“No, I haven’t seen him. I only just heard he was missing. I hoped to ask you a few questions.”
“The police already asked a few questions, and I ain’t got any new answers. Vern run off just after Christmas, likely mad at me and his daddy for not buying him the video player he wanted.”
Max watched the woman rifle in her pockets and pull out a pack of cigarettes. She knocked the box against her thigh and retrieved one, propping it on her lip and lighting it with a pink lighter.
“You believe Vern ran away, then?”
Something flashed across Goldie’s face, and she took a long drag on her cigarette, replacing the look with indifference.
“Vern’s a real independent boy, always has been. He used to take apart radios and car engines with Darwin. He’s real smart. If anyone can make it out there on his own, it’s Vern.”
Max understood Goldie didn’t think Vern had run away, but she needed to convince herself he had. If he’d run away, he might come back.
“Is Darwin Vern’s biological father?”
Goldie glared at him.
“I don’t know what that has to do with nothin. Darwin raised Vern from diapers. Vern’s real daddy, if you can call a man who ain’t ever bought him a single birthday present a real daddy, was in Alaska last I heard, workin’ the pipeline. Course, we ain’t ever seen a dime of all that pipeline money.”
Max wanted to probe Darwin and Vern’s relationship, but sensed he’d stepped on a hornet’s nest bringing it up. Best not to spray the bees too.
“I’d like to hear about the day Vern went missing, if you’ve got a few minutes to chat,” Max said.
Goldie had stepped back to the door as if a sixth sense told her, her daughter was preparing to burst through it. Sure enough, the child barreled out, the large gray cat clutched in her skinny arms.
“Put that cat down. Good lord, Lacy. One of these days you’re going to get your eyes clawed out of your head.”
Lacy dropped the cat, and he ambled into a patch of sunlight, flopping on his side.
Goldie caught her daughter by the shoulder as she started toward the stairs.
“You stay in the yard. I don’t want to see you go past the swing set.”
Goldie gestured at the swing set that included a metal slide on one end. An old tractor tire turned sandbox rested beside it.
“But I want to play in Vern’s fort!” The girl gestured to a tree near the road.
About fifteen feet in the air, Max spotted a piece of plywood positioned on two large branches. A black tarp hung over the platform, holey and flapping in the warm breeze. It looked abandoned, forlorn, sinister even, and Max jerked his eyes from the eerie treehouse.
“You’re not to go near that fort. You hear me?” Goldie grabbed her daughter’s arm.
The girl cried out and jerked away. She jumped off the porch, skipping down three steps before running to the swings.
She stuck her tongue out at Max as she passed.
Goldie shook her head as if eternally perplexed by the child. She sat down on the top step of the porch and gestured to the space beside her.
“You’re welcome to sit.”
Max walked to the bottom of the stairs, but he didn’t sit down.
“Vern left on January fourth,” Goldie explained. “We had one of those winter storms and got about two feet of snow overnight. They called school off, which Darwin was all pissy about because Joe brings his three kids into the garage and they run like wild animals. Vern and Lacy slept in.
Vern came down around nine and said he was going sledding. I told him to take his mittens because his gloves are the thin kind that get all wet. He didn’t take them. I know because I saw them lying in his bedroom later that day.
Lacey and I,” she paused and gestured at her daughter. “That’s my daughter, Lacy. We baked most of the day. Joe’s Autobody was having their Christmas Party that next weekend. He does it in January every year, and I’d offered to bring Christmas cookies. We baked until about two o’clock. I thought it strange Vern hadn’t come home, but he’d been sulking since Christmas. He wanted one of those handheld video game thingies all the kids have. Well, we just couldn’t afford it. Last year wasn’t a great year for us, and we were lucky to get food on the table let alone little video games you can carry in your backpack.”
Goldie finished her cigarette and stubbed it on the porch, tucking the butt in the pocket of her overalls.
“If I’d have known it meant so much to him, I would have found a way,” she said, lifting a hand to study her fingernails.
Max noticed the same color paint he’d seen on Lacy’s shirt in the cuticles of Goldie’s nails.
“By the time Darwin got home with the truck, I was worried sick. Night comes early in January, and by five pm, there was nothing but dark out there.” She gestured at the dense forest edging their property.
“We loaded up Lacy and drove for hours. We went all over town, stopped at his friends’ houses. Nothing, not a peep. We called the police the next morning and filed a report, but Darwin found a note in Vern’s room. It didn’t look like a note to me, just the scribblings of a kid, but the police seemed to consider it proof he’d run away.”
“What did the note say?” Max asked, his eye flitting involuntarily back to the treehouse and the black tarp above it.
He’d drawn a picture of a boy flying in the clouds, just a little sketch. Vern had written flying south for the winter underneath the figure of the boy. He loved to draw and was good at it too.”
Max alerted to Goldie’s use of the past tense and considered mentioning it, but swallowed the words.
“The police considered a kid’s drawing a note?”
Detective Welch’s smug face rose in Max’s mind, and he flexed his fists unconsciously.
Goldie nodded, took out her cigarettes, and opened the top. She counted the cigarettes, touching each one before sighing and putting the box back in her pocket.
“That’s it. Not a peep out of the police since then and nothing from Vern, not even a phone call.”
11
Ashley almost told Shane about the raccoons, but changed her mind at the last moment.
Shane had stashed his skateboard in a pile of brush near the woods. He grabbed it and they headed for town.
“Want to go to the skate park?” he asked Ashley. “I’ve been trying to grind on the rail over there.”
She shrugged. She didn’t have anything else to do, and she could always feed the raccoons on her own later.
“Sure.”
Shane pushed along beside Ashley, one foot planted on the board, the other pushing off the road.
Ashley crossed her fingers and let out a sigh of relief when she saw the skate park was empty. She’d thought the Thrashers might be there, at which point she would have abruptly turned and walked home.
Shane pushed off hard and jumped his board onto a long metal rail a foot off the ground. He hit the side, his board skidding, but only made it a few feet when he jumped off and let the board clatter to the pavement. He tried a second time.
“So, why’s your dad a dick?” Ashley asked, as Shane rode his board up the curve of a ramp.
“Huh?” he asked, glancing at her.
“The other day you said your dad was a dick,” she explained. She didn’t know why she asked the question, to fill the silence maybe.
Shane tucked his hair behind his ears and bit his lip as he tipped the skateboard over the edge of the ramp and cruised gracefully down, bending his legs and jumping up before landing back on the board with both feet and drifting to a stop.
He put one foot down and kicked back to where Ashley stood.
“I guess he wasn’t when I was little. It’s hard to remember now, but I think he was decent for a while.”
“And then what?”
“And then my sister killed herself.”
Ashley’s mouth fell open.
“Catching flies?” he asked.
She closed her m
outh.
“I didn’t know you had a sister.”
Shane shrugged, pushed off hard on his board and sailed away, curving around in a circle and coming back.
“Most people don’t. She died before we moved here. We lived in Saginaw until I was seven. My sister had ten years on me. She was born before my parents graduated from high school. It was a big scandal my mom said. My mom’s family had money, my dad’s didn’t. Typical bullshit.”
“What was her name?”
“Annabelle. Everyone called her Belle. I called her Belly. Not in a mean way,” he added hastily. “Like in a kid way, you know?”
Ashley nodded.
“I was crazy about her,” he laughed and squinted at the pavement. “But it’s getting harder to see her in my mind. Every year she fades a little more. But my mom keeps an album in her closet and we pull it out a few times a year when dad’s gone. He won’t talk about her. If we talk about her, he gets all pissy and stomps out the door.”
“Why?”
“Beats me. My mom says he never learned to process his feelings - whatever that means.”
“Why did she do it?”
Shane walked up to the highest ramp, dropped his board and set one foot in the center. He kicked off and sped down the drop, curving up and catching air. He flipped the board and again landed easily in the center, not even a wobble in his knees.
Ashley whistled, impressed.
She’d tried skating a few times, but couldn’t get a feel for the board beneath her. She’d always ended up flat on her butt with skinned elbows to show for her efforts.
“She left a note,” he explained. “She said she was sorry, it was better this way, not to be mad at her. She said she wanted me to have her cassette player and her tapes.” Shane laughed, but no smile accompanied the sound.
“You’ve read it?”
“My mom keeps it in the album. It’s on the very last page. I used to sneak it out and read It over and over again. Like maybe if I read it enough times, I would know why she did it. But there’s nothing there. There’s no why.”
Ashley searched for words. When someone died, her mother would tell the family I’m praying for you or you have my sympathies, but Ashley didn’t find those words comforting. Plus they’d sound strange coming from her lips.
“That really bites,” she offered.
Shane looked at the sky, tilting his head so far back, his blond hair brushed his shoulders.
Blazin’, Hot, Stud. That’s what the girls at school called Shane. But the word that came to Ashley’s mind as she watched him was beautiful. She could practically hear the other kids ribbing her for such a thought. Guys weren’t beautiful. And yet… Shane Savage kind of was.
She felt warmth rise into her cheeks and looked away.
“If you look high enough, like put your head so far back you can’t see the ground, there’s only sky. There could be nothing but sky right now,” he said. “She jumped off the roof of her high school. It was a pretty high building, like three stories.”
He pulled his head down and blinked at the ground.
“Makes me dizzy,” he murmured.
Ashley tried to imagine his sister, Belle. Maybe she looked like him, beautiful with golden hair billowing out behind her as she stepped to the edge of the roof at her high school.
Did she look at the sky or the ground?
“The janitor found her. She did it in the afternoon. I still remember the day, weird how days get stuck in your mind. I can’t remember the first time I fell off a board, but I can remember that day vividly. My mom was cooking chili. It was October, one of those cold, blustery days where you look out the window and see the wind shaking down all the trees. I wanted to play in the leaves, but my mom wanted me to wait for Belle to get home from school so she could keep an eye on me. It was sunny. A sky like today with those huge clouds, marshmallow fluff, Belle called them. And later on, I thought about that. It wasn’t a kill yourself kind of day. Didn’t people kill themselves when it was raining or gray? Who kills themselves when the sun is shining?”
He bent down and picked at a skull decal peeling off his board. He ripped it off, but only a corner pulled free, leaving a one-eyed skeleton gazing up at him.
“By the time the cops showed up, the sun had set and my dad was home from work. We ate chili at the table and my mom kept glancing at the door. Every few minutes she’d say an excuse like maybe the girls went for sodas or Belle’s been working so hard on her history paper so she probably stayed after for help. We saw the cop car pull into the driveway and my dad stood up so fast his chili knocked over. I remember my mom scrambling to clean it up. She started to cry, these big gasping sobs, and I thought it was because the chili was dripping onto the carpet. I kept saying, ‘It’s okay, Mom,’ and trying to sop up the chili with my stuffed bear. Now, I understand she somehow knew.”
“That your sister had killed herself?”
Shane ripped another strip off the skeleton.
“That Belle was dead. When the cops came in, one of them took off his hat and held it to his chest. My mom collapsed. She curled into a little ball and started wailing. My dad told me to go to my room, but he wasn’t paying attention, so I just stayed right there.
“We’re sorry to inform you that your daughter is dead. That’s how I remember it. I’m not sure if that’s right, though. That part of my memory is more like watching a film. I might have taken those words from a movie, for all I know.”
Ashley frowned, her mouth dry and her heart thudding softly against her breastbone. The world seemed fuller suddenly, bright and aching and hard to take in. In her mind, she could see a seven-year-old Shane watching his mother on the floor, chili dripping from the table as two policemen took their entire world and crushed it into a little ball and then threw it in the trash.
“I don’t know if she died instantly or lay there on the concrete, everything broken, blood leaking out of her. I remember the casket was closed at her funeral. There were hundreds of kids, like teenagers, kids her age. The girls were crying and falling into each other, and the boys stood shoulder to shoulder, eyes all screwed up and confused. My mom had to be carried out after the service. My uncle Joe carried her because my dad had to help carry the casket.”
Ashley wanted to speak. She searched again for the right words and managed only a little puff that sounded a bit like ‘sorry.’
Shane sat heavily on his board, pulling his legs in and resting his elbows on his knees.
“I guess that’s why my dad’s a dick.”
Ashley sat down too, crossed her legs, and pulled at her t-shirt, wishing she had gum or some poppers to explode, anything to focus on other than Shane’s solemn face.
His eyes didn’t water, but they’d gone a few shades paler as he spoke, the navy irises fading to match the sky.
“She’d be twenty-six now. We celebrate her birthday every year. Mom and me. My dad would go ape-shit if he knew. But we go out to a restaurant and get a piece of cake and put a candle on it. Her birthday is in September. She’d had her seventeenth birthday just a few weeks before she did it. My parents had given her a new pair of roller skates for her birthday. She loved to roller skate. There was a rink a few miles from our house, and she went there with her girlfriends every Friday night.”
“Do you have any other brothers and sisters?” It was a stupid question. They attended the same school. She knew he didn’t have other brothers and sisters.
He shook his head and then looked up, offering her a wry smile.
“Want to go get ice cream? Swirly Cone still has two for one.”
Surprised at the abrupt shift in conversation, she nodded.
Shane hopped up, dropped his board, and pushed toward the road, looking back as she hurried to keep up.
12
“Did you see his eyes?” Ashley whispered as Warren passed her and Sid in the hallway.
To both their surprise, he didn’t reach over a meaty hand to knock Sid’s books from his ar
ms.
Sid twisted around, but Warren had already shuffled around the corner.
“What was wrong with them?” Sid asked, stopping at his locker and hoisting his books under one arm while he fumbled with the lock.
One by one the books slipped and fell, and Ashely caught each one before nudging Sid out of the way and putting his combination in for him.
“What if I’m sick one of these days, Sid? How will you ever get your math homework?”
Sid laughed and held up his thick fingers. “My mom says I’m all thumbs.”
“I hate to agree with a parent, but she might be right,” she said.
Ashely swung open his locker, and a tumble of papers flew out followed by his Star Wars lunchbox. Ashley rolled her eyes at the box, choosing not to mention for the hundredth time that he’d get made fun of less in the cafeteria if he brought a brown bag like she did.
“Meet you here before lunch?” Sid asked.
“Yep.” Ashley nodded and walked off.
Sid didn’t need to ask. They met at his locker before lunch every day and then ate their food at choking speed before rushing outside for twenty-three minutes of recess before returning to the building for their final two periods of the day.
Ashley had almost forgotten all about Warren’s strange appearance until she spotted Travis Barron and Warren outside the side entrance to Winterberry Middle School. Travis’s head shook from side to side and his cheeks flared red as if he were yelling at his large friend. Warren seemed unmoved by the display, his shoulders hunch forward. After another minute of yelling, Travis threw up his hands and stomped back through the doors of the school.
Ashley ducked into the empty science room and flattened herself against the wall.
She slid over to the window and peeked out.
Warren lumbered away from the school, slow and heavy, his head bowed as if walking into a stiff wind, though Ashley didn’t notice any rustling in the trees.
The bell for lunch rang and classroom doors swung open. Feet pounded down the hall as other middle schoolers stampeded toward the lunchroom.
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