“No,” Ray said. “I leave that to you.”
“Everything is changing here now. Every time I come back something is gone that made it not just every other place in the country,” she said.
“Do you want to go inside the house?” Ray asked, but he was thinking of me. How his crush had come when he was thirteen. He had seen me walking home from school ahead of him, and it was a series of simple things: my awkward plaid skirt, my peacoat covered in Holiday’s fur, the way what I thought of as my mousy brown hair caught the afternoon sun so that the light moved fluidly from spot to spot as we walked home, one behind the other. And then, a few days later, when he had stood in social science class and accidentally read from his paper on Jane Eyre instead of the War of 1812 – I had looked at him in a way he thought was nice.
Ray walked toward the house that would soon be demolished, and that had already been stripped of any valuable doorknobs and faucets late one night by Mr. Connors, but Ruth stayed by the sinkhole. Ray was already inside the house when it happened. As clear as day, she saw me standing there beside her, looking at the spot Mr. Harvey had dumped me.
“Susie,” Ruth said, feeling my presence even more solidly when she said my name.
But I said nothing.
“I’ve written poems for you,” Ruth said, trying to get me to stay with her. What she had wished for her whole life happening, finally. “Don’t you want anything, Susie?” she asked.
Then I vanished.
Ruth stood there reeling, waiting in the gray light of the Pennsylvania sun. And her question rang in my ears: “Don’t you want anything?”
On the other side of the railroad tracks, Hal’s shop was deserted. He had taken the day off and brought Samuel and Buckley to a bike show in Radnor. I could see Buckley’s hands move over the curved front-wheel casing of a red minibike. It would be his birthday soon, and Hal and Samuel watched him. Hal had wanted to give Samuel’s old alto sax to my brother, but my Grandma Lynn had intervened. “He needs to bang on things, honey,” she said. “Save the subtle stuff.” So Hal and Samuel had chipped in together and bought my brother a secondhand set of drums.
Grandma Lynn was at the mall trying to find simple yet elegant clothes that she might convince my mother to wear. With fingers made dexterous from years of practice, she pulled a near-navy dress from a rack of black. I could see the woman near her alight on the dress in greenish envy.
At the hospital, my mother was reading aloud to my father from a day-old Evening Bulletin, and he was watching her lips move and not really listening. Wanting to kiss her instead.
And Lindsey.
I could see Mr. Harvey take the turn into my old neighborhood in broad daylight, past caring who spotted him, even depending on his standard invisibility – here, in the neighborhood where so many had said they would never forget him, had always thought of him as strange, had come easily to suspect that the dead wife he spoke of by alternate names had been one of his victims.
Lindsey was at home alone.
Mr. Harvey drove by Nate’s house inside the anchor area of the development. Nate’s mother was picking the wilted blossoms from her front kidney-shaped flower bed. She looked up when the car passed. She saw the unfamiliar, patched-together car and imagined it was a college friend of one of the older children home for the summer. She had not seen Mr. Harvey in the driver’s seat. He turned left onto the lower road, which circled around to his old street. Holiday whined at my feet, the same kind of sick, low moan he would let out when we drove him to the vet.
Ruana Singh had her back to him. I saw her through the dining room window, alphabetizing stacks of new books and placing them in carefully kept bookshelves. There were children out in their yards on swings and pogo sticks and chasing one another with water pistols. A neighborhood full of potential victims.
He rounded the curve at the bottom of our road and passed the small municipal park across from where the Gilberts lived. They were both inside, Mr. Gilbert now infirm. Then he saw his old house, no longer green, though to my family and me it would always be “the green house.” The new owners had painted it a lavendery mauve and installed a pool and, just off to the side, near the basement window, a gazebo made out of redwood, which overflowed with hanging ivy and children’s toys. The front flower beds had been paved over when they expanded their front walk, and they had screened in the front porch with frost-resistant glass, behind which he saw an office of some sort. He heard the sound of girls laughing out in the backyard, and a woman came out of the front door carrying a pair of pruning shears and wearing a sun hat. She stared at the man sitting in his orange car and felt something kick inside her – the queasy kick of an empty womb. She turned abruptly and went back inside, peering at him from behind her window. Waiting.
He drove down the road a few houses further.
There she was, my precious sister. He could see her in the upstairs window of our house. She had cut all her hair off and grown thinner in the intervening years, but it was her, sitting at the drafting board she used as a desk and reading a psychology book.
It was then that I began to see them coming down the road.
While he scanned the windows of my old house and wondered where the other members of my family were – whether my father’s leg still made him hobble – I saw the final vestiges of the animals and the women taking leave of Mr. Harvey’s house. They straggled forward together. He watched my sister and thought of the sheets he had draped on the poles of the bridal tent. He had stared right in my father’s eyes that day as he said my name. And the dog – the one that barked outside his house – the dog was surely dead by now.
Lindsey moved in the window, and I watched him watching her. She stood up and turned around, going farther into the room to a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf. She reached up and brought another book down. As she came back to the desk and he lingered on her face, his rearview mirror suddenly filled with a black-and-white cruising slowly up the street behind him.
He knew he could not outrace them. He sat in his car and prepared the last vestiges of the face he had been giving authorities for decades – the face of a bland man they might pity or despise but never blame. As the officer pulled alongside him, the women slipped in the windows and the cats curled around his ankles.
“Are you lost?” the young policeman asked when he was flush with the orange car.
“I used to live here,” Mr. Harvey said. I shook with it. He had chosen to tell the truth.
“We got a call, suspicious vehicle.”
“I see they’re building something in the old cornfield,” Mr. Harvey said. And I knew that part of me could join the others then, swoop down in pieces, each body part he had claimed raining down inside his car.
“They’re expanding the school.”
“I thought the neighborhood looked more prosperous,” he said wistfully.
“Perhaps you should move along,” the officer said. He was embarrassed for Mr. Harvey in his patched-up car, but I saw him jot the license plate down.
“I didn’t mean to scare anyone.”
Mr. Harvey was a pro, but in that moment I didn’t care. With each section of road he covered, I focused on Lindsey inside reading her textbooks, on the facts jumping up from the pages and into her brain, on how smart she was and how whole. At Temple she had decided to be a therapist. And I thought of the mix of air that was our front yard, which was daylight, a queasy mother and a cop – it was a convergence of luck that had kept my sister safe so far. Every day a question mark.
Ruth did not tell Ray what had happened. She promised herself she would write it in her journal first. When they crossed the road back to the car, Ray saw something violet in the scrub halfway up a high dirt berm that had been dumped there by a construction crew.