by Una Mannion
“I thought I shot into the trees,” Thomas said.
Then Barbie Man pulled a dart out of his T-shirt with his right hand. It was me: I had shot him again with the Marksman without even knowing it.
“Tell us where she is,” I said.
“Don’t know . . . what the fuck you’re talking . . .” He was groggy; his voice dragged, and he tried to lie down. His face was pasty white.
“No, don’t go to sleep,” I shouted. I went toward him, and for an awful, sickening moment I held his hair in my hands, trying to pull him up.
The sirens came closer, and a police car turned up the McVays’ driveway, the red and blue flashing through the trees, the headlights bringing us all into view: Thomas holding a gun, Wilson fetal on the ground, Barbie Man half conscious on his side, me above him, still holding the Marksman.
A voice shouted, “Put the gun down.” Officer Day.
“We can’t find her. He won’t tell us where he took Ellen.” I could hear the panic in my own voice. I started moving toward the police car.
“Hold on. Let’s drop the guns.”
I looked at the Marksman in my hand. “It’s just a dart gun. It’s not real,” I shouted, and dropped it. I put my hands in the air. “She’s not in his car. He won’t tell us where she is.”
“Something’s wrong with his breathing.” Thomas was leaning over Wilson.
I could hear them calling in the ambulances. Other cars arrived. A searchlight on top of one of them flooded us all in an unreal wash of white. We looked like ghosts. One of the cops wrapped Barbie Man’s hand and was pressing on it, and I could see his fingers with the long nails cupped with his own blood. There were officers looking inside the Camaro and in the trunk, maybe for traces that Ellen had been there. Thomas was still beside Wilson, and I sat down on the grass next to them. There was a police officer talking to Wilson and speaking into a radio. “Possible traumatic pneumothorax. Don’t let him move until the paramedics arrive,” said the voice on the radio. Wilson was pale, and his breathing was fast. I wanted them to make Barbie Man tell us what he had done with Ellen, make him talk, not fix him.
“Libby.” Wilson’s voice was lower than a whisper.
“Yeah?” I leaned in toward him.
“Where. Would she. Go.” His words sounded like they were being swallowed. Caught in the light, his face shocked me. It was so swollen that his eyes had disappeared, like lines drawn in marker on a misshapen balloon. “Where. Think.”
I shook my head. Not the Bouchers’. I wasn’t there. She wouldn’t go to a neighbor’s house. And then I remembered that there was one place I hadn’t thought of.
“I know,” I said. “I think I know.” I turned to Thomas. “If she ran, I know where she would go.”
25
It was my dad who told me that horses and pack animals weren’t native to North America. They were brought by European settlers. These types of details about America interested him most. No horses or mules meant that the natives had traveled mostly by foot, and while they sometimes used their bark or dugout canoes and had dogs to carry packs, for thousands of years they walked. Making paths. He loved this—how they’d felt and listened to the woods, how they must have watched the deer and foxes and shadowed their tracks through the undergrowth, how they’d always found the driest and most direct routes. He said that their footfall still marked the landscape and that those traces spoke something about man’s potential relationship with the surface of the earth—quiet, instinctive, respectful.
I thought about how, all of our lives, the paths we followed had been started by the first people here; almost every road had first been a trail. Dad would say that being “on the warpath” wasn’t just a figure of speech—it referred to an actual trail, a real place. Maybe it was a path that gave warriors an advantage when confronting an enemy, and they had learned this from their elders, how to travel to fight.
I led Officer Day and another cop, who said he was Officer Schuster, down the trail toward the Kingdom—probably a Lenape path before it was a horse and hiking trail. He pointed a flashlight at the ground, and his partner angled a high-powered beam straight ahead, casting the trees and path in phantom white, like in a horror film. Thomas and I walked ahead, out of their beams, several times, and they asked us to slow down.
The crooked tree was ahead of us, visible even before the policemen’s lights hit it. Looking at its bend, its pointing arm, it felt as if something living in this place was directing us toward Ellen, and I prayed to whatever it was that she would be there.
“This way,” I said, leading them off the Horseshoe Trail to circle into the Kingdom from behind. We ducked under branches and pushed through mountain laurel into the canopied clearing.
“What is this place?” asked Thomas.
“The Kingdom. It’s mine and Sage’s. Ellen knows about it. She’s been here before.”
“Ellen.” Thomas called her name softly, like a question.
Officer Day directed the beam of light around the circumference of the clearing. Nothing. We all stood silent and listened. He swung the light back again slowly, shining it up and down tree trunks, as if somehow we would see her perched up in the branches or down inside the tangle of rhododendron roots.
“She’s not here,” said Thomas. “Jesus Christ, Libby, she’s not here.”
“We need to get the two of you back to the station,” said Officer Day.
“No. This is where she would’ve come. I’m certain. When Sage and I buried stuff, we told her that in an emergency this was the best place to hide.” I knelt at the foot of the red oak and pushed the earth off the board and lifted it. “Can you shine the light here?” I asked. There were cans of beans and Campbell’s cream of chicken soup, a tube of Crest toothpaste, and two rolled-up sleeping bags. There was one missing. Definitely.
“This is your apocalypse survival plan?” Thomas asked.
“She’s been here. I’m positive. The Lone Ranger and Garfield sleeping bags are here, but the Star Wars one is missing. There should be three. No one else knows about this except Sage, and she doesn’t even come here anymore.” The sleeping bags had belonged to Sage’s brothers, and we’d retrieved them from Goodwill bags Charlotte had put in the trunk of the car.
“Are you sure?” asked Thomas.
“Positive. She must’ve gone home. She waited here for us to find her, and when we didn’t come, she went home.”
“There were definitely three?” Thomas was afraid to hope. Marie called him Doubting Thomas, saying it would make him a good scientist, able to question things, to see the possible pitfalls.
“Please,” I said to Officers Day and Schuster, “we have to go back to the house.”
“We left a squad car at the house. They’d call it in if she went there.”
“She’s waiting for us, then. For me and Thomas. She got home and saw the police car in the driveway, and she’s afraid. Please. Can we go there first?”
We would have to cut off the path to get to our house, but it was only a few hundred yards down from the main trail. If Ellen had gone back home, we were already so close to her. Thomas and I nearly ran all the way, the two policemen following. We turned right off the trail, onto the path that led to our house, and both started sprinting, shouting her name. I could see the bathroom light still on, where I had crawled out hours earlier. There was a light on in the kitchen. A police car was in the driveway, its parking lights on.
“Ellen . . . Ellen!” I shouted, and Thomas did too. We stopped where the path ended at the steps leading down to our drive. “Ellen!” I glanced at Thomas, the expectant look on his face. Where was she?
“Here.”
A voice came from under the low dogwood on the little hill where we’d buried our cat and goldfish and toad and dead things we found, like birds or chipmunks. I could see her, trying to stand up inside the Star Wars sleeping bag under the sweeping branches.
Thomas reached her first. He lifted her in the sack and sidestepped dow
n the embankment, holding her cocooned shape. He sat on the ground with her, hugging her swaddled body, and I sat with them and we waited there for the policemen to catch up.
Marie was waiting for us at the Phoenixville police station. As we walked up the sidewalk, she pushed through the double glass doors and came running out to us.
“How did you get here?” I asked, feeling for her number in my pocket. “I never gave them your number.”
“Sage called, and she and Grady came and got me. They’re still here.”
I looked at Marie and wondered what the police made of her, and if they believed she was even an adult. She had on Doc Martens, a black miniskirt, and a cropped T-shirt with rips. Ellen was still wearing her Fourth of July outfit; the heart flags she had painted on her face to match Peter’s were smeared across her cheeks like bruises. Her thin blond hair was tangled, and her white shirt was streaked with dirt. But it wasn’t Ellen that Marie was looking at with shock, it was me.
“Jesus, your hair.”
I lifted my hands either side of my head and felt the immense tangle. I looked down. My arms were covered in dried blood. There was dried blood in the cuticles of my fingernails. “Oh God. Marie, it’s not my blood. Please, get it off me.” I felt panic, like I might start clawing at my own skin. “I have to get it off.”
“I need to take her to the restroom,” Marie said to Officer Day. Sage and Grady Adams were sitting in plastic chairs in the waiting room, but they weren’t looking over at us. It was more than just giving us space; I had done some irreversible damage. I could see it in the way Sage sat, and the way Grady didn’t do his polite-southern-father routine. They were sitting in their own devastation, and I was the cause.
In the mirror of the police station bathroom, I looked even more horrifying. There was his blood on my face, or maybe some of it was mine. My hair was caught in clumps of burrs and sticks.
“You’re going to have to cut it,” Marie said. She turned on the hot faucet and handed me a bar of soap. “Wash your face and your hands really well, and when you get home, you can have a bath.” She took a toothbrush out of her backpack. “Use this like you would a nailbrush, and we’ll throw it away. But get it all off you.”
It took several hours for our statements to be taken. We sat in a room together, Marie with us. Grady and Sage were still in the waiting room. The police gave us cans of Coke and bags of potato chips from the vending machine. Later, around four in the morning, Ellen and I went to the bathroom together. She finished first and went back out. When I stepped into the hallway, Sage was hugging her, but she didn’t look at me. I knew the message was to stay away. I didn’t blame her.
We told our stories. Ellen had to begin with that night in the car when Julius Korhonen picked her up. Officer Day asked why she was on the road, to tell him again how she ended up getting out of our car and standing on the road in the dark.
“It was almost dark. But not quite. That time that’s more like twilight,” Ellen said. “And I was being horrible, losing my temper, and my mom couldn’t control me . . .”
I glanced at Marie. We knew Officer Day was thinking about what kind of mother would leave a girl this size on the side of the road.
Marie said she really didn’t know anything about who went up to Pottstown with Wilson, or exactly what they did.
I found myself defending Wilson again. “He was trying to help us,” I said.
Ellen told her story from the fireworks, how she had turned out of the swim club parking lot to come find me. Meredith Hunter just wanted to follow a group of boys from her middle school around, and she was getting on Ellen’s nerves. It wasn’t Barbie Man’s car she’d seen—she saw him, standing in the middle of the road, looking around, taller than everyone else. She thought he was looking for her, so she ran straight across to the trail, past the tower, and kept going. She waited in the Kingdom, and when she thought for definite that she’d waited long enough, that Thomas and I would be home, she walked back, only to see the police car in the driveway. She didn’t know what to do, so she’d waited under the dogwood for one of us to come home.
Thomas had gone straight to get Wilson, convinced that Barbie Man would make Ellen take him to Wilson. They’d gone out on the Yamaha to see if they could find Ellen or the black Camaro, then back to Wilson’s in case he came for them there, not expecting him to already be waiting. He definitely hadn’t expected to see me coming out of the woods, holding a gun.
“A gun?” asked Marie.
“The Marksman.”
“You’re serious? You armed yourself with a toy?”
“It’s not a toy, and it looks real in the dark.”
We had to describe repeatedly what had happened to cause Barbie Man to get stabbed in the hand. I didn’t know. The knife was his. Thomas had thought he was going to stab Wilson or slit his throat, he was so out of control.
Officer Day asked Marie for our mother’s contact phone number in North Carolina.
“I’m sorry,” Marie said. “We left my apartment in such a rush, I didn’t bring my bag with the information sheet my mother gave me. It had all her contact details and the emergency numbers. I’d call my roommate, but she’s away right now.”
I knew Marie was lying to protect Mom, but I worried we had still told the police too much, and that maybe she’d be in trouble already. Would they take us away? From each other? What would happen to Beatrice?
The police spoke to the hospital. Wilson had a broken jaw and a punctured lung from a broken rib, which was why his breathing had sounded so difficult. He was having surgery to wire his jaw shut. He’d be in the hospital at least a few days, but should be okay.
“What about . . . the other one?” Thomas asked.
Officer Day said, “Don’t worry. You didn’t kill anybody, son.”
At the end of the interview, we stood in the hallway for a few minutes. “That’s my T-shirt,” Marie said. I looked down. It was the black one I had put on before I left the house.
“Oh, yeah. I borrowed it.”
“It’s one of my favorites,” Marie said. I looked at it. It was the Ramones’ Blitzkrieg Bop shirt, Hey Ho Let’s Go! written across the front, around the American seal.
We stepped out of the police station into early-morning light. The Schuylkill River was flushed in pink and gold, a chorus of birds sang from unseen trees or ledges somewhere, and the earth felt clean. We were safe and together. Grady and Sage walked ahead of us. Despite everything I had done, they were still there, waiting to take us home. Grady told Thomas to sit in the front. I got into the back of the Mercedes and slid all the way over to the far door. Marie sat next to me, then Ellen. Sage sat on the other side.
We drove along the river, and I pressed my face against the glass and watched it pass. In the distance, the cooling towers of the Limerick nuclear power plant were visible. In a few months clouds of steam would billow out of them. Sage and I had signed petitions and written to our representatives to try to stop construction. Outside Phoenixville we passed farmland, and I kept my face against the window so I didn’t have to look at Sage.
During the journey, Ellen fell asleep on Sage’s shoulder. When we turned onto our street, Marie nudged her. “Wake up, Ellen, we’re almost home.”
There was a car parked in our driveway and someone was crouching in front of the failed marigold patch I had tried to plant. A very small woman outside the front door looked up at the house.
“Who’s that?” asked Thomas. I sat forward, leaning over to peer through the windshield.
“Oh God, the Gambinos. I forgot. Ellen was supposed to be going with them this morning to start art camp. Whatever you do, don’t anyone tell them anything.” I didn’t think Mrs. Gambino could comprehend it all.
“How are we going to get out of this?” said Marie.
“No. Please. I want to go.” Ellen was awake, sitting up. “I have everything packed. Tell them I was at a sleepover, and I’ll need to sleep today.”
We stumbled out
of the car and said thank you. Ellen ran to the garage to go in and get her stuff. Marie went to the front to talk to Mrs. Gambino while Thomas and I stood awkwardly by Gabriel.
“Hi, Gabriel,” I said. I saw him take in my hair and clothes. He was wearing a pressed white shirt with shoulder pads, and his hair was parted and slicked back like the boy from The Munsters. I actually thought he looked a bit New Wave, but that was most likely by accident. He was a strange kid.
“These are dying,” he said, pointing at our marigolds. I looked at the overgrown grass, which was still yellow, at the sludge at the bottom of the garden where the septic tank was overflowing, at the weeds growing between the steps up to the woods, so high you couldn’t even tell there were steps.
“Yeah, they are,” I said. I could hear Mr. Walker across the road turn the ignition on his sit-down mower. I could see all the signs of our chaos, of how we were not coping.
“What happened to your hair?” Gabriel asked.
26
We tried conditioner and mayonnaise and gently taking hair off the burrs strand by strand, even cutting them out, but it only got worse, and the tangles were moving closer to my scalp. When we used to cut the grass at one of the houses on a cul-de-sac in Penn Valley, Dad would always say to “mind the burdock,” a crowd of purple flowers that grew down the side of the embankment leading to the Schuylkill Expressway. We’d see their burrs, green in the summer, turned brown by the fall cleanups. Sometimes they got caught in my socks or my sweater, but until yesterday I had never run headfirst through a whole hill of them. Marie put a towel around my shoulders and let me hold a mirror in my lap while she cut chunks of hair.
We were all exhausted, but Marie warned that if I went to sleep on my hair, she’d have to cut it as close as Annie Lennox’s. I said, “Please make it more Belinda Carlisle.” With Marie there, home felt safe again, like there was an answer for everything. I sat very still as she cut, and watched the nests of hair drop to our bedroom floor. In the end it was like a short bob that fell just above my chin and had a few layers. Marie said this framed my face more, and that she liked it on me. I was so tired, it didn’t seem to matter. We left the fallen hair on the floor without sweeping it up and went to bed in the bright morning.