When the baby got tired and began to fuss, one of the women picked him up and they started coming back down the hill. Teddy wasn’t able to wiggle out of sight, and they saw him. After conferring briefly, they walked over to the bushes.
“Well, hi there,” the younger one said. Teddy decided she must be the baby’s mom, and that the other one was his grandma. The mom gave the baby to the grandma, and he started to cry, his face crumpling up and turning red. The mom crouched down in front of Teddy and smiled at him.
Teddy made himself keep looking at her so she wouldn’t worry. He knew that when he didn’t look at people when they were talking to them, they thought he wasn’t listening to them.
“What have you got there?”
For a moment Teddy worried that maybe the cup belonged to her and that he was in trouble because he had filled it with dirt and grass and sticks, and then he remembered that grown-ups never thought that trash was good to play with. He held it up so she could see it wasn’t really trash anymore, now that he had the worm house started.
“Wow! Well, isn’t that—you’re making something special, aren’t you?”
Teddy nodded, glad that she understood. He knew it would be easier for people to understand him when he started using words, but he still wasn’t quite ready. Sometimes, when he was working with Mrs. Tierney, Teddy felt like he was almost ready, but then he’d get busy with other things and the moment would pass. He had tried to explain it to his mom, that the words were all there, waiting.
“So, is your mom here?”
Teddy looked down at the cup in his hands. Some of the bits of grass had fallen out, lifted by the wind and blown gently back into the dirt. He wasn’t sure what to do now. If the women started looking for his mom, a lot of people were probably going to come over and ask him questions and then get upset when he didn’t speak. It had happened before, when Livvy was supposed to be watching him at the mall.
If the two women would just leave him alone, his mom would come as soon as her errands were done. She always did. If he could tell the women his mom’s name they would probably go and get her, but he couldn’t do that, so it would be better if they just went away.
“Beth,” the older woman said in an irritated voice. She was jiggling the baby from side to side, which was making him cry more. “I think he’s hungry, I can’t get him settled.”
“Just a sec,” the mom said. “This is important.”
Teddy looked down into the park, where there were fewer moms and kids now. It was almost dinnertime, the sun slipping down in the sky and his stomach rumbling with hunger. But there was still a group of moms over by where the benches were, next to the sand lot, chatting while the kids played on the jungle gym.
Teddy pointed to the mothers gathered below, moving his finger, trying to decide which one to choose.
“Oh, your mom’s down there?” the woman asked, sounding relieved. “Does she know you’re up here?”
Teddy nodded, exaggerating the motion to make sure she understood.
“It’s kind of cold up here, isn’t it?”
Teddy shook his head. He wasn’t really cold anymore. The coat came down almost to his knees and made a sort of blanket to sit on, and he was able to pull his hands into the furry sleeves whenever they started to feel too cold.
“Okay, well...have fun up here. Go back to your mom if you get too cold, okay?”
The woman stood up and took her baby back and settled him onto her chest. He let out a loud burp, which made Teddy smile. She took the baby’s hand and waved it at Teddy, and Teddy waved back as they went down the hill.
When they got to the playground, the mom turned around and looked back up at him, and then over to the women on the benches. She and the grandma stood there for a minute talking and then they went into the parking lot and put the baby in his seat in a big silver car, got in and drove away.
Teddy went back to his cup. Soon he’d have the house all nice and ready, and then he’d just have to find a worm.
Chapter Nineteen
“Where’s Daddy?”
Livvy had to repeat the question twice. Jen was so relieved to have her daughter back unharmed that she wasn’t able to do anything but hold her, warming Livvy’s cold hands in her own.
“He’s resting upstairs, honey,” she said, hoping Livvy wouldn’t see the lie in her face. She hoped that Ryan had at least helped Ted back up onto the bed. Maybe he’d even given him something for the pain, a few Tylenols or some of the Vicodin she was pretty sure was left over from when Livvy had had her wisdom teeth out.
“So you didn’t see any sign of Teddy?” she asked, helping Livvy unzip her jacket.
“No, nothing. We went through the woods and along the ravine. We looked in all the cul-de-sacs and over by the gas station. He wasn’t anywhere, Mom. He’s got to be at the Sterns’. Is Daddy doing okay? Did you get to see him?”
“I did, actually,” Jen said lightly. “I went up there with Ryan to help. Ryan wanted to, um...he wanted to wrap up Daddy’s arm better. Why don’t you come sit with me.”
Livvy seemed skeptical, but she didn’t voice her doubts. Maybe she didn’t want to know the truth—maybe she couldn’t bear to know.
“Mom, listen, I was thinking, while we were looking for Teddy.” Livvy sat on the couch and ran her hand under the edge, coming up with the toy receiver. “We have to try to call Jake on the walkie-talkie. It’s going to be dinnertime soon, and you know Jake will have his on, especially since he missed us last night.”
Jen glanced at the window. The light was failing fast. Her tongue felt sluggish in her mouth, the sense of possibility making her faintly dizzy. “I’m sorry, sweetie, I just don’t know how we would manage it,” she said.
“Mom, come on! Please!” Livvy drew a frustrated breath, pushing the button on and off.
Jen calculated: Could it actually work? Their house was well within the units’ one-mile range, but they only worked when both boys were by the windows above the trees, without a lot of buildings or branches in between.
And being denied the nightly call last night would probably only make Jake more hungry to talk to Ted. He adored his uncle, and Ted hammed it up for him— “Hey, Jakey my man, calling Jake the Snake 1—2—3—4, one foot on the floor, one hangin’ out the door.” So the odds were very good that Jake would have his unit turned on. But unless they got out of the basement, it would never work.
“There’s just no way for us to get up on the second floor.”
“We have to find a way,” Livvy said. “I’ll just say I want to see Daddy.”
“Honey. Listen.” Jen took her hand, lacing their fingers together. “This is a great idea, and I think we should try to figure it out, but I just don’t want you to get your hopes up. And I don’t want you to worry, because everything is already all set up. The funds were wired today. Tomorrow Dan and I will go to the bank and get the money and then they’ll leave and this will all be over.”
“Mom!” Livvy exclaimed, pulling her hand back. “Daddy is hurt and Teddy is gone, and it’s all my fault. We can’t just wait around doing nothing. We have to get help.”
Her voice dissolved into tears, and Jen hugged her close. “Baby, no, it’s not your fault. You’ve got to stop thinking that way. Sweetie, come on, you’ve been so brave....”
As Jen tried to comfort her daughter, she wondered if Livvy had stumbled onto an idea that might really work. God willing, Teddy was safe at the Sterns’, but at some point Cricket was going to come to the house to find out what was going on. And the longer Ted went without medical attention the worse it would be. She didn’t know much about medicine but it seemed likely that there could be infection, blood loss, shock, things she didn’t even know the name of. Frankly, if Ted got through this with anything left of his arm she would be grateful.
�
�Honey. All right.” She gave in to the lure of hope. “I’ll try to get upstairs.”
“Tell them you have to see Daddy,” Livvy said, wiping her eyes on her sleeve. “Tell him we need him back down here with us tonight. Maybe they’ll let you go up there to help bring him down here.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea, since he’s stable where he is.” Jen couldn’t let Livvy see Ted’s arm, couldn’t let her see how weak he was. “I don’t think he should be moved.”
“It doesn’t matter...you just have to say it,” Livvy said impatiently. “Say anything, whatever it takes to get up there. But it has to be at seven, Mom. Jake always tries right at seven. If we’re too early or too late, it won’t work.”
“How are we going to figure out what time it is? I don’t even have a watch down here, a phone, anything—”
“Mom!” Livvy’s voice was increasingly hysterical. “You have to! Just think—come on, you always figure things out. You always do.”
Hearing Livvy’s desperation, Jen knew she would fix this because she had to fix it. She couldn’t let Livvy down.
She looked around the room. The basement had accumulated more clutter than she’d realized. She scavenged the shelves, searching for something, anything that would help them.
“What are you looking for?” Livvy said, following in her wake.
“I don’t know—something to tell us what time it is. I thought maybe I could find that souvenir wristwatch we got you in Disneyland.”
“Mom, I was in seventh grade! That was four years ago!”
Jen kept looking. Maybe she’d find that silver-plated clock they’d received as a wedding gift, the one that Ted had insisted they display for years just in case his aunt came to visit. There had to be something among all this detritus from their past, the hundreds of possessions they simply had no room for, enough to furnish entire homes, blocks, villages.
In a box Jen found the Easter decorations she had lovingly packed away last April, the hand-painted eggs from the little import store downtown. In a dusty unlabeled Rubbermaid tote were dozens of juice boxes and Clif Bars, the product of Ted’s fleeting enthusiasm for disaster preparedness. There were boxes of outgrown toddler clothes, little overalls and turtlenecks Jen hadn’t quite been ready to give away.
Jen worked her way around the room, getting splinters in her hands from the rough plywood shelves, but finding nothing that would help them. She was reaching behind stacks of plastic shoe boxes filled with the kids’ school papers when her hand brushed against something soft—the silken nap of synthetic plush—and she knew immediately what it was and she gasped because she’d forgotten she’d kept him.
Licorice.
Her fingers tightened involuntarily on his soft paw and the room seemed to tilt. Her vision flickered and faded, and she gripped the post holding up the shelves. She tried to speak, but nothing came out of her mouth as she slowly slipped to the floor.
Chapter Twenty
Jen could feel the cold concrete through the fabric of her pants, but she couldn’t seem to stand up. Her strength had left her, all but the hand that held on to Licorice.
Hold on to him and forget everything that happened tonight.
Tanya had said that. Long ago, the night she gave Jen the stuffed bear. But why? What had happened? Jen tried to remember, but it was like someone lowered a screen over the memory every time she got too close. She remembered that it was August and their mom was getting sicker. She spent all her time at home on the couch, and she was missing a lot of work. Jen and Tanya didn’t talk about it. It was like they had worked out a deal without ever discussing it, that neither would acknowledge what was happening to their mother—and maybe then it would stop being true.
Tanya was staying away from home more and more, hanging out with her friends at the Soul Patch or going for drives with boys. That night she had gone to the carnival with some boy, and Jen pretended she didn’t care. But the night dragged out long and lonely. Jen lay in the upper bunk listening to Jackson Browne on her Walkman and trying to focus on the problem set she was working through from the math book.
Jen didn’t blame her sister for wanting out for a few hours. She wanted out, too, but the sort of escape Tanya favored—the boys and the loud-revving cars and the smell of cigarettes on her clothes, the sticky lip gloss and front-porch manicures and shorts made even shorter by rolling the hems—none of that was within Jen’s grasp. So she waited for her sister to come home on nights like this, and as she drifted off to sleep in the upper bunk, she’d listen to Tanya’s whispered accounts of skinny-dipping in the lake and making out at Suicide Point and someone’s older cousin buying them beer. And it would be enough, even with the sweltering heat and the clacking fan, the sweat on her pillow, to get her to sleep—just knowing that Tanya was there below her, anchoring them both, making it all okay.
Around eleven she heard a car pull up and tossed the math book to the floor and yanked off her headphones. It was here that the memories became hazy and unreliable. Sometimes she remembered watching for her sister through the window. Other times she thought she might have gone out on the porch. Sometimes she thought she remembered the boy, a lanky senior named Dwayne, who had a farmer tan and a car he’d saved up for by working at his father’s scrap yard. Other times, she couldn’t remember anyone bringing her sister home that night.
This time, the memories took her further. Treading softly, she passed through the living room—her mother had managed to get herself to bed, the afghan was folded on the couch and her bedroom door was closed—and let herself out the front door. She didn’t want to wait through some long make-out session. Whoever the boy was, the sight of Tanya’s little sister on the porch ought to be enough to cut short his ardor. And Tanya wouldn’t mind, not too much. That was the good thing about her—she didn’t stay mad at Jen for long, not these days.
Standing on the porch, worn-paint boards cool under her bare feet, she inhaled the overripe smell of river and exhaust that drifted up their street on summer nights. The porch light hadn’t worked in ages, but the moon glimmered in and out of a bank of chalky clouds. A car. How could she have forgotten that car? It wasn’t one she recognized, a long sedan like someone’s dad would drive. It was parked carelessly, front tires sunk into the edge of the yard, and the driver had left the motor running.
Jen tried to see who it was. She squinted and took a few steps forward. She could see the oval of his face, glowing pale under the moon, but all the features had been erased. The car shimmered and shifted, changing from the dark sedan to their mother’s car and back, refusing to stay still long enough for Jen to understand.
She took a few more steps forward toward the car, trying to peer around the faceless figure to see if her sister was in the passenger seat. The face shook slightly. It was laughing at her—somehow Jen knew it was laughing, even though she couldn’t see its eyes or mouth. Why couldn’t she remember who had come that night?
A sound behind her caught her attention, and she turned. Her body felt light and graceful; it seemed to move without her moving a muscle. The house loomed in front of her, dark and foreboding and empty, the way it looked later, after their mother had died and they had moved away and no one lived there at all, broken glass on the porch and the windows boarded up and graffiti on the front door.
When she turned back around, everything had changed. In the yard lay a listless mound that resembled a heap of rags more than a person—except for the sounds that emanated from it.
The car was still there and the engine revved, but no one was at the wheel. The tires spun on the wet grass and then found purchase, kicking up cinders and dirt as it backed off the lawn. For a moment it idled there and then it was gone, taillights disappearing down the street and around the corner.
Silence. The heap of rags on the lawn twitched.
Jen walked across the yard, t
reading softly like she and Tanya used to do when they were in grade school, playing Indian scout and making no noise. She slowed as she approached the thing on the ground. A few feet away, she saw that it was a man, lying facedown, limbs splayed. But that was Sid’s coat, wasn’t it? His scruff of thick black hair was like a wet hound’s, his squared-off fingers scrabbling at the grass. He was making sounds like a man carrying a sofa up a flight of stairs, grunting and trying to sit up.
But suddenly Tanya was there in front of her, materializing out of nowhere to stand between Jen and the man. Under her arm was a big stuffed animal, a prize from the arcade at the fair. Around its neck, a bow of shiny satin reflected moonlight.
“I never remembered this part before,” Jen said. She wasn’t sure if she was speaking out loud as her mind flickered between the present and her memory. “Sid being here.”
“Go on back inside, now,” Tanya said, smiling. “It’s awfully late for you to still be up.”
“But it’s Sid,” Jen said, pointing at the thing on the ground.
“Don’t you worry about that.” Tanya held out the stuffed animal, a big-bellied stuffed bear with a smile stitched on its snout. In the moonlight it appeared to be the color of blood. Jen took it and hugged it against her chest, ducking her chin into the soft place between its head and its floppy front legs. It smelled like the cotton in an aspirin bottle.
“You know, he had it coming,” Tanya said, her voice echoey and far away, like she was speaking from another room. “You go on inside, and I’ll come get you in a few minutes when I need you.”
But Jen didn’t go inside; she sat down on the porch steps to watch, the bear in her lap.
Tanya took her keys out of her pocket. She had a little mini flashlight on her key chain, and she shone it down onto Sid. His shirt was slick with blood, the plaid disappearing into the dark of it. Tanya used the toe of her shoe to hook him under the arm and roll his body over. Sid groaned and his hands went to his gut as fresh blood leaked out.
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