Broken Strings

by Nancy Means Wright

  “Call Chance to help,” Fay told Apple. “She’s upstairs.”

  “She won’t help. Not unless you tell her.” Apple’s face was dissolving into tears. Sweetie Pie was her goat. Once before the foolish doe had broken loose and the stress of it caused Apple to have a seizure, despite the medication.

  Fay ran back and hollered at the girl’s open window. “Chance! Come down and help Apple get her goat. Now!” she screeched. “I have to go, dammit. I need your help!”

  “Coming.” But it wasn’t Chance’s voice. It was loud and deep. And here was Billy, running on his tight-jeaned legs, his black dreadlocks out straight behind him, his face definitely ghoul-like with the blackened eyes. Another marionette, he seemed. Was the whole world turning into a puppet show?

  And Chance, screeching out the window. “Billy. I need you up here. Right now!”

  Apple hollering, “Help me find Sweetie Pie!”

  Billy stopped in his tracks, a prisoner of three females. He looked back at his Honda bike as if what he really wanted was to take off in it, let the females fend for themselves.

  Fay had to go. She turned the key in the pickup and left. They’d all have to learn to cope. Tough love, the caseworker had warned. She stopped briefly at Stormy’s house to drop off Beets’s tee shirt, tossed the cheese in the back door of the Co-op, and sped up Route 7 to Green Pastures.

  It wasn’t until she was halfway, cruising past the underground railway place, that she thought of what Stormy had told her. Something about the original Beauty puppet that the police were keeping. What was it exactly? Um… She couldn’t think, her memory shorting out again. But no fuse to plug in and bring on the light. She’d just have to hope it would come back.

  * * *

  Green Pastures was cheerful: yellow walls, artificial plants in colorful plastic pots, wall paintings of flowers and fauna. Everything bright and happy except the residents, who were wandering about talking to themselves or staring at cards at a bridge table – unable to make a call; moping in wheelchairs, some strapped in so they couldn’t “walk away,” an aide whispered.

  “Here’s Gloria.” The aide tapped the back of an armchair where Marion’s mother sat in a purple satin blouse and raggedy boa stained with what looked like tomato sauce. “We call them by their first names, their childhood names,” the aide whispered loud enough for the whole room to hear. “Many of our residents are reliving their childhood.” Residents like Gloria Valentini, Fay supposed, unable to recognize their own children.

  “Her second daughter died,” Fay said. “Did you know that? Gloria wasn’t at the funeral.”

  “We knew, oh yes, someone called. But said not to tell her. Not that she’d remember, anyway, but, well, in case. There are moments of lucidity, followed sometimes by a little violence. But such a terrible thing. Both her daughters murdered! I read it in the paper. Shocking. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? How safe it is to live in Vermont even? Were we right not to tell her?”

  Fay didn’t know. She imagined some inner vibe, recognition of a name, some electrical jabbing at the heart that could trigger violence. Or the absolute denial Gloria had shown at Marion’s service. She thanked the aide, who seemed a sensitive young woman.

  Gloria held out her arms as though Fay were some strange feline coming to sit on her lap, and Fay took her hands. They were white, frail hands that hadn’t done a whole lot of housework; the husband’s inherited money would have seen to that. Her face was a corrugated washboard, the old fashioned kind you scrubbed the dirty clothes on. Fay and the mother had actually met on three or four occasions before Marion’s funeral. Once after a puppet show when the mother kept clapping her hands and was shushed by Puss, she’d looked hard into Marion’s face and said, “Bye bye, Beauty.” In retrospect, it seemed prophetic.

  “Hello, Gloria. I’m your daughter’s friend,” Fay said. “I’m helping with her puppets.”

  Gloria’s face lit up at the word “puppets.” As though puppets were more real than any lost daughter. She looked into Fay’s face as if searching for something, then not finding it, looked away. She suddenly shoved her wheelchair forward, banged into another resident’s chair and snatched up the doll the woman held in her lap. “Mine!” Gloria cried. “Mine!”

  “Give it back!” The victim, a scrawny wizard of a woman in a blue striped housedress screamed and lunged forward.

  “Mine!” Gloria cried again and held it to her breast, sobbing. It was a hand puppet. It looked like Marion’s work: the careful stitching, the bright red dress, the witchlike hair.

  “Mine!” the Wizard screamed, and rammed her wheelchair against Gloria’s. “Mine!”

  “It’s hers,” Fay told the Wizard, her eyes filling up for no reason at all. “Gloria’s daughter made it for her,” she told the two aides who’d come running to help.

  “Mine!” the Wizard screeched as an aide wheeled her off. The second aide patted Gloria’s white permed head and the woman sobbed louder.

  “I think you’d better go now,” the aide told Fay. “When she gets like this, we can only stop her with a sedative.”

  “But I just got here,” Fay said. “We haven’t had a chance to talk.”

  “I’m sorry,” the aide said.

  “Both her daughters were killed,” Fay said. “We need to find out who did it. She might have some memorabilia in her room that could offer a clue.”

  The aide thought about it. She stuck a tongue in her cheek, then blew out a breath.

  “You can look in her room, number twenty-one. Unfortunately, she shares it with the woman who took her puppet. We might have to switch them.”

  “Please do,” Fay said, remembering her own mother after the breast cancer surgery. Her own quiet mother in a bed without a window, between two women who had roomfuls of visitors. It cost two months’ savings, but Fay had her mother moved to a single. Once she found her mother staring out the window, quoting from Robert Frost. “For once then, something,” she whispered. What was that “something?”

  Now her quirky brain gave back what the psychic had said about Beauty. Stormy had seen a cave, and inside, a marionette with long leafy vines attached to its head, shoulder, and limbs. And then “in front of my very eyes,” Stormy said, Beauty began to age. Till the vines turned brown and snapped like twigs. “Maybe you can make something of it," she’d told Fay. “I can’t. I’m just a psychic. The visions go through me like chocolate.”

  Fay couldn’t think of any caves Marion would have gone into. Except the cave of her own mind. Once Fay had played a blind woman who lived almost entirely in her mind. She’d gone around for days with a blindfold, and tried to move back into her past and it was like a cave. One rehearsal she’d keeled over in a dead faint, she was so frightened.

  Had Marion been frightened like that when she was in that coma? Or before the coma, at a time Fay knew nothing about? It was possible. Glastonbury came into her mind. King Arthur and his Avalon and the cave he allegedly died in. But of course she’d told Stormy about Glastonbury, and the psychic’s mind was receptive. It probably didn’t mean a thing.

  The old mother’s room didn’t yield a clue. The closet held mostly once elegant clothing that had now turned to shabbiness: a tatty looking beaver coat, a scattering of expensive shoes, boxes of old photographs. Fay opened a box to find a small string puppet made out of rosewood and dressed in black silk with a tiny gold cross around her neck. The features were bland except for a slightly thickened nose like Marion’s and a sheaf of hair made out of fine black yarn. And in her ears, two tiny skull earrings. On the back of the puppet was a faded piece of parchment with the hand-scrawled words, From me to yew. Love you, witch.

  Where had that come from? It didn’t seem like the kind of puppet that the elegant Gloria Valentini would have. Unless it was Marion’s. Unless Gloria had taken it from Marion at one time. Or Marion gave it to her?

  Fay felt like a thief about to make a haul. A snare drum beat in her temples, her ankles wobbled. But she stuffed
it into the Guatemalan catch-all bag she’d brought. And why should she feel guilty? Who else was there for Gloria? There was only one ancient cousin who never came to visit. Puss had told her that.

  * * *

  I’m Marion now, Fay thought as she drove home, I’m Beauty. Hadn’t Willard fashioned her face onto the new marionette? Back in the farmhouse, she shoved the puppet into a bureau drawer. She would give it to Willard to replicate when he felt better. She flopped down on the bed for a quick think. Only there wasn’t much time because Ethan was home from school and pushing a web printout in her face. “A new picture from the skull man,” he announced. “See? The skull’s got a gold cross in its nose hole. It’s smiling, too, the teeth all shiny like pearls. Geezum, maybe they’re pearls.”

  “Ah. Well, leave it on the bed table. And go milk the goats, would you? It’s almost four o’clock. I’m exhausted.”

  He stared down at her, a pencil thin, blue-eyed young man with a face full of acne. He’d done something to his hair, too. It stood up on his head in two dozen brown spikes. He stuck his hands on his hips. “You asked me to find this stuff for you. So I found it. And now you want me to go milk the smelly goats?”

  “I do appreciate what you’ve done, Ethan. I truly do. But I’m exhausted. I just need an hour to rest, that’s all.”

  “I’ve got a practice. I’m on the soccer team in case you forgot. And the goats were never my idea. I do not like goats. Ask Chance to help. She’s into goats – big.”

  “She’s not home. Down at the craft center, I think she said.”

  “…including,” he went recklessly on, “that Billy goat she goes with. He wants her to move in with him, like, permanent, you know that? I found a letter in her room.”

  “You shouldn’t…”

  “It was just lying on her bed. I went in to get my CD back. I couldn’t help – ”

  “Reading it, sure. Dated when?”

  “No date on it. Could’ve been last month.”

  “And she’s still here. We’ll hope.” She got up off the bed. There was no point trying to rest. No point trying to sleep. Arrows shooting at her from every direction. Skulls with gold crosses in their nose cavities, eleven-year-olds on the run in a dangerous world. A teen-age girl moving in with a Billy goat who was, in Fay’s opinion, too old for her. Although a girl who had lived in as many foster homes as Chance had, was surely older for her age than the average girl. The Family Services social worker had told her that. Fay had to give the older children a bit of space or they’d run away, as Chance had earlier. The younger ones, if she kept them any length of time, she could rein in. Still, she’d try her best.

  “I won’t let her move in with him,” she said. “I won’t. Over my dead body.”

  “That would make three of you then,” Ethan said, and slouched off to his computer.

  * * *

  Beets longed for a comfortable bed, his own bed, even full of crumbs and a little duck poop from smuggling Homer upstairs. He’d stretched out two nights now in the church pew, slipped in before they locked up at six, and slipped out when somebody came in to open up. Churches were safe. He’d learned that from his father, who’d slept in one for a whole week before the minister walked in on him one early morning. The man took him to his own house, but after two nights the wife complained. To punish her, Rudolph stole her pewter candlesticks and a copper kettle that came in handy when he had to hit some guy on the head with it.

  But Beet’s ass was sore from the hard pew, and besides, he needed to skip town – he’d run out of restaurants to steal from. “Never steal from the same place twice,” his father warned while they were riding north in the U-Haul. “They’ll catch on, throw you in the cooler.” It wasn’t hard, though. The two guys working Dunkin’ Donuts were stupid. They even left money on the counter when they ground something up with their backs turned. All Beets had to do was reach out and slip it in his pocket – each probably thought the other had cashed up. Then he paid for the order with the same money. Ha!

  Well, he couldn’t go home, not after what his father done, what he’d seen, been an accomplice just because he was forced to help. What he’d been trying to block out for two nights and three days now. When that Puss lady walked in on them and then…

  A side door cracked open and he sat up. And stared into the face of an older boy with eyes like glittery knives. The boy looked at him, let his tongue roll around his yellowy teeth. Beets jumped up from the pew. His spine felt broken from the hard wood. The boy stuck his hands on his hips and said, “So?”

  “I was praying,” Beets said. “For my mother who died. And then, um, I fell asleep. And the door locked.”

  “You can get out when it’s locked,” the boy said, sounding know-it-all. “You just can’t get back in, that’s all. You came in here on purpose, didn’t you? To sleep.” It wasn’t a question. The boy knew. He was probably an altar boy, here for a rehearsal or something. It was a Catholic church, the huge gold crucifix up front, the table with the fancy lace thing on it, like the cloth his mother brought in once, a present from the woman she cleaned for. His father had grabbed it off the table and held it up in front of her face. He’d put it over her head and throat till she sunk down on the floor and then took it off and laughed while she sat gasping for air. All that, Beets thought, led to her heart attack.

  Those stained glass windows, full of Jesus. Beets knew about Him from one of his foster homes. The foster mother tried to make him go to church, but he refused and they transferred him to a place with an older boy who beat him, then told him not to tell. He told anyway, and got transferred again.

  “Sorry,” Beets told the boy, grabbing his knapsack and starting for the side door.

  The boy barred his way. “What’s in that?” he said, pointing a beefy finger at the sack.

  “Stuff,” Beets said. “Change of underwear.”

  “Show me,” the kid said. He was taller than Beets by a good six inches and had what looked like a broken nose – probably someone broke it for him. Which meant Beets might get it now, that was the way things worked. From the top down.

  Beets showed him. He’d thought of taking one of the silver candlesticks but was glad now he hadn’t – too heavy to carry, anyway. When the boy dumped the contents out on the floor there were only two school books, three packs of gum, a penknife, pen, used tissues, small change and three dollar bills leftover from Dunkin’ Donuts.

  The boy pocketed the bills and pointed that fat finger again. “That’s so I won’t talk. ’Cause nobody sleeps in this church. It ain’t allowed, the Fathers don’t like it. You can ask my dad, he’s the janitor here.”

  Beets thought of challenging him. But only for a minute. The kid was big, though some of it was belly flab. Instead he said nothing and stuffed his clothing back in the sack and went to the side door. Now he had no money for breakfast.

  “Hey, Red?” The boy’s voice stopped him just as he got to the path that led around to the street. He waited a split second, swallowed hard. He hated to be called Red. It made him see red. “I know who you are, Red. Your ugly face is plastered all over town. If you’re smart you better take off somewhere.”

  Beets looked straight ahead. He could feel his heart drop into his feet.

  “I’d suggest Siberia,” the boy said, and snickered. The church door slammed.

  He had to get out of town but he was starving. He had no watch of his own, but the clock tower on the town hall had struck eleven some time before. He still had another two dollars tucked deep into a pants pocket the janitor’s kid hadn’t discovered, so he started down the street with his head down. “Your ugly face is plastered all over town” the kid had said – Beets resented the word ‘ugly.’ There was a big mirror in the bathroom at Fay’s place and while he wasn’t exactly good looking, he wasn’t bad either, just the mop of beet-red hair, a spatter of freckles on his face and the upturned nose that Apple said you could slide down on. Though Apple had the same nose – his father didn’t take th
at into account when he said Apple wasn’t his kid.

  So what if she got Apple from somebody else? He hoped it was a nice guy and not a thief like his father.

  Like himself, he thought. A thief on the run.

  The hair though, they’d be looking for a redhead. He’d have to get some kind of dye, or keep a hat over it. For now he had only the feed cap Fay had made up for the farm that read “Goats ‘R’ Us.” He was hungry, too, hoping for a convenience store where he could buy a power bar or doughnuts, but there weren’t many stores in this part of town. He passed the Greenhaven Nursery, Sally’s Shear Delight, Froggy Hollow Lounge, then an Arts and Crafts place that announced a Fine Arts Exhibit: Grand Opening today: 10 to 4. Paintings by blah, blah and blah.

  An opening meant food. He knew that because he’d been to a craft center opening in Branbury with Fay. The pottery, weaving and jewelry was okay, he guessed, but the food was why he went. So he went in. There was a crowd in there already, oohing and aahing over the rugs and pots, et cetera et cetera. The only table that might hold food had a hundred pamphlets on it, with titles that all seemed to end in exclamation marks: The End is Coming! Repent! Save the World from Unbelievers! Fight the Devil in You! It was his nose that finally led him to the food. The lady in the purple blouse behind the table narrowed her eyes at him, but he smiled politely and said, “Nice paintings. My mother’s got one here, why I came.” When she asked who his mother was, he said, “Oh there she is, and pointed back in the crowd. While the lady turned to look, he emptied a plate of bagels and chocolate chip cookies into his pack and said, “She’s signaling to me. Gotta go.”

  Rudolph’s teachings came in handy now and then.

  He saw the lady still stretching her neck to see who his mother was, and he ducked through the crowd and made for the door. But got nearly knocked down by a man with a shaved head, shoving through with a huge painting. A sharp corner of the frame struck his neck and he yelped, felt a bruise coming on.