Thirty-two years later, now, the two hours after Melanie ran away are still lost. There’s an image of Alex, falling back into the water on one arm, of Rodge, just standing there, limp, and then it’s trees, maybe, and roads. The red-brick buildings of town; an adult guiding my inhaler down to my mouth. Alex running up the side of the highway to meet his Buick.
At his funeral, Rodge held my hand, and I let him, but then I couldn’t hold on tight enough, I guess. Three years later, on his birthday, he bungee-corded car batteries to his work boots, stepped off a stolen boat into the middle of the lake.
Leaving just me.
Geographically, I moved as far away from Lakeview as possible. There are no significant bodies of water for fifty miles, and my children, Reneé and Miller, they each got through their twelfth years unscathed somehow. Probably because I stood guard in their doorways while they slept. Because I only allowed history and political books into the house. Because, finally, they were each popular in their classes, unaware of the kids standing at the back walls of all the rooms they were in, their faces a combination of damaged hope and hopeful fatalism, ready to break into a smile if somebody looked their way, at them instead of through them, but knowing too that that was never going to happen. I didn’t tell them that that kid was me. The day Reneé came home with a spirit ribbon on her sweater—SKIN THE BOBCATS—I almost cried. When she forgot about it, the ribbon, I took it from the dash of her car. It’s in my sock-drawer, now. One Saturday morning I woke to find my wife, Sharon, studying it, but then she just put it back, patting it in place it seemed, as if putting it to bed, and I pretended not to have been awake. It’s a good life. One I don’t deserve, one I’m stealing, but still, mine. Last Sunday I dropped Miller off at basketball camp two towns over, then, on the way home, bought Reneé some of the custom film she said she needed for the intro to photography course she’s taking at the local community college.
Three nights after that, a Wednesday, I took her to the carnival. Because she’s seventeen, and I won’t get many more chances. I even broke out the Bobcats ribbon; she remembered it, held it to her mouth. At the carnival she took picture after picture, washing the place in silver light—clowns, camels, the carousel—and at the end of the night put her hand over mine on the shifter of my car, told me thanks. That she wouldn’t forget.
Like I said, I don’t deserve any of this.
When I was twelve years old, I helped kill a girl. Or, according to the doctors, helped her kill herself, punish herself for what her step-father had been doing to her. I never told them about the dead pecans though, or about how her hands had been tied. Just that we’d been daring each other farther and farther out into the water, until her hair snagged a Christmas tree or something. At first, I’d tried the truth, but it wouldn’t fit into words. And then I realized that it didn’t have to, that, with Rodge clammed up, catatonic, I could say whatever I wanted. That I’d tried to save her, even. That something like I thought I’d seen just couldn’t happen, was impossible, was what any twelve-year-old kid would insist he’d seen, rather than a drowning. Especially a twelve-year-old kid already in a “scare” club, a book buried in a cake pan under the leaves that nobody ever found, that’s probably still there.
I told it enough like that that sometimes I almost believed it.
But then I’d see her again, running on the surface of the water, and would have to sit up in bed and force the sheets into my mouth until I gagged.
When I finally told my wife about her—the girl I’d had a crush on who I’d seen drown when I was in the sixth grade—I’d even called her Melody, I think, like the story, and then not corrected myself. The main thing I remembered was her hair. The sheets I stuffed into my mouth were supposed to be it, I think, her hair. An apology of sorts. Love. The way your lip trembles when your best friend from elementary tells you he’s moving away forever. Or your mother tells you they found him out on the highway, crammed up into the wheel well of a Buick.
The story I told myself for years was that her body was still down there, really tangled up in a Christmas tree or a trotline. That Rodge was down there now for all of us, trying to free her, but his hands are so waterlogged that the skin of his fingers keeps peeling off. Above him, a mass of fish backlit by the wavering sun, feeding on the scraps of his flesh.
“Keep her there,” I’d tell him, out loud, at odd moments.
“Excuse me?” Sharon would say, from her side of the bed, or table, or car.
Nothing.
The other story I told myself was that I could make up for it all. That I could be the exact opposite of whatever Melanie’s father had been—could be kind enough to Reneé that it would cancel out all the bad that had happened to Melanie, and that Melanie would somehow see this, forgive me.
So I go behind Sharon’s back, buy her film she’s supposed to buy herself. I take her to the carnival and hold her hand. I sneak into her room the morning after and—a gift—palm the film canister off her dresser, so I can pay for the developing as well, then can’t wait twenty-four hours for it so go back and pay for one hour, leave the prints on her dresser without looking at them but then have to, when she leaves for a date. Like Rodge, I’m reading the book in secret, preparing myself, cataloging points to appreciate when she finally shows them to me, proud: the angle she got the man on stilts from; the flag on top of the main tent, caught mid-flap; the carousel, its lights smearing unevenly across the frame. The . . . the tinted or heat-sensitive lens or whatever she had on her camera, to distort the carnival. And the shutter-speed—it’s like she has it jammed up against how fast the film is, so that they have to work against each other. Like she’s trying to mess up the shots, or—this has to be it—as if it might be possible to twist the image enough that it would become just another suburban neighborhood. Maybe it’s part of the project, though. They’re good, all of them. She’s my daughter.
Saturday, deep in the afternoon, Sharon gone to get Miller from camp, I walk into the living room and Reneé’s there. On the glass coffee table, she has all the prints out, the table lamp shadeless, lying on its side under the glass, making the table into the kind of tray I associate with negatives, or slides. I see why she’s done it, though: it filters out some of the purple tint in the prints, and makes everything sharper.
She’s in sweats and a T-shirt, her hair pulled back to keep the oils off her face. No shoes, her feet curled under her on the couch.
“Date?” I say.
She nods without looking up.
I’m standing on the other side of the coffee table from her. “These them?” I ask.
Again, she nods.
“They’re—wrong,” she says, shrugging about them, narrowing her eyes.
I lower myself to one knee, focus through my reading glasses, pretend to be seeing them for the first time.
“What do you mean?” I say.
“Daddy . . . ” she says, as if I’m the thicko here.
“They’re . . . purple?” I say.
“Not that,” she says, and points to one of the carousel shots that, with her lens/shutter speed trick, has come out looking time-lapsed. I lift it delicately by the edge, hold it up to the light, my back old-man stiff.
“See?” she says.
I don’t answer, don’t remember this one from when I flipped through them the first time. It’s one of the carousel shots, when she was figuring out how to move her camera with the horses. The effect is to keep them in focus, more or less. Not the children—their movements are too unpredictable to compensate for—but the horses, anyway. And some of the parents standing by the horses, holding their children in place.
I shrug.
“Look,” she says.
I shrug, try, and then see it maybe, from the corner of my eye, as I’m giving up: what’s been waiting for me for thirty-two years. I relax for what feels like the first time. Don’t drop the picture.
“Right?” Reneé says.
I make myself look again. Tell myself it’s ju
st a trick of the light. The special film. It was a carnival, for Chrissake. I even manage a laugh.
What Reneé captured and the drugstore developed—maybe that’s where the mistake was: an errant chemical, swirling in the pan—is two almost-paisley tendrils of iridescent purple breath curling up from one of the wooden horse’s nostrils, the horse’s eyes flared wide, as if in pain.
Somebody with a cigarette, maybe, I say, a mom or dad standing behind the carousel, smoking. Or cotton candy under neon light. But then I follow the high, royal arch of the horse’s neck, to the crisp outline of a perfect little child sitting on its back, holding the pole with both hands.
Standing beside him, out of focus, is his mother, her hand to the horse’s neck. Patting it.
All I can see of her is her hair, spilling down the side of her legs.
This time I do drop the picture.
After Reneé’s gone on her date, her mouth moving, telling me her plans but no sound making it to me, I take the flashlight into the backyard.
Buried under what Sharon insists will be a compost pile someday is a cake pan I bought at the discount store. In it, a book. Not the same series, not the same publisher, but the same genre: an encyclopedia of the unexplained.
The carousel horse isn’t going to be in there, I know. Because it was an accident.
But Melanie.
That’s the only page I read.
Her entry is in the chapter of unexplained disappearances. The woman jogger who disappeared is on the opposite page from her, like an old friend. The title the jogger gets, because of a later sighting, is “Green Lady Gone.”
The title of Melanie’s entry is “Roger’s Story.” They forgot the d; for the thousandth time, I smile about it, then close my eyes, lower my forehead to the book the way Alex used to, in class. It was a joke: by then we both knew enough about Edgar Cayce that we wanted too to be able to just lay our heads on a book, absorb it.
Like every time, though, it doesn’t work. Or, now, this book is already in my head. All closing my eyes to it does is bring Melanie back. Not as she was on the water, but as she was running across the wet grass for the last bell, fighting to keep her hair out of her face.
Did she even leave tracks in the dew?
If she hadn’t, and if we’d noticed, it would have just been because of her ballet training, her gymnastics. That she was made of something better, something that didn’t interact with common stuff like grass and water.
But that wooden horse, breathing.
The mother I always knew she would be, this is the kind of gift she would give her child, I know. If she could. If it wasn’t just a trick of the light.
Rodger’s story is what he left as a birthday card to himself. Not word-for-word—it’s been edited into the voice of the rest of the entries—but still, I can hear him through it. It starts just like Melanie’s, with four social outcasts, creating their own little society. One in which they matter. How none of the four of us knew what we were doing, really. How we’re so, so sorry. We never meant for . . . for her—
Rodger places us by the lake. The reason I’ve never been able to stop reading his version is the same reason I was never able to forget my father’s story about me as a baby, sleeping on the floor: because I’m in it, just from a different angle.
In the light-blue box framed with scrollwork, the way Rodge tells it is he was just watching us, not as if he knew what was going to happen, but as if, in retelling it, reliving it, he had become unable to pretend that the him watching hadn’t been through it a hundred times already. The way he watches us, he knows about the Buick coming for Alex, about Melanie, writhing on the surface of the lake. How a car battery changes the way a boat sits in the water.
Maybe the gases that escape from the cells of the battery on the way down are iridescent, are the last thing you see, before the strings of moss become hair, smother you.
According to Rodger, Melanie asked us to tie her hands and feet, throw her in the lake. I shake my head: he’s protecting Alex. Protecting me. And then our stories synch up, more or less, the viewpoint just off a bit: instead of an image of Melanie’s face just as I let her go, I see her rising from, slipping out of mine and Alex’s hands the way a magician might let ten doves go at once.
And then she hisses, throws her hair from her face, and crawls across the lake, her hip joints no longer human. Her body never recovered.
The question after the entry is What was Melanie Parker?
I close the book, set it on the island in the middle of the kitchen, then look down the hall when the noise starts, but don’t go to it.
It’s the bathtub. It’s filling.
I raise my chin, stretching my throat tight, and rub my larynx, trying to keep whatever’s in me down, then am clawing through Sharon’s cabinets in the kitchen, spice jars and sifters raining down onto the counter.
Finally I find what I know she has: the three tins of nuts, from Christmas.
The first is walnuts, the second two pecans, still in their paper shells.
I raise the blackest one up against the light, to see if I can see through it. When I can’t, I feel my chest tightening the way it used to—the asthma I’ve outgrown—and know what I have to do. My head wobbles on my neck in denial, though.
But it’s the only way.
I place the pecan on my tongue, shell and all, afraid of what might be inside, then work it over between the molars of my right side, close my eyes and jaw at once. Make myself swallow it all. Fall coughing to the floor, have to dig out one of Miller’s old inhalers, from when he had asthma too.
The mist slams into my chest again and again, my eyes hot, burning.
At the end of Rodger’s birthday card to himself, which the editors chose to encase in their version of the blue-box, are the words She’s still down there.
I envy him that.
When I was twelve, I helped kill a girl I thought I loved, helped give birth to something else, something she didn’t even know about. Something that saw me before crawling away. What makes it real, maybe, undeniable, is the way, that last time she looked up, she spit out the piece of Alex’s shoe lace she had in her mouth. Had to shake it away from her lip.
Her tongue was any color. Maybe the same it had always been.
Because I don’t know what else to do, I sit with my back against the wall, behind my chair, every light in the living room on, random muscles in my shoulder and right leg twitching, as if cycling through the sensory details of letting Melanie go that day, above the water. My lap warms with urine and I just sway back and forth on the balls of my feet, hugging my knees to my chest, Miller’s inhaler curled under my index finger like a gun
An hour later, eleven, midnight, something, I try to tell the story to the end, name the out-of-focus kid on the carousel Hodge. Give him a good life. And then the front door swings in all at once and I know I’m dying, that this is what death is, and have to bite the knuckle of my middle finger to keep from screaming.
From behind the chair, all I can see is the top of the door. It closes and my vision blurs, a grin spreading from my eyes to my mouth—that this will be finally be over, after so long—but then a sound intrudes: keys, jangling into a brass bowl. The one on the stand by the coat rack.
Reneé.
She swishes past me in slow motion, for the mess the kitchen is. Never sees me.
I stand in the doorway behind her, my slacks dark enough that she won’t see the stain maybe.
Instead of putting stuff back into the cabinets, she’s looking through the book I left out. Opening it to the place I have marked—marked with a spirit ribbon.
Slowly, she cocks her head to the side, studying the ribbon, then holds it to her mouth again, breathes it in.
I cough into my hollow fist to announce myself, there behind her already.
She sucks air in, pulls the book hard to her chest. Turns to me, leading with her eyes, and looks at me for too long it feels like, then past me, to the living room, so brig
ht.
“You okay?” she asks.
I nod, make myself smile.
“How’d it go?” I ask—the date.
“You know,” she says, opening the book again. “Sandy and his music.”
I nod, remember: Sandy’s the one with the custom stereo.
“What is this?” she says, about the book.
“Just—nothing,” I tell her. “Old.”
“Hm,” she says, leafing through, wowing her eyes up at the more sensational stuff. Aliens, maybe. God.
“She did it to herself,” I say, all at once.
Reneé holds her place in the book, looks up to me.
“She was . . . she was sad,” I say. “She was a sad little girl. Her dad, he was—you’ve got to understand.”
Reneé shrugs, humoring me I think. I rub my mouth, look away, to all Sharon’s cooking utensils, spilling onto the floor. When I don’t look away fast enough, Reneé has to say something about it: “A surprise?”
“Surprise?” I say back, trying to make sense of the word.
“Reorganizing for Mom?” she tries, holding her eyebrows up.
I nod, make myself grin, feel something rising in my throat again, have to raise my shoulders to keep it down. Close my eyes.
When I open them again, Reneé’s sitting on the island, the book closed beside her. Just watching me.
“I could have stayed home tonight,” she says, an offering of sorts, but I wave the idea away.
“You need—need to go out,” I tell her. “It’s good. What you should be doing.”
The heels of her hands are gripping the edge of the countertop. I can’t not notice this.
“Okay,” she says, finally, “I guess—” but then, sliding the book back so she won’t take it with her when she jumps down, her hand catches on the stiff, upper part of the spirit ribbon, pulls it from the book. “Oops,” she says, doing her mouth in the shape of mock-disaster, “lost your place.”
The Ones That Got Away Page 18