When I went to the open window, I saw groups of adults—Brickie and Mr. Shreve among them—standing in front of the Goncharoffs’. A police car and an ambulance idled in the street. My heart clenched. Up and down Connors Lane, neighbors stood silently in their yards, staring. The Goncharoffs’ front door gaped, but I couldn’t see any of the family. I didn’t see Max or Ivan, who I knew normally would be rubbernecking at any event involving emergency vehicles. I ran down the stairs and out into our front yard, where the Fiesta dishes and our decorations lay trashed and sodden. Dimma’s precious walnut chairs were black from the rain, and she stood in her housecoat, hugging herself as if she were freezing. She grabbed me as I tried to run past her, falling to a crouch with her arms around me. I thought I was about to get spanked because of the ruined chairs, and I struggled to get away. “John! John, look at me, sweetheart,” she said. I stopped, frozen with dread, and she held both my arms tightly.
“What’s wrong? What’s wrong?” I cried. “Dimma, what’s going on?”
Dimma said, “Something terrible happened last night, John.” Her voice trembled, something I’d never heard before, and that alarmed me even more. “Your friend Elena died last night.”
A strangled, desperate laugh came from my throat. “You’re joking, Dimma!” But Dimma’s face was contorted with sadness, and tears filled her eyes. She held me tighter and kissed me. “My poor, sweet boy,” she whispered.
“No she didn’t! No she didn’t!” Using every ounce of my strength I broke away from Dimma, hurtling toward the street.
Dimma, weeping now, called, “John! Come back! Please stay here! There’s nothing you can do.”
I ran past the adults, and Brickie, who tried to grab me, to Ivan’s house, calling, “Ivan! Ivan!” Halting on the porch, I looked wildly around for Ivan or Elena. There, huddled on the floor against the wall, I saw my friends. Max, sniffling, had his arm around Ivan, whose dirty, tearstained face was white with what? Fear? Horror? “It’s not true, is it? It’s not true! Say it’s not true!” Max looked at me miserably but said nothing. Ivan stared off, shaking uncontrollably. “What happened? What happened to her? Did…did he…hurt her?”
Ivan looked at me then and said wonderingly, “She…she sat in The Throne. Why’d she do that?” and began sobbing. I wanted to shout out, “How could he kill her for that?” But I could only collapse next to Ivan, hugging him tightly. I began crying, too. We stayed that way for what seemed a long time. Nobody bothered us; the men were busy talking to one another and to the police, writing things, doing things. The neighbor ladies—Mrs. Friedmann, Mrs. Shreve, La Senhora—stood shocked and teary-eyed in the lane. I thought I could hear, way back somewhere in the house, Maria’s weeping.
The ambulance drove off, and I understood then that inside it was our darling Elena. Max, watching the ambulance, began softly humming “Taps,” but he couldn’t get past the “gone the sun” part before the dirge choked in his throat. A policeman and a man in a jacket and tie came onto the porch and they began winding yellow tape around the railings, closing the area off. The cop went into the house. Before following him, the other man spoke kindly to Ivan, and said that he was a detective. Then he told us not to touch anything. “We haven’t had a chance to examine the scene yet.” He said that Ivan should go inside—this made me shudder—and Max and I should go home and be with our families. But we weren’t going anywhere unless we went together.
Brickie came up onto the porch and went into the house for a moment. He came back and squatted down with us. “Why don’t you boys all come over to our house for now? We’ll get you some breakfast, you can watch TV, and things might seem a little…more normal. There certainly won’t be any school today.” Brickie reached out to Ivan and took his hand, gently pulling him up. “We’ll just take it easy, okay? Ivan, I told your dad you were coming with us.” He hugged Ivan to his side. “Try not to worry, son. Not right now. Let’s just get through the day.” As they walked to the lane, the neighbors began drifting off, stopping to give Ivan hugs, which he silently tolerated.
Max and I stood to follow. Max, catching up to Ivan and Brickie, threw his arm around Ivan protectively. Coming behind them, I glanced at The Throne with a mixture of feelings—I wanted to either burn it down or make it into some kind of shrine to Elena—where she last had been our living, loving, laughing goddess. Then I spotted something jammed back in its cushions. Glancing around to make sure nobody was watching, I hurried over, and from the cushions I pulled out Ivan’s green prescription bottle, marked with the skull and crossbones. It was empty and the cap was gone. A paralyzing sense of alarm came over me. I guessed that nobody had seen it yet because it was well camouflaged by the green foliage print of the upholstery. Sniffing it, I detected the faint odor of vinegar. I shivered, the hair on my arms and neck standing up, but I couldn’t think and just pocketed the bottle. Catching up to Brickie and the boys, I turned, checking again to see if anyone had come out of the house and seen me. There was no one, only Elena’s swing slowly drifting forward and back, forward and back.
Brickie and Dimma fixed Ivan and me a big breakfast: scrambled eggs, bacon and sausage patties, buttered toast, chocolate milk, and orange juice. Max’s parents had made him come home to go to school. Ivan hardly touched a thing on his plate, and Brickie said, “Ivan, try to eat something. You need to keep up your strength.” Ivan didn’t reply, but he finally ate a piece of toast and drank some chocolate milk. I didn’t have much of an appetite, either, and Brickie for once didn’t badger me. He and Dimma sat at the table and chatted pleasantly to each other, which I knew was fake because Dimma was rarely downstairs so early and they didn’t talk much in the morning anyway. Estelle arrived, and she must have heard what had happened from the neighbors, because before she even set her purse down, she came over to Ivan and rubbed his head, hugged him, and said, “Poor little fella. God bless you, baby.” Then she hugged me, too. I was dazed, haunted by what was in my pocket. After a while, I said, “May we be excused?” and Dimma allowed us to take our chocolate milk into the living room to watch TV.
I turned on Looney Tunes. Ivan and I sat close to each other and stared at the screen. I wanted to talk to Ivan, but more than that I wanted Ivan to talk to me. Finally, I reached into my pocket for the green pill bottle. I held it out. Ivan looked at it, and then looked at me, his red-rimmed blue eyes filling with tears. “Ivan, what happened to the vinegaroon?”
He put a hand in his pocket and drew out the cap. After a second, he said, “He must have got away.”
“What do you mean, got away? How?”
“Why did she have to sit on his Throne?” He began crying a little bit.
“I don’t know,” I said. Then, petrified, I asked, “Did you put the vinegaroon there?”
“It wasn’t for her!” he wailed. “I didn’t mean for it to bite her! When I was going to bed, I heard someone walking around, and I thought it was…him, and that he’d go out to smoke his cigar, so I snuck down to the porch and put it in The Throne for him. But she sat there! She told me at the Fiesta that she wasn’t coming home—she had to get away from him, but she’d come back for me soon.” He blubbered, “I just wanted to hurt him, not kill him. I think.”