okay,” said one of the guys manning a camera.
“What’s the problem, Keisha?” said Paula.
“What is it?” Cynthia asked, alarmed. “What is it you didn’t want to say on camera? Something about my mother? Something about what she wanted you to tell me?”
“Sort of,” Keisha said. “But I just wanted to get straight, before we go any further, how much I’m getting paid to do this.”
Here we go.
“Uh, Keisha,” said Paula, “I think it was explained to you that while we would cover your expenses, put you up in a hotel for the night if necessary—I know you had to come down from Hartford—we weren’t paying you for your services in any sort of professional sense.”
“That wasn’t my understanding,” she said, getting a bit huffy now. “I’ve some very important stuff to tell this lady, and if you want to hear it, I’m going to need to be financially compensated.”
“Why don’t you tell her what you have to say and we’ll go from there?” Paula suggested.
I walked forward to the set, caught Cynthia’s eye. “Hon,” I said, tipping my head, the international “let’s go” gesture.
She nodded resignedly, unclipped the microphone from her blouse, and stood up.
“Where are you going?” Paula asked.
“We’re outta here,” I said.
“What do you mean?” Keisha asked, outraged. “Where are you going? Lady, if this show isn’t going to pay to hear what I know, maybe you should.”
Cynthia said, “I’m not going to be made a fool of anymore.”
“A thousand dollars,” Keisha said. “I’ll tell you what your momma told me to tell you for a thousand dollars.”
Cynthia was rounding the couch. I reached out my hand for hers.
“Okay, seven hundred!” Keisha said as we went to find our way to the green room.
“You really are a piece of work,” Paula told Keisha. “You could have been on TV. All the free advertising in the world, but you’ve got to shake us down for a few hundred bucks.”
Keisha gave Paula the evil eye, looked at her hair. “That’s one bad dye job, bitch.”
“You were right,” Cynthia said on the drive home.
I shook my head. “You were good, walking away like that. You should have seen the look on that so-called psychic’s face when you took off your mike. It’s like she was watching her meal ticket walk away.”
Cynthia’s smile was caught in the glare of some oncoming headlights. Grace, after a flurry of questions we declined to answer, had fallen asleep in the backseat.
“What a waste of an evening,” Cynthia said.
“No,” I said. “What you said was right, and I’m sorry I gave you a hard time about this. Even if there’s only a one-in-a-million chance, you have to check it out. So we checked it out. And now we can cross it off and move on.”
We pulled into the drive. I opened the back door, unbuckled Grace, and carried her into the house, following Cynthia into the living room. She walked ahead of me, turned on the lights in the kitchen as I headed for the stairs to carry Grace up to bed.
“Terry,” Cynthia said.
Ordinarily, I might have said “Be there in a sec” and taken Grace upstairs first, but there was something in my wife’s voice that said I should come into the kitchen immediately.
So I did.
Sitting in the center of the kitchen table was a man’s black hat. An old, worn, shiny-with-wear fedora.
12
She tried to move in a bit closer, got as near to him as she could, and whispered, “For heaven’s sake, are you even listening to me? I come all this way and you won’t even open your eyes. You think it’s easy getting here? The things you’ve put me through. I make the effort, seems the least you could do is stay awake a few minutes. You’ve got the whole day to sleep, I’m only here for a little while.
“Well, let me tell you something. You’re not quitting on us. You’re going to be with us for a while longer, that’s for sure. When it’s time for you to go, believe me, you’ll be the first to know.”
And then he seemed to be trying to say something.
&n
bsp; “What’s that?” she said. She was just able to make out a question. “Oh, him,” she said. “He couldn’t come tonight.”
13
Gently, I set Grace down on the couch in the living room, tucked a throw pillow under her head, and went back into the kitchen.
The fedora might as well have been a dead rat, the way Cynthia was staring at it. She was standing as far away from the table as possible, her back to the wall, and her eyes were full of fear.
It wasn’t the hat itself that scared me. It was how it got there. “You watch Grace for a minute,” I said.
“Be careful,” Cynthia said.
I went upstairs, flicked on the lights in each room and poked in my head as I did so. Checked the bathroom, then decided to check the other rooms again, looking in closets, under beds. Everything looked the way it should.
I came back down to the main floor, opened the door to our unfinished basement. At the bottom of the steps I waved my hand around, caught the string, and turned on the bare bulb.
“What do you see?” Cynthia called from upstairs.
I saw a washer and dryer, a workbench piled with junk, an assortment of nearly empty paint cans, a folded-up spare bed. Nothing much else.
I came back upstairs. “The house is empty,” I said.
Cynthia was still staring at the hat. “He was here,” she said.
“Who was here?”
“My father. He was here.”
“Cynthia, someone was here and left that on the table, but your father?”
“It’s his hat,” she said, more calmly than I might have expected. I approached the table, reached out to grab it. “Don’t touch it!” she said.
“It’s not going to bite me,” I said, and grabbed one of the peaks between my thumb and forefinger, then grabbed it with both hands, turning it over, looking inside.
It was an old hat, no question. The edges of the brim were worn, the lining darkened from years of sweat, the nap worn to the point of shiny in places.
“It’s just a hat,” I said.