Arrowood

by Laura McHugh

  I don’t know how long I waited before I ran home to tell my mother. Her face had gradually reddened at the bank that morning during a whispered conversation with the teller, and she had been in a twitchy mood all day. I was scared to tell her what had happened; I wasn’t supposed to take the twins outside in the first place. It was my fault that they were gone, and in that moment, I was more upset about the fact that I had done something wrong and would get in trouble. It hadn’t yet occurred to me that the twins might not come back, that I might never see my sisters again.

  The rest of that first day remains jumbled and patchy in my head. I don’t know exactly what I said to my mother, or what she did when I told her. I can’t remember my father coming home, or Grammy picking me up to take me to the Sister House. At some point that afternoon I must have fallen asleep, because I had a vivid dream that everything was fine, that the twins were safe after all. I would sometimes immerse myself in the memory of that dream, to feel again the warm flood of relief, however fleeting.

  I didn’t speak to the police the first day, or the next. Grammy said I was too distraught, and sick. I’d started vomiting again, and my fever returned. My mother told them my story, the one I had told her, about the gold car that had turned toward Main. When a policeman—wiry, ruddy-cheeked Detective Eckland, who had once visited my school with McGruff the Crime Dog—finally met with me and asked me to tell him what I’d seen, my throat closed up and I began to wheeze. Hot tears gushed out and Detective Eckland fetched me tissues and cold water in a paper cup and a roll of Wild Cherry Life Savers, but nothing helped. Finally he repeated my account as relayed to him by my mother, and asked me to nod if it was correct. He had everything right except for the icy wound that lingered in my chest.

  I stayed at the Sister House, where Aunt Alice closed the drapes and popped popcorn on the stove and Grammy read to me from Anne of Green Gables until her voice grew hoarse. The two of them sheltered me from what was happening outside. I wasn’t aware, at the time, that the entire town was consumed by the kidnapping of the Arrowood twins; that bloodhounds searched the river bluffs, and that the night crew at the dam, where debris would often wash up, was put on alert for bodies. I didn’t know that parents locked their children indoors, or that candlelight vigils were held in the streets, or that the Sisters of Perpetual Adoration, at their convent in Oskaloosa, had begun to pray in shifts, twenty-four hours a day, for my sisters’ safe return. Our house and neighborhood were scoured for clues. The highway patrol was called in, and later, the FBI.

  My father assured me in a broken voice, over the phone, that no one blamed me. I didn’t believe him.

  Days passed with no sign of the twins, and my parents did not come to take me home. I didn’t return to school, either. Nana called from Florida and together we prayed to Saint Anthony, the patron saint of lost things, which Nana said included missing children. Saint Anthony, Saint Anthony, please come down. Someone is lost and cannot be found. I had said another prayer, silently, to all the burning saints, Anthony included: May your flames light the way to bring my sisters back home.

  Grammy and Aunt Alice did everything they could to comfort me, and I pretended that the twins were back at Arrowood with Mom and Dad, and that I would see them soon. My teacher sent a fat envelope stuffed with letters from my classmates, and I dug through them to find Ben’s. He had drawn two rabbits with big, sad eyes, the paper smudged where he had erased and reworked the feet to get them right. My name was at the top of the page, embellished with curlicues. Below the drawing, Ben had printed a single sentence. When are you coming bake? He had always struggled with the silent e, adding it in all the wrong places, but I knew what he meant. No one had talked to me yet about going back. I stuck the letter inside my pillowcase, where I could hear it crinkling every time I rolled over in Grammy’s bed, unable to fall asleep.

  I had moments of happiness while in limbo at the Sister House. Upstairs, in Alice’s half of the house, you could see the river from her bedroom window, through a gap in the trees, and we would sit on her bed dealing hands of Old Maid or playing Chinese checkers on a wooden game board with marbles she kept in a mason jar.

  She and Grammy loved to cook, and after a lifetime of feeding families and visitors and boarders, they did not seem to know how to prepare food in small quantities, so there was always too much to eat. A typical lunch would have the table laden with pork chops and fried potatoes, corn cut from the cob, boiled cabbage, sliced tomatoes, rolls, sweet pickles, and pickled peppers. Chocolate pudding for dessert, or oatmeal cookies, or homemade fudge that they had boiled on the stove and poured onto buttered plates to cool. They also shared a love of plants, and their windowsills were crowded with things growing roots in old salad dressing bottles and mayonnaise jars. There were cupboards full of treasures to explore—fossils and coins and antique postcards, and stacks of musty Seventeen magazines that had once belonged to my mother.

  A month passed before my father came to retrieve me. I’d barely been outside in all that time. He didn’t speak in the car as we drove past tree after tree tied with yellow ribbons. The house was quiet, and my mother didn’t come down to greet me. She’d been frazzled before, from lack of sleep and taking care of the twins, and would occasionally set meat out to thaw and forget to cook it, or send me to school without brushing my hair, but now everything was worse. She got more prescriptions in addition to the Xanax and sleeping pills, but they didn’t seem to help. She stopped doing laundry. She wouldn’t go near the twins’ room, which was two doors down from mine, and so I began to put myself to bed each night, sometimes not brushing my teeth or washing my face, thinking that would somehow draw her up the stairs to scold me, though it never did. I would sneak into the twins’ bedroom and touch the dresses in their closet, lie on the floor near their cribs, fold their blankets under my head so I could breathe in their scent as I slept.

  At school my teacher, Mrs. Wagner, seemed on the verge of tears every time she spoke to me. She put stickers on all my papers, even the ones I didn’t finish. My classmates kept their distance, as though my situation might somehow be contagious, except for Ben. He played hopscotch with me at recess, ignoring the boys who made fun of him. I knew by then that a man had been found in possession of a gold car like the one I’d described taking the twins. His name was Harold Singer.

  The twins’ second birthday came in December, and Grammy made a cake with pink frosting, which no one ate. It sat on the kitchen table, untouched, until it grew mold and someone threw it away. My mother couldn’t bear to celebrate Christmas at Arrowood without Violet and Tabitha, so I was sent back to the Sister House for the holiday break. Aunt Alice put up her aluminum tree and we made popcorn-and-cranberry garlands to hang. I didn’t have my embroidered Christmas stocking, and there was no mantel, so I taped a gym sock to the radiator, where Grammy assured me Santa would find it. I taped up socks for my sisters as well, and in the morning, all three lay on the floor, stuffed with oranges and nuts and Freedent chewing gum, things suspiciously unlike what Santa usually left at home.

  My parents came for dinner that night, and Grammy and Aunt Alice prepared a spread of baked ham with mashed potatoes and gravy, green bean casserole, Jell-O salad, and rolls and apple pie. After we finished eating, Mom and Dad announced that we would be moving to Illinois. My father was pursuing a new business venture there, and it was becoming too difficult to stay at Arrowood, surrounded by memories of the twins. They were also concerned that it might not be safe to continue living in the same town where Harold Singer roamed free.

  There was a snag in Dad’s plan. He knew that Arrowood would be passed down to him when his parents died, but Nana and Granddad were still living. They had grudgingly retired to Florida before the twins were born, in hopes that the balmy weather would soothe Nana’s crippling arthritis, and the house was still in their names. Since they weren’t planning on moving back, Dad wanted permission to sell the house right away and collect the money. Granddad wouldn’t allow it. Th
e house had been in the family for nearly one hundred and forty years, and he didn’t want it sold.

  They flew up to visit us for the first time in a year, and I was shocked to see that Nana was in a wheelchair. She sat crying quietly in the foyer with my mother and me while Dad and Granddad shouted at each other in the study. Mom lay slumped on the stairs, eyes closed and mouth open as though she had fallen asleep, and I stood staring at Nana’s shoes, sturdy orthopedic loafers that looked at odds with her delicate pearl-buttoned sweater set and tailored slacks. I knew that she must be having trouble with her feet, because prior to that day, I had only ever seen her wear heels.

  Nana motioned for me to climb up onto her lap and I did, inhaling the comforting scent of talcum powder and Prell shampoo. Her fingers were twisted at odd angles, the joints knobby and swollen despite her prayers to Saint Alphonsus, the patron saint of arthritis sufferers. She tried unsuccessfully to smooth my hair, tug the wrinkles out of my shirt. Nana had wanted to come as soon as the twins went missing, but traveling was hard on her, and she and Granddad did what they could from Florida, calling in favors and hiring a private detective, who spent most of his time tailing Singer. Nana had been diligent about keeping in touch after they moved away, calling every Sunday to speak to me and the twins, though she had only seen my sisters in the flesh a handful of times.

  Don’t listen to the yelling, she murmured, forcing a smile, her dry lips sticking to her dentures. Tears took an indirect route down her face, following the grooves and wrinkles, clinging to the bristly white hairs on her chin. Everything will be fine. Her voice wavered. She wasn’t good at lying.

  Granddad made it brutally clear how disappointed he was in my father, going so far as to blame the twins’ disappearance on Dad’s deficient parenting. He regretted coddling Eddie, who was the baby of the family and the sole remaining child, only thirteen years old when his two older brothers were killed months apart in Vietnam. Nana and Granddad had provided my father with an education and a trust fund, and that hadn’t been enough. They had allowed us to live under their roof, had fed us and paid the bills while my dad dabbled in pyramid schemes and made dubious investments. If we wanted to leave Arrowood, we were free to go, but we wouldn’t be welcome back. Regardless, the house would not be willed to my father, and it would not be sold. I imagined Arrowood living on without us, extraordinary measures being taken to keep it viable: foundation rebuilt, plumbing repaired, wiring replaced. It would go on, a house without a heart, like a body on life support.

  Time split in two, and from there we started a new calendar, our lives forever divided into before and after. Days crept into years and after became the only time that seemed real, everything before dissipating into a lovely dream that I wasn’t sure had existed. Each of us became a different person after, and while I couldn’t say with certainty that these weren’t the people we were meant to be, it seemed that the twins’ disappearance had knocked us irrevocably off course. We had struck an iceberg, and though three of us survived, we were left adrift, each to find the shore on our own.

  CHAPTER 5

  * * *

  I slept fitfully, dreams wending through my body, tightening ligaments, straining muscles, grinding teeth. In the darkness, I felt the tickle of the twins’ wispy hair, their small hands tucked in mine, their breath warm on my cheek. I sang to them in the dream, whispered verses of mockingbirds and diamond rings.

  I woke with a dull headache and aching jaw, my sheets clammy and my hair still damp from washing it the night before. When I went to brush my teeth, I saw that I had broken the tip off one of my canines in the night, leaving a sharp, jagged edge. It wasn’t the first time. For the past several months, I’d been grinding my teeth incessantly. I’d cracked a molar in Colorado, and I was still making payments on the crown. I wanted to pretend the tooth was fine, but it drew blood when it touched my tongue. Reluctantly I got dressed and drove downtown to Ferris Family Dental—Ben’s father’s practice—where Grammy had taken me every summer to get my teeth cleaned, because my parents couldn’t seem to remember to take me to a dentist during the school year.

  I was nervous about seeing Dr. Ferris. I didn’t want him to ask what had happened to me, why I had disappeared from his children’s lives after so many years as close friends. I hoped, instead, that he might talk about Ben and Lauren, tell me where they lived and what they were doing and spare me the awkwardness of having to ask.

  “I don’t have an appointment,” I told the receptionist, “but I broke a tooth, and I was wondering if Dr. Ferris could take a quick look at it.”

  “Are you a current patient?” she asked, winding a section of highlighted hair around her pen. Her eyebrows had been plucked into dramatic arches that made her look like a cartoon villain.

  “Former patient, I guess,” I said. “I’ve been gone for a while and just came back. Arrowood. Arden.”

  She tugged the pen out of her hair, her eyes widening. “Arrowood?”

  I nodded. It occurred to me that while people might recognize my name, hardly anyone would recognize my face. Certainly not the younger generation, who hadn’t known any living Arrowoods.

  The receptionist tapped on her keyboard, eyes flicking from the screen to me and back as she typed. “You’re not in the new system. You’ll have to fill out these forms. I’ll check and see if we have time to squeeze you in today.”

  She handed me a clipboard and stared after me as I sat down to fill out the papers. A woman sat across from me reading an issue of Good Housekeeping while her little boy, maybe five years old, banged a Matchbox car against the side of Dr. Ferris’s aquarium. “Fishy, fishy, fishy!” he screamed. “Stop that,” the woman mumbled, not looking up from her magazine. The boy dropped the toy car and pounded the aquarium with his fists.

  It didn’t take long to complete the forms, because I didn’t have answers for most of the questions. Insurance provider? None. Date of last cleaning? No idea. I returned the clipboard to the desk and flipped through the magazines. Nothing left but Field & Stream and Golf Digest. I walked back toward my seat, avoiding the little boy, who had thrown himself onto the floor and was swishing his arms and legs back and forth like he was making snow angels on the carpet.

  “Arden?”

  I turned around, and Ben Ferris stood in front of me, wearing a white lab coat. Ben. My first and best friend. He was taller than I remembered him being when we had said goodbye the last time, when he barely had to lean down to kiss me. I could tell by the way he was looking at me that he hadn’t forgotten anything, and an uncomfortable buzzing sensation spread from my heart out through my limbs, like a swarm of frantic insects. Ben’s wistful expression was quickly broken by a grin, and I took a halting step toward him, not sure of the appropriate greeting for someone I’d once been so close to but hadn’t seen in years.

  Ben didn’t hesitate, though. He wrapped his arms around me. “I heard you were coming back. I can’t believe you’re here.”

  I could feel myself warming in his embrace, the heat and humidity of those long-ago summers seeping into the air-conditioned office, and I hastily stepped back, letting my arms fall to my sides.

  “I can’t believe you’re a dentist.” He used to say that he would never work with his dad, no matter how much his parents pressured him. He had wanted to be an artist. I had wanted to be a history teacher.

  Ben laughed. “Yeah, well, it’s a job. Come on back, I’ll take a look at your tooth.”

  “Is your dad not here?” I asked.

  “He’s out playing golf,” Ben said. “He probably spends half his time on the course, now that he’s got me here.” He gave me an amused smile. “Don’t worry, I promise I’m qualified. I’ve pulled tons of teeth. Some human ones, even.”

  “Ha-ha,” I said. He still had the same sense of humor. I was glad he was making this easy for me, not dredging up the past, not asking why I had shut him out.

  I got situated in an exam chair and Ben leaned over me, shining a light into my mou
th. I could smell his aftershave, woodsy and subtle, unlike the Axe body spray he used to coat himself with. I wondered if his mom had picked it out for him. Or a girlfriend. I glanced furtively at his left hand and was relieved not to see a wedding ring, though I chided myself for checking. I had no claim on him anymore.

  He poked around my mouth with a metal pick, his gloved fingers gliding over my gums. “You grind your teeth a lot?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I can tell. Have you been feeling stressed?” Concern showed on his face, though I couldn’t be sure if it was concern for me or for my teeth. Possibly both.

  “I guess. My dad, you know. And moving back.”

  “I’m so sorry about your dad, Arden. I would have gone to the service, but I didn’t know they were having it in Quincy. Everyone thought there would be something here in town.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “It all happened pretty fast. I didn’t really have time to tell anyone.”

  “My mom took flowers,” he said, “out to the cemetery. We were all thinking of you, worrying about you. Lauren tried to track you down. She wanted to call, but she couldn’t find a current phone number.”

  Lauren. I hadn’t spoken to her in so long.

  “Thank you,” I said, “for the flowers, and everything. I’m all right, though, really. Just a lot going on.” I was still reclined in the chair, and it was a bit uncomfortable talking to him this way, like I was on a therapist’s couch.