Meanwhile, Max focused on his chocolate. The bitter flavor of the dark chocolate didn’t seem to bother him. He’d liked the food, but even so, he seemed sad. His face was wet like he’d been crying, without my even noticing.
The mood in the blue house was so depressing that I decided to pull out the blankets, stuffed animals and flashlight. I undid the zipper of my backpack loudly.
“Here,” I said to Julia, “for tonight, and so you have some light. I’ll be back again first thing tomorrow morning.”
Julia looked so worn out and when she opened her mouth to speak, she said nothing. I said good-bye and left quickly so they wouldn’t be able to ask me any more questions, like why I hadn’t brought them their own stuffed animals.
It wasn’t really dark out, but the dim sky with its gray haze and the songs of the owls and the crickets made the evening feel suddenly spooky. Luckily, Julia and Max wouldn’t see or hear much of that, not from inside their house. The air had grown cooler, and I felt a breeze across my face. I ran, first between the prickly rows of grain, then along the path through the field and finally through the neighborhood. I ran till I was in my grandparents’ garden and then climbed through the window back into their guest room.
My heart pounded. Julia and Max, and Max and Julia, and the darkness, and the field, and the wind in the barley. Along with my heart, I felt the pounding of a bad conscience. I thought of how frightened they must be and how worried their mother must be. The one thing that helped my bad conscience was the image of the brightly lit Brandner house, which I’d run past again on the way home, and the small cluster of people gathered in front of it, whispering quietly among themselves. Mr. Brandner had stood out in front of the door with his wife, making himself out to be the kindest, most caring father in all of Clinton.
22
The night was long. It just wouldn’t end. If I was able to sleep at all, it was for a couple of hours at most. The rest of the time I lay there, wide awake, tossing and turning. What I really wanted to do was get up and go back to the blue house, but I was also hoping that Julia and Max were asleep, and I didn’t want to wake them. I lay there thinking that nothing in the world takes longer than night turning into day. It happened so slowly I wanted to scream, but I didn’t, because I’d never heard of a night that forgot to end.
In the dark, I made a thousand plans, most of which seemed silly by dawn. In the morning, only one idea was left: to go to the bakery and get Julia and Max some breakfast.
It was still very early as I put on my sweats and sneakers and left a note saying: Gone jogging. I tried to imagine how perplexed my grandmother would be when she found the message. She would shake her head and then go into the kitchen with a shrug. I had never once gone jogging in all the time I’d been coming to Clinton. Truth be told, I’d never in my life jogged willingly at all. I only had the sweats because they were comfortable, and the sneakers were just what I wore every day.
I set the note on the table in the hall, put some money from my wallet into my sweatpants pocket and left the house. The early quiet was nicer than the quiet in the middle of the day. At seven o’clock in the morning, it was supposed to be quiet.
There was almost no one around, just two roofers standing in front of a house, propping a ladder up against the side of the building. I walked for ten minutes through the neighborhood, but this time didn’t pass the Brandner house because the bakery was in the opposite direction. I could have stopped at the newsstand where Mr. Benrath got his cigarettes, but I knew the owner there, and he might wonder why I was craving breakfast things; and anyway, I didn’t think he carried breakfast things.
I didn’t know the bakery lady, but unfortunately Mrs. Johnson was there, peering through the glass at the pastries. She had her back to me and studied each item closely, then finally said, “Four rolls, Margie, the usual.”
I entered the shop quietly, without saying good morning, so that Mrs. Johnson wouldn’t notice me. Between us on line was an old man with a tiny cloth shopping bag in his hand, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. It looked like he had to go to the bathroom and wouldn’t take long to make his purchase, which was exactly the way it went—just an almond croissant and a quick exit. I should have been able to make my order in peace—two poppy-seed swirls and two cinnamon swirls and two chocolate milks—but then Mrs. Johnson, who had spent the past several minutes peering into her pocketbook, turned around and discovered both her wallet, still lying on the counter, and me.
“You’re certainly up early, my dear. Are Grandma and Grandpa still sleeping?”
“Uh, good morning. Yeah, they’re asleep. I wanted to surprise them with some pastries.”
“That’s a lovely idea! Well, go ahead, make your order. I have something I want to talk to Margie about.”
“No, no, I have time.”
“Just a moment, dear. By the way, you know the Brandners’ children, don’t you? Did you play with them yesterday?”
“Just for a little while, before lunch. Why?”
“Oh, I was just wondering. So you didn’t see them again after that?”
“No, Mrs. Johnson.”
“Did they say anything to you?”
“Like what sort of thing?”
“Hmm, well, never mind. How many rolls are you buying then?”
“Uh, I don’t know.”
And though no one had asked her, Mrs. Johnson turned to the bakery lady and said, “Margie, pack up six rolls for the little one here, that should do.”
I started to object, but the bakery lady took a paper bag and loaded it with the rolls that I didn’t want. I stood there with my bag and couldn’t do a thing about it because Mrs. Johnson wouldn’t leave. When she went back to rummaging around in her handbag, I said as quietly and as quickly as I could, “And two poppy-seed swirls and two cinnamon swirls and two chocolate milks,” but when it was all added up, I was nineteen cents short.
I wanted to put back the rolls, but there were too many people in the neighborhood who knew my grandmother’s diet and knew she would never in her life eat something sweet for breakfast. Mrs. Johnson thankfully came to my rescue and laid the missing coins on the counter.
The shop had gotten crowded while this was happening, and the people were all watching me. I wondered whether Julia and Max were awake yet, and if they were hungry. I grabbed my bags, said good-bye without even looking at Mrs. Johnson and fled the shop. I ran all the way to the playground, where I was waved at by the old man on the bicycle who always seemed so glad to see me.
I was actually jogging, so it would look like I’d gone out for a run and to get the bread, but I was worried because Mrs. Johnson would definitely mention the whole thing about the rolls to my grandmother. What then? I didn’t care. The important thing now was to get Julia and Max something to eat as quickly as possible. Especially Max.
When I arrived at the blue house, soaked with sweat because I’d run so fast, Max really did look like some poor child who was dying of hunger. He was cowering at the back of the mattress, wrapped tightly in the woolen blankets, and he was crying, crying, crying, but I couldn’t make out his words. Julia sat beside him and rested her forehead on his shoulder. His sobs jostled her head, but Julia stayed there with him. After a while, she said loudly, “No one is going to give you a bath. No one!”
Suddenly, I understood what he’d been wailing: No bath! No bath. A bath must have been a horrible thing for him. I couldn’t understand it because I had always liked taking baths, but I guess Max saw baths differently. For him the idea of a bath was so awful that Julia couldn’t calm him down at all.
I stood there a while before either of them noticed me. As soon as they did, Julia began to talk. She wasn’t looking at me, but what she said was definitely intended for me to hear. She spoke the way some kids recite poetry for school: like a robot. Her poem went like this: “Max went in the bed, do you understand,
Mascha, he went in the bed.”
“Yes, okay, Julia, he went in the bed, I get it.”
But I guess I didn’t understand at all what it meant to them for Max to pee in the bed. Maybe it meant that Max would be shoved by his father into a bath full of very hot water. The fact that there was no tub in the blue house, not even a washbasin, didn’t stop Max from screaming. There was so much fear in his face, red, wet-faced fear.
He finally got quiet, but just for a minute, and I asked, “What are we going to do?”
Julia, still pressing her forehead to Max’s shoulder, repeated weakly, in a mechanical voice, “Yes, what are we going to do?”
23
I don’t know how long I listened to Max’s screaming. When I couldn’t take it anymore, I said, “I’m going to get some dry clothes and things. Here, eat breakfast.”
I left the house and took my shortcut, running through uncut fields and leaping over holes in the ground, to my grandparents’ house. When I got there, I was sweating and out of breath, so my grandparents totally believed that I’d been jogging, and I didn’t have to dream up another story, which was a good thing—my head was too full of them already.
I had to get dry clothes for Max and a new bedsheet. Julia and Max needed water for drinking and bathing. I also planned to take some sausage and cheese from the fridge for the rolls, which turned out not to be such a bad thing to have, after all. A day could be long, and they would be hungry. But just then, I couldn’t think about any of those things, because I had to sit down and have breakfast with my grandparents and pretend like everything was normal.
I could tell my grandparents knew all about Julia and Max’s disappearance. In this neighborhood, everyone knew everything about everyone, and that included missing kids, even if they were kids nobody ordinarily cared about. I’m sure Trudy had told her something. She always had some new gossip for my grandmother, and she would come by first thing in the morning to share it. Trudy must have been there, because my grandmother stirred her coffee and finally said, with a strange look in her eye, “Apparently, your friends have run away. What do you know about it?”
“What friends? Julia and Max? What do you mean they ran away?”
“They didn’t come home last night.”
“Oh.”
“Their parents are extremely upset. Trudy says she’s never seen Helen Brandner in such a state.”
“But what do you mean they ran away? How do you know?”
“There’s no way of knowing for certain, but two years ago they did the same thing. The little one was no older than five at the time. They got on the train and went all the way to South Carolina. That’s a ten-hour trip, at least.”
“South Carolina? That’s weird. They’ve never mentioned South Carolina.”
“Their aunt lives there. Their mother’s sister. Near Greenville.”
“Greenville?”
“Tell me, Mascha. They must have said something to you. They must have told you their plans.”
“All I do with Julia is listen to music. And Max never says anything at all.”
“Hmm. Well, at any rate, the children are missing. The whole neighborhood’s talking about it.”
“What are the Brandners doing?”
“They haven’t been able to get ahold of the aunt, but by now the children must have gotten there. The police have been notified. Trudy says they’re just waiting. It’s almost certain they know where they’ve gone, but I think Helen also called a few children from the school.”
I looked up at my grandfather. He was eating an apple in a way that only a grandfather can eat an apple. He held it in one hand and used the other to cut off small pieces with a fruit knife. He was eating them from the tip of the blade. It made me worry he was going to hurt himself. But he didn’t; he did something entirely different: he spoke. With his mouth full, he said, “It’s no wonder they’ve run away.”
My grandmother hissed sharply, “John! We said we were going to keep out of it!”
And with that, the subject was closed. Grandma had a tight grip on Grandpa. Dad had told me as much, and I’d seen it for myself many times. The truth was, I was happy to hear what my grandmother said because it meant I didn’t have to come up with any more Julia-and-Max lies, and on top of that, my grandfather had said something. He had admitted that he knew something.
About the blue bruises.
The screams.
I wasn’t sure how news of the bruises and screams had spread through the neighborhood, or exactly what my grandfather knew, but he clearly knew something, and that was good. If it had been the day before, I probably would have pestered him to explain what he meant, but everything was different now, so I just spread jelly over my roll and went to search through my T-shirts and pants for something that Max could wear.
I looked through the clothes I’d used to stuff my bedsheets the night before and found plenty that he could wear, but when I held them up, I realized that Max and his belly would never fit into my clothes. I felt my face turn red and my ears were ringing. I didn’t know what to do. Max was sitting there in the blue house in wet clothes, on a wet sheet, and I didn’t have a clue how I could help him. I took my purple leggings, because at least they were stretchy, and went into my grandparents’ room to look for a bedsheet in the closet. I took a flat one. It smelled like it came from a tidy world where nothing bad ever happened to anyone.
Once I was in the closet, I noticed my grandfather’s shelves.
There was one shelf with pants, one with sweaters, one with T-shirts. All of them would be much too big for Max, but they would fit him better than my things. At least they would go over his belly. I took a pair of worn, dark green corduroys from the bottom of the shelf, plus a pair of suspenders and a pale yellow T-shirt that said Together in Clinton, the town’s slogan. I took some underwear, too, after debating whether it would be strange for Max to wear them, but in the end I decided it would be stranger if he didn’t have any.
Meanwhile, I could see through the bedroom window that my grandparents were outside in the garden. Grandma was hanging the wash on the line, and my grandfather was weeding. They both looked odd to me, the way people sometimes do when you see them through glass. I opened the window and called, “I’m going out, I’ll be back for lunch.”
Then I ran through the house and packed a couple plastic bottles of water, a washcloth, a hand towel and soap into the bag with the clothes. I took cheese and cold cuts and a plastic bowl I found in the kitchen and got some paper and pencils and two books from the guest room and then I headed off. I was able to go right out the front door with my bag and the bowl without raising any suspicions because everyone who might wonder about the things I had with me was out in the back garden. But that wasn’t entirely true. I couldn’t pass by the Brandners’ house—not with the bag, not with the bowl. So I decided on the shortcut, though I was curious to see what was happening at Julia and Max’s just then.
24
When I opened the door to the blue house, I was hit by the familiar smell of a toilet and a feeling of sadness—dark, sticky sorrow, and it was worse than before. The mattress was propped up to dry against the wall. Max was still wrapped in the blanket but now he was naked underneath, and his clothes lay wadded up with the sheet in a pile by the shelf. He wasn’t screaming anymore, just whimpering. Julia had laid her hand on his heaving shoulder and was whispering to him, just like she had at the playground: “It’s going to be all right. It’s going to be all right.”
Over and over.
“It’s going to be all right.”
But it wasn’t all right. It was horrible, the smell and the sadness.
“I have everything here,” I said, with fake cheerfulness. “Some things to put on, some things for washing up, and even some men’s shower gel for the well-groomed gentleman.”
“I won’t!” Max shouted. “I won’t, I won’t
!”
But Julia was firm and said, “You’re going to do it, Max, or I’ll do it for you!”
Slowly, Max dropped the blanket from his shoulders. Though Julia shielded him like a bodyguard, I could see plenty of him, because there was so much of Max that protruded beyond her edges.
Oh God.
No.
Max’s behind and back had been so badly beaten that there was hardly any normal skin left. On the insides of his arms, on the backs of his thighs, everywhere, there were scabs and welts and blue bruises, some darker, some lighter. On the back of each buttock there was a wide stretch of red, and I saw that his feet were red, too.
I’m not really the sort of person who gives other people hugs—no one ever taught me how to do that—but at that moment, when I saw Max’s body, I wanted to hug him. I wanted to hug him so tightly that no one would ever dare hurt him again.
But instead I just stood there with a sick feeling in my stomach. And then I began to cry. Tears ran down my cheeks and into the corners of my mouth. So they didn’t notice, I quickly turned and began to fill the bowl with water. “Here you go,” I said, and pushed the bowl, washcloth, towel and shower gel toward them.
I squatted in a corner—not the one with the stinking bucket—and watched Max wash. Julia, who was still being very kind to him, urged him to hurry. Max washed his legs and backside quickly and quietly, with a shocked expression. For a few seconds, Max turned his face toward me, and I could see how unpleasant bathing was for him, but somehow I could also sense him relaxing. Before, I imagined, the water had always been too hot and his father had just beaten him.
When he was finished washing, Julia handed him the towel and told him to dry himself. I stood up from my corner and went to get the dry clothes from the bag. The things looked even more grandfatherly now than they had before on the shelves. They were just terrible. I brought them to Max and expected him to refuse to put on such hideous ill-fitting things, but it didn’t seem to bother him. It was only Julia who looked at the clothes with hatred.
You Can't See the Elephants Page 6