No Book but the World: A Novel (11 page)

We stayed in the woods until the new early darkness caught us by surprise. We’d grown chilly by then, even with our sweaters buttoned and our hoods up. Our hands were red-knuckled and bunched like cold apples we kept stuffing back into our pockets. Before leaving we stood together on the slab and looked up through a gap in the branches at the crushed velvet sky.

“S’ah-moon,” said Freddy.

“Where?” I asked.

“There.” Kitty pointed and it seemed natural that for once she had not asked for a translation but had understood him on her own.

I looked and couldn’t see it. Then I could. Glittering ivory rind. I exhaled. My breath ghostwalked hoarily out of my mouth and expanded, dispersed, vanished. A sense of limitless increase.

We were five and seven and seven, out of sight and out of earshot of our parents. Out of their thoughts, perhaps, too. As free children we were accustomed to this. I shivered and reached out, not for Freddy’s hand but for Kitty’s, and she held it and squeezed back.

You couldn’t do that with Fred.

L
ISA, SWEETHEART,
could we get a little water for Miss Manseau, please?”

Mr. Charles’s bass rumble is pitched discreetly low. I wasn’t aware of him getting up from his desk, but now I see him standing once more in the doorway to the outer office. My pulse throbs behind each ear. The blood peals there.

“Thank you, honey,” he says to his secretary, and then he is coming back toward me with a plastic cup, his gait too purposeful and swift for this cramped room: I see him passing right through me, holding the shining white cup and striding clear through my person without spilling a drop, as if I am vapor, as if we exist on different planes.

“Here.” He hands me the cup. Warm tap water. Metallic-tasting, welcome.

“Thanks.”

“Lightheaded?”

“No. Mr. Charles, what—”

He holds up a hand. “Just take a moment. Drink some more water. No rush.” He returns to his chair, sits sorting through papers. The newspaper clippings. I have read them all multiple times, can conjure their words, bitter as ink on my tongue. Thirty-year-old white male. No permanent residence. No occupation. Drifter. Collected cans. Reported to have been staying, since September, in an apartment over a garage located on an auto salvage lot owned by Ronald Ferebee, also the owner of the adjacent house where he lived with his wife and their twelve-year-old grandson, James Ferebee. The missing boy.

I sip. Mr. Charles doesn’t look up; he seems really to have become absorbed, and I wonder if this is the first time he’s reading the articles. The window behind him is a narrow slab of fading light, grave-marker gray. I drink some more. I’m not really lightheaded, just the air in here is overpoweringly close. I want to ask why it smells of bananas. Maybe Bayard Charles is potassium-deficient. I remember my hunger, the fact that I haven’t eaten anything since that meager breakfast: egg, grapefruit half, toast. No wonder I felt a little faint. Sip by sip I drink until the water is gone.

“I’m fine now,” I say.

He looks up from the articles, smiles in a way that seems weary, resigned.

“Mr. Charles. You were saying. You think Fred should enter a plea. Meaning saying he’s guilty? I don’t . . . You haven’t even talked with him yet, you don’t know his side of the story. You haven’t met him. You haven’t asked me anything about him.”

He clears his throat. “Miss Manseau, understand. The reality, the way assigned counsel works in this county, we don’t have the resources. No way we can meet with every client before their court dates. I’m not saying I like it that way.”

“So what, you just advise everybody to enter a plea?”

“Don’t misunderstand. I’m not ready to advise anything yet. But you should prepare for . . . I won’t say the worst. But for a difficult road. Do you want me to level with you, Miss Manseau? If you’d rather be kept in the dark . . . but I don’t think you came all this way just to have me sugar-coat things. The charges I read you, that’s just the arraignment. You oughtn’t be surprised if the D.A. brings additional counts at indictment.” He rubs his chin. “I’d expect it.”

I concentrate on looking him in the eye. I don’t trust my voice to ask what additional counts he foresees.

“If I thought,” he continues, “sugar-coating had practical use, I’d do it in a heartbeat. But I’ve never known it to help a client’s case. Miss Manseau, understand: we’re dealing with the death of a child, a minor. When the medical examiner’s report comes in, the D.A.’s going to be combing it for any reason, any evidence at all that would support his bringing some kind of wrongful death charge. In all likelihood we may be looking at negligent homicide. Maybe man two.”

“Man two?”

“Second-degree manslaughter. That’s a class C felony.”

“Manslaughter’s . . . less than homicide?”

“Opposite. Criminally negligent homicide is a lesser charge than manslaughter. Class E. It’s early days, a lot’s going to depend on the examiner’s report, whether the D.A. thinks he’s got enough cause to convince a grand jury.” He throws his hands wide, shrugs. “
Maybe
it’s going to amount to nothing.
Maybe
we’ll learn . . . oh, the boy had a preexisting condition, was going to have an aneurysm, say. No matter what, no matter where he was or who with.”

“But that’s . . .”

Mr. Charles closes his eyes. “But that’s unlikely. And there’s something else,” he says, now addressing a spot above my head, “that I’d prepare for.”

The blood slams heavily again behind my ears.

“You’ve been reading the papers, following the news? Given the fact pattern of the case, certain questions have been raised about the nature of your brother’s relations with the deceased. Again, we’re waiting here for the medical examiner’s report, but you can believe the D.A. is going to be looking closely at any evidence, anything that might come up in the report that might be indicative of abuse. Of any kind.” His eyes fasten on me. “You’re here, you said, because you want to offer information about your brother. To help me understand him—that right? You said you wanted to ‘explain certain things.’”

Another pause. I know this is my cue to speak. I cannot.

“I wonder,” he suggests, “if there’s anything you want to tell me about your brother’s history. Anything about his prior relations with—boys, children.”

“No.”

“Nothing you want to mention?”

“Nothing to mention.”

The air is thick.

I make it clearer: “There is no history.”

I say it as firmly as possible, all the while knowing it is not precisely true. Or may not be precisely true; the truth is I never knew. But I cannot keep my thoughts from wandering to the story of the family—an old Batter Hollow family with a son—that took Fred on vacation with them the summer he was twenty-three, the summer after Neel died. All I ever knew for sure was that the family brought Fred back to Batter Hollow after only a few weeks. “The trip ended early,” June told me over the phone in a voice like milkweed. I thought she would explain, but she trailed into silence. Then, her voice seeming to dwindle into even frailer wisps: “He seems . . . sad, Ayv.”

The next afternoon I sat across from her at the kitchen table, having wrested myself from Dennis’s and my apartment in the city and traveled grudgingly north to Freyburg. I sat there wary and a little resentful, summoned by what she hadn’t named, waiting for her to explain, but she offered no more details—perhaps she lacked any—of what had happened on the trip, the reason for Fred’s early return. I didn’t press her. Out of sensitivity, I think. But it is also possible I also wanted to wound her a little with my deliberate incuriosity.

“Their son broke his leg,” she finally explained. “It was only an accident, but the break was bad—he needed surgery, so they came back to the States.”

“What do you mean ‘only an accident’? As opposed to on purpose?”

“Of course not,” she said. Then repeated what she’d said the evening before on the phone. “Fred seems so sad. He hasn’t spoken since they brought him back.” Sometime in the night he’d gone out to the tree house he’d built in the woods and stocked with army blankets; she hadn’t seen him all day. “Not one word.”

And I watched her knuckles whiten on the cup—she’d taken to using Neel’s old soup bowl–sized teacup—each time she turned to look out the window at the dense woods behind the house.

Now Mr. Charles clears his throat. “Are you aware that when he was found the boy was wearing only”—he glances at his desk, finds the passage, reads aloud—“a pair of briefs and a single sock?” He gives me a quick look, his seed-eyes sharp, then scans the paper again and reports neutrally, “The temperature at the time they found him was thirty-four degrees. It had dipped to twenty-five the night before.”

“A sock?” I whisper, but the word, malformed, flakes apart in the back of my throat. This hasn’t been in any of the accounts I’ve read. I try to glimpse what sort of paper he’s consulted. Some kind of police form, I think it must be.

“Also,” he continues, “that investigators found, laid out on a table in the apartment where your brother had been staying, the skeletons of dead animals?”

How could I be aware of this?

He says the next thing almost gently. “Also pornographic materials.”

I shake my head.

“You say you’ve been out of contact with him for two years?”

“A little less.”

“Why is that?”

I can only shake my head again.

“And the occasion of your last meeting?”

“Our mother died. So I saw him then, he came home for that.”

“For the funeral?”

“For her. We didn’t have a funeral. He came to see her when she was sick and we knew she was dying. He stayed a few weeks and then he went to Cape Cod. It had all been arranged. He went to stay with a friend of the family, the son of people my parents knew. He’s a housepainter. Fred worked for him. He’s never been a big phone person. My brother, I mean. He doesn’t own a cell. I did speak with him there on the Cape, a few times.”

“When was the last time?”

“A few months ago?”

“Why did he leave?”

“I don’t know.”

“Were you surprised he didn’t tell you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are there any other living relatives?”

“No.”

“Yet it doesn’t surprise you that he’d take off for no reason, without letting you know.”

How can I explain? Mr. Charles’s voice is magnificently dignified, carefully stripped of inflection, but I see what he must be thinking, see the way the elements must be composing themselves in his head.

“Would you describe your brother as a drifter?”

“No.” Something cracks and I look down: I’ve split the plastic cup. “He—we—it’s how we grew up. Traveling, I mean. Our parents took us on lots of trips, camping and things. We’d make it up as we went, fairly unstructured. And Fred didn’t go to school. Or only for a short time and then our parents—well, nowadays you’d say they homeschooled him. We had a lot of freedom. We were encouraged to explore.”

“Explore?” Mr. Charles twists the base of a silver pen.

“We . . . He’d spend, you know, whole days in the woods. Sometimes longer. It was normal for him.” What is it I’m trying to tell Mr. Charles about Fred?
He shall have no master but Nature
. I wonder if Bayard Charles is familiar with Rousseau.

“You weren’t homeschooled?”

“No.”

“Why was your brother homeschooled and not you?”

“Fred is . . . it suited him. He’s different. He’s always been different.” I feel heat blossom on my neck at this treasonous confession. Even a word as vague and benign as “different” was never used in our family. But who am I betraying? Fred? Our parents? And suddenly I’m furious, because how am I supposed to help Fred without including this part of the story, without telling Mr. Charles the story?

The phone in the outer office erupts with another full-throated warble, but Mr. Charles, jotting quickly now with the silver pen, seems not to notice. “In what way ‘different’?”

“Well . . . he didn’t start reading until late. He didn’t talk much as a kid. I mean he never talked much, period, but especially when he was little, he was slow to begin talking and . . . well, slow with lots of things.”

“Are you saying he has some kind of disability? Are we talking about an individual of diminished capacity?”

“Yes. No. I mean, what is diminished? He’s just different, he’s his own way. What I’m saying is if you knew him it wouldn’t seem strange that he took this boy to the woods. He was always going into the woods, into nature.”

“Has he ever been diagnosed with a specific condition? Ever been evaluated that you know of?” Mr. Charles is leaning forward, more animated than he’s been this whole time. “Do you know whether we’re talking about a cognitive impairment, or something behavioral? Any mental illness?”

“No, not . . . I don’t think so.” I press my fingers hard against my bottom lip.

“You say he did attend some school?”

“Only for a year. Well—part of a year.”

“When was this?”

I picture us down at the mailboxes at the end of Batter Hollow Lane, waiting for the school bus. Bracing for the school bus. “When he was eight.”

“Was this a private school, some type of special ed?”

“No. Public. Freyburg Primary School, where we grew up.”

“Why did he stop?”

I picture us sitting outside the main office, Freddy and me, swinging our legs on the little bench, waiting while Neel and June met privately with the principal, Freddy’s second-grade teacher and the school social worker. Hearing Neel’s raised voice right through the cinderblock wall. Seeing June’s smile when they came out, an awful, crooked smile that tried to cover the fact she’d been crying. “It wasn’t the right fit.”

“Do you remember the name of your pediatrician?” asks Mr. Charles. “I assume your parents took you to the same doctor?”

I shake my head. “We mostly would go see Ginny Gann if we got sick. She was our neighbor, an osteopath? I think that’s what she was. Like a family practitioner.”

Writing as he speaks: “Still in practice?”

I have no idea. June will know, I think for a split second, then make the autocorrection: would have known.

•   •   •

N
ONE OF THE FAMILIES
live at Batter Hollow anymore. The Shed was only ever sporadically occupied after Jim and Katinka left back in the mid-eighties. The Salinas-Buchbinders moved out of the Annex when Noah left for college. The Ganns, after so many years of providing a more or less cheerfully frenetic backdrop to my own childhood, eventually vacated the Classrooms to go west, I think, someplace like Seattle or Vancouver. And the Manseaus left immediately upon Kitty’s finishing high school. They’d grown tired of the inconveniences of experimental living some years earlier, but waited long enough for Kitty to graduate with her class before they relocated back to Lower Manhattan, not far from the art gallery that had begun to show Don’s metal sculptures. Their desertion came as a particular blow, not only because it vouched a loss of faith in Neel and June’s way of life, but because it left them without any neighbors. Neel felt their move as both a philosophical and personal rejection, and it became one of the grievances he nursed with bitter dedication during his final years.