I balk at him. “Well, she lied about having a kid,” I say, handing over my money.
“I know.”
“So the flirting and the questions?”
Knick Knack shrugs. “Why not?” He hands me the pack. “You want to know my professional opinion?” he asks, lowering his voice and leaning his elbows on the counter so that he’s close to my face.
“She got rid of her kid. Wasn’t no stranger that took her.”
The pothead gas attendant is the first one to voice my thoughts. I glance over my shoulder to see if anyone else is in the store.
“Why do you think that?” I hiss, tucking the cigarettes into my back pocket.
“My cousin works with her at the car wash,” he says. “My cousin has a little girl, you know. About the same age as Lyndee’s kid. My cousin was saying that she couldn’t go to this party her friend was having because she didn’t have anyone to watch her daughter. Lyndee told her to slip the kid half a sleeping pill. Said it’s what she did when she wanted to go out.”
I stare at Knick Knack, sour dread curling in my stomach.
“I gotta go,” I say. I am halfway to the door when he calls out to me. “Hey, Maggie!”
“Margo,” I say.
“You look good, girl! I’d hit that.”
I roll my eyes, but there is something so deeply satisfying about that, You look good girl, I have to smile.
I am walking down Wessex when I realize I bought cigarettes, and my mother is in a jar in the corner of her old bedroom.
The Bone has one grocery store, two gas stations, and a peppering of small businesses like Fat Joe’s Burgers and the FUN! FUN! ARCADE. You’re bound to run into the same face more than once a week; at least, that’s what I tell myself as I follow Lyndee up and down the streets of Bone Harbor.
It’s not until I follow her from the bus stop to Wal-Mart one night that I realize the extent of my obsession. I trail her through the brightly lit aisles with a blue basket looped on my arm, as she piles things into her cart in a hurry: a package of bologna, two liter bottles of Pepsi, a giant jar of pickles, and a bag of green apples.
Every day she eats her apple as she sits at the bus stop, thin slices in a plastic baggie that she pulls out of her purse. I walk past her on my way home from the Rag, studying the bag of apples beside her on the bench. Watching as she sits hunched over her cell phone, her thumbs darting across the screen.
Lyndee was with her boyfriend, Steve, the night Nevaeh went missing. They made dinner and stayed home to watch a DVD: macaroni and cheese—the Kraft kind—and Transformers.
The more I see Lyndee Anthony, the stranger I feel. I see her on her porch some nights when I walk home, drinking Mike’s Hard Lemonade with Steve, music pounding from the overly juiced stereo inside. I watch carefully for her grief, but it never comes. At least not for my eyes. But I can’t tell anyone, not even Judah. My mother had the same look about her—the deer in the headlights vulnerability. I buy a box of Gushers, like the ones Nevaeh used to eat on the bus, and take them to Judah’s house. We eat them on his porch as we watch the rain.
“I’ve never seen her cry,” I say about Lyndee.
“Everybody deals with their pain differently,” Judah says.
I suppose he’s right.
“But shouldn’t you cry? Just a little. Or at least look sad?”
He sucks the candy off his teeth and looks at me seriously.
“They found my tumor when I was five. I had to have surgery to remove it. The doctor did a shitty ass job and there was nerve damage.”
He runs his hand over his face, and suddenly the cocky joker is gone, and I can see all of his shadows. “God, the therapy … no little kid should ever have to be that sick. My mom was there all the time. Every day. They had to make her leave to sleep and shower. But, not once did I ever see her cry. That didn’t mean she wasn’t suffering.”
That’s the most Judah’s ever said about what put him in the wheelchair. It wasn’t a car accident like the kids at school had guessed. I remember him as a little boy. He used to run around the front yard naked, shrieking until Delaney would catch him from behind, and tickle him into a fit of laughter. Sometimes I used to see him working in the dirt with her, planting things.
Then one day he just stopped being in the yard. I never thought much about it until school started. He would have been in the same kindergarten class as me, except he never showed up on the first day of school, or the second, or the third. Then a few months later, when I was walking home from school, I saw the chair. It was on the porch, empty, but spoke volumes. Something had happened. Something. But what?
When I asked my mother, she said that he’d been sick. He had to go away for a while, and now he was crippled. I didn’t know what cripple was until I went to school the next day and asked my teacher, Mrs. Garret. Then the wheelchair made sense. Judah couldn’t use his legs anymore. I tried to imagine what it would be like. His house didn’t have stairs like mine, but how did he get in the bath? Get out? Who put his pants on in the morning if he couldn’t stand up to do it himself?
I imagine his mother does it for him, my mom said when I asked. I watched him really carefully from then on, not because I thought he was a freak like the other kids. Because I didn’t know how he could be so different and still always be smiling.
I finish my bag of Gushers and crumple the wrapper in my fist. How did I even end up here, on Judah’s porch? We’d never spoken a word to each other, and now, here I was every day.
“Hey,” he says.
“What?”
“You look different lately.”
I laugh a little. “Lately? As in the two months you’ve known me?”
“Awe, come on. We’ve lived on the same block since we were little. We might not have known each other’s names, but…”
“Different how?” I ask. My palms are sweating. I look like a murderer, that’s what. But what does he see? Can he see the blood on my hands?
“Like you don’t give a shit anymore,” he says.
I don’t.
“I remember watching you walk to school. Every day. First grade through twelfth. You reminded me of a rat.”
“Whaa?” I spin around, and he pretends to flinch like he’s afraid of me. He’s laughing when he says, “You scurried around like you were afraid of everything. Hiding behind the hood of your raincoat, sneaking looks at the world like you expected it to take your cheese.”
“It did take my cheese, fool.” I laugh.
“Well, you don’t do that anymore. You’re gangsta now, with your Groceries & Shit bag, and your blue Docs, and your defiant walk.”
“You’re dumb,” I say, though inwardly I wonder how right he is, and when exactly I stopped being a rat?
“I like this new look on you, Margo the lion,” he says.
What Judah doesn’t say is how much weight I’ve lost since I broke up with Little Debbie and her crew. Fat rat lost a few pounds. And I stopped chopping my hair off every time it grew past my chin. So, now it’s shoulder length, and it reminds me of dying grass—pokey and yellow.
I wonder if he saw those changes, and not just the ones that happened on the inside. The fact that my lips aren’t buried in the dough of my cheeks, or that I actually have long legs once the cottage cheese deposits melt away. Or maybe he’s one of those saintly people who only looks to the inside of others and doesn’t see their doughy arms and freckled double chins. He’s just a cripple kid, I think. Who cares what the poor, cripple kid thinks of you? But I do. Because pot-smoking, Judah Grant is the best human I’ve ever known, and I can’t even pinpoint why. I listen to Alanis Morissette on my headphones all night and pretend I don’t have a crush on that smiling fool.
“You listen to white girl music,” Sandy tells me the next day. I’m singing “Uninvited” as I empty garbage bags in the stock room. “And on top of it, old white girl music,” she says.
“I am a white girl,” I say, putting an ugly ass shirt into the ugly as
s shirt pile.
“Yeah, but you have to stay current and shit. Listen to some Miley Cyrus or somethin’. That bitch is a ‘Wrecking Ball’!” Sandy cracks up, and I frown. I don’t have a radio, car, or television. I use my mother’s old CD player and listen to my mother’s old CDs.
“And why you singing anyway? You in love or something?”
“Ugh, Sandy! Go away and manage something.”
“I’m managing you, girl,” she laughs. “You’re different lately. I like that.”
I stare at the wall after she walks away. Why does everyone keep saying that? And yet no one … NO ONE has said anything about the fact that I’m not a walking Honey Bun anymore.
I make it two more weeks, covering Lyndee Anthony’s shortcomings with Judah’s words. Everyone grieves differently.
But it’s her laughter that changes everything for me.
I no longer see her as Nevaeh’s mother, because, after all, Vola Fields was Mo’s mother, and that didn’t give her a minute of pause when she beat him. I see her instead as a possibility. Is there a possibility that she is tied to Nevaeh’s death? Her boyfriend? Her negligence? Her hands?
Nevaeh looked at me with years in her eyes. She had the young, fresh face of a child, the kind that should always be suntanned, and dimpled, and kissed, but instead her eyes held all the years of a seriously damaged adult. I hated the world for her. I wished someone had seen the years in my eyes when I was her age, and loved me for them. I hate that her father didn’t claim her, not even when she went missing, and then only when he could get something out of it. I hate that nothing can be done about the suffering of children, and that most of the world blocks out their suffering to cope with their own inability to help. The few who carry the burden, like social workers and teachers, become weary, burning out after only a few short years, forced to carry the weight that should be shared by a society. Children are vastly overlooked. Their importance underestimated by their size.
In my eighteen years I’ve heard the phrase children are resilient in passing, half a dozen times. But in books they tell you that a child’s personality is set by the time he is four years old. That gives parents a four-year window to mold and love accordingly. And thank God that my mother still loved me when I was four, that she only kept her distance later in my life, with the sum of who I was already set like a wobbly Jell-O mold. I can be shaken; I can have a mother reject me over and over, and still I remain someone who is accustomed to love, enough to still seek it out. I desire a deep connection because I have had a deep connection. Reject me, and I’ll look elsewhere. I’ll just cast less and less of my pearls before swine each time.
THE POLICE ARREST LYNDEE ANTHONY on December 27th. Delaney saw it all go down. She says that when they brought Lyndee out of the house—handcuffed and in a T-shirt with her daughter’s photo on it—her face was as peaceful as if they were escorting her to Sunday lunch. Her arrest sent the Bone into a rage. Lyndee had already lost her child, now the police were bringing murder charges against the bereaving mother. The Bone was sick of the persecution of the poor. Sick of not being seen, then being seen for the wrong thing.
Within hours of her arrest, someone had graffiti’d the side of the Wal-Mart that faces the highway with ‘Lyndee is innocint!’ I cringe when I see it. I have my doubts about her innocence, though no one else seems to. I remember what Knick Knack told me about the sleeping pills. And there’s something about her face when no one is watching. But to everyone else, she is a representation of the system trying to hurt you, and all of those who have been hurt rally behind her. Sometimes I wonder if half of her supporters even know what she is being accused of, or if they are just looking for a reason to be mad. Either way, T-shirts pop up all over the Bone. Green ones that say ‘Lyndee is Innocent!’ I am relieved that someone got the spelling right this time.
But you can’t convict a woman based on her facial expressions, and the police seem to have found evidence enough to arrest her. To keep up to date on the case, I buy a small television from the Rag and put it on the kitchen counter. It only gets three channels, but one of them is the news. I watch, like everyone else, as one news station then another picks up the story: Little girl murdered, her body burned and left in a field.
It makes us sick all over again, especially when the photos begin to emerge. The police are building a case against Lyndee, the news says. Their evidence is a footprint that matches Lyndee’s left in the mud near Nevaeh’s body. They found a sneaker in her closet with the same dirt crusted on its sole. The news has been showing a picture of the sneaker in an evidence bag. Different angles of the same shoe, so we know how important it is. It is purple and white, and I wonder if they are making a big deal about the shoe because it is all they have.
We are all on the edge of our seats, waiting. Lyndee’s boyfriend provides her with an alibi, as do two other people—their roommates—who saw the couple that night. They release Lyndee on insufficient evidence, and the Bone rejoices. She is innocint! And who could blame anyone for believing that with her sweet, childlike face. All across the nation, people make fun of Bone Harbor’s shit poor police work. The handling of the crime scene was a joke; they didn’t even bag the evidence correctly. The media focuses its attention for a little while on her boyfriend, Steve, who disappeared for a bit and now is back. But since his alibi is Lyndee, they come up empty-handed. This is a case with no evidence.
A little girl went missing on her way home from school, and was murdered, and all they have is a sneaker in a plastic evidence bag. I wonder if the rain had something to do with it—if it washed away something the police could have used.
One afternoon, when I have the day off, I walk to the crime scene. The eating house has been strangely quiet since my mother died. It only speaks when I am trying to sleep—groaning and heaving like it is displeased. Its silence is what really bothers me. So, I escape. Judah is with his father, and I have nothing to do. The day is still. Everything frozen in place without the mountain wind. I take the path through the woods, climbing over fallen trees, and rocks, stopping briefly to pick some blackberries that grow wild along the river. Even the animals are quiet today, I think as I listen for even a bird song in this incredible stillness. But, there are no birds singing, only the sound of my shallow breathing as I push through the undergrowth. When I arrive at the place where they found Nevaeh’s body, I am surprised to find the yellow police tape still stretched between the trees. The plants have been flattened, stomped down by too many boots. I can see the water from where I stand, peeking lazy from between the trees. I wonder if Nevaeh saw it before she died—if she was conscious and if it brought her peace, or became something ugly because of what was being done to her.
I cannot feel her in this place. I came here looking for her, hoping her presence would kick-start something in my heart. A decision. Now I feel cold and lonely, worse than before. There is a tree with broad, thick branches overlooking the area. I decide to climb it, throwing my leg over the lowest branch and pulling myself up. The bark digs into the exposed skin on my arms and legs, but I don’t care because there is something I want to see. I climb higher and higher without stopping. When the branches have thinned enough for me to know that my climb is becoming dangerous, I stop. I can see far into the woods. Most of the trees are below me. Over to the left, the mountains rise, snowcapped, framing the Bone in a wild beauty. I can see some houses on the hill; two of them have red roofs so bright they look like splashes of blood amidst the green. And there it is, what I was hoping to see. The little shack I found weeks ago. It’s tiny; you really have to know what you’re looking for to be able to spot it. It’s a straight shot from here—a place someone could stop if they were hauling a body around in the woods—especially if they were coming from town. I scramble down the branches, careless, and almost lose my footing and fall twenty feet to the ground. When my feet are on the forest floor, I take off running. I hear voices now—laughter. People are in the woods, probably a bunch of kids going
to see the crime scene. I flinch when I hear their loud swearing and the high-pitched screams of a girl as she calls out to her boyfriend to stop messing with her. I make a broad circle, hoping to steer clear of their path. I want to see the shed … the shed … the shed.
The door to the shed is open. Wide. I stand in between the half-unhinged door and forest, uncertain if I want to step inside. I could be disappointed. I could find everything I need. I step through the doorway and suddenly get the sense that someone is watching me. The inside is much the same as when I last left it—musty, faded. The box of garbage bags is still there … has it been moved? I can’t tell. Piles of leaves lay across the floor—more than before because the door has been left open. I search the corners, kick the leaves aside. There is nothing unusual. I wonder if the police came here when they were searching the woods after they found her body. There is nothing here, but I still get the feeling that there should be. I leave the shed, walk west toward the eating house. The moss is thick on the tree trunks, bright lime against the black bark. It’s because of that stark contrast that I see it. The pink among the green. I bend down to retrieve it, half-buried in the moss. A pink hair tie. One that I used to tie off the end of her braid that last day on the bus. I clutch it in my fist, my eyes burning from the tears. There you go, I think. You found what you were looking for.
I hope Judah comes back soon; when he’s gone I start having very bad thoughts.
JUDAH GOT A NEW WHEELCHAIR. One of those electronic things that move around with the press of a button.
“Someone donated it to the center, anonymously” he says, swiveling it in circles until I feel dizzy watching him. “I don’t like it, but the director looked like she was going to cry when she presented it to me. I feel like a lazy ass pushing a button to move.” I glance at his old chair, which looks mournfully abandoned on the lawn.
“Maybe you can lift weights,” I offer. “You can’t let your guns go; they’re a thing of beauty.”