Thunderstruck & Other Stories Page 2

  He would do anything for her. He knows that right away, too. You have to, to get your wish granted.

  He has cobwebs in his hair but she doesn’t smell them. She doesn’t smell the cigarette smoke or the fibers off the wall-to-wall carpet or the must that clings to him from the trunk, the usual immigrant disappointments, the rusty cut on his ankle that needs medical attention. What she smells is little-kid sweat touched with sweet bland tomato sauce. Ketchup, canned spaghetti, maybe.

  “Come in,” she says. “I’ll find my purse.”

  Once he’s inside she doesn’t know what to do. She sits him at the kitchen table and offers him a plate of pebbly brown cookies. He eats one. He would rather something chocolate and store-bought, but his mother likes cookies like this, studded with sesame seeds, and he knows that eating them is a good deed. She hooks a cobweb out of his hair with one finger. He picks up another cookie and rubs the side of his cheek with the back of one wrist.

  “You need a bath,” she says.

  “OK,” he answers.

  Now, Joyce. You can’t just bathe someone else’s child. You can’t invite a strange boy into your house and bring him upstairs and say, “Chop chop. Off with your clothes. Into your bath.”

  The bathroom is yellow and pink. Johnny Mackers understands his new obedience as a kind of sanitary bewitching. He is never naked in front of his mother like this: his mother likes to pinch. “Just a little!” she’ll say, and she’ll pinch him on his knee and stomach and everywhere. Santos is right, their mother loves Johnny best. His hatred of kisses and hugs has turned her into a pinching tickler, a sneak thief. “Just a little little!” she’ll say, when she sees any pinch-able part of him.

  “Bubbles?” Joyce asks, and he nods. But there’s no bubble bath. Instead she pours the entire bottle of shampoo into the tub.

  So it’s true, what the neighborhood kids say. She does kidnap children.

  He’s not circumcised. He looks like an Italian sculpture from a dream, a polychrome putto from the corner of a church. The tub is rotten, pink, with a sliding glass door that looks composed of a million thumbprints. Soon the bubbles rise up like shrugging, foamy shoulders, cleft where the water from the faucet pours in.

  The almond soap is as cracked as an old tooth. The boy steps over the tub edge. “Careful,” Joyce says, as he puts his hand on the shower door runners. When Missy was born, Joyce was relieved: she loved her husband and son but there was, she thought, something different about a girl. Maybe it was scientific, those as-yet unused girl organs speaking to their authorial organs, transmitting information as though by radio. A strange little boy is easier to love than a strange little girl. The water slicking down his dirty hair reveals the angle and size of his ears. She soaps them and thinks of Missy in the tub, the fine long hair knotted at the nape, the big ears, the crescent shape where they attached to her head. The arch at the base of her skull.

  “Your ears are very small,” she says.

  “I know,” he answers.

  She soaps the shoulder blades that slide beneath the boy’s dark skin and is amazed to see that he’s basically intact, well-fed, maybe even well-loved.

  (Of course he is. Even now his mother is calling his name on the next block. Soon she’ll phone the police.)

  “What’s your name?” Joyce asks.

  He says, “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know your name?”

  He shrugs. He looks at his foam-filled hands. Then he says, “Johnny.”

  “What’s your last name?”

  “Lion,” he says. He drops his face in the bubbly bath water, plunges his head down, and blubs.

  When he comes up she says, smiling, “Your clothes are filthy. You’re going to need clean ones. Where were you?”

  “Trunk.”

  “Of a car?”

  “Trunk like a suitcase,” he answers. He pounds the sliding glass shower door, bored with questioning.

  It’s after school. Mrs. Mackers, the owlish pincher, is back on Winter Terrace, asking the neighborhood kids if they’ve seen Johnny, the little boy, the little boy on the trike. She doesn’t know where Santos is, either, but Santos is old enough to take care of himself (though she’s wrong in thinking this—Santos even now is in terrible trouble, Santos, miles away, is calling for her). The last teenage boy she asks is so freckled she feels sorry for him, a pause in her panic.

  No, Gerry Goodby hasn’t seen a little kid.

  He’s looking up at Missy’s window; he always looks at it when he comes home, shouldering his lacrosse stick like a rifle. He didn’t remember to pull down the blinds all the way before closing the room up and it always bothers him. You can see the edge of the dresser that overlaps the window frame, a darkened rainbow sticker, and just the snout-end of an enormous rocking horse named Blaze who used to say six different sentences when you pulled a cord in his neck. Blaze had been Gerry’s horse first. It seemed unfair he had to disappear like that. Someday, Gerry knows, they’ll have to sell the house, and the new owners will find the tomb of a six-year-old girl pharaoh. It’s as though they’ve walled in Missy instead of burying her in the cemetery, as though (as in a ghost story) he will someday see her face looking back out at him, mouthing, Why? Gerry, in his head, always answers, It’s not your fault, you didn’t know how dangerous you were.

  But this time he sees something appearing, then disappearing, then appearing again: the rocking horse showing its profile, one dark carved eye over and over.

  Not only that: the front door is open.

  The barrier cloth has been slit from top to bottom. Beyond it is the old door with the brassy doorknob still bright from all its years in the dark. Beyond the door is Missy’s room.

  “Hello,” says his mother. She’s sitting on the bed, smoothing a pair of light yellow overalls on her lap. There’s a whole outfit set out next to her: the Lollipop brand underpants Missy had once written a song about, a navy turtleneck, an undershirt with a tiny rosebud at the sternum. The dust is everywhere in the room. It’s a strange sort of dust, soot and old house, nothing human. Even so, compared to the rest of the house, this room is Oz. The comforter is pink gingham. The walls are pink with darker pink trim. Dolls of all nations lie along one wall, as though rubble from an earthquake has just been lifted from them. The 50-50 bedclothes are abrasive just to look at. He inhales. Nothing of Missy’s fruit-flavored scent is left.

  But his mother doesn’t seem to notice. She has—he’s heard this expression but never seen it—roses in her cheeks. “Look,” she says, and points.

  A boy. He’s fallen through the chimney or he’s a forgotten toy of Missy’s come to life. What else can explain him here, brown and naked next to the rocking horse he’s just dismounted, a gray towel turbaned around his head. He’s pulling two-handed at the cord that works Blaze’s voice box, but Blaze has had a stroke and can’t speak, he just groans apologetically before the boy interrupts him with another tug. Through the half-drawn shades the police lights color Winter Terrace: blue, less blue, blue again.

  Outside, the neighborhood kids sit on the sidewalk, their feet in the gutter, daring the cops to tell them to move along. The little smoking kid, the one who likes to swear, is missing. The kids are working on their story. When did you last see him? a policeman asks, but the fact is the woman, who is not crying yet, will get her boy back. That is, she’ll get one of her boys back: the one she hasn’t missed yet is missing for good, forever, and by tomorrow morning he will be his mother’s favorite, and by tomorrow afternoon the police will have questioned everyone on the street, and the neighborhood kids will pretend that they remember Santos, though they can’t even make sense of his name. He will pass into legend, too.

  Inside Missy Goodby’s room, Gerry obeys his mother: he looks at the little boy. He wonders how to sneak him back home. He wonders how to keep him forever.

  Property

  The ad should have read: For rent, six-room hovel. Filled Mrs. Butterworth’s bottle in living room, sandy s
heets throughout, lingering smell.

  Or: Wanted: gullible tenant for small house, must possess appreciation for chipped pottery, mid-1960s abstract silk-screened canvases, mouse-nibbled books on Georgia O’Keeffe.

  Or: Available June: shithole.

  Instead, the posting on the college website called the house at 55 Bayberry Street old and characterful and sunny, furnished, charming, on a quiet street not far from the college and not far from the ocean. Large porch; separate artist’s studio. Just right for the young married couple, then: Stony Badower and Pamela Graff, he thirty-nine, redheaded, pot-bellied, long-limbed, and beaky, a rare and possibly extinct bird; she blond and soft and hotheaded and German and sentimental. She looked like the plump-cheeked naughty heroine of a German children’s book who’d just sawed off her own braids with a knife, looking for the next knifeable place. Her expression dared you to teach her a lesson. Like many sentimentalists, she was estranged from her family. Stony had never met them.

  “America,” she said that month. “All right. Your turn. Show me America.” For the three years of their courtship and marriage they’d moved every few months. Berlin, Paris, Galway, near Odense, near Edinburgh, Rome, and now a converted stone barn in Normandy that on cold days smelled of cow pies and on hot days like the lost crayons of tourist children. Soon enough it would be summer, and the barn would be colossally expensive and filled with English people. Now it was time for Maine, where Stony had accepted a two-year job, cataloging a collection of 1960s underground publications: things printed on rice paper and Popsicle sticks and cocktail napkins. It fell to him to find the next place to live.

  “We’ll unpack my storage space,” he said. “I have things.”

  “Yes, my love,” she said. “I have things, too.”

  “You have a duffel bag. You have clothing. You have a saltshaker shaped like a duck, with a chipped beak.”

  She cackled a very European cackle, pride and delight in her ownership of the lusterware duck, whose name was Trudy. “The sole exhibit in the museum. When I am dead, people will know nothing about me.” This was a professional opinion: she was a museum consultant. In Normandy she was helping set up an exhibition in a stone cottage that had been owned by a Jewish family deported during the war. In Paris, it had been the atelier of a minor artist who’d been the longtime lover of a major poetess; in Denmark, a workhouse museum. Her specialty was the air of recent evacuation: you knew something terrible had happened to the occupants but you hoped it might still be undone. She set historic spectacles on desktops and snuggled appropriate shoes under beds and did not overdust. Too much cleanliness made a place dead. In Rome she arranged an exhibit of the commonplace belongings of Ezra Pound: chewed pencils, drinking glasses, celluloid dice, dog-eared books. Only the brochure suggested a connection to greatness. At the Hans Christian Andersen Museum in Odense, where they were mere tourists, she lingered with admiration over Andersen’s upper plate and the length of rope that he traveled with in case of hotel fire. “You can tell more from dentures than from years of diaries,” she’d said then. “Dentures do not lie.” She herself threw everything out. She did not want anyone to exhibit the smallest bit of her.

  Now Stony said, solemnly, “I never want to drink out of Ikea glasses again. Or sleep on Ikea sheets. Or—and this one is serious—cook with Ikea pans. Your husband owns really expensive pans. How about that?”

  “I am impressed, and you are bourgeois.”

  “Year lease,” he said.

  “I am terrified,” said Pamela, smiling with her beautiful, angular un-American teeth, and then, “Perhaps we will afford to have a baby.”

  She was still, as he would think of it later, casually alive. In two months she would be, according to the doctors, miraculously alive, and, later still, alive in a nearly unmodifiable twilight state. Or too modifiable: technically alive. Now she walked around the barn in her bra, which was as usual a little too small, and her underpants, as usual a little too big, though she was small-breasted and big-bottomed. Her red-framed glasses sat on her face at a tilt. “My ears are not plumb,” she always said. It was one of the reasons they belonged together: they were flea-market people, put together out of odd parts. She limped. Even her name was pronounced with a limp, the accent on the second syllable. For a full month after they’d met he’d thought her name was Camilla, and he never managed to say it aloud without lining it up in his head beforehand—paMILLa, paMILLa—the way he had to collect German words for sentences ahead of time and then properly distribute the verbs. In fact he did that with English sentences, too, when speaking to Pamela, when she was alive.

  He e-mailed the woman who’d listed the house—she was not the owner, she was working for the owners—and after a month of wrangling (she never sent the promised pictures; he was third in line, after a gaggle of students and a clutch of summer people; if the owners rented it out for the summer they could make a lot more money) managed to talk her into a yearlong lease, starting June 1.

  The limp, it turned out, was the legacy of a stroke Pamela’d had in her early twenties that she’d never told him about. She had another one in the farmhouse two weeks before they were supposed to move; she hit her head on the metal Ikea counter as she fell. Stony’s French was good enough only to ask the doctors how bad things were, but not to understand the answer. Pamela spoke the foreign languages; he cooked dinner; she proclaimed it delicious. In the hospital her tongue was unemployed, fat in her mouth, and she was fed through a tube. Someone had put her glasses on her face so that she would look more herself. A nurse came in hourly to straighten them. They did this as though her glasses were the masterpiece and all of Pamela the gallery wall—palms flat and gentle, leery of gravity. He sat in a molded green chair and dozed. One night he woke to the final nurse, who was straightening the glasses, and then the bedsheets. She turned to Stony. The last little bit of French he possessed drained out through the basin of his stomach.

  “No?” he said.

  This nurse was a small brown rabbit. Even her lips were brown. She wobbled on her feet as though deciding whether it was better if the mad husband caught and ate her now, or there should be a chase. Then she shrugged.

  When someone dies it is intolerable to be shrugged at. He went back to the farmhouse to pack. First his suitcase, an enormous green nylon item with fretful, overworked zippers. Then Pamela’s, that beige strap-covered duffel bag that looked like a midcentury truss. He had to leave France as soon as possible. He stuffed the bag with the undersized bras and oversized underpants, her favorite pair of creased black patent-leather loafers, an assortment of embroidered handkerchiefs. He, he needed a suitcase and a computer bag and then any number of plastic sacks to move from place to place, he collected souvenirs like vaccinations, but all of Pamela’s belongings fit in the duffel. When he failed to find the duck, he remembered the words of the lovely Buddhist landlady in Edinburgh, when he’d apologized for breaking a large Italian bowl painted with plums: “We have a saying: it was already broken.” Even now he wasn’t sure if we meant Buddhists or Scots. He would leave a note for the landlady concerning the duck, but of course the loss of the duck could not destroy him.

  The weight of Pamela’s bag was like the stones in a suicide’s pocket. Stony e-mailed his future boss, the kindly archivist, asked if he could straighten things out with the house—he would come, he would definitely come, but in the fall. My wife has died, he wrote, in rotten intelligible English. He’d wept already, and for hours, but suddenly he understood that the real thing was coming for him soon, a period of time free of wry laughter or distraction. The duffel bag he put in the closet for the French landlady to deal with. The ashes from the mortuary came in an urn, complete with a certificate that explained what they were, to show to customs officials. These he took with him to England, where he went for the summer to drink.

  The Not-Owner of the house was a short, slightly creased, ponytailed blond woman in a baseball cap and a gleaming, fricative black tracksuit that suggested
somewhere a husband dressed in the exact same outfit. She waved at him from the not particularly large front porch. For the past month she’d sent him cheerful e-mails about getting the lovely house ready for him, moving furniture, outfitting the kitchen, all of which came down to this: what have you spent your money on during your time on earth?

  Books, art, cooking equipment. Oh, and a collection of eccentric but unuseful tables. That was it. Could they make room for tables, books, pots, pans, paintings? Of course, she wrote back. He’d chosen this house because it was not a sabbatical rental: even before—a word he now pronounced as a spondee, like B.C.—he longed to be reunited with his books, art, dishes, the doctor’s table, the diner table, the various card catalogs, the side table made from an old cheese crate. He didn’t want to live inside someone else’s life, and sabbatical houses were always like that. You felt like a teenager who’d been given too much responsibility. Your parents were there frowning at you in the very arrangement of the furniture, how the spatulas were stored.

  The house wasn’t a Victorian, as he’d for some reason assumed, but an ordinary wood-framed house painted toothpaste blue. Amazing, how death made petty disappointments into operatic insults.

  “Hello!” The woman whooshed across towards him. “I’m Carly. You’re here. At last! It seems like ages ago we started talking about you and this house!”

  The porch was psoriatic and decorated with a series of camp chairs. “I’m glad you found summer people,” said Stony.

  Carly nodded. “Yes. The last guy moved out this morning.”

  “Ah,” said Stony, though they’d discussed this via e-mail over the last week. It was his ingratiating way, as a lifelong renter, to suggest unnecessary, helpful things, and he’d said he’d arrive on the fourth instead of the third so she’d have more time to arrange for cleaners.