by Joe Hill
“How will I know you made it across the bridge?” Maggie said.
“I always make it,” Vic said. The sunlight was a steel pin, pushing back into Vic’s left eyeball. The world blurred. Maggie Leigh split into twins for a moment; when she came back together again, she was offering Vic a sheet of paper, folded into quarters.
“Here,” Maggie said. “Anything I didn’t cover about inscapes and why you can do what you can do is explained here, by an expert on the subject.”
Vic nodded and put it in her pocket.
“Oh!” Maggie called. She tugged at one earlobe, then the other, and then pushed something into Vic’s hand.
“What are these?” Vic asked, looking into her palm at the Scrabble-tile earrings.
“Armor,” Maggie said. “Also a concise s-s-stuh-stammerer’s guide for dealing with the world. The next time someone disappoints you, put these on. You’ll feel tougher. That’s the Maggie Leigh guarantee.”
“Thank you, Maggie. For everything.”
“’S what I’m here for. Fount of knowledge—that’s me. Come back to be s-s-sprinkled with my wisdom anytime.”
Vic nodded again, didn’t feel she could bear to say anything else. The sound of her own voice threatened to bust her head open, like a lightbulb under a high heel. So instead she reached out and squeezed Maggie’s hand. Maggie squeezed back.
Vic leaned forward, bearing down on the pedals, and rode into darkness and the annihilating roar of static.
Haverhill, Massachusetts
THE NEXT THING SHE WAS CLEAR ON WAS WALKING UP THE HILL, through the Pittman Street Woods, her insides feeling bruised and her face fevery hot. Vic weaved, unsteady on her legs, coming up out of the trees and into her yard.
She could not see out of her left eye. It felt as if it had been removed with a spoon. The side of her face was sticky; for all she knew, the eye had popped like a grape and was running down her cheek.
Vic walked into one of her swings, knocking it out of her way with a rattle of rusty chains.
Her father had his Harley out in the driveway, was wiping it down with a chamois. When he heard the clatter of the swings, he glanced up—and dropped the chamois, his mouth opening as if to cry out in shock.
“Holy fuck,” he said. “Vic, are you all right? What happened?”
“I was on my Raleigh,” she said. She felt this explained all.
“Where is your bike?” he asked, and looked past her, down the road, as if it might be lying in the yard.
It was the first Vic realized she wasn’t pushing it. She didn’t know what had happened to it. She remembered hitting the bridge wall, halfway across, and falling off the bike, remembered the bats going shree-shree in the dark and flying into her, striking her with soft, felty impacts. She began to shiver uncontrollably.
“I was knocked off,” she said.
“Knocked off? Did someone hit you with their car?” Chris McQueen took her in his arms. “Jesus Christ, Vic, you’ve got blood all over you. Lin!”
Then it was like the other times, her father lifting her and carrying her to her bedroom, her mother rushing to them, then hurrying away to get water and Tylenol.
Only it was not like the other times, because Vic was delirious for twenty-four hours, with a temperature that climbed to 102. David Hasselhoff kept coming into her bedroom, pennies where his eyes belonged and his hands in black leather gloves, and he would grab her by a leg and ankle and try to drag her out of the house, out to his car, which was not K.I.T.T. at all. She fought him, screamed and fought and struck at him, and David Hasselhoff spoke in her father’s voice and said it was all right, try to sleep, try not to worry, that he loved her—but his face was blank with hate, and the car’s engine was running, and she knew it was the Wraith.
Other times she was aware that she was shouting for her Raleigh. “Where’s my bike?” she shouted, while someone held her shoulders. “Where is it? I need it, I need it! I can’t find without my bike!” And someone was kissing her face and shushing her. Someone was crying. It sounded awfully like her mother.
She wet the bed. Several times.
On her second day home, she wandered into the front yard naked and was out there for five minutes, wandering around, looking for her bike, until Mr. de Zoet, the old man across the street, spotted her, and ran to her with a blanket. He wrapped her up and carried her to her house. It had been a long time since she had gone across the street to help Mr. de Zoet paint his tin soldiers and listen to his old records, and in the intervening years she had come to think of him as a cranky old Nazi busybody who once called the cops on her parents, when Chris and Linda were having a loud argument. Now, though, she remembered that she liked him, liked his smell of fresh coffee and his funny Austrian accent. He had told her she was good at painting once. He had told her she could be an artist.
“The bats are stirred up now,” Vic told Mr. de Zoet in a confidential tone of voice as he handed her to her mother. “Poor little things. I think some of them flew out of the bridge and can’t find their way home.”
She slept during the day, then lay awake half the night, her heartbeat too fast, afraid of things that made no sense. If a car drove by the house and its headlights swept the ceiling, she would sometimes have to cram her knuckles into her mouth to keep from screaming. The sound of a car door slamming in the street was as terrible as a gunshot.
On her third night in bed, she came out of a drifting fugue state to the sound of her parents talking in the next room.
“When I tell her I couldn’t find it, she’s going to be fuckin’ heartbroken. She loved that bike,” her father said.
“I’m glad she’s done with it,” said her mother. “The best thing to come out of this is that she’ll never ride it again.”
Her father uttered a burst of harsh laughter. “That’s tender.”
“Did you hear some of the things she was saying about her bike the day she came home? About riding it to find death? That’s what I think she was doing in her mind, when she was really sick. Riding her bike away from us and off into . . . whatever. Heaven. The afterlife. She scared the shit out of me with all that talk, Chris. I never want to see the goddamned thing again.”
Her father was silent for a moment, then said, “I still think we should’ve reported a hit-and-run.”
“You don’t get a fever like that from a hit-and-run.”
“So she was already sick. You said she went to bed early the night before. That she looked pale. Hell, maybe that was part of it. Maybe she had a touch of fever and pedaled into traffic. I’ll never forget what she looked like coming into the driveway, blood leaking from one eye like she was weeping . . .” His voice trailed off. When he spoke again, his tone was different, challenging and not entirely kind. “What?”
“I just . . . don’t know why she already had a Band-Aid on her left knee.” The TV babbled for a while. Then her mother said, “We’ll get her a ten-speed. Time for a new bike anyway.”
“It’ll be pink,” Vic whispered to herself. “Any money says she’ll buy something pink.”
On some level Vic knew that the loss of the Tuff Burner was the end of something wonderful, that she had pushed too hard and lost the best thing in her life. It was her knife, and a part of her already understood that another bike would, in all likelihood, not be able to cut a hole through reality and back to the Shorter Way Bridge.
Vic slid her hand down between the mattress and the wall, and reached beneath her bed, and found the earrings and the folded piece of paper. She had possessed the presence of mind to hide them the afternoon she came home, and they had been under the bed ever since.
In a flash of psychological insight, uncommon for a girl of thirteen, Vic saw that soon enough she would recall all of her trips across the bridge as the fantasies of a very imaginative child and nothing more. Things that had been real—Maggie Leigh, Pete at Terry’s Primo Subs, finding Mr. Pentack at Fenway Bowling—would eventually feel like nothing more than daydreams. Without
her bike to take her on occasional trips across the Shorter Way, it would be impossible to maintain her belief in a covered bridge that flicked in and out of existence. Without the Raleigh, the last and only proof of her finding trips were the earrings cupped in her palm and a folded photocopied poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins.
F U, the earrings said. Five points.
“Why can’t you come up to the lake with us?” Vic’s mother was saying through the wall—the sound of a whine creeping into her voice. Linda and Chris had moved on to the subject of getting out of town for the summer, something Vic’s mother wanted more than ever, in the aftermath of Vic’s illness. “What could you have to do down here?”
“My job. You want me to spend three weeks up on Lake Winnipesaukee, get ready to stay in a tent. The goddamn place you have to have is eighteen hundred bucks a month.”
“Is three weeks with Vic all by myself supposed to be a vacation? Three weeks of solo parenting, while you stay here to work three days a week and do whatever else you do when I call the job and the guys tell me you’re out with the surveyor. You and him must’ve surveyed every inch of New England by now.”
Her father said something else, in a low, ugly tone that Vic couldn’t catch, and then he turned the volume up on the TV, cranking it loud enough that Mr. de Zoet across the street could probably hear it. A door slammed hard enough to make glasses rattle in the kitchen.
Vic put on her new earrings and unfolded the poem, a sonnet that she did not understand at all and already loved. She read it by the light of the partially open door, whispering the lines to herself, reciting it as if it were a kind of prayer—it was a kind of prayer—and soon her thoughts had left her unhappy parents far behind.
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.
Í say móre: the just man justices;
Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—
Christ—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.
—GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS
DISAPPEARANCES
1991–1996
Various Locales
THE RUSSIAN GIRL WHOM MAGGIE LEIGH HAD MENTIONED WAS named Marta Gregorski, and in Vic’s neck of the woods her abduction was indeed big news for several weeks. This was partly because Marta was a minor celebrity in the world of chess, mentored by Kasparov and ranked a grandmaster by the age of twelve. Also, though, in those first days after the fall of the USSR, the world was still adjusting to the new Russian freedoms, and there was a feeling that the disappearance of Marta Gregorski and her mother should’ve been the stuff of an international incident, an excuse for another Cold War showdown. It took a while to realize that the former Soviet republic was too busy disintegrating to even take notice. Boris Yeltsin was riding around on tanks, shouting until he was red in the face. Former KGB agents were scrambling to find good-paying jobs with the Russian mafia. It was weeks before anyone thought to denounce the decadent, crime-ridden West, and the denouncing wasn’t very enthusiastic at that.
A clerk working the front desk of the Hilton DoubleTree on the Charles River had seen Marta and her mother exit through the revolving door a little before six on a warm, drizzly evening. The Gregorskis were expected at Harvard for a dinner and were meeting their car. Through the rain-smeared window, the clerk saw Marta and then her mother climb into a black vehicle. She thought the car had running boards because she saw the little Russian girl take a step up before sliding into the back. But it was dark out and the clerk was on the phone with a guest who was pissed he couldn’t open his mini-fridge, and she hadn’t noticed more.
Only one thing was certain: The Gregorski women had not climbed into the right car, the town car that had been rented for them. Their driver, a sixty-two-year-old named Roger Sillman, was parked on the far side of the turnaround, in no condition to pick them up. He was out cold and would remain parked there, sleeping behind the wheel, until he came to at nearly midnight. He felt sick and hungover but assumed he had simply (and uncharacteristically) nodded off and that the girls had caught a cab. He did not begin to wonder if something more had happened until the next morning and did not contact the police until he was unable to reach the Gregorskis at their hotel.
Sillman was interviewed by the FBI ten times in ten weeks, but his story never changed and he was never able to provide any information of value. He said he had been listening to sports radio, with time to kill—he was forty minutes early on his pickup—when a knuckle rapped on his window. Someone squat, in a black coat, standing in the rain. Sillman had rolled down the glass and then—
Nothing. Just: nothing. The night melted away, like a snowflake on the tip of his tongue.
Sillman had daughters of his own—and granddaughters—and it ate him alive to imagine Marta and her mother in the hands of some sick Ted Bundy–Charles Manson fuck who would screw them till they were both dead. He couldn’t sleep, had bad dreams about the little girl playing chess with her mother’s severed fingers. He strained and strained with all his will to remember something, anything. But only one other detail would come.
“Gingerbread,” he sighed to a pock-scarred federal investigator who was named Peace but looked more like War.
“Gingerbread?”
Sillman looked at his interrogator with hopeless eyes. “I think while I was passed out, I dreamed about my mom’s gingerbread cookies. Maybe the guy who knocked on the glass was eatin’ one.”
“Mm,” said Peace-not-War. “Well. That’s helpful. We’ll put an APB out on the Gingerbread Man. I’m not hopeful it’ll do us much good, though. Word on the street is you can’t catch him.”
IN NOVEMBER 1991, A FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD BOY NAMED RORY McCombers, a freshman at the Gilman School in Baltimore, met a Rolls-Royce in his dorm’s parking lot. He was on his way to the airport, was joining his family in Key West for Thanksgiving break, and believed that the car had been sent for him by his father.
In fact, the driver that Rory’s father had sent for him was passed out in his limo, half a mile away. Hank Tulowitzki had stopped at a Night Owl to gas up and use the bathroom, but he could remember nothing at all after topping off his tank. He woke up at one in the morning in the trunk of his own car, which was parked a few hundred feet down the road from the Night Owl in a public lot. He’d been kicking and screaming for most of five hours before an early-morning jogger heard him and summoned the police.
A Baltimore pedophile later confessed to the crime and described in pornographic detail the way he had molested Rory before strangling him to death. But he claimed not to remember where he had buried the body, and the rest of the evidence didn’t fit; not only did he not have access to a Rolls-Royce, he didn’t have a valid driver’s license. By the time the cops decided the kiddie fiddler was a dead end—just a perv who got off on describing the sexual assault of a minor, someone who confessed to things out of boredom—there were new abductions to work on and the ground on the McCombers investigation was very cold.
Neither Rory’s driver, Tulowitzki, or the Gregorskis’ driver, Sillman, had his blood tested until more than a day after the abductions took place, and any lingering presence of sevoflurane in their bodies went undetected.
For all they had in common, the disappearance of Marta Gregorski and the kidnapping of Rory McCombers were never connected.
One other thing the two cases ha
d in common: Neither child was seen again.
Haverhill
CHRIS MCQUEEN TOOK OFF THE AUTUMN VIC BEGAN HIGH SCHOOL.
Her freshman year was already off to a rocky start. She was pulling straight C’s, except for art. Her art teacher had put a comment on her quarterly summary, six hastily scrawled words—“Victoria is gifted, needs to concentrate”—and given her a B.
Vic drew her way through every study hall. She tattooed herself in Sharpie, to irritate her mother and impress boys. She had done a book report in comic-strip form, to the amusement of all the other kids who sat in the back of the class with her. Vic was getting an A-plus in entertaining the other burnouts. The Raleigh had been replaced by a Schwinn with silver-and-pink tassels on the handlebars. She didn’t give a fuck about the Schwinn, never rode it. It embarrassed her.
When Vic walked in, home from an after-school detention, she found her mother on the ottoman in the living room, hunched over, her elbows on her knees, and her head in her hands. She had been crying . . . still was, water leaking from the corners of her bloodshot eyes. She was an ugly old woman when she wept.
“Mom? What happened?”
“Your father called. He isn’t going to come home tonight.”
“Mom?” Vic said, letting her backpack slide off her shoulder and fall to the floor. “What’s that mean? Where’s he going to be?”