Heading to my first-period creative writing class, it struck me that anyone who’d construct a high school timetable in such a way as to make anything “creative” come first thing in the morning either had no understanding of high school students or was possessed of a wicked sense of humor. I had mentioned this to Rolly, whose response was, “That’s why they call it creative. You have to be, to find a way to get kids to care that early in the day. If anyone can do it, Terry, you can.”
There were twenty-one bodies in the room as I walked in, about half of them sprawled across their desks as if during the night someone had surgically removed their spines. I set down my coffee and let my satchel hit the desk with a fwump. That got their attention, because they knew what had to be inside.
At the back of the room, seventeen-year-old Jane Scavullo was sitting so low in her desk I almost couldn’t see the bandage on her chin.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ve marked your stories, and there’s some good stuff here. Some of you even managed to go entire paragraphs without using the word ‘fuck.’”
A couple of snickers.
“Can’t you get fired for saying that?” asked a kid named Bruno sitting over by the window. There were white wires running down from his ears and disappearing into his jacket.
“I sure fucking hope so,” I said. I pointed to my own ears. “Bruno, can you lose those for now?”
Bruno pulled out the earbuds.
I riffled through the pile of papers, most done on computer, a few handwritten, and pulled out one.
“Okay, you know how I talked about how you don’t necessarily have to write about people shooting each other or nuclear terrorists or aliens bursting out of people’s chests for something to be interesting? How you can find stories in the most mundane of environments?”
A hand up. Bruno. “Mun-who?”
“Mundane. Ordinary.”
“They why didn’t you say ‘ordinary’? Why you have to use a fancy word for ‘ordinary’ when an ordinary word would do?”
I smiled. “Put those things back in your ears.”
“No no, I might miss something mun-dane if I do.”
“Let me read a bit of this,” I said, holding out the paper. I could see Jane’s head rise a notch. Maybe she recognized the lined paper, how the handwritten sheets had a different look to them than paper pumped out of a laser printer.
“‘Her father—at least the guy who’d been sleeping with her mother long enough to think he should be called that—takes a carton of eggs out of the fridge, breaks open two of them, one-handed, into a bowl. There’s bacon already sizzling in a pan, and when she walks into the room he tips his head, like he’s telling her to sit down at the kitchen table. He asks how she likes her eggs and she says she doesn’t care because she doesn’t know what else to say because no one’s ever asked her before how she likes eggs. All her mom’s ever made her that’s even remotely egg-like is an Eggo waffle out of a toaster. She figures whatever way this guy makes them, there’s a pretty good chance they’ll be better than a goddamn Eggo.’”
I stopped reading and looked up. “Comments?”
A boy behind Bruno said, “I like my eggs runny.”
A girl on the opposite side of the room said, “I like it. You want to know what this guy is like, like, if he cares about her breakfast, maybe he’s not an asshole. All the guys my mom hooks up with are assholes.”
“Maybe the guy’s making her breakfast because he wants to do her and her mother,” Bruno said.
Laughter.
An hour later, as they filed out, I said, “Jane.” She sidled over to my desk reluctantly. “You pissed?” I said.
She shrugged, ran her hand over the bandage, making me notice it by trying to keep me from noticing it.
“It was good. That’s why I read it.”
Another shrug.
“I hear you’re flirting with a suspension.”
“That bitch started it,” Jane said.
“You’re a good writer,” I said. “That other story you did, I submitted it to the library’s short story contest, the one they have for students.”
Jane’s eyes did a little dance.
“Some of your stuff, it reminds me a bit of Oates,” I said. “You ever read Joyce Carol Oates?”
Jane shook her head.
“Try Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang,” I said. “Our library probably doesn’t have it. Bad words. But you could find it at the Milford Library.”
“We done?” she asked.
I nodded, and she headed out the door.
I found Rolly in his office, sitting at his computer, staring at something on the monitor. He pointed at the screen. “They want more testing. Pretty soon, we won’t have any time to teach them anything. We’ll just test them from the moment they get here to the moment they go home.”
“What’s that kid’s story?” I asked. He needed to be reminded who I was talking about.
“Jane Scavullo, yeah, shame about her,” he said. “I don’t even think we have a current address for her. The last one we have for her mother has to be a couple of years old, I think. Moved in with some new guy, brought her daughter along, too.”
“The fight aside,” I said, “I think she’s actually been a bit better the last few months. Not quite as much trouble, a little less surly. Maybe this new guy, maybe he’s actually been an improvement.”
Rolly shrugged. He opened up a Girl Scout cookie box on his desk. “Want one?” he asked, holding the box out to me.
I took a vanilla.
“It’s all wearing me down,” Rolly said. “It’s not like it was when I started. You know what I found out behind the school the other day? Not just beer bottles—if only—but crack pipes and, you won’t believe this, a gun. Under the bushes, like it had fallen out of someone’s pocket, or maybe he was hiding it there.”
I shrugged. This wasn’t exactly new.
“How you doin’ anyway?” Rolly asked. “You look, I don’t know, off today. You okay?”
“Maybe a bit,” I said. “Home stuff. Cyn’s having a hard time giving Grace any kind of taste of freedom.”
“She still looking for asteroids?” he said. Rolly had been over to the house with his wife, Millicent, a few times and loved talking with Grace. She’d shown him her telescope. “Smart kid. Must get that from her mother.”
“I know why she does it. I mean, if I’d had the kind of life Cyn’s had, maybe I’d hold on to things a bit tight, too, but shit, I don’t know. She says there’s a car.”
“A car?”
“A brown car. It’s been by a couple of times when she’s been walking Grace to school.”
“Has anything happened?”
“No. A couple months ago, it was a green SUV. Last year, there was a week or so there, Cyn said there was some guy with a beard on the corner, three days in one week, looked at them funny.”
Rolly took another bite of cookie. “Maybe, lately, it’s the TV show.”
“I think that’s part of it. Plus this is twenty-five years since her family vanished. It’s taking a bit of a toll on her.”
“I should talk to her,” Rolly said. “Time to hit the beach.” In the years after her family’s disappearance, Rolly would occasionally take Cynthia off Tess’s hands for a while. They’d get an ice cream at the Carvel at Bridgeport Avenue and Clark Street, then stroll the shore of Long Island Sound, sometimes talking, sometimes not.
“That might be a good idea,” I said. “And we’re seeing this psychiatrist, this woman, you know, once in a while, to talk about things. Dr. Kinzler. Naomi Kinzler.”
“How’s that going?”
I shrugged, then said, “What do you think happened, Rolly?”
“How many times you asked me this, Terry?”
“I just wish this could end for Cyn, that she could get some sort of answers. I think that’s what she thought the TV show would do.” I paused. “The thing is, you knew Clayton. You went fishing with him. You had a handle on the type of person he was.
”
“And Patricia.”
“They seem like the types to just walk out on their daughter?”
“No. My guess is, what I’ve always believed in my heart, is that they were murdered. You know, like I told the show, a serial killer or something.”
I nodded slowly in agreement, although the police had never put much stock in that theory. There was nothing about the disappearance of Cynthia’s family that was consistent with anything else they had on their books. “Here’s the thing,” I said. “If some kind of serial killer did come to their house, took them away, and killed them, why not Cynthia? Why did he leave her behind?”
Rolly had no answer for me. “Can I ask you something?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said.
“Why do you think our fabulously engineered gym teacher would put a note in your box, then go back a minute later and take it out again?”
“What?”
“Just remember, Terry, you’re a married man.”
6
After Rolly finished telling me what he had observed while sitting on the far side of the staff room, supposedly reading a newspaper, he had some good news for me. Sylvia, the theater arts teacher, was doing an early morning rehearsal the following day for the school’s big annual production, which this year was Damn Yankees. Half the kids from my creative writing class were involved, so my first-period class was effectively wiped out. With that many missing, those who were still obliged to show up would not.
So the next morning, as Grace picked at her toast and jam, I said, “Guess who’s walking you to school today?”
Her face lit up. “You are? Really?”
“Yeah. I already told your mom. I don’t have to be in first thing today, so it’s okay.”
“Are you really going to walk with me, like, right next to me?”
I could hear Cynthia coming down the stairs, so I put an index finger to my lips and Grace immediately went quiet.
“So, Pumpkin, your dad’s walking you today,” she said. Pumpkin. It had been Cynthia’s own mother’s pet name for her. “That okay with you?”
“Sure!”
Cynthia raised an eyebrow. “Well, I see. You don’t like my company.”
“Mom,” said Grace.
Her mother smiled. If she was actually offended, she showed no signs of it. Grace, less sure than I, backtracked. “It’s just fun to walk with Dad for a change.”
“What are you looking at?” Cynthia asked me. I had the newspaper open to the real estate ads. Once a week the paper had a special section filled with houses for sale.
“Oh, nothing.”
“No, what? You thinking of moving?”
“I don’t want to move,” Grace said.
“Nobody’s moving,” I said. “Just, sometimes, I think we could use a place with a little more space.”
“How could we get a place with more space—hey, that rhymes—without moving?” Grace asked.
“Okay,” I said. “So we’d have to move to get more space.”
“Unless we added on,” Cynthia said.
“Oh!” Grace said, overcome with a brain wave. “We could build an observatory!”
Cynthia let loose with a laugh, then said, “I was thinking more along the lines of another bathroom.”
“No, no,” Grace said, not giving up yet. “You could make a room with a hole in the ceiling so you could see the stars when it was dark out and I could get a bigger telescope to look straight up instead of out the window, which totally sucks.”
“Don’t say ‘sucks,’” Cynthia said, but she was smiling.
“Okay,” she said. “Did I commit a fox pass?”
Around our house, that was the deliberately dumb pronunciation of faux pas. It had been an in-joke between Cynthia and me for so long, Grace had genuinely come to believe this was how you described a social misstep.
“No, honey, that’s not a fox pass,” I said. “That’s just a word we don’t want to hear.”
Switching gears, Grace asked, “Where’s my note?”
“What note?” her mother asked.
“About the trip,” she said. “You were supposed to do a note.”
“Honey, you never said anything about any note for any trip,” Cynthia said. “You can’t spring these things on us at the last minute.”
“What’s it for?” I asked.
“We’re supposed to visit the fire station today, and we can’t go if we don’t have a note giving us permission.”
“Why didn’t you tell us about this soon—”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I’ll bang off a note.”
I ran upstairs to what would be our third bedroom, but was a combined sewing room and office. Tucked into the corner was a desk where Cynthia and I shared a computer and I did my marking and lesson planning. Also sitting on the desk was my old Royal typewriter from university days, which I still used for short notes since my handwriting is terrible, and I find it easier to roll a piece of paper into a typewriter than turn on the computer, open up Word, create and write a document, print it out, etc.
So I typed a short note to Grace’s teacher giving our daughter permission to leave school grounds to tour the fire station. I only hoped the fact that the “e” key looked more like a “c” didn’t create any confusion, especially when my daughter’s name came out looking like “Gracc.”
I came back downstairs and handed Grace the note, folded, and told her to tuck it into her backpack so she wouldn’t lose it.
At the door, Cynthia said to me, “Make sure you see her go into the building.” Grace, out of earshot, was in the driveway, twirling around like a ballerina on crack.
“What if they play outside for a while first?” I said. “They see some guy like me loitering around the schoolyard, aren’t they going to call the cops?”
“If I saw you out there, I’d arrest you in a minute,” Cynthia said. “Just get her to the schoolyard then. That’s all.” She pulled me closer to her. “So when exactly do you have to be to school?”
“Not till start of second period.”
“So you’ve got almost an hour,” she said, and she gave me a look that I did not get to see quite as often as I like.
“Yes,” I said very evenly. “You are correct, Mrs. Archer. Did you have something in mind?”
“Perhaps I do, Mr. Archer.” Cynthia gave me a smile and kissed me very lightly on the lips.
“Won’t Grace seem suspicious when I tell her we have to run the whole way to school?”
“Just go,” she said, and ushered me out the door.
“So what’s the plan?” Grace asked as we started off down the sidewalk, next to each other.
“Plan?” I said. “There’s no plan.”
“I mean, how far are you going to walk me?”
“I thought I’d go right in with you, maybe sit in class with you for an hour or so.”
“Dad, don’t joke.”
“Who says I’m joking? I’d like to sit in class with you. See if you’re doing your work properly.”
“You wouldn’t even fit in the desk,” Grace pointed out.
“I could sit on top of it,” I said. “I’m not particular.”
“Mom seemed kind of happy today,” Grace said.
“Of course she did,” I said. “Mom’s happy lots of times.” Grace gave me a look to suggest that I was not being totally honest here. “Your mom has a lot on her mind these days. This hasn’t been an easy time for her.”
“Because it’s been twenty-five years,” Grace said. Just like that.
“Yeah,” I said.
“And because of the TV show,” she said. “I don’t see why you guys won’t let me see it. You taped it, right?”
“Your mother doesn’t want to upset you,” I said. “About the things that happened to her.”
“One of my friends taped it,” Grace said quietly. “I’ve sort of already seen it, you know.” A kind of “so there” tone in her voice.
“How d
id you see it?” I asked. Cynthia kept Grace on such a short leash, taking her to and from school, supervising playdates. Had Grace smuggled home a tape, watched it with the volume down while we were up in the study?
“I went to her house at lunch,” Grace said.
Even when they were eight, you couldn’t keep a lid on things. Five years and she’d be a teenager. Jesus.
“Whoever let you see it shouldn’t have,” I said.
“I thought the cop was mean,” she said.
“What cop? What are you talking about?”
“The one on the show? He lives in a trailer? One of those shiny ones? Who said it was weird that Mom was the only one left? I could tell what he was hinting. He was hinting that Mom did it. That she killed everybody.”
“Yeah, well, he was an asshole.”
Grace whipped her head around and looked at me. “Fox pass,” she said.
“Just swearing isn’t a fox pass,” I said, shaking my head, not wanting to get into it.
“Did Mom like her brother? Todd?”
“Yes. She loved him. She had fights with him, just like lots of brother and sisters do, but she loved him. And she didn’t kill him or her mother or her father, and I’m sorry you saw that show and heard that asshole—yes, asshole—detective suggest such a thing.” I paused. “Are you going to tell your mother that you saw the show?”
Grace, still a bit dumbstruck by my shameless use of a bad word, shook her head no. “I think she’d freak out.”
That was probably true, but I didn’t want to say so. “Well, maybe you should talk to her about it sometime, when everyone’s having a good day.”
“Today’s going to be good,” Grace said. “I didn’t see any asteroids last night, so we should be okay at least until tonight.”
“Good to know.”
“You should probably stop walking with me now,” Grace said. Up ahead, I saw some schoolkids about her age, maybe even her friends. More kids were funneling onto our street from side streets. The school was visible three blocks up.
“We’re getting close,” Grace said. “You can watch me from here.”
“Okay,” I said. “Here’s what we’re going to do. You start pulling ahead of me. I’ll do my old man walk. Like Tim Conway.”