Little Lovely Things, page 12
“Remember I told you about the search effort supported by the FBI? Near that ravine where we discovered the Taurus?”
Claire pictured it, desolate, menacing trees naked in the season. “Is the storm causing a problem?”
“Actually…” Hearns slowed her speech. “I got the call during the show today. They found more evidence.”
The room filled with phantoms, ghostly creatures dancing in the weirdish glow of the TV. Glen got up and snapped it off. The gray outside spilled into the room. Claire was glad he didn’t switch on a lamp. More light would make it all worse, would define Hearns in contrast to the things around her, the drapes, the end table, the plastic plant. Not seeing Hearns’s face made her a free-floating voice. Somehow less difficult to comprehend.
“Not too far, five miles maybe, from the car. Just over the border into Wisconsin. The FBI found a hidden plot of land with a small cabin. Looks like the kidnapper may have been there after he left Lily. And then in an attempt to escape, took off and the car ended at the bottom of the river.”
“What?” Claire couldn’t make sense of any of this. First, Lily half-buried along a roadside. Then, months later, the Taurus emerges some forty miles north in a ravine. Where was Andrea?
“Claire, Glen, there’s been a discovery.” Juanita hesitated and then continued. “Fibers. Blue chambray. They match the description of”—she swallowed—“the charm dress.”
Claire gasped.
“I’m sorry. This is so hard.” The detective proceeded with words that seemed as though she were stepping through broken glass. “Apparently…apparently, there was a fire of some sort near this cabin. Like a bonfire. Materials were burned—charred—pretty bad. Found in a crude outdoor…well, oven. A goddamn outdoor oven.”
The windows were whitening by the minute. It could easily bury them alive, this snow.
Glen groaned.
“I’m so sorry,” Hearns continued. “And—”
“That’s it?” Claire interrupted. “Fibers? Some material? That’s nothing. I don’t care about some burned fabric. Andrea’s alive. I just know it.”
“There’s more—” Detective Hearns spoke softly.
But Claire cut her off again. “My daughter is alive,” she said, as if Andrea were hers alone; Glen somehow didn’t factor into this now that she could feel his belief slipping away. “Out there somewhere.” She made a grand sweeping gesture toward the window.
“Cut it out, Claire,” Glen said flatly.
How could this be true? What about Lily’s light? The certainty with which Jay White had said Andrea was alive? Claire choked with anger, disbelief.
Glen looked at her with disbelief of his own. Only his was directed at the ridiculous woman who had caused all this pain.
“Calm down,” Glen barked. “Calm the hell down.”
“Claire.” Juanita struggled to hold her voice steady. “I know this is hard. But I need to tell you more…”
Hearns could say what she liked, but Claire knew her daughter. She’d escaped that car accident. She’d run away from that Charcoal Monster. Remained hidden all these months.
Claire stood up. “We need to go look for her. In those…those woods… She’ll be cold.” She faced the door. “Freezing… She’s almost five. She can do this…”
“A fragment, too.” Juanita raised her voice. It was necessary in order to speak over Claire. “Of a tooth. In the ashes. It matches Andrea’s.” The detective’s voice wavered. “The one you gave us when the girls were abducted.”
“God.” Glen put his head down to his knees. “Oh God.”
Claire rocked backward. She pressed her hands to her face. “My little girl…”
Gretchie, tail down, crawled to Claire and whimpered as she licked Claire’s arm.
Glen groaned again.
The detective was openly crying.
They sat, unmoving, like creatures caught unaware and frozen in place. The detective stayed with them as long as she possibly could before standing and gathering her coat closed.
“I really have to go. Before it gets worse. I can’t tell you how…” She wiped her eyes. “I’m just so sorry, Claire and Glen.”
Claire didn’t get up. Glen did, though, and walked Hearns to the door. The wind practically carried him away, as though he were standing near a hole in the wall of a plane at cruising altitude. He slammed the door behind the detective and then fell forward, pounding his fist into the doorframe.
Vicki arrived not much later. The scene must’ve looked like some sort of a massacre had occurred. Two people drained of blood, drained of life really, yet somehow still alive. She cried with them, but Claire remained stiff during her hugs. She wouldn’t accept any comfort she didn’t deserve.
The snow kept coming and then abruptly halted at midnight, leaving gleaming piles and drifts throughout the yard and driveway. Claire didn’t know how, but she ended up alone on her and Glen’s bed with Gretchie stretched longitudinally against her, touching her with as much dog as possible. Glen stayed in the living room with the TV on low volume, droning through infomercials. Claire must’ve fallen asleep because she dreamed. She was in the sky, floating. Miles above the earth. And then she began to drop like a stone through inky black silence. The earth, rushing closer, was the most sparkling shade of sapphire blue. In her dream, she closed her eyes and prepared for the inevitable, the terrible impact.
Claire whiplashed awake.
The clock on the nightstand read 3:00 a.m. She went to the window. The backyard was blanketed in white, layered like a torte, the top crusted like sugar. What was that she was seeing? Snow angels! Fifty in total, maybe more—the yard was covered with them. It would’ve taken her girls half the night to make these, their small bodies pressed into the powder like footprints in sand or bottle caps in clay. Claire wrapped herself in a short terry-cloth robe and stepped out onto the porch, then down into the yard, touching each indentation, each perfectly fan-shaped crater where one of her girls had laid flapping her legs and arms like wings.
How clever of Andrea to give the angels personalities! Some looked frantic, edged with mounds caused by the kicking up of hastily removed snow, while others were luxuriously delicate. And then there were Lily’s, shallowly pressed into the fluffy powder.
How her girls loved to play in the snow.
Claire felt an arm at her waist and a hand on her shoulder. Glen. He led gently, turning her toward the house.
“No, no, I can’t leave. They’re so beautiful. So very beautiful.”
But her bare feet burned with an icy fire, and as she stumbled into the house, they were numb. Vicki appeared in the living room surrounded by night silence. She and Glen sat on either side of Claire.
“The angels are a sign from them, from Lily and Andrea,” Claire said. “Don’t you see? She’s still alive, Andrea is alive.”
“Jesus, Claire,” Glen said. “Be real. Both girls are gone.”
“No, no, it can’t be,” Claire moaned.
“Honey,” Vicki said softly, wrapping her in an afghan and rubbing the circulation back into her feet. “What you saw were little drifts. An illusion created by moonlight on the fresh snow.”
Claire sat, unmoving.
“Glen,” Vicki whispered. “I have an idea. Can you open a window in your bedroom?”
They escorted Claire to the bedroom, one on either side of her. Vicki coaxed her to the window and helped Claire to place her head out into the freezing night air. Claire coughed. Her breath surrounded her like a cloud of white ash, and her nostrils stung.
“See?” Vicki urged. “It’s a trick of the eyes.”
Claire looked around at the quilted mess in her yard, the jagged footprints going forward and then back—large, boxy chunks of snow displaced by some kind of skirmish with one or two people, maybe three. Her sister was right: bodies as small as her girls’ couldn’t create such deep indents in that type of snow, thick as cotton batting yet unforgiving as cement. But still…
“Claire, look at the moon.” Vicki’s voice was encouraging. Claire understood this was an effort to anchor her back into the world as everyone else saw it. She searched the sky and found what Vicki was calling the moon, a large, gleaming spot of milk on a dark wood tabletop, spilled in June by Andrea when they’d celebrated Glen’s father’s birthday at his parents’ soon-to-be-sold condo in Evanston. The shape wavered in the air. Yes, she saw it now; it really was as Vicki said. Gretchie licked the back of Claire’s leg with her soft warm tongue. But it did not console her.
Claire pulled away from the window and looked at Glen. His eyes were enlarged, shining.
“Tell me, Glen. Is it true? Are both of our girls gone?” A long minute past and then Claire’s voice broke. “Did I do this to us?”
Glen dropped his head into his hands and responded. Not with words, but with guttural sounds that grew into an aural storm, as deep and marred as the snow outside.
Part Two
Four Years Later
Chapter 12
Colly
“Ach! Out of that tree!”
Aha! Colly just knew she was being spied on. And from her own room no less. When she and Moira first moved to this part of Indiana, she’d discovered that the towering jack pine next to her room was the perfect spot for practicing sleight of hand tricks, only with acorns instead of coins. In the lower branches, she could keep a watchful eye on her new Barbie who was sunning on a rock in her neon-pink bikini. An internal alarm rang when she saw weeds parting at the edge of the yard. This was the preferred pathway for that nasty neighbor kid.
“You’ll kill yourself, Colly.”
Colly looked over. She could see Moira’s face behind the screen, strained with concern, piercing eyes deep in their sockets surrounded by dark hair tumbling around her head like a mess of coils. Her voice, tinged with brogue, rang through the curtains. They weren’t real curtains, of course, but pillowcases tacked over the windows to help screen the bugs, the biting kind with black bodies and shiny green heads, that seemed to find every little snag in the wiry mesh to pop through. The kind that left tiny volcanoes of itchy skin when they were done.
“Please, serku.”
Serku meant daughter. Moira only used that word when she was really scared—as in anything to do with heights—or really happy. But she wasn’t Colly’s mother. Had actually rescued Colly from druggie parents that tried to sell her. And then they died in a crash. But Colly didn’t know more. It upset Moira too much to talk about.
Colly went a branch higher.
She hoped Moira wasn’t messing with her stuff. In addition to paints and drawing material, she had a number of collections: wild berries from the woods set out to dry on the TV tray she’d scavenged on garbage day. A shoebox of pinecones sorted with greenies on one side, fully opened brown fans on the other. Acorns, a particular favorite, hard shelled and rigid as clams, were stored safely in a hinged cigar box under her bed, only to “magically” appear on the bathroom floor, giving Moira a surprise or two when she stepped out of the shower. Now Moira never went without sandals. Colly, for her part, abhorred anything on her feet, which were calloused like exoskeletons, a term she had gleaned from the National Geographic magazines she devoured.
“Jesu, Mary, and Joseph. Come down now.”
“Oka-ay.”
Aligning for a dismount, Colly set her stomach to the trunk, dug her fingers into the corduroy-like bark, and wrapped her legs around the tree’s girth. She needed to come down anyway, confront that pudgy booger before he caused trouble.
“Don’t jump, Colly. By God, don’t do it!”
She imagined Moira crossing herself as she hitched her shoulder blades into wings and let go, free-falling the eight or so feet, bringing Moira’s stomach—she was certain—along for the ride. Twisting in midair, she landed in a swell of pine needles, soft-pawed and flushed with accomplishment.
“You’re giving me a heart attack!” The rusty window grated along its track. “Come in now and help me gather the laundry.” The window slammed shut like a resounding period at the end of a sentence.
But Colly wasn’t bothering with Moira. Chubby had gotten his grubby mitts on Barbie, snagged before there was time to fill her in on the hazards of trailer park life. Colly wiped her palms, smeared with dark pitch from the tree, onto her cutoffs and faced the kid.
“Give her back.”
“Sure,” the boy sneered. “For a dollar.”
“I mean it.”
“One dollar.” His eyes ran up and down. “What are you, some kind of freak? You and Barbie with the same hairdo!”
Despite Moira’s protestations, Colly managed her own hair, had chopped it short so it stuck out like porcupine quills. Today, it was purpled from a paste of Kool-Aid powder she’d run by the fingerful through the stubby strands. Along with two missing bottom teeth, it gave her a clownish quality. Colly didn’t mind his insult. At eight-and-a-half, she kept her own counsel, followed up on her own ideas.
She eyed her doll, suspended cruelly by her bright-toned hair that Colly had dipped in food coloring the moment she’d been brought home. It was almost a weakness, Colly’s love of color. Behind her, tree trunks were patterned with enormous swaths of pastel chalk, her work from earlier that day.
“Gort muilsha sik—I said, give her back.”
“What did you just say?”
Colly bit her lip, angry with herself for this breach. The deeply engrained rule was to keep their lives, especially their language, a secret. Avoid attention at all costs. The authorities might take her back to the people who’d paid for her.
“Weirdo. Ha-ha.”
Colly could see gapped teeth inside his mouth, which was ringed with grape juice and dirt. Barbie remained prisoner in his unrelenting grip, stiffly holding her own.
She briefly considered calling to Moira for backup but knew she needed to handle this on her own. Moira hated anything to do with neighbors or people in general. Besides, she disapproved of this Barbie, a cheap purchase at a garage sale the day before.
“You don’t want that doll, Colly,” Moira had said. “Look, she’s damaged. Someone’s been at her face with a knife!”
“Moira.” Colly spoke with insistent authority. “I’ll make her good as new. You’ll see.” She dropped two quarters on the table, a bargain as far as Colly was concerned.
While Barbie’s nose indeed had been gouged off, Colly planned reconstructive surgery later that day with a pinch of dried Play-Doh and glue. She’d done this type of thing before and found the results passable, admirable, even. But now, Barbie was close to losing her bathing suit as she dangled from the creep’s hand, creased at the wrist with dirt and chub. He was one of those whose mother shouted at dinnertime from rickety aluminum porch steps, his name joining the others that bounced among the trailers, rattling like tin cans, the syllables spread thin as margarine on toast.
“Toh-ho-mmy!” or “Roh-hob-bie!”
The kids, one faceless mass to Colleen, dashed off in a mad scramble to get home, eat their supper, and laze in front of the TV until bedtime. Colly had no official bedtime or suppertime. There were days when it was only Wonder Bread and watery milk from powder. She fended for herself. Because they stayed on the move—Moira’s jobs only lasted a short time, and never paid much—it meant grabbing what you could when no one was looking. Always careful to, as Moira put it, “avoid pryin’ eyes.”
Aside from remaining wary of outsiders, Colly was free to do as she pleased. And it pleased her to be in the trailer as little as possible. The black-and-white TV provided little interest anyway. Colly had better things to do: sift through the woods and fields near their trailer, rifle through her beloved secondhand National Geographic magazines, or draw the landscapes that lived in her head, putting them to paper with crayons, chalk, water paints, whatever was handy. It was these treasures, carefully hoarded and sorted, that she feared Moira might mess up. But right then she needed to liberate this new Barbie. She hadn’t even had time to name her. A name was a shining coin, a precious medal to carry with you. Barbie’s would have to be properly considered.
“What do you have to say, Skinny Minnie?”
Colly caught a glimpse of herself in the chrome edging on the trailer. Pale and thin to the point of bony, with dark serious eyes, she was aware she sported dimples when she smiled. She faced the boy straight on. He began circling, swinging the doll wildly. She sized him up. He was a head taller than her, but he’d be slow with all that pudge. She ignored his taunting and focused on his back pocket and the small bulge in his dirty beige shorts. Probably a pocketknife. His best treasure, no doubt.
She couldn’t wait too long to make her move. Today was one of her sluggish days; she was wracked with sporadic light-headedness. When it happened, it was as if her very blood lingered in her veins. Moira said it was Colly’s picky eating, but Colly sensed it went deeper. She shook her head, sweeping away the stars that danced in her eyes.
Squinting into a shaft of sunlight, Colly made an awkward move forward and stumbled right into the bully. He clawed frantically to break free of their awkward dance. As they floundered, Colly seized the opportunity to slip her hand into his pocket. He staggered onto his heels and then shoved her away.
“Get off of me!” the bully cried. Barbie swayed and a bikini strap slipped down her slick plastic arm. The worst thing would be that her private parts would show, and the disgusting brat would see it and leer.
But Colly sighed loudly with satisfied relief and fixed her gaze at his pants.
The boy suddenly stopped. Looking down, he could see a smudgy handprint of black pitch from Colly’s palm outlined near his pocket.
“Ew! You touched me!” His eyes narrowed as he held Barbie aloft like a football. “Fun’s over. Prepare to launch!” Arm cocked, he took aim at the towering treetops. “Get ready.” He hesitated dramatically, preparing to spiral the hapless doll into oblivion. “’Cause thar she blows!”
