He walked over, bending into the wind, and when he reached the fence around the burned-out theater, he saw that all the equipment, the backhoe and bulldozer and crane, had been removed. Still no workers in sight, no noise, nothing but the sagging, blackened beams of the theater behind the chain-link fence, looking strangely sated, as if it had somehow eaten them all up.
Scott followed the fence to the gate. It was closed but not locked, despite the big NO TRESPASSING signs. He ducked through it, thinking of what it must have been like for Henry wandering around out here in the dark. What had the kid been looking for?
In the daylight and bracing temperature, the events of last night felt even more distant and dreamlike. Since awakening this morning, Scott had told himself repeatedly that what he’d seen in the house had been nothing more than misfiring neurons, a logical conclusion that his conversation with Feldman had backed up. Visual disturbances, hallucinations, could happen to anybody. At the time, it had felt real, but that was why he was back on the Lexapro, wasn’t it? To take care of that problem.
He picked his way through the debris, past the mobile home office to the half-collapsed structure where his mother and Great-Uncle Butch had died. Great sagging black walls, a ruined family-eating husk that didn’t seem real either. Was the medication already starting to work?
Looking up at the wall, shielding his eyes against the hard sun, Scott noticed a hole where the bricks had fallen in. A pile of rock and dirt rose up alongside it, and without thinking, he began to climb. Little bits of mortar, wiring, and pipe crumbled beneath him.
This kind of reckless irresponsibility isn’t like you, Scott.
Yet apparently it was. He looked down. A stream of sunlight slanted through the hole, like a finger pointing out the path he would follow if he lost his balance and fell all the way down to the partially demolished floor and basement, one more Mast family casualty. A trapped circuit of moving air cycled low and mournful through the open space, powdery ash mixing with snow over charred rubble, mostly unrecognizable—a twisted row of theater seats and a jagged, oblong slab of flooring.
Scott looked deeper into the bottom of the pit, thirty feet down where the excavation looked newer, more freshly overturned. Someone had placed a blue plastic tarp over half the exposed flooring, flapping in the wind, held in place with cinder blocks. It was a familiar shade of blue—blue paper, blue fabric, something about it stimulated the connection, the way a random noise on the street might unexpectedly remind you of a song.
There was a loud crash inside the trailer behind him. Scott jerked around, expecting to see someone, maybe Red Fontana, coming out bawling at him that this was private property. But the door stayed closed. Scott climbed down and walked over to the trailer. He looked through the window, rising up on his tiptoes for a better view.
He opened the door.
It was dark inside the trailer, the curtains drawn, with just the green glow of the computer and telephone emanating from the corners. It took him a moment before he noticed the body lying on the floor. It was a man, motionless, sprawled on his back with one arm over his eyes, his leg tangled in a telephone cord. When daylight from the doorway fell across his face, the man moaned and rolled over, opening his eyes to foggy, agonized slits.
“Owen?” Scott asked.
“Oh, man,” Owen said. “Turn off the lights. God, please, Jesus, turn out the lights.”
“What are you doing here?”
Owen made a groaning noise without enough consonants in it. Scott noticed that the drawers of the file cabinets were open and papers scattered on the floor. Blueprints, Scott thought, architectural designs, suddenly remembering the ones that he’d found in Colette’s granary. More papers were clutched in Owen’s hands, as if some kind of halfhearted snatch and grab were in progress.
“What are you doing?” Scott repeated.
Owen made the same sound again, like a long, drawn-out attempt to say his own name—ooohhhnns—and clutched his forehead, trying to curl his body away from the light and cold air pouring through the open door. He wondered if Owen had even considered what might have happened to Henry last night. The thought made him angrier than he’d expected.
“Come on,” Scott said, bending down to lift him. “Let’s get out of here.” He caught a better look at the blueprints, not for the house but for the Bijou, original designs from the 1950s, it looked like.
Owen made the sound again.
“What?”
Owen resisted, yanked his arm away, staring at the floor but speaking clearly enough now: “Bones.”
“What are you talking about?”
Ruined red eyes came up to meet him like two reflections of a polluted chemical sunrise. “There were more down inside the theater”—Owen stopped and wiped his mouth—“that they never got out when they cleared the other bodies.”
Scott tossed the old blueprints aside, unexpectedly struck by the notion that his brother might actually be telling him something important, or trying to, an association that might change everything if he could just make it stick. He thought of that single white pill washed down with a handful of snow, all that condensed whiteness spreading diligently through his brain like steam, keeping his thoughts from cohering.
“More what? More bones?”
Owen nodded and burped, gulped, then went limp, still clutching the papers he’d dug out of the file cabinet.
“How do you know?”
Owen just shook his head. “Doesn’t matter.”
“Tell me.”
His brother looked at him. “I got wasted last night—drunkest I’ve ever been. I just kept drinking. Finally I woke up in the back room of Fusco’s this morning. Let myself out. Walked over here to the theater and started looking around.”
“Why?”
“Last night I dreamed about the fire,” Owen said. “Except it wasn’t just a dream … it was like … I remembered things about that night. Things I forgot I knew. Like on Oprah when people get hypnotized and remember shit that happened to them when they were kids …”
“Retrograde amnesia?” That wasn’t even the correct name for it, but Scott was having difficulty finding the right words, the white cloud in his brain absorbing them before his very eyes. Why had he taken the pill? But Owen knew what he was talking about; he was already nodding.
“I ran out,” he said. “That night, at the theater, I just ran out of there.”
“What about Mom and Dad?” Scott said. “Weren’t they trying to get away from the fire too?”
“The fire hadn’t even started yet.”
“Then why were you leaving?”
“I just—I knew somehow,” Owen said. “I knew something bad was going to happen. There was this little kid in the theater behind me, and I could hear him screaming and crying, and I knew whatever it was, it was going to be bad, so I got up and ran out. Mom looked at me and said, ‘Where do you think you’re going?’ but I didn’t even answer her. I just started running.”
Scott wondered how accurate this dialogue was. A morning-after memory of a booze-fueled dream hardly constituted gospel truth. But Owen was repeating it for him now with a kind of heartfelt sincerity that Scott could not remember seeing in his brother’s eyes throughout recent memory, if ever.
“I got halfway up the aisle,” Owen said, “and I saw the kid, the one that was crying and screaming. He was just a little younger than Henry is now—he even looked like Henry—and he held out his arms for me to pick him up. I grabbed him on the way out.”
“You took him from his parents?” Scott asked.
“He called me daddy.”
Scott felt another realization trying to come together in his mind, tantalizingly close to joining up and forming a bigger picture, then withering away in the pale antidepressant mist.
“How sure are you that all this really happened?”
“Like I said, I didn’t remember it until last night,” Owen said. “But it happened. I know it did.”
“So …”
Scott felt his hand being drawn up to the raw spot between his eyebrows, a pressure valve where the cloud might escape, allowing his thoughts to come together properly. Creative visualization. He rested his thumb on the spot, feeling the familiar salty sting, and heard Feldman’s scolding voice again. This kind of reckless irresponsibility isn’t like you, Scott.
“Why were you looking for his bones here?”
“The kid didn’t make it out,” Owen said.
“How do you know?”
“I dropped him. When the fire started.”
Henry’s voice, out of the blue: She said I already was a ghost.
“They never found his body,” Owen was saying. “He’s still down there. For some reason, Red and Colette are covering it up.”
Covering it up. Scott thought of the blue tarp, the blue dress, the blueprints, all things you used to cover things up. He wished he could see through it, beyond it. Yet there was still so much whiteness in the way. He pressed harder on the spot between his eyebrows, as hard as he could, working through the skin, as if the pressure alone could make something happen.
He heard a sharp chiming sound. He glanced up. Owen was fumbling in his pants pockets, taking out a cell phone. Scott had never known his brother to carry one, but here it was, Owen flipping it open as if he knew what he was doing.
“Yeah?” He paused, listening, a slackness coming over his face. “Yeah, it’s me.” Another pause, longer, and Scott heard a tinny voice on the other end, before Owen said, “Okay, all right. I’ll be right there.”
“What is it?” Scott asked.
“Accident at school,” Owen said. “It’s about Henry.”
THE LITTLE GIRL WITH THE BAND-AID on her forearm sat holding her coat on her lap like a small pink pet that she was afraid might run off. Bunches of wadded-up Kleenex lay around her everywhere, on the bench and on the floor. Sitting next to her, a woman in an outmoded brown suit and thick glasses sat patting her knee. She looked up at Scott and Owen with a kind of startled alarm.
“Mr. Mast?”
Both men answered “yes” simultaneously, and the woman looked momentarily confused. “I’m Principal Vickers,” she said, standing up and turning. Scott saw a run in her left nylon, from ankle to calf. “Henry’s in my office. Would you come with me, please?”
“What happened?” Owen asked as they walked.
“I think at this point I should just speak with the father.”
“That’s me.”
Principal Vickers stopped with her hand resting on the doorknob, her lens-distorted eyes sweeping from Scott to Owen, back to Scott, and then, with what appeared to be genuine reluctance, to Owen, where they stayed. “We’ve never had any sort of trouble with Henry in the past,” she said. “He’s a very sweet little boy, always plays with the other children. That’s what makes this kind of thing all the more … confounding.” Scott realized he’d misjudged the scowl; it wasn’t severity but profound, almost heartfelt dismay. “Frankly I’m at a loss.”
“I don’t understand,” Scott said. “What did he do?”
Principal Vickers let them both in.
ON THE WAY HOME Henry sat in the backseat of Scott’s rental car, silent, his shoulder belt twisted across his chest. He hugged his backpack in both arms, the same way he’d held on to it when Scott had dropped him off this morning, like a paratrooper about to jump out of a plane.
“You know who bites people?” Owen asked, staring at his son’s reflection in the rearview mirror. “Animals, that’s who. Are you an animal? Huh?”
Henry picked a dust mote in the air and stared at it.
“That principal said the girl might need stitches. What if her parents decide to sue us? You think I’ve got money for lawyers?”
The wrinkles in the backpack deepened.
“Fuck this shit,” Owen said. “I’ve got half a mind to lock you up inside the house where you can’t hurt people. That’s what you do with wild animals that bite, you lock them up in cages. Did you know that?”
“Or set them free,” the boy mumbled.
“What was that?”
“Owen—” Scott began.
“When we get back to the house, you’re going right upstairs. I don’t give a shit, you understand? You can stay up there all day and rot. Think about what you did. And hope and pray that kid’s dad doesn’t decide to take me to court.”
Scott pulled up in front of the house. There were no vehicles here, and he remembered Owen’s truck still parked outside Fusco’s from last night. Owen got out and stormed across the sidewalk, slowing down among the piles and heaps of snow and almost falling over on his way to the front door. Scott looked in the rearview mirror at his nephew’s face.
“Uncle Scott?”
“Yes.”
“Are rats wild?”
“No. I don’t know. Henry …” He turned around. “Why did you bite that girl?”
“She wanted to look in my backpack.”
“Why didn’t you let her?”
“It’s private.”
Scott looked at the pack in the boy’s arms, black smudges and streaks across the side. Ashes, he thought. It had been in the back of Sonia’s car this morning, meaning … what? The backpack had been with him last night when Red found the boy in the theater’s wreckage.
“Can I look?” Scott asked.
It took several seconds before Henry reluctantly opened his arms, allowing Scott to take the backpack. He found it to be surprisingly heavy, as if packed to the seams with wet sand, and he realized he’d never actually touched it this morning—Henry had held on to the backpack, all the way to school. He started to open it; the zipper got stuck on something inside. Scott tugged harder, and it sprang open with a little puff of black dust. The burned smell came out, filling the car with a stench worse than simple ash. The backpack was bulging with cinders.
“What is this?” Scott asked.
Henry didn’t answer. His eyes gleamed and two big tears welled up and fell, cutting clean tracks over his dirty cheeks. But when he spoke, his voice was clear, almost defiant.
“It’s my brother.”
HE DROVE TOO FAST TO COLETTE McGuire’s house, taking the curves recklessly, overextending the car’s center of gravity. When he got there, the driveway was empty, buried under half a foot of snow. He ran up to the front door and knocked three times—hard—pounding, really.
“Colette?” he shouted through the door. “It’s Scott. Open up.” His voice seemed to be floating down from some distant corner in the winter sky, up where it was totally disconnected from the rest of him. “I need to talk.”
Still no answer. He was about to call her on his cell phone when the door creaked open. On the other side, he saw Aunt Pauline sitting in her wheelchair.
“Scott,” she said. “How nice to see you.”
“Is Colette here?”
“Of course, dear. Come in out of the cold.”
He ducked through the doorway. The olfactory preponderance of flowers was back, and heavier than ever, swirling almost visibly in the bands of sunlight that spilled across the floor. Following the wheelchair past the spiral staircase, Scott tried to catch a glimpse of the woman’s face, but she turned the corner into another hallway. For the first time, he realized that the first-floor layout of the McGuire house wasn’t entirely dissimilar from Round House. True, these walls, floors, and ceilings all met square and true. But other than that, both houses might have been designed by the same architect. He had another random thought: The black wing somehow connected them.
“How do you like living out in the woods?” the old woman asked.
Scott flinched. Had he been speaking aloud?
“Sorry?”
“In that lovely old house.” Now she turned, eyes twinkling from her tiny, prunelike face. “So peaceful out there, don’t you think?”
“I’d really like to talk to Colette.”
“Have you been out to the pond?”
“Aunt Pauline—”
�
��It’s behind the house, through the trees—the pond, I mean.” Aunt Pauline touched her ear. “I left my hearing aid up in my bedroom. Would you mind going up to get it for me? It’s on top of the mahogany bureau next to the door.”
Hardly thinking of what he was doing, Scott climbed the stairs. Recovered memory. That was the term he’d been searching for earlier with Owen. Despite everything else, he was relieved to have thought of it. Perhaps more of his brain was working properly again.
He stepped into the old woman’s bedroom, found the hearing aid, a small pink thing in an otherwise empty silver dish, and took a moment to look around at the theater memorabilia on the walls, images of pretty young Pauline from back in her Barbara Stanwyck years. His gaze settled on a framed poster for a play called One Room, Unfinished. Familiar from somewhere, but the white pill blotted the memory to a sulky blur. Scott got close enough to read the small print. Opening soon at the McKinley Theatre on Twenty-third Street.
The play’s author was Thomas Mast.
“Looking for something in particular?” a man’s voice asked behind him.
Spinning around, Scott saw Red Fontana staring at him from the doorway in his bathrobe. The robe’s belt hung loose, and the robe itself was open just enough that Scott could tell Red was naked underneath it.
“I came over to talk to Colette,” Scott said.
“Then you got the wrong room.”
No small talk this time, and Scott was glad for it. “What’s going on at the Bijou? Why did you shut down the demolition project?”
“What?” Red smiled. “Is your brother bitching about his paycheck? He barely lasted a few days on the job.”
“He said you found something down there.”
“That movie?”
Scott shook his head. “Something else, down in the pit.”
“The only thing I found was his little boy, scrounging down inside the foundation, digging around in the ashes. Sonia wanted to get social services involved. Good thing I like the guy.”
“So there wasn’t anything else down there?” Scott asked.
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