When She Was Gone

by Gwendolen Gross

  “Geo!” his mother called from inside the house. He knew he didn’t have to go in until the third or fourth warning. He was unearthing a small colony of pill bugs from beneath an early-yellow sycamore leaf. He touched them and they curled.

  “Because of Megan’s Law,” said his next-door neighbor, the twins’ mother, as she opened the car door. He could hear everything on their driveway, the pieces of conversation that left their beginnings and ends inside the doors of house or car.

  “No,” said her husband, Mr. Stein—Mrs. Stein had her phone on speaker. “Just no.” He had a smile Geo liked. And his voice was deep, the kind of deep that made your own breastbone vibrate.

  Mr. Stein had come to speak at career day at school last year, and afterward, while everyone was standing in line for the school-lunch oatmeal cookies Geo didn’t like—too dusty—he’d come up to Geo as if Geo was a real neighbor, the kind who came in and out of the back door without knocking, one who shared in screaming for business at the lemonade stand.

  “Howdy, neighbor,” Mr. Stein had said. “I didn’t know you were in the same class as Cody.”

  “And Toby’s last year,” said Geo. Toby was actually a decent kid.

  “And Toby’s. Last year. I guess I should know your name. Mine’s Frank.” He grinned. He almost seemed nervous.

  “Geo. For George. Or the earth. I kind of like that better.”

  “You aren’t as shy as they say,” said Mr. Stein.

  And Geo, because he liked his neighbor’s voice, because he knew his own voice would be wide and deep someday, said, “No, I’m not actually shy at all.”

  He knew he was different, and most of the time he didn’t mind, but in summer he was tired of being taken for a visitor from some Paterson youth group, or some lucky kid from the Fresh Air Fund. He was some lucky kid, but not the way they thought he was. They thought he was some lucky kid because he’d been rescued from what was rightfully his—poverty, drug addiction, all the horrors of not having. Actually, he was some lucky kid because his sisters were relatively cool, and now that Caroline was off at NYU, living in the city year-round, he had his own room, and he had only two chores: emptying the dishwasher and keeping his gerbil, Clive, clean, fed, and alive. He was lucky because he had everything he needed and many things he didn’t, because his mother had finally made a name for herself hand-making silk and cotton baby sweaters for boutiques in town and on the Upper West Side.

  Ever since he could grapple, Geo loved sorting things that looked similar and different. He used Merry’s camera, downloading photos by the time he was six, sorting, arranging. He was the king of the kitchen cabinets, making the spices alphabetical. For his ninth birthday, his parents bought him a used Nikon camera he’d coveted from the camera shop in town. Its silvery body was an empty notebook awaiting possible poetry. He saved his allowance for film and prints from the drugstore in town, where they knew him as one of their last regulars at the photo counter. He cut and glued collages onto oak tag or poster board or abandoned scraps of wood, creating order out of the chaos of photo after photo, mining individual faces from groups, faces in backgrounds, faces in mirrors. He crafted collages of his mother, one of each of his sisters, Caroline, Merry, and Victoria, using the old shots he’d scanned in from baby albums and current pictures. He used corkboard he found at yard sales, constructed popsicle-stick-fence frames. He constructed a collage of his neighbor Toby, who appeared in the background of shots he took at Westfallen Park, where the dog run made a great shooting ground, or simply hidden in the corner of a series of shots he took of the corner of the main street and his cul-de-sac, showing the year’s procession of recycling bins, used Christmas trees, green grass and dun.

  Geo made a collage of Mr. Leonard the music guy, who appeared in shots he took at the arts fest in town, the winter carnival when the horse-drawn carriage clopped along Broad Street and people sat and noticed the storefronts instead of scurrying from one to another. People’s faces were different around animals.

  Trimming the photos revealed people Geo might not have otherwise seen—Tina Sentry’s mother, her face turned upward in one background, looking at someone out of the picture. In another Mrs. Sentry held a look of fury, standing behind the fence at a baseball game—the expression was so intense Geo discarded the scrap, but it recurred in other shots. His collages were like his mosaics, about sameness and difference. Deeply right and satisfying, like filling a necessary well with sweet water.

  Just last week Geo had had enough photos of Toby’s big sister, Linsey, who was going off to college, to make a collage. He’d trimmed and pasted, shellacked the finished board and let it dry, only he felt embarrassed at the thought of offering it to the family—he’d have to talk to the parents; he’d have to commit to their front door. Plus, in some of the pictures, though he’d trimmed around his face, Linsey was kissing her ex-boyfriend, so she looked contorted, almost desperate for air. He’d save the collage in his desk, where ungifted expressions waited.

  For his father, his sister, his art teacher Mrs. Greenberg—with whom he shared a disdain of still lifes—he offered as gifts their collages or family collages or neighborhood collages on thick paper.

  • • •

  Despite being born a bit of a mystery, baby Geo had grown up in the ordinary fashion, learning letters first and then numbers. Learning the workings of his body. It wasn’t until he was four years old that he had noticed. It was as if he’d been unaware of his separateness until then, that the cautious teachers who included Kwanzaa songs and paid special attention to Martin Luther King Junior Day at his preschool hadn’t gotten to him. It was his best friend, Minal, whose long-lashed oak brown eyes watched everything the way Geo’s did, taking in, taking in, storing and classifying—they were best friends from the first day of preschool, when Minal had announced that she would be sitting with Geo from now on and Geo made no protest—had asked him, “Geo, you know you are black?”

  “I am a boy,” said Geo, because this was generally the main distinguishing feature in preschool. Brown eyes or blue or green, hair color, boy or girl. Minal used to joke that she was a boy, too, but he’d never claimed to be of the fairer sex. Fairer. Minal had skin almost as dark as his, and long, licorice black hair. She also had a little dandruff and two other girls teased her, saying she had lice.

  “No,” said Minal. “You are a black boy. I know because I am an Indian girl.”

  “One little, two little, three little Indians,” sang Geo. He didn’t sing with the group, but he sang with Minal. The two of them were in a corner of the sandbox, their corner. The other children were knocking over a sand castle in the other corner or stepping on ants under the slide.

  “Not that kind of Indian,” instructed Minal.

  “What kind of Indian?”

  “Indian from India. The way you are black from Africa.”

  “I’m not from Africa,” said Geo. “I’m from Ridgewood.”

  Only that night he looked in the mirror over the bathroom sink. He stood on his toes on a stepstool and watched his face for long enough to really notice, then inspected his mother, his sisters. His mother knew what he was doing as soon as he took her hand and rested it, palm down, on the table, then rested his beside hers.

  “Am I black from Africa?” he asked her. “The way Minal is Indian from India?”

  His mother sighed. She put his hand inside hers, a small warm stone, though he already didn’t like to be held as closely as he used to.

  “You are black,” she said. “Your skin is dark. But you are black from white,” she said. “Because Mommy and Daddy have light skin, but they have some dark skin in their genes. We made you; you are ours, no matter what anyone else says. And probably the dark-skin genes are from Africa.”

  “But I’m not from Africa,” he said. “I’m from Ridgewood. Are you from Africa?”

  “Part of me must be,” said his mother. “Because you are from me.”

  • • •

  When his neighbor
s were coming or going, Geo was tempted to lean over the fence, to say something. He was always tempted to join in the music of their conversations, but it was just pieces, and he didn’t belong. Their door sighed closed.

  He had a collection of items that he kept in the fence gap: wine bottles from his parents’ recycling bins, or others out on the street every other Wednesday, with their Spanish and French labels, bright graphics or subdued woodcuts, their hard grape scent; he liked how they moaned different notes when he blew across their open tops. For a while he kept bricks he found, pieces and wholes, in the woods just up from the pebbly stream bank. There was a place people dumped things—beer cans; cigarette butts; blue plastic New York Times baggies of dog poo; the ends of construction projects, like the broken bricks and dregs of cement and occasionally paint cans. He thought of it as a graveyard, these abandoned projects, and he picked up bricks for a while, carefully avoiding the squish of the blue bags as he stepped into the site.

  But his mother had found the wine bottles and took him inside and sat him down to talk about alcohol. Geo had tasted beer and wine at his parents’ table and once at Merry’s secret party when his parents went camping by themselves for an overnight at Bear Mountain and she was in charge of him, but he didn’t particularly like either the taste or the dizzy feeling he got after having too much at that party. So when his mother was worried about the wine bottles, it was hard for Geo not to laugh at her. He didn’t, though; he told her he didn’t drink but he’d stop collecting. Then he had moved on to the brick bits, last summer, until someone, and he suspected Cody Stein, had knocked over the wall he’d been building, a dry wall, which meant there was nothing between his bricks, no mortar to hold them together. So it could’ve been the wind, or it could’ve been Cody, who had been peering over the wall all that week, bored because he was home sick from soccer camp with hoof-and-mouth disease. He had sores on his lips and Geo had pretended not to look at him, not to see him looking, because he knew Cody didn’t actually want to play with him—he’d learned that years ago when he went to play once at Mrs. Stein’s insistence, and Cody had taken Geo’s Pez dispenser, called him a fag, told him he’d have a turn with the stomp rocket that never came, and spat at his own brother, Toby.

  No wonder Geo didn’t play with the twins. And “fag” wasn’t the only name Cody called him, and Toby, too, even if he didn’t shout it out the way his brother did. Marshmallow. Oreo. Booger.

  “Can you talk at all?” Cody teased when he said very little.

  Maybe all the names weren’t for his blackness, maybe they were for his shyness, but they were still mean. Especially Cody. Toby was quiet the way he was, and once he came over to look at Geo’s bottle caps. But they weren’t going to be friends, it was a matter of distance, of those two fences, of the way his mother called out of the back door and the twins’ mother or a babysitter was always with them, watching.

  He was working on his bottle caps this summer. He collected them down by the river in the woods and in the alley behind the ShopRite, picking them out from cigarette butts and crushed plastic bottles sticky with artificial sugar. He had collected the wine bottles with Minal, before she moved to St. Louis. He sometimes went to dial her phone number in Ridgewood before he remembered she was gone.

  The bees loved the caps. They visited them like flowers. Geo arranged his findings in the silky dirt between the fences, the Steins’ fence and his family’s. Two fences. He knew the Robert Frost poem, and wondered whether two good fences made them the best of neighbors, or canceled out like a double negative.

  He had a Yoo-hoo, a Tusker lager, a dozen Cokes, and two dozen Diet Cokes, pressed into the soil, flat on top like coins. Occasionally the beer caps had dents from bottle openers, but mostly they were twist offs, and had to be eased in so they wouldn’t bend. Eagle Rock. Stewart’s root beer, cranky Red Dog, swoopy Orangina, Snapple after Snapple, Zima, round-edged Fruitopia. At home they drank two-percent milk (“What’s the other ninety-eight percent?” joked Merry. “Air?”) and Victoria’s favorite, orange juice, and when she was home, his oldest sister, Caroline, drank bottle after bottle of vitaminwater. She was getting too thin; Geo knew it from her face, her hair looked almost gray it was bleached so pale. His newest Caroline photo collage showed the change.

  The wind blew hard, dusting him with piney soil. Sometimes trash collected in the spot between the fences. Sometimes Geo found Cody Stein’s homework or the prescription label for Tina Sentry’s acne medication.

  Today, there were some new papers in the crease where the fences narrowed into an oblique angle, and Geo rescued them. A bill from the milk truck that delivered to the Sentrys’ house where there was always a gaggle of kids and the mother wore a leather blazer and swore sometimes in front of them. A water-stained scrap of box from a frozen shrimp Creole entrée. A note, folded and folded again, wet so the ink bled through the white side of the paper, so the thin blue printed lines had swelled into the spaces between them.

  “Mom” he read. He peeled it open and examined both sides, but “New” and “L” were all he could make out. He refolded and tucked this into his pocket. Geo wadded the other trash in his hand as he made his way to the cans behind the garage.

  “THIRD TIME, GEO,” his mother called out from the back door.

  “Can I have a soda?” Geo asked, because he was bored. He already knew the answer, and she didn’t even bother.

  “Wash your hands,” she said. “Cookies? I want you to help me tie on some beads.”

  26 SYCAMORE STREET

  She was home by three, still abuzz from Margaret’s inexorable enthusiasm and three iced tea refills. Maybe she wanted to open a gift shop, she thought, fingering the things she loved on the shelf in the hallway, the tiny cloisonné boxes, the carved wooden birds from a roadside stand in Vermont, which had sold rabbit meat, eggs, maple syrup, and the glorious little painted birds: a chubby robin, a slightly haughty red-winged blackbird. She had been with Joe when she bought them.

  Or maybe a restaurant. A tea shop. The women of this town would like that, a proper English tea. Margaret always stretched the frame of her world; Margaret always reminded her of the possibilities still there for the grasping. There was a business proposal course at the community college—none of this was too hard for her, it was just the sum of it that seemed daunting. For now, they’d agreed, she’d try out something part-time—to eavesdrop on the small business world, to wind the gears of something before trying to make it tick.

  The bus would be back soon from camp, and Linsey would get a ride home from someone at work; the empty house would be full. She went upstairs and changed back into jeans. Passing in the hall, she sniffed; the boys’ room felt stuffy, so she opened the windows, airing out the crushed-grass, sour sweat as best she could, waving her hand, ineffectual. She looked in their drawers, always embarrassed to be prying, but she needed to keep them safe from their own curiosities. She found pennies; gum wrappers; a thousand tiny plastic party favors—superhero wobbly heads, ball-and-cup games; hardened, unwrapped licorice; collector’s cards with their peculiar Japanese characters; a picture in Toby’s drawer of the basketball team Toby had quit while Cody kept at it. Nothing dangerous. She still regretted not paying more attention to Linsey’s drawers when it mattered, to Linsey’s teenage hiding places. Leaning her face against the screen, she could almost smell September out there, the leaves letting go of green.

  Since it was summer, Frank would come home early. He came home early as often as possible. He played catch with the boys in the backyard. Connect 4 with Toby, over and over, at the dining room table. He took Linsey shopping for the things she needed that Abigail had not managed to find for her, or with her. He mixed piña coladas and planter’s punches for her, and sometimes for Linsey, and brought them out to the yard, where mother and daughter sat with their feet in an old tin tub that used to hold Linsey’s vast collection of Beanie Babies before she donated them to the day care in Paterson where she now worked. The school was i
n a warehouse in a horrible neighborhood with a gun shop two doors down and loitering lost men on the street, but Linsey and her coworkers traveled with buddies and pepper spray. She could give the kids attention they wouldn’t otherwise receive. She was there right now, but her mother was already ahead, thinking about the evening, swatting the invisible mosquitoes, wondering whether they had any bendy straws for the boys’ virgin version of the punch.

  Never mind the phone, she thought, as it rang. Let it ring, she had to put away the three baskets of laundry waiting on the landing. Let it ring, let it ring, and then she dashed across the landing to the master bedroom to answer it anyway, because Abigail had a hard time ever letting the phone ring.

  “Is Linsey Hart there?” asked a young voice, a bright bird sound. Maybe it was the new roommate again. Linsey had talked with her for two hours just last week. They had texted and talked on Facebook relentlessly. Preparation for friendship.

  “No,” said Abigail. “She’s at work. May I ask who’s calling?”

  “Oh,” said the voice. Chipmunk, really, but sweet. Very young, maybe someone from high school. “No, I mean, this is the day care—I didn’t realize she had two jobs. It’s just, we thought she might come in today to pick up her last check. But we can mail it to her.”