“I think the fear thing has to have something to do with Cindy’s sister. I imagine that’s why Cindy’s parents are so strange with her, too. They probably look at Cindy and see Cathy. Although you’d think they’d be grateful to have Cindy and be a little nicer to her.”
“Cindy doesn’t have a sister.”
“She did. She didn’t tell you?” He shook his head. “That’s weird. It’s one of those famous stories that every town has. Sooner or later she must have known someone would tell you. Cindy was an identical twin. From what I’ve heard Mrs. Manford really used to do it up the way people used to with twins, twin girls mostly, curls and Mary Janes and matching dresses and all that. The story I heard was that one day their mother sent Cathy out to their cornfield to call Mr. Manford in for dinner. He was on one of those big tractors, those John Deeres with the huge wheels they use around here, where you sit up high off the ground. Apparently he never even saw her. Someone told me he thought he hit a rock.”
“Jesus Christ,” I said.
“Yeah. If I’d been the father it would have killed me. But I’d also like to think it would make me treasure the one I had left.”
“I can’t believe Cindy never told me.”
“Maybe it’s too hard for her to talk about it,” he said as he pulled up in front of the house. “Here we are.”
Robert had fallen asleep in the back, his game still buzzing in his hand. Mike Riordan carried him inside, laid him on the couch and turned to go. Our living room had a small tree stuck in a bucket of wet sand, decorated with glass balls and paper apples I’d found at the discount drugstore, and beneath it were a few packages. I handed him one. “Merry Christmas,” I said. “I didn’t bring it tonight because I didn’t know you were going to be there.”
“I didn’t know you were coming, either.”
He lifted the green jacket from its box, held it up in front of him as though he’d never seen a jacket before, had no idea what it was used for or what it might be. Robert stirred on the couch, then sat up. “That’s a good jacket,” Robert said faintly.
“If you’ve already got one—” I said.
“No,” Mike said. “Thank you. I really needed this.” He laughed. “I’ll drop your presents by tomorrow. I didn’t bring them because I didn’t know—you know.”
“Merry Christmas, Mr. Riordan,” said Robert.
“Mr. Riordan was weird about his present,” Robert said later as I tucked him in.
“I think he didn’t like it but he was trying to be polite,” I said.
“I liked everything I got,” Robert said.
“Me too,” I said. “I love you, Ba.” I held him for a moment and realized that he was beginning to feel different in my arms, more geometric, less soft. The tears slid down my cheeks and onto his face.
“I love you, too, Mom,” he said. “I had a really good Christmas. Don’t be sad.”
“I’m not, hon. I’m not.” In the kitchen I picked up the phone, put it down, picked it up again. I wasn’t even sure who I wanted to call. Or who I could afford to call. Patty Bancroft had called me, three days before, when the phone bills came, to ask icily about the twenty-three-minute call to New York on the evening of November 24. It hadn’t felt like twenty-three minutes, those precious minutes on the phone to Grace. It had felt like no time at all. “You have no idea what can be done with phone records,” Patty Bancroft had said coldly.
“How could anyone see my phone records? I haven’t even seen them. I don’t even know where they’re delivered.”
“Holidays are a difficult time, Elizabeth,” she’d said. “People call home during the holidays, and people who are looking for them know that. And getting a copy of a phone record, for someone who knows how, is nothing. Nothing at all.”
I’d hated the tone of her voice, as though she were talking to a child, a teenage girl who talked too long to her friends, a stupid adolescent with no idea of the results of her actions. But she’d scared me. I picked up the receiver in the kitchen, then put it down, then picked it up again. The dial tone turned into the manic high-pitched beeping of a phone off the hook, and I could hear the singsong murmur of the recorded message: “If you wish to place a call …” Finally I hung up, then picked the phone up once more and dialed the number on an index card tacked to the kitchen doorjamb.
“Hello,” she said, her voice a little hoarse, as though she had not had cause to use it that day.
“Hi, Mrs. Levitt. It’s Beth Crenshaw. I know it’s late, but is it all right if I say Merry Christmas?”
In the background I heard the sound of conversation, even music. “Is this a bad time?” I added.
“Ach, no,” she said. “Irving and I are watching White Christmas, aren’t we, Irving. A Christmas movie, what can it hurt? Not like having a tree, right? That Rosemary Clooney, it’s a shame, how heavy she got. She was a nice-looking girl when she was young.”
“She was, wasn’t she?”
“But you can tell, the ones that have to watch it when they get a little older, or next thing you know, a backside out to here. Now she wears nothing but muumuus.”
“But a beautiful voice.”
“Beautiful. Merry Christmas, Mrs. Nurse. I’ll tell you something—Irving likes you. I can tell. This one you like, Irving, I said.”
“I’m glad. Tell him I said thank you.”
“We’ll see you Tuesday, won’t we, Irving? I have a little something for the little boy.”
And then I called Cindy, even though I’d just left her. “I just wanted to say thanks again,” I said. “You saved my life with that dinner, and the presents and everything.” I thought of Cindy’s twin, of the early years, when she’d been able to look at a mirror image without even looking in the mirror, of sitting in the kitchen, or their room, or wherever she was when Cathy went out to call Ed Manford for dinner, of her hearing the shouting, the screams. Or maybe not. Maybe just hearing a silence where a moment before ordinary life had been. It had been a good story, that story about Jackson Islington. But it hadn’t been the real story. Although I couldn’t complain; it had been a good story I’d told her, the story of the nuns. But it hadn’t been the real story, either.
“I love you, kid,” I said.
“Love you, honey,” she said. “I got to go to bed. I had too much wine.” And in the kitchen I poured myself a glass of water and drank it by the living-room window, looked out over the dark quadrangle hung with motley lights from a gap I made with my two fingers in the blinds. Finally I went to bed, with Nat King Cole playing over and over in my head, with my stomach roiling with wine. I thought of Ed Manford leaning so close to me, of Cindy’s sister disappearing beneath the big ridged wheels of a farm tractor. And I thought of Bobby. The Christmas before he’d given me a half-heart, cut down the center with a jagged line, hanging on a heavy gold chain. The other half he’d hung around his own neck, on the chain where he wore his miraculous medal, the image of the Virgin Mary his father had been given by his own parents when he became a cop, that Ann Benedetto had refused to have buried with her husband, had given to her son instead. I’d left the half-heart in my jewelry box, below the costume things. But I knew Bobby had found it, his heart, jettisoned, left. Maybe that had been enough. Maybe he had let me go. Maybe he was singing Nat King Cole into some other woman’s ear, some woman he’d found to take my place, a woman who didn’t make him angry or mean, who got all the good stuff and none of the bad. As Christmas Day darkened and deepened into the morning of the day after, I fell asleep, wondering.
The next morning Mike Riordan came by with two packages, beautifully, extravagantly wrapped, the work of a department store gift-wrapping department, all foil stars and glittery ribbon. “I thought you had company today,” I said.
“They’re coming at three,” he said. “I cleaned up by stuffing everything in the closets.”
For Robert he had gotten a Yankees baseball shirt, blue and white pinstripes. For me there was a runner’s rain jacket, lightweight, de
ep green. It was more or less the same jacket I’d given him, except that his was size large, mine size small. The look on my face must have been funny.
“Don’t tell Cindy,” Mike said, “or she’ll talk about it till next Christmas.”
There was something called a Safe-Home party with kids, balloons, hot-dog wagons, and clowns at the school on New Year’s Eve, Mike so busy that I only got to wave at him across a very crowded cafeteria, and then the holidays were over. Soccer ebbed, basketball flowed; Robert had practice three times a week after school, games every weekend, enough homework that he moved straight from his desk to the sink to brush his teeth and wash his face for bed. Jennifer got a new wheelchair and taught me to play a computer game called “Knockout” she always won, the high score table a list of variations on her name and initials. Cindy and I ran a sale of books the library no longer needed, our hands and faces gray with the dust of years. And one day at the end of January, walking home from the Levitts, seeing familiar lights in now-familiar windows, it occurred to me that the tedium of this life had become comforting, that it felt real and lasting in its sheer ordinary drudgery, that in the same way I found it restful to run a route I’d run dozens of times before, so it had become restful to do these small tasks that I knew by heart, that asked no more of me than a kind of rote recitation of the body.
I was less fearful, but not foolhardy. I still scanned every crowd—at the mall, at the ball games—as careful as a snitch looking for a hit man. Not just for Bobby, for his dark head, his hawkish profile, but for his uncle Gerald, or some cop now retired who’d once shared a squad car with him, or a woman who knew us both from St. Stannie’s. America turns out to be a very small country if you’re trying to get lost in it. Mention you’re from Omaha and it’s a cinch: any stranger you meet will say he has a cousin there. It’s why I had been able to come to Lake Plata and be absorbed by the town as completely as a stone falling into deep water: because there was no town, really, just a collection of strangers ranged around a commercial strip. No families who had lived on one block for three generations, or even the remnants of that sort of life, a son or a daughter living in a house a block or two away from where their parents had raised them.
One Saturday we went to a carnival outside town to celebrate the first win of the peewee basketball team. Every carnival is the same carnival. Literally. If you read the name on the tickets they make you buy in vast quanties for the rides, or look at the gaudy logos painted on trucks parked around the outskirts of the glittering circle, you might see the same name in an empty field in Florida as you see in a high-school parking area in Westchester or outside a mall in Oak Park, Illinois. Westhammer Amusements, Jensen Amusements, Richter Amusements. They just hook it all up to trailers or throw it all on flatbeds, the haunted house, the midway games with their bad odds and cheap toy prizes, the Tilt-a-Whirl and Cyclone. Three days later they pack it all up and haul it to the next town. Bobby would never let Robert go on any rides at a carnival. “Look at these dirtbags,” he’d whisper if Buddy or Jimmy or one of the other guys managed to drag us to one instead of just barbecuing in their backyards. “How tight do you think they made the screws on those things? Those look to you like the kinds of guys that take a lot of trouble with a wrench?” Not even the little boats that traveled in a tiny circle in a track of fetid water two feet deep, or the cars that were lower to the ground than Robert’s tricycle. Someone else’s children would be screaming from the Dragon Wagon, waving at us as the cars thundered up and down the track, and Robert would be standing, big-eyed, next to Bobby, a hand in his, as though my failure to recognize the clear and undeniable danger of this place removed me from them both. Crackerjack he could have, and cotton candy. But no hot dogs, or sausage and peppers cooked on a big griddle by women with tattoos. “What are you, nuts, Frances?” Bobby would say.
“You want a hot dog?” I said to Robert while I was taking food orders and we were trying to settle the boys on some splintered picnic benches. He nodded, then smiled. It felt like something to me, maybe a moving on, a moving over to some other place, where we made new rules and traditions. Hot dogs were no longer dangerous. We were living a different life. Every once in a while, at moments like this, it felt like mine. “Mrs. Bernsen asked us in school to talk about an adventure,” Robert had said one night over leftover lasagna. “I talked about it being an adventure to move to a new place where you’ve never been before and where you don’t know anyone.” I’m not sure what showed in my face, but he’d added quickly, “I didn’t talk about before. Just now. Like meeting Bennie and everything.”
“You are the best boy in the world,” I’d said.
Mr. Castro was working nights as a janitor at the paper products plant and had agreed to come along to the carnival to help Mike and me keep the boys in order. He brought Bennie’s little sister Sandy, who had just turned five, as a special treat for her birthday; he held tight to her hand as she danced and smiled and cried, “Popcorn, Papa! Popcorn, please?” Jason Illing’s father was there, with his video camera, just as he was at every game, filming Jason slumped on the bench, the boy’s shoulders bowing to his belly like an old man, filming the two minutes or so that Mike, who played everyone, cut no one, gave Jason to play. “Hold up your burger,” Mr. Illing called, but Jason ignored him and hunched over his Dutch Fries and his root beer. Cindy came with us, too, after one of the other boy’s mothers backed out. She had Chad in the stroller, and I’d managed to coax Chelsea from the little niche between Cindy’s torso and the stroller handle onto a picnic bench, where she ate a hot dog slowly and thoughtfully.
“I don’t like rides,” Chelsea said.
“Can I tell you a secret?” I said. “Neither do I. They always make me feel like I’m going to throw up.”
Chelsea nodded.
“Eleven, twelve,” I heard Mike muttering to himself, and I laughed. “They’re all here,” I said.
“It’s hard to keep track of sixteen of them in a place like this,” he said.
“I know. But you don’t really need to keep track of sixteen. Jason is under constant electronic surveillance, I never let Robert out of my sight, and Robert never makes a move without Bennie. Mr. Castro is keeping an eye on Jonathan, who always gives Bennie a hard time. That leaves twelve. And Cindy and I divided the twelve up on the bus. So all you really have to do is hand out tickets.”
Of course, it wasn’t as simple as that once the leavings of their lunch were bundled into waxed paper and tinfoil and chucked—underhand, overhand, Jonathan Green from behind his brawny back, and why was I so happy when he missed by a foot?—into the metal drums used for trash. “Tilt-a-Whirl!” Mike yelled, and as of one accord most of the group would move toward the ride and some would scatter, to knock down weighted milk bottles with a hardball, to buy junky jewelry or sugar-coated nuts, to look at the Army Reserve tank.
“Can I put you in charge of stragglers?” I asked Cindy, who was trying to get mustard out of her shirt with a paper napkin and a cup of water she’d wangled out of the homemade lemonade stand.
“Not with herself hanging onto my midsection,” she said, looking down at Chelsea. “I’m straggling myself.”
“Chelse,” I said, bending down, “will you come with me and we’ll make sure the guys are okay on the rides?”
“I don’t want to go on.”
“Me neither. That’s why I need your help.”
Her hand in mine was sweaty, but sweetly curved. Cindy had put her hair into a French braid and she was wearing pink shorts and a matching shirt with ruffles of lace around the legs and sleeves. “You look so pretty today,” I said.
“So do you,” Chelsea said. “You look nice in a dress.”
“It’s a T-shirt dress, not a real dress. Your mom bought this for me for Christmas.”
“I know. She likes to buy people clothes.”
“They’re making me go on,” Mike shouted from a car on the Tilt-a-Whirl, wedged in between two of the smaller boys, his arms aroun
d each one.
When he came off he was rolling his eyes. “The only way you keep from throwing up is by fixing on one stationary point and staring at it,” he said.
“Really?”
“That’s my theory.”
“Did it work?”
“So far,” he said. “I just stared straight at you.”
I could feel the color come up in my face, see it in his. “What next?” I said.
“How about dinner and a movie?” We both looked down. “Never mind. I can’t believe I said that. Jesus, Riordan.”
“Beth, I have to go to the bathroom really bad,” Chelsea said.
“We’ll be at the House of Horrors,” Mike said.
When we got back they were all still in line. Jason’s father was panning the row of boys, calling “And your name is …” to each. A group of retarded children and their teachers were ahead of them. The children were wearing name tags and smiling, dancing in the sunshine, rolling their eyes at the demons and ghouls painted on the outside of the House of Horrors. “Are you sure?” one of the teachers kept asking, and they all nodded. But once inside we could hear shrieks and wails, and the ticket-taker flicked his cigarette into the grass and swore. “Keep your people back,” he barked at Mike, who threw out his arms as though to restrain a regiment of unruly soldiers.
“Bring them back out,” he yelled into the House of Horrors, and a moment later the teachers and the children hurried through the black door and down the up ramp, the adults rosy with embarrassment, the children drenched in sweat as though in an instant every bad thing they had ever imagined had come at them by the light of the cheap strobe, ready to rip their hearts out.
“Wow,” said Chelsea.
“Go ahead,” the ticket-taker yelled at Mike.
“Are you guys still up for this,” Mike said, turning around.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” said the ticket-taker.
After that there was the Viper, and then the bumper cars. Chelsea thought about the bumper cars, but then she saw sparks fly from the tether to the ceiling when one of them hit the wall. “Are you gonna go on anything at all?” said Cindy. “Anything? They have pony rides.”