Come play. Come play.The six of them formed a circle and chanted it.Peter, come and play with us.
He got over the rise and ran the rest of the way. The circle broke to let him join in. The hands on either side of him were warm. On his left was the older boy, the leader of the group. “We like you, Peter,” he said, and his voice was like singing.
They spun around in their circle, laughing when it made them dizzy.
The girl made a circlet of her braided witchgrass and put it over Peter’s wrist. It was scratchy. “If it itches, it means you love me,” she said coquettishly, although Peter didn’t have a word for it. “Does it itch?”
“Yes.”
“You can stay here forever,” she said. He nodded happily. Yes. Yes.
They raced across the grass, the sting of it nice on his legs. He looked down at the grass, so tall, and wondered where they were, and saw that he wore his pajamas and was embarrassed.
“It’s okay,” one of the other boys said.Ethan is his name, Peter thought clearly. Ethan. He opened his arms as if to show Peter what he wore and Peter saw that his pants were too short and one knee was gone. It made Peter smile.
“Let’s run!” The six of them ran together, collapsing in a pile.
“You can come all the time!” the little girl said. “You can even bring your mama.”
The others nodded.
From far away there was a booming sound. The six children looked up when it sounded. They jumped up. Peter didn’t.
“We have to go!” said the oldest boy, Jack. The girl was Mariette. They ran away.
Come back!he shouted. They turned and looked, but only waved. They were all smiling at him. They were disappearing into the distance while Peter lay in the deep grass, trying hard to follow them with his eyes because he could not move.
Your mother is calling you,he heard Mariette say, deep in his ear, even though she was a speck in the distance.Your mama is calling.
“Time to get up, Peter.”
He opened his eyes to morning and the smell of witchgrass in his bedroom.
There were three jobs in Monday’s paper that Barbara thought she might have a shot at.
She took over one end of the long dining-room table, a fresh package of printer paper—she wasn’t even sure they sold typing paper anymore, but the twenty-year-old clerk had assured her that they were one and the same—opened next to her portable typewriter from college. Among the things stashed in the attic she had found a dried up bottle of Wite-Out, useless, and Correct-It tape, also likely dried out, but she wasn’t about to scour the city searching for antiquities. She would just have to be careful, and accurate.
Two of the ads were her “safe bets”: they were in childcare. At very least, she could claim eight years’ experience. Her work history over the last ten years was sketchy to nonexistent. She didn’t even have a résumé, résumés not being a necessary requirement in the volunteer sector. That was all she was going to have for previous experience, and she was smart enough to know how to play it up. She’d had some good volunteer positions, including an impressive year during which she (almost) single-handedly organized the “Festival of Learning,” a combination career-symposium-cum-adult-education-cum-elder-learning weekend at the community center in their neighborhood the year Petey turned three. She would see what she could make of that. The other job was slightly more interesting, a part-time secretarial position in a church office only a couple of blocks from the house. That would not only be more interesting than the day-cares, but also was close enough (and had boasted “flexible hours”) so that her own childcare requirements might be nil. It would be ironic if she had to hire childcare during the week so that she could care for other people’s children, but she had to do something.
There was twenty thousand dollars in savings and another two thousand in checking. She had some mutual funds and other small investments, and Petey’s child support was just under five hundred dollars a month. All of it was adequate for now, but not for long. She had to get a start, some experience, so that she could move on. Work was good for the soul.
The typewriter was a very old manual, and in addition to noting her poor, mostly forgotten manual skills, she noted with dismay how old-fashioned and small the letters were, as made by the keys. The secretarial ad had suggested that a knowledge of computers was an asset, but not essential. She hoped that meant she didn’t have to have a home computer to qualify. While she wasn’t exactly computer literate, she had rarely used theirs when she’d had the opportunity. Dennis had gotten the computer.
Does he have a jewelry box, personal drawer, something like that?The morning after Dennis had left, after Petey had gone to school so that he wouldn’t see his dad walking out with a suitcase and have to explain, Barbara got on the phone to Debra, hysterical by then, having watched Dennis leave without so much as a backward glance. In fact, his very walk to the car had seemed…jaunty.
Right from the start Deb had insisted there was another woman. Barbara, smug and foolish, had claimed vehemently that he would never do that, bolstered with a petulant, and in retrospect, naiveI would know.
She underscored her name on the résumé and decided after the fact that she should have centered it. She yanked the paper out and carefully added another sheet, beautiful, clean, white and centered and underscored her name; then her address, 362 Belisle Street. It looked strange and unfamiliar on the page.
There had been nothing in his drawer or in the little wooden box that Barbara had given him for Christmas around the time Petey was four. Debra stayed on the phone and coached her through the little pieces of paper, the search through the jacket pockets of his suits, his shoeboxes on the floor in the back of the closet, and made her shake books from his side of the bed table. She was astounded at the variety of hiding places Debra came up with, and began, by osmosis almost, to feel suspicious herself. She would never have thought to look in his books. What a tremendous hiding place they would have made. But there had been nothing.
What else has he got that’s only his, that only he uses?
She filled in her education, excluding her dates of graduation, a moot point since she had added her date and year of birth. She toyed with the idea of starting over again, putting her vitals (other than the pertinent like her address) at the end of the résumé, after she’d dazzled them with her abilities.
What else has he got that’s only his, that only he uses.
Debra had walked her through the downstairs, more coat pockets, old briefcases, his knapsack that he took to the gym; when she told her to look inside his winter boots, she drew the line, feeling that Debra—her friend—wantedher to find something incriminating when there was nothing. After an hour on the phone, an hour of sticking her hand into the most absurd places, growing more and more suspicious, more and more frightened—as much as by what she was doing as what she was looking for—she finally got off the phone, pleading an appointment and offering the promise that she would call a lawyer, “just to see.”
What else has he got that’s only his, that only he uses?
The ad for the day-care closest to the house on Belisle had said that electronically transmitted applications were acceptable before the fourteenth. E-mail.
Dennis was an LPP guy: little pieces of paper. There had been dozens of them found on her search through his things. None of them had any meaning for her, all pertaining, she suspected, to work: indecipherable things that said, “110 bcu. 120,” and appointment notes, all men’s names, likely work-related since they were all daytime hours. Debra was disappointed each time they found one.
She’d been a computer widow one long year, when Petey was about six. Dennis had bought a brand-new computer “for the family” that Christmas and was enamored. He’d spent hours every evening after Christmas playing with it, and when the initial thrill abated, he continued to use it religiously, for work, she assumed, and had taught both her and Petey some basic uses. Petey played computer games, becoming easily bored with t
he Step 1–2–3 to Grade Two! types of games that Dennis bought for him. Slowly, over the year, it became Dennis’s toy.
Barbara tried to jot down some notes on her work experience on a piece of the printer paper beside the typewriter. She got lost several times. She started again.
The password had been easy enough to find. It was written on a Post-it tucked on the bottom of the keyboard. That hadn’t exactly been detective work. She had seen him do it. She’d asked him what it was.
The password got her into the programs. On the bottom of the computer screen there was a little symbol of a letter. She only vaguely understood the concept of e-mail, had certainly never sent one and didn’t know the mechanics of how it worked, even, but it really was point-and-click—who’d have thought?—and from there it was easy enough to decipher in-box from out-box and so on. It took a little longer to figure out “sent.”
The pen was still in her hand, but by then Barbara was staring off into space, her face slack with remembered disbelief and the hurt. The terrible hurt. Real physical pain. A bone breaking. She’d curled up into a ball, clutching her stomach in very real pain on the floor of the office and let out a wail. Without warning, everything she had eaten the night before and that morning, mostly nothing, a piece of toast and a couple of sips of coffee, came rushing up and she vomited right there on the spot, some of the vomit hitting her hand, warm and horribly wet. The taste of it in her mouth forced her up off the floor and into the bathroom. She rinsed her mouth and bent over the toilet and threw up again. Off and on, for an hour, until her sides hurt, her throat burned, and her jaw ached from being forced open so wide, so often.
She pressed her eyes tightly shut, trying desperately to get the memory out of her head. Finally she curled her hands into fists and closed them so hard for so long that it became distracting. Did it until it hurt. That helped.
Ancient history.
She wrote two sentences about organizing the Festival of Learning, and then gave up. Just for a little while she would do something else. It would all fade in a half hour or so, she knew from experience. She wondered, ironically, if she could add “effective knowledge of e-mailing” to her special skills. Wouldn’t that be a kicker?
It was several hours before she sat back down at the typewriter and worked on her résumé in earnest, putting behind her the memories of what was ancient history. In between she cleaned her house.
The sun was bright again, for several days in a row. It poured in through the windows on the south side of the house, lighting the hall and making even the bathroom, with its menacing and mysterious tub, seem benign. She flung open the windows in all the rooms and let spring-summer inside. It cheered her considerably.
When she was downstairs collecting her dust mop, she put on a CD. Dusty Springfield. She sang along. Even the sad songs were okay, buffered as they were by her own ignorance of the lyrics.
Petey had left the empty tins of pudding on his dresser, along with the spoon. Otherwise, his room was tidy, if (probably) dirty. She moved everything out of the way for her mop, pushing the dresser away from the wall and retrieving two mismatched socks and a Matchbox car, before dusting behind it. Motes of dust flew everywhere, in spite of the spray of oil soap she gave her mop. She rolled up his little rug and left it in the hall for later shaking. Under his bed there were a number of books and two empty wrappers from the peanut-butter cups, and pajama bottoms that she had thought were in the wash. She stepped on a piece of Lego, shrieking with pain when it dug into her arch. Lego was deadly. All in all, she was in a good mood.
She would get one of the jobs, of that she was certain. She hoped for the secretarial thing, but would take the childcare work. If nothing panned out—a pointless exercise in futility, that sort of thinking—she would apply for a cashier’s job at any number of the stores just blocks from the Belisle house. She felt like there were (suddenly) endless options.
The worst parts done, under the bed, behind, under the dresser, she turned her attention to the rest of the floor and gave it a once-over, pausing now and then to rub at something with the cloth she kept with her for tougher marks. She would have to come back for two: a dust-coated splash of what looked to be dried apple juice and an unidentified blue mark that scraped off—partly, with her thumbnail.
Barbara was just on her way to the bathroom, for a sturdier cloth and some chemical elbow grease, when she saw yet another mark on the floor that hadn’t been swept away with the mop, noticeable only with the sun shining on it. She backed up a step or two and tried finding it again. When she did, she knelt down for a better look. It was alongside the cubbyhole door.
It was a footprint. That in itself wasn’t strange—she had found a footprint beside the apple-juice mark, but it had apparently been covered in a sock at the time—except that this footprint was substantially smaller than the sock print. She looked closely at it, putting her hand down beside it, wondering if it was some sort of optical illusion. But no, it was small. It was smaller than the length of her hand, practically a toddler’s footprint. And complete. She could count all five toes.
She looked at it for a long time.
Eventually she shrugged. She hadn’t washed all the floors when they’d moved in. Obviously a small child had looked at the house with its parents before Barbara and Petey. She/he had left their mark. (She just hoped they hadn’t stepped in pee or something disgusting before they’d done it; nasty germs might have been left.)
She got up off the floor and went and got a cloth. She rubbed the mark away easily. She finished her dusting of the floor and, for no good reason at all, was reminded of the night she heard Petey sleepwalking.
The footprint had been facing outward. As though leaving the closet.
My mother’s dead.
That’s terrible.
By the time she was once again ready to work on her résumé—no bad thoughts allowed!—she was feeling pumped and in control. The upstairs sparkled. If she finished in time, she could stop at the copier’s, get several made and be back in time to do the same for the downstairs. Dusty Springfield was on her third tour when she sat back down to the typewriter.
Everything was going to be fine.
There are no alleyways all the length of Belisle Street; it is one of the few distinctions of the neighborhood. Instead of an alley, Belisle and its backyard sister, Harrod, are separated by a copse of birch trees that have been standing for as long as anyone can remember. Most of the houses have back gardens, whether planned or the very opposite. A great many of the homeowners over the years had put up fences that ran the length of their property, protection against the small animals that make the mini-forest their home. A narrow path had been beaten down from the time of the first child to live there, and so the “back way” is passable, but only on foot. Branches and the unpredictable undergrowth have made even bike riding inadvisable. Every few years a neighbor gets up a petition to turn the back way into a real alley, wanting to park his car and bring in his groceries in anonymity. So far, they have all given up. Cars are parked in driveways or on the street; garbage and recycling is toted out front, deliveries, moving vans and guests all enter and exit through the front street; neighbors with a tendency toward embarrassment have learned to ask for paper instead of plastic.
There was a good four feet on the east side of the house, between it and the hedge. When Petey got home from school, he looked anxiously toward the side of the house, as though expecting to see something there, then ran up the steps and inside. It was a cool place, he bet. He hadn’t spent any time exploring the yard, at all.
He dumped his backpack on the floor. He listened for his mom, and, after a second or two of hearing the unfamiliartap tap tap, he poked his head around the archway between the hall and the living room and saw her at the end of the dining-room table, pecking away at the keys of her little typewriter, her forehead crunched in concentration.
She heard him. “Hey, baby,” she said distractedly.
“Hi.”
> “I’m just typing up my résumé, I’ll be done in a couple of minutes. How was school? School okay?”
Petey mumbled something that she didn’t catch and she looked up quickly; he could almost see her doing a quick assessment in her head. Clothes unsoiled, face clean of dirt and tears, no pinched look (no more than usual), and she smiled swiftly, and bent her head back over the keyboard. She resumed her awkward pecking until the carriage bell rang. She wiggled her shoulders and glanced back at him once more with a satisfied smile.
“I might just get this right,” she said.
“I’m going out in the yard, ’kay?” he said.
“Okay. Don’t go far. Dinner in an hour or so.”
The pecking started again, just as Petey closed the door.
It was still nice out, although the sun had been hidden behind clouds for most of the afternoon and it looked like it might rain. Petey pulled his jacket down over his belly—it was getting too small, but he didn’t want to say anything to his mom because mostly it was getting too small in thefront, and that was about being a husky kid and he didn’t want to talk about it—and stepped off the small stoop, standing on the sidewalk for a heartbeat, as though establishing his presence. He took a deep, manufactured breath, then ducked his head covertly and headed toward the side of the house.
The grass was just starting to turn green. The sidewalk went around the other side of the house to the backyard, so there was no path between the east side and the sidewalk. Petey took big steps as though wanting to disturb the earth as little as possible. It was different at the side, though. It was narrow and dark between the hedge and the house. The house next door had only one window along that side, at the top. Petey’s house didn’t have any windows on the west side, and for a little bit that fascinated him. The houses all looked so much the same he hadn’t considered that they might be different. His mom’s room, the biggest, had a window on the east side. He could see it—although notin it—if he looked up from where he stood. Maybe the neighbors’ had an opposite layout? He compared the two houses in the most casual way, a thoughtful, responsible expression on his face, a look of casual curiosity. Then he got to business.
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