by Dan Chaon
“Oh, really,” Nora says. “That’s an unusual name.” And the knitting girl looks down. She has dark eyebrows that meet in the middle of her face, right above the bridge of her nose, and her chocolate-colored eyes focus on the movement of the needles between her fingers. She is a girl who is used to being made fun of, the sort of girl who clutches her books tightly in front of her and plunges through the hallways of high school like she is walking into a blizzard. Nora knew of a girl like this back in Little Bow, a girl named Alice, which they all thought was funny. A Lice, they called her, and the boys sat behind her and flicked their boogers into her badly permed hair. A man who would make a girl like Alice or Dominique pregnant would have to be entirely evil, Nora decides.
“What are you knitting?” Nora says at last, but the girl keeps her head down stubbornly, as such girls will. Someone, their mother probably, taught them to suffer silently, taught them sticks and stones will hurt my bones, but words will never hurt me, taught them a quiet girl is better loved. Dominique pinches her lips as Nora looks at her.
“Well,” Nora says, after the silence extends for a time. “It’s pretty, whatever it is.”
“It’s a blanket,” says Dominique, finally. “It’s just a blanket. It’s cold in this place.”
“Yes,” Nora says. “It’s going to be a long winter!” she says, reminding herself unpleasantly of her father, his cheerful, commonplace chatter. For a minute she hates him, misses him, hates him, misses him, like flipping a coin or plucking petals off a flower.
——
It will be a long time before she sees her father again. This is another one of the rules: relatives are not allowed to visit the girls at Mrs. Glass House, and she recalls her father’s sorrowful, doubtful eyes as the matron, Mrs. Bibb, recited this to him. Mrs. Bibb is one of the horrors in a long list of horrors, with her orange hair and freckles and her cheerful, caustic blandness. A person incapable of either cruelty or kindness, Nora imagined, only an indifferent nice. It was terrifying, listening to her sweet voice, but what could be done? Nora was expressionless as her father looked at her shyly, as if she might advise him, as if she could tell him what to say or think. “Well, I suppose,” he said, and Nora imagined that he was waiting for her to intervene, to lose her nerve, to cry out, “Daddy, don’t leave me in this place!” Mrs. Bibb seemed to be preparing herself silently for just such a scene.
“Honey . . . ?” her father said, but Nora didn’t say anything to him. She stared down at the ribbed upholstery of the easy chair she was sitting in. He knew what she thought, he knew what her decision was.
Originally, his own ideas had been quite different. “Just tell me his name,” her father had said. “I’ll talk to him, he’ll do the right thing. I can promise you that.”
But she shook her head. “No,” she said.
For a while, he’d tried to argue. “It’s his responsibility, too,” her father said. “Believe me, he’d want to know what’s going on. You just have to give him the chance. You think you know everything, Missy, but you know, I think that most men, they think that it’s their baby, too. Men are not so different as you might think.
“Did he rape you, is that it?” her father said.
“Are you protecting somebody? He’s married, isn’t he?” her father said. “If he comes around here, I’ll know it’s him. I’ll know it’s him, and I’ll kill him, you know that, don’t you? I don’t care about me, they can put me in prison, but I’ll kill him.”
“Did he hurt you?” her father said. “Did he threaten you? You don’t have to be afraid to tell me.”
“Don’t do anything you’re going to regret,” he said. “A life lasts for a long time, you may not know that yet.”
Of course, these conversations linger in her mind now that she’s alone. Her father says, “Just let me help you, babygirl. You’re my daughter. I’ll do anything for you.”
——
That is the worst part of it, she thinks sometimes: knowing that she has hurt him perhaps more than she has hurt herself. It aches to think of him, to picture him sitting in the mornings, hunched over his cup of coffee at the kitchen table, licking the lead of his pencil as he fills in the daily crossword in the newspaper, alone in the small house. She knows that he is already thinking of this baby of hers, that he won’t let it go, that it will be on his mind for the rest of his life. She knows that the coldness and stubbornness she’d turned toward him will be like a cloak she has put on, which she can never take off.
But she cannot choose what he wants for her. Her father is a lover of babies, of families, of connection and structure, and she is not. She knows his stories, the events of the past that he’s turned into little trinkets in his mind, telling them over and over, the same words, the same welling of emotion—wet eyes, constricted voice—at the same precise moments in the telling of his sad, sentimental tales. The orphan train, how they picked him up off the streets of New York City when he was only four years old and sent him all the way across the country to be adopted by a cruel farmer and his wife, who didn’t want a child but a slave; how he’d run away at the age of fifteen. Or her mother, so beautiful and young, and him almost twenty years her senior, but they were soul mates from the start, his pretty little brown-eyed Sioux lady, how can he live without her now that she’s dead? And Nora herself, his own babygirl, the way she used to follow him around and imitate whatever he did, she even wanted to put shaving cream on her face and pretend to shave, just like her daddy!
Oh, these stories—by the time she was fifteen they were almost unbearable. She would feel a smooth airtight window sliding up inside her, impervious to sympathy or pity. “I’ve heard this before,” she’d say softly, but that wouldn’t stop him.
Here at Mrs. Glass House, at least there is silence. At least there are no stories, and she is glad, because she can’t transform what has happened to her into a romance. The boy, the father, is almost gone from her mind now, lingering only in her awareness of her own stupidity. Soon, the baby will be gone, too.
——
But until then, there must be punishment. Humiliation.
Here, at Mrs. Glass House, they are herded from place to place. They move, very docile, single file down the stairs to the basement cafeteria; they are preparing to walk down the hill toward town, where they will eat ice cream and see a movie. Mrs. Bibb distributes “wedding rings,” cheap gold-painted strips of tin, which they are to wear on their left hand, third finger. The Home is said to be a convalescent house for expectant mothers. No one says words like unwed, or bastard, or whore. Certain aspects are pretended. Nora watches as Dominique is given a ring, watches as Dominique slides the ring on, over the chewed fingernail and ugly, wrinkled hillock of finger joint.
They line up. They will be led down the long winding driveway toward the town, young girls in various stages of pregnancy, ripeness, swollen and swelling girls marching single file from the doorway of this place that looks like a haunted house in movies or dreams—The Mrs. Glass House, with its three-story, turreted facade, with its loose gutters and peeling white paint, the long lawn and spike-tipped, curlicued cast-iron fence. If this were a picture, its caption would be: Dread. Its caption would be: The undead stream forth in an endless torrent from the mouth of hell.
——
She covers her mouth at the thought but doesn’t laugh. She focuses instead on the steady crunch of Dominique’s feet against the gravel, the girl’s solemn, gracefully bovine trudge. She focuses on the clot of houses at the bottom of the hill, the tender, dirty nub of a prairie town, with its ice cream parlor and its movie house and its little post office and bank and gas station. There is a satisfaction in knowing that such places are dying their wretched deaths, in knowing that such towns are stumbling, wounded, their young people flowing out and away once they leave high school, draining out of the town like blood. Stupid people, she thinks. What kind of an idiot tries to build a town in the middle of the sandhills, a grassy desert where only sod will grow? T
hese are the same people who would be pleased to act as if the fake rings make some sort of difference, the sort of people who will stare out their windows, deeply content, as the girls drift into their streets. After a moment, Nora slips the tin ring off her finger and lets it fall to the ground. She can imagine a soft “ping” as it hits the gravel driveway. She can picture it rolling down some groove in the ditch, through the dry weeds and mud, off toward some adventure. She thinks of the gingerbread man in the fairy tale. Run, run, as fast as you can, you can’t catch me, I’m the Gingerbread Man.
——
If she lives long enough her life will have a story, and the story will begin at this moment. Once upon a time, there was a girl who didn’t want to have a baby, but she did. Once upon a time, there was a baby who lived in the body of a girl, and there was nothing that she could do about it. Once upon a time, there was a girl who thought her life would be different.
4
June 4, 1997
A child disappears from his grandmother’s backyard on a morning in late spring. He is there one minute—the grandmother glances out the window while she is washing the dishes and she sees him standing by the cyclone fence near the copse of lilac bushes, his hands clasped behind his back, talking to himself, as he likes to do.
And then he is gone.
It is a morning in early June, tranquil and warm, and the town of St. Bonaventure, Nebraska, has reached its greenest moment. By July the prairies that surround the town’s clutch of houses and trees will have faded to a grayish-tan, the color of lichen, and even the fields of corn and alfalfa will seem artificial, desperately verdant beneath huge, insectlike irrigation systems that stride over the fields on long metal legs. Dust devils as high as churches will rise up in the stubble fields and churn their way across the roads and highways, right into the walking sprinklers as if attacking. Dust will settle on the crops’ damp leaves.
But this particular morning the hot, dry, rainless days still seem far away. It is truly, purely spring. School is out. Children play in yards and ride bikes on the sidewalks. Discount City has set up rows of bright pink and blue kiddie pools, in three sizes, along its outside wall. Farmer’s Co-op displays planters full of seedlings—tomato plants and jalapeño peppers and watermelon vines and garden flowers—spreading them out on folding tables in the sun.
On such a day the grandmother is not particularly concerned that she doesn’t see the child when she looks out the kitchen window. He’s playing, she thinks. The boy, Loomis, is six years old, and in fact is a kind of miracle of restraint and politeness for a child of the late twentieth century. He’s the type of child who still consistently presents himself to her to ask, “Grandma, may I use the rest room?” and who will pause to take note of the time on the plastic wristwatch his father has given him because he likes to be in bed at exactly eight-thirty. When she looks out again and sees that he is no longer by the fence she doesn’t think much of it. He is a quiet boy, almost aloof in his elaborate pretend games, and she likes that about him. She respects his sense of privacy.
Another twenty minutes pass. The grandmother, Judy, finishes the breakfast dishes, dries them, puts them away in a cupboard. She is watching—half watching—an old musical on the small television she keeps on the counter for company. Carousel, very sad. “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” a woman sings, and she purses her mouth against a welling of sentimental emotion.
——
She is tired today; she didn’t sleep well. Recently she’s been troubled by strange fluctuations of her pulse as she lies down to sleep, and then, once her pulse stops accelerating and she begins to drift off, her heart seems to stop. It is as if the body has suddenly forgotten that it is necessary to keep blood pumping, and she rises with a jolt into consciousness, like a cork from the bottom of a bucket of water. Her whole body tingles for a moment.
This happens irregularly, but it had frightened her badly last night, and she had paced gingerly through the kitchen with a cup of warm Ovaltine. She wondered if something was wrong with her. The doctors would blame her weight, she thought. Her blood pressure, probably—she had escaped it up until now, but she saw ahead a whole series of adjustments: pills, diets, tests. She would begin the slow and futile ritual of staving off her own mortality. She had seen this happen with her own mother—the way the maintenance of health began to occupy more and more of her mother’s daily life, until most of her waking hours were consumed in a kind of endless tennis match with her own body. Prevent one thing and the ball would come whizzing back over the net: a cold she couldn’t shake, another organ failing, another limb hard to move, or painful. Eventually her mother died from shingles—a ridiculous and almost comical-sounding ailment that had beaten Judy’s mother simply by virtue of her weakened immune system.
Judy had been thinking of this, pacing through the darkened house, when a noise came from outside—a rattling, the soft echo of a jar rolling over a hard surface. She heard what at first she thought was a high-pitched, raspy voice—a voice not unlike her mother’s in her last years—and she shuddered. Out the window, she saw the raccoon. When she flicked on the porch light, it stood up. It held its front legs against its chest like palsied arms, hunching there, cringing. Its eyes glinted, and when she opened the screen door to holler at it, the creature stared at her like a malevolent and senile old person—like one of those old men who glare from their wheelchairs as you pass them at the nursing home. Abruptly, the raccoon dropped from its standing position and trotted to the corner of the yard. On all fours, the animal looked grotesquely swollen, its wide hindquarters jiggling as it ran. She watched as it smoothly slipped through a gap under the fence, near the lilac bush, and vanished.
It is this image that comes to her when she opens the back door to call Loomis. An image of that creature loping, waddling, into the bushes, like a heavily drugged person trying to crawl quickly. Its body was too slow and casual to express terror, but she could tell that it was actually quite desperate. “Loomis,” she says, and for a second she thinks she sees a flash of movement, a tail, a swatch of dark pelt disappearing under the lilac foliage.
This image unnerves her at first. She actually shudders—a shadow passes along the nape of her neck—and then there is the emptiness of the yard. “Loomis?” she says, uncertainly.
The yard behind Judy’s house is not a place a person could hide in. It is a simple square, a clean patch of grass with some dandelions and clover in it, enclosed by a metal cyclone fence. In the northwest corner is a lilac bush, near the end of its blooming; to the east, along the wall of the garage, is her small garden plot: two tomato plants, two zucchini, four rows of yellow wax beans, a cantaloupe vine she is experimenting with. There are some hollyhocks along the side of the house. But mostly it is open yard. A few of Loomis’s toys are scattered there—a Batman doll, a blue rubber ball with yellow stripes, a plastic bag full of dinosaur figurines and soldiers and matchbook cars.
“Loomis?” she says. There is a moment of disorientation, eyeing the yard again, when she thinks somehow he must be here, that there’s something wrong with her perception, her vision.
——
He could have climbed the fence, she supposes, though that seems so unlike him. Maybe he tossed something over the edge by accident and went to retrieve it? The wire of the fence crisscrosses in a diamond pattern, easy enough for him to fit his tennis shoes into the holes and hoist himself over. It seems foolish—he is not a particularly athletic or adventurous child, not liable to run off.
Still, she walks across the yard toward the north end of the fence, her thongs snapping under her bare feet in the warm grass. Here is the narrow alleyway that separates the rears of the houses on her block from the rears of the houses that line the block to the north, just wide enough for the beeping garbage truck to lumber down on Monday mornings. She looks to the right and left—nothing, just trash cans of varying shapes and sizes, plastic and corrugated metal, a few with stuffed garbage bags beside them. Weeds breaking throug
h the cracked cement. Trees and poles, the branches and wire lines interpenetrating. At the far end, where the mouth of the alley opens into a street, a red truck drives past and vanishes. No sign of Loomis.
She is aware, for the first time in many years, of the way the world might look from the point of view of a small child. The largeness of it, the way a common alley might seem to be a mysterious tunnel, the way the back fences and gates of houses have an ancient, abandoned quality. She notices—remembers—the narrow strip of space between the fence and the rear of her garage: another tunnel, but one that doesn’t seem maneuverable even for a child, since logs are piled up there—pieces of an old tree that she’d had removed several years ago. For some reason she must have thought the wood would be useful, though now she can’t remember why. Now it is spotted with lichen and shelf fungus, wet, rotten, perhaps full of termites or ants.
“Loomis!” she calls, raising her voice for the first time, now not embarrassed for the neighbors to hear her. She lets herself bellow, once: “Loomis! Where are you?” And the dog in the neighbor’s backyard to her left begins to bark. He wouldn’t have gone there, of course. He hates and fears the dog, a moody and thickly muscled pit bull named Pluto. Nevertheless, she goes to the edge of the fence and peers over, and Pluto runs at her. He is leashed to a clothesline, and the eyelet of the leash makes a hollow sound, like a marble rolling down a pipe, as it passes along the length of the clothesline rope. At the sight of her, Pluto lets out a series of angry, territorial barks, his ears pinned back and eyes bright with outrage.