“He’s gone off after that man and gotten himself in trouble.”
“We should go out, Mom,” Lindsey said. “We should go help him.”
“No.”
“Mom, we have to help Daddy.”
“Buckley, stop milking your thumb!”
My brother burst into hot panicked tears, and my sister reached her arms down to pull him in tighter. She looked at our mother.
“I’m going out to find him,” Lindsey said.
“You are doing no such thing,” my mother said. “He’ll come home in good time. We’re staying out of this.”
“Mom,” Lindsey said, “what if he’s hurt?”
Buckley stopped crying long enough to look back and forth from my sister to my mother. He knew what hurt meant and who was missing from the house.
My mother gave Lindsey a meaningful look. “We are not discussing this further. You can go up to your room and wait or wait with me. Your choice.”
Lindsey was dumbfounded. She stared at our mother and knew what she wanted most: to flee, to run out into the cornfield where my father was, where I was, where she felt suddenly that the heart of her family had moved. But Buckley stood warm against her.
“Buckley,” she said, “let’s go back upstairs. You can sleep in my bed.”
He was beginning to understand: you were treated special and, later, something horrible would be told to you.
When the call came from the police, my mother went immediately to the front closet. “He’s been hit with our own baseball bat!” she said, grabbing her coat and keys and lipstick. My sister felt more alone than she had ever been but also more responsible. Buckley couldn’t be left by himself, and Lindsey wasn’t even able to drive. Besides, it made the clearest sense in the world. Didn’t the wife belong most at the husband’s side?
But when my sister was able to get Nate’s mother on the line – after all, the commotion in the cornfield had awakened the whole neighborhood – she knew what she would do. She called Samuel next. Within an hour, Nate’s mother arrived to take Buckley, and Hal Heckler pulled up to our house on his motorcycle. It should have been exciting – clutching on to Samuel’s gorgeous older brother, riding on a motorcycle for the first time – but all she could think of was our father.
My mother was not in his hospital room when Lindsey entered; it was just my father and me. She came up and stood on the other side of his bed and started to cry quietly.
“Daddy?” she said. “Are you okay, Daddy?”
The door opened a crack. It was Hal Heckler, a tall handsome slash of a man.
“Lindsey,” he said, “I’ll wait for you out in the visitors’ area in case you need a ride home.”
He saw her tears when she turned around. “Thanks, Hal. If you see my mother…”
“I’ll tell her you’re in here.”
Lindsey took my father’s hand and watched his face for movement. My sister was growing up before my eyes. I listened as she whispered the words he had sung to the two of us before Buckley was born:
I wish a smile had come curling up onto my father’s face, but he was deep under, swimming against drug and nightmare and waking dream. For a time leaden weights had been tied by anesthesia to the four corners of his consciousness. Like a firm waxen cover it had locked him away tight into the hard-blessed hours where there was no dead daughter and no gone knee, and where there was also no sweet daughter whispering rhymes.
“When the dead are done with the living,” Franny said to me, “the living can go on to other things.”
“What about the dead?” I asked. “Where do we go?”
She wouldn’t answer me.
Len Fenerman had rushed to the hospital as soon as they put the call through. Abigail Salmon, the dispatcher said, requesting him.
My father was in surgery, and my mother was pacing back and forth near the nurses’ station. She had driven to the hospital in her raincoat with only her thin summer nightgown beneath it. She had her beating-around-the-yard ballet flats on her feet. She hadn’t bothered to pull her hair back, and there hadn’t been any hair elastics in her pockets or purse. In the dark foggy parking lot of the hospital she had stopped to check her face and applied her stock red lipstick with a practiced hand.
When she saw Len approaching from the end of the long white corridor, she relaxed.
“Abigail,” he said when he grew closer.
“Oh, Len,” she said. Her face puzzled up on what she could say next. His name had been the sigh she needed. Everything that came next was not words.
The nurses at their station turned their heads away as Len and my mother touched hands. They extended this privacy veil habitually, as a matter of course, but even so they could see this man meant something to this woman.
“Let’s talk in the visitors’ area,” Len said and led my mother down the corridor.
As they walked she told him my father was in surgery. He filled her in on what had happened in the cornfield.
“Apparently he said he thought the girl was George Harvey.”
“He thought Clarissa was George Harvey?” My mother stopped, incredulous, just outside the visitors’ area.
“It was dark out, Abigail. I think he only saw the girl’s flashlight. My visit today couldn’t have helped much. He’s convinced that Harvey is involved.”
“Is Clarissa all right?”
“She was treated for scratches and released. She was hysterical. Crying and screaming. It was a horrible coincidence, her being Susie’s friend.”
Hal was slumped down in a darkened corner of the visitors’ area with his feet propped up on the helmet he’d brought for Lindsey. When he heard the voices approaching he stirred.
It was my mother and a cop. He slumped back down and let his shoulder-length hair obscure his face. He was pretty sure my mother wouldn’t remember him.
But she recognized the jacket as Samuel’s and for a moment thought, Samuel’s here, but then thought, His brother.
“Let’s sit,” Len said, indicating the connected modular chairs on the far side of the room.
“I’d rather keep walking,” my mother said. “The doctor said it will be an hour at least before they have anything to tell us.”
“Where to?”
“Do you have cigarettes?”
“You know I do,” Len said, smiling guiltily. He had to seek out her eyes. They weren’t focusing on him. They seemed to be preoccupied, and he wished he could reach up and grab them and train them on the here and now. On him.
“Let’s find an exit, then.”
They found a door to a small concrete balcony near my father’s room. It was a service balcony for a heating unit, so even though it was cramped and slightly chilly, the noise and the hot exhaust of the humming hydrant beside them shut them into a capsule that felt far away. They smoked cigarettes and looked at each other as if they had suddenly and without preparation moved on to a new page, where the pressing business had already been highlighted for prompt attention.
“How did your wife die?” my mother asked.
“Suicide.”
Her hair was covering most of her face, and watching her I was reminded of Clarissa at her most self-conscious. The way she behaved around boys when we went to the mall. She would giggle too much and flash her eyes over at them to see where they were looking. But I was also struck by my mother’s red mouth with the cigarette going up and away from it and smoke trailing out. I had seen this mother only once before – in the photograph. This mother had never had us.