“Anything suspicious,” Detective Rogers repeats.
Then they’re gone, and Caroline and Minna are left standing together in the greenhouse, surrounded by dead and rotting things.
I’m expecting Sandra to make an idiotic comment but instead she simply mutters, “Bad business.” I can feel her withdraw, curling into the walls, into the wood shavings, small, hard, and impregnable, as she always does when she’s in a bad mood.
The ghost, the new ghost, is still shaking.
“Vivian?” I whisper. “Is that you?”
But she doesn’t make a sound.
The search party for Annie Hayes was organized two days after her parents first noticed she’d gone missing; I heard about it as I did almost all my gossip, from Dick Harte, who ran a dairy farm in Depew and delivered the milk. It had been a bad winter, and the ground was just beginning to thaw from the latest assault: fissures appeared on the blue-veined rivers, still slickly coated with ice; the ground was patchy and raw, the trees had their hackles raised to the wind. On some mornings, with the wind howling and the gas sputtering under the kettle, I even missed Ed. I sweetened my coffee by drinking it through a sugar cube. There was a war on, and at home we felt it this way: in the cold-bed mornings, and sugary grit between our teeth.
Dick Harte had a truck embossed with a cow and the name of the farm, but for most of the winter he made his rounds in an old-fashioned sleigh, hitched to two of his horses. I remember he had the sleigh the day he told me about Annie Hayes and the search party, because he complained that the remaining snow was so slushy and full of muck he’d practically had to turn around; and the horses stood there, breath steaming in the dawn, and I thought of how cold Annie must be, wherever she was.
We were to meet at noon in front of the church in Coral River, a walk of just over four miles. The sky was dense and knotted with clouds, like a gigantic, fleecy eyebrow.
All this has stuck with me.
I don’t remember receiving instructions, or the early part of the search. I don’t remember seeing Thomas among the volunteers, although he must have been there, and it seems strange that I shouldn’t have noticed, since so many men were away. I do know at some point we were fanning out across a field and it had begun to rain. Black expanses of mud grinned up at us between the snow; I was freezing again and had called Annie’s name so often my throat was raw.
How awful, I was thinking. How unbearably awful to lose a child.
I got separated from the group—there was movement in the forest at the edge of the trees; I was sure it was Annie, scared, hiding in the shadows. The rain was rattling hard through the branches, and I could hardly see, my eyes were watering so badly; my fingers were swollen to uselessness.
A few feet into the woods, my foot drove straight through a fine surface of gray ice, down into a pit of mud and pulpy leaves—some kind of animal hole. I pitched forward onto my hands and knees. Immediately I knew I’d twisted or sprained my ankle, and the pain cleared my head. I realized I’d been following some animal, a fox or a deer. There was no child out here, in these woods. If there were, she was no longer alive.
I tried to stand, and suddenly there was a hand guiding me firmly to my feet.
“Are you all right?”
Glasses, beaded with rain; a beard, not too closely trimmed; the smell of damp wool and tobacco; a fine, straight nose, with a bead of moisture hanging from its end.
Those were my first impressions of Thomas.
Afterward he claimed to have noticed me even earlier, standing in the crowd, though I never believed him. I’ve relived that moment so often in my head, I can never be sure what really happened and what we only embellished afterward. But does it matter? We make reality our own, handle it until it is as soft as pressed butter.
There was the offer of a ride; the polite resistance, his insistence—you can’t make it back on your own, not on that foot—and, finally, the yes, thank you, if it really isn’t too much trouble. He kept calling me Miss Lundell, even though Lundell was my married name. I didn’t correct him.
There was his arm around my waist as he supported me across the field through the endless sheet of rain. There was feeling as though we were alone, with a sky of glass above us.
Thomas had a Hudson touring sedan, which felt novel and very luxurious to me, even though it was corroded with rust and the engine turned over several times before it would start. Ed and I didn’t own a car.
Thomas told me he was a professor of classics at St. Aquinas University, in Buffalo; I asked him several questions, and I thought he was ignoring me until he apologized and told me he was deaf in his right ear. He’d lost his hearing as a little boy, after his older brother stuck a pen in his ear, as an experiment, to see how far it would go.
It was then—in the car, as he explained about the pen and why he wasn’t at war, when he had to tilt his left ear toward me so that I could give him directions to the house and twice made the wrong turn, anyway—that I began to love him.
Do you think that’s unrealistic? That this, too, is a story I made up after the fact? To justify and excuse, perhaps—to make sense of everything that came after? Maybe. But it happens—every day, for someone.
Take little Annie Hayes, for example. Two days after the search, it was discovered that she’d been hiding in the cellar of the local pharmacist. His eight-year-old son, Richard Kelly, had been sneaking her chestnuts and milk from the kitchen all week, and they were plotting to run away together. A month earlier, he’d given her free ice cream at the counter of his father’s shop, and she had decided it was love.
Both children were whipped, of course. But Annie did, finally, grow up to marry the pharmacist’s son, and in the spring of ’52, when I had not spoken to Thomas in nearly a decade, I threw handfuls of rice at the new Mrs. Annie Kelly and tilted my face up to the sun to watch it scatter.
SANDRA
Memory is as thick as mud. It rises up, it overwhelms. It sucks you down and freezes you where you stand.
Thrash and kick and gnash your teeth. There’s no escaping it.
Down.
In Georgia, the mud was thick and dark as oil.
Down.
I remember my dad scraping his shoes on the rusted shoe box he inherited from his father, who I met only once, and who had chins like fat rolls of sausage; and my mother, vibrating like a plucked string, hitting high notes of rage, whenever he forgot and tracked mud across the floor.
And further down:
My friend Cissy’s housekeeper, Zulime, smearing cold mud on my arms swollen with poison oak, telling me to hush, now.