And then I noticed his bracelet. Threads of purple and green, with tiny white beads. Exactly like Henry Barradale’s: the bracelet he’d worn when he was murdered; bracelet on which we’d focused our elaborate stories.
I felt both fascination and fear. I looked at my mother, but she wouldn’t catch my eye. I grew dimly aware of a small, rhythmic creaking sound, and I realized she’d started the tape recorder. Then she lifted her own hand to the dashboard, and quickly, like a striking snake, wrapped her fingers over his.
“You sure wear a lot of clothes,” she told him. “The weather hasn’t even gotten all that cold yet.”
“It’s my style.”
“And you haven’t even told us your name.”
“You haven’t told me yours.”
“I asked you first.”
The boy unfolded one side of his jacket to reveal an adhesive paper name tag stuck to his shirt. The tag had a blue border with the word OTIS stamped along the bottom. But nothing had been written inside the white square. “It says Otis because that’s the town I was just at,” the boy said. “A school music contest. We were supposed to write our names on these tags, but not me! Those music things are stupid anyway. Stand in a group and sing stupid songs, and there’s some asshole judging you. And I can’t sing worth a crap.”
She was nodding eagerly. “I couldn’t sing worth a crap when I was a kid, either.”
“That’s a lie,” I said. Sharp in my memory was our morning radio, years ago: Alice and I listening as our mother’s voice drifted from her six o’clock shower. “You’ve always had a wonderful voice.”
She shook her head and interrupted me. “I kinda like Otis as a name,” she told the boy. “What if we call you Otis?”
“Fine with me.”
“Want to know our names? He calls me Tired. And I call him Wired.” She paused, waiting for my conspiring smile. But I couldn’t; it felt as though she’d broken a precise, sweet promise.
The boy seemed to consider her words. The dimming sunlight outlined his oily hair and the flecks of blood along his nose. He gave a choppy, counterfeit laugh; the sound seemed to pacify my mother.
“This pickup truck makes you guys look badass,” he said in his corn-husk voice. “This pickup truck is pretty cool.”
“This rattletrap?” She grinned, pleased with the word. “Oh, it’s awful. I’d be lucky if somebody’d give me eight hundred bucks for it.”
“Wish I had eight hundred bucks.”
“Don’t we all?”
It seemed they were rehearsing an intricate, classified routine. She had taken his hand again, interlacing the fingers. I wanted him gone. I kept my eyes on the road but could sense them nodding and smiling beside me. The pickup passed a faded deer-crossing sign and, beyond that, another, signifying the turnoff for Sterling. By now the ditches were no longer burned. Again the world turned yellow and brown. My mother was chattering and the boy was laughing, but I wouldn’t buckle; I wouldn’t be their audience.
She told the boy to look into her purse. He obeyed, perhaps hoping she would give him money. Instead he found more of her photographs, responses from our ads and pictures from newspapers, faces she hadn’t yet pinned to the walls. Otis leafed through them, picking one out and holding it toward the light—a girl’s school snapshot, her braces and polka-dot blouse—but my mother only shook her head.
“Oh, I didn’t mean those. I meant for you to get my pills.”
“What kind of pills?”
“Life or death pills.” She waited for the words to penetrate. “If I don’t take the right pills at the right times, I won’t be around much longer.”
He brought forth the pills and handed them to her. The headache darkened behind my eyes: it was the first time I’d heard her utter words like these. I had to protest, or I knew she’d continue, as she’d done that impetuous day with Mr. Wyler. “But that’s not true at all,” I said. “Now let’s be quiet, and let’s just take him home.”
The road through Sterling ran parallel to a silty river; we passed streets lined with trimmed hedges and evergreens, the solemn Methodist church, the box-shaped houses white as butcher paper. The town was nearly identical to Haven—or Partridge, I thought, or so many other neighboring towns.
Perhaps, beyond one of those doors, the boy’s parents sat waiting. Soon we’ll be free of him. Yet even as I thought this, I knew he wouldn’t reveal the correct house. I knew she didn’t want to let him go.
“Living here’s like living in hell,” said Otis.
I saw this as my chance, and I tried to take control. “We feel bad for you. We really do. But you have to tell us which house is yours.”
“Not yet,” she said. “Let’s drive around awhile.”
Otis searched his coat pocket and found a stick of the peppermint gum; she cupped her hand, dainty as a soap dish, and he dropped it in her palm. “Yeah,” he said, smirking at me. “Let’s drive around.”
“I will not ‘drive around.’ We really should head back home.”
But Otis continued scrabbling through his pockets. Now I could see that one side of his neck was discolored, a purplish blue above the collarbone. I realized he’d been in a fight: the bruise, the rim of blood in his nose. A sudden fear surged high into my throat. I pictured him drawing a knife; turning on my mother and me.
Instead he pulled an apple from the pocket. He held it in his palm, astonishingly red; he brought it against his cheek, relishing its sleek chill. With a slow, comical blink, he swallowed his gum. Then he put the apple to his mouth and bit. When I didn’t hear it crunch, I realized it wasn’t an apple but a soft, ripe tomato. Otis kept it against his mouth, sucking its juice in a ruby rush, watching the road ahead as he ate.
My mother smiled and chewed the gum, waiting until his tomato was nearly gone. “I bet you stole that, didn’t you?” she asked.
“They’re my favorite vegetable. Two more in my pockets for later.”
“That’s funny,” she said, “because what you’re eating isn’t a vegetable at all. The tomato is a fruit. Anyone will tell you that.”
“What makes you think I stole them?” His stole came out stold, his voice cracking on the vowel, the alto boy lingering in the tenor man.
“We can see straight through you,” she said.
The boy canted his head and let forth a laugh, muscles shuddering in his bruised throat. He seemed so vibrant and alive: the sort of vibrant that made me jealous; the sort I wanted, once again, to be. I knew Henry Barradale had been this way once. Maybe Henry, too, had scribbled shapes on his high-tops; maybe five-pointed stars on his wrists. My mother started laughing too, her ardor fusing with his, and, as I looked away, I pictured Henry at his funeral, the casket draped with roses and the football bouquet. Henry in the earth, the calluses bleaching on his hands, his heart drained and sealed, yet still fire-red as a boxing glove.
With a final bite Otis finished the tomato. Above us, the rows of lamps began flickering on. I turned onto another street, recognizing at once that we’d already driven the length of it. I had no patience left. “Tell me which house is yours,” I said, even louder than before.
But neither the boy nor my mother was listening. He reexamined the photos with his grimy fingers. She put her hand there too, and said, “We know a lot about these people. These missing people. And I know what it’s like to disappear.”
Now I could sense where she was leading: once again, the old, misty story. “You’re both acting stupid,” I said.
“When I was a girl, someone scooped me up in their car and took me away. Took me right out of my everyday, little-girl life.”
“Enough,” I said. “Just stop.”
“There was a boy close to your age. A boy who looked a lot like you.”
I braked abruptly in the middle of the crumbling street. “This is nonsense,” I said. “I won’t let you tell these stories again.”
“Sometimes you get lucky,” she continued in her teasing voice, “and someone steals you away
and treats you like their little princess or prince. But not everyone winds up like that. Others wind up like that boy Henry.”
“Tell us where your house is,” I yelled at Otis. “Now.”
“Aw, I’ll tell you when I’m good and ready.”
“You’ll tell us right now.”
I was shouting, but my mother shouted louder. “You should be careful! You never know what might happen. Here one minute and gone the next!”
He had taken her hand; he could see what it did to me. The laughter, the sly affinity, the bracelet on his skinny wrist: it seemed I was the target of their elaborate, calculated trick. Frantically, I looked for a place to push him out of the truck. Ahead on the horizon, along an arcade of sugar maples, was the entrance to a trailer court. I could see the torn shingles and dented siding; the three long rows of mailboxes.
Yet even as I sped toward our departure spot, I could sense them crafting their next sentences, following through with their act. “I’m too smart to disappear,” he said. “Besides, you guys wouldn’t hurt me. You don’t have the guts.”
Now she spoke directly to me. “It’s like he’s daring us to do it.”
We’d nearly reached the trailer court, but I couldn’t hear another word. I stomped on the brake, opened my door, and stepped out to the leaf-littered street. “We’re leaving you here,” I said. The boy’s mouth twisted in mock fury and he defiantly crossed his arms. But I stopped the gesture, reaching in to grab his elbow, pulling him outside. My temper caught him off guard. The after-drug fatigue sent creases of pain along my chest, but as he started striking back, I only pulled him harder, fighting him farther from the truck. He scuffled and pawed like a cornered cat. I felt his fingernails slashing the length of my arm. “Stop it,” I heard my mother say. “It’s not supposed to happen like this.” I shoved him away and turned to her, and as I turned, I saw his arm yank back and quickly forward. I tried to deflect, but his fist slammed the side of my head. “Stop it,” my mother repeated. The boy wound his arm to strike me again, but this time seemed to falter or trip. I saw my chance and rushed back through the open door. I slammed it, locked it, and cranked the window.
“He hit me,” I said, breathing hard. “He hit me.”
“Don’t let him go,” she said. “This isn’t the way we planned.”
He righted himself, and in a convulsive rush came leaping toward the truck, thrusting his shoulders and chest against the door. In the baggy clothes his body was puny and wet with sweat, the bones and skin of a drowning boy. “Don’t drop me here!” he screamed, his breath fogging the glass. “I don’t really live here!”
“We’re leaving,” I said.
He drove his fist against the window. “You’re supposed to take me with you!”
The twilight coiled around him but his face was shining through the glass. In the brake lights, his skin was tinted scarlet. I could see the rage flickering darkly in his eyes, flaring his defiant nostrils. And beneath the rage, his panic, so alarming and earnest and pure.
“You can’t leave me here,” he whined. “My father beats me. And my mother. I think he’s going to kill us. I have scars all over my back and he’s going to shoot me with one of his guns.”
“All lies,” I said.
Otis continued yelling, but I was done with him. I shifted into drive, and the truck surged forward. In the rearview, he drove his fist against his hipbone. He stamped his foot. Just then he seemed much younger than before; I recalled tantrums I’d once thrown, too, and knew that Otis was just a troubled, scab-elbowed boy who surely thrived on swindles and shattered glass, on playing hooky and telling lies.
As I watched his reflection, he jerked both hands from his jacket pockets. I expected to see some obscene adolescent gesture but instead saw the two tomatoes, his ammunition. He raised both arms above his head, bending the elbows as though hurling a heavy weight. Both tomatoes came whizzing toward the truck. His aim was sure as an all-star’s; I heard the vacant splutch, the first and then the second, as they struck.
At the noise, I instantly braked. The boy turned and took off running. I saw his skinny, grinding legs and the flail of his arm, and in that moment I knew.
I waited to assure he wouldn’t return. Then I glared across the seat at her. “That was him, wasn’t it?”
She turned toward me, her face tensed with frustration. At first she refused to answer.
“The candy bars. That was him…the man on our porch.”
“Yes,” she finally said.
I could only stare, muted and confused. I watched her jaw slowly grind over the gum. Eventually I looked back to the road and drove, letting the quiet settle around us, between us, into the boy’s absence. We left Sterling, its houses vanishing, its street lamps dimming in the violet distance. The fight had quickened my heartbeat; I could feel the rise of nausea, the migraine and constricted throat, all the splintery familiarities of an especially bad comedown. Perhaps it’s my mind, not hers, I thought. Perhaps it’s mine that needs mending.
Above the horizon, the sky was slashed with vapor trails from the early-evening planes. In the setting sun, they slowly changed from white to pink. My mother put the photographs back into her purse. Her lip was trembling; she blinked with a pained, unsteady stress. I knew that whatever I could say would be the wrong thing, the terrible thing. When I looked again, the sun was gone, and the slashes of pink had darkened to red, as though some angel, buried alive in the sky, had frantically scratched and bloodied its nails, wanting out.
At last I gave in, but I couldn’t bridle my anger. “Mom, what is wrong with you? You’re acting crazy.” I could feel the debris of the meth, rising inside me, pushing forth the awful words. “I did not come all this way back home to play ridiculous games. I didn’t come back to be embarrassed over and over by you.”
“Please don’t yell at me,” she said. “Please don’t be mad.” Her voice was wounded and soft; the please made everything worse. In the shadows, she seemed younger, almost beautiful. A yellow leaf had fallen in my mother’s hair.
“I don’t know what you’re doing,” I said. “But you’re scaring me.”
“Let’s wait and talk about this at home. First thing, after we get home and get comfortable. I was planning to tell you soon anyway.”
The smell of him surrounded us. I thought of the candy on the porch; the piston of his arm as he sprinted away. I thought of the way he looked at her, and I thought of their linked hands. It seemed the boy knew secrets I didn’t, and I swallowed hard: jealousy, its rotten olive taste. “He’s a liar,” I said. “He probably doesn’t even have a father. He’s a liar, and he’d been in a fight, and he probably would have stolen from us if we had anything to steal.”
“But he looks so much like you when you were that age. Almost exactly like you.”
We neared the final road toward Haven, lulled by the propulsive rumble of the Ford. Here and there the darkness was stung by firefly light. I rolled my window down and heard cicadas in the branches of trees, crankily chewing the air, signaling autumn’s end. We passed a farmhouse with a partially collapsed barn; on its broken roof was a wind-bunched flag, unknotting its stripes and stars. Higher up, the blue had smudged to black, the stars blocked by clouds but still there, I knew, just beyond our sight.
“Mom, are you okay?” I asked, almost whispering. “Are we okay?”
She looked at me in silence. I turned the evening in my head, picking apart our shames and mistakes. I looked to the back window, the rectangle of glass where his tomatoes had struck. The red wounds stayed stunningly in place, two successful blasts of his target, and, as we drove the last miles, I thought of how I’d someday write about this, perhaps for Pen & Ink, perhaps for something else. I thought of silly, showy descriptions: the tomatoes like double-barreled bullets of blood, like ketchupy stars, like the twin gouged eyes of some irascible beast.
But then I realized the futility: they were only tomatoes, nothing less or more. All the images in my head, the possib
le ways I’d describe them, no longer mattered. The darkness softened our world, and I steered the pickup from the highway, toward the turnoff for home. Already I could sense the Haven streets, slate-gray as bars on a jailhouse cell. Already I could picture the mothers and fathers, safe with all their safe children, behind dusty windows, refueling fires, dimming lamps. The murmuring televisions, the clattering mismatched silverware, the shuffling chairs.
FIVE
I LED HER to the couch, gave her a glass of iced tea, and told her to wait. I washed my face and hands, the dried scratches of blood from my arms. I swallowed half a sleeping pill to calm the shock of all they’d said and done. In the basement room, as expected, I found her sewing kit; among the loops of embroidery floss were the colors she’d used for his bracelet, the precise shades of purple and green. I even found a few leftover egg-shaped beads.
When I brought the evidence back upstairs, she had switched off the lamp, sitting now within the television’s glow. She’d replaced her wig with a blue-and-white scarf, and she’d taken his peppermint gum from her mouth. When she looked at me, she seemed both hungry and cold.
“Who is he?” I asked. “How do you know him?”
“He’s just a boy I met.”
“Right before we left today, you said you were calling Dolores. But you didn’t, did you? You called that boy.”
She put the glass to her lips, swallowed, and dabbed at her mouth with the sweatshirt sleeve. I waited for her to answer, but she kept silent.