by Beth Kephart
“Be clear,” Sergeant Rose said.
“Smoke,” I said. “Cigarette smoke. Somewhere around here.” I pointed. Then drew a circle out. I couldn’t remember precisely. I wasn’t really sure.
“I got lost,” I said.
“You didn’t mention smoke in the interview,” Sergeant Rose said.
“I didn’t remember.” It was dry inside my throat, my mouth.
“We asked you several times to remember all you could.”
“I’m just remembering it now.”
“What else are you remembering?” He was standing beside me. His arms were crossed. He rocked back on his heels. Gave me a long, hard look, like I was the criminal here.
“Cigarette smoke,” I said. “Just”—I showed the size of a puff—“this much.”
He dropped the knot of his arms and pinched his lapel. He put his radio on alert. He rubbed at his head and tilted his Stetson. He smelled of a full day’s work.
“This is a critical detail,” he said, and now Mrs. B. was crying again and Mr. B. was rubbing her back with one hand, zooming the map with his other, trying to see the smoke that I said I thought I’d smelled. Had I smelled it? Yes. I had. I was pretty sure I had.
“I was looking for Matias,” I said. “Not two men on a break.” I could hear the tears in my voice. The guilt. How had I forgotten? Every detail counts.
“Smoke,” the sergeant said. “Just a puff. Somewhere around here.” He pointed. He asked me again.
Be precise.
Tell the truth.
The truth is a trick.
“Somewhere,” I said, and nodded. “Yes.” Closing my eyes. Trying to remember. Where in the woods I was. How the smoke had moved. Downwind from where? Could smoke ever blow up?
“Anything else we should know,” Sergeant Rose said, “before calling it in?”
“Right here.” I pointed. “There was smoke. Right here, or thereabouts.”
Mrs. B. pushed her black hair back behind her. It had curled from the heat in the house. She stuffed a fist into the pocket of her jeans, tugged at her orange camisole, turned around again to look at me, because I was standing there, behind them, on the other side of the couch, on the other side of the world; that’s how it felt. Her eyes were like two wells I could have fallen into. I was inside her eyes, and I was drowning, like I had drowned before.
“They have him,” she said. “They have him. What else?” Her voice like a murmur. Like a rustle of birds. Accents and ruffles and hurt.
“Let’s avoid summary conclusions,” the sergeant said.
He touched his hand to her shoulder. Gave me a look. Called it in.
There was commotion through the crackle.
46
OUTSIDE, THE CLOUDS REPLACED THE sun. The day grew dark. I throbbed. I stood at the front door of the B.’s white house, watching the street for the Dart. For my uncle. And his nephew.
Come home. Come home. Come back.
I had forgotten the puff of smoke. I’d been there—eyewitness—and I’d lost a clue that could have mattered. A whole afternoon gone by and now night had come on, and I’d been there where the smoke was, I’d been close, and I’d forgotten, and maybe, I thought, Matias had seen me walk by. Heard me calling his name. Tried to call back but was stopped. I tried to imagine how that would feel. I tried, and I got sick with it. Choked up.
See me. Help me. Hear me.
I’d walked past.
Matias?!
My uncle with his slippery celebrity shoes was out in the woods. Matias was out there too. I was in the snow-fort house, at the door, watching for lights on the road—the Dart, a Crown, something. I was there, just standing there, waiting. Nothing. Waiting is nothing.
Now, in the glass, I saw Mrs. B. behind me, her curls spilled out around her head, her fist in the pocket of her jeans. Watching the road, watching me, waiting like I was until I turned. She opened her arms. She hugged me close. She wasn’t tall for a mom. I was taller.
“You are my one boy’s best friend,” she said with extra syllables.
I nodded.
“I know that you are doing what you can.”
I sobbed.
I hugged her back.
We stayed like that for a long time, and then we turned.
Standing there. Watching the road.
Waiting is the worst kind of nothing.
47
MAYBE IT WAS TEN O’CLOCK when Sergeant Williams came back. Her cop lights on, her siren off. I heard her come up the drive and park. I ran and opened the door, let her in, called out for Mr. and Mrs. B., who were still in the living room, watching the news. I’d been watching too. Breaking news, CNN kept saying, but it was the same endless loop. Pictures of the escapees. Pictures of the car they’d left. An accomplice jailer in handcuffs, already accused. An inside job, they kept saying. Tools hidden inside food.
Now, behind me, CNN was showing pictures from the afternoon—the fan of troopers, the manhole cover, the possible escape routes, the topographics of six million acres. There was talk about police sources and challenges, pictures inside the walls of Little Siberia. CNN would be showing pictures of Uncle Davy and Matias soon. Uncle Davy in one of his celebrity shots. Matias in one of the pictures they had sorted in the courtyard.
Both of them with the same word running like a river down below: MISSING.
They’d be showing them soon. They already had.
But now Sergeant Williams had come, and Sergeant Rose was at attention, relaying the nothing-new-from-out-there news to Mr. and Mrs. B., and leaving me with the first sergeant. There was a smudge of eyeliner under each of her eyes, no more blush on her cheeks. She was off duty, and she had a kid and husband at home, but here she was. More waiting. More regrets. I should have remembered the smoke. She was going to tell me.
“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
She worried her lips. She scratched the skin on her neck. “Lizzie,” she said, and I knew it was bad, whatever was coming. She led me back down the hall, closer to the front door. A private conversation. My stomach hurt.
“We’ve heard from your mother,” she finally said, when we’d reached the door, when going any farther would have meant going outside beneath the sky that was dark with night and clouds. “She’s very concerned.”
Oh, I thought. Oh. No.
I nodded. I tried to picture my mom at home, her blood all smogged up with the medicine, her hair white at its roots. She was at home in the dark watching CNN. Seeing her brother on the news. My friend Matias. Calling my phone. A sergeant answered.
I felt full of the ugly then. All I’d done was wait. And forget a detail. And try—there was a promise—to protect my mom. Worst promise keeping I’d ever done.
“You said that there was no one else to contact,” Sergeant Williams said. “We believed you. Under other circumstances we would have investigated, but Lizzie, we have a break on our hands. And two possible kidnaps.”
Is there anyone else we should contact?
I’d said no. Shaken my head. Left my mother out of the mess we all were in, left her secret to herself. I’d had a plan. To find Uncle Davy and Matias first and then call Mom—get us all three on the phone, tell her the adventure we’d had. See? We’re okay. See? Nothing to worry about, Mom. I’d had a plan not to tell my mother until the only thing to tell her was, We’re fine. And she’d be so happy after that, and the happy would stand beside the hope she had to have to beat the cancer, and she’d get better like she had to, no interruptions. That would have been the story I’d tell. That would have been it, if my uncle and Matias had been found. If there weren’t six million acres and two men.
And the person who had helped them.
Put their tools inside that food.
Sergeant Williams dug into her pocket, found my phone, tapped the screen. She crossed her arms and tipped back in her boots, like Sergeant Rose, and waited for the call to ring through.
“Mom?” I said.
She burst into t
ears.
“Mom. I’m sorry. I’m so . . . I thought . . .”
“Oh,” she said. “Honey. What’s happening there?”
But she already knew. She’d been watching CNN, like I said. She had called my phone and the sergeant had answered, and I had to tell her what I knew of the truth. That Uncle Davy had been filing at the library. That I’d gone up into the woods. That Matias was lost and his cane had been dropped and that I’d walked and looked, and I hadn’t known. Not until I saw the cops had I known about Little Siberia. Not until we drove to Uncle Davy’s house and found the Dart but not found him had I understood the horribleness of the trouble we were in. Uncle Davy must have heard about the break in the library or on the radio, I said. Uncle Davy was looking for me. Uncle Davy was that kind of—
“Yes,” she said. “Yes. Lizzie. He is.” And now my mom began to sob.
Estrangement or no estrangement, my mother loved my uncle, who was her brother first. It was my father’s fault that they’d stopped talking. My father, to blame for this.
Sergeant Williams rubbed the liner from beneath her eye, looked past me, through the door, into the night. Because my uncle was no good out in the woods. He had never been. He had chosen the six million acres because a celebrity like him needed space. Because a man like him needed space too. Because he had lost something once. He walked the woods in slippery shoes. He never went far. He understood the trees and the bears and the glacial tucks through the books he’d read, the stories I had told him, the biology I knew, Matias’s watercolor art.
“He has The Art of Keppy, Mom.”
“Keppy?”
“Camping and Woodcraft like I’d read to you.”
My mom on one side. My uncle on the other.
And now.
And now?
Sergeant Williams uncrossed her arms and scratched her head. She put her hand up on my shoulder. I listened to Mom sob and myself sob, and sometimes four hours and a bump and turn is much too far from the people you love.
“Mom?”
“Sweetie.”
“We’re going to find him.”
“I love your uncle,” my mother said.
“I know.”
“I just haven’t said so lately.”
“He loves you back. He tells me . . . stories.”
I thought of the photo in my backpack. The ways that families do begin and how they cannot end.
“He’s being a hero, right now, Mom. Wait till you see. He’s going to come home with Matias.”
“I’m coming up there,” Mom said.
“You had the medicine, Mom. You can’t.”
I checked the sergeant’s face. She raised a brow. My mom had not mentioned any sickness or medicine or doctor’s rules to the sergeant. This much was clear enough.
“In a few days,” my mom said, saying the words for hope’s sake.
“In a few days we’ll be all right. I promise.”
Sergeant Williams motioned for the phone. I told my mom I loved her and gave it up. Sergeant Williams walked away, down the hall, opened a door into the courtyard, and they talked. Trooper to daughter’s mother. Mom to mom.
I stood there, out of hearing.
Finally Sergeant Williams came back with the phone inside her pocket. She stood there, in the kitchen, beneath the hands of a clock. It was 10:26 at night. Sergeant Williams fixed the mess of her hair. Walked the circle of the house. Returned to where she had started. It was 10:31. She asked, “Who has eaten dinner here?”
Not one of us had.
“Mrs. B.,” she called, and I heard Mrs. B. stand up.
“Teach me to make rice pudding,” she said.
The weirdest thing she could have said.
Also the rightest one.
48
ONE FIREFLY. TWO. TWO LITTLE lights in the sky above the rectangle window that they sliced into the roof before, when my mom lay here, in this bed, waiting for a miracle. You have to see the sky to hope. The sky, because it is always new, always promising a future, because it’s the only way I can forget, sometimes, the itch of the ivy in the itch of the plaster over every broken bone, the nexts of my story.
Tomorrow is day five.
Tomorrow, and the blue moon is past us now, and I’m counting.
You’re counting, I can see it, too.
I wish to be outside. I wish.
Tragedy is fast and it’s so slow.
Your shoes scuff the stairs on the way down.
49
BASMATI RICE. THREE CUPS OF milk. One cup of whipping cream. And sugar. And one half of a whole vanilla bean. And water and a cinnamon stick.
Mrs. B. had these things.
That’s where I left this story yesterday, inside the kitchen in the snow-fort house.
That’s where we’ll start again, now that you’ve returned.
Mrs. B. showed Sergeant Williams how to salt and simmer the rice, how to add the milk and cream and sugar, how to knife out the seeds from the split vanilla bean, how to fold the bean in.
She showed her that.
She showed her how to stir—not slow, not fast.
She showed her: “This is the way in my country, which we left.” The beautiful. The dangerous. The coffee and the coffee men. Tiburcio.
They cooked and they stirred and in the end they tossed the bean and all that time they were standing there, and sometimes Mrs. B. couldn’t work for how panicked she was, jumping at every last noise outside, every new something on the TV or radios, and Sergeant Williams would put her hand on her shoulder and say something I couldn’t hear, and she would stir again, taste again, keep going, and Mr. B. stood by, near, his iPad in hand, looking up and looking down, not saying anything, all his terror carried high and in his neck. I thought of all the worry they’d had in El Salvador. Of the reasons they’d come here, to my country. Of how they’d wanted safety for their son, how they’d come here for his protection, and now two men had climbed through the pipes of Little Siberia and pushed up out of a manhole and gotten a getaway car two miles in. Two men. And the B.’s son was missing. Not every murderer has a heart of gold.
It took forty minutes, maybe, of stir. It was way past Sergeant Williams’s shift, and she had Sammy and her husband at home, but she was still with us.
“Oh,” she said, putting a clean spoon into the pot. “That’s good.”
There was four servings’ worth.
We stood there, suddenly starving, scraping our bowls clean.
Looking back now, telling this to you, I can see Sergeant Williams, with her bright-blue eyes and the black knot of her hair at the base of her neck. I can see her Stetson on the counter, hear her radio hardly crackly. I can see Mr. and Mrs. B. and how, after the bowls were empty, there was silence. Even the radio went quiet for a spell. You don’t know how you are going to survive what surely plans to kill you, then someone makes rice pudding.
I could taste the good in it. And the fear.
Like Salvadoran Cream of Wheat.
50
THAT NIGHT I LAY AWAKE in Matias’s room. On the side of the house, one turn to the left from the kitchen. I lay on his bed on top of his quilt with the window open—hardly any stars out there, clouds over the moon.
The paper parakeets hanging from ceiling strings floated in the night breeze. An empty cage, like an antique lamp, perched above my head. One wall of his room was painted green, and three walls were painted white, and above his headboard, pinned to the corkboard, were a bunch of photographs.
Pictures of Matias at a black-sand beach. Pictures of Mr. B. inside a cove. A picture of Mrs. B. at the end of a dock, unclipping a fish from a hook. A picture of a swimming hole in a jungle cliff, Matias leaping, folded, a regular naked-to-the-bone cannonball, the size of any cannonball, no proportionate nothing. A picture of Mr. B. drinking coconut milk from a hairy shell. Pictures of a courtyard house, snow-white on the outside, a garden inside, flowers tumbling off the roof—purples and reds. A house like this one except it wasn’t in New
York.
But the best picture of all was Matias and the man with a machete hung from a beaded strap and tucked into a leather holster. The two of them walking toward the camera, their heads thrown back in a laugh. The man was taller than Matias, but only by a broken straw hat. His skin was dark as furniture polish.
As walnuts, Matias had said.
Tiburcio, I thought. Tiburrrrrrcio.
And there beneath the photographs, hung from a hook, was the machete itself, tucked into its holster. Right there, in my best friend’s room.
Why would you keep a machete by your bed?
What was Matias afraid of?
Why didn’t I know?
I turned the light off. I kept my eyes open. Through the window I heard the tymbal songs of the cicadas. Crepitations. A word my uncle had used one night last year when we were sitting on his stoop and he was telling me about his M-B-As and then he stopped.
“Listen to that,” he said.
I listened.
“Every song has a purpose. The courting calls. The flick-flicks.”
“Love songs,” I said, and he said, “Crepitations,” and I should have asked him then about love and about its opposite, which is loneliness. I should have asked him what he did without me, if he sang when I wasn’t there, if he made his Cream of Wheat when it was only him at the table, if he ate his edibles, if it was always only him. I should have asked the man who loved me best, but there are some things you shouldn’t ask, just some things you should fix.
If.
And now my uncle, my beautiful celebrity uncle, was out there, in the woods, with his slippery shoes, his pink shirt, his lime-green socks, his polka-dotted bow tie, his turtle-shell sunglasses, and I was thinking how loneliness is private and how fear is the loneliest thing of all, and he was out there because of me, but also because of Matias.
The night songs rushed and sizzed. Like someone shaking popcorn in an aluminum pan. The cicada songs would swell up and die down, and then the tymbals would play again, all these bugs calling, Love me, and it would go on, loud, then simmer off like a low-heat pot, then burble up again. I imagined the songs ricocheting over six million acres. I imagined Uncle Davy and Matias listening in. Wherever they were, they were hearing this.