only like one hundred yards away from where it happened."
"I know," he said.
They both sat on the thin metal rim of the shot-putters' brace, holding tea in their gloved hands. The cornfield had become a place no one went. When a ball strayed from the soccer field, a boy took a dare to go in and get it. That morning the sun was slicing right through the dead stalks as it rose, but there was no heat from it.
"I found these here," she said, indicating the leather gloves.
"Do you ever think about her?" he asked.
They were quiet again.
"All the time," Ruth said. A chill ran down my spine. "Sometimes I think she's lucky, you know. I hate this place."
"Me too," Ray said. "But I've lived other places. This is just a temporary hell, not a permanent one."
"You're not implying..."
"She's in heaven, if you believe in that stuff."
"You don't?"
"I don't think so, no."
"I do," Ruth said. "I don't mean la-la angel-wing crap, but I do think there's a heaven."
"Is she happy?"
"It is heaven, right?"
"But what does that mean?"
The tea was stone-cold and the first bell had already rung. Ruth smiled into her cup. "Well, as my dad would say, it means she's out of this shithole."
When my father knocked on the door of Ray Singh's house, he was struck dumb by Ray's mother, Ruana. It was not that she was immediately welcoming, and she was far from sunny, but something about her dark hair, and her gray eyes, and even the strange way she seemed to step back from the door once she opened it, all of these things overwhelmed him.
He had heard the offhand comments the police made about her. To their mind she was cold and snobbish, condescending, odd. And so that was what he imagined he would find.
"Come in and sit," she'd said to him when he pronounced his name. Her eyes, on the word Salmon, had gone from closed to open doorways--dark rooms where he wanted to travel firsthand.
He almost lost his balance as she led him into the small cramped front room of their house. There were books on the floor with their spines facing up. They came out three rows deep from the wall. She was wearing a yellow sari and what looked like gold lame capri pants underneath. Her feet were bare. She padded across the wall-to-wall and stopped at the couch. "Something to drink?" she asked, and he nodded his head.
"Hot or cold?"
"Hot."
As she turned the corner into a room he couldn't see, he sat down on the brown plaid couch. The windows across from him under which the books were lined were draped with long muslin curtains, which the harsh daylight outside had to fight to filter through. He felt suddenly very warm, almost close to forgetting why that morning he had double-checked the Singhs' address.
A little while later, as my father was thinking of how tired he was and how he had promised my mother to pick up some long-held dry cleaning, Mrs. Singh returned with tea on a tray and put it down on the carpet in front of him.
"We don't have much furniture, I'm afraid. Dr. Singh is still looking for tenure."
She went into an adjoining room and brought back a purple floor pillow for herself, which she placed on the floor to face him.
"Dr. Singh is a professor?" my father asked, though he knew this already, knew more than he was comfortable with about this beautiful woman and her sparsely furnished home.
"Yes," she said, and poured the tea. It was quiet. She held out a cup to him, and as he took it she said, "Ray was with him the day your daughter was killed."
He wanted to fall over into her.
"That must be why you've come," she continued.
"Yes," he said, "I want to talk to him."
"He's at school right now," she said. "You know that." Her legs in the gold pants were tucked to her side. The nails on her toes were long and unpolished, their surface gnarled from years of dancing.
"I wanted to come by and assure you I mean him no harm," my father said. I watched him. I had never seen him like this before. The words fell out of him like burdens he was delivering, backlogged verbs and nouns, but he was watching her feet curl against the dun-colored rug and the way the small pool of numbed light from the curtains touched her right cheek.
"He did nothing wrong and loved your little girl. A schoolboy crush, but still."
Schoolboy crushes happened all the time to Ray's mother. The teenager who delivered the paper would pause on his bike, hoping that she would be near the door when she heard the thump of the Philadelphia Inquirer hit the porch. That she would come out and, if she did, that she would wave. She didn't even have to smile, and she rarely did outside her house--it was the eyes, her dancer's carriage, the way she seemed to deliberate over the smallest movement of her body.
When the police had come they had stumbled into the dark front hall in search of a killer, but before Ray even reached the top of the stairs, Ruana had so confused them that they were agreeing to tea and sitting on silk pillows. They had expected her to fall into the grooves of the patter they relied on with all attractive women, but she only grew more erect in posture as they tried harder and harder to ingratiate themselves, and she stood upright by the windows while they questioned her son.
"I'm glad Susie had a nice boy like her," my father said. "I'll thank your son for that."
She smiled, not showing teeth.
"He wrote her a love note," he said.
"Yes."
"I wish I had known enough to do the same," he said. "Tell her I loved her on that last day."
"Yes."
"But your son did."
"Yes."
They stared at each other for a moment.
"You must have driven the policemen nuts," he said and smiled more to himself than to her.
"They came to accuse Ray," she said. "I wasn't concerned with how they felt about me."
"I imagine it's been hard for him," my father said.
"No, I won't allow that," she said sternly and placed her cup back on the tray. "You cannot have sympathy for Ray or for us."
My father tried to stutter out a protest.
She placed her hand in the air. "You have lost a daughter and come here for some purpose. I will allow you that and that only, but trying to understand our lives, no."
"I didn't mean to offend," he said. "I only..."
Again, the hand up.
"Ray will be home in twenty minutes. I will talk to him first and prepare him, then you may talk to my son about your daughter."
"What did I say?"
"I like that we don't have much furniture. It allows me to think that someday we might pack up and leave."
"I hope you'll stay," my father said. He said it because he had been trained to be polite from an early age, a training he passed on to me, but he also said it because part of him wanted more of her, this cold woman who was not exactly cold, this rock who was not stone.
"With all gentleness," she said, "you don't even know me. We'll wait together for Ray."
My father had left our house in the midst of a fight between Lindsey and my mother. My mother was trying to get Lindsey to go with her to the Y to swim. Without thinking, Lindsey had blared, "I'd rather die!" at the top of her lungs. My father watched as my mother froze, then burst, fleeing to their bedroom to wail behind the door. He quietly tucked his notebook in his jacket pocket, took the car keys off the hook by the back door, and snuck out.
In those first two months my mother and father moved in opposite directions from each other. One stayed in, the other went out. My father fell asleep in his den in the green chair, and when he woke he crept carefully into the bedroom and slid into bed. If my mother had most of the sheets he would lie without them, his body curled up tight, ready to spring at a moment's notice, ready for anything.
"I know who killed her," he heard himself say to Ruana Singh.
"Have you told the police?"
"Yes."
"What do they say?"
"They say that for now there is nothing but my suspicion to link him to the crime."
"A father's suspicion..." she began.
"Is as powerful as a mother's intuition."
This time there were teeth in her smile.
"He lives in the neighborhood."
"What are you doing?"
"I'm investigating all leads," my father said, knowing how it sounded as he said it.
"And my son..."
"Is a lead."
"Perhaps the other man frightens you too much."
"But I have to do something," he protested.
"Here we are again, Mr. Salmon," she said. "You misinterpret me. I am not saying you are doing the wrong thing by coming here. It is the right thing in its way. You want to find something soft, something warm in all this. Your searching led you here. That's a good thing. I am only concerned that it be good, too, for my son."
"I mean no harm."
"What is the man's name?"
"George Harvey." It was the first time he'd said it aloud to anyone but Len Fenerman.
She paused and stood. Turning her back to him, she walked over to first one window and then the other and drew the curtains back. It was the after-school light that she loved. She watched for Ray as he walked up the road.
"Ray will come now. I will go to meet him. If you'll excuse me I need to put on my coat and boots." She paused. "Mr. Salmon," she said, "I would do exactly what you are doing: I would talk to everyone I needed to, I would not tell too many people his name. When I was sure," she said, "I would find a quiet way, and I would kill him."
He could hear her in the hallway, the metal clank of hangers as she got her coat. A few minutes later the door was opened and closed. A cold breeze came in from the outside and then out on the road he could see a mother greet her son. Neither of them smiled. Their heads bent low. Their mouths moved. Ray took in the fact that my father was waiting for him inside his home.
At first my mother and I thought it was just the obvious that marked Len Fenerman as different from the rest of the force. He was smaller than the hulking uniforms who frequently accompanied him. Then there were the less obvious traits too--the way he often seemed to be thinking to himself, how he wasn't much for joking or trying to be anything but serious when he talked about me and the circumstances of the case. But, talking with my mother, Len Fenerman had shown himself for what he was: an optimist. He believed my killer would be caught.
"Maybe not today or tomorrow," he said to my mother, "but someday he'll do something uncontrollable. They are too uncontrolled in their habits not to."
My mother was left to entertain Len Fenerman until my father arrived home from the Singhs'. On the table in the family room Buckley's crayons were scattered across the butcher paper my mother had laid down. Buckley and Nate had drawn until their heads began to nod like heavy flowers, and my mother had plucked them up in her arms, first one and then the other, and brought them over to the couch. They slept there end to end with their feet almost touching in the center.
Len Fenerman knew enough to talk in hushed whispers, but he wasn't, my mother noted, a worshiper of children. He watched her carry the two boys but did not stand to help or comment on them the way the other policemen always did, defining her by her children, both living and dead.
"Jack wants to talk to you," my mother said. "But I'm sure you're too busy to wait."
"Not too busy."
I saw a black strand of her hair fall from where she had tucked it behind her ear. It softened her face. I saw Len see it too.
"He went over to that poor Ray Singh's house," she said and tucked the fallen hair back in its proper place.
"I'm sorry we had to question him," Len said.
"Yes," she said. "No young boy is capable of..." She couldn't say it, and he didn't make her.
"His alibi was airtight."
My mother took up a crayon from the butcher paper.
Len Fenerman watched my mother draw stick figures and stick dogs. Buckley and Nate made quiet sounds of sleep on the couch. My brother curled up into a fetal position and a moment later placed his thumb in his mouth to suck. It was a habit my mother had told us all we must help him break. Now she envied such easy peace.
"You remind me of my wife," Len said after a long silence, during which my mother had drawn an orange poodle and what looked like a blue horse undergoing electroshock treatment.
"She can't draw either?"
"She wasn't much of a talker when there was nothing to say."
A few more minutes passed. A yellow ball of sun. A brown house with flowers outside the door--pink, blue, purple.
"You used the past tense."
They both heard the garage door. "She died soon after we were married," he said.
"Daddy!" Buckley yelled, and leapt up, forgetting Nate and everyone else.
"I'm sorry," she said to Len.
"I am too," he said, "about Susie. Really."
In the back hall my father greeted Buckley and Nate with high cheers and calls for "Oxygen!" as he always did when we besieged him after a long day. Even if it felt false, elevating his mood for my brother was often the favorite part of his day.
My mother stared at Len Fenerman while my father walked toward the family room from the back. Rush to the sink, I felt like saying to her, stare down the hole and look into the earth. I'm down there waiting; I'm up here watching.
Len Fenerman had been the one that first asked my mother for my school picture when the police thought I might be found alive. In his wallet, my photo sat in a stack. Among these dead children and strangers was a picture of his wife. If a case had been solved he had written the date of its resolution on the back of the photo. If the case was still open--in his mind if not in the official files of the police--it was blank. There was nothing on the back of mine. There was nothing on his wife's.
"Len, how are you?" my father asked. Holiday up and wiggling back and forth for my father to pet him.
"I hear you went to see Ray Singh," Len said.
"Boys, why don't you go play up in Buckley's room?" my mother suggested. "Detective Fenerman and Daddy need to talk."
SEVEN
Do you see her?" Buckley asked Nate as they climbed the stairs, Holiday in tow. "That's my sister."
"No," Nate said.
"She was gone for a while, but now she's back. Race!"
And the three of them--two boys and a dog--raced the rest of the way up the long curve of the staircase.
I had never even let myself yearn for Buckley, afraid he might see my image in a mirror or a bottle cap. Like everyone else I was trying to protect him. "Too young," I said to Franny. "Where do you think imaginary friends come from?" she said.
For a few minutes the two boys sat under the framed grave rubbing outside my parents' room. It was from a tomb in a London graveyard. My mother had told Lindsey and me the story of how my father and she had wanted things to hang on their walls and an old woman they met on their honeymoon had taught them how to do grave rubbings. By the time I was in double digits most of the grave rubbings had been put down in the basement for storage, the spots on our suburban walls replaced with bright graphic prints meant to stimulate children. But Lindsey and I loved the grave rubbings, particularly the one under which Nate and Buckley sat that afternoon.
Lindsey and I would lie down on the floor underneath it. I would pretend to be the knight that was pictured, and Holiday was the faithful dog curled up at his feet. Lindsey would be the wife he'd left behind. It always dissolved into giggles no matter how solemn the start. Lindsey would tell the dead knight that a wife had to move on, that she couldn't be trapped for the rest of her life by a man who was frozen in time. I would act stormy and mad, but it never lasted. Eventually she would describe her new lover: the fat butcher who gave her prime cuts of meat, the agile blacksmith who made her hooks. "You are dead, knight," she would say. "Time to move on."
"Last night she came in and kissed me on the cheek," Buckley said.
"Did not."
"Did too."
"Really?"
"Yeah."
"Have you told your mom?"
"It's a secret," Buckley said. "Susie told me she isn't ready to talk to them yet. Do you want to see something else?"
"Sure," said Nate.
The two of them stood up to go to the children's side of the house, leaving Holiday asleep under the grave rubbing.
"Come look," Buckley said.
They were in my room. The picture of my mother had been taken by Lindsey. After reconsideration, she had come back for the "Hippy-Dippy Says Love" button too.
"Susie's room," Nate said.
Buckley put his fingers to his lips. He'd seen my mother do this when she wanted us to be quiet, and now he wanted that from Nate. He got down on his belly and gestured for Nate to follow, and they wriggled like Holiday as they made their way beneath the dust ruffle of my bed into my secret storage space.
In the material that was stretched on the underside of the box spring, there was a hole, and stuffed up inside were things I didn't want anyone else to see. I had to guard it from Holiday or he would scratch at it to try and pry the objects loose. This had been exactly what happened twenty-four hours after I went missing. My parents had searched my room hoping to find a note of explanation and then left the door open. Holiday had carried off the licorice I kept there. Strewn beneath my bed were the objects I'd kept hidden, and one of them only Buckley and Nate would recognize. Buckley unwrapped an old handkerchief of my father's and there it was, the stained and bloody twig.
The year before, a three-year-old Buckley had swallowed it. Nate and he had been shoving rocks up their noses in our backyard, and Buckley had found a small twig under the oak tree where my mother strung one end of the clothesline. He put the stick in his mouth like a cigarette. I watched him from the roof outside my bedroom window, where I was sitting painting my toenails with Clarissa's Magenta Glitter and reading Seventeen.
I was perpetually assigned the job of watching out for little brother. Lindsey was not thought to be old enough. Besides, she was a burgeoning brain, which meant she got to be free to do things like spend that summer afternoon drawing detailed pictures of a fly's eye on graph paper with her 130-pack of Prisma Colors.
It was not too hot out and it was summer, and I was going to spend my internment at home beautifying. I had begun the morning by showering, shampooing, and steaming myself. On the roof I air-drie