by Laura McHugh
—
I clicked Reply on Josh Kyle’s email. Let’s meet, I typed. I’d love to hear why you think I’m wrong.
I’d barely hit Send when his name popped up again at the top of my heap of new messages. Thank you for agreeing to speak with me, he said. Friday at noon? We could meet at the roadside park on the river road, if that’s all right with you—it’s a good halfway point between us. I have something to show you.
Yes, I replied. See you in two days.
CHAPTER 4
* * *
I tried to put the meeting with Josh Kyle out of my mind and focus on settling in. I went to get groceries at Hy-Vee, where Grammy had always shopped, and without realizing what I was doing, I’d filled the cart almost exclusively with my favorite childhood foods: blueberry Pop-Tarts, powdered doughnuts, SpaghettiOs, tomato soup, Cap’n Crunch cereal, Coca-Cola in little glass bottles. I bought some cheap wine, too, the kind that comes in a box with a spigot, and picked up a copy of the Daily Gate City so I could check job listings in the classifieds.
I didn’t feel like unpacking after eating lunch, so I decided to take a tour through town to see if the rest of my old haunts had fared as poorly as the A&W Drive-In. I started with the Keosippi Mall, where Ben, his little sister, Lauren, and I had hung out on weekends in the summer. The parking lot was nearly empty when I pulled in, and all the store signs had been removed from the front of the building, leaving behind vague outlines that I still recognized as JCPenney, Woolworth’s, RadioShack, and Montgomery Ward. Instead of movies, the weather-beaten theater marquee advertised a bingo night and service times for New Life Evangelical Bible Church. It appeared to be a trend in Keokuk, and maybe in all the other small, dying towns across the heartland: churches taking over abandoned retail space. Jobs trickled out and God seeped in to fill the void.
The public tennis courts where Ben and I had played were fractured and glittering with broken glass, the nets gone, the chain-link enclosure sagging halfway to the ground. The elementary school we had attended sat inexplicably empty, plywood over the windows, holes in the crumbling asphalt where the playground equipment had been torn out. I guessed that there were no longer enough students to fill two schools and they were all bused across town to the newer one.
On Main Street, Keasling’s Pharmacy & Gifts, where Grammy had replenished her constant supply of Brach’s Chocolate Stars, had been torn down, and a brand-new Walgreens perched directly across from the gaping space. The hardware store was gone, and the doughnut shop, and the deli. Many of the buildings on Main were unoccupied, their cracked plate-glass windows patched with cardboard and duct tape. One storefront had burned, its charred remains grown over with trumpet vines as it awaited demolition.
Since Main Street was also Highway 136, with the only bridge across the river for miles, light traffic flowed constantly in both directions, but the sidewalks were mostly empty: a teenage boy clacking by on a skateboard, his cheeks welted with acne, his unlaced shoes held together with black electrical tape; an emaciated woman in a tube top smoking a cigarette as she pushed a battered stroller; a pair of men in cheap suits drinking gas station coffees in front of the Keokuk Savings Bank.
I drove up and down the numbered streets starting with First, just west of the bridge, losing count of the abandoned houses. The yards were overgrown, paint weathered away, wood rotted out. It took me a while to realize that not all of the houses that looked abandoned were empty. I spied toys in the tall grass, televisions glowing inside broken windows, people going about their lives while their houses decomposed around them.
I knew it might be a bad idea, but I needed to see Grammy’s house, the Sister House, where I had spent my summers, the house where my mother had grown up. The Sister House was a pink Victorian with a wraparound porch, surrounded by drooping evergreens that kept the front yard in perpetual shadow. It was known as the Sister House because it was built as a father’s wedding gift to his two daughters, who were so close that they married a pair of brothers in a joint ceremony and refused to live apart. The upstairs and downstairs living spaces were identical, and a speaking tube connected the two floors so the sisters could talk to each other whenever they pleased.
My grandparents bought the house when my mother was small, renting out the upstairs apartment to pay the mortgage. After Grampy died, Grammy’s sister, Alice, had moved in upstairs. The house became a Sister House again, though instead of newlyweds the sisters were widows. When Grammy and Aunt Alice passed away, Mom had moved their things to a storage unit and then sold the house at auction. We had needed the money.
I dropped my car off at Arrowood and walked south to Orleans Avenue, where gnarled elms hung over the sidewalk. Their roots had burrowed beneath the concrete slabs, heaving them up at odd angles and breaking them into pieces. In my mind, the Sister House sat on a hill, though now, as I approached it, the ground was barely sloped. I saw the drooping evergreens that shaded the yard, and then the house came into view. I stopped, a pinching sensation in my chest, as though someone were stitching it up: a needle punching through, thread pulling tight. It was hard to reconcile what I was seeing with the picture in my head. The porch had been removed, leaving a thick scar where it had been torn away, and the original carved wooden door had been replaced with one made of cheap fiberglass. The tall windows at the front of the house had been exchanged for squat vinyl ones, the gaps between old and new filled with chipboard. I couldn’t tell anything else about the condition of the house, because it was covered in vines. Virginia creeper had swarmed over the yard, scaled the walls, and worked its way through a missing window on the second floor. The Sister House looked utterly abandoned, draped in a leafy shroud.
Without thinking, I entered the yard and made my way through the vines to the front door. A broken lockbox lay on the top step, the kind realtors use to store keys, but there was nothing inside. The crimping in my chest was unbearable, my legs wobbling as though my bones had gone limp. I reached out and tested the knob, which twisted easily in my hand. There was no traffic, no one walking by, the street barely visible through the trees. I slipped into the house and shut the door behind me.
I stood motionless, my skin prickling in the heat, and listened. The house was silent but didn’t quite feel empty. The air was stifling and reeked of smoke—not just cigarettes, but other burnt things, as though someone had lit a bonfire indoors. A pile of ruptured trash bags lay just inside the entry, beer cans and fast food wrappers spilling out. A black puddle had seeped across the foyer and dried on the hardwood.
I edged around the trash bags into the living room, where the windows were covered with newspaper. Dead flies and mouse droppings peppered the floor, and the wood-paneled walls had been painted a deep purplish red, like raw liver. My pulse drummed in my ears. Gone were the green plaid couch, the knobby rug, the sagging bookcase, the framed photos of distant relatives on dusty farms. I knew that even if I dragged those things back from wherever my mother had stored them and arranged them exactly as they appeared in my memory, the room wouldn’t feel the same. It looked like someone had been squatting here at some point. There were clothes piled in the corner and a mattress with a large brown stain spreading out from the center in concentric circles, as though someone had wet the bed over and over again.
The built-in china cabinets in the dining room, the ones Grampy had made, had been hacked apart, the splintered pieces piled on the floor like kindling. The tiny kitchen, where Grammy, Aunt Alice, and I had eaten hundreds of breakfasts at the Formica table, now appeared too small to have ever held furniture. How had all the knickknacks fit? I cataloged missing pieces: the white enamel trash can that opened with a foot pedal; the monolithic Westinghouse fridge; the squirrel-shaped nutcracker that had fallen on and broken Alice’s toe; the coffee percolator; the aluminum canisters labeled FLOUR, SUGAR, and GREASE; the Coca-Cola bottle opener that had been attached to the edge of the counter; the ancient radio that gave the farm report every noon; the red metal step stool for
reaching the highest cabinets. Stripped of those things, it was no longer my grandmother’s kitchen. It was a room completely foreign to me. A room I did not want to be in.
I tried the switch in the hallway, but there was no power. The door to Grammy’s bedroom at the end of the hall was missing, and a weak rectangle of light spilled from the opening. As I took a step forward, a shadow moved across the doorway, and I froze. I had always felt safe in this house, and now, looking down the hall where a shadow blocked the light, I was scared to breathe. Someone was in my grandmother’s room.
The floor creaked, and I was running back toward the front of the house, passing the staircase without glancing up the stairs, the pinching in my chest like fingers reaching through my ribs to probe my heart. I flew through the front door and out to the street. Aunt Alice and my grandparents had been dead a long time, and now the Sister House was gone, too. It had been a mistake to go inside. I didn’t want what I had seen to take root in my head, to ruin the carefully curated pictures in my memory. I jogged back toward Arrowood—fully understanding, for the first time, why Nana and Granddad had gone to such extreme measures to keep the house in the family and to ensure that it stayed exactly the same.
—
Back at Arrowood, I set to work unpacking and making the place feel lived in. Whomever Heaney had sent to clean hadn’t done a very good job, and my first priority was to tackle some of the dust and cobwebs. I dug around in the laundry room cabinets looking for cleaning supplies. This back part of the house had once been servants’ quarters, and there was a separate stairwell that led up to the second-floor hallway so that the help didn’t have to use the main stairs. The laundry was a bright, serene space with tall windows on two sides to let in the sun. The plank floors and cabinets were painted a glossy white, the walls papered a soft dreamy blue, my great-grandmother’s enormous French serpentine armoire the only dark piece in the room. A musty odor lingered in the air, like wet laundry left to mildew, though I doubted anyone had done laundry here in a good long while.
I found a can of furniture polish and some rags and carried them to the entryway. It was one of the few parts of the house that was not wallpapered. Growing up in a house rich with nineteenth-century character, my mother had longed for shag carpeting and beige drywall and popcorn ceilings. Arrowood was even more ornate and old-fashioned than the Sister House, and as soon as Nana and Granddad retired to Florida, leaving my parents and me alone in the house, Mom set out to update the décor. She vowed to peel off every shred of wallpaper, starting with the entry. It didn’t take her long to give up once she realized how difficult it was to remove the glue—she grumbled that the Arrowoods had probably boiled a horse in the front yard to make it—and the plaster walls were mottled gray and brown, like damp stone, where she’d angrily scraped them bare. Looks like the inside of a crypt, Mom had said. When Mrs. Ferris from next door saw it, she thought my mother had hired someone to apply a faux finish and asked how much it had cost.
I sprayed Old English on a rag and smoothed it over the wainscoting and the banister, moving on to the study to wipe down the bookshelves, which were still filled with Granddad’s anatomy and physiology texts, medical journals, and leather-bound encyclopedias. My mother used to cram her paperback romance novels into the empty spaces, though none of her books remained. After a moment of uncertainty, I retrieved one of my boxes of books from the foot of the staircase and placed the volumes one by one next to Granddad’s. Lee County, Iowa: A Pictorial History; Keokuk and the Great Dam; Indian Chief: The Story of Keokuk; The River We Have Wrought: A History of the Upper Mississippi; Legendary Keokuk Homes.
Among my history books was The Illustrated Book of Saints, which Nana had given to me as I prepared for my First Communion. Nana knew which saint to pray to in every situation. Saint Erasmus for abdominal pains. Saint Jude for lost causes. Saint Agatha to protect you from fire. I had been fascinated by the gruesome stories and pictures. Agatha, who had been assaulted and tortured, was depicted with her severed breasts on a plate. Saint Apollonia’s teeth were broken and knocked out before she was burned to death. Saint Florian was sentenced to be burned alive, though when he proclaimed that he would ascend to heaven on the flames, he was drowned.
I had noticed, despite the many references to fire, that only a handful of saints were drawn with flames in their hands or hearts or atop their heads. Nana explained that the flame represented a deep religious fervor, and I decided that the burning saints were the best and most powerful, the closest to God. While I no longer believed that the saints were watching over me, I still invoked them absentmindedly from time to time, much as I could still recite the Nicene Creed or work a rosary in my sleep, though I had long since stopped going to church.
After I finished with the books, I pulled the sheets off the armchairs and the desk and slid the heavy drapes aside to let in some light. The room looked so much better that I decided to do the same throughout the first floor. When I was done, I dragged all the sheets down the hall to the laundry room and kicked them into a pile in the corner.
As I turned to go, I heard the muted trickle of water running. Back in Colorado, in my basement apartment, I had heard that sound every time someone upstairs took a shower or flushed the toilet, but here I was alone in the house. I imagined corroded plumbing leaking inside the walls, rotting the joists and softening the bones of the house, one of the many potential problems I’d hoped to avoid, right up there with fires from the remaining bits of knob-and-tube wiring. If Nana were here, she’d be praying to the patron saint of plumbing, whose name I couldn’t recall. I couldn’t quite tell where the sound was coming from, so I pressed my ear to the blue wallpaper to listen.
The doorbell rang then, a series of deep melodic gongs, startling me. Mom had chipped through a plaster wall with a hammer to disconnect the bell years ago, after cursing out the two young Mormons who had unintentionally woken the twins from a nap. It must have been reconnected after we’d moved away. I hurried back to the entry and peeked through the sidelight. I was slightly disappointed to see Heaney. I considered not answering the door, but my car was parked outside, so he knew I was home.
“Hi, Miss Arrowood.” His lips lost their color as they stretched into a smile, as though the blood had been pressed out of them. “Sorry to bother you,” Heaney said. “I wanted to let you know I was here before I gave you a scare creeping around the yard.”
“Oh, thanks.”
“You getting settled in?”
“Yeah.”
Heaney’s gaze drifted over my shoulder, into the house. “Anything you need me to take care of inside today?” I shook my head. “All right, then. Thought I’d check.” He took a couple of steps back.
“Oh, wait, there is one thing—were you watering the grass out there a minute ago? Or using the hose for something?”
“No. Did you want me to? Water the lawn? Or…?”
I shook my head, and after waiting fruitlessly for me to explain why I’d asked about the hose, Heaney edged closer. He was only a few inches taller than me, our eyes almost level, his breath bracingly antiseptic, like he had just rinsed his mouth with Listerine. I tried to imagine him hanging out with my mom and dad in their high school days. How well had he known them? Aside from Mrs. Ferris, I didn’t know any of my parents’ childhood friends.
“Whatever you need, I’m here for you,” Heaney said. “Don’t be afraid to ask. I want you to think of me as family.”
It was a nice sentiment, though it didn’t strike me the way he’d likely intended. Think of me as family. Even at my lowest point in Colorado, I had refused to call my mother for help. I was still angry that someone else had called her for me. I watched Heaney go down the steps and into the yard, wondering if it had been hard for him to ring the bell after years of letting himself in; if he had felt, in a way, that the house belonged to him, the same as I had, all those years it wasn’t mine. I listened again for the sound of running water, but wherever it was coming from, it had stopp
ed. The house was too quiet, holding its breath.
I had been disappointed that it was Heaney at the door, though I wasn’t sure whom I’d expected. Ben? Even if he hadn’t heard people gossiping about my return, his parents still lived next door to Arrowood and had surely noticed the car outside, seen me coming and going. They would have told him I was back. Did it mean anything, that Ben hadn’t yet come by? It had only been two days, and there were a dozen logical reasons for his absence, the most likely being that he didn’t live here anymore. He and his sister, Lauren, would have moved away for college, and maybe they’d never returned. Ben had always wanted to illustrate comic books when he grew up, or work in animation. It would make sense that he had started a new life someplace else. I knew there was also a chance that Ben was here and didn’t want to see me, though I didn’t want to think about that.
I wouldn’t have admitted to anyone that when the doorbell rang, a tiny spark flickered through the circuitry of my brain, the tenuous hope that the twins might magically show up on the doorstep now that I was home.
Josh Kyle’s email had been nagging at me all day, a splinter needling its way beneath my skin. What evidence could he possibly have that would change my mind about Singer? Still, I wanted to know what he had to say. The moments surrounding my sisters’ disappearance were so firmly stitched into my memory that they were bright and clear after so much else had come unraveled and faded away.
—
After the gold car had disappeared with my sisters inside it, I’d squatted under a tree and buried my face in my Hello Kitty T-shirt, trying to catch my breath. Something dug into my hip, and I pulled a half-eaten sucker from my pocket. Violet, Tabitha, and I had been to the bank with our mother early that morning, and each of us had received a Tootsie Pop from the teller. Violet hadn’t liked hers, and after a few slobbery bites, she’d managed to get it stuck in Tabitha’s hair. I’d worked the sucker free and shoved it into the pocket of my shorts. It was fuzzy with lint now, though I could still make out the marks of Vi’s tiny teeth and a blond hair that must have been Tabby’s. I held on to the sucker, a sticky talisman, as if it might make them reappear.