By Light We Knew Our Names

by Anne Valente

  I don’t believe you, Nick Dorsey said. Nick, who never believed anything, who’d shouted that pigs and spiders couldn’t talk when Mrs. Levy tried to read us Charlotte’s Web, who’d told us all last year that Santa wasn’t real, though most of us still believed. Nick reached into the huddle and grabbed the shard of mirror. Before Tom or any of us thought to stop him, he chanted the name of the Rosewood Phantom three times.

  We waited, our breath all held as one. The wind picked up, blew yellowed leaves across the playground. We could have been angry with Nick, but none of us were, those few moments of waiting as delicious as sugar. And then nothing happened but the sound of a faint scream, carried across the blacktop on the autumn wind, a lone call of triumph from the four-square grids.

  Nick threw the mirror down, called Tom’s bluff, told us ghost stories were for babies. Then we heard the whistle blown from the school doors, the end of recess, and we climbed down from the rocket, disbanded our summit, left the mirror shard abandoned inside the rocket’s cage. And then three months later Craig Davenport disappeared, and a real rocket broke apart.

  These were links, impossible to discard, as we’d so carelessly done with the mirror.

  Spring arrived early, melted the icicles from the tree limbs beyond our windows, pushed a space between us and our nation’s lost rocket, and even helped us forget the empty desk in Mrs. Levy’s classroom, Craig’s pencil box still inside, a sign of hope to all of us that he’d come back someday for its contents, that he’d sit beside us again. We moved through Valentine’s Day, the first real reminder that Craig was gone—our shoeboxes papered and glittered as mailboxes for valentines, for the cards we brought each member of the class, even Craig, a puffy painted box Misty Jones had made for him that sat atop his desk, its mail slot overflowing. But then an early wave of warmth drove the snow away, drove the weight of Craig from our minds occupied instead by lighter coats, by splashed puddles and mud, until the thaw brought forth police, as readily as it drew small crocuses and ants.

  On our broadcasts, new searches—a new thirst for clues, hidden all those weeks beneath hard-packed snow; new locations to inspect, new community volunteers prepared to slug through sodden forests, to dig beneath softened ground. Our parents asked us, at times, if we remembered anything particular about Craig, if we’d seen anything unusual that day. We shook our heads no, avoided our parents’ eyes, and on the playground avoided the rocket.

  Mr. Tillman, one of Craig’s neighbors, had reported seeing a strange vehicle on their street that day, 1979 Buick LeSabre Estate, a brown station wagon he’d never seen before, parked along the mailboxes that afternoon while he watched daytime game shows. The police followed that lead, though that was all we knew, and no other clues presented themselves under layers of snow, finally melted. While our town picked up searching we receded, kept our mouths shut, and at night locked our windows tight, crouched beneath covers, waited for the turn of doorknobs, the creak of panes slowly rising.

  But nothing came, no telltale sounds, not even brief glimmers in mirrors though we held our breath every time we brushed our teeth. And then March melted into April, and no more clues were found or pursued, and early spring slid into full bloom, tulips and hyacinth lightening us, relaxing the tight cores of our chests, settling us into sleep as their growing bulbs guarded our yards.

  And then in late April, the day after the Chernobyl disaster, after we learned that over four thousand people had been killed, a radioactive bloom above two continents, we awoke to a world tilted even further off its axis, a world in which Rachel Vasquez had disappeared.

  As the police swarmed our school and streets, as our parents spread their hearts between the Ukraine and Rosewood, disasters separated by seas, we knew for sure that there were no misgivings, no coincidences. We knew what we’d done, and we knew the scope now, unfathomable. We’d brought these disasters upon ourselves, and upon the world as well. We’d taken two of our peers from their parents, with imprudence born of curiosity and nothing else, and now the stakes had risen beyond the height charts lining our closet doors: looming ghost, the deaths of more people than we knew to name.

  Our parents installed security systems, new technology, Rachel taken from her bedroom just like Craig. They bought us personal alarms, tucked mace inside our pockets, an arsenal of protections that we knew, even as we accepted them, could never save us, neither siren nor latch, not the tightest of bolts tugging our windows shut. We were not safe, none of us, and we curled into ourselves, grew quieter as the police descended, tried relentlessly to determine what connected Craig and Rachel, why Rosewood, why this class and these kids?

  Tom Davies began collecting meteors, though we all recognized their shapes as shale. We watched him scour the playground, line space rock along his desk, where he’d watch them for hours, ignoring Mrs. Levy and imagining, we were sure, another world beyond this one, a planet of gentler tilt. Karen Kettleman stood at the edge of the swing set during recess, stared at the sun long enough to brand an afterimage into her brain, some vision that flashed long after she closed her eyes, something bright and burning. And Nick Dorsey pored over Two-Minute Mysteries, as if solving them might open a portal, some solution, as if knowing how Mr. Deeds died could dissolve the impossible specter of death.

  When Trina Johnson’s personal alarm went off in her backpack, a blaring sound that interrupted Mrs. Levy’s storytime and took over five minutes to stop while the siren blasted ever louder, splitting our ears, Tom at last signaled to us, every one of us across the magic carpet, somehow less magical now, with a flicker of eyes we knew not to ignore. In the library, when we should have been finding books for our annual readathon, we met by the card catalogue instead, flipped through musty entries until we found the Rs, then Rosewood, then the Rosewood Phantom at last. We holed away in a deserted corner, behind young adult stacks where the windows leaked in faint light, and scanned our books, only two on all of Rosewood, until we found the paragraphs we needed, the Phantom himself.

  What we found sank our hearts, so little information for so much hurt. His name, unknown. Lost over time, like every name in the Ukraine that we didn’t know, never would. All those parents, also lost, not even brief mention of a winding sheet, not the rags Tom promised would appear. The only mention we could find was of a killer, that he’d existed, that he’d been buried in Stillwater Park like Tom said. But the legend—just a story, a tale to keep children from wandering off after dark, with no word or warning of perfect sunshine, of the shade we’d brought in light.

  Tom sat back on his heels, held his palms against his jeans. I told you there'd be nothing, said Nick, not believing, even still, though his voice cracked against the syllables, opened a gap of doubt. He waited, hovering with the rest of us, over books that told us nothing, though we lingered, as if the black text below us might rearrange itself into the absolution we craved.

  The police trekked through our neighborhoods, made maps, made diagrams. They tracked every Buick LeSabre Estate, every color, every year, every driver. They hunted yards and forests, swollen by rain and spring, scoured sodden landscapes for footprints, for hairs and blanket fibers and clothes. In early May, our local broadcasts erupted for several days when Officer Franks found a bloodied rag in Craig’s yard, discarded beneath Mrs. Davenport’s rosebushes. We lay hiding in our beds, not sleeping, strange roil of shame and hope and fear, that the rags were what we’d waited for, that this was the end, that one of us, we weren’t sure who, would have to start talking.

  We hoped for an end as much as we feared it—that blood meant our classmates were not simply elsewhere, but gone. We imagined limbs, broken or worse. We imagined teeth, sharp nails, cloths to cloak and suffocate. We imagined the crushing sensation of hands, clamped down on our chests while we slept, pulling us away, beyond windows, beyond the walls of our rooms, and though some of us had never known religion we prayed, beside our beds at night after we heard our parents settle into sleep, that the Phantom was found, that he’d
never find us.

  But our salvation, some exhaled breath that lifted this from our shoulders, never came. We awoke to the morning news, only animal blood, a clue that still might have signaled a lead if not connected immediately to Jericho, Mrs. Feinberg’s cat, a neighboring, pregnant feline who’d birthed her kittens beneath the Davenports’ porch. The police had found one dead kitten near Mrs. Feinberg’s sycamore tree, wrapped loosely in the rest of the bloodied rag, an attempt at burial by claw and teeth and Jericho still hiding beneath the porch, refusing to come out.

  We imagined Craig’s parents, in their home above this feline mother, equally sequestered, equally heartbroken. We felt the compression against our own rib cages, as those astronauts must have felt before they ever reached orbit, mistook for gravity, as every heart in the Ukraine must have felt at the blast, a weight as unimaginable as a phantom’s pale hands, gripping the stalks of our necks.

  The pulse of summer approaching soothed us, the days growing warmer, then warmer still until our final day of class had come and gone, celebrated with kickball and popsicles, with an outdoor field day and with lingering looks at our classroom, as we waved Mrs. Levy goodbye. Then we were on our own, no classmates and no carpet, no pencil boxes to remind us of what we’d lost. The trees thickened above us, and leaves erupted from their branches, a canopy of green light that grew steadily darker through June.

  We spent our days splashing at the pool, guarding lemonade stands, thumbing through our summer reading lists, full sun beating above us, a light bright enough to erase the shade we’d shared. We felt our parents relax, calmed by sun, by warmth and no news on our television screens, and we stayed up late, had sleepovers, watched Cujo and Carrie, films we were still too young to see, films we couldn’t help but watch. The thrill felt illicit, a transgression all the same, but this time one that felt honest, and our guilt slid away on the unending calm of each day. We had picnics with our families, chased ice cream trucks, helped our parents make sun tea, left on the back porch to steep in sunshine. We marveled at fireworks on the Fourth of July, let ourselves fall silent and hushed beneath the glare of their splendor, and for only a moment thought of the space shuttle’s sparks, an unbearable trail of light dissolving into ember. But every night at dusk, when our neighborhood lights flooded on, we whipped home on our bikes, spokes whirring with wind, or we stayed home altogether, watched from our windows as the streetlamps flickered on. We could see them from our beds, pools of milky light on the sidewalk, illumined circles that at any moment we expected to break with a flash of shadow, a flutter of torn rags.

  We knew the police were still looking. We watched their cars patrol past the pool, saw them stationed on our streets. But the long days, that lack of dark, let us forget the things we’d done, let us off the hook by keeping us from one another, no collective conscience, no reminders in the glances we shared, in looks we now avoided.

  And then in August, our class lists posted, we walked with our parents to the school doors, felt a cored dread return. We saw our names listed together, heard our parents exclaim joy, tell us we’d move through third grade together, Mr. Jeffries’s class, no longer Mrs. Levy’s magic carpet but together all the same. The sun felt strange above us as we walked home, and we lay awake at night and felt summer receding, even in restless heat, in the stretch of weeks we still had until Labor Day.

  Then in late August, full sun overhead, we awoke to an explosion of carbon dioxide in Cameroon, the unimaginable deaths of thousands of people, so much livestock; and to the disappearance of Nick Dorsey, gone before school even began.

  We sat before televisions, forgot our bicycles, our books, our swimsuits. The Rosewood pool closed, off limits for safety until further notice, and the flash of blue and red lights beneath blistering sun, a heat that simmered against blacktop. We watched FBI agents fan through our community and saw reporters question our neighbors, interviews we watched on local broadcast and beyond, the disappearances swelled to national news.

  We watched our televisions for Nick Dorsey, and for Rachel and Craig, but also for Cameroon, all those people, all those animals, a cloud of asphyxiation over Lake Nyos that we felt enclose our own throats, a constriction of lung and air sac and cell that made some of us wake in the night screaming, the flooded relief of gasped oxygen at once a reprieve, a requiem. That we could breathe, that we were alive. But that we awoke at all, to this world, a world no longer ours. We imagined suffocation, what that lack of breath might mean. We feared the shape of our own organs, that our lungs could fail us, that our hearts could sputter and cease, and that we held things beating inside of us, things we’d never fully understand, things we couldn’t trust.

  Our parents held us close. They made our beds, washed our dishes, sang us lullabies and read us bedtime stories, though we knew as well as they did that we were too old now. We felt them watching us, at times, while we pretended to sleep, never knowing if they watched us breathe out of love or if they watched the windows beyond our beds, standing guard for the threats pressed like palm prints against our panes.

  The school year came, without our wanting, beyond sobered Labor Day celebrations, no barbecues or last swims. The pool remained closed, water draining slowly, a murky pond of still glass that caught leaves from shaken trees. Our neighborhoods and parks kept curfew—past dusk, no cook-outs or bike rides, the streets deserted and silent. The FBI remained in Rosewood, stood guard outside our school, alongside police and parents and community volunteers, a wall of protection to keep us inside, to keep us safe. But our classroom no longer was, neither cocoon nor nest, not a place that felt sound with so many gone, so many missing. Mr. Jeffries welcomed us, had us glitter new nametags, arranged us in desk pods that were full, no missing desks, no vigil pencil boxes. But we knew, as he knew, a misgiving we heard beneath his voice, bright but clear, as he began his first lesson on life sciences, as he tried to ignore that we were those kids, from Mrs. Levy’s class, those kids who were connected by inexplicable lines, by irrevocable bounds.

  Misty Jones was the first to act out. During storytime, no magic carpet but a nook in the corner of the room, she stayed at her desk as we all moved to the corner, her face crumpled and red before she smashed her pencil box against her desk, its contents splintered and rattling. Mr. Jeffries looked up, rose from his rocking chair in the nook, but Misty was already gone, ran from the room and hid in the last bathroom stall until her father picked her up early. Then there was Karen Kettleman, who never came inside from recess, whom police were already tracking around the perimeter of school before they found her curled up inside the rocket, awake but unmoving, and shivering though the September sun still bore down bright above.

  We all felt unhinged, though Mr. Jeffries tried his hardest to calm us, an effort that broke our hearts a little, as much as our parents’ concern for us did, their worried glances we saw and ignored. We got into first fistfights, slammed each other against corridor walls, a solidity that felt satisfying. We remembered the sensation of fist against skin as we tried to fall asleep, held the feeling close against our fingertips, a memory of tangibility to beat back, to drown out the win-dowpanes beyond the foot of our beds.

  We struggled together inside the confines of a classroom, that first week a preliminary taste, some terrible foreshadowing of what the year would bring, what we would force ourselves to endure. We longed for Nick’s distrust, a trait we’d once hated but ached for now—some checked rationality, a voice to tell us this wasn’t ours, this wasn’t what we’d done. We ran our hands over cavernous absence, indelible as ink in the wooden swirls of our desks, lines we traced during lessons that never led back to Rachel, to Craig, though we peeked sometimes into Mrs. Levy’s classroom, at their once-full desks, at the magic carpet of what we’d been.

  And yet we still held hope, sputtering flame, a tiny spark captive inside hollowed marrow to protect from wind, extinguishing gusts, that there was more for us than this. At night, we watched the glowing stars glued against our ceiling
s and imagined life beyond this, somewhere older, a place where this would end, where we would unfurl like crocuses and begin anew.

  But at the end of that first week, just four days into the school year, we learned that terrorists had grounded a plane in Pakistan, hijacked with 360 people on board, that twenty of those people had been killed. We learned that Trina Johnson had disappeared overnight, and our sputtering flame blew out.

  We watched an anger erupt in Rosewood, a rage kept bottled for months. We watched Trina’s father collapse on his porch during a press conference, watched the contours of his face bend with fury and sorrow. We watched community volunteers become vigilantes, grab guns dusted off from cellar gun cases, meant for hunting and shooting cans, pulled forth from storage to kill.

  Beyond culpability, beyond hope, we felt something change, something imminent and menacing. A space shuttle, a radioactive cloud, an explosion of lake and gas—these were things no one had rendered, disasters without intent, all terrible, terrible accidents. But this, violent siege, a disaster more deliberate, more calculated, and coming on us so much faster, only two weeks between Nick and Trina’s disappearances. We felt a heaviness span the Atlantic, blanket our chests, the fear of all those families, so much brutality, a mirror held up to our own. We felt the gravity of our own violence, of a chain set in motion and now of inertia, as crushing as a phantom’s hovering presence, his shadow cast long across our homes, our bedrooms, as the September sun sank under its own heavy weight.

  We couldn’t avoid each other, not anymore. We couldn’t ignore the shared burden of our actions and inactions, our classmates missing, the world around us collapsing, as much as we couldn’t ignore our collective hope burned down, gasped away on a trail of unfathomable loss. So when during recess Tom Davies caught our eyes, each of us watching the others, we allowed ourselves to move wordlessly to the rocket, pulled by common, magnetic force. We crowded inside the structure’s cage, our separate shadows pooled beneath the sun, melded darkly into one.