And then the summer ended and Leah came home to begin fifth grade at Edna L. Toliver Elementary School.
And now somewhere her little brother was scared, was in pain, was dead, was—
“Leah,” her mother said, “Hush. Please, God. Hush. It is time for school.”
She didn’t know what to expect when she saw her classmates. She’d seen no one she knew since it happened. Several of her classmates’ parents had called in the days that followed to offer their support to the Shepherds, and Mrs. Shepherd told Leah that a few of her classmates had called themselves, probably at the prodding of a parent, but Leah hadn’t talked to anyone. She’d just been in her room, waiting, certain that at some point her parents would come in, faces red with rage, realizing that this was all her fault, ready to peel her skin off with a belt. She sat in homeroom and waited for the bell and the pledge and the anthem, and her classmates, children she’d been in school with since kindergarten, or before in some cases, filed in and sat in desks as directed by the teacher, a heavyset man with a gray crest of perfectly structured hair, and they talked to one another loudly and they fidgeted and fussed and some fussily put away the new year’s supply of paper and glue and some turned and looked at her and then leaned together to whisper. Their whispers scissored through her skin. After morning announcements, they began learning math. At lunch Leah sat alone. Rectangular pizza on soft white bread and a half pint of chocolate milk. At recess, Leah sat on the swings. Then the day ended.
Was something in the house? Her skin prickled, responding to the slightest fluctuation in pressure, a sensitive flame. The skin on the nape of her neck felt warm. The house spoke the sounds that old houses speak: that too-heavy creak on the stair, that groan of door hinge, that rough breath. But no sound came that she could discern from the clutter of sound that comprised the silence of the night.
The smell of machines, of paper and printer ribbon. The men wandered off to waste the day talking about that boy who’d gone missing to anyone who would listen to them. “It just ain’t like it used to be. Can’t trust none. You see how some of those people are. How they dress. How they talk. Just sad.” Lower lips lined with the black shards of the last dip.
In the kitchen, her mother standing over the sink crying in the darkness qualified only by drapes of light from the streetlamp just outside the window. It licked away a few traces of night with hazy warmth. The room was black everywhere save slivers of pale pink-yellow.
Mrs. Shepherd took to reading a verse of the Bible every day and made it as far as Psalm 27. Mr. Shepherd came home from work, ate dinner, put Leah to bed and quietly went back to work. Her mother’s mouth moved silently. Her father kept the door to his library closed. The leaves were to turn brilliant colors but it rained and washed them away. Silly birds with a mind for games. And then winter and spring and summer. She did not hear her father come home. Her father went away on a business trip for a few weeks. When he came home, he gave her a stuffed dog. Leah tossed it in the closet. She was too old for such things.
Voices straining to stay unheard. The night sky erupted and the whole house smelled like running water. She sat up and in the passing bright shadows saw her children reading from a book on the floor, turning the pages in the dark. A voice outside, echoing in the street, echoing off houses. The house was quiet. The ground swallowed the rain and was dry again.
Dusty school windows with slants of light. Had anyone seen any faint light moving between the stones and the obelisks? Could even they hear the singing, a faint melody she did not know? The teacher called her name, told her to go to the principal’s office where she was excused from school for the rest of the week, the boy suspended. The singing followed her home.
There were birds in the school. Brown-black bodies. Swoop and swirl around the halls, darting high to the exposed beams of the student commons, shitting on anything they could get their shit on. The children would cheer. Small voices and the beating of wings. The custodian would chase them up and down the school with brooms and yardsticks, hollering and whooping, quickly out of breath. Sometimes a dead bird would appear on the floor, a feathered comma in the middle of the gray marbled tile. The children would scream.
The bathrooms were always cold and when in there alone, you could hear soft voices being carried at odd angles from some other place.
“And then judge said, Ma’am do you realize that you are facing felony abduction charges? And then I said, Whatever, it’s my birthday. I mean it should be attempted murder. When you are holding someone down and they can’t breathe. And something like illegal possession of personal property. I finally got my coat back. See, she likes that Mike’s Hard Lemonade. We just sat in the car at the end of the parking lot, it was raining, and we sat and listened to the radio and once she was drunk enough, I took her back to her mother.”
Leah kept her eye on the windows of the classrooms on the third floor, the ones no longer used, with orange shades drawn, pale, sun-faded eyelids. She watched for slight movement, a tremble, a twitch, a face looking down.
Leah kept her eye on the street, on passing cars that slowed. Listened for the sound of idling engines. Vans parked discreetly around corners. Men sitting in shade, leaned back, eyes closed. A man in thick glasses with a bald head glistening in morning light watched her come in from the parking lot of the gas station across from the school and Leah was crying as the boys and girls on the swings dared one another to leap off and fly as high as they could. She went shopping with her mother and a man with a thin gray beard touched her head and told Mrs. Shepherd that Leah would be a real heartbreaker one day. A man in the back of the movie theater watched her walk with her father toward the exit as the credits rolled. When would the car stop, the door open, the arms reach out, the voice speaking calmly: Your mother is sick. Your father is hurt. They asked me to bring you to see them. Come, come, come. The school offered a program on identifying the danger of strange people. Those that are overfriendly. Those that are threatening. Those who claim to know your parents. Pictures of boys and girls who trusted and disappeared into nothing, never to be seen again. The man who presented the program stopped Leah in the hall and crouched down and said, “You wouldn’t ever talk to a stranger, would you?” He smiled and wet his lips with his tongue. And the stories she read in the books she checked out from the public library: children lost in the mists on the moors, hounds the size of horses carrying babies away, a man rushing to confront a noise in an unused room only to return with his hair turned white and his eyes empty and dead. Perhaps there weren’t vampires and werewolves and creatures in the lake, but there was something. Leah knew that.