Tangled Up in Blue
LL Brown
For Warren and TL with much love
Published by Boat Drinks Press at Smashwords
Copyright 2010 LL Brown
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PROLOGUE
Sometimes early in the morning I can’t sleep. Something snaps me wide awake, but I refuse to recognize that sleep is over. I lie in the dark as if dead, trying to fool myself that I am still dreaming the deadness dream, the one where I am Katy and I am buried alive in a human-sized box, even though we don’t really know whatever happened to Katy, and I just got that idea from a movie called The Vanishing, which you should rent unless you get too scared by scary movies. I say that, but my true underlying belief is that everyone should be a lot more scared than they are. Not of terrorists, and not of criminals somehow getting past the gates of our neighborhood. But of something.
Everyone says, worst case scenario, Katy’s with Jesus. This makes me think of Jesus being held captive in a box, but that’s not as scary because of course he could probably get out okay.
This morning, as on many mornings, without even making the decision, I roll out of bed and onto my feet. Without pause I run. Down the hall on thick padded carpet, out the patio door, cater-corner across the raggedy expanse of back yard – our yard is bigger than most of our neighbors’, but our house is smaller -- and down into the cement culvert behind our house. I am barefoot, and my feet grab the rough cement, but it doesn’t hurt any more because I’ve been doing this for so long. If it is still dark, and today it is, I can see from the dry floor of the concrete channel the halo of lights shining out of the backs of the mini-mansions that house our neighbors.
Simon Court is what they call a gated community. We literally have walls surrounding our division, and a guard out front to stop anyone without a certain
little gold and blue sticker on their windshield. My grandparents lived here before the wall was built, before a lot of the houses were torn down and rebuilt bigger, brighter and closer together, with redder bricks and grander windows and security company signs sticking out of the ground next to their front steps. We inherited our proximity to faux wealth. Used to be you had to be downright wealthy to live inside a fortress; you had to be the king, or someone he trusted with his life. But Dad says Simon Hills is full of people struggling to pay for their mini-mansions, which the builders strive to make look like real ones. But my parents and I are here through luck, or I prefer to say chance, simply because we were here before the developers came through. Before everyone got so scared. Why didn’t we sell to the developers, I asked my Dad once. Because Simon Hills High is a good school, he answered. I came to realize that by good, he meant safe. People think we’re joking when we say there’s only one fight a year in our halls. But it’s true. So far, anyway.
Running south parallel to Simon Court, I pass the Maguire house, which my dad calls Glare House because their Christmas lights rival a department store’s in wattage, mixing Wise Men with Santa and his elves to achieve maximum, if illogical, presence. Mom says he’s just jealous, with his measly strings of red and green strewn across our single hedge. It’s September, and Glare House is all dark now. Mr. Maguire is often away on business, and his wife sleeps late after staying up half the night, watching portions of movies randomly, never a beginning and never an end. Next to the Maguires are our newest neighbors, Brandon and Laurie Beck, who are young and good-looking in a soap opera-ish kind of way, properly groomed and, well, clean. They each drive a new Lexus and often wear clothes that coordinate, if not match, though that seems too stupid to be purposeful. Sometimes they are up feeding their new baby. Right now the kitchen light is on, so I can see their giant shadows thrown up against the big blank wall of their family room.In the last house on this side, Rob and Rose Lewis live with their five-year-old Savannah, who is the Spawn of Satan, or aspires to be, though no one ever says so to their faces. I sometimes babysit for her but I’m trying to think of a polite way to stop, since she steals and lies and generally reflects the state of the decay of humanity, what with the wars and suicide bombings and rudeness you see every day. Mom sometimes tells me, when she’s in a spiritual kind of mood, that Jesus says to love everyone the same. But I’m not Jesus.
Three doors down, the culvert makes a Y and I veer left and cross in the wet dark under the Simon Court bridge, then take another left to come back up behind the houses across the street from ours. Jan and Wendell Cook live on that corner, and their house is dark. Jan used to teach school until her husband started making fabulous money selling real estate. They moved onto this impeccably ordered street soon after she quit her job and Dad says she hasn’t quite figured out how not to work.
Dad’s a cop. A detective actually. He likes his job because what he does truly affects the world in a positive way. But he would love to be able to quit work and read all day, so it mystifies him when people don’t know what to do with their time. But I’ve noticed that most people really don’t. When Dad hears someone say they are bored, he suggests they come over and mow our lawn. Or paint the trim on our house. He has dozens of jobs for them.
Next to the Cooks are Rick and Theresa Genovese, whose kids go to my school but pretend they don’t know one another. If a teacher accidentally refers to Sam when talking to Sophia, or asks Sophia how Tony is doing, they’ll each scowl and shake their heads and possibly say, “Who?” and everyone laughs because they hate one another so much. The funny part is, everyone likes all three of them because they’re all really good-natured. Jasper and Pam Langheim and their twins, Hayley and Paige, live in the next house. The twins are a year behind me at school, but sometimes hang with Isabel Walker, my best – well, oldest -- friend, who lives directly across the street from us with her parents, next to the Langheims. All of their houses are usually dark, but sometimes I can see that Isabel is up early like me; sometimes I can hear her pretending to be Leadbelly, wailing on her guitar. My dad keeps telling her Clapton is God, but she doesn’t realize he’s trying to be funny. She just wrinkles her nose.
Today, as is the case on many mornings, Isabel’s mother Audrey is up drinking a giant coffee and peering out of the big kitchen window and waiting for her Missing Kids website to load. She glances out the window as I run past and her gaze sticks for as long as we can see each other. Today is a school day and I should be in bed getting my sleep. But even more than that, she is thinking how unsafe it is, even in Simon Hills, for me to be out by myself at this hour. Katy, the original Missing Kid, is Isabel’s older sister. Or she was, because she probably is “with Jesus.” After this many years, she must be dead.
I run on, past the Rourke house where Tim, two years ahead of me, disappointed his parents with Cs and beer cans under the bed until he left for state college last month. But who doesn’t disappoint someone, somehow? That’s what my mom says. The Rourke house is dark. One more house, the Knights’, features a solitary light in the hall, but I know no one is up; it’s a night light, kept on, their son Shipley told me outside the Quik Trip one day, because his whole family is afraid of the dark.
I turn one more time, running up the side of the culvert, and swing over the railing to the bridge that crosses back to the other side of Simon Court, my side. My bare feet pad silently as I run back down into the culvert behind my row of houses, on the last stretch before home. I pass the Gable place, which houses the only other people who, like us, were here before developers gated the neighborhood. Their house is big enough to fit in, though, and Mrs. Gable is on the school board, though her husband is retired and stays home all day. You can see the TV flickering in the front window all day long. They are the oldest people on the block.
At last I am in back of the green house, the little one that doesn’t fit in, even more than our house doesn’t. It’s been empty for over a year, and it’s a rental house – a garish black and orange FOR RENT sign is parked in the front yard – which automatically makes it suspect in Simon Hills. My mom explained this, because I couldn’t understand it: it would be okay if the place were, instead, a studio apartment on top of someone’s garage, but the little green house belongs to someone who lives outside the neighborhood, someone who so far hasn’t sold it to be torn down and replaced with something new, a dazzling residence with huge windows and bricks that are freshly-baked but look old, and room in the garage for three cars. Mom says it’s because the lot is too small by itself. The developer would have to make it into a small park, or combine it with another lot to make it big enough to hold a typical house in our neighborhood.
Our house is one story, with fewer square feet than most in the area and inept landscaping, but it has an attached garage and a large picture window and a small grove of trees, so our divergence from the norm is not as noticeable. The green house is too small, too impermanent with its peeling wood siding, and its ill-conceived color. It is waiting, as the neighbors wait, for someone to figure out how to deal with its presence, as if they are at a party and someone in a wheelchair has come in. They want to be polite, to make sure the odd person out doesn’t think they’re condescending, but they end up ignoring the cripple and hoping he’ll go away.
Just one more thing to be scared of, I guess.
AUTUMN
CHAPTER 1
The exquisite Mr. Tristan murmured to us about the dangers of totalitarian regimes, his warm eyes and cool grin making it clear that, if we weren’t actually listening, we were missing something really special. We would all be sorry later, too, his shaggy haircut seemed to say.
My good old best friend Isabel, who sat two rows over from me, was gazing at our teacher, appearing to be paying avid attention, but I knew she was hearing music in her head. Later, she would ask me for my notes, then she would lose them, then she would ask me to explain them. She definitely wouldn’t read them. She was failing AP World History, but she didn’t care because then maybe next year she could take it again and spend an hour a day with the object of her inappropriate thoughts. Back in ninth grade, she had audaciously written “Isabel Tristan” on the inside of her binder. Mercifully, she threw it away after about two weeks. Mr. T was dating one of the counselors, but that didn’t stop Isabel or any other girl at Simon Hills High from letting their minds wander where no mind should go. Not in public, anyway.
But no matter who flirted with him, or how much, Mr. T never seemed to notice. They were like little mosquitoes he swatted away, even as he assigned more reading, more Socratic journals, more essays. The work was hard, but when he made you do something, it wasn’t a waste of time. You actually learned something.
Isabel was my good old best friend because we hadn’t actually told each other that we weren’t friends anymore. But for a long time we’d been careless toward each other, when we weren’t being downright foul.
“You’d look really pretty if you wore a little makeup, Jackie,” she’d said to me recently.
“And you’d look really smart if you carried a book around with you, Isabel,” I’d replied. She had laughed and wrinkled her nose at me.
I don’t know what reason she would give to explain why we don’t just disengage from each others’ lives. Maybe she’d say it’s because we grew up directly across the street from each other, or maybe that she has faith that I’ll come around some day and be like her and her new, more attractive, friends. Those kinds of memories, those kinds of delusions, can make you think you have a lot in common.
But if you ask me, it’s because of Katy. It’s been ten years since she disappeared. When it happened, Isabel and I were only six and lounging around in the den at her house amusing ourselves by watching Isabel’s old copy of The Last Unicorn and refusing to believe it really was as bad as my mom said it was. It was a lazy day, a Sunday, and we both remember Isabel’s mom, Audrey, saying goodbye to us when she went to pick Katy up from her summer job. Katy was sixteen and had her license, but she didn’t have her own car yet. We remember Audrey coming home without Katy, making the first tentative phone calls to see if Katy had gone home with a friend. We remember the police coming around later, to ask Audrey and her husband Mike all the unremarkable questions they ask -- what was she wearing? And, was there trouble at home? Because Katy was gone; no one had seen her since that morning. At first everyone thought she had run away, or that she forgot to meet her mother and would turn up later in the day with some lame explanation for worrying everyone like that. Isabel and I thought it was exciting, frankly, because uniformed police never came to Simon Hills, except to glide by in their cars, watching for lawnmower thieves, or otherwise suspicious-looking people. People who didn’t live there, in other words, and had somehow breached the gates.
But when I started home from Isabel’s house that evening to have dinner at home, I met my dad coming across the street in the opposite direction. His beat isn’t missing persons, or kidnapping, or homicide. He investigates burglaries and armed robberies.But someone had asked him to step over, as if your across-the-street neighbor might automatically give you more hope than strangers.
“Dad. What?” I asked.
He just shook his head and told me to go on home. The look on his face told me not to argue, not right now. My stomach turned over, and I watched from our big front window all evening, waiting for him to come home again, thinking if I looked hard enough the house itself would tell me what was going on. Later, Mom would tell me the beginning of the end: Audrey remembered seeing a man waiting outside the store when she dropped Katy off after church. She thought nothing of it at the time, but when she described him to the police, they matched the description to another one from a few weeks before, a near-abduction of a high school girl walking home from school.
Back then, and for a long time to come, we all thought Katy would be found alive. Surely we would get to know the end, and surely the end would be happy. Katy might need to be mended, but surely she would come home.
At the time, Isabel was sure Katy had run away from home, or she said she thought that. It was crazy; Katy hadn’t taken any money with her, and she was dressed in churchy work clothes, clothes she hated. She left her diary and all of her other possessions behind. But Isabel rejected logic when it came to her older sister. Katy was the beautiful one, she used to say. Katy was the one who belonged in the Real World.
“You know this isn’t our real world, don’t you?” she used to ask me. “This isn’t where we are supposed to be.”
My mother said Isabel watched too many Disney movies.
Isabel nudged me. Mr. T was giving us the next week’s worth of assignments, and she wanted to make sure I was listening because even if she tried, she’d miss something. She grinned, glad to catch me drifting off for once. Point for her. The bell rang and I gathered my things and turned left out the door; normally we stopped at our lockers before going down a floor to British Lit with Mrs. Harris. Last year when we were still the best of friends, we had arranged to take three of our six classes together. But I looked around and Isabel was halfway down the hall to the right. I almost stopped and called to her, but thought better of it.
I made it to Harris’ class before her. She came walking in with Mira Burton. What can I say about Mira without it sounding as if I’m just jealous? Nothing, I guess. If high school were the Mafia, she would be capo di tutti capi. I’m sure you have one at your high school. She’s not the most pretty, or the smartest, or the most fun. But people congregate around her and no one can say why. She’s a blank to talk to and yet the most fascinating guys end up being her boyfriend, at least for a while. I wanted to shake her. Or them. And Isabel was being thoroughly chummy with her.
This shouldn’t have surprised me. School had been in session for four weeks and from the first day she had been moody. We had gathered as usual before school with our familiar cohorts: Beowulf Yes-That’s-My-Real-Name Harvey, our brooding artist Justin, Evil Luther, and Olivia, the sweet one. Luther calls himself evil, by the way; he likes to say horrible things just to make people angry but we have learned to ignore him. Isabel had gathered with us, but didn’t join in our mindless chatter. She leaned against the building and smiled, but declined to sit with us in our circle.
In the following weeks, Isabel had laughed at our jokes but sat with us at lunch less and less. I looked around for her but often did not know where she was. I pictured her off alone somewhere, maybe getting serious and studying for once, though there was no other evidence of that. But when I saw her with Mira, I realized she had been moving into another social circle: the Bowheads. That sounds mean, but it’s a simple fact that they wear bows a lot. The bows weren’t the problem, though. We both went to middle school with Mira and I recognized her to be treacherous. She would take you in and make you one of her crowd, but just until she got bored with you. Then she would entertain herself by humiliating you publicly. She was like a stereotype in a bad movie. But as Dad says, there’s always an original for every cliché.
Isabel should have known that, too. It wasn’t a secret. But every year, every month, someone new fell for it. It was Isabel’s turn.
I caught Olivia’s eye and could tell she was thinking the same thing I was. I shrugged at her. She gave me a sad head-tilt back: I don’t get it either.
Mrs. Harris finished taking roll and asked someone on each row to get a stack of books to pass out. She started a signout sheet going around and turned on the video projector to give us some background information.
“Do we have to take notes?” Tony Genovese asked.
“Oh no,” said Mrs. Harris, smiling. “Not at all.” Then she stopped talking so he could think that through.
Olivia, the sweet one, whispered to the questioner, “Yes.”
Tony seemed puzzled at first, and when some of us started to laugh, he got it, and opened his folder to get out some paper.
Mrs. Harris acted out an elaborate shiver, as if she had just escaped a trap in a horror movie.
“Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner comes from a school of writing called the Angry Young Man,” she began.
“Ooh!” said Evil Luther. “At last, someone speaks to me!”
“Yes, Luther. I thought of you when I was putting together my notes.”
“Can I do the lecture for you?”
“You know I love you.” This means no. Mrs. Harris says it any time someone is being obnoxious. Evil Luther hears it every day.
“So, anyway,” Mrs. Harris continued, “the Angry Young Men were a group of British writers, kind of a subset of social realism. Anyone remember anything about that?” she asked accusingly.
There was a distressing silence before Beowulf broke down and attempted an answer. “Does it have something to do with being realistic, and talking about society?”
Mrs. Harris laughed bemusedly. “Well, at least you were using logic there, Bey. Um, yeah, it does.”
Mrs. H went on to tell us about all these blue-collar types who suddenly started writing about the corrupt underbelly of the world when no one wanted to hear about it. To Mrs. Harris, that is the exact center of what is wrong with everything, everywhere: that nobody wants to hear about it.
“So, given what I just told you about the economic and social situation in England in the 1950s, she hinted broadly, what do you suppose these angry people were so upset about? Luther?”
She had him there; Evil is smart but he hates to be told what to do, so of course he didn’t consider that he might actually know the answer. “Democrats?” he ventured. Oh yeah; I forgot to say that Luther lives on the far right side of the political spectrum. Mrs. Harris is really liberal and she says it’s unnatural for young people to be conservative. But she has a sense of humor about it.
“This was in England, Luther. They don’t have Democrats and Republicans. Over there, you would consider the Labour Party the enemy. But, no, these guys were a bit more likely to belong to Labour. In fact, you might think about that. I can’t believe you, Luther, can think of nothing they would be angry about.”
Olivia, who can’t stand even friendly conflict, whispered loudly to Evil. “Labor! That’s a hint!” But Evil ignored her. Because he’s evil.
As usual, Mrs. Harris wouldn’t give us the answer. She made us get into groups and brainstorm things young males might be angry about. Olivia, Justin, Beowulf and I gathered around Evil’s desk in the back of the room. Isabel stayed with Mira and they teamed up with Paige and Samantha. All four of them were wearing the same color. I don’t know if it was on purpose or not, but it said something.
And then there was a fire drill. We knew it was a drill because it was the last day of the month, and the administrators always forget to hold the legally required drill until the last day. As usual, people grabbed their backpacks even though we’re supposed to leave them where they are for safety’s sake. As usual, we blocked the driveway outside the exit door instead of spreading out on the grass. As usual, you could see plainly through the line of windows that the counselors had chosen to stay inside the building, ready to burn alive if they were wrong about its being just a drill. As usual, a mere five minutes later we were told to go back to class.
But when was the last time you heard of a school burning down? There was one out in a small town near here about five years ago, but that was because of lightning. I don’t even know why we have fire drills.
CHAPTER 2
At dinner that night, my father tried to clarify Mr. Tristan’s point about totalitarian regimes, because I just don’t get how people could let themselves follow a dictator, how they could allow one guy to kidnap their neighbors and kill their relatives and generally take away their freedom, without doing something about it. Whereas he’s a cop and sees it every day.
“It’s like that woman I told you about a few weeks ago, the one who wouldn’t press charges against her son?”
I thought back. “The guy who cut up all the furniture with a machete?”
“Well, not all of it. She had locked him out, and he broke back in while she was supposed to be at church, but she stayed home that day. He destroyed her favorite rocking chair and stole some money she had stashed in a canister. She tried to stop him and got a pretty bad gash on her upper arm.”
“How charming,” my mother says. She is amazed that my father loves his job.
“Yes. Anyway, yeah, he had an arrest record long as the Bible, but she refused to send him to jail. She said he just wasn’t himself.”
“But that’s stupid,” I said.
“Yes. It is,” he answered, and let me think about it for a while.
We always seem to have this same conversation whenever I underestimate the dark side of human nature, which is so often it’s pretty much my hobby. I’m thinking of starting a web site for fellow sufferers: www.toostupidtolive.com.
“So,” I ventured, “you’re saying that it’s not so much that evil is too strong in the world, as it is that people don’t realize it’s there?” By evil, my dad would mean criminals: serial killers, rapists, drug dealers, child molesters and of course burglars and robbers. I thought it was more subtle than that: talking behind people’s backs, lying to their faces.
“Well, yeah. Not to say there isn’t lots of evil out there. But so many times, it could be -- it could be rendered helpless, so to speak, if people just thought for a minute before they did things.”
I looked over at Mom. This had caught her attention.
“You mean, like watch your kids when they’re in the swimming pool? Lock the car while you dash into the store for cigarettes, instead of leaving it open and running? Like, actually know where they are at three o’clock in the morning?” Grieving parents on TV who had forgotten to do these things were her least favorite members of humanity. “I just want to warn the other parents,” they inevitably say, and my mother can’t abide it. “Don’t warn us!” she mutters at them from the sofa, “Everybody but you knows that already! You’re the idiot!”
“Yes, just like that,” my dad grinned at her. He doesn’t think it’s funny, it’s not that, but he loves it when she gets riled. He says that’s why he married her, because she bothered to care so much more than most people.
Mom says she comes by her allergy to stupid criminal behavior honestly. I’ve never met him, but we have a relative, her cousin Jerry, who is a longtime drug user and petty criminal. She says he was always asking her parents for money and for a while they fell for it, always thinking he was going to get a job, get a place to live, and make something of his life. He’s in his forties now and doing jail time for trying to burglarize the house next door to where he was living. Somehow, he dropped a piece of junk mail he was carrying right under the window he came through, so he wasn’t hard to find. I’ve always had a hard time believing some of Mom’s stories about Uncle Jerry, but the older I get the more I think she isn’t exaggerating.
Before Mom could respond to Dad grin, I got a text on my phone and tried to surreptitiously press “ignore.” We all knew it was probably Isabel, my parents don’t believe in talking on the phone during or after dinner. “The phone is a utensil,” my mother says, “like a fork. We don’t have to obey it.”
But this time, Mom said, “It’s Isabel, isn’t it? Go ahead.” Curious.
In the service to timesaving, I called her back. “S’me,” she said. She was chewing on something while she talked, which I never thought was annoying until she started doing it. “Have you looked out your window lately?”
“Nope. We’re still at the table. What’s up?”
“Just look. Go look out your bedroom window.” she smacked. “You can see them from there.”
Them?
I explained to the parents and escaped into my room. I flopped across the bed with my phone and nosed my head past the curtains to see what I could see, which was a funny-looking, banged-up yellow Jeep hooked to a U-Haul trailer in the driveway of the little green house. The porch light was on, and next to the Jeep was one of those Large Cars, as mom puts it – an Escalade or a Yukon – something almost as big as the house. Three people – two men and a woman -- stood on the front porch of the little house. The younger man wore jeans and a flannel shirt, hair in a braid down to the middle of his back, like in a time travel movie, and a huge shaggy beard. The older man must have belonged to the Large Car – he was wearing a suit and had one of those crisp gray haircuts that handsome older people wear in commercials for investment companies. The woman looked kind of old-fashioned, wearing some kind of beige polyester pants, a puffy-sleeved blouse, and running shoes like the older teachers wear. Her hair was pulled up in the back into a bulky, but secure, bun.
Religious fanatics? I thought. I had seen girls on the news whose religion mandated that kind of hairdo. But this one was wearing makeup, enough that I could see her eye shadow in the dusky light. It too looked like something a grandmother would wear, or maybe she had just put it on too thick. Maybe she was hiding a scar, I thought, like my mother’s friend who had her glasses made with decoration on one side but not the other. She claimed it drew your eye away from the pinkish scar on the other side of her face. But it only made you stare more.
“What do you think?” Isabel asked.
“Um … I’m guessin’ they’re moving in.”
“I know,” she enthused. “My mom’s about to spit.”
“You mean the beard?”
“The beard, the hair. That and the Jeep. She called it a blemish.”
“But I love the Jeep.”
“Yeah, me too.”
Even when we were little, Isabel’s mom was pretty particular about appearances – Isabel hung at our house by the hour just to be in the presence of my more flexible mother -- but in the last few years, since Audrey started appearing on local television talking about missing kids, she had embraced the conviction that Looks Matter. That is, how things looked on the outside. When you saw Audrey on television, her hair, makeup, blouse and blazer were meticulously, conservatively, faultless – from the waist up. She would wear a Ralph Lauren sweater with a pair of jeans that bagged in the seat, and her feet would be covered by the same shoes she wore to edge the lawn with hand clippers. Isabel’s house exhibited the greenest and most uniformly mowed lawn, the squarest hedges, and the least cracked driveway in the neighborhood. The inside of the house, which few people ever saw, looked like Goodwill exploded. Their kitchen table was Audrey’s command center for the Missing Kids Network, but every time she went to sit at the computer and update her website, she had to move about five teetering piles of notes, letters and emails from parents, and newspaper articles. My mother once said she would love to attack Audrey’s kitchen and get her things organized, but Dad reminded her there’s no changing people. If anyone organized it for her, Audrey would no doubt return it to its chaotic state within days.
So, of course Audrey would hate the Jeep, and our new neighbor’s long hair would cause her to suspect him immediately of living a nefarious lifestyle. For some reason, Isabel seemed pleased about this. She seemed to savor conflict with her mother, rather than avoid it. I’m sure there was some deep psychological reason for this, but I tried not to think about it.
“Maybe he’s in a band!” she said.
“Don’t think so.” Longhair Guy and the older man were tugging on the garage door, revealing another trailer, a flat one with cross-hatched wire sides, which in turn held several lawn mowers, including one that must have been three feet wide, a couple of ice chests, and a selection of rakes, a leaf blower, and a lawn trimmer. “Looks like he might do lawn work for a living.”
Isabel saw it too. “Okay, that’s weird.” It was too weird for Simon Court. People who hauled their equipment with them generally worked in our neighborhood; they didn’t live there. For some reason I couldn’t pin down right then, I felt a flicker of delight. Was it because, like Isabel, I wanted Audrey to be ticked off? Or was I so bored with life that any kind of conflict looked more appealing than it did troubling? Or was I like so many people I hated? Did I just want someone to be inferior to me, too – or for others to think so, anyway?
I shrugged off the feeling as I watched the three strangers hug one another as if they were estranged family, or as if one of them was going off to war. Then the older man got into his extremely expensive car and backed away while the other two stood on the porch of the little green house, their arms around each other’s waists, and waved goodbye to him.
Then Longhair Guy drew one hand to his face and touched his eyes for a minute. As if he were wiping away tears. Another thing you don’t see too often in Simon Hills.
CHAPTER 3
Biology class is in progress and Mr. Jordan probably appears, from outside the soundproof window, to be teaching us something, but actually he is inviting Nick Foley to write on the board exactly how he, Mr. J., has ruined Nick’s life. So far on the list, Sam McDonald has written, “worst test in universe,” (he made his first B+ of all time) and Tia Doakes has written, “called my mother for no reason,” (she forgot herself and shouted “Bitch” at Mira Burton) and now Nick rises at the invitation and writes, in malformed letters, “won’t let me play video games during lekchers.”
The list has been up for a week now and I’d like to write something on it, but Mr. Jordan is my favorite teacher and I can’t think of anything to write. I’m terrible at biology – I scrape by with low Bs, when all of my other grades are easy As, -- but I work my tail off for Mr. J. because he treats us like actual humans instead of his little subjects. My theory is that people have three different reasons for becoming teachers. Some like to boss people around and they’re too chicken to do it to other adults. Others want to correct their own inaccurately remembered school experience by making sure we have fun all day (“When we’ve finished reading the book, we’ll get in groups and determine which color best represents each character. We’ll make posters, too, because the superintendent is coming soon and we can put them in the hall.” At the end of the day you feel as if you’ve been doing occupational therapy all day because of the bad accident you had with your head.) Then there are the very few who actually want to make you think about something. Mr. Tristan and Mrs. Harris do that, and so does Mr. J., though many people don’t think so. To hear him tell it, he is looked down on by his colleagues. “I’m Mr. Jordan, and I’m very, very bitter,” he said the first day of class.
On this particular day, before Nick complained, Mr. J. was challenging us to think about the difference between parasitism and symbiosis. I’m sure there is one, because Mr. J. never lies. I wasn’t paying attention, however. First, because I was sitting right behind Sam McDonald, whom I hopelessly yearn for, and second, because Isabel, all friendly again for some reason, was “hsst”ing me, trying to get my attention. I kept slapping her hand when Mr. J. wasn’t looking, which made her laugh and “hsst” louder, which made me laugh, too.
I tried to switch off my childish motor and tune back in to Mr. J’s lecture. He was, with the help of an elaborate diagram drawn on the board, giving an example of parasitism. Or possibly symbiosis. “It’s like if Nick were to stop playing video games in class. He’d die.” Nick laughed as much as anyone, but he still demanded his turn at the board and the “ruined my life” list. The bell rang before Mr. J could get back to his lecture. If I’d been watching the clock instead of Sam’s shoulders, I would have had my things packed up and I could have beaten the Bowheads out of there, but unfortunately I met Mira Burton at the door. It was like those scenes in movies where two people try to go through the door together and keep bouncing back because they both can’t fit.
“Um, sorry,” I uttered.
Mira shot me the smile she used when running for class president, the one that seemed to say, “You are too a good person!” It made you feel as if you had something to explain, but Mira would be there to back you up when you did the explaining.
“No problem,” she said back, then went through the door first, as was her privilege.
“You know, she’s a perfectly nice person,” said Isabel, behind me.
“Oh, I know!” I replied. “Everyone knows how nice she is.” I stared at her for a minute, in case she didn’t realize I was being sarcastic. There was just something about the Mira types that made my brain bleed. Metaphorically, of course. But I wondered again why Isabel was being friendly to me today, and hadn’t run to keep up with Mira.
“You don’t even know her,” she said.
“I can’t dispute what you say, Isabel. And I hate you for it.”
Isabel laughed and punched me in the arm, which she’s done ever since we were in the third grade.
“So,” Isabel continued. “You want to spy on the Joneses?”
“The who?”
“The new people. The hippie and his wife.” The two of them seemed to be settling into the neighborhood. The husband had already dug up the flower beds and planted all new bushes and even a few flowers. The wife had painted the shutters white. Already, the house looked more cheerful.
“Is that really their name? Or are you just calling them that?”
“No, that’s it. Got it from Mr. Cook when I was babysitting Benny. Mr. Cook sold them the house. Or actually, he sold it to the guy’s father.”
“Would that be Big Car Guy?”
“I’m guessin’.”
“Seems suspicious. ‘Jones`, I mean.”
“Like it’s made up? I know. But somebody somewhere must really be named Jones.”
“Yeah, but how many Joneses do you actually know? Maybe we should spy on them.”
“That’s what I’m saying. Your house or mine?”
“Either.”
At eight that night I was sprawled on Isabel’s bed exploring our biology textbook with a flashlight for clues as to what the hell Jordan was talking about in class, and Isabel was using her roll-y chair to scoot up to the east window, the one that looked out on the Jones house, if that was their real name. She had the curtains tight on each side of her head and the blinds tipped backwards so she could theoretically see out but no one could theoretically see in. She needed the lights out for this procedure, but my flashlight, acting as a symbol for my brain, was losing power and growing dim. She didn’t care.
“Jackie. This is important,” she said when I complained.
“Why?”
She looked away from the window to stare at me. “Try to get into the mood, okay, Jackie? We’re spies. It’s fun.”
“Reminds me of our eighth birthday party. Anyway, very little payoff, it seems to me. I mean, if only they were communists or something.”
“What are communists again?” She turned back to the window.
“Um … bad people. No religion, don’t care about money. Wear red a lot. You know.”
“Is that true?”
“Marginally. Are you actually seeing anything?”
“He just came outside!”
Oh well, I couldn’t see my biology homework in the dark anyway. I joined her at the window.
“Where?”
“There.” She pointed, which didn’t help, but then I saw him. We watched for a while as Long Hair Guy, or should I say, Mr. Jones, puttered around the front yard.
“He’s watering the lawn.”
“No, he just moved the hose over. He’s, he’s, burying something!”
“Nunh-unh.”
“Un-hunh! Watch.”
We watched. Actually, he was burying something. Something small, and rectangular, like a metal box; he dug gently down in the brand new flower bed at the front left corner of the house, right next to an azalea bush. It didn’t take him long. Then he used the hose to wash off his hands. He curled it back perfectly when he was done.
“Good neighbors,” my dad would remark at breakfast the next morning. All week, my dad had been watching; over cereal he would point out the improvements I had missed. Mr. Jones had scraped and painted the wood siding – still green, but a darker, more dignified shade, and mowed and trimmed the lawn back so the sidewalks and driveway were somehow more square-looking. He’d re-planted the flower bed, as I noticed, and scraped off the old paint a previous owner had sloshed onto the windows. The tiny house would never really fit into the neighborhood. It seemed too measly; it wasn’t made of bricks. But it was starting to look as if it might fit into some other nice neighborhood. Maybe one without a gate.
“So,” Isabel asked me, “what do you think it is? What would he need to hide under the dirt like that?”
“Body parts.” I answered, because I was supposed to. “Probably nothing. Nothing mysterious is ever really significant.”
“That’s not logical. Some mysterious things have to mean something. You need to watch more crime shows.”
“Yeah. That’s what I need. More murder.”
Suddenly we became aware that Audrey was standing in the doorway. We hadn’t even heard the door open. She was already dressed for bed, but I knew she wouldn’t be asleep for hours; too busy working on her Missing Kids business. Oddly, she wasn’t even looking in our direction; her eyes were on the wall above my head, where the same old Johnny Cash poster had been for at least a year. I was sure she wasn’t really seeing it. She came back to us. “Isabel. I asked you to empty the dishwasher this morning and it’s still not done.”
“I told you I’d do it. Not when.”
At my house, this would have been taken as sullen, but Audrey just nodded, minutely, then closed the door after herself. We were silent for a minute. Then, I asked, “Do you think she’s mad?”
“You know how many times a day I accidentally mention something that reminds her of Katy? Summer jobs. White vans. Being late.” She flipped her hand like Mr. Tristan swatting away his fangirls. “Don’t worry about it.” She turned back to the window and parted the curtains, but she had the same look in her eye that Audrey had had, as if Katy was on the porch of the green house, waving goodbye.
Audrey scared me; or the way her life had stopped when Katy disappeared scared me.
When I visited the Walker house, I preferred to keep to Isabel’s room as much as possible. The rest of the house was too filled with anguish. Pictures of Katy at all ages – up to sixteen – lined the hallway. Katy in her baby swimming pool, every year’s school picture, her dinosaur-themed birthday party, sitting on a bench between two classmates during her last dance, watching television in a slouch on the sofa, getting off a plane, in Halloween costumes – a small witch, a medium-sized Supergirl, and a full-sized Goth, posing with a variety of soccer trophies, walking on crutches from when she hurt her knee so badly a few months before she disappeared, eating breakfast in her pajamas with her hair comically out of place. There are pictures of Isabel, too, of course, in the living room and den, but surprisingly few -- Mom says all parents tend to take more pictures of their firstborn and that it’s only natural to slow down after the excitement wears off. But Isabel didn’t appear in the hallway, not at any age. Only Katy.
As I said before, the rest of the house had been taken over by Audrey’s Missing Kids organization. There were more pictures – photos of the kids, some digitized into older versions of themselves, and pencil drawings of suspects, as well as the many newspaper photos of Audrey as she spoke before parents’ organizations and schools, meetings of police and volunteer groups. But the hallway was entirely Katy.
Katy’s room was still intact, too, ten years later. It was clean, and things had been put away; it wasn’t ghoulish. But even in broad daylight, passing Katy’s door as I came and went between the front door and Isabel’s room, made me nervous. Like they didn’t realize she was dead and I was the one who was going to have to tell them. When would Audrey finally take down the posters and pack up Katy’s books? Even her crutches were still there, as if they might be needed again before she went back to playing soccer.
I didn’t blame Audrey. Dad says everybody has to grieve in their own way. But Katy wasn’t the only child in her family, and Audrey seemed to be tangled up in her disappearance, ignoring Isabel, and even Isabel’s dad, Michael. I saw Mr. Walker sometimes when I ran through the neighborhood early on summer mornings, because he occasionally watered the lawn in the dark to avoid the heat. But he never seemed to be home when I was at their house. Isabel told me he had a kind of den in the basement where he liked to hang out. But that was weird, too.
I lay back on Isabel’s bed with the biology book closed beside me, and wondered for the millionth time how to keep my life from sticking in one place.
CHAPTER 4
Over the next few weeks, my mother had done the television sitcom things that she didn’t ordinarily do in order to get to know our new neighbors. Took them a pie, asked them over for dinner. Gave them our newspaper after we read it, until they could get their subscription started. The woman, Alma, was shy. So shy that my mother found herself becoming almost manic in an effort to lighten the mood in the room. Her husband, Corey, always declined our invitations, and seemed distressed that he might have to eat food someone gave them.
“There are people who just don’t like to take gifts from anyone, ever,” my mother mused. “Remember that movie where the mother wouldn’t let her kids take the Christmas presents the townspeople gave them?”
“I hated that movie.”
“Me, too. But I don’t know what to do.”
“Mom, why are you so worried about them? They’re grownups. I’m sure they can manage.”
“Oh, I know. It’s just that they’re right next door.”
This made no sense. No other next-door-neighbor had received this executive treatment, not in my lifetime. Maybe she was just curious, like I was. For people who didn’t want any attention, they sure stirred up a lot of mystery about themselves.
Then Mom discovered that Alma didn’t know how to cook. She instantly organized a time table so Alma could come over every evening and cook in our kitchen and Mom would show her how to cook one thing. I don’t know if this wore Alma out or not, but Mom seemed happy. Slowly, Alma began to talk more, even to smile when I walked through the room.
One Saturday morning, I had just come in from my morning run when the doorbell rang. I heard Mom mutter as she dropped what she was doing to answer the bell. “I shouldn’t answer this.”
I knew she would, because she always had that tiny hope that it was the million dollar prize patrol. She had told me that one time.
“Hi, Pam. What can I do for you?” I heard her ask. I could imagine her eyes narrowing as she said it. It was Pam Langheim, whose husband was the biggest real estate agent in our neighborhood. I had to wonder why Pam Langheim wanted to talk to my mother. They had nothing in common, to say the least. I innocently wandered into the kitchen, where I could kind of see into the living room.
Pam had two Quik Trip coffees in her hands, and she forced one on my mom. “Hi, Ellie. Just wondering if you had time for a chat.” Very clever. She had spent money; Mom would find it hard to be impolite to her.
“Just a few minutes. I need to leave at ten.” It was fifteen ‘til.
“Really?” Pam said, as if Mom were lying. Well, she was lying, but that wasn’t any of Pam’s business.
“Yeah, I’m kind of behind, you know,” Mom said vaguely, which Dad has taught us not to do. Explaining too much is a tipoff that you’re not telling the truth. But it’s a hard rule to remember.
Pam settled herself onto the good sofa and opened her coffee, letting the steam warm her face and giving a satisfied sigh. “So,” she said. “What all do you know about these new people?”
That was what Mr. Tristan would call an open-ended question. I wondered how Pam would grade my mother’s answer.
“Not much. He does landscaping for a living, and she’s looking for work.”
Pam looked at Mom as if she had told a bad joke. “Landscaping! Is that what you call it? He mows lawns, fer Chrissakes.” Pam liked to imitate a hick accent for comic effect, but she didn’t do it very well. She took a big slurp of her coffee and waved her hands around to cool her mouth.
“Well, that’s all I know. Why do you ask?”
“She doesn’t work. I know that. Seems like she’d have to, with him not having a very good job.”
“I said she’s looking for a job. Anyway, maybe he charges outrageous rates.”
“Speaking of which, he better keep that equipment inside the garage. It’s just plain tacky. How can they even afford to live here, I wonder.” Had Pam forgotten our house was the second least expensive one, after the little green house?
Mom was angry. I could tell. “Maybe they’re independently wealthy. You can’t judge people by the cars they drive.”
“Sure you can. I mean, sure some people might have an old thing they keep around for their kids or something, but come on. Her clothes are from Walmart and his are from the hardware store.”
Mom didn’t have anything to say to that. She just sat there, fuming.
“Anyway,” Pam continued, “I’m asking Jan to find out from Wendell just how they financed that house. She says he can’t tell me, but he will.”
“What difference will it make? There’s no law about what kind of car you drive, or how long your hair is. I know this is becoming a more … select neighborhood. But the developers threw up those gates to impress potential buyers. We don’t have any kind of agreement – at least not yet – that says people can’t have a trailer in their own driveway.”
“Wendell Cook will see about that. He’s trying to form a neighborhood association so we can have some rules.”
“What kind of rules? You can’t wear cheap shoes?”
“Oh, Ellie. You know what I’m saying. I know you’re liberal, but come on!”
Mom stood up and handed the coffee, still full, back to Pam, who looked confused. “Well, you be sure to keep me posted because I’m sure Noah and I aren’t up to the standards, whatever they’re going to be. We’ll just have to move if things get any stricter around here.”
Pam looked stricken; then she laughed. “You can’t move. Simon Hills is the best high school in the city. You’d at least have to wait until Jackie graduated. Oh Ellie, I’d hate it if you did.”
“Jackie is smart. She would do fine at any school.” Thanks, Mom. But was she serious? Would we really move?
When Mom finally got Pam ushered out the front door, I came to the door between the kitchen and the living room. She looked at me for a minute.
“Do we still have that Christmas jam?”
“You mean the little jars you forgot to put in people’s stockings? Yeah, they’re on top of the refrigerator.”
“Help me carry.”
Mom and I took the little decorative boxes full of jam jars and delivered them to the little house next door. Alma opened the door and looked surprised to see us, and the boxes.
“Come in,” she said, halfheartedly but politely. We sat on their old couch in their tiny living room that still held a number of boxes that hadn’t been unpacked. I’d never seen a shag carpet in a living room. It made me feel bad for some reason. Alma tried to be gracious as she took the jams and put them on the battered coffee table.
“What’s the occasion, Ellie?”
“What?” Mom was distracted, I could tell, still thinking about Pam’s visit.
“I mean, why are you bringing these right now? Did something happen?”
Mom sighed. “I’m sorry. I must seem like a lunatic.”
“No more than a lot of people.” She said it without a smile, but so that it sounded funny. Was it possible meek little Alma had a sense of humor?
“Look,” Mom said. “Some of the neighbors here are kind of … snooty, I guess you’d call it. You’ve probably figured that out already. But I just want to say, don’t let them bother you. We’re the weird people here, so you can always come rant to us if anyone does or says anything stupid.”
Alma seemed almost amused. “Oh, you know, people aren’t just one thing, are they?” This startled Mom, and me, too.
“Of course you’re right. I’m sorry, Alma. Somebody just ticked me off and I ran over here without thinking. I shouldn’t have worried you.”
“Is it something I should know about?”
“No. Not at all. Just … enjoy the jam.”
There was a slight pause before all three of us caved into laughter.
Finally, Mom said, “I’ll just take them back.”
But Alma wouldn’t hear of it. “No way. A gift is a gift. These will always remind me of one time when we laughed really hard. I’ll cherish them forever.” She smiled slyly. She really was losing her shyness.
Mom got up and hugged Alma, and we left.
Mom was still mad at Pam, though. All day.
WINTER
CHAPTER 5
“Businessmen they drink my wine ….”
Jimi Hendrix – if my dad said Clapton was God, Mom said Hendrix was Jesus -- blasted, at relatively low, adult-ears volume into our backyard from the same stereo Dad had put together when he was my age and now showcased in the den. “None of them know what it’s worth,” Jimi sang from a pile of six speakers leaning up against the inside of the window. Dad says this setup is better than any new technology, no matter how much less complicated it would be to actually use it.
The deal was, Mom got to choose the first hour of music; then Isabel and I could pick. Actually, Isabel liked Hendrix and Dylan, The Who and Credence Clearwater. At night I could sometimes hear her amusing herself with their timeless works of genius on one of her progressively more expensive electric guitars. Even if I didn’t already know it was her, I would recognize her distinctive style by the awkward extra pauses and strangled blues riffs she put in, affecting the pose of a blind black guitarist from, I’m pretty sure, Mississippi. But only at night.
During the day, Isabel became what was expected of her – of all of us teenaged girls – a lavender-swathed giggle machine. I’d punch her arm occasionally, to turn down the volume. Maybe it was Blind Pomegranate Walker I secretly liked.
Ironically, businessmen were drinking my mother’s wine. Once a year, and always just as winter starts taking itself seriously, she loses her mind and decides to entertain the neighbors with a sort of cookout/cocktail party. I think in her brain she sees a congenial gathering of witty people enjoying a few drinks and discussing world affairs. Maybe she waits until it gets uncomfortably cold because she also pictures them dressed in coordinated turtlenecks from that catalogue she gets. But that would require a different set of neighbors. Dad always tries to warn her, but that only makes her more determined to pull it off.