“Ray,” I said, but before the name had left my mouth, he leaned into me and caught my open mouth in his. It was so unexpected, even though I had waited weeks for it, that I wanted more. I wanted so badly to kiss Ray Singh again.
The following morning Mr. Connors cut out an article from the paper and saved it for Ruth. It was a detailed drawing of the Flanagan sinkhole and how it was going to be filled in. While Ruth dressed, he penned a note to her. “This is a crock of shit,” it said. “Someday some poor sap’s car is going to fall into it all over again.”
“Dad says this is the death knell for him,” Ruth said to Ray, waving the clipping at him as she got into Ray’s ice blue Chevy at the end of her driveway. “Our place is going to be swallowed up in subdivision land. Get this. In this article they have four blocks like the cubes you draw in beginning art class, and it’s supposed to show how they’re going to patch the sinkhole up.”
“Nice to see you too, Ruth,” Ray said, reversing out of the driveway while making eyes at Ruth’s unbuckled seat belt.
“Sorry,” Ruth said. “Hello.”
“What does the article say?” Ray asked.
“Nice day today, beautiful weather.”
“Okay, okay. Tell me about the article.”
Every time he saw Ruth after a few months had passed, he was reminded of her impatience and her curiosity – two traits that had both made and kept them friends.
“The first three are the same drawing only with different arrows pointing to different places and saying ‘topsoil,’ ‘cracked limestone,’ and ‘dissolving rock.’ The last one has a big headline that says, ‘Patching it’ and underneath it says, ‘Concrete fills the throat and grout fills the cracks.’”
“Throat?” Ray said.
“I know,” said Ruth. “Then there’s this other arrow on the other side as if this was such a huge project that they had to pause a second so readers could understand the concept, and this one says, ‘Then the hole is filled with dirt.’”
Ray started laughing.
“Like a medical procedure,” Ruth said. “Intricate surgery is needed to patch up the planet.”
“I think holes in the earth draw on some pretty primal fears.”
“I’ll say,” Ruth said. “They have throats, for God’s sake! Hey, let’s check this out.”
A mile or so down the road there were signs of new construction. Ray took a left and drove into the circles of freshly paved roads where the trees had been cleared and small red and yellow flags waved at intervals from the tops of waist-high wire markers.
Just as they had lulled themselves into thinking that they were alone, exploring the roads laid out for a territory as yet uninhabited, they saw Joe Ellis walking up ahead.
Ruth didn’t wave and neither did Ray, nor did Joe make a move to acknowledge them.
“My mom says he still lives at home and can’t get a job.”
“What does he do all day?” Ray asked.
“Look creepy, I guess.”
“He never got over it,” Ray said, and Ruth stared out into the rows and rows of vacant lots until Ray connected with the main road again and they crossed back over the railroad tracks moving toward Route 30, which would take them in the direction of the sinkhole.
Ruth floated her arm out the window to feel the moist air of the morning after rain. Although Ray had been accused of being involved in my disappearance, he had understood why, knew that the police were doing their job. But Joe Ellis had never recovered from being accused of killing the cats and dogs Mr. Harvey had killed. He wandered around, keeping a good distance from his neighbors and wanting so much to take solace in the love of cats and dogs. For me the saddest thing was that these animals smelled the brokenness in him – the human defect – and kept away.
Down Route 30 near Eels Rod Pike, at a spot that Ray and Ruth were about to pass, I saw Len coming out of an apartment over Joe’s barbershop. He carried a lightly stuffed student knapsack out to his car. The knapsack had been the gift of the young woman who owned the apartment. She had asked him out for coffee one day after they met down at the station as part of a criminology course at West Chester College. Inside the knapsack he had a combination of things – some of which he would show my father and some that no child’s parent needed to see. The latter included the photos of the graves of the recovered bodies – both elbows there in each case.
When he had called the hospital, the nurse had told him Mr. Salmon was with his wife and family. Now his guilt thickened as he pulled his car into the hospital parking lot and sat for a moment with the hot sun coming through the windshield, baking in the heat.
I could see Len working on how to state what he had to say. He could work with only one assumption in his head – after almost seven years of ever more dwindling contact since late 1975, what my parents would hope for most was a body or the news that Mr. Harvey had been found. What he had to give them was a charm.
He grabbed his knapsack and locked up the car, passing by the girl outside with her replenished buckets of daffodils. He knew the number of my father’s room, so he did not bother announcing himself to the fifth-floor nurses’ station but merely tapped lightly on my father’s open door before walking in.
My mother was standing with her back toward him. When she turned, I could see the force of her presence hit him. She was holding my father’s hand. I suddenly felt terribly lonely.
My mother wobbled a bit when she met Len’s eyes, and then she led with what came easiest.
“Is it ever wonderful to see you?” she tried to joke.
“Len,” my father managed. “Abbie, will you tilt me up?”
“How are you feeling, Mr. Salmon?” Len asked as my mother pressed the up arrow button on the bed.
“Jack, please,” my father insisted.
“Before you get your hopes up,” Len said, “we haven’t caught him.”
My father visibly deflated.
My mother readjusted the foam pillows behind my father’s back and neck. “Then why are you here?” she asked.
“We found an item of Susie’s,” Len said.
He had used almost the same sentence when he’d come to the house with the jingle-bell hat. It was a distant echo in her head.
The night before, as first my mother watched my father sleeping and then my father woke to see her head beside his on his pillow, they had both been staving off the memory of that first night of snow and hail and rain and how they had clung to each other, neither of them voicing aloud their greatest hope. Last night it had been my father who’d finally said it: “She’s never coming home.” A clear and easy piece of truth that everyone who had ever known me had accepted. But he needed to say it, and she needed to hear him say it.
“It’s a charm off her bracelet,” Len said. “A Pennsylvania keystone with her initials on it.”
“I bought that for her,” my father said. “At Thirtieth Street Station when I went into the city one day. They had a booth, and a man wearing safety glasses etched in initials for free. I brought Lindsey one too. Remember, Abigail?”
“I remember,” my mother said.
“We found it near a grave in Connecticut.”
My parents were suddenly still for a moment – like animals trapped in ice – their eyes frozen open and beseeching whoever walked above them to release them now, please.
“It wasn’t Susie,” Len said, rushing to fill the space. “What it means is that Harvey has been linked to other murders in Delaware and Connecticut. It was at the grave site outside Hartford where we found Susie’s charm.”
My father and mother watched as Len fumbled to open the slightly jammed zipper of his knapsack. My mother smoothed my father’s hair back and tried to catch his eye. But my father was focused on the prospect Len presented – my murder case reopening. And my mother, just when she was beginning to feel on more solid ground, had to hide the fact that she’d never wanted it to begin again. The name George Harvey silenced her. She had never known what to say about him. For my mother, connecting her life to his capture and punishment spoke more about choosing to live with the enemy than about having to learn to live in the world without me.