I gave myself chills with such thinking, and I backed away and went right to the porch and sat down. The police and fire departments showed up and started clearing people out. Seemed like half the crowd moved onto my front lawn and all of them snapping pictures with their phones. I hollered to one of the officers, Icie Harp’s boy Randy, and told him I didn’t want them on my lawn. It wasn’t that I was worried about the grass or my flower beds like I told him, but that I needed space. I needed to be able to go into my house and try and forget that dark emptiness. Before long I knew the television crews would show up and start interviewing every hick we have in town, making us all look like a bunch of fools—that’s what makes for good news these days—when what really happened was that a woman was disappeared.
The officers and firemen pushed the crowd toward the sidewalks to make way for search teams and vehicles, but as those men went to work, rigging themselves up in climbing equipment and surveying the hole, they kept glancing back over their shoulders. Like the rest of us, they couldn’t turn away.
“They’ll stay off the lawn, Mrs. Anderson. I’ll make sure of it.”
“What about that woman?” I said.
“They’ll do what they can to find her.”
“She’s gone,” I said. Men were now lowering themselves down into the hole.
He didn’t even react. “We don’t know that. You should go inside and rest. I’ll come get you for a statement in a little while.”
“What sort of statement?”
“You were the last person to see her,” he said. “You were the first person to see this.” He turned to the hole.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“We’ll need your statement to file a report,” he said.
“There’s nothing to say.”
“We just want you to tell us what you saw.”
“What I saw is what you see there.” I pointed to the assembled crowd. I stood up and started into the house, and Randy stepped toward me, or at least I thought he did, and I held my hands out for him to stop, which confused him. I didn’t want to be bothered by him or by anyone for that matter. I went inside and locked my door.
“Mrs. Anderson,” he called through the glass. “I didn’t mean to scare you, but I’ll need to come back later.”
I remained quiet. His dark figure came through the curtains, head cocked to the side, listening. Finally, he stepped away and I did too. I went to the sofa and sat down with the lights off. I kept remembering the earth ripping apart and seeing that woman’s honey-colored hair, her throat fully exposed to the light.
THE NEXT MORNING, yellow tape surrounded the scene. There were some gawkers, but mostly it was just neighbors who’d walked down the street for coffee. The dog walkers cinched their leashes around their hands when their dogs began to circle the hole, sniffing and prodding with their muzzles, tails pointed toward the sky. Icie’s boy was down the street, parking his cruiser and setting up traffic cones.
For most of the night I had stayed by the window, watching as the rescue teams moved in shifts. Three went down and three came back up. Bright floodlights tried to show them a path and lit up the street and the front rooms of the house. From the minute she fell, something inside of me sensed I would never see the woman again, that none of us would, and yet I still wanted very much to walk out there and peer down once more.
When my husband Everett was alive he used to get mad at me about the way my imagination could run. He said I dreamt too much and wasn’t practical, but I used to tell him being practical doesn’t allow for any joy and what good is a life without joy.
“But you always go dark,” he said. “You never think about the good that can come from something.”
He may have had a point. I am prone to melancholy, so when I walked off my porch and into the yard, I tried to imagine that woman landing someplace safe and gentle. I tried to think of where that might be and what came to mind were those gilded images of heaven in the Bible I gave up on long before I was an adult. They’re just too perfect and too out of sync with what’s actually beautiful on this earth and in this life, so I pictured her falling into a field of blue wildflowers and clover or tall grass near a hillside shaded by oaks and sycamores with a picnic blanket spread beneath their leaves and the sun overhead and a cooling breeze. A blue sky dotted with puffy clouds. Then I had to shake the image from my head because it was too damn foolish given how she had left, given the ugliness and violence of how she was taken.
“Ready for that statement, Mrs. Anderson?”
It was Randy. He’s nearly the same age as my son, and I can never think of him as an officer of the law but rather as a boy who is playing dress up. I see him as a child, riding his bike across my lawn and jumping the sidewalk. I keep expecting him to tell me he has a Halloween party to attend, but he is a man now with a wife and child at home.
“How’s your mother?” I said.
“She’s fine. Says to tell you hello. She saw your house on the news and asked after you. I told her you were feisty as ever.”
“Don’t go spreading rumors, Randy.”
“No rumors, ma’am. Just the truth.” He smiled big and wide, and I thought to myself he must be a good son.
“What do you need to know?”
“Just what you saw.”
“Who was she?” I said.
“Excuse me?”
“The woman. Do you know who she was?”
“We haven’t a clue. No one has reported a missing person. As far as we can tell you’re the only witness. Everyone else was inside when the sinkhole opened up.”
“Only me.”
He nodded.
“She was driving down the street without a care.” I stopped. I didn’t know how to tell him what I saw. I had convinced myself overnight the young woman looked me in the eye as she fell below the world, that I was the last person she saw before darkness overtook her.
“Mrs. Anderson? Can you go on?”
“She didn’t see it coming. She was singing, mouthing along with the words. Then there was the sinkhole opening up and it was over. It was so fast and so loud.”
“Anything else? Did you see a license plate? Do you remember the make of the car?”
“The car was light blue. Japanese. That’s all I can recall. The things that must have run through her head once it started,” I said.
He penned something in his notepad and told me he would type it up and bring it back for me to read over if I wanted. I was about to say no, that I’d said all I needed, but something told me I should tell him I wanted to look at it one more time. Just then the radio on his shoulder crackled.
“Go ahead,” Randy said.
A clear voice came back. “We’ve got another sinkhole.”
He turned to me. “I’ve got to go, Mrs. Anderson. I’ll stop by later.”
Then he was running toward his cruiser and hopping in. The roof flared blue and the siren rang through the neighborhood trees. I had the urge to get in the car and follow, but I didn’t want to be in the way. When I turned the news on an hour later, there was Randy in front of Mills Hardware, saying nobody was hurt and answering questions. The phone rang and I checked the caller ID.
“Hi, Sam.”
“Mom, are you okay?” His voice was urgent.
“I’m fine. How are you?”
“I saw the news. Right in front of the house?”
“It’s nothing to worry about, though another one just opened up across from the hardware store.”
“Is there any damage to the house? Where were you when it happened?”
“I hope Mills is okay,” I said. “He’s getting so old I can’t imagine how he keeps a store these days.” I walked to the front of the house. I couldn’t stop looking at the spot.
“But what about you? Should I come home?”
“You should always come visit your mother. You and your sister both should come home more often, but you don’t need to come home on account of this. It’s just stra
ngeness. Untelling what’s caused it.”
“Fracking,” Sam said. “All that damn fracking. Those fuckers just keep tunneling through the earth like a bunch of overgrown ants. They’ll suck the earth dry until we’re all on fire.”
“You don’t know that. And stop cursing.”
“We don’t not know it. Remember the earthquake last year? And those others up in Ohio? That’s all because of fracking.”
“Well, son, you’re not the one that has to live with it, are you?”
The line went silent. I shouldn’t say such things to him because I know he is concerned—and probably right—but I’m the one that lives here. Not him. He left when he went off to college, and he’s never come back and he’s not going to. Before he could say anything more I saved both of us and said, “I’ll be fine. Have you talked to Heather?”
He gave me a reluctant sigh but answered. “I talked to her yesterday. She seemed to be doing good.”
“And when are you two going to come home?”
“We think at the end of summer.”
“Well, I’ll be here. I’m not going anywhere. At least I don’t plan on it.” It was hard for me to say more, to tell him I miss them, and that the days get lonelier with each year. They are in the middle of their lives and I remember what that was like for Everett and me, but our only aim was to have them, to raise them right—to be true and good people. They want more than that, it seems, and we encouraged them to leave, to experience a world past Fordyce. They listened to us and they have gone. My loneliness, in this way, is my own doing.
“I’ll call again tomorrow,” Sam said.
THE NEWSWOMAN FROM Lexington, thankfully, wasn’t some young child fresh out of college. She appeared to be in her early forties, though her hair was stiff enough it could have stopped a brick. When she came to my door, I politely declined, though she tried to insist I was “integral to the story.” I told her if she wanted to do some good, she should find out who that woman was and locate her people. That’s what was most important. She left the porch with a short cameraman trailing behind her, and they set up camp on the sidewalk.
I went up to the second floor and watched her from behind a parted curtain. Nobody was lining up to talk to her, but nobody walked away when she approached either. Past her, the firemen were still at it, still going down in threes, but their attitude was a lot different than on that first day. They laughed aboveground and sipped on coffee. They might as well have been standing around a fire in someone’s backyard. No one cared about that girl anymore. No one, it seemed, except me.
That night, after I watched our little town on the news, I went outside. They had already given up night searches. Police barricades and heavy equipment surrounded the hole, but nobody was there. I squeezed past a barricade and ducked under some police tape. The neighborhood slept, and I shined a flashlight into the opening. I saw what I expected, but then I sat down and let my legs dangle above the dirt. The asphalt still held the day’s heat, and I ran my hands along the road’s broken edge and felt the soft crumbling of it at my fingertips. The sky was full of stars, and I turned off the flashlight so that I was in the dark. I pictured that poor woman once more. Where was she headed? Who was expecting her? What kind of life had been taken? The crickets’ whine was high in the air. I have more days behind me than in front of me, which is something I’ve thought about more and more in the last five years since Everett’s passing, but I don’t know how to make them last or count. And that girl was gone before life even began for her. Without thinking much, I found my foot searching for a place to step, my body lowering itself into that hole. There was a makeshift ladder constructed for the rescue workers that was only four rungs tall, like one you find in a swimming pool, but it was on the opposite side of me. The flashlight I had was small enough to be held in my mouth, so I turned it back on and placed it there and then bent my neck downward to see where my feet might land if I pushed off with my arms. There seemed to be a ledge of dirt that would hold me, so I took a careful step forward and felt its solidness. Then another.
My eyes were level with the road, and below me it was as if a path opened up into nothing. Nothingness, I corrected myself. I wanted to sit down in that space and let the earth cover me, but why I wanted to escaped me. I didn’t want to die; I wasn’t ready to leave this life, but maybe I wanted to know what it might feel like to be below rather than above. I made a motion to sit with a slight shuffle step to my left and slid, the dirt giving way underneath me, and I let out a scream that made the flashlight fall from my mouth and tumble quickly toward the darkness. I flailed my arms toward the edge and grabbed the jagged asphalt and managed to keep myself from falling. I kicked like a cartoon character trying to find a foothold until finally my toe struck something solid. I was sure I was going to fall, and confronted with the danger, my heart beat faster, my fear churned, and I pressed my body as close to the edge as I could. Soft dirt touched my cheek, and then, despite myself, I felt wet tears at the edges of my clenched eyes. I opened them wide to see only the night, and then, inch by inch, I made my way to the ladder where I pulled myself up to the road and then lay flat on my back, collecting my breath but unable to stop the tears.
THREE WEEKS LATER the sinkhole was filled. They did bring in geologists from the university and some structural engineers to study the hole, but they said there was too much earth to move and too much to risk by peeling the road back to search any longer. So they showed up one day and dumped load after load of concrete and sand into the pit, and then they poured new asphalt and tamped it down with a road roller. I watched all this over the course of four days, and when they were done a black flat rectangle covered the street, and somewhere underneath it all she was still there. I thought of her beating against the roof of her car and somehow making her way out, crawling through all that sediment and dirt only to find one more layer of darkness she could not claw through. It kept me up, and I found myself going out there nearly every night, standing right in the middle of the newly repaved surface—beside where I had lain.
Cars rolled right over top of it, and with each one I waited, expecting the earth to open up again, but it never did. I thought of the one time Everett and I went to New York. We had been planning that trip for months, and two days before we left I took ill with a terrible cold and fever. We shouldn’t have gone, and as we walked up and down Fifth Avenue I shook with chills. Every step of the way Everett said we could go back to the hotel room, but I wanted to keep going, to keep looking in those big store windows at clothes that were more expensive than our mortgage. I wanted everything. At Bergdorf Goodman there was a scarf in the window that stopped me in the middle of the sidewalk. A marvelous golden cashmere with specks of marled blue and fringed ends. Everett didn’t even have to ask what I was looking at. “Let’s see how much it is.”
“We can’t afford it,” I said.
“We can if you want it.”
“It’s not practical,” I said, using his own argument against him.
“You can’t always be practical. You’ve got to enjoy yourself.” He winked and tugged at me, but I didn’t budge. I don’t know if I had ever wanted anything more, and yet I couldn’t take one step toward the store.
He walked in without me. And though I put on a show of being angry and upset, of talking about the expense, when we got to our room that night I pulled it from its box and tissue paper, and the first thing I did was brush the soft fabric across my cheek.
We went out that night and I put the scarf on, and I loved it so much I didn’t want to take it off when we sat down to dinner. For a few hours my fever and chills left me, and on our way back to our hotel, every time we passed a window or mirror, I stopped to notice the scarf, not believing it was mine. I clutched at the fabric as if it might fly away. On the sidewalk those metal grates from the subway whooshed hot air past my knees. I hated walking over top of them, fearful they might give away.
“Let me on the solid ground,” I told Everett, and he tr
aded places with me, smiling like I was a silly child.
At Mills Hardware I walked up to the resurfaced road, noticing its blackness already fading.
“Hell of a big hole,” Amos Mills said, coming out from the store.
“I’ve seen bigger,” I said.
“Yes you have,” he said. “I still can’t understand how a car disappeared. I can’t believe nobody has come to search for that woman.”
“Maybe she got turned around and was lost. Just passing through town on her way to someplace else.”
“Must have been. I feel for her family. They’re going to come calling one day. They’ll figure it out and they’ll show up and you’ll see them, Alice. They’ll be standing right outside your house looking at a discolored patch of road, and maybe everybody else will believe them to be crazy but you’ll know who they are and why they are there.”
“I never thought of that,” I said, “but you’re right.”
“I don’t envy you that one.” Then, changing the subject, “How are the kids?”
“They’re fine. Planning to visit soon.”
“You don’t think they’ll ever grow up when they’re babies and you’re up all night after them, but then they leave and you don’t know if they’ll ever come back, do you?”
“That sounds about right,” I said. “And yours?”
“They’re fine. They’ll come back for Labor Day. You think it’s finished?” he said, pointing to the hole.
“What do you mean?”
“Are they done opening up?”
“My son doesn’t think so,” I said.
Any Other Place Page 15
