Jacob’s older brother, Will, had announced that he was moving out of the room they shared and into the back bedroom. His parents were perplexingly, frighteningly unwilling to acknowledge the injustice of it, or to right it.
“Come on now,” his father said across the dining room table. It was a Saturday afternoon in January and they weren’t eating — they were flipping through plastic-covered library books, looking for facts about the pyramids to put into Jacob’s history report. “It’s got nothing to do with whether he loves you, you know.” His father couldn’t say a word like “love” without clearing his throat and glancing around as if to see who had spoken. “Now look at this. After you died, they cut you open and took out all your insides and filled you up with cloth and straw. How would you like that?”
All their lives Jacob and Will had shared the room at the top of the stairs. They’d had separate beds, of course, and their own bedside tables and white wire dressers and painted metal reading lamps whose elbows were perpetually giving out, but they were — like their parents, Jacob thought — bound by their shared room in a way that was both permanent and private. Will was two years older than Jacob, darker-haired and moodier, much less timid. It was Will whose opinion about a movie or a teacher counted, Will who decided whether a joke was funny, Will who actually played the Nintendo while Jacob, sitting forward on his stool, merely winced and shrieked and cheered at every death barely avoided.
The games they played — Metroid and Contra and Super Mario — were absurdly convoluted and involving, and often it would be an entire afternoon’s work, such work as they never thought of putting into school, just to make their way through a single locked passage or to understand what was to be done with a soothsayer’s gift of an enchanted flute. Jacob kept Nintendo Power’s maps unfolded in his lap and when he shut his eyes, many nights, he’d see fireballs and floating walkways and unmoving waterfalls.
Will had recently been elected president of their elementary school, Spillerton. This meant that he read the morning announcements over the P.A. in the morning and rang the bell before assemblies. These powers, Jacob believed, had gone to his head. Rounds of applause, a special patrol belt, teachers calling him “President Vine” in a teasing but respectful way. If only Will had lost, he wouldn’t have had the surge of independence, of adult-feeling, that had culminated in this move to his own room. (But if he had lost that would have been disaster! Jacob would have been humiliated on his brother’s behalf, nauseous just to step inside the school where all those defunct posters — which Jacob had helped to color — would be hanging, all that hope mortifyingly revealed as foolishness.)
But it wasn’t just the election. Will had also, Jacob knew, recently begun to date. What did this mean? He and his girlfriends went nowhere, certainly didn’t kiss. They were bound simply by the decision to be bound, by their mutual willingness to stand apart from the rest of the grade and risk whatever derision came to them. Melanie Freedman, Julie Sutter, Emily Cobb, ordinary girls who now giggled when they passed Jacob in the halls, or who would call and ask for Will with lightly masked danger in their voices. These calls made Jacob miserable — he would stand outside the shut door of his and Will’s room (when it was still their room) and listen to Will’s murmur, desperate to know what they were talking about, to be included and so to transform Will’s interest in girls into something that might not signal the approaching end of their way of life together.
It had ended, though, that piece of it, by the time the snowstorm came. Woodside was covered by dinner time, and already the first sledders were tromping up the hill in outfits like spacesuits. The Vines kept their sleds against a wall in the clammy basement — these were heavy wooden sleds of a sort that almost no one else used anymore — and on the first snow of the year Jacob’s father would wax the metal runners by rubbing a candle all along them. He’d accept no help doing this, or if he did he would hastily go over each runner once himself afterwards. The happy physical concentration required to get it properly done was the same as when he would chop an onion or a bunch of parsley — the tip of his tongue between his teeth, his hands a blur. Chopchopchopchop.
On the driveway, the cold pushed right through their jackets and stung their faces. There were shouts of joy and mayhem from kids and, from adults, similar sounds but deeper, more menacing. When Jacob thought of adults playing with kids, he thought of accidental injuries — heavy arms and knees and elbows plowing into small bodies, apologies and sweat and strange, unwelcome smells.
Howard Sheldrake, a Spillerton parent who lived on the corner of Surrey Street, was there, fiercely directing the assemblage of what everyone called a “Chinese dragon” — a fleet of sleds all yoked together. Arranged like this they went no faster than they otherwise would have, but there was an appeal in the very disorder of it. The possibility — the certainty — that one sled would whip into a car’s bumper, or that the entire snake would collapse into a clot of snow and bodies, was apparently too much to resist. And no one loved these like Howard — he could have been directing an army battalion. “Get up! Get up! You hold him. Vincent, sit down. Sit like that or you’re getting off. Here. Trade sleds. That won’t work, I’m telling you, because I already tried it. Get up!”
Also there were the Dewsons’ three boys, all on the swim team, all tall and square-jawed and shy, practically like farmboys, each clutching a plastic trash can lid instead of a sled. And Edward Rowl, wide and raspy-voiced and violent, standing mock-casually on the curb, waiting to leap onto the back of some unsuspecting sledder. He was in the eighth grade and he was known to shoplift from the little store where people bought candy and sodas after swimming — to Jacob he may as well have been a bank robber.
“You start with me,” Jacob’s father said to him. They had only two sleds, and Jacob would have much preferred to go with Will, but already Will had run up the hill toward his friends. His father took his place on the sled, on his stomach, and Jacob lay face-down on the bulk of his father’s back, clutching the folds of his coat. “Ready?” his father asked.
“Ready.”
“Heave…….ho!”
Jacob tasted snow in his father’s coat collar, and before long his nose began to run in a way that burned. A couple of times they eased to a halt on a soft drift of snow and were left a little sheepish, piled together like that, unthrilled. Once, racing along a path that had been pressed down practically to ice, they flew so hard over the speed bump in front of their house that Jacob was sure they’d left the ground. By their fifth or sixth run, Jacob was having trouble gripping anything with his numb fingers.
His father was preoccupied by the crowd on the street, all the people he was failing to talk to. “Susan!” he’d shout, as their sled whizzed by. “Don! How about this, huh?” Yes, yes, smiles and waves, but no one wanted to talk quite the way he did — instead there was a silly sort of competition, all these adults trying to seem playful without having to work at it. Marcia Drape spun down the hill in a plastic saucer, shrieking theatrically. “Just taking his old dad out,” he’d say even to strangers, clapping Jacob on the back.
Although Jacob nodded along at this, and ran back up the hill, and even said things like “Did you feel how fast we went?” as they stood up and brushed themselves off, he felt quietly awful. He didn’t take a step or say a word that wasn’t poisoned by his memory of the night before with Will, and he was amazed — horrified and grateful in equal measure — that no one seemed able to see it.
Will had taken up with a group of boys who were sliding down the hill on their feet, and he had left his sled leaning against a No Parking sign. Someone had once stolen a sled from the Vines’ front yard, so Jacob began to tell on him, but his father said, “Oh, don’t be like that.” The street had come to look, as it always did on snow days, like a carnival, that demented milling, and it became harder and harder for Jacob to keep an eye on Will. He would disappear behind the crowd, then pop up at the bottom of a snowy heap, then disappear again. Jacob was aware of Will’s movements the way a person’s aware of a sore shoulder — a faint, persistent flickering around the edges that eats away at the quality of life.
“Come on. Up,” Jacob’s father said. “One more run. Take your dad for one last spin.” His round nose was covered in water droplets, and snow clung to the dense hair that poked out from the sides of his hat. His bearish body rose and fell under all those layers of clothes. There was a moment, when his father took off his glasses to wipe the lenses, in which he gave Jacob a look that seemed to say, How are you holding up?, and from that too-close intimacy Jacob could only reel; it was like the cold pokes of the doctor at a checkup.
Part Two
They were standing at the top of the hill by the mailbox, deciding where to take off for their last run, when Jacob noticed Aunt Judy. Jacob’s father was chatting happily with Kathleen Bunsen, who cross-country skied in even the lightest flurry, and Jacob didn’t register Judy’s appearance at first, only that Will had stepped out of the crowd and was talking to an adult who he knew. He recognized this in Will’s posture, in the way his face was tilted. Jacob only realized that the adult was Aunt Judy once she turned in his direction, the orange tip of her cigarette wobbling as she made her way towards him. Her hair was caked with snow, her face was wet and red. She wore a long black coat that clearly wasn’t warm enough.
There was a way Jacob’s father’s face had of changing when he became aware of a crisis. Slack or smiling one second, once any of a certain list of words were mentioned — “sick,” “fell,” “hurt,” “crying” — his eyes would focus, his mouth would purse, his entire being would prime for action.
The boys’ cousin Paula was missing. Judy had called the police already and they were out looking along Wisconsin. “Peter’s going to kill me, he literally will.” Judy’s voice was raw with misery, her eyes looked swollen, her hands shook. Jacob imagined Paula moaning, stumbling through the snow, shrieking for her parents, pounding her head with her fist, and he got it into his head that the great risk — the thing that his father and his aunt were so afraid of — was that she would freeze to death. This set a clock ticking in his mind. He’d seen it in movies: shiny and purple skin, an expression of disbelief preserved for all time. She’d already been lost for at least an hour. The tone of the night changed like his father’s face. “Run home and tell your mother to get the car,” Jacob’s father said to him. “Tell her to print something up.”
Jacob found his mother standing at the kitchen counter, scooping spoonfuls of Quik from the yellow metal canister into a row of mugs. He was trembling with the responsibility of carrying such an important message. “Oh Jesus,” she said, but more with dismay than urgency, as if he’d told her that the ceiling in the upstairs bathroom was leaking again. With a longing look she left the mugs on the counter and, in the cozy chaos of her office, set about making the flyers for them to distribute. This was the sort of chore that was perpetually being heaped on her — solving the dreadful mystery of how to get a diorama’s scenery to hold, arranging a flip-book in such a way that it would actually flip — and she worked with habitual weariness, a joyless competence.
“Should I get the picture of her from upstairs?” Jacob said.
“Is it pretty clear? Sure. Bring it down.”
With the photo taped in place, the details typed, the collage Xeroxed a hundred times on the gray, scorching hot machine, they bundled up and climbed into the freezing car. In his jumpiness Jacob had become very hungry, and his mouth was now chokingly lined with dense Quik powder.
“Did Judy seem OK?” his mother said, adjusting the mirror. Jacob swallowed and considered carefully.
“She looked cold. And she kept asking dad if the police would find her.”
“And how did she think he was going to know that?”
Cars on Woodside during snow storms were regarded by kids with a kind of manic attentiveness. At the sound of tires — easing up the middle of the road at two or three miles an hour — shouts of “Car!” “Car!” “Car!” would travel all up and down the street, and the passengers in the car would be made to feel like royals on parade, as all these cold patient faces lined up along the curbs.
Jacob’s father and Will and Judy were standing together just in front of the elementary school, and they all leapt eagerly into the back of the Volvo, bringing with them a whoosh of cold and, from Judy, the smell of cigarettes. Instead of asking Jacob to move into the back, as he would usually have done, Jacob’s father plucked off his gloves and pressed his palms against the warm stack of flyers. “Now, this is serious here. We’ll need you guys to help. So eyes peeled.”
Judy, whose knees were forced up almost to her chin, reached forward and took Jacob’s hand. Her panic seemed to have eased. “I’m sorry I didn’t really get to say hello to you. I love you. You guys are awesome for helping out like this. Your family is so amazing. I mean that.” Her breath smelled like smoke and coins.
She was even taller than the boys’ father and, like him, her body seemed too large to be built around an ordinary skeleton — a telephone pole seemed more likely to be at the core of her than a spine. For the first few years of Jacob’s life, her only significant characteristic for him was her size (once he’d described her to a friend as “the biggest woman in the world” and his parents’ laughter, which he’d been counting on, had been laced with rebuke, which shamed and puzzled him). She lived alone in the strange, abandoned part of Bethesda past the strip of shops on Bradley, separated from her husband and daughter, just over a mile from the Vines. She would come for dinner a couple of times a month, usually unannounced, and she’d stand towering in the kitchen, her skirt the size of a curtain, her earrings as long as hands, her face a beaming slab. She was always stepping into the backyard to smoke, and Jacob would go with her. He liked the smell, and he liked the pained expression she wore when she inhaled. “If I ever catch you smoking, I’ll kill you,” she’d say. “I really will. Don’t think I won’t find out.” She wore heavy makeup, and she laughed with greater abandon than any of his parents’ other guests, throwing back her head and emitting something between a yell and a snort. She could also sing. Toward the end of dinners, when she had had more wine than his parents would drink in a week, his father would sometimes say, looking at his sons, “Judy is also a terrific singer,” and his mother would say to Judy, “Come on — sing something. You’re so good.” And Jacob would sense, in the hush that fell over his parents, that something big was about to happen. “I hate people watching me,” she’d say, turning her chair to face the bookshelves.
And then, after an unbearable pause, her voice would fill the room. Jacob wouldn’t have been any more surprised, that first time, if tiny fireworks had begun to explode over the back of her head, or if she had transformed, in her chair, into a cheetah. The song would be something like “Amazing Grace,” and she’d fill it with such sadness, such depth of feeling, that, in addition to delight and astonishment, he would feel a small surge of panic, as if she had burst into tears rather than into song. When she turned back toward the table she’d be flushed and glossy with sweat, tucking her napkin back into her lap, and Jacob’s father would give everyone at the table a knowing, pleased look, as if she were an instrument on which he’d performed.
This singing, though, seemed to be connected to a dangerous unreliability in her life — she was a person subject to passions, untrustworthy whims, astonishing plans that would collapse at the last minute. The trip with a documentary crew to the northern coast of Alaska (his parents had actually begun to pack) canceled because of an argument with the producer; the plan to perform on “Oprah” gleefully announced and celebrated and now forgotten; the ongoing romance with the Polish fireman. Their father conveyed the connection between Judy’s dramatic gifts, her appeal, and her ultimate failings without having to explain it: to believe so insistently in your own talent was to invite suffering. It was like bragging. He was a man of no small talents, he didn’t want anyone to forget — he had once been poised to go far in radio, he had acted in all the best roles at Cornell — but he had chosen to go into selling scientific equipment because that had been the wisest option. To have choices, that was the thing. Judy had spent her whole adult life walking farther and farther out along the limb of her own talents and now there she was, too far to get back to the tree.
“Do you guys mind if I use the phone, in case the police left a message at home?”
Judy dialed the car phone and waited, looping the coils of the cord around her finger. She was embarrassed. With a wobble of her eyebrows, a funny face directed at Jacob or Will, she tried nudging this toward adventure, but in her distress she couldn’t pull it off.
But it did feel something like an adventure. The car crept along and Jacob kept his face just an inch from the window, staring out as if on a safari. Every mailbox, bush, bag of road salt, was sharpened by the possibility of concealing Paula. To be the one to find her would be unspeakable glory. Jacob imagined diving into traffic to save her, pulling her up from the bottom of a freezing river, crawling after her into a tunnel that was too narrow to fit anyone but him. An honorary badge from the police.
On the web of streets on the other side of Piedmont, their father decided they should split into two groups. Will and Jacob and their father would go on foot, and Judy and their mother would drive around the other half of the neighborhood. If the women found anything (their father said “anything,” rather than “anyone”) they would honk. If the men did, they were to shout. The streets were so quiet, every surface tamped down by snow, that a shout seemed as if it would have been hardly necessary — a firm clap would have done just fine.
These streets, though officially a part of Spillerton, were separated from the Vines’ side of town by a hard-to-isolate quality of danger. The people from school who lived over here — Nick Pember, Michael Cullerton, Aaron Bonwell, David Walther — were all tough in a way that people on Jacob’s side of town weren’t, they were scrappy and athletic and capable of startling cruelty. At school these were the boys who’d get into fistfights, tumbling around the mulch, returning to class with torn shirts and bloody noses. Jacob both dreaded and craved running into one of them. He loved to imagine the devastating casualness with which he’d explain what he was doing — but he understood too that he’d be taking an enormous risk, that his father might say something for which Jacob would be mocked for all time.
Their task was to tape up the signs to telephone poles and mailboxes, and to hand them out to anyone they happened to pass. Their father carried the stack, but he left most of the taping to Jacob and Will.
“You don’t have to put one on every single pole,” Will said. “If they haven’t seen her there, they’re not going to see her by the time they get there.”
“But someone might be not paying attention.”
“You’re an idiot.”
“Both of you shut up right now,” their father said. He said this in a growl, then, in apology, he added, “Will, don’t bully. Jacob, try not to waste the signs. There’s only this bunch.”
The wind sent clouds of snow scurrying just over the surface of the streets, and Jacob shut his eyes each time he passed through one. He felt like a polar explorer, impossibly brave and beset by hardship. His snow pants were wet and bunched, his face — when he pulled off a glove to touch it — felt cold and waxy and as if it belonged to someone else. With every slow step his boots made an odd creaking sound, which sounded to him like a voice begging him, go on, go on. A pair of boys from Will’s grade took turns sliding down a steep hill a few houses away — at the bottom they would wrestle and scramble and take turns trying to shove each other’s faces into the snow. Everything seemed, to Jacob, to depend on Will not noticing them.
“Hey!” one of them called out, horrifyingly. “Hey! Will! Come here for a second!”
“I can’t,” he called back. “I’m doing family stuff.” Will’s voice changed when he talked to them — he sounded the way he did on the phone, gruff and secretive.
“You aren’t helping,” Jacob hissed, once they were safely away. “Paula’s going to freeze because you’re standing there acting tough.”
“You’re a fucking idiot.”
“I hate you,” Jacob said, and real tears leapt to his eyes, in addition to the ones from the cold. He understood now, in a way he hadn’t quite the night before, that he was doomed. He was going to be reduced to crying to his mother, to explaining once and for all that this was unbearable, that he couldn’t spend another night alone. Simply couldn’t.
Will, walking along the sidewalk across the street, tapped out a rhythm with the flyers against his leg and clucked his tongue in a way that he knew made Jacob insane. Pop. Pop. A sludge of hate bubbled up in Jacob, practically choking him, and he imagined plunging a knife into Will’s chest. Blood soaking the snow, a helpless collapse. Jacob would undo it only if Will admitted that he’d been wrong, only if, with his dying breath, he promised that he regretted everything.
Part Three
Last night when he’d been struggling to fall asleep, Jacob had peeked out between the Venetian blinds next to his bed, expecting to see the beginning of the sun. But nothing. Perfect blackness, as if Earth had lost its way and would now swim back and forth in darkness forever. The smoke alarm flashed red. Now. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Now. Each flash seemed to confirm some terrible bit of news. Was it possible to feel this way if you weren’t sick? He hoped for a fever, or the familiar urgency of needing to throw up, but instead he just felt helplessly awake and a crackly nausea of the skin.
They’d gone to bed that night just as they always did, and Will had even listened patiently as Jacob described, in lavish and invented detail, that day’s basketball game. But after their lights had been out for a few minutes — when Jacob’s thoughts had just begun to tilt toward sleep — he woke up to the sound of Will rustling in his bed. He was gathering the blankets around himself, sitting up, and then, without saying a word, he was out the door.
Just outside their room was an area that they used hardly at all. It had a bookshelf full of the books that neither of them liked enough to keep close by, a pair of dark wicker baskets full of heavy, forgotten stuffed animals, a white desk made of the same material as their bedside tables. Now — while Jacob watched silently from their doorway — Will made himself a bed in this room, placing together a row of the itchy blue pillows that stood stacked in one corner. He lay himself down on these pillows, sighed, and didn’t move.
Was he sleepwalking? (A few times Will had had “night terrors,” during which he had crashed around the house, sweating profusely and shrieking whenever his parents tried to touch him.)
With his heart pounding, Jacob took the blankets from his own bed and went out to join Will on the floor. The carpet was stiff but thick, and Jacob tried to imagine, as he settled down under his covers, that he was comfortable, and that, if need be, this could be a tolerable new arrangement. Will didn’t stir.
But after a few minutes their mother appeared at the head of the stairs, just at the edge of their territory. She came onto the third floor, their floor, only very rarely; generally she stopped on the stop step and called to them, wearily respectful or else simply aware that she’d just as soon not see the condition of their room. She wore her long white nightshirt, and she took a few steps now onto their green carpet, but instead of speaking she simply gave both of her boys a sad look. Jacob felt that he’d been caught at something humiliating. “You guys aren’t going to get any sleep here,” she said quietly, almost as if to herself, and then to Jacob’s surprise she turned and headed back down the stairs.
Jacob could feel that Will was awake. And Jacob was certain too that if he were to say a word, or even to breathe too loudly, then Will was going to stand up. Only if he kept absolutely still, perfectly quiet, was there a chance that Will would actually fall asleep, and that their new arrangement would be able to settle into place. But after waiting for as long as he could bear, Jacob turned to scratch his side — and sure enough, Will stood up. Again he had gathered his blanket around him, and then, once he was on his feet, he stood over Jacob, looking down at him with contempt and bewilderment (Jacob could feel it — his eyes were tightly closed). Jacob stood up, practically holding his breath, and followed Will back in.
“What are you doing?” Will said, as he spread his blankets over his mattress.
“I’m trying to go to bed.”
“Why do you keep following me?”
“I want to sleep in our room, if you are.”
At this Will whirled around — Jacob was alarmed to see that he was furious. “Don’t you get it?” Will said. Some seam in him had ripped. “I don’t want this to be our room! I want to be alone!” Jacob felt, for the first time, the exquisite pain of hearing the very words that he most dreaded. The clarity, the stab of pain, the chilly flood of disbelief.
Trying to act exactly as if Will had never spoken, Jacob went ahead and settled into his bed. Now he was crying, but trying not to be noticed, and he didn’t say a word or move — instead he held the blankets pinned to his throat — when Will gathered his bedding again and shuffled out toward the back bedroom.
Just as Jacob passed Frane Road, he thought he heard someone move at the top of the street. A bush swayed where the sound had been.
“It’s a garbage can,” said Will.
“No, you jackass. Look! It’s moving!” Jacob suddenly felt that proving Will wrong on this point would be nearly as good as stabbing him. “Hello?” Jacob called, sprinting up the street. “Paula? Hello?”
It was a garbage can. But it was moving, being shifted and dragged by the old man who lived in the last house on the street. “What’s all that shouting about?” the man said, yanking the wings of his long coat more tightly around his body. His Rottweiler, a familiar menace, opened his eyes where he slept in the snow. The man was known for writing long, irate letters to Spillerton, demanding that students take recess indoors because the noise was keeping his sick wife awake. He was, Jacob realized, wearing only a bathrobe underneath his coat — his naked ankles stuck up from his sneakers. “Get! Get!” He glanced at his Rottweiler, who had stood up. “What is this, trying to scare me? I know you. I know what you boys want. Go on and make trouble somewhere else, huh?”
His skin was both boyish and ancient — smooth but lined with a fine red network of veins — and his eyes were large and pale, like a fish’s. Jacob stood watching him for a second, paralyzed by the approaching dog, before regaining mobility and running back down the street to his father and Will, calling, “It wasn’t her. It was a guy, but he hasn’t seen anything.”
“You didn’t give him a flyer,” Will said.
“I didn’t want to waste one. I talked to him.”
A few cars pulled to a stop alongside them as they walked, and each time the driver would ask if they needed a ride anywhere, and their father would explain No, but if you happen to see – and there would be a minute or two of unusually open conversation with these strangers. The car would go on with a flyer in the passenger’s lap, moving even more slowly than before.
The picture on the flyer had come from the vacation Jacob and Will had taken that June to the Chesapeake Bay. The boys had been in the picture too, but their mother had papered over everything but Paula for the Xerox machine. Paula stood wearing a life vest over a bathing suit and smiling her smile on the dock — this was the dock where they’d watched the brother and sister pull up their crab trap, a square cage hellishly full of black clacking claws. Jacob and Will’s parents had been in Florida that weekend, celebrating an anniversary by joining a scuba driving trip. Jacob remembered the vacation as a passage of rare joy.
Judy had rented them a narrow, dusty house that gave them all allergies, and the stove hadn’t seemed to work, so they drove barefoot into town and bought marshmallows and peanut butter for dinner. Jacob and Will fought over who got to light Judy’s cigarettes for her — Jacob practiced and practiced the hard metal flick all weekend until his thumb was sore and the flame leapt effortlessly. One afternoon Judy announced that she felt like doing something outdoorsy, so they canoed through a muddy inlet, and Jacob couldn’t manage to coordinate his paddle with everyone else’s, so while the boat lurched he looked down at the bottom, at fields of reeds pressed flat and at plastic bags, a miniature traffic cone, a surreally vivid rock.
The joke of the weekend was their father and what he’d been like when he was young. Judy told these stories with endless delight, and a presumption of endless fascination from the boys. “He followed me around for a month, asking me how you take a girl’s shirt off. Do you know what my friends and I called him? Pauly-wanna-cracker! Because he was like one of those birds that’s always following you around, repeating things. Call him that. Pauly-wanna-cracker. Don’t tell him I told you to!”
In town, where the grocery store was, Judy would tell these stories while looking half-heartedly for available men. “Your dad once told our mom and dad he was moving to Mexico. Has he told you guys about that? He packed his bag and everything. Here, gimme a light. He was probably fourteen. Wait, how about that guy?” She nodded in the direction of a paunchy man unloading boxes from the back of a truck.
“He looks too mean,” Will said, and she squinted thoughtfully, yes, he was probably right, too mean.
“Anyway, Mexico. I think he got it from a comic book. He was going to live on a ranch and design airplanes. He said it was because no one took him seriously enough at home. No one took him seriously. That was always his big thing. Oh, did our dad beat him when they found him. Hey hon!” The earnest young man walking out of a bike store looked around in some puzzlement, and Judy dissolved in giggles on Will’s shoulder.
With Judy there was no idea so outlandish that they didn’t dare to suggest it. She let them stay up until 11:30 one night, eating popcorn in their underwear and t-shirts, because the Fat Boys were performing on one of the late-night shows. Judy laughed until she wheezed, imitating again and again the jiggle one of them had done at the end of the song. “‘Night, homey,” she said.
She’d tried to sweep Paula up into the general hilarity too, and Paula’s mood did change, as Jacob remembered it. Her groaning became happier, she laughed, she spent hours at the table one day stacking piles of Monopoly money. Jacob knew from his mother that Paula had once chomped on a light bulb and needed to go to the emergency room, and that another time she’d thrown a saucer full of boiling water at Peter, but she didn’t seem dangerous now, she seemed like an unusual but not unpleasant pet.
“Why’s she like that?” Jacob had asked his mother afterwards. He wouldn’t think of asking his father such a thing.
“That’s how some people are born. It’s just bad luck.”
“What about when she grows up?”
“That’s what so awful — it doesn’t get better.”
“So, what, she’ll be like pounding her against the wall when she’s an old lady?”
“If she even gets to be an old lady,” she said, biting off of the conversation — this was a line of such bleakness that even his mother, frank as she was about bodies and death, refused to pass it.
Some dramatic disaster befalls people like Paula, Jacob understood. This gave her an aura of special power, even over adults, as if she alone knew a tremendous secret. Her final surprise. It would be something she would do as unthinkingly as eating the light bulb or throwing the saucer but even worse. Something unimaginable.
And now here it was. Surely, though, the ultimate disaster would be more clearly marked out, wouldn’t feel so provisional? Surely there wouldn’t be such uncertainty, even between his parents, about whether the night would end with Paula warm in bed or dead in a freezing creek?
Part Four
Each telephone pole Jacob approached was covered in all different kinds of staples, thick and thin, silver and rust-red. On one was a Cat Found sign, on another a flyer for furniture movers with ten carefully cut phone number tags all untouched.
The wind had taken on a higher, more frantic, pitch, and, except for their father muttering as he plucked more fliers off the pile, they talked almost not at all as they went on. “Should we maybe start knocking on people’s doors, in case they saw anything?” Jacob asked.
“No, they won’t know anything.” And then, half a block later, “Oh, why not. It can’t hurt. Let’s try it.”
An old woman holding a wooden stirring spoon, with the sound of TV news loud in the background, shook her head with true concern, studying the flyer. “Has she been gone very long?” she asked. “It’s so awful, when they’re young. My heart does go out.”
“She’ll turn up,” Jacob’s father said to her. He had a voice he used around strangers, an entire professional persona, that made Jacob brim with pride. He seemed to be equal to anything. “It’s happened before. Sorry to be a bother. Have a good night.”
A girl in pajamas, who Jacob recognized as being in the grade above Will’s, asked in a shy voice if the girl they were looking for was challenged or anything like that. “She’s retarded,” Jacob said. His father added, “She’s just fine.” And then, once the door had closed, “You don’t need to get into it with people. I’ll talk.”
Outside the next house, just as they were heading up the front walk, Jacob’s father said, “Wait — a — second,” and stepped lightly over toward the garage. Jacob held his breath. Had his father heard something? The garage door was hanging half open, and he bent over to look under it, then stuck his head inside. The house’s front door flew open and a man with a mustache charged past Jacob and Will. You need something?”
“We’re just looking for a little girl. I thought I might have seen something in there.”
“Stay off my place, alright? What are you doing in there?”
“We’re looking for a little girl. Don’t be a nut.”
“I’m not a nut – you’re on my fucking property.”
“Don’t you dare talk to me in front of my sons that way.”
“I’ll talk any way I want. Get the hell off my lawn.”
“Go fuck yourself,” their father said, walking away (“Who’s talking that way now? Huh? Some fucking model you are!”), and an air of nervous amazement hovered over the boys and their father, just as it did after any outburst of his. Confrontations at the grocery store, arguments with waiters, furious rants to telemarketers — they regarded all of them with semi-anxious awe, like branches of lightning during the severest storms. “Forget about him,” their father said. “Don’t think twice about a jackass like that.”
The honking, when it came, sounded astonishingly close. Three hard bleats and instantly they were stumbling through the snow, hurrying in the direction of the bike path. “That did sound like our horn, didn’t it?” their father said, but all of them knew it had.
The car honked again and then a third time (“That had better be Judy and not your mother,”) and finally they found the Volvo parked in front of Kathleen Bunson’s house. It had been their mother honking, or at least she was the one in the driver’s seat. Kathleen stood just outside the car, holding her skis, talking with Judy about something. She was thin and had long messy blonde hair and a weathered, weary face. Jacob liked her. After school she taught dance classes in the all-purpose room that always involved colored scarves. She seemed to take children precisely as seriously as she took adults, and so did her shambling, funny husband, who was one of the only men in town with a full beard. He was known for being a Buddhist, for his vegetarianism and prayer mats — he would say about himself, happy and scandalous, “But there Larry goes with his old sacred East stuff again.” He came walking out of the house now in jeans and a sweater, looking as if he didn’t notice the snow.
Kathleen and Larry’s son, it turned out, had been driving and had seen a girl standing alone alongside River Road in front of the complex with the office supply store and Crazy Cones.
“I’d just like to know why he didn’t stop for her,” their father said, once they were all in the car.
“Oh, you’re such a grump,” their mother said.
“You really are,” said Judy. “They seemed great. She said she can feel that Paula’s fine. She said it so confident. We’re all gonna go for a retreat in March in Massachusetts.”
“Who is?”
“We all are.”
There was no one on the street in front of the complex, no one in the parking lot. “Shit,” Judy said, looking around. “Shit. I’m sorry, boys. Shit.” Jacob had never seen these streets so barren and unpromising.
“What’s that over there?” Will said in a drawn-out voice, and all the air in the car seemed to disappear, or to go still. There was a dark hump in the middle of the road, about fifty feet away. “I’m sure it’s just –” their father said, but he didn’t finish, because the closer they got the less it looked like a branch or a rock. Something perfectly still, not yet covered in snow, just where River Road curved out of sight.
“Wait, stop,” Judy said. “You go. You go. I can’t. I can’t. Oh God.” She was bobbing forward and backward in her seat just as Paula might have done.
Jacob’s father got out of the car and Will did too, and before his mother could stop him, Jacob leapt out to follow. He didn’t feel afraid, he felt merely a tenacious narrowing of purpose, as if he were walking across a wobbly bridge.
“Well, that certainly doesn’t look right,” their father said. A mound that could have been a torso — and something lower to the ground, longer that could have been an arm. It seemed as if it couldn’t have been anything else. A high-pitched mindless chattering accompanied Jacob’s every step. As they got closer, he thought of running back. He did glance back, but the car was too far away, he didn’t think he could make it.
The shape had taken on such vividness as a body, as Paula’s body, that when they finally came upon it, it seemed as if someone must have made a switch at the last second. Someone must have taken Paula away and put this burst black bag of garbage — torn battery packs and celery stalks and a heap of stained paper plates — in her place; some bit of magic, a transformation.
And some transformation seemed to have affected their father too — he looked around him and seemed suddenly to have realized what it was that his sons would be seeing, if he’d been right. A look of guilt and alarm passed over his face, sensibleness rushing back in. “Now who’d put that there,” he said. He gave the bag a light, disdainful kick, and his foot accidentally dipped inside, a piece of orange peel clung to his shoe.
Once they were back in the car, just as they were going to turn back toward home, a police car passed them going the other way. Its lights were off, but it drove quickly, and they watched it turn into the complex they’d dismissed and park in front of Crazy Cones. Their father followed the police car in. Hope throbbed almost visibly in Judy, she sat greedily forward and wrung her hands. Jacob’s father shut off the radio. A man walked out of Crazy Cones to the police car and bent to the driver’s window, explaining something. He pointed back to the street, shook his head. It was the African man who managed the store. He’d delivered ice cream cakes for soccer parties, given out free cones on the day of the Spillerton Fun Run. Now he walked over to the Volvo — Jacob’s father fumbled for the window-crank as if he’d never used it.
“You all looking for a girl?”
Part Five
The manager led them into his store, where the police stood chatting by the freezer, and displayed Paula to them with irritable pride. She sat alone at one of the high tables in the back with a sundae nearly untouched in front of her, wearing her enormous Notre Dame sweatshirt and sweatpants.
“I was already all closed up,” the manager said. “She start crying, so I give her the ice cream. You her parents? I keep saying to her that I need to close up. The roads are going to be all a mess.”
The store was dim and smelled exactly the way it always did, a sticky stale sugary smell. Paula drew her spoon through the sundae, mashing it up, and occasionally she’d lift the spoon to her wet mouth, touching the ice cream to her lips and then lowering it without taking a bite. She seemed not to notice that anyone had come in, although Judy, in a rapture of relief, was draped over her back, kissing her neck and shoulders.
“I seen her outside going up the street,” the manager said, “and I figure something not right. Car with no lights on nearly knock her right to the ground. People can’t be walking outside in weather like this alone. Then I get close enough and see she’s not alright and I think, Now who let you go out for a walk tonight? The police got to know about this.” He addressed no one in particular, but spoke with vehemence. “Who let her wandering around the middle of the road on a night like tonight?”
Jacob was powerfully let down. The unbearable jumpiness as they stepped up to what turned out to be garbage hadn’t been only, or even mostly, terror; there had been excitement too. To be present for such drama, part of the search party — he would have missed school for days and days, he would have been touched, set apart, made extraordinary; he and Will would have had to talk to each other about it. But watching Paula now, with her wet mouth and running nose and little piggish eyes, he felt slack with disappointment.
“Oh, my Paula darling,” Judy kept saying. “My sweet girl. You scared me so much. You were supposed to be watching TV! Don’t ever scare me like that again. Never do that again! You hear me?”
The policemen didn’t pretend to be any more interested than they were. The one with a gray mustache walked over to Paula and Judy and said, “A hell of a night for a walk. We’ve been out looking for you before, huh, Paula? You just don’t like staying put, do you? You like wandering? You’re going to give your mom and dad a heart attack, you know that?”
The manager stood at the center of all this looking forlorn. “Supposed to been closed at eight o’clock,” he said softly to Jacob’s father. He’d taken off his apron, he’d shut off the lights behind the counter, locked the cash registers.
“You’ve gone far beyond the call of duty,” their father said. “We’ll need to thank you somehow.”
The manager shook his head and said, “Just worried the snow’s going to block everything up on the roads.”
Jacob’s father took Paula’s sundae and slid it unceremoniously into the trash. Judy seemed hardly to notice.
In the parking lot, before they got into their car, the gray-haired police officer turned to Judy and said, “You and Paula need a ride home or you all covered?”
Judy looked back and forth between the policeman and her brother with an expression of delighted indecision, like a girl with two suitors at a dance. “Paula, we’re going to ride in the police car! How’s that sound?”
She hurried to the car but seemed to sense that she’d left something undone. “Thank you!” she shouted to the manager across the parking lot. “Paula, say thanks. Thank you so, so much!”
The manager smiled grimly and set about trying to start his old car.
“Oh my god,” Judy said, facing her brother now. “I will never –. I can’t even think about –. Oh my god oh my god. What the hell was I going to do? I really had to ask myself that: what the hell was I going to do? Here we come, officer! Sorry! Bye guys! I love you!”
She’d been taking a bath when Paula had run away. A long, lingering bath — candles, lavender oil — of the sort she loved but had denied herself as long as Paula was staying with her. But the man she was seeing was coming over tonight. And tomorrow Peter would be back and Paula would go with him. No crises, she’d report. They’d had fun, just a couple of girls. With her foot she nudged open the tap and let in a blast of scalding water, sunk herself lower in the tub.
As she came down the front stairs afterwards, wrapped in towels and feeling pleasantly dreamy, she noticed that the house was cold, but she didn’t think immediately of what that might mean. “Paula?” she called. The TV was on. But then she saw the front door open, and snow on the edge of the carpet in the hallway. “Paula?”
She rushed outside in her towels and bare feet and looked frantically up and down the street. What amazed her, afterwards, was how quickly she’d believed the worst. Again, had been the first thing she thought, although Paula had never run away from her house before. She meant her life, she realized, she meant disasters that anyone but her would have been able to predict. Everything she touched went this way. Everything. She went back in and picked up the phone.
Jacob’s father drove off in the opposite direction from the garbage bag, and Jacob strained vainly to twist around in his seat. On Woodside the sledders were mostly inside by now, except for a couple of older boys that Jacob didn’t know. Someone had built a jump midway down the hill, and someone else had planted a stick in it with a glove jammed on top so that it stood like a flag. The older boys were being chased down the hill by a Golden Retriever who barked with every step.
“Wait a minute,” his father said to himself, when they were nearly home, and he reversed a few feet. He eased out of the car and grabbed his sled, which lay just where he’d tossed it, and put it in the trunk. No one felt the need to comment that they would have ordinarily. Not Good memory or even just Brr – nothing. It felt the way the ends of the very longest drives did — mild but pervasive exhaustion, some sadness or defeat that could usually be washed away by the first sight of the hotel room TV or a good dinner.
The feeling lingered now, though, and followed Jacob up to his room — where Will’s bed was still made and his binders of basketball cards still stood on the shelves between his soccer trophies, but where Will would never sleep again. All this space was Jacob’s now, however little he wanted it. He’d lost, he hadn’t gotten his way, and he wasn’t going to get it. He turned on the radio and turned it loud enough for Will to hear. “What the hell is going on up there?” his father shouted, so he turned it off. Before he’d brushed his teeth, before he’d even taken his clothes off, he was asleep on his bed.
The dog outside barked and barked, chasing its owners down the hill, and Jacob succeeded in weaving the sound into his dream. He was with his mother in a leaking canoe, in the dream, and every time the dog barked his mother coughed. She was trying to drink the water. But when the barking stopped, his dream seemed to stub its toe. He woke up and found that hours had passed, and found too a simple, startling idea waiting for him: Paula had been in the road. The thought wasn’t his, it was handed to him fully formed. Nothing he could think of would convince him otherwise. Suddenly shivering, he peeled off his pants and sweatshirt and stuffed himself under his blanket. Had he really gotten a good look at the heap of garbage? Shouldn’t they have sorted through it? Couldn’t she have been under it, or behind it? They’d all miscalculated and overlooked what was plainly in front of them. The ice cream store, the police, Judy’s kisses — all of it blew away like scraps, when confronted with the simple picture of Paula on her side, shivering in the snow. He had no doubt that if he were to go back there now she’d be waiting for him, she’d be closer to death but still breathing, but that she wouldn’t survive the night.
He did nothing.
He thought of going to the back bedroom to wake Will, or of making the treacherous trip down the stairs to his parents, but he felt stuck in his bed as surely if he’d been strapped. Or not quite as sure. He knew the restraints could be overcome — he’d overcome them on nights when the need to pee had won out over visions of a serial killer crouched beside the doorway — but tonight he let himself give in. He fell asleep again, by steady ticks, and when he woke up in the morning — to the sound of his father’s voice in the kitchen, the sound of a snow day — his assurance had wavered. Maybe Paula really was home with Judy, and maybe it really had been nothing but soggy napkins and apple cores out there in the street. But a part of him held onto the belief, guarded it. On the way downstairs, when he stopped at the window on the landing and saw, touching his nose to the cold glass, that there had been yet another layer of snow, that the cars and trees and sled-tracks had all again been perfectly covered, he felt a flare of vicious, and triumphant, satisfaction.
