December Park

by Ronald Malfi

Behind him, the rest of my friends remained standing with their knives out, expressions of utter disbelief on their faces. Even Denny Sallis looked upon the scene with incredulity. I turned and saw Eric Falconette leaning against the underpass with his hands in his pockets. There was a black streak of blood on his left cheek, and I had to wipe tears from my eyes to make sure I was actually seeing it.

  Keener rolled over onto his side. Blood purled from his nose, soaking his shirt and pants. He took his time coughing and spitting onto the ground. His face was so red it looked as though it had been heated in a kiln. With great care, he propped himself up on his hands and knees and remained in that position while he caught his breath.

  “Hey,” Sallis squawked at Keener. It seemed like he couldn’t make up his mind whether to help his friend or take off running through the underpass. “Nate, you okay?”

  Keener held out one hand in Sallis’s direction. He didn’t lift his head to look at him.

  My attention returned to Falconette. When he caught my stare, he manufactured an overlarge and humorless smile. He possessed the blank and soulless eyes of a department store mannequin.

  Keener spat on the ground—a globule of reddish mucus—then climbed unsteadily to his feet.

  “Nate?” Sallis queried again.

  Keener faced me. A bright red banner of blood had spilled from his nose and was smeared across one half of his face. When he winced, I saw blood on his teeth. “Okay.” The word sputtered out in a shaky exhalation. It was barely a whisper. “Okay.” And he nodded at me. “Okay.”

  When I opened my mouth and tried to speak, all that came out was a thin whistling sound.

  Keener stumbled toward the mouth of the underpass. Sallis, whose eyes were as large as flashbulbs, followed him.

  Falconette remained leaning against the tunnel, hands in his pockets. The cut on his left cheek was leaking toward his chin now. After a moment, he slid one hand from his pocket—very slowly—and pointed at me. He jerked his finger like he was pulling the trigger of a gun and said, “Ka-pow.” Then he faded into the darkness of the underpass, whistling.

  As all the adrenaline was pumped from my bloodstream, pain began to blossom across my face and body. I patted my tenderized face and discovered that much of the blood on my hands and shirt had come from my own nose and mouth. “I think I’m gonna pass out,” I muttered, slowly lowering myself to the ground.

  I looked up and tried to focus on the Park Closes at Dusk sign to anchor myself, but it pixelated and scattered as a sickening numbness enveloped me. I closed my eyes and felt the earth tilt to one side. An instant later, I was overcome by the very real sensation that the world had opened up beneath me and I was falling, falling, falling, just as my friends and I had done in my nightmares, right down into narrow little holes in the earth . . .

  Then, little by little, I felt the warm night air against my face, the trickles of sweat and blood across my skin, the numbing throb in my right hand. The world came back to me in fragments.

  Scott’s face appeared in front of me. “You okay?”

  I couldn’t speak. My throat was so dry I could have lit a match by striking it across my teeth.

  “That really just happened,” Peter said on a gust of pent-up breath and collapsed on the ground beside me.

  Michael dropped down on the other side of me and slung an arm around my shoulders. “Your face looks like hamburger meat. It’s a surprising improvement, to be honest.”

  “Don’t make me laugh,” I croaked. “Hurts.”

  “Should you go to a doctor?” Adrian said.

  “I’m okay,” I said. “Just a little banged up.”

  “I think you broke Keener’s nose,” said Scott.

  “Good,” I said. “What happened to Falconette’s face?”

  “Shit,” Michael said. “Scott cut him.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah,” Scott said, a bit out of breath. He looked around nervously as if fearful he would be overheard. “He tried to jump in on the fight so I . . . well . . .”

  “He just lashed out and cut him,” Michael finished.

  “Holy shit,” I said.

  Scott turned his palms up and stared at his hands. They shook.

  The sky growled. Either a dump truck was bounding down the road or a storm was fast approaching. Fat drops of water pattered on my head, and I turned my hot face up to them.

  Adrian let me clean up at his house before I went home. Thankfully his mother had gone to bed early, so that was one less thing I had to contend with.

  In the downstairs bathroom, I scrubbed the dried blood from my face and hands while Adrian disappeared upstairs to fetch me one of his shirts. My face was a little red, and there were some nicks on my cheeks and chin and a decent horizontal gash across my forehead. But considering Keener’s busted nose, I thought I had gotten off pretty easily. The worst was my right hand—it ached, and I found it next to impossible to make a proper fist.

  Adrian appeared in the bathroom doorway with a Captain America T-shirt that looked about two sizes too small. “It’s a little big for me, so it might fit you pretty good.”

  That was when I lost it. Tears sprung from my eyes, and I felt my legs threaten to collapse beneath me. My entire body burned. I sobbed—a pathetic foghorn sound.

  In the mirror, Adrian’s blurry reflection watched me. “Does it hurt?”

  I swiped at my eyes and turned the water on. After I washed my face again, I muttered, “No. I’m not hurt.”

  “Then how come you’re crying?”

  “I’m not,” I whined, feeling the anger and frustration and fear rise up in me all over again. “I’m n-n-not—”

  Tears spilled down my face again. Ashamed, I hung my head and let them fall down the drain. I was thankful for the running water covering up my sobs. “Don’t tell the guys,” I managed, my breath hitching.

  “Never,” Adrian said. Then he shut the door and left me to it.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  What Michael Found

  Two weeks into July, a ringing telephone jarred me from sleep. The clock on my nightstand said it was just after four o’clock. Darkness still permeated my bedroom, and I thought the phone had been part of a dream I’d immediately forgotten the second I opened my eyes.

  Then I heard the ringing again, followed by my father’s gruff, groggy voice as he answered. His words were muted, but I didn’t have to hear him to know it was work. When he hung up, I heard his heavy feet creaking on the floorboards in the hallway. A moment after that, I heard the pipes shudder in the walls as the shower clunked on.

  I rolled out of bed, tugged an old T-shirt over my boxer shorts, then crept downstairs to the kitchen where I brewed a pot of coffee. From the window, the first glimmer of daylight could be seen between the stunted pin oaks and pine trees on the eastern side of the street.

  Fifteen minutes later, my father appeared in the doorway, straightening his tie and tugging on a navy-blue blazer. “What are you doing up this early?”

  “Phone woke me. What happened?”

  “Did you know a girl named Jennifer Vestos?”

  I felt my stomach avalanche into my bowels. “She goes to Stanton.”

  “She’s missing.”

  I said nothing.

  He went into the vestibule where he fished his car keys out of the ceramic bowl by the front door. From the window, I watched him drag his tired-looking body into the old sedan, then back slowly out of the driveway. I watched his car go until it hooked a right onto Haven. I could still hear the car’s engine growling even after it had vanished.

  I turned the coffeemaker off and went upstairs. Climbing into my bed, I found the sheets cold from my absence. My room was still dark, but I couldn’t go back to sleep and enjoy the few hours remaining until I had to get up to go to work at the thrift store. My father had already referred to the girl in the past tense—Did you know a girl named Jennifer Vestos? That spoke volumes, I thought. My father had finally lost hope.

&nb
sp; While I had slept, Rita Vestos had woken around four in the morning to feed the baby. As she always did, she poked her head into Jennifer’s room, only to find the girl’s bed empty. Panic-stricken, she’d awoken her husband, Ford, who eventually discovered that the back door was closed but unlocked. Ford Vestos swore to police that he had locked the back door earlier in the evening and checked it before going to bed.

  The final conclusion by the HFPD was that Jennifer Vestos had most likely known her abductor. Jennifer had presumably gone outside to meet this individual, which would explain the pair of sneakers missing from her closet (she would have put them on before going outside) as well as the unlocked back door.

  Something Scott had said to us earlier that summer returned to me upon hearing this information: “Adults don’t know all the city’s secrets, all the places to hide. Not like we do. We’re kids and we know, and that’s what we keep bringing to this thing over and over that the cops can’t.”

  It was true: there was a secret society of children throughout the city, like an underground network of rebels in a distant and war-torn country. Adults knew nothing about Michael’s penchant for stowing cantaloupes in people’s gardens (just as he had done recently to my grandfather). They had never learned who’d stolen the homecoming cow or of its underwater grave in the Shallows. They weren’t aware that the chain-link fence around the construction site behind the library was never locked, creating a shortcut to the Superstore plaza. Just as these grown-ups were ignorant to the hidden byways and whispered secrets concerning their town, so were they ignorant to the whims of the children who lived there.

  This is what we knew about Jennifer Vestos. She hung out with a cadre of loners who smoked pot in the school bathrooms and skipped out of class more frequently than my friends and me. Though she was only a sophomore, she frequently hung out with degenerates from the local community college or the vocational school in Glenrock, guys with facial hair and shiny cars with chrome wheels and tinted windows that looked like spaceships. They would sometimes pick her up from school, their music blasting, their cars belching out clouds of black exhaust that reeked of pot. It was rumored she had gotten pregnant by one of these dirtbags and had had an abortion, though no one ever knew if it was true or not.

  Jennifer also held the honor of being involved in one of only two girl fights that had ever graced the Pepto-Bismol–colored halls of Stanton School. During the fight, Jennifer had ripped out the hoop earring of the other girl, spraying blood all down the girl’s cheek and across Jennifer’s shirt. True to form, Jennifer wore that shirt an entire week (after returning from her suspension), the arc of blood droplets across the front like a badge of honor.

  Every night after her parents had gone to bed Jennifer would sneak out onto her back porch and smoke pot. It explained the missing sneakers; it explained the unlocked back door. The rear of her house faced the side of the Lambeths’ house, and the Lambeth twins frequently bemoaned their inability to sleep with their windows open in the summer because of the fat, pug-faced Vestos girl who was out there every night, smoking like a goddamn chimney.

  The Lambeth twins said that the police questioned them about the night Jennifer disappeared. No, they hadn’t heard anything. No, they hadn’t seen anything. Did they tell the cops about Jennifer’s penchant for sneaking out of the house and smoking dope? No, they did not. It never occurred to them.

  A week later, the phone rang just after eight o’clock on a Wednesday morning. I was already up, having to be at Secondhand Thrift for work by nine. My father had left for the day, but he’d scribbled his beeper number on the wall pad beside the phone in case anyone called for him. I had hardly seen him since Jennifer Vestos went missing.

  “Is that you, Mazzone?”

  I just barely recognized the voice. “Michael? Where are you?”

  “At summer school. I told the secretary I left my lunch at home and needed to call my mom.”

  “I’m not bringing you your lunch.”

  “No, man,” he said, his voice urgent but hushed. I pictured the overweight school secretary who always wore too much makeup staring at him from across the office. “I don’t need a lunch. Well, I mean, yeah, I could use a lunch, but that’s not why I’m calling.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Round up the guys, and meet me here after school lets out at two thirty.”

  “It’s summer. The last thing I want to do is meet you at school.”

  “Dude, you have to. I found something, and you guys are gonna flip the fuck out.” In his excitement his voice had risen, and in the background I heard the secretary scolding him for his language. Michael ignored her.

  “I’ve got work all day,” I reminded him. “I don’t get out till five.”

  “You need to get here before they close the school. Can’t you call in sick or something?”

  Since Callibaugh was friends with my grandfather and knew my dad peripherally, any excuse I used to get out of work would eventually follow me home. I had to be careful. “I’ll think of something,” I said, sighing.

  “Awesome. Two thirty by the smoking door.” A second later, there was a dial tone in my ear.

  When I arrived at Secondhand Thrift, Callibaugh was scrounging around on his hands and knees behind the front desk. He looked up, his features relaxing when he saw that it was me and not a customer.

  “Morning,” I said.

  “The cavalry has arrived,” Callibaugh intoned, locating what he’d been looking for, which turned out to be a tiny plastic sprocket no bigger than an atom.

  “Can I use the phone in the back?”

  “Are you planning to call China?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Have at it, young scalawag.”

  The back office was no bigger than a closet, its rows of unpainted wooden shelves crowded with paperwork, three-ring binders, and a few model ships. A cheap desk was shoved against one wall, its surface frilly with curled bits of receipts and other random papers, and the telephone was buried beneath a VCR manual.

  I called Peter, informed him of Michael’s request, then told him to pass along the info to Scott and Adrian. “You guys may have to go without me. I’m stuck at work.”

  “Sneak out.”

  “It isn’t that easy.”

  “That old fart wouldn’t even know you were gone.”

  I laughed and we hung up.

  I spent the morning transporting boxes from the stockroom, and to the best of my ability, organizing the shelves.

  When I didn’t adjourn to the back room at noon for lunch, Callibaugh said nothing yet eyed me suspiciously as if he’d just caught me doing something immoral.

  At a quarter past one, the old cur shambled out from the back room, a can of Chef Boyardee in one hand. There was tomato sauce at the corners of his mouth, and he smelled of cigar smoke and modeling glue. “Your grandmother got you on some strict diet? Because you look like skin and bones to me.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Food,” he said, spraying flecks of Chef Boyardee into the air. “Didn’t bring your lunch today?”

  “I forgot it.”

  Callibaugh surveyed the store, which hadn’t seen a customer since eleven thirty. “Why don’t you skip out for your lunch hour and get some food?”

  “Thanks. I’ll just finish stocking this shelf first.”

  Thus, I was tearing across the rear parking lot of the high school on my bike by 2:25. With the exception of a solitary cheddar-yellow school bus chugging out onto the main road, the boisterous cackle and flailing arms of students spilling through the half-open bus windows, the parking lot was deserted.

  I pedaled over to the set of concrete steps at the far end of the lot. Peter, Scott, and Adrian were perched on them. Behind them, the bloodred steel smoking door, which would have looked less out of place on the hull of a submarine, stood shut. We’d termed it as such because it was the door we popped out of whenever we wanted a quick smoke between classes but didn’t have time
to make it to one of the less populated restrooms in B Hall. It was the only door in the whole school that wouldn’t automatically lock you out.

  “And he arrives,” Peter said. “I was wondering if you’d make it. So what’s this about, anyway?”

  I dumped my bike on the blacktop. “I don’t have a clue. You guys know just as much as I do.”

  At the top of the steps, the smoking door creaked open—a sound equally befitting of a submarine—and Michael poked his head out. He beamed at us.

  “Okay,” I said, still a bit winded from my bike ride halfway across town, “so we’re here. What’s the big surprise?”

  He waved us inside, and my friends hopped off the steps and filed through the doorway. I brought up the rear, thankful to be out from beneath the hot sun. It was a scorcher.

  We followed Michael down B Hall, and I was overwhelmed by the sheer emptiness of the school and the sense of vacancy, of dormancy. It’s asleep, I thought as we moved down the hall. The large beast hibernates in summer, dreaming of the tiny children who will traipse through its innards come fall. We are insects passing through its system while it slumbers.

  Michael led us to the glass display case that held the school’s trophies, pennants, ribbons, plaques, and other such paraphernalia. It hung on the wall at the end of B Hall between a janitor’s closet and a water fountain that never worked.

  “This?” Peter said. “What’s—?”

  “Check it out.” Michael pointed at two framed black-and-white photos on the back wall of the display.

  The photos seemed to be of the same gothic structure taken from two slightly different angles, the stone façade a confusion of various architectural motifs: medieval parapets, marble arcades, Greek pillars, obelisk posts on either side of a sweeping semicircular stairway that led to a pair of massive doors with intricate iron sigils. The windows were arched and networked with iron bars. Detailed carvings were inlaid above the entranceways. Indeed, even the date on the brass plate at the bottom of each frame was engraved with the same year—1893. Yet on closer inspection I noticed the words engraved above one set of doors said Stanton School for Boys while in the other picture they said Patapsco School for Girls.