lost boy lost girl (13 page)

Mark jammed his hands into the pockets of his jeans and glared at the neat, suspiciously lush grass that ended in a knife edge at the sides of the path. “I hate my father,” he said in an eerily reasonable voice.

With a brief, electric thrill of panic, Jimbo wondered how Mark was going to get through the funeral.

14

For Mark, the day of his mother’s funeral revolved around the moment the hard, grayish-brown lump of clay bearing the print of the gravedigger’s shovel fell from his right hand into the maw of her grave and struck the top of her coffin. Before that moment, he had wondered if he could make it through everything the day would demand of him, or if he might succumb to various disasters either internal or external in nature. He could see himself fainting, as Jimbo had fainted on the lawn of the house on Michigan Street; far worse, he could also see himself falling down in a frothing, eye-rolling seizure. These humiliations would occur, he thought, in front of the mourners assembled at Sunnyside Cemetery. The minister would be opening his great Bible; the Monaghans, and the Shillingtons, and the Tafts, plus a couple of the goofy ladies from the gas company and maybe a schoolteacher or two would be standing beside the grave, looking sad and dignified; even Jackie Monaghan, who would surely be in a most grievous condition of hangover and therefore in desperate need of a quick, medicinal jolt; and Mark’s father would be staring straight ahead, with his hands folded on the mound of his belly in a fury of enraged impatience; and then he would embarrass everyone and disgrace himself by jerking and twitching and drooling into the cemetery’s beautifully maintained grass. Or the sky would suddenly darken, abrupt rain would slash down onto the mourners, and a bolt of lightning would slide out of the firmament and fry him where he stood.

The internal catastrophes were far worse, involving as they did a painful death caused by the overheated, untrustworthy physical mechanism that was his body. Because these were worse, they were far more likely. A heart attack, an aneurysm, a brain hemorrhage—common sense told him that he was much likelier to die from a brain hemorrhage than a lightning bolt.

His father’s face suggested that he was counting the minutes until he could leave. Mark regarded the stiff, damped-down expression and realized that he was bound to this man for years and years to come.

Standing a bit apart from the rest of the group and wearing a dark blue suit, horn-rimmed sunglasses of an odd, solarized blue, and a dark blue WBGO cap bearing the image of a man playing a tenor saxophone, Uncle Tim looked as though he was checking everybody out. Maybe Mark’s father would let him stay with Uncle Tim for a week or two.

He listened to the Rent-a-minister’s words, thinking that he seemed like a nice man. He had a slow, pleasant way of speaking, and the sort of rumbling, trustworthy voice that paid off for politicians and voice-over men. Every word the man said seemed to be sensible and carefully chosen. Mark understood each one as it entered his consciousness. The larger verbal units of phrases and sentences, however, made so little sense to Mark that they might as well have been in a foreign language—Basque, maybe, or Atlantean. He was hyperconscious of the breath moving in and out of his throat, the blood traveling through his veins, the sizzle of sunlight on the backs of his hands.

The minister stepped back. A machine like a forklift lowered the coffin into the Astroturf-bedecked grave. The coffin settled on the ground, and two men whisked away the fake grass. Mark’s father walked the few steps to the pyramidal heap of earth scooped from the gravesite. He picked up a baseball-sized lump of dirt, leaned over the open grave, and extended his arm. The lump of dirt fell from his hand and struck the lid of the coffin with a reverberant
thunk
that made Mark fear he would be struck deaf and blind. For a second, the world before him faded into hundreds of fast-moving red and white specks like infant comets. The dancing specks resolved into the figure of Philip Underhill wiping his hands as he stepped back from the grave. Mark’s head was spinning and the middle of his chest seemed to be filled with effervescent air slightly cooler than the rest of his body. Uncle Tim moved toward the grave. He, too, held a baseball of earth in one hand.

Uncle Tim’s rock hit the coffin with the flat, hollow rap of a hand on a massive wooden door.

Still a little disembodied, Mark moved over to the temporary pyramid of grave dirt and pulled from it a lump with long striations on its widest surface. This piece of clay had been through the mill. It had been stabbed in the gut, bitten, and cut in half. The cool gas filling his chest advanced into the bottom of his throat. His feet moved with surprising confidence alongside the deep trench in the ground. He let the hard-edged clod drop from his hand, and it struck the coffin with a high-pitched pinging sound that reminded Mark uncomfortably of a doorbell. A shiver passed through him.

No matter what Jimbo said, Mark suddenly understood that he had
seen
the force that had stopped him inside the back door of the house; he had
seen
the force that had killed his mother. It had been standing at the top of Michigan Street with its back turned to him. Mark remembered the dark, tangled hair, the wide back, the black coat hanging like iron, and the sense of utter wrongness that had flowed out from this figure. That wrongness had seeped into his mother and so poisoned her that she had leaped into her grave.

The day swung around on a pivot, and his fear transformed itself into clarity. Two tasks lay before him. He had to learn whatever he could about the history of 3323 North Michigan Street and those who had lived in it, so that he could put a name to that evil being. And he had, more than ever, to discover its secrets. He could avenge his mother’s death in no other way. Images of himself ransacking the closets and ripping up floorboards raced through his mind. According to Jimbo, guilt lay behind these desires, but Jimbo was wrong. What he was feeling was rage.

Like a set of orders, his new clarity accompanied him on the journey back to Superior Street and sent him into the house with the white noise of his purpose humming in his head. The funeral was over, it was time to arrange the next step, hurry hurry the minutes slip away.

Men and women filtered in through the front door, but Jimbo was not among them. Mark’s father and Uncle Tim set out the soft drinks and the casseroles and coffee cake brought by the Shillingtons and the Tafts, and soon a crowd as numerous as flies around a bloody corpse had fastened on the dining room table, fracturing and coalescing again as they wandered in and out of the living room holding paper plates and paper cups. The Rochenkos came in hand in hand because they felt shy and ill at ease. A few beats later, Old Man Hillyard eased through the door, not holding hands with anyone, in fact gripping a cane with one hand while the other was deep in a trouser pocket. Annoyingly, Mr. Hillyard caught Mark’s eye and came limping toward him. On a ninety-degree day, he was wearing a thick plaid shirt, ancient corduroy trousers held up by suspenders, and an incongruous pair of cowboy boots.

“I was very sorry to hear about your mother,” he said. “You have my condolences, son. If there’s anything I can ever do for you, just ask.”

Like that’s gonna happen,
Mark thought, and thanked the old man.

“See you and the Monaghan boy out on your skateboards almost every day,” Hillyard said. “Those wheels of yours sure make a hellacious racket.” His face drew itself up into a network of deep corrugations, and Mark realized that he was smiling. “Looks like you might be improving some. Wish I could get around like the two of you.” He lifted the cane and shook it. “I was doing all right until my ankle folded right under me when I stepped off my porch the other day. Went down like a sack of potatoes. The way I feel now, I can barely make it to the grocery store.” He leaned forward and whispered, “Tell you the truth, son, I can barely make it to the can when I have to go wee-wee in the middle of the night.”

“I can’t help you with that one,” Mark said, wanting desperately to get away from the old man.

“You and Red spend a heck of a lot of time staring at that empty house across from me,” Old Man Hillyard said, horrifying him. “The two of you thinking of moving in?”

“Sorry, my dad needs me to do something,” Mark blurted, then backpedaled on an angle that gave him a better view of the front door. His father’s boss, Mr. Battley, had just appeared at the head of a phalanx of people from the school, all of whom he knew far too well. In their professional costumes of gray suits and white shirts, they resembled FBI agents, but poorly paid ones.

Never before had the house contained so many people. The crowd spilled from the living room into the dining room, where the Quincy people were now single-mindedly headed, and from there into the kitchen. Although most people were speaking quietly, their voices created a noisy Babel in which it was difficult to make out individual words. Ordinarily, this would have resulted in furious eruptions from his father, but Philip seemed more relaxed and at ease than at any time earlier in the day. He looked like a host who had decided to let the party take care of itself. Now his father was following Mr. Battley toward the food, and Mark suspected that he would stay by his boss’s side until the principal had scarfed down enough free grub and made his good-byes.

When Mark glanced again at the front of the living room, Mr. Hillyard was boring the pants off the Rochenkos. The Monaghan family was beginning to come through the door. First Margo, as ever suggesting that some movie star had happened to walk in by mistake; then Jackie, grinning and red-faced, as ever suggesting that he wouldn’t at all object were you to offer him a wee dram of popskull; and finally Jimbo, who gave him a not-unfriendly glance of inspection.

Before he could signal Jimbo to meet him in the kitchen, his uncle Tim appeared beside him with an unexpected offer. “I think you should come to New York and stay with me for a week or so. Maybe in August?”

Pleased and surprised, Mark said he would love to do that and asked if Tim had mentioned the visit to his father.

“I will later,” Tim said. He smiled at Mark before cutting through the crowd in search of Philip.

For the next ten minutes, he lost sight of Jimbo as neighbors and coworkers patted his cheek or gripped his upper arm and uttered, over and over again, always with the sense of communicating a great truth, the same useless and depressing remarks.
Must be awfully tough on you, son. . . . She’s in a better place now. . . . God has a reason for everything, you know. . . . Gee, I remember when my mom died.

Finally, he spotted Jimbo eyeing him from just inside the dining room arch and went over to talk to him.

“Are you okay?” Jimbo asked.

“More than you’d think.”

Their fathers stood, conversing quietly, only a few feet away, their backs turned toward the boys. On the other side of their fathers, Mr. Battley was flapping his gums at Uncle Tim.

“Good,” Jimbo said. “You know . . .” Jimbo’s wide mouth turned down at the edges, and his eyes shrank into a look of pure anguish. “Yo, I’m really sorry about your mom. I should have told you that right away, but I didn’t know how.”

Without warning, emotion surged up within Mark, searing everything it touched. For a couple of seconds, an abyss of feeling opened before him, and the sheer weight of the air on his shoulders threatened to push him in. Tears blinded him. He brought a hand up to his eyes; he exhaled and heard himself make a strangled, inarticulate sound of grief.

“Are you sure you’re okay?”

Jimbo’s voice rescued him.

“I guess,” he said, and wiped his eyes. His body was still reverberating with emotion.

Behind him, Jackie Monaghan said, “Wasn’t Nancy related to this weird guy who used to live around here? Somebody said something about it once, I don’t remember who.”

His father said, “Should have kept his mouth shut, whoever he was.”

“I sort of lost it for a second there,” Mark said, wondering what Jimbo’s dad was talking about. Now Jackie was saying that his mother’s relative had risked his life to save some children. Mark turned his head just in time to see Jackie tell his father that the kids were black. That would be that, he thought; the conversation would get ugly in a hurry.

“Well, it’s no wonder,” said Jimbo.

“No, it’s not the funeral,” Mark said. “I just understood something I should have seen before. Actually, I don’t know how I missed it.”

“What?” Jimbo asked.

Mark moved closer to Jimbo and whispered, “It was
the house
.”

“What do you mean, ‘the house’?” Comprehension flashed into his eyes. “Oh, no. No, man. Come on.”

“It’s the truth. You didn’t hear her chew me out for even thinking about that place. Ask yourself—why would she kill herself?”

“I don’t know why,” Jimbo said, miserably.

“Right. I didn’t stay far enough away, and something in there killed her. That’s what happened, Jimbo. We can’t dick around about this anymore. We have to go in there.”

In the silence of Jimbo’s inability to respond, both boys clearly heard Philip Underhill say, “I should have known better than to marry into a bunch of screwballs like that.”

Mark turned pale. Unnoticed by Philip and Jackie, he moved past them and dodged through the crowd gathered around the table. Jimbo hastened after his friend and caught up with him at the opening into the kitchen, where, surprisingly, Mark had come to a sudden halt.

When Jimbo reached Mark’s side, he was struck by the expression on his face. His mouth hung slightly open, and the side of his face visible to Jimbo had gone white. But for a small blue vein beating just above the V of hair at his temple, he might have been carved from marble.

Jimbo did not dare to look into the kitchen. After having glimpsed that being through his father’s field glasses, the last thing he wanted to do was to see it in Mark Underhill’s kitchen. The thought of that formidable presence standing before him sent fear washing through his stomach.

He had no idea how long he stood beside Mark Underhill, too afraid of what he might see to turn his head. Mark did not move; as far as Jimbo could tell, Mark did not even take a breath. To Jimbo, they seemed to stand, he immobilized by Mark’s immobility, for an eternity. Around them, the world, too, had become immobile; yet the blue vein in Mark’s temple beat, beat, beat. Jimbo’s tongue felt clumsy and enormous in his dry mouth.