The Story of Beautiful Girl (38 page)

They took Sam and Jean’s van. He and Sam shared the driving, with Jean interpreting. And now they were here, and the gate was open.

Let’s go in,
he signed.

It was the smell he couldn’t believe as the van rolled past the gate. Not the stench, which wasn’t apparent, but the Pennsylvania countryside. Homan lowered his window and breathed in. The scent was just as it used to be this far from the cottages: grassy and earthy and clean. Beautiful Girl had loved these smells, though she’d never been free to roam all the way down the drive. It was he who used to come here when the guardhouse needed repairs, giving his lungs a break from the odors in the cottages. Now the guardhouse was gone, and the grass was a few inches higher than had ever been allowed. Did anyone coming through this gate guess what this place once was?

The first building came into view as they continued up the drive, a gleaming five-story hospital. Made of red sandblasted stone, it had flags flying from poles, a portico at the entrance, and rows of tinted windows with not a single bar among them.

He wondered what it replaced. The drive curved in new ways, and he couldn’t remember.

He looked out the passenger window. Jean was facing him, but his eye was drawn past her to—he realized—the administrative building with the tower. Although it was ancient, it looked better than ever, with freshly painted trim, uncracked marble steps, a polished railing.

He climbed past Jean and threw open the van door.

Positioned before the steps, he regarded the tower. The stone was as gray as he recalled, the corners as sharp, and as his gaze rose up, he remembered the first time he’d stood here. How enraged and frightened he’d been, locked in handcuffs, clueless
about where he was. He’d come into the town of Well’s Bottom seeking nothing more than a place to sleep for the night.

He thought of that night now. He’d jumped off a train and found himself in the borough, looking for food and a safe place to sleep until morning. In the back alleys, he’d come across a jacket someone had left in a yard, then he’d helped himself to a loaf of bread inside the back of a bakery. Satisfied, he’d curled up in an alley behind a bar and slept. And that would have been it.

Except that just as the sun was rising, he saw, right before him, a trash can with an upside-down lid. The lid had captured water, and when he rose to his feet and looked into it, he saw his reflection. He was dirty, and his teenage beard was more ragged than it had seemed with his hands. But with a razor and some soap, he could look good, even respectable. Maybe even like someone who could walk into a train station and get treated like a regular human being.

O muh.
He tried to say his name aloud, his first effort to form a word with his voice in many years. A vibrating feeling came into his throat, though with no way of telling how he sounded, he put his hand before his lips to feel the air.
O muh.
He smiled. He was a person who could amount to something. Didn’t he know how to steer a car? Hadn’t he survived in the outdoors?

Muh nuh O muh.
My name Homan. He banged on the lid.
Muh nuh O muh!

The light came up hard from behind.

He spun around.

Police! He hadn’t known they were there! He’d been too stuck on his voice!

He fought like the dickens to get away. But they grabbed and cuffed him and drove him to a jail, then a court, where a judge decided he was a thief, too slow-witted to understand them, a danger to others, and sent him here. He remembered being hauled out of the car right in front of these steps, terrified and confused.
And saying to himself, as he stared up to the clock,
Be a cold day in hell ’fore you use that voice again.

Now he looked down the tower, one window at a time. Dark. Dark. Dark. Even the one to the left of the front staircase, the office for the big shot’s—no, Luke Collins’s—secretary. Homan mounted the steps to get a better look. A small sign was screwed into the oak door:
BUILDING CLOSED
. He peered over the hedge and looked into the window.

The room was nothing more than walls and a floor. There was no one to get back at now.

He turned to the van.
You see any signs stopping us from driving over the grounds?

You want to do that?

No. But I have to.

All the cottages remained, and as Sam drove slowly past, Homan saw
BUILDING CLOSED
affixed to every door. There was the cottage where he’d met Shortie and Whirly Top. The dining cottage, where he’d stolen sugar cubes. The laundry, where he’d given her bouquets of feathers.

And there was the path where he’d sometimes seen the other deaf man stuck here, an African American who loved uniforms and used signs Homan thought meaningless, though which probably weren’t, any more than Homan’s had been. He’d finally figured it out. Homan had learned a dialect the McClintocks’ father had picked up in deaf school, a black dialect of American Sign Language. Whites didn’t know it, off in their own schools as they were down south. Apparently some blacks didn’t, either.

How far Homan had come to know all this now. If only he’d known a sliver of it then.

Turn toward the fields.

The barn was pathetic, with vines covering the sides, a tree
growing through the roof. He’d kept her drawing of the sea in that barn. He’d held it up many mornings, fascinated by the aqua water pushing against the rocks and foaming along the tower to the side. He could not get into the barn now, but what did it matter? If the cornfields had become beds of wildflowers, and the staff huts had been wiped off the map, that drawing had surely become dust.

I don’t get it
, he signed to Jean as they approached the cemetery, now almost entirely overgrown.
Why have they left all this here?

Maybe it’s just too much land and they couldn’t find someone who’d want to take it over.

The drive took them back toward the main building, and Homan thought,
Maybe no one wants to deal with ghosts.

After returning to the new hospital building, they worked through a succession of offices until they found the right bureaucrat.

“I’m afraid I don’t know much,” Mrs. Raja said after she’d rolled her desk chair to sit in a circle with them so Jean could interpret. “I do know that everyone who lived here was moved back with their families or into smaller facilities. Some of those are nearby and some aren’t. I could give you a list of the agencies.”

We don’t have her name,
Homan signed.

“Isn’t she a relative?”

He paused, then flashed on the image of her face coming toward him that last night, the old lady’s dress flowing from her shoulders, the pantomime ring he’d placed on her finger.

Yes.

“But you don’t know her name?”

He felt his face fall.
No.

“I’ll be honest with you, sir. We occasionally get people like you stopping in. Usually they learned late in life they had a rela
tive here, or decided to find a long-lost son or sister. I give them the list of agencies, but their search often proves fruitless. The institution closed before computers, and many files were deficient to begin with. Some families gave only first names, or used false names. Some residents didn’t even have names.”

Sam, looking at Homan, asked, “They didn’t have names?”

“No one knew who they were. They just ended up here one way or another, and if they didn’t arrive with records and lacked verbal abilities, they had no identity.”

Homan signed,
What were they called in the files?

“They were given numbers for the order in which they entered the system. John Doe Number One, John Doe Number Two. Like that.”

Homan looked out the window to a tall maple tree. Beautiful Girl hadn’t known his name, either. He remembered her name sign for him. He was sure it wasn’t a number.

A squirrel scampered along a branch, and he realized with a start that he’d seen this view from this very location. Mrs. Raja’s office was where Chubby Redhead’s office had been. This building had replaced the staff cottage. Beautiful Girl had drawn her pictures right here.

He turned back. Mrs. Raja was already rising. “Wish I could be more helpful,” she said.

We’re sorry,
Jean signed when Homan turned on the ignition and glanced over at her.

He pulled the van out of the lot. With his hands on the wheel, Homan was at least in control of something. This way he could forget any impulse to kick trees and could kick himself instead.
You knew nothing good come outta this,
he berated himself, dialing his mind back to who he’d been then.
Why you need to find her anyhow? So she accepted you just the way you was. That nice, but
Sam do that now, too. And Jean and King and Queen and all them new friends. Ain’t that good enough? Your guilt so bad you can’t make your peace with that?

Sam tapped the back of his arm with his stick.

We just passed the off-ramp,
Jean signed.

Homan shook his head back to the road. Sure enough, he’d missed the turn. The road had become a bypass, cutting through hills. He looked to either side and saw nothing except box stores and chain restaurants where there used to be trees.
Well, ain’t that just the way of the world. Everything come to an end, whether you wants it to or not. All that nature out there: over. The Snare: dead and gone. Even a love that make a man giddy and romantic, that give him a hope and joy he never known, that brave him into taking a slingshot to the impossible and bringing it almost complete to its knees—even a love like that come to an end. Life just ashes to ashes and dust to dust. And there nothing you can do about it neither.

Jean banged on the steering wheel.

I know you’re feeling bad, but we have to turn around.

You’re right,
he signed.

He had to get a grip. He had to be on the lookout for a road sign to get them off the bypass and back in the opposite direction. But they were on a bridge now, and he wasn’t about to do a U-turn here. That was something movie heroes did—and he was no hero. He was just a man who’d loved. A man who’d felt so treasured by a beautiful girl that he’d become more than he’d known he could be. A man who’d, yes, gotten loads of acceptance and respect from friends and employers, but—
Tell yourself the truth—
had never felt that treasured again.

After the bridge, the road narrowed to two lanes, with farms and woods on either side. It took a few miles until he finally saw a place to turn at a gap in the trees. He put on his turn signal, and as he neared the gap he saw it was a dirt road, and beside it was
a sign:
RIVERSIDE BOY SCOUT CAMP
. And something tumbled into place inside him.

It was the place where he’d run that night. Where he dove off the dock to cross the river.

He was on the road. The same road.

He signed before Sam and Jean could react:
I know where I am. I have one more thing to see.
He turned off the turn signal and sped up.

Yeah, it was ridiculous, he thought, hitting 50 mph, 60 mph, passing pokey cars, farms, woods. He wouldn’t find her there. He couldn’t imagine Roof Giver would still be alive. And it was impossible that Little One would still be in the farmhouse.

Yet he had to do it. If he didn’t, his search would never feel complete.

He reached the turnoff to the other road so much faster than they had that rainy night. Now he could read the signs, though he knew to stay where he was, on Old Creamery Road. That night, they hadn’t known what to do. It was a random choice to stay straight.
What more you need to know there ain’t no big drawing? You go straight on one road just because. You pick up a trash lid with water just because.

The woods flew fast. He wondered if he’d recognize it.

He knew he’d recognize it.

There was the white house they’d almost gone up to. But she’d shaken her head no, so they’d pressed on.

There were other houses they’d passed, older and more weathered. Maybe, against all odds, the old lady
would
be there. Maybe she’d know the answers he was seeking.

He reached the bend in the road and knew he was almost there. It was coming up on the left, after the road straightened out, only a few hundred yards away.

The road straightened, and as it did, the trees hugging the
asphalt gave way to houses. Hundreds of them, all split levels, spreading up the rise to his left, marching toward the horizon on his right.

He slowed the van, staring to his left. The ground rose at a grade he remembered. He’d rushed up it with Beautiful Girl. He’d run down it through the woods.

The entrance to the development was easy to see up ahead, flanked as it was by two low brick walls. In front of the walls, he saw as the van neared, grew crisply trimmed shrubs and ornamental grasses, the display on the left matching the one on the right. The only difference was that the right side also displayed a sign with gilded letters:
THE ESTATES AT MEADOW HILLS
.

He turned into the development. The main road was wide, with narrower streets snaking off across the hillside. He parked at the curb. Then he opened the door and got out.