I watched the wheel nudge, nudge, tip forward. Behind me, Brent said, “We don’t live here anymore. Thanks to you.” I heard him drop down, start to slide out, but I didn’t turn around. I was riveted, suddenly, to the top of the wheel.
“Oh, my God,” I murmured, holding up my hand as if commanding the wheel to stop. But it didn’t. It nudged forward, and the paddles swung down.
“Come on, Mattie!” I heard Brent snap from outside as I crumpled forward onto the banister, but all I could think was, How really fucking stupid. All those hundreds—maybe thousands—of kids who’d stood on this bridge. How was it possible that none of us had remembered?
“Shit, shit, shit,” I said, fighting for balance as splinters shot into my palms and rusted nails scraped my flesh. I could feel blood between my fingers and tears on my cheeks. I could see Theresa’s crazy stare on Cider Lake as she coughed and woke up and realized she was outside again.
I folded into a sitting position on the walkway, which seemed to swing beneath me like a rope bridge, and my brother said, “Fine, good, stay here,” and tears exploded onto my face. Hello, my dwarves. That’s what Theresa had said. The red half for you, the white half for me. I could still hear Miss Galerne’s voice—thick and slow with her Belgian accent, as though her tongue were coated in honey—reading those words to us as we sprawled on the red throw pillows in our second-grade classroom on Fairy Tale Day. Jon. Jamie Kerflack. Garrett. Theresa. Me. Only in Theresa’s Snow White, the girl goes to the witch’s house, knows the apple’s poisoned, knows she’s going to die, and eats it anyway. The apple. Here. She figured out he’d be here. Tried to tell us. So we could follow and save her, or just so we’d know she knew? Then she came and found the Snowman and refused his drugs and stared him down while he murdered her.
Or. She came and hid here by herself, no Snowman, no James Sea—she might not even know about James Sea, I realized—and then walked all the way home to Cider Lake the night before Lake Cleaning Day, stepped out onto the ice, lay down, and let the cold take her.
Or...
At the top of the wheel, the slat I knew would come appeared, its front edge toothy and its bottom warped. I watched through my tears as it lurched toward me, spun slowly down, until at last I could see what I already knew was carved in the top. The crude heart. And in its center, soaked in apple guts but clearly readable, the names: Richard. Grace.
I made a sound, a sort of whimper that seemed to trickle down the paddles like rainwater and die in the floor. The last thing she saw. If she was really here. Or the last thing she remembered. Or just random bits of information among the billions scattered across her brain like stars, bright against all that emptiness inside her.
The hush of the place settled over me. Did he kill them all in here? I wondered. He could still be here. Suddenly, I couldn’t turn around. In my ears, the whine of the engine began to form words, nothing I could understand, but words, and the Snowman climbed down off the wall behind me, a wet red spider. Hurling myself to my stomach, I dove straight through the opening, crying out as a sliver of wood raked my cheek, just under my eye. I jerked my feet clear and lay there weeping with my face in the snow and my heart jackhammering in my chest. Nothing, I thought. When I’d whirled around, I’d seen nothing at all.
“What the—“ Brent started, and I lifted my head.
“Get Mom,” I said.
“You’re a freak,” Brent shouted, sounding furious, terrified, and I put my hand to my cheek and felt the sloppy wetness there, snow and blood and tears.
“Get Mom.”
“You’re bleeding all over the—“
“Get Mom, get Mom, get Mom!”
Brent ran, while I struggled to a sitting position and kicked farther from the mill, my eyes locked on the opening, just in case anything came slithering out, even though I knew that room was empty. My heart beat so hard I could feel the throb of it in my throat and all along the roof of my mouth. What could I tell her? I suddenly wondered. What did I think I knew? Nothing, nothing, nothing. Almost nothing.
Seconds later, my mother hurtled around the side of the mill and stopped dead when she saw me. “Mattie. What did you to do to your face?”
“Richard Grace,” I said, and gestured toward the wheelhouse.
“What?”
I closed my eyes. The teardrops felt freezing, little crystals of ice in my lashes, as though I was turning to snow. “Not Richard Grace. Richard and Grace.”
Behind my mother, Brent’s mouth dropped open as understanding swept over him. He stared at me, as though I really was transforming into something else, right in front of him. Then he flew straight off across the field, screaming. Leaping to my feet, I raced after him, past my astonished mother, and as I chased, Brent curled around, back toward the mill. He kept on screaming, which slowed him down, which is the only reason I was able to catch him. I dove, finally, at his knees, knocked him flat, and we skidded together into the drifts, and then I was lying on top of him, and he was punching me, trying to bite me.
“Stop it,” I said, and he kept flailing, wriggling his arms free while I tried to pin them. “Brent, stop.” The running around hadn’t warmed me up any, just forced freezing air down my lungs. New tears slid down my cheeks, leaving fresh rivers of icy skin.
Beneath me, Brent stopped squirming, lay still. He stared up at me with his mouth still open, his eyes huge in their panic.
“Mattie,” my mother snapped, stalking behind us. “Let him up. If this is another one of your goddamn jokes—“
“It isn’t,” Brent whispered, and I realized that he was clutching my sleeves in his hands. Staring at me, clinging to me.
Easing myself to my knees, holding on to my brother, I told my mother about the wood chip Theresa had been holding and the heart on the wheel. Afterward, we had to half drag Brent to the car. He couldn’t get his legs to work, so we just laid him across the backseat. Then we were driving.
I don’t know how long it was before I realized we weren’t heading toward our house. As soon as we’d started moving, I felt myself shut down, empty out, and I just sat there, aware only of the sting of my cheeks and fingers and feet as they warmed and the hot, musty sighs of the car heater. Thoughts tumbled down, occasionally, like paddles on a wheel, passed behind my eyes, crushed down on nothing as they disappeared.
“Aren’t we going home?” I asked.
My mother wrenched the wheel, skidding us into a strip-mall parking lot. I’d never been here before, as far as I knew, but there was an A&P and a hardware store.
“Watch your brother,” my mother said, shutting off the engine and shouldering her door open.
“Where are you going?”
“To call the police. Then we’re going to Kentucky. As fast as we can.”
“Aren’t they going to want to talk to us?”
For the first time since the Cider Mill, my mother looked at me. Her hair, wet when we left, had dried in hard, uneven clumps. Her eyelids hung heavy from lack of sleep, and her mouth was expressionless. She glanced back at Brent, still rigid on the seat.
“They’re not going to know it is us, Mattie,” she said. “They’ve talked to us enough.”
She was gone a long while. I watched my brother. He just lay there, mostly, until I said his name, and then he turned his head into the vinyl seatback and wept, but without the violent, terrified heaves of before. There was something familiar, peaceful, almost soothing about watching him cry like this, like staring out my bedroom window at a spring rain.
My mother came back, started the car, and slid a Bob Dylan tape into the player.
“You told them,” I said, and she nodded, and after that no one said anything until well into the afternoon.
The drive was slow and long. The sky stayed gray, the world white. My brother cried himself to sleep in the back and roused himself only to stumble into gas station bathrooms or to pick at hamburgers. I felt like I was drifting directionless in space, a little boy in a space suit with a tiny r
ip somewhere, so that everything inside me was leaking into the void and trailing back the way we had come.
Long past dark, my mother let me turn on the radio again. Again, the story came up immediately, reported by a female newscaster I didn’t recognize. “Acting on an anonymous tip, police today pored over every inch of the Oakland Park Cider Mill, after the latest bizarre twist in the elusive search for the child killer that has haunted suburban Detroit for more than a year. A department spokesperson would confirm only that the lead appeared legitimate, and that it changed the nature of—quote—certain aspects of the investigation.”
“Mom,” I said, while she clicked off the radio, and the wheels chattered on the icy asphalt, and the full fat yellow moon glided over the southern Ohio cornfields like the eye of some monstrous nighttime bird, “will Kentucky help?”
And for some reason, that was the question that finally broke my mother down. She steered the car onto the shoulder of the road and lowered her face into her gloved hands. Her body shook in ripples like a sail whose lines have snapped. But when she lifted her head and wiped the wetness from her cheeks with the sleeve of her coat, her eyes were bright and the tightness around her mouth had loosened and she didn’t look quite so old.
“Will Kentucky help?” she said. “I don’t know, Mattie. But I do know one thing. And I need you to believe it. I am...proud of you, my strange, solitary son. I’m proud of who you are, and all the things you see, and everything you think and brood on in there. I always have been. Do you hear? That hasn’t changed.”
She touched my hand. I didn’t know what to do. I could feel the tears massing in the corners of my eyes, but I didn’t cry.
“Mattie. Do you hear me?”
Then she let go, dropped her hands back on the wheel, and without another word drove us all the way to Kentucky.
Chapter 25 – 1994
“Spencer, what the fuck?”
For one second, Spencer looks as if he’s going to lash out and punch Eliza. Instead, he sticks up his fist, flips her the bird, and storms out of the library. I start after him, then stop and look back.
Eliza sits with her folder open in front of her, her eyes on the door. She looks less angry than bewildered, a little sad.
“Thanks,” I say. “You have no idea how much this...well, obviously, I’m just realizing, myself, how much ...” The sentence dissolves in my mouth. “I have to hurry.”
“Go,” she says, “before he gets away. I will tell you, Mattie, his behavior makes no sense. Not based on anything I found.”
I attempt a smile, but I have no idea if I intend it to be reassuring, flirtatious, grateful, or what, and it just feels wrong. Today, even more than all the other days in my life, I can’t seem to deal with people from the present. Finally, I just wave and leave her at the table, staring out the window at the snow.
I find Spencer leaning on the hood of his car with his head buried in his hands. When he looks up, I catch a glimpse of the boy I’d last seen tucked inside his mother’s coat as he was hustled away from me. “Just get in the car, Mattie,” he says.
“You knew about the Doctor dying,” I snap. “You know about everything that’s happened since. You haven’t told me one true thing.”
“I’ve told you almost all true things. Just not everything. I didn’t see the point.”
“I assume you see it now.”
“Yes, Mattie,” he says. “I see it now. For everyone’s sake, I have to get rid of you. That’s the point. Now get in the car.”
In the weak afternoon sunlight, the birch trees look like tornadoes frozen in mid-whirl, their white trunks columns of whipped snow, their branches airborne detritus. Spencer drives us through Birmingham, past Shane Park, the minimall where Jiggly’s was, and the turnoff to Cider Lake Road, continuing down Maple. Once we enter Bloom-field Township, the streets and sights get less familiar. Finally, not bothering to mask my exasperation, I say, “Spencer, really. I don’t know why you’ve been lying, or what you’re hiding, or what could possibly matter so much about keeping me away after all these years. Just please, please, tell me what’s going on.”
Spencer purses his lips, raises one hand and knots it into a fist, then drops the hand into his lap. We cross Telegraph into an area I never knew well. The feeling I have is completely new, a fresh and chilly combination of hope and fear and dislocation.
“Theresa Daughrety is alive and well and lives around here somewhere. Right?” Saying these words sucks all the serenity out of the landscape.
“The movie’s over, Mattie. You understand that, right? You’re here for the end credits, that’s all. There’s no one for you to save. Nothing for you to do. It’s Universal Studios, man, the Tour. I’m just showing you where it all happened.”
We pass an open space between subdivisions, a lake I never knew was there. It’s smaller than Cider Lake, less groomed along the edges. But there are upside-down canoes humped in the snow, and I remember the day in my Lexington high school American Lit class when we read the Emily Dickinson poem about a grave being “a swelling of the ground.”
“We’re almost there,” Spencer says.
He turns off Maple onto a street lined with older houses set on rolling, irregular lots. Oak trees and evergreens mark curving boundaries. There are no fences. Edging onto the gravel shoulder, Spencer pulls to a stop in front of a low red-shingled house nestled among several acres. Erase the suburb around us and this house could be a homesteader’s cabin dug into the ground for warmth. My hands wave uselessly in the air.
“Is this it? Is Theresa here?”
Spencer eyes me. At least a little of the hostility has drained out of his face. “Mattie, I just want you to know something. The lying—it wasn’t personal. I was trying to protect a whole bunch of people, including myself. Including you too, whether you believe it or not. Nothing here is likely to bring you or anyone else any closure. But your visit has already caused huge problems.”
“Sorry,” I murmur, though not as sarcastically as I intended.
“I’ve got that librarian to worry about now, for one thing.”
“Spencer, what are you talking about? She couldn’t even figure out why you were upset.”
“Good. Let’s hope she drops it.” He cups his hands over his mouth and blows, and steam streams through his gloved fingers. “There is a very fragile sort of peace in what has happened, Mattie.”
“Spencer, just—”
“I’m trying to tell you to be careful. I don’t want her hurt again. Do you understand?”
My mouth falls open, and I can feel blood rushing to my face. “Spencer, why on earth would I hurt her any more than you would? Think what you’re saying.”
Spencer nods. “I guess maybe I should tell you the rest of the story first.”
“Goddammit, I want to know where we are. Is this where Theresa lives?”
“I don’t know if I’m going to be up to saying this later, Mattie. And I’m only saying it once. You want to hear or not?”
I feel eleven, weak and lost on the road to Kentucky. “I want to see Theresa.”
“Get out, then,” he says. “Go right up that drive. Holy Grail time for you. Congratulations.”
Shoving open his door, Spencer twists off the ignition and gets out of the car. I snatch up my backpack and exit my own side. In the Sunday-afternoon silence, the snow on the rolling lawn seems to bubble and murmur like whitewash from some ancient tidal wave still sweeping down the continent. Halfway up the drive, I see a black mailbox and next to it, suspended from a red wooden frame, a white metal board with the words CHAPIN HOUSE painted on it in blue and yellow letters. Underneath, in smaller letters, are the words For those in need of long-term rest.
“Sounds like a mortuary,” I mutter.
“Not quite,” Spencer says.
Images of Theresa rattle through my brain like unbound discarded photographs in the back of an album. How is it, I wonder, that the person I feel most inextricably connected to in this wor
ld is someone I barely even know? Is everyone’s most lasting love not the most important, necessarily, or the most lasting, but the one that frames all others? A promise of yesterday rather than a hope for tomorrow?
The house isn’t low to the ground but sunk in a sort of hollow between swells of grass. A red cedar-shake roof slopes down to meet the red-shingled frame. The windows are small and tucked high under the eaves, but there are a lot of them. Frost and ice lie in thick uneven coats over the glass, so I can’t even tell if the lights are on. Folded upright under the windows, a half-dozen lounge chairs have been stacked together like lifeboats. Other than its setting on the lot, the house’s most striking feature is the pinewood deck sprouting ten feet from every side. On the side nearest us, I can see two sun umbrellas still open, tilting under their burdens of snow.
Spencer steps around to the back of the house and pulls off a glove with his teeth. He fishes around in his coat pocket and removes a key that he slides into the door’s dead bolt. I have a sudden flash of the two of us at the back door of the Fox house, except now the roles are reversed.
“You keep her here yourself, like a prisoner?” I ask. “Sorry, I just don’t get it.”
“I know, brother,” he says, pushing open the door.
Standing in the entryway is like looking up from the bottom of a pool; all the light collects near the beamed ceiling. A long hallway curves to the right, fronted by a trio of coat racks that cast stick-figure shadows over the hardwood floor.
Spencer locks the door behind us and removes his coat, scarf, and boots. Without looking at me, he starts down the hallway. I shed my own coat and boots and follow him along the white spotless walls, bedecked with rows of photographs. A huge percentage of them are of children, though no person or place seems to appear twice. A bearded man leans over a little boy by a fountain to feed a pigeon in a park. Twin sisters, age nine or so, slap matching yellow handbags together at the base of the Washington Monument. Squinting, I hurry by them and come into a small wood-lined den. A low fire curls and snaps around a stripped tree branch behind a grate. On the first of two plain brown-pillowed couches, situated at an angle, two women, one in her mid-fifties and the other not yet twenty, sit side by side. Between them is a toy: a row of brass balls suspended on wires. Lift the ball on one end, let it go, and watch it smack into the row and send the last ball on the other end flying. The women are taking turns, and the balls make a metallic kissing sound.
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