Stony River. Tricia Dower
that?” Tereza asked real low.
“Somebody visiting Crazy Haggerty, I guess,” Linda whispered.
“What’s wrong with the kid?”
“How would I know?”
The girl turned and stared straight out to where Tereza and Linda were hiding. It made Tereza shudder. The kid looked starved. Maybe the cops were taking the girl to jail because of that. Jimmy used to threaten her with jail before she figured out she could scare him worse with it. He told her the cops would pull her fingernails out with pliers and parade her around naked.
A sudden dread for the girl brought her to her feet. “I’m gonna find out what’s going on.”
“No!” Linda yanked the back of Tereza’s pants and pulled her back down. “They might tell on us. I’ll get in trouble.”
“With the cops?”
“No. My folks.”
“What’s the worst they can do to you?”
“You can’t imagine.”
Tereza hadn’t spotted a single scab or bruise on those rubber doll arms and legs but maybe Linda’s old man and lady weren’t as harmless as they looked.
Tereza dropped back to the ground. “My brother’s a big chicken, too.”
Linda’s face collapsed like a squashed Dixie cup. Tough gazzobbies. Tereza couldn’t babysit everybody’s feelings.
• • •
For twelve years Miranda has viewed the World through the attic’s streaky window, seeing half a tree, a snip of street and only the birds and clouds that pass by her scrap of sky. Being at one with nature is our birthright, James said. Depriving her of that pained him. Daylight makes her eyes water. And the smells! She feels dizzy. Focus, James would say. Imagine yourself the circus tightrope walker he described seeing as a child—taking slow, deliberate steps, placing one foot carefully before the other.
She wants to touch the tree whose branches scratch the roof and hug the earth. But Nolan leads her to a black car with two white doors. She balks as Nolan opens a door for her. Is the car any less a cage than that holding Nicholas? Then she recalls the professor’s nephew who feared entering the volcano, at first, nearly missing out on that incredible journey to Earth’s core. She ducks her head inside. Cian squeals when the engine erupts but bounces excitedly on her lap as they pull away. Twisting to see through the rear window, Miranda watches the home she hasn’t seen from outside since she was three shrink and grow faint.
• • •
Tereza hacked off two more punks and handed one to Linda. “If you smoke it down to the end,” she said, “sap will fizz up into your mouth.”
Linda screwed up her nose as if Tereza had farted. “Revolting.”
Tereza turned away and studied the old house. One thing she always did in a new town was suss out possible hidey-holes. No sign of Crazy Haggerty and the dog was gone. If the house turned out vacant for sure she’d come back and prop a window open in case she needed to get in someday. Bordering the neighborhood were the river, a farm and the highway her family had taken all the way from Florida. In the middle were houses, empty lots and trees. The farm had a haystack big enough to hide a girl but a vacant house would be better when the weather turned cold. Across the highway were a zillion other possibilities. Right now, though, Crazy Haggerty’s house was boss. She’d sneak back to it after dark.
• • •
As the car gathers speed, a hot breeze from the open windows lifts Miranda’s hair and slides under her dress. Curious wonders pass by so quickly they become blurs of color, so many shades of green, yellow, brown, blue and red. Cian, frightened and delighted at once, clings to her neck with one arm. He points with the other and babbles, attempting to name all he sees. Each dog is “Nicko.” Closing her eyes when sights overwhelm her makes her queasy. Fixing her gaze on the back of Nolan’s head helps but, even so, she’s bilious and disoriented by the time they arrive at a building Nolan informs her is the hospital.
Dunn deposits them at the entrance. Carrying her valise, Nolan leads them through a door made of glass (imagine!) into a large room with sofas, chairs and an illuminated ceiling. Someone approaches them. A woman, she realizes with a thrill. A woman who rises on the toes of her flat black shoes and kisses Nolan on the cheek.
“Thanks for being here,” he says to her. “Where’s Carolyn?”
“With Mom. She’ll keep her as long as we need.”
“Ah, she’s a peach.” Turning to Miranda, he says, “My wife, Doris.”
Doris has tightly curled black hair and a swollen stomach under a long white shirt: a mother goddess at full moon. Her black trousers stop mid-calf. Doris captures Miranda’s free hand with her two small ones. Her smooth hands are pink against Miranda’s candle-white skin, her pursed lips painted the color of fresh blood.
“You poor thing,” she says.
Panic flaps its wings inside Miranda’s chest as Nolan excuses himself to check on arrangements for viewing James’s body. She no longer wants to see a corpse. About her come and go more people than ever she’s seen. Voices from nowhere say words she can’t decipher and invisible chimes go bing-bing. She misses the slow, predictable rhythm of the house, wants to chase after Nolan and ask would he take her home. But Doris, smelling like dried wildflowers, steps even closer and shines a smile on Cian.
“What’s your name, little guy?”
Miranda answers for him. Cian isn’t one of the five words he can say.
Doris mispronounces it as a single, reverent, syllable: “Keen. That’s a new one on me. How old is he?”
“One year and four months.”
“I would have guessed younger.”
Miranda lays a hand on Doris’s melon-hard stomach.
Doris quicksteps back then catches herself and smiles. “Three more months.” She extracts a red tubular object from a large blue and white checked cloth bag. “Say, Keen, do you like kaleidoscopes?” The lad frowns and sniffs it, puts his tongue on it. She laughs. “No, no. Look into the eyehole. Here, let me show you.” Softly, almost mouthing the words, she asks Miranda, “Can he understand?”
“And why wouldn’t he?”
“Well, I wasn’t sure, given his condition.”
“There’s no want in him,” she says as James answered her when she wondered if the lad was like other children. James said naught about a condition.
Doris succeeds in getting Cian to peer into the tube and hold it by himself. “Oh, you’re clever.” She sets her bag on the floor and opens it wide. “I have more toys. Want to see?”
“See,” Cian says. Miranda sets his bare feet on the floor. He toddles to the bag and reaches in as though he’s done it forever, pulls out a block with the letter Y.
Nolan returns and says to Miranda, “Whenever you’re ready.”
Doris bends her head to touch Miranda’s: a silent benediction. “Go on,” she says, her voice as soft as dusk. “He’ll be fine with me.”
• • •
Their footsteps resound as Nolan leads Miranda through double doors and down a hallway smelling like pinecones. At the end, a blue door opens to a narrow windowless room with a red floor, a yellow chair beside a gurney. Her toes in the open shoes recoil at the cold. She shudders.
All the dark was cold and strange.
“It’s called the cooler,” Nolan says. Another word for her personal lexicon.
They move from doorway to gurney. Tightrope walking again, a thunderous pounding in her head. She stares, unseeing,