Mrs. Dolorosa was a comfortable woman who ate a lot of pasta and rarely came out of her house. The day Vinny disappeared she at first thought he was up in the caves with his “hooligan friends.” Then the police came and started asking questions. Then she thought maybe he’d gone down to the lake and drowned. Then everyone searched the woods.
He was never found.
When Halloween came two weeks later, her porch light was off.
The whole thing scared the hell out of all of us.
~~**~~
The first time I wondered about the closet in Dad’s den, it was just after Labor Day—and it was the first time I remember feeling hunger.
Dad had lost his job several months before, but until the past week, it’d seemed as though nothing had changed: Mom was cheap and could make that buffalo scream. She’d go to Bantam Market, stock up on meat, put it into plastic bags she’d label with the item and date, and freeze it in an orange behemoth she called Bessie. Bessie lived in one of the off limits rooms of the house because Mom was afraid less-than-bright Kimmie would play in it and lock herself in, but I suspected our supply had run out, and there was no money to get more. The last few nights, we’d been living on canned kidney beans and generic cheese from Grand Union.
That day was rainy, and the house was dark: it was cut into the hillside, so the windows in the back rooms of the first floor sat at ground level. While they provided a convenient out when I wanted to meet Myron—the kid next door—in the woods after I was supposed to be in bed, they made the den a foreboding place crammed with yellowing books. Across from a shrink-wrapped Robert Frost poster that talked about the road less traveled was the knotty pine, padlocked closet.
A storm was rolling in. Thunderstorms were terrifying prospects; the house wasn’t properly grounded, and it’d been hit a couple of times. Once, a fireball shot past my head. Twice, the electrical box, in the closet too close to the woodstove, got whacked. Because my bedroom was below grade, I felt like I’d be safest there—but sounds from Dad’s den stopped me.
I heard banging and scraping, and there was a peculiar smell, like mud and wet metal; different from the usual smoky vanilla and old paper. I crept closer and pressed my ear to the door, but the only thing I clearly grasped was that he was doing something in the closet; I heard the unmistakable press of the doors and snap of the padlock.
I heard Dad drop into his leather-covered chair. Although I imagined all sorts of crazy things going on in there, when I had to interrupt him for something like “Mom has dinner ready” or “Mr. Leary’s here”—there was never anything but him in the chair, a book on his lap, his loafered feet propped on his mahogany desk.
I raised my hand and knocked.
He always knew it was me. “Yes, Denise.”
“Can I come in?”
“Just a minute.” I heard the unmistakable snap-thrush of a match; he was lighting his pipe. “Okay.”
I entered the room and I could see the crack of Dad’s rear end through the open lower back of the chair. He was wiry and seemed to have no hips or butt. Even when he wore a belt, his pants wouldn’t stay up. “Is dinner ready?”
“No, I . . . I just wanted to . . .”
“Are you bored?” He looked at me—with one of his gray eyes, anyway. His right one was lazy, and sometimes it wandered and I couldn’t tell what he was looking at. It was unnerving right then, actually, because if I knew that if I said yes, he’d give me a crummy job to do. But he didn’t wait for my answer. “You finished all your Nancy Drews, huh?”
I was a pretty advanced reader for ten years old, so the three Mom had given me just last week for my birthday I’d already read.
I thought I heard something shift in the closet, and eyed it.
“Never mind that. I was reorganizing. Tell you what.” He got up off his chair and motioned around the room. “I think you’re old enough. Any one of these books you see here—any one at all—you go ahead and choose and you can start reading that.”
I was immediately distracted. Dad’s library towered around and walled in the window, and there were all sorts of pretty hardcovers—Sargasso, Telefon, Jaws. I’d been down here when he wasn’t and looked at them so many times in all their glorious covers, wondering if what was inside them was as good as the cover art itself. There was one I had my eye on in particular.
I stretched to place my middle and index finger on the top of Clive Cussler’s Raise the Titanic! I’d learned about that ship in school and had been captivated by it.
“Just don’t tell your mother, and if you have any questions about anything, you come to me—and only me.” He puffed his pipe as he noted my choice. “It’s got deep-sea submersibles and marine archaeologists and spies. You might like that one.”
Just then, Mom called us for lunch. It was the usual slop can of cheap stuff smashed together to make a meal—one of the women at church, perhaps knowing our predicament, had given her a new Crock Pot, and she was digging it. The only uncool thing was that I knew we should’ve been eating nicer recipes—like Hungarian goulash, stuffed green peppers, and hamburger casserole—but instead, we were eating last week’s leftover chicken in a tomato broth that tasted like watered-down ketchup.
We had a house they’d built themselves that was murder to maintain, and even if we lived in a nice neighborhood, it wasn’t beyond me that they were always this far from losing it: my bedroom was directly under theirs, and I could hear them fighting at night, especially about Mom’s faith. “We can’t keep tithing to the church like this,” Dad would say. “You just trust Jesus and everything will be rosy fucking fine, for sure! But is the church really going to help us when we’re out on the street? How about Jesus? Is he going to descend and give us a place to live?”
Mom would never respond. I’d just hear the bathroom door slam.
~~**~~
Myron’s real name, Mom said, was Ronnie, but his mother would refer to him as “My Ron” so eventually all the kids started calling him Myron. He was a rough-and-tumble who covered his hands in socks instead of gloves, always wore a maroon, puffy, dirt-smeared coat, and when it was chilly or he had a cold, had a bright green caterpillar of snot crawling out of one or both of his nostrils. He pronounced the word number as numper, and when you got too close to him, he smelled like stale air freshener and matches.
The only thing he liked more than me, he confessed, was the sandbox.
There, we built castles as tall as we were and pitched rocks at each other in a game called Bury the Dead: Dad would always entomb chicken bones, so we’d dig them up, then split the pile so each one of us had an army. The idea was to pitch the ammo at the other one’s army and knock the bones over. Whoever knocked over the most won, and there was usually some sort of “slave duty” at stake.
A late-September storm was threatening; bloated gray clouds trundled over the lake. “Let’s go in!” I told Myron.
“Nope-a-dope!” He hurled another rock, but it missed. He ducked back down behind his fortress. “I’m winning!”
“Not for long!” I popped up from behind my castle and opened fire. I was trailing behind him, for sure. He still had twenty-one out of twenty-eight bones standing; I had only seven left between me and incurring the penalty of having to pull his toboggan up the hill all winter long.
He stood up and winged another rock. It knocked over not one, but two of my bones.“Numper twenty-one! Numper twenty-two! Your hands gonna be freezing when you towing my magic carpet through the snow!”
I popped up from behind my fortress. “Nope! I’ll have real gloves!” I fired a rather large rock, confident it was going to wipe out maybe two or three of his bones. I was fighting a losing battle, but I wasn’t about to give up.
I knocked him in the head. He fell backward, his shoes thrusting right through the front of his fortress, his wall crumbling like so much brown sugar.
When I got to him, he wasn’t on his back. He was standing, with a hand over one eye, pointing at the ground where he
’d fallen.
I went to grab his arm, then thought better of it when I saw the smear of an unidentified substance on the arm of his coat. “Are you okay, Myron?” His mom was going to kill me, and she was going to tell my mom, and this could very well mean spending next summer weeding that stupid pachysandra.
He shook his head and went white. “The ground moved.”
I frowned. “What do you mean?”
“It. Moved!” His breath came is short gasps. Snot crawled down his upper lip. “I swear, man!”
Silence. There was the whine of the boats on the lake.
I started to laugh.
Myron looked horrified at first, but I just laughed harder.
He turned up the corners of his mouth in a nervous expression, and then he laughed, too.
~~**~~
Two days after Vinny disappeared, Dad refilled the sandbox. He’d taken the Scout down to Lloyd Lumber, loaded it up with twenty-pound bags, and slashed them open with his Bowie knife. Whitish puffs clouded the Columbus Day breeze when he emptied the bags.
Myron and I started a new game of Bury the Dead almost immediately, but the thicker layer of sand made it harder to knock over the bones.
“Whaddaya think?” Myron hummed a rock at my line of bones, but it didn’t hit—the pile of sand around it blocked the assault, and the rock just slid to a stop.
“About what?” I retaliated with equal force, but the same thing happened.
“You know—Vinny.” He threw a rock again, to no effect. “You scared?”
I was. Halloween was coming up, so Channel 11 was showing scary movies on Saturdays. I thought maybe what happened to Vinny was the same thing that had happened to this woman in the Three o’clock Thriller: she was dragged into hell by monsters that lived in her fireplace. Maybe in those caves where Vinny kept his dirty magazines, there were monsters lying in wait. Not like I’d ever go up there, but what if they ran out of neighborhood baddies to eat?
“You are!” Myron razzed. “You are scared!”
My cheeks burned “Am not!”
“Are too!”
“Am not!” I lobbed another rock, and it, too, ploughed into a sand pile and failed to take down a soldier.
“This is a bummer.” He came out from behind his fortress, and for a horrifying moment I thought he was going to wander out of the sandbox and back home.
He didn’t. Instead, he flopped down between our castles. “Sit down, ’Nise.”
He never put the De at the beginning of my name. Not that it bothered me; if anything, I felt this sort of special flutter in my stomach when he said it, except for right then, when it was irritating. “No. You’re laughing at me!”
“Nope-a-dope.”
“You are!” I watched another inchworm of snot crawl down his upper lip. “And you oughtta learn to wipe your snotty nose!”
He patted the sand. “Get your butt over here.”
His eyes, the color of a blue jay’s back, were honest. So I emerged from the depths of my granular castle and sat next to him, getting a whiff of stale air freshener.
“Vinny was a dumbass.” He made little circles in the sand. “He prolly did sumpthin’ stupid.”
“How do you know?”
“’Cause I do. Besides”—he wiped his nose—“you shouldn’t be scared. I’m gonna be Mark from Battle of the Planets for Halloween. So if sumpthin’ bad was coming, I’d stop ’em.”
I was giggly and blushy all at the same time, and when another snot worm started coming out of his nose, it didn’t seem as gross.
~~**~~
Myron wasn’t the only one who got defensive after Vinny disappeared; the whole town went crazy. In health class, puberty discussion was booted in favor of Stranger Danger education, which meant two things: filmstrips about kids getting kidnapped and assemblies with local policemen. By mid-November, we were all pros at rebuking candy-pushers in Chrysler Newports.
“I know this is, like, scary city for you kids, but you just need to be cool.” Mom, who was cooking, took a slug of her usual pre-dinner bourbon. “Those boys were always in a tango with trouble.” She lifted the lid off the Crock Pot and inhaled.
I thought about what Myron said. Maybe he was right.
“It’s perfect!” She smiled the biggest smile I’d seen in a while, and I noticed she’d put on frosted melon lipstick. Mom had always been a manicured person who wore the latest fashions when Dad had had a job, but lately I’d noticed tiny indiscretions, like the absence of earrings, a necklace, or makeup. Today she had on all three. “Smell that bacony smell!”
“What is it?” I asked, interest in mealtime renewed.
“Authentic pepper pot soup.” She ladled it into one of her harvest gold serving bowls.
I’d never heard of it. “What’s that?”
“You promised this was gonna be far out, Mom!” my sister Kimmie whined, banging her spoon on her Land of the Lost placemat. “I don’t like peppers!”
“Well.” She set the bowl in front of her. “There are actually very few peppers in it.”
Dad grabbed a beer from the fridge and cracked it open. Mom kissed him.
Mom set my bowl in front of me. The soup looked rich and smelled like bacon and onions, but there was something hot in it, because I could feel the sweat pop out on my cheeks. She plopped a platter of crusty bread and margarine in the middle of the table. “Eat up! It’s the soup that won the American Revolution!”
Kimmie wasted no time gobbling it up, her eyes gleaming like a thief’s, nodding and yum-yumming like a child actor on a bad sitcom.
I was a little more cautious.
Mom seated herself and spread her paper napkin across her lap. “Come on, now, Denise, didn’t you know that George Washington’s troops didn’t even have shoes? They were leaving bloody footprints in the snow. And then the cook came up with this soup—”
“Good God, Adelaide,” Dad grunted. “We don’t know that’s true.”
Mom, clearly annoyed, eyed him. “It was in my cookbook.”
The room grew heavy; the only sound was my sister, who had lifted the bowl and was slurping.
For as good as it smelled, it was horrendous—I swore I could taste turds in it someplace. I choked it down and found myself, although at least no longer hungry, desperate for diluted ketchup and crackers.
“So.” Mom blew on her spoonful to cool it. “What are your plans after dinner?”
“TV!” Kimmie cried. “TV!”
“I’m going over to get Myron,” I said. “We have to finish this week’s battle.”
“What battle?”
“In the sandbox.” I fished three or four potatoes out of the soup; they were, at least, tolerable.
There was silence. My parents looked at each other.
Dad lifted his beer. “Why don’t you read instead?”
The whole reason we had the sandbox was so that we could have friends over. “Why?”
Mom set her hand on mine. “Oh, you know, we’ve just turned the clocks back and it’s a little darker now than usual. And it’s cold. Don’t you think it’s cold?”
Kimmie slammed down her bowl. “More! I want more!”
I knew better than to argue with my parents, but that didn’t mean I had to follow their instructions. So after I’d managed to hide at least half of the bits of meat in those flimsy napkins, I went over to Myron’s.
His mother came to the door, wiping her hands on a muddied apron, a Benson & Hedges clenched between wine-colored lips. When she spoke, I could see her yellow teeth.
“My Ron! My Ron, baby, come here—it’s your friend from next door!”
No response.
“My Ron?”
No answer.
“Ronnie?”
She turned and smiled at me sweetly, but I knew she was panicked.
“Wait. Just wait right here.”
She searched the house, the basement, she cried out into the night air in the neighborhood. The police came; they dredged the lake.<
br />
Myron was never found.
He might have been grungy, half-illiterate, and stale smelling, but he was just about the only real friend I had. Every day after school I’d want to go out to the sandbox, then think better of it and sit in the window and look at it instead. The chicken bones and castles were still there from our last game of Bury the Dead. For once, I was about to beat him—I’d figured out a way around the too-high-pile problem, and he hadn’t. So I had twelve left in front of my castle; he had three.
When an odd Thanksgiving snow fell, the little bones stood against the white like forlorn orphans.
Numper twenty-one, numper twenty-two echoed in my head. I never imagined I’d ever miss hearing that mispronunciation.
Sometimes when I went to bed, I could swear I heard Myron’s voice, and I felt like there was no one else who could stop the bad from coming.
~~**~~
Me and Kimmie had been hoping for a turkey on Thanksgiving. We got something like a turkey—a turkey loaf, it was called, that Mom simmered in bourbon and green apples in the Crock Pot. Kimmie gobbled it up like it was her last meal.
“This is the best turkey ever, Mom!” She had so much gravy on her fork it ran down her arm. She licked it off her skin. “Tastes just like the real thing!”
“It is real, dear. It’s just pressed together.”
It didn’t taste too much like turkey to me. Maybe it was all the Crock Pot fodder we’d been eating, but it tasted the same as everything else. I was okay with it until I bit into something hard that jammed itself painfully under one of my teeth. I pried it loose.
It was a fragment the size of a pebble, white with a nick in it. “Ew, Jesus!” I threw it next to the salad cruet and jumped up from the table.
“Language!” Mom snapped, her eyes wide. “What is the problem?”
“It’s an icky hard thing!”
The Shadows Behind Page 4