Broken Strings

by Nancy Means Wright

  “Hey,” the man said. “Look what you did.” He pointed out a tiny nick.

  “Wasn’t my fault,” Beets said. He wasn’t going to take anything from this dumb man whose painting wasn’t art anyway. It was a skull, just an ugly skull nobody’d ever want to look at. A skull with, jeezum, a gold cross in the hole of one ear and at the base of the ugly thing, a string of gold beads.

  Somebody was running up to talk to the skull man now, so Beets pocketed a flyer he’d dropped on the floor – he’d show it to Fay if he ever saw her again – and scurried out. He’d already drunk the juice that tasted like Kool-Aid and wasn’t worth drinking, except he was parched. He walked quickly up the road. The buildings were farther and farther apart, and then there were fields of wildflowers and tall grass with sheep or cows grazing. He felt safer here where no one would know him. He removed his cap and let the wind take his hair. He might find a trucker going west – he’d never been out of New England, only once out of Vermont. He’d like to see the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone Park, all those grizzlies he’d read about in Glenna’s National Geographics. But then, he’d never been to Canada either.

  When a pickup truck came along and the straw-haired guy stopped and didn’t say anything, just opened the door that squealed like Glenna’s old fridge door, he got in. “So where you wanna go, kid?” the guy said, his big belly hugging the wheel, and Beets said, “Canada, please.”

  * * *

  Chance left the afternoon rehearsal in a bad mood. Willard took the prince’s part and his marionette had the moves all right, but he was no actor. His voice wobbled and he sounded more like sixty-five than twenty-five. Even with a mask on they’d know he was no prince, although Fay seemed to think so. It was clear Fay was sweet on him. Though she didn’t know it. Fay walked around in a fog so thick you could almost see it moving with her, like the cartoon of the guy with the rain cloud always over his head.

  And when hypocrite Fay, who kept telling Willard what a great prince he was finally said to Chance, “Why don’t you ask your friend Billy if he’ll do the prince?” and Chance did – Billy wasn’t there. Instead, a woman answered the apartment phone and this time Chance recognized her voice. It was that slinky Sammy from the co-op. She’d waited on Chance a few times at checkout, was trained to smile. What was she doing at Billy’s apartment? “Tell him to call back,” Chance said.

  The rehearsal ended early. Willard was tired from the yew he’d swallowed, Fay said, so Chance went to Billy’s apartment. It wasn’t a rehearsal night for his band, and if he was there with that Sammy, so much the better. They’d have a showdown. A blue light was on in the bedroom, the shades drawn. It was the blue light he’d bought for her, because blue was her favorite color. He wanted to see her lit up in blue, he said, when they were doing the Great Love Rite. But then the blue light turned her skin into someone else’s skin, a sort of translucent color that illumined her veins, and she felt out of control, like she’d been smoking pot, when she hadn’t, and the magic was gone.

  She climbed the grimy steps slowly, to the second floor, then the third. Once Chance had swept the hall and left a note that said, Swept by tenant. Please reciprocate. But the landlord never did. When no one answered her knock, she opened the door and there was Billy with that Sammy woman, his hands on her shoulders like they were dancing, that big map spread out on the floor. There was something surprisingly familiar lying on the sofa, she’d have to tell Fay. Sammy was dressed in jeans, bare feet, and a crimson blouse so low-necked you could see clear down to her underpants. She pretended not to recognize Chance, though she’d made up dozens of Lily’s Monsters at the Co-op for her.

  “Aren’t you going to invite your guest in?” Sammy asked Billy, like Chance was some little kid here on an errand for her mama.

  “I don’t need an invite,” Chance said. She wanted the woman to know that. That she and Billy had a relationship.

  Billy smiled up at her through his bruised eyes. “Sammy was just teaching me a step. For the pagan group, you know. I want you to learn it, too.” He introduced Chance, and Sammy smiled. “Oh, sure, now I remember you from the store.”

  Chance stood there, unsteady on her feet. She’d meant it to be a showdown but she didn’t know what to say with everybody smiling at her. She felt small and stupid, like she was just here on business. Like that was all her and Billy’s relationship was: business. “I’m here because, well, Fay thinks you might like to do the prince at the school this Saturday. I mean, Willard’s not too convincing for the part. You’d have to learn how to operate the puppet. It’s not that hard, it…” Her voice trailed off.

  She wasn’t ready for a committed relationship. She wasn’t herself at all tonight. She was feeling hot and sweaty. It was like Billy was manipulating her and she was the puppet. But the answer didn’t come from him. It was Sammy, standing behind him now, laughing. She put an arm around Billy like she owned him.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “but we’ll be out of town Saturday, won’t we, Bill. You should have told her. There’s a guy at the Co-op might do it,” she told Chance, who was trying to close her mouth but it was stuck, open. “You’ve seen him, he works with me, he…”

  Chance didn’t hear anything after that remark, something went haywire – crazy – in her head. She turned and stumbled down the hall stairs. Billy was calling but she kept going down and down and out the door, like something was after her, wanting to crack her on the head; down and down the hill to the creek. Shunted off her shoes. Stuck her cell phone and one jade earring (where was the other?) in a Ziploc bag with the snacks she’d brought – no point ruining those – and contemplated the water. She wanted to make Billy sorry, wanted to make him worry. The more she thought about him with that Sammy woman the more she was upset. Angry. Needing to get away, far away. She teetered a moment on a high rock, looking down at the swift current by the falls.

  And let herself go.

  * * *

  Life had been so easy with Mother alive, Willard thought as he stood at his worktable, a bit spacey but feeling okay and ready to examine the witch puppet Fay had thrust at him after the rehearsal. Mother would tell him what to do and he’d do it, take out his frustration on the outdoor work, the mowing, trash removal, snow shoveling. They’d sit together nights with Mother doing her little craft projects: doilies, mittens for the church sales, while he worked on his signs. Now and then she’d comment: “Nooo, Willard, that’s too bright a color for the bookstore sign, books are blue or green, not orangey-red!” And he’d repaint it and Mother was usually right, the bookstore owner said the new cornflower blue was “Perfecto, Willard,” her very words.

  But there were businesses that liked bright colors, liked the canary-yellow pencil he painted on the Main Street Stationery sign and it was a way of escaping, going “outside the box,” as they called it these days. But now, it seemed, he was outside the box all the time and, to tell the truth, he wanted back in. He didn’t want to be on display, standing there for all to see, like he’d have to do Saturday at the graded school. No. Willard was a backstage man. Let the others take the bows and get the applause.

  And now he was mixed up in a murder case! How had that happened? He might’ve died from that yew. But here he was. His dining room turned into a workroom for Valentini’s Marionettes and a fragile old witch puppet that Fay wanted him to copy. Though he couldn’t copy it without practically taking it apart, despite Fay’s orders to “Be careful! Don’t damage it! I have to give it back to Marion’s mother.”

  Well, the mother had probably already forgotten she owned it, that was Willard’s opinion. He’d seen the old lady at the memorial service; she didn’t even know her own daughter, that P person.

  It was a clever thing, though, the puppet. He liked the way the face was almost beautiful with its round black eyes and the full smiling lips, with no nose to speak of, just a chipped white button. The hair looked human, but probably wasn’t – might be something like upholstery fringe, rayon maybe. Someone ha
d sewed it on, but he would glue it. Willard didn’t sew, that was one thing he’d insist on not doing. Knitting yes, he’d learned that from Mother. Sewing, no.

  From me to yew. Would he have to copy that onto his puppet? He thought not.

  The torso, arms and hands were carved out of wood, yew, yes, but lacquered, and therefore safe. The soft fingers made from cloth-covered wires to look like claws were the only part of the puppet that was truly witchlike. The right fingers were clenched into a kind of fist as if the puppet was holding some kind of anger inside. There were no feet, just legs of stuffed cloth, with a joint at the knee. The black gauzy dress had a ring sewed to its bottom to keep it from flying up.

  When he put his right forefinger into the hole in the back of the head, and then his thumb and little finger into the arms, he discovered that the puppet was meant to be worked by the left hand. Odd. The average person was right-handed. Willard’s brother had been left-handed and his mother worked hard to turn him into a right. So Ralph Jr. would eat with his right hand but then play ball with his left when Mother wasn’t around. In school, he’d start mixing his letters, turn the word “God” into “dog,” that kind of thing.

  So Willard, who was pretty much ambidextrous though he never used the left in front of his mother, took his left hand and stuck his forefinger into the head. But the finger wouldn’t go all the way down, though he pushed. Carefully, he withdrew his fingers and turned the puppet inside out. And a pink wrinkled ball of cloth fluttered to the floor. At first he thought it part of the stuffing, but when he unballed it he saw it was pink paper with tiny writing on it. And it wasn’t addressed to the Alzheimer mother but to someone called Dominick. A man’s name, Italian, possibly her husband – Fay would know. And across the page someone had written: BITCH!

  He didn’t have to read past the first line to know that it was a love letter. He had principles: he wouldn’t read anyone else’s love letter, it wasn’t right. Especially with those three words scrawled across it, words written by someone upset with that love letter, and now the witch was like a voodoo doll. If Fay wanted to read the letter, all right – for himself, he couldn’t. So for now he’d simply make a replica of the witch and stuff the balled-up letter back into the original puppet’s head. Let Fay find it.

  * * *

  Chance was swimming: long sweeping strokes, face down in the cold water, arms stretching, stroking back the surface of the water like troubles she’d let go, like the water was a bed sheet. Mother make my bed for I mun’ lie me down – the Scots ballad Billy sometimes sang. My lover abandoned me an’ I’ve nothing for to live.

  Reach, stretch, stroke, right arm, left, head up to breathe, then down again, down, keep it down as long as you can. Then up it goes to suck in the air, like a life, a will of its own, the breath undoing the death bed as quick as you can make it. Like her whole seventeen years coming up in the wash of water, the scrap and scrape of competition with other foster kids, each grasping for the same straw, the biggest dessert, the bed with the slats that didn’t break down every night. The schools, sometimes three schools in a single year, new teachers, new caseworkers: Tell me dear, do you like it there? Do the foster parents get along? For if husband and wife didn’t get along, it was bye-bye. She’d taken to storing food and quarters in her closet for the next bus out. And even before the rape, the manual she’d read that said: Teenage girls are sexual assaults waiting to happen. A girl she knew had sued her foster father, accused him of assault, the man’s reputation ruined before they found the girl had lied. A foster boy who shot their foster mother when she sent him to his room without supper.

  Her arms were tiring now. How long had she been in the water? Her watch stopped, she didn’t think of that when she jumped in; just wanted to leave that Sammy woman behind, that lying Billy who would go off with a woman and leave Chance without a word. Then something she’d seen in that apartment before she ran, something on the sofa Fay should know about… She couldn’t think now, couldn’t make sense of it.

  She remembered the book they’d read in English class, The Awakening, where the woman takes a lover to escape her oppressive husband. “I give myself where I choose,” she says to herself and then the lover abandons her. In the end she walks out into the lake and swims – and swims. Like Chance, who dropped off the rock into the water and thought of dying but her mind and body wouldn’t let her. Free, free, the woman in the novel thinks, I’m free…. I’m myself, nobody owns me.

  Chance looked back, exhausted. She saw the shore far behind her but she swam on. Somewhere back on land a dog barked, a kid shouted.

  Free, free. Free, she cried wordlessly when the hands caught her and pulled her up into the boat. “Let go, let me be, leave me!” Free…

  But the hands pulled her over the edge and down into the boat.

  “We got ourselves a mermaid,” a male voice said.

  Chapter Eleven

  “To Yew from Me. No Strings Attached.”

  Wednesday, October 3

  “She’s at Billy’s,” Ethan said. “I saw her bike.”

  “Saw her bike where?” Fay asked, her nerves popping out like hives. She’d just come back from milking and discovered Chance’s room empty. The girl wasn’t known for early morning departures, so she must have been out all night.

  “By his apartment building, of course,” Ethan said. “Where else? I warned you.”

  Fay sighed. A year before, the girl had been gone ten days and still come back. “Let me know if she’s in school, would you? Call me when you get there.”

  What else could she do? Confront the girl and you had a tempest in your kitchen. At least things had been going smoothly of late – Chance had been preoccupied with her goat marionettes. And she’d played the good fairy at last night’s rehearsal. They’d changed the Sleeping Beauty ending back to something more traditional for the sake of the young children. “We wouldn’t want to disillusion these youngsters, would we?” the teacher had said. “They’ll wake up to reality soon enough.”

  She heard the yellow school bus wheeze and groan outside on the road. Ethan was running for it. “What were you doing outside Billy’s place last night?” she called after her grandson. She worried that Billy was selling drugs. But Ethan was already leaping up the steps onto the bus, the black spikes of hair rising up like snakes on his head. Medusa in a male body. The bus lurched forward with a gassy hiss.

  She raced haphazardly through a number of household chores: she fed Chance’s mutt and then the greyhound; tossed a chicken treat into the Maine Coon cat’s dish; reminded Glenna to “take notes if anyone calls,” although Glenna’s glaucoma was worsening and her handwriting looked like hen scratchings. So now there was Chance to worry about as well as Beets. Delores, the caseworker, had been calling twice a day; she’d sent out waves to all the foster care people across the state, even the former foster homes, in case he went back to one for a bed or meal.

  In case of what? Fay didn’t know. It had been five days since the boy had gone north with his father, then run off. Five days since Puss was found hanging from the shower curtain rod. Two weeks since Marion’s death – and no one accountable.

  In case of something bad, she told herself. Every day she read about missing children, sometimes found, but too often not. Now there were two foster children missing – had it anything to do with the Valentini sisters’ killers? It was important to find those killers, yes, but the sisters were already dead. You had to consider the living, still in danger.

  Here was Apple in khaki pants and red sweater, ready for school. Today the girl was getting a ride with a classmate’s mother up the road. Fay enveloped the child in her arms, then held her at arm’s length. “You look lovely, sweetie. Got your lunch box?”

  “I put a banana and two of Glenna’s cookies in it, too.”

  “They’re probably burnt.”

  “Not yesterday’s batch. I got them out while Glenna was napping. Chance didn’t drink her cranberry juice last night. Can I have
it?”

  Another bad sign for Chance. “You can have it, yes. Tell me, sweetie, did Chance ever talk to you about Billy?” Apple had a habit of eavesdropping. You’d be on the phone, look up, and see her on the floor beside you with a doll.

  “No, but...”

  Fay waited.

  “I heard her when she called him about being the prince. And when he didn’t answer, she said the b word. I knew you’d be mad if you heard that word.”

  “Oh, dear. But she wouldn’t call him that, um, b word. You mean, someone else answered the phone?”

  Apple shrugged. “After she said ‘You b word,’ she said another b word and started to cry. And then you called her to rehearsal and she blew her nose a bunch in a tissue and came back. And when I said “What happened?” she pushed me down and I fell and hit my head on the edge of the table. So I started to cry.”

  Someone honked in the driveway: Apple’s ride. The girl lunged for the door with her lunch box, the brand new Apple A Day book pack bouncing on her back.

  So Chance and the Old Kid had been arguing, Fay thought, as she waved at the two little girls in the back seat. A woman answered and Chance was jealous and picked a fight with the Kid but they finally made it up and hugged and…

  Fay’s scenario ended with the hug. She didn’t want to think what had happened next. She was still a virgin when she’d married Dan and his chicken farm. None of that living together first – though she might’ve learned a lesson. At seventeen, she didn’t even have a steady boyfriend!

  Her cell rang. It was Ethan, informing her that Chance hadn’t shown up in her homeroom. “Her bike’s still at Billy’s. I told you she’s okay.”

  “She’s not okay! She shouldn’t miss school like that.”

  “I’m just telling you, that’s all. Gotta go to chem class now.” The line went dead.